The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  I was on Fourteenth, going slowly, when I heard the sound of security grates forced up. Plate glass broken. It was a Thom McAn store. People pulling boxes and boxes of Jox tennis shoes out onto the sidewalk, bouncy brand-new tennies tumbling from the boxes, glowing white in the dark. You couldn’t get from A to B in New York without an ad for Jox or its redoubling, someone wearing them.

  I heard the short whoop of a police siren, but there was something impotent about it, that single, short whoop.

  Traffic was almost at a standstill. I could have gone between lanes, but I had no place I was trying to get to. A group of people wheeled racks out of Says Who? Plus-size Styles. Farther down the block, two men backed through the broken window of an Orange Julius, each lifting one side of an industrial juicer. They struggled along the sidewalk with it and then swung one two three through the plate glass of a pawnshop.

  WE BUY GOLD ANY CONDITION

  People knew what they were doing. Like they’d been waiting for the lights to go out.

  You had to believe in the system, I thought, to feel it was wrong to take things without paying for them. You had to believe in a system that said you can want things if you work, if you are employed, or if you were just born lucky, born rich.

  The city was in the process of being looted. Chain stores and mom-and-pop stores that owners, families, tried to defend with baseball bats, tire irons, shotguns. People said it was despicable that looters would turn on their own, and target struggling and honest neighborhood businesses. Their own. But they misunderstood. It didn’t matter whether looters hit a chain or the local jeweler. To expect them to identify particular stores as enemies and others as friends was a confusion. We buy gold, any condition.

  Looting wasn’t stealing, or shopping by other means. It was a declaration, one I understood, watching the juicer crash through the window: the system is in “off” mode. And in “off” mode, there was no private property, no difference between Burger King and Alvin’s Television Repair. Everything previously hoarded behind steel and glass was up for grabs.

  Jox are lightweight. Built for speed.

  * * *

  I parked the bike in front of my building on Kenmare. The Italians were all outside, domino games and drinking and full-volume news radio.

  We’re getting reports from all five boroughs, the announcer said. Commanding officers tell us the vandalism and looting are so dispersed they simply cannot prevent individual crimes.

  Listeners were calling in to describe trouble in Harlem, the Bronx, Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights.

  “Bushwick is being destroyed,” one caller said, “by niggers and spics.”

  “This guy dies in custody and these animals go nuts, destroying everything on Broadway, but he was robbing a liquor store—”

  The old Italians playing dominoes weighed in on this.

  “They don’t know how he died. Probably he was on drugs.”

  I left the Moto Valera securely locked where my bigoted neighbors could watch over it. No looting would occur in Little Italy, a self-governed fortress, armed, punitive.

  I wanted to walk. It was a night to be on the street, where everyone else was, listening to radios, trading stories, marveling at the uncanny dark—natural, but not for a city. I crossed Kenmare and walked down Mulberry, which still reminded me of my arrival to New York, two years earlier, when the sight of a woman smashing a cockroach under her slipper was an exciting urban novelty. Every New York sensation, heat, firecrackers, the humid grit coating people and things, even the smell of chicken blood in the hall, meant possibility then.

  At the corner of Spring and Mulberry, by the little park where I used to sit, I saw Henri-Jean. This was his haunt, his quadrangle. But he wasn’t in the park. He was standing in the street, directing traffic, using his striped pole like a semaphore, nodding and beckoning with dramatic enthusiasm at the cars. He smiled and directed as if he were a cheerful usher volunteering to put everyone in their rightful seat, the official host and steward of Mulberry and Spring. There was a type who came to life in a blackout, those who would use the suspension of normal life to finally become their full selves.

  I went east down Houston Street. There were bright flames over the dark rooftops ahead of me. I heard sirens. The surging horns of emergency vehicles. They passed, heading toward the flames, a building on fire down by the river. As I approached First Avenue there were small fires burning in the street, from dumpsters rolled into the intersection and knocked on their sides.

  I passed a little playground where a group of people, mostly children—boys, little ones and older ones—had sledgehammers. They were breaking concrete and scurrying around to pick up pieces of it as it ricocheted, putting heavy chunks of it into knapsacks and plastic shopping bags. One kid had bolt cutters and was using them to sever the seatless chains hanging from the swing set in the little playground. Every time I’d passed that playground on my way to visit Giddle, who lived nearby, I noticed those chains dangling, useless, no swings. The kid was making use of them. He wrapped the freed chain around his hand, with a loose end for swinging. Another took the bolt cutters and began tearing out pieces of the chain-link fence that bordered the playground. Other boys helped him drag out rectangular sections of fencing and toss them into the street.

  A man was with them, his face covered with a black bandanna, the only adult, it seemed, caught up in their fury and even directing it a little, and for that, odd and somewhat out of place, because it was a youthful fury. He was dressed all in black, only his eyes showing. He held a long pole in one hand. The pole had something metal and sharp on the upward tip—it looked like a knife, maybe, duct-taped to the end of this pole, which towered over the man. He held it like a staff as he spoke to the kids, gave low-voiced instructions as they hunched and listened, self-consciously, almost vainly, pulling their own scarves and shirts and bandannas up over their young faces. I couldn’t hear actual words but his emphatic tone, his flattened and tough New York accent, was familiar.

  A grocery store nearby had been looted and people were streaming past with bags and shopping carts filled with goods. Another blaring fire truck headed toward the building burning near the East River. A Mister Softee truck parked at the curb and the driver opened his window to sell ice cream. People surrounded the truck, saying that it was a blackout and he should not be charging for his cones because they were giving it out other places for free. A teenage girl in cornrows, shopping bags on the handlebars of her white ten-speed, said, “Shit is going to melt anyhow.” The Mister Softee driver yelled back that his refrigeration was working just fine. He peeled out as the children with scarves over their faces began hurtling chunks of concrete at his truck.

  The man dressed all in black was leading a chant, holding his weird pike or pole aloft, jabbing it upward, the children chanting with him,

  “El pueblo! Armado! Something something something.”

  He was chanting with the kids but his eyes met mine. He was looking directly at me, his face covered. I stared back, sure now of who he was.

  I walked closer. The bright, sad eyes.

  “What did I tell you, sister?”

  Before I could answer, a boy was calling that he and the others needed Burdmoore’s help. A park bench had been unbolted from the ground and angled up, and they were trying to drag it to their elaborate pile of smoldering debris and fencing stacked in the street. Burdmoore went over to assist. They moved the bench onto the pile and squirted something flammable over it. The fire blazed up, its light bathing the boys’ masked faces. They looked to Burdmoore, who directed. It didn’t make sense to wait to speak with him. We were on different planes of existence. He was deep in his blackout self, activated.

  “Burn the schools,” he called out to his masked brood as they surrounded the fire.

  “Burn the schools!”

  “Burn the banks.”

  “Burn the banks!”

  “Burn the precincts.”

  “Burn the precincts!”


  “Yeah, fuck the pigs!” added a child’s high-pitched voice like a grace note.

  They were gone. They had finished their chant and fled down the street in a loose wave of bodies, some slower, some faster, all of them turning a corner and disappearing.

  * * *

  I opened the windows of my studio on Kenmare wide, lay down on my mattress and tried to sleep, floating on a cushion of wailing sirens.

  I thought about that long day of waiting and waiting for Gianni. I’d looked up and searched for human color against the white apron of snow: Gianni’s red jacket. Any sign, any brightness against the mountain’s sameness of face. I had looked and waited, not exactly hopeful. I did not feel hope. I felt expectant. They were different. I waited, not wanting to turn away, to leave without his arrival.

  If he never arrives, I had thought, looking up at the blank and impassive white, he’s either hurt, or possibly dead, or he has deceived me, and I won’t ever know which.

  * * *

  I woke to a red sun pouring into my curtainless windows, the electricity still out. My night came back to me in pieces almost as if I’d been drunk, the people behind the green door and the way the movie’s mysteries, unveiled, gave way to a night of suspended time, a city unmasked by darkness.

  A Chemical Bank had burned on First Avenue and Fourteenth Street, I heard when I went out in search of coffee (no luck: I bought a warm RC Cola). There had been no available fire truck to come and put out the fire, a suspected arson. The fire had swept through and gutted the building rapidly. Three Chemical Bank employees, either forced under threat of termination to remain on site for security, or voluntary recruits who’d been offered triple overtime, were inside. What was the difference? All three died.

  19. THE DAY ROME WAS FOUNDED, APRIL 21,

  but April 21, 1937. And so it was movies and Rome and babies and Mussolini and Papa the great industrialist, all together for a photograph.

  Sandro wasn’t yet born, not for two more years, but he’d been told about it: the grand opening of Cinecittà, his father and the Duce and little Roberto at the ribbon cutting.

  What Sandro did remember was when the Allies bombed it, in 1944. Cinecittà, his father explained, was where they made the frivolous films Sandro’s mother liked, the ones she took Sandro along to. He was five years old and could not really follow what was happening on-screen. He ate his snack in the dark and then fell asleep holding his mother’s hand, his neck against the cold armrest, his wool coat covering his bare legs. White telephone films, they were called. Telefoni bianchi. There was always a white phone next to a bed. The tension of the scenes, the thing that gathered them taut, was whether it would ring. When the white phone next to the bed rang, through its earpiece came bad news, or a promise of devotion or a breach of it, this white instrument with flares at either ends of its handle, ear and mouth. The white telephone kept life’s pleasures and disappointments arriving to a lavish and dead surrounding, not unlike the lavish and dead surroundings of Sandro’s own home—the one that he and his mother returned to after their outing to the movies and then Passerini’s for hot chocolate—their villa in the Brera, so clean and ordered there was nothing for the servants to do but look nervously at Sandro’s mother and pretend to polish polished things.

  Why did the Allies bomb the place where they made movies? Sandro had asked his father as they looked at the photographs in the newspaper of its collapsed roofs, German tanks on the destroyed soundstages, German officers carting the still-usable cinema equipment away. His mother loved the telefoni bianchi, and young Sandro had felt that the Allies bombing Cinecittà, the Germans looting it, were attacks on her, and possibly on them, because the people in the films, the vulgar escapist fantasies that Sandro later understood them to be, depicted more or less his own reality.

  * * *

  After the war ended the movies were different. The directors went out in the streets to film “real” life. Which was convenient, because Cinecittà was destroyed, and in addition to that problem there were people living in its ruins. From 1945 to 1950 displaced people, mostly children, lived in the film studios. If your parents died suddenly, Sandro understood, your home was wherever you were, and now you were from nowhere. Your parents were your provenance. Dead, you had no provenance. You lived at Cinecittà, so be it. Sandro saw pictures in a magazine, orphans crammed into little warrens divided by hay bales and corrugated cardboard. They were using huge props from costume epics about ancient Rome as makeshift furniture.

  “They’re extras,” his father said, “for Rossellini,” when Sandro asked why children were living in the bombed rubble of the movie studios. Extras for Rossellini. It was actually funny, Sandro later thought, when he understood the joke. Rossellini was too busy casting regular Italians to play wretches, too busy casting them to portray the actual wretches who were living in the former kingdom of elaborate fictions. We must confront our reality directly, or so the idea went. And yet the idea—“reality directly”—was there at Cinecittà: children who had lost their transport during the war. Lost their parents. Who had dysentery. Who did not know their own last names, nor what country they should be returned to. The whole displaced nightmare of World War Two, there among fake Roman columns, and it was too incredible and strange to be dealt with by the neorealists.

  While real people suffered in movieland, the great neorealist director turned away from movieland to capture the supposedly real people, and what were they like, the Italians in Rossellini’s Open City? They were brave. Noble. Moral. Religious, humane, strong resisters to their German occupiers. Hilarious. This is fucking hilarious, Sandro thought, watching it with Ronnie when it played at the Coronet on Third Avenue in 1963. Practically all of Italy had celebrated Mussolini, and then the war had ended and suddenly everyone was an anti-Fascist, except for the bastards in Salò. As if the entire problem could be isolated to a few rich families in the lake district, where Mussolini had set up his exiled government. Families like the Valeras, whose villa was occupied by Germans. After the war, walking to school in Brera, Sandro and Roberto were pelted with rocks. Their father moved them back up to Bellagio, where the boys were pelted with cow chips, and once misled into a swarm of angry bees that stung and restung them more times than Sandro had thought possible. Was he stung because he lacked natural virtues, ones the children who pushed them into the bee swarm possessed? Had those children stood up to Mussolini? No. Did it matter who possessed natural virtues? No. A blend of good and bad characterized all humans, and to pretend to sort that out was an insult to human complexity. But at the same time, Sandro understood that people only tended to allow their own contradictions, and not those of others. It was okay to be murky to yourself, to know you weren’t an angel, but other people had to be more cleanly divided into good and bad.

  Roberto joined a youth chapter of the neo-Fascists, the MSI, praised Mussolini, and defensively recited the bad-luck contingencies that had led to their own disgrace. Sandro took his licks on the road home from school and did not fight back. He dreamily wished he could perch himself in the spear of a cypress tree that bordered their enormous garden and from the cypress’s pointed tip fly north, cross over Lake Como, and continue into the mountains. In the Alps, it would be the time of his father’s glory, World War One. Sandro would join the Alpini, the mountaineering troops who had seemed to him, in his youth, so fine and brave, with stiff eagle feathers in their caps.

  He had an entire set of World War One assault units, the Arditi. They were paper dolls, with all the accessories and clothing for each unit, and little cardboard tabs so you could remove and replace parts of the uniform. The little paper belt with cartridge pouches and the dagger and scabbard and even a bersagliere’s helmet with a paper flume to one side, black cockerel feathers inked onto it. The felt cap of an Ardito, a scodellino they called it, a little dish.

  Colonel, I don’t want bread. I only want lead for my musket, his father would sing to him on the rare occasion when he was in a friendly mood.
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  The Arditi were called the Black Flames. The Alpini were the Green Flames, his father told him. Bersaglieri were Red Flames, sharpshooters who ran instead of marched.

  Sandro moved his paper Alpini around and pretended he was a Green Flame, a thing burning that wasn’t meant to be, a thing releasing its poison, like the flames that licked over the plastic bedside clock he’d melted to see what would happen, and his room had filled with a noxious odor he’d waved out the open windows with towels so the servants wouldn’t know.

  He had the dolls and the full-color catalogues that listed which items belonged with which doll. To make them run he lifted and lightly bobbed them along the dresser edge, dun-dun-dun, instead of a more plodding and rhythmic march march march. They did not come with wristwatches, and having been told by his father that the wristwatch was an invention of war, for aiming a pistol and not having to fumble with a pocket watch, he drew them each a watch with a pen. There were units with different skills and missions, and each looked different and wore different hats and did different things, used different kinds of weapons and caused different kinds of deaths and destructions. The game was keeping them straight. Knowing which hats and badges and daggers went with which unit. That was how Sandro liked to play it and if things got mixed up it was enough to make him cry, because what about war as military order, as the invention of the wristwatch and so forth? Roberto came in and jumbled everything and said Sandro was a sissy and a fool. It’s not like that, instructed Roberto, an authority because he was older and could better understand the terribleness of the subject matter. Roberto clanged cymbals against Sandro’s ears before the sun had risen. “Wake-up call for Arditi is oh six hundred hours!” Roberto announced, “And by trench mortar round!” At breakfast he ate Sandro’s pastry and declared it the way of an Ardito to be a plunderer.

  Included with Sandro’s dolls was the cycle battalion, like Papa’s. Papa had been an Ardito and he rode a cycle called Pope. A gold cycle and the white skull-and-crossbones on the jacket, a Carcano bolt-action rifle on the rear, and on the hips, a file-handled dagger on one side and a Glisenti automatic pistol on the other. Machine gunners behind him with water-cooled Fiat 14s.