Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

He fetched his Ping-Pong paddle. “Game before you are going?”

She shook her head, but made two mugs of instant coffee.

He tasted his. “Where’s sugar?”

“I put in two heaping tablespoons already.”

“Must be more heaping.”

“Humph,” she said, “we’re always going to have lots of conversations. Okay?”

He smiled. “But, Tooly, I’m not really alive — I am already with my friends,” he said, pointing to his books. “I died already and I’m only watching now. You can go on with this twenty-first century. I am staying in number twenty. It is nicer for me.” The concerns of his century — inspiring millions, swindling them, murdering them — had once amounted to everything, then expired, as the species repeated itself in different generations, in different bodies, uniquely animated in each person, yet united by one fear: that upon their own deletion the world went extinct, too. The times to which he had peripherally belonged — a world war, the ideological battles thereafter — had ended, but his physical powers had not exhausted themselves, nor had the organism stopped. “I know what twentieth century has for breakfast,” he said. “It is too much work getting to know new century.”

“We’ll let everyone else test number twenty-one,” she suggested. “What do you think? If it looks nice, we’ll join them.”

“Is good idea.” He rose as if to give an after-dinner speech, then sat back down and patted her hand. “You so sweet, darlink. I go get fresh air.” He spent twenty minutes locating his coat and roll-up chess set in case he wanted to study positions, plus a few dollars in loose change. All this he narrated loudly. Farewell unstated, he closed the front door after himself. Even then, he muttered on the landing for a minute before clomping downstairs, the building door squeaking open, crashing shut after him.

Ten minutes later, Tooly left, as he had intended her to do. Reaching the end of their street, she checked the contents of her shoulder bag, ensuring that everything was there: clothing, passport, bank card. “Oh, well,” she said, pressing a knuckle into her breastbone, pushing as hard as she could, as if to cave in her chest. “Oh, well.”

Her train left Penn Station, passing the smokestacks of New Jersey, factories with windows smashed, rusty bridges, residential streets, houses whose insides she filled with blaring televisions, pregnant silences, uproarious laughter, sex, showers, cigars, chatter. She had no location of her own and none in prospect — less in common with those home-dwellers than with the sinister types lurking at each station the train pulled into, its brakes squealing to a halt, air vents gusting, a bag of chips crinkling behind her. “Last call for …” Trenton and Philadelphia, through Chester, Pennsylvania, Wilmington, onward.

THE PASSENGERS EXPLORED their trays of foil-covered treasure, but she turned down her meal, irking the airline steward, who kept telling her that it was free. She looked out the window, smelling rubbery eggs, watery sausages. Flying reminded Tooly of her father. Whenever they’d had a bank of three seats to themselves, they left an empty one between them, she at the window, nose pressed to the glass, Paul on the aisle, looking around for a stewardess to request another ginger ale for his daughter.

There were no empty seats on this flight from New York to London. The passengers were crammed in, bulging over the armrests onto each other. She read a copy of The New York Times , whose front page contained a report that neutrinos may have broken the speed of light:

Even this small deviation would open up the possibility of time travel and play havoc with longstanding notions of cause and effect. Einstein himself — the author of modern physics, whose theory of relativity established the speed of light as the ultimate limit — said that if you could send a message faster than light, “You could send a telegram to the past.”

The purported discovery was shaky, the article continued, but the idea was wondrous. How Humphrey would have loved pondering it! And how odd that events went on regardless, leaving behind those who should have witnessed them.

It seemed inconceivable that he existed nowhere. Even when they’d been apart for years, she’d heard his commentary each time she ate a potato or looked at a Ping-Pong table. The proxy Humphrey inside her continued talking even now that the original had gone from existence. He most definitely was , therefore it was jarring — almost impossible — to know that he was not.

Humphrey had talked once about block time, an idea of the philosopher J.M.E. McTaggart, who in 1908 had posited that human perception deceives us: time only feels like a forward-moving flow because of the limits of our minds, whereas time actually exists, as does space, with everything in existence simultaneously, even if one is not there anymore. The events of twenty years earlier still exist, just as another country and its inhabitants exist even once you leave it. Block time was like turning backward in a novel, as Tooly had done in childhood, finding dear characters preserved, quipping and contriving as ever. Block time offered comfort to secular minds, for those who had no heaven in which to save vanished friends. Nevertheless, to Tooly there was something untrue about the theory; a slight comfort, but not true.

She returned to the article, recalling a conversation during which she (in an H. G. Wells phase) had lamented to Humphrey that people always talked of building a time machine to go back and see great moments of history, whereas she’d want to go forward and see what the world looked like then. He had been appalled: to see two hundred and fifty years hence would be devastating. “Maybe in two hundred and fifty years,” he cautioned, “nobody plays Ping-Pong.” His world would be extinct, even if humanity continued. Extinction, as he meant it, took place yearly, in increments small enough to tolerate, harder as they accumulated. To leap so many extinctions at once would be too painful. That conversation had been twelve years earlier, in a world already long extinct.

From Heathrow, she took the Tube to central London, then two trains onward to Wales, and a cab from the local station. She had the driver drop her at the top of Roberts Road, so she could stroll through the village.

Bag over her shoulder, she tapped on the window of World’s End and entered, the bell above the door tinkling. She had doubted that the shop would be open anymore. But Fogg remained there on his stool. “Oh, hello,” he said. “Are you back, then?”

Each sought the appropriate register to address the other. Before, it had been owner to employee, then during her absence — after phone calls and his assistance in her search — they’d become friends, only for her to drop all contact for weeks. Now they settled midway.

She explained her plan: to transfer formal ownership of the shop to him, then be on her way. If he didn’t want World’s End — and she’d understand — she would need to sell the stock, pay any outstanding bills, formally close the company, and lock up within a fortnight. These travels had decimated her savings. She’d be eating empty sandwiches for a while now.

That night, Tooly looked out the attic windows at the rain and the muddy pastures, sheep mewling in the darkness. Lying on her own mattress once again, she slept for eleven hours, utterly tranquil (a tweeting bird, sounds of distant construction, long stretches of oblivion between). Waking, she inhaled the smell of the rafters up here, which until her return she’d never realized had a scent. Her only unease was a hovering sense of responsibility — that she ought to be looking after someone. But there was no one anymore, just herself, which seemed so frivolous.