The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  Sandro had told me about one of Helen Hellenberger’s artists who had done a drawing by walking in a straight line across a mile of the Mojave Desert and marking it in chalk. It was almost feminine, Sandro joked, to walk. Contemplation, nature, submitting passively to the time it took.

  The time it took: that was when I had gotten the idea to do this. What about going as fast as you possibly could? I’d thought. And not marking it in chalk. Drawing in a fast and almost traceless way.

  * * *

  I’d spent half a day among those waiting on death and now I was in line for the long course and hoping I was not the sacrifice.

  Perhaps because I was one of the few women running a vehicle that day, the timing officials let me store my knapsack and camera with them while I did my run. Everyone loved the bike. It was brand-new, there was a waiting list to order them from every dealership in the United States. Even the Valera people came over to admire it. I didn’t explain that I was Sandro’s girlfriend. I simply let them admire the bike, or admire the idea of an American girl riding it. Didi Bombonato was not among the Valera people who came over to say hello, see the bike. Didi Bombonato was in the air-conditioned bus. He would make his run later, when the salt was closed to everyone else.

  No bump vehicle? The timing official asked me.

  Street bike, I said, with electric start.

  They would mark my time at two miles, but I was planning to sustain it for longer. For the entire ten miles, and so I had lots of time and space to get up to top speed. I wanted to feel the size of the salt flats. When I’d requested the long course instead of the short course, the timing association secretary had asked if my vehicle went over 175 miles an hour. I lied and said yes, and she shrugged and put an L next to my name.

  It had rained recently, which was why everyone’s tires were ringed in salt. The salt was still rain-damp and sticky, which meant I’d leave tracks to photograph after my run.

  Take it easy, the timing official told me. We’re expecting wind gusts. At mile three the course gets funky for several hundred feet, didn’t get completely smoothed out when they graded. He was kind. He didn’t belittle me for being a woman. He gave the pertinent information and then nodded that it was okay to go.

  I was reminded, as I prepared to accelerate out of the start, of ski racing, and the many hundreds of moments I’d spent counting down seconds in the timing shack, my heart pounding, hunched at the start on the top of a course, squeezing the grips of my ski poles, planting and replanting them for the kick out of the start, surrounded by timing officials—always men, all men, but who took me seriously, spoke gravely about the imperfections of the course, what sorts of dangers to watch out for, a courtesy they gave every racer. At Bonneville, the sensations at the start were almost identical, the officials’ neutrality, the same people who surely had made this course, painted its three oil lines, dragged graders up and down it behind trucks, just as the officials at ski races prepped the course surface and set the gates. The beep of timing equipment, waiting to trip a red wire suspended over white. And the quality of light, pure reflecting white, like a snow-glinting morning above tree line.

  Beep, beep, beep. I was off.

  I moved through the gears and into fifth. The wind pushed against me, threatening to rip my helmet off, as though I were tilting my face into a waterfall. I hit 110 on my speedometer and went low. The salt did not feel like a road. I seemed to be moving around a lot, as if I were riding on ice, and yet I had traction, a slightly loose traction that had to be taken on faith. I was going 120. Then 125. I felt alert to every granule of time. Each granule was time, the single pertinent image, the other moment-images, before and after, lost, unconsidered. All I knew was my hand on the throttle grip, its tingling vibration in my gloved fingers: 130, 138. Floating Mountain hovered in the distance, a mirage at its skirt. Hazy and massive. Whatever happened, it would watch but not help. Pay attention, it said. You could die.

  The trucker had said it more or less, telling me I’d look worse in a body bag. Probably I’d passed him, my loud exhaust pipes catching him off guard.

  My left hand was cramping from tension. I slowed to 120 and lifted it off the grip, steering with my right hand. I felt the wind through my deerskin glove, heavy and smooth like water. Wind gets thickest just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier. The sound barrier is nothing but air, an immense wall of wind. Was wind one thing or a thing of many parts, millions or billions of parts? It was one thing, one wind. My two hair braids had worked themselves free from under my jacket and were flapping behind me, stinging my back like two long horse’s tails.

  The photographs would be nothing but a trace. A trace of a trace. They might fail entirely to capture what I hoped for, the experience of speed.

  “You don’t have to immediately become an artist,” Sandro said. “You have the luxury of time. You’re young. Young people are doing something even when they’re doing nothing. A young woman is a conduit. All she has to do is exist.”

  You have time. Meaning don’t use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don’t rush to meet it. Be a conduit. I believed him. I felt this to be true. Some people might consider that passivity but I did not. I considered it living.

  I tucked in and pegged the throttle. The salt stretched out in front of me. I saw the real ambulance, there in case of accidents, parked along the side of the course. I was going 142 miles an hour now. Two oil lines painted on either side of me marked the track, with a third down the middle. I flew along the centerline. I was going 145 miles an hour. Then 148. I was in an acute case of the present tense. Nothing mattered but the milliseconds of life at that speed.

  Far ahead of me, the salt flats and mountains conspired into one puddled vortex. I began to feel the size of this place. Or perhaps I did not feel it, but the cycle, whose tires marked its size with each turn, did. I felt a tenderness for them, speeding along under me.

  A massive gust of wind came in. I was shoved sideways and forced down.

  The bike skipped end over end. I slammed headfirst into the salt, a smack into white concrete. My body was sent abrading and skidding and slamming before flipping up and slamming down again. I almost crashed into my own salt-sliding motorcycle. We barely missed each other. I skidded and tumbled.

  There’s a false idea that accidents happen in slow motion.

  The crash test dummy careens into the steering column, the front end folds inward, car hood accordioned, glass showering up and then collapsing gracefully like those waterfalls at the casinos exploding into confetti. (“Confetti,” Sandro says, “confetti is hard almond candy. No one throws it. We say coriandoli, a more beautiful word anyway.”)

  What happens slowly carries in each part the possibility of returning to what came before. In an accident everything is simultaneous, sudden, irreversible. It means this: no going back.

  I know the wind gusted and that I crashed.

  What came after was slower, but I wasn’t there for it. The lights were out.

  3. HE HAD COME A LONG WAY TO THAT MOMENT OF QUICK VIOLENCE,

  to braining a German soldier with a motorbike headlamp, and then taking the soldier’s dagger, his pistol, his gas mask, no longer of use to him. Such a long way.

  From a placid childhood that faced the African sea, in which every young boy’s game was a set of silhouettes against a clean division of water and sky, vast and limitless, a sea smooth and convex as a glassmaker’s bubble, stretching and welling as if the aquamarine water were a single molten plasma.

  Valera spent hours on his family’s balcony in Alexandria, looking for ships and pissing on the Berber merchants who trundled below with carts of sticky dates and ostrich plumes. Flaubert had done this before him, on his trip down the Nile in a felucca with Maxime Du Camp. Coptic monks had swum up to the boat, naked, begging alms. “Baksheesh, baksheesh!” the monks cried out, the felucca’s sailing crew hollering back this or that about Muhammad and attempti
ng to cudgel the monks with frying pans and mop handles. Flaubert couldn’t resist taking his prick from his trousers, waving it and pretending to piss on their heads, and then delivering on the threat as the wretched monks clung to the rigging and prow. “Baksheesh, baksheesh!”

  Valera was more furtive, sending a patter over the balcony railing and ducking behind a potted plant as the merchants yelled up, indignant, and then briskly wheeled their carts away, leaving Valera to read in peace, without the irritating clang of handbells and the distracting grind of wooden cartwheels on the paving stones. He was busy supplementing his strict lycée education with Rimbaud and Baudelaire, with Flaubert’s letters, volumes he purchased on trips to Paris with his father. His father proudly paid the extra customs fees for Valera’s crates of literature, unaware that some of it was not only improper but downright lewd, like Flaubert’s letters from the year he went down the Nile, 1849. Pages were passed among schoolboys, creased and underlined, depicting a life that confirmed the essential goodness of everything the boys had been told was bad, a life that involved fucking before breakfast, after lunch, before dinner, all night, and then again the morning after, ill with hangover—the best yet, by Flaubert’s own account. Valera memorized Flaubert’s reports and dreamed of his own sentimental education of see-through pants and sandalwood, of the endless succession of breasts and velvety cunts that Flaubert encountered.

  Valera longed for a French girl named Marie, closing his eyes to close the physical gap between their two bodies, as he pretended his own hand was Marie’s lips, mouth, and tongue. Dark-eyed, pale-skinned Marie, who lived at the convent next door. She was older than Valera, but she let him hold her hand and even kiss her, though nothing more. The promise of her warm body was buried under layers of no and not yet. Every morning the girls were taken into the convent courtyard by the nuns, and Valera would strain at the kitchen window to see them doing their knee bends and stretches. On occasion the sun angled in such a way that it penetrated the girls’ thin white cotton blouses, and he was able to glimpse the shape of Marie’s breasts, which were round and large. They were not suspended in any kind of undergarment, like the complicated muslin-and-elastic holsters his mother wore, and he wondered if brassieres were only for married women. When he looked in the mirror he felt unfree, a hopeless entwinement of longings and guilt. His private pleasures were wrecked by the specter of guilt, even with the door locked, the covers pulled up: a fortress of privacy breached by his mother’s voice, calling his name. He figured he’d stored up a lifetime of lust and that upon its first real release he would unburden himself in one violent salvo and then settle into a more manageable state. He imagined that physical proximity would instruct him in so many things—first of all, the real distance between people. He was willing to pay to begin this education. He strolled the Rue de la Gare de Ramleh, where the whores worked in the open, but the truth was that he could not distinguish male from female, even as he’d been told that men were on one side of the street and women on the other. But which side was which? He was embarrassed to ask. They looked the same, wore their scarves knotted and wrapped the same way, trailed the same perfume. He longed for his own sexual delinquency, but he had no taste for surprises if he should accidently choose the wrong side of Ramleh. On the night of his fourteenth birthday he mustered his courage and visited a brothel on Rue Lepsius, where native women—maybe they were Jews—yawned and adjusted their hairpins. A large doll lay on a chair, its legs splayed wide. Valera quickly selected a woman in gold-slashed bloomers whose curly hair reminded him of Marie’s. Together they entered a little chamber with threadbare rugs and a rickety settee. The woman flopped on the settee and began puffing on a hookah in a mannish and private-seeming fashion, eyes closed, mouth like a trumpet bell exhaling smoke toward the ceiling in O’s that floated virginal and then frayed and collapsed. When she was done with the hookah she took off her bloomers. The settee creaked loudly as she pulled Valera down and wrapped her legs around him. Soft pressures enveloped him. He ignored the symphony of creaks from the settee and moved into a drifting sea, felt a sensation of a boat and waves, but whether he was the boat and she the waves did not matter, only the pleasure of movement mattered. Suddenly the woman bore down, activating ridiculous muscles. He didn’t know that females possessed such muscles, which were like a hand that grabbed him and squeezed until there was nothing left to squeeze.

  The salvo he’d been dreaming of was not violent, though it produced a strange aftershock of trembling. Most unexpected was the sadness that followed on the heels of pleasure, like smoke from an extinguished candle. But like smoke, the sadness quickly dissipated, and a week later, behind the open bazaar, he paid a native woman to let him touch her bosom. He’d been so consumed with the mechanics of the act with the woman in the brothel that he’d all but forgotten to investigate her breasts, which had stared up at him, jiggling softly in rhythm with the creaking settee. Behind the bazaar, he prodded and handled the breasts of the native woman as if they were fruits for purchasing. They felt, to his horror, like farmer’s cheese with gravelly bits buried deep inside. He was sure that Marie’s breasts would not be lumpy and unpleasantly complicated. Marie’s would be springy and consistent, like two water balloons. He would wait for hers and hers alone.

  * * *

  One late afternoon on his way home from rugby practice, Valera saw a strange machine parked on the seawall, a cycle with odd compartments, painted black. He supposed it was technically a bicycle—two wheels, a seat, handlebars. But it had a motor like an industrial machine. Its surfaces gleamed, showing none of Alexandria’s pervasive dust, road dust, brick dust, lime dust. As if it had just been transported from a trade show or museum, and yet it ticked with life, metal expanding as the cycle cooled: someone had just ridden it. Over its solid black rear wheel was sprung an odd upside-down sluiceway or gutter with interior machinery. German names were lettered in gold on its rear, “Hildebrand & Wolfmüller, München,” in fussy and old-fashioned cursive stencil like on the Prussian War–era sewing machine his mother kept for the seamstress. The place name, München, made him think of workmen whose lives were organized around haptic knowledge and early wake times, tinkering away as the Bavarian sun rose over narrow cobblestone streets. The cycle’s frame was thick and looked made of iron, to which a giant canister was bolted, a sort of metal keg that must have been the engine. There were no pedals, just two rigid pegs. The front wheel was spoked, the rear an opaque black disc like a factory flywheel. A young man came around the corner, and by the tap and click of hard-soled, well-made city shoes, Valera understood that he was the owner of this weird cycle. The sun was already low over the sea. The man’s hair was slicked and wet with the possibilities of evening. Valera had never seen him—a Frenchman, he guessed. The man got on the contraption. There was nothing athletic in the attitude of his body, as if he would get the cycle going without physical effort, as a horseman swings his leg over, settles in the saddle and digs his spurs. He compressed a crank with one of his fancy shoes, to start the motor. After a few tries, it caught with a rumbling bub-bub-bub, coughing smoke, banging and backfiring, almost sputtering out, but then it seemed to find itself, and idled evenly again. Oh, but what happened next. Above the din of the engine Valera had not heard the broad, heavy door of the convent sing shut on its hinges. Had not heard the soft slap of a young woman’s espadrilles. Marie, walking along the seawall. She was glancing nervously at the convent’s open casement windows, moving quickly as if to avoid detection. She did not notice Valera. She approached the man on the bubbing cycle, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him. Is this real? Valera asked himself. Or am I dreaming this absurd betrayal? Marie hopped onto the seat of the cycle behind the man, her legs wrapped around his, her arms clutching his waist, the side of her face pressed against his back, her skirt bunched up around her knees. Off they went on the black machine, a thin looping trail of white smoke unfurling behind them.

  Marie, were you not a virgin after all? Did yo
u refuse me because you were taken, and not because you were pure? Or was I not good enough?

  They rode along the seawall, Marie’s skirt and the man’s jacket flapping erratically in the warm wind. The cycle picked up speed until they seemed to be darting into the horizon, an orthogonal razor across Valera’s eye. Valera shouted. He used everything he had. He knew they could not hear him. He needed to enter the space of air, too, as that machine had, as that man had, taking Marie with him, man and bike and Marie making an obscene double-humped centaur’s profile that moved along the seawall.

  Watching its smug glide, Valera was in pain, but he felt a strange exhilaration around the edges of his pain. “The world is unknown to me,” he said out loud. “It is unknown.”

  The cycle quieted to a distant throgging whine and then he could no longer hear it or see it. He was abandoned to his own sudden urge. He felt like a baby snake with too much venom. Afraid he would do something rash if he went inside his family’s apartment just then—defiling melons smuggled from the pantry was only half-pleasurable and led to an empty and disgusted sentiment, not worth the momentary joy—he instead descended the crumbling stairs along the seawall. Above the railing were smudged blue handprints, placed there by superstitious Egyptians to ward off the evil eye. No one was around, and he could have attended to the matter discreetly but decided against it. This erection, he felt, meant something. He wanted to use it, somehow. He disrobed, and with the calm thrill of entering a woman, he entered the ocean.