Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

With nothing to do, he booked a countryside tour, lured by the promise of birds. Also, he hoped for cooler locales, since heat aggravated his respiratory problems. But the tour guide drove homicidally, and constantly sought to divert Paul to bordellos and shady jewel merchants. Part of the tour had been touted as a two-night “bird safari,” yet turned out to be nothing of the sort. Paul found himself at a ramshackle former hunting lodge run by a louche Italian and his miserable English wife, both serious drinkers. Big-game hunters used to stay out there, but the independent Kenyan government had banned blood sports. A few lodges had transformed themselves into nature parks; others offered illegal hunts. When Paul refused such an expedition, the Italian owner lost interest, telling him to wander the grounds and look skyward — that was the bird safari. But traipsing through the bush seemed madness, with savage creatures out there, so Paul remained in his room, feeling aggrieved. The daughter of the lodge owners turned up, offering to show him the few birds found on the premises, several in cages. Previously, her job had been to photograph guests with their kills. She asked him about America, gazed too directly at him.

He returned to Nairobi and resumed his nonexistent job. To his surprise, the young woman from the lodge appeared at his hotel with a tale of woe: her ex-boyfriend had tried to shoot himself, and all the white settlers in the area falsely blamed her and made life insufferable. She had nowhere to stay in the capital, so Paul booked her a room at the hotel — on a different floor, however, to avoid any suggestion of impropriety. She knocked on his door late that night, inviting him to the bar for a thank-you drink. He ordered a glass of milk, listening as she recounted her life, a series of injustices and misfortunes, it seemed. Well after closing time, they continued their conversation on a lobby sofa — it was she who spoke — before breaking apart at around 2 A.M. and taking the elevator to their separate floors. At dawn, there was a knock at his door. She stood there. Only because Paul was half asleep did he have the courage to do what followed.

For the first time, he understood the accounts of sane citizens hurtling toward disaster because of romantic passion. He’d thought lovers were showing off when they made their ardor public. But his need for her proximity overwhelmed reason. It was a need too expansive for his insides, requiring outward acts. They had “relations” (Paul put the matter delicately, even decades later), which he’d always thought a fearsome milestone, but which she offered with intoxicating ease. There was — despite his lifelong expectations to the contrary — a little territory available to him. Not just the confines of himself but in her, too, and a place they might have together. Before his departure, Sarah was pregnant. They flew to the United States, and he bought a home for his new family.

“Where?”

“You’re in it.”

But, soon after arriving, Sarah recanted the plan to marry, a shock to Paul. After all, she was pregnant — he hadn’t imagined that a woman might willingly not marry under such circumstances. But she seemed to find him intolerable, even repugnant. She came to blame Paul for everything, be it the immigration official at whom she’d cursed or the obnoxious shop detective who’d accused her of shoplifting. When Paul noted that the U.S. surgeon general had deemed smoking noxious during pregnancy, Sarah reached for her lighter. Just as impulsively, she broke down and apologized, appearing so disconsolate that her underlying decency was plain to him, and she was redeemed. Their daughter, Matilda, arrived. The situation only worsened. Once, Sarah left the girl in her bath seat and spun on the tub faucet, then went to make phone calls. She’d only turned on the hot tap. The infant howled and howled, and Paul ran upstairs, finding his tiny daughter’s feet submerged in scalding water. “Thank God it was a weekend and I was there. You can imagine what it made me wonder about days when I was away at the office. For years, you had those burn scars on your feet.”

“Was that why you always made me wear socks around the house?”

“Maybe, yes.”

The day he saved her in the tub, Paul went down to the basement and paced. He loathed Sarah with an intensity that exceeded his former desire for her. The easiest option was to move out, have nothing to do with her. But he had duties to this small person, who hadn’t chosen to be included in his mistake. So he resolved to live an unhappy life, to allow Sarah her manipulations, her relations with other men, and whatever else she was up to. He’d work and ignore the rest. This was to be his life.

However, Paul’s acquiescence only riled Sarah. She grew more provocative, seeking to spike him into rage — and he had a temper, if pushed. During one such quarrel, she threatened to take their child back to Kenya, or maybe farther, and live as she pleased, and never see him again. He believed her. Yet Sarah seemed not even to care for Tooly, playing with her for just a few minutes before losing interest or berating the infant — only to then cuddle her, leaving their daughter stupefied. Daydreaming of escape, Paul recalled that road trip in Kenya. How far from the world he’d felt. You could disappear overseas, especially in poor countries. It was like leaving the present.

Ritcomm won a major government contract to modernize communications at smaller U.S. diplomatic outposts. It was 1981, and the State Department was connecting even the most far-flung tentacles of the United States to Washington, or at least to a regional mainframe with access to the visa lookout system. This meant using local phone lines. But hooking into an overseas grid — generally operated by a state telecom company — incurred security risks. You couldn’t allow foreign nationals to do the installation; it would take just one Soviet infiltrator. But the U.S. government lacked suitable specialists to do the work. So it contracted Ritcomm. The company itself struggled for staffers willing to take the work, which meant a rootless existence, only a few months at each consulate.

Paul volunteered. As an installer, he’d have a generic maintenance account to log on to the mainframes, which allowed him to read the bad-guy list. Not only could he vanish overseas; he’d have access to the very system that would flag his name to U.S. officials when Sarah reported him. He prepped their disappearance by apologizing to Sarah for being so boring, promising to take her on an expensive vacation — or, if she preferred, she could go alone with Tooly. Yes, Sarah answered with alacrity, that’s what she wanted. He agreed, on condition that she obtain an American passport in their daughter’s name. Tooly could have traveled on her mother’s passport but it was Kenyan, he noted, which might mean delays and complications. Better to secure their daughter a U.S. passport, which could subsequently help Sarah herself obtain citizenship. Paul filled out the application. Sarah signed everything.

“Then,” he said, “I took you.”

Life abroad had been hard. Foreign locales exacerbated his allergies and his asthma. The food made him sick. And fear of capture kept him in constant anxiety, especially at border crossings. He had access to the American watch lists but not to foreign ones, so each international flight was a cause for fear. Had Sarah reported him to any other nation? Might they detain him on arrival? If so, what would happen to Tooly?

Paul persuaded Ritcomm to base him for a full year in each foreign hub. The company agreed, because he was such a useful employee: never wanted to come back, neither for home leave nor permanently. (Indeed, he refused to return to America at all, leery of heightened security stateside. His responsibility to guard Tooly prevented him even from traveling back to California when his adoptive father was dying — an omission that wrenched Paul still.) A full year in each city, he figured, allowed Tooly to attend a full grade. But the plan stumbled in Australia, since schools there worked on a different calendar, which later led to dispute over which grade she was rightly in. He couldn’t risk arguing the case — he sought to be forgotten the moment he left any room. He avoided teachers and parents, remained distant with colleagues. Once again, Paul commented, he’d thrust himself into a situation that he could not manage.