The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

1988

PAUL STOOD, then sat, then stood, then went to his room, then returned, and told her. His father, Burt, had passed away. Paul knelt before the VCR, pressing buttons. “I should have been there.”

Tooly was unsure what to say. “If you try hitting Play and Record at the same time, that’s what I—”

“I know how to operate a video machine.”

The next morning, she got up two hours late for the microbus — Paul hadn’t woken her. Nor had he turned on the air-conditioning in the living room, which was sweltering. The apartment had a strange desolation. She crept into his room, found a long lump in his bed.

He turned to face her.

“It’s late on the bird clock,” she whispered.

He nodded.

In the kitchen, the housekeeper, Shelly, was in a frantic state. “Everybody sleeping!” She asked if they would be at home all day — they hadn’t warned her! She didn’t have lunch supplies! It wasn’t fair to do that!

Tooly climbed for the cereal boxes, poured a bowl for Paul, overfilling it with milk. She delivered it to his bedside, but he had no interest. “Don’t you have your job today?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you going?”

He stared at the ceiling.

“Can I pour cold water on you?”

“Why would you?”

“To wake you up.”

He flipped over, giving her his back.

She opened his curtains, parting them in stages, as he did when waking her. Paul rose and went into the bathroom, stood before the medicine-cabinet mirror.

She clambered onto the closed toilet seat with a can of shaving cream and sprayed a white whoosh onto his face, then ran the safety razor down his cheek, as she’d seen in television commercials. But she did it too softly, drawing only a puff of foam, no stubble. She tried more firmly. A crimson dot of blood rose through the white. Terrified, she glimpsed his face in the mirror. “I didn’t mean to,” she said, and ran into her room.

He did not emerge that day. She tried reading in the living room, but couldn’t finish a single page. She stood outside his door — she should do something, but didn’t know what.

Mr. Priddles had once told her class that, whenever they encountered problems at home, they should talk to him. The idea — him invading her life even more, glimpsing how things were here — outraged her nearly to tears. Why did she have to see him ever again? But there Mr. Priddles was, every single day, at the front of class, smiling to himself as he cued up the music.

Later that week, the name Matilda Zylberberg boomed over the school speakers. Tooly leaped up from her desk. Even if she was in trouble again, she could at least waste some time slow-walking to the admin offices. When she arrived, someone awaited her.

“So sorry, darling.”

Before Tooly could respond, the woman picked her up like a bundle and hugged her. “I completely forgot my things at home. You’ll vouch for me, won’t you? Or are you going to turn Mommy in to the authorities?”

Bewildered, she glanced at the woman, then at the receptionist, who responded with a smile. “You guys good to go?”

“Apologies for being such a ditz with the ID.”

“No problemo. Just sign here, Mrs. Zylberberg.”

“You’re a gem,” Sarah told the secretary, and led Tooly outside, pointing to the front gate.

Holding the girl’s hand, she whispered, “I hate schools. They give me the creeps.”

“Where are we going?” Tooly asked.

“Wherever you like, Matilda. Sorry I vanished — got so busy. But I’ve been aching to see you.”

“I’m not allowed to leave.”

“Is this a prison? Course you can go. What were you even doing that was so important?”

“The hypotenuse.”

“Don’t even know which subject that is!” She slipped on white Ray-Bans and offered her hand, bangles clinking. Uncertainly, Tooly took it. “I’m here to see if I like you,” Sarah said. “But I have to say, I think I adore you already. I really do. Ready? Off we go!”

“I can’t.”

“You don’t want to?”

“I …”

A tuk-tuk waited outside the gates, engine belching, frame shuddering.

“I’m not supposed to get in those. They’re dangerous.” Paul had always said that. “Aren’t they?”

“Not if I’m here. Come on, you!” She tickled Tooly’s arm, making the girl giggle, then drew her into the cab, arm around her shoulder, tugging her closer along the vinyl seat. Sarah said something to the driver, squeezed the nine-year-old around the middle again, kissed her cheek. “What fun!”

“But I …” Tooly began, her question drowned out as the vehicle tore into traffic.

“You know who I am,” Sarah assured her. “You remember me.”

They took a sharp turn, causing them to slide across the backseat, Sarah squashing Tooly, making them both laugh. The driver, Tooly noticed, had handlebars rather than a steering wheel — a tuk-tuk was just a motorcycle, it seemed, with a bench at the back and an awning above. Warm wind rushed at her face, row shops blurring past, bumpy roadway disappearing beneath, jolting them up and down.

“Khao neow ma muang?” Sarah told the driver. “There was a place along here — I saw it before. Khao neow ma muang?”

He looped around, pulled over at a food stall, pointing.

“You’re a marvel,” she told him, folding a twenty-baht note into his hand and hoisting Tooly onto the sidewalk in one airborne hop. “Now this,” Sarah said, “is the most gorgeous thing in the world. Have you tried it?”

“I don’t know what it is.”

“I woke up wanting khao neow ma muang and thought, I hope Matilda hasn’t tried this, so I can be the one to introduce her to it. It’s heaven. Better than heaven, since heaven probably drags on forever, which must get so boring. This is much perfecter.”

“Perfecter?”

“Much more perfecter. Here.” She twirled around, facing the food stall, raised her eyebrows at the Thai vendor, who smiled back. “Two, please.”

“This girl in my class,” Tooly cautioned, “went to the hospital after eating cuttlefish on the street.”

“Two times out of three, you don’t die from street food. And this isn’t cuttlefish.” The vendor chopped a mango, scooped out sticky rice, drizzled it with coconut sauce, sprinkling toasted sesame seeds atop. “No need to worry about food poisoning — I’ll probably eat all yours anyway.”

The vendor handed the first serving down to Tooly, who held it, the heat of sticky rice warming the underside of the Styrofoam platter. “Mustn’t be polite with me,” Sarah said, rubbing Tooly’s back encouragingly. “If I had mine first, I’d never wait for you.”

Nevertheless, Tooly rested her plastic fork on the rice — Paul minded if she ate first. Finally, Sarah received hers and took a mouthful, eyes rolling to indicate euphoria. “Much better than heaven.”

Tooly took a nibble: melting mango and coconut-scented sticky rice, slightly salted.

“You have to get the balance of mango to sticky rice right with each bite,” Sarah counseled. “It’s an art. Something my friend Humphrey taught me.”

Tooly tasted a grain of the sweet rice. “You were outside my school bus that time.”

“I was. Everywhere I go, I look for you. If I get lucky now and then, and you happen to be there, how nice!” Noticing Tooly struggling with a mango lump, Sarah jabbed it with her own fork. “Here.”

Tooly bit it off.

“Listen, my favorite person”—to be addressed this way produced a surge in Tooly—“my favorite person, you have no idea how many people would love to meet you.”

“Who would?”

“Everybody in the world who hasn’t. You’re just the best.” She turned to the vendor, asking, “Isn’t this the best girl you’ve seen in your life?”

The old woman clucked.

“It’s a known fact you are,” Sarah said. After only three more bites, she patted Tooly’s hair, stroked her chewing cheeks, and announced that they must leave. “Terrible to do, but there’s a party to prepare for.”

“Okay,” Tooly said, the food losing flavor. “Uhm, I don’t know how to get back from here.”

“You’re not coming with? Abandoning me in deepest darkest Bangkok?” Sarah drew a long white cigarette from a packet of Kools in her purse, lit up, and exhaled a minty stream, then extended her slender arm into the roadway, causing two motorcycle taxis to screech to a halt. “I’ll let you take the first one.”

“I never went on a motorbike before,” Tooly said.

“Poor thing, you look so worried!”

Her driver barked, “Where you go?”

Tooly didn’t know how to direct him to her school, so stated her home address. Sarah paid Tooly’s driver, hiked up her skirt, and climbed onto the other motorcycle. “I hate this part,” she said. “Hate the going-away bit. Big kiss, my dear.”

“I’m a bit scared.”

“Don’t be! Oh, Matilda, I had the most wonderful time. Did you?” Her motorcycle roared off, cutting through traffic, and was gone.

Tooly tentatively grasped the driver’s orange bib, but he yanked her arms tight around his midriff and gunned the motorbike toward the gridlock, weaving through at speed, a terrifying, thrilling ride that ended with a sharp turn down her soi and a sudden halt, Tooly’s momentum squashing her into his back.

Her legs wobbly, she took the elevator up, then dashed for her room, as if this escapade might have left a visible mark that Shelly could see. When Paul came home, she feared that the phone would ring, the school reporting her latest infamy. Instead, she and Paul ate in air-conditioned silence. He was getting up in the mornings again and going to work. Yet he hardly spoke, and they hadn’t watched wrestling in days. After dinner, he retired to the computer in his bedroom, while she sat for hours on a deep leather armchair in the living room. She fell into a strange sleep there, then dragged herself to bed, still feeling the motion of the motorbike as she lay on her mattress.

The next evening, while Paul worked in his room, Tooly went downstairs, imagining that Sarah might still be out there. The building porter at the front gate saluted when she left, careless that this tiny girl strode into the night. Traffic grew louder as she neared Sukhumvit Road. An aproned maid passed, carrying a fish by the gills; it kicked, kicked. Plastic tables around a food stall stood vacant, an empty bottle of Singha on its side, rolling back and forth. Neon arrows pointed to the entrance of the King and I massage parlor, before which stood a trio of cheerless Japanese men, each on a different step, each smoking, one inhaling, then the second, then the third. In unison, they disappeared inside.

November arrived, and the heat remained implacable. When Tooly turned ten, she told nobody at school. Whenever possible, she sneaked out and wandered the neighborhood, glancing around for Sarah. But weeks had passed since their adventure. Every morning, she awoke longing for another.

It arrived.

“Come out and play,” Sarah said through the window of the microbus.

At her stop, Tooly hurtled off the bus and raced back toward Sarah. Such an odd way of walking, the woman had: shifting speeds, hurrying as if taken by a gust, then spinning around and beaming at Tooly, kneeling to stroke the girl on the top of her head, hopping a step ahead, then striding normally again.

“Before I die,” Sarah proclaimed as they ambled through Sukhumvit, “I will learn flamenco. Promise you’ll keep me to that, Tooly.”

“What’s flaminging?”

“Flamenco? It’s Argentinian dancing. Or is that the tango?” She thrust her arm forward, cocked her chin in demonstration. “Anyway, very moody and melodramatic. You would love it.”

This casual assumption of Tooly’s preferences — of how she was — thrilled the little girl.

“I know exactly what you’re like,” Sarah affirmed.

After a long pause, Tooly responded, “What are you like?”

“Me? Well, I like bread with strawberry jam and believe raspberry jam ruins everything. I think those who joke around with such matters are barbarians. And I’m right about everything. Except in the morning, when I’m wrong.”

Tooly looked up to see if she was being teased. “I keep trying to think of something funny.” She showed her empty hands.

“You are the most adorable thing. Say whatever you like around me.”

“Where were you born, Sarah?”

“On a game park in Kenya.”

“Did you see lions?”

“Thousands.”

“Did you pat one?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Did he bite you?”

“He licked my hand and smiled.”

“Lions smile?”

“If you pat them nicely. Do you like animals?”

Tooly nodded enthusiastically.

“Know where we should go?” Sarah said. “That crazy market with the wild beasts. Shall we?”

“We shall!” Tooly said intrepidly, then: “Am I allowed?”

A tuk-tuk driver deposited them before Khlong Toey, at the fringe of the open-air bazaar, which reeked of panicked fowl. Sarah took Tooly’s book bag so the girl could walk freely into the throng. On either side were tarps to keep sunlight off the produce: purple eggplants, green gourds, tamarind pods, cassava roots, taro. Vendors called across the market aisles, negotiating and laughing, while laborers in coolie hats dragged carts up and down. Tooly looked upward between adult bodies, and the sky dazzled her. Sarah shaded the girl’s brow, pointing to a stack of warty vegetables. “Ugliest thing you’ve seen in your life. This is fun, isn’t it,” she said, clutching Tooly’s arm. “Just you and me. Lead the way!”

Tooly pushed on, peeking into buckets filled with fried baby crabs, red chilies, oyster mushrooms, mouse-ear fungus. Under netting were live toads (eyeing her) beside flayed toads (pink-muscled, arms flung back). On a butcher block lay pig heads. In a metal basin, shiny fish flopped, two leaping over the edge as if in coordinated jailbreak, only to land pointlessly on the concrete floor. A fishmonger tossed them back into the squirming mass. The paving stones were specked with feathers of the live geese crammed into cages, necks bent to fit inside, the metal wires caked with droppings. Sarah must have read Tooly’s expression. “Ready to leave?”

But seeking the exit only drove them deeper inside the market, each aisle offering a different wriggling horror. “That way?” Tooly suggested, and went ahead to prove herself brave. She paused at a bamboo cage of long-beaked birds. “Look!” she exclaimed. “Pied kingfishers!”

“What?”

“They hover over the water. I’ve seen them before. Their wings go five hundred times a minute, and they look like they’re standing in the air. Then they see a fish and they go down into the water and bite it.”

“They’re beautiful,” Sarah said, studying the overstuffed cage. “I’m tempted.” She glanced down at Tooly. “Tempted to open it and free them.”

“The owner’s right there.”

“Fuck him!”

Tooly had only heard children swear; it was astonishing to hear a grown-up trying it. “Won’t they fly off?”

“I hope so. Now, listen; here’s the plan. Don’t run when I do it. We’ll just walk slowly away, cool as can be. They’ll never know it was us.” She fiddled with the cage latch. The kingfishers flapped with anticipation. The door sprang open.

But the birds stayed inside.

“Why aren’t they going?” Tooly asked in a whisper.

One ventured out, fluttering to the ground.

“Run!” Sarah shouted, snatching Tooly’s hand, urging her on. “Quick! Quick!” They bolted, Tooly scrambling to keep up, suppressing wild nervous laughter as they barged into carts and flunkies. The netted toads watched them rush past.

By the road, Tooly grabbed the knot at the back of Sarah’s cornflower-print dress. Like a horse reined, Sarah slowed from canter to trot to a clopping stop. They caught their breath, grinning at each other. Sarah wiped sweat from her forehead, then reached for Tooly’s face, plucked off a fallen eyelash, rolled it on her fingertips. They watched it float to the sidewalk.

After the tuk-tuk ride back to Sukhumvit Road, Sarah gave an affectionate yank of the girl’s long frizzy hair and returned her book bag. Goodbye was implicit. Tooly nearly followed her, but she hadn’t been invited. Sarah blew a kiss and spun off down the road.

Tooly looked down her soi, at the end of which stood Gupta Mansions, where Paul would be waiting in high agitation because of her tardiness, with Shelly upset because dinner was cold. A wordless night, a thin sleep, another school day tomorrow. Tooly wished not to exist, to be erased, imprisoned as she was in this unpopular little junk of a girl, exhausted by the constancy of herself.

Bangles clinked, followed by the scratch of a lighter flint. Tooly spun around. Sarah stood there, eyebrows raised, blowing white smoke, a plume swaying left and right. “I’m stealing you.”

“Are you allowed?”

“If people only did what was allowed, how dull.”

“But,” Tooly said, faltering, “I don’t know who you are.”

Sarah tucked Tooly’s hair behind her ear. At this affectionate touch, the girl’s face turned down.

“You know me, Tooly,” Sarah said. “We’ve known each other forever.”