Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

Toward the end of Humphrey’s life, he had abstained from alcohol, wanting clarity of mind, and Tooly had stopped in solidarity, no matter how she had craved a drink. Since then, she’d ceased the solitary tipples of old, abolishing her nighttime habit of vanishing into glasses of red wine, that nightly amnesia starting around 8 P.M. Anyway, she was collaborating so much with Fogg now that her evenings were no longer solitary. She reserved time to practice her ukulele (oddly, she’d gotten slightly better by not playing these past weeks). Even as she strummed, her new cellphone often trilled beside her in the attic, with a text from Fogg posing a catalog query. She thumbed in half a response, then gave up and went downstairs to answer him. For breaks, they closed the shop, took afternoon hikes past the priory, up into the Black Mountains.

When they returned from one such ramble, there was a delivery truck idling before the shop, hazard lights blinking. The driver unloaded six boxes. An invoice was thrust at her; the van zoomed off. Duncan had sent these. She peeled off the packing tape and the cardboard flaps popped apart. Inside: volume after volume, crammed in, and the smell of Humphrey’s room.

His books were cheap editions, mostly — dust jackets missing, bindings torn, pages unglued and falling out. Many were too worthless even to consign to the Honesty Barrel. She sorted them, pausing here and there, losing herself for hours in familiar copies — there was the edition of Nicholas Nickleby that Paul had bought for her a quarter century before, that she had read in secret at King Chulalongkorn International School, had lugged to that house party in Bangkok, left behind with Humphrey, and from which she’d read to him in Sheepshead Bay. So strange that this had taken place weeks before — seemed at once like a single day and many years ago.

She organized the worthiest volumes on three low shelves against the right wall of the shop, with a sign identifying the new section: HUMPHREY’S BOOKS. There were about a hundred — that’s all it amounted to in the end — and they were all for sale, including his prized blue volume of essays by John Stuart Mill. Inside each cover, she wrote his name, picturing a stranger years later opening the book, reading “Humphrey Ostropoler,” and wondering who had possessed that name, and why he’d surrendered this edition. People kept their books, she thought, not because they were likely to read them again but because these objects contained the past — the texture of being oneself at a particular place, at a particular time, each volume a piece of one’s intellect, whether the work itself had been loved or despised or had induced a snooze on page forty. People might be trapped inside their own heads, but they spent their lives pushing out from that locked room. It was why people produced children, why they cared about land, why nothing felt equal to one’s own bed after a long trip.

For days, customers failed to notice Humphrey’s Books. Then, a sniffly-nosed Jaguar driver crouched before them, gathering on the cat-scented carpet a pile of volumes to buy, including that edition of John Stuart Mill essays. To avoid the sight, Tooly made a trip to the post office.

Along with business parcels, she brought two padded envelopes, one containing Palm Groves and Humming Birds: An Artist’s Fortnight in Brazil , a copiously illustrated 1924 rarity with maroon pigskin binding, gilt title lettering, and marbled end papers that she mailed to Paul. The other envelope was for Sarah, containing a work on coin collecting and a coffee-table photo book of Kenyan landscapes. She addressed it to the seaside apartment in Anzio on the assumption that this was where Sarah might be, now that the weather had turned cold.

When Tooly returned to World’s End, the customer had gone, along with several of Humphrey’s books, leaving the remainders leaning at glum angles. She crouched before them, stricken with regret, and shifted the leftovers to hide the gaps.

“You said I could sell those,” Fogg reminded her.

“No, yes, I know. I’m trying not to be stupid about it.”

He tapped the sales ledger with his pencil. She glanced up, then returned to reordering the section. He yammered on with uncommon noisiness about — well, she didn’t know what — and kept tapping his pencil on the ledger. “I’m trying to get you to come over and look,” he said.

She obliged, reading the sales entries, including those for a dozen of Humphrey’s volumes.

“Yes, I know.”

From under the counter, he produced them all. “I’m the one who bought them. Out from under his runny nose.”

She thanked Fogg, but returned them all to the Humphrey’s Books section.

“I’ll just have to buy them again,” he warned her. “Could get dear after a time.”

“Okay,” she relented. “I’ll keep these ones. Thank you.”

Sarah never did respond to her package. But Paul did, with a touching note, thanking her for the visit that past summer and for the beautiful volume, which would be ideal for the flight he was about to take, heading off for two months with Shelly to their house in Nong Khai. He wrote of his efforts to cultivate dwarf banana trees there, saying he longed to show off his renovations but could convince no one to trek out there. Tooly was welcome to visit — and even to bring somebody. He’d be honored to meet any companion of hers.

“Fogg,” she said, “would you accompany me through the jungles of Thailand?”

“You being honest?”

“No, not really.”

He departed to alphabetize Asian History for a few minutes, then returned. “You know what I am?” he said. “I’m …” He wandered into the reference section.

“What are you, Fogg?”

“Thesaurus.”

“You’re a thesaurus?”

“The word begins with an h . Where’s the thesaurus?”

“Hungry?”

“No, why do you ask?”

“You said you begin with an h . Did we sell it?”

“Sell what?”

“The thesaurus. Are you hypnotized?”

“How do you mean? Oh, another h -word. No, no.”

“Are you heroic? Or happy? Or hangry?”

“Not any of them,” he replied. “What’s ‘hangry’?”

“When you’re hungry and angry at the same time.”

“I’ve been that. Many a time.” He snapped his fingers impatiently, unable to recollect the word.

“What’s it to do with?”

He went outside, door tinkling. Through the window, she observed him dipping into the Honesty Barrel, his arm disappearing in there. She half expected it to emerge drenched and clutching a trout. Instead, he returned with a battered Roget’s thesaurus and stood flipping its pages. “There,” he said, suddenly hesitant, splaying the book, thumb under the word. “That one.”

“That’s not an h -word. It begins with b .”

“Right you are.” Not having received the desired response, he closed the book over his thumb and went back outside to the Honesty Barrel.

It was a cool autumn day, feathery clouds and a sun too timid to warm the village yet. Roberts Road was empty, as if there were nobody but Fogg in the village of Caergenog, in the nation of Wales, in all the British Isles — none but him there, feeling like an ass. He cursed himself for trying to sound clever with her. If only the earth would open up and swallow him. A forbidden thought entered his mind, a sexual one about her, and his knees weakened. Can’t think things like that at the Honesty Barrel! He imagined making her a meal using a cookbook, not the tatty old ones in Recipes & Eating but a posh volume bought brand-new in Cardiff, with photos of how food never really looked. He fantasized about the two of them in a proper town, poor but happy. His invalid brother had decent help now, and his mother had met someone — it wasn’t mad for him to consider leaving here, at least for a spell. He was younger than Tooly, but could make the case that it was better for an older woman to be with a younger man since women lived longer, and if they went with older men they risked becoming nurses, as his grandmother had done for thirty years, poor devil. He daydreamed of a city, where things happened, where they’d attend meetings — he’d never been to a proper meeting. Everything was under way in the world, right at that moment!