The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

2000: The Middle

AFTER WAITING AT THE CAFÉ nearly an hour, Tooly acknowledged that Venn was not returning. She walked once around the block, knowing it to be fruitless, then proceeded north. At 115th Street, she stood across from Duncan’s building, uncertain if she wished to be spotted. She studied the building’s façade, the vertiginous fire escape, and distinguished windows at whose other sides she’d stood, the rickety iron balcony where she’d sat, her legs curled beneath her, sharing a damp filtered cigarette, wondering if the bolts in the brickwork would hold.

She walked through Morningside Park, past a guy rolling a joint, his lizardy tongue sliding across the cigarette paper as he watched her. Through East Harlem, she continued, skirting the concrete projects, past adolescents in camouflage and skewed NY baseball caps, stuffing junk food and catcalling. She kept going for hours, crossing the footbridge to Randall’s Island, on to Queens, wending her way south to Brooklyn, reaching her street after midnight, traffic grumbling along the Gowanus Expressway. She entered the building, climbed to their floor, put her key in the front door, but didn’t turn it. She listened to the sound inside: a page crinkling as it turned.

“Tooly?” Humphrey asked through the closed door, then opened it. “Hello, darlink. You are asleep?”

“What do you mean?” she said, puzzled. “I’m standing up.”

“Certain animals sleep standing.”

“I’m not one of them.”

He made for his customary seat at the end of the couch, expecting conversation. But Tooly continued into her bedroom.

Awakening the next morning, she remained under the covers, wishing to escape herself in sleep. She reached for her watch on the floor, opened one eye to read it, daylight streaming around the edges of her bent blinds. A few minutes after noon.

In the shower, she pressed her forehead against the tiles, water whispering down her back, skin goosebumped. A strand of her hair remained stuck to the wall, a black S on the white tile. She wanted nothing for breakfast, took only a few gulps of water from the faucet. She microwaved yesterday’s coffee, hands shivering from caffeine and fatigue, which angered her obscurely. She abandoned her mug in the sink.

“He went,” Humphrey said, meaning Venn. “This is better.”

“We’re meeting up.”

“Where?”

“Haven’t decided,” she said. To avoid his gaze, she looked into her cupped hands.

So much of what Tooly thought, said, her mannerisms, attitudes, and humor, had come from Venn. There was no meaning to “Tooly” without him inside it. The two were akin: living among others but estranged from everyone, recognizing the pretense, forsaking a place of their own for the right, as Venn put it, “to relieve citizens of their transitory property.” He and she had no interest in riches, only in remaining free of the fools who reigned, and always would.

“We have items and activities to discuss,” Humphrey said.

“I’m not interested,” she said. “Not interested in hearing your conversations with the Great Thinkers. Just because you own books by smart people doesn’t make you smart. All you do is sit there. You’re wasting time.”

“I know that.”

“You are,” she said, repeating the charges not from conviction but in distress at her own cruelty. “All you’ve done is sit there, looking at what other people did. You don’t do anything; you never did anything in your life. I know you had a hard time a long time ago in Russia. I’m sorry. But I—”

“This is our last conversation. Can it be nice? Please? We were friends, and now you are sick of me. But everything you say I will think about many times after. And you are right. You are right. But you are going now.”

“Where am I going? I have nowhere to go.”

“You’re leaving.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he said, “I like you to go.” He went into her room, returning with her passport, which he placed on the Ping-Pong table.

She clasped her hands to hide their tremors at what she’d said, what was happening. This was what Venn had spoken of: cutting out the unnecessary, managing alone. She opened the passport, and a bank card fell into her hand. “That’s not mine,” she said.

“There’s money on it. You take it.”

“I’m not taking your money,” she said, unable to look at him.

“No? Well, it’s not money from me. Since when I have money? It is from Venn. He leaves it for you. He says, ‘Tell Tooly that PIN number is her birthday, month and day.’ That is what he says.”

She closed her hand over the card.

“He tells me he is leaving today,” Humphrey continued. “He says you should go, too. You must get on train and go somewhere very interesting, do something you always want to do.”

“It’s not our last conversation.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, leaned forward, eyes stinging, clutching the couch upholstery until her arm went weak.

He sat beside her. She took the book from his lap — essays by John Stuart Mill — turned it over, looked at him. “Don’t look sad, Humph. Please. I can’t bear it.”

“Sad? That is lie — it is complete and utter fabric.”

“Fabrication,” she said, sniffing, smiling.

He fetched his Ping-Pong paddle. “Game before you are going?”

She shook her head, but made two mugs of instant coffee.

He tasted his. “Where’s sugar?”

“I put in two heaping tablespoons already.”

“Must be more heaping.”

“Humph,” she said, “we’re always going to have lots of conversations. Okay?”

He smiled. “But, Tooly, I’m not really alive — I am already with my friends,” he said, pointing to his books. “I died already and I’m only watching now. You can go on with this twenty-first century. I am staying in number twenty. It is nicer for me.” The concerns of his century — inspiring millions, swindling them, murdering them — had once amounted to everything, then expired, as the species repeated itself in different generations, in different bodies, uniquely animated in each person, yet united by one fear: that upon their own deletion the world went extinct, too. The times to which he had peripherally belonged — a world war, the ideological battles thereafter — had ended, but his physical powers had not exhausted themselves, nor had the organism stopped. “I know what twentieth century has for breakfast,” he said. “It is too much work getting to know new century.”

“We’ll let everyone else test number twenty-one,” she suggested. “What do you think? If it looks nice, we’ll join them.”

“Is good idea.” He rose as if to give an after-dinner speech, then sat back down and patted her hand. “You so sweet, darlink. I go get fresh air.” He spent twenty minutes locating his coat and roll-up chess set in case he wanted to study positions, plus a few dollars in loose change. All this he narrated loudly. Farewell unstated, he closed the front door after himself. Even then, he muttered on the landing for a minute before clomping downstairs, the building door squeaking open, crashing shut after him.

Ten minutes later, Tooly left, as he had intended her to do. Reaching the end of their street, she checked the contents of her shoulder bag, ensuring that everything was there: clothing, passport, bank card. “Oh, well,” she said, pressing a knuckle into her breastbone, pushing as hard as she could, as if to cave in her chest. “Oh, well.”

Her train left Penn Station, passing the smokestacks of New Jersey, factories with windows smashed, rusty bridges, residential streets, houses whose insides she filled with blaring televisions, pregnant silences, uproarious laughter, sex, showers, cigars, chatter. She had no location of her own and none in prospect — less in common with those home-dwellers than with the sinister types lurking at each station the train pulled into, its brakes squealing to a halt, air vents gusting, a bag of chips crinkling behind her. “Last call for …” Trenton and Philadelphia, through Chester, Pennsylvania, Wilmington, onward.