Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

Paul ushered them inside his home, where he ran a consultancy of which he was the sole employee, working on contract for U.S. government departments like Homeland Security, Defense, and State to produce white papers on risks to the telecom grid: How easy would it be for foreign nation-states to hack in? Could we have a Stuxnet here? What effect would a disaster like the tsunami in Japan have on systems at American nuclear plants?

In the front room, framed prints of sparrows and owls hovered on the wall. The bay window overlooked a mowed front lawn, bird feeder hanging from the oak tree. He assigned Tooly and Mac seats and inquired about refreshments — milk or ginger ale? — then went to prepare lunch.

“Can I help with anything?” she called to him.

“No, you can’t. You can wait there.”

Mac remained seated but Tooly stood, tensely browsing his books. These volumes were the scenery of her childhood. On the first page of each, he had written his full name, including middle initial, proclaiming that this book, on his shelf, in his front room, did indeed belong to him. Flipping through The Complete Birder , she discovered his pencil notations in the margins, marks too faint to read but for a single comment, “Interesting warbler,” followed by the impress of an exclamation point that he had erased.

It was clear without asking that he’d been alone all these years — his solitude evident in the television squared to a seat at the far end of the couch, a line of HB pencils on the coffee table sharpened to pricking points and awaiting bird books in urgent need of his name. Within the folds of the curtain, a telescope crouched, its capped nose turned down as if too timid to peep outside. His binoculars rested on a high shelf, which she could reach these days, and did, sliding them from their satin-lined case and trying them at the window, finding neither birds nor planets, only a garage across the road, the wavering sky lined with power cables.

“Lunch is served.”

She torqued around, caught playing without permission. He waved away her apologies and led them into the kitchen. From a deep serving bowl, Paul ladled coconut-cream soup, with tiny eggplants bobbing, sweet basil, Kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass. Every course was Thai — tom yum soup, red curry with rice, sliced green mango — in bittersweet tribute to the last point of their acquaintance.

“I left out the hot peppers,” he assured Mac, “not knowing how you took it. Some young people don’t appreciate spice. Some old people don’t, either.”

“Nice?” Tooly asked Mac.

He nodded fast, swallowing.

“I thought of you recently,” Paul told her. “The wrestler ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage died.”

“Do you always think of me when you hear about wrestlers?”

“Yes, actually.”

“Me, too,” she said. “Did you actually enjoy that stuff? Or was it just to be nice to me?”

“I found it relaxing,” he answered, preparing himself a spoonful, his rimless glasses steamed from the soup. He removed them and, with much deliberation, wiped each lens with a corner of the tablecloth, blind eyes blinking, pink dents on either side of his nose where the spectacle pads had pressed.

The sight of this — for reasons that escaped her — made Tooly too sad to speak. She tried to eat, but swallowing was impossible.

For a minute, the only sound was the boy’s slurps. Each time he made this noise, she looked to Paul, expecting irritation, finding none.

“You used to avoid foreign food,” she told him.

“I’ve come around,” Paul said. “Only, not the very spicy stuff.” He’d taken cooking classes in Thailand, he informed her.

“I’m impressed.” She would never have imagined him taking a course. “I’d love to do something like that. I’m crazy for classes.”

“You used to hate them in school.”

“Maybe that’s why I like them now.”

After the soup, he asked, “And can you still count a minute?”

She smiled, not having thought of this childhood trick in nearly a quarter century. “When I was little,” she explained to Mac, “I could guess exactly how long a minute lasted by counting in my head. Shall we test me after lunch?”

But Paul unstrapped his watch right then and dangled it before the boy. Mac stared, nonplussed at the antiquity of calculator functions. “It’s this button,” Paul explained, and Mac pushed it, liquid-crystal numerals cycling onscreen.

Tooly scrunched her eyes, counting silently to sixty. “Now?”

“Thirty-seven seconds,” Mac informed her.

“Terrible!” she said.

The boy gave it a try. Long after what seemed a minute to Tooly, he raised his finger.

“Fifty-five seconds,” Paul reported. “Very good.”

Paul had remained in Thailand for eight years after her departure — by far his longest overseas residence. Without Tooly around, he no longer needed to keep moving. He had married, and his wife lived here with him. “You remember Shelly, don’t you?”

“Our housekeeper?”

“Well, not in a long time.” Shelly had stepped out to the Costco in Beltsville to give them time alone, and to supply herself for the yearly trip to her home province, Nong Khai, where she and Paul owned a house. “Year by year, I’m phasing out my work. She wants us to retire there. Within five years, I won’t have to be here at all.”

He asked about Tooly’s bookshop, her life on the Welsh-English border, her travels, all of which she had mentioned in their phone call. While she answered, he folded his napkin, placed the spoon and fork perpendicular to each other, rotated them like clock hands, leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs one way, then the other.

“I’ve been waiting,” he interrupted, drawing his chair up to the table. “I’ve been waiting to hear from you. It was years. I thought I wouldn’t.” He went quiet, tried to finish, voice rising in pitch but strangled in his throat. He forced a laugh, unthinkingly tapping the boy’s arm.

“Ow, get off!”

“Excuse me. Sorry,” Paul said, hand raised. “Pardon me.”

Mac — unaware of the distress emanating from the man — asked when they were having dessert. There was none. Could he get down and play on his phone? He could. The boy departed for the front room, where he lay on the floor, swiping at a game onscreen, indifferent to their conversation in the kitchen.

“I always wanted to explain myself to you,” Paul continued. “Always wanted to. I had a duty — thought I had a duty — regarding what I did. I wanted to explain that, but planned to wait till you were grown. Then I never heard from you. I wasn’t going to interfere. Didn’t want to disturb your life.”

Tooly could have claimed that she’d been prevented from contacting him, but that was untrue. She hadn’t wanted to. They had been a team once, she as vital to him as he to her. Yet she had abandoned him. Knowingly, she’d done so.

“I felt it was not in your interest that you stayed with your mother,” he explained. “That was why I acted. That’s why I took you. It wasn’t selfishness. I hope you realize that.”

“I know.”

“She’d just go absent, days at a time. Stop me if you don’t want to hear this.” Since Tooly didn’t object, he continued. “She could only fix her attention on the thing in front of her and nothing else. And we weren’t it. You were so undersized when you were little — is it possible that was caused by your mother neglecting you? I had a duty, I thought. Not only as your father but as a human person. Which is why I acted. But only with good intentions.”

From adolescence, Paul had been a joiner of clubs and teams — not by preference but against it, plunging himself into uncomfortable social situations in the hope of converting himself into a different person, one more affable and easygoing. But his nature resisted experience: he remained frustratingly the same. By college, he’d submitted to introversion, taking a degree in computer science, which led to a job in D.C. at Ritcomm. After a few years, they appointed him to run an overseas project, a ten-week contract with the Kenyan government. It proved a disaster. The independence leader, President Jomo Kenyatta, was dying, and members of his inner circle were contesting power and enriching themselves from state programs. When Paul refused to cooperate, officials shunned him. He petitioned Ritcomm to return stateside, but this risked voiding the contract. They told him to sit it out.