Short Century (3 page)

I vomited on the joystick. Sheila's sympathy was limited; the equipment was very expensive.

f

Two rather baroquely taciturn
agents escorted me from the site and deposited me at the airport. Given how queasy and shaky I felt, the airport might have been in the middle of the ocean. I was randomly selected for individual screening, and my genitals were brushed by the thick, latex-encased fingers of a large black man with the face of an owl and the back of a turtle. Certain that I was going to be sent to the Hague to be arraigned as a war criminal, I was told instead to have that most peculiar of things: a nice day.

After finding my gate, I sunk uncomfortably into a blue leather chair that invited uncomfortable sinking. The only book I had with me was Jersey Rothstein's
The Dominion of Pleasure
—some impulse made me grab it as I left my apartment—so I opened it and tried to concentrate. Both Emily and Miranda read this copy, many years ago. I stared at my sister's sketch, on the title page, of
REDACTED
Palace. I flipped through the margin notes and could tell, instantly, which notes had been made by Emily and which had been made by Miranda.

The thought of Emily made me choke up, as it often did.

Whether Emily has survived is anyone's guess. Only God and Emily know where Emily is, and maybe only Emily knows. If anyone could hide, if anyone could find and crouch behind the one boulder on earth that God does not monitor, it would be my sister. I should never have stopped trying to find her. I should never have chosen to “respect her wishes,” a decision that now seems childish, poisonous, lightly evil. It would not surprise me if she made her own fortune, building better mousetraps or smuggling arms. Maybe she's a hotel magnate and owns ten or twenty beach resorts, and from time to time she sits on one of her beaches and thinks of me with less rancor than might be expected. Maybe, her brain pinched by a clot of spite and sentiment, Hotel Magnate Emily bought a controlling interest in the Chappine. Or maybe she's led an exquisitely undistinguished life in the suburbs, playing an erotically and spiritually sated Harriet to some Ozzie Mandias. (“Look upon my three-car garage, ye Mighty, and despair!”) Or she never married and she sits every evening in her car in an office park parking lot, hating her pantyhose somewhat less than she hates me.

Why does our culture so insistently celebrate survival, as though it were a magic trick? Everyone presently alive has survived, with precisely the same provisional success.

Not presently alive: that woman in the burqa under the balcony.

Think of the lives that you've saved, Arthur. Even if Little Brother were no longer in power, the knowledge of what had happened to his sibling would certainly deter Big Brother, unless of course it angered him and spurred him to even greater violence. But if that happened, this would only aid the case for the full-scale regime-changing intervention that I wanted, and even if that intervention never materialized, at least the people of
REDACTED
would know that we cared about them, unless they focused instead on the civilian casualties, a focus which would be unfair, since of course it's impossible to kill people who deserve to be killed without occasionally killing people who don't, and in any event Little Brother, probably
not
under house arrest and probably still an active member of the government, would, had he lived even until nightfall, have figured out a way to kill a half-dozen or so women, maybe even including the woman that I had killed, and except for that one woman those half-dozen women retained their pulses because of what I had done. A net of five women were still alive because of what I had done! So if the people of
REDACTED
hated me without knowing that it was me they hated, they were being unfair, as I've said, and I can handle unfair hatred. Besides, in my experience, when people are being unfair they usually know, so even if the people of
REDACTED
burn the American flag and shake their fists at the sky from which more missiles might emerge at any moment, on some level they would have to know that America had destroyed the man who oppressed them. And even if they did not know that by “America” they meant “Arthur Hunt,” then at least I would know.

Suddenly I felt rich, energized. I stood up, partially to let a jumpy young Dominican boy sit down next to his mother, and partially because I like to stand up when I feel ready for battle.

A quick visit to Google News revealed that Little Brother's death had already been announced by Big Brother's state television. So had the death of the woman in the burqa, who, according to a state press release, had been “mangled beyond recognition.” Some left-wing bloggers had, predictably, already started attacking the American government. These people would rather Big Brother kill ten thousand people than America kill one. I couldn't stop myself from posting to Twitter.

Little Brother is dead! Let's be happy about that, okay?

I got some coffee and an apple croissant from the airport outpost of a faux-French chain restaurant, and by the time I checked my phone again, the Internet was awash with posts attacking me. The usual “Imperialist stooge” invective, for the most part, and I was about to turn off my phone when a reply to my message caught my eye—this one, again, from @PeterReaper.

Arthur Hunt loves destruction, but no one cares. What I know about Arthur Hunt WILL command attention.

Distressing, but still vague. An article on Reuters worried me more. Big Brother announced that any American spies discovered in
REDACTED
would be subject to “immediate execution.”

Some bile that tasted of apple croissant flooded my mouth as I dialed Sydney. She didn't pick up.

f

Soon enough I was
on a plane—on an actual plane this time, or, rather, actually on a plane. Netted to the seat in front of me was the in-flight magazine, this issue devoted to AMERICA'S UNDISCOVERED COUNTRIES. Undiscovered Countries here meant off-the-beaten-path, not beaten-off-the-path, or the path-of-beating-off. I stared at the headline's yellow lettering until it slid and grew blurry, as illegible to me as the codes and formulas that kept the plane aloft, as illegible to me as everything my sister ever thought or felt or even said. My sister, I loved her, I wanted to tell the tie-choked young man sitting next to me, but there was the vile confusion over the word “love.”

Out the window, past the young man and his tie, the transformation of houses and cars—any one of which might have contained a rapidly receding Emily—affected me more than it usually did. These Monopoly pieces, however far away they got, remained much closer to me than Little Brother or the woman in the burqa had been, but I held no power over these houses. I missed the drone as though I had had one all my life.

Whoever that woman in the burqa had been, she was going to give me a difficult time.

“Excuse me,” said the Asian woman sitting in the aisle seat. “Aren't you Arthur Hunt?”

Arthur Hunt. Arthur Hunt, who spent his career writing articles about massacres and crackdowns and tyrants, as though oppression, like Rumpelstiltskin in the fairy tale, will recoil and yield if you speak its name.

“On my better days.”

“And on your worse days?” This she said with a smile that even the diffident would recognize as flirtatious.

“Arthur Huntington.”

She looked at me as though not getting a punchline.

“Don't worry about it.”

The girl introduced herself as Julie and told me that she really liked a book I had written a few years ago about George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling, and T.E. Lawrence. She had also enjoyed my hundred-page histories of the Balkans, Afghanistan,
REDACTED
, and Iraq.

Tie-choked young man grunted, but I didn't care. Conversations like this one are where life lurks.

Julie and I talked about the ethics of military intervention, about her need to chew gum during takeoff, about the D.C. law firm that she was thinking of leaving to work for a nonprofit, and about our shared habit of drinking orange juice during takeoff even though the acidity could only make the experience worse. I hardly noticed when the flight attendant announced that we could now use the Internet. Then Julie pursed her lips and said that she didn't believe a word of what Peter Reaper wrote about me.

“I had hoped you hadn't seen it,” I said.

She shrugged sheepishly. “It's been going around the Internet. But don't worry. Nobody believes anything this guy writes.”

I opened my laptop and navigated to Reaper's site. Expecting another attack on me for being a war criminal or some other hyperbolic libel, I found this instead:

ARTHUR HUNT HAD SEX WITH
HIS OWN SISTER IN 1969

The laptop wouldn't close quickly enough, and Julie gasped.

“This guy is saying that you raped your sister?”

“I didn't rape my sister! She consented!”

Not the smartest thing I could have said. All I had to do was all anyone ever has to do: deny everything. Too late. I drew horrified looks from throughout the cabin, not least from Julie. I wanted to say something in my defense, but I just burst out sobbing. I wiped my face with a papery paper napkin, trying to keep the ring of orange juice residue from my eyes. The guy in the window seat grunted and fiddled with his tie without loosening it, cursing his luck for getting even worse.

I tried to stand up and immediately hit my head against the underside of the storage bin.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I just have to use the bath…” I tried to step over her but I tripped on her lap. She held her breath until I pushed myself up and propelled myself into the aisle.

I stumbled and saw a woman on the other side of the aisle staring at her laptop. For a moment I thought she must be reading Reaper's update, but she wasn't. She and the guy sitting next to her were looking at pictures of themselves together. Ahead of them, a pair of parents looked at pictures of the two-year-old climbing all over them. Why should I feel so terrible about myself, when I was surrounded by these summer-home solipsists, who were drenched with information but not getting wet?

No doubt few of the people on this plane had heard of
REDACTED
, and those who had did not care. They had not grappled with the moral implications of this or any other American action. The passengers didn't care whether America killed one civilian to kill a thousand terrorists or killed a thousand civilians to kill one terrorist, and they certainly care didn't care whether another government killed tens of thousands of its own citizens. It is a commonplace that Americans are the absentee landlords of history, but the assiduous indifference of every person on this plane shocked me as much as the revelations of my behavior shocked them, or shocked those who were paying attention. All these people cared about were their own fear and their own entertainment. On the rare occasion that they turned their own thoughts to foreign policy, it was because they were scared for themselves and for people who looked and lived like them. Of all the people on this plane, I was the least guilty of incest.

“His
sister
? You mean the guy in the
aisle
?”

I hurried toward the restroom, pawing the backs of seats. Looking around the cabin filled me with loathing. All these fit and fat boomers. If the revolutions of the sixties had been about anything, they must have been about freedom and equality, the two things that I had always supported.

A woman waiting outside the lavatory door turned away from me, as you do from someone who smells terrible.

I think it was then that I realized, without a doubt, that Emily was Peter Reaper.

Yes, Emily is alive. Somewhere in me I must have always known this. Maybe everyone who has ever attacked me has been Emily. And what gives her the right to judge me? She transgressed no less enthusiastically than I. At a time when all taboos seemed to be falling, we knocked down the greatest taboo of all. We should have hailed ourselves as sexual pioneers.

I slept with my sister so that I could be…what, exactly? The Malcolm X of incest?

A horrible mistake, okay, but surely everything else I have done in my life has gone some way toward redressing it. At twenty-two I pursued a putridly private freedom. Ever since I became a journalist I have pursued freedom for people I have never met, people with whom I have no familial or even racial ties—surely the opposite of incest.

The lavatory door opened and I pushed past the woman in front of me, causing her to gasp, causing more gasps throughout the cabin. As soon as I was inside I slid the door shut and I looked at myself in the mirror. I had never needed a cigarette more in my life, and I fingered my pocket as though I had matches (and as though I could smoke in the lavatory). I thought of the first time Emily smoked, when she was maybe thirteen and I was maybe seventeen; we were on the beach, and she grabbed a cigarette and matches out of my pocket, and I ran after her for a while. Finally I stopped running and told her to smoke if she wanted to. The late summer breeze made it hard for her to light a cigarette, and once she succeeded she could not take one drag without coughing wildly, so of course I laughed. I didn't laugh when I saw a Bosnian soldier crouching by a dead boy, trying to strike a match against the dead boy's cheek. The soldier struck the match five, six times without success. I tossed him my lighter to get him to stop, and he smiled at me with an offhand gratitude, without any hint of malice.

The boy was gone, and so, probably, was the soldier. They were just figures in my head, saying nothing. Dumb. Stupid. Good word for the dead: stupid. They don't know a goddamn thing.

I imagined taking a drag from a cigarette. A few months after Emily's first cigarette, she was teaching me the differences between Marlboro and Lucky Strike.

The counterfactual demon, right there in the bathroom with me: If only I had treated the sixties as a childish diversion, just as everyone else had, I could be on this plane, in this bathroom (or the bathroom in the first-class cabin) with the name I was born with, Arthur Huntington. I could be a wealthy, morally untroubled lawyer, or I could be a layabout living off the substantial inheritance I had instead forsaken. If only I hadn't decided to take the taboo smashing to its ultimate extreme, if only I hadn't turned my entire life into a search for justice, maybe my grandchildren could be with me on this plane, on their way to visit their Great-Aunt Emily, who would welcome them warmly, with some freshly made marble pound cake.