Short Century Read Free Page B

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.
    â€œI 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