The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  I had been back in New York a month. I was not in contact with Gianni. Not in contact with Sandro, had not seen him since the week after my return, when he walked out of the Kastles’ loft nodding angrily.

  My guilt concerning the question of Roberto’s life was a fantasy, I told myself. It was not reality.

  If Gianni was involved in Roberto’s kidnapping, that was not related to anything that was related to me. If Gianni had said the family would pay, that was something Gianni had said. I was just a girl who went to a factory to meet her boyfriend and met him by accident with another woman.

  If Gianni was keeping tabs, well, that was Gianni. And if the family paid in some form, that could be Gianni. It certainly was not me.

  This is what I told myself. And then repeated. And then said again. I ignored the part where I drove Gianni’s getaway car—or maybe it was his hearse.

  * * *

  “So in the fall of 1967 I went to Los Angeles,” Marvin said. I was on the white divan for a new round of prints, something to do with emulsions, different emulsions.

  Roberto had now been in captivity for a week. I kept expecting to run into Sandro, waiting to. Marvin was speaking in the flat, nasal, unmodulated tone of his, almost a drone, indicating that he was going to recount in great detail some aspect of what he considered his critical personal history. I had just said that Sandro’s brother had been kidnapped by the Red Brigades. It was impulsive, but I figured maybe we could talk about it. It was Marvin who had introduced me to Sandro in the first place.

  Marvin said it was terrible news. He shrugged and added something about it being a high-profile family and then there was an anecdote and we were suddenly, it seemed, going to talk about Marvin instead, about his own history.

  “The first job I had was as a stock footage researcher. I was employed by a director doing preliminary work for a feature. The script called for documentary scenes of people dying violent deaths. That’s to say, actual people dying. The stock footage vaults where I did my research had the negatives of the Pathé newsreels from beginning to end. I went through, looking for violent deaths. What I found overwhelmingly were executions, almost all of them by firing squad. I gave the director all the scenes I’d had printed. Nothing ever came of the project, and that director disappeared off the face of the Earth, as people tend to do, change their names, become Hare Krishnas, drink themselves to death, whatever. I never heard from him, wouldn’t have thought of him again, but one of the scenes I’d given him was, according to the newsreel caption, the execution of an Italian Fascist by a partisan militia, and when I met Sandro in 1968 or ’69, I had a déjà vu about his name. Was the condemned man in the stock footage also Valera? Because that would be an incredible coincidence. In the summer of 1974 I was back at that same vault and tried to find out. But in the intervening time, things had changed. They used to make a viewing print for just a lab charge. Now they charged a fee for each phase of their service. I didn’t want to find out badly enough to spend a lot of money. Really it had nothing to do with Sandro Valera. It was about something specific becoming stock footage. I always had this feeling there were two worlds. The one we live in, you know, just streaming along, future into present into past, recorded distortedly in people’s minds, and this other world: stock footage. Small integers of life, I mean life in quotes, which represent whatever did take place, whether or not what’s on the stock footage actually occurred. Cropping can make outcomes so ambiguous, but it doesn’t matter, see. It’s stock footage. A reference file to reality. Like you’re a reference file for Caucasian skin tones; it doesn’t matter that you exist. For the technician or projectionist, you’re an index for the existence of woman, flesh, flesh tones. Which brings up the question of race, unaddressed. You, as you, have nothing to do with it.”

  Marvin took pictures of me holding the color chart. I began to feel like I was made of lead, heavy enough to sink right through the divan. If he had touched on the subject of Roberto, even in the most glancing way acknowledged the possibility that Roberto could be harmed, he would have helped me out. But he used the subject as a pretext to talk only about himself.

  “I tried to explain this idea about two worlds to the people who worked in the vaults. One of them said, ‘If you love stock footage so much, won’t any piece of it do?’ And the thing is, I had to agree with him. Even if they were just trying to get rid of me. He reached into a fireproof safety container and retrieved a role of negative that had started to deteriorate. He gave it to me for free, since they were discarding it anyway. And here is the kicker. It was of . . . uh, hmm. Actually, I can’t recall. That’s funny. It’s gone, just . . . poof. I guess it wasn’t that important to the story. The story was about how it doesn’t matter what they ended up giving me. Also that violent deaths are part of stock footage, even if someone had to be killed, I mean originally, to generate the reference. You look different, by the way. Did you dye your hair or something?”

  On my way home from work, I ran into Giddle on the Bowery. It was too late to avoid her.

  “Want to come drink old overheated coffee and entertain me while I get paid and you sit and listen to me?” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  We could meet later, she said. She was going to park herself at Rudy’s and drink after her shift was finished.

  “That kind of drinking where you make a wilderness,” she said, “and tear a path in. You meet someone else there, deep in the woods. Go home together. Claw your way toward each other through the booze, confusion, misery, horniness.”

  “Sounds like fun,” I said, “but no thanks.”

  “I bet you’re going to Ronnie’s opening,” she said.

  I said yes. It was tonight.

  “You know what it is, right? His show? Pictures of beat-up women.”

  * * *

  Stanley and Gloria would be hosting a dinner for Ronnie after the opening. When I got back to the loft, Gloria had assistants running here and there, moving tables, putting out flowers, preparing food.

  “What a mess,” she said. “It’s not the time to entertain but I cannot let Ronnie down. I won’t. But it could not be a worse time.”

  I asked why.

  “They killed his brother,” she said.

  Sandro had called earlier that afternoon to tell them the news. “He says they weren’t close. But he’s in terrible pain. He’s leaving tomorrow for Milan. But he’ll only be gone a few days—just for the funeral. And when he comes back, we need to be there to support him. Stanley wants him around. You can stay until you find a place, but perhaps find a place soon.”

  I called Sandro’s number and got the machine. I hung up, unable to bring myself to leave a message, and went to lie down in the little guest room, the Burdmoore room, as I thought of it, my own photographs, the white on white of the salt flats, on the walls above me. I closed my eyes, but with the noise from the party preparations, the news about Roberto, the jangle of thoughts in my head, I felt like I was trying to rest on a freeway overpass. I tried Sandro again and got the machine. I went out for a walk. I’d seen a FOR RENT sign on a fire escape on Kenmare, near my old apartment.

  As I left the Kastles’, I decided to walk over to Sandro’s. Who else knew Roberto? Only me. Sandro never spoke of his brother. He downplayed his family, the company, in every way he could. I rang the bell. No one answered. Gloria had said he was coming to Ronnie’s opening. I would see him in an hour. We’d speak then.

  * * *

  I had not guessed Ronnie would use the photos he’d taken that night at Rudy’s, of Talia Valera and her friends. I should have. He did. The show was called Match Your Mood. Talia and the other women mugging for the camera with their faces roughed up. They’d gotten drunk, and instead of meeting a stranger in the dark wilderness that lay before them they met themselves, in slaps and punches.

  Talia was larger than life, with her bruised, swollen eye. She stared out from the glossy black-and-white image with a look of calm satisfaction, as if R
onnie had revealed her profound nature by asking of her this task, to punch herself, and she had, and look, she was not afraid, she was undamaged, still beautiful. But she was damaged; they all were.

  I thought of the pregnant biondina. The biondina told to strip nude, deloused for the camera, and what was the difference? Vincenzo has the baby.

  There was no sign yet of Sandro. We would be speaking in front of a huge image of Talia’s battered face. She was just a confused girl, like Sandro said. Roberto was dead and maybe it was time for me to come home.

  Helen Hellenberger had not wanted to show the work. Ronnie had left the gallery and was now represented by Erwin Frame, on Mercer Street, which was Sandro’s old gallery. I walked around the show with Gloria, who told me Helen had felt the work was too misogynistic.

  Gloria started glancing behind me as we talked. I turned around. Sandro had arrived.

  He was with a very young woman, practically a child. She might have been eighteen years old. A friend’s daughter, I thought. Someone’s daughter, petite and delicate, a blonde in a black sliplike dress, tiny shoulder blades like a bird’s wings, a child someone had dressed up for this event. But they were holding hands, she and Sandro. Walking together, her hand in his, and then he pulled her to him and kissed her on the side of the head. It was the girl on layaway. I hadn’t recognized her dressed up, the blonde in the photograph in Ronnie’s studio, who had stood in a cave of noise and smoke and gazed sadly at Ronnie that night at the bar, and no one had noticed her but me.

  From that moment I began to drift, to really drift. I felt light and queer and untouchable, by people or things. The huge black-and-white photos of beat-up faces receded and blurred. They were too large, like tribal masks or billboards. Gloria’s hand was on my arm but I could not really feel it, just a vague pressure. “Let’s get you some wine.”

  I better leave, I thought. Go to Rudy’s and get drunk with Giddle, as much a stranger as any of these people but she never really professed to be anything more. Go and enter the dark and tangled wilderness, a different one than Giddle’s, each of us tumbling in, in, in.

  I was outside, pondering Rudy’s, when Ronnie appeared.

  I felt keenly aware that it was the second time in a month he’d done this. Followed me out when I’d left someplace alone. But I knew his game, showing just enough interest to keep me hooked in.

  “You’re ditching my opening.”

  “Fuck you,” I said. I was unsure where it came from but it seemed appropriate.

  He laughed. “You really are growing up. Just come to dinner. Sandro won’t be there.”

  “That’s not why I’m leaving,” I lied.

  “We both have dead brothers now,” he said. “But no one knows about Tim. You’re the only one I told. You can be my date tonight. What do you say?” He grinned stupidly, showing that broken tooth. He never had explained how it had happened. “Walk with me. It’s my dinner and I want you to come. To be my guest.”

  Ronnie held my hand as we walked, and I wondered if he was doing it to console me because Sandro was holding the hand of a child bride, Ronnie’s layaway plan transferred to Sandro. Did a pink owner’s title go with her? The strange competition and sharing of friendship. We both have dead brothers now.

  He squeezed my hand. Then he squeezed it again.

  “I never understood you,” I said.

  * * *

  As Ronnie had promised, Sandro and the girl did not come to dinner. I assumed they did not come because he was grieving, but the thought crossed my mind that it was also because he wanted to be affectionate with his date without the censoring element of my presence. The day I had caught him with Talia and left for Rome was only two months earlier, and he was already with someone else. What I had considered an open issue, the question of me and Sandro, was closed. I hadn’t been ready for that. I had forgotten that he was free to move on, that he would seek comfort. A new girlfriend to help bear his sadness about Roberto. Roberto, whose death I felt connected to in a way I would never be able to disclose.

  Most of the Larrys whom Ronnie had found so funny bunched together at John Dogg’s opening had been invited to this dinner for Ronnie. And Saul Oppler, who seldom attended these things. And Didier, puffing his Gauloise and taking bites of the fish Gloria served, his plate a mixture of fish and ashes and cigarette butts.

  Erwin made a toast to Ronnie. Gallerists needed so badly to believe. They were not allowed the skepticism the rest of us harbored. The photographs were tasteless and mean. They were as questionable as a documentary about a pregnant girl with a fever and no place to lie down. The movie director sleeping with her as a way of offering her a bed. And because Ronnie’s photographs were so obviously tasteless, Erwin talked about their tastefulness and surprising tact, their great humanity, Erwin said, their honesty, an unexpected tenderness—

  As he spoke, he searched the table for us to agree with what Ronnie himself would have called bullshit hagiography.

  We clinked and sipped.

  Ronnie cleared his throat.

  We waited quietly for him to speak.

  “When I was a kid,” he said, “I was messing around at a construction site and got whacked on the head by a railroad tie.” He looked around. “Have I told any of you this story?”

  We shook our heads. Wind came in through the open windows of the Kastles’ loft, and the little candles on their long schoolhouse table dimmed and flickered, as if in anticipation.

  “I got whacked so hard I forgot who I was. Twelve years of life, gone. I wandered with a headache, stunned and aimless, for a couple of days, sleeping in public parks, competing with pigeons for old french fries, relieving myself in bushes, drinking from plaza fountains—”

  “Ronnie,” Gloria said, “they recycle that water. You’re not supposed to drink from fountains.”

  “For crying out loud,” Stanley said, “Ronnie just told us he hit his head and forgot who he was. What does it matter about the water?”

  “I came to a small marina,” Ronnie said. “Probably I’d been there before, but everything looked new to me. The ocean flashed and glistened. A salty breeze riffled my hair. The gentle slap of waves against the boats docked in the marina was a voice beckoning me. The sound of the rigging. Of sun-bleached, heavy canvas snapping in the wind. The creak of rope knots—”

  “Where did you grow up again?” Didier asked skeptically. I felt skeptical, too. Was he making this up?

  “Connecticut. Anyway, it was a place of real logic. A logic of the senses. Stunning, really, and I can still recall the scene in precise detail, the shimmer of blue tarps, the heady fumes of deck paint and turpentine vaporizing in the warm air. The green algae that flocked the dock moorings like furry hip waders from the waterline down. I was overcome by a sense of openness, an open destiny. Easy to say, of course, since I did not remember a single element of my old life, not one fucking thing. But actually,” he said, “I did remember one thing: after the log came down on me, the only image I held on to, strangely, was of a woman drying her hair with a bath towel. Rubbing vigorously, just out of the shower, with a dingy pink towel, like a white towel that had been washed with red T-shirts. I could only see her from the back, head bent forward, water-clumped strands that were the color of wet sand. Her neck. Her wet hair revealing the shape of her head and something more, a general strippedness, though I can only see her from the shoulders up as she towels her wet hair.”

  “How oedipal,” Gloria said. “Let me ask: what color is Mrs. Fontaine’s hair? And I mean your mother. Not that teenager from New Mexico you were married to for a couple of weeks.”

  “You married a teenager from New Mexico?” Stanley asked with barely concealed envy.

  Ronnie shrugged. “She was a hitchhiker. I couldn’t help myself. She was just so adorable. With these bangs that hung down into her eyes. But she started to get on my nerves. It was like being a legal guardian, I had to tell her to eat her vegetables, to put on a sweater—”

  “Ronnie
,” Gloria said, “are we to assume your mother had sandy-blond hair?”

  “No,” Ronnie said. He was staring at me across the table. “No, she doesn’t.”

  It was a searching, scanning gaze. Like he was trying to discern something.

  I had taken a shower that night that Ronnie stayed over. I’d put my hair in a faded pink towel, my Pickwick towel. I had lain next to him, thinking, so naively, that this would be the first of many moments with his fingers in my wet hair.

  “I walked along the dock and considered each boat. Their names, one after another, appeared to me as the names of different lives I could choose. Me and Mrs. Jones. Loan Shark. Come to Papa.”

  There was laughter. Ronnie waited for quiet and continued.

  “There was one especially beautiful boat. It singled itself out. It was the rich color of eggnog, a fifty-foot cruiser called the Reno.”

  So. He was speaking to me from across that knife-scratched table. A story for twenty with a message for one. But what was the message? Could it be that Ronnie loved me? Or was his use of our secret history one more hoax? Yet another layer of the joke?

  “The Reno,” Erwin said. “That’s an odd name for a boat.” He said it with the confusion of someone who concerned himself with the naming of boats.

  “This older couple sat on the deck. I shaded my eyes and looked up at them. ‘Well, hello,’ the man calls down. I said hello back. ‘The wind is just perfect,’ he says. ‘We’re getting ready to go.’ I asked where. He said to see the world. Was I interested? I guess I thought he meant generally, and I said sure. I mean of course. He asked if I liked the open sea. ‘Well, sure I do,’ I said, but what did I know? I liked the words open and sea. I still like those words. He said to call him Commodore. He told me they were setting sail that afternoon. I said, ‘Just you two?’ looking from him to his wife—he had introduced her by name but I forgot it immediately, and soon we were all chummy-chummy and it was too late not to know it. No one ever called her by it. He called her ‘dear,’ or ‘my wife,’ and everyone else simply said the commodore’s wife. ‘Just us,’ the commodore said, ‘and our first mate, Xerxes, who also cooks. And maybe you.’ And then he tamped his pipe, one of those meerschaum pipes, and something shifted or brightened in my mind. I didn’t know then, I mean I could not have recalled, that my own father smoked a pipe.”