The Rise & Fall of Great Powers (6 page)

Mr. Thomas made the first purchase of the day. A man in his late fifties possessed of multitudes of Welsh-speaking grandchildren, he visited World’s End once a month. Back when he attended school, education was viewed as an irksome delay before farm employment—an attitude that produced two varieties of citizen: those who scorned book learning and those who revered it. Huw Thomas—scar on the tip of his nose, head like an upright loaf, always in homespun cardigans—was among the reverential autodidacts. But he’d sooner not talk about it, and deflected her conversational gambits, standing at the servery counter with a volume in each hand, like a child before the librarian’s desk. (She never found a pattern in his selections. Today, it was a history of the Boer War and
Alice in Wonderland
.)

“Get all you wanted, Mr. Thomas?”

“No, thank you.”

“Can I help you find something else?”

“No, thank you.”

“See you again, Mr. Thomas.”

“Very well, then. Best be off.”

The bell on the door tinkled after him, a false calm before a dozen schoolkids swarmed in. Hardly a feral pack of readers, these were junior shoplifters testing their skills, glancing around furtively as if they’d invented the art. Impressive how much a schoolbag swallowed. Sometimes she let them get away with it, unless a previous haul had been discovered in the rubbish bins on Roberts Road, in which case she stopped the culprits on their next foray, speaking discreetly at the door and sending them away. The rude ones—there were a few—she crushed with choice words. One brazen boy had kicked the door when he left, giving her the finger as he ran backward until, most pleasingly, he fell flat into a puddle.

She checked the time—had a lesson this evening. “Mind if I …?”

“Say no more, say no more,” Fogg responded. “Off you go.”

Since her arrival in Caergenog, she had engaged in an adult-education frenzy, taking classes in sewing, home repairs (unexpectedly gripping), music. For a spell, she’d driven every Tuesday night to Cardiff for an art course, where she did life drawing in charcoal, acrylic, and oil. Each medium confirmed her lack of talent: every arm came out longer than its leg; ears were tea saucers; fruit resembled basketballs. Lousy though she was, Tooly adored it, and even improved in a plodding way.

“Will we be doing a class on noses?” she’d asked the instructor, an irritably failed sculptor.

“What?”

“Can you help me with drawing noses?”

“What?”

When the course ended, she sorted through her work and couldn’t justify conserving a single piece. Nevertheless, she drove home with a still life, called “Apples—I Think That’s What They Were,” and nailed it up in her attic quarters. The sight of that canvas, its comical terribleness, still made her happy.

Now and then, a classmate invited her for a friendly drink and a gossip. Prue, a recent divorcée taking the home-repairs course in Hereford, asked what Tooly did besides work at a bookshop, and heard of her daily hikes. “Should get a bit of a walkabout myself,” Prue said. “Lazy since the kids.”

She arrived at World’s End one morning, buying a romance novel to be polite. Tooly drove them to the priory and marched upward, her acquaintance keeping up only till the foothills, then battling bravely in the middle distance. Tooly waited at the top, admiring the countryside, as a human dot clomped closer, expanding into a woman. “Brought the.” Wheeze. “Brought the wrong.” Wheeze. “Brought the wrong shoes.”

“It’s flat from here on,” Tooly said, continuing down the ridge.

“You walk!” Wheeze. “So!” Wheeze. “Fast!”

“Not that fast. Do I?”

Afterward, Prue thanked her. She never asked to come again.

Partly, Tooly had engineered it this way. Friends required a life story. Your past mattered only if others sought to know it—it was they who demanded that one possessed a history. Alone, you could do without.

That was why she and Fogg got along so well. He accepted her evasions, never pried.

“What are you mastering tonight, then?” he inquired.

She held up her ukulele.

“To be brutally honest, I’m not familiar with a large oeuvre of ukulele compositions,” he said. “What led you to pick up the instrument?”

“Just decided one day,” she replied. “When you lock up, bring in the barrel, I think.”

Already on the drive to Monmouth, rain poured down. At the home of her teacher, she rushed from the car, ukulele and sheet music under her shirt. On her request, they practiced “The William Tell Overture.” She played one part, her teacher accompanied, then they switched. What delight, this synchrony, the development, leaning into the phrases, a melody emerging from black dots on the staves,
marks inked there in 1828, communicating across all this time! It was such excitement that, at times, she could barely strum.

She drove home jerkily fast, foot tapping the rhythm on the gas pedal, singing at full voice—“Dada-dum, dada-dum, dada-dum-dum-
dum
!”—accompanied by the flapping plastic sheet over the passenger window. At the parking lot across from World’s End, she nosed the car around for a free spot—at night, the place filled with patrons headed to the Hook.

What about dropping in there for a glass of something to amplify her good cheer? She took a wander up Roberts Road, the rowdy banter growing as she approached the pub. A group of laborers—faces worn by sun, dirt, and cigarettes—sat at the picnic tables outside, gripping sloppy pints, eyeing ladies out on a hen night, heavy gals in stilettos, ankles tattooed, thighs goosebumped, floppy bosoms held up with underwire scaffolding. On the opposite side of the road was the legion bar, reserved for veterans of foreign wars. Now and then, a boy who’d fought in Iraq or Afghanistan took a break from darts and glowered at the pub across the way, at the wobbly girls giggling over spilled cider.

As Tooly passed between these two drinking holes, hawkish men on each side registered only her short haircut, pale lips, and sexless fashion, which rendered her invisible to them. If ever a man fancied her these days, she suspected him of low standards, of being a goat in heat. Were she to enter the Hook, she’d find many such goats. A tipsy one might make for brief amusement. But in a village you couldn’t avoid your mistakes. Best to return home. She wanted only a glass of mild intoxication tonight. A bottle of Pinot Noir was already open in the kitchen.

She filled her glass too high and, lips to the brim, slurped it to a more seemly height, then nibbled crackers and cheese, humming “The William Tell Overture” with wine-purple lips. What a marvel, this drink! Past a certain age—about twenty-six, was it?—after the last flickers of the younger self, a pressure grew inside her during the course of each day, butting against the limits of her existence. Until,
at her first nightly sip, she dilated, the tightness eased, and she floated in thoughts, outside time. She cupped a hand over her brow and gazed out the latched window at the farmland beyond Caergenog, all blackness at this hour. She took a pace back, watching a reflection of the kitchen and of herself, wine level decreasing over the minutes.

Down the stairs she went, treading tipsily through the darkened shop. Within arm’s reach were so many sublime minds—she could awaken them off the shelf (no matter the hour, they were more alert than she), bid them start, and encounter a soul fitted with perception like hers, only sharper. But tonight it was the computer that lured her. She cradled the keyboard in her lap, giving a little shiver as the machine blinked and whirred, icons populating the desktop, her face lit by the screen.

Tooly had long shied away from computers, associating them so strongly with Paul. And she’d managed to avoid them better than most, living as she had, disconnected from wires, traveling city to city, job to job, taking positions that required minimal technological skills. The longer she’d gone without a computer of her own, the more mystifying all the digital hubbub became.

But World’s End, for all its bound paper, came with a few microchips, too, in the form of this clunky old desktop, a senior citizen at age four. Fogg had taught her how to enter sales on it, and had insisted on showing her around the Internet, too, extolling its marvels and scope by searching for her name—though he was rather crestfallen to discover no results whatsoever.

For more than a year, Tooly had remained aloof from that computer. At most, she tried simple Web searches like “ukulele,” nearly scared at the landslide of hits. Then, gradually, she explored a little further. Eventually, hours vanished there. Like a black hole, the Internet generated its own gravity, neither light nor time escaping. Cats playing the piano, breasts and genitals popping out, strangers slandering strangers. The lack of eye contact explained so much of what happened online. Including her own new habit: prowling through the past.

In recent weeks, she had started searching for names, old ones, of lost friends, former schoolteachers, fellow pupils, acquaintances from cities she’d left years before. Through the online murk, she spied their lives, piecing together what had happened: colleges, employers, married to, activities, interests. An employment history on LinkedIn might suggest a glittering start—Trainee to District Manager to Vice President—followed by an unexplained Self-Employed. The “Lives In …” on Facebook provided unexpected locales: Oslo or Hanoi or Lima. If she and they had maintained contact, the progressions from school to career to family would have passed so gradually as to be unremarkable. But online profiles converted the increments of life into leaps, transforming schoolchildren into graying parents in an instant.

How odd to have quit so many places and people, yet be preoccupied with them now, as they were surely not concerned with her. Still, Tooly never contacted those she peeped at, conducting her compulsive searches under the pseudonym Matilda Ostropoler, which combined her proper first name with the last name of a former friend.

All this nostalgic prowling—invariably after a few drinks—promised gratification yet left unease. It was as if a long spoon had been dipped inside her and stirred. Unlike in books, there was no concluding page on the Internet, just a limitless chain that left her tired, tense, up too late.

Time to switch off. Time to go to bed, look at the rafters, restore the memory of her music lesson. If she closed her eyes thinking of the fingerboard, would her brain practice while she slept?

She half stood—then roused the computer, testing its promise of satisfaction behind each next click. At the top left of the screen appeared a flag, a Facebook friend request. Because of her pseudonym, such requests came only from lurking weirdos. She clicked it, intending to decline.

Except she recognized this name: Duncan McGrory.

Tooly walked away from the computer, down the closest aisle, tapping nervously on books as she went. It had been years since her last contact with Duncan. How had he found her? Mouth dry, she stood
with her finger over the mouse button. Read his name again. She clicked yes.

Within moments, he had messaged her: “Desperately trying to reach you. Can we talk about your father???”

She clenched her clammy hands, wiped them on her shirt. Her father? Whom could he mean?

1988

“D
ON
’
T
.”

“Don’t what?”

Before Paul had walked in, Tooly was jumping on her bed, watching the view of Bangkok fly up and down through the window. Upon hearing him, she bent her knees and grasped the covers in a breathless crouch, feet flexing on the quivering mattress. “I’m not wearing any shoes,” she said in her defense.

“Don’t be argumentative about everything.”

She took a ballet leap off the bed and crashed to the floor, tumbling across the cool tiles, landing on her belly, then rolling onto her back to show that she was unhurt.

“People live below us. Stop that.”

Paul was particularly tense that morning, expected at the U.S. Embassy in less than an hour to start his latest contract. He was an information-technology specialist for Ritcomm, a private company hired by the State Department to upgrade diplomatic communications overseas. The larger American embassies, such as here in Bangkok, had mainframe computers with telecom links to Washington, allowing them to check the latest “bad-guy list” whenever a foreign national sought to visit America. But many smaller U.S. outposts had never been linked to the network, and were obliged to consult ancient documents on microfiche. Paul was overseeing upgrades around the world, traveling to each dinky consulate, where he conducted a site survey, installed the Wang VS able to open up a 3270 emulation, ran BNC cables to every desk terminal. Finally, the staffers could connect
at 9.6 bps via the phone line, type in a name, date of birth, place of birth, and wait for a hit.

Each of his assignments lasted about a year, during which he based himself at a hub like Bangkok and traveled throughout the region, doing his best to avoid time at the suffocating embassies. Diplomats there often styled themselves a ruling class, treating support staff like servants. Paul might be assigned to fix a faulty dot matrix, for instance, or told to exorcise gremlins from the ambassador’s monitor. On embassy days, he tried to vanish among the swarms of staff and visitors—just another guy slouching out of the cafeteria with a Styrofoam box for lunch. He avoided others’ company by choice, although this was not the only reason he made himself unknown.

Tooly watched him hobbling around in one black Velcro shoe, his polo shirt tucked into pleated khakis. He sniffed—air-conditioning congested his sinuses—then swallowed, Adam’s apple rippling, neck dotted with razor-burn blossoms. “Where’s my other shoe?” His anxiety pervaded the apartment, and her. The disquiet of others was an undiscovered force alongside gravity that, rather than pulling downward, emanated outward from its source. Unfortunately, she was excessively attuned to his nervous pulses. She joined the hunt and discovered his lost shoe under the couch. Disastrously late now, he grabbed for floppy disks and printouts. At the door, he stopped. “Oh, no.”

“What?”

“Where are you today, Tooly?”