My sister was the one who ensured I would never sleep soundly. When I was a child I couldn’t sleep for fear of what would happen to her; as an adult I can’t sleep for fear of what has happened to her. Those who make it their primary purpose in life to attack me—and their ranks have swelled in the past twenty-four hours—would probably say that I sleep badly because I have lived badly. But popular language gets sleep backwards. The indifferent and the evil find it easy to sleep at night, while the sleep of the just is fitful at best. An infant’s loving father, a dissident intellectual in a totalitarian state: these are not men likely to claim a comfortable eight hours. To be moral is to be an insomniac.

Comparing myself to a dissident or even to a father might come across as grandstanding. What I’m trying to say is that I would have slept much more and much more soundly had I not always loved my sister.

At any rate it is not a normal thing for me to be awoken, since I am usually already awake. This made it even more disconcerting to be awoken at three-thirty this morning by a human-shaped shadow standing over my bed. The human shape, I quickly realized, did in fact belong to a human, a human in a black shroud. It may have occurred to me for a drowsy instant that this was the Angel of Death, but with such steady work the Angel of Death can probably afford to dress with more panache. No more than two or three seconds passed before I realized it was Daisy Rothstein, known to gossip websites as “Crazy Daisy” and “The White Girl in the Burqa”—but for a few more seconds I could pretend that this sheet billowing in the air conditioning covered anyone I wanted it to cover. I could pretend that it was my sister, here to let me haggle for forgiveness. Maybe Emily would allow us to be siblings again now that our once-enviable genetic inheritances had been reduced to wrinkly, saggy pittances, and would soon be wiped out entirely.

“Sleeping naked, I see,” Daisy said. “Just like Noah. Or Adam.”

Humiliated, I reached for a blanket and covered myself.

“I don’t think Adam got so flabby,” she said, “so you must be Noah. I wonder whether his dick curved to the left like yours.”

“How did you get in here?”

She opened her black-gloved hand and displayed the spare set of keys I had given to her sister, Sydney.

“Sydney left these on her desk before you sent her off to die.”

I reached for the stress ball that Sydney had given me, on which she had written with a felt-tip marker: PRETEND IT’S BIG BROTHER. But the ball slipped through my fingers and fell behind the nightstand.

“What do you want, Daisy?”

“I wanted to thank you for murdering my siblings. No more rivalry for me.”

The outrage of the charge hardly registered; what registered was the plural. “Have you heard something about Sydney?”

She hesitated for a long time. I doubted I would survive the news of Sydney’s death.

“I haven’t heard anything, no,” she said behind those horrible layers of black. “But she’s going to die before she can make it home. I know this because the burqa gives me magic powers. Oh, wait. I know this because you’ve sent her to a place where they shoot Americans on sight.”

“That’s an exaggeration.”

“Oh, then I’m sure she’ll be fine. I’m sure she won’t join Jason on your list of murdered Rothsteins.”

I should have thrown her out right then. Instead, I tried to do something that no one can ever do: explain myself.

“If I had my way, neither of your siblings would ever have left New York. I begged Jason not to enlist.”

“He was too much of a coward to let down his hero. He was a scared little boy trying to impress you, so he died in a useless war.”

Rather than object to this obscenity, I reminded myself that she spoke out of grief, and when you speak out of grief you can speak the most pernicious nonsense and no one can criticize you for it. I calmly listed a few of the abundant forgotten successes of the Iraq War, successes that Jason had contributed to. Naturally, none of this persuaded Daisy.

This was a difficult situation to handle while not wearing a shirt. I had thrown the previous day’s button-down in the hamper, so my lumpy old man’s torso had to remain exposed and jiggling while I made it across the room. In doing so I knocked over the pile of books that I keep closest to my bed: Kanan Makiya’s Republic of Fear, my own We Might as Well Be the Murderers: The Cost of American Inaction in REDACTED, Camus’ The Rebel, Homage to Catalonia, Jersey Rothstein’s The Dominion of Pleasure, Middlemarch, and a rather thick edition, for which I had written the introduction, of the unsent letters of Arthur Koestler. The last three fell onto Daisy’s black-slippered foot, but if her face registered any pain, I of course had no way of knowing.

She tapped The Dominion of Pleasure. “It’s nice to see that you’re rereading my father’s book while you’re killing his children.”

“Sydney is going to come back,” I said, making a prediction in which I had no confidence. Out of concern for her safety, I had talked Sydney into becoming a journalist rather than following her brother into the army, but by going to REDACTED she had made her life more dangerous than any American soldier’s. The day before she left—just a couple months ago—I took her out to dinner at a French restaurant near Columbia to make my case for what must have been the ninth time as to why she shouldn’t go. The REDACTED police, if they found her, would likely call her a spy and arrest her. Less likely but not out of the question: they would murder her. In the best-case scenario, in which she did her job unmolested, she would still have to wear a burqa, and she of all people should know that when you put a black cloth on your body you put a black cloth on your soul. If she wouldn’t agree to stay home, I told her, the very least she could do would be to call me every day—REDACTED has excellent cell phone reception due to what might charitably be called a complicated relationship with China—so that I could stay in close touch with her editors and with U.S. officials to make sure she was staying as safe as possible. In response, she grabbed my cell phone with fingers sticky from the mussels she loved to pluck from their shells and programmed my phone to play Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” whenever she called, a rather cruel way of telling me she would not be calling at all.

“These women need someone to tell their stories,” Sydney said, “and I’m going to be the one to do it.”

Daisy mocked these very women by dressing the way she did.

“Why do you wear that thing?” I asked, knowing I would be answered with derision.

“It’s warm, for one thing. I get chilly easily.”

“Don’t you think that question deserves an answer? Don’t you think you’re insulting the millions of women who are forced to wear what you’re choosing to wear?”

“I hope so. Those bitches get on my nerves. What do you think you’ll wear to Daisy’s funeral? The same suit you wore to Jason’s?”

“Sydney is doing some really heroic reporting,” I said, almost tripping over Volume II of The Gulag Archipelago. “Reporting that I’m certain she will turn into some of the best journalism of our era. And she’s going to come home safe.”

“She won’t, but if she did, she’d come home to find her mother dead.”

“Daisy, would you stop with this?”

“My mother had a stroke this morning. She’s in the hospital now, but the doctors don’t expect her to recover.”

Because I was not wearing a burqa, Daisy could see quite clearly that this news turned my skin even paler than usual. Miranda—Daisy’s, Sydney’s, and Jason’s mother—had been my girlfriend a million years ago, in college in the late sixties.

“I’ve been trying to get in touch with Sydney to tell her,” Daisy said, “but she won’t respond to my texts and emails. Since you’re her gross boyfriend or something, maybe she’ll listen to you and come home before our mother dies.”

“I’m not her boyfriend,” I said. For the record, I want to be very clear that this was true: we never slept together or came anywhere near romantic involvement.

“Then why did I find keys to your apartment at her place?”

“I just wanted someone to have a spare set.”

“There’s nobody else in your life you could give your keys to?”

I thought about an editor I sometimes went drinking with, a man who found it difficult to talk about anything other than the collapse of journalism and the inevitability of his firing.

“No.”

“Then I hope you’re fucking Sydney. Because otherwise, that’s pathetic.”

“The Dominion of Pleasure advocates isolation,” I said. “So I guess I’m your father’s last disciple.”

“Maybe it’s not too late for you and my father to get married,” Daisy said. “I even know what I’ll wear to the wedding.” She did a little fashion runway turn and then she left my apartment.

Sydney’s phone went straight to voicemail, as I expected, so with no chance of sleep I sat on my sofa and tried to read over the galley of my new book, which is about the neuroscience behind altruistic military action, but I couldn’t concentrate. I opened my laptop and tapped an email to Miranda that she wouldn’t be able to read, so I deleted it. I could have gone back to the galley, or I could have gotten dressed and gone to the hospital. There are many things that I could have done that would have at least stood a chance of serving some purpose. Instead, I logged on to the Internet.

The last several weeks had seen the emergence of a new blog dedicated to attacking me. The author, if that’s not too dignified a term, chose the mildly threatening name “Peter Reaper.”

I didn’t think Reaper wanted to kill me. “Reaper” was most likely a reference to Reaper drones, America’s use of which to hunt down terrorists I have strenuously supported, earning me the enmity of those on the left who already hated me because of the Iraq War, the ones who can’t think of anything better to do than to argue that tyrants and medieval murderers should be left in peace. Reaper had been posting the usual lazy calumnies, albeit with an unusually heavy concentration of bile: “Arthur Hunt’s stated concern for human rights merely masks his love for the unfettered use of American power”; “Arthur Hunt’s stated support for Muslim women masks his love for male aggression”; “Arthur Hunt’s stated desire for an ice cream masks his inclination to throw his cone on the ground.” I made this last one up, of course, but the logical form is always identical: anything I say I love, I hate. It’s useful to remember that, of the many thinkers who lived on reversals alone, most of them died of syphilis.

Here was Reaper’s new Twitter post:

Former 1960s student radical Arthur Hunt, now a professional warmonger, just loves saving women. But what has he done to women in the past?

I felt a quick shiver that Reaper had discovered something, but really this was just the basest kind of innuendo, free of any detail that might damn or orient. Very unlikely that Reaper spoke to my sister.

More bothersome than this message was one just below it, this one set to the children’s ditty about kissing in a tree:

Sydney and Arthur/making people free/B-O-M-B-I-N-G

Pretty much the essence of juvenile, and pretty much the essence of tasteless.

Staring at these posts, refreshing the browser as though I were sitting at some horrible insult-dispensing slot machine, I almost dropped my phone when the display dissolved into an incoming call from a restricted number. Of course I hoped to hear Sydney, but it instead was a CIA source.

The first thing I said: “Any news about Sydney Rothstein?”

“We’re not tracking her.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t get this. She’s not your daughter. Are you fucking her?”

These assumptions were starting to grate. “I just want her to be safe.”

“Cheer up. I’ve got some joystick joy. This is good.”

“Big Brother?”

“Okay, not that good. Little Brother.”

Little Brother, though chronologically the elder, was the clearly junior partner of the two siblings who had tyrannized REDACTED for nearly half a century. For years there had been conflicting reports about how much influence Little Brother retained in the government; most of the worst offenses linked to him occurred in the seventies and eighties. According to some reports, Big Brother placed him under house arrest following a failed coup, so it was possible that a drone strike would actually aid Big Brother. Still, the priapic and paranoid Little Brother had for years maintained, and in all likelihood still maintained, several houses that amounted to harems, stocked with presumably disease-free preadolescent girls reserved for him alone. Some reports said that the girls were murdered on their twelfth birthdays; other reports said that keeping track of their birthdays would have required more attention than Little Brother and his staff felt inclined to pay and the girls were simply murdered whenever the boss decided he was finished. (There were also some reports that the harems were merely hysterical rumor, but there are always apologists trying to squeeze ambiguity into the most solid cases.)

True, the CIA didn’t care about the harems, and was concerned only about Little Brother’s possible connections to a group that might possibly be connected to Al Qaeda—at present, America cares only about threats to American flesh, not about threats to the flesh and freedom of all humankind. And it was Big Brother who was still oppressing his people. But for years I have called, in articles and on television, for American intervention to overthrow these two terrible men. Greeting Little Brother’s death with anything less than all-out pleasure would constitute a dereliction of moral duty.

“That is good,” I said.

“It gets better. You’re going to watch.”

“Seriously?”

The CIA kept its drone strike program a technical secret, despite its constant discussion in the media, but “some people who decide these things” thought that an article detailing a strike that took out a genocidal and pedophilic monster would benefit the agency’s image. My source had hinted at all of this, and at the possibility that I would be the one to do the reporting, but I hadn’t believed it would actually happen.

“I can’t wait.”

Hard to imagine a better scoop—it was a life’s scoop. Within a few seconds I had a blue button-down over my undershirt. I was just about to undo an unsatisfactory knot when my phone started playing a song that took me several rings to identify as “Enjoy the Silence.”

“Sydney? Are you all right? Where are you?”

“I’m very confused,” she said.

“Of course you are. Listen, there’s something I have to tell you about your mother.”

“I know. I just heard. I’m going to do my best to get back to New York as soon as I can.”

“Good.”

“I shouldn’t have come here. I shouldn’t have left New York.”

“Just come home,” I said. I probably shouldn’t have added, but couldn’t stop myself from adding: “Listen, I’ve got great news. We’re about to take out…”

“Big Brother?”

“Not quite. Little Brother. But I’m going to be there to write about it.” A boast, okay. And a fairly stupid thing to say over the phone. Still—couldn’t help myself.

“That’s amazing,” she said. “That makes me so happy.”

“You have to get on a plane, Sydney,” I said. We said goodbye and we felt such pride in each other that at that moment I could have died with my life’s mission complete. But death wasn’t kind enough to stop for me right then.

f

Within a few hours I was standing in the back of a room, watching a movie.

What I was actually watching was a monitor, on which was playing, in a manner of speaking, OPERATION TAHOE—so named because we were essentially killing Fredo. The drone’s-eye view: a cluster of small buildings, outside of which milled a handful of women in burqas. Sheila, whose name is not actually Sheila, gripped the joystick and leaned in as the drone barreled on. Dressed in an impressively serious and therefore weirdly arousing suit, Sheila could have pressed the button atop the joystick and turned these three women into curls of dust. The monitor wasn’t very large but I really did feel like I was watching a movie, standing in the back of the theater, in the days when movies were still strange and scary—it was like that famous and probably apocryphal screening wherein audiences ducked from the oncoming train, except that the train was real and we were onboard rather than in the way.

True we weren’t actually onboard, but the basic principles apply, more or less.

“Poor clitless fucks,” Sheila said.

The way that Sheila’s red hair settled on her powerful shoulders—along, of course, with everything else about her—made me suspect that she was the woman who tracked and killed Osama bin Laden, the woman on whom several upcoming Hollywood projects were based. She looked too young to be that woman, but it’s wrong to judge a woman based on her looks. The anonymous source for a half-dozen of my most-linked-to articles, she was a woman of the utmost seriousness, and even more importantly, she was a woman. The murderous misogynist Little Brother would only truly be getting what was coming to him if he got it from a woman, and apparently he would. This would have been even better if Sheila were black, or a Muslim, since it was by and large black Muslim women whom we were saving from Little Brother, but such justice as the world offers is never quite perfect.

We left the women behind and passed over what passed for a highway. For a long time the highway repeated and repeated. Dry, cracked land stretched out as though the world were breaking from the effort of covering itself.

Finally, a truck came into view. A black arm hung out the window, holding a handgun, or maybe a rifle. A rebel, a soldier: who could tell except for Sheila? I steeled myself for her to bomb the truck, and from the way she stroked the joystick with her thumb, she appeared to steel herself for the same thing. But I looked again at the gun and it was just a cigar. Okay, we were looking at civilians. Civilians whom, over the next several weeks, we would liberate. Maybe the driver harbored a dream of sending his daughter to school to become a doctor, a dream that could become a reality after an American intervention. And maybe one day, twenty or twenty-five years from now, his daughter would be my oncologist, and she would save me, or at least bring me some last light comfort.

But what was really happening was more impressive than this fantasy. What was really happening was another kind of fantasy. For most intents and purposes I was actually flying over this truck, actually guiding the driver’s fate.

“Wait a minute.” Sheila now looked serious, and put a finger to her ear. She muttered some technical language I didn’t understand, and then she locked a target on the truck.

“It turns out these guys are terrorists,” she said.

“What tells you that?”

She didn’t turn around, but I could feel her pitying smile. “What tells us that? We can’t tell you that.”

She pushed the button, and within seconds the truck was just so much smoke.

“Bug splat!” she said, and pumped her arm.

Without moving her eyes from the screen, she reached behind her so that I could give her a high five. When I didn’t do so, she let her arm fall and she sniffed in a way I hadn’t heard before.

“Arthur,” she said, still without turning her eyes from the screen. “You are cool, right? We let you in here because you’re cool.”

The word has never sat right in my mouth in any context, but I said it anyway. “I’m cool.”

“Good.” Then she relaxed her shoulders a bit. At no point did she stop looking at the screen.

My anger at her rebuke subsided when I reminded myself that I was not the one putting my life on the line. Granted, neither was she, but she probably had put her life on the line at one point. She refused to say anything about whether she had gone to Afghanistan or Iraq or anywhere else, maybe due to harrowing experiences.

An honor, I needed to remind myself, to be allowed into this room at all. I had had actual dreams about witnessing the end of Big Brother, and for something this close to one’s dreams to come true is the most that any adult can ask for.

Granted, it was also humiliating.

There is always something humiliating in being trusted—a suggestion that you’re too dull to spring any surprises. I had been selected only because I could be trusted to write an article that would make the CIA look like heroes. There would be nothing unexpected, or at least nothing unwelcome, in an article by Arthur Hunt. Easy to imagine Reaper’s response: “Arthur Hunt Gives Assassination Two Thumbs Up.”

But I would write a glowing article for a reason. My government was about to slay a monster, and praising heroes who slay monsters is a writer’s most ancient task.

Maybe witnessing the operation had started my blood, but as the drone glided above more parched farmland I had difficulty watching Sheila without imagining having sex with her. There was something incredibly erotic about her focus and intensity and competence and the immense history that all these things held inside her, about what might be called her ten-thousand-hourness. Not only were her deceptively delicate hands and clear brown eyes wholly given over to the task of guiding the joystick; so was her alert rabbit’s nose, and so, somehow, were her modest but substantive breasts. The very model of the modern moral warrior, every inch of her. I imagined lifting her up on to her control panel, spreading her legs, and pushing her clit into the button before impaling her on the joystick, all while I readied my sleepy dick.

As it turned out, thinking this way had given me an actual erection, of the inconvenient rather than labored-for kind I thought had left me behind years ago. I held my notebook in front of my crotch and worried that she would notice, but fortunately she kept her eyes on the first cement hints of the city.

The aerial view of the city went straight to my heart. When my sister was little, she and I had spent countless hours looking at picture-book drawings of the sprawling palace at the city’s center. (I’m sure that some people would call me racist for romanticizing this country, but I do not apologize for loving REDACTED. Nor will I ever apologize for saying and writing the word, even though the word is always snatched away between my hard drive and publication. If what I am writing serves no other purpose, at least I know it belongs to me alone and will never be smeared with that horrible word “Redacted.” I savor the bend and curve of the syllables of the country I am fighting for, and I shout them out loud as I type: REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED.2)

That palace, I suppose I should note, existed only in my sister’s picture books. The buildings that actually populated the city back when the picture books were written have long since been destroyed and replaced. The buildings now on display belonged in every sense to Big Brother. Like many dictators, a failed artist, Big Brother briefly studied architecture at Harvard before flunking out and trying his hand at torture, rape, and the assiduous abasement of language. Like a stockbroker coloring canvasses on the weekends, Little Brother designed all the buildings in the capital, although for the metaphor to be perfect, that stockbroker would have to level the Louvre to make way for his own museum.

For some reason Little Brother had a fondness for cylinders, and thus many of the buildings looked like someone had poured concrete onto a top hat. One of these buildings, a solitary structure separated from the city by an enormous empty lot, had been identified as Little Brother’s residence. Near the roof was a balcony.

And there he was, standing at the window and gazing out at the balcony. Grainy and partially obstructed by a window and orange trees and apple trees offering more food than most REDACTED citizens ate in a month, but there he was, with that pitted face I had seen in so many magazines that he outlived. Little Brother, about to join Life magazine in the land of the dead.

We waited for what seemed like forty-five minutes—probably closer to forty-five seconds—for confirmation that the man we were looking at was in fact the man who had once chopped off the hands of the infant daughter of a rival. For a moment I thought of my own older brother, the cruel and tyrannical Paul, and I wondered where Paul would be right now had he survived his twenties. Here in the arena, even if only as an observer? No. He would be on a sofa somewhere, a retired high school gym teacher yelling at a screen full of people he would never meet.

When authorization finally came, Sheila looked up at me with a smile that was flirtatious or perhaps filial, but in either case full of affection. “Would you like to press it?” she asked.

Would I like to press it? Pressing it was a line I had never crossed and had never expected to cross. My role was that of the dog who sniffs out injustice, not of the hunter who actually pulls the trigger.

“I shouldn’t.”

She ran her finger down the joystick. “I’ll press it at the same time. It’s okay. Think of all the things this guy has done.”

This guy routinely ordered the hanging of women who had committed the crime of being raped. This guy had ordered the torture and murder of the relatives of a man who had been overheard in a bar saying, “I know a great joke about Little Brother, but I’m not going to tell it since he would torture and murder all my relatives.” This guy terrorized, in ways too embedded in daily life to reckon, every citizen of the city on which he was gazing. Not only gazing, but smiling. This man was standing at his window and grinning.

No, not grinning. Picking at his teeth. An elderly murderer contentedly grooming himself.

I put my notebook down, wrapped my fingers around the joystick, and put my thumb on the button. The plastic felt cold and good in my hand. Sheila put two fingers on top of my thumbnail.

To obliterate any transgressor with a bolt from the sky—the dream of this power is so fundamental to our species that we invented gods to wield it. The dream of this power united all mankind, and now it—the power, not the dream—was actually in my hands.

Sheila nodded and we pressed the button.

To repurpose a line from John Updike about a Ted Williams home run, the missile was in the books while it was still in the sky. In a moment it was in Little Brother’s living room. Nothing but shards of glass and crumbling cement and thick smoke, and I worried that he must have escaped somehow. Not until a human-shaped fiery figure writhed around in cosmically merited agony did I know that I had, in fact, gotten him.

This time I was the one who reached for a high five. In form the corpse closely resembled those of the many brave political protesters who have set themselves on fire to protest this evil regime and many others, but the resemblance ended with form. Here was the man, or one of the men, who had made all that burning necessary in the first place.

Then the balcony started to creak, and it broke apart and fell. We were silent for a moment and then the camera zoomed down to the street below. We saw rubble and black cloth and a few smoldering flames.

“We don’t know where the black cloth is from,” I said. But a little more zooming revealed a cinder block smashed into what was clearly a severed head encased in a burqa’s face-net.

“Shit,” Sheila said.

I had killed a woman.

“I thought there were no civilians in the area!” I said.

She shrugged. “One civilian for this operation is actually pretty good. At least she’s the last civilian Little Brother will ever kill.”

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.

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 11th, 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.

As Emily got a little older she started telling Paul that he was mean and that she didn’t like him, and every time she did so he looked stricken. I took to encouraging her, though she didn’t need much encouragement. Every time she learned a bad word, she used it against him. Once, Paul came home with a bag full of Emily’s favorite candy bars. He said, “Ho Ho Ho, Merry Christmas,” even though it was nowhere near Christmas. She jumped up and down as she unwrapped a candy bar, which she then very theatrically dropped, saying, “I don’t want candy from a jerk,” as she stomped it into the carpet. Then she ran into her room, and instead of chasing her, Paul grabbed me by the back of the neck and pushed me into the sofa.

“Ha ha ha, she doesn’t like you.” I did my best to taunt him while he held me down long enough to grab an apple from the bowl on the glass coffee table, eat the apple, and shove the core into my mouth. Before he let me go, he beat me hard in the back and the chest.

Eventually Emily started mocking Paul by taking a piece of fruit out of the fruit bowl, taking a bite of it, and then dropping it. Sometimes she pretended an apple was too hot to hold; other times she pretended that she was incompetently juggling one pear. Whenever she did this, I was sure to receive a beating later in the day, but I never told her about these particular beatings, partially because I didn’t want her to feel guilty but mostly because I didn’t want her to stop making fun of Paul.

My father, having decided that Paul’s treatment was my just punishment for being who I was, mostly ignored us whenever he would pass. I learned to imitate the thud and sweep of his crutches the way other boys imitate fart noises. Emily did not like it when I kicked fruit into our father’s path, and though she would have sooner died than tell on me, she did try on a number of occasions to kick the fruit in a different direction so that it wound up becoming like a soccer game. When our father did get knocked down, he would never let us help him up.

Noble but absurd, absurd but noble, mostly absurd, mostly noble; my thoughts on my father and his crutches have shifted probably tens of thousands of times over sixty years. My mother I did not see much of—she was usually in her room drinking or reading the romance novels that she consumed at the rate of one or sometimes two per day, thus leaving our apartment lined with several thousand drugstore-grade romance novels that shared space with the Latin copies of Virgil and Tacitus that my father had ostensibly read in prep school.

Emily spent a lot of time following me around, asking me what I thought about whatever she happened to be thinking about, gazing at me with the extremely large blue eyes that made her look like a bug (“Ladybug” was her hated childhood nickname, used by everyone in the family except for me). I helped her dance, after a fashion. We watched movies together; we shared a fondness for the 1930s and 1940s comedies, musicals, and gangster films that played on the Late Show and the Late Late Show. When there was a movie playing at three in the morning that we both wanted to see, we would set the alarm and watch Humphrey Bogart or Fred Astaire, and then go back to bed just as Paul was waking up. I was always amazed by Emily’s intelligence and her lightness of heart. It was impossible to see her in the glow of the television and not think that one day she was going to be a movie star, or a famous writer, or something else wondrous.

Actually, Emily was talking about becoming a writer when Paul almost went too far. Paul had sat down to watch television with us, and Emily said that when she grew up she was going to write a book called “Stupid Paul.” For whatever reason, this silly child’s insult set Paul off, and he grabbed her by the shoulder and raised his hand to hit her. I leaped in between them and grabbed Paul’s fist. I told her that if he ever hit her, I would kill him. To my surprise he backed off and Emily hugged me and thanked me, and I felt immensely proud of myself for having scared him off, though in fact I think that he scared himself off.

After that, Paul started leaving us alone. I want to say that this was the result of my having stood up to him, but it’s just as likely that he left us alone because he started having girls over, and he seemed to understand that girls wanted to see him treat his two younger siblings well. Emily would sometimes tell these girls that Paul was “mean”—she told one, using a word that was truly shocking coming from a little girl in the late nineteen-fifties, that he was “an asshole”—but the girls tended to think that Paul was a saintly older brother beset with a bratty little sister, and they rewarded him for this saintliness in the only way that saints want to be rewarded: with copious sex. Given the mores of the time the sex was probably mostly limited to handjobs, but there was no telling what those girls were sighing about behind Paul’s locked door. If it had occasionally occurred to me previously that I wanted to be Paul—as, after all, it probably had—the thought was there constantly now. If Paul was what girls wanted, then I wanted to be Paul.

Of course I also hated myself for wanting to be like him.

At Yale, he was very much a baseball star; in addition to being an astonishing hitter, he had become an astonishing outfielder, and he had plucked so many would-be-homerun balls out of their natural destiny that he had acquired the nickname of “The Interventionist.” He looked destined for a brilliant career in the major leagues.

On my thirteenth birthday, he came to my room and told me, with a broad just-us-gentlemen smile, that he was sorry for treating me as he had, and that he hoped we could be friends. I told him that I would hate him until one of us died. This did not result in the beating I had steeled myself for; he just continued to smile, said he hoped I would change my mind, and left my room.

I had never really thought of my room as my room until I asked Paul to leave it. Since he had left for college I had mostly felt indignant that I had to stay in my smaller room while he kept the bigger one, even though he was in New Haven most of the time. But now I thought: this is my room. My next thought was that I should shut my door to Emily. I was starting to get a little irritated by my little sister. She was only nine and was not going to understand The Stranger, and though I didn’t really understand it either, I longed to be left alone long enough to try. She was constantly coming in to tell me about something that had happened with her friends, or some new plotline she had made up for her dolls. It might be fair to say that I was outgrowing her.

Then Paul took a turn. In the spring of his senior year at Yale, he announced that he was not going to pursue the career in baseball that a few teams were trying to tempt him toward, and that he was instead going to become a soldier. My father was not quite delighted—I think he had gotten used to the idea of cheering as his son stopped a home run—but nothing could shake my father’s faith that a soldier was a fine thing for a young man to be. I on the other hand couldn’t have been happier; I was going to be claiming the big bedroom while my brother shared a bunk bed.

The first truly disturbing incident came in April. He had gotten into a fight with another boy at a bar, and apparently had somehow broken the kid’s left arm. The victim’s family wanted Paul expelled without a diploma, and since they were more or less exactly as wealthy as we were, my father was truly worried for a while, and his crutches thudded with less alacrity. But he used whatever magic he possessed to turn Paul into a Yale graduate.

Expected to enlist shortly after graduation, Paul decided instead to take the summer off. This seemed completely reasonable, and for the first summer in several he came to Southampton with us. (Emily and I would spend summers in Southampton while my father stayed in Manhattan. Save for the summer before my sophomore year in college, which I spent in Italy, this continued every summer until the summer eight years later that I’ll get to sooner than I’d like.) I worried that he would quickly revert to attempting to beat me, and I had even started going to the gym that spring to be able to fight, but I was still a small fourteen, so I knew I wouldn’t have much chance. To my surprise, he more or less completely left me alone, instead spending most of his time sitting on the beach outside our house. Once, he grabbed me by the back of the neck and I thought, Here we go, but he just turned me around and draped me in his muscular arm and, his face deformed by weeping, he said: “Why can’t I feel good, Artie? Huh?” This bothered me so much that I ran away as though I were four rather than fourteen. He didn’t chase me, and when I got home, he was gone. He didn’t come home that night, and then he didn’t come home the next night, and my mother started getting worried.

“He probably went somewhere to be an asshole,” was Emily’s guess. My mother scolded her and then tucked herself back into a romance novel.

Paul returned the next afternoon without any explanation and without seeming to have showered or shaved or slept in the interim, but he did all three, and then things were fine for another couple of weeks.

And then the attack finally came. Emily and I had gotten into a fight, because she wanted me to walk her to the movie theater and I told her I just wanted to read; Emily and I essentially had no one else to talk to in Southampton, so the atmosphere could become stifling and the air could get a little thick with Little Girl. But any time Emily was mad at me, I felt terrible and felt like I should apologize. The upshot was that I had difficulty concentrating on what I was reading. Paul had gone out, and returned with a bag of apples (we had stopped keeping fruit around after he discontinued his regimen). As soon as I saw the bag in his hand I started to run. He dropped the bag of apples, letting them roll down the vast tiles. He grabbed me before I could open the glass door, but I could see Emily walking on the beach as he dragged me back to the sofa and pushed me down, face-first. With one hand, he bent my arm and I couldn’t escape. With his free hand he picked an apple up off the floor and ate it noisily, though I couldn’t see it, and in fact couldn’t see anything because he was pushing my nose into the sofa. Finally he turned me around and shoved the apple core down my throat, so far that I felt certain I was going to vomit, and I started to wonder whether he was actually going to kill me. He punched me three times in the gut, and I was absolutely certain that I was going to vomit, but somehow I did not. Finally he took the apple core out of my mouth and I said “Paul is King!” before he had even asked me to, though I was crying too hard and was too close to vomiting to say it distinctly.

He left me alone and I lay on the Persian rug sobbing, hating myself. I was not thinking much of anything until I heard Emily screaming.

I ran across the broad white-tiled living room, and finally out the door. All I could see were two blond creatures wrestling in the blond sand, but immediately I knew that I had to save Emily.

She was facedown in the sand and he was straddling her back; with one hand he was pushing her head down into the sand and with the other he was pummeling her back. They were at the tidemark, and as I ran toward them the ocean water washed up to Emily’s nose and receded. Fear and anger battled in my heart and left me numb and strong. I leapt onto Paul’s back and bit into his ear and there was soft-hard flesh between my teeth. He screamed, and with a push I knocked us both off of Emily. He picked up a rock and brought it down quickly and heavily on my knee. The pain was excruciating, though not as excruciating as the pain that came as he brought down the rock several more times, cracking and bloodying my leg. Then he raised the rock above my head, and if I were to live for a thousand years I doubt I would forget watching his eyes as he pondered the question of whether to kill me. He must have decided in my favor, because he finally dropped the rock and continued down the beach. Emily, her forehead bloody, ran into the house to call for help and fetch some bandages. I was not going to take my eyes off Paul in case he doubled back, but he just kept walking under the clouds like a young man off to meet a great destiny.

I woke up in a hospital bed to see my mother sitting beside me, streaks of gray in the hair tangled against her cheek.

“I’m sorry I let the roughhousing get a little out of hand,” she said. When I laughed out loud, she lowered her eyes. She rubbed my knee. This hurt, so she rubbed the underside of my foot. I told her that that hurt, too, though it did not, and then she started crying a deep, heaving cry. “I’m proud of you for standing up for your sister,” she said. Crying was a fairly cheap ploy, one she ferried out whenever the miserableness of her parenting became too obvious to ignore, but as it always did it made me feel bad, so I told her it was okay. She said no, it’s not, and I said, yes, it is, and she said no, it’s not, and I said, yes, it is, and this continued until we let the subject drop. Then she told me that Paul would be spending the rest of the summer in Manhattan, while we would stay in Southampton.

Over the next weeks, Emily took it upon herself to nurse me back to health. She was ten years old, but already a surprisingly accomplished baker, and she made delicious oatmeal raisin cookies that she would bring me several times each day, along with tea. She asked me to read to her from The Princess of REDACTED. Just for old times’ sake. I didn’t want to, but saying no seemed silly, so I had no choice but to say yes.

She asked me if I had heard about bombings against the British in REDACTED. I had, and I had also heard horrible stories about the REDACTED army castrating rebels, but I didn’t think that either was appropriate to mention to her.

One day I heard a splashing noise, followed by a little yelp, and I called down to her to ask whether anything was wrong. She quickly called out, “No,” in a very cheery voice. When she came upstairs, I saw that her long, thin ten-year-old’s fingers were red, and I asked whether she had spilled boiling water. She said no, and I had to ask several more times before she admitted that yes, she had burned her fingers. When I asked why she had lied, she said that she didn’t want me to feel guilty. She was such a sweet girl, and somehow these memories are mostly untainted; the bright, adoring, devoted, grateful ten-year-old does not occupy the same place in my mind as does the obviously brilliant, frankly sexual girl of a few years later. No Humbert, I.

Nonetheless I was fourteen that summer with a broken leg and two functioning arms, so I wanted my sister as far away as possible from my essentially unavoidably constant masturbation, masturbation that was particularly disturbing since the fantasies I was now finding most effective occasionally involved stopping my brother as he was about to rape one of his girlfriends, a brunette named Suzy or something like Suzy, who would repay my heroism willingly. Maybe once or twice the image of Emily bloodied on the beach popped in, but I stopped it, and I told Emily that I did not want her to bring me tea anymore. Mother or the maid could bring me my meals. This made her cry harder than I had ever seen her cry; she cried so much that she resembled a crumpled tissue.

On the third day of my enforced isolation, Emily opened the door holding a tray of tea. She told me not to be mad, and then she told me that she had a surprise. She had a bouncy little walk when she was a child, and she bounced out of the room. When she returned she grinned, and then whipped her ponytail from one edge of the grin to the other. In one hand she held a naked female doll with its hair cut off. Her other hand she held behind her back.

“It’s Paul!” she shouted. “He thinks he’s a big man but he’s really just a stupid girl. And the Prince and Princess sentence him to death. Off with his head!” From behind her back she produced a pair of scissors and cut at the plastic neck, though she wasn’t strong enough to do more than squeeze the plastic together. I told her to stop, fearful of what would happen if my mother found her destroying Paul in effigy, but she wouldn’t stop. So I grabbed the doll from her and ripped the head off myself.

“Paul is fallen!” she shouted. “Paul is fallen!” She ran out onto the landing and called out: “Paul is fallen! Paul is fallen!” That is when I heard my mother’s soft voice carrying upstairs.

“How did you know?”

Apparently, my mother had just received a phone call saying that Paul had checked in to the Chappine and hanged himself.

I told Emily over and over again that the timing had just been a strange coincidence and that she was absolutely not responsible in any conceivable way. Each time, she told me: “I know, Arthur.” To my considerable surprise, she did not display any sign whatsoever of actually feeling guilty, and as if to underscore the point, she brought a bright, polished apple to the funeral, hiding it in a pocket of her black dress. During a lull in the service she led me to the wooded area beyond the cemetery, took the apple out of her pocket, took a bite, and held it up to me, ostensibly so that I could eat it while I balanced on my crutches, but really so that she could deprive me of a choice. She just shoved it into my mouth and I took a bite. Then she opened her hand and let the apple fall on top of some twigs and some dirt.

“Goodbye, Johnny Appledead!” she said, looking up at me for approval.

There are times when I regret what I said immediately afterward more than I regret anything else I have ever done. “Our brother just died,” I said, still chewing the apple. “You’re a horrible person.”

These words etched a great deal in her tiny face: confusion, betrayal, shame. She hadn’t started crying yet when she turned and ran away, her well-combed blond hair bouncing against her black dress, but I heard her sobbing before I had hobbled all the way back to the funeral site. My mother and some of my parents’ friends had their hands all over Emily’s head, their own faces breaking at the thought of this little girl who had lost her champion and protector, and under such terrible circumstances. My father propped himself up a bit off to the side. A few distant cousins approached with the coffin, and my father looked longingly at it, as though, having failed to keep his son alive, he should at least be able to hold his coffin aloft. Pallbearers bearing Paul suddenly struck me as funny, and I wished I had not antagonized Emily and could whisper about it with her. When Paul’s coffin had been laid in the ground, my mother pushed Emily toward the grave, so that she could throw some dirt on it, but Emily shook her head and shouted:“No! No!”

“Poor thing,” my mother said. “She misses her brother.”

“No, I don’t,” Emily said, but I’m fairly certain that all the attendees mentally completed the sentence to say: “I don’t want to pour any dirt.”

My father, on the other hand, did want to pour some dirt, and he shrugged off the kind offers of graying men in expensive suits. He wanted to pour the dirt himself. One colleague tried again after being rebuffed and my father shoved his crutch at him. Then he dropped this crutch and leaned on the other one while he swung down, ape-like, to scoop up some dirt and hop to the edge of the grave to throw the dirt in. He did this successfully, but everyone present was so afraid that he was going to fall in that it was impossible to feel moved by the sight, mostly it just looked ridiculous. My father must have agreed because he suddenly started to guffaw with an abandon I had never heard before.

“On crutches or underground,” he said, looking at me and putting on a fake British accent. “Tally ho, Huntington men, tally ho!”

f

For the next several years Paul was never very far from my thoughts, even apart from Emily’s birthday weekends at the Chappine, which started soon thereafter. The fact was that I missed Paul. The cliché about missing your enemies turned out to be true in my case, and not only that: I found that I truly respected him in ways that I hadn’t previously understood. You have to understand that all of this is quite difficult for me, insofar as I am trying sort out exactly what it is that has caused me so much pain in my life and that caused me to cause so much pain in others. I suppose that on some level I had come to love my tormentor, just as oppressed populations come to love their dictators, a phenomenon I examine at length in my book That Which Is Caesar’s.

When I was fifteen I had a swift and comprehensive growth spurt; by the time I left for college I was over six feet. Everybody started telling me that I looked like Paul. It was easy to see in the mirror. I was Paul’s height, and shared the sharp cut of Paul’s chin, the face that looked like a V for victory, and a small nose that turned very slightly up at the end. My mother saw it, our doorman saw it, even Mac Bundy3 saw it when he came for drinks.

One Sunday afternoon while I was sitting at the kitchen table doing some math homework, I heard my father thumping by, and as soon as I looked up he threw a baseball in my direction. When I instinctively cowered and the baseball shattered the mirror behind me, he told me that Paul had had excellent reflexes and that Paul had never failed to catch a ball thrown at him. “But at least you’re strong enough to pick up broken glass.” Then he hobbled away. I bent down to pick up the shards and Emily came running to help me.

“Don’t touch the glass. It’s dangerous,” I said. But she couldn’t be dissuaded, and with her still small hands she picked up the shards of glass and made funny faces into them. She stuck out her tongue and twisted her mouth. She held her eyelid open with her thumb and held a shard up close, making her look even more bug-eyed than normal, and even though I was nervous I laughed. Then she held the shard up to my strong jaw.

“You don’t look anything like Paul,” she said. “They’re just trying to keep him alive. You don’t look anything like Paul.” When she said this the second time her voice cracked just as the mirror had, and it certainly wasn’t effective to show me the mirror when I could see beyond it to a picture of Paul in a prep-school uniform that matched my own.

Over the next several years, Emily grew more and more precocious, cutting our initial age difference, intellectually speaking, from an original four and a half to three, and then to two, and then really to nothing at all. She read all the books that I read and she looked to me for my opinion, which typically became her own, though her reasoning was usually a bit clearer. It was often intoxicating, I have to admit, to hear her defy our mother and father but almost always defer to me.

Toward the end of high school I became friends with a small dark-haired kid two years below me named James Hickham. We started spending a fair amount of time together, mostly because he was the only kid I knew who liked foreign movies, and occasionally I wanted to see Truffaut with someone who wasn’t my sister. I didn’t like to admit it, but Hickham intimidated me; he was younger than I was but he had already almost certainly read more books. He had already read both of Tolstoy’s big books—or claimed to, but I think he was probably sincere. When we met I was ahead on Dostoevsky, having read Crime and Punishment and about half of Brothers Karamazov, but by the winter of his sophomore year, he had read both of those plus The Possessed. One of the more backward kids at school called him a “Jew,” which in addition to being racist did not really make a great deal of sense, given that his name was James Hickham, though Hickham explained to me later that all of his grandparents were Jews who had changed their names. I could see it a little bit—his features were rather Mediterranean. He looked a lot like a younger Jean-Paul Belmondo, albeit one whose nose had been smashed.

As much as James liked to read, it was not particularly interesting to talk to him about books, because he was obsessed by two grand theories, one dull, the other repugnant. The dull one had it that men do everything that men do, from waging war to reading books, for one purpose only: to get laid. This was more or less what everyone thought already, but for some reason James considered it his solemn duty to proclaim this belief to anyone who would listen and to many who wouldn’t. If he couldn’t get a listener to sit still for the boring belief, he would move on to the repugnant one (itself no less boring or clichéd): all women secretly long to be raped. He would use this theory to spin long, usually boring interpretations of classic texts (Hamlet was about Hamlet’s conflict over whether to fulfill Ophelia’s desire for him to rape her). I knew it was a terrible idea to talk to Emily about this, but Emily was my primary confidant at the time, and I couldn’t help but tell her about this horrible, frankly somewhat evil theory. I was absolutely horrified when she said that she thought it was interesting. She was barely fourteen at the time and I suppose that I still thought of her as for the most part asexual, and the fact that she would find something like this intriguing made me worry. One time, Hickham came back to the apartment with me and he started chatting with Emily. He started in on Hamlet and Ophelia and then said something about how Penelope had to wait twenty years to be raped by Odysseus, and he even touched Emily’s arm at one point and that was the end of my hanging out with Hickham.

I wound up going to Yale, amusingly enough, out of an attempt to defy my father. Yale by this time was run by Kingman Brewster. Brewster had been a good friend of my father’s when they were undergraduates at Yale together, but my father had never truly forgiven him for opposing American entry into the Second World War. My father had wanted me to go to Harvard or Princeton. So Yale was, yes, my teenage rebellion.

I should say here that something was happening to me in the middle of the sixties. My awakening did not exactly track that of the rest of the country. I had been used to thinking that there was something wrong with the way that society was structured, and specifically with my privilege within that society, but somehow, oddly, I did not like to learn that other people seemed to be beginning to agree with me.

This is how I came to have a series of conversations with George Bush. Leftist magazines and blogs like to caricature me as “a George W. Bush crony since their days at Yale,” but this is not accurate. He was a year ahead of me at school, that’s true, but I hardly knew him. Yes, both his father and my father were Skull and Bonesmen, but so was Yale’s chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, and it was his hatred of Coffin that led Bush to befriend me in the first place.

Because of my family, Coffin recognized me on sight, so we happened to strike up a brief conversation one day when we passed each other on campus. As soon as Coffin walked away, I felt a tug at my collar that reminded me of Paul.

“Arthur Huntington, right?” asked a dark-haired kid. We had met in a large group a few months earlier, and I was surprised that he remembered my name; it wasn’t until decades later that I learned that he possessed an unsettlingly acute gift for remembering names. Once I had checked that my tie was unmolested—whenever I’m invited to speak at my alma mater, I can count on a few laughs by recalling that in my day, Yale men wore ties, and were called “Yale men”—I responded that yes, I was and always would be Arthur Huntington. (Amazingly, he recalled this line when I was invited to dinner at the White House, and he ribbed me about it.)

“Why were you talking to Coffin?” he asked, and didn’t give me a chance to respond before he launched into a story that, in later years, he loved to recount to reporters (Coffin wrote Bush a note saying he had no recollection of the incident; Bush responded that he was quite certain it had occurred). Bush’s father had just lost the race for Texas Senate, and he sought out Coffin for consolation. Coffin said: “I know your father. Frankly, he lost to a better man.” This crystallized for Bush what he hated most about the wealthy: lack of loyalty. Everyone else is loyal to the small group of his or her birth; why do the wealthy think they have the right to be different?

This basically tribal approach to the world was much on my mind in the run-up to the Iraq War, an endeavor as far from tribal as any in recorded history. The major purpose of that war was to liberate people who were nothing like us. (If you go back and read what I and other war supporters wrote about the war in 2002 and 2003, and compare that to what the so-called “anti-war activists” wrote, I think you’ll find that they and not we were the racists. I make this point at greater length in a post I wrote in 2004 for a symposium Slate hosted in which “liberal hawks” were supposed to beat our heads in anguish over how wrong we were about the war.)

At Yale, I always told Bush I agreed with him about class loyalty and so forth, and I told myself that by doing so I was making fun of him. What I really thought is difficult for me to gauge. Almost everyone at school had been paying a great deal of attention to Coffin, and I was no exception. There he was, the obvious model for how someone from my background could be a positive force in the world. The fact that Bush hated him only made him more attractive to me, or should have—it did not take any particular insight to discover that Bush was smarmy. I was under no illusion that Bush was anything other than a belligerent buffoon. I was also under no illusion that Bush and Paul would have been best friends; Paul would probably have been contemptuous of Bush’s lack of intellect, but on the issues of our class privilege they would have been in lockstep agreement. Which means that, given my desire to disagree with Paul whenever the opportunity presented itself, I should have told Bush to go to hell.

Instead, I found myself agreeing with our future president more than I was comfortable with. Through my sophomore year, as the sixties were just starting to become The Sixties, I found myself worrying about what would happen to Emily if there were ever any kind of revolutionary conflagration. If there were ever some kind of Jacobin-style violent purge of the rich, she could be in serious trouble. I’m not proud of this, but I spent much of the summer of 1967 daydreaming about what I would do if a bunch of hippies attempted to rape or kill Emily. Basically I imagined fighting them by hand, or devising elaborate ruses that allowed Emily to escape. Sometimes these ruses involved me sacrificing myself; other times I survived and became a hero. Very silly stuff. As I say, I’m not proud of it.

f

One day in the fall of 1967—my junior year at Yale—I decided to come home one weekend unannounced. Actually, I can figure out the precise date—October 7th, 1967, a Saturday. It was a few days before Emily’s birthday, and my intention had been to surprise her and thereby get out of going to the Chappine on her actual birthday. My father would not like it and would do everything he could to force me to go, but I figured that I could claim a test or something. The world was getting more relaxed, and so could my father.

Though I don’t think I was ever a racist—certainly not in the way my grandfather was—my understanding of and ability to relate to black people did take some time to percolate. Enough discomfort with racism had gotten through to me now that I always dreaded meeting Fred, our black doorman. Sometimes I tried striking up a conversation with him, but I never knew what to say. The previous summer, I had told him I sympathized with the race riots in Detroit and that I thought that black people might be justified if they rose up in New York or New Haven. Of course I neglected to mention that at the same time I was imagining saving Emily from these same riots. Throughout this conversation he kept opening the doors for people who were just passing by, and I could tell that he thought I was trying to trap him or something. I wound up saying something embarrassing about how much I respected him and then I just went upstairs. The few times I had come home since, I tried to do so during hours when I knew he wouldn’t be working. He would be working today, so I spent most of the walk up Park Avenue trying to think of what I would say.

As it turned out I needn’t have bothered because when Fred saw me he looked confused, and I knew something was wrong.

“Your friend James went upstairs half an hour ago. He said he was here to see you.”

I instructed myself not to panic; maybe Hickham had dropped by to see me, on the off-chance that I might be home. But that was extremely unlikely, since I was at Yale and came home only rarely. No, by the time I was in the elevator, I was convinced that Hickham was raping my sister.

When I arrived at the apartment upstairs I heard Emily saying, “No, no,” fairly insistently. I opened the door to find them both on the white sofa. They both sat up having seen me, but Hickham was slow to disentangle his hand from Emily’s blue blouse. By the time his hand was free I was at the sofa and in the middle of a punch. Nearly half a century later I can still hear the pop-crack of the breaking of his nose, and the thud he made when he fell onto the Persian rug, which still bore its stains of candy bar and apple. Despite my bad knee, and despite Emily’s pleas that I stop, I jumped over the couch, knelt by Hickham, and grabbed him by the throat. I’m doing my best to remember whether I squeezed; I’m fairly certain that I did not.

“You think women want to be raped? You think violence is sexy?” He shook his head no, and I punched him in the stomach.

“Arthur!” Emily said, now grabbing my arms and trying to restrain me. “Arthur, leave him alone.”

It did not take me all that long to let him go.

Emily crouched down next to James and held both of his shoulders. She looked at him and then she looked at me. The two looks were very different, and both were very familiar to me. When he had taken a moment to recover, he lunged for me with his right fist, but Emily restrained and then soothed him.

“It’s all right, James,” she said. “It’s all right.”

“I’ll call the police,” I said. “He needs to be locked up.”

“I think you should leave, Arthur. I need to get some ice for James, but I’m not going to do that until you leave because I’m not going to leave you alone with him.” The looks were looks she had been giving since she was a child, but they had always been directed at Paul or my mother. The calm, articulate strength was new, if unsurprising.

“He was trying to rape you.”

“No, I wasn’t, you idiot,” James said, holding his bleeding nose.

“He wasn’t.” Emily sat up straight. Her shirt was still unbuttoned and her bra cup, though it covered her nipple and areola, was twisted. She looked, unquestionably, like a sexually competent woman. But looks can be deceiving, and Hickham had once said that he had no desire to have sex with a woman whom he wasn’t raping.

I looked at her, trying to be sympathetic and caring.

“Emily,” I said. “We told each other that we would never deny the truth. Right? And the truth is that he was trying to rape you.”

“The truth is that he’s my boyfriend.”

“He’s your boyfriend? But he doesn’t respect women.”

“Arthur. We’ve been going together for three months and this is the first time he’s tried to touch my breasts. He’s a gentleman. You, on the other hand, are just like Paul.”

I was shocked that she would actually say this out loud. I stood up, finding that my knee hurt very badly.

“You’d probably like it if I killed myself like Paul.”

This was an immensely petulant, manipulative, and self-pitying thing to say. It—and I—deserved her contempt. What it and I got was something else.

Her face crumpled into a helpless sobbing that made her look five years old again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Arthur, I’m so sorry. I never should have said that. You’re nothing like Paul.”

“I wouldn’t mind it if you killed yourself,” Hickham said.

“James!” she said, and slapped him across his cheek.

“Ow!”

Shame started to set in, and I said that I should probably go.

“You should stay. James should go.”

But I was already on my way out.

f

The incident left me so unhappy that I took a cab back to Grand Central and got on the next train to New Haven. I realized fully that I had overreacted, and that Hickham had unquestionably been the victim of the afternoon. If anything, I was more clearly guilty of assault than Paul had ever been, at least until that day on the beach. When I got back to my dorm I knew I should call Emily and apologize, but I was embarrassed about my behavior. I hardly got any sleep that night, because I kept thinking about what I had seen and what I had done. I was going to call Emily the next morning, but then I didn’t, and a couple more days went by and I still didn’t call her. I found it difficult to concentrate on schoolwork, so mostly I did a lot of wandering around campus, thinking of everything and nothing. She called several times and left messages with the guys who lived on my hall, prompting them to tease me a bit. Sounds like she’s got it bad for you, that sort of thing. Finally I called her back, and the first thing she told me was that she had broken up with James Hickham.

“Get back together with him,” I said. “I had no right to…interrupt you.”

“No. You were right all along about James. Only an unredeemable prick would tell someone to kill himself. Of course I should have known he was a prick, since he talks all the time about how women want to be raped. Just like you said. I’m so stupid.”

“You’re not stupid. You’re the furthest thing from stupid.”

“What I said was stupid. Nobody has ever said anything stupider than that thing I said. Promise you forgive me?”

“Of course. And I’m sor…”

“Listen, I’m going to tell Father that we’re not going to the Chappine this year. He’ll just have to cancel the reservation.”

“Don’t worry about it, Emily.”

“We’ll get out of the Chappine. I promise. So what are your plans for the week?”

“Lady Bird Johnson is giving a talk today, so I was thinking about going to a protest rally against her.”

“That reminds me. I just read this amazing book called The Dominion of Pleasure, by Jersey Rothstein. He says that politics is a waste of time. Politics are? Politics is? Anyway, a waste of time. He says you should focus only on your own sexual gratification.”

“Why are you reading something like that?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean something about…”

“You mean something about sex? I’m going to be sixteen tomorrow.”

“Sixteen is young.”

“Too young to think about sex? That’s a boring rule, and boring rules aren’t for us,” she said. Already she was back to her provocative self.

This reminded me that James Hickham, an eighteen-year-old college freshman, had touched the breasts of a fifteen-year-old girl. Maybe it was unnecessary to feel sorry for assaulting him.

“James read the book and said it was a masterpiece. I read it so I could argue with him, but he turns out to have been right about that, at least. Anyway: sex, not politics. Don’t go to the protest. Go out and get laid. Unless you’re going to the protest to get laid. In which case I don’t know what I think.”

“Happy early birthday, Emily. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Not at the Chappine.”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“Read Jersey Rothstein’s book so we can talk about it. I’m really sorry about what I said.”

She apologized for a few more minutes before I could get her off the phone.

f

I intended to walk to the library, but instead I just took a long, aimless stroll around campus. I knew that there were things motivating me that I couldn’t name, or at least things that I didn’t want to name, things that left my actions soggy with psychology.

The protest itself was well attended, by Yale men and by girls from various women’s colleges. Fifteen hundred people, according to later estimates. We were all jammed together outside the Commons, the building inside of which Mrs. Johnson, rather ill-advisedly, was giving a talk entitled “Beautification in America.” The attire at the protest would have been unimaginable only a year or two later, with most of the boys in coats and ties. People jostled me and, twirling an unlit cigarette in my fingers, I surveyed them. Many looked engaged and hopeful, like they might taunt Lady Bird into divorcing her husband and blowing some guy with long hair and a beard on the White House lawn, or perhaps on the steps of the Capitol, on the theory that steps would be harder on her knees. Many others stood slack and chatted with their friends; this was just something to do for an afternoon. Signs jutted and bobbed over heads: “Lady Bird Beautifies While Lyndon Burns” and “How Do We Beautify Vietnam?” Many of the signs depicted burned children war victims.

A bone-thin, sandy-haired girl paced a small stretch of concrete; she was wearing a blue sweater and she had her arms folded over her breasts as though she were awaiting the results of a medical exam. Beyond the quad was the law school tower, decorated with thin spires. From the sky, the tower and the quad would look like a watchtower and prison courtyard.

Almost all of the guys at the rally came from families that were just as wealthy as mine or wealthier. Among them were guys who would later talk about blowing things up. Other guys were standing apart in clusters and mocking the protesters, laughing with that laugh they all had, the one where they threw their shoulders back and raised their chins. I could never master this laugh, though I had to admit I had spent much of my teenage years trying.

I was convinced, as many other people were at the time, that America was headed for some revolutionary conflagration of race, of class, of anything else people could think of. I knew that if I became a revolutionary there would be something craven in it, a simple desire to be on the winning side. And a large part of me still thought that the side that I had been born into deserved to win, had to win if there was going to be anything other than chaos and fire—if not for the country, then certainly for me. Everyone I had grown up with had been raised to know that the world worked a certain way, and now, just as we were reaching adulthood, the world might cease to work that way. There was a word for a game in which the rules changed in the middle: a scam.

Did I want to be a guard in the watchtower, my rifle trained? I looked at a guy with brown hair and pictured how he would look from the tower. I would stand on a ledge on the tower and I would balance my rifle on one of the spires. I would get the guy in my sights and shoot. The guy would fall, the crowd would scatter. Then I saw the guy’s mother over the body, wailing, and I felt an immense rush of guilt. I wanted to apologize for fantasizing about killing him, I wanted to apologize to his mother for fantasizing about killing her son.

It must be awful to kill someone if a daydream could make me feel this bad, I thought.

It was easy enough to imagine Paul, had he lived, taking a rifle to every anti-war protester he encountered. These protesters were all Yale men who, no matter what they would later say, were no likelier to participate in a present-day American revolution than they were to build a time machine and fight next to Robespierre, but Paul wouldn’t have taken a chance, or maybe he just wouldn’t have cared, and would have just shot them all. When that guy shot some people from a tower at the University of Texas, I thought: Paul must have survived, this must be him. And yet here I was, having the same fantasy.

By the time I looked back for the bone-thin girl in the sweater, I could not see her anymore.

It didn’t matter if I was on the losing side right now. I had been born on one team, but the glory of democracy was that I could switch sides. Equality was good, a goal to strive for. If the war was what my class had done for the world, then it deserved to lose. I could switch sides. The glory of democracy was that it sanctified betrayal.

There was a reason, it occurred to me, why people who shared my blood had ruled this country for hundreds of years. It was because we were stronger, more powerful. And the truth was that I was stronger than Paul; he had killed himself and I never would. There was only one other person as strong as I was: Emily. That bone-thin girl wasn’t worthy of me—only Emily was.

If I married my sister, even the hippies in San Francisco would have to be impressed. Talk about freedom from taboo!

In a way it made a certain amount of sense. Emily and I got along very well, probably better than most boyfriends and girlfriends or husbands and wives, and there was no reason for us to pay attention to anyone else’s standards of morality.

But it was also insane.

This was bad. I could feel myself turning into some kind of evil fascist. That wasn’t who I wanted to be. I wanted to be someone who stood up for justice against unfair privilege. In the smithy of my soul I wanted to forge not the oft-created consciousness of my race, but simply my soul. I wanted to turn inward, but not incest-inward. I wanted to be wholly myself in a world that was new, and my sister was not new.

It occurred to me that I should date a black girl. There were, of course, a lot of black girls who lived in New Haven. But I didn’t want to date a black girl just for the sake of dating a black girl; that seemed racist, too.

I put a cigarette in my mouth and struck a match against the matchbook, but to no avail. Two more matches failed to light. I could feel Paul laughing at me, both for failing to light a match and for worrying so much about becoming a traitor to my class or to my family. The fact that I was even worried about betraying my class or my family showed that I was much more beholden to Paul than I wanted to think.

I stood there for another ten minutes. Burned children jerked and spun as people shifted their feet and let their placards fall to their sides.

Fingering my cigarette pack, still needing a smoke, I looked around this stretch of Connecticut and wondered whether any of my ancestors had ever killed an Indian where the school’s buildings now stood. Doubtful, but it was almost certain that my ancestors were responsible for many deaths.

There was a boisterous couple a few feet from me, the guy with his hands on the girl’s waist and both of them laughing. Without noticing it until now, I had been dipping in and out of eavesdropping on their conversation. They had been talking about movies and music and occasionally they shouted slogans. The girl reached behind and scratched the back of her boyfriend’s head. Her sunglasses and her dark, curving bangs made her impossibly attractive to me. There would be something wonderful about a world where everyone was equal and everyone shared and no one owned anything or anyone, where I could walk up to this girl and kiss her. Where she could scratch the back of my head.

Paul would have known what to say to this girl. He had probably picked up a lot of girls right where I was standing. I could feel him taunting me for not being bolder.

It was important that I start dating someone immediately—someone as far from a WASP, and certainly as far from Emily, as I could find.

I reached into my pocket for another cigarette, and as I fumbled with the pack I noticed a girl with long black hair. There was something about her mouth that intrigued me—was it that it was wide or that it was narrow? I put the pack back in my pocket and walked over to her.

“Can I bum a cigarette?”

She examined me from head to toe, making no effort to hide that she was doing so.

“You look like you went to Eton.”

“Wrong side of the pond.”

“I think bluebloods are parasites.”

“We are. That’s why I’m bumming a cigarette.”

She tilted her head and smiled faintly. I was impressed with myself; this was the sort of line I usually came up with only after the moment was over. I tried to smile slyly, in a way that acknowledged our mutual attraction as an oblique, private joke. She gave me a cigarette and a light. I took a drag and felt wonderful.

f

After the protest dispersed with a long silence, I took her to an agreeably scummy New Haven diner, where she insisted on ordering only toast.

She told me that she was a sophomore at Smith on scholarship—“my mother wouldn’t pay even if she could”—and that she wanted to be a painter. It turned out that we had both seen a production of Julius Caesar several weekends earlier, so we talked about that.

“The play was pretty conservative,” Miranda said. “They didn’t make any effort to connect the play to our time. They could have dressed Caesar up as General Westmoreland. Or maybe they could have dressed Cassius up as General Westmoreland, depending on how they interpret the play.”

I took an unpleasant bite from my burger. The burgers were good at this diner but they were ruined by the damp buns. I usually ate the burgers with a fork and knife but I didn’t want to do that now.

“I think it was about our time,” I said. “It was subtle.”

“Subtle! Subtlety is bourgeois. Brecht taught us that when he popped drama’s cherry. He fucked drama until it stopped being subtle, like a lady, and started being useful, like a whore. Don’t tell me you’re afraid of whores.”

I was transfixed. “I’m not.”

“I’m starting to think that whores could be the revolutionary vanguard.” She leaned over her plate as she spoke, clearly the sort of person who needed to gesticulate in order to follow her own train of thought, and since her hands were occupied with cutlery she compensated with broad facial expressions. In an unattractive girl, this might have been another reason to find her unattractive. It made me want Miranda even more.

“They’re obviously the symbol of the proletariat, the human being as chattel, but they can be more than that.” I looked at the tiny mole just above her mouth. Her mouth quivered just a little as she spoke. For all her bombast there was something nervous and shy about her.

“I feel bad,” she said. “I should be back out there. They’re holding an all-night vigil outside President Brewster’s house.”

“I’m curious. What do you say to people who think that communism is better in theory than in practice?”

She took a bite of her toast and answered as she chewed, trying to suppress a self-satisfied smile. “Practice is better in theory than in practice.”

There was a nice silence that lasted too long and became an awkward silence. I thought I should say something and, after struggling a bit for a topic, I brought up the negotiations to merge Vassar and Yale. She shrugged a bit and said she didn’t know why people kept talking about that, as it probably would not wind up happening and it didn’t matter much anyway. I brought up Staughton Lynd, a history professor who had been denied tenure, possibly on the basis of academic merit and possibly because he had made a much-publicized visit to Hanoi in support of North Vietnam. She said that the topic was boring and that, even though some students still were not convinced, it was obvious that the process had been fair.

“Somebody can be leftist without being smart,” she said. “By the way, you realize that everything I’ve told you so far is a lie.”

I knew that she was joking, but something about this claim was arousing.

She was leaning back in her seat now with her arms crossed over her stomach and I could feel her interest in me dissipating. I could envision myself going home alone, with nothing to think about except for my sister.

“Have you read The Dominion of Pleasure?” I asked, pulling it out of my back pocket. She had not heard of the book, and she read the back cover with dismay. She read the first page and, not looking up from the book, she said that Rothstein was all wrong, that in fact sex without justice was not sex at all. It was only brutality, and justice without sex was likely only brutality as well.

“This guy is an asshole,” she said. “He’s a fascist.”

“An asshole,” I said. “Yes.”

I motioned for the check and took out my wallet, but I didn’t have any cash.

“I’ll talk to the owner,” I said. “He likes me, I think.”

Miranda swung her leg up on to the table. She reached into her boot and took out a ten-dollar bill. “I always keep a ten-dollar bill in my shoe,” she said. “Just in case.”

After that we walked around campus and she talked about Rothstein, about how if she were a dictator she would want everyone to follow Rothstein’s philosophy, about how obvious it was that Rothstein did not understand sex at all. Then she talked about de Kooning and Rothko and other painters. She told me she was an only child. I told her that I had a sister, but that we were not especially close. That was too bad, she said, it always warmed her heart to hear of close siblings. Occasionally she would say, plainly without meaning it, that it was getting late and she really should go to the vigil outside President Brewster’s house. I decided not to mention that President Brewster had been a good friend of my father’s when they were undergraduates. Haltingly, checking my reaction as she spoke, she talked about her ex-boyfriend, Neville Norture, also a Yale student. She said that he was not the smartest guy she had ever met but beneath all of his idiocies and his off-putting arrogance he really cared about improving the world. A lot of guys were like that, she thought, stupid but caring. He was nothing like me, though, she said; he was not nearly as witty. Before I had time to wonder why she thought I was witty we were talking about a play that she had seen and that I pretended to have seen called How Now, Dow Jones. For the most part she talked and I listened; I was afraid that the more I talked the more likely I would be to say something that would expose me as a freak with fantasies of fucking his sister.

Eventually we stopped by the vigil and we stayed until it was too late for her to catch the last bus back to Smith. We both pretended that this was accidental.

f

Bright young lad, the world outside is just a fad
Once you’re here, you won’t need a map
Welcome to the Chapp

“Such a great song,” my sister used to say of “I Pine for the Chappine.” The eponymous film—one of the more energetic of the fur-coat-and-tap-dancing movies of the Depression—probably appealed to her more than did the song itself. There’s a scene where Ginger Rogers does a few steps of a waltz with a portrait of a stuffy-looking fat man with a moustache and a gold watch, and then tosses the portrait into the fireplace and does a tap dance. Hanging above my desk as I write this is a hack painting of the Chappine’s lobby. There are leather chairs and men with cigars, the backs of their heads reflected in mirrors. Today the hotel is for tourists who’ve seen the movie. Even when I used to come here with my family it was in decline. My grandfather killed himself toward the end of its great era. The leather chairs are still there, though, as are the pillars. There’s a new, ostentatious hanging waterfall to replace the old mural, which depicted members of an Indian tribe, presumably the Chappine tribe, huddling around a fire, thrusting spears into the air, as though their spears might propel them into the sky.

When we used to come to the Chappine for Emily’s birthday, we rented out a capacious suite on the third floor that is now a fitness center, filled with televisions and elliptical machines. The room I’m staying in is tiny, certainly not large enough for the king-size bed they’ve insisted on cramming in, and not large enough for the desk on which I’m writing this.

Downstairs in the lobby, the white pillars look just as they did when Emily would try without success to climb them.

For some time after Paul’s death, the hotel was a forbidden subject. Because it was only a few blocks away from my family’s apartment, we passed by frequently—and when we did, my father dug his crutches into the concrete. My mother had this way of widening her eyes that suggested that she was absent from her body, but that she might very well do violence if she ever returned. One day Emily pointed to the birdshit-dappled gargoyles on the hotel’s façade and said they were pretty. Our father halted and, after looking from Emily to the gargoyles, laughed in a way that scared me and made Emily cry—not something Emily often did. He told her that she was right, the gargoyles were pretty, and inside the hotel was even prettier, and because her birthday was coming up the family would spend her birthday there. After that my father rented a suite every year to celebrate Emily’s birthday.

When I was a teenager, there was, of course, no Internet. Between checking whether Peter Reaper has said anything new—he hasn’t—and exerting the energy required to stop myself from idly looking at pornography, it’s amazing that I can write anything at all.

The last time I was at the Chappine was in February of 2003, for a debate on the then-imminent war in Iraq. The debate was sponsored by a liberal magazine I had occasionally written for and which now wanted nothing to do with me, other than to put me at a podium and yell at me. After I accepted his invitation, the editor responded with an email accusing me of accepting only so that I could gloat that all the blood I had been calling for would soon be shed. But gloating wasn’t at all what I had in mind. These people had once been my friends, and I didn’t want to lord any victory over them (a victory which in any case was not mine but the Iraqis’, and for that matter the world’s), or honestly even to debate them, but simply to embrace them and drink wine with them and talk about something else entirely. We are about to overthrow a tyrant, I wanted to say, let us celebrate the moment that is about to arrive, regardless of whether we wanted it to arrive. Failing that, they could yell at me all they wanted. It would still be good to see them.

I would have preferred an invasion of REDACTED to an invasion of Iraq, but it would have seemed churlish to complain.

Was I nervous about going to the Chappine? Not at all. Whatever ghosts there were would have grown tired of waiting for me and moved on. Besides, the war was too important for me to be thinking about myself. I was thinking about the Iraqis, about the people in Saudi Arabia and throughout the region, and I was thinking about Emily. Surely, Emily, if she was still alive, must have read my articles, and she must have supported the war. She must have seen that I was fighting for the rights of women. She must have been reading the newspapers every day for the previous eighteen months, cheering as women in Afghanistan took off their burqas. Maybe she was an aid worker in Kandahar, having moved there after the fall of the Taliban. Maybe she was somehow in Iraq and she was one of the women whom the American military would save from rape. In any case, she must have seen that I was fighting for the right of women not to be raped by the sons of a dictator, for the right of women not to cover their faces, for the right of women not to be beaten by their husbands. Emily couldn’t help but see my involvement in all of this as a righting of what she and I had done. Even if everything that happened between us had gone as we had hoped, only she and I would have been made free. What was happening now would make many people free. She must have supported the war. On my way to the debate I thought that there was even the possibility that she would be in the audience at the Chappine, there to smile at me from the audience, even if she perhaps covered her face with a scarf or something, not ready to see me yet—and for all I know she may have been there.

The debate had been scheduled to coincide with the Saturday of the massive worldwide protests against the war, so I wound up spending much of the subway ride listening to two college students, a boy and a girl on their way to the New York protest. The girl, whose eyes were strikingly similar to Miranda’s, was holding a placard that said, in purple marker and glitter, ARTHUR HUNT IS A WAR CRIMINAL. I was wearing a Panama hat and they did not seem to have noticed me. They would have loved to have known that I had been up late into the night on the phone with a friend at the Pentagon, even though he and I had spoken only very briefly and in very broad terms about military strategy before settling into a conversation about whether Solzhenitsyn or Orwell was of greater world-historical import.

I didn’t want to listen to these kids. I wanted to see Emily in the audience.

“Why do you care about Arthur Hunt?” the boy asked his girlfriend, putting his hand on her lower back. “Nobody really listens to him. There are plenty of other guys who betrayed their sixties principles.”

Oh, the betrayal of principles! What very few people understood was that my support for the war on Islamofascism, of which the Iraq War would be merely a part, was not at all a slinking to the center or the right as it is frequently caricatured, but a hardening of revolutionary principles, of a refusal to accept that you should do nothing to prevent Arab women from being raped or hanged simply because of the accident that you were not born an Arab. To support the war was to believe that Arab women were your sisters, or closer than your sisters, because the affinity was free of the cumbersomely genetic.

“I hate Arthur Hunt because of why he supports the war,” said the girl with Miranda’s eyes.

“Every war has journalists who say that it’s for freedom. Doesn’t mean anything.”

“I think some of them mean it. I think Hunt definitely means it. Hunt actually believes that this war will bring freedom to the Iraqis. That’s what makes him so bad.” Her movements, too, reminded me of Miranda, especially the way her free hand was fluttering. “It’s one thing to be honest and say that you want to burn the flesh of Arabs because you think that the smell will reassure you that you are safe and secure, like the smell of a fireplace in winter. But the liberals seem to think that kindling is what benefits from a fire.”

For all the rhetorical energy of this speech, it sounded very much like something she had rehearsed several times. It sounded willed rather than willing. There was none of what had made Miranda so exhilarating to listen to: her expectation of success. Still, it was gratifying that a girl this young was paying attention to my arguments at all. I imagined lying naked with her in a hotel bed, maybe kissing the butterfly tattoo on her neck, proving to her the errors in her logic and the moral necessity of invading Iraq. She was smart, so it wouldn’t take more than an hour to correct her, and then we would make love again. I chastised myself; the girl was much too young for me. But I felt so young just then, and she seemed so defeated and old. Maybe, spiritually speaking, she was even too old for me.

“It doesn’t feel very good,” said the girl, “to be protesting getting rid of Saddam Hussein. It feels kind of awful, actually. It would be so great for so many people if he were no longer in power. The war might be necessary. Maybe what’s important right now is to have a lot of doubt about everything.”

This was too much for me, this luxuriating in caution and doubt. Not making up your mind provides the illicit thrill of complying at once with the most rigorous standards of morality and with none at all. “It seems awful,” I wrote in an article at the time, “either to support the war, which is to add one more signature to a death order for what admittedly could be thousands of civilians, or to oppose the war, which would be to consent to the continued rape and torture of those same civilians. But to understand this, to look clearly at the awfulness of either option, to keep your mind clean of every evasion and euphemism and thus see things in all their terrible contours, this is condemnably satisfying. For all the famously perilous pleasures of certainty, doubt has its own heady, priggish joys.”

I pulled my Panama hat down so it obscured my eyes as I leaned toward the kids.

“Have you heard the rumor,” I asked, “that Arthur Hunt likes to eat Iraqi babies? Dipped in oil, of course, and a pinch of salt, though he abstains from butter for reasons of health. You’re right that he’s a monster.”

“Let’s get off at the next stop,” her boyfriend said, edging between her and me.

“We have a couple more stops to go,” she said. There is a particular type of young girl who can never resist engaging with apparently lunatic people she happens to meet. She turned back to me. “I’m not saying that Arthur Hunt is a monster. I’m saying he’s a war criminal.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Monsters are sympathetic once you understand them.”

“Hasn’t Hunt written that he’s concerned that the Bush Administration has unnecessarily alienated our allies and that we’re not going in with enough troops?” I asked.

“Sure, but he still insists that any American who criticizes the war has been duped into loving Saddam Hussein.”

“Just the sort of atrocious behavior I’d expect from a baby-eater. That story is true, you know. He’ll do any disgusting thing that pops into his head, whether it’s supporting the war or eating babies. Killing Iraqis to make them free is something he enjoys doing only on a full stomach of babies. Everything is fair game for Arthur Hunt. Especially eating babies.”

About halfway through this, the girl recognized me and said so, but I ignored her.

“Why do you think we have the right to get involved in things that are none of our business?” asked her boyfriend. “The war isn’t in our interests.”

“Why are you interested in our interests?” I asked. “Steadying the stilts of a dictator does not strike me as a revolutionary activity.” I turned to the girl. “Your beautiful green eyes remind me of a girl I used to know. I don’t think she would have liked you very much. You remind me of a different girl I knew, too, but it’s more painful for me to think of her. I hate Bush and I would do anything for this war to be fought by someone else. Do you know how awful it is to be supporting that man? I’m sorry I’ve been yelling at you. Won’t you slow down so we can talk for a minute?”

By the time I got to the end of this, the doors had opened, the boyfriend had shepherded the girl off the subway, and I was following, shouting against a crush of people getting on. I had almost caught up with them before I realized I had no idea why I was following them, so I slowed down to let them get far ahead and disappear into the crowd.

My desire to debate had rather definitively gone. I couldn’t stand another round of Munich-Vietnam pingpong in which I would say “Munich” and they would say “Vietnam,” and then we would repeat until it was time for refreshments. But the cold air reminded me of my purpose. That particular day of protests has acquired some prestige in retrospect, as well as some of the energetic, offhand beauty of girls raising their brightly colored mittens to their mouths to amplify their demands that there be no war for oil. But at the time most of the energy seemed to be little more than the exhaust fumes of backward-looking vanity. All these people pretending not to know that, if the Islamofascists have their way (as they still might), the twenty-first century will be a short one.

For me, it was the war itself that felt like a second flowering of youth, a third coming of 1968 and 1989. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be very nearly old was very nearly heaven. A new society was possible, if not for us then for the Iraqis. Iraqi society as it horrifically was would be incinerated, and out of it would grow something else. All across the region the sexual revolution would arrive by tank.

Of course my euphoria was shadowed by the thought of Jason Rothstein, by then in basic training.

My way to the hotel was only very minimally obstructed by the overstuffed but undernourished protest. I stopped by a group of girls in matching turquoise knit caps. They were talking in terms that were more or less blatantly anti-Semitic about how Jews had “hijacked U.S. foreign policy” on behalf of Israel. This has always struck me as a strange argument. Second- or third-generation Americans wholeheartedly supporting a war fought for American ideals was, far from of an act of sedition, a form of immigrant striving.

“Do you think Arthur Hunt is a war criminal?” I asked the girls.

“Who’s Arthur Hunt?” one of them asked. None of the others had heard of me either.

“He’s a journalist who supports the war,” I said. “You haven’t heard the rumor that he was involved in the assassination of Augusto Sanchez? The labor leader in Mexico?” There was no such person.

“I think I remember reading that somewhere,” one of them said. “How was he supposed to be involved again?”

“He scheduled an interview with Sanchez,” I said, “and the CIA assassinated him at the meeting place. Did you read the article in the New Neo-Marxist Review?” There was no such magazine. Or there may have been, but I hadn’t heard of it.

“Just before he was murdered,” I said, “Sanchez gave a speech saying that America was a cannibal. America feeds on the flesh of the world. But why shouldn’t it? Not to feed on the flesh of world wouldn’t just be weak—it would be arrogant. The only possible reason for the greatest power the world has ever known not to use its power would be haughtiness. And Arthur Hunt is so haughty that he believes American power should be used for the freedom of others, which is just to squander it. The machinery of the military itself is not haughty and wants only, beautifully, to destroy.”

They were already beginning to argue with me as I turned away from them and approached the hotel. The entire façade had been redone recently; the old stone gargoyles had been replaced with new, sleeker gargoyles made with what looked like shale but probably wasn’t. By any standard this was far uglier, though this was not quite enough to recommend it.

If only I could be the Arthur Hunt who collaborated in killing Augusto Sanchez. An Arthur Hunt who would do whatever his government asked of him, and so would never have any confusion about his motives, never have to wonder about Bush’s true motives, never have to construct complicated Rube-Goldberg justifications for the use of American power. What a beautiful thing it would be to love your own nation and to hate all the others—openly and simply and, therefore, beautifully. A politics that needed no explanation. Why would I want to use American power? Because I was an American.

Before I made it into the building a giant puppet head of Bush, painted a rotting eggplant blackish purple, bobbed and swayed down the street. The mouth was twisted into the anguished knot of a mask of tragedy. Whoever was holding the mask was obscured, and the head looked as though it were commanding the marchers, as though it were in the midst of a speech so powerful that it needed no words at all. From time to time it jolted upward as though to stir the crowd. Only with the dreary aid of context could you see that the mouth was supposed to be twisted into agony rather than into Bush’s dazzled, triumphant smirk. Just like me, everyone here was submitting to George Bush because there was no other option.

It occurred to me—as of course it had already occurred to me—that Paul, if he had lived, would have supported this war. But he would have supported it for the wrong reasons.

I walked past the Chappine and missed the debate.

f

The morning after I slept with Miranda, she took the bus back to Smith and I took the bus to New York. The windshield wipers pushed away the rain, both the wipers and the rain slow and heavy, as though each possessed the stolid determination extolled at prep school. My father would not let me have a car; inexplicably, he deemed it extravagant. This was typical of my father, who denied things to me apparently at random. I knew I had no cause to complain, but still it was a curious despotism. As I sat on the bus I was gripped by a feeling that was beyond happiness or unhappiness, that in fact made the concepts of happiness and unhappiness seem feeble and perverse, as feeble and perverse as stolid determination.

When I arrived at the hotel my suit was dripping. As I entered the lobby I imagined, as I always did, my grandfather hanging by a noose from the chandelier. Emily was sitting in one of the clay-red leather chairs in the lobby with her legs draped over the edge, which in the nice silver dress she was wearing had probably taken some effort. Her hair had clearly been worked on that morning and looked even straighter and more exhaustively yellow than usual. I did not think her attractive or unattractive. I just thought her my lovely sister, and I felt terrible that I had entertained thoughts of defiling her. She looked uncomfortable, as though she were wearing a movie-star costume.

She jumped out of her chair and stumbled on her heels. Grabbing my hand to steady herself, she twisted her mouth for an instant to acknowledge her clumsiness.

“Welcome to Hanging Huntington’s Hotel,” she said. “I really thought I would be able to get us out of it.”

“Next time.”

“James just bought me a really nice sweater. It’s a shade of blue I really like. Do you think I need to give it back?”

“You shouldn’t have broken up with him just because of what happened with me.”

“It wasn’t just that. He’s boring. All the boys I know are so boring. And the girls are much, much worse. I wish you still lived at home.”

This was not what I wanted to hear given what I had been thinking about the previous day. “Maybe you should get back together with James,” I said.

“Don’t I look horrible? Mom forced me to wear this ugly dress.”

“You look gr…”

“I thought about calling you this morning and saying you didn’t have to come, but I wanted you here. Was that selfish?”

“Of course I’m here. It’s your birthday.”

And on saying this, I felt a rush of triumph, just because Paul was dead and I was here.

“I was just thinking,” Emily said, “about a time when I was maybe three or four when Paul told me that all the Greek gods lived in the Chappine. This was before anybody in the family knew that I knew that Grandpa had killed himself. I was too old to believe Paul about the gods so I asked him to take me to the Chappine to prove it. He said that the gods killed little girls who entered. I think on some level he actually believed that the hotel had some sort of mystical force, as opposed to just being a place where the wives of insurance agents from Kansas pretend they’re rich Europeans. He was such an idiot. You’re nothing like him. Are you sure you’re all right? You look like something’s bothering you.”

“Buses always make me want to throw up.”

“You know, I don’t know what I think about whether I want to get married. And I sometimes think that I wouldn’t miss Mom at all if she suddenly dropped dead. That’s awful to say, but it’s the way I feel. I love Dad, but you’re the most important person in the world to me. I want you to know that in case you ever think about doing what Paul did. You’re so much smarter than he was and I don’t think you would, but just in case you ever…”

“Maybe you should get back together with James.”

“You don’t have to worry. I’m doing fine. We should get going. Arthur the Third is waiting.”

As concerned as she was for me, she couldn’t resist the opportunity to get under my skin. And I couldn’t resist the urge to let it bother me.

“Do you have to call him that?”

“Arthur the Third is waiting.” She asked me how I thought the war was going as we headed to the elevators.

Emily rang the bell to our suite and we waited a longer time than I would have expected. She pantomimed a noose, cocked her head sideways, and stuck out her tongue. This was not such a bad life, really. I would never have to work if I didn’t want to. I could stay in hotels like this one, but that weren’t this one. That were much more luxurious than this one, in fact. I could marry a girl like Emily and laugh all the time. I could ignore politics. People who didn’t ignore politics usually got into trouble, and they often got a lot of other people in trouble as well. It was frequently said that the only reason you got involved in politics was to distract yourself from personal problems. And it was true that you could consign your life to politics and get everything wrong. But you could just as easily consign your life to personal matters and still get everything wrong. You could think you were advocating for democracy and actually be advocating for the death camps. Or you could fling open every closet of regret and desire in yourself and the people you loved, and still there would be one closet you missed, and crouched in that closet, never to see the dark of day, would be your most crucial self. Maybe these were synonyms for private and public: the unspoken and the unspeakable.

Our mother opened the door wearing a dress identical to Emily’s and holding a half-eaten pear. She hugged me, and past her I saw discarded fruit lying on the floor: apple cores, banana peels, orange peels. It had become a ritual when we were at the Chappine, one that we never acknowledged, to discard fruit on the floor. Not even Emily and I talked about it. How this ritual got started, I can’t say, but one of the first things my mother did whenever we arrived at the Chappine was order a bowl of fruit from room service, and over the course of the day we all dropped fruit on the floor.

“Bright young lad!” my mother said. “Welcome to the Chapp!” Then she dropped her pear and, careful to step around the fruit, disappeared into the suite’s master bedroom with the small, aggrieved, but unobtrusive steps that were her trademark.

While she was making her retreat, my father greeted me, not moving his crutches. By this time my father was spending more time in Washington than in New York, so I hadn’t seen him in some time. He had a habit of giving a weary little laugh whenever he saw me, as though I were the punchline to a very long joke.

“I was at the protest against Mrs. Johnson’s speech,” I said. Immediately, I knew that saying this this way made me sound like a child leaping at the chance to offend. I expected sarcasm and dismissal, but instead I got delight.

“Good! Maybe you’ll end the war. Mac Bundy thought he could bring freedom to Vietnam, but the problem with freedom is that when people have it, they do what they want to.”

This comment hit me hard, and I thought about it often as my thinking evolved. I have often wondered whether the anti-war left secretly agrees with my father, and is secretly uncomfortable with the idea of freedom, particularly for black and brown people.

“The only good thing the Defense Department does is make bombs,” my father said. “Bombs are a marvel created by a human race otherwise unworthy of them.”

I had heard my father talk like this before. The aesthetics of bombs was one of his favorite topics, and it always led directly into the main speech of the afternoon.

“Arthur,” Emily said, pulling me away. “I want to show you that new sweater I was telling you about.”

“The human race is horrible, but if it has to survive, it should at least survive with a Huntington stamp.” He picked up a pear from the fruit bowl and now there was no stopping him, and now there was no question that we would all have to listen. Even my mother emerged from her room and stood in the doorway. We knew he was ridiculous but there was something arresting about him as well, as he leaned against one of his crutches, holding aloft a pear and discussing the end of the world.

“The twentieth century will be a short century,” he said. “Either we or the Soviets will launch the missiles before long, and all the lies will be burned away. Members of our family will be there for whatever comes afterward. Emily, you may be the founding mother of the postapocalyptic race.” Emily and I suppressed our giggles. “You’ll have to watch out for weakness, though,” our father continued. “Some of us have indulged in the ultimate weakness right here in this hotel.”

Emily ducked behind him and did the noose-pantomime that she always did at this part of the speech.

“I could tell even when I was a child that your grandfather was weak. When he killed himself I was not even terribly surprised. But Paul surprised me. I thought Paul was strong, and yet he decided to leave nothing of himself. It’s awful to say, but Paul might as well never have lived. You should have as many children as you can. I love both of you, but two surviving children is not enough.”

“Are you insulting Paul?” I asked.

“No. I respect Paul enough to acknowledge that he never existed. That was what he set out to do and that was what he did. He also set out to make every minute that I spent with him a waste of my time on earth, and he did that as well. My son and my father had a lot in common with each other, and nothing in common with me. I find suicide simply unintelligible, as, I can already tell, does Emily.”

“Daddy, don’t you want to give me my presents?” She adopted this little-girl tone whenever she spoke to our father. Around our father she was a different, and much diminished, person, which is strange given that I’m fairly certain that our father would have preferred her as she acted when it was only the two of us. How much sarcasm there was in her behavior was never clear to me, and maybe never clear to her.

“Arthur,” my father said, “you should know that I don’t think you’re doomed to kill yourself if you don’t want to.”

“Daddy doesn’t mean that,” Emily said, putting her hand on my shoulder.

“So he does think I’m doomed to kill myself?”

“Just because you’re not a very forceful young man,” my father said, “doesn’t mean you won’t find a way to make your mark.”

“I’m going to prove you wrong,” I said. “Not about me, I don’t care about myself, but you’re wrong about the world. We’re not condemned to war, or whatever it is that you’re saying. There is good in the world.” I stormed off, though I didn’t know where in particular I was going. I made it a few steps before I fell on my ass.

Yes, I slipped on a banana peel.

f

Free the oppressed peoples of the world, and make love to Miranda. These were my directives that fall and winter, and if I made little progress on the former, I proved abundantly triumphant on the latter. Soon, she was coming to school every weekend. (I always bought her ticket, though we never talked about it.) After the first several times we made love, lying entwined with Miranda’s sweaty body came to feel sacramental, or at least as I imagined sacraments must feel for a believer. I was amazed that both this and the episodes of haphazard groping and grasping I was accustomed to could be crammed together under the word “sex.” Our pleasure was so momentous it seemed Vietnamese peasants would have to experience some ripple effect.

Our impulses were essentially monastic; for all our bluster about a worldwide movement, we brought out each other’s essential shyness. In truth we missed everything about 1968, both what was at the time incidentally and is now canonically ridiculous, and everything that was truly important. We were only dimly aware of the student movements outside the country, in Paris, Prague, Warsaw, Mexico City, Rome, West Berlin. The amount of freedom in the world is at least minimally greater as a result of what happened in these places, and they happened without my participation, or anything more than my fitful attention. Many years later I read that in Prague in April, there was an average of one suicide per day among politicians, and now whenever I think about 1968 I imagine these politicians getting in line, waiting their turn. Miranda and I might have gone to Europe or Mexico, but we did not, nor did we do much at home. The university movement was not as dramatic inside the country as it was outside of it, and not as dramatic at Yale as it was at Columbia, or, a bit later, Harvard, but there was still a great deal going on, and we barely left my room on any given weekend. We went to a few sit-ins and teach-ins, but during these we talked mostly only to each other. We would have been horrified if someone had pointed this out to us—Miranda insisted on keeping the radio on when we made love, “to let the world in”—but for us 1968 might as well have been the first year of a nuclear winter; there might have been millions of survivors across an ocean, but to our unaided eyes and noses we were the only unburned of our species.

There were entire days when I did not think of Paul or Emily. Or at least entire afternoons.

For hours we would lie, her nose at my shoulder or my navel, reading aloud from Das Kapital. We were determined to read Marx’s entire corpus before the end of the year, or rather she was determined, and her determination was infectious. At some point we realized that Marx had little to do with contemporary communist movements, or else we simply got bored, so we read Marcuse and Debray. Furtively, as though we were each trying to keep it a secret from the other, we read Jersey Rothstein. Marcuse provided a counterpoint to Rothstein: Eros and Civilization argued that sexual freedom would itself change the world. “See,” Miranda said, “this is the truth.” Sitting in class one morning, I found her pubic hair in my teeth.

When we weren’t having sex, she painted. One painting was titled “McNamara in Hell.” It depicted the Secretary of Defense among charred foliage, besieged by Asian children with garish green wings and tails. The lapels of McNamara’s suit coat were a smoldering orange, like the tip of a cigarette. As propaganda, the painting was numbingly blunt, but there was something in her palette that left me haunted.

Many mornings, there was some variation of this scene: she would kiss my neck, waking me. She pressed her cheek against mine. I felt her oven-warm breath against my face and her scratchy pubic hair against my abdomen. I started laughing and so did she. There was something triumphantly funny about being so turned on. She slid down my torso, lumbering like a penguin. I loved that she lumbered. She put my cock inside of her, quickly and smirking, the way she might toss something into her purse if she were shoplifting.

f

“How’s Miraaaaanda?”

“She’s all right.”

“What do you like about her?”

I couldn’t think of what to say, so I said that we had a lot of fun together. When Emily said nothing in response and seemed to be waiting for me to say more, I added that she was very sweet.

“You two want to stop the war, right? What have you done to stop the war in the last two weeks?”

“Emily, I only have a few minutes to talk.”

“Don’t get mad. I’m just kidding around. I haven’t had a chance to say this to you, but I’m really happy for you.”

“I’m not mad. It’s just that I only have a few minutes to talk.”

“You always cut our conversations short. And we only talk when you pick up. Whenever I leave messages with other people on your floor you never call me back. You probably picked up hoping it was Miranda.”

“That’s not true.” It was true.

“Do you promise on Paul’s grave that you’re happy to talk to me?”

“Emily, come on.”

“I lost my virginity last night. To James Hickham.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. But we’re not really dating. We just had sex.”

I knew that the fact that this news made me miserable and angry was cause for alarm. “Hickham?”

“I know. That’s why I wanted him to be my first. I didn’t want my virginity to be a present for anyone. You should throw away your virginity the same way you throw away anything you’re finished with.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why not?”

“Because…”

“Because it should be a present for someone?” she said. “I should have awarded my hymen like a ribbon? ‘In recognition of your maturity, your patience, your intelligence, your warm sense of humor, and above all your true kindness, I present you with this hymen’?”

We parried back and forth a bit about whether having sex with someone she didn’t like was a good idea. The image of my sister standing naked with James, the thought of her giving him permission to touch her, was so clear in my head and so impossible to get rid of that it was as if I were locked in the room with them. I assured myself that I would have been happy for her if she had lost her virginity to any other boy. It was because James was such a terrible choice that I was upset. Because I wanted her to have a good life. And because there should, it seemed to me, be at least some justice about who gets to have sex with whom.

f

And now to Neville Norture, more or less a constant undertow of my relationship with Miranda, from the earliest days to the funeral that he and I will be attending in a little under sixty hours. And his name is Neville. As he or his ghostwriter details in the Saul-to-Paul memoir When I Was Bad, he decided sometime in the eighties that he did not like bearing a name that made everyone think of the word “appeasement,” so he changed his name to Winston. Apparently the television executives thought that Winston was too British for a general audience; hence Win Norture and the nightly program On the Homefront with Win Norture.

Right now I’m watching a late-night comedy show on which “Win” is proudly displaying the sagging skin around his neck. He asks the brunette on the couch next to him whether she thinks a real man would get plastic surgery. She giggles and says that that depends on where; this gets a huge laugh from the audience. Neville invites her, with an ostensibly facetious leer, to stroke his gullet. “Hey, unlike some other cable-news guys I could mention,” he says, “I may have a chicken neck, but I’m no chicken.” In a few minutes, Neville will do what he always does on late-night comedy shows: he’ll offer some outrageous opinion and the host will either berate him indignantly or chuckle and change the subject. I forget which host does what.

Neville was far more active than Miranda and I were; he organized almost all of the few events we attended. He also threw a lot of parties and Miranda often insisted that we go, unhappy about that as I was. “Are you going to be jealous or can we go to Neville’s party?” was a question she asked on many Saturday nights. He liked to make speeches about how his pharmaceutical executive father was a fascist, how he created drugs to keep the population docile. “My father is no different from the Nazis he dropped bombs on during the war,” he would say (unsurprisingly, he would later write a bestseller entitled Uncomplaining Valor about the heroics of his father and the other men in his squadron). Miranda and I would sit on the tattered sofa in the middle of the room and mostly we would talk to no one but each other.

f

We were making love when news came over the radio of Martin Luther King’s assassination. I tried to stop, but I was almost finished, and in the process of pulling out I ejaculated, some inside her, some out. Miranda grabbed a tissue and didn’t talk to me for the rest of the day. She wouldn’t talk to me as we walked around the stricken campus, hugging the people we knew. “I tried to pull out!” I kept saying, but she just kept shushing me.

Classes were cancelled the next day and there were two memorial services for King at Yale, one for blacks, one for whites. A black minister who spoke at the rally for whites said that King was “a hero for the white man, who deluded us into believing that this was not a nation of division.” Neville leaned over to me and said, simply: “King was a fake. I knew it all along.”

I wanted, or thought I wanted, to live in a world without racial distinctions. I wanted my white skin to mean nothing, but I had done nothing at all to bring about any change. I had barely spoken to any of the blacks who lived in New Haven. I had no cause to feel superior to any racial separatists.

Still, I couldn’t help but complain. “Aren’t we trying to erase racial distinctions?”

Miranda shushed me. “We need to be respectful.”

Later that night, Miranda said that we had been right to make love through the announcement of King’s death since King had long since become a tool of the Establishment. Making love, she said, was far more important, far more politically useful, than mourning this hero for the white man. I sat on my bed and stroked her arm through her light sweater.

f

We came across a magazine profile of Jersey Rothstein. In his photo, Rothstein had one of those smiles that suggested a joke that you were being kept out of, and of which you might be the object. In 1936, at the age of seven, Rothstein, a Berlin Jew, was sent to the United States to live with distant relatives. His parents and three siblings died in concentration camps.

“My family is of no consequence,” Rothstein told the journalist. “My father, my brothers, my sister, there is one relevant fact about them, and that is that they are dead. The idea that the dead live on through those that loved them is a lie in the costume of a metaphor. To seek justice on behalf of dead people, to ‘honor the dead,’ as the phrase goes, is advocacy without a constituency. Yes, I carry my family’s genes, but to think this entails any moral responsibility is to infect natural selection with sentiment, to mistake Darwin for a theologian, or perhaps a novelist.”

When Miranda finished reading this aloud, she threw the magazine in the air. It grazed my nose as it fell. “That’s genius,” she said. I responded that I was feeling sick and she should take the bus back to Smith. But as soon as she had left I started wondering about what she had said.

Wandering around campus, I ran into George Bush.

“Hunty-Dumpty!” he said. “You look like you…just had a great fall.”

“Maybe I did, George.”

“What’s the matter? Chairman Mao pass over you for the Red Guard?”

I was a little embarrassed that Bush asked me this; I hadn’t mentioned anything about my political conversion in the few times we’d spoken this year, and I didn’t know how he had heard about it. I decided to toss it off. “Yes. Now I’m trying to see if Castro will take me on as the minister of cigars.” The joke wasn’t very good, and he seemed to know it wasn’t very good, but he laughed anyway.

“I don’t know why you’re always so mopey, Hunty-Dumpty. Are you just mad that you didn’t get tapped?”

“I didn’t notice.”

This was an unconvincing lie, and one that made Bush smile. Of course I had noticed I hadn’t been selected for Skull and Bones, which might have been my final shot at my father’s respect.

“Why are you going around telling people you’re a communist?” Bush asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe you’ve been right all along. Maybe loyalty is the only thing that matters in the world.”

“Did I say that?” He gave me a grin that was either goofy or threatening or both.

“Maybe the most important thing is to be committed to your family,” I said. “Maybe that’s much better than chaos. I see some people right now, they’re laughing over the death of their family. I’m not saying that’s normal, but I’ve seen it.”

“I’m glad to hear this out of you, Hunty-Dumpty. You had me worried for a while there. I thought maybe you were one of those guys who would sell out his friends and family just because he thought it would help him pick up girls. I was afraid you would deny me three times before your cock grows.”

“This isn’t about picking up girls,” I said.

“Sure it isn’t, Hunty-Dumpty.”

“Everything’s fine for us, but things are fine for us because things are so bad for other people. Coffin said that, and I know you hate him, but he’s right.”

He took a step closer to me and raised his nose a bit. “Look, Huntington. I’ve been pretty patient with you over the years. Other people think you’re pretty much worthless but I never agreed. Maybe I shouldn’t even bother. But I like you. I’m trying to look out for you. I think you should calm down and try to think about who you are. Are you just some guilty rich kid who feels sorry for people who couldn’t care less about him?”

I looked into George’s eyes, which even then were shifty and dim, and I was certain that the dimness of his eyes concealed some oblique, recondite wisdom, wisdom that he might not be able to articulate but that nonetheless animated him, wisdom that camouflaged itself so that only a happy few could detect it. Really, there was no reason for me to waste any more time on my unacted-upon radicalism. Miranda might leave me any day for a life of nourishing promiscuity. Maybe Rothstein would be revealed as psychotic and disturbed. Maybe it would turn out that he had strangled his wife and child, and then everyone who followed him would have strangled that woman and that child by proxy. Maybe there would be a race war and I would be murdered by the same blacks I was now so quick to defend. Maybe there would be some peaceful transition to communism and I would be arrested and mocked for thinking I qualified as a communist. Maybe there would be no race war and no war of any other sort and Norture and the rest would decide that America and their fathers were not so bad after all. Right now, I could stop being radical or pretending to be radical or whatever I was doing and accept whatever sinecure the Establishment elected to toss my way. I touched our future president on the forearm.

“I’m going to go now, George. Maybe I’ll see you around. If I can, I’m going to burn every city in this country to the ground.”

He smirked at me and we walked in opposite directions. The next time I spoke to him was at a White House function shortly after the launch of the Iraq War. “Don’t worry, Hunty-Dumpty,” he told me then. “REDACTED’s on the list.”

f

One afternoon toward the end of the year Miranda and I were walking back from lunch when we saw Emily standing by herself. She was wearing a frilly white summer dress and was massaging her left hand with her right, as she sometimes did when she was nervous. As soon as she saw me, her nervousness disappeared and was replaced by a big energetic and athletic smile.

“You didn’t tell me you were coming to New Haven,” I said.

“I didn’t want to ruin the surprise.” She stretched her arms out, almost certainly unconsciously pushing up her cleavage. “Here I am, Big Brother.”

Yes, she sometimes called me Big Brother. I can hear it now, Peter Reaper tapping: the supposed disciple of Orwell was actually Big Brother! What a mob of incisive thinkers the Internet has created.

“You must be Miranda.”

“And you’re Arthur’s sister. What’s your name again?”

Emily tilted her head, and then gave a smile that made her look like our mother.

“Emily,” she said. “I guess Arthur doesn’t like to talk about me. I’m like his crazy first wife in the attic.”

This started the girls talking about Jane Eyre, which they both loved. Then they moved to making fun of me for being awkward and it was clear that they were great friends. Soon enough we were at a bar, and despite my reservations, Miranda talked me into buying a beer for Emily. Emily had never drunk beer before and it affected her very quickly.

“Don’t you think,” she asked me, not slurring her speech but speaking slowly, “that Miranda looks like that doll I used to have?”

“Which one?”

“The one whose head I tore off after Paul died. Or before he died. After? After. Or maybe before. Miranda has the same pointy nose as the doll. It’s a really pretty nose. I wish I had a nose like that.”

“Who’s Paul?” Miranda asked.

“Our older brother,” I said. “He died a long time ago.”

“You’ve never mentioned him.”

I felt nauseated and I wanted to go home. “He died a long time ago.”

“Gone and forgotten, apparently.” Miranda lit a cigarette and offered one to Emily, who declined.

“He should be forgotten,” Emily said. “He was an asshole. He was a Nazi who was too stupid to be born at the right time or in the right country. He killed himself. Or I killed him by tearing the head off the doll. I don’t really know.”

“Emily, come on,” I said. She shrugged and frowned and looked extremely young.

“Don’t you wonder sometimes,” Miranda asked, “whether women have all the power or no power at all?”

“I wonder that all the time!” Emily said, and in her excitement she accidentally swept her hair into her beer. Miranda laughed but grabbed some napkins and shepherded her into the ladies’ room. I looked at them as they waited in line and whispered to each other. It occurred to me that I could leave right now, get on a bus and go somewhere, never see either one of them ever again, and become a different person. But to do any of this, I would already have to be a different person.

That night Emily slept on the floor of my dorm room while Miranda slept beside me. Two girls in my room at night was a pretty clear violation of parietals, and I congratulated myself a bit on my rebellious nature.

Emily fell asleep quickly and very lightly snored. Miranda reached for my penis but I pushed her hand away.

“She won’t wake up,” Miranda said.

“Let just not do it tonight.”

Miranda took my hand and put it on her breast but I pulled it away. This made her mad and she turned to the wall.

“If you’re tired of my breasts, maybe you should look at your sister’s.”

“Miranda, come on.”

“Maybe you can feel her up without waking her.”

“Don’t be gross.”

“It feels like you’re getting hard against my leg because I’m talking about your sister. That’s gross.”

“Miranda, please be quiet. I don’t want her to wake up and hear you saying these things.”

“Why did you never tell me you had a brother?”

“I was ashamed of him.”

“You should have been. That’s okay. You don’t have a brother. You don’t have a sister either.”

“What?”

“We don’t have families. We’re new. That’s what Jersey Rothstein was really trying to tell us. We’re as new as we have the courage to be. After she leaves tomorrow, let’s never talk to or see your Paul-murdering sister ever again.”

I wanted to argue with her, but I didn’t want to wake Emily. Besides, I knew Miranda was just trying to bait me, and that in all likelihood she thought very highly of Emily. This thought was confirmed the next morning, when I woke to the sound of Miranda and Emily, both already awake and sitting on the floor in their pajamas, giggling about something. Later, Miranda hugged Emily goodbye at the train station and said: “Maybe Arthur and I will get married and you and I will be sisters.” Part of me was too happy that Miranda wanted to marry me to think about anything else, and part of me was incredibly disappointed. Part of me wanted to have no sisters rather than two.

3:00 p.m. Saturday, May 12, 2012

Jersey just called me at the Chappine. I was hoping that he would have some news about Sydney, but he didn’t.

“A few weeks ago,” he said, “Miranda told me that she never loved Jason. Or Daisy or Sydney. She said she had read my book too well.”

“She was in a lot of pain. I doubt she meant that.”

“Could you tell me what happens to a body after a suicide bomb?”

“Don’t think about that. Remember what his friends told you? Jason was almost certainly killed instantly and never felt any pain.”

“I’m not talking about Jason’s body. I’m talking about what happened to the body of the suicide bomber. The one wearing the vest. Does anything survive, or is the entire body incinerated in the blast?”

“The man who killed your son is dead, Jersey.”

“Is that so?”

“What does that mean?”

“I haven’t asked anything about my son. What I asked is what happens to the body of a suicide bomber.”

“Jersey, I think you should probably get some sleep. Is Daisy at home to make you some tea or something?”

“Excuse me, Arthur, but do you know the answer or not?”

“I don’t know the answer.” This was a lie.

“Thank you. Goodbye.”

Miserable again, I hung up the phone. To forget this conversation, I turned on the television to discover a repeat of Norture’s broadcast from last night. Norture is onscreen, with a recent photograph of Miranda floating next to his eyes.

I should have mentioned earlier that Miranda is dead. Shortly after I started writing this manuscript I received this text message from Daisy: “My mother is dead. Sydney soon to follow. Don’t contact my father. Go fuck your family and leave what’s left of mine alone.” So, yes, Miranda is dead. Facts are facts. That’s one tautology I’ve been made to see the truth of.

Norture is, or was, asking the audience’s forgiveness for “taking a portion of this evening to honor the passing of a dear old friend. This was a woman who stayed in her marriage even though it was much less than perfect, and if I have strong differences with her husband’s if-it-feels-good-do-it philosophy, I cannot help but applaud them both. What God joined, they let no man put asunder. And of course I must also salute their son Jason, who bravely fought and died in Iraq.” Here, the photo of Miranda was replaced with a photo of Jason in uniform, looking self-important and humorless in a way that there is every reason to believe he would have outgrown. Norture then started talking about how Miranda believed those who had successfully called for a premature end to the war in Iraq had dishonored Jason’s memory.

Jason’s memory. Once I finished college, I didn’t see the Rothsteins again until shortly after the fall of the Wall; that encounter had ended acrimoniously. It was not until January of 2003 that they came back into my life. Miranda sent me an email that wound up in a spam folder along with a couple thousand other emails about the Iraq War. I would never have seen it were it not for the fact that I read every one of those emails carefully.

Her son had, apparently, grown obsessed with my books and articles and had “been spending all his free time crouching in the Current Affairs section of Barnes & Noble” reading everything I wrote. It was flattering to hear this, and maybe something in addition to flattering. Surely sowing ideas into the mind of his child is a more ruthless and satisfying way to cuckold your enemy than is merely fucking his wife.

But then I read further and saw that he was thinking of joining the Army because of what I had written. This sentence felt like a slap. It had not occurred to me that my articles would inspire anyone to join the military.

“Though I have nothing but miles-high respect for anyone who serves in the military,” she wrote, “I’m terrified for my son. Would you be willing to call him? Maybe you can suggest some other things Jason could do to support the war without actually going over there.”

I didn’t want anyone’s death on my hands, so I called the number she provided immediately. On the other end was the deep and sleepy voice of a college male. I expected that introducing myself as Arthur Hunt would make him feel honored, but instead he groaned.

“Did my mom tell you to call?” he asked.

“She did. She mentioned that you’re a fan of my work.”

“She asked you to call so that you could talk me out of going. I should never have let her buy me a cellphone.”

Naturally, his tone put me off. He also, strangely, sounded a bit like Paul. But this was important. “She told me you would want to talk about my work.”

“Talking is exactly what I don’t want to do. I’ve read your work. Now I want to act on it.”

“There are lots of ways to act on it. There’s no reason to…”

“Mr. Hunt,” Jason said. “I know you dated my mother like five hundred years ago and I know that you’re trying to do her a favor. I do love your work, and if we were talking for any other reason, I would be incredibly honored. But you can’t ask me to be a coward. Iraq is the great cause of my time and I have to be a part of it.”

“You should finish school. There are important things you can do…”

“After reading your work, I made the only choice I could make.” Then he talked about how this was the new Spanish Civil War. The rhetoric all sounded silly in his voice.

“Nobody else I know is serious about this,” he said. “All of my friends who support the war and all of my friends who oppose the war are just applying for internships in Washington. Except for a few of them who are writing novels.”

“There are more important ways to fight the war than…”

“Than fighting it?”

He had a bit of a point.

“Mr. Hunt,” he said, suddenly sounding disturbed. “Is it true that you…”

“Is it true that I what?”

“Is it true that you…look, I just think that a man should follow his ideals.”

“Please don’t enlist,” I said. “Please just don’t enlist.”

But he did enlist. And for a while I was happy that he had. I thought that the war might go much better for the presence of a boy who was, after all, most likely every bit as smart and dedicated as he was naïve and unprepared.

As I write this, I have placed a photo on my desk—right next to the Chappine stationery and cheap plastic pen—of Jason from the autumn before he dropped out of school. He is standing in Riverside Park with a purplish New Jersey in the background, tall, at least six foot two, with close-cropped dark hair and a big grin redolent of confidence and orthodontia. He is full of the promise that attaches to young men like leeches. Next to it is another photo of Jason, the one on Norture’s show, the one of Jason in uniform looking self-important and humorless in a way that maybe he would not have outgrown. I don’t know. His mother gave both photos to me after he died and asked me to keep them above my writing desk as a tribute to her son. I suspect that, at least unconsciously, she did this to make me feel awful, which it certainly does. I comply with her request anyway. Whatever her unconscious motives may have been, I am glad that she and her daughter were important parts of my life over the last several years.

Norture had said more about me, but thinking about Jason had distracted me, so I had to find the clip online in order to hear the rest. First I had to watch a thirty-second clip in which a couple in a car squabbled in a way that was supposed to make you want to buy corn chips.

Norture continued:

“As for Arthur Hunt, an occasional guest on this program, I am naturally distressed by today’s frankly disgusting revelations. The sixties were a terrible time, and made some people do some truly terrible things. Hunt will no longer be welcome on my show, since to be honest, I’m not certain that I’ll ever be able to look at him again without throwing up. But I will say that the support that he has shown in the last decade for his country and for our troops may redeem him a little bit.”

Redeem him a little bit. I suppose that that is a little bit more than I deserve.

f

In the summer of 1968, I declined my usual summer job at my father’s firm and decided instead to drive cross-country with Miranda. My father agreed, maybe too readily, but I wasn’t going to complain. I wrested permission to use the older Mercedes. Emily was upset about my decision but she would get over it. It would be good for her, I thought, to spend a summer without me. She needed to be independent, and besides, she was so much smarter than I was that sometimes I wondered whether her effusive idolatry was a covert form of mockery.

Anyway, after a few days on the road with Miranda I hardly thought of my family at all. The wheat stalks seemed to bow to us as we drove by. Throughout the summer, we were expecting a violent revolution. We speculated on where exactly we would be when the conflagration would begin.

We were in the backseat having sex when news came over the radio that Robert Kennedy had been shot. I paused, still inside of her. Our eyes locked and she arched her back as she absorbed the news, causing a jolt to my cock.

“Do you think we should stop?” I asked Miranda.

“Well,” she said, “I guess it would be racist if we stopped now when we didn’t stop for Mart…”

“Yeah.” I resumed thrusting.

We went to San Diego, home of Turon University, to meet Jersey Rothstein, but a secretary at the biology department told us he was on vacation.

One afternoon I told Miranda I loved her.

“Why do you have to call it that? Love. It’s so bourgeois. Why use the oppressor’s words? When you name something, you kill it. Naming is like napalm.”

We intended to be in Chicago for the convention, but the Mercedes broke down in Nevada.

f

By that October, we had been dating for a year, and I wanted Miranda to meet my family. I did not know why I wanted this. I was barely speaking with my parents and I spoke to Emily perhaps two or three times each month. Miranda and I agreed that family was a regressive institution that shackled us to the past. Still, I wanted my girlfriend to meet my family. It was a desire I didn’t understand and couldn’t get rid of. I felt like a pervert.

A few days before Emily’s birthday I was sitting in my room with Miranda, trying to work up the courage to invite her to the hotel. There were many reasons not to invite her. Miranda had already said she didn’t want to see Emily anymore. And it seemed selfish to expose my girlfriend to all the creepiness in the hotel. A good boyfriend would want to meet her family, not prop her up as a shield against his own.

“Miranda, why don’t we visit your mother?”

“Why do you have to meet my mother? Isn’t seeing me naked enough?”

“I don’t have to. I’d like to.”

“Why?”

“I guess I’d just like to see where you came from.”

“You want to see my mother’s cunt?”

“Miran…”

“Where I came from. Spoken like a true Daughter of the American Revolution. Or were your ancestors Tories?”

“Well, aren’t roots important?”

She laughed in a way that made me feel stupid. “We’re radicals, Arthur. We’re supposed to tear the roots up. That’s what the word means. More or less.”

“I just thought it would be nice. We don’t have to.”

“You’re going to meet my mother on Saturday.”

“We really don’t have to.”

“Too late. We’re going to Queens on Saturday. You should bring some wine or something.”

I bought some wine and borrowed a car from one of Norture’s friends. For the first half of the trip to Ridgewood, we said little, and I could feel her hating me. At one point I offered to turn the car around and forget the trip, but she said no, firmly and without looking at me. She rubbed her arms and I turned up the radio, thinking that the odds were fairly good we would hear of another assassination.

“Could you stop drumming your fingers on the steering wheel?” she said at one point.

“That’s how I relax when I drive.”

“Can’t you find some other way to relax? My mother is going to hate you, by the way.”

“Well, I hope she doesn’t.”

She adjusted the review mirror and then studied it carefully.

“What if I told you that my father was a Nazi officer?”

“That’s not true, is it?”

“What if it is? What if my father and mother left Germany after the war and changed the family name? What if my mother still thinks that Hitler should have won?”

“That’s not true.”

“You don’t believe in God, do you?” she said.

“No. What does that have to do with anything?”

“I think I might believe in God. I feel some sort of presence, it’s hard to describe. You have no idea how much I hate my mother. I really think I might love you, though.” She said this calmly, and then just as calmly grabbed the wheel and turned it sharply to the left. Before I could recover we hit the divider.

We rehashed what had happened several times over the next several hours, first with the police—I told them I had somehow lost control of the car—and then alone.

“We could have been killed,” I said. “Are you psychotic?”

“We weren’t killed. We weren’t even injured. I had this feeling that we wouldn’t be hurt and I was right. Or the feeling was.”

“Feeling? What are you talking about? We could have been killed or we could have killed someone else.”

“I told you, I felt a presence. I decided to have faith.”

“Since when do you believe in God? I thought that’s why you hated your mother, because she believes in God.”

“Maybe I hate my mother because she’s a Nazi.”

“You shouldn’t call your parents Nazis.”

“It’s the literal truth.”

“Be serious, Miranda.”

“Well, it’s not the literal truth that my mother is a Nazi. My mother was a Nazi. And my father used to be a Nazi rocket scientist. Now he works for the Americans. The bombs we use against the Vietnamese, some of them were designed by my dad. That whole thing about living in Queens was bullshit. I live in Virginia.”

“Would you stop with this shit? You practically killed us both, Miranda.”

“This conversation doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere.”

“That’s because you won’t let us actually have a conversation.”

“I’m trying to talk to you about this intense religious feeling I had and all you can think about is something I did to a machine.”

“You say you love me and then you crash our car?”

“I don’t like to be yelled at.”

“You crashed the fucking car, Miranda.”

“Don’t be so dramatic. It’s not like your father can’t afford to pay for it.”

“That’s not the point.”

“It’s part of the point. And this would never have become an issue if you hadn’t insisted on meeting my mother in the first place. There was no reason for that.”

We continued arguing in this vein for some time. When she returned to Smith I did not expect to see her again. For a day or two I felt free, I felt that I had rid myself of a bizarre and reckless girl; then I started to think that I had made the worst mistake of my life, that I had lost the girl I loved for no reason, or rather for a very good reason. I knew that she hated her mother, and yet I wanted to meet her anyway because I wanted to get out of going to the Chappine. So I was worthless and selfish and I wanted her back.

The following Saturday morning she woke me with a knock at my door. “Hey there,” she said sweetly.

“Miranda, I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve had such a terrible week. I really realized…”

She put a finger to my lips. “What I did was wrong. Completely wrong. I don’t know what came over me. I’m not crazy and I don’t believe in God. Please forgive me.”

We held hands as we strolled through campus, and I felt the giddiness of reprieve. By the lawn outside the chapel, she stopped. Biting her lip seductively, she led me into the chapel, which was empty except for an older man in the first pew who kept coughing loudly. As we reached one of the back pews, Miranda winked at me and genuflected. She unbuttoned my pants and took out my cock while we were still in the aisle, so that if the man had turned around, he would have seen it. She lay down under the pew, raised her knees, hiked her skirt, and took off her panties. It struck me as silly to have sex in a church. Religion had never meant anything substantial to me, so defacing it offered no erotic jolt, and all I could think was how dusty the floor was.

We had sex less and less after this. She still visited every weekend, but we just went to sleep at night. She shivered every time we passed the chapel. She said things like “I think it’s wrong when people commit sacrilege just for the sake of doing so,” with no reference to what we had done and whether that had constituted sacrilege. Just before winter break, after we had not had sex for over a month, she woke me, straddling my abdomen.

“Guess what?” she said, with a twinkle in her eye that reminded me of Emily.

“What?”

“When I went out to take a walk just now I bumped into Neville. He told me Jersey Rothstein is moving to New Haven! He’ll be here in January!”

“Did he get a job here?”

“Neville doesn’t know why he’s moving here.”

“I’m not sure I understand why you’re so happy about this.”

“He’ll be here and we’ll able to challenge him face to face. Isn’t that great?”

“Yeah, that should be exciting.”

She ran her hands up under my white undershirt and kissed my forehead. “Promise to love me forever, Arthur?”

6:00 p.m. Saturday, May 11, 2012

I have not eaten since I checked into the Chappine. When I was writing about Paul I ordered some fruit to bring back memories in a kind of a sour-Proust way, but I didn’t eat any of it, partially because I didn’t like the way the attendant who brought it smirked at me—apparently, “#Huntcest” is a trending topic on Twitter—but mostly because my stomach is too full of Sydney and my past. I have checked news services but no one seems to have any information on her. I have emailed some colleagues and sources but no one has responded; no one seems to want to speak to me. The entire experience does rather make me wish I had a burqa, and this in turn makes me think about Daisy.

Before Jason deployed to Iraq, Miranda emailed me several times a day asking me whether it was possible that there was anything else I had not yet thought of that might still dissuade him, or if there was anything I could think of that might convince the military to keep him in the States or send him to Korea or do anything other than send him to Iraq. After he went to Iraq, she started emailing me several times a week wanting more details about how great and necessary the war was. These were the words she used, great and necessary. At first I thought she was mocking both me and the war, but it quickly became clear that she did in fact want to know precisely what the war was accomplishing, so that she could better cheer on her son. Soon enough, she was sending me her own arguments for the war, her own glosses on the day’s news. Sometimes a particularly bad day of bombings would leave me dispirited, but she would email saying that this only further proved that defeating the Islamofascists was absolutely necessary. She started mentioning Jason less and less, restricting herself to general comments about the insurgency. Her support for the war only heightened with Jason’s death. “It pains me to say it,” she wrote me only two weeks afterward, “but I think that it may be time to put people in prison for criticizing the war.”

The other issue that Miranda routinely emailed me about was Daisy and her burqa. “What can I do to get her to stop? Any ideas?”

I did not have any ideas, apart from the obvious one that she was doing this only to piss off her mother or someone else. But I thought that there was likely some other reason. I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about burqas, though for the most part there is very little to think about burqas: they are terrible and repressive, and to think anything more about them is likely to yield something clever and wrong. Sydney got angry with me whenever I speculated about the burqa.

“You and my mother don’t get it at all. You keep playing Daisy’s ‘Guess Why I’m Doing This’ game, when it’s completely obvious that the only reason she’s doing it is to trick you into playing her game. It’s like the stupidest and most obvious possible modernist novel, one that the author actually locks in a box so that you can’t read it, except that she—her soul more than her body—is the novel and you’re the dumb critic who speculates about what’s in the novel and why the author would possibly hide a work of such genius. There’s nothing in the fucking box! Daisy’s clothes have no emperor.”

Sydney didn’t often confront me like this—she usually agreed with most of what I said—but when she did, I have to admit that it was exhilarating. Nevertheless, I haven’t been able to stop myself from thinking about the burqa. Just after Sydney left for REDACTED—mostly to distract myself—I wrote up the few pages I reproduce below in which I imagine myself into Daisy’s perspective, imagining, if you’ll forgive a hacky reporter’s phrase, life inside the burqa. I emailed it to Sydney in hopes that she might receive it while waiting in Cairo, but of course she did not respond, most likely because she didn’t receive it. When not talking about her sister, Sydney likes to say that empathy is the most important thing, that empathy is the most important part of our jobs. So I hope that she would appreciate the amount of effort I have put into crafting the friendliest possible version of what I still in my heart consider her sister’s essentially evil act.

Maybe the burqa occurs to Daisy as she leaves a bar late one Friday night. The bar is crowded, people are pushing their elbows into her, her boyfriend is drunk and putting his hands on her to an extent that is embarrassing in front of her friends. She keeps on getting poked with a pool cue. Guys look at her breasts and push against her as they pass by. So she leaves the bar, needing a cigarette, and she is surprised at the sudden revulsion she feels, pushing her way to the exit, against all those stupidly constructed elbows. It seems to her that she could rip off the arms and legs in her way and not do any significant harm to the people they’re attached to. There’s no one in this bar, there’s not a single human being in the world, who does not look pasted together from some fleshy stumps of something. They might as well be pasted together by children. People are just bloated stick figures. What kind of a thing to keep a person in is a body?

Yes, yes, a body does not contain a person, a person is something that happens to a body. If she does not know that, she does not know anything.

Still, the problem with faces is that people can see them. The problem with eyes is that with them you see faces. And as soon as she sees a face she has an opinion, whether she’s aware of it or not. In this bar for instance: one girl looks needy, one girl looks fucked-out and stupid, another girl looks stupid and sexually deprived. Every girl she sees, and herself depending on the day, has either too much sex or not enough. She has less control over her opinions than she does over how she looks and speaks, which means she has less control over what she thinks about other people than she has over what people think about her. Maybe opinions are the problem, not bodies. Where do opinions come from? About smoking, about war, about the differences between men and women and the precise formula of nature and nurture in causing those differences. Three tablespoons of nature and two of nurture! Five tablespoons of nurture and three of nature! To hell with opinions. Prefer desire, she says to herself, now almost at the exit, passing the bouncer who is flirting with a girl who must have a fake ID, and whose ID the bouncer must know is fake. See? She couldn’t care less about this, and still she is crowded by an opinion. Prefer desire, she says to herself, more or less out loud. This is what is taught by the writers she loves and what is taught by advertising, and an agreement between literature and advertising is the sort of consensus that would only be breached by the sort of people who are too unimaginative to do anything but breach.

Finally she gets outside and lights a cigarette, inhales deeply. Cigarettes: her great triumph of desire over opinion. All of her opinions about the evils of the tobacco industry, all the health consequences she so often recites to herself, mean nothing to her. She wants to smoke and that’s that. Smoking will give her body pleasure and then it will destroy it. Which does not say much for desire.

All of these thoughts will go away. Only prigs hate the body, almost by definition. You might as well love what the senses give you, since there’s nothing else to love. To hate the body and to hate desire is to hate sex, and she certainly does not hate sex. She wants sex much more than her boyfriend does, though he would never admit it and pretends to want to paw her all the time. She has held herself back, because women are trained to be their own policemen, and still people think she’s bitchy. Though of course men are trained to police themselves as well. And here she goes again, men versus women. Boring subject. Since there is no difference between the body and the mind, opinions are calamities that befall bodies.

And then it is there: the idea to wear a burqa. Nothing that she has been thinking has logically led to it. Like all thoughts, it was not there and now it is there. At the first instant the idea must just seem funny or it must seem like it would be funny to anyone else. It would even be funny to her if things were slightly different. A burqa. She takes another puff of her cigarette, tries to imagine black flakes settling into a burqa on her lungs. If she wears a burqa, she will still have a body. She will still have all of her desires and opinions underneath all that black...what material do they use? Cotton? And how do they make the face masks, those things that look like wire netting? How is it possible to breathe? It must be so difficult to breathe and to find your way that there is no room for opinions or desires. If she wears a burqa, no man will be wrapping her up. No one will tell her how to wear it, or remind her that she must. If anything, it will be the opposite.

But there is more to this than a matter of wearing what she’s not supposed to wear. She wants this element to disappear. She knows what it feels like to do something just to be shocking. It feels constricting, like she’s entangling herself further in rules. This feels different. Suddenly the burqa is such a terrific idea that she wants everyone to wear one, she wants all people to wrap themselves up as though they are their own gifts.

No, she will never be able to wear a burqa; even right now she loves the feel of the cold air on her face too much. And it must be impossible to smoke through those things. Maybe she will make the sacrifice and be the only person not to wear the burqa. All men should wear the burqa even if women do not, not to settle some score, but because after all men deserve some kindness. For the expressions on your face to be hidden, who wouldn’t want that? No one wants to divulge what the face divulges. Even people who can’t be nudged away from annotating their inner lives would like to do away with their faces, which so often show how wrong their annotations are. Our faces cannot help giving us away, like tattletale little sisters. And for men it would have to be a particular blessing, to be able to lust after women as theatrically as they pleased, without their stares bothering the women they looked at. Come to think of it, men would not like this at all. But she would. What a burqa would offer is something she never expected. Privacy? An insufficient, merely political word. The word doesn’t exist yet. She’ll have to invent it.

But of course all of this is wrong. Daisy is selfish and wants the most selfish thing it is possible to want: to be looked at without being seen. She wants to be a drone, and maybe as lethal as a drone. She has more in common with any famous-for-being-famous starlet who “accidentally” leaks a sex tape than she does with women who are actually forced to wear burqas. No one would voluntarily put on a burqa except for fame. The only other non-Muslim American I have ever heard of wearing a burqa is clearly insane. This is an American woman who lives in REDACTED and is known as “The DVD Lady.” During a brief period of relative liberalism that the country underwent in the mid-2000s, a few American journalists—pointedly not including me—were allowed to visit the country, and the DVD Lady stood outside the hotel where they were all forced to stay and tried to sell them pirated DVDs in obviously American English (I say this based on secondhand reports, since she refused to speak whenever any of the reporters were recording). How and why she was in the country was a subject of much speculation, though most likely she’s a drug addict or a schizophrenic or both. In any event she wore a burqa and claimed not to be a Muslim. The only time to anyone’s knowledge that she lifted her face-net was the time when, outside of any camera’s shot, she spat at Brian Williams. This woman is clearly crazy and I see no reason to judge her. She does not have control over her actions, and over the offenses she commits against those forced to wear burqas. Daisy does.

f

When I returned to campus in January of 1969 for my final semester at Yale, Miranda was waiting for me in the lobby. She was wearing the blue sweater I loved and I wanted to feel her breasts immediately. She jumped up when she saw me; she was holding a flyer. I put my arms around her and kissed her. She pressed her fingers into my back. We stumbled into a ficus plant, then stumbled some more until I pushed her against the mailboxes that lined the wall. I felt her breasts through her sweater and ran my fingers up her abdomen, causing that giggle-sigh of hers as I kissed her neck.

“Baby,” she said. “Baby. Somebody might walk in.”

“Let them look. Let everyone look.” I knew I had heard this line in a movie, maybe lots of movies, but the guys in the movies didn’t mean it like I did.

“Baby,” she said. She put her palm on my chest and pushed me away. “Rothstein’s speaking at his new house in half an hour. We have to go hear him.”

“I want to make love to you,” I said.

She put her hand on the back of my head. “Later.”

“Noow,” I said in a playful mock-whine, as though I were kidding and didn’t want to have sex all that badly.

“Soon.” She took me by the hand and led me out the door.

Rothstein’s house was well off campus, deep into New Haven. In the foyer was a full-sized African warrior statue, the spear of which pointed the way to the living room. Thirty people or so crammed into the room, bunching up the mohair rug, and Miranda and I had to push our way inside. A handful of girls I recognized from Neville’s parties smiled at us, and I smiled and waved and Miranda chatted with them a bit. I felt sure that I could have any of these girls, or all of them, or many others, but I only wanted Miranda and I felt wonderful. I positioned myself behind her, kissed her neck, and put my hands on her hips. She pulled my arms around her stomach.

Norture cleared his throat and people cleared an area for him in the center of the room.

“As the not-leader of Love Circle,” Norture continued, “I am pleased to welcome you to this very special meeting. We’re very lucky that Professor Rothstein has invited us here today. He will be speaking to us shortly.”

Norture spoke more, using the words “watershed” and “generation” several times. We waited for Rothstein for ten or fifteen minutes longer, and the crowd broke off into small conversations. Miranda and I didn’t speak much; I rocked her and kissed her neck and she stroked my arm. In the months afterward I would spend a great deal of time imagining what Jersey was thinking during that fifteen-minute period, when he was upstairs and there was so much noise downstairs, so much noise from so many people who wanted only to be silent so that he could speak.

“Your generation sickens me,” he called out from the staircase. He continued speaking as he made his way to the center of the room, wearing, somewhat ridiculously, a white robe and sandals. “But not for the reasons you sicken others. Others are sickened because they think you have divorced yourselves from your parents. I am sickened because, for all of your petulant protestations of rebellion, you remained curled in their marriage bed, fighting for your share of the blanket.

“There is one thing that matters. The pursuit of your own sexual pleasure. The ability to fuck whomever you want to fuck, precisely at the moment that you want to fuck them. Look at your slogan. ‘Make love, not war.’ You capitulate before you’ve even thrown down the gauntlet. Make love, not war? You should say that you will make love, and pay no attention to whether they make war. By speaking as though making love is some sort of compensation for not making war, you reduce sex to politics by other means. Political power? What is political power? Senators and presidents decide which states get the most highway money, and maybe every once in a while they decide to blow up some yellow people.” There was clapping and hollering from some people in the audience, the ones who probably weren’t paying attention and recognized this as an applause line, but most of the room remained silent.

“But you do not want power, you say,” Rothstein continued. “You want justice. Of all the breathtakingly stupid things to want. If justice is for you an erotic prop, as fur was for Masoch, then you are welcome to it. But do not waste your life chasing justice. What looks like justice today will look like repression tomorrow. What you may call your social conscience, what the superstitious call their soul, is a siren that will lead you to crash upon rock after rock. Your body is your only true compass. Giving yourself over to your body is the only way to take revenge against… the only way to take revenge against those who destroy bodies.”

The room was quiet when Rothstein finished. Some people were drawn into themselves and thinking, others were looking around, surveying each other’s reactions (the fact that I remember this means I must have been among the latter). Many people examined their beer bottles and wineglasses, as though this were where they would find the verdict on Rothstein. Much of what Rothstein said, particularly about sex, was inspiring, but it seemed more than likely that he had just repudiated everything the youth movement stood for.

“Fucking fascist,” I whispered to Miranda, my arms still around her. I knew “fascist” was not the right word, but it sounded better than “asshole.” She wriggled out of my arms. I didn’t notice until she did so how upset she looked.

“Fucking fascist,” Miranda said, much louder than I had, and causing everyone to look at her.

She puffed herself up and stood, somewhat ridiculously, on her toes. “Fucking fascist,” she said again, screaming this time. She screamed it a third time and a fourth. People stared at her and there was silence. Rothstein stared dead at her with an unreadable expression.

“You’re a fucking fascist,” Miranda said.

Rothstein grinned. “But haven’t you heard the prevailing opinion? You change the world by having sex. Perhaps with your tall, blond, blue-eyed friend.”

“All you care about is your own pleasure. What’s the difference between that and a fascist?”

“Come on, Miranda,” Neville said. “Don’t use the term ‘fascist’ so lightly.”

“You’re not using it lightly,” Rothstein said to Miranda. “At first you were just idly calling me a fucking fascist, but now it sounds as though you’re calling me a fascist of fucking. Fatally juvenile, but it has some juvenile charm. Overall I would say you’re promising, if not quite impressive.”

I was trying to think of what I could say on her behalf, but Miranda was already storming out. She swatted people out of her way as though she were clearing brush. I followed her; we didn’t speak until we were alone on the sidewalk.

“Let’s go get some lunch,” I said, putting my hand on her hip.

“Go away.” She folded her arms over her breasts. Except for her breasts she seemed very much like a child.

“Miranda, he’s a fascist pig, don’t let him get to you.”

“He’s such an asshole. He’s such an asshole.”

“He is. He is an asshole.”

“I made a fool of myself.”

“The man is a liar,” I said, though I knew that “liar” was even less accurate than “fascist.” Maybe “asshole” was the right word.

f

The next morning, when Miranda told me she intended to visit Rothstein, I tried to talk her out of it, saying that confronting Rothstein would give him too much power, but I could not convince her. So I insisted on going with her.

When we arrived at Rothstein’s house he was once again wearing his white robe and sandals. He looked past us, clearly agitated about something. He started speaking without any greeting or preamble, ushering us in and sitting us both down on his sofa, and both Miranda and I were too bewildered to do anything other than follow him.

“I could never get a job at Yale,” he said by way of introduction. “It hurts me that I’m a Jew, and it further hurts me that I’m considered an anti-Semite—not because the powers that be do not sympathize with anti-Semitism but because they do. Of course the WASPs all need to put on a good show of cosmopolitanism, and so they hire Jews when they must. But if they’re going to hire a Jew, they’re certainly not going to hire one who will fail to make the others happy. They’re not going to hire a Jew who is something other than a curator for a museum of his ancestors.”

A man who was angry because he had been denied tenure, and who invented a conspiracy theory to justify the failure: nothing so unusual about that. Though he would never directly admit to anything so foolish, I was able to glean from later conversations that a friend of his at Yale claimed to be fairly certain he could get him a job with the University, so he moved to New Haven.

“There’s less anti-Semitism now than there used to be,” I said. “Just a couple of years ago the school reformed its admissions policy. They pay more attention to academic standards now, so it’s harder to get in just because you’re a blueblood.”

Rothstein eyed me up and down, reminding me very much of the way Miranda had eyed me the first time we met. “Where did you go to prep school?”

“Well, I…”

“I’m sorry, did you tell me your name?”

“I’m Arthur Hunt. Huntington.”

“You seem unsure.”

“You’re a fake, Professor Rothstein,” Miranda said. “Or does it make sense for me to call you Professor, since you’re not one?”

To my surprise, he looked honestly hurt by this, and he foolishly proceeded to defend himself by describing his work, which had to do with various issues in molecular biology too esoteric for me to understand. As he spoke I felt more at ease. Perhaps he had a good idea or two, but the man was deluded, a blowhard, ground into resentment by career disappointment. Not a sexual threat.

“All of that is nice,” she said. “But you’re still a fake. You say you don’t care about your family but everything you say makes it clear that that’s a lie. ”

He looked at her for a moment before responding.

“I think of my family all the time. Standing in the kitchen looking up at my mother as she cooked, playing games with my older sister, that sort of thing. I think about what their final years and particularly their final minutes must have been like. But that does not mean I would not be substantially better off if I could forget about them.”

Miranda put both of her hands on her abdomen; I hadn’t noticed until that instant that she always did this when she felt a rush of sympathy.

“I think you’re right that it’s better to forget about the past,” she said. “I’ve always thought that, Professor Rothstein, ever since I first started reading you. That’s why I admire you so much. I know it seems like I don’t but I really do admire you. But aren’t you saying that we should forget about the future as well as the past?”

“If politicians avoid thermonuclear warfare, it will be by accident, and I don’t have all that much faith in chance. Do you really think mankind is going to see the next millennium?”

He was saying, of course, that ours would be a short century. And yet here I am writing this in 2012, so clearly he was wrong.

“That sounds very easy to me,” Miranda said. “You’ve had a very difficult life, more difficult than I could imagine, but you’ve made the easy choice of shutting yourself off to the world. Arthur had a very easy life but he made a difficult choice—he decided to break himself off from a family that exploits the world. He doesn’t even drive a car—his father offered to buy him one, but Arthur refused.”

I winced at all of this.

“You’re really quite intelligent,” Rothstein said. “You’re on to something about the dubious morality of my background.”

“That’s not what I said. I just said that… Why do you have to twist my words like that?”

“Well, if that was what you were arguing, you would have been right.”

Rothstein took a breath and looked at me.

“And you. I wonder what you’ll do. A homemade bomb in a café? Maybe you’ll set a policeman on fire. Or perhaps you’ll find a child in a diner, lure him to the parking lot, and slit his throat. I hope you won’t be so literal that you murder your father.”

Setting a fire: I had never thought of that before. Everything in this room was flammable. It would be almost pitiably easy to burn Rothstein’s house to the ground. (Did I imagine myself as a god, outside my body, looking down at the house and throwing a lightning bolt? Probably not.) I was formulating an answer, but Miranda preempted me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “Arthur’s not cruel.”

Rothstein made a noise at this that was almost a chuckle, but not quite.

f

“He’s kind of like a little boy,” Miranda said later. “You know how little boys are always saying things to make themselves sound wise to the ways of the world? He’s like that.”

“Why did you make up that lie? About the car?”

“That wasn’t a lie. You don’t have a car.”

“But you said I refused a car.”

“I think maybe I gave him too much credit,” she said. “He’s very smart, of course, but he’s really vulnerable, and it makes him say things nobody could possibly really believe.” She looked at her nails. “Do you think you’re capable of violence?”

“What? No.”

“Why do you think he said you were?”

“How should I know? Do you think I’m capable of violence?”

“Well, maybe violence is what we need.”

“No. It’s not. I don’t think that and neither do you.”

“No, I don’t think that. It’s funny, people say that women are turned on by violence but I really don’t think it’s true. Do you think Emily gets turned on by violence?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re really totally non-violent, you’re totally incapable of doing anything violent or anything terrible, and that’s what attracted me to you. I’ll never forget that first day, when you were so witty. You’re so witty that you would never need to use violence.”

I was having difficulty keeping track of whether she thought I was witty or not, and of why she thought I was witty in the first place. “Yeah.”

“But I guess it’s always surprising when people become violent. So maybe you’ll go out and buy a shotgun. Will you make me your accomplice or your victim?”

f

For three or four weeks, Miranda and I were at Rothstein’s house almost every day. So was Neville, whom Miranda must have invited at some point. The question of my wanting to do something terrible never came up—the phrase “Do I want to do something terrible?” even came to sound silly after I repeated it in my head for several days—but it was never exactly absent while we sat in Rothstein’s kitchen and ate eggs and talked. Sometimes I went over alone, while Miranda was at Smith.

“The title of my book is a lie,” he said to me once. “The dominion of pleasure does not exist. There is not an inch of real estate over which death does not have dominion. Sex is too paltry a revenge against death to be called a revenge at all; it is just a pinprick on the butcher’s thumb. But a pinprick is the best you can do if you are a pin.”

Conversations with Rothstein consisted mostly of monologues, monologues that would begin with his battles with the biology department, wind their way through his opinion as to, say, why Adorno was correct about jazz but wrong about Bach, which in turn might shift to something about the behavior of dung beetles that I could not follow, which in turn would lead to thoughts on the idiocies of his students at Turon University, always returning to his battles with the Yale biology department. Occasionally Norture would interject with some elaboration, either superfluous or obtuse, on a point Rothstein had made; I made objections to Rothstein’s arguments that he countered with ease; Miranda for the most part was silent. For the most part. I should have seen the creeping affection in her offhand, mocking asides. I should have seen that it was the very fact that she had caught a glimpse of his ridiculousness that allowed her to fall in love with him.

f

In the interest of tormenting my younger self, here is the ballad of the courtship of Jersey Rothstein and Miranda Schuldenfrei. (Maybe it was inappropriate to send what follows to Sydney, but once I started writing about Daisy I couldn’t stop writing about the Rothsteins, and I thought Sydney would want to know at least some of the conclusions I’ve come to about her parents.)

Let’s say that you’re Miranda and you want to make love to Jersey. It hasn’t occurred to you yet—the man is far too old for you and besides, he is ridiculous, and you could never love a man who is ridiculous. And his ideas are all wrong. But his wrong ideas fructify your own ideas; they will help you develop the brilliant way of looking at the world that you are sure will occur to you soon, as long as you keep thinking. You want to hear Rothstein talk more, unimpeded by Arthur and Norture—really, before you spent so much time listening to the two of them interrupt and contradict each other and Rothstein, and then backtrack and amend and withdraw, you had no concept of how much the two of them have in common, or of the puerility of the two boys you have loved, how loquaciously defensive they are without having much of anything to defend (I would argue that I have outgrown this puerility while Norture has not, but yes, in the sixties we were both puerile). You want to visit Rothstein alone, but this is logistically impossible because you are in New Haven only when you are visiting Arthur. Do you look for a time when you can speak to Rothstein—say, one evening when Rothstein asks Arthur and Norture to go buy some wine, which would take them forever because they would argue over which wine involved the least amount of colonial exploitation—and then set up a private meeting? But how do you do this without seeming to have sexual intentions? Perhaps you say: “There are some things I’d like to talk about with you that I don’t want to talk about in front of Arthur. I really don’t intend this as some sort of romantic rendezvous or anything. I know it probably sounds that way.” At which Rothstein nods sagely and says: “Of course, I’d be delighted to discuss whatever is on your mind.” And there is the slightest hint of a smile on his lips. Perhaps it is only after you see Rothstein’s smile that you understand how nervous you were that he would reject you. But you do not want to have sex with him, you want to learn from him, and you will make a trip from Smith on a Tuesday evening to do so. Throughout the bus ride you worry that you will run into Arthur on campus, and you know that if you do whatever lie you tell will be unconvincing. Still, the thought of lying to Arthur gives you a thrill; you hope you do see him. You hug your knees to your chest on the bus seat and fiddle with the ten-dollar bill that you always keep in your boot. No, it is not the thought of lying that gives you a thrill. It is the thought of telling the truth. Of saying without equivocation or apology: “Arthur, I don’t want to see you anymore.” For months you have been terrified of dumping Arthur, and why? Arthur is sweet sometimes but needy. That’s what nobody admits about men, how needy they are, how they need to be reminded all the time how brilliant and strong they are and how independent and astute and erotically gifted. And how noble and moral and correct on all the great ethical issues of the day. You know it is not possible but you actually feel as though your nipples are sore from all of Arthur’s need. This is how it must feel to nurse an infant. You must break up with him before you grow to hate him even more. Many of the things you give him he doesn’t even ask for, and perhaps he does not actually need them, perhaps his need doesn’t have an object and he is simply raw need personified. And you are just as needy as he is: another reason to break up. The two of you spend so much time convincing each other that you’re both so ethically committed, but really, you have done absolutely nothing. You must act on your politics or shut up. Or both. And whatever you do, it must be without Arthur. Without Arthur or Rothstein. The worst thing you could do would be to jump from man to man, as though you were a disease. If Rothstein makes a move on you, you’ll reject him.

Rothstein betrays no hint of a leer when he opens the door; nor does he betray any delight in seeing you. His cheeks are haggard and his general appearance is resigned. Resigned to what? To the fact that he will never get a job? Or to the fact that he is going to sleep with you tonight? You should walk out right now. If his eyes betray no hint of a leer, that is only because he is such an experienced and successful lecher; you have to be hopeless to leer. Perhaps he is so confident of his sexual powers that he is bored by the inevitability of sleeping with you. He says something about being glad you came by for a chat, and you swallow your anger long enough to respond with perfunctory gratitude. He sidesteps the spear on the African warrior statue, level with his neck. You could walk underneath the spear but you sidestep it as well, as though he will not notice how short you are. He offers to cook an omelet for you, but you say you are not hungry. How about some toast? Well, maybe some toast. You search his eyes for some sign of calculation. Maybe he doesn’t even enjoy sex, but only the conquest; this would explain how tired he looks now that all that is left is the act. Or so he thinks. The marks that you dimly see on the wall above the living room sofa are probably notches for every girl from Smith, Vassar, and even Briarcliff whom he’s ever made love to, and every girl at Yale now that the school is co-ed. That’s absurd: he just moved here. You have no reason to believe he is any sort of womanizer—you have not seen him with any girl. As he leads you to his living room you can only catch his eyes for seconds at a time, as he shifts his head. He seems to be trying to think of something to say, and the fact that he is trying without success is charming. His eyes are lovely and heavy, and whatever is making him suffer has nothing to do with sex. As he sits down on the couch he takes on that childishly serious look that Arthur always has, for a moment it seems that Rothstein could in fact be Arthur trying to absorb some point in Marcuse or Marx as you and he lay on his too-stiff bed, or maybe he could be Arthur in the Nevada desert concentrating comically underneath the hood of the Mercedes. Suddenly you feel a surge of affection for Arthur that you haven’t felt in a long time, and almost out of habit you put your hands in Rothstein’s hair, as though he were Arthur. And Rothstein looks up at you, honestly surprised, which makes you certain he did not plan to try to seduce you. Of course this may just be another seduction tactic, but you are tired of this line of thought; if it is a seduction tactic, admit that it has worked, and leave it at that. But you do not think it is a tactic. Rothstein looks more childish, needier than Arthur ever has, but instead of turning you off this only makes you want to kiss him, and you do.

Contrary to your expectations, cheating on Arthur does not give you any thrill. Plotting the route between the bus stop and Rothstein’s house so as not to run into Arthur; escaping from Arthur’s room in the middle of the night without waking him up and without getting caught in violation of parietals; touching Rothstein no more than surreptitiously when Arthur is in the room; maintaining a smile when Arthur rubs your stomach: all these things make you ashamed, not because they constitute adultery, but because they are an imitation of adultery. As with a girl who puts on her mother’s lipstick, your playing at adultery does nothing but make it clear what a child you are. Adultery is the only thing more ridiculous than monogamy, and the only thing more ridiculous than adultery is whatever it is that you’re doing with Rothstein. You are a child and Arthur is a child. You hate Arthur for acting like the two of you are married all the time, and whenever he touches you you get shivers of eternal childhood; this is how hellish it must feel to be a child forever. And of course he mistakes those shivers for excitement.

It is not excitement you feel with Rothstein, not quite. Nor is it the protection, alternately hard and soft, of a father figure. Rothstein has nothing in common with your father beyond his veiny hands (you like to trace the veins on his hands, just as you did with your father when you were a little girl). Moles on their eyelids: another thing Rothstein and your father share. A general looseness to the skin, as though their skeletons were losing pull. But the two share nothing beyond the things shared by all men over the age of forty or so and a refusal to talk about their pasts—though Rothstein will at least acknowledge his past, unlike your father, who walked out of the room every time you asked him what he did before you were born. There is in Rothstein nothing of your father’s volatility. The more time you spend with Rothstein, the more you poke at him, the more comments you make to affront his vanity, the absurdity of his hopes at Yale. You poke at him not out of cruelty or, as was the case when you first met him, to grab at some power over him, but out of love. You insult him not out of a hope that he will lose his delusions, but out of a lover’s curiosity. You want to know everything about him, you want to know how he moves, how he catches himself when he feels himself about to trip in the shower, the sounds he makes when he chews and how those sounds differ depending on how hungry he is, and you want to know how he reacts to affronts to his vanity, and more crucially how he reacts to repeated affronts to his vanity from someone he seems to love, in most of the admittedly arbitrary measures you have for judging such things (the watery look in his eye, the eagerness to see you). And there is a difference between how Rothstein reacts to these affronts now and how he reacted to them when he first knew you. No longer does he respond with sarcasm, possibly glad for the affront because he enjoys refining and displaying his sarcasm more than he enjoys pitying himself. Now when you affront him he looks sad and responds defensively, pathetically, about how he just had a conversation with someone in the biology department and it really does look as if something might come through. You keep waiting for him to respond with rage, as your father would have, to throw you out of his house or perhaps to take off his belt and to try to hit you—you are curious whether you could outrun Rothstein, as you could always outrun your father. But rage is not something that Jersey seems capable of; he couldn’t even find it in himself to feel rage at the Nazis. You are surprised at your surprise that you love him for this. That your father may have been a Nazi—he always talked about how much he hated America and the Jews, and your parents never explained their background to your satisfaction—is the most obvious but not the most salient distinction between him and Jersey. It is not until now that you understand just how much your father needed to feel enraged, with what devotion he searched for the next humiliation. When he sent you to the butcher shop for cut-rate meat, he did not need meat, in fact he probably could have sustained himself with nothing but his bile; he needed to be humiliated in front of the butcher, so that he could then hate the butcher, and throw a punch at the butcher, which would then cause him to break his hand, another cause for humiliation and another reason to hate the butcher. Like a child who lives only to redress a swiped ice cream cone or some sand kicked in his face. And like a piece of machinery from Freud’s assembly line, you were prepared to find a man just like your father. Isn’t that what you have seen in Arthur? Wasn’t all of your talk of wit simply a cover for what really attracted you to him, his constant need to be enraged? A rage so overpowering that he has no idea it is there, that it has made him, to most outward appearances, meek. (Yes, she probably thought this. Let no one say that I can’t follow empathy all the way into masochism.)

Unfortunately, Rothstein does not excite you either. He excites you in bed—he is a skilled lover and it is impossible not to admire how many different ways he knows how to deliver an orgasm. You are curious whether he loves you, you look for clues that he loves you, but you would not be devastated to discover that he did not in fact love you, or so at least you think. You are actually irritated that he loves you, because now you will never know how you would feel if he did not love you. There is affection in your curiosity but no urgency. Maybe the problem is with you: you lack the ability to feel. But that’s not true. The thought that you lack the ability to feel makes you almost unbearably sad. You lack the desire to feel. Your old excuse, your Catholic education, with its search-and-destroy incursions into your sexual desire, won’t save you; whatever it is that makes it impossible for you to love was inside of you before the nuns got to you, before even your parents got to you.

This is intolerable, and there is no reason to believe it is true. You’re a child, and the belief that you’ll never change or get better is a childish one; worse, it’s an adolescent one, and whatever people’s thoughts on childhood and adulthood, everyone seems to agree that nothing thought by an adolescent can be correct. You’ll get better. Maybe the problem is that you don’t understand what romantic excitement is, perhaps you are experiencing romantic excitement with Rothstein but you are so inexperienced that you don’t recognize it. After all, your only models are Arthur and Neville. Stay with Rothstein and you’ll learn what romantic excitement is.

Before the end of every evening spent with Arthur and Neville at his home, Jersey will pull you aside. He will ask to see you the next night, and you will agree, even though you are exhausted from making the bus trip so frequently and you wish you could be free and in your dorm room, even though you can hardly think for how tired you are and wonder if you would be someone else entirely if only you could get a little more sleep. You do care for him intensely, even if there is nothing romantic in it. Each time he makes love to you, you hope that he and his expert dick will finish quickly, because you like to watch him when he is asleep. There is nothing impressive any longer about his endless opinions, but there is something adorable in them, the way it is adorable when children express their opinions on whatever the adults are talking about. The fact is that there is something maternal in your feelings for him. It doesn’t make any sense, of course; he is twice your age and there is a good deal of gray in his pubic hair. But he seems so sad all the time, so blustery in ways that you can’t believe once fooled you into thinking he was invincible. He is like the sort of young boy who, after being hit, does not hit back but rather broods on the hit. Without being aware of it, you’re brooding on whether you might like to spend your entire life as this man’s mother.

f

Now let’s say you’re Rothstein. The speech at your house neither galvanized nor shocked most of the assembled kids. They applauded and moved on to the next manifesto. Only manifestoes that tell them what they want to hear or tell them the precise opposite of what they want to hear will hold their attention for more than a minute or two. The kids applaud what you say about sex and ignore what you say about politics. The only one who seemed to get anything out of your speech was the girl who yelled afterward; at the very least she understood that you were presenting them with a stark choice, and even with her it is impossible to tell whether she actually considered what you said or whether she reacted against you like a Maoist robot, her anger response switched on by a word or two in your speech. Neville failed to notice that you mocked him for mangling your words, as did the rest of the crowd. You are ashamed because this was what you wanted to happen. You wanted the kids to misinterpret what you said, and to think you said they could have sex and change the world. This was what they thought you said, what functionally you did say; their indifference was not a result of your telling them difficult truths.

But after all, the kids are only kids. You concentrate on getting the job. Not the job, a job. There is no specific position available. You should never have given your friend’s hints of a job any credit at all, but instead you gave them so much credit that you moved to New Haven. And by the time you moved he had clearly forgotten, he was clearly bored by you. Why did you move to New Haven, of all places? Because you are obsessed with prestige? But surely you are more sophisticated than that. Did you move to New Haven so that you can be here to witness the race riots, which, when they come in full force, will burn the country to the ground? Do you want to see the world destroyed? The race riots so far, even the worst of them, in Watts and Newark and Detroit, have still left buildings standing. There is much, much worse to come, and New Haven will be a perfect place to watch; it will be a perfect place to watch the blacks burn the WASPs.

No, that’s not the reason. Really you are here for the prestige because you can’t accept that you will never get a job again. You can’t accept that no one takes you seriously anymore. You are widely suspected to be just another imitator of Timothy Leary, just another moderately talented academic straining for prophethood. Maybe you should never have published the book, but the proceeds allow you to live unemployed. Unemployed and bitter. You know that you are bitter. The reasons that you haven’t gotten a job have nothing to do with anti-Semitism. You don’t even believe what you say to the black-haired Maoist robot and her comical WASP boyfriend; you say what you say simply because you are bitter and agitated, although there is something about the boy’s agitation that relaxes you, as it is so much worse than your own. His eyes keep darting to check his girlfriend’s reaction and your reaction to everything that is said, as though everyone else needs constant surveillance because everyone else’s darkest emotions are always as close to the surface as his are. He is as angry as you were when you were his age, but you can forgive yourself for thinking that you had much more to be angry about. You are rather astonished at the WASP capacity for resentment, which seems close to inexhaustible. The earliest of them probably resented Indians for allowing themselves to be cheated and killed. But putting aside the questions of the merit and justice of one’s hatreds, the boy still reminds you of yourself at a young age, reminds you of the Jersey Rothstein who not only wanted but needed to kill Nazis, and for whom being denied the ability to kill Nazis was a denial on par with the denial of all human contact; it felt like being locked in a room with food and water and nothing else for a lifetime, or at least for ten years. You are happy to see the boy again because he reminds you so much of yourself, though you do not tell him this, because he would not understand what you mean and in any case being compared to a Jew whose family perished in the Holocaust would give him the smugness of oppression without the cost, far outweighing the benefit, of actually having been oppressed. At the moment he is like you were after the Americans entered the war, and probably wants not to fight as desperately as you wanted to fight. Soon enough he will come to the point that you came to, that morning when you sat at your aunt’s kitchen table as the sun was rising, that morning after you had spent yet another night not sleeping and instead imagining your mother and your sisters in the gas chamber (Were they together? Did they embrace as they died? Did they hate each other and fight over food?) that morning when you said to yourself: Enough. No more. No more of the dead. You decided that your life would not be a funeral procession for your family, a funeral procession that would end only with your own funeral. Let others appease the dead, as though the entire Earth above ground were Munich. Over you, death shall have dominion, but the dead shall not.

And why do you want Arthur to come to this conclusion? Simply because adopting a Goy would be so offensive to your dead ancestors? To satisfy your paternal desires, your desire to pass on what you are and know?

For whatever reason, you sit with Arthur and you try to guide him. Essentially you restate points you made in the book. You tell him that love is the opposite of freedom, that it is love that makes people waste their lives on jobs they cannot stand to provide for their family. You add something you left out of the book, that communism is even worse than capitalism because it turns everyone into a giant family. Arthur nods thoughtfully as you talk, but sometimes you get the sense that he wants something entirely different from you, that he wants guidance on how to lash out rather than on what to do instead of lashing out. It is difficult to tell, though, because most of the time Arthur is there Miranda and Neville are there as well. Why do you listen to Neville, why do you allow him to speak? Really, you should simply throw him out. And yet you have to admit you enjoy mocking him. You wish you did not but you do; perhaps it is a way of taking revenge on the entire rotting carcass of twentieth-century vatic banality.

And then there is Miranda. At first you are unnerved by how quiet she is. True believers tend to be much more dangerous when they are quiet than when they are loud. When they are loud, they are just talking; when they are quiet, they tend to be plotting something. You wonder if you have gotten it wrong, and Miranda is the one who wants to do something terrible. When she asks to see you privately, you almost say no for fear of what she will do (knife you? set your house on fire?), and you are all but certain that her intimations of a tryst are just a ploy, but you realize that your fear is irrational and so you agree, and to ensure that she does not know you are unnerved, you force a smile. You are nervous for hours before she arrives, and you try to calm yourself. When she does arrive, you make a great show of calm. When she kisses you, you are shocked, though the kiss lasts no more than three or four seconds before you think that of course she is attracted to you, of course she wants to kiss you.

You never find her attractive, exactly, and she is not particularly creative or experienced sexually, but whatever the reason, she quickly becomes all you think about. After this, Norture and Arthur are no more than an irritation, a distraction from Miranda. They sit in your kitchen, and you cook for them, because cooking for them is better than paying attention to them, and as you scrape eggs onto their plates with your spatula they ask you for your opinions on topics you don’t care about. You could tell them not to come anymore, but you don’t. Why? Their adulation, still? Or is it mere politeness? Or politeness and the fact that you prefer Miranda to have a boyfriend? You do not want her to fall in love with you. Long after you have fallen in love with her, you do not want her to fall in love with you. Why do you fall in love with her? Why do you fall in love with a twenty-one-year-old who is under the impression that she is a communist? How does the switch in your mind get flipped that turns you into the robot adorer of a Maoist robot? On that you have no idea. One day you can live without her, the next you cannot. A love as unwelcome and inarguable as death.

Do you love her for a reason out of dime-store psychoanalysis—that submitting to this girl of German background is some sick way of submitting to the Nazis?

What terrifies you most of all is that there is no reason whatsoever for you to love Miranda, that nothing motivates love, and love is simply capricious. You cannot believe the other reason that often occurs to you. Nonetheless, it is there, and every time you are with her you think about the way that Miranda resembles your older sister Ulrike. Ulrike used to put her hands in your hair and stroke your hair for hours, and very often she would comb your hair with a kitchen fork, changing your hair from one style to another. When Miranda puts her hands in your hair, they feel like your sister’s hands. You have not asked her to comb your hair with a fork, but you would be lying to yourself if you pretended it had not occurred to you to do so.

f

I am not making up that last detail out of whole cloth—Jersey once made an offhand comment to me that Miranda resembled Ulrike, and the story about Ulrike combing his hair with a fork is true, or if not then he was the one who made it up. I mentioned it offhand to Sydney once and she laughed and said it reminded her of The Little Mermaid, but once again, this was her father’s story.

I have to take a minute here to compliment myself. There were many details in what I just wrote that were extremely painful for me to write—I basically attacked myself, didn’t I? But it yielded what I would wager is a fairly accurate portrait of Jersey and Miranda. I am a much better and more empathetic writer than my enemies maintain, and am better even than Sydney gives me credit for.

Of course I was oblivious while all of this was going on (assuming it was going on—I could, of course, be completely wrong); I was paying too much attention to the conversations. So I might say: “What do you make of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia?” And Rothstein would reply: “It is in the nature of governments to exert as much power as they can just as it is in the nature of people to exert as much power as they can,” a fairly banal answer that may have been the result of his preoccupation with the way Miranda was nibbling at her toast.

“Tell me, Jersey,” I asked late one night. We had all been talking for hours, I had drunk a great deal of wine, and the conversation was winding down, but I wasn’t quite ready to go home yet. “Why do you think it is that we think incest is wrong?”

This got his attention. He leaned back in his chair and gripped the armrests, the way certain kinds of men do when preparing for certain kinds of battle.

“Are you asking because you want to have sex with your little sister?” Miranda asked, quickly and sharply enough that I wondered if she truly suspected that the thought had occurred to me.

“That’s not called for, Miranda,” Jersey said. “Arthur, you’re asking because we’re questioning every other kind of sexual restriction, so why not this one as well?”

“I know it sounds like a right-wing parody of sexual freedom, but yes. Why don’t we question it?”

“It seems to me that it should be questioned,” Jersey said. “Darwin married his first cousin. And the old argument that it causes a somewhat higher rate of birth defects doesn’t quite do the trick, does it? It doesn’t explain the revulsion we feel. Do you think it should no longer be taboo?”

“It could be an incredible acte gratuit,” Neville said. “I like where you’re going with this, Arthur. It would hit the bourgeoisie right where they live.”

“Exactly where they live,” Jersey said, “but does that mean they would be against it? It might be just what they are looking for. Never to have to leave the house.”

I wanted to talk about something else, but I wanted to make my position clear so that it wouldn’t seem strange that I had brought it up. “But don’t you think that we’re not truly free if there’s one single breathing person we’re forbidden to have sex with?”

“No,” Jersey said, chuckling a little. “I don’t think that at all.”

“I just think it would be completely disgusting,” Miranda said.

“I’m with Arthur on this one,” Neville said. “We have to be allowed to have sex with every other adult on earth. We don’t have to actually do it, because like Miranda says it would be disgusting, but we have to be allowed to do it.”

“So, Jersey,” I asked, as a rather inelegant way of getting off this subject, “how’s your love life?”

Neville made some hemming and hawing noises, apparently afraid that this would ruin our evenings with Rothstein altogether. I can’t say how Miranda reacted at first, because I was focused on Rothstein. He gave me a flat grin that became more menacing the more he looked at me, and if I were smarter I might have realized right there that he was sleeping with Miranda. I wasn’t smarter, so I interpreted his grin as having no other meaning than that I had hit a nerve.

“My love life is arid,” Rothstein said. “There is nothing good to be said about it.”

“Jersey has no time for the fairer sex,” Miranda said. “He’s too busy unraveling the mysteries of evolution.” She tried to affect an ironic, mock-formal tone when she said this, but something was off.

“How about your father?” Rothstein asked me. “Do you think that your father has affairs with his secretaries while he’s making his bombs?”

“What do you mean?” Miranda asked. “Arthur’s father is a lawyer.”

“He works for a defense contractor,” I said. “As a lawyer.” I must have let this slip to Rothstein at some point.

“I didn’t mean to give away a secret, Arthur,” Jersey said.

“A defense contractor?” Miranda said. Then she started laughing. “Well, at least you don’t tell the truth all the time!”

“What company does he work for?” Neville asked. “We should bomb his office!”

“No!” Norture may consider me immoral now, but I have never—not even once—suggested any kind of terrorist act.

“Now now, Norture,” Jersey said. “We don’t have time for bombing. I have cheese omelets on the stove.”

I didn’t apologize to Miranda because I didn’t think this was any worse than, say, causing me to crash someone else’s car because she didn’t want me to meet her mother. When we were back at my room, I asked her: “Do you think Rothstein’s having sex with a Briarcliff girl?”

“A Briarcliff girl? What makes you think that?”

“I’m just wondering.”

“Have you heard something? Did he say something to you about a Briarcliff girl? Did Neville say something to you about a Briarcliff girl?”

“I was just thinking. Rothstein spends an awful lot of time with us,” I said. “I don’t know how he has time to see anyone else. There must be a Briarcliff girl he’s having sex with, don’t you think?”

“Oh,” she said. “Yes, I guess that would make sense. He writes about sex so much that there must be a girl he’s having sex with.” She looked relieved, or she looked indifferent, or indifferently curious, as people are about gossip. No, she looked relieved; I would have had to have been an idiot not to see that they had been having sex all this time behind my back. Then I told myself that no, my jealousy was monstrous, I was monstrous for failing to trust her. For her to be sleeping with Rothstein would have required a preposterously elaborate deception. And besides, we weren’t married; if she were sleeping with Rothstein she would simply tell me and I would have no right to be angry.

“But maybe he’s not sleeping with anyone,” Miranda said. Her hands were out of her pockets now and across her stomach, and she looked truly thoughtful. “For all you or I know, he may not be interested in sex at all. When you think about it, when someone talks a lot about God, you don’t automatically think he’s truly holy. Often it’s the opposite. Maybe it’s the same with Rothstein. Maybe it’s the same even if there is a girl he’s sleeping with. Maybe he really loves her but he finds the sex boring. Maybe he’s a total hypocrite and he thinks of nothing but his dead parents when he’s fucking her. Or maybe he loves her and he loves having sex with her, but then he’d still be a hypocrite because of what he says about monogamy. Or maybe he’s sleeping with tons of girls and loves it every single time. But I hope that’s not the case, Arthur, because I’ve been having sex with him.”

Even though I had suspected it, or because I had suspected it, it seemed impossible that she had said what she just said.

“I’m so sorry. I’m really so sorry. Oh God, I wish I hadn’t told you. I’m such a horrible person. Can you forget I said anything?”

“What?”

“Of course you can’t. Of course you can’t. Look, I’m not a horrible person. Why would I even think that? Why do you make me think in this puritanical way? We’re not married. I never swore that I would be faithful to you. I don’t think I ever said it out loud. Would you stop looking like a puppy that just got kicked?”

When she was gone, I didn’t feel upset that she had broken up with me; I only felt upset that I had cried. The truth was I hadn’t been happy for months, I had been so concerned with losing her—not to mention with her new boyfriend’s opinion of me—and now maybe I would be able to be happy again. I took a walk that night and was impressed with how refreshed I felt. It was only over the next several days that rage and grief began to colonize me.

f

For weeks after that I either lay in bed or skulked through campus. I stubbed out my cigarettes in the stone buildings, as though this might burn them down. Occasionally I would spot someone I recognized and I would turn away as I passed. I felt like a conspirator with nothing to plot and no one to plot with.

Miranda hadn’t cared about me, I told myself, and she hadn’t cared about politics. If she cared about politics, she wouldn’t be dating that prophet of disengagement. Her paintings were shit. She had just used me for my money. She was greedy. She just wanted to string me along until we got married, and then she would have divorced me and taken as much of my money as she could. Now she was after the money Rothstein had made off of The Dominion of Pleasure. She couldn’t feel love. No, she refused to feel love. She claimed to care about the poor, but really, she was as heartless as Johnson or Nixon or McNamara. I pitied her, really.

No, pity was obviously not what I felt.

How simple: she had hurt me, she was evil. What was the truth of it?

She loved me, I would say to myself, but we were young, and love fades when you’re young. Mature people accepted that. That was what maturity was: accepting things. The more things you accepted, the more mature you were. Bad things happen to good people, life is full of disappointments, war is hell, soldiers burn babies. Occasionally you love people. They leave you: that’s how life is. They die: that’s how life is. You die: that’s how life is.

Who was the first man who looked at his own surrender and called it maturity? I wanted to tie that guy to a tree, punch him in the gut, and bash his face with a rock. Then he would look back up at me with his blue-black bloody nose and smile wisely with his remaining, splintered teeth. He would say: “This is how life is.”

I knew I wouldn’t feel this way forever. There would be the usual anodyne attractions. The world isn’t that bad, I would say later. But at this moment I was right and my palliated future self was wrong.

Throughout those weeks I would have done anything to be with her. I would have done anything to touch her. To smell her.

Rothstein was wrong. The world could be changed, must be changed. Fucking wouldn’t stop bombs. There was evil in the world, and it was evil to accept it.

Miranda lay next to Rothstein, her sweaty legs entwined with his sweaty legs. Miranda’s hand over Rothstein’s hairy stomach. Was it hairy? It was probably hairy.

As the weeks passed, I went to class more. The budding flowers irritated me, with their intimations of sex, but it was nice to see budding flowers. It was nice to smell them. Misery came in discrete sessions, like bombing raids, and as long as I turned out the lights and waited in the cellar all would be well.

Thinking this way, waiting in the cellar, was surprisingly useful. Wait in the cellar for your pain to pass. Maybe I could throw in some Asian-sounding words and start a religion. “There was no meaning in my life until I became an Arthurist,” people would say. Or maybe they would say they found Arthurism. People seemed to like to find things: God, themselves, their true calling. Life, when lived richly, was an Easter egg hunt.

After the misery, emptiness. There were only weeks until graduation and I felt no ambition. I had never had ambition, but I remembered having ambition to have ambition. I wanted to help people but feared I was too lazy. Maybe laziness was my cardinal characteristic. That was one thing about being rich: if I wanted to do nothing, I could. I tried to imagine it, decades of nothing. Playing tennis, lying on the beach. I tried to imagine what thoughts I would have. I would think about girls. There would be girls on the beach.

Inexhaustible indolence. There was something terrifying about the idea.

People felt sorry for the poor, for blacks. If you were poor or if you were black and you failed, it wasn’t your fault. You failed because you were poor or black and because society was unfair. Nobody would feel sorry for a rich kid; a failed rich kid was either embarrassing or funny, and most likely both.

f

One day Rothstein called me and, without any reference to Miranda, invited me to dinner that night. For fear of looking petulant, I accepted.

After dreading it for the entire day, I made my way to his house that night. When I rang the doorbell, no one answered for several minutes. Other guys waited on stoops for their girlfriends, not for old men who were fucking their girlfriends. After a time, Neville opened the door.

“Isn’t it exciting?” Neville said as soon as he saw me. “Our Miranda is dating Jersey Rothstein!”

“Exciting,” I said.

When Jersey came down, he was wearing his silk white robe and sandals. When I would think of this outfit later, it would strike me as ridiculous, but at the time it seemed magisterial, a devastating rebuke to my own poisoned conformity.

“Arthur! I have to admit I didn’t expect you to come tonight. Whenever I see you, you turn haughtily away, as though I were nothing but a poor peon. Or a poor, wandering Jew. I’m so delighted that you could join us tonight. I’m very glad you’ve given up all that pettiness.”

“What pettiness?”

“You’ve acted as though I stole something from you.”

“I haven’t given anything up. I hate you and I always will.”

Neville broke out into a snorting laughter at this.

“Well,” Rothstein said. “It’s nice to know that I can count on something.”

“You mean other than not getting an appointment at Yale?” I said.

“We’ll see about that,” Jersey said, smiling. “Dinner is almost ready.”

Miranda was sitting at the dining room table and wearing a toga. She murmured a weak hello that made me understand how craven I looked by having shown up, and I wanted to leave, but Jersey entered the room carrying a large bowl.

“Jersey has cooked us one of his amazing curry dishes,” Miranda said, glancing at me for a second, but then turning her eyes, embarrassed, to Norture.

She stood up to help but tripped on her toga. I wanted to laugh at her but Rothstein took her in his arms and the act looked like one of romantic grace. I thought of Emily, the way she was always tripping on things, and I felt a sharp longing to be with her. Emily did not make conversation into a sweaty, bloody contest.

“Stay on your feet, my dear.”

Miranda collected herself and smiled. “Jersey’s an excellent chef,” she said.

Jersey touched her elbow, her hair.

“One day, I’ll get her to cook for me. I’ll make her wifely yet.”

“Marriage is for the herd, Professor Rothstein,” Miranda said.

“You can be wifely without being a wife.”

Miranda giggled and hit Jersey playfully, which made me want to die.

Jersey put some curry on my plate. “This is filled with herbs I acquired while I was in India. They enhance sexual appetite and performance. They should help you with your repression, Arthur.”

“Excuse me?”

“We don’t know enough about the brain to know how these chemicals work, but from my purely anecdotal perspective, the effects are astonishing.”

I dug my fork into my palm. “I’m not repressed.”

“I can give you a few bottles to take home if you like.”

I put my fork down and looked at Jersey, with his skeleton’s smile. The man was a catastrophe of self-satisfaction. “I don’t think you heard me. I’m not repressed.”

“It’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” Miranda said, smiling at me sweetly. “You’re very young.”

“I’m very young? We had sex all the time.”

“Yes,” Jersey said. “I had to undo all those automatic maneuvers and responses.”

I struck my plate with my fork. “That’s bullshit. That’s bullshit. You only make such a big deal out of all this stuff because you’re too much of a coward to try to change the world.”

“Stop hiding with the world,” Jersey said. “It’s not a fig leaf.”

Neville put his hand on my elbow. “Calm down, buddy. You’re not going to learn anything by getting angry and shutting yourself down.”

I jerked my arm away. Norture’s eyes resembled those of a particularly stupid animal, and I clenched my fist and punched his nose. I felt a sharp pain in my fingers and Norture screamed and covered his face.

Jersey stood up, gently chuckling. “Ah, the vigor of youth. Neville, I’ll get you some ice and take you to the hospital. Arthur, I think you should storm out of the house in righteous fury.”

Norture’s hands covered most of his face. Blood was seeping through his fingers.

“I am not going to hit back because I am a pacifist.”

My hand was numb now. I tried to think of a response to Jersey, but I couldn’t. I looked at Miranda. She didn’t look angry or disgusted, though she was probably both, or at least would soon be both. There was a hint of feeling in her eyes, but there was no way to know what the feeling was. I was careful to keep my back straight as I walked out of the house.

I had to admit it felt good to hit Norture, even if he had not been my desired target. I wanted more of this feeling. I wanted to destroy something, but I didn’t know what.

12:35 a.m. May 12, 2012

On the television tucked into an armoire in my hotel room, Norture is nowhere in sight. What is in sight is a girl who has tripped on some stairs, and who is gasping, terrified, into the camera. A knife comes into the frame and I look away. Of all works of art, it is poorly written horror films, in which repellant people say inane things and make stupid decisions as they fail to evade death, that are most true to life.

When my grandfather hanged himself, all he left behind was a giant, bloated house on the beach that he had built with money he didn’t have. Lining the house were eleven empty pedestals. Well, the pedestals weren’t empty when he died. At an auction two months before he killed himself, he bought eleven French sculptures for far more than they were worth, which was already quite a great deal. My father sold the sculptures at a heavy loss, but kept the pedestals. Why? “That’s for you and your sister. A monetary memento mori.” Really he should have gotten rid of the house, but instead he paid the massive mortgage every month, which until he was very well established was a major burden. Why? He would say because the house was beautiful, but it wasn’t particularly. He probably could have built a better house for less money. But he kept it. He also kept, at the far end of the driveway, a sculpture of Cupid pointing an arrow into his own mouth. “Your grandfather thought this sculpture was profound. In a way it is—everything that costs a lot of money is profound. The hustle is beautiful even if the art isn’t. Especially if the art isn’t.”

My father kept my grandfather’s suicide note in a locked drawer in our apartment in New York (I discovered where he kept the key when I was twelve or so). It read, in part: “I despise sleeping at the Chappine because you never know if a Jew or a Negro has slept here the previous night.”

After graduating, I spent much of May and June sitting on the beach, alone when I could manage it (my mother had taken my sister and me to the beach house while my father spent the summer in Washington on business). Emily was home with nothing to do with her summer before entering Wellesley, so she took it upon herself to fix me as though I were a car that had stopped by the side of the road. Whenever she found me outside, she would join me with a bottle of wine and two glasses.

Often she would interrupt a reverie in which Miranda would be lying naked on the beachhead, sitting up, looking at me over her shoulder, tired but excited at something that had just occurred to her. That wonderful morning-sex look. She smiled sweetly, with concern for every fluctuation of my mood. Then out of the ocean, like some free-love doctrinaire sea monster, came Rothstein. Rothstein, whose cock walked on water. He touched Miranda with those hands, varicose veins like rivers of blue-green sewage. She kissed and embraced him and they rolled around.

Rothstein and Miranda were probably somewhere making love creatively, originally. They were enacting the erotic equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting. They were certainly not ripping off From Here to Eternity.

And then Emily would be there, pouring me a glass of wine. She would rub my neck and ask me how I was doing, or she would talk about people both of us knew and neither of us cared about in a way that made it clear that the only thing she was thinking about was how I was doing. It made me feel awful to be sprawled in my own wretchedness in front of her, and soon I came to resent her for seeing me as I was.

Once, she sat down next to me and said:

“I spent most of last night talking to James Hickham.”

This took me completely by surprise.

“What did you talk about?”

“I don’t know, music or something. Would it make you feel better if I said that I think Rothstein is wrong about everything?”

“But you don’t think that.”

“I certainly don’t think he’s right about everything.”

“Did James Hickham tell you about his plans to make you a housewife?”

“He did tell me that all women should be housewives. He tells me that every time I see him.”

“That’s awful. I told you you shouldn’t have slept with him.”

“It’s not like he’s actually going to rape anyone. He’s just a dumb guy who thinks he’s a great philosopher of love.”

“You’re not going to go out with him again, are you? He wants to make you a slave. Remember when you were a kid and you used to do that dance on that strange ornate rug we used to have where you would swing your arms around and make weird faces while you chanted ‘Emily can do whatever Emily wants because Emily is free’?”

She put her hands in her hair and raised her toes at the memory. “Mom would say that I was free but that was only because I was a child, and that the older I got the less free I would be. I thought that was a stupid thing to say and I told her so. I remember thinking even when I was doing that dance that the chant wasn’t true. Do you remember, I think it was on the same rug you’re talking about, when you would pretend to teach me the ballets that we watched on TV?”

“What does that have to do with freedom?”

“Nothing, it’s just a nice memory.” She poured me a cup of wine. “Sometimes I would climb up on the coffee table and then you would twirl me around a bit.”

“So are you going to go out with Hickham?”

“I told him I have a boyfriend. I figured you would pitch fire and brimstone at me if I said yes.”

“You do have a boyfriend.”

“Bradley and I aren’t engaged.”

“So if it weren’t for me, you would have gone out with him, despite the fact that you have a boyf…”

“Our Puritan blood is making your face red. Don’t worry. Nobody’s going to make me wear a scarlet ‘A.’”

“Trust me, you’d be better off alone than with Hickham.”

“Sometimes when we would do those ballet moves,” she said, “I would look through the window and see Paul sitting on the beach by himself. I remember thinking that it was so silly to sit for hours and look at the ocean. The ocean always looks the same.”

“So now I’m like Paul again?”

“No.” Tears came into her eyes. “I’m not saying that at all. When you sit out here, there’s something about you that’s completely different from Paul. You give me the sense that you’re thinking about something much more important than Miranda. I honestly think you’re a genius, Arthur. I just wish there were a way I could make you happy.”

There was no indication that she was mocking me. Or that she knew that I thought only about Miranda and was saying this as some sort of nudge for me to think about other things. She truly thought there was something more to me than there was, which made me hate her for a second. It even made me wonder about her intelligence.

“So you’re not going out with Hickham?” I said.

“You’re exasperating.”

“Why did you mention him? You knew it would upset me.”

“I just wanted to tell you something you would think was interesting.” She wiped the sand off her jeans and left.

Anything that I said she probably would have taken as a sign of some dusting of depression that lay atop whatever she thought there was in me. And of course, nobody wants to be thought less of.

f

My mother: a carnival of euphemism.

“Maybe you should see someone, or maybe go somewhere.”

“Where, exactly, Mother?”

“Somewhere where they can help you.”

“Where who can help me?”

“People who are trained in this sort of thing.”

“What sort of thing?”

“You can’t keep this up forever.”

“Keep what up?”

f

One morning Emily strode into my room and threw open the curtains.

“It’s ten. Time to face the day.”

“You sound like Mom,” I said.

She pursed her lips and folded her hands at her stomach. “My, you’ve been sleeping an awful lot, haven’t you?”

Her impression of our mother wasn’t particularly accurate or perceptive.

“Who cares if I sleep? Nixon’s going to bomb whether I get out of bed or not.”

Emily cocked her eyebrow at this comment and started laughing, and then I laughed, too. I looked at the red in her cheeks. When we stopped laughing I still felt awful.

“Brad is coming over later. He’s bringing Melissa. The four of us should…”

“I don’t think so, Emily.”

Her mouth flattened and her lips receded. She looked more like our mother now than she did when she was trying to do an impression of her. She tapped her left foot quickly.

“Brad and Melissa are coming over. The four of us should play tennis.” She grunted and left the room.

Melissa, in addition to being Brad’s neighbor, had been my girlfriend my senior year of high school. Emily thought Melissa was still infatuated with me and kept trying to set us up.

I looked at the window and remembered kissing Melissa against it. I felt no desire for Melissa or anyone else, but celibacy would be a capitulation to Jersey and Miranda. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the things about Melissa that I liked. We had made love on this bed a couple times, quickly and on top of the comforter. I was sure I enjoyed it. It was sex, after all.

I threw the blankets off and went to the bathroom to shower and shave. Then I was consumed with which aftershave I would use, with how I would arrange my hair. How pathetic: I was primping for Melissa.

f

At tennis I concentrated on Brad’s serve. Tennis had meant something to me once. I used to love the smells of the game. The heat, the ball, the concrete.

Emily, standing next to Brad, tamped down the air with her racket. “Come on, Arthur, you’re not even trying.”

“Leave him alone,” Melissa said, stroking my back. “He’s got a lot on his mind. Don’t you, sweetie?” I remembered loving the way she said “sweetie.” I wanted to find the person who delighted in Melissa’s scratchy voice. What capacity for love, what generosity of spirit that person must have had! I was a usurper in my own body and I wanted to restore the exiled ruler. I looked at the way Melissa’s black hair fell over her shoulders. In the scheme of things, it wasn’t that different from the way Miranda’s black hair fell over her shoulders. By any reasonable standard Melissa was much more attractive. As Emily and Brad conferred over something, Melissa pressed her breasts into my side and I got an erection, as though she had placed a quarter into a jukebox and produced a song.

I turned to Emily, who was preparing to serve. Sweat from her abdomen soaked through her shirt.

“You know, Arthur,” Brad said. “You might want to consider seeing my tennis coach. I’ve been using him for years.” Brad threw his broad, toweled shoulders back and smiled at me. His smile asserted that there was nothing in the world that might displease anyone who mattered, and it was surprisingly persuasive on this point. I wished I could be Brad, this strong-jawed, bountifully inconsequential boy who was fucking my sister.

“He has this marvelously Italian way of looking at things,” Brad continued. “He…”

“That’s fascinating, darling.” Emily tossed the ball, and as she did I noticed something in her smile. Or maybe it was something in her eyes. There was no question that I wanted to have sex with her. It had nothing to do with politics, there was no way that I could dress up my desire in ideology—I just wanted to have sex with her. She hit the ball and then she shook her hair from her face and repositioned her feet. A loud noise came from Melissa’s racquet, then another, and another. Some of these noises came from my racquet but I was repelling the ball more than returning it. I looked at the muscles in Emily’s thighs, straining against her shorts. She was beautiful. But I knew this already.

This was just a passing thought. Like all the other thoughts had been passing thoughts. I did not want to have sex with my sister. I was not some hunched-over, jagged-toothed pervert.

Melissa hit the ball over the net. “Hahaha. I’m so bad at this,” she said. Melissa’s hair looked like a clump of squid ink. Her eyes looked like coins that had been left in a fountain too long. “I’m so bad. Hahaha. Hahahaha. Hahahahahahahaha.”

I dropped my racquet. “Fucking shut up, you goddamned whore.”

f

I did not leave my room for the rest of the day. My mother yelled at me from outside my door, and then yelled at Emily when I wouldn’t answer. I picked up books but could not stay focused for more than two or three paragraphs. I thought of the way Emily would bunch her hair and massage her scalp when she was embarrassed. I thought of those movies where at the end the hero realizes he’s in love with the girl who’s been close by all along.

I would stop thinking like this soon. It was absurd and it would pass. It was nothing to worry about. It was nothing. It would be gone after a good night’s sleep. I just had not been myself lately.

If I was not myself, my sister was not my sister.

This was bad. I had had the idea before, but it had never felt like a need. Had some combination of Miranda and the Department of Defense ravaged me so thoroughly? Surely I had enough moral fortitude, well below the reasonably expected minimum, not to attempt to seduce my sister.

In all likelihood she would probably not even want to have sex with me. True, there was the way she touched me—always grabbing me, always poking me—and there was the way she wanted to know every opinion and every observation that crossed my mind. But she wasn’t insane, she wasn’t sick. There wasn’t some sort of canker growing on her brain, as there apparently was on mine.

I needed sleep. That was all.

f

When I heard Emily’s voice the next morning as she threw the blinds open, I scratched some crust from my eyes and roused myself.

“You’re not going to like this, Arthur,” she said. She was wearing a white dress that showed no cleavage.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“We’re going to go to church.”

“Church.”

“I know, I know. But Mom says you need it. She wasn’t happy about the way you spoke to Melissa. And apparently she thinks that going to church will sanitize your potty mouth. She’s so medieval.”

“She’s right. Let’s go to church.” I reached for the sheets, intending to throw them off, but I stopped myself when I realized I was naked.

“Don’t worry, it won’t be that bad,” Emily said. “If we just go today, she’ll forget and she won’t make us go next week.”

“Right. Let me just take a shower and get dressed. I won’t be more than twenty minutes.”

“You look like you’re actually excited to go.”

“Yeah, I’m really excited to go to church,” I said, careful to sound sarcastic.

She grinned. “You have a hard-on for church.”

“I don’t have a hard-on!”

She laughed. “Sorry about this. You know how Mom gets. See you downstairs. Oh, I dumped Brad.”

“What? Why?”

“He wanted to make me make you apologize to Melissa, and I told him that all you did was accurately describe her as a godforsaken whore.”

“Emily, why did you…”

“I know, you actually called her a goddamned whore, but I think I was more precise. I don’t think God has condemned her to Hell; he just can’t be bothered with her. Anyway, they’re both morons, you know that. I just set you up with Melissa because I thought maybe you wanted to get laid.”

“Why did you date Brad in the first place?”

“I’ve been trying to figure that out. I’ll see you downstairs.”

My tie was tied as well as it had been at prep school—which is to say, serviceably if not perfectly—when I arrived downstairs. I greeted my mother, but she did not look up from her paper. There was a dryness to her face, her face looked like an arid patch of desert, as though having me for a son were like living in a drought. This was entirely reasonable. I was a disgrace, a humiliation. I had called an intemperately nice girl a goddamn whore. Even though my mother couldn’t know what was happening in my head, I had done enough to be awful.

But I was sure that she did know what was happening in my head. Somehow she knew what a monster her son was.

“I’m sorry, Mother,” I said. “I really am. There’s no excuse for my behavior.”

“I hope you plan to apologize to that poor girl,” she said without looking at me.

In the car Emily kept trying to catch my eye to draw me into some private joke, but I wouldn’t let her. When we got to church, I tried to make sure that our mother sat between us, but Emily grabbed my arm as we filed into the pew and we sat next to each other.

We were silent until the Reverend spoke. The Reverend, blond and blue-eyed with imposing girth, reminded me of Rothstein, though he looked nothing like Rothstein. He began to read the second book of Samuel, chapter 7, verse 2.

“The King said to Nathan the prophet: See now, I dwell in a house of Cedar, but the ark of God dwells within curtains. And Nathan said to the King: Go, do all that is in your heart, for the Lord is with you.”

As the Reverend continued speaking I looked down at the floor and as I did so I saw Emily’s calves. I thought of the way Miranda’s legs looked against the pew the day we made love in the church.

Maybe Emily was right; maybe I was being a Puritan. Maybe breaking up with Miranda had left me disgusted by the human body, which was not something I wanted to be disgusted by. I should be encouraging Emily’s robust sexuality. We could not have sex with each other, but we should each travel the most scenic of erotic roads.

Paul would never have had the balls to seduce Emily.

I remember that this was a jarring thought even in that morning of jarring thoughts. Surely I did not want to seduce Emily to prove that I was more of a man than Paul. Strange way to prove that, if this were my goal.

But I wanted to have sex with Emily. I loved her.

I could fuck, more, I could make love to Emily. One session would be fucking and another would be making love, or we would erase the distinction between the two. It would be sex for its own sake and sex for the highest of political ends. Rothstein was wrong: sex and politics were not antagonists.

Maybe sex between a brother and a sister was the opposite of what I wanted to oppose. Sex between a father and a daughter or a mother and son would never be clean of coercion, if only because any relationship between parents and children is never quite clean of coercion. A brother and a sister who had sex, on the other hand, would be doing so as equals. It would be an act of total freedom—freedom from taboo, freedom from power, freedom from imperialism, freedom from anything it was possible to think of. Not a Raskolnikov-like act of violence, but an Arthur-like act of creation. An Arthur-and-Emily-like act of creation.

It was my duty to do this, it was my duty to destroy civilization by fucking my sister.

Do all that is in your heart, for the Lord is with you.

f

Throughout the rest of the service I could not wait to speak to Emily, and it was only as we were leaving the pew and she asked me if I had spotted the curl of hair coming from the Reverend’s left ear that I remembered that deciding to have sex with my sister would not by itself make it happen. I would have to convince her, and I had no idea how to do that.

On the drive back, Emily said, much louder than necessary: “Wasn’t that boring?” She directed the question at me, but she was looking at our mother to see her reaction.

“Yes!” I said. “Christianity has always been the Gestapo of desire, since long, long before there was a Gestapo. Instead of Jews to hate, Christianity has desire. Though I guess Christianity has Jews, too. In any case, all the ovens in the world can’t incinerate desire. So they try to turn desire into other things. Jesus was a carpenter! Think about that! Think about it. Carpenters take wood, which comes from nature, trees, forests, they cut down wood so they can take what nature made perfect and turn it into these ugly pieces of furniture.” I did not know why I was saying the things I was saying. “That’s what Christianity does. We need to defy Christianity by having healthy, unfettered sex. And also by bringing social justice to the world.”

Then I continued on about how Jesus was right about social justice even though he was wrong about sex. I ended up on something about the camel and the needle’s eye. As I spoke, Emily and my mother looked progressively more confused.

“What I mean is that Christianity takes beautiful desire and makes ugly morality the way carpenters…”

“Maybe that’s enough now, Arthur,” my mother said, more concerned than angry, the way she used to speak to me when I had a fever. Emily looked at her hands, folded in her lap.

f

To want something with all of one’s soul and to be too timid to go after it was to fall into the most contemptible class of people, and that class was now mine. I was a failure at transgression: the moral equivalent of smelling of piss and eating out of garbage bins.

There was at least cause to feel sorry for people who ate out of garbage bins. If there was any creature with two eyes and a cock less likely to receive sympathy than a rich kid who couldn’t be happy, it was a pervert who couldn’t get laid. Or a rich pervert who couldn’t get laid. I might as well buy a raincoat and start leaving puddles of semen in the Manhattan subway.

For the first time all summer Emily left me alone. I ate my meals by myself and spent the rest of the day on the beach or in my room. When we passed in the house Emily smiled at me and did not say anything. She was so distant that I wondered whether she had detected what I had been thinking. It was either that, or she had decided that my suicide was a foregone conclusion, so there was no point worrying about me anymore.

Later that day the phone rang. It was the voice of a boy who wanted to speak with Emily. I told him he had the wrong number.

f

Late that night I came downstairs to get some food when I found Emily in front of the television. Right now the movie was It Happened One Night, one of our favorites.

There was a famous scene, about ten or fifteen minutes away, where Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert try to hitchhike and she hikes her skirt up her thigh to stop a car. Emily liked to raise her skirt in tandem with Colbert, and we had always acted as though it were innocent for her to show off her leg for me. Now it was obvious to me that we had been deluding ourselves, and I couldn’t wait for the scene.

“I love this movie,” I said, though Emily already knew this.

“I love the guy playing the violin,” she said. “I love how he’s playing the violin on a bus. Or would you call it a fiddle?”

“A fiddle, I think.”

“Men look so good in fedoras. It must be great to take an all-night bus trip. Look at the rain on the bus window; it’s ghostly in a weird way. Why did you tell Jacob Anderson that he had the wrong number?”

“Who’s Jacob Anderson?”

“The boy you told had the wrong number when he called here today. Why did you tell him that?”

“I’m sorry, I just…”

“Always playing the protective older brother. What happened to waging war on Christendom by sleeping around?”

“I’m sorry, I just…”

“Shh, we’re about to get to the part where Gable pretends to be a gangster and threatens to kill that guy’s kids.” She reached under her blanket, pulled out a bowl, and produced two carrots, one of which she tossed to me. “The carrot scene is coming up soon,” she said.

I thought about sitting on the arm of the chair where she sat, but I sat on the sofa across from her instead. She laughed at something Gable said and I twirled the carrot in my fingers. During some commercials, I tried to come up with an explanation about Jacob, but Emily seemed to have forgotten it. She was looking at me in a way that I couldn’t read. Maybe she was thinking the same thing I was, maybe she wanted to have sex with me, too. But that was unlikely.

On screen, Colbert, lying on a makeshift hay-bed, said that she did not need Gable’s character and that she could “get along.”

“I hate this scene,” Emily said.

When Gable didn’t answer, Colbert looked up with her baroquely wide eyes and, discovering that he was gone, began to scream.

“Peter! Peter!” Colbert screamed.

“Peter! Peter!” Emily mimicked. “She’s such a whiny bitch. Why did they have to make her such a whiny bitch?”

I brought the carrot to my mouth, intending to take a bite.

“Wait!” Emily said. “You have to wait until we get to the scene. What’s wrong with you?”

I lowered the carrot.

Gable and Colbert were walking by the side of the road, then stopped and rested against a fence.

“Okay, here we go,” Emily said. She placed her carrot between her teeth and bit it precisely as Gable did. I watched her nose as she chewed. If she hadn’t been my sister, we would have fallen in love at first sight. She picked up a carrot and threw it at me.

“You messed up again! You didn’t bite in time! You’re such an amateur.”

I smiled and took a bite. The carrot tasted faintly of cotton from the blanket, but I didn’t complain. Colbert was refusing to eat the carrot Gable offered her because it was raw.

“She’s such a pampered whore,” Emily said.

“I know.”

“Or a goddamned whore, as you might say.”

“Shh,” I said. “This is it.”

“Are you okay?” Emily said, and looked at me sympathetically for a longish time to give me an opportunity to speak, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. “There’s something weird about you tonight,” she said. “It’s like you’re nervous or something.”

“I’m fine. Let’s watch the scene.”

She twisted her face a little and concentrated on the television. Gable was boasting of his hitchhiking prowess, demonstrating various ways he used his thumb to stop cars. Then each way fails to stop a car. This made Gable look silly, and such was his faint, instantly discarded comeuppance. Gable had what men in these movies always had, an arrogance that was empty but charming, and therefore not empty. I was struck by how unfair it was that I didn’t have this arrogance.

This was where Emily usually stood up, but this time she did not stand up. She glanced at me and then bent toward the television.

Colbert said: “I’ll stop a car and I won’t use my thumb.”

Emily wasn’t getting up. I wanted to remind her to hike her skirt up like she always did, but I was too embarrassed. Colbert hiked her skirt over her knee and the scene was over.

“You didn’t do the skirt thing,” I said.

“Let’s get on a plane and move to REDACTED,” she said.

“What?”

“We can just go.”

“And do what?” I asked. “They’re in the middle of a civil war.”

“Maybe we can help,” she said.

“How?”

“Arthur, I’m really afraid you might kill yourself. I’m really afraid.”

“I don’t want to talk about this,” I said, and stood to leave.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Let’s watch the rest of the movie.” She looked genuinely remorseful, which made me feel bad. I sat down and tried to concentrate on the movie. I looked at Emily’s feet, her ankles.

“You have better legs than Claudette Colbert,” I said.

Emily looked at me quizzically.

“I thought of it because you usually do the thing with your skirt when she does,” I said. “You’ve got world-class legs.”

She looked both confused and flattered. “Thank you.”

“World-class legs.”

Emily looked at me, and as she did, her mood darkened. She started to say something but just grumbled to herself. She put the bowl of carrots on the coffee table and stood up.

“I’m going to bed,” she said.

“Did I say something?”

“No, I’m just tired.”

She gathered the blanket around her torso and walked out of the room. I tried to think of something to say but could not.

f

The next day, Emily suggested we take a trip into town. She probably wanted to talk about my strange behavior. I was lucky she was even willing to talk to me at all; I had gone much too far with innuendo while watching the movie. We walked in silence past the shops and through a small park by the water. We often walked in silence, but when we did Emily was usually looking around, swinging her arms, the way children did.

“It’s nice to go for a walk,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Arthur, do you think I’m going to become boring?”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Forget it. I don’t know why I said it. I mean, not giving me Jacob’s message.” Still walking, she hugged her breasts and looked away from me.

“I told you I was sorry about that.”

“No, no, it’s okay. And it was nice of you to pretend you were just being a protective older brother. I know Jacob is as boring as Brad. He’s boring in the same way that Brad is. James Hickham is boring, too. I know you’re afraid I’m becoming like that. But that doesn’t mean you can make decisions for me.”

I was perplexed. “Emily, I’m not sure…”

“You don’t have the right to make decisions for me.”

“Of course I don’t.”

“I’m not going to become like that. I’m not going to become boring, even though you think I am.”

“Emily, I don’t think that at all.” I let out a sort of sigh-laugh.

She stopped walking. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She stepped in front of me and turned to face me. “I know you think I’m a child, but I want you to listen to me, all right?”

“Emily, I don’t think you’re in any danger of becoming boring.”

She grabbed my arms. “No, just listen to me. I’m very smart. I know you very well. I usually know what you’re thinking, and I always know what you’re thinking about me.”

She paused. Maybe she did suspect, and this was her roundabout way of finding out for certain. But maybe she suspected and she felt the same way. Maybe we were about to make love.

“Never lie to me,” she said. “Never lie to me. Now tell me what you really think of me. Tell me you think I’m going to turn into some garden-variety garden-party hostess.” She couldn’t help smiling at her joke, and this made me smile as well.

“Emily, I…”

“Arthur, I’m serious. Tell me you think I’m going to wind up as boring as Mother.”

I wanted to tell her the truth, which was that I didn’t think she was going to become boring—I wasn’t sure that my mother was boring. But Emily wouldn’t accept any answer. She turned around, hugging her breasts, and started walking. “You were really patronizing last night. World-class legs. Do you think you can liberate me with dumb compliments like that?”

“I don’t know what I think.”

“Did you ever think,” she said, “that maybe becoming boring is better than whatever is happening to you? Maybe it’s better than feeling sorry for yourself all the time and always talking about revolution when you’re obviously never going to do anything about it. Maybe it’s better to be like Mom. Well, not like Mom, but like Dad.”

She stuck out her jaw, as though by performing this action she might convince herself that I was wrong and our father was right. We walked in silence through a vast patch of lawn toward a pond.

“Arthur, that was a horrible thing to say,” she said. “I’m so sorry. Can you forgive me?”

“It’s all right. Maybe you’re right.”

“No. It was a horrible thing to say. I mean, I think it’s true that you spend too much time feeling sorry for yourself. But you’re going through a hard time. It’s better to feel a little too sorry for yourself than to bottle everything up and go to the Chappine Hotel once a year.”

I hoped she wouldn’t start talking about suicide again. “I see your point,” I said, inanely.

“But still, I mean, you could try to be happier. Or at least less sad.”

I took her hand and I felt a jolt of love. “I will.”

She let go of my hand and looked out at the pond.

“The ducks are so cute,” she said.

It occurred to me that I might kiss her now, this moment.

She turned back to face me. “So you’re going to be all right, but I’m going to become boring.”

“Emily, I…”

“And why aren’t you worried about me committing suicide? He was my grandfather, too.” She turned and took a few steps away from me. I caught up to her and put my hand on her elbow.

“Emily, I…”

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m not going to commit suicide. I don’t have enough control over myself for that.” She looked down and twirled her fingers. “I’m just going to become boring.”

“I don’t think you’re going to become boring.”

“No, if that’s what’s going to happen, that’s what’s going to happen. I’ll make the best of it and be the best hostess of my generation. Glamorous party after glamorous party until I die.”

“What about free will?”

She tossed her hair and smiled. “What about it?”

“You can do what you want. You’re not bound by God or fate or your family.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be a Marxist? Aren’t I bound by historical inevitability? And by material conditions? Isn’t it my fate to oppress the worker?”

“No. You can choose to rise up and overthrow the oppress…”

She cocked her head. “Actually, it’s sort of my duty to oppress the worker, at least according to Marx. Your duty, too. Or at least our fate. Marx says that our roles are fated by material conditions, doesn’t he? The capitalist must oppress the worker, so that the worker will rise up and overthrow the oppressor. So that all that is solid will melt into air. I like that phrase, by the way.”

She was grinning when she finished.

“You certainly like arguing with me, don’t you?” I said.

She opened her mouth, still grinning, and clucked her tongue. “It’s not really much of an argument. It’s more me annihilating everything you say, and then yawning at the ease of it all.”

She did a mock yawn. I responded by making a face of mock anger, though I wasn’t sure I wasn’t actually angry. I grabbed her and hoisted her over my shoulder. She shrieked.

“Put me down! Put me down!” She laughed and batted my shoulders. We stumbled around and she pulled on my neck, trying to pull me down. I fell to my knees on the grass and put her down gently. When I released her she dusted her knees and then she grabbed my torso and we started wrestling. She pressed her thighs against mine in an effort to pin me. My nose was in her hair and I felt her breasts against my chest. Her feet were wrapped around my lower back and her thighs were pushing against my cock. I wondered if she could feel it. I grabbed her hands and tried to pull them behind her back. She resisted so I pulled her hands over her head and then behind her back. She started bucking her thighs against me, trying to get loose.

“I have you pinned with my feet,” she said.

“I have you pinned with my hands.” My lips were an inch or two from hers.

She bucked her thighs a little. “Holy shit,” she said, laughing.

“What?”

“You have a hard-on.” Still laughing, she took her feet off my back and shifted her thighs so they weren’t touching my cock. I let go of her hands and she rolled out from under me.

“I don’t have a hard-on,” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

She laughed. “Look at it.”

I didn’t have to; I could feel it.

“Um,” I said.

Suddenly she stopped laughing; she raised her head and looked around. She saw that no one was there and she started laughing again. She fell back onto the grass.
“I just gave my brother an erection!” she shouted.

“Shh,” I said, even though no one could hear. “Emily, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it, it’s just friction.” This struck her as funny, too, so she laughed harder. She put her hands on her abdomen. “I don’t think my ribs are going to be okay. It’s just too funny.”

Eventually she stopped laughing and looked at me. “Oh, come on, it’s okay. Nobody saw. And it really is just friction.”

“I know. But I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” She made a sweep with her arm. “It’s a beautiful day, don’t waste it being sorry.”

“You’re right. It’s a beautiful day.”

“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” she said in a mock-deep voice. We both laughed, and then lay in silence for a few minutes.

If I let this moment go by, I would be proving Rothstein’s point and repressing my sexual urges. I had to kiss her right now.

But we were outside.

“That would be one way to make sure you don’t lead a boring life,” I said. I was careful to sound like I was joking.

“Yeah. No quiet desperation if you have sex with your brother.”

“Nope.”

She sat up and hugged her ankles. “Well, too bad for me. I have a date with Brad tonight. He wants to get back together and I think I’m probably going to give in. There’s nothing you can do about what I’m going to become.”

f

As I waited for Emily to return from her date, I resolved to have sex with her before the night was over. So far I had acted stupidly, everything I had done was poorly planned. I could either go bumbling around all summer or I could take decisive action. There was no question that this had to happen: Arthur and Emily, Destroyers of the Greatest Taboo. If there is one person on earth whom you consider yourself not permitted to fuck, then you are not truly free. Emily and I were not made for constraints. We were born to this.

It was a few minutes to one when headlights finally appeared. The car pulled up the driveway past where I could see it from the window. Emily would kiss Brad’s neck as she opened the car door, and she would think how silly it was to think that the expected life was something she would have to push herself to live—the expected life, after all, allowed for some erotic bliss, and an expected life with Brad would allow for a lot of it. Brad would watch her as she walked in front of the car and squinted in the headlights. Maybe there was sand in her shoes from their frolic on the beach, and her walk would reflect that and the wine she had drunk. She would look back at him and smile and bite her lip, and he would think of making love to her in the sand a few minutes earlier, a memory which would be the greatest of his life had it not happened so many times before and if it did not promise to happen so many times in the future.

I turned away from the window as she was coming up the steps.

“Arthur!” she said as she opened the door. She clearly wasn’t drunk at all. “I had a horrible premonition just now. I had this awful feeling that you had hanged yourself. I’m so glad to…”

“Emily, you have beautiful legs.”

“What?”

“Take off your shoes.”

“Absolutely, yes, let me take off my shoes. You know, it must be hard for men to respect women, when women are so willing to wear shoes that cause them pain just because they think it makes them look better. I’m not going to wear high heels anymore.”

“You have beautiful legs.”

“Okay.”

“You also have beautiful breasts.”

“Okay, you’re making fun of me. I’m going to ignore you and talk about my date. I actually had a really nice time tonight. But that may be because Brad hardly said anything. He was so happy to see me again that he treated every word I said like it was a gift from the most beautiful woman in the world. Usually I find it embarrassing when he treats me like that, but tonight for some reason I really liked it.”

“Can I get you some wine?”

“Sure.”

“Did you have sex with him?”

“No, he was very gentlemanly. He treated it like a first date.”

“Did you want to have sex with him?”

“What if I did? I have the right to have sex with anyone I please.”

“That’s true. Absolutely anyone.”

“I think I was lying just now about becoming more selfish. I actually did find Brad’s attention embarrassing tonight, just like I always do. My standards are too high. I need to learn to accept imperfection in people. I’m looking for some non-existent ideal, so I’m not giving him a chance. That’s what being an adult is, right? Making compromises and accepting less. When you can say that all of the terrible things in the world are just the flaws that make life beautiful, then you’re a man. Or a woman. As the case may be.”

“If that’s what being an adult is, I don’t think it’s for you.”

“Neither do I. Can I be honest with you? I wish there were something exciting that I could do. Maybe I won’t go to Wellesley and I’ll just bum around Paris for a few years instead. Or go to REDACTED.”

“No, you need to go to college.”

“Okay then. No excitement for me.”

“Maybe you don’t need to go to Paris for excitement.” This was a lame thing to say.

“You mean the most exciting journey is the journey inward? If that’s what you’re saying, I swear to God I’m going to have you defenestrated, decapitated, disemboweled, and castrated. In whatever order I see fit.”

“What I mean is that I don’t really see you bumming around anywhere. I see you doing something great.”

“You mean like leading people to freedom?”

“I see that as something you could do.”

“That’s a nice compliment.”

I handed her a glass of wine and took a sip of my own.

“Are you sure you’re okay, Arthur? You really do look a little strange.”

“Maybe you don’t need to go to Paris for excitement.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about what happened this afternoon at the park.”

Something turned in her face. “That was funny. Right?”

Out with it. Now.

“Emily. I think we should have sex.”

She could clearly tell that I wasn’t joking. “Arthur, I know you’re trying to be funny, but I think you’re getting sick. You should get to bed.”

“Why shouldn’t we? Why shouldn’t we make love?”

“Arthur, tomorrow I’m going to call the doctor and I’m going to make you see him.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Dr. Richardson can see if there’s anything wrong with you physically, and if not, I’m sure he can suggest a psychiatrist.”

“That’s still not an answer.”

Her face was firm and determined. For the first time that I could remember, I thought she looked like our father. “I’m going to bed. Goodnight, Arthur.”

She walked a few steps, and I knew that if I let her go to bed with things the way they were our relationship would be ruined.

“Because you can’t come up with an answer?” I said, careful to speak softly so as not to be heard anywhere else in the house, and also to lend my voice authority. “Because you obey a taboo that you can’t defend?”

She stopped and stood with her back to me. I could see that she had raised her arm but I couldn’t see what she was doing with it. I wanted to calm her and protect her, but it was better to say nothing and let her come to whatever she would come to.

“Fine,” she said, turning to me and smiling. “Make your argument for why this is all right.”

“Um.” I had an argument, I had many arguments, but I couldn’t remember any of them. She drummed the fingers of one hand against the back of the other and cocked an eyebrow to taunt me.

“Why should we be shackled by society?” I said. “Why should we let the same society that burns children in Vietnam tell us who we can fuck and who we can’t fuck? Why should we let our family, with all its blood money—because that’s what it is, blood money—why should we let our family with all its blood money and all its hotel hangings tell us what to do? Emily, for all of our protestations of rebellion, right now we remain curled in our parents’ marriage bed, fighting for our share of the blanket. The flag of sex is ours to hoist. Why should we let it lie twisted at our feet?” I hated myself for using Rothstein’s words.

Her hand was at her hip and she pulled at her dress. For the most part she seemed unimpressed, but she had furrowed her brow when I said “hotel hangings.” I had just thrown it in for cadence; it was a stupid thing to bring up, entirely irrelevant and the opposite of an aphrodisiac. She looked away from me, but came back to the kitchen.

She picked up the corkscrew and traced the metal with one finger. She turned it over several times and then pulled at the wooden handle.

“If we did this,” she said, “you wouldn’t kill yourself.”

“What?”

“This would set you apart from Paul and Grandpa. Whatever it was that made them kill themselves wouldn’t be able to touch you. Don’t you think that’s true?”

“Emily, that doesn’t really have anything to do with…”

“If we did this, I would never have to worry about you killing yourself ever again.” She scratched at her neck, still not looking at me. “And I’d be leaving boring behind forever.”

“Forever.”

“We’d sort of be sexual pioneers,” she said. Gently she swayed and held her fingers still at her neck.

“That’s right. We’d be cutting through the brush. We’d be…”

She grabbed the back of my neck and kissed my lips.

“Fuck,” she said. “I can’t believe that just happened. Fuck.” Then she grabbed the back of my head and thrust her tongue deep into my mouth. There was absolutely nothing sexual in the way she did this; she was like a child taking medicine. We stood there, moving our tongues. I didn’t want to break the kiss because I had no idea what I would do next.

After a minute or so we broke apart.

“Wow, Arthur. Wow.”

Suddenly I was unspeakably irritated at the thought of having to touch her. I wanted her to be away from me.

I told myself that I needed to take the lead. I had started this and I needed to guide her.

“See?” I said. “We weren’t struck down by lightning.”

She was looking away from me. “I wonder if I’ve wanted to do that forever,” she said.

I put my hand around her waist and kissed her again. “Let’s go upstairs,” I said.

“This is fun,” she said. “Let’s do it.” She kissed me again, and when we broke the kiss, she took my hand and led me to the stairs.

“You know, I’m not a virgin,” she said. “I wasn’t lying about having sex with James.”

I wasn’t sure why she had said this. “Good,” I said.

The stairs creaked and I was afraid our mother would wake up, but I didn’t want to remind Emily of our mother, so I didn’t say anything.

When we were halfway up the stairs, she stopped me and bit my neck. She looked at me and smiled, then bit my neck again. Was she trying to give me a hickey?

“This is ridiculous,” she said. She was giggling and sounded happy. “This is totally ridiculous.”

She squeezed my hand and pulled me the rest of the way up the stairs. She continued to giggle and I realized she didn’t sound happy.

“Emily,” I said, “let’s not do this.”

“Too late.” She pulled my shirt out of my khakis and ran her hand over my abdomen. “Besides,” she said, “if we don’t like it, we can always pretend it never happened.”

“You’re drunk. You’ve had too much wine.”

She gazed at me, attempting a sexy fake-innocent pout. She stood on her toes and, walking backwards, pulled me toward my room. I wanted to say we had to stop, but instead I kissed her neck, her shoulder, her neck again, and reached behind her to open the door.

“Emily, you’re so beautiful,” I said. “God, you’re so beautiful.”

She giggled, and I wished she would stop.

I decided that I shouldn’t read into her giggling. Of course there would be something different about her behavior; she was about to have sex with her brother. She said everything was all right, so everything was all right. I needed to stop tyrannically assuming that I knew better.

She pushed me into the room and slammed the door behind us, slamming it again when it didn’t close all the way the first time.

“Arthur, you’re handsome,” she said. “Handsome and brilliant.”

I kissed her. “You’re beautiful and brilliant.”

I pushed the dress straps from her shoulders and ran my hands over her back. She wriggled in my arms and I unzipped her dress and she twisted and jerked until the dress was at her feet. She stepped out of the dress and kicked it away. Now she was wearing cotton panties, a cotton bra, stockings, and a necklace. She looked plumper without clothes, and she looked happy.

And so when Emily said, “This is right. This feels right,” I said that it did and I reached behind her to undo her bra. My fingers knocked against each other as I tried to unfasten the clasp, which would not give way. It occurred to me that I was terrified at the thought of seeing her naked.

She chuckled, sounding perhaps truly comfortable. “Let me,” she said, and unfastened the clasp and took off her bra.

I looked at her breasts. They were just tits, a girl’s tits. They looked no different for belonging to my sister. All those years, in towels, in bathing suits, in anything really, she had been hiding these wonderful tits from me. It was unnatural that she had devoted so much effort to depriving me of seeing her this way.

“Emily, you’re so beautiful,” I said.

She laughed her confident mocking laugh that I knew so well, proving to me that the way I was acting was silly and pretentious, but not evil.

“I can hear you breathing a little heavier,” she said. “Do you think I’m prettier than Miranda?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Touch them.” She sounded suddenly impatient. I put my hands on her breasts, and she closed her eyes and I kneaded her breasts. Her eyes still closed, she leaned forward to kiss me, but she kept missing my lips, and for some reason it didn’t occur to me to lean into her kiss. She opened her eyes and, without kissing me, placed my hands on her hips. I tried to pull down her panties but she stopped me. She had changed her mind. Of course she had changed her mind. This was insane.

She unbuttoned my shirt and took it off me. She took a deep breath, as though she were about to dive under water, and pulled my boxer shorts down to my ankles.

“So, that’s your penis?”

“Um,” I said. “Yes.”

She rose and put her hand on my shoulder and shook me a bit. “We must be two of the bravest people who have ever lived,” she said. She took her hand from my shoulder and put it on my cock. I felt somehow surprised that her fingers were around my cock, as though I had awoken to find them there. She was pinching my cock more than stroking it. I slid her panties down. I looked at her yellow pubic hair and my own.

She stepped around me to sit on my bed. She hugged her breasts and her knees touched.

“You need to use a condom,” she said. “I should be on the pill. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. God, you have nothing to apologize for.” I turned to my chest of drawers and took a condom from the sock drawer. I put it on and turned back to her. She was still hugging her breasts and her knees still touched. I reached between her thighs, hoping she would part them. She did not. I kissed her forehead again and I kissed her nose. I drew back to look at her. The corners of her mouth were turned up in what was possibly a smile. I kissed her breasts and with my hands parted her legs. On seeing her vagina, I wanted a glass of water and I wanted to sit down.

This was absurd. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t expected her to have a vagina. I touched her knee to steady myself.

I had always thought that vaginas, with their flaps and folds, looked somehow unfinished. Emily’s vagina had come out of my mother’s vagina, as had all of her, as had all of me. There was something wonderful about the two of us making love, two halves of a clay sculpture once again becoming whole.

She reached up for my hand. I thrust my cock into her and she groaned or sighed. I moved in and out. Her vagina did not feel all that different from Miranda’s. Part of me had hoped that the act itself would feel wrong, perhaps even that the parts would not fit, that there would be a signal from nature that what we were doing was wrong and we would be called to account. But if our bodies noted any kinship, the feeling was one of warmth, of the comfort rather than the shock of recognition, like two old friends who meet after years apart and fairly burst as each tells the other of all that has happened since they were last together. Emily was crying lightly so I thrust more gently. Her eyes were so beautiful. I steadied myself with my right hand on her thigh and stroked her face with my left. I looked at the way she held her hand, curling her fingers into her palm. I had been witness to the entire history of her movement, gesture by gesture I had watched the whole evolution of things she had done with her body, from the flailing infant I could remember dimly to the little girl pressing her nails into a red balloon to see how much pressure she could apply without popping it, to the beautiful woman who curled her fingers into her palm as I penetrated her. Now this history had, in retrospect, a goal. Every step she had ever taken had brought her closer to my bed.

I wasn’t entirely sure whether it had been one minute or ten when I felt myself about to ejaculate; I tried to delay it but I ejaculated. I pulled out of her vagina and looked at my condom-covered cock, which, soaked and shrinking, looked like a snake that had died in a swamp in the midst of shedding its skin. I pulled off the condom and as I did so I felt a sharp pain; I must have gotten it caught on a pubic hair. I dropped the condom on the floor, wiped my hands on my thighs, and flopped onto the bed next to her.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I draped my leg over hers and grasped her hand. “I usually last longer.”

“Don’t worry about that,” she said, still looking at the ceiling.

What felt like a long time passed in silence. “So,” I said, hoping this would make her laugh. It did not.

“Yeah,” she said.

“This was right, Emily,” I said. “You put it perfectly. We’re sexual pioneers.”

“I think you said that.”

“I think you said it.”

“You’re right,” she said. “I did say it.”

“Who cares who said it? We did it. We broke the taboo.”

“Could you move your leg? It hurts a little.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” I felt suddenly shy and solicitous.

“No, it’s okay.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I’m fine. We—we did something great. I think I’m going to go. I’m going to go.” She stood up, still naked, and put her hand to her mouth, obviously on the verge on vomiting. She picked up her panties, her bra, and her dress. Dressing, she hopped toward the door, looking like a miserable parody of a ballet dancer.

I wanted to tell her not to be ashamed, but the feeling was surrounding me that I had made her do something terrible. She finished dressing and left without saying goodnight.

Why had I done this? I remembered thinking that having sex with my sister would have some sort of political impact, would make the world or at least the two of us freer. This was so stupid it seemed impossible that I had ever thought of it. Surely there must have been some other reason.

There would never again be a moment in my life when I had not fucked my sister.

Now it was clear to me that I had been free until a few moments ago, and that now I was a slave to this event.

What an idiot I was! Tomorrow I would decide that this was wrong and that the truth of my life was elsewhere, and then I would decide that that truth was a lie, and on and on. At the moment of any given evening’s revelation, I would wonder at how I could have been so misguided for so long. Life’s ceaseless epiphanic zigzag.

f

Emily woke me the next morning, throwing the curtains open and saying things that I could not distinguish, though the noise prodded at me.

“Jesus, Emily. Isn’t it early?”

“It’s good to get up early. It makes you feel good the entire day.”

I searched her tone for hostility but I could not detect any. I wanted to see her face, but the sunlight was such that I could not see her clearly.

“How could you fall asleep last night?” she asked.

I tried to think of something to say, something funny and comforting, or at least one of the two.

“Do you know if the Yankees won yesterday?” she asked.

“No.”

“You and I don’t talk about baseball. Dad and I talk about baseball a lot, but only when you’re not around. One time he told me that I’m manlier than you, which I didn’t think was very nice to either of us. Brad doesn’t like baseball but he won’t admit it for some reason. We go to games but he never pays attention and I have to find subtle ways to tell him what’s going on. He told me he loved me last night. He said, ‘Emily, you’re the only girl I’ll ever love and I hope we get married.’ He’s a really sweet boy. How should I tell him it’s over?”

“Why would you tell him that?”

She turned to the window, and I knew that I had answered terribly—it wasn’t just my words but my voice, indecisive, plaintive, and exasperated at once. I also knew that there was likely no answer that would have pleased her. As she paced by the foot of my bed, her arms folded, I grew angry with her and I wanted her out of my room, or at the very least I wanted her not to fold her arms the way she was folding her arms, not to make the faint noise her feet made as she paced the floor.

“So,” she said. “It’s the morning. Do you still respect me?”

“Of course.”

“What are we going to do now?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

She tapped her feet. Her face was wrinkled and knotted in ways that made it impossible to read. With her toe she poked at my boxers, still crumpled on the floor from the previous night. When she grunted in disgust I thought it was because of the boxers, but in fact it was because of the used condom still lying on the floor.

I expected her to start screaming or crying, but with breathtaking composure she took a tissue, picked up the condom, walked to the wastebasket, and dropped it in. Still I was afraid that an explosion was imminent. She turned to me and, smiling at me as though we were about to share a cake meant for someone else, took off her nightgown and was naked. She kneeled onto the bed and crawled toward me. I wanted overpoweringly to be alone, but I did not resist her for fear of hurting her beyond repair. She pulled the blanket from my torso, bunched it between her knees, and took me in her mouth. At first her tongue lapped dully against my cock and I doubted I would get an erection, but something shifted and I became aroused. I reached for her hand, first hitting her arm, then my leg, before finding and grasping her fingers. She moved her fingers around mine until we were holding hands. I squeezed and she squeezed in return, then I squeezed harder and she squeezed harder, until this was a silly, sweet, loving game. I loved her and I would never leave her. It was insane of course but I would never leave her.

“I’m about to come,” I said. I expected her to lift her mouth from my cock, as Miranda did when I was about to come, but Emily did not lift her mouth, and it felt wonderful, perhaps better than anything I had ever felt before. And certainly better than anything I have ever felt since.

“Thank you,” I said. “Emily, thank you.”

She peeked up at me, wearing the blanket as a shawl, and I kissed her. The thought of it was a bit disgusting since she had my semen in her mouth but I kissed her.

“They say boys don’t respect girls who use their mouths,” she said.

I kissed her nose, delighted at the words she used. I was a boy and she was a girl.

“I love you so much, Emily. I feel so good right now I can’t tell you.”

“Try.”

“I feel so so so sooooooo good right now.”

She squealed and rolled over and over on the bed, entangling herself further in the blanket as she did so. When she stopped she was on top of me. I felt her chest against my stomach. We were man and wife: we were one flesh. We were one flesh and this was how we would enter eternity.

Even if I were wrong, even if it had to end, this was enough, this moment was enough and this moment would never die.

“Your cheeks are red,” I said, trailing my finger along her back.

Giggling, she covered her cheeks with her forearms and her ears with her fists. When our laughter died down, she rested her elbows on my chest.

“Should I break up with Brad?”

“God, yes,” I said, twirling my finger in her hair.

“I can hear your heart beating,” she said. “That’s very cool.”

I murmured happy assent.

Slapping my thigh, she threw off the sheets and hopped out of bed. “Let’s go tell Mom.”

“Tell Mom what?”

She smiled brightly. “That we’re in love.”

I searched for a sign that she was joking, but she was not. “Emily, why don’t you sit down and we’ll think about this.”

“What is there to think about? I’ll tell Mom that we’re in love, she’ll throw us out of the house, and we’ll go off somewhere. Or maybe she’ll understand. I was thinking about this last night, that maybe I’ve underestimated her. Maybe she’ll be happy for us.” She picked up her nightgown and threw it on.

I disentangled myself from the sheets and got out of bed; I picked up my boxer shorts and put them on. “I think maybe we should take everything more slowly.”

Her face became wrinkled and knotted again. “Why?”

“Emily. We’re brother and sister. Whatever we do is going to be complicat…”

“We’re brother and sister,” she said in a horrified whisper, as though this information were new to her. She folded her fingers in a steeple at her mouth. “I had sex with my brother. I had sex with my brother.” Then she was sobbing convulsively. I tried to take her in my arms but she pushed me away. I stroked her hair in a gesture I hoped was absent of sex. Her sobs were quick and ceaseless. I felt a brotherly urge to pummel the person who had treated her so badly.

I needed to get control of myself. If I could steady myself I could steady her.

“Emily, I…” I did not want to say that I loved her. “I care about you more than anything. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“We just fucked, Arthur.”

“Emily, please. Emily, we…we made love.”

“Goddamn it. I did not want to do this. You manipulated me, you manipulated me and we…How did this happen?”

“Keep your voice down.” I hugged her tightly to my chest, partially to muffle her voice.

“I’m sick and perverted and a whore. God, I’m so disgusting.”

“Emily. You’re none of those things. All of this is my fault. It’s all because I’m so stupid—it’s because I’m evil—and I made you do this.”

Emily picked at her nails and I waited, strangely out of breath, for her to respond.

“You’re not stupid, you’re not evil,” she said. “I did it, too.”

“It’s my fault. You’re not old enough and it’s my fault.”

“Of course I’m old enough. I’m seventeen years old, I’m not a child.”

“It’s my fault.”

“I can make my own decisions. If you say I can’t I’m going to be really upset.”

We started laughing at the same moment.

“Wow,” she said. “Wow.” She wiped her eyes with her wrists. We looked at each other and started laughing again. “Do you really think what we did was so wrong?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What about: ‘Ooh, I’m evil, I’m stupid.’” She laughed and entangled her fingers in mine. “I mean, I do love you,” she said. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“And maybe we were right last night. I think we were right. So what should we do?” she asked. “Just pretend this never happened? That’s probably what we should do.”

I saw that agreeing with her would destroy her.

“No,” I said. “I think we should be together. But we probably shouldn’t tell Mom.”

“Yeah.” She trailed a finger along my hand. “Sorry about that.”

“Don’t be sorry.” For lack of anything else to do I kissed her neck.

“We could move to California,” she said.

“Do you like the sun that much? Let’s go downstairs and have breakfast.”

“How about San Francisco? The weather there is pretty temperate.”

“I didn’t like San Francisco that much when I was there last summer.”

She frowned, rather childishly. “You went to San Francisco with Miranda.”

“Maybe we can move to India or Morocco or something. But first let’s go downstairs and have some break…”

“REDACTED. We can go there, Arthur. We can help those people.”

“Okay. But first let’s go downstairs and have breakfast.”

“Those soldiers in REDACTED who are killing villagers? We can take guns and kill the soldiers! And then we can make love in the sunset. Or! Maybe we could move to Appalachia and admit that we’re brother and sister. Or maybe we could move to Kansas and become farmers. That might be fun. No one around for miles. We could pick up pitchforks like in that painting. We should change our names. Something exotic, like Dietrich. Oh, hey! We could just shorten it to Hunt. Arthur and Emily Hunt. It’s sort of exotic in its own way. Who will we be?”

I was caught up. “I grew up in Manhattan. My parents were jazz musicians. They died of a heroin overdose.”

“Both of them?”

“You’re right. Too melodramatic. My father was a jazz musician and he abandoned my mother when I was an infant.”

“He was a saxophone player! Like in Some Like It Hot.”

“My mother was a cellist with the New York Philharmonic.”

“They were star-crossed lovers.”

“I grew up privileged,” I said, “but suffocated by my mother’s sadness. One day I got on a Greyhound bus and never looked back. That’s how I got to Kansas.”

She laughed, and how could I not be in love with her laugh? “That’s so good,” she said. “My father died in World War Two.”

“Wait, how old are you?”

“Right. Details. My father died in the Korean War. No, after the war was over, but while he was still in Korea. A supply truck backed over him.”

“Oh, the poor man.”

“My mother became a prostitute in order to feed me.” She touched my chest. “You’re right. Too melodramatic. You’re sexy when you frown, though.” She kissed me and stroked my cheek.

“Okay,” she said. “My mother was an English professor at a small New England college. I hate New England because…because…because I’m color blind and the autumn foliage mocks the limitations of my sight.”

“That’s brilliant!”

“So I decided to move out West—let’s move out West, let’s not move to Kansas, Kansas is probably boring and farming is probably boring, too. Then we met… How did we meet? How did we meet? Oh, wait. Can girls be color blind? I forget. You know what? This game is a tiny bit boring. Let’s figure out the details later. Let’s wake up Mom and have breakfast.” She was headed for the door.

“Emily.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to tell her anything. I’m not stupid.”

As we walked down the stairs, Emily was holding my arm and I was realizing that I had over the last several minutes become not only Emily’s lover, but also her boyfriend, virtually her husband. It had been stupid of me to join in her identity fantasy, which a few days earlier might have been a harmless game but was now an urgent discussion of what to do next. Everything I did or said now, short of an outright rejection, which would have been unthinkable, drew us closer together.

When we reached the kitchen, Emily told me to wake up Mom while she started the eggs.

“Do we have to wake her? You know she needs her sleep. Let’s just have breakfast.”

“Fine. I’ll wake Mom.” She headed down the hallway to our parents’ bedroom. As her bare feet hit the wood floor they sent echoes; the acoustics of the house were such that anything that happened in that hallway could be heard throughout the house. I was terrified of what would happen and furious with Emily for refusing to be cautious, but I followed her.

She flung our mother’s door open without knocking. “Mother, wake up. We’re making eggs.”

Our mother did not stir. “Jesus fuck.” Emily folded her hands and took a deep breath. She looked, or perhaps I only hoped that she looked, like she was trying to get control of herself. She crossed to the window, calmly, and opened the curtains.

“Wake up, Mother,” she said, still sounding calm.

“Emily,” our mother said, sitting up. “What’s the matter?”

“Arthur and I are making eggs. We’d like you to join us. I haven’t made breakfast for you in a while and Arthur and I thought it would be nice. It will be fun.”

I saw her getting upset and tried to think of something I could say that would allow her to get back to sleep and allow me to get Emily out of the room.

“Please, Mommy,” Emily said, her voice tinged with sarcasm now. “It will be fun.”

I thought sarcasm was a foolish tactic, but it worked. “You’re right. It will be fun. Just give me a few minutes to get ready.”

Emily clapped and skipped out of the room, brushing past me and looking very much like a small child. I wondered whether she had actually been being sarcastic at all. I followed her to the kitchen, a few steps behind. She took a carton of eggs from the refrigerator and I took out the frying pan, finding the right cupboard on the third try.

“It’s been so long since we’ve done this,” our mother said as she joined us. She looked delighted. Emily greased the pan and turned on the stove.

“So, Emily, how was your date last night?”

“I had a really great time. I think I’m in love.”

I clutched the edge of the counter.

“That’s wonderful. You know that I like Brad.”

“No, a different boy. But I’m going to keep it a secret.”

Our mother scowled.

“Is it some boy you just met?”

Emily laughed. “Not at all.”

“Emily,” I said, “why don’t you come over here and help me pick out the eggs?”

“They’re eggs,” she said. “They’re all the same. Mother, I’m going to keep it a secret for now. I’ll tell you who it is after things are a little more settled, all right?”

“I like these the best,” I said, still desperate to distract her and pointing to a few eggs at random. “What do you think, Emily?”

“I want to break them,” Mom said. “Emily, if you’re happy, I’m happy.”

“Thank you, Mommy. Thank you.”

Mom took from the carton the eggs I selected, as though my selections meant something. She cracked the eggs against the frying pan; I looked at her dark blue eyes and hated myself. My mother might have been an extraordinary woman for all I knew, or she might have been an entirely ordinary one, or even a barely adequate one, but in any case she was my mother and I had profaned her.

“I’m glad the two of you woke me up,” she said. “We should do this more often.”

I gritted my teeth to keep from sobbing. I took another egg and cracked it swiftly, making a loud noise and causing the yolk to spill over my hand. Emily wiped my hand with a hand towel and leaned into the side of my face not facing my mother.

“Don’t fall apart,” she whispered.

“Arthur, is something bothering you?” our mother asked.

“Arthur never knows whether he’s making an omelet or just breaking eggs,” Emily said.

As we ate, Emily and our mother talked, Emily seeming cheerful but not distressingly so. My contributions to the conversation were limited to terse replies. When we finished the meal, our mother, uncomplicatedly pleased with breakfast, excused herself to shower.

At Emily’s suggestion she and I went for a walk. She led me through the garden and past the empty pedestals. I watched her legs as she walked, I watched her bite her lip as she looked back at me. A life with Emily, it seemed to me, might be wonderful. I touched her shoulder and moved to kiss her, but she put her palm on my chest. After standing on her toes and ostentatiously checking that we couldn’t be seen from any of the windows, making us both laugh, she kissed me.

Shortly after this, a group of astronauts found that all their energy and effort had landed them atop a giant, airless wedge of stone.

f

Many of the days that followed were days of bliss, days when the world was new, or at least elsewhere. We had sex, waited for me to get hard again, then had sex again. I stroked her hair, nuzzled her breasts, stroked her legs. I nuzzled her nose and her neck and her toes. It felt so good to have a girl in bed beside me; I had missed it so much since Miranda.

I imagined what Emily and I looked like from above. Perhaps there was a God and this was how God saw us. Perhaps God was not omniscient but was in fact a faltering old man, prone to forgetting things about the world he had once created, and among the things he had forgotten was that Emily and I were brother and sister, and when he looked at us he saw two people in love and nothing else. Perhaps there was a God and he was omniscient and he loved Emily and me for loving each other.

There were several nights when we stayed up all night, taking a break from sex to watch a late movie. Once she climbed on to the coffee table and we made love.

We would play tennis for four or five hours at a time, well past the point of physical exhaustion for both of us. Neither of us wanted to be the first to suggest that we leave the court; this was the competition more than the games themselves. Eventually we would both stagger off the court at the same time. Then we would go to my room and Emily would say, over and over, that she loved me.

Emily and I had always spent a lot of time together, so our mother suspected nothing. Besides, what we were doing was unthinkable, so she would have no reason to think it. Emily stroked the back of my neck at dinner, with my mother across from us.

In the streets in town, Emily tugged me out of the way of cars that were far down the road. It was not until she started doing this that I realized Miranda had done it as well.

Emily had always wanted to talk to me about everything; now she had little to say but wanted to be around me all the time. I started to think of when we were kids, when she would refuse to leave my room. I wanted to be alone; I had never wanted to be alone the way I wanted to be alone now. One afternoon, as we lay in bed, Emily started stroking my chest with her index finger and her thumb. I wanted to read a book or take a walk or something, but I knew she would get upset if I asked. I ran my hand up and down her back, filled with the sort of boredom that feels as though your mind is being boiled into steam.

“Why did we do this?” she asked.

“For freedom,” I said.

“That’s not why I did it,” she said. “Do you think I could still marry Brad? Or Hickham?”

“Hickham?”

“I think he’s cute,” she said. “And he’s stimulating to talk to.”

“And you’re saying you want to marry him?’

“Do you think I’d be able to?”

“Why wouldn’t you be able to?”

“Let’s just have sex.” She reached for my cock, but I grabbed her wrist and stopped her.

“Is there anything I can do to make you feel better?” I asked.

She wriggled her wrist free and pulled the blanket against herself. “You can have sex with me. That’s pretty much it.”

f

I was reading one afternoon when Emily came into my room. I kept reading, hoping she would leave, but she did not, and finally I put the book down and asked her how she was.

Not looking at me, she took a few steps toward the window, then stopped. “Would you like to take a walk in the garden?”

There was nothing at this point that I wanted, other than to be left alone.

“All right.”

I followed her down the stairs, and she devoted a great deal of effort to staying several steps ahead of me.

“So,” I said. “Do you have housing picked out at Wellesley?”

“Yes. You know, the government of REDACTED fell yesterday.”

I hadn’t heard about this.

“Supposedly these two brothers are going to run it together. They’ll probably wind up killing everyone. That’s what usually happens when countries get taken over, isn’t it?”

“Maybe things will be okay.”

“Let’s move there, Arthur. Let’s help.”

“At Wellesley. Are you going to have a roommate?”

“Yes.”

We walked for a while in silence; I couldn’t tell whether we were walking in silence as siblings or as lovers.

“Did you know,” Emily said, “that they have a new technique for punishing adulterous women in REDACTED? They cut out one of their eyes.”

“That’s horrible,” I said.

“Do I count as an adulterous woman?” When I stumbled over an answer, she said: “I’m thinking of getting a tattoo. A scarlet ‘I’. What do you think?”

I stopped walking. “Emily.”

“What? What’s wrong with a scarlet ‘I’? I, as in me. What did you think it was for?”

I took a couple more steps, then stopped again. “What do you want from me, Emily?”

“What do I want from you? Maybe I want you to marry me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry for everything that’s happened.”

“Never say that again. Never say you’re sorry about what’s happened. I love you and I want to marry you.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I’m sorry. I’m acting like a child. Please forgive me.”

“No, don’t be sorry. Look, what’s happened has clearly been a mistake. But we can’t take it back.”

“I don’t think it was a mistake.”

“Emily, you need to…”

“My life is over,” she said.

“Don’t be silly. Nobody ever has to know anything about what’s happened except for you and me. And we can forget it. Remember what you said the first night? We can forget it ever happened. If we could do that, that would be true freedom.”

“Can you please do me a favor and never use the word ‘freedom’ again? I don’t want to forget what happened. What is happening. Why do you want to forget it? I love you.”

“No, you don’t.”

She slapped me, hard, and it stung enough that I held my hand to my face.

“Look,” I said. “We’re both very confused right now. Just give yourself time.”

“Fuck you. I love you. We wouldn’t have done this if I didn’t love you and want to marry you. That would be absurd.” She hoisted herself onto an empty pedestal. “Put a finger inside me. Right now.”

“Emily, come on.”

“Put a finger inside me or I’m telling Mom and Dad.”

“You obviously don’t mean that,” I said.

“I obviously do. Right now, I’m blackmailing you into fingering me. Come on, your fingers have been there before. So has your dick.”

“Emily, please be reasonable.”

“Is that a no? Fine.” She moved to get down. “How do you think Mom will take it? How do you think Dad will take it when I call him? I bet Mom will be angrier at me and Dad will be angrier at you. Maybe they’ll send us both to jail.”

“All right.”

“Goody!” She clapped her hands, hiked her skirt up, and spread her legs.

I looked into her eyes as I prepared to put my fingers inside her. “Are you sure you want this?”

“Just do it, you sisterfucking motherfucker.”

She pulled her panties to one side, exposing her vagina. I moved my hand toward her.

“Not with your fingers dry, idiot. Here.” She grabbed my wrist, raised my hand to her mouth, and licked my fingers. “Now do it.”

I put two fingers inside her and she closed her eyes and began to squirm. I hated her and thrust my fingers deep inside, wanting to hurt her.

“That feels good,” she said.

I moved my fingers faster and harder, wanting to cause her pain.

She shut her eyes and started shuddering all over her body. “Oh, God, keep doing that.”

Seeing her so turned on turned me on, and I felt tenderness toward her again. I slowed my fingers, caressing her.

“No,” she said. “Do what you were doing before.”

This pissed me off and I tried again to hurt her.

She shuddered and gasped, then grunted contentedly. “Mmmmm, that felt so good. You’re getting so good at this.”

I removed my fingers from her and wiped my hand on my khakis.

“So,” she said, hopping off the pedestal. “When are we getting married? Next week? Are there any states where a brother and sister can marry?”

I was miserable and I did not want to speak. “I don’t think so.”

“Right, of course not. We’ll get forged identification, that’s probably not too hard. We could go to Reno. We could take the BMW. Though I guess we’d have to steal it. Maybe we should just get married in New York. That way we can take the train. I’ve been thinking about it. I don’t need to go to college. We can…”

f

Brad called the next day. He got nervous when I answered and said he would call back later, or not call back later, but I interrupted him.

“Emily wants to go out with you,” I said. “I think she’s a little reluctant to be dating anyone, with college coming up and everything, but I know for certain that she really likes you. Don’t take no for an answer.”

I called to Emily that Brad was on the line. She came into the room and said she didn’t want to talk to him. I muffled the receiver.

“There’s no point in talking to him,” she said, “when I’m in love with you.”

I hung up the phone as quickly as I could.

“You have to call him back and tell him you want to see him tonight,” I said.

“Why would I do that? I’m in love with you.”

“You asked me a few days ago if I thought you could still marry him. Well, obviously he’s still interested in you.”

“That would be pretty funny if I married Brad now. I could live a boring life even after what’s happened.”

“You wouldn’t be boring.”

“He wouldn’t want to date me if he knew.”

“There’s no reason why you should tell him.”

“I don’t want to marry Brad. I don’t know why I said that the other day. I want to marry you.”

“See him tonight. If you don’t have a good time, then you don’t have to see him again.”

“Wouldn’t it be a little deceitful not to say that I’m in love with someone else?”

“Maybe when you see him again you’ll realize that you’re actually in love with him.”

“Arthur, I’m in love with you.”

“You said the other day that the only thing I could do for you was to have sex with you.”

“I think that’s all I need. I want to be with you forever. It says in the Bible that that’s what we’re supposed to do. She that loveth not her brother abideth in death.”

“Maybe you should go out with Brad again just to make sure that you don’t like him.”

“I didn’t tell you last night, because you wouldn’t come out of your room, and it seemed like you were mad at me, but I went on a date with James Hickham.”

“And did he rape you?”

“At least he’s not my brother.”

“Of course. But Brad’s much better for you.”

“I like James better. So if you want me to date someone else so you can dump me without feeling guilty, he’s your man. He’s kind of hilariously gallant. He pulled my chair out and he took my coat in this way that was just too sweet. He even very sweetly made it clear that he wasn’t trying to date me and that we were just having coffee as friends. By the way, Arthur, I’ve been thinking, and I don’t know why you ever liked Miranda. She seemed incredibly cold and self-involved, and it sounds like she’s all talk when it comes to politics. I know you don’t like it when I talk about her, but you must be over her by now, right?”

“What happened with Hickham? Did you kiss him?”

“At the very end he looked like he wanted to kiss me, so I told him that I was involved with someone else. I was faithful to you, Arthur.”

I tried to overcome my relief that she hadn’t kissed him. “I think you should see him again. It sounds like you like him.”

“You could at least be caring enough to be a little jealous. I came this close to kissing someone you hate.”

“It would be better for you to date at least one other person. You’re very young and you need to see more of what’s out there. I’d rather it be someone other than Hickham, but if he’s the one you want to see, then fine. If you date him and maybe a couple other people and you still feel the way you do now, then we can talk about doing what you mentioned yesterday.”

“You mean get married?”

“That’s what you want, right?”

“You can’t even say it. You’re disgusted by the idea of marrying me.”

“I’m disgusted by the idea of marrying my sister, yes.”

She folded her arms and stamped her foot, looking simultaneously like our mother and like a little girl. On her way out she slammed the door.

A couple of hours later I went to her room to apologize. She told me she had made a date with James Hickham.

f

I can do this. I can write this. I can imagine myself into Emily, not something I would be able to do if I didn’t love her.

She must have considered putting her napkin over her chicken l’orange, ignoring whatever James would do to try to make her stay, pushing him to the floor if necessary with a little flick of her palm—ridiculous that he would talk so much about raping women, with those shoulders that don’t even look like they could stand to carry a purse all day. It would be easy to walk to the bus stop from the restaurant. In New York she could catch a bus to wherever she wanted to go—she wouldn’t even really have to decide until she got there. She must have imagined taking a bus all the way to Chicago, or to San Francisco, where she would never again have to accept a dime that had been handled by a Huntington. Anywhere she could go, there would always be food and shelter for a creature with two eyes and a hole between her legs. Maybe she would get off the bus in a small town, where she could get a job pouring coffee for men who would look at her breasts and dream of fucking her, never dreaming that her brother had done so already. She would let some of them fuck her, maybe many of them, maybe all of them. Maybe she would fuck every man who looked at her for more than a second, and infect them all with incest.

But she doesn’t run away. She doesn’t even laugh with derision as Hickham says that the way the waitress pours the wine proves that she wants to be raped. Something about tightness in her lower back. She isn’t really paying attention. There had been something arousing a year ago about this theory, not because there was anything to it, but because at the age of sixteen she had thought it was shameful not to be aroused by everything that anyone might be aroused by.

There is still something arousing about the way that James talks about his theory, about the way he clutches it as though it were a stuffed animal that will keep him company in the dark, and about the way he constantly checks her reaction, about the little bit of panic in him every time he catches her losing interest. He really is astonishingly like Arthur. Which is another reason to leave, right now.

The fact is that she doesn’t want to be here, because she loves Arthur. She loves Arthur and she hopes to make him jealous. If she feels anything for James, and if James reminds her at all of Arthur, then that just proves that if she marries someone other than Arthur, she’ll just wind up marrying someone exactly like him, and what is the point of that? What makes her feel worst of all, maybe, is how unfair it is that she has to be the only person in the world to fall in love with someone who is literally her sibling.

The only person? Does Arthur love her, or did he use her to make some sort of grand historical point? There is, horrifically, no way for her to know. If only she could know what he was thinking. And yet she must know, because we always know what the people we love are thinking, however much we try to pretend that we don’t. If only she could know how likely it truly is that he will kill himself—maybe her date with James has made him so jealous that he is twisting some rope into a noose right now, assuming that he even knows that there is rope in the garage, which is unlikely. And she is wondering whether she hopes that she will return to the house to find him dead. In addition to making things easier, it may be what he wants.

James starts talking about Ayn Rand or some writer who might as well be Ayn Rand—he has a way of turning every writer he reads into Ayn Rand. She must go home immediately and convince Arthur to take the bus with her. There is no question that they must be together. Destroying taboos, creating total freedom in the world, Arthur can talk about all of that if he wants to. He can make himself into whatever sort of grand hero he likes. All the stuff about not being boring that she had thought about, none of that matters either. This won’t make her any less boring—it will just make her a boring old lady who happened to have committed the most repulsive act that a human can commit, a fact which would hardly make her more interesting, whatever it means for a person to be interesting. What matters is that she and Arthur must be together. What matters is that they read books together and watch movies together and play tennis. What matters is that, when the mood strikes her, she will jump on the coffee table and do ballet moves as he pretends to coach her. Really, she would have to be greedy to want anything more from life than what she has with Arthur. The shock of what’s happened has left her angry and erratic, even vicious, these past several weeks, but she can give all that up and be a good girlfriend, and soon a good wife. She’ll be a wonderful wife and he’ll be a wonderful husband. With his degree, Arthur will have to be able to find a job somewhere, maybe in Chicago, maybe in San Francisco. If he can’t find a job, then she’ll work as a waitress. Maybe he’ll get a job as the manager of the diner where she works. Maybe she’ll be the manager and he’ll be the waiter. Maybe one day they’ll own a diner together in a town surrounded by a lot of corn and he’ll be very particular about finding a supplier with dry, crisp hamburger buns, and very particular too about finding a way to store the buns so they’ll stay dry and crisp, and occasionally someone will mention that the two of them look awfully similar, like they could be related, and everyone will laugh about it with only the slightest discomfort, and then the two of them will start talking about the tennis competition their daughter just won. Emily will read books to her little girl and she will nourish whatever curiosities the little girl has. If the girl becomes interested in something she knows nothing about—quantum physics, say—then she and the girl will learn about it together. Every morning she will play tennis with the girl. If the girl likes a game other than tennis, then Emily will learn how to play that. And if Arthur decides he wants to take them all to the Chappine, or that he wants to choose another hotel in Dubuque and pretend it’s the Chappine and go there every year and drop fruit on the floor, then she will refuse. She will not make the occasional sarcastic comment and then let Arthur get his way, nor will she let her daughter turn into that sort of person. She will name her daughter Elizabeth, after the woman who, only Arthur and Emily will know, will be her grandmother on both sides, and the girl will in many ways resemble that woman, only done right. She will raise Elizabeth so well that the girl will understand even the worst mistakes a person can make, and one day Emily will tell her the truth about her parentage, and the girl will tell her mother that even a mistake like that does not make her a bad person. Elizabeth will even be glad she made the mistake, because without it she would not be alive, and Elizabeth will be so happy to be alive and to have such a very nearly perfect mother.

Assuming, of course, that their daughter isn’t deformed. She should make herself imagine it, living as a housewife in St. Louis or San Antonio, taking care of a little retarded girl with six fingers on each hand who screams in public at the age of twenty. It’s hard to imagine that, wiping the horrible girl’s spittle from the front of her shirt, looking at her tiny, horrible eyes, she won’t think back on this very dinner and wish that she got on the bus and left, or even that she had stayed behind and married James.

So of course there is no chance that she will make a life with Arthur. Of course she will not take that sort of risk and have a baby with him. Of course she will not take the risk of living with Arthur without having a baby, either because she wants to be a mother or because she feels she has to be one (Oh, God, if she could only know the difference!), and because after all, Arthur might become a little much to take after a while if it’s only the two of them. So of course she will do what any of the women at the surrounding tables would have done if they had fucked their brothers (what they did do after fucking their brothers, for all she knows), and pretend it never happened. She will marry James, or someone a little less silly but still essentially like James, and she will spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with the parents of James or James-facsimile rather than with Arthur—she will have to find a way never to see Arthur again—and she will wear whatever old-lady fashions are in fashion, and she will make sarcastic comments before doing whatever her husband wants her to do.

Or, of course, she could take responsibility for what she has done, rather than let Arthur act as though the responsibility is his alone, and as though she is his victim. And of course Arthur will never truly take responsibility—he will just poke at it and then jerk his hand away, as though it’s a plate that’s too hot. No one in this restaurant, no one she has ever met, will take responsibility for anything, will truly accept punishment when they’ve earned it, however much they talk about doing so. Accepting punishment—that would be revolutionary.

She watches the waitress maneuver a corkscrew at the next table.

f

It was the middle of August now, and I was sitting alone on the beach again. For days I had barely seen Emily at all. If I had any courage, I would leave. I would take the bus to New York, stay at the YMCA, and get a job washing dishes or something.

The sun was setting when Emily sat down next to me, holding a bottle of red wine and a corkscrew.

“I saw you sitting out here for a long time,” she said. She plunged the corkscrew into the wine, grimaced, and pulled out the cork. She offered me the bottle but I declined. “When you used to sit out here all the time in the beginning of the summer, I watched you from my window and wished there was something I could do to make you happy.” She pulled the cork from the corkscrew and tossed it into the ocean. She took a swig from the bottle and wine dribbled down her mouth and onto her white shirt. “I guess I haven’t made you very happy.”

“You shouldn’t have been so concerned about me,” I said.

She looked at me for a long time. I kept my eyes straight ahead, not wanting to meet her gaze. “Yeah,” she said. She took another swig and more wine poured down her chin and onto her shirt. Her hair was beautiful in this light. “This is terrible wine.” She stood up and dropped the bottle. She walked along the beach, away from me and away from the house. I stood the bottle up after most of its contents had poured onto the sand, forming a damp reddish clump. I clutched the sand-covered mouth of the bottle and watched Emily.

She started speaking again when she was about fifty feet away. “Everyone makes jokes about how European royalty is inbred. Maybe we can start our own royal family.”

“You might want to keep your voice down,” I said.

“Don’t worry, no one can hear.”

“Why don’t you come closer and we’ll talk.”

“If Dad ever finds out, I was thinking of saying that at least I didn’t fuck a Negro.” She laughed. “Actually, incest is kind of the only way to keep the, you know, undesirable elements out. I think I should I get a medal from the Daughters of the American Revolution.” She twirled the corkscrew in her fingers, then raised it over her head.

Seeing that I would get nowhere, I closed my eyes and lay back on the sand.

“You know,” she said, “if you were a real man, I think you would commit suicide. It’s your destiny as a Huntington male, or what have you.”

“I know you don’t mean that, Emily.”

“I think we should start our own royal family,” she said. “There’s the increased possibility of birth defects. But we might also get the best of our genes. We’re both very smart, we’re both very good looking. It could be the beginning of a master race. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Just look at Oedipus. Antigone is the product of incest, and I think she’s a daughter to be proud of. So why is it wrong?”

I kept my eyes closed and imagined that she and I had been born on opposite sides of this ocean and had never met.

“Arthur. Look at me.”

I opened my eyes and sat up. “I’m sorry.”

“Maybe it’s not wrong,” she said. “But I think you have to have rules. If there are no rules life is boring. Sex is boring. Maybe that’s why Oedipus gouged out his eyes, to restore the rules. Maybe I’m completely wrong. That doesn’t sound like a convincing explanation, actually, now that I say it out loud. It sounds kind of puritanical and wrong. Anyway, I’m going to gouge out my eyes.”

She held up her left eyelid with her left thumb and angled the corkscrew with her right hand. By the time I was on my feet and running toward her she had sliced her eye with the corkscrew and there was blood. As soon as I reached her I grabbed her wrist and tried to get the corkscrew away.

“Let go!” she screamed. She slapped my hand and then dug her nails into my arm. There was blood all over her face, and her eye was a horrible reddish black. “I need to get the other one,” she said, trying to shake me off.

Finally I wrested the bloody corkscrew from her and threw it into the ocean. “No!” she screamed. “I hate you! I hate you!”

I did my best to hold her as she wailed. I looked at her left eye and tried to think of something I could do to stop the bleeding. I was afraid that moving her would do further damage.

Desperately I called to the house for help, and called again. Emily was screaming and flailing now, and I told her to be still. I told her that everything was my fault and I was sorry and I would kill myself if that was what she wanted but please, she had to be still so that she would not do further damage to her eye, but she kept screaming and flailing until she passed out from the pain and sunk limp and breathing and still bleeding into my arms.

*

I sat with my mother in the waiting room as the doctor told us that Emily’s eye had been sliced too deep to be saved. I had come up with a story about how I was trying to open a wine bottle as she sat beside me and my hand had slipped. The story was preposterous, but it was aided by the fact that it did not occur either to the doctor or to my mother that Emily might have sliced her own eye, and by the fact that my feelings of culpability were not feigned. My mother handled all the procedural matters very well, but the situation was clearly beyond her, and she said nothing more than necessary. Emily, when she awoke from anesthesia, apparently refused to say anything to the doctor beyond that she was willing to see our mother but not me. During the twenty minutes my mother and sister were alone, I was terrified that Emily would tell our mother the truth, but I learned afterward that she had stayed silent, staring with her good eye at the ceiling while my mother implored her to speak. This must have made my mother suspicious, but she did not say anything accusatory to me or ask me any probing questions.

When my mother and I returned from the hospital that evening, I sat in my room and began what has become the central sordid occupation of my life: attempting to understand how, over a period of several weeks, I had entered into a sexual relationship with my sister, which had culminated in her taking a corkscrew to her eye. My father arrived a little before midnight, and he clearly did not believe my story, but he did not challenge me directly. As my father listened to my story, obviously knowing that the truth was darker but not knowing what the truth was, I felt a devastated triumph at having defiled his daughter, his home, his son.

I was not, or at least I like to believe I was not, concerned with what would happen to me. I had made a promise to Emily to kill myself, and while I could not conceive of it, I was determined to evolve into the sort of person who was capable of suicide.

It was a little past four in the morning, I later calculated, when I heard my father at the door to my room. He didn’t like to knock; he did his best to open the door himself, an impossible task if he was holding something. I opened the door for him and saw him clutching a notebook by his crutch.

“I remember, at your grandfather’s funeral, looking at Paul in his little boy’s black suit. He didn’t pay attention to the service at all because he was wholly focused on a worm crawling across his path. He kept on kneeling down to the worm and poking at it. Each time he knelt his mother pulled him back up roughly by the shoulders. She tried to hold him to keep him still but then he would just wriggle in her grip. I thought that yes, this was right, the boy should be more concerned with the worm that will eat his grandfather than with this failed man who happened to have provided the seed for his own father. Even when Paul was a teenager, I was amazed at the joy he would take in the natural world. He would sit on the beach for hours with such a joyful, peaceful look on his face, while you and your sister would make this racket while the two of you played at being ballerinas or something. I always admired and even envied Paul’s talent for quiet. Human beings are terrible things, Arthur.”

He held the diary out to me with disgust. He had it open to the entry for the day Emily and I first had sex. It read simply, “I had sex with Arthur tonight. I am sorry.”

“Who was she apologizing to?” my father asked.

It might have been possible to argue that this was a joke in poor taste on Emily’s part, but I was too exhausted to lie, so I did not respond.

“Did I do something to deserve two repulsive beasts instead of children? Could you tell me what it was? I never wanted another child in the first place, let alone two more. As soon as you were born, I should have barged into the delivery room and shoved you back into your mother’s cunt.” My father grunted, daring me to reply, but again I did not respond.

“Well, I suppose there’s nothing you can possibly say,” he said. “I’ve always known there was something wrong with you, Arthur, but I did not know you were a monster. I certainly did not know your sister was a monster as well. I certainly did not know that my daughter is a useless slut. But the solution is simple enough. You will leave this house and this family within three hours and never return. We’ll send your sister to a sanitarium, and I’ll see to it that she is never released.”

This shocked me, but of course this is what he would do. His revulsion would never be any less than it was right now, and he would never stop punishing Emily.

In an instant I saw how I could save her.

“I raped her,” I said.

For the first time since he came into the room he looked me straight in the eye.

“I took a knife from the kitchen and I held it to her throat and I raped her in this bed. She was too scared to say anything to Mother, so I did it three times after that. She cut her eye open today to get away from me. I did it because I hate her and because I hate you. And now you’re going to put her in a sanitarium anyway, because you won’t be able to look at your daughter after she’s been raped by her brother. You’ll destroy her and finish the job I started. Because you won’t be able to help yourself.”

He dropped his crutches and fell on top of me, dragging us both to the floor. First he slapped me and then he punched me. He asked me how I could have done this to his baby, his angel. When he had stopped, he gripped me roughly by the shoulders and looked me in the eye.

“Emily is going to have a wonderful life despite what you’ve done.” He crawled across the floor to pick his crutches back up; I moved to help him but he slapped my hand away. Finally he hoisted himself back up and left the room, returning fifteen minutes later, as I was still trying to stop the bleeding from my mouth and holding ice to my broken nose. One eye was swollen shut (though I did not, symmetry be damned, lose the sight in it). Without looking at me, he explained that a car would arrive in sixty minutes and that I was immediately to pack two bags. Then he looked at me as though he wished he could finance the invention of a nuclear bomb that would destroy only me, and that would destroy me retroactively.

“I’d like to see you in prison for the rest of your life,” he said, “but it is not in Emily’s best interests.”

Only to be fully rid of me, he continued, and for absolutely no reasons of affection, he would put some money into my account. I was to have no further contact with the family or with anyone the family might come into contact with. Beyond that I was free to do as I wished.

“It is no concern of mine,” he said, “what you do.”

“You don’t have to worry,” I said. “I’m going to the Chappine Hotel and I’m going to hang myself.”

At this, something happened to his face. “Don’t do that, Arthur. You deserve to die, but don’t do that. I don’t even know why I don’t want you to, but please don’t do that. Please.”

I was overcome by this. “All right,” I said. “I promise.”

“Thank you. Thank you.” Still sobbing, he hugged me, as though I were leaving for summer camp, and then he turned and left and I never saw him again. In October of 1978, I received a telegram from my mother informing me that my father had hanged himself at the Chappine.

Attempting to maintain my composure, I bandaged my nose, packed my bags, and met the car in the driveway. It was not until we were on the road that the enormity of what had happened impressed itself upon me. I felt a hot, almost tactile despair, and I wanted to vomit until there was nothing left of me. The idea had already come to me, but it seemed inaccessible and possibly absurd, a false hope, and to torment myself I whispered it to the rhythm of the highway bumps. Arthur Hunt, Arthur Hunt, Arthur Hunt.

5:10 a.m. Sunday, May 12, 2012

Writing all of this down took everything out of me. At almost the same instant I wrote the last sentence, today’s Times thudded down outside my door. Nothing about Emily and me—I guess it’s not really news, and certainly not fit to print. Nothing about Sydney. There is a front-page story about the death of Little Brother, but it’s below the fold. It does not seem possible that Emily could want anything from me. But she would. I am certain that she would.

f

For a year or so afterward I traveled around Europe, eventually stopping in Berlin. The Wall exerted an undeniable pull on me, and I had dreams about it, but for several weeks I resisted actually going to see it. I told people that I didn’t want to turn the Wall into a simple tourist attraction, that I was worried about treating the Wall as an inverted Statue of Liberty, and if there was more to why I avoided it, I wasn’t aware of it. Finally one day I decided, without much rationale, to take a walk through the Tiergarten and see the Wall near the Brandenburg Gate. Just as the Wall was becoming visible, a truck carrying American soldiers hurled some slush on me. The Wall itself did not look formidable. Had it been unguarded, a child who jumped it would hardly consider the feat worth boasting about. In front of the Wall was a row of metal barriers no more threatening than those used to block off certain parts of the sidewalk during parades. But from the watchtowers, rifles and occasionally men were visible. I wondered what life was like for these boys, who were probably even younger than I was. There was an argument to be made that they were doing something noble, if they believed they were creating a Utopia. Creating a Utopia was difficult, and of course there would be times when workers would be tempted to flee to the false ease of the West. These men were there to compel courage, and courage is always, one way or another, compelled. I was not certain that I did not envy these guards and their lovely views of Berlin. I looked up at one of the watchtowers and I saw a solider. He was immobile, but there was something in his eyes that looked hungry and vicious and needy, ready to destroy and ready to follow, like a dog’s eyes.

f

“Arthur Hunt” was supposed to cut off the past, put everything that happened to me into a box marked “INGTON” and leave the Hunt to me, a fresh man with no history. This wouldn’t be a bad idea for generations in general, cleaving off part of your parents’ name. My son, had I had one, would have been named Hu—a nicely global sounding name, appropriate for the twenty-first century. My grandson would have been named H, perhaps appropriate for the H-bomb which Al Qaeda might yet steal from the former Soviet Union and with which it might—in, say, 2051, or tomorrow—obliterate New York. My great-grandson, deformed by this hypothetical radiation and by the distant stain of incest, would have no name at all for his own son to call out in the post-apocalyptic mud.

But as it turned out I remained a Huntington, no matter what I called myself. Family connections were not what I wanted to rely on, but they were all I had, so I sought out a friend of my father’s who edited The Pond, an English-language magazine based in Berlin. Skeptical, he started me out with with some book reviews, but finally gave me a shot at covering Eastern European politics. Some people accuse me on this basis of having worked for the CIA, but the CIA-backed magazine that they’re thinking of is Encounter. I’ve never been able to discover who funded The Pond, but there was a lot more money for magazines in those days than there is now, and it’s doubtful that much or any of it came from the CIA. I wrote a great deal about the Eastern Bloc for The Pond, but I wrote just as often for liberal magazines about right-wing dictators all over the world; I wrote a lot attacking Big Brother back when the Reagan administration was supporting him. Maybe pursuing oppression was no kind of way to atone for Emily, but it’s the one available to me. I pursued my sister, too—I tried very hard to find her—but Emily proved even more elusive than justice.

f

It was in Berlin, on a sunny afternoon shortly after the fall of the Wall, that I saw Jersey and Miranda again. Jersey’s craggy face, twenty years older than I had last seen it, immediately stuck out to me among all the other faces on Unter den Linden. It was the only face that looked American.

How did Miranda look? She didn’t look like a twenty-year-old. But she looked happy.

After hesitating for a moment, I crossed the crowds to say hello. “Rothsteins!” I said, and then their eyes were on me. Had I been in a gloating mood, there could not have been a more perfect time for me to see them. The months after the fall of the Wall constituted one of the few points in history when the past seemed to lead to the future, rather than the reverse. Historians would later mark it as the end of the twentieth century, the period dominated by murderous plans to perfect the world, the “short century” of 1914 to 1989. (Time flies when you’re having fun.) At the time the idea that political action could not improve the world seemed simply silly. Totalitarianism was disintegrating in Eastern Europe, and from there: the Communists in China, apartheid in South Africa, Big Brother in REDACTED, Castro in Cuba would all have to fall. Meanwhile, Jersey’s reputation had had a bad time of it. I had kept track of his progress with some editor friends, and while there were rumors of another book—called Onan’s War—it seemed that twenty years of work had failed to produce a manuscript. If he ever did finish, it was unlikely that anyone would care. When he was remembered at all, it was by way of dismissal (“Jersey Rothstein, an also-ran among sixties hucksters”). And I had heard from Norture, who at this point was a network correspondent and whom I ran into professionally from time to time, that Jersey’s only teaching jobs since we knew him had been at community colleges. Miranda supported the family as a real estate agent, while Jersey for the most part stayed home and took care of their three children. It amused me more than it should have that Jersey was a housewife.

But I was not—mostly—in a gloating mood. “Turns out that politics isn’t always useless, Jersey,” was the first thing I said, and I guess that counts as gloating. And it made me feel good to see them both look embarrassedly at their feet, humbled by my success. I had my hand out for some time, and it was Miranda who finally worked up the courage to shake it.

“Arthur,” she said. “I thought you had become a doctor.”

This turned out to be somebody else we had known at Yale.

“It’s almost shockingly good to see you,” Jersey said, finally warming, though he still hadn’t shaken my hand. “It turns out that it is always a relief to see people who aren’t dead.”

“And speaking of not being dead,” I said, “your city is alive for the first time since you left it.”

Jersey stopped walking, and at the immense inconvenience of the many passersby, bent down toward me, sniffing in the direction of my legs to catch a whiff of the Berlin sidewalk. “How long does evil leave a smell, Arthur? Twenty years? Sixty? Or does it wash away with the next morning’s shower, followed by properly applied deodorant?”

His anguish at his return was understandable, but nonetheless I took a few steps back. Miranda muttered some disapproval and yanked at him until he was standing up straight again.

“Let’s not talk about Berlin,” Miranda said. “Let’s talk about our children. Do you have children, Arthur?”

I replied that I didn’t.

“The fall of the Wall is Arthur’s child,” Jersey said.

Then they started talking about their three energetic-sounding children: karate lessons, soccer. Jersey talked about how much his son liked to play Nintendo. As always with fathers, the annoyance and pride were difficult to separate. He started to say something about Sydney’s fondness for pretending to be a pirate, but Miranda shushed him.

“You don’t sound much like a man averse to all connection.”

He smiled and shrugged. One could imagine a happy movie ending there, with this smile of a crotchety man bashfully accepting his family. “How is your sister?” he asked.

“Jersey,” Miranda admonished.

“You know I have a sister?”

“I knew your sister.”

Now it was my turn to stop walking. “What is this about?”

“We’re going to talk about this. It was after you went to Europe,” Miranda said. “She called me at Smith and met me in New Haven, at Jersey’s. We had a nice dinner and she slept over. She had sex with Jersey, and Jersey likes to bring it up whenever he feels like starting a fight.”

“What happened to her?” Jersey asked me.

“He’s just trying to make me jealous,” Miranda said. “We should probably leave you alone, Arthur, our hotel is…”

“I don’t know what happened to her,” I said. “We had a falling out just before I left, and I have no idea what’s become of her since. Has she ever tried to contact you? If you know anything, I would…”

“You don’t have to justify anything to us,” Miranda said. She clearly wanted to stop talking and go back to her vacation. “I think Jersey thinks of her as a great conquest or the one that got away, but really she was just a teenage girl he took advantage of a long time ago.”

“It was a long time ago,” I said, wanting out of this just as much as she did.

“Why do you call yourself Arthur Hunt now, instead of Huntington?” Jersey asked. “Neville calls himself Win. I thought it was Jews, not WASPs, who were supposed to change names.” Without waiting for an answer, he spit on the ground. “Morgenthau was right. They should have turned this entire country into farmland. What am I supposed to feel here? The presence of ghosts? Arthur, do you think that the fall of the Wall means anything? Do you think that this means that even one fewer body will burn?”

The entire conversation had left me, to my surprise, relieved. Whatever had happened to Emily, at least I hadn’t ruined her sexual desire. Maybe she was living a happy life after all.

“You know something, Jersey?” I said. “I think it just might mean that.”

Two years later I was in Bosnia.

f

Liljana was the first in her home to be awoken by the Serbs. She heard their truck pulling up and knew what it was without seeing the boys with machine guns heading toward the front door. Before the first knock she had taken a knife from the kitchen, she had passed by her brother’s room (a year younger than Liljana, he would be useless now), and she had awoken her father and asked him to kill her. “No, Sweetheart, we will survive. We will cooperate with them, they will humiliate us, rummage through our things and steal whatever they want to steal, they will tell us that we must leave town. Tomorrow we will leave.” At this point the Serbs started knocking. “Yes, Liljana,” her mother said, rising from the bed and, for some reason, brushing her hair. “Tomorrow we will leave.” “No,” Liljana said, “they will kill us all. They will rape me. Please kill me now. I wish I could kill myself but for some reason I can’t. If you love me you will do this.”

By now they could hear the Serbs knocking in the door. Her father said, “You will be safe. I have a plan to make sure we will survive.” He took the knife Liljana had brought him and put it in the pocket of his pajama bottoms. The soldiers were yelling for them to show themselves. Her father rose from the bed and took a pistol from the dresser. They could hear her brother screaming and then stop screaming. Her father took his old tattered robe from the closet—Liljana had bought him a new one the previous year but he had never worn it—and put the pistol in the robe pocket. “Your brother is not dead,” her father said. “Do not worry, Liljana. This is my plan. You will hide under the bed. When the Serbs come into the room, they will say some things to me, and then when I say the word ‘piglet’ you will yell in order to distract them. Then I will take out my pistol and shoot them.” At this point a Serb came through the door and shot him in the head. The Serb looked at her and her mother, and then he got a look on his face that reminded her of the way that dumber boys looked when they were trying to solve a math problem at the blackboard. Then he shot her mother twice in the chest and took Liljana by the elbow into the living room, where four other soldiers were waiting. One of them had a gun to the neck of her brother, who was now crying loudly. Because of this he was slapped by another Serb, this one wearing a patch on his jacket that said “Top Gun!” in English. “Do not cry,” Top Gun told him, and slapped him again. This was something that Liljana also wanted to do, she wanted to slap her brother for crying. No tears for you now, she wanted to tell him. You wasted all your tears crying when you were four and dropped an ice cream cone, when you were seven and your team lost in soccer, when you were eleven and Grandma died, when you were twelve and our dog died, three weeks ago when your girlfriend dumped you. No more crying for you now. Slap him, Mister Top Gun Serb. Slap him and make him shut up. But he did not stop crying. “If you don’t stop crying,” said Top Gun, “I will shoot off both of your sister’s tits.”

This only made him cry more. Top Gun tore off the front of her nightgown. Then he slapped her brother again. “What is wrong with you? Why are you looking at your sister’s tits? Do you want to fuck your sister? Go ahead. Fuck your sister.” Now the Serbs were laughing and her brother was sobbing like a car that wouldn’t start.

“I want to live,” she said. And she did. She was only human. Everyone laughed, of course they would do nothing but laugh, but she wanted to live and she wanted to tell them that they were going to kill someone who wanted to live. Top Gun pushed her to the floor and tore off the rest of her nightgown. He struck her brother’s cheek with a pistol over and over until he took off his pajama bottoms. Then he pushed her to the floor and forced her brother to molest and finally to penetrate her—which he would not have been able to do had he not been evil—while all the others laughed. “I am so sorry,” her brother said. “Please forgive me.”

“I will never forgive you,” Liljana said. “We will both be dead soon but I will hate you after the grave. I hate you more than I hate the Serbs.” He was still sobbing when he ejaculated. He was still inside of her when the Serbs shot him in the back of the head. Then two of the other Serbs pulled her brother’s body away and each of the Serbs raped her before leaving her on the floor.

f

Liljana told me this story through an affectless translator. She was seven months pregnant with the child of either her brother or one of her attackers. Assuming her story was to be believed. She had already told it to another reporter, who didn’t believe her. He thought that the translator was embellishing the story, so that we would report it to the Western world (which, he said, would then have no choice but to intervene). “This is overreaching. This story is so horrible and so obviously fake that it almost passes into comedy.” This reporter hadn’t been here very long. I had already heard stories of Serb paramilitary soldiers forcing fathers to castrate their sons and rape their daughters. There was a widespread campaign by Serbs to rape Muslim and Croat women in order to impregnate them with their enemy. There were even rape camps, where women would be raped sometimes for four months before being murdered or let go, depending on the whim of the people doing the raping.

When Liljana had finished her story, I took out a cigarette and out of habit offered her one. She reached for it, but the translator slapped her hand and gave me an admonishing look. I apologized and excused myself, saying I would be back in just a moment. I wandered aimlessly; it was a few minutes before I realized that I had an unlit cigarette in my mouth. I had quite distinct images in my head of the men who had done this. I was already formulating a plan of what precisely I would do when I would meet them, weighing whether it would cause them greater pain if I stuck a knife into their abdomens or if I told them to kneel down and beg for their lives prior to shooting each of them in the back of the head. Forget that there was no chance that I would ever meet them. I would have to meet them. They couldn’t simply get away with it. My images of them were of a group of men in leather jackets (maybe they were Serbs and maybe not) whom I had seen in the airport when I first got here, men who I thought were laughing sinisterly over something. If I didn’t meet the men who had raped Liljana and murdered her family, then maybe I would simply have to find those men I had seen in the airport and kill them. And if I could not find the men from the airport, as of course I could not, then I would find random men on the street and kill them. I would take their wallets from their pockets, wipe off some of the blood with my sleeve (for there would be blood all over and all around these men, blood would seep out of their bodies as though it were surrendering), and then I would find their surnames. I would find where they lived. Then I would kill their brothers and their fathers and their sons. Hell, I would kill the women, too, for allowing men to pass out of and into their vaginas, for allowing their vaginas to be treated as the filthy hotel lobby of the filthy awful world. To kill everyone: That was the only humane way to respond to what I was seeing in Bosnia. I had walked through a village full of the bloated corpses of men, women, and children. I had seen garbage bags full of severed human heads. I had heard reports of people being crowded into buildings and the buildings set on fire.

And I had come here, I had to admit, thinking that I would see the first great triumph of the New World Order—thinking that the Europeans and the Americans would be able to sort things out. Would be willing to sort things out. Instead I was seeing the sort of things that make you gouge out your eyes with a corkscrew simply for being a member of the same species as the people who were doing this.

Should I have felt more implicated than most? A facile idea. I fucked my sister, so now I must listen to the story of this young girl whose brother was forced to rape her? This girl who probably looks nothing like Emily, but to me looks exactly like her, just as all seventeen-year-old girls do? Faced with this story, it would be awfully easy for me to say that what I had done wasn’t bad at all. I had fully consensual sex with my sister? Maybe she was a little young? At least I didn’t murder her parents while she looked on. At least I didn’t force her to stand naked in front of men with machine guns. At least I did not murder her brother while he was still inside of her. Though perhaps she would have liked it if I had.

If Liljana’s story had tied me to the Huntingtons in any way, it had done so by making me love death and want it for the entire human race. Just like my father.

In what way was what I had done at all similar to what had happened to Liljana? At all similar? The Serbs wanted to destroy the families of their enemies; I wanted to destroy my own family. Genocide, as many have noted, is a form of community-building. No one has ever accused me of building a community.

But then maybe this was the point. Or it might just as well be the point, given that there was no point at all. What I had done was horrible, and I could atone for it by working to end something much worse. Stay in Bosnia and tell people what is going on, keep telling them until they do something, and in that way love life.

Start with Liljana. Do not look to this to ratify any abstract theories of history. Do not look for some coded message about yourself. You and the world are not the same, however much you would like to forget that. Pay attention to Liljana and treat her as an individual. And don’t talk to her like a reporter, talk to her like a human being. That is the way you might do some good right now.

As I walked back I had to struggle with the feeling that I was about to start calling something by the wrong name.

“You could still get an abortion,” I told Liljana. “If that’s what you want.”

“I’m going to have the baby,” she said.

“You realize that it could have birth defects if it’s your brother’s.”

“So I should hope I was impregnated by one of the Serbs?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“If the baby has birth defects,” she said, “then I guess it will have a hard life.”

“All right,” I said. “You’re going to have the baby because you love it. You don’t care who the father is. If you want, you can move somewhere and never tell your child about the war. Or you could stay here and you and your child can rebuild.”

“Rebuild what? I don’t know how to build anything. I don’t know about bricks or concrete or wood.”

“I was speaking metaphorically.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I am going to tell my baby exactly what it is.”

“Good. And you and your child will live happily. It will be the ultimate revenge against the Serbs.”

“I want this baby to be miserable, so I want it to live,” she said. “If anything deserves this world, it’s this baby.”

“You’ll feel differently once you see the child.”

“I don’t want to see the child. That is the worst thing about having it. I would like to put a sheet over it. That way I could tell it how awful it is but I would not have to look at it. I hate it enough without having to see it. I would like to put a sheet over myself and pretend that I don’t have a body. I wish I could just talk and talk and not have a body anymore.”

“This is what the Chetniks wanted,” I said, using the derogatory term for the Bosnian Serbs. “Let her know I said Chetniks,” I told the translator. “They wanted to make you hate your family, your baby, your own body.”

“War is a good way of getting what you want,” she said. “Isn’t that why people do it?”

f

The Serb television stations all carried images of atrocities committed against the Serbs, some of them actually committed against the Serbs, some of them committed by the Serbs. Most likely, there were times when the people running the television stations thought that they were lying, when they thought that bodies they announced as Serb bodies were actually Muslim bodies, but the bodies were in fact Serb bodies. A pile of corpses is a pile of corpses.

The Serbs showed atrocities against Serbs, and the Croats showed atrocities against Croats, and the Muslims against Muslims. This is the problem with thinking that you’ll be safe if you concentrate on the suffering of individuals, with thinking that the burning of a particular body tells its own story.

For the first time since I left home I started desiring Emily sexually again. If the Serbs were going to kill the Muslims and Croats because of fractional, probably fictional differences in their blood, then I was going to lock myself up in my Sarajevo hotel room with someone who shared enough of my blood to make any racial purist happy. I didn’t have sex with Emily, of course, but I did have sex with many other women, more one-night stands than I’d ever had in my life. It’s something of a cliché, at least among war correspondents, that war makes people unusually horny; what it actually does is make you want to touch as much flesh as you can get your hands on.

It is difficult for me to articulate how ardently I wanted the Americans to bomb the Serbs. Milosevic’s regime was the clearest example of evil I had seen. For years I was in the Balkans almost without interruption, hoping for intervention first from the administration of my old friend’s father, then from Clinton. That Bush did not bomb did not especially surprise me. Of course there would be no help for Muslims in the middle of the mountains of Europe; just like the Serbs, the Bush family only cared about the preservation of people like them. But then Clinton did nothing for years. And really, bombing their artillery and their tanks would have been so easy, incapacitating them militarily would have been so easy in ’91 or ’92 or ’93, well before NATO did any bombing, and hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. Yes, this is all speculation. As always, we don’t know how it would have been otherwise. This is one of the worst things that victors do to losers: to starve their dreams into speculation. Never will you know if the way you wanted things would have been better or worse than the way they turned out.

Often I would sit in my room in the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, imagining the bombing of the Serbs. I imagined Serbs being burned. I imagined the men I had imagined as the men who raped Liljana burning, their faces shredded by American shrapnel.

I would imagine, also, Clinton sitting in the Oval Office, weighing the fate of a people, deciding whether or not to bomb the Serbs, deciding whether or not to lift the arms embargo that allowed the Serbs to keep all the weapons for themselves. He had the reports, thousands dead. All he would need would be one anecdote, one story that would make the war vivid for him, that would make it clear to him that he would have to act. What would it take? The story about Liljana? A story about a doughy, ambitious forty-six-year-old beaten almost to death in his own home? More photographs? There were plenty of photographs. Take more! Show as many emaciated bodies as you can find. Choose a prisoner at random from the Serb concentration camp at Trnopolje, put him in a cardboard box, and mail him to the White House, if that’s what it takes. Find a way to package the smell of dead bodies piled on top of each other, and make him smell it.

Instead Clinton read a fucking book, one that said that ethnic hatreds in the Balkans were eternal. As though anything is eternal.

Every day I was in Sarajevo, there was the constant thud of mortar fire, like a car alarm that won’t shut off. Every day I was outside of the city, there were new massacre sites to see. It got to the point where if I went a few days without seeing a dead body, I missed it. It was boring but I needed it. Once you’ve gotten used to a certain kind of smell from a certain kind of flesh, whether it’s a lover or a rotting corpse, you long for it when it’s not around. Or maybe it’s just me.

Milosevic’s parents both killed themselves after he was well into his adulthood, which, many of us liked to joke, was not nearly soon enough. Ana Mladiç, the daughter of Ratko Mladiç (the Bosnian Serb war criminal) killed herself in 1994, at the age of twenty-three, with her father’s favorite pistol. Of all the suicides I have ever encountered, this was my favorite.

The American bombs did not come until after eight thousand men and boys were murdered in Srebreniça. By then I did not feel a great deal of bloodlust. I felt sure that I would be killed by American bombs. I even drove down mountain paths that made this more likely. A fitting end to several years of what I had seen and smelled. At the very least I hoped some shrapnel would hit my eyes and nose. I would lose my senses of sight and smell. And yes, touch and taste and hearing as well. Take them all away. Stay in the sensual world, Rothstein had advised me, give up your abstractions. Well, give me back my abstractions.

But I continued my as-yet-unbroken streak of surviving every situation in which I find myself. All my senses were intact, and there were more bodies for them. After Dayton there were revenge attacks by Muslims against the Serbs. Old Serbian women were harassed and killed. The Chetniks got what was coming to them, I would say after some whiskey. It was racist and awful of me to say it, and the worst thing is that I didn’t even believe it at the time. I just wanted to believe that there was finally some sort of justice.

f

Some sort of justice: this was what I wanted to believe America could deliver. What I consoled myself with, after leaving Bosnia, was reading about the latest military advances. It had come too late in Bosnia, but it could come on time in the future. What had happened in Bosnia had happened because the Americans were too timid about using American power. American power was the only thing that could save the world. My mission now was to coax the United States into dropping bombs where dropping bombs would do some good. Everywhere there were artillery installations targeted at civilians, I wanted American planes to drop bombs on them. Everywhere a man with a machine gun on his lap was driving a truckload of his compatriots to a town where they would line up young children and old women and healthy young men and shoot them all, I wanted a precision bomb to shatter that man’s windshield and pierce his eyeball before blowing his friends to hell.

The American people no longer had any stomach for protracted ground wars, and there would no longer be any need for them. We had planes and bombs, bombs so exact as to more closely resemble scalpels than axes. No longer would there be any need to convince our soldiers that we thought they were heroes as we sent them to die, the way we might give a dog a pat on the head before putting it to sleep. No longer would we need to think of our soldiers as anything other than technicians, technicians who would do their job and then come home, and not expect stories to be told about them or expect politicians to pretend to mistake them for saints. No ideas of individual greatness or national glory would be necessary. Computers would do the work of defending the innocent, and computers don’t create myths about themselves, computers don’t find war erotic. The men in the planes would be more or less irrelevant, in uniforms that announced their humility, uniforms that hid their faces like burqas. (Now, of course, the men in the planes don’t exist, and the plane itself is like an empty burqa.)

And so it was in Kosovo. When Milosevic sent troops in, I was reluctant to cover it, because I thought it would all but certainly simply be a repeat of Bosnia, where we would do nothing until it was too late. And for the first several months it looked like this was exactly what it would be. But finally Clinton decided to launch an air war, and all of my dreams came true. Yes, there were mistakes—no dream is very far from a nightmare. There was the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy and a Serb passenger train, mistakes of intelligence. There was the excessive bombing of Belgrade, Milosevic’s home city and of course the home city of many, many civilians—a mistake of zeal, though if I was being honest with myself, I did not truly regard it as a mistake at all. Overall it was a wonderful war, as wars go. We won ugly, sure, but we won. And through most of it I felt that where I should have been, where the real action was, was not in freezing Kosovo, inspecting haystacks where Serb soldiers had tied old men and burned them. I should not have been in Kosovo, but above it.

But I was in Kosovo, adding to the list of the horrible things I have seen. There were infants dying in the mountains after their families were thrown out of their homes, and of course there were massacres upon massacres. But now the people were being rescued, the people felt pride in their cause and loved the Americans, and it was impossible not to feel differently. It was impossible not to think that what the Americans were doing was wonderful.

I returned home to New York after Milosevic surrendered. I remember thinking in the cab ride home how much uglier the skyline was now than it had been when I was a child, now that there were these two giant, faceless towers. Soon enough the towers were removed and New York looked as it did when I was young.

f

So there it is. Are you happy with what you have sown, Mr. Reaper? What was the point of making me write all that? Does the fact that I did something wrong and arguably evil mean that my thoughts on wars of liberation are somehow invalid? The best ideas often come from the worst people. Haven’t you ever heard of the tragic view of history? For that matter, hasn’t it ever occurred to you that history itself should be history? Who would have truly been harmed if everything that I have just written down had been forgotten forever? The Owl of Minerva flies at dusk: that’s why we should clip that motherfucker’s wings while there’s still enough light to see.

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

The 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.”

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 11th 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.

As it turned out, it was not the last conversation we would ever have. The next time we spoke, in lieu of either of us apologizing, we just talked about how much we both hated Daisy. Then I wrote an article called “Why I Do Not Miss My Sister,” attacking Daisy for “removing herself from the world in the most conspicuous way possible.”

Jason and I spoke many times after that; I think that the last time we spoke we talked about Ghostbusters and how much we both loved the villain inside the painting. The night after he died, I appeared on Norture’s show. I insisted that a PA bring me some 100 Grand bars and then I forced myself to eat them before going out and saying something about freedom not being free.

“Does this make you rethink your support the war?”

“It makes me understand what the people of Iraq have suffered, first under Saddam Hussein and now under these insurgents who want to restore repression. I wish we could make things right without any good guys dying, but that’s just a fantasy, and Jason and I, we’re adults. Or he was an adult and I am one.”

I had learned to put away childish things, one of which was my brother. Arthur called me sobbing that night, and I felt a strong urge to go to his apartment, wrap my arms around his neck, and pull us both down to Hell.

“You sweet-talked my brother into his own death, you sisterfucker.”

That’s not what I said. What I said was: “I want you to come to Jason’s funeral.”

“Seriously?” A lost dog who had just been found. “Your mother won’t mind?”

“My mother wants you there,” I said. This was not true. I wasn’t even sure whether my mother wanted me there, or whether my father did. My sister almost certainly didn’t want me there. The truth is I invited Arthur because I didn’t want to be completely alone when we put my brother in the ground. In the years that followed, Arthur often expressed gratitude that I was able to get him invited, but I think that he would have been less grateful had he ever learned that, on the night of my brother’s funeral, I slept with Win Norture. Naturally I had picked up on the rivalry between the two men, and on some level I must have already been angry at Arthur, though I didn’t tell him about Norture and I don’t think he ever knew.

My calling was to agitate for freedom. It would not be accurate to say that in the wake of my brother’s death I did not question my calling—I questioned it many times every day, in fact—but there was always a very clear answer. Spending my days thinking about something other than mass suffering felt even less tolerable than continuing to follow the philosophy that had killed my brother. I read about Bosnia and grew angry that we hadn’t intervened sooner; I read about Rwanda and grew furious that we hadn’t intervened at all. All I wanted to do was write until we burned the people who needed to be burned. Feeling trapped in Arthur’s correctness only made me hate him more.

During these years I spent a lot of time in Washington and was invited to lots of parties with lots of famous people. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t like it, and I would be lying, too, if I said that I didn’t want to write things that would make these famous people want to spend more time with me, take me seriously. I certainly didn’t want to write anything that would make these people think that I was a crank, or that I was naïve. Most importantly I wanted to be right, of course, but keeping an eye on moral correctness is as difficult as keeping an eye on an apple core that you’ve tossed into the ocean: there’s not much to do but hope it will wash up at your feet. And as Iraq kept going badly—as the opinions of the professionally serious started turning against it, so that supporting it was suddenly as socially unacceptable as opposing it had been a few years or weeks earlier—my attention drifted to REDACTED.

I’m being a little hard on myself. My attention didn’t drift. After the brief period in which he experimented with openness to the Western media and general liberalism, Big Brother suddenly shut the country down and forbid its public naming. He and his thugs also murdered a lot of women. Those he didn’t murder he raped, and those he didn’t rape he terrorized with the threat of rape and murder. It was almost impossible to know what was going on in the country, but the violence against women seemed to get worse as Big Brother grew older and more paranoid, and the law that he passed (or, rather, declared) allowing the rape of any unaccompanied woman made it clear to me that he needed to be stopped.

How exactly he should be stopped was a different issue. I grew interested in Big Brother in 2007, long past any serious hope for intervention from the Bush Administration. Traveling to REDACTED was now impossible, so I couldn’t write from first-hand experience. My only option was to write second-hand about the things said by those who had escaped. Actually affecting events did not seem likely, but neither, for a while, did it seem desirable. Journalists of late seem too eager to change the world in various ways; the point is to describe it, accurately and carefully. My shoulders were more relaxed now that I wasn’t thinking about war all the time. I hadn’t noticed how tense they were. An easily mockable metric, I know, but the peace of the body is often the peace of the world. Maybe this peace is also the peace of the grave, but the opposite seems more likely.

In any case, leaving the world as it was did not last long. Bush had left office, and I no longer had to worry so much that I was standing guard for the ancient bloodlines of Bush and Huntington, and around this time the CIA decided that Al Qaeda was in REDACTED. Whether that was actually true was and is difficult to say, but whether due to internal politics or serious if deluded conviction, Big Brother announced his support for Al Qaeda. This support drew drones like so many moths to a flame, except of course that the drones were supplying the flames.

Arthur and I argued over the drones. Neither of us was happy that America’s experiment in destroying dictators and constructing democracies had ended just because Bush had botched the job so terribly. But if we weren’t going to construct democracies, Arthur argued, at least we could destroy dictators. True, the drone wars were just as likely to prop up dictators as destroy them, and it’s also true that we were killing a lot of civilians, but between targeting women-hating murderers and making the odd mistake and leaving women-hating murderers alone completely, better not to stand idle. This was Arthur’s position, expounded at great length in Bloody Crossroads. (There was also, of course, some simple professional jealousy. Bernard-Henri Lévy got Libya, so Arthur wanted REDACTED.) The very idea of drones bothered me; the idea that you could just sit in a room and press a button and kill a person thousands of miles away did not seem morally tenable. There was too much protection in a drone, protection that was also a denial of one’s own humanity, very much like the protection offered by a burqa.

There was also another kind of anger in me: an anger that drones hadn’t been popularized in time to save my brother. How dare all these warriors sit in safety, with my brother’s balls in Basra. (Terrible alliteration, I know. Think how I felt when some guy from Jason’s unit, after dragging me out for a drink, mentioned that the IED had blown off my brother’s genitals, and the phrase “my brother’s balls in Basra” came into my head. If nothing else comes of everything that has happened, at least I have afflicted you with that phrase and it is no longer mine alone.) Anyway, I should probably delete that parenthetical, but I’m not going to because I’m angry about my brother’s death and that’s just the way it is. It was around this time, when drones were first used in REDACTED, that it finally started to sink in with me that particular configurations of words induced my brother to go somewhere and die, and that much of this really was Arthur’s fault.

I had trouble sleeping. I could have confronted Arthur; maybe I should have. There were a few parties during which I came very close to announcing to all invited that he had fucked his sister. Why not? I want to say that I held my tongue out of decency—out of respect, if not for Arthur’s privacy, then for his sister’s. But the truth is that by that time I spent so much time with Arthur that if I were to suddenly accuse him of incest I might invite the question of why I was so comfortable around a man who had fucked his sister. The first answer—that he could help me with my career—would not exactly paint me in a positive light, and was by this time a dead letter, since my career was going superbly and would continue to do so without Arthur. The more enduring answer—that he made me feel close to my brother—seemed weird, and also seemed to invite the question of whether I had fucked my own brother, or whether I had wanted to. Of course I did not and never wanted to, but a question like that can make you unsure of who you are and of your own desires.

Speaking of who I am and what my desires are: it was over dinner with Arthur that I both formed and announced my plan. I hadn’t been serious about joining the military to fight in Iraq, but this time I was very serious about going where the military would be fighting, even though the military and the CIA would be working from home.

What Arthur reports about the dinner we shared just before I left is accurate, but I was surprised that he does not mention, and in fact seems at pains to deny, that after dinner he and I had sex for the first and only time. I had sex with him for comfort; he had sex with me because he had always wanted to, and also, probably, for comfort. Why did he decide to hide it, considering everything else he divulges? Maybe he wanted to feel chivalrous, or maybe it was one uncomfortable sexual revelation too many. Or maybe he just always needed to know that there was at least one thing that he was hiding.

f

The situation for those Western journalists who crossed illegally into REDACTED was incredibly dangerous—three British reporters were found shot in the back of the head, an atrocity for which the government blamed the rebels and the rebels blamed the government. I knew that I had to go anyway, and I knew, too, that I stood a better chance of getting into the country inside of a burqa. So I did something I didn’t think I would ever do again—I went to see Daisy. Living at home with our parents and wearing that horrible thing, she made me so angry that I insisted on meeting Jersey and Miranda only in restaurants. I assumed that the hatred was mutual, so when she opened the door I expected her to ask me to leave. Every time I saw her eyes through her face net I felt horrible chills, sort of what you feel when you see someone you’re still in love with with a new lover. I hated her burqa so much, and yet before she could say anything, I asked her to sew me one, too.

“Too embarrassed to be seen with yourself?” she asked. Before I could respond with a jab of my own, she opened the hall closet and asked me what color I wanted.

She sewed me a burqa with the antique sewing machine that she had found in our basement laundry room when we were children. Watching her barely visible eyes focus on the needle felt so intimate that I could barely stand it, and I felt certain that when I returned, we would be sisters again.

And who knows? If a couple things had gone differently, I might even have been right.

f

I really did intend to go to REDACTED when I flew to Frankfurt. I intended to catch a plane to Cairo, where I would put on a burqa and somehow get to the country that I couldn’t name in print. Hiding out in the back of a truck, hiking most of the way, impersonating a military contractor: many different scenarios occurred to me. My daring entry would be a part of the articles and book I would write, of course, but only a part. My work would focus on the women of REDACTED, on their stories, not on my own. I wanted to document what was happening to these women, and I wanted to document the fall of Big Brother.

Chain restaurants comfort us more than we want them to, and I was drinking a cappuccino on a stool at an airport Starbucks when boarding began for my flight to Cairo. Simple cowardice might easily have stopped me, but cowardice always has accomplices. In this case, the accomplice was an email from Arthur Hunt.

SR:

By now you are probably in Cairo, en route to REDACTED. I would ask you to reconsider but I know that you would respond with a dismissive, snarky joke and I love your dismissive snarky jokes so much that this would just make me fear for and miss you even more than I already do. But I have been thinking about you non-stop since you left, and I have been thinking about your family, too, and I have written up some thoughts about what they might be thinking, things that might explain the ways in which they crafted the particular problems of their lives. Please see attached.

Scared for you,

Hunt

What was attached were passages that Arthur reproduces in his manuscript, the ones in which he puts himself into the perspectives of my mother and father and sister. The brazenness bothered me immediately. These passages struck me as more incontestably obscene than did the incest. Obscene and faintly totalitarian. For all the empathy that Arthur seems to extend to my parents, the truth is that he can see only himself. The thoughts that he gives to my mother and father are almost all centered around him and his concerns. Arthur’s versions of my parents worry about cheating on him much more than the real ones probably did—after all, he was just one of my mother’s college boyfriends, hardly her husband or the father of her children. My mother was never one to feel guilt even when she should have, and there was very little reason for my mother to feel any guilt at all about throwing him over for a handsome older man. And it’s not at all clear to me that history weighed on their genitals to anything like the degree that Arthur suggests; history seems to have weighed much more heavily on Arthur’s genitals. Similarly, his passage on Daisy conveniently shunts the burqa into a hand-wringing meditation on the costs of freedom, safely violating the very thing she was trying to prove, which was the very impossibility of knowing what it’s like to wear a burqa. I don’t think by any means that that’s all there is to say about the subject, but this is what she was trying to prove, and it was not Arthur’s place to use my sister’s strange decision to barge his way into the way that my sister thought about sex. I suddenly understood why Big Brother worked so hard to stop the invocation of his country’s name: to talk about something is the first step toward invading it.

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.

So I have an appointment tomorrow to have an abortion. I will have a family one day, but I have a few things to do first, even though I’m not yet sure what they are. I have quit my job—my days of cheering for America are over—but I do not know what I will write next.

I do know that I must stop thinking about Arthur and Emily, Jersey and Jason, Miranda and Daisy. Whatever is in them that has cast a shadow upon me, either I or what I’m standing on will move eventually, and then I’ll have the full benefit of the sun. After all, while Emily and I both failed to save our siblings, only I got out with my vision intact. There is something romantic about Emily’s isolation, but there is much more in it that is cowardly. There must be something in this wilderness, and there must be a way out of it.

There are worse things to be than an orphan.

2 Sorry—Ed.

3 McGeorge Bundy, national security advisor under Kennedy and Johnson, was a close friend of Arthur Huntington III, father of Arthur Hunt.–Ed.