The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

1988

SUNLIGHT AND A DISTANT WHOOSH of morning traffic came through the holes in the second-story wall. Someone approached up the stairs.

It was the old chessplayer of the night before, who trudged past her in a rumpled shirt and tie, tucked into sky-blue polyester shorts. He closed himself in the bathroom, faucet gushing, a pee stream audible. Minutes later, he emerged, having brushed his wiry gray-brown locks into submission, only to scratch his head, mussing the hair back into a peppery swirl. He set up his card table and his folding chair. Once seated, he raised a book—The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell — and began to read, dabbing fingers to his lips, flinging aside each page, pointing at the text as if in heated debate, and he not necessarily getting the better of it.

“Hi,” she said.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” he asked, eyebrows scrunching together.

“I’m a bit—” She looked at her bare knees, then up at his book cover, blinking at the daylight coming through the holes in the wall. “A bit worried.”

Humphrey held still a moment, then slammed the book onto the card table. He stood, walked a lap around the room, laceless tennis shoes clunking with each step. She braced herself, believing he was about to roar. Instead, he stopped, looking at the wall. “I also am concerned.” He turned to face her. “There is something I can get for you? I can help in some way?”

“I don’t know. I’m just — I woke up a bit worried. My neck hurts. I didn’t go home yet. Do you know if Sarah is here? Did she come back?”

“Not sure,” he said. “I …” He resumed pacing, working himself into a terrible state over his inability to help.

Oddly, his worry eased hers; she found herself wanting to make him feel better. “Can we play chess again?”

He paused — yes, this he could arrange. He helped her onto the folding chair, dragged it to the table, and prepared the board meticulously. Her chess strategy, if it could be flattered with such a term, was to sneak pieces up the board in hopes of snatching away Humphrey’s queen without his noticing. But each piece only found itself taken. For two hours they played, the sole interruption coming when Tooly rubbed her whiplashed neck, sore from her fall off the ladder the night before.

“No cheating,” he said, standing. “I go away for minute.”

“Can I cheat when you get back?”

“Of course.”

He disappeared into the storage room, returning with a neck brace, which he attempted to fit for her, though it was far too large. When this failed, he brought her aspirin. Applying utmost discretion, he inquired as to her weight, height, and age, jotting them on a pad to calculate how many milligrams were safe to prescribe. He produced a cup of water, a saucer bearing her half pill, plus a heap of sugar to nullify any bitterness. As the day progressed, this sugar remained her only nourishment. He displayed no signs of hunger himself, prompting her to say something finally.

“When do you eat breakfast, Humphrey?”

“I reject concept of meals. Why I must eat breakfast in morning? Then in midday, I must eat lunch? No, no — when it comes to eating, I am freethinker.”

“You only eat free things?”

“I only eat when hungry. Any times of day. Yesterday, for example, I eat at night one cereal bowl.” (She pictured him consuming the bowl itself.) “Today, I have cheese sandwich.”

“You had that already?”

“No, but later maybe.” He returned to the chess position, belatedly looking up. “Wait—you are wanting cheese-sandwich activity?”

He hurried her into the kitchen, designating Tooly the assistant chef, her only duty being to approve while he fried a hunk of orange cheese. Once this had melted, he used two knives to scrape it from the blackened pan and laid it across a bed of Triscuit crackers.

She devoured it.

“Is nice?” he asked.

“Really nice.”

“But something bother you,” he guessed.

“Just, I’m going to be in trouble. I’m supposed to be at school,” she said. “Are you leaving here soon? You told Sarah you had to go this morning. Will I be on my own now?”

“We see, we see. You don’t concern about,” he said. “You want Coca-Cola, darlink? I can provide.” He fetched a plastic cup of it, which she glugged. “More chess activities?”

“Maybe not.”

“You have reading items?”

She produced the novel from her book bag. He inspected it, approving of the author, Charles Dickens, although he expressed reservations about invented stories. “Myself, I read only facts. Art is tool of conformity,” he declared. “Art pleasure is connect with complacency. To resist domination of economic factors, artist must produce negative, not affirmative, culture. Avant-garde, in particular. Work of art should make unhappy. It shows horrors of world. More grill cheese?”

She nodded.

As he fried another, she contemplated his bewildering remarks, and decided that he had been talking about the difference between happy endings and sad endings, this being her distinction between books written for children and those for adults. Tooly let it be known that she had read several books with unhappy endings. There was one, she recalled, “where the main girl and her brother drown at the end.”

“Drown?”

“Both of them.”

“Avant-garde,” he said approvingly.

As the day passed, they read, seated on opposite sides of the card table, each interrupting to make points. When she grew hungry, they ate, regardless of the hour; if she felt thirsty, he poured warm Coke. A scandalous and thrilling thought came to her: school was going on right then, Mr. Priddles’s class happening without her. Then her attention drifted to Paul, and all pleasure dissolved.

She put down her book and got permission to go downstairs into the back garden, where she inspected the dolphin mural. Humphrey found a paintbrush and a can of red paint in the storage room, and let her draw noses on the wall. “You are magnificent artist,” he commented.

“Am I avant-garde?”

He smiled, and left her out there while he napped. (The bed upon which Tooly had slept was his — he’d given it up for her, dozing all night on the floor downstairs.) Alone, she explored the dilapidated house, out onto the front patio, past its walls, a few steps down the deserted lane. She ran back inside.

Later that day, delivery men arrived with crates of beer and bags of ice, followed by Venn, the man who had saved her life during that stampede the night before. He conferred with Humphrey and gave orders to Jaime, who counted out the float and explained to Tooly how his bar setup worked. Others came and went, some depositing packages in the storage room upstairs, a few taking parcels, everyone answering to Venn.

Amid all this, Tooly stood against the wall, her fingertips on the bricks behind her, motionless as a gecko. When Venn looked over, he winked, as if there were a second level beyond what went on around them, and his glance acknowledged her entry into that level, available to him and her alone. When she had nearly gathered the courage to address him in front of everyone, he spoke to her, anticipating her thoughts. “Not to worry,” he told her. “Everything’s fine.”

“Just that, I don’t know how to get to my house from here,” she said.

“We’ll wait for Sarah on that,” he replied. “And I’m around. Nothing to fear, duck.” His voice — its deepness, its surety — captivated her. He assigned her little tasks: tell So-and-So; tag along while I resolve this problem. He adorned nothing with “please” or “thank you,” yet was kinder than those who did. Wherever he went, she hastened just ahead of his stride, lest he lose sight of her and be lured away, leaving her among large strangers.

Even when partygoers began arriving, all greeting Venn, he continued to keep an eye on her. If he spoke to a particularly intimidating dead-eyed thug, he called Tooly over, introducing her and conveying his protection. He even said, “Grab my arm, little duck, if you need anything.” As the crowd thickened, grown-ups crushed her and trod on her feet, so she went upstairs and sat opposite Humphrey, who had his toilet-paper earplugs in again. They read together, trying to ignore the racket. When fatigue overcame her, Venn cleared everyone off the upper floor, deposited her on the bed, and left her to rest, though the music boomed downstairs. Drifting off, she worried that Humphrey would be gone by morning.

Instead, he was there, pouring her Coca-Cola. He was not leaving, he promised, until Sarah returned and took care of matters. In this way, they passed that first week together. Tooly noticed that he wore almost the same outfit every day. She had scarcely more variety herself, just the school clothing she’d arrived in, plus the gym clothes in her book bag. When Venn noticed her increasing scruffiness, he dispatched two young Thai women — mainstays at the parties — to buy her outfits from a night market. Phueng and Mai must have argued, because they returned with separate hauls, Phueng with girlie pink T-shirts emblazoned with logos of My Little Pony and Strawberry Shortcake, while Mai had outfits that miniaturized her own look: off-the-shoulder blouses, zebra-print leggings, slouch socks. Both had bought toiletries and good-naturedly scrubbed the girl clean in the bathtub. Tooly let them, but insisted on staying fully clothed, her new rolled-up jeans bleeding indigo down the plughole. Afterward, they employed a blow-dryer on her. The humidity caused her hair to spring outward with comical frizziness, making even Venn laugh — the first time she’d seen that lovely sight — and he pressed her staticky head when next he saw her.

Phueng and Mai were freelancers — not bargirls tied to a particular nightspot but hairdressers who supplemented their income with “tips” from foreign boyfriends, hoping one would eventually agree to marriage and make the income permanent. As the night went on, they found customers, and Tooly was left alone. She visited with Jaime, who taught her about his trade: how you poured heavily early in the evening, then tapered off as the night went on; and how you managed the drunks, whom he referred to as los zombies. When the party reached fever pitch, Jaime spoke less and pointed more: get me that, hand me this, run upstairs, more ice. “Look at this one,” he said, of an approaching zombie, the woman’s eyelashes out of sync.

“C’mon, kiddo,” the woman snarled. “Pour it a little stronger, will ya.”

The two bouncers were supposed to keep the peace, but it was usually Venn who broke up fights. When he intervened, the combatants soon submitted — at most throwing a late punch over his shoulder, which only earned a hard slap from Venn. Even men twice his size reddened and apologized. During such scenes, he flashed Tooly the quickest of winks to show her not to be afraid, that this wasn’t real. All around were raised voices — including his own ferocious outbursts — while she, against a wall, glowed inside to know what was really happening. “I never lose control, duck,” he’d explained. “I choose to get angry.”

The roughest men adored Venn, and women were equally drawn to him, though many of his girlfriends derided the cult of Venn — rogues adopting his speech patterns and requesting the music he liked (schmaltzy seventies love songs). After a couple of weeks, they were even calling Tooly “duck,” as Venn did, treating her like a bar mascot, patting her head with coarse paws, offering low fives. Sometimes they inquired if her dad was around, by which they meant Venn. Once, she mentioned the disgusting piano player who, on her first night there, had kissed her. A dozen of the hardest men on the premises gathered for details on the culprit. She later heard that he’d “been sorted out,” and never saw him again. If anyone bothered her now, a wall of villains closed around her. This protection imbued her with an intoxicating power over grown-ups. But she avoided using it, since violence — even in her favor — made her whole body tremble.

From listening in, she learned that Humphrey rented this house, although the things in the storage room belonged to Venn’s associates. These included a Bulgarian ex-wrestler who bleached one-dollar bills in the bathtub, using desktop publishing to reprint them as hundreds; Nigerians who smuggled brown packets in disassembled televisions; and a Brazilian who showed Tooly a plastic tube surgically implanted in his left arm that, when he flexed, sucked air through a hole in his fingertip, allowing him to “disappear” pretty stones from a jewelry shop in Bang Rak. Such characters increased Humphrey’s wish to leave — if the police found this stuff, they’d blame him. But Venn was watching out. “Baksheesh for Bangkok’s finest” was how he put it, meaning bottomless drinks, nightly entertainment, and weekly envelopes for the precinct commanders.

After days of taking up Humphrey’s bed, Tooly obtained her own space, a camping tent in the storage room with a padlock on the inside for privacy. “You’re staying a little longer than planned,” Venn told her.

“Am I going to be in trouble?”

“Not a chance.”

The thought of Venn standing up for her with Paul was frightening — even to think of the mismatch made her guilty.

Now that Tooly was stowed in the storage room, she took the opportunity to snoop around, finding designer watches, golf memberships for Panya Resort, fax machines, a stack of U.S. marriage certificates and blank Canadian passports, twenty-four-inch color TVs with the insides hollowed out, packets of expired pharmaceuticals (where Humphrey had found her aspirin), an industrial sewing machine, restaurant tables. Finding herself among these objects, it occurred to Tooly that she, too, was a stolen good.

Each morning, she unzipped her tent and peeked out.

“Conversation and debate?” Humphrey asked, handing her a glass of Coke. As she sipped, he opened his notepad, pen in hand, its tip aimed at the ceiling, and wrote, ITEM I — MAKE LIST.

He immediately drew a thick line through this. “Done,” he said, and tossed the pad on his unmade bed. “Important to be productive. Already, I achieve something. Good mornink.” The pad — and, indeed, his productivity — made no further appearances for another day.

Sarah’s absence, so scary at first, grew less troubling. Tooly’s days assumed a pleasant routine. She raced around on the lower floor, leaping as she went, singing loudly and tunelessly — a long warbling note. The turning fan whirred slowly toward her, blowing her off balance. “What are you reading today, Humphrey?”

He responded at length, circumnavigating anything resembling an answer in order to hold her attention, tossing forth references, personal commentary, perplexing claims: that a man called Francis Bacon had experimented with the refrigeration of chicken in a snow drift, caught a cold, and died; that Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely when his mother heard that the Spanish Armada was sailing up the English Channel, thus condemning her son to a lifetime of poor digestion.

While speaking, Humphrey gesticulated wildly, as if skywriting the names of his idols. He was of the firm opinion that, had the Great Thinkers been around, had they stumbled across this house, they’d have become his personal friends. “Sir Isaac Newton and I, we are like two peas in a pond.” Sadly, it was trivial beings who were in abundance; the Great Thinkers proved so hard to find.

“Who’s your favorite writer, Humphrey?”

“Samuel Johnson, Yeats and Keats,” he said, pronouncing the two last names to rhyme, “Kafka, Baudelaire, Baron Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt, Thomas Carlyle, Fichte, Demosthenes, Cicero, Rousseau, Aristotle, and Milton.”

“If you had to pick one.”

“That is who I pick.”

“It’s not one.”

“Also,” he added, as if the unmentioned might complain, “John Locke, Plutarch, Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill.”

Much as he enjoyed rambling, Humphrey liked nothing more than listening to her. He wasn’t simply being polite — he thirsted for information and swallowed any she offered, even the plots of novels she’d read. She told him about the World Wrestling Federation, too, and the controversy over whether it was all fake, which intrigued him.

“Fabulous information you are giving,” he said, stirring his coffee with a ballpoint pen and licking it, unaware that the heat had breached the ink cartridge, dyeing his lips blue. “You know who you are reminding me of?” he said, wiping his mouth and spreading ink across the back of his hand. “John Stuart Mill. He was child prodigy like you, always eating watermelon.”

She sat cross-legged on the floor, half of a watermelon in her lap, digging into it with a wooden cooking spoon so ineffectual at chiseling that she gripped it with both hands, which meant the juice-slippery melon kept leaping from between her knees and bouncing across the floor.

With no sign of anyone retrieving Tooly, Humphrey soon took on her education, loading her down with reading material. Each time she returned to her tent, she found a fresh volume at its entrance.

“You have read Spengler yet, darlink?”

“What is Spankler?”

“You are ten years old, and you not read Oswald Spengler? How this is possible?” He placed a copy of The Decline of the West by the tent.

Humphrey had no friends at the parties, just a few trading partners. Their dealings were mostly in expired pharmaceuticals and medical prosthetics, such as a pair of flesh-colored plastic legs he was constantly trying to sell, each wearing a scuffed black dress shoe and a red sock. “How much I get for this?” he asked Tooly, placing one before her.

“Just one leg?”

“I give half price if you buy two.”

“A hundred baht?” she guessed.

“Not even left shoe without sock do I sell for hundred baht! This is high-demand product.”

Nevertheless, the legs sat around (stood around) for days before he found a buyer in a cuddly Cameroonian named Lovemore Ngubu, who planned to paint the legs brown and ship them to Yaoundé for sale at his uncle’s electronics-repair shop. It was Lovemore who told Tooly that Humphrey had served time in jail.

“Not jail,” Humphrey clarified, when she asked about this. “It was Gulag. That is like jail but made by Russians, so worse.”

“What did you do?”

“Communists say I am social parasite, which is big exaggeration.”

“What was it like in jail?”

At first, they kept him awake for days in complete isolation, he said. To stay sane, he tried to recall his life, framing recollected events as if they were photographs, looking at each in detail. Talking with prisoners in adjacent cells was forbidden, but he and a neighbor had a sewer pipe in common, so they communicated with a tapping code used in Russian prisons since tsarist times. It was at this point that Humphrey started playing chess seriously — different taps connoted different moves. The man in the next cell had been there for eight years, and each day paced back and forth, counting his steps to calculate the distance, mapping in imagination the walk back to his hometown, thousands of miles away on the other side of the Soviet Union.

“What happened to him?”

“They let him out, but his body is ruin; he dies. After this, they send me north for chopping wood.”

“What was that like?”

“Hungry every day. They tell us when to eat — little soup with grains — and when to sleep. Very cold. Everybody dreaming of food all night. One prisoner, he is crazy, kills friend — they find him eating.”

“Eating what?”

“Eating friend. They mix me with common criminals. This is where I become corrupted. Before, I am honest man,” he said. “It is so cold up there all time. Even here and now, where it is so hot and sweating, I am cold in my bones. Yes, it was bad in Gulag. Another man, he puts ground glass in his eye just to get to hospital. Other politicals, they try hunger-strike.”

“What’s that?”

“You stop eating as protest. But only works in country where they care you are not eating. In Soviet Union, they stick tube in you with boiling soup, and this destroys stomach right away. There is saying in Gulag: ‘Only first life sentence is hell. After that, everything gets better.’ You want Coca-Cola?”

His resentment over those six years of detention had expanded into a generalized hostility toward his birth nation. If one mentioned anything to do with the Soviet Union, he remarked contemptuously, “Typical Russian! This is typical Russian way of behave.” As for the language, he refused to speak it even when his countrymen approached him — a provocation that would have led to violence had Venn not intervened. Humphrey even spurned Russian in written form, saying that English was more beautiful than the ugly Cyrillic script. There were many people who had the misfortune of being born in the wrong place. He was one of them.

“How did you get out of Gulag, Humphrey?”

“I run away hundred miles. At Black Sea, I get boat to Turkey, through Greece, bottom of Sicily, into Portugal. I meet man at dock and say, ‘Mister, where this ship is going?’ He tells me, ‘England.’ I am thinking, Very nice — land of Samuel Johnson, Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill. I say, ‘I can come? Is all right?’ He says, ‘Yes, why not.’ Then, halfway into sea, someone asks, ‘Why you are going to Africa?’ I say, ‘No, I go to England.’ He says, ‘We go to South Africa on this boat.’ So, that is where I end. Years, I am stuck there. Why? Because trivial being tells me wrong boat. It is example of Moron Problem. If not for moron, I have different life, write many books, have nice fat wife and children. But no. This idiot”—Humphrey pronounced the word as if it contained only two syllables: EED-yot—“this idiot, he has been highly — how should I put to you?”

Remembering one of his favorite words, she said, “Detrimental?”

“Yes, highly detrimental. But there is important fact I learn: half your life is decide by morons,” he explained. “Does not matter how brilliant you are. You can have intellect big as John Stuart Mill. Even he probably has many difficulty from idiots.”

“I have difficulty from idiots,” she told him. “My old school in Australia sent the wrong information to the place I go to now, and they’re making me do a whole year over.”

“Why they let this happen? It is like something from Soviet Union. Just because moron sent wrong papers?”

“I told them.”

“This makes me fury. Quite fury. Why they do this to you? They do not realize you are high-quality intellectual?”

“I’m supposed to be in fifth grade.”

“You should be in sixth! In seventh! Better, I put you in medical school. That is how intellectual you are.”

“I hate trivial beings.”

“I hate them also. But careful; it is trivial beings that run the world.”

So went their days — talking, reading, commending each other’s forbearance in a world bedeviled by the Moron Problem. Whenever it suited them, he cooked a meal. His specialty was anything potato-based: potato sandwiches, potato pie, and his favorite, smashed-potato pizza.

“What’s your favorite food, Humphrey?”

“Me? I like all things eatful.”

That was daytime. When night fell, all changed. Some evenings, Venn kept her near. Other times, he entertained associates, and she watched from a distance until he summoned her. “Little duck!” he said, scratching his thick beard, lines crinkling around his eyes. And she walked away from Humphrey as one might from a classroom friend when a fancier after-school companion arrives. She was ashamed of him, and he knew this, so let her go. Yet he watched from afar. When she was tired, it was he who asked Venn to banish the revelers upstairs, a trick that Humphrey, despite his pleas to the crowd, had no power to effect.