The Rise & Fall of Great Powers (11 page)

2011

S
HE PASSED JUST ONE HIKER
in the Black Mountains that morning, a small boy with a large rucksack who mumbled a greeting that Tooly cheerfully returned. It didn’t seem like the world up here. The villages below remained attached to modern life. But the hares and sheep darted away whichever the century, whatever excitation swept the valleys, whether menfolk were conscripted, if decades later they reminisced of war, if long after that their widows sat alone for supper.

In the distance down the ridge, something caught her attention. A group of walkers, maybe. But they were approaching too fast. Dirt bikes? She squinted. Those weren’t people but ponies, the wild ones that roamed these hills. They were a mile away but galloping—in two minutes, they’d be on her. The path was only as broad as a car, with thick brush on either side and sharp slopes beyond. The ponies grew distinct now, about twenty of them. She waded into knee-high bracken. Could the animals veer off the path and trample her even there?

But upon arrival they had slowed to an amble, scarcely glancing at this strange human observing them from the brush. They grazed before her, foals between mares, a chestnut youngster on twig legs, a heavy-gutted gray stallion with tail swishing. Tooly held still—a thrilling arm’s length from wild animals. She tried to memorize this instant, all the more urgently because there was nobody to share it. Once, she had read a story in which a man, dying in an asylum, sees “a herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful,” run across his
imagination. If this moment returned to her years hence, what would she recall? A memory of having wanted to remember?

Abruptly, she turned from the ponies, striding down the steep hillside, tripping through bracken, speeding to the point of danger. It was futile, she knew, to ruminate.

“Desperately trying to reach you,” Duncan had written. “Can we talk about your father???” What gave a boyfriend from a decade before the right to bludgeon her with punctuation? Her father had been beaten and robbed in New York, Duncan explained via Facebook messages. Whatever falling-out she’d had with the man, she needed to fly out immediately and help. Well, yes—that sounded reasonable. Except that Tooly had no idea who this father could be.

She had never mentioned
any
relative when she and Duncan were together. But after he lost touch with her in New York, it transpired, Duncan had gone looking for her, only to find her father living at a storage space near the Gowanus Expressway. The old man conveyed nothing about Tooly’s whereabouts—instead, he had made Duncan play chess.

And, with that, she knew this “father” could only be Humphrey.

Little stirred her as did thoughts of the past. Starting with—well, how to describe what had happened? She didn’t consider it a kidnapping. What, then? Taken from home, left in the care of a stranger, moved around the world. Those events had seemed to be heading toward some purpose, only for everything to collapse in New York.

The lack of a proper ending gnawed at her still, no matter how she had tried to forget. For years, she had awaited Venn’s return. She had moved from one country to another, taken on lovers, changed jobs, yet retained the expectation of another life—a wormhole through which she’d one day slip, rescued by his company. Only upon buying the shop had she suspended this. It had been crushing, then almost a relief: no longer wandering, no longer believing herself distinct from those she walked among. Instead, she came to consider herself rather less worthwhile than average. As Venn had done, she razored away the
unnecessary: companions, conversation, affection. She understood now all that he’d once said to her, and longed to tell him so.

But it was Humphrey who had now popped back into her life. Was it crazy to think Venn might be involved? If she went out there, might he be waiting?

Tooly gazed up the hillside, straining for a last glimpse of the ponies. But she absorbed little of her surroundings. None of this mattered. Her bookshop. Nothing. The past simply outranked the present, and it awaited her in New York.

T
HE PLANE DESCENDED
toward the city, its winged shadow gliding over the ocean surface. Tooly, who’d flown so often in her life, had become nervous about planes in recent years. She clenched at each wobble now—when the engines roared into action, when they fell silent.

In the terminal, a Homeland Security officer with elephantine legs and a crackling walkie-talkie watched the hordes plod by, bleary JFK arrivals dragging bags and babies and time zones behind them, their shoulders and hopes sinking at the monumental immigration lines—fault of the terrorists or fault of the response, depending on one’s politics. She recalled how nervous Paul had been whenever they crossed a border. At the counter, a thick-shouldered agent with a dapper little mustache took her American passport, flipped the pages slowly. “Welcome home, ma’am.”

The outer boroughs of New York rushed past the window of the yellow cab, with Tooly crammed behind a bulletproof divider implanted with a blaring television that she couldn’t shut off. The driver chatted on a hands-free, and Tooly kept looking up, thinking she was being addressed, only to realize that he was speaking Punjabi.

In her two-star midtown hotel, she awoke in the dark—that under-the-soil blackness of a hotel room with the curtains drawn. Syncopated police sirens blooped faintly from the street below, as if a kid
were in there pressing buttons. Demonic red digits glowed beside her: 4:31
A.M.

Cupping basin water to her mouth, she roused herself, parted the curtains, and discovered an Orion’s belt of office lights. On the television, she read descriptions of pay-per-view movies: “A former marine falls in love with a native of a lush alien world”; “Two NYPD detectives must retrieve a valuable baseball card.” Every commercial seemed to be for pharmaceuticals. Possible side effects included unpleasant taste in mouth, dizziness, abnormal thoughts and behavior, swelling of the tongue, memory loss, anxiety, getting out of bed while not being fully awake and doing an activity you do not know you are doing.

Would she disturb those in the next rooms if she practiced her ukulele? To be among people again, in close quarters, required an adjustment. When she left Caergenog, placing Fogg in charge, he had insisted there was no such place as “away” these days, because of technology. But
this
seemed “away.”

In about twelve hours, she’d see Duncan. How would he be? Angry? He had never been that way when they were together. But in their online exchange he was curt, mentioning coldly his wife, kids, job. When she requested a phone number for Humphrey, he told her to just come out there. Your father needs you. Not just a phone call.

Hours later, she awoke again, a different self on second rising, parting the hotel curtains on a different city, too: sunlight gleaming off skyscrapers, geometric patches of sky. It was Saturday, but in the offices across the street a few human shapes approached their desks, rubbing their faces as Windows started. In the hotel lobby, a brass revolving door swallowed Tooly, spat her into the metropolis, her entrance punctuated by doormen whistling for cabs and the bap-bap-bap of horns. She navigated without a map, knowing her way without knowing how, the topography within her still, though latent for more than a decade.

In her absence, New York had been invaded by cupcakes. Joggers ran barefoot now. Hipsters wore nerd glasses and beards. And walking had become an obstacle course, pedestrians inebriated on handheld devices, jostling one another as they passed, glancing up dimly at the shared world, then back into the bottomless depths projected from shining glass.

When she lived here, people were always lamenting how New York had changed, how Mayor Giuliani had cleansed Times Square of its gritty charm, turned it into a bland Disneyland. But the city had gentrified further since. Maybe it was just the experience of knowing New York over time, that it kept tidying up. Or perhaps it was the experience of living generally, that you hitched yourself to a particular period but places refused to remain anchored, jarring you at each re-acquaintance.

She arrived at Grand Central for her 4
P.M.
train, people fast-walking in all directions, an explosion of humanity with rolling bags. In Caergenog, the church parking lot would be full right now, Saturday-night drinkers at the Hook, ponies wandering the windy ridge. It would be dark up there, lights dotting the valley.

Upon her arrival in Stamford, she hesitated before the station exit, surprised at her nerves on seeing Duncan again. A silver BMW pulled up; the passenger door clicked open. He nodded at her. “Welcome to sunny Connecticut.”

He’d become rather middle-aged: a hunch and a paunch, skin dull, eyes fatigued. She saw already the elderly man he would become, while the youth she’d known grew faint. “Jet-lagged?” he asked, glancing from Tooly to his lap, where he balanced an iPhone on one thigh, a blinking BlackBerry on the other. A notepad lay on the dashboard. She hadn’t seen his handwriting in years. Architectural block letters on graph paper evoked him so powerfully—even more than the man himself, somehow.

Driving toward his home in Darien, he pointed out the sights: a pond where he’d ice-skated as a boy, plus the old Post Road, a stagecoach-mail route in the early years of the republic that now offered
SmartLipo, laser hair removal, and Bob’s Unpainted Furniture Gun Exchange.

Duncan was a partner at a Manhattan law firm now, head of a household, and self-possessed as he’d endearingly not been when younger. She perceived irony in the way he spoke to her, as if he’d discussed her earlier, perhaps with his wife—had said that Tooly was just so, and now before him she was proving exactly that. What had Duncan said she was? A little false? A little untrustworthy?

He turned sharply into a driveway. “Home.”

Before exiting, she said, “About tomorrow?”

“There’ll be time to discuss that later,” he said, getting out. “Meet my family now.”

“Sure. Of course.” She took out four cellophane bags of wrapped Swiss chocolates. “I brought presents for the youngsters. They each get a bag, I thought, to avoid civil war.”

“They’ll explode if we let them eat all that,” he said, struggling to unlock the house door with a mobile phone in each hand. “May have to take control myself.”

“Will not, you thief. I’m handing them out now, and you’re not interfering.”

“Three of them over there,” he said, back-kicking the door shut and nodding toward his seven-year-old identical triplets, who lay on an Oriental rug in the living room, one bopping to huge white headphones, her genetic double playing a game on a smartphone, the third goggling at an iPad. All three were dressed as fairies, in leotards with gossamer wings.

“Abigail?” Tooly said. “Which is Abigail? Stand and identify yourself—this is for you. Actually, doesn’t matter who gets which. Are you Chloë? And you’re Madlen? Eat them fast, before your father confiscates.”

Each girl snatched a package and ran to the couch.

“Four candies each and save the rest for later,” he said. “All right, girls?”

The triplets settled cross-legged, picking through their respective
hauls, wings quivering as they dug forearm-deep into crinkly cellophane.

“And your boy?” Tooly asked, raising the final gift bag.

But Duncan was shouting upstairs for his wife. “Hail to the chief! Bridget!” No response. “Girls,” he asked, “where’s Mommy?”

They ignored him, gorging themselves.

“Bridget!” he shrieked, calling down to the basement now. “Bridge!”

“Mommy!” one of the triplets cried.

Another added, “Mom-my! You got uh vis-i-tuhhhh!”

Soon all were yelling. Houses with children—Tooly had forgotten about the shouting.

Chloë started dialing her phone.

“Honey,” Duncan told her, “don’t call Mommy. She’s probably just studying upstairs.”

That’s where they found her, earbuds in, which explained her fright when Duncan tapped her shoulder. “Oh jeez, hi,” she said, clasping her necklace. “Why didn’t you tell me your guest got here?” She clipped back her dirty-blond hair, nudged up black-rimmed glasses, and offered a handshake. Tooly would never have put her with Duncan. She was considerably taller, for a start. Not that this precluded a match, but it wasn’t what you expected.

They found the eldest child, Keith (known as Mac), playing Kinectimals on his Xbox 360 in the den. Whenever he moved, it controlled a cutesy puppy onscreen. Though, when you saw the eight-year-old falling on his back, then on his hind legs, it looked rather like the machine was doing the controlling.

“Seriously, Mac, isn’t that kind of a baby game?” Duncan asked.

Chastened, the boy turned it off. Whereas the triplets had traces of Asia in their slender features, with long black hair swishing like prideful little ponies, Mac was a plump boy who shared his mother’s pale Irish-German coloring.

“You didn’t hear us calling?” Duncan said. “We were all calling.”

Mac accepted his bag of chocolates and thanked Tooly, standing barefoot before her, his big toes crossed over each other.

“We’re about to eat dinner,” Duncan said. “You can try them after. Just be patient.”

“Oh, let him have some,” Bridget said.

Duncan counted out just two, then placed them on the table.

Dinner proved raucous, not just owing to the cross-purpose conversations but because of the laptops. Checking email was discouraged at mealtimes but—fortunately for Abigail, Chloë, and Madlen—there was no rule against playing Justin Bieber videos on YouTube. The triplets kept jumping from their seats and setting off new clips.

“Aren’t there
nine
planets?” Duncan said. “Can someone Google that? Not with your knife and fork, Mac. You’re getting sauce in the frickin’ keyboard, man!”

“I’m not Googling. It’s Wikipedia.”

“How on earth,” Bridget said, “did people find out stuff before Google?”

“The library?” her husband suggested.

“Like on iTunes,” one of the triplets said.

“Not an iTunes library, Maddy,” Duncan told her. “Like an
actual
library.”