The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  None of it could be re-created. We’d eaten the lotus paste buns on a cold, damp November day, on which the sun shone and rain fell simultaneously, the strange, rosy-gold light of this contradiction intensifying the colors around us as we walked, the fruits and vegetables in vendors’ bins, green bok choys, smooth, sunset-colored mangoes packed into cases, the huge, spiny durian fruits in their nets, crushed ice tinged with fish blood.

  As we walked, he kept staring at me. I looked over at him and he continued to stare.

  When the rain won out and darkened the sky, he led me into a Chinese movie theater.

  The movie careened and clanged along, an old-fashioned opera full of cymbal crashes and agonies, the occasional gong, stringed instruments wearily entangling and detangling. Sandro watched attentively, as if he were riveted by the drama being narrated in thunderous bursts of a language we couldn’t understand. It was subtitled, but the subtitles were Asian characters of some kind. The theater was almost empty. We still had not touched. I kept my arm in my lap instead of putting it on the armrest, to avoid his. But then Sandro reached over and rested his hand on my knee, his gaze fixed on the screen. Just like that, he placed his hand on my knee. The feel of it sent electricity through me. I had been with almost no one—just the nameless friend to whom I gave my Borsalino. This was different. This was a man who wasn’t playing some kind of parlor game, a cat-and-mouse pretend seduction, which, I now understood, was what Thurman and Nadine’s friend had played, and I had been too naively hopeful to understand. It may go without saying that I was the type of person who would call a disconnected number more than once.

  While the movie played, Sandro leaned over and whispered to me.

  “Do you want to be friends?”

  I whispered back that I had a requirement for friendship.

  “I’m glad,” he said. “It’s good to have standards. What is it?”

  “Sincerity,” I said.

  He sighed and squeezed my hand, then put his own back on my knee.

  As we continued to watch the movie he began to unbutton my skirt. One button at a time, slowly, methodically, with no hesitation. He knew how to unbutton buttons. There was no fumbling, which was part of why I couldn’t find the courage to say, “Hey, what are you doing?” The other reason I didn’t find the courage to stop him was that I didn’t want him to. No one was in our row, or behind us. My skirt unbuttoned, he took off his coat and placed it over my lap, chivalrous and careful. His hand slipped under the coat that covered me, and found its way through the unbuttoned skirt. He pressed his warm palm firmly against my underwear. I looked at him. He looked straight ahead, his face suggesting only that he was engaged in watching this Chinese movie, in Cantonese or Mandarin, who could say? I tried to watch, too, but was distracted by the warmth of his hand, and the protective sensation of being covered by his coat, denim lined with wool, its unfamiliar scent and feel, which promised a whole world, one I wanted a place in. He concentrated on the film, or seemed to, never looking at me once, as his fingers crept into my underwear. In this manner, both of us watching the film, the act of what he did with his hand was not just erotic but also slightly melancholy, even a little grave. I leaned my neck against the back of the seat and tried to relax, to not be nervous or self-conscious. I focused on the round gold of the gongs, the rice-white faces and wax-red mouths, bleached complexions with artificially rosy cheeks that looked pinched or slapped or scalded. I watched these images in gold and red and white as Sandro’s fingers fluttered and moved.

  When my body began to tense, his hand understood and slowed itself down, its rhythm matching mine.

  After, he rebuttoned my skirt and moved the coat up over my chest and shoulders, as if to redignify its purpose. We both pretended to be absorbed in the inscrutable opera that flickered on the screen.

  * * *

  The gold and red crashes, a gratitude to this person, his wolf eyes and confidence and skill, the feel and smell of his chivalrous coat. On that day, nothing could have seemed more romantic to me, no other scenario more like real courtship, than a Chinese movie and a hand job under a coat.

  It would have to be late autumn and the coat would have to be Sandro’s. The hand his. The voice his. The movie followed by a walk west, the rain having ceased, the walk led by him. I wanted to be led. To see the city as he wanted me to see it. He had a way of leading, I later understood, by not stating we were going anywhere in particular. By seeming to wander when he wasn’t, we weren’t.

  We were on Gansevoort Street, where Giddle and I had kicked bagels. At the end was an old pier building of corrugated metal. Sandro pulled on the doors, which were locked. We walked around to the side of the pier, and Sandro explained that the artist Gordon Matta-Clark had cut holes into the building. Into the floor, the walls, the ceiling, one large half moon on the end facing the river, converting the place into a kind of cathedral of water and light. Sandro said Matta-Clark was clever, that he’d done everything so perfectly, and then someone tried to get a film permit, which tipped off the cops.

  “What does it mean to do this kind of thing perfectly?” I asked.

  “There was no bravado,” Sandro said. “He didn’t storm in, have a big party, get immediately raided.” Matta-Clark had cased the building quietly and with discipline for weeks before sneaking in and changing the locks, then slowly, stealthily, he’d moved in equipment, power saws, acetylene torches, pulleys, and ropes to make his cuts. He had noted when, if ever, there was security around the pier. When, if ever, the building was in use. He had learned that its only use was for discreet sex acts between men.

  “If we could get in,” Sandro said, “we could see about illicit use.”

  It was cold, the light waning. I wanted to be someplace warm, and I resented this presumption that I would be willing. I saw how easy everything was for Sandro. I felt it, all at once. That he simply found a girl he liked and incorporated her. And because I was attracted to him, his charisma, his looks, and his knowledge, if I didn’t form an attachment it would be my loss.

  We walked down West Street and viewed the building from the side, water slapping up against the pilings.

  Sandro said the police tried to arrest Matta-Clark for the cuts he’d made, so Matta-Clark had fled the country, gone to Milan. There he found a recently closed Valera factory and sawed holes in the building, had an illegal show inside. Invited young kids to turn it into a squat. Sandro laughed as he told me about this.

  “You don’t care?” I asked. “He’s squatting something that belongs to you?”

  “Does it belong to me?” he asked. “More like I belong to it. I think it’s great,” he said, “that’s all it means to me. I think it’s great.”

  We walked along the water, buffeted by wind, an occasional glass beer bottle rolling past like an escapee. Sandro bent to pick up a piece of paper, wet from the rain, a torn page from a magazine, an image of a picnicking couple, an advertisement for something but it wasn’t clear what. He’d give it to his friend Ronnie, he said, and carried the page between two fingers as we walked, absentmindedly waving it dry. Sandro liked to collect images and messages from the sidewalk. Some he gave away, but the best things he kept for himself, like the piece of paper he’d found on Canal Street, an awkwardly worded letter written by someone whose first language was not English, about selling something for a fair price and wiring payment to a sister in Switzerland. The letter was signed Alberto Giacometti.

  We watched a huge container ship being towed by a tug. I noticed something in the waves, rising up and down with the sloshing wake of the container ship’s passage. The bobbing thing was a person in the water. A man.

  “People swim here?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure he’s swimming,” Sandro said.

  Sandro waved his arms over his head stiffly, to get the man’s attention. “He can’t swim,” he said.

  The man was barely keeping his head above the waterline. Only his face emerged, water rolling over it from the ship’s
wake.

  “He looks like he’s going to drown.”

  Sandro took off his coat. The chivalrous coat, removed for the second time that day. There was no choice but to try to save this person. “Go call 911,” he said.

  I ran until I found a pay phone that was not broken and dialed. The operator told me she couldn’t send anyone until I gave her the street address. The address is the Hudson River, I said, Gansevoort and West Streets. A man is drowning. She needed a street address. I repeated myself. She must have alerted someone because I heard sirens, louder and louder. When I got back to the pier, firemen were there. The sound of radios, of heavy coats and boots. The truck’s clattery, loose-valved idle.

  “There’s a guy in the water?” one of them asked me in a Staten Island twang, nasal and flat, looking at me from crotch to neck.

  Sandro had managed to secure the man to the edge. He’d found a length of wire and had used it to lasso the drowning man, but he couldn’t pull him out. The man was wearing so many layers of wet clothing that he weighed about four hundred pounds. Sandro was pulling on the wire around the man’s middle to try to keep him afloat when the firemen and I arrived. They swarmed around to take over. The man looked up at us. In his face I saw confusion and misery, and I understood that we had interrupted him. He’d been trying to kill himself. He looked up, helplessly alive, swaddled in his drenched clothes. He must have been wearing twelve overcoats. It could be that it was necessary to taste the experience of dying to know you wanted to live. Or that you didn’t want to live. The man’s face said he didn’t want to, but he’d had to come this far to learn it.

  The firemen had secured a proper rope and were lifting him out, little by little. He dripped like one of those cars they winch from the end of a pier in television police dramas. Drip drip drip.

  I picked up Sandro’s jacket.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  * * *

  The events of that first date with Sandro, the curious, distant intimacy in a Chinese movie, the almost-drowning, were two bars that crossed to form an X, and the X pinned us to each other. Sandro walked me home, kissed me on the side of the head, and said he was going to stand on Mulberry outside my building until it was time to see me again.

  “You can give signals from the window,” he said. “Just a hand, a bare arm.”

  I went upstairs, took a bath to warm myself, watched the light through the windows turn the bleached gray of winter dusk as the radiator, finally repaired by Mr. Pong, clanged and banged and hissed, its steam carrying a curious feeling of safety, of comfort, as well as the complete unknown thrill that love was, these things filling the room through the rattling valve on the radiator. (Later, Giddle’s response when I told her I was in love: “Oh God, I’m so sorry. Love is awful. It ruins every normal thing, everything but itself. It makes you crazy and for nothing, because it’s so disappointing. But good luck with that.”) I let the bath drain while I was still in the tub, a habit I was attached to, the way the receding water pulled at the body, dragged it down while returning its substance, gravity, density, making the body heavier and heavier as the waterline sank. Finally, there was no water, just bones like lead.

  Flushed from the hot bath and sleepy, I looked out the window. Two kids leaned against a car, an Italian boy and a Puerto Rican girl who lived in my building, one of the girls who practiced dance routines in the breezeway. She was on roller skates, and as she and the boy talked, she rocked silkily from side to side on her skates. Sandro was gone. I didn’t really expect him to stand there all night, and yet, at twenty-two years old, part of me was buoyant with silly fantasies, capable of disappointment that he had actually gone home.

  * * *

  To be young was to be more closely rooted to the thing that forms you, Sandro said to me on our second date. We were at an Italian restaurant in my neighborhood where he pretended to speak no Italian, pronouncing menu items with an accent that sounded like John Wayne, a voice Sandro always used to imitate an American way of speaking. We all sounded like John Wayne to him.

  He wanted to know about me. Not just the usual things, small-town Reno stuff, giving out ribbons at rodeos, growing up with Scott and Andy, Uncle Bobby, who left the three of us, eight, nine, and ten years old, in the back of his car, gave us Cokes and cherry cigarettes to occupy us while he banged an old lady’s box, as he put it. Sandro liked those stories, but he also drew from me, that night in the Italian restaurant, things I hadn’t spoken about to anyone before. What I thought about as a child, the nature of my solitude, the person I was before I went through puberty and became more readably “girl.” The person I was before I became more readably “person.” We seemed to share certain ideas about what happens in childhood, when you have to place yourself under the sign of your own name, your face, your voice, your outward reality. When you become a fixed position, a thing to others and to yourself. There were times, I told him, at the age of five, six, seven, when it was a shock to me that I was trapped in my own body. Suddenly I would feel locked into an identity, trapped inside myself, as if the container of my person were some kind of terrible mistake. My own voice and arms, my name, seemed wrong. As if I were a dispersed set of nodes that had been falsely organized into a form, and I was living in a nightmare, forced to see from out of this limited and unreal “me.” I wasn’t so sure I occupied one place, one person, and Sandro said this made sense, this instinct of a child, to question the artificial confines of personhood.

  I tried to relay to him an almost inexplicable trauma, standing in my mother’s yard, in our tiny house in Reno, being unconvinced I was myself. He understood. He wanted to understand. At about that same age, I put short little pieces of string in a bottle. Each New Year’s Day I took one string out of the bottle and let the wind carry it away. If I looked which way it floated off, I would bring myself bad luck. I told Sandro how I used to sit for hours and stare at the kitchen stove, concentrating on the burner knobs, sensing, at a certain point, that I was ready to turn them on with my mind. That I could do it. I was on the verge of doing it, of finally turning on the stove with my mind, waiting for the coils to glow orange, and then I would ask myself, Are you ready for this? Are you ready to have your entire world turned upside down? (Because what happens once you know you can turn on the stove with your mind?) I wasn’t ready. I always pulled back from the brink. I told Sandro about the shortcut from school to home, the man I’d seen. He was standing in the bushes, which had an empty space about waist height, so that his face was hidden behind leaves, but I could see him from the waist down. He was masturbating. We both laughed at the ridiculous geometry of the bush, but then he said, “I really want to hurt the bastard for doing that to you.”

  I told him how I ran all the way home, as if I were being pursued, in physical danger. Which of course I wasn’t.

  “No,” Sandro said. “You were in danger. You absolutely were. It’s okay to let go of innocence. But when you’re ready,” he said. “On your own terms.”

  Telling Sandro these things collapsed the layers between me as woman and me as child. Sandro saw both, loved both. He understood they were not the same. It was not the case that one thing morphed into another, child into woman. You remained the person you were before things happened to you. The person you were when you thought a small cut string could determine the course of a year. You also became the person to whom certain things happened. Who passed into the realm where you no longer questioned the notion of being trapped in one form. You took on that form, that identity, hoped for its recognition from others, hoped someone would love it and you.

  We were the last customers to leave the restaurant. Sandro walked me home under the holiday lights of Little Italy, little frosted bulbs glowing white in the cold air. I invited him up.

  I didn’t have to be recognizably one thing. Even his touch relayed this. It almost restored some lost innocence.

  Sandro’s strong, heavy arm stayed wrapped around me all night. Whenever I stirred, he pulled me closer.
Later I saw this gesture, the pawing habit of Sandro’s sleeping limbs, as a blindness, an unconscious registration: body. Body that’s near. But in those first months I thought he was reaching for me.

  * * *

  For our third date, Sandro said he wanted to have me over, show me his place.

  “What will I find there?” I asked, assuming he’d say dinner.

  “Justice,” he said, in that half-joking, half-grave way of his. “I’ve got justice.”

  It was a cold winter day. When I arrived, he had company. A friend just about to leave, who was sitting on a couch in Sandro’s loft, flipping through an art catalogue. He wore a peacoat and scarf, and his hair was darker, from winter light, or because it needed to be washed, but he looked otherwise just the same. Just the same.

  Rain began to fall, wet darts hitting the windows of the loft. The rain fell harder and harder until the sound rose to an incredible crescendo, like glass beads pouring down over the front of Sandro’s building. The sky beyond the windows was dense and gray but with the curious buttery quality of daytime darkness, as if there were a yellowish light lurking behind the rain clouds. Time had slowed to an operatic present, a pure present.

  “My very best friend,” Sandro said as he introduced us.

  This friend of his stood.

  In that strange light, the showering-glass-beads rain, I felt that I was seeing this person before me in two ways at once. Again—finally. And also for the very first time. His smile was simple and open. If there was the faintest edge of knowingness in it, it was purely of this type: my friend digs you. That was all.

  I don’t want to know your name, I’d said to him that night, when he was one of the people with the gun, Nadine and Thurman’s friend.