The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  “You know him?”

  “Yeah. He lives in the neighborhood. It’s his thing, that pole. No sellable works, just disruption. Goes to gallery openings, bonks people on the head by accident.”

  The children who taunted him in the playground all had fathers in the Mafia. Every Sunday, the fathers exited their social club on Mulberry, next door to my building, and got into black limousines. There were so many limousines they took up the entire block, lined up like bars of obsidian-black soap, double-parked along Mulberry so that no traffic could pass. The chauffeurs stood next to the open passenger-side doors all afternoon. It was summer, and sweat rolled down their faces as they waited for the men to emerge from the social club.

  Every morning I sat at the counter of the Trust E on Lafayette, hoping Giddle and I might talk, and if business was slow, we did. I paid my rent to a Mr. Pong, who said I should contact him only if I was moving out or if the city showed up to inspect. I spent each day looking at the want ads and walking around. As I came and went from my apartment, I would say hello to the two teenage girls who cut and styled each other’s hair in the hallway. Sometimes they were in the courtyard between the two buildings—one building was behind the other, and I lived in the front—working out dance routines under the wet flags of hung laundry. Each night I went to a pizza place on Prince. The kind of young people I hoped to know, women and men in ripped, self-styled clothes, smoking and passionately discussing art and music and ideas, were all there. I didn’t interact with them except for once, when one of the men called me cutie, he said, Hey, cutie, and a woman near him became upset, telling him that the street was not his pickup joint, and the other women laughed, and none of them asked if I needed friends. Which was something people never would ask. I ate my pizza and went to lie in bed with all the windows wide open. The trucks rumbling down Kenmare, the honking, an occasional breaking of glass, made me feel that I was not separate and alone in my solitude, because the city was flowing through my apartment and its sounds were a kind of companionship.

  I had met Giddle, but she was of little real help. The stream of New York, at least the one I imagined, moved around her as it did around me. She seemed as isolated as I was, which was troubling, because she’d been in New York, as far as I could tell, for many, many years. She would tell me about herself but it often contradicted something she’d said on a different day. Once she said she was raised in a Midwestern Catholic orphanage. We wore green skirts, she told me, white blouses, white bobby socks, saddle shoes, green jackets. We watched the nuns shower. But on another quiet morning at the diner, she told me her father sold appliances. They’d lived in Montreal. Her mother stayed home, was always there when Giddle returned from school. She had three brothers. Got an F in French. And I looked at her and nodded and realized she had forgotten she’d told me about the nuns a few days earlier.

  Something would happen, I was sure. A job, which I needed, but that could isolate a person even further. No. Some kind of event. “Tonight is the night,” I later believed I’d told myself on that particular night when I heard the music and Nina Simone’s voice, walked into the bar on Fourteenth Street, and met the people with the gun. But in truth I had not told myself anything. I had simply left my apartment to stroll, as I did every night. What occurred did so because I was open to it, and not because fate and I met at a certain angle. I had plenty of time to think about this later. I thought about it so much that the events of that evening sometimes ran along under my mood like a secret river, in the way that all buried truths rushed along quietly in some hidden place.

  * * *

  “This is my wife,” the nasal man in elegant clothes said as I sat down next to them at the bar. “Nadine.”

  He said it again. “Nay-deeen,” and looked searchingly at her.

  She ignored him, as if she were used to this audible pondering of her Nadine-ness in bars, for the benefit of strangers.

  “We were at a wedding,” Nadine said, turning to me. “They asked us to leave. They asked Thurman to leave, I mean. But I don’t like weddings anyway? They make my face hurt?”

  That was how she spoke.

  “Why did they want you to leave?” I asked, but I could sense why. Something about their presence in an empty bar many levels below what the man’s clothes might suggest.

  “Because Thurman lay down in the grass?” Nadine said. “He started taking pictures of the sky. Just blue sky, instead of the bride and groom. He’d had a few too—”

  “I did not have a few too. I was looking for something decent to photograph. Something worth keeping. For posterity.”

  “Oh, posterity,” Nadine said. “Sure. Great. If you can afford it. You could have just told Lester you didn’t want to be the picture taker.”

  There was a camera sitting in front of him on the bar, an expensive-looking Leica.

  “You’re a photographer?” I asked him.

  “Nope.” He smiled, revealing a tar stain between his two front teeth.

  “But the camera—” I couldn’t think of how to say it. You have a camera but you aren’t a photographer. I sensed he would only keep meandering away, like something you are trying to catch that continually evades your grasp.

  “Better to say yes,” Thurman said, “and then disappoint people. I mean really let them down.”

  “Lord knows you’re good at that,” Nadine said in a quiet voice.

  “I’m talking about building a reputation.”

  “So am I,” she said.

  “All I want,” Thurman said, “is for people to stop asking me to come to their weddings. And funerals.”

  “I don’t mind funerals?” Nadine said. “Except when they buried my daddy in a purple casket. That was awful.” She turned to me. “Thurman knew my daddy? Daddy was a mentor to him? A teacher?”

  “A mentor,” I repeated, hoping this might lead somewhere, to some explanation of who she and Thurman were. Because they were someone or something, I was sure of it.

  “Well, my daddy was a, I guess you could say pimp. Pimp is acceptable—I mean now that he’s dead. And you know what? People don’t say procurer anymore.”

  I thought of the narrow wing tips in tropical bird colors. Who knew what was true.

  “And my mother was a whore, so they got along perfect.”

  Probably nothing was true, but I liked the challenge of trying to talk to them. I had spoken to so few people since arriving that it felt logical to interact in this manner. It was direct and also evasive, each in a way that made sense to me.

  “May he rest in peace,” Thurman said. “A gentleman. I wanted to ask him for your hand in marriage. You were fourteen and goddamn. I wanted to just marry the pants off you.” He grinned and showed the ugly stain on his teeth. “But then there was no point. It wasn’t marrying to get in your pants, since you were allowing it. Not with me. That motherfucker you did marry, later on.”

  Nadine frowned. “Do you want a purple casket, Thurman? Because Blossom might have one all picked out for you. With a copper millennial vault, to preserve your—”

  He got up, walked to the end of the bar, and aimed his camera at a sign above the register. SORRY, NO CREDIT.

  Three or four drinks in, still they hadn’t asked me anything. But what interesting thing did I have to tell? I was content to listen to their stream of half reports on people I’d never heard of, stories I could not follow, one about a baby named Kotch. “This lady was nursing him,” Nadine said, “and then another lady and you begin to think, wait a minute, whose baby is Kotch? I don’t know who was his mother and who was a wet nurse—”

  “I’ll make you a wet nurse,” Thurman said as he grabbed Nadine and put his hand between her legs. She twisted away and then she was prattling about a McDonald’s she once went to in Mexico. I had been in a McDonald’s commercial when I was in high school, and I thought, as Nadine spoke, that it might be a story I could share with them.

  “McDonald’s is supposed to be the same everywhere, right? Well, not in Me
xico. They Mexicanize it. Hamburguesa con chile. No fries—fri-jol-es. I was with my ex. We were starving and I was ready to eat beans. We’re at the counter and find out we have no money. He had lost his wallet.”

  She went on about this ex, the revolution he had been fomenting that never took place and had led to their harsh and vagrant life in the mountains of northern Mexico, the hole in his pocket that his wallet wriggled through, leading to his inability to provide for her the most fundamental thing—a McDonald’s hamburger. That was how she put it, that he couldn’t provide even a hamburger. After which she left him and went to Hollywood, where the nightmare really began, a series of episodes and hard luck that involved rape, prostitution, and an addiction to Freon, the gas from the cooling element in refrigerators.

  “What you get,” Thurman said when she was finally finished, “for marrying a motherfucker.”

  “I don’t want to talk about him. And stop calling him that, would you?”

  “You brought him up.”

  “Only to tell her about the Mexican McDonald’s.”

  “I was in a McDonald’s commercial,” I said.

  “Oh, you’re an actress!”

  “No, I just did the one thing, I was sixteen and it was just something, an ad our coach answered and—”

  “Thurman, she’s an actress.”

  “Well, I . . . we did act, I guess. But that’s not . . . they needed a girl who could ski, and so I—”

  “You’re an actress and a skier! I never meet anyone who skis.”

  “Do you ski?” I asked, only vaguely hopeful.

  “Do I ski. No, honey.”

  The commercial’s director and crew had come to Mount Rose, where we trained. They talked to our coach and ended up choosing me and a racer named Lisa, a quiet girl no one really knew. There was a long day of takes and retakes. They wanted two girls with hair flying, snow bunnies on a brisk, sunny afternoon. A week later they flew us both to Los Angeles, to a strange McDonald’s in the City of Industry where they only filmed commercials. It looked like a regular McDonald’s, with cashiers in paper hats, a menu board, the plastic bench tables where Lisa and I sat across from each other and smiled as if we were friends although we weren’t, each of us holding a hamburger in our fingers with hot lights on us, in this fake restaurant that looked real except they didn’t serve customers. I tried to explain this to Nadine, but she kept interrupting me.

  When we finished shooting the ad, I flew home to Reno. Lisa was supposed to be on the flight but she wasn’t. She was eighteen, an adult, and I didn’t wonder. She had apparently gone to a bar near the fake McDonald’s in the City of Industry. No one ever heard from her again.

  “Freaky,” Nadine said. “There’s no telling. Once I met the serial killer Ted Bundy. Can you believe it? He was real handsome. Real smooth. I was on a beach and here comes this hunky college guy. I was this close to ending up like the gal in that commercial with you.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that Lisa had been murdered. I assumed she’d been impatient to meet her future and had just fled into it and never bothered to let anyone know where she was and what she was doing. The representative who paid me could not track her down. He called to ask if I knew anything and I’d said no.

  “I miss Los Angeles,” Nadine said. “Don’t you?”

  “I was only there the one night,” I said. “In the City of Industry, which isn’t really Los Angeles, and so—”

  “The way the palm trees shake around,” she went on, “and it sounds like rain but everything is sun reflecting on metal. I once went to a house in the Hollywood Hills that was a glass dome on a pole, its elevator shaft. Belonged to a pervert bachelor and he had peepholes everywhere. He was watching me in the toilet. Same guy drugged me without asking first. Angel dust. I was on roller skates, which presented a whole extra challenge.”

  Thurman was laughing. I understood she was his airy nonsense-maker, a bubble machine, and occasionally he would be in the mood for that.

  “How the hell did you manage, drugged, on skates?” he asked her.

  “Like I said, there was an elevator. Anyhow, there’s some use in being doped against your will. Before it happened I didn’t have my natural defenses. Some people don’t get the whole boundaries thing until they’ve had their mind raped by another person. It helped me to establish some kind of minimum standard.”

  She turned to me. “Did you see Klute?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I did, I—”

  “I liked it,” she said. “He didn’t.” She gestured at Thurman. She wasn’t curious what I thought of Klute. But that very film had been on my mind, this portrait of a woman who is alone and isolated in the dense and crowded city. In my empty apartment I’d been thinking of the scenes where her phone rings. She answers and no one is there.

  * * *

  Perhaps because I was so isolated, as darkness fell outside that Fourteenth Street bar, and more drinks were ordered, and a sense of possession over time faded away, a sense of the evening as mine loosened, one in which I would eat my habitual pizza slice and lie down alone, I began to cling in some subtle way to these people, Nadine and Thurman, even as they were drunk and bizarre and didn’t listen to a word I said.

  I heard the sound of a motorcycle pulling up on the sidewalk in front of the bar.

  A man walked in wearing jeans tucked into engineer’s boots and a faded T-shirt that said MARSDEN HARTLEY on it. He was good-looking and I guessed he knew it, this friend of Thurman and Nadine’s whose name I did not catch. He walked in knowing he was beautiful, with his hard gaze and slightly feminine mouth, and I was struck. He had the Marsden Hartley T-shirt and I loved Marsden Hartley. He rode a motorcycle. These commonalities felt like a miracle to me. I realized when he sat down that he had made his T-shirt logo with a pen. It was not silk-screened. He’d simply written MARSDEN HARTLEY. He could’ve written anything and that was what he wrote.

  Compared to Thurman and Nadine it was like reason had stepped through the door. He didn’t speak in rambling non sequiturs or take pictures of the ceiling. Thurman started acting a bit more normally himself, and he and this friend of his had a coherent exchange about classical music, Thurman demonstrating a passage of Bach by running his hands over the bar as though it were a piano, his fingers sounding pretend notes with a delicate care and exactitude that the rest of him seemed to lack. There were several rounds of drinks. Their friend asked if I was an art student. “Let me guess,” he said. “Either Cooper or SVA. Except if you were at Cooper your enlightened good sense would keep you away from dirty old men like Thurman Johnson.”

  I said I’d just moved to New York.

  “You had a college sweetheart who is joining the military. He was also in fine arts. He’ll use his training to paint portraits of army colonels. You’ll write letters back and forth until you fall in love with someone else, which is what you moved here to do.”

  These people seemed to want to have already located the general idea of the stranger in their company, and to feel they were good guessers. It was somehow preferable to actually trying to get to know me.

  “I didn’t move here to fall in love.”

  But as I said it, I felt he’d set a trap of some kind. Because I didn’t move here not to fall in love. The desire for love is universal but that has never meant it’s worthy of respect. It’s not admirable to want love, it just is.

  The truth was that I’d loved Chris Kelly, who’d gone to the South of France to find Nina Simone, only to be shot at with a gun she’d lifted from the pocket of her robe. We were in an Italian film class together. He looked at Monica Vitti like he wanted to eat her, and I looked at her like I wanted to be her. I started cutting and arranging my hair like hers, a tousled mess with a few loose bangs, and I even found a green wool coat like she clutched to her chin in Red Desert, but Chris Kelly did not seem to notice. He was graduated and gone by my second semester at UNR and mostly an impression by this point, a lingering image of a tall guy who wore black turtle
necks, a cowlick over one eye, a person who had risked himself for art, had been shot in the arm and then moved to New York City.

  A few days earlier, I’d finally tried the number I had for him, from a pay phone on Mulberry Street. I’d gone downstairs, passing the teenage girls styling each other’s hair in the hallway, trying not to breathe because the Chinese family one floor below me slaughtered chickens in their apartment and the smell of warm blood filled the hallway. I’d dialed the number from the phone booth, nervous but happy. Someone was yelling, “Babbo, throw down the key!” It was the morning of the Fourth of July and kids were lighting smoke bombs, sulfurous coils of red and green, the colors dense and bright like concentrated dye blooming through water. I was wearing Chinese shoes I’d bought for two dollars on Canal Street. The buckles had immediately fallen off, and the straps were now attached with safety pins. Sweaty feet in cheap cotton shoes, black like Chris Kelly’s clothes. It was sweltering hot, children cutting into the powerful spray from an uncapped fire hydrant. As the phone began to ring, I watched an enormous flying cockroach land on the sidewalk. A woman came after it and crushed it under the bottom of her slipper.

  The phone was ringing. Now there was a huge mangled stain on the sidewalk, with still-moving parts, long, wispy antennae swiping around for signs of its own life. A second ring of the telephone. Mythical Chris Kelly. Third ring. I was rehearsing what I would say. An explosion echoed from down the block. An M-80 in a garbage can. The key sailed from a window, inside a tube sock, and landed near the garbage piling up because of the strike.