The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

2011: The Beginning

THE PASSENGERS EXPLORED their trays of foil-covered treasure, but she turned down her meal, irking the airline steward, who kept telling her that it was free. She looked out the window, smelling rubbery eggs, watery sausages. Flying reminded Tooly of her father. Whenever they’d had a bank of three seats to themselves, they left an empty one between them, she at the window, nose pressed to the glass, Paul on the aisle, looking around for a stewardess to request another ginger ale for his daughter.

There were no empty seats on this flight from New York to London. The passengers were crammed in, bulging over the armrests onto each other. She read a copy of The New York Times, whose front page contained a report that neutrinos may have broken the speed of light:

Even this small deviation would open up the possibility of time travel and play havoc with longstanding notions of cause and effect. Einstein himself — the author of modern physics, whose theory of relativity established the speed of light as the ultimate limit — said that if you could send a message faster than light, “You could send a telegram to the past.”

The purported discovery was shaky, the article continued, but the idea was wondrous. How Humphrey would have loved pondering it! And how odd that events went on regardless, leaving behind those who should have witnessed them.

It seemed inconceivable that he existed nowhere. Even when they’d been apart for years, she’d heard his commentary each time she ate a potato or looked at a Ping-Pong table. The proxy Humphrey inside her continued talking even now that the original had gone from existence. He most definitely was, therefore it was jarring — almost impossible — to know that he was not.

Humphrey had talked once about block time, an idea of the philosopher J.M.E. McTaggart, who in 1908 had posited that human perception deceives us: time only feels like a forward-moving flow because of the limits of our minds, whereas time actually exists, as does space, with everything in existence simultaneously, even if one is not there anymore. The events of twenty years earlier still exist, just as another country and its inhabitants exist even once you leave it. Block time was like turning backward in a novel, as Tooly had done in childhood, finding dear characters preserved, quipping and contriving as ever. Block time offered comfort to secular minds, for those who had no heaven in which to save vanished friends. Nevertheless, to Tooly there was something untrue about the theory; a slight comfort, but not true.

She returned to the article, recalling a conversation during which she (in an H. G. Wells phase) had lamented to Humphrey that people always talked of building a time machine to go back and see great moments of history, whereas she’d want to go forward and see what the world looked like then. He had been appalled: to see two hundred and fifty years hence would be devastating. “Maybe in two hundred and fifty years,” he cautioned, “nobody plays Ping-Pong.” His world would be extinct, even if humanity continued. Extinction, as he meant it, took place yearly, in increments small enough to tolerate, harder as they accumulated. To leap so many extinctions at once would be too painful. That conversation had been twelve years earlier, in a world already long extinct.

From Heathrow, she took the Tube to central London, then two trains onward to Wales, and a cab from the local station. She had the driver drop her at the top of Roberts Road, so she could stroll through the village.

Bag over her shoulder, she tapped on the window of World’s End and entered, the bell above the door tinkling. She had doubted that the shop would be open anymore. But Fogg remained there on his stool. “Oh, hello,” he said. “Are you back, then?”

Each sought the appropriate register to address the other. Before, it had been owner to employee, then during her absence — after phone calls and his assistance in her search — they’d become friends, only for her to drop all contact for weeks. Now they settled midway.

She explained her plan: to transfer formal ownership of the shop to him, then be on her way. If he didn’t want World’s End — and she’d understand — she would need to sell the stock, pay any outstanding bills, formally close the company, and lock up within a fortnight. These travels had decimated her savings. She’d be eating empty sandwiches for a while now.

That night, Tooly looked out the attic windows at the rain and the muddy pastures, sheep mewling in the darkness. Lying on her own mattress once again, she slept for eleven hours, utterly tranquil (a tweeting bird, sounds of distant construction, long stretches of oblivion between). Waking, she inhaled the smell of the rafters up here, which until her return she’d never realized had a scent. Her only unease was a hovering sense of responsibility — that she ought to be looking after someone. But there was no one anymore, just herself, which seemed so frivolous.

After opening the shop, she made an early sale.

“Find all you wanted, Mr. Thomas?”

“No, thank you.”

“Can I help you find something else?”

“No, thank you.”

“See you again, Mr. Thomas.”

“Well, best be off now.”

Fogg arrived with their shared newspaper, but without his customary cappuccino. He’d grown jaded about the quality of coffee at the Monna Lisa Café, he told her, so Tooly brewed tea for them both. He accepted his with thanks, flapping open the newspaper, front page devoted to rebellions around the world that summer. “Must be said,” he remarked, “that everyone should live through at least one revolution.”

It was such a wonderful Fogg comment — declaiming on global affairs as the two of them sipped tea inside a bankrupt rural bookshop. Yes, bring on the revolution!

“Why are you smiling?” he asked.

“Just the idea of a revolt here in Caergenog. Who would we overthrow? The fiendish village council with their dastardly plan to mend the overturned fence posts on Dyfed Lane?”

“Yes, yes, I know — you think I’m beyond stupid.”

“I was smiling because I liked what you said,” she protested. “Don’t say that — that’s an awful thing to say.”

Among Fogg’s charms was that nothing wounded him for long. “To be brutally honest,” he resumed, pursing his lips importantly, “I’m not even sure I’d know how to start a revolution.”

She suppressed her smile, lest he misread it once again. And perhaps she had inadvertently belittled him in the past. Why had she? That’s just how she was. But damn how she was! She didn’t accept that how one was is how one must remain. Consistency in character was a form of tragedy.

She resolved to blunt her flintier side, not to assume that she understood people entirely, and to accept that to be surprised or disappointed or even betrayed was not a catastrophe. It could be a revelation to learn that you were wrong, as she had been about Fogg, a notion he confirmed with what he said next.

“I have something to show you.”

She walked around the servery to see what he indicated on the computer screen. It was a database of some sort.

“What is that?”

“It’s that,” he answered, pointing to each aisle of the shop in turn. “Took me millions of hours, and still not done.”

While she was away, he had occupied himself compiling a catalog of the entire stock and posting it online, then publicizing it on various bibliophile blogs. A notable American antiquarian had emailed for prices, expressing particular interest in the vintage cookery volumes and animal books that Tooly had amassed. For walk-in customers, Fogg would have settled on a pittance for most of these editions. But, shrewdly, he had consulted competing prices online, and adjusted accordingly. By the next afternoon, he’d made his first Internet sales, almost eight hundred dollars from a single email. The dealer, delighted with his purchases, gave a favorable write-up of World’s End Books on his blog, followed by a rave on Twitter that encouraged his followers to check out the shop’s wares. Now, Fogg explained, a good deal of each workday was spent handling overseas orders, responding to emails, going back and forth to the post office.

“Fogg,” she exclaimed, “this is incredible!”

“Actually earning a bit of money.”

“This means the shop is even more yours now.”

He raised counterarguments, but her attention kept drifting to the window. How she had ached for a proper hike while away — she must go for a scramble right this instant. “Sorry,” she interrupted, “but it’s going to rain later. Would it be okay if I dashed out for a walk? I’ll be back, and we’ll continue this. I promise.”

“Or I could come along.”

“What about the shop? Then again,” she remarked, “how much walk-in business are we really going to lose.”

When he caught up with her at the ridge summit, Fogg was breathless, raising his hand. “Completely out of puff.”

Previously, Tooly would have marched ahead. But she waited till he was ready. When he apologized for his slow pace, she reduced hers. “Nice to have a calm wander for a change,” she said. “No point running ourselves ragged.”

“Look!” He pointed out a hare darting through the gorse.

They watched, and when Fogg turned to her, aglow with pleasure at his sighting, she hopped over to hug him.

“Physical harassment,” he joked, blushing.

By the time the weather had changed, they were in the little old Fiat, trundling back to Caergenog. And by the time she’d parked opposite the shop they had reached agreement: although Fogg refused to take full possession of the shop, he might take half. That is, he’d accept nothing officially, but she would proceed on the assumption that each owned fifty percent of World’s End and that any profits (even to mention such a possibility was extraordinary) would be split. “That’s non-negotiable,” she insisted. “Really, you should have it all. With my business acumen, this place would’ve been bankrupt ages ago.”

Later that week, Duncan phoned. After Humphrey’s death, he had encouraged Tooly to return home and pledged to take care of the paperwork. He called now to update her on the disposal of Humphrey’s possessions, having traveled down to Sheepshead Bay and glanced through everything, finding only garbage, junk mail, tons of old pill containers.

“Humph was a pharmacist once,” she explained. “He liked to keep all sorts of cures around to help people. When you throw away the drugs, I think you’re supposed to pull off the labels so they don’t get misused on the street.”

“They were pretty much empty already.”

“No,” she corrected him, “did you check under the cushion of his armchair? There was a bunch of heart medication there. I saw it recently.”

“I checked there. Just empty bottles.”

When could Humphrey have taken all those? Tooly had gone out that morning. He knew well the effect of those drugs.

“So, in theory,” Duncan continued, “you’d get anything.”

“What? Sorry, I was thinking of something else.”

“Just saying how Humphrey left no will. But if there’s anything left in his estate you’ll get it as his daughter.”

She wasn’t sure how best to explain, after all this time, that Humphrey was no relative of hers. “Sounds like there’s nothing of value anyhow.”

“That’s pretty fair to say. Given the outstanding bills for that surgery he had,” Duncan said, “we’ll move toward declaring him insolvent upon death. I’m going to Sheepshead this weekend to oversee the removal of his junk.”

She hated that strangers would rummage through Humphrey’s belongings, then toss it all away. “Should I come back and deal with this?”

“Seriously, it’s fine.”

“If there are fees, you have to bill me.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Duncan,” she said.

“It’s fine.”

He couldn’t accept gratitude, so changed the subject to talk of the winter break. His kids were still grumbling about not having gone anywhere that past summer. Unseriously, he and Tooly chatted about the family coming to visit Wales the following year. She offered free lodgings at World’s End — he’d been so generous to her, and the inn rooms would accommodate them all for as long as they liked. But his family was a closed circle again, she an outsider, one whose lifestyle had initially looked like novelty to the McGrorys, briefly like inspiration, and finally like subtle criticism. Sometimes it was best to leave the past where it lay.

During this period, Tooly kept her grief over Humphrey to herself. She contemplated him when opening books, speculated about his opinion, imagining how it would have been to show him around the shop, which really was his. She kept busy, working with Fogg to complete the database, dealing with online sales, which were not quite as rampant as he’d suggested but kept them afloat.

Toward the end of Humphrey’s life, he had abstained from alcohol, wanting clarity of mind, and Tooly had stopped in solidarity, no matter how she had craved a drink. Since then, she’d ceased the solitary tipples of old, abolishing her nighttime habit of vanishing into glasses of red wine, that nightly amnesia starting around 8 P.M. Anyway, she was collaborating so much with Fogg now that her evenings were no longer solitary. She reserved time to practice her ukulele (oddly, she’d gotten slightly better by not playing these past weeks). Even as she strummed, her new cellphone often trilled beside her in the attic, with a text from Fogg posing a catalog query. She thumbed in half a response, then gave up and went downstairs to answer him. For breaks, they closed the shop, took afternoon hikes past the priory, up into the Black Mountains.

When they returned from one such ramble, there was a delivery truck idling before the shop, hazard lights blinking. The driver unloaded six boxes. An invoice was thrust at her; the van zoomed off. Duncan had sent these. She peeled off the packing tape and the cardboard flaps popped apart. Inside: volume after volume, crammed in, and the smell of Humphrey’s room.

His books were cheap editions, mostly — dust jackets missing, bindings torn, pages unglued and falling out. Many were too worthless even to consign to the Honesty Barrel. She sorted them, pausing here and there, losing herself for hours in familiar copies — there was the edition of Nicholas Nickleby that Paul had bought for her a quarter century before, that she had read in secret at King Chulalongkorn International School, had lugged to that house party in Bangkok, left behind with Humphrey, and from which she’d read to him in Sheepshead Bay. So strange that this had taken place weeks before — seemed at once like a single day and many years ago.

She organized the worthiest volumes on three low shelves against the right wall of the shop, with a sign identifying the new section: HUMPHREY’S BOOKS. There were about a hundred — that’s all it amounted to in the end — and they were all for sale, including his prized blue volume of essays by John Stuart Mill. Inside each cover, she wrote his name, picturing a stranger years later opening the book, reading “Humphrey Ostropoler,” and wondering who had possessed that name, and why he’d surrendered this edition. People kept their books, she thought, not because they were likely to read them again but because these objects contained the past — the texture of being oneself at a particular place, at a particular time, each volume a piece of one’s intellect, whether the work itself had been loved or despised or had induced a snooze on page forty. People might be trapped inside their own heads, but they spent their lives pushing out from that locked room. It was why people produced children, why they cared about land, why nothing felt equal to one’s own bed after a long trip.

For days, customers failed to notice Humphrey’s Books. Then, a sniffly-nosed Jaguar driver crouched before them, gathering on the cat-scented carpet a pile of volumes to buy, including that edition of John Stuart Mill essays. To avoid the sight, Tooly made a trip to the post office.

Along with business parcels, she brought two padded envelopes, one containing Palm Groves and Humming Birds: An Artist’s Fortnight in Brazil, a copiously illustrated 1924 rarity with maroon pigskin binding, gilt title lettering, and marbled end papers that she mailed to Paul. The other envelope was for Sarah, containing a work on coin collecting and a coffee-table photo book of Kenyan landscapes. She addressed it to the seaside apartment in Anzio on the assumption that this was where Sarah might be, now that the weather had turned cold.

When Tooly returned to World’s End, the customer had gone, along with several of Humphrey’s books, leaving the remainders leaning at glum angles. She crouched before them, stricken with regret, and shifted the leftovers to hide the gaps.

“You said I could sell those,” Fogg reminded her.

“No, yes, I know. I’m trying not to be stupid about it.”

He tapped the sales ledger with his pencil. She glanced up, then returned to reordering the section. He yammered on with uncommon noisiness about — well, she didn’t know what — and kept tapping his pencil on the ledger. “I’m trying to get you to come over and look,” he said.

She obliged, reading the sales entries, including those for a dozen of Humphrey’s volumes.

“Yes, I know.”

From under the counter, he produced them all. “I’m the one who bought them. Out from under his runny nose.”

She thanked Fogg, but returned them all to the Humphrey’s Books section.

“I’ll just have to buy them again,” he warned her. “Could get dear after a time.”

“Okay,” she relented. “I’ll keep these ones. Thank you.”

Sarah never did respond to her package. But Paul did, with a touching note, thanking her for the visit that past summer and for the beautiful volume, which would be ideal for the flight he was about to take, heading off for two months with Shelly to their house in Nong Khai. He wrote of his efforts to cultivate dwarf banana trees there, saying he longed to show off his renovations but could convince no one to trek out there. Tooly was welcome to visit — and even to bring somebody. He’d be honored to meet any companion of hers.

“Fogg,” she said, “would you accompany me through the jungles of Thailand?”

“You being honest?”

“No, not really.”

He departed to alphabetize Asian History for a few minutes, then returned. “You know what I am?” he said. “I’m …” He wandered into the reference section.

“What are you, Fogg?”

“Thesaurus.”

“You’re a thesaurus?”

“The word begins with an h. Where’s the thesaurus?”

“Hungry?”

“No, why do you ask?”

“You said you begin with an h. Did we sell it?”

“Sell what?”

“The thesaurus. Are you hypnotized?”

“How do you mean? Oh, another h-word. No, no.”

“Are you heroic? Or happy? Or hangry?”

“Not any of them,” he replied. “What’s ‘hangry’?”

“When you’re hungry and angry at the same time.”

“I’ve been that. Many a time.” He snapped his fingers impatiently, unable to recollect the word.

“What’s it to do with?”

He went outside, door tinkling. Through the window, she observed him dipping into the Honesty Barrel, his arm disappearing in there. She half expected it to emerge drenched and clutching a trout. Instead, he returned with a battered Roget’s thesaurus and stood flipping its pages. “There,” he said, suddenly hesitant, splaying the book, thumb under the word. “That one.”

“That’s not an h-word. It begins with b.”

“Right you are.” Not having received the desired response, he closed the book over his thumb and went back outside to the Honesty Barrel.

It was a cool autumn day, feathery clouds and a sun too timid to warm the village yet. Roberts Road was empty, as if there were nobody but Fogg in the village of Caergenog, in the nation of Wales, in all the British Isles — none but him there, feeling like an ass. He cursed himself for trying to sound clever with her. If only the earth would open up and swallow him. A forbidden thought entered his mind, a sexual one about her, and his knees weakened. Can’t think things like that at the Honesty Barrel! He imagined making her a meal using a cookbook, not the tatty old ones in Recipes & Eating but a posh volume bought brand-new in Cardiff, with photos of how food never really looked. He fantasized about the two of them in a proper town, poor but happy. His invalid brother had decent help now, and his mother had met someone — it wasn’t mad for him to consider leaving here, at least for a spell. He was younger than Tooly, but could make the case that it was better for an older woman to be with a younger man since women lived longer, and if they went with older men they risked becoming nurses, as his grandmother had done for thirty years, poor devil. He daydreamed of a city, where things happened, where they’d attend meetings — he’d never been to a proper meeting. Everything was under way in the world, right at that moment!

He brushed off a ladybug, which had climbed from the barrel up his arm, and he dithered to avoid returning, removing his thumb finally from the thesaurus, from under that word beginning with b: “besotted.” He’d meant it as a joke, or to be taken as a joke, anyway, or to be taken not altogether as a joke.

In his pocket, the mobile phone beeped and wriggled. They’d said on the radio that the entirety of human knowledge was available on these handsets, that smartphones had outsmarted their owners. But, for now, he was in control, and the nagging gadget had to wait. He took only a glance at the little screen, enough to see that the text came from Tooly. He pocketed the phone and finished tidying up the Honesty Barrel. Soon he’d read her message and he would know. But not yet. That present had not arrived yet. This one lingered.