Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said.

It was Xavi, then starting business school at NYU, who’d encouraged Duncan to apply to law school there, and even found them a sublet near “the university.” Unfortunately, it proved to be the wrong university, Columbia, at the opposite end of Manhattan. The official tenants here were two Columbia students who had fallen in love while falling in hate with their assigned third roommate, Emerson. The lovers’ plan was to claim that they still lived at Columbia, so their conservative families would keep paying rent while they secretly took a place together in Chelsea. In subletting, Xavi and Duncan got an amazing deal — with the downside of having to schlep downtown for school.

“So,” he said, “tell me something about you.”

“Here’s something: I saw a pig downstairs.”

“Not running wild, I hope.”

“Some guy was taking it back from a walk. A huge fat potbelly.”

“The guy?”

“The pig.”

“He lives on the first floor,” Duncan said. “He’s a composer.”

“The pig?”

“Yes, the pig.”

She laughed.

“Sorry — you probably need to go,” he said. “I don’t normally talk so much. Hope it was cool seeing your old place.” He took a step toward the door.

“Duncan, how come you were lying on the floor before, with the shopping bags everywhere?”

“I hoped you’d forgotten that.”

“Did you fall?”

“It’s this weird thing. You’re going to think I’m insane.”

“I don’t mind insanity, as long as it’s reasonable.”

He sighed, then confessed. Often, when crossing the Columbia campus with groceries, he had this fantasy of lying down on College Walk, all the kids stepping over him, nobody stopping for days and then weeks, rodents nibbling at his groceries, he getting thinner, looking up through the tree branches, during the rain, the nights, until he just disappeared. Captivated by his strange thoughts, he had returned home, called out to ensure that he was alone, then lain down right there.

“If you’re doing nutty stuff at home,” she said, “you need to think about closing the front door properly.”

“That was an error in retrospect.”

“Lie down now,” she said.

“How do you mean?”

“I want to show you something from when I used to live here. But you have to lie down a second, right where you were.”

“On the floor?”

“Exactly as you were.”

Haltingly, uncertainly, he obliged.

She hooked the chain lock on the front door and returned to Duncan, knelt, opened her duffle coat, and lay atop him.

“What are you doing?” he asked softly.

“Human blanket.”

They remained still for a minute, his heart thudding, palpable through her sweater.

A key entered the lock. The front door hit the chain and shook.

She rose calmly, while Duncan scrambled up with such haste that he nearly keeled over from dizziness. He unhooked the chain lock. “Hey,” he said.

It was Xavi, who proved to be quite a dresser: smoking jacket, violet scarf, tortoiseshell glasses. Rather than shaking her hand, he held it. A grin spread across his face. His glinting eyes closed languorously and, when they opened, looked to Duncan.

“She used to live here,” Duncan explained.

Tooly remarked again on how many memories it had stirred up.

Duncan nodded stiffly, opened the front door. “When was it you lived here, exactly?”

“I’m so glad to meet you,” she said, and took the stairwell down.

As Tooly strolled back downtown, she glanced at other buildings. No matter how she imagined their insides — parties veering out of control, kitchens with faucets running, angry couples playing cards for real money — the truth was always more peculiar. In a vertical city, cramped dwellings were the only territory unreservedly reserved, each home an intimate fortress. Yet they were so easy to penetrate. (“Don’t want to intrude, but I used to live here. Might it be possible to take a quick look? I happened to be passing and — wow, even just standing here, so many memories!”) Mostly, one needed only to knock, say a few lines, enter. Why limit yourself to the outside when you could walk right in, peek at their lives — maybe even leave with a useful nugget.

She took out her pen and the newsprint that had wrapped her peanut-butter sandwich and jotted down all she’d gathered in this encounter, dredging her memory for every detail worth recounting to Venn.

Duncan had been awkward, clumsy, alone. So easy to capture a boy like that. She grew melancholy thinking this, and it took a moment to recognize why: something in him had reminded her of Paul.

Tooly turned sharply from the notion and tried to keep writing. But she gained little cooperation either from her hand — she shook out icy fingers — or from her will, which resisted parsing the boy’s candor for something to exploit. She scrunched the newsprint, discarded it in her pocket. His life and hers had intersected for a few minutes; that would be all.

She kept perfectly still on the sidewalk, studying the faces of pedestrians, her cold hands balled, her pulse increasing. She had the urge to run from here, and did.

AFTER THE MONKS had abandoned Llanthony Priory hundreds of years before, the Norman-Gothic complex crumbled gradually, the cathedral walls left without a roof, the stonework patched with mustard lichen, naked to centuries of drizzle, raindrops striking where once an altar had been.

Behind the ruins rose the Black Mountains and, this morning, a thick mist. She hiked as if into clouds, over grassland spiked with thistles, past grazing sheep, straight up the hillside. The mist dissipated as she ascended, her green rubber boots squelching, the muscles in her feet gauging rocks under her slippery treads, the ache in her thighs a pleasure, strength flagging but pace increasing.

At the top, a wild wind pulled and pushed her, fluttering the cable knit tied around her waist. The plateau widened, its edges lost to sight, a chalky path banked by heather and bracken for miles, the spine dividing two nations. To the right lay England: quilted countryside seamed by hedgerows and trees, every field fenced in and farmed. To the left was Wales: a tangle of rambling green, flinty farmhouses, forbidding woods.

The sunlight shifted and mottled the land. She paused under its rays, closed her eyes, absorbing the warmth. When the sun shone — and days passed without a glimpse of it — she hurried beneath. But it was rain that exhilarated her, watching through the bookshop window, the world hushing, sidewalks vacant. It wasn’t feeble drips that thrilled her but torrents — when raindrops exploded off leaves, choked drainpipes, drummed the attic roof at World’s End. Once, a thunder-clap sounded in the afternoon and Fogg gasped, though he masked it by noisily turning the page of a book on Mongol hordes.

“Storms are beautiful,” she’d said.

“Storms are wet.”

“Come on, you softie. When nature does something strong, dramatic like that, it’s exciting. Don’t you think?”

“Would you consider an earthquake exciting?”

“Well, if you could just watch it — imagine — if no one got hurt and nothing of value was destroyed, then yes, it’d be incredible. Like when you see pictures of molten lava.”

“Nothing nice about molten lava when it’s shooting at you.”

“It never has shot at me.”

“Nor me, to be brutally honest.”

From behind her closed eyelids, she perceived a darkening. The sunlight had migrated along the moorland. A speck of rain hit her cheek. The drizzle fell noiselessly, the wind shouldering thin raindrops into diagonals that darted one way then another, like shoals of fish in a nervous mass. She watched wet dots multiply on her blouse; the cotton clung to her small breasts and belly. Back in her twenties, she had considered her body parts irrelevant to the whole of herself, as if she lived in a container unrelated to the contained. When she caught sight of herself today, thinner than once, she thought less of shape than of time, which had arrived, its incursions marked by the coarsening of her. She gazed at her rubber boots on wet stalks of grass, vision blurred by beads of rain that hung from her eyebrows, shivering at each step.