Short Century (28 page)

Now I have to go to Miranda's funeral. Now that I am coming up for air I don't know why I wrote down everything that I did. It doesn't seem likely that Emily is alive; it should be easy enough for me to pretend that I am Peter Reaper, and that this was a hoax to expose my enemies as gossip-mongers. I will destroy all of my words as soon as I return.

AFTERWORD

By Sydney Rothstein

T
he Sunday of my
mother's funeral was, by mourner consensus, the finest Sunday of the year. “Miranda made this weather,” said someone standing around the gravesite. An idiotic thing to say, but in fairness, we were waiting for Daisy and my father and the funeral was in an awkward cocktail party phase.

“So the blue sky is my sister,” I said. No one knew whether this was supposed to be a joke, and if it was, why it was supposed to be funny, so there were some non-committal half laughs, and then for some reason I was talking to two friends of my mother's—one who had had too much plastic surgery and one who could have benefited from a little more. One said that she thought it would be inappropriate for Daisy to wear her “costume” today, and the other told me not to worry that my “little adventure” in
REDACTED
had hastened my mother's death. Score one for the lady with the facelift. You need your wits about you whenever the dead are around, and I hadn't packed mine, so I had no comeback.

Scattered disgusted gasps heralded the arrival of Arthur Hunt, groveling toward the grave. By groveling, I mean stumbling. The hill was steep and uneven and everybody stumbled and many relatively innocent older people lost their breath, but nobody's here to stop me from reading repentance into his panting. He was wearing a crumpled light-gray suit and an untucked white shirt, and his tie was coming loose. A confused, terrified, bashful expression combined with messy gray hair made him resemble a heavily but poorly made-up sixth-grader starring in a school production of
Death of a Salesman
. Nothing like the solemn, even sexy figure he had cut at my brother's funeral. When he saw me, he looked up and gave me a crooked little smile, as though that little boy playing Willy Loman looked out into the wings and saw his lost dog.

“Sydney,” he said. “I was so worried.”

His love for me was easy enough to see, and broke my heart in spite of everything.

“I got in last night.”

“Why didn't you call?” he asked.

“Because you're not my family.” This hurt him, as of course I intended it to.

“I guess you heard about…” he said.

“Yes. I heard about it.”

“I loved my sister. I did.”

“Neither wisely nor too well.”

The lack of total absolution didn't sit well with him, and he screwed up his face into a nasty smile. “I guess I deserve that. So go ahead. Tell me about the mistakes I've made. Hit me with the wisdom of youth.”

I folded my arms over my chest. “I'm not that young. And I don't have any wisdom.”

This was closer to what he was looking for, and he relaxed into his customary avuncular pose.

“The only thing that young people and old people have in common,” he said, quoting his epigram as he composed it, “is the same thing they have in common with the dead: none of them know anything.”

“Well,” I said. “Some of them know more than you do.”

Now he was angry. “All right, I'm an idiot. Yes, of course. I know that, at least. Honestly, Sydney, there's nothing you can tell me that I don't already know.”

“I'm Peter Reaper,” I said.

He took a step back, and he scrutinized my face for a sign that I was joking, but there was no such sign because I was not joking.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because you killed my brother. And your sister.”

“Sydney. What are you…”

“The woman you killed in the drone strike. The woman in the burqa. That was Emily.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Emily lived in
REDACTED
. Do you think you were the only one who stayed interested in the country? She moved there many years ago. She made a living selling DVDs outside of a hotel.”

“She was…she was the DVD Lady?”

It's hard to describe what his face did as he absorbed this information. He took a few horrible breaths, and then he took a few more.

“But…but Reaper started posting before…”

“I met her at the hotel and she told me the story. That was enough to make me realize that you are a diseased liar. It made me realize that you are a diseased liar who murdered my brother, and it made me realize what an idiot I've been for trusting you. Then Emily had the bad luck to be out for a walk when you dropped your bomb on her.”

“It wasn't my bomb. I didn't drop it.”

“Of course it was, and of course you did.”

He looked up into the blue sky, as though looking up at the God who had plotted against him.

“So the head that I saw. That was…” This is when he raised his hands up to his gray hair and started screaming.

What I had said about Emily was not true—I had never met her and had no reason to believe she had ever set foot in
REDACTED
. The anguish that he was feeling would probably have been enough to make me admit that I was making this up had we not been interrupted by my own burqa-clad sister, who was emerging with our father from over the hill. My father tried to shake her off, but Daisy would not let him lose her. They resembled a father leading his daughter to the altar, except that they did not resemble this at all.

A bride who had been dipped in ashes: that was Daisy. By this time I had seen many women in burqas, but she still made me think of the Angel of Death. Given Arthur's redoubled howl, he must have seen her the same way.

“Stay back, you black-sheeted slut!” my father said, and hooked his leg under hers so that he could trip her. He did, and though it looked like they would both fall down, he managed to stay upright as she collapsed into a pillowy black heap. With several halting steps, my father reached Arthur, and it surprised me when he grabbed Arthur into an embrace and joined him in hysterical sobbing.

“Oh, Arthur. I wish you had married her! Is it too late to ask you to take my wife, please?”

Arthur grabbed him tight. The crowd backed away, and, not wanting anything more to do with either man, I backed away, too.

“I miss my son!” My father said this with as much shame as if he were confessing to having had sex with his sister. “I miss my son!”

Daisy must have gotten to her feet and rushed toward them. Maybe she sensed what was about to happen and was trying to stop it, or maybe she wanted to die, too. In limited defense of my father, I don't think he could have heard her approach.

Now that my whole family is dead, I have plenty of time to explain myself.

f

The night before he
left for Basic Training, Jason came to my dorm room at Columbia with two 100 Grand bars that he had bought from the vending machine. I liked 100 Grand bars and he didn't; the transparency of the gesture annoyed me and made me feel condescended to.

“You're taking away my brother and giving me a candy bar?”

“I'm having doubts,” he said. “Maybe I won't go tomorrow.”

This dangled hope annoyed me even more than the candy bar had, and I came close to throwing him out of my room.

“I'm not scared about my own life,” he said, making me believe it. “I'm scared about what will happen to Mom and Dad. They won't be able to take it. They're both such weak people.”

That Mom and Dad were weak—and therefore needed to be treated carefully, as the weak are treated—was an insight that I had thought was mine and mine alone, and the revelation that Jason knew it too made me feel proud of my little brother, if also a little resentful that my powers of perception were not as special as I sometimes wanted to believe. But mostly I felt much less lonely than I had thirty seconds earlier. My sister was so scared of the great power of our parents that she hid under sheets every moment of the day, and my brother's desire to join the army had struck me as a similarly hysterical attempt to flee. Now it struck me as something else, and my brother struck me as my brother, someone who had seen the things I had seen. What I wanted more than anything else was to keep him right there. I wanted him to stay safe and to stay my companion.

“You have to go,” I said.

He unwrapped his candy bar and took a few bites. I never wound up eating mine. A few days later, I discovered it melted in my desk drawer.

“You think Mom and Dad will be okay?”

“I don't know. But this is who you are. You're someone who is going to go to war, not someone who is just going to talk about it.”

I intended this as a statement of fact, though as I've thought about it over the years, I've worried that it came across as a taunt.

He sat on the edge of my bed and he no longer looked like my baby brother. He looked like a mature man, a man who had made a decision and who would have the support of the universe in all his endeavors. He looked like he could walk through fire, or a firefight, and remain unscathed. He looked like a man to listen to.

Maybe the fact that such a man was my brother and was sitting on my bed led me to the next question.

“Are you doing this because of Arthur Hunt?”

“I'm doing it for a lot of reasons. Arthur Hunt just pointed them out to me.”

“So it doesn't bother you that he had sex with his sister?”

Jason stood up from the long dorm-room bed. “That's disgusting. And irrelevant. I don't care about people's personal lives. And maybe Mom is lying, anyway.”

“She's not lying.”

“How do you know? You say all the time that you can never tell when people are lying.”

“Right. But you can. And you know she's not lying.”

“I don't know anything, except that Saddam Hussein is oppressing the people of Iraq and that destroying him will free them. It's a pretty obvious principle that Hunt is pointing out. If it turned out that Newton fucked his sister, would apples stop falling to the ground?”

The last thing he said to me before he left was “I'm going to stay safe,” which he said in a way that made me realize, with one hundred percent certainty, that he was right. He was going to come home as surely as an apple shaken from a tree will fall to the ground. By the time this and everything else I believed turned out to be wrong, I had become a famous journalist.

f

I knew that Arthur
Hunt fucked his sister before I knew who Arthur Hunt was, or, for that matter, what fucking was. My parents liked to scream at each other, or at any rate they did scream at each other, and one night when I was maybe five the screaming was about a woman named Emily, “that cunt with an eye patch who fucked her brother.” I don't think I'd ever heard the word “cunt” before, and the word “fuck” was just what my father muttered to himself over his typewriter all day. What made an impression on me was “eye patch.” Pirates were the epitome of the freedom I wanted as a child, a freedom that had something to do with theft and a little to do with the sea and almost everything to do with the emancipation from depth perception. When I asked my mother about the woman she had been talking about the night before, she was naturally upset that I had heard and relieved that I seemed to care only about the eye patch. But my questions about Emily quickly got on her nerves, which, of course, only made me want to ask more questions. All I was able to get was that Emily was blonde, had an accident with a corkscrew, and disappeared shortly after spending a week with my parents.

Children, like Arthur Hunt and America, often create elaborate spectacles based on stories that are themselves based on vanishing evidence, spectacles that can be quite fun to watch if you're far enough away. I cut eye patches out of construction paper and pasted them to the eyes of my American Girl dolls. An old black dress of my mother's soon became a heap of eye patches on the table between my sister's bed and mine, and I forced these eye patches onto Jason and Daisy. Sometimes Daisy and I would make Jason wear eye patches on both eyes and be blind for an entire afternoon; we would lead him down the promenade in Riverside Park and tell him that the sun had gone away forever. “I don't need the sun,” he said. “I have you.”

In retrospect my mother was probably more patient with my Emily obsession than I would have been in her place. I kept on asking her for details, and, once she said she remembered that Emily had been very interested in
REDACTED
, I demanded that we visit the country. My mother's reply that we could not go because it was a dictatorship prompted me to say that that was stupid, and that we should be able to go wherever we liked.

“Most places we're allowed to go but never do,” my mother said, “so there's no real difference. You know how on old cartoon shows when the characters walk you see the same background over and over again? That's what the world is like.”

Naturally I did not know what she was saying, though I did know that whatever she was saying made me mad. At the library I read that children's book about
REDACTED
, and I was totally unsatisfied with its story, so I started getting up early to check the
New York Times
for mentions of the country. Such mentions were rare in the very late eighties and very early nineties, and what mentions there were—mostly having to do with the brutally suppressed 1990 rebellion—did not interest me. I think I gave the practice up after a couple weeks, but
in the meantime I managed to exasperate my mother.

The evening after my ninth birthday, while my mother was in the kitchen cleaning up and I was lying on the living room sofa with a stomachache from all the ice cream, I made this announcement:

“I'm going to change my name to Emily.”