The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

1988

LUXURY CARS BLOCKED the entrance to King Chulalongkorn International School, engines snarling as a pair of sweat-soaked Thai guards checked credentials and pointed families toward the parking lots. The vast complex — elementary school, middle, and secondary, over acres of southeastern Bangkok — was on display for International Day, an annual celebration of the diversity of bankers, diplomats, journalists, shady expats, and spies rich enough to send their children here.

Once inside, the kids ran wild, unleashed by parents and yet to be harnessed by teachers, with classes not starting till the following week. Some had arrived in school uniform; others wore street clothing, with Izod Lacoste and Polo Ralph Lauren in abundance. Childhood hierarchies reasserted themselves, abandoned during summer and tweaked now according to the growth spurts, the arrival of new dweebs, the repatriation of schoolyard idols.

“Tooly?” Paul asked, as they waited outside the administrative offices for a tour. “Were you in those same clothes yesterday?”

She wore shorts from which her little legs jutted, one sport sock pulled high, the other at her ankle, deck shoes squashed at the back to allow entry without lacing, T-shirt specked with soup stains from the Chinese restaurant.

“You didn’t wear that to bed, did you?”

“I don’t think so.”

He glanced around, assaulted by high-pitched shrieks everywhere. The children segregated themselves according to gender but, since this was elementary school, the boys’ voices were just as shrill as the girls’.

“You don’t smell, do you?”

Before she could answer, a young teacher with ginger hair approached across the open-air courtyard.

“Let me do the talking,” Paul told Tooly, thrusting his left hand into his pocket, thinking better of it, wriggling it free, then pocketing it again, lip curling upward to catch a sweat droplet. “Don’t draw attention. All right?”

Mr. Priddles smiled at each of them in turn, sandy eyelashes fluttering. He had been assigned to sell them on enrollment here, and led Paul and Tooly through the impressive facilities — playgrounds, band rooms, canteens, an aquatic center — describing the plethora of pursuits available.

They passed a pond with rainbow carp bulleting through the water, and Tooly paused. A tortoise stood at the pond’s edge, looking at her. “Is he alive?”

“That’s our new school pet, basically,” Mr. Priddles told Paul, ignoring her. “We’re running a competition to name it. Oh — excuse me, one sec.” He hustled off to chasten a rowdy trio of second graders for running near the pond.

Entry forms were stacked by a ballot box, with a pencil hanging from a string. “What’s a good name for a tortoise?” she asked Paul, picking up the pencil and chewing the end.

“Don’t. That’s not clean.”

“What?”

He took the pencil. “Tim?”

“Who?”

“Tooly, pay attention. Naming the turtle: Tim.”

She hesitated, disliking his suggestion but not wanting to reject it.

Two small boys bumped up against Paul, like a couple of waist-high mobsters. “What’s the difference between a tortoise and a turtle?” one demanded.

Paul blinked. “Hmm, is it like the difference between a crocodile and an alligator?”

“Nooooooo!” the boy howled. “Tortoise has round shell and turtle has flat. Turtle has web feet and tortoise has normal. Bet you don’t know how old tortoises get.”

“Hmm, twenty?”

“Nooooooo! Tortoises live to, like, a hundred and fifty-five years old. Bet you don’t know the difference between a typhoon and a hurricane.”

“One is a strong wind and …” Paul speculated, plucking at pit stains forming on his shirt. “Or is that a hurricane? I didn’t mean that. Is it …?” He shut his eyes, rummaging for facts untouched in years.

The boys ran off.

“Is a typhoon where …?” Paul opened his eyes, finding his interrogators gone, only Tooly before him, filling out her entry slip. He fumbled for his inhaler. “Children,” he remarked, “they know facts about things. How do they know these things?”

“I don’t know the difference between a hurricane and a thingy.” She dropped her entry into the ballot box, having written “Jasper,” which suited a tortoise. “Can I pick him up?”

“Who up?”

“The tortoise that doesn’t have a name.”

“We’re not allowed, Tooly.”

“Why not?”

“The teacher said.” He’d said no such thing, but Paul often concocted regulations to bolster his authority.

When Mr. Priddles returned, he asked if Tooly wished to touch the animal. She did, and stroked its shell, tortoise limbs paddling slowly in air.

“Just one remaining issue, basically,” Mr. Priddles said. “We received a dossier from her previous school in Australia, but it seems to be about a girl in ninth grade.”

“Tooly’s nine years old,” Paul noted, “not in ninth grade.”

“Yes, I realized when we spoke by phone. Alas, their error caused us to reserve her a place in ninth grade. We do welcome your daughter. Just not sure where to put her. Strict limit on class size and—”

“I’m starting fifth grade,” Tooly interjected, fearful that someone’s mistake might consign her to a class of teenagers doing algebra exams and cross-country running.

Mr. Priddles flashed her an artificial smile, then resumed his exchange with Paul. As the men spoke, she ventured in ever-larger circles around them, drifting farther from their orbit until she was able to spin through a doorway and out onto a playground, where she watched older girls playing volleyball. A teacher ordered them to the main field for the International Day festivities, and Tooly trailed a distance behind.

At each new school, in each new country, she presented a new personality. It crystallized during the first weeks of school, after which there was no changing — people wouldn’t let you. In the end, you became what they expected you to be. At previous schools, she’d been diabolical, girly, a tomboy. But this time she had little urge to invent a new self, knowing it would be wiped away once they left. Even close friendships at her previous schools never lasted more than a few pen-pal letters after her departure, each note shorter than the last, until the responses stopped. It was just her and Paul; all else passed.

Among new children, she always spotted the outcasts first, and had read enough novels to prefer them. Sometimes this let her down — certain kids deserved social banishment. But hidden among the losers, she suspected, were her kind. What she longed for was a person who’d say, as none ever had, “This is all so fake, isn’t it? Wink at me sometimes and it’ll be our sign.”

The main field lacked cover from the scorching sun, so parasols were out, hats were on, and hands shaded brows. Parents occupied the plastic seats before the temporary stage, while hundreds of children sat on the grass around them. Tooly scanned the crowd. She found Paul nowhere.

The principal, Mr. Cutter, tapped the microphone, exhorting the kids to simmer down and take a seat. Tooly knelt on the grass, layering hair over her face to block the sunlight. After a tedious welcome, the principal inaugurated the International Day parade, in which kids from the fifty-two countries represented at the school tromped across the stage in traditional outfits from their homelands, sweating under headdresses, tripping in curl-toed boots, stating into the malfunctioning microphone “Welcome!” in different mother tongues. The procession — every nation in alphabetical order to avoid charges of political favoritism — concluded with the lanky daughter of Zaire’s ambassador, who whispered her greeting and scurried away.

Principal Cutter retook the microphone to announce the winner of the pet-naming contest. “After much discussion, we decided not to allow names of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Sorry, boys,” he said. “Drum roll: our school pet for the year 1988-89 is henceforth known as …” He drew out the suspense. “Her name is … Myrtle the Turtle!”

“Myrtle?” snorted the parent of a losing entrant. “Are you kidding me?”

“A turtle?” another grumbled. “Isn’t it a tortoise?”

“What’s the difference?”

While this perplexing question rustled through the crowd, hundreds of kids scrambled for the picnic tables, aware that a potluck lunch was soon to materialize.

“Not all at once, you guys!” Principal Cutter said, to no avail.

Thai support staff distributed plastic plates and forks, paper napkins, bottled water. Many mothers and the occasional father opened Tupperware containers of homemade (maid-made) food across the tables. Tooly entered a queue at random and exited holding a plateful of parsley-flecked meatballs with spicy sauce for hats, the native dish of a country she never identified.

She weaved through the crowd, attempting to appear headed somewhere, then sneaked into a building, past an Olympic pool, through the girls’ changing room, down a long hallway of lockers, passing a Thai janitor to whom she said hello, though he only looked down. The cafeteria was empty except for six boys younger than she, all boasting of disgusting food they’d eaten, including (they said) elephant and live snakes. One claimed to have eaten human being, though this turned out to be only his own toenails. At the presence of a girl, they fled.

Alone at the long refectory table, Tooly chased a slippery meatball around her plate, then parted her hair curtains and consulted the wall clock. A teacher had once told her that, viewed in the timespan of the universe, a human life lasts just a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second. Her life didn’t feel like a fraction of a second; things took ages. Time may pass quickly for the universe, but she had never been a universe.

When she returned to the administrative offices, Paul had still not materialized. The secretaries paged him with no result, finally dispatching a search party of sixth graders. A Malaysian girl found him locked in one of the basketball courts. “Like a labyrinth in there,” he muttered in the taxi home.

“I’m not in ninth grade now, am I?” Tooly asked.

“No, no — they’ll find space in fourth or fifth.”

“Fourth?” she exclaimed, looking at him. “Didn’t I do most of that already?”

“Let’s not make a fuss. There’s not a huge difference.”

But how could grades be compared? Each person you fought or befriended would be different, every teacher changed, your life unfolded in another way. Instead of escaping school after eight more years, she’d be sentenced to nine. An extra year of life wasted.

Being young was so unfair, and you couldn’t leave. That was the difference between childhood and adulthood: children couldn’t go; grown-ups could. Paul made them leave every year. Just packed up — another city. Whatever you hated disappeared.

She looked out the taxi window. “I only …”

He waited. “Finish your sentence, Tooly.”

“They named the tortoise.”

“What?”

“Tim,” she lied.

“That was your suggestion,” he said. “Good, Tooly.”

“You thought of it.”

“Well, it was our idea.” He reached over to shake her hand. “Let’s take it as a sign — this is the school for you.”

CLASSES DIDN’T START till the following Monday, so Tooly found herself confined to the apartment again, though the live-in maid had now arrived. Previous housekeepers had been beloved friends to Tooly, so she greeted this woman with much optimism. Shelly was a Lao speaker from the northeast with a slight hunchback, possessing every skill required to endear herself to a Western household: she ironed flawlessly, kept purified water in the fridge, knew how to make spaghetti bolognese and to fry eggs, kept the floors sparkling, the surfaces dustless. Yet she proved a less-than-calming presence. When Paul or Tooly entered a room, Shelly bowed her head, pressed her palms together in the wai praying gesture, and hurried away as if someone had stamped at her.

To avoid provoking this distressing reaction, Tooly hid in her bedroom much of that first week, bounced on her bed, and read. When she needed food, she listened until the sounds of Shelly — the slop and slurp of rags squeezed into the water bucket, the scuff of flip-flops, her surprisingly sweet singing — had passed before darting into the kitchen to eat pomelo segments. When Tooly returned, her bed had been made, dirty clothes removed from the floor, pencils lined up on the dresser table beside her sketchbook of noses.

Minutes after Paul returned from work each evening, Shelly tinkled a brass bell in the living room, calling “sir and madam” to dinner. Tooly bounded from her room, and the maid ran away into the kitchen. During the meal, Paul studied software manuals or lists of birds. Tooly tried to think of something to say.

He looked up. “A man from the embassy invited himself over. He’s considering a move around here and wants to see the building. I couldn’t get out of it. He’s here for dinner Wednesday.”

“I can’t come, can I?”

He shook his head.

But on the day of the dinner Paul tried to compensate by returning home early with a special treat for her, a videotape of WrestleMania III. Owing to a misapprehension, Paul believed her to be a pro-wrestling enthusiast. She was not. But Tooly couldn’t find a way to say otherwise without disappointing him. So they spent hours watching the TV spectacles together, always with the sound off, since he considered the commentary biased.

“Can you remind me,” he asked, slotting the tape into the VCR, “is George ‘the Animal’ Steele on André the Giant’s side?”

“He isn’t on anybody’s side,” she answered. “He’s part animal and helps whoever he wants.”

“Where’s he from, Tooly?”

“Parts unknown.”

They watched in silence, Paul wincing whenever a wrestler slammed a folding chair into the forehead of a rival. “It’s said to be fake,” he remarked. “What do you make of that whole controversy?”

“The whole what?”

“Do you think it’s fake?”

She shook her head, watching the screen.

After a few bouts, Paul consulted his watch, rose, and strode to the television, depressing the knob with his kneecap, a scene of walloping pandemonium sucked into the center of the screen, leaving a white mark for a second, then glassy gray. “Nice?”

She nodded, thanked him, went to her room. Tooly was supposed to stay out of sight if ever he had visitors, but she left her door slightly ajar to eavesdrop.

The guest was a sun-leathered former U.S. marine with a blond mustache. Bob Burdett had fallen for Thailand eighteen years earlier when sent from the Vietnamese battlefront for seven days of R & R (rest and recreation) or, as the troops called it, I & I (intoxication and intercourse). After the war, he’d stuck around rather than return to Arkansas, and sought work at the U.S. Embassy. But foreign-service postings were above his pay grade, and, anyhow, lasted only two to three years; if they went longer, the theory went, American personnel risked identifying with the natives, an ailment known as clientitis. Anyone determined to remain long-term could always apply for a local-hire gig, which was what Bob Burdett had done, ending up as head of the car pool, a position with low status and low pay that reinforced his distaste for the Ivy League diplomats who sailed in and out every few years. “Don’t suppose you got a beer for me?” he asked.

“Oh,” Paul responded, glancing at Shelly — when it came to drinks, they kept only Fanta, milk, and water in the house. She dashed downstairs, returning breathlessly with six bottles of Singha as Paul concluded his abbreviated tour of the apartment, bypassing Tooly’s room altogether.

Bob Burdett inquired into the building and its services, commented on the city and the characters at the embassy, mused on expatriate life in Bangkok. Most expats, he explained, fall prey to the three-year itch. “By which I mean hating the locals and bitching about the help — how you can’t find a good mechanic, how everything’s better back home, how people actually work stateside. Don’t matter how good-intentioned folks are on arrival, they turn mean within three years. In my opinion? People are the same all over God’s earth. Just the food is different.”

As if on cue, Shelly entered with dinner. Conversation stopped, only scratches of cutlery on plates, Bob Burdett’s beer bottle clunking on the table. “Might I ask that pretty maid of yours to kindly bring me another of them beers?” By dessert, he’d downed five, and either alcohol or tedium had turned his talk to politics. “Quite a situation back home, wouldn’t you say?”

Paul murmured agreement.

“My concern is that we backslide,” Bob Burdett continued. “We’re a strong, prideful nation under Reagan. Like he told Mr. Gorbachev, the most important revolution in the history of mankind began with three words: ‘We the people.’ Don’t need another Jimmy Carter apologizing for who we are. Without the United States of America, this world falls on dark times. The Europeans? They’d be talking German now, weren’t for what our daddies done. Am I right? Same for the Koreans.”

“The Koreans would be speaking German?”

“You drunk on Fanta, son? I’m saying that, without us, Korea would be nothing but a bad neighborhood of Red China today. That’s what I’m saying.”

“Okay, I see.”

“I’m a student of history, and I can tell you one thing about these Soviets. You look at the great powers in history, you find there’s only one way to defeat an evil empire: on the battlefield. The Spaniards and their empire? Brits knocked out the Armada, and that was it. Napoleon? Overextended in the Russia campaign. Ottomans? Beaten down in the Crimean War, finished off in the Balkans. Austro-Hungarians? Kaput because of the First World War. You eliminate evil through war, not peace. Trust me. I’m a marine, and nobody hates war more than a man who’s seen it. But it’s a fact. We overcome these Soviets with force. I’m telling you now, you’ll hear all manner of hooey at the embassy about perestroika and glasnost. By God, I hear a lot of it. But now is the time to act. You strike when your adversary is weakened. That’s right now. Can’t sit around and wait for the Communists to build back up. Goddamn term limits — what we need is Reagan for four more years. You with me?”

“I don’t know that much about—”

“Don’t say you’re voting Dukakis. Do not tell me that.”

“Uhm, actually, I probably won’t vote.”

“Not for nobody?”

“Just, I haven’t lived in America for so long now,” Paul said, sniffing. “Seems wrong for me to pick who’s in charge.”

“Ain’t you alone doing the picking, son — rest of us get a say, too! It don’t matter how long you been overseas. We’re always Americans, wherever we end up. And you’ll move back sooner or later. Plus, I bet you go stateside pretty regular on home leaves.”

“I don’t really take home leave. I have too much work.”

“Don’t take it ever? Your momma and daddy back home, they don’t mind?” he asked, adding hastily, “Excuse me — I’m assuming your folks are living. That’s impertinent of me.”

“No, they are.”

“And they’re good with that?”

Paul said nothing for a moment. “Actually,” he said, “I heard some troubling news about my father’s health a few days ago. Something serious. I …” He cleared his throat.

Tooly held her breath to hear better.

“He’ll be in my prayers,” Bob Burdett said. “That’ll take you home quick, I guess.”

“I’ve got things here. It’s not possible right now.”

They ate in silence.

“I never asked if you served,” Bob Burdett remarked.

“Served?”

“The armed forces.”

“I didn’t really consider it, to be truthful.”

“Where’d you go to college?”

“Berkeley.”

“Hell’s bells. You mixed up in them protests?”

“I was just studying computers.”

“Guys studying computers can’t be subversives?”

“I never really knew those people.”

Bob Burdett slurped his beer. “Your housekeeper’s a little cutey.”

“Maybe don’t say that so loud, please.”

“Don’t matter if she hears — probably likes it. You stay out here a while, son, you’ll find everything’s for sale in that department.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Paul stated softly.

The conversation stalled; rain pattered outside.

“I was going to ask you,” Paul resumed, as if working up to something crucial, “about the rainy season.” He cleared his throat. “Do you know when it formally ends?”

“Formally?” Bob Burdett chuckled. “Not sure they got no official ceremony.”

“Humidity’s bad for my asthma.”

“You picked the wrong city, son. All we got out here is humid. Maybe you ought to turn right round and go back to the U.S. of A. — except, kind of seems you don’t like the place.”

“What do you mean?”

“Heck, if my daddy was ailing and—”

“I have things I’m trying to deal with here,” Paul said. “Doesn’t matter what I’d like to do. This is what I have to do.” He took a breath from his inhaler.

“Guess you got a real important job,” the guest conceded. “That’s top priority for people these days. I’m from another era. If my people were in need, I wouldn’t be out here doing no car pool, I promise you that.”

“It’s … it’s … it’s not like I’m out here for fun,” Paul said. “Okay?”

Tooly — hearing his unsteady voice, his dry mouth — clutched the hem of her T-shirt.

Bob Burdett persisted. “Maybe that’s what they teach you in college: put yourself first. You can wait out here till your daddy’s funeral, I guess. Or you not going home for that, even?”

“I have a duty to be here right now, and if I—”

“You don’t know the first thing about duty. You don’t care about your own blood. Don’t care about your country. Don’t know how you’re going to vote. Don’t know if you’ll vote. Thank you kindly for supper. But, Lord above, what is wrong with you, son?”

“Nothing’s the matter,” Paul snapped. “Okay?” Tooly recognized from his tone that he’d lost his temper. He repeated himself shakily—“Nothing’s the matter”—saying that he couldn’t care less about voting, about politics, about empires, about who ran what, who succeeded Reagan, who led the Communists.

Bob Burdett reminded Paul to act like a representative of the United States out here, then recalled that his host wasn’t an embassy officer, just a contractor. “Another mercenary,” as he put it. “Going around for a paycheck and a piece of tail.”

“Can you leave my home,” Paul said, voice trembling, knocking over his chair as he stood. “Get out of my home. Okay? Scolding me like I’m an idiot! Like I’m here for a good time! This is my home. Not for you to come in and lecture. Any duties I have, I’m aware of. Fully aware of. Okay? I don’t need you to tell me. What I do concerns nobody.”

“Don’t concern nobody?”

“Can you go, please?”

Bob Burdett’s chair squeaked as he rose. “Sometimes,” he said slowly, “there’s things that are bigger than you in the world.”

“Are you being threatening now?”

“Sometimes,” the guest repeated, voice hardening, “there’s things in life that’s bigger than you.”

There were smaller things, too, and one emerged from her bedroom.

“I can make my eyeballs vibrate,” she said.

Bob Burdett — looming over Paul — turned at the sight of the little girl and stepped back, cocking his head. “Well,” he said, “hello there, little lady. And who might you be?”

Paul, voice choked, answered hastily, “My daughter. She’s my daughter.”

“Well, howdy, little girl. Nobody told me we had young folk on the premises. Do excuse my profane words. I enjoy firing off the occasional political firecracker — keeps things lively out here in the tropics. No harm intended. None taken, I trust.” He nodded at Paul, then smiled at Tooly. “Didn’t hear me say no cuss words, did you, sweetheart?”

She looked at each man in turn, unsure if she was in big trouble. “I can make my eyes vibrate.”

“I’d be most appreciative, young lady, if you’d provide a demonstration.”

She opened them wide and performed her trick, eyeballs moving fast from side to side, to the approval of Bob Burdett. “I seen it all now,” he exclaimed. “Yes, I have.”

“And I can count a minute exactly,” she said. “You can time me.”

Bob Burdett readied the stopwatch function on his watch. “Go right ahead.”

All fell quiet, but for the fizz of Fanta. Finally, she raised her finger.

“Fifty-eight seconds,” Bob Burdett said.

“Sometimes I get it exactly.”

“Darn good.” He ruffled her hair, which made Paul wince. “You all should come around to my place sometime, meet my dog. This young lady’s got a momma? Bring her, too.”

“My wife’s in America,” Paul said. “She’s busy at the moment.”

Bob Burdett looked at Tooly. “You don’t prefer staying there, with Momma?”

She glanced at Paul, then at the guest, then back at Paul.

“All righty, then,” Bob Burdett said. “Thank you both for the hospitality. And your momma gets here, you all come over and meet Pluto.”

“What kind is he?” Tooly asked.

“Good old mutt, like his daddy.” He smiled thinly at Paul, broadly at Tooly, and left.

As soon as Paul and Tooly were alone, she asked, “Am I in trouble?”

He shushed her, hastening to the window to watch until the guest had departed Gupta Mansions and could be seen walking up the soi. Paul closed his eyes, shook his head. “Damn,” he said. “Damn.”

“If your father’s feeling sick,” she ventured, “should we go there?”

“Yes,” he shot back. “I should be there helping. Right now.” He pinched his thigh. “But we can’t go. And you know that.”