Short Century (31 page)

But a lot of this is beside the point, since a lot of what Arthur writes might very well be accurate and is reasonably beautiful. What bothered me most of all was that Arthur chose not to inhabit Jason. This tends to be the problem with empathy; it tends to be doled out in ways that flatter the empathizer. In his bizarre attempt to woo me back to America, he swerved away from my dead sibling, the sibling he led into death. It wasn't until this batch of emails from Arthur that I realized that I had blamed him for my brother's death all along. Suddenly I saw Arthur as a horrible plague that had befallen my family, a man so obsessed with his college girlfriend that he decided to kill her son.

Not fair, maybe, but the upshot was that on the train to Berlin I decided to become Peter Reaper and destroy Arthur Hunt.

Why? The same reason why I kept on supporting wars long after they made any sense: to take revenge for my brother. That was my fate all along. True, I had no idea when Arthur was fucking me or when I was at a party nibbling cheese like some brilliant little mouse that I had anything like a plan for revenge, but any revenger has to keep her plans a secret. I just happened to keep them a secret even from myself.

I created the Peter Reaper account at an Internet café near the Berlin train station and published the posts in the hostel where I stayed or in nearby cafés. It was not my intention to reveal what happened between Arthur and Emily. It wasn't my place to reveal it. For all I knew—or know, for that matter—Emily is still alive and well somewhere, and I had no right to divulge her secret. My intention was to unnerve Arthur, to torment him with the knowledge that he had not gotten away after all. Nonetheless, as I wrote, I realized that he must have done serious damage to his sister, serious enough to make her disappear, and suddenly all this nonsense about freedom suddenly seemed like a way for him to keep fucking her, and I started to think of myself as avenging Emily as well as my brother. I imagined her sitting in a room somewhere and reading my posts with glee. I imagined her as the DVD Lady, but I tried to stop myself from imagining much of anything about her, since clearly she had decided to hide and I did not want to become like Arthur, the writer as secret police.

In any case, my hatred for myself had quickly overwhelmed my hatred for Arthur, so I started writing hateful things about Sydney Rothstein. I was in the middle of a truly vile post entitled “Sydney Rothstein Has Sucked the Cocks of Hunt and Norture and American Missiles” when I started to feel guilty, and for some reason decided to call Arthur. This was the phone call in which he told me that he was going to observe the assassination of Little Brother.

I should be clear: the phone call filled me with glee. Everything that Little Brother had done was still on my mind, and whatever else was going on in my mind I still wanted to see justice served to the man with the harems full of eight-year-old girls. Had it been me rather than Arthur in that room, I would have pushed the button, too. Do not think I am pretending to be better than Arthur.

After that I took a walk through the Tiergarten, and was trying to find some meaning in the trees when I checked my phone and saw that Arthur's strike had killed a woman. There was a photo: a severed head in a face net, like something alien that had fallen from the clear blue sky.

f

Here's where I have
to say that I should not have lied to Arthur. My apology cannot help but sound funny: I should not have told him that his sister was the victim of the drone strike. Since no one knows what happened to her—and since
REDACTED
occupied her childhood thoughts—I'm tempted to say that I have some kind of spooky feeling that she was in fact the victim. This would be in bad faith, but if it wasn't for bad faith, I wouldn't have no faith at all.

I lied to Arthur because he already knew that he had killed the woman in the burqa, and this didn't seem to matter to him, but I knew it would destroy him to know that he had killed his sister. If, as he claimed, all women were his sisters, then this distinction shouldn't have mattered. If
he
spoke in good faith, then he
did
kill his sister. Nonetheless, the sister that he killed was almost certainly not Emily, so this probably should not have been the last thing he heard before his head was torn from his body and cast into the air to fall like an apple upon a faraway gravestone. The apple analogy is grotesque, and now that you and I have both read Arthur's apple-filled manuscript you probably think it's forced, but all I can say is that when I watched the arcs of Arthur's head and my father's head, apples are what I thought of.

After the funeral, I did not leave my apartment for two weeks. I often turned on the television to watch Norture, suddenly my last living link to Arthur and to my family. Rather bizarrely, Norture said nothing on his show about the bombing, even while other right-wingers were claiming, rather absurdly, that my father's bomb and Arthur's incest constituted the logical endpoint of sixties rebellion. Some liberal bloggers heckled Norture for his silence; contrary to his character, he did not take the bait. Maybe he had realized the same thing that Arthur seems to have realized, or at least to have grappled with, in the process of thinking about Daisy: the evil pointlessness of all opinions. We are all naked and we are all the same—all sex is incest, all clothing is doomed, as silly as an attempt to hide…as is a burqa—and opinions are just desperate attempts to prove that we deserve to die a little bit less than some other people do.

Convinced that Norture had learned something, I happily went to bed with him when he showed up at my apartment about a month after the bombing. When we were finished he scoured my face for signs of authentic bliss. He must have found what he was looking for, because he sighed happily and laid back.

“Can I be honest with you?” he asked. “I really wish I could go back in time, back to the sixties, so I could show your parents and Arthur that I was going to win.”

I laughed out loud—mostly at myself for having fallen for him and for so many other things—and then I threw him out of my apartment.

Monsieur Norture has recently received the Peabody Award.

f

I am now primarily
known as the sole surviving member of a crazed family that conspired to persecute and murder Arthur Hunt. The truth is that I had no idea what my father was planning, even though I was with him the night before the funeral.

Daisy, blaming me now for our mother's death as well as for our brother's, refused to come out of her room that entire night, despite my father's pounding on the door. I suggested that we let Daisy come out whenever she wanted to, and, rather than force her to join us, just sit together, just him and me, father and daughter, on the decaying sofa in the den where my father was still pounding out page after page of
Onan's War
, but he wouldn't let me inside that room, and of course I now understand why—inside the room must have been his vest and its accessory. When he finally accepted that my sister was not going to come out, he sat down with me at the kitchen table.

“Did your mother ever say or do anything to make you think she was cheating on me?”

“Daddy, no. She loved you just like you loved her.”

“Then I'm lost. If Jason truly was my son, then I am lost. I am a man without a choice.”

“Please don't talk that way.” I stood up, but he grabbed my wrist, in a way that still managed to hurt.

“Say you're sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

“For what? For screwing the man who spilled my seed by the side of a desert road.”

He looked tired, the way Death must look tired on days of great massacres.

“How did you know?”

“I've seen it in your eyes. For years.”

“It only happened once. Relatively recently.”

“Then I must have known it before you did. A father knows everything his child is ever going to do. That's why you should never be a father or a child.”

“I guess I'm safe.”

“You're pregnant with Arthur's baby.”

“Yes.”

“Get an abortion. It's the baby's only hope.”

“What turned you into such a mean, limited man?”

“Love.”

“Give me a fucking break,” I said. “You're eighty-three years old. Your heart has kept up its stupid percussive accompaniment as the earth has made eighty-three trips around the sun. Time to stop pretending you haven't learned the difference between love and fear.”

“It takes longer than that to learn the difference. It takes a century. And all we get…”

“And all we get is a short century. I've read your book. I've read Arthur's books, too. Why didn't you tell Jason not to go to Iraq?”

“He wouldn't have listened to me.”

“You know that he would have, or you would have said something before it was too late. You stood aside and made
jokes
while Mom
asked
him not to go, and while she
asked
some random guy she once dated to
ask
him not to go. Why didn't you and Mom
tell
him not to go?”

“He was determined.”

“You wanted him to die. You wanted him to die so that you could sit in your room and be right. That's why you're keeping the door locked. You're afraid of letting all the rightness out.”

“I have a very different reason for keeping the door locked, one that I think you will soon understand shows how much I love and have always loved my son.”

Obviously I should have followed up on this comment at the time, but I was too concerned with thinking up something to say that might sting.

“I would understand a lot more,” I said, “if I had different parents and different siblings.”

A petulant comment more worthy of a teenager, and I was more or less expecting him to laugh. Instead, he stood up, making a lot of noise while he did so.

“After Arthur's sister told me what happened between them, she asked me why I thought Arthur had done it.”

“What did you say?”

“The obvious. I said that he wanted to break the taboo, and that he was jealous of Miranda. She said that was wrong and shallow. She said that he wanted to feel as though he dominated something, and since he had never been able to dominate Miranda, he chose her, Emily, instead. She said that he hadn't wanted to have sex with his younger sister; he wanted to be his older brother. Has he ever talked to you about his older brother? Do you know what she was talking about?”

She hadn't and I didn't, although after reading Arthur's manuscript I have some idea.

“I think that we were both wrong. I think that Arthur had sex with his sister to create a short century.”

“Daddy, what are you talking about?”

“He was trying to end something, and by ending it start something totally new.”

I have to admit that I was charmed by this rather romantic view of Arthur's incest, and I thought it spoke of some kind of final forgiveness in my father. But of course this forgiveness was probably just a way to get me to shut up while he went about avenging his blood. And now that I've read Arthur's manuscript it's clear to me that Arthur had no sense of any century, short or long, and he was really just another man with no idea what he was doing but lots of ideas about why he was doing it.

f

To write this Afterword
correctly, I felt as though I needed to write it in the Chappine Hotel. I checked in just before six yesterday evening, and even though I can't remotely afford it, I ordered duck from room service. When I had reduced the duck to juicy bones, I smoked a cigarette out the window, sat for a long time in an armchair and stared at the sofa across from me. For the first time in my life I said a prayer. I wanted to speak to at least one of my dead, but I felt no presence but my own. Somehow I found that I could not even conjure their faces. All I could imagine was a figure sitting on the bed wearing a burqa. It could have been Daisy or Emily or the woman under the balcony; it could have been Jason or Arthur or my father. I imagined handing the figure a glass of scotch, which the figure waved off with a gloved hand. I imagined sitting until dawn and hearing of the underworld, of the world of the shades, but the figure would not speak. I actually said, “Who are you?” out loud, a completely absurd act that I had gotten drunk to justify.

If I am going to make any kind of peace with the dead, it is going to take more than a night at the Chappine with a bottle of scotch. Dawn is breaking now and I had hoped that the night would produce an epiphany, but I will have to settle for this Afterword.

Throughout my twenties I was in the grip of what Robert Lowell called “a savage servility.” I am now in my early thirties and I like to complain about how old I am, but I am still nowhere near the end of my century, which may be a short one but still has a way to go. I am sitting above Sixth Avenue, watching the taxis crawl by at first light, and the schmaltzy romantic-comedy insight is at once reassuring and appalling: in every single cab might be the love of my life.

Clearly I am supposed to love what is growing inside me. I am certainly not supposed to drown it in scotch. It would be a relatively tidy ending to this story for me to give birth to Arthur's child so that I could form a new familial tie, this one on my own terms. Maybe the child would be the best of Arthur and not the worst of me. It is at any rate a mark of maturity to accept that there is no forward movement from one generation to the next, and that one's most solemn task is nothing more complicated than keeping things moving, creating more bodies that will briefly mistake themselves for gods. So I know that I am on dangerous territory by making any move other than becoming a mother and moving on with it. But until now I have been so consumed by hatred and veneration that I have not begun to forge in the smithy of my soul my own soul. And my soul must now accommodate Emily's soul, and the soul of the woman in the burqa under the balcony.