The Rise And Fall Of Great Powers Part 2

Duncan led her to his room: dirty laundry bursting from the closet, gla.s.ses of bubbly old water, a laptop and modem beside legal casebooks. On a rickety stand was a Yamaha electric piano. The walls bore just one poster, depicting the countryside in j.a.pan, where he'd taught English for a year.

She looked around the room. "Really brings back memories."

"Sorry everything's so chaotic."

"Not at all," she said. "I like squalid boy places."

"In that case ..." He led her to the kitchen, the sink heaped with dirty dishes and pans, oven clock blinking an eternal 12:00. One cupboard was filled with scrunched plastic bags, while another contained sinister jars of pickle juice and a packaged stew that had expired in 1998. "Normally, when girls come over they never come back."

"Fools." She drifted onward.

"Guess you know your way around," he mumbled, following her into the living room, the dining table piled with junk mail for kids who'd long since graduated but had yet to inform the ma.s.s-mailing departments at Victoria's Secret, Macy's, and L.L.Bean. She raised the window-"I loved going out here"-and stepped onto the rickety fire escape, inadvertently flipping an ashtray there. Below were bare trees and parked cars, the potholed tarmac painted with XING SCHOOL.

"My elementary school was right near here," she improvised, returning inside. "Went there from eight till eleven."

"How was it?"

"Heaven."

"Not a word I normally a.s.sociate with elementary school."

"Oh, yeah? You didn't like yours?" She took this opening and burrowed in, inquiring into his schooling, his plans, and those of his roommates. Emerson, an unpopular member of the household, was doing a doctorate in comparative literature. Xavi, who came from Uganda originally, was Duncan's best friend and had been since high school in Connecticut.

"That's where you come from, Connecticut? From one of those posh old families there?"

"No, no. First generation." His dad, Keith, hailed from Glasgow, an architect who'd transferred to New York three decades earlier to build skysc.r.a.pers or die trying. Today, he was the director of design at a partnership in Stamford, Connecticut, specializing in atriums at shopping malls. As for Duncan's mother, Naoko, she'd reached New York from Kobe, j.a.pan, in 1973 to study art at Parsons. She and Keith met as foreigners in the big city, their accents bemusing locals, though they understood each other perfectly-that is, they misunderstood each other sufficiently. As a child, Duncan read of kilts and haggis and the treachery of the Campbells, played snare in a fife band, kept a Scottish flag in his room, and effaced his j.a.panese half. This reversed in junior high, once ethnicity had become chic. By college, he described himself as j.a.panese. After graduation, he moved to Yokohama, intending to teach English and become fluent in his mother's tongue. It proved a disaster. "I don't normally get into this."

"Come on," she said. "You'll never see me again."

He'd had no friends in j.a.pan, and learned little of the language, except how impossible it was, with honorifics and respectful forms and humble forms-and myriad ways to get it all wrong. After years of claiming to be j.a.panese, he learned how un-j.a.panese he was. Wasn't anything anymore. "This suddenly required me to have a personality. I hadn't planned for that."

"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 a.s.signed 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, n.o.body 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, tortoisesh.e.l.l gla.s.ses. 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 pa.s.sing 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-b.u.t.ter 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.

2011: The Beginning 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 gra.s.sland 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.s. She watched wet dots multiply on her blouse; the cotton clung to her small b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 coa.r.s.ening of her. She gazed at her rubber boots on wet stalks of gra.s.s, vision blurred by beads of rain that hung from her eyebrows, shivering at each step.

A crow flew overhead. Needs a trench coat, that crow. Do they mind the rain, birds? Paul would've known. But only thoughts of this place and this time were allowed: her legs marching beneath her. She inhaled. The joy of empty thoughts, occupied by senses alone. If she were ever to write a book (and she'd never consider it), it would be on the satisfaction of thinking nothing. What a dullard I've become! And what a book that would make! It would cure insomniacs, at least.

The trail descended through woods, across farmers' fields, over a stile, past the ruins. Back in the Fiat, she flung her wet cable knit into the backseat and adjusted the rearview mirror, amused at the sidelong image of her bedraggled self. The drive home was twenty minutes down a one-lane road, her toes curling as onrushing lorries appeared around each corner, she swerving into hedges to let them pa.s.s. Her car was a spine-jarring contraption lacking shocks, seatbelts, or a pa.s.senger-side window, the missing pane covered with plastic sheeting that flapped furiously as she drove. Through holes in the rusted floor, she glimpsed asphalt rushing beneath.

Tooly pulled in at the church parking lot, and sparrows-battling over scattered rice from a weekend marriage-took flight. For nearly two years she had lived in the village, yet she had no friends here. Reserve was the norm in these parts, which suited her. The place let her be, and she'd grown fond of it. The newsagent, the village doctor, the solicitor, the police constable, the butcher's apprentice in red-striped ap.r.o.n smoking on his delivery bike. The pie-and-chip shop on Unicorn Street, the village clock, the monument to "those sons of Caergenog who fell in the Great War 19141918," with a wreath of plastic poppies.

To the locals, she was known as the bookshop lady, seen hiking on public paths, a little foreign-she was "from away," as they put it. In her defense, she wasn't English. The Welsh were much concerned with "the English," a term uttered curtly, as of neighbors who barge into one's living room on a Sunday, monopolizing the cakes and conversation. Worse still, the English language had supplanted their own, whose wondrous native words were still extant on traffic signs-CERDDWYR EDRYCHWCH I'R CHWITH-but unp.r.o.nounceable to many of the Welsh themselves. At least their lilting accent held fast in English, words articulated as if there were s.p.a.ces between every syllable.

She entered the shop and took the staircase up past the inn rooms, each furnished with a four-poster bed and a hay-stuffed mattress, every chest of drawers smelling of lavender. In the kitchen, the floorboards bore the impression of a now departed range, its border outlined in caramel stains. The bathroom contained a clawfoot tub, while the water closet had a wooden-seat toilet, which flushed with a cold chain, the tank trickling.

Rather than lodging in one of the inn rooms, Tooly had settled in the attic. She'd evicted the spiders, disposed of the broken furniture and the gramophone, then scrubbed the splintery floor and wiped the porthole windows to transparency. Up the attic ladder, she had shoved a double mattress, leaving it on the floor. She slept under the rafters, her nose cold by morning.

Clothes still damp from her walk, she undressed and stood nude at the window, only her head visible from the street. She preferred not to hang curtains, and it was too high for anyone to spy. On the floor were piles of her clothing, plus a canvas bag large enough to contain everything. This was all she owned. Over the past decade, she had discarded anything of value.

Once dressed, she went down to the shop, counted out the float, entered yesterday's sales into the computer (this never took long), reversed the OPEN/CLOSED sign, and unlocked the front door. Opening time was 10 A.M., but she was always early. By contrast, Fogg was always late.

"Caught in traffic," he explained, dropping a folded newspaper from under his chin, placing his cappuccino on the bar counter. His house was a four-minute walk from World's End, so "traffic" was understood to mean a queue at the Monna Lisa Cafe. It was his habit to arrive every morning with a hot beverage and a cold periodical. He bought a different publication each day, and they took turns reading it, holding a discussion in the afternoon. Till then, or at least noon, he tried to limit his jabbering, disappearing behind shelves, his location perceptible by coffee slurps emanating from Geography or Political Thought.

When the morning was quiet like this, she read up on her latest hobbies, tried books that customers had recommended, and dusted. Formerly, she'd played music from a ca.s.sette player on the servery, the same few tapes she'd been addicted to for years. But those ca.s.settes were gone. Weeks earlier, a crotchety old couple had entered, both in identical anoraks and looking so alike that it was nearly impossible to say which had once been groom and which bride. They walked around single file, then returned to the servery, where one of them gathered a handful of Tooly's mixtapes. "We need something to play in the camper van."

"Those aren't for sale," Fogg said.

"They can be," Tooly interposed. Any income was worth accepting at this point. "Don't you want to see what they are first?"

"Prefer music. Doesn't matter what kind."

"You prefer music? To audiobooks, you mean?"

"Prefer music to conversation."

They agreed on fifty pence per tape, and the couple counted out the coins while Tooly stared at the stack of ca.s.settes, with t.i.tles like "Year 2000 Mix by D-Mac." They'd been produced years before by her then boyfriend, Duncan McGrory, and included extensive liner notes about the musicians (Fiona Apple, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Tori Amos, Bob Dylan, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Tom Waits), written in lettering that shrank as s.p.a.ce ran short, asterisks added to asterisks. Tooly regretted the sale before it had concluded, but refused to reverse herself. That had been weeks earlier. No point dwelling on it. "Shall we put on the radio?" she asked Fogg, handing back a novel he'd lent her.

He went behind the computer and live-streamed Radio 4. "Did you enjoy that book?" he asked. "Utter rubbish, I thought."

"Terrible. Why did you recommend it?"

"It was so awful, I thought: Tooly has to read this."

"You're the only person, Fogg, who recommends a book because you hate it."

"Hang on." He scurried away, voice drifting back through the stacks, overlaid by radio chatter. "If you didn't like that book," he called back, "you have to try this one."

"Does it involve an alien playing the saxophone?" she asked. "If there are aliens playing the saxophone, or any other instruments, or even just being their alien selves without any musical inclination-if there are aliens, Fogg, I'm banning you."

"That's a bit rough," he said, returning with a paperback.

"Okay, I won't ban you. But I ask one final time-aliens?"

"No aliens," he promised, adding, "There may be an orc."

"Is there or is there not an orc?"

"There's an orc."

Fogg's most salient quality as an employee was his ability to be present while she fetched a sandwich. Beyond this, he contributed little that could be quantified. But she would not have wanted to continue without him. World's End earned nothing, meaning she paid him from her personal savings, a small and diminishing sum. Within a couple of years, she'd be insolvent. Yet she observed her bank balance nearly with impatience for bankruptcy. This was the most fixed abode she'd known, and she couldn't shake an urge to lose it.