The Rise & Fall of Great Powers (17 page)

“I’m fine here.”

“Well, never say I didn’t have your best interests at heart. Okay? Anyway, I’m staying a few days.”

“I need to check with Humph.”

“Check what?”

“Just let him know you want to stay.”

“You’ve got a huge mattress—there’s not space for me for a couple of days? Remember when we used to share your tent? Seriously, I don’t see why you’re making a big deal of this. Are you trying to humiliate me?”

“No, Sarah. Last thing I want.” Tooly reached for her, was pushed away, then placed her hand on Sarah’s upper arm, stroked it, as if soothing an animal.

“You’re so happy to see me!” Sarah said. “How cute!”

Tooly had spent so many years adjusting to the storms of Sarah that the habit of tranquilizing her overpowered the wish not to. To break the pattern, Tooly stepped away and rested her hand on the kitchen counter. Sarah placed hers atop, nails blood red.

“You all right?” Tooly asked.

“I’m fine.” She cleared her throat. “God, I don’t know.” At times like this, verging on the confessional, she evoked an aging actor before
the dressing-room mirror, regarding the sagging vacancy. There
was
vulnerability in Sarah.

“I hope,” she said. “I hope that bitch gets her comeuppance. I really do.”

Tooly had lost track of all the bitches, found no need to seek clarification on this one, another among the legions opposing Sarah. And it was partly true. The world did thwart her, but not because it conspired to that end. Obstacles materialized because they did for all. Her paranoia was a form of egoism, that merciful failure of the imagination. But the truth of her condition was worse: nobody plotted against her because nobody thought of her at all.

“How happy you were when I saved you!” Sarah said.

“How do you mean?”

“In Bangkok, when I saved you.” Sarah perceived the flicker of irritation. “Oh, come on—don’t act like you’re still loyal to Paul.”

“Anyway,” Tooly said.

A bang came from the door downstairs.

“Probably Humph,” Tooly said. “I’ll go check.” She hastened downstairs, frigid air rushing in from the open door.

“Hello, darlink,” Humphrey said. “You come out in pajamas? I would not believe it, if I do not hear it with my own eyes.”

She leaned in to whisper, “The empress is back.”

His expression transformed to disappointment, then annoyance. “I have to talk to you about important things,” he said. “Why empress is coming now? She is staying?”

“Seems so.”

He stared miserably.

Sarah opened the apartment door. “Talking about me?”

“No, no,” Tooly said.

“Liar.”

In the following days, Sarah rarely left, reading fashion magazines purloined from nearby stores. She was short on money, until a wire transfer came from Valter in Italy. After this, she vanished into a bar on Hoyt Street, finding overnight lodgings with the younger men
carousing there, followed by awkward scenes in the morning when they said versions of “Gotta run to work; mind leaving?” Sarah returned to the apartment, where Humphrey hid behind his books, and she chain-smoked at the window overlooking the expressway, waiting for Venn to call.

2011

T
HE BOOKSHOP WAS CLOSED
on Sundays, so when Tooly phoned from Connecticut, intending only to test her borrowed cellphone on a familiar number, she expected no answer.

“World’s End,” Fogg said.

“Oh,” she responded, “you’re not supposed to pick up.”

“Isn’t that the custom when these things make noise?”

“Why are you at work today?”

“Not really working, to be fair. Just popped my head in to see everything’s in order.”

“Very conscientious of you. But, sorry, I should go. This isn’t my cellphone and I was only—”

“You’ll be chuffed to hear I did the Honesty Barrel this morning even though it’s Sunday,” he said. “I’m admiring it through the window as we speak—a thing of beauty. No rain this morning. There are miracles, yes, even in Wales. What’s the time by you? Middle of the afternoon in America, is it?”

“It’s six here.”

“Is that tomorrow morning? Or yesterday evening?”

“It’s six in the morning. And it’s today.”

“It may
feel
like today to you. But you’re still in yesterday.”

“Fogg—we’re on the same day, you nut. It’s Sunday in both places.”

“Can’t take a joke now you’re in America. And what on earth are you doing awake at six o’clock on a Sunday morning, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“That’s when I get up.”

“Don’t believe a word of it. It’ll be the jet lag. I’d like to try that one time—nice bit of jet lag on a holiday to America.”

“I’d happily trade places,” she said. “And this isn’t a holiday. Actually, I miss the shop.”

“Shop didn’t say a word about you.”

“I’m slightly surprised that you haven’t burned it down yet.”

“Burning’s not scheduled till Thursday, I’m afraid.”

“Fogg,” she said, “aren’t you at all impressed that I’m calling you with a mobile phone?”

“I can barely contain myself. Utterly jubilant. You’ll be ringing on a daily basis now. I’ll be a bag of nerves.” He took down her number and provided his own in case of emergencies. In the background, the bell above the shop door tinkled.

“Customer?”

“Probably wanting directions. Yesterday was beyond busy—three people came in,” he said. “Well, should be off and deal with this.”

“You’ve become disconcertingly attentive.”

Children’s footsteps thundered above her—Duncan’s triplets awake and running across the floor.

“I should go myself,” she said.

Tooly took an early train into Manhattan to allow the McGrory family a little time together. She attempted to rest at the hotel but was too anxious, running through her questions for Humphrey, shaky to know that answers were hours away now. To expel tension, she set forth on the long hike to south Brooklyn.

Her walk took hours, yet she arrived in Sheepshead Bay early, so continued onward to the Russian enclave of Brighton Beach, wandering down its main avenue, shadowed by the elevated-train platform. Whenever subway carriages clattered overhead, sunlight strobed over the street-level nail parlors, clothing wholesalers, bankruptcy consultants. Side streets provided distant glimpses of sand—this was as far south as Brooklyn went before hitting ocean. Along the boardwalk, stubby seniors in wraparound shades gripped radios that crackled in Russian. The Atlantic sloshed now and then.

To prepare her, Duncan had insisted on meeting a few minutes beforehand. “We have to be punctual,” he informed her, locking his BMW outside the Sheepshead Bay station. “Your dad gets agitated if people are late, thinks he’s got the time wrong.”

“This apartment he lives in—you said it’s not great, right?”

“Well, the building got attention in the local press when a couple of Uzbek guys there were arrested for playing tennis with a mouse.”

“That’s horrendous.”

“It’s a weird place. You’ll see.”

Graffiti covered the glass entrance door, spray paint having run in long streaks under each tag. Duncan punched a code into the digital access pad and shouldered inside, finding a nervous Chinese man who’d just emerged from an apartment, key still in lock. The man said, “No, no,” waving them away.

They climbed the winding staircase, passing grimy windows that overlooked the street from ever-higher aspects: cars, then electrical poles, then rooftops. The floor got dirtier as they went, litter everywhere, an abandoned kiddie bike with training wheels, a broken umbrella, cigar ash.

The place she shared with Humphrey in Brooklyn a decade earlier had been run-down, as had Duncan’s apartment share on 115th Street. But they’d all been passing through; the squalor was transitory. Here no one was going on to better things. They were staying and rotting. It was a flophouse, one person to a room, shared bathroom at the end of each floor, communal kitchen at the other. Most of the inhabitants were men, jobless, addicted, ill. “Your dad has been here a few years now. I thought you should see it,” Duncan said, as if she deserved a little guilt for this.

Many of the gun-metal doors were dented, as if kicked repeatedly. A torn Tigres del Norte poster hung from one. Another was open, a fat shirtless man with a hair net seated in a deck chair, chewing his hand. From other rooms, conversation emerged in various languages along with the pungent scent of food. “This is him. Door’s always open. I tell him to lock it, but you know what he’s like.”

“Should we knock?”

Duncan just pushed in. The door hit an obstacle but he squeezed past, disappearing from sight. Tooly, who hesitated in the hall, heard him asking, “Did I wake you?”

In response came, “Hmm?”

Tooly turned her back, closed her eyes, heart pounding.

Duncan called to her, “You coming in?”

The door was impeded by a white leather armchair. She turned sideways to edge in, and saw first the back of Humphrey’s head, then his rheumy eyes. The room contained a bed piled with documents and books, a window with blinds down, a small television on a chest of drawers, a bar fridge, microwave, and sink, above which hung graph paper with Duncan’s distinctive handwriting:
TURN OFF TAP!
Around the room, he had posted further exhortations:
LOCK DOOR AT NIGHT!; TOILET PAPER IN DRAWER!
A stench, like spoiled stew and floral air spray, filled the room.

“He just woke up,” Duncan said.

Humphrey scowled, tangled white eyebrows overhanging his lids, face like a walnut shell. He wore a red sweatshirt and oversized bluejeans—she’d never seen him in leisurewear and it looked wrong, as if he’d been dressed by someone else. He had lost weight, too, his jeans cinched with a rope. Duncan raised the blinds. Humphrey gripped his chair, arms shaking from exertion as he pushed himself to his feet.

“Humphrey,” she said. “Hello.”

He blinked, the heavy sacks under his eyes quivering.

“I walked all the way here from Manhattan,” she went on. “I know you disapprove of physical exercise, but I enjoyed it. Was thinking on the way down that I should’ve brought you some smashed potatoes.”

He shuffled past her, arm outstretched to feel his route, overgrown yellowing fingernails ticking against the wall. He stumbled on a book, which made her and Duncan lurch forward. But he was fine. Lips pursing, slackening, he turned to Duncan, stating softly, “Go out.”

“You want a moment alone with Tooly?”

“Have
her
go out. I want her to leave the room. Now, please.”

Tooly went rigid, not just at his statement but at how he delivered it. The man she had known was Russian. This old man—it looked like the same person; surely, it was him—spoke as if English were his native tongue. She looked to Duncan, then to Humphrey.

She hastened around the armchair and into the hallway, closing his door behind her. From inside came muffled voices. What, what, what was going on here?

A neighbor burst from her room, shouting “Fuckin’
told
you!” and flung before her two little boys, then slammed the door, leaving them in the hall. Giggling maniacally, the brothers—the elder about eleven—pounded on the door for their mother, rattled the handle, screamed for a few minutes, ran at it with karate kicks, looking over at Tooly to see if she was impressed.

“We’ve all been thrown out,” she told them. From inside their mother’s apartment, music boomed. The older boy sprinted up the corridor, spat at the closed windowpane. The younger kid lay on the floor, finger up his nose, staring at Tooly.

Duncan opened the door. “You can come back now.”

Humphrey had changed into a collared shirt, which was tucked into his roped jeans, and he’d put on a tie. His hearing aids were in now and he wore bifocals, whose lenses split his clouded old eyes across the middle.

“Is there somewhere I should sit?” she said, watching Humphrey. “I’m not sure where to go. It’s a bit cramped.”

He pointed to the armchair, but she declined—that seemed to be his seat, the white leather darkened in his smudged shadow. Duncan sat on the edge of the bed, so she did the same. Shaking, Humphrey lowered himself into his chair, curled forward, chin against tie, hands compressed between his thighs, as if bracing for a punch.

“We woke him. Waking is always difficult,” Duncan told Tooly, who nodded brusquely, hating to discuss someone who sat across from them. “Yelena was here this morning,” he said, of the Russian woman who was paid to help out.

“I don’t recall.”

“Did you enjoy your lunch?”

“Didn’t have any.”

“There’s a pizza box in the sink.”

Humphrey turned to consider the evidence. “Yes, some pizza. Wasn’t good, which is why I didn’t remember it.”

Tooly tried to catch his eye, to inquire with a glance, What the hell is going on?

“I didn’t offer you coffee yet,” he said.

Tooly stood to make it, but the jar of Nescafé was empty.

“Was telling Tooly,” Duncan said, “that waking can be difficult for you.”

“Feels strange,” Humphrey said. “Apprehension. But not about anything. If you fear something concrete, you can do something about it. But I don’t know what I feel frightened of.”

“His vascular system isn’t working properly,” Duncan continued. “That’s what the memory-clinic guy told us. His brain doesn’t get the blood it needs.”

“I don’t want to exaggerate the problem,” Humphrey said. “It’s uneven. It depends on what cells are attacked.”

“You must be happy to see your daughter.”

Humphrey grunted, laughed uncomfortably.

“I heard that someone robbed you,” Tooly said, looking at him hard, though he failed to meet her gaze.

“I was told I was robbed. Don’t remember any of it. Attempts were made to strangle me. This is where my problem stems from, I think.”

“The attack seems to have affected his memory,” Duncan said. “Short-term, particularly. But there are other problems. He forgets how to do stuff.”

“I don’t want to exaggerate,” Humphrey said. “It depends on what cells are attacked. Blood doesn’t flow in that direction.”

“What sorts of things are you forgetting, Humphrey?”