Read Online The Rise & Fall of Great Powers by Tom Rachman - Free Book Online Page B

tightening between his eyebrows. “I heard that my father is sick.”
    “Shall we venture to America to see him?”
    “Why are you talking like that?” he said. “I just told you my father’s sick.”
    “Sorry.”
    “We can’t go back. And that’s that.”
    When Tooly was younger, she had met Paul’s father, but had no memories of him, only images from two photographs: one of a cheerful bald man with a mustache and a butterfly collar clowning around; the other of a youth in an army uniform. Burt Zylberberg, a basketball player in college and later an insurance salesman, had converted from Judaism to Catholicism as a young man, and served as a chaplainin World War II. During the Anzio invasion, an explosion shredded his legs. He and his wife, Dorrie, had intended to start a family after the war, but the extent of his wounds precluded that. They adopted a boy, Paul, and settled in Northern California. They were jovial parents, particularly Burt, an indefatigable optimist despite his infirmity. But they were so different from their adopted child, an earnest boy without any spiritual inclination. Yet he was intensely loyal to them. Whenever people asked if he thought of finding his real parents, he grew annoyed—he had no curiosity about those people, and never developed any. Paul went on to study computer science at UC Berkeley, which gave him access to high-end mainframes. In the wee hours, he haunted the computer lab, partly because all the interesting hardware was available then, but also to escape his peers’ cavorting. The hum of mainframes produced in him a conditioned response of tranquillity. During his final year of college, a surprise came: his parents informed him that he had an elder brother. When World War II was breaking out, they’d given up a baby, and that child had grown up and found them. This biological son—having just met Burt and Dorrie—already interacted with them with an ease and warmth that were alien to Paul. Rather than spurring him to seek his own biological kin, the development instilled the sense that he had no origins at all.
    Paul placed his credit card on the bill, and went to the toilets. Tooly waited and waited, then wandered toward the front door, which a waitress opened for her. Outside, the air was hair-dryer hot and smelled of exhaust. Pedestrians gushed down the sidewalk, a human river coursing past the Chinese-Thai shopfronts displaying vases, gongs, ceramic lions, meat grinders. She found herself swept away, bundled along among strangers until the end of the block. On her return to the restaurant, Paul had still not come back from the bathroom. She approached it, heard his inhaler hissing in there, and she whispered his name.
    Sheepishly, he edged out, a water stain down his trousers. “The sink area was all flooded but I didn’t see,” he said. “I leaned against thecounter and got soaked. It looks …” As if he’d urinated down his khakis.
    “I’ll ask for a napkin,” she suggested.
    “Don’t say anything, Tooly!”
    “Can we just run out?”
    “I haven’t got my credit card back.”
    “I could knock over the water. Then everything will be wet and they won’t see the difference.”
    “That’s a terrible idea.”
    “I can run through the restaurant and you chase after me, shouting that I poured water on you.”
    “We can’t do that.”
    But they did, to the bewilderment of the waiters and diners. Paul hunched forward in humiliation, mumbling his lines. “Why did you do that?” he said, rushing after her.
    “I poured water all over you!”
    “You’re a bad person! Where’s my credit card? Look what you did!”
    “I threw water all over!”
    Outside, he crossed his hands over his crotch as she searched for taxis, waving wildly at the passing traffic. “Don’t make a scene,” he pleaded.
    In the cab, Paul said, “I wasn’t really angry in there.”
    “I know you weren’t.”
    They arrived back at Gupta Mansions, took the elevator up,