The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  I heard the garbage trucks outside. Ronnie was probably making his appearance at the young girl’s, the one he was keeping on a layaway plan. Not as he had doubtlessly promised, hours earlier, but now, in the final moments of night, to take what she offered.

  The woman in the film drinks in a bar. She’s in hair curlers, a chiffon headscarf tied over them like a tarp over a log pile. The hollows of the curlers, spaces for hope: something good might happen.

  There was no sign of Sandro. I watched the film to keep myself awake while I waited.

  A man bought the woman a beer. She took dainty sips in her hair curlers, in preparation for no specific occasion. Curler time seemed almost religious, a waiting that was more important than what the waiting was for. Curler time was about living the now with a belief that a future, an occasion for set hair, existed.

  But then she was putting on her ratty underwear and the rest of her clothes and chasing a traveling salesman out of a motel room, abandoning the curlers for good.

  Hey! Hey, wait up!

  I came to rehearse parts of this film, my memory of the scenes returning in more detail as I watched. I began to anticipate. Not the lines, though I remembered a few of them, but looks on the woman’s face.

  Gazing at department store mannequins as if they possessed something essential and human that she lacked. Mannequins were carefully positioned to look natural, looking off in this direction or that but never at us. This was part of the Sears Mannequin Standard. My mother had worked for a short time as an assistant window dresser at the Sears in downtown Reno. She was given a booklet with a list of instructions, the most important being the no-eye-contact rule. If the mannequins made eye contact with shoppers they would disrupt the dream, the shopper’s projection. A mannequin’s job was to sell us to ourselves in a more perfect version for $19.99.

  The woman peered at the mannequins for guidance. Examining their enameled makeup, a purse dangling from a stiff arm, a pole supporting each life-size figure from behind, disappearing into a hole cut into the rear seam of her slacks. They each have a pole up their ass, says the sudden wryness in the woman’s face. How about that.

  Her face when Mr. Dennis, the jumpy man, tosses her new lemon pants out the car window: childlike disappointment.

  When you’re with me, no slacks. No slacks!

  Tosses her lipstick.

  Makes you look cheap.

  When you’re with me, no curlers. Why don’t you get a hat?

  You don’t want anything, you won’t have anything, he tells her. You don’t have anything, you’re nothing. You might as well be dead.

  Everything goes wrong when they try to rob a bank. It was like poor Tim Fontaine, Ronnie’s younger brother. Tim Fontaine, who had robbed a bank and then waited at a crowded bus stop when the ink bomb in the money bag went off. Why didn’t he take a cab? I’d wondered. “Because that’s my brother,” Ronnie said. “If he was smart enough to take a cab he might have figured out some other way to finance his drug habit.” Ronnie said that before his brother robbed banks he sold heroin in Bushwick and that it was a stupidly hard job, sixteen-hour days, and his only pay was a morning and evening fix. “That’s the thing about junkies,” Ronnie said, “they work like dogs, it’s all day out on the streets and they think they’re cheating the system. I told my brother, you make twelve cents an hour.” “How much do you make, Ronnie?” Sandro had joked. And Ronnie said, “I don’t make a wage, I’m an artist. I’m not part of the system.” “Neither is your brother,” Sandro said. “So you have to tack on something to his twelve cents an hour, some added value.”

  I once met Tim Fontaine. I’d had ideas about what he’d be like, as a brother of Ronnie’s, and as a person who’d spent several years robbing banks and armored cars before he was caught. I pictured sideburns like Ronnie’s, swaggering and handsome like Ronnie, the never-washed and greasy Levi’s, the motorcycle boots. The sarcasm. Sunglasses propped on his head and the slightest, barest touch of a grace that was almost feminine, because Ronnie had a pretty mouth. In other words, I pictured Ronnie. Tim Fontaine was nothing like Ronnie. He mumbled and shuffled and stared at the floor. He wore the stiff, ill-fitting, and too-new-looking work clothes I later learned is the universal wardrobe of ex-cons. The severe, barbershop hair. A mustache that covers some kind of pitting or scarring. The awkward bulk of prison yard muscles. There was a sense with Tim Fontaine that it was all uphill from here. Twelve steep steps, then repeat. He barely looked at me when I met him, just stared at his hands, the pads of his fingers crusted and shiny. “The dumbfuck removed his fingerprints with acid when he turned eighteen,” Ronnie said. “As if that won’t instantly ID you as a criminal.”

  Nearing the end of the film, morning in a deserted quarry. The woman wakes up in a car, a soldier unzipping his pants and forcing himself on her. She escapes, runs screaming into the woods in her white sandals, slingbacks Mr. Dennis had borrowed from the trunk of a car in the Woolworth’s lot. By luck they had fit her perfectly. She tears through the bramble, scratched, frantic, half-dressed, half-raped, and falls, facedown, crying.

  Night at a roadside tavern. Someone fits an unlit cigarette behind her ear. She’s given a hot dog. Chews it, meek and grateful. Her beer glass is filled and refilled.

  Honky-tonk music plays, fiddles eking out cheer as people shout and smoke and drink, their voices pelting the woman.

  You don’t want anything, you won’t have anything. You don’t have anything, you’re nothing.

  The cigarette in her long-fingered hand. Her snow-faced beauty, the light of it dim.

  I am still . . . so . . . pretty. Nadine, leaning toward me to prove it.

  The camera frames the woman, her eyes toward the table.

  That’s it. End of film.

  As if on cue, I heard our freight elevator climbing toward the top floor on its chains.

  * * *

  The elevator rumbled and squeaked slowly back down to its resting position on the first floor. I turned off the television and got up.

  Sandro was sitting in the dark, on a chair in the middle of the large entrance room. I went for the light switch.

  “No,” he said, “leave it and come here.”

  He buried his head against me. I was flooded with sympathy for him. The only fair thing, I thought, was to try to share the psychic fallout for his mistake. And yet as I stroked his hair, his warm weight against me, I felt separate from what he’d done, defending eight dollars plus a phone number scribbled on a hardware store receipt—the contents of his wallet, I later saw. The number was the Trust E. Ordering takeout, probably. He’d shot a person in the hand to defend eight dollars and a phone number I knew by heart.

  He picked me up and carried me to the bed. There was a bed in that room that we didn’t normally sleep in. It and the single chair were the only furniture. Sandro liked to have a bed in every room, freestanding, never pushed against a wall. Even on the floors below, which were only for displaying his finished works and the works of his friends, Stanley Kastle, Saul Oppler, John Chamberlain, a few pieces of Ronnie’s, there was a bed in each open room, islands of domestic comfort in spaces otherwise so spare that an old steam radiator in the corner, its silver paint flaking, seemed homey and domestic. The only person who used these beds was Sandro. He liked a surface for lying down and thinking, for feeling the space of a room, for looking up at the high, repeating pattern of stamped tin, listening as the cobblestones made their hollow clomp-clomp when trucks passed on the street below. Its austerity gave Sandro’s loft the feel of a very clean machine shop. Everything in it was coated in a fine residue that had a greasy sustenance to it, like graphite shavings, dust that left a blackish smear if you tried to wipe it from a windowsill, or if you sat on a chair in light-colored pants. Sandro’s loft would never be clean like a regular home. Machine lubricants and the solvents and by-products of fabric treatment were stained into the floorboards in ghost-dark shadows. In the building’s former life it had been a dress factory. Whe
n Sandro first bought it, Gloria Kastle was working for him as an assistant, one aspect of their “long history,” which Gloria took pleasure in alluding to and Sandro rolled his eyes at. Dress pins had been packed into the spaces between every floorboard, and Gloria’s job had been to pull them out, crouching on her knees with a handheld magnet. It took her a week and her back hurt for months afterward, but she said she grew attached to the task, consolidating stray pins. “When I closed my eyes at night,” she said, “I saw pins being coaxed from cracks and crevices with a very strong magnet, the pins sticking to one another like a chain of paper dolls.” Sandro had done the brute work, unbolted and javelined the scores of industrial ironing boards into an open dumpster in front of the building, whose sea level of discarded machinery rose each day and was magically lowered each night as nocturnal scavengers climbed into the dumpster and carried things away.

  We lay on the bed in the entrance room. It was five in the morning and the streets were silent, nothing but the sound of one basketball bouncing in the courts across the street, occasionally bonking the backboard. It was my habit to picture a lone person playing with the single ball, dribbling, bringing it to the netless hoop, retrieving it. Someone unable to sleep who had gone out with his ball to pensively shoot baskets. There could have been two or three or even a whole team of people shuffling around in the dark, dribbling, passing, shooting, and yet whenever I heard a ball echoing on the little court I thought it was the sound of a single player.

  Sandro stared at me as if to confirm we were in the same register. I stared back, unsure what the register was. It seemed important to convey that I understood. Isn’t that what intimacy so often is? Supposing you understand, conveying that you do, because you feel in theory that you could understand, and you want to, and yet secretly you don’t? Then he was pulling my underwear off and I didn’t need to understand. In that large open room, my thoughts wandered as Sandro descended, his breath against my thighs, a sensation that always embarrassed me a little, as if I were a frigid teenager. I had the vague feeling that consenting meant approving of his act of violence and I did not approve, but then again this was simply sex, not approval or forgiveness, and I’d already decided I wasn’t going to reciprocate. Too tired, too late, I didn’t feel like it. Sandro never cared about reciprocity. Sex is not about exchange values, he said. It’s a gift economy. I relaxed and let my mind wander. I was thinking about the woman in the movie, her snowy face. Daintily sipping her beer in its short glass. I was half-removed from what was happening, from Sandro’s mouth, an asymmetry that was meant to be read as connection, a man’s face, tongue, and focus, between a woman’s legs, and her focus on fruition. Not gratitude, not intimacy, just fruition.

  The woman in curler time, sipping her beer, was readying to lose herself. She would do it. She was not afraid.

  The sky lightened through the loft windows, the trucks on Grand Street beginning their daylong stream of bangs and rumbles as they hit the large steel plates that lay over the street.

  Sandro had waited with the mugger, he told me, a fourteen-year-old kid with a shattered hand. I was quiet. He took my silence as an accusation. A guy with a knife was threatening us, he said. How could we have known he wouldn’t harm us? There was no way to know. The only sure thing was the revolver, which, because of Sandro’s demonstration for Didier, was loaded.

  When the ambulance wailed toward them, Sandro left the scene. He went walking down Houston to Allen. Down the Allen Mall, as we called the pedestrian walkway between north and south traffic, to Delancey. Past Ratner’s, which was filled with late-night diners. He climbed the steps of the Williamsburg Bridge and began to cross. He could see the yellow neon of the sugar refinery across the East River, the halogen safety lights of the Navy Yard, the electrical substation to the south of the Navy Yard, its dark smokestacks blinking red. He’d forgotten how magnificent that view could be. But passing along the graffiti-pasted walkway he felt the gun in his pocket and began to wonder if he was going to be mugged again. Surely it couldn’t happen twice in one night. The odds were totally against it. It should have been impossible, given that it had already happened. He saw a clump of dark figures lurking on the walkway at the next concrete anchorage and decided that being mugged had nothing to do with odds. Nothing to do with what had already taken place. He had no desire to use that gun again. He turned around, descended the steps of the bridge, and wandered into Chinatown, over the hose-sprayed sidewalks in front of closed fish and produce markets. He found a bakery on Hester Street that had its interior lights on, the windows slicked with a veil of white steam, so much steam it was collecting in rivulets that ran down the interior of the glass. Inside, workers were filling display cases from large bakery pans. He rapped on the window and talked them into selling him a lotus paste bun. It was just out of the oven and its warmth and aroma, he said, transported him to me. Nothing mattered except coming home to see me.

  “And there you were,” he said. “In your cotton-underweared splendor. Your leggy splendor.”

  * * *

  Helen Hellenberger called in the morning with the name of a lawyer for Sandro.

  How does she already know what happened? I asked.

  Sandro rubbed his head like he was overwhelmed by technicalities and the trauma of the incident and said, “I telephoned her when I got home. But what does it matter? The whole thing is a kind of blur. A fuckup and calamity. I’m really mad at myself.”

  He put his head in his hands, and then I was busy comforting him and told myself not to be paranoid about Helen.

  The lawyer informed Sandro he would have to choose, either go to the police and tell them exactly what happened, or decide not to go, to do nothing.

  “But what happens to me if I turn myself in?” Sandro asked him.

  The lawyer explained that Sandro had it all wrong. There was no reason to worry. They would want to make him a hero. Hero vigilante chases down mugger, takes back night.

  Sandro relayed all this to me at the Ukrainian diner we liked to go to on Second Avenue and Ninth Street. Then we drifted east down Ninth toward Tompkins Square Park. It was a beautiful fall day, a quiet morning, oak trees with their leaves going burgundy, the smell of woodsmoke from someone’s fireplace.

  We were near the strange little storefront congregation that gave out free doses of DMT, communion for anyone hoping to get closer to God. Ronnie had pointed it out to me—a door with an ugly brown mandala painted on it, a place you had to already know about in order to find. He’d once gone in for the experience, not God, just DMT. He said the preacher was “fair,” meaning he gave everyone and himself the same amount. Ronnie had taken his hit, which was instant and hard. He floated up to the ceiling. He wanted to come down but it was too late and the preacher and his congregation were haranguing him from below, yelling something at him about Jesus and the true inner light. It was terrifying, he said, really unpleasant, and there was nothing he could do but wait it out up there on the ceiling. “If that’s God,” Ronnie said, “he’s deranged.”

  Sandro and I passed the ugly mandala of the little DMT church. Beyond it, a group of hippies sat against the chain-link fence of an abandoned lot, drinking beer out of clear forty-ounce bottles.

  The impulse to shoot someone in the hand. To hide a gun in your boot. What was it? I felt free of that. Like I could float up to the ceiling, unweighted by the burden of a male ego. I would float on up and not be afraid.

  “So that’s what we’ll do, okay?” Sandro was talking, and I had not been listening.

  “Call them as soon as we get back. Because they’re Italians and you have to plan things months in advance and deal with tons of bureaucracy.”

  I should go ahead and schedule the publicity tour with the Valera team, and he would come along.

  I was happy. I had never really considered not going, but Sandro supporting it made everything so much easier, even if his sudden support was about him, the mugging, and had little to do with me.

  “You
can protect me,” he joked, “from Italy. I’ll hide behind you. Cling to you in a way that will drive you nuts.”

  * * *

  Sandro had a show at Helen’s in February and wanted to leave right after. The tour with the Valera team was supposed to begin in March. We could use his mother’s country place as a base. I would go to Monza and then other racetracks in northern Italy, and possibly France and Germany. I would make a film about the tour, about my own encounter with speed.

  “You can flirt with Didi Bombonato,” Sandro said teasingly, and did a play flip of his hair.

  I tried broaching the subject with Marvin at work the next day. My hope was that he’d say I could take a leave and come back and be assured of a job. But Marvin heard “Italy” and started off on a story.

  “In the summer of 1967,” he said, “a friend of mine was working for the company that was going to distribute Contempt. He spoke Italian and French, so he was assigned to prepare the subtitles. When the print was ready, this friend invited me to its first showing. There were some funny errors in the subtitles. The Odyssey kept coming up ‘odious.’ Later this same friend did other Godard films, and there were more typos in his subtitles. My favorite was from La Chinoise. Hegel came out ‘Helga.’ ”

  “Marvin, I want to go to Italy,” I said. “For three or four months, probably, enough time to travel with the Valera team. I’m hoping to make a film.”

  “It’s not unusual for subtitles to run off onto the leaders,” Marvin continued.

  Had he heard me? Was he responding in some coded way?

  “Just a few frames from the girl cut into the negative as a calibration tool. You, or some other, there with a bit of accidental subtitle. Helga.”

  When Eric came back from lunch, I told him I was hoping to go to Italy in the spring. He said it was fine, that I could keep my job as long as I returned by midsummer.