Short Century (25 page)

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.