The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

2011

SHE TOOK HIM.

Mac was scheduled that morning for floor hockey, a sport at which he demonstrated absolute ineptitude and corresponding dread. Tooly clicked him under the passenger-side safety belt, tossed a bag of their belongings on the backseat of the minivan, and drove right past the Y, taking the turnoff for interstate south. He looked at her. “Is this the right way?”

“No.”

“Oh, good. Today was quarterfinals.” He stared out the window, incurious about the change of plans. Mac tracked their mileage through Westchester, checking the odometer against the highway signs. After a silent patch, he said, “Trees don’t count as being alive because they don’t have heads.” He returned to his open window, warm air fluttering his belt strap, the late-July sun intensified through the windscreen.

“Don’t you want to know where we’re going?” she asked.

He shrugged. They drove that whole morning, playing car games and listening to the radio. She inquired about his moviemaking class, and he explained his Flip videocamera, with the combination of patience and inexactitude that young children exhibit when informing their elders about the present day. He fell asleep for a couple of hours, miles rushing beneath them, past Philadelphia and Wilmington, southwest around Baltimore, before they turned off for Lodge Haven, Maryland.

That name had always felt privately hers, the place of birth listed on every form and passport of her life. But she remembered nothing of the place, just a Washington, D.C., suburb that she’d left as an infant and never seen since. She woke Mac gently, houses sliding past, a neighborhood of long lawns, basement romper rooms, college stickers on car windows.

“It’s okay that I kidnapped you?” she asked him.

“It’s okay.”

“We can travel around and I can show you all sorts of things. No piano lessons required, and no Seroquel.”

He looked down, ashamed of his medications. “I like my piano lessons.”

“In that case, we’ll find a piano teacher and kidnap him, too.”

“Where are we right now?”

“We’re going for lunch with my father.”

“With the banana split?”

“No, not him. My real father,” she said, scanning the street for the address.

At a distance, she spotted him kneeling on the lawn outside his home, pruning a flower bed beneath the bay windows, his back to her, trowel in hand, a long strand of white hair on his balding head flapping back and forth in the wind, like an arm waving Mayday. She lowered her window. Paul turned, smoothing the hair across his head, raising the trowel in greeting. “That you there?” he asked, shading his eyes with gardening gloves, his arms sun-freckled, polo shirt tucked into khakis. “Park in the driveway, or on the street. Nobody tows here.”

An urge to stamp on the pedal and zoom away came over Tooly. She pulled to the curb, cut the engine, and reached over to Mac. “Shake my hand for luck.”

“Why?”

“Just an old habit.”

But he wouldn’t, so she unclicked his seatbelt. “Hungry for lunch?”

As they crossed the road, she watched Paul’s thin mouth, which wavered rather than spoke, as if the lips were engaged in a dispute over how to greet her. “So,” he said, “you found the place.”

During all these years apart, Paul had existed for Tooly as a character in her story, one who had left the stage. Now he stood before her, a little man around sixty, awaiting a response. Custom suggested she inform him that the drive was easy, the traffic sparse, his flower bed lovely. Instead, she said, “It’s such a pleasure for me to see you again,” and touched his forearm, whose slenderness discomposed her, a warm, brittle limb. He was so much smaller than he ought to have been. His arm tensed at her touch.

Paul ushered them inside his home, where he ran a consultancy of which he was the sole employee, working on contract for U.S. government departments like Homeland Security, Defense, and State to produce white papers on risks to the telecom grid: How easy would it be for foreign nation-states to hack in? Could we have a Stuxnet here? What effect would a disaster like the tsunami in Japan have on systems at American nuclear plants?

In the front room, framed prints of sparrows and owls hovered on the wall. The bay window overlooked a mowed front lawn, bird feeder hanging from the oak tree. He assigned Tooly and Mac seats and inquired about refreshments — milk or ginger ale? — then went to prepare lunch.

“Can I help with anything?” she called to him.

“No, you can’t. You can wait there.”

Mac remained seated but Tooly stood, tensely browsing his books. These volumes were the scenery of her childhood. On the first page of each, he had written his full name, including middle initial, proclaiming that this book, on his shelf, in his front room, did indeed belong to him. Flipping through The Complete Birder, she discovered his pencil notations in the margins, marks too faint to read but for a single comment, “Interesting warbler,” followed by the impress of an exclamation point that he had erased.

It was clear without asking that he’d been alone all these years — his solitude evident in the television squared to a seat at the far end of the couch, a line of HB pencils on the coffee table sharpened to pricking points and awaiting bird books in urgent need of his name. Within the folds of the curtain, a telescope crouched, its capped nose turned down as if too timid to peep outside. His binoculars rested on a high shelf, which she could reach these days, and did, sliding them from their satin-lined case and trying them at the window, finding neither birds nor planets, only a garage across the road, the wavering sky lined with power cables.

“Lunch is served.”

She torqued around, caught playing without permission. He waved away her apologies and led them into the kitchen. From a deep serving bowl, Paul ladled coconut-cream soup, with tiny eggplants bobbing, sweet basil, Kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass. Every course was Thai — tom yum soup, red curry with rice, sliced green mango — in bittersweet tribute to the last point of their acquaintance.

“I left out the hot peppers,” he assured Mac, “not knowing how you took it. Some young people don’t appreciate spice. Some old people don’t, either.”

“Nice?” Tooly asked Mac.

He nodded fast, swallowing.

“I thought of you recently,” Paul told her. “The wrestler ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage died.”

“Do you always think of me when you hear about wrestlers?”

“Yes, actually.”

“Me, too,” she said. “Did you actually enjoy that stuff? Or was it just to be nice to me?”

“I found it relaxing,” he answered, preparing himself a spoonful, his rimless glasses steamed from the soup. He removed them and, with much deliberation, wiped each lens with a corner of the tablecloth, blind eyes blinking, pink dents on either side of his nose where the spectacle pads had pressed.

The sight of this — for reasons that escaped her — made Tooly too sad to speak. She tried to eat, but swallowing was impossible.

For a minute, the only sound was the boy’s slurps. Each time he made this noise, she looked to Paul, expecting irritation, finding none.

“You used to avoid foreign food,” she told him.

“I’ve come around,” Paul said. “Only, not the very spicy stuff.” He’d taken cooking classes in Thailand, he informed her.

“I’m impressed.” She would never have imagined him taking a course. “I’d love to do something like that. I’m crazy for classes.”

“You used to hate them in school.”

“Maybe that’s why I like them now.”

After the soup, he asked, “And can you still count a minute?”

She smiled, not having thought of this childhood trick in nearly a quarter century. “When I was little,” she explained to Mac, “I could guess exactly how long a minute lasted by counting in my head. Shall we test me after lunch?”

But Paul unstrapped his watch right then and dangled it before the boy. Mac stared, nonplussed at the antiquity of calculator functions. “It’s this button,” Paul explained, and Mac pushed it, liquid-crystal numerals cycling onscreen.

Tooly scrunched her eyes, counting silently to sixty. “Now?”

“Thirty-seven seconds,” Mac informed her.

“Terrible!” she said.

The boy gave it a try. Long after what seemed a minute to Tooly, he raised his finger.

“Fifty-five seconds,” Paul reported. “Very good.”

Paul had remained in Thailand for eight years after her departure — by far his longest overseas residence. Without Tooly around, he no longer needed to keep moving. He had married, and his wife lived here with him. “You remember Shelly, don’t you?”

“Our housekeeper?”

“Well, not in a long time.” Shelly had stepped out to the Costco in Beltsville to give them time alone, and to supply herself for the yearly trip to her home province, Nong Khai, where she and Paul owned a house. “Year by year, I’m phasing out my work. She wants us to retire there. Within five years, I won’t have to be here at all.”

He asked about Tooly’s bookshop, her life on the Welsh-English border, her travels, all of which she had mentioned in their phone call. While she answered, he folded his napkin, placed the spoon and fork perpendicular to each other, rotated them like clock hands, leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs one way, then the other.

“I’ve been waiting,” he interrupted, drawing his chair up to the table. “I’ve been waiting to hear from you. It was years. I thought I wouldn’t.” He went quiet, tried to finish, voice rising in pitch but strangled in his throat. He forced a laugh, unthinkingly tapping the boy’s arm.

“Ow, get off!”

“Excuse me. Sorry,” Paul said, hand raised. “Pardon me.”

Mac — unaware of the distress emanating from the man — asked when they were having dessert. There was none. Could he get down and play on his phone? He could. The boy departed for the front room, where he lay on the floor, swiping at a game onscreen, indifferent to their conversation in the kitchen.

“I always wanted to explain myself to you,” Paul continued. “Always wanted to. I had a duty — thought I had a duty — regarding what I did. I wanted to explain that, but planned to wait till you were grown. Then I never heard from you. I wasn’t going to interfere. Didn’t want to disturb your life.”

Tooly could have claimed that she’d been prevented from contacting him, but that was untrue. She hadn’t wanted to. They had been a team once, she as vital to him as he to her. Yet she had abandoned him. Knowingly, she’d done so.

“I felt it was not in your interest that you stayed with your mother,” he explained. “That was why I acted. That’s why I took you. It wasn’t selfishness. I hope you realize that.”

“I know.”

“She’d just go absent, days at a time. Stop me if you don’t want to hear this.” Since Tooly didn’t object, he continued. “She could only fix her attention on the thing in front of her and nothing else. And we weren’t it. You were so undersized when you were little — is it possible that was caused by your mother neglecting you? I had a duty, I thought. Not only as your father but as a human person. Which is why I acted. But only with good intentions.”

From adolescence, Paul had been a joiner of clubs and teams — not by preference but against it, plunging himself into uncomfortable social situations in the hope of converting himself into a different person, one more affable and easygoing. But his nature resisted experience: he remained frustratingly the same. By college, he’d submitted to introversion, taking a degree in computer science, which led to a job in D.C. at Ritcomm. After a few years, they appointed him to run an overseas project, a ten-week contract with the Kenyan government. It proved a disaster. The independence leader, President Jomo Kenyatta, was dying, and members of his inner circle were contesting power and enriching themselves from state programs. When Paul refused to cooperate, officials shunned him. He petitioned Ritcomm to return stateside, but this risked voiding the contract. They told him to sit it out.

With nothing to do, he booked a countryside tour, lured by the promise of birds. Also, he hoped for cooler locales, since heat aggravated his respiratory problems. But the tour guide drove homicidally, and constantly sought to divert Paul to bordellos and shady jewel merchants. Part of the tour had been touted as a two-night “bird safari,” yet turned out to be nothing of the sort. Paul found himself at a ramshackle former hunting lodge run by a louche Italian and his miserable English wife, both serious drinkers. Big-game hunters used to stay out there, but the independent Kenyan government had banned blood sports. A few lodges had transformed themselves into nature parks; others offered illegal hunts. When Paul refused such an expedition, the Italian owner lost interest, telling him to wander the grounds and look skyward — that was the bird safari. But traipsing through the bush seemed madness, with savage creatures out there, so Paul remained in his room, feeling aggrieved. The daughter of the lodge owners turned up, offering to show him the few birds found on the premises, several in cages. Previously, her job had been to photograph guests with their kills. She asked him about America, gazed too directly at him.

He returned to Nairobi and resumed his nonexistent job. To his surprise, the young woman from the lodge appeared at his hotel with a tale of woe: her ex-boyfriend had tried to shoot himself, and all the white settlers in the area falsely blamed her and made life insufferable. She had nowhere to stay in the capital, so Paul booked her a room at the hotel — on a different floor, however, to avoid any suggestion of impropriety. She knocked on his door late that night, inviting him to the bar for a thank-you drink. He ordered a glass of milk, listening as she recounted her life, a series of injustices and misfortunes, it seemed. Well after closing time, they continued their conversation on a lobby sofa — it was she who spoke — before breaking apart at around 2 A.M. and taking the elevator to their separate floors. At dawn, there was a knock at his door. She stood there. Only because Paul was half asleep did he have the courage to do what followed.

For the first time, he understood the accounts of sane citizens hurtling toward disaster because of romantic passion. He’d thought lovers were showing off when they made their ardor public. But his need for her proximity overwhelmed reason. It was a need too expansive for his insides, requiring outward acts. They had “relations” (Paul put the matter delicately, even decades later), which he’d always thought a fearsome milestone, but which she offered with intoxicating ease. There was — despite his lifelong expectations to the contrary — a little territory available to him. Not just the confines of himself but in her, too, and a place they might have together. Before his departure, Sarah was pregnant. They flew to the United States, and he bought a home for his new family.

“Where?”

“You’re in it.”

But, soon after arriving, Sarah recanted the plan to marry, a shock to Paul. After all, she was pregnant — he hadn’t imagined that a woman might willingly not marry under such circumstances. But she seemed to find him intolerable, even repugnant. She came to blame Paul for everything, be it the immigration official at whom she’d cursed or the obnoxious shop detective who’d accused her of shoplifting. When Paul noted that the U.S. surgeon general had deemed smoking noxious during pregnancy, Sarah reached for her lighter. Just as impulsively, she broke down and apologized, appearing so disconsolate that her underlying decency was plain to him, and she was redeemed. Their daughter, Matilda, arrived. The situation only worsened. Once, Sarah left the girl in her bath seat and spun on the tub faucet, then went to make phone calls. She’d only turned on the hot tap. The infant howled and howled, and Paul ran upstairs, finding his tiny daughter’s feet submerged in scalding water. “Thank God it was a weekend and I was there. You can imagine what it made me wonder about days when I was away at the office. For years, you had those burn scars on your feet.”

“Was that why you always made me wear socks around the house?”

“Maybe, yes.”

The day he saved her in the tub, Paul went down to the basement and paced. He loathed Sarah with an intensity that exceeded his former desire for her. The easiest option was to move out, have nothing to do with her. But he had duties to this small person, who hadn’t chosen to be included in his mistake. So he resolved to live an unhappy life, to allow Sarah her manipulations, her relations with other men, and whatever else she was up to. He’d work and ignore the rest. This was to be his life.

However, Paul’s acquiescence only riled Sarah. She grew more provocative, seeking to spike him into rage — and he had a temper, if pushed. During one such quarrel, she threatened to take their child back to Kenya, or maybe farther, and live as she pleased, and never see him again. He believed her. Yet Sarah seemed not even to care for Tooly, playing with her for just a few minutes before losing interest or berating the infant — only to then cuddle her, leaving their daughter stupefied. Daydreaming of escape, Paul recalled that road trip in Kenya. How far from the world he’d felt. You could disappear overseas, especially in poor countries. It was like leaving the present.

Ritcomm won a major government contract to modernize communications at smaller U.S. diplomatic outposts. It was 1981, and the State Department was connecting even the most far-flung tentacles of the United States to Washington, or at least to a regional mainframe with access to the visa lookout system. This meant using local phone lines. But hooking into an overseas grid — generally operated by a state telecom company — incurred security risks. You couldn’t allow foreign nationals to do the installation; it would take just one Soviet infiltrator. But the U.S. government lacked suitable specialists to do the work. So it contracted Ritcomm. The company itself struggled for staffers willing to take the work, which meant a rootless existence, only a few months at each consulate.

Paul volunteered. As an installer, he’d have a generic maintenance account to log on to the mainframes, which allowed him to read the bad-guy list. Not only could he vanish overseas; he’d have access to the very system that would flag his name to U.S. officials when Sarah reported him. He prepped their disappearance by apologizing to Sarah for being so boring, promising to take her on an expensive vacation — or, if she preferred, she could go alone with Tooly. Yes, Sarah answered with alacrity, that’s what she wanted. He agreed, on condition that she obtain an American passport in their daughter’s name. Tooly could have traveled on her mother’s passport but it was Kenyan, he noted, which might mean delays and complications. Better to secure their daughter a U.S. passport, which could subsequently help Sarah herself obtain citizenship. Paul filled out the application. Sarah signed everything.

“Then,” he said, “I took you.”

Life abroad had been hard. Foreign locales exacerbated his allergies and his asthma. The food made him sick. And fear of capture kept him in constant anxiety, especially at border crossings. He had access to the American watch lists but not to foreign ones, so each international flight was a cause for fear. Had Sarah reported him to any other nation? Might they detain him on arrival? If so, what would happen to Tooly?

Paul persuaded Ritcomm to base him for a full year in each foreign hub. The company agreed, because he was such a useful employee: never wanted to come back, neither for home leave nor permanently. (Indeed, he refused to return to America at all, leery of heightened security stateside. His responsibility to guard Tooly prevented him even from traveling back to California when his adoptive father was dying — an omission that wrenched Paul still.) A full year in each city, he figured, allowed Tooly to attend a full grade. But the plan stumbled in Australia, since schools there worked on a different calendar, which later led to dispute over which grade she was rightly in. He couldn’t risk arguing the case — he sought to be forgotten the moment he left any room. He avoided teachers and parents, remained distant with colleagues. Once again, Paul commented, he’d thrust himself into a situation that he could not manage.

“But you did manage, amazingly well,” she said.

“I found it tough.” Partly, it was the risk of discovery — that she’d say something imprudent. He came to rely on his own daughter. She was his sole companion. “But never a moan from you. You settled in wherever we were. New kids, new friends, never complaining.”

“You didn’t complain, either — and never one mean word about my mother. I remember you saying she couldn’t be around, and we kept things private in our family. But nothing nasty ever. You were protecting me.” She watched his hand, wanting to touch it, but couldn’t somehow. “You were brave to do this, you know.”

“Brave? I lived in constant dread.” Then his worst fear was realized: she failed to come home. Something had happened, but what recourse did he have? The Thai police? They were notoriously corrupt. She’d never mentioned any friends in Bangkok; he didn’t know where to start looking. Her school called the next day, asking where she was. He claimed Tooly was at home, ill. He was in a panic. Couldn’t report her absence to the embassy — or should he? What if some bad person had her? What if she’d run away, or had an accident? Then Sarah got in touch.

“How did she even know we were in Bangkok?”

“That trick you had of counting out a minute?”

“What about it?”

“You remember a guy named Bob Burdett, from the U.S. Embassy? You might not recall this, but he was over for dinner once. You came out of your room and showed how you could make your eyes vibrate and did your one-minute trick.”

“He was getting violent with you. I came out to try to help.”

Bob Burdett — a wannabe spy always trying to impress the station chief by finding “subversives”—had invited himself for dinner because he hadn’t liked the look of Paul. During the meal, Bob Burdett tried to provoke his host into saying something anti-American. Toward the end of the evening, a small girl stepped from a bedroom. How odd to conceal her like that. And no mother in evidence. Bob Burdett checked with contacts at other U.S. embassies Paul had passed through, and heard versions of the same story: a systems specialist, barely remembered, no wife or daughter anyone knew of. Further burrowing turned up the name of a Kenyan national, Sarah Pastore, who had entered the United States with Paul several years earlier. A contact in military intelligence located her, still in the United States, though with an expired visa. She’d been arrested for shoplifting and awaited deportation. Bob Burdett reached her, posing as a State Department official. What was her relationship to a man named Paul Zylberberg? Had he ever voiced any socialist tendencies? Was she aware of a little girl? If the child was Sarah’s, why was she not there in Bangkok? Had she filed a missing-persons report? Didn’t she want her daughter back?

Soon thereafter, Sarah arrived in Bangkok.

“I was in a bad state after you went. I hoped you were fine, but there was nothing I could do. Legally speaking, I’d kidnapped you. I had no rights. Sarah needed only turn me in. We came to an arrangement, but I had no right to expect you’d contact me,” he concluded. “You were angry at what I’d done. You had every reason to be.”

“I wasn’t. And I’m not.”

“You found a good school in the end? With friends you liked?”

Her childhood after Bangkok would have appalled him — never another day in a classroom, tramps for babysitters. She gave a sanitized summary, inventing an adolescence that was varied and carefree. As she rolled out this fantasy, she recalled the truth and found herself sorrowful, though unsure why.

Paul had always worried, he said, about whether the money for Tooly was sufficient. Sarah demanded that four thousand dollars be paid monthly in exchange for never reporting what he’d done. “I’d have sent child support anyway — all I could possibly afford. I often sent more than what was expected. She really didn’t need to threaten me. And I’m sorry, Tooly, about cutting it off when you turned twenty-one. I was hurt that you never contacted me. Suppose I hoped you might write or something. Which was unfair.”

Her insides tightened, yet she could say nothing — needed Paul to think all had been fine. But she’d known nothing of any payments, let alone a cutoff at age twenty-one. She had turned that age in New York, in 1999. Sarah had shown up then, just before her birthday, promising to tell her something. What?

“Sorry to be going on about this,” Paul said. “I’m sure you and your mother are close. As you should be. I really had no right trying to raise a little girl. Never was good with children.”

“You were good with me.” She looked directly at him, needing to impress this upon him. “And, Paul, you’re happy in your life now,” she said, to reassure herself as much as to inquire.

“Shelly’s been a godsend. Didn’t think I had space in my life for someone, but she’s been, yes, a godsend.” But they’d become friends only after Tooly left, he added decorously.

“Just think, if I’d been there, that would never have happened.”

“Well …” Paul didn’t welcome hypothesizing — he’d settled on a past, knew which elements hurt him, which provided comfort, and wasn’t prepared to reconsider.

He inquired about this young fellow, Mac, whom she had arrived with.

“No, he’s not mine. I stole him.”

Paul looked up pointedly. “That’s a joke.”

“It better be — it is,” she said. “Actually, we should be going. Long trip back to his house.” She stood. “Look — I want us to meet up again. Can we?”

He rose as if unprepared, as if he hadn’t considered this outcome. “I’ll get bottles of water for your drive,” he said hastily. “You need to stay hydrated on the road.”

As he fetched them, Tooly stared hard at the floor, trying to compose herself.

He returned with a gift he’d been keeping for years: her old sketchbook of noses. “And this photo — thought it’d give you a kick. Us on the plane to Thailand. Remember that Australian girl, the teenager sitting beside me who took our picture? The one who kept smoking the whole time?”

It was a Polaroid, showing more of the overhead bins than of its subjects: Paul in the middle seat, earnest, young, fatigued; Tooly by the window, far more smiley than she’d believed herself to be then. “I’m always available for you,” he said, as they hesitated by the front door. “Always have been; always will be.” He extended his hand.

“You used to wake me every morning with a handshake,” she said, talking fast in order not to cry.

“Did I?” he said, self-conscious now, lowering his hand.

But she took it, holding it between both of hers. “Can I just say something quickly?” she asked. “I felt — actually, still feel — so terrible about everything that happened, about what I did. I left you there alone.”

“You were a little girl, Tooly.”

“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “I was still me.”

Seated in the minivan with Mac, she took a moment to calm herself. A sedan was parked down the street, she noticed, a middle-aged Asian woman in the driver’s seat, waiting for her to leave. Tooly started the engine, pulled out, and watched in her rearview mirror as Shelly exited the car and returned to her home.

As Tooly negotiated the unfamiliar streets of Lodge Haven, she wondered what it was like to live in a suburb like this, to have been from here. She switched on the car radio, using an NPR interview to orient herself again in the present:

Host: Uhm, before we get to why you think this is a result of climate change, which is I think what you’re saying, what are some of the records that this month’s heat wave has set so far? And I’ll say we’re recording this on Friday, July 22, so—

“This trip is boring,” Mac said. “It’s taking forever.”

“Sorry,” she responded. “I was selfish to take you with me. I wanted company, and thought you might enjoy it.”

She reminded Mac that he had agreed to say a quick hello by phone to Humphrey, which would be so welcome, particularly since she’d been unable to make her daily visit there.

Mac said the old man “smelled gross,” at which Tooly fell quiet and drove.

The sun was low when they arrived. She had phoned Bridget to say she’d taken Mac out, claiming it was just to look at birds. Tooly asked Mac to stick to that account, and infiltrated his belongings and medications back upstairs. She overheard him in the TV room, talking to Duncan.

“I’m doing an email right now, Mac.”

“We went to Maryland.”

“Good for you guys.”

It wasn’t for her to intrude on this family, or to alter anyone’s life. I’m not made to be a mother, she thought. Anyway, not to Duncan’s child.

THE NEXT DAY, Humphrey looked around upon waking, anxious, then soothed by the sound of her voice. She helped him stand and led him down the hallway to the communal toilets. Yelena had been unable to come that morning, so Tooly sponged him down in the shower stall, dried him. “You’ll feel better after a shave.”

“Everything keeps going on so long.”

She stood him before the mirror and lathered his cheeks with hand soap, which made him sniff shyly.

“Well, you’ve been around for a while, Humph. You’re eighty-three now.”

He turned to her, jaw soapy. “Am I? It’s almost indecent.”

“Hold still, my dear Humphrey.” She ran the safety razor gently down his jaw, then helped him brush his remaining teeth, a white bubble of Colgate on his lower lip. Another resident walked in, spat in the toilet, then pissed with the stall door open.

She led Humphrey back to his bedroom, helped him into fresh clothing, brushed his hair. “Done.”

Once returned to his armchair, he glanced around quizzically.

“Nice and comfy?” she asked.

“I was on a ship,” he said, “and we wore black armbands the whole way.”

“You’ve told me this story before.”

“Had to hold mine because my arm wasn’t thick enough,” he continued. “They were made for a man’s arm.”

“Where were you going, Humph? Where was the ship going?”

“Then they sewed my armband smaller, so it fit me.”

“I remember you telling me that.” She wondered if all this rummaging through his past interfered with a merciful process of forgetting. These retold snippets of his childhood returned with diminishing pleasure, it seemed. “Know where I took Mac? To see my father. He told me all sorts of stuff about how Sarah used to be. Said he used to send her money for me.”

“Who did?”

“My father, Paul, sent Sarah money.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I think that might be right.”

“You remember this?” she said. “But wait — Sarah was always borrowing off me. What the hell was she spending it on?”

“I was on this ship, a liner,” Humphrey continued, “and I had to wear a black armband.”

“Humphrey? What was she doing with all that money?”

“But the armband was too big on me.”

“I know this story.”

“What happened was …” His was cable-car conversation: you could get on or you could get off, but you couldn’t divert it from its track. Didn’t really matter who was listening, she or a stranger. Except that Tooly was the last person who listened to him at all.

He fell silent, pensive. “There are things,” he said, as if preparing her for a shock, “that people claim happened to me, and it’s completely blank. I think I’m getting away with it for now. But if people start noticing — I don’t want people looking after me. That’s undignified. I need you to tell me if you see I can’t manage anymore. Do you understand what I mean?”

“I understand.” She sat on the edge of his bed, watched him, wondering how direct to be. “Humph, I will be honest with you.”

“All right,” he said rigidly.

“You asked me to say if I thought you couldn’t manage anymore. I think that’s the case now.”

“Most ridiculous thing I ever heard!”

They sat in silence.

“When I get to that stage,” he continued, “I’ll jump out a window. But I’m not at that stage. So you can damn well shut up about it.”

She didn’t recall his ever having spoken to her so aggressively. Such words were not shocking in themselves, but from his mouth they wounded her. “Sorry,” she said.

He shifted in his armchair, pressing the TV remote, unable to produce any effect.

“Can I help you, Humph?”

“No, you cannot. Television’s broken.”

The push of a single button would have lit it up as he wanted. Yet she couldn’t think of a tactful way to take it from him. He closed his eyes, clearly not sleeping, hands twitching with rage.

Since her arrival in New York, his condition had only worsened. It was as if he’d been clinging on, and her presence had allowed him to release.

“It’s okay, Humph. I’m making sure everything’s all right.”

He spoke again of his exhaustion with being alive, of his desire to be gone already. She struggled for a response — she might have felt the same in his position, into the ninth decade of life, blind and deaf and trapped in this miserable room. “Dear Humph, I know it’s rotten, this situation you’re in. It is. But you’ll be free from it soon.”

“I’m impatient,” he said. “I want to be done.”

She took his hand, but it remained limp in hers.

“You’re here now,” he said, “and I’m afraid of you going away, me being alone again.”

“There are other people. There’s Yelena.”

“But you are Tooly Zylberberg.”

“I am,” she said, smiling sadly.

“The favorite person of my life.”

Her eyes welled up. “I’m not going away,” she promised, fighting to maintain a steady voice. “I’ll stay as long as you need me.”

“When my father died,” he said, “his breathing went very slow.”

“Do you remember that, Humph? Where was it?”

He recalled looking out a window at a big tree. And imagining himself seen from space, a miniature dot of a human being, there at the southern tip of the African continent.

“This was in South Africa, was it? Can you tell me more about your life there?”

“At my age, you can either have time or you can have dignity.”

“How do you mean?”

“If you’re not careful, it gets too late to do anything about it, and …” He gazed at the convex reflection in the switched-off TV, then around the room. “I don’t want you staying. It’s horrible here — that awful bitch next door with her loud music and those little boys of hers that she treats so horribly. I can’t bear it. I don’t think I should have to keep going forever. It’s enough now. I’ve had an interesting time. I’ve seen many things. I had friends. Not many. I’ve had friends. Not many.”

“Have you been lonely in your life, Humphrey?”

“The people who liked me are all in books. I would’ve loved to meet a woman who took an interest, but it didn’t happen. When you and me kept each other company, I wasn’t lonely then. We were friends.”

“We were; we are.”

“I’m glad I didn’t stop my life earlier. I wouldn’t have known Tooly Zylberberg.”

“And I wouldn’t have known you,” she said. “Think how different I would’ve been. I wouldn’t have read John Stuart Mill!”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “My old friend.”

“Who knows how I’d have ended up without you.”

“I didn’t let that happen.”

“I know you didn’t, Humph. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me, please. Don’t thank me,” he said. “I can’t bear it if you thank me. Please, don’t thank me.” He leaned forward, rested his hand atop hers, head bowed, and she saw the crown of his rumpled gray hair.

She exhaled, very slowly.

“I’d like to make you coffee,” he said.

“Let me.”

“Would you?” he responded, as if amazed at such generosity. “Thank you, do. Thank you, do.” He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed it, dry lips grazing her fingernails.

She walked fast to the communal bathrooms, hugging herself to stifle her distress. She splashed water on her face. He had been forced to use these toilets, these filthy shower stalls, for years. She returned with his mug. This time he drank not in big drafts but slowly, sipping like a connoisseur, like one who wants to pay attention.

As she patted his veiny old hand, it occurred to her that not only would he soon not exist but that, when she no longer existed, no trace of this man would remain anywhere. It would be as if Humphrey, now pulsing before her, had never been. Within a generation or two, not even your photo was identifiable: just a person, at some forgotten event, in old-fashioned clothes, the distractions and appetites of that day lost, an image framed halfway down a stairwell, or stuck in a drawer, or saved in digital code. Once you; in time, a stranger to all.

Upon leaving the building, she dialed Fogg, needing to be transported from this time and this place. As the call clicked through the circuits — in that instant of hissing quiet — she anticipated his buoyant voice. Yet by the first ring, regret gripped her. She had to tell him definitively.

It was the first time they’d spoken in weeks, and Fogg had much to recount. “Where do I even start? We’ve had drama of the highest order here in Caergenog: police are investigating criminal damage to two pushed-over fence posts on Dyfed Lane.”

She smiled. “I miss being there.”

“Yes, yes — what torment,” he said, “you living it up there in New York City.”

“Did you talk to any bookstores in Hay yet?” she asked. “I told you — sparkling reference from me, whenever you want.”

“That’s settled then, is it? You’re not coming back?”

She shook her head, said nothing. “I have to stop your wages soon. I’m so sorry, Fogg. World’s End is yours for a penny, if you want it. All stock included. You’d still have to cover the rent. And utilities. Probably, I should pay you to take the place. Would if I could.”

That evening, she lay in bed, remembering Xavi — lately, she kept thinking of him. She went upstairs to help herself to a drink, and awoke one of the McGrorys’ laptops. She typed in his name: Xavier Karamage. As ever, the only result was a middle-aged white businessman with a red mustache, the director of a company at the International Financial Services Centre in Dublin.

She called the number. There was no answer — it would be dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. So she waited. At 4:12 A.M. Connecticut time, she tried again. A receptionist picked up. It was good luck, the woman remarked, since the company staffed the office only one day a week. Tooly asked if Mr. Karamage was present. He was not. Further questioning indicated that he didn’t often appear — indeed, the receptionist had yet to meet him, despite having worked there for two years.

“The name is so unusual,” Tooly said. “African, right?”

“No, no. American, I think. But, sorry, what can I help you with?”

Tooly asked for a number where Mr. Karamage might be reached, but the receptionist wasn’t disclosing it. Tooly could leave a message, and Mr. Karamage would reply at his leisure. The problem was, Tooly explained, she’d been ordered by her boss to send a birthday present to Mr. Karamage. The courier required a phone number to take the delivery. And the gift had to get there on time, or her boss would murder her.

“Sorry. Can’t give out his number.”

The receptionist suggested that Tooly send the gift to the office. Though, of course, it was hard to say when he’d receive it, since he hadn’t been there in two years. After much coaxing, the receptionist gave a long sigh, then put Tooly on hold, returning finally with a mailing address in rural Ireland. She was not giving out any phone numbers, but Tooly could try sending the gift there.

Tooly stayed awake for another hour until Duncan arose. She asked if he might arrange for Yelena to do more hours with Humphrey that week, and if Bridget could make alternative arrangements for Mac. She apologized profusely, but there was a crisis at the shop — she had to fly back immediately.

But it wasn’t to Wales that she flew.