Short Century (30 page)

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.