The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  “After I got out,” he said, “I was incredibly happy. Freedom after confinement is different from plain freedom, which can sometimes be its own sort of prison. The problem was ‘Green Onions.’ Weeks turned to months and it hung around. That surging rhythm was always in my head and I mean always.”

  He hummed it. “It woke me up in the middle of the night, like someone had turned up the volume and there I was, lying in the dark listening to the tweedling ‘Green Onions’ organ riff, waiting for the guitar parts to cut in, stuck inside its driving rhythm, this groovy song boring out the canals of my brain. It was so unfair, because I had paid my debt to society.”

  “Green Onions” came on again, for I think the third time, and it felt to me that the whole room was conspiring in some kind of hoax. The friend hummed enthusiastically.

  “If you had to hear it for ten whole years,” I said, laughing, figuring if I laughed openly, he would stop putting me on, “how can you stand to listen to it now?”

  “Because you have to know your enemies,” he said. “How can you fight if you don’t know what you’re up against? Who are your enemies?”

  I said I didn’t know.

  “See? Exactly.”

  * * *

  Later we danced. My arms were around his neck, his Marsden Hartley T-shirt clinging to his broad shoulders in the heat and sweat of the bar. I had not kissed him but knew I would, and he knew that I knew, and there was a kind of mutual joy in this slide into inevitability, never mind that I didn’t know his name or if anything he said was true.

  “You’re pretty,” he said, brushing my hair away from my face.

  How did you find people in New York City? I hadn’t known this would be how.

  “They could put your face on cake boxes,” he said.

  I smiled.

  “Until you show that gap between your teeth. Jesus. It sort of ruins your cake-box appeal. But actually, it enhances a different sort of appeal.”

  Some women wouldn’t want a man to speak to them that way. They’d say, “What kind of appeal do you mean?” Or, “Go fuck yourself.” But I’m not those women, and when he said it, my heart surged a little.

  The hotel, it turned out, was the Chelsea. I don’t know whose room it was, maybe it was Nadine’s, a room that Thurman got for her. There was the sense that Thurman helped her out when he felt like it and that perhaps she was out on the street when he didn’t. We were drinking from a bottle of Cutty Sark and Nadine was not, it turned out, Thurman’s wife. From a phone pulled into the hallway he spoke with his actual wife, Blossom, or maybe he just called her that, not at all tenderly, a nasal, “Blossom, I will call you in the morning.” He enunciated each word like the sentence was a lesson the wife was meant to memorize and repeat. “In the morning. I will call you tomorrow, after I’ve had my Sanka.” Which sent Nadine into hysterics. “Sanka! After he’s had his Sanka!”

  After he got off the phone, Thurman seemed energized by a new wildness, as if the compromise of the phone call had to be undone with behavior that Blossom, wherever she was, might not approve of. He put on a Bo Diddley record with the volume turned all the way up, and when it began to skip he pulled it from the turntable and threw it out the window. He put on another record, a song that went “There is something on your mind,” over and over, with this clumsy but sexy saxophone hook. At the friend’s suggestion, I danced with Thurman. He smelled like aftershave and cigarettes and hair tonic. There was something synthetic and unnatural about him, the way his hair formed a perfect wave and the crispness of his fitted suit, clothing that kept him who he was, a person of some kind of privilege, through whatever degraded environment or level of drunkenness.

  There is something on your mind

  By the way you look at me

  The friend was dancing with Nadine. Her arms were slung around his neck, her strawberry hair over his shoulder. She pressed her hips against him, and he pressed back.

  There is something on your mind, honey

  By the way you look at me

  Watching their bodies make contact, I wished we could trade partners.

  “Well, look at that,” Thurman said. “Take your eye off her for just a minute—”

  I felt him fumble for something in his suit jacket. Nadine and their friend turned as a unit, slowly one way and then the other.

  Before I understood what it was Thurman had retrieved from his coat pocket, something body-warm, heavy, he was aiming it at them, at the friend and Nadine, who danced to the slow rhythm of the song, pressed together and unaware.

  I heard a click. He was pointing it at them. A deafening bang ripped through me.

  The friend laughed and asked for the gun and Thurman tossed it in his direction. The friend opened it and took out the bullets and inspected them.

  “Blanks,” he said, and gave it back to Thurman, who grabbed Nadine by the neck in mock violence and stroked the front of her dress up and down with the gun barrel. It seemed a stupid and ridiculous gesture but she took it seriously and even moaned a little like it turned her on.

  I remembered my cousins Scott and Andy saying blanks could kill a person. Thurman put the gun in a cabinet and brought out a new bottle of Cutty Sark. He poured us fresh drinks and then played “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” on the little electric piano that was in the room. The friend took me up to the roof of the building and narrated the New York skyline. “It’s up here on roofs where all the good stuff is taking place,” he said. “Women walking up the sides of buildings, scaling vertical facades with block and tackle,” he said. “They dress like cat burglars, feminist cat burglars. Who knows? You might become one, even though you’re sweet and young. Because you’re sweet and young.”

  “What are you, some kind of reactionary?” I said.

  “No,” he said. “I’m giving you tips. But actually, the roofs are somewhat last year. Gordon Matta-Clark just cut an entire house in half. It’s going to be tough to beat that. What now, Reno? What now?”

  Back downstairs, Thurman barged into the bathroom while Nadine was peeing, for some reason not in the toilet but in the bathtub. He looked at her, sitting on the edge of the tub with her minidress hoisted up.

  “You know what I love more than anything?” he said.

  “What?” she asked with quiet reverence, as if the whole evening were a ritual enacted in order to arrive at this moment, when he would finally tell her what he really loved.

  “I love crazy little girls.” He grabbed her and hoisted her over his shoulder, her underpants still around her ankles. Carried her into the bedroom and shut the door.

  “You know what they do?” the friend said. “They shoot each other with that gun. In the crotch. Bang. Pow. It makes your eardrums feel ripped in half the next day.”

  “Isn’t that dangerous?” I asked.

  “Of course. That’s why they do it.”

  The gun went off. Nadine shrieked with laughter. The telephone in the room began ringing.

  The friend and I sat quietly, either waiting for the next gunshot or for the phone to stop ringing, or for something else.

  “Hey,” he said. “Hey, Reno. Come here.”

  But I was already right next to him.

  We kissed, his pretty mouth soft and warm against mine, as the phone kept ringing.

  * * *

  When we’d finally lain down on my bed, the early sun over the East River filling my apartment with gold light, I told him I didn’t want to know his name. I didn’t think much about it. I just said it. “I don’t even want to know your name.”

  He was wearing the brown Borsalino I’d found at the bar near my house. He took it off and put it on the floor next to my mattress, peeled off his homemade Marsden Hartley T-shirt, and pinned me down gently. My heart was pounding away.

  “I don’t want to know yours, either,” he said, scanning my face intently.

  What was he looking for? What did he see?

  What transpired between us felt real. It was real: it took place. The th
ings I’d heard and witnessed that evening, their absurdity, were somehow acknowledged in his dimples, his smirk, his gaze. The way he comically balled up the Marsden Hartley T-shirt and lobbed it across the room like a man fed up with shirts once and for all. Surveyed the minimal room, nodding, as if it were no surprise, but information nonetheless that he was taking in, cataloguing. And then surveying me, my body, nodding again, all things confirmed, understood, approved of.

  I had followed the signs with care and diligence: from Nina Simone’s voice, to the motorcycle, to the Marsden Hartley shirt. All the way through the night, to the gun and now this: a man in my room who seemed to hold keys to things I’d imagined Chris Kelly would unlock had I found him. I never did.

  * * *

  When I woke up in the late morning, he was gone. The day was already midstride, full heat, full sun. My head pounded weakly. I was tired, hungover, disoriented. The brown felt Borsalino was gone, and I remembered that I had wanted him to have it, had told him to have it.

  I sat on the fire escape. It was Sunday. Down below, the limousine drivers were in front of the little Mafia clubhouse, waiting next to a long line of black cars. They looked sweaty and miserable and I envied them. To wait by a car and know with certainty that your passenger would appear. To have such purpose on that day.

  I had said something embarrassing about the Borsalino being already his, that it had been waiting for him in my apartment. I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us. But all of that—me as Reno, he as nameless, his derelict friends against whom we bonded, and yet without whom I never would have met him—all of it was gone.

  I had said I didn’t want to know his name and it wasn’t a lie. I had wanted to pass over names and go right to the deeper thing.

  * * *

  Rain fell. Every day, heavy rain, and I sat in my apartment and waited for sirens. Just after the rain began, there were always sirens. Rain and then sirens. In a rush to get to where life was happening, life and its emergencies.

  Do you understand that I’m alone? I thought at the unnamed friend as I stood in the phone booth on Mulberry Street, the sky gray and heavy, the street dirty and quiet and bleak, as a woman’s voice declared once more that I’d reached a number that had been disconnected.

  It was just one night of drinking and chance. I’d known it the moment I met him, which was surely why I was enchanted in the first place. Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.

  5. VALERA IS DEAD

  was what he’d written in his notebook late that night, his hand trembling, the pen trembling. He had lain down in his clothes and trembled.

  Valera is dead.

  Here lies a different one.

  * * *

  As he savored the too quickly degrading images, his memories of the Great Ride the night before, its moments slipping away as if it had been a rare and precious dream, receding in the way the best dreams, the erotic ones, must, he looked at his note to himself, which he’d written exhilarated and shaking, the wobbly hand declaring his death.

  From now on, he thought, leaves tremble. Not men. Only leaves.

  The death was over. The birth had begun.

  * * *

  The little gang he’d met at the Caffè Aragno had a leader, Lonzi. If not officially the leader, Lonzi was the most belligerent and original among them. Like Valera, Lonzi was from a rich Milanese family, his own father in timber and real estate, with a big, beautiful house in the Brera, near Valera’s family villa. Like Valera, Lonzi had fled that and enrolled in the university in Rome. Both were young men who had been told to work hard and claim what would be theirs, to remind the world of their names and behind the names their power and prestige. Lonzi was a dropout, using the name to disgrace it and what it stood for. Though Valera understood this, the call of it, using one’s training in self-importance to turn power on its head, he had no interest in giving up on becoming an engineer. Instead, he added Lonzi to his studies, the world of things that could instruct. Lonzi said inherited wealth and stature meant sloth, comfort, and nostalgia. Lonzi detested sloth and nostalgia and said he had no interest in aristocratic splendor, in rotting under the sun as he was meant to, wallowing like a hog in the thick, warm mud in which the Italian upper classes were trapped, in which all of Italy was trapped, lives structured around tradition, custom, sameness.

  Valera pictured Egypt when Lonzi talked like this. His hours upon hours on the balcony, gazing out at the steady blue lid of the Mediterranean, pushing his face against the leaves of a potted date palm, trying to feel some scratch, some sharpness.

  Lonzi and the little gang hated tourists, Sundays, torpor. They wanted speed and change. For his own quickness, Valera was becoming known among the motorcycle riders. He had a talent and feel for the two-wheeled machine, for how to corner it, braking as he angled into a turn, jutting his foot out to the side to steady and counterbalance the cycle, and then blasting open his throttle to straighten the bike, accelerating out of a curve as the others were still on their brakes, worried about crashing. He pulled ahead of the other riders without fail. He didn’t yet have his own cycle—he’d asked for the money but the wire had not yet come through from Milan—so he was always having to wait on the curb outside the Caffè Aragno, hoping to grub a ride on someone else’s. Some of the gang were proud to have their cycle ridden by Valera, who would always pull to the front, and others were annoyed by it and tried to avoid him when they saw him on the curb.

  When the money arrived, he purchased his first motorcycle, a Pope V-twin, American made, and by far the fastest in the group. Its engine was 999 cubic centimeters, its tube frame painted a stunning, lurid gold. It was powerful and scary, vibrating his hands and arms numb, its suspension and handling not suited to its speed. It was an unruly thing and he loved it. He was officially part of the little gang, and when they whispered, “Third room,” and headed to the secret back area of the Aragno, they said it also to Valera, and this tiny gesture, a whisper, strengthened his resolve to be like Lonzi, to fill himself with the spirit, the pneuma, as he thought of it, of the group.

  “Don’t say words like pneuma around here,” Lonzi said to him, embarrassing Valera when he expressed this idea in front of the others. “That’s crap. Ancient Greece. We’re not gazing into the sewer grates of history, Valera.”

  They were smashing and crushing every outmoded and traditional idea, Lonzi said, every past thing. Everything old and of good taste, every kind of decadentism and aestheticism. They aimed to destroy czars, popes, kings, professors, “gouty homebodies,” as Lonzi put it, all official culture and its pimps, hawkers, and whores.

  Lonzi said the only thing worth loving was what was to come, and since what was to come was unforeseeable—only a cretin or a liar would try to predict the future—the future had to be lived now, in the now, as intensity.

  You can’t intuit the future, Lonzi said, even the next moment. He talked about a sect in the Middle Ages who believed that God reinvented the world every moment. Every single moment God reinvented the whole thing, every aspect and cranny, all over again, this sect had believed. All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said. And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulders like a stinking vulture, he said, we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom. This is how we’ll take the future and occupy it like an empty warehouse, Lonzi said. It’s an act of love, pure love. It isn’t prophecy. It’s hope.

  The little gang hosted evenings at the Aragno, where Lonzi and others, Copertini, Cabrini, Caccia, Bompiello, Papi, read poems about speed and metal, recipes for soufflés of wire and buckshot, a diet that was part of the general call to metalize themselves, their bodies turned metal, into machines, their spirits no longer lethargic and fleshily weak, but fast and strong. Lonzi never seemed to be kidding. Valera took him as a kidder anyw
ay. Lonzi was a fabulist. He made clothes out of screws and mesh, books out of sheets of stamped tin. Many among the little gang drew—dream machines and swift-moving men, or they arranged typed words to look like explosions on paper. Valera drew, too, but with his engineer’s training it was hard for him to turn away from the laws of the universe. He drew what he felt was actually possible. Real machines.

  The little gang played amplified noises on these evenings at the café, sounds that had been recorded at Lonzi’s apartment by hitting sledgehammers on anvils, or snipping giant hedge shears attached to pickup microphones, SNIP SNIP, open and closed, which they announced to the audience were the sounds of the pope’s feet being severed at the ankle. The king’s fingers sawed off at the knuckle. The optic nerve of God’s one big eye cut. Lonzi’s shears cutting off the pope’s feet brought Valera to an image of young Marie’s foot, tan, in her little cloth espadrille, dangling over the rear wheel of the motorcycle that Alexandrian afternoon. A delicate feminine foot that had been carried away on a smoke-puffing beast. As Valera became a part of Lonzi’s gang, the image of Marie’s young foot, summoned by Lonzi’s performance of mock amputations, stayed with him. The foot belonged to Valera, an appropriation that had something to do with being virile, metalized, and part of a group of men also virile and metalized. He had not thought of Marie in years, but in the heat and craziness of those nights at the Aragno, she appeared, a vivid image, its colors unfaded, Marie on the rear of a motorcycle, a figure in loose, white flapping cotton, her dangling foot tanned by the African sun, she and the unknown man flying along the seawall like those wooden figures that slide past a painted panorama in a carnival shooting gallery, the sky above them a broad silk banner of blue.

  Standing on a chair at the front of the café, Lonzi said that in the future women would be reduced to their most essential part, a thing a man could carry in his pocket. Valera thought of Marie, how he’d reduced her to her own foot, to a thing he could carry in his mind, like a rabbit’s foot. Not so much a gift as a sacrifice. She’d gone from love lost to something he’d loved but had to cut down. The foot was his. Yes, Lonzi, you understand, thought Valera. Woman reduced to parts. But after various of Lonzi’s digressions, mostly about the Great War—Lonzi felt that joining the war would be the perfect test and triumph of their metalized gang, who would be their ultimate selves in war, vanquish the putrid Austro-Hungarian Empire and wake all of Europe from its slumber—after all that, Lonzi returned to talk of this essential female part, and it turned out he was speaking specifically of a woman’s vulva. A good example of how it was Lonzi had come to be leader. He was willing to think to extremes and name them.