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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.
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    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 11 th , 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,