The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  After a pause, Stanley’s recorded voice began to sing to us from the machine:

  Oh, dreams coming true in Quin-ta-na Roo

  Where we will cut off what’s making you blue.

  We’ll take it away, and you will feel whole.

  Oh, dreams coming true

  in Quin-ta-na Roo.

  Stanley got up and fast-forwarded the reel. His voice became a high-pitched ribbon until he lifted his finger and it quavered back down to the speed of regular talking.

  “The great thing is, it’s a buyer’s market right now,” his voice said from the machine. “Then again, if you want to sell, it’s a great time to do so, because it’s a seller’s market right now, too.

  “Home. We say ‘home,’ not ‘house.’ You never hear a good agent say ‘house.’ A house is where people have died on the mattresses. Where pipes freeze and burst. Where termites fall from the sink spigot. Where somebody starts a flu fire by burning a telephone book in the furnace. Where banks repossess. Where mental illness takes hold. A home is something else. Do not underestimate the power in the word home. Say it. ‘Home.’ It’s like the difference between ‘rebel’ and ‘thug.’ A rebel is a gleaming individual in tight Levi’s, a sneering and pretty face. The kind Sal Mineo wet-dreams. A thug is hairy and dark, an object that would sink to the bottom when dropped in a lake. A home is maintained. Cared for. Loved. The word home is savory like gravy, and like gravy, kept warm. A good realtor says ‘home.’ Never ‘house.’ Always ‘cellar’ and never ‘basement.’ Basements are where cats crap on old Santa costumes. Where men drink themselves to death. Where children learn firsthand about sexual molestation. But cellar. A cellar is where you keep root vegetables and wine. Cellar means a proximity to the earth that’s not about blackness and rot but the four ritual seasons. We say ‘autumn,’ not ‘fall.’ We say ‘The leaves in this area are simply magnificent in autumn.’ We say ‘simply magnificent,’ and by the way, ‘lawn,’ not ‘yard.’ It’s ‘underarm’ to ‘armpit.’ Would you say ‘armpit’ to a potential buyer? Say ‘yard’ and your buyer pictures rusted push mowers, plantar warts. Someone shearing off his thumb and a couple of fingers with a table saw. A tool shed where water-damaged pornography and used motor oil funneled into fabric softener bottles cohabitate with hints of trauma that are as thick and dark as the oil. I’m not talking about Playboy or Oui. Harder stuff. Amateur. Pictorials featuring married people with their flab and bruises and smallpox vaccines, doing things to each other in rec rooms and sheds like the one housing these selfsame magazines. Middle-aged couples who get trashed on tequila and document with a supply of flash cubes. You have to be careful about words. You’re thinking about your commission, your hands are starting to shake at the idea of the money, and meanwhile your client hears ‘yard’ and sees himself nudging icky amateur porno with his foot, potato bugs scattering from their damp hideout underneath. Again, it’s ‘lawn.’ ‘Lawn’ means crew-cut grass. It means censorship, nice and wholesome. It means America. And you know what I mean by America, and by the way, ‘cul-de-sac.’ Not ‘dead end.’ If I have to explain that, you’ll never pass the exam to get your license. We say ‘dinner.’ Never ‘supper.’ ‘Dinner’ is the middle class, semi-religious . . . Christian . . . Christianesque. ‘Dinner’ is a touch-tone doorbell with a little orange light glowing from within the rectangular button. The bell is there for expected guests. People carrying warm dishes covered with gingham checked cloth—the cloth, needless to say, has been laundered with stain remover. The type of people with stained old dishrags are not going to press this doorbell. No one with a beard. No one with a grievance. Only people who share the values of the hosts. ‘Thank you for having us to dinner in your lovely home.’ Say ‘dinner.’ Say ‘home.’ Say ‘lawn.’ Don’t be afraid. Like prayer, through repetition and habit, these words will begin to—”

  Stanley shut off the reel-to-reel machine.

  “Indeed, indeed,” Didier said, nodding at Stanley and stubbing a cigarette butt into his food. He retrieved another and lit it, blowing smoke across the table but waving it from in front of his own face as if it were something unwelcome that someone else had just put there. He continued to nod at Stanley, smoke going up in a tight spiral from the end of his held cigarette. Everyone else was quiet, waiting for Didier to make his comment.

  Stanley peered at him as if from a great distance. “Why do you look so amused, Didier?”

  “Because I enjoyed your little ramble there, Stanley. And I know what you’re getting at.”

  “What am I getting at, Didier? Because I’m actually not sure myself.”

  “The power and emptiness of words. And yet they rule us nonetheless. Are the sole horizon. Language as the house of being. The home of being, excuse me.”

  “That wasn’t my point. I, uh, don’t know what my point was, except that men over fifty can’t stop talking. It’s an illness, I mean a real epidemic, and I’m trying to cure myself with this recording project, sicken myself of talking by talking it all out, like the Schick Center method for quitting smoking. But since you bring it up, Didier, you know what I think of language? That it’s a fake horizon and there’s something else, a real truthful thing, but language is keeping us from it. And I think we should torture language to stop fucking around and tell it to us. We should torture language to tell the truth.”

  Gloria let out a long, dramatic not-this-again sigh.

  I felt Sandro looking at me. I always could. I turned and met his gaze. His mouth slightly curled in amusement. “We should torture it to tell us the truth,” he whispered to me much later that night, or rather, it was close to dawn by the time he whispered that in his feather-light accent, as I lay next to him, feeling his warm breath on my bare shoulder, his arms wrapped around me. Let’s torture it.

  People began to chat in subsets. Gloria served dessert. Didier rested his cigarette on the edge of his plate of almond cookies, dispersing ashes and cookie crumbs and insisting that Freud was correct that language was the only route to the unconscious. Stanley countered that language was given to man to hide his thoughts, and that all you could do with words was turn them on their sides like furniture during a bombardment.

  Sandro got up to greet his cousin Talia, a woman I’d never met whose late arrival he had been expecting. Gloria led her in, and she and Sandro embraced.

  That first moment, as I watched them, her dark eyes shining at Sandro, I knew that Talia Valera was going to take something away from me. Burdmoore was watching them, too, and I had the disturbing sense that he was sharing my thought, knew by his long experience with trouble that it had arrived, but specifically for me.

  Sandro brought his cousin Talia around the table. Her hair was short and carelessly chopped, as if she’d cut it herself, but she was pretty enough that it didn’t diminish her. She had a husky voice and dirt under her fingernails. She wore a black tank top and karate pants. The effect was meant to seem boyish and nonchalant but something else came through, a refinement maybe, a kind of calculation.

  I should have gotten up to speak with her, but I stayed where I was and focused on Burdmoore, who was talking again about the Lower East Side. He said that while I might think it was the same, rubble piles and squats and graffiti, dope dealers and artists, that it could not be more different. They’d had it all mobilized. Even the bums, he said, were their own cadre—WFF, Winos for Freedom—with a cache of weaponry scared up by Fah-Q, a comrade in the group who Burdmoore kept mentioning. He and Fah-Q were the lost children, as Burdmoore put it. They were awake, he said, while most of America slept. And those awake are the nightmare of the sleepers. “We were their nightmare,” he said.

  “Now everybody says, but be reasonable. We never pandered to that reasonableness bullshit. ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable’—that’s John F. fuckin’ Kennedy. A clown who didn’t do shit but he was right about that one thing. Plus,” Burdmoore said, “he had a pretty cool wife. I still think urban in
surrection is the only way, but not in New York City. Not at the moment.”

  There were still some major issues to be worked out, he said, and I nodded, wanting to hear what they were, but unsure what it was we were talking about, worked out for what purpose.

  “A lot of people think the city is decadent emptiness,” Burdmoore said, “empty of potential. It’s dead now, I mean currently. But the day will come when the people of the Bronx wake up, the sisters and brothers out in Brooklyn, and I can hardly wait.”

  Sandro’s cousin had seated herself next to Ronnie and was asking him what he did.

  “Have you seen those signs around town, green and yellow with red lettering, and they say Blimpie?” he asked her.

  “No,” she said with a laugh. “I guess I missed those.”

  “Well, then it won’t mean as much to you. But that’s my family—we make the tastiest sandwiches in New York City. You might be the Valeras, but we—see, we’re the Blimpies. My name is actually Ronnie Blimpie but I changed it. Because we own a sandwich empire and I didn’t want to forever be the sandwich guy. I can tell you because you don’t have us yet wherever you live.”

  “London,” she said.

  “Yeah, we’re not in London yet. At the moment we’re not expanding. We’re focusing on subsidiaries. Like how Valera isn’t just tires, we have another business, which is actually enormous. You know those plaid plastic laundry bags that are ubiquitous in Third World countries, crappy plaid bags that you see in every town from one end of the African continent to the other, and in Asia, and all over Latin America, too? Rectangular bags with zippers? Which Gypsies drag around and live out of, in First World countries? And people cart from project housing to Laundromats? Well, we make those, all of them. There are huge profits in semi-disposal goods like that.”

  “You’re joking,” she said.

  “It’s true. I mean it’s true that I’m joking. We don’t own the Blimpie chain. And we don’t manufacture those bags, but whoever does is making a killing. We’re Fontaine. We don’t own anything. But I was not raised Fontaine. I was really at sea.”

  “Everyone’s like that when they’re young,” she said.

  “No, I mean I was actually at sea. On a boat.”

  Didier de Louridier and Sandro had stood, as Didier inspected Stanley’s collections of bric-a-brac on the small tables that lined the room. Didier paused before the cap-and-ball pistol.

  “Pick it up,” Sandro said. “Nothing to be afraid of. You’d have to shoot someone in the eye to actually hurt them.”

  Didier picked it up and looked down into the barrel.

  “What about the others in your gang?” I asked Burdmoore. “Are they still around?”

  “There are remnants,” he said. “Remnants and debris. Fah-Q lives with his retired father in Miami, got so paranoid he can’t do anything but throw pots. He’s really into that, making pottery. One guy became an anti-fluoride crusader. Another is a Guardian Angel. Those guys are complete psychos. They’ve adopted state power as volunteers.” As Burdmoore spoke, he was watching Sandro explain to Didier how the cap-and-ball pistol worked.

  “Your boyfriend likes guns,” Burdmoore said.

  “It belonged to his father,” I said. “His family used to manufacture that gun. There’s a logic.”

  “Right. A logic.”

  “He doesn’t use it. It’s not stuffed in the cuff of his boot.”

  “And yet I’d wager he is the type of man who would enjoy the feeling of that,” Burdmoore said.

  He leaned his chair back on its hind legs and looked at me. The chair was creaking and I worried he might hurt it and that it would gouge marks into the soft wood of Gloria and Stanley’s pine-plank floor.

  “And I think you might be . . . oh, never mind,” he said.

  “I might be what?”

  “I think you might be the sort of sister who likes that type,” he said.

  His chair kept creaking. I was convinced it would break from the strain of bearing his weight on its hind legs.

  “You like a guy who puts a gun in his boot,” he whispered, “don’t you?”

  * * *

  In fact I had once watched Sandro put a gun in his boot. I did not admit this to Burdmoore. We had been in Washington, DC, for Sandro’s show at the Corcoran Gallery. DC had some kind of weapons ban that Sandro was secretly protesting by showing up to his own opening armed.

  His interest in guns had never bothered me. I was around them all the time growing up. My uncles, my cousins, all shot guns. Reno’s main thoroughfares were lined with pawnshops, and I understood the pawnshop to be a kind of forge that liquidated objects into money. The things that could be most quickly converted were guns. When someone in our family died, the big inheritance question was who would get the guns. Relatives would stake a claim based on sentiment. “Your dad’s nickel-plated Browning meant a lot to me,” Andy had said after my father died. “First gun I ever shot.” He knew my father better than I did, because Andy was older than I, and my father had left Reno when I was three, had gone to Ecuador to build log cabins on someone’s get-rich-quick scheme, and when that didn’t work out, had gone on to other get-rich-quick schemes. I didn’t know him and I didn’t want his guns. I gave them to Andy. A few days later they were in a pawnshop window downtown.

  Click-click. We watched as Sandro showed Didier how to pull the cylinder and unscrew the nipples on the cap-and-ball pistol, how to load the chamber.

  “Black gunpowder goes first,” Sandro said. “Then you press the lead ball down into the chamber.”

  Didier asked what the attraction was to such an antiquated thing.

  There was a loophole, Sandro said. Anyone could own one. Carry it concealed.

  “It’s not considered a gun,” he said. “But it is one. And it fires very, very straight.”

  Burdmoore didn’t say anything more, but I felt a need to explain away Sandro’s interest in guns.

  “His work is all objects that are what they are, and something else, at the same time,” I said. “A gun can be an idea, a threat, or a thing. As Sandro would put it, imaginary, symbolic, or real, all at once.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Burdmoore. “I mean, it sounds good. Except you can’t brandish a gun and shoot it.”

  Didier was directly behind us now, practicing quickdraws with Sandro’s cap-and-ball pistol like a Western gunslinger, gazing into the mirror that hung on the wall behind Burdmoore.

  “A gun is either symbolically enlisted or it’s enlisted enlisted,” Burdmoore said, watching Didier, who froze with the gun drawn, admiring his own reflection. “Threats are for people who aren’t willing to risk anything.”

  Didier laughed. “Oh, right,” he said, turning to Burdmoore. “But wasn’t it someone from your little gang who shot at me with blanks? Is that not a kind of hysterical threat?”

  “That was . . . it just happened. You were not on our list of targets.”

  “But what was the purpose, if not for intimidation? Obviously you didn’t intend to kill me. Or you would have used real bullets.”

  “Look, man. You fainted, is what I heard. Which, for an esoteric guy like you, is a kind of death.”

  “A kind of death—what crap,” Didier said. “You guys were a bunch of image-obsessed poseurs. Sorry. If I recall correctly, Antonioni wanted to put you in his youth cult film, the one with the Pink Floyd soundtrack. Or am I mistaking you for some other group of cinema-ready toughs?”