Short Century (4 page)

I looked into the toilet, unzipped, and peed. Miranda. I thought of her, the way she looked when we were young. Miranda Schuldenfrei, though I had grown accustomed to thinking of her as Miranda Rothstein. I thought of her body.

Without making a deliberate decision to do so I shifted to the sink and started stroking my cock. I thought about Sheila. I thought of a girl with hazel eyes who had once called me a war criminal on the subway. I thought, I couldn't help thinking, of Emily, the way it had felt to be inside her. I thought of a plump photographer I slept with in Sarajevo in '92 or '93. I thought about Sydney at her brother's funeral.

The garish light made my semen glisten in the black plastic sink. My seed, after I rinsed it down the drain, might mingle with the other waste to become what is called “blue ice,” and plummet through the clouds, perhaps sashaying a bit before falling into the ocean, where in the august tradition of my seed it impregnated nothing.

f

So, yes, Internet reports
that I “was grunting in a masturbatory fashion” are true. I probably don't even need to add that the remainder of my time in the air may have constituted the most unpleasant flight ever to terminate somewhere other than the side of a skyscraper.

Now, several hours later, I'm sitting in the Chappine Hotel with nothing but my laptop. I am, to the probable horror of Daisy, naked. Not even swaddled in a smoking jacket. I wish I could go back in time to see the face of my twenty-two-year-old self at the news that, at the age of sixty, he would still be drawn to the Chappine. It would wreck him, that grasping, flailing boy who looks like me only better, and he would deserve it.

I am here because Emily is alive—probably—and I am determined to offer her an accounting. But wouldn't it be better to forget? I have spent most of my life arguing that the past must never be forgotten, but maybe we should scour our memories as though they were pots licked by the pestilent.

Case in point: In July 1995, just before he led the murders of seven thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebreniça, the Serb commander Ratko Mladic appeared on television and said: “Finally, after the rebellion of the Dahijas, the time has come to take revenge on the Muslims in the region.” He was referring to an event that took place in 1804. If you're going to mount any defense of memory, this is the sort of thing you have to forget.

Also arguing against memory is the Chappine itself. Downstairs in the lobby, the white pillars look just as they did when Emily would try without success to climb them. They look just as they did when she was a little older and she would lean against one and read a book. My grandfather hanged himself here a few years before I was born. My brother hanged himself here when I was thirteen and he was twenty-two.

In the days after September 11
th
, I found myself wondering whether Mohamed Atta, his hands at the controls, his destination in view, had seen the Chappine for an instant. Did he dream of the day that this building, too, would find its plane?

What I came here to do—I must do it. This memoir will serve as the trial of Arthur Hunt. As prosecutor and prose cutter, I'll depict myself as a dictator. As defense attorney, I'll depict myself as a dissident. As judge, I'm biased, but not in my favor. What I've done is terrible and I've seen far worse, and I have no desire to keep limping around like a wounded animal, trying to evade God or whatever there is.

The question of where to begin is a difficult one. In life, time is stupidly linear. Always in joint, however arthritic that joint may be. In the mind, time looks like a chunk. Let me put it this way:

Your past is like an abstract sculpture outside the building where you work. Say, a giant white cube. Pockmarked and cantilevered. You walk by it in the morning. Peering beyond it at a pretty girl, you tilt your head. You eat your lunch on a bench beneath it, sometimes under its shadow, depending on the time, the weather, the calendar, and which seat happens to be free. How big and unmovable it is, you marvel. You snigger that it is a sham, a child could have created it, it does not symbolize anything. That someone could be permitted to exhibit it in public—could be paid to do so—shows just how much is wrong with society. Many days you do not notice it at all. It can be moved, but not by you.

So, like the most confused of storytellers, I will begin at the beginning.

3:45
a.m.
May 12, 2012

I was born in
1947, the middle of three children. My older brother, Paul, was eight years my senior. In early childhood one bathes in knowledge more than acquires it, and the knowledge I was bathed in was that Paul was going to be a great baseball player. Paul spent hours every day practicing, doing push-ups, doing pull-ups from a bar stretched across his doorway; I remember very strongly the sound of his grunting, a sound often accompanied by the muffled thud of crutches as my father observed and circled. (My father had lost a foot at Guadalcanal, and within a matter of months had returned to law school, from which he graduated third in his class. The two men ahead of him, he was fond of pointing out, didn't have to subtract an hour from studying every time they confronted a building without an elevator.) Often, when there was company over for dinner, my father would ask Paul to stand up, so that his body from neck to ankles could be admired and commented upon, with particular fawning attention paid to shoulders, biceps, and calves. “Paul is what I could produce when I was complete,” my father often said, not caring that I was sitting at the table. My brother tended to sulk during these displays, though I don't know whether the sulking was the result of the display or of the care with which my father oversaw everything he ate. My father had somehow come under the influence of a diet fad that aggressively promoted fruit at the expense of most other breeds of food, and the underpinning of Paul's diet was the daily consumption of seven apples, four pears, three oranges, and two bananas. It is difficult to date these things, but I believe that my first discrete memory is of Paul's attempt to shove an apple core down my throat.

“Attempt” is not quite the word, since Paul was as successful in this endeavor as he wished to be; his object was subjugation rather than suffocation. First he pushed me into the scratchy-soft cream-colored sofa cushion, then he lifted me up and shoved the core in my mouth. Cushion fibers mingled with the apple to create a taste I can still recall. Balling my fists into his forearms did little, as I was most likely four years old and he was a preternaturally powerful eleven, so my ventures into punching probably felt, to me and to him, like faint knocks on a thick locked door. “Say: Paul is king,” he said. Of course I couldn't say anything at all, because there was an apple core in my throat, but ordering me to say something that I couldn't say was exactly his idea. He was not looking for compliance, exactly; he was looking for an excuse to shove an apple core down my throat (as Orwell notes in “Such, Such Were the Joys” and elsewhere, an impossible-to-comply-with directive is a particularly effective tool for the breaking of will). I recall trying to scream and being unable to because of the apple core. The enforced silence was almost as terrifying as the core itself, and at the risk of psychoanalyzing myself I believe that this experience convinced me to consign my life to giving voice to those whom the powerful wish to silence. Finally, Paul took the apple core out and told me that I had five seconds to say “Paul is King” or I was going to get it again. So I said “Paul is King!” through snotty tears. I added “King of the Idiots,” but only softly, and only after he was gone.

After that, the “corings,” as Paul smirkingly called them, became a regular occurrence. I would fight back, without any kind of effect—exactly once I appealed for help to my father, who informed me, as I had already intuited he would, that I needed to learn as early as possible that only I could fight for myself, since “the only law is the law of the jungle.” (There was a second time, when I was six or seven, when I told my father that, if he didn't make Paul leave, I was going to run away; his response was that I might as well learn to fight here “because the entire world is Paul.”)

The summer that my mother was pregnant with Emily, when I was four, I spent many afternoons in the bleachers at Paul's baseball games, held aloft by my mother and doing my best to avoid putting my feet on her pregnant stomach, resulting in a lot of swinging of my feet. Paul was so large and so intimidating that the twelve-year-old outfielders always toddled back awkwardly when he stepped up to the plate. Sometimes he would turn back and smile at the observers, who ate it up. Sometimes he would point at me and wave, and the crowd ate that up, too, the baseball prodigy treating his baby brother so solicitously. But there was no love of my big brother in me, at least not then, and all I felt was a hatred too big for my body. I didn't want to see him bat, so I would wail and try to wriggle free, but my mother would not have it; for the most part she was the most passive and confused person I have ever met, but to hold me up was a clear directive, and the more I tried to get out of her grasp and reach for a seat on the bench, the more holding me up made her feel like a firm, serious parent doing her motherly duty. So whether I wanted to or not I watched Paul. I was delighted when Emily was born and my mother had to hold her, leaving me to sit beside the two of them in the stands, staring either straight ahead, at sat-on suitcoats, or up at pink, squished-face Emily and her tiny, flickering hands.

As Emily grew bigger, Paul kept shoving apple cores down my throat. He also started discarding fruit on the floor, leaving it for my mother or our maid to pick up. (I do not remember any maid clearly, since, at least compared to our friends, we had a high turnover rate.) I recall a crawling Emily putting her hand on a damp pear and dissolving into tears. Our mother told Paul and me “not to play rough while Emily is around,” but that hardly stopped Paul; in fact, he seemed to relish an uncertainly mobile audience member. The apartment always smelled of terrible juices from discarded fruit.

Apart from some embarrassment that my humiliation now had a witness, I didn't notice Emily very much when she was very small, as I was much too distracted by my hatred of Paul. One of the few things that I believed myself to have over him was my ability to sleep late, as my father awakened him for baseball at five in the morning. Very often I would make myself get out of bed just so that I could barge into the bathroom while he was brushing his teeth and taunt him that I could go back to bed, after which I would run back to my room and try to lock the door before he could reach me. More often than not he would outrun me and slam me headfirst into my bedroom door before dribbling some toothpaste on the top of my head. Whatever the outcome, I enjoyed these games. There is no pleasure like the pleasure of fighting back. This would generally wake Emily up, but I didn't care.

It was when Emily was three or so that I figured out that, for whatever reason, she preferred me to Paul. She grew obsessed with an illustrated storybook called
The Princess of
REDACTED
, which recounted the (obviously racist, in retrospect) tale of a young European princess who has been kidnapped by a Moor and taken back to the kingdom of
REDACTED
, and who through various plot machinations involving a kindhearted maid, an evil Mohammadan Priest, and a brave Prince Valiant lookalike disguised as a merchant, is rescued from her bondage. Sometimes Paul picked up the book to read it to her, but she would snatch it away and say: “Arthur read!” This left Paul confused and frustrated, and of course anything that frustrated Paul delighted me. Even when he wasn't around, she begged me to read this book to her, over and over again, and when I got fed up with reading, she would relieve me of the book and then pretend to read it, reciting the story as best as she could remember, or just making up a new story entirely.

Occasionally she would stray from the book and devise plotlines of her own, which she would then enlist me in acting out. She usually played the role of a beautiful princess from an evil kingdom, and I would play her brother, whose main role was usually to tell her that she had been abducted as a baby, and that she was actually a princess from the good kingdom. Then I would play the prince from the good kingdom, whose job it was to marry her. Sometimes I said that that didn't make any sense, since if she was actually a princess from the good kingdom and I was a prince from the good kingdom, then we were brother and sister and couldn't get married. She told me that that was stupid, and then we would continue playing with the dolls. There were other times when I would play the evil prince, the oldest one—whom she, to my amusement, called “Bastard.” But she would always come back to
The Princess of
REDACTED
. She said that the princess was stupid for not wanting to stay in
REDACTED
, because
REDACTED
was the most beautiful kingdom in the world. Even more than the story itself, she loved to look at the pictures, the drawings of
REDACTED
Palace, which seemed to extend for many, many acres. “Let's move to
REDACTED
!” she said. “I will be the princess and you will be the prince.”

A young graduate student I dated very briefly in the nineties—one of the few people to whom I have even mentioned that I had a sister—told me that this book was racist, and the fact that my sister loved it so much proved she was racist as well. I dumped her on the spot. She got her revenge a few weeks later, when she emailed to say that she had discovered that not only did my sister like an arguably racist book (although it really was obviously racist, I knew that even if I couldn't admit it to the graduate student), but my grandfather had
written
an inarguably racist book. This is, unfortunately, true. Arthur Huntington II was a devotee of the infamous early-twentieth-century eugenicists Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, and sometime in the late 1920s my grandfather wrote a book called
The Color of Our Destruction
, published by a small imprint that was either a vanity press or an imprint dedicated to racist publications. My grandfather's suicide note also included a lot of bile about the destruction of the white race; he wanted to “get off the earth before the colored races take it over.” The book, the suicide note, and my grandfather all have one thing in common: they all have nothing to do with me. To hold me accountable for my grandfather's actions is fairly explicitly anti-American.