Short Century (29 page)

The water shut off and the long arm of the faucet retracted. My mother came into the living room and spoke very quietly.

“If you want to name yourself after a girl who fucked her brother, that's up to you.”

Then she stepped tightly back into the kitchen, and finished the dishes. Without knocking I opened the glass doors to my father's den—when his door was closed, I wasn't supposed to disturb him unless “the WASPs were rounding up the Jews”—and I asked him whether Emily fucked her brother.

Anything that his face betrayed has been betrayed by my memory. “Do you know what fucking is?” he said.

“It's a nasty word for kissing?”

“Not exactly. It was just a fad that began in 1963 and ended in 1979. It's not something for you to worry about.”

That night my mother woke me up and walked me down the hall so that my sister wouldn't hear.

“Sex is when a man puts his penis inside a woman's vagina. You shouldn't do it until you're at least eighteen, and you should never do it with your brother.” Then she left me in the hallway and went back to sleep.

Strange as it was, this incident could not have made much of an impression on me at the time, because soon I was corralling my siblings into a game I called Freedom Ship, wherein we imagined sailing all the way to Northeastern Africa, where, depending on my mood, we would either arrest the leaders of
REDACTED
or load all of its
citizens onto the boat and rescue them from their leaders.

“I love playing Friendship with you guys!” Jason said.

“Freedom Ship,” Daisy said.

Daisy and I outgrew this game fairly quickly, and around the same time I outgrew my obsession with Emily. But the fantasy stuck with Jason, who, during the first Gulf War, enlisted his friends in kickball-based simulations of liberating the people of Kuwait.

As the three of us got older, Daisy and I swore an oath not to compete with each other, since that was the clichéd and boring thing for sisters to do. It quickly became clear that she would be the pretty one, with a small, sharp face and limpid light-brown eyes, while my face resembled a chocolate-chip pancake. Daisy designed and cut all of her own dresses, and though I liked to mock her fondness for sheer tops and peasant skirts—“stripper milkmaid,” I called her style—she had a mercurial way that attracted boys with ease. Jason became obsessed with the Holocaust, and obsessed with being Jewish. He wanted to have a Bar Mitzvah around the same time all his friends were having theirs, and he also wanted to write a history of my father's family. Naturally, my father laughed deeply at both of these ideas, and at the yarmulke that Jason briefly took to wearing. Even I couldn't help needling Jason: after all, we were not even, according to traditional matrilineal descent, Jewish. We were nothing but Americans, I told him, and that would have to be good enough for him. He told me to fuck off, but eventually he stopped wearing the yarmulke, either because he had decided I was correct or because he had simply lost interest. After that he went through a period, lasting several years, in which he did little but smoke pot and play video games, and I started to regret criticizing the yarmulke. He was my little brother and I wanted him to be interested in
something
. Eventually, I got my wish.

As for me, I was one of those embarrassing fifteen-year-old kids who wore one of those red Che Guevara shirts; I still have it in my closet, stained with the lattes I bought as an excuse to flirt with baristas three or four years too old for me. By the time I got to college I was already jaded. The kids who thought they were revolutionaries just struck me as silly, not smart enough to learn or honest enough to admit that the world has always been and will always be what it is. I took a creative writing class and wrote a few admittedly fourth-rate knockoffs of Kafka. My teacher encouraged me to write about my background, which he described as “fascinating, fertile material” given that I was half German Jewish and half German Catholic. The entire idea of ethnic heritage bored me but I liked German literature, so I majored in German and spent most of college reading books and thinking of other places. I probably thought about
REDACTED
no more than four or five times between my childhood and my junior year in college.

This is the part of the story where 9/11 happens. I had just arrived in Berlin for my junior year abroad, and though I was frantic until I learned that my family was safe, mostly I was grateful for the good will that the events earned me as an American abroad, at least initially. My brother and sister were both at Columbia when the attacks happened, my brother a sleeping freshman and my sister a sophomore on her way to class. They were so far uptown that everything they learned about the attacks they learned the same way I did: through the Internet and television. What changed me wasn't the attacks themselves so much as the reading I did in Internet cafés in the ensuing weeks. Fear for my family and outrage over the treatment of women in Afghanistan proved impossible to disentangle; men evil enough to enshroud their wives would certainly be evil enough to incinerate my parents and siblings.

The women of Afghanistan were in my mind all the time. It seemed evil and stupid to read “In the Penal Colony” for the fiftieth time instead of doing something to help these women consigned to lives that were not lives. It wasn't October yet when Jason emailed me saying that the attacks had changed him, and now he could think of little but devoting his life to protecting America, and to protecting the idea of freedom. He emailed me about a writer he had started reading, Arthur Hunt. He sent me links to Arthur's articles and told me that apparently Mom had dated him in the sixties. One of these articles included a reference to Arthur's lifelong love of
REDACTED
; this, plus the connection to Mom, was enough for me to make the connection with Emily.

There was no real reason to believe the incest—at the time I was all too happy to consider my mother a hysterical liar. If I had known for certain that Arthur had had sex with his sister, I might have been too disgusted to read him seriously, but the possibility made his work on freedom more enticing to read.

“Let's say he did have sex with his sister,” reads one of my journal entries from the time. “I'd take incest over throwing acid on the faces of unveiled women.”

When Jason wrote that he was thinking about enlisting in the military to serve in Afghanistan, I told him not to, but only because I was scared for him, not because I didn't see the justice of the cause. When he called to tell me that he would be going to the enlistment office the next day, I sobbed and pleaded, but I knew in my heart that it was the right thing for him to do. So I was surprised when I called the next day and found that he had changed his mind.

“What convinced you?” I asked. “Your sister's love?”

“Uggh,” he said. “Don't even say that.”

Suddenly I knew exactly what had happened: In the hope of putting Jason off from joining the army, Mom had told him a few things about his hero, Arthur Hunt. The disappointment proved bigger than I realized, and I almost argued with him, since it didn't seem fair that a middle-aged WASP's long-ago incest should impede the liberation of fourteen-year-old girls in Kandahar, but mostly I was happy that my brother would stay out of danger.

A week or so later, when Daisy emailed to say she had sewn herself a burqa and intended to start wearing it every day, I assumed that she was joking. The burqa hit me the same way the September 11
th
attacks had: I couldn't believe that such a thing was possible until I saw the pictures, but once I saw the pictures I had essentially never not seen them. The second plane hitting the tower, my sister strolling down College Walk in a burqa—these things might as well have been inside me since I had been inside Miranda's amniotic sac. I emailed Daisy to tell her that what she was doing was not funny, since so many women had no choice but to wear the burqa, and that if she continued to wear it I didn't think I could remain her sister. She responded with one word: “Bye.”

On returning to my family's apartment at the end of the summer of 2002, I discovered my brother lying on my bed, surrounded by books about Iraq.

“Still reading Arthur Hunt?” I asked.

“I'm going to Iraq,” he said.

“Are
we
going to Iraq?” There had been a lot of talk in the hostels where I stayed, but on some level I thought that my foreign friends were just paranoid and Cheney just blustery; it didn't seem possible that we would invade a country for no reason. Of course, over the months that followed, the invasion came to seem much more possible, and also much more reasonable. Saddam probably had weapons of mass destruction, and even if he didn't, he
was
a weapon of mass destruction. A guy I dated my senior year made a lot of jokes about his own weapon of mass destruction, and I was more interested in the guy than I was in the war, though by January the war had taken over everyone's thoughts and the guy had announced that he was gay.

It's humiliating to admit that this announcement hit me harder than the one that my brother made over a
sans
-Daisy dinner with our parents at a not-great French restaurant across the street from a diner made famous by television.

“I'm going to Iraq,” my brother said.

My father screeched out one of those horrible laugh-coughs that are one of the worst attributes of old men. “Send us a postcard.”

“I'm
going
, Dad,” Jason said. This is the moment that I think about whenever I hear the words “Dad” or “I'm” or “going,” which is to say, I think about it all the time. He sounded like such a child, and yet he was a man capable of war. All nineteen-year-old males are children who are men capable of war. If it weren't for their frequent attacks of total paralyzing cowardice, no one with a penis would make it past twenty-five.

But cowardice is a gift like any other, and Santa didn't pack it in my brother's stocking that year.

“You want to fight the Nazis,” my father said. “But they outsmarted you and got themselves defeated a few decades before you were born.”

“This is because of Arthur Hunt, isn't it?” my mother said. “But what about the fact that he fucked his sister? Doesn't that disgust you?”

My father coughed-laughed again, and this time so did I. I looked around to see whether anybody was listening, but no one was.

“Somebody else's incest gets you out of only one war,” Jason said. “I think that's in the Geneva Conventions.”

Did my mother try the crying that usually made Jason do her bidding? She did. Was I proud of Jason for resisting? I was. I do wish, I must admit, that my mom had been a more effective guilt-tripper.

My career started mostly because I missed Jason. Hoping to conjure him through his hero, I emailed Arthur Hunt. Arthur suggested we meet for dinner at the French restaurant, “since it's so close to Columbia and to my apartment.”

That dinner was the first time I had ever met Arthur; his demeanor was bashful and, as I've mentioned, avuncular, and the thought that he had had sex with his own sister nearly made me vomit. When he extended his hand so I could shake it, I kept my hand at my side for much longer than I should have. But finally I shook the man's hand. After all, he had washed it since 1969.

Arthur spent a few minutes complaining that you could no longer smoke in restaurants, no longer smoke in bars. I started to focus on his association with George W. Bush, at least as off-putting as the incest. There was no desire in me to befriend a blueblood Republican crony. Then he cracked a mussel and leaned in over the votive.

“I wish your brother hadn't gone,” he said. “But only because I'm a coward.”

“You didn't fight yourself.”

“Vietnam was a bad war. But if I were twenty today I probably still wouldn't fight. I'm a coward. I don't want to fight, I don't want your brother to fight, I don't want anyone to fight. But your brother is stronger than I am. All I can do is write. The pen is mightier than the sword. You know who wrote that? Somebody who was holding a pen.”

“I'm going to join, too,” I said.

“What?” Now he tightened his fist around the dry white dinner bread.

“Women can, now. I have no excuse not to fight.”

He later told me that he was astonished by my ferocity and my conviction, though the truth is that when I said these things I had no, absolutely no intention of joining the army. I was full of shit, and when I'm full of shit I have a way of getting so angry and immovable that people tend to believe me. I was also full of something Jason should have been full of: fear.

“You should write,” Arthur said.

“But you just said…”

“I haven't seen any really powerful writing about America's role in the world from anyone anywhere near your age. Your brother gives you the perfect perspective. And I can tell just from your email that you're a terrific writer.”

“The only thing I will ever write will be letters home from the war.”

I very consciously and very stormily stormed out of the restaurant, furious with myself for vowing to do something I had no intention of doing. Arthur expected me to write a cheap sentimental article, and I went back to my room and, without the aid of Red Bull or even of coffee, stayed up all night to write the least sentimental article I could type. The central thesis was that the people of Iraq were our brothers and sisters, so I could not begrudge the absence of my particular biological sibling as he left to help our other siblings. The article sounded great when I read it over, so I sent it to an editor whose contact information Arthur had given me. As soon as I sent it I read it again, and this time I could tell that it was in fact more horribly sentimental than I could have feared. I was trying to compose an email retracting the article when I heard back: the editor loved it and was going to publish it. The article wound up getting emailed among lots of families of service members. Norture had me on his show, where I discovered, much to my surprise, that I could be quick with a memorable line. My opinion of my article changed again—now I saw, behind the sentimentality, depth and earnestness and even a modest amount of brilliance. This gave me enough confidence to write articles attacking the war's opponents and to appear again on Norture's show and on other shows, and soon I was a minor celebrity among people who spend their time reading online articles or watching cable news, which is to say, pretty much everyone who either has a job or doesn't. This period corresponded with the rise of the insurgency in Iraq, but rather than shaking my faith, the insurgency reinforced it. Suicide bombers, transparent thugs, just proved America's probity, and so did the fact that we spent vast resources improving the lives of people thousands of miles away. The worse the war went, the more convinced I grew that we were doing the right thing, if not always in the right way. Once, Jason told me over the phone that he was having some doubts over whether the American occupation was accomplishing anything. This made me so mad that I accused him of weakness, of being a typical American who needed results right away. He responded the way he had to and said the things that of course he would say. I probably started the fight because I wanted him to say these things. I wanted him to call me a coward and even a bitch. Finally I hung up on him, and then I sat on the edge of the tub of my new post-grad apartment and cried for most of the night, terrified that he was going to die and that our fight would prove the last conversation we would ever have.