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    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.
    â€œHis 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