Short Century_A Novel

by David Burr Gerrard

  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. Ev
er 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 t
hese 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.”)