The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  The sun was already half-melted, its redness spilling like cassis over the horizon. Valera pumped his legs in the water and composed. Composed! He made a poem, his first, to commemorate the black machine and to condemn the man who rode it.

  When the sun had sunken completely under the horizon, the whole of the ocean’s visible surface turned an opaque silver. His body disappeared at the waterline and he felt bifurcated. Two halves, above the water and below it. He could hear everything acutely, as if the silvery light were fine-tuning all his senses. He was aware of tiny nuance in the lap and slurp of water against his body as he was raised and lowered in the swell.

  He wrote a very fine poem in that swell. But with no pencil, no paper, he had only his memory to commit it to. He practiced it viva voce in the waves. But dazed by the awful truth that young Marie had a secret life, that someone else was holding and squeezing her perfect water balloon breasts, and stunned by the silver surface of his sea—his, where he’d swum every day of his childhood and yet had never seen it turn this . . . not quite a color, but the colorless shine of mercury—the reverie was a crucible of forgetting. An hour later he could not recall his poem. Only a few fragments, like broken seashells caught in a dragnet. OIL OF POSSIBILITY and REMORSELESS, SPEEDING SHADOW BELOW BLUE UNBROKEN SKY, and LOVE AND HATE THE SAME, FORGED IN YOUR FLYWHEEL / BLACK AS MELTED PRUSSIAN CANNONS / NO TAINT OF DEFEAT. Strung together, they were not a poem. The unity and cadence were lost. Later this happened to him repeatedly, not in the ocean but in sleep. He would wake up with an understanding that he had just generated, in the final crepe-thin layers of active dreaming, the greatest poem of his life—objectively great—and that it was lost forever, sacrificed to the process of waking.

  As Valera swam toward shore this occurred to him: If Marie was getting on strange cycles and spreading her legs for strange men, it meant Valera, too, had a chance with her.

  Don’t despair, he told himself. Be patient. And get a cycle with a combustive engine.

  * * *

  When his family left Alexandria for Milan, six years after he’d composed his poem and then lost it to the ocean, motorcycles were becoming common. It was 1906. His father, who had quickly built a vast construction empire in the newly industrial Milan, would have gladly purchased him one if he’d asked, but Valera expressed little interest. French-made, German-made, even American-made, the cycles in Milan were newer, sleeker designs than the one from München with its giant metal-keg engine, but none gave him the same thrill. At first he knew why. Later he forgot. The reason was in his own fragment: unbroken sky.

  Valera had grown up in a world of long and empty afternoons in the African heat, and he succumbed to Milan’s noise, chaos, and frenetic schedules poorly. The city was overrun with screeching electric trams, shuddering violently to their scheduled stops as though their rigid wheels were being forced over piles of lumber and debris. The trams were chained to one another like bulky oxen, with a gripman whose only choice was to pull the lever or to jam it shut and stop the tram. The dour gripman. Pull the lever, jam it shut. Pull the lever, jam it shut. Lunch break. Dry ham panino and scalded espresso thimble. Pull the lever, jam it shut. The trams were powered from overhead by electricity, via a wand that attached magnetically to a wire strung above each route. Wires crisscrossed the sky like a great ventilator through which the city exhaled its polluted breath. The explosions and smoke from automobiles and motorcycles were a war fought on his nerves. The electric lights, burn holes in his vision. Most depressing were the rush hour masses, darting like rats down numbered trackways, clutching sacks that contained mass-produced snacks they would eat without pleasure as they were conveyed to their outer-rung apartment blocks.

  The cycles that putted along coughing their blue smoke took people to work in street-level shops and upper-level offices, not into the bosom of pink sunset, into Marie’s arms. It was discord that had struck him so many years earlier. Cycle against honking and crowds and wires was nothing. Girl against pale laundry and waves, well, something, but a lust doomed to boredom. It had been the frisson of the two, cracked limestone wall and gleaming motor parts, Marie’s skirts fluttering, her knees wrapped around the back of some asshole Frenchman, the loud machine farting a trail of exhaust into the calm, vast blue, that had made its impression.

  * * *

  Valera with his elegant leather satchel, a student in Rome, was not part of any Bohemian rabble. It was 1912 and he was just about to finish his university degree and move back to Milan, to work for his father. But he nursed a secret interest in this rabble, young men who gathered at the Caffè Aragno on the Via del Corso, arguing and penning manifestos instead of going to their classes at the university. He spied on them daily, lurking at one of the Aragno’s outdoor tables, pretending to read, scribbling silly poems, or openly staring at these little clusters of subversives who spoke to one another in low tones. To spy and to participate are separate worlds, and when the little group had something important to discuss, they retreated to a back room of the café, which the proprietor let them use. They’d glance at one another and say, “Third room,” and as they filtered inside the secret back room, Valera, the sole voyeur, was left with no group on which to eavesdrop. He longed to be among them.

  One night, motorcycles converged on the corner beyond the café, motors revving, goggled grins exchanged among the cyclists. No one had clued him in.

  What was happening?

  “A race, pal.”

  The young people smoking at the outdoor café tables cheered. Someone threw a full bottle of Peroni, which smashed in the paved intersection, leaving a great wet stain that glittered with broken glass.

  The drivers all backed out simultaneously and squealed off down the Corso.

  Two men crossing the avenue with evening newspapers under their arms and a woman in a black toque carrying packages were all sent diving for the curb. A tram came, and the brakeman had to pull the lever and let the gang of motorbikes pass. Pedestrians and vehicles halted for these renegades, their cycles growling like a convoy of hornets. The atmosphere had changed. The quick looks, the retreats to the secret meeting room, there was none of that. This was an open celebration, and Valera, too, was lifted by the festive spirit. He felt that he was part of it, even as he wasn’t sure what they were celebrating.

  Twenty minutes later he heard the far-off noise of cycles accelerating in sync. The racers, returning.

  The motorbikes came streaming down the Corso, their light beams diffused by fog into iridescent halos, each a perfect miniature of the colored ring that appeared around the moon on rare occasions, an effect of ice crystals in the clouds. Scores of moon rings laced and interlaced. Valera knew they were cycles with riders, but all he saw was glowing rings. They sent a seditious crackle through the air, those headlights, promising that something would happen.

  The drivers collected along the curb near the café, some popping up onto the sidewalk, spoked wheels and hot exhaust pipes in one tangled mass under the orange neon letters CINZANO. The shiny metal of gas tanks, fenders, carburetor covers, headlamp rings, and wheel rims sent the orange neon skidding over chrome and steel and suffusing everything—the atmosphere and the charge in the atmosphere, this feeling of sedition—in ember orange. For the first time in his life he found the neon, and the way it bathed those shiny machines parked below it, dazzling. Something was coalescing, an energy transfer from the cyclists to his own spirit. Life is here, he thought. It is happening now.

  People were trading cycles, letting others take turns.

  Valera stood.

  “You want to give it a go?” A chrome pudding-bowl helmet was placed in his hands by a rider who had just dismounted.

  Valera put on the helmet, looping the chin strap. He climbed onto the cycle with what he hoped was the élan of Marie’s companion on the seawall in Alexandria, with his wet hair and those hard-click shoes, who had seemed completed by his machine, as if together they made one thing.

  You start it like th
is, see? It’s in neutral. Pull the compression lever. A downward thrust of the body’s weight on the kick-starter, and release compression. Bub-bub-bub-bub. Careful not to pop the clutch. Ease off it gently. First is down. Second, third, and fourth are up. Here’s your hand brake and there’s your foot brake. Don’t pull the hand brake alone without your foot brake, or you’ll be over the handlebars like a pole vaulter.

  Valera stalled the motor trying to shift from neutral into first. His face went red.

  It’s okay, just put it back in neutral and give it another kick start. . . . Yes, good. . . . Now into first. Pull in the clutch so you’ll be ready—

  The cycles began to move and thin. They were off!

  Go! That’s it—go!

  The cycles were dispersing. Valera pushed on the shifter with the sole of his shoe, gave the throttle gas, and eased off the clutch, understanding, this time, that it was a two-part invention: the gas flows and the clutch releases as one movement, but each part is controlled independently, the two meeting at a fluid halfway point.

  The cycle burped forward, not at all gracefully, but he felt the essence of what was required, control with the wrists. After a few erratic lunges, learning the stiff springs of clutch and throttle, he was able to go along more smoothly and to follow the movements of his fellow riders, each reacting to the next as fish do, swimming in a school, auto-choreographed in one undulation, fish to fish, rider to rider, as they threaded the narrow streets beyond the Corso.

  He grew bold and began moving forward between riders, under neon signs that looked like bright, hard candy, reflecting from the tram wires and the tracks in smears and gleams. He was making his way to the front of the pack.

  As they cornered the roundabout of the Piazza Venezia, Valera reached the front. He and three others formed a motorcade. Light and noise, and the damp air on his face, the helmet making him feel like a brave soldier. Four cycles across, vanguarding.

  As if they were both in an official capacity and yet undermining all.

  Hunched over the handlebars above a blur of paving stones, flinging off their burdens behind them.

  A night junta.

  Amid the growls of so many engines echoing through the streets, the rider next to Valera yelled, “Let’s take the city!”

  They swerved down Via di San Gregorio, past glimpses of the exterior wall of the Colosseum, whose massive belly was lit with electric light leaking through its dark and crumbling walls, turning the Colosseum into a broken and blazing lantern.

  They were on Via Nazionale, streaming through the dark in a cavalcade of motorbike headlights, under the glow of argon and neon.

  RINASCENTE FARRINI FALCK

  BAR TABACCHI CAFFÉ

  CINZANO CINZANO CINZANO

  He could see the dim lights in the fountain up ahead, in the vast Piazza Esedra. The night felt like it would burn. It was burning. Why had he waited so long?

  He surged into it.

  4. BLANKS

  I had moved to New York from Reno just over a year before my Bonneville trip. I’d found an apartment on Mulberry Street and planned to make films with the camera I never returned to the art department at UNR, a Bolex Pro. I arrived with the camera and Chris Kelly’s telephone number and little else. I was twenty-one. I figured I’d wait to call mythical Chris Kelly, shot in the arm by Nina Simone. I’ll get situated first, I thought. I’ll have some sense of what I’m doing, a way to make an impression on him. Then I’ll call. I knew no one else, but downtown New York was so alive with people my age, and so thoroughly abandoned by most others, that the energy of the young seeped out of the ground. I figured it was only a matter of time before I met people, was part of something.

  My apartment was about as blank and empty as my new life, with its layers upon layers of white paint, like a plaster death mask of the two rooms, giving them an ancient urban feeling, and I didn’t want to mute that effect with furniture and clutter. The floor was an interlocking map of various unmatched linoleum pieces in faded floral reds, resembling a cracked and soiled Matisse. It was almost bare, except for a trunk that held my clothes, a few books, the stolen or borrowed Bolex, a Nikon F (my own) and a men’s brown felt hat, owner unknown. I had no cups, no table, nothing of that sort. The mattress I slept on had been there when I rented. I had one faded pink towel, on its edge machine embroidered PICKWICK. It was from a hotel in San Francisco. I knew a girl who had cleaned rooms there and I somehow ended up with the towel, which seemed fancier than a regular towel because it had a provenance, like shoes from Spain or perfume from France. A towel from the Pickwick. The hat was a Borsalino I’d found in the bathroom of a bar. I wrapped my jacket around it, rather than giving it to the bartender. It decorated the empty apartment. Each morning I went to a coffee shop near my apartment, the Trust E on Lafayette, and sat at the counter. The same waitress was always there. The men who came into that coffee shop tried to pick her up. She was pretty and, perhaps more importantly, had large breasts framed in a low-cut waitressing smock.

  “Hey, what’s your name?” a man in a yellow hard hat said to her one morning as he stared at her breasts and dug in the pocket of his work overalls to pay his check.

  She glanced at the radio behind the counter. “My name is . . . Zenith,” she said, smiling at him with her slightly crooked teeth.

  That was the precise moment I wanted to be friends with Giddle—her actual name, or at least the one I knew her by.

  * * *

  There are no palm trees on Fourteenth Street, but I remember them there, black palm fronds against indigo dusk, the night I met the people with the gun.

  That was how I thought of them, before I knew who any of them were. The people with the gun.

  I had been in New York two weeks, and the city to me seemed strange and wondrous and lonely. The summer air was damp and hot. It was late afternoon. The overcrowded sidewalk, with young girls standing along Union Square in shorts and halters the size of popped balloons, electronics stores with salsa blaring, the Papaya King and its mangoes and bananas piled up in the window, all made Fourteenth Street feel like the main thoroughfare of a tropical city, someplace in the Caribbean or South America, though I had never been to the Caribbean or South America, and I’m not sure where I saw palm fronds. Once it became familiar, Fourteenth Street never looked that way to me again.

  I remember a rainbow spectrum of men’s wing tips parked in rows, triple-A narrow, the leather dyed snake green, lemon yellow, and unstable shades of vermilion and Ditto-ink blue. All of humanity dresses in uniforms of one sort or another, and these shoes were for pimps. I was on the west end of Fourteenth. My feet, swollen from the heat, were starting to hurt. I heard music from the doorway of a bar, soft piano notes, and then a singer who flung her voice over a horn section. What difference does it make, what I choose? Either way I lose. A voice so low it sounded like a female voice artificially slowed. It was Nina Simone’s. A piano note and a man’s baritone voice percussed together, and then higher piano notes came tumbling down to meet the low ones. I went in.

  The music was loud and distorted by the echoing room, where a man and woman sat close together at the far end of a bar, the sole customers. The woman had the kind of beauty I associated with the pedigreed rich. A pale complexion, cuticle thin, stretched over high cheekbones, and thick, wavy hair that was the warm, reddish blond of cherrywood. The man conducted the song with the tiny straw from his drink, jerking his arm in the air to the saxophone and the cartwheeling piano notes, which fell down over us as if from the perforations in the bar’s paneled ceiling. The horns and strings and piano and the woman’s voice all rode along together and then came to an abrupt halt. The room fell into drafty silence.

  The woman sniffled, her head down, hair flopped over her face, curtains drawn for a moment of private sorrow, although I sensed she was faking.

  “Why don’t you sit down,” the man called to me in a nasal and Southern voice, “you’re making us nervous.” He wore a suit and tie but there was so
mething derelict about him, not detectable in his fine clothes.

  The woman looked up at me, a glisten of wet on her cheeks.

  “She’s not making anybody nervous,” she said, and wiped under her eyes with the pads of her fingers, careful not to scratch herself with long nails painted glossy red. I realized I’d been wrong. She was not the pedigreed rich. He was and she was not. Sometimes all the information is there in the first five minutes, laid out for inspection. Then it goes away, gets suppressed as a matter of pragmatism. It’s too much to know a lot about strangers. But some don’t end up strangers. They end up closer, and you had your five minutes to see what they were really like and you missed it.

  “Come on, honey,” she said to me in a voice like a soft bell, “sit down and shithead will buy you a drink.”

  * * *

  I’d thought this was how artists moved to New York, alone, that the city was a mecca of individual points, longings, all merging into one great light-pulsing mesh, and you simply found your pulse, your place. The art in the galleries had nothing to do with what I’d studied as fine art. My concentration had been film, but the only films the galleries seemed to be showing were films scratched beyond recognition, and in one case, a ten-minute-long film of a clock as it moved from ten o’clock to ten minutes after ten, and then the film ended. Dance was very popular, as was most performance, especially the kind that was of a nature so subtle—a person walking through a gallery, and then turning and walking out of the gallery—that one was left unsure if the thing observed was performance or plain life. There was a man in my neighborhood who carried a long pole over his shoulder, painted with barber stripes. I would see him at dusk as I sat in the little park on the corner of Mulberry and Spring. He, too, liked to sit in the little park in the evening, in his bell-bottoms and a striped sailor’s shirt. We both watched the neighborhood boys in their gold chains and football jerseys as they taunted the Puerto Rican kids who passed by. They were practicing for the future war. The Italians were going to exterminate the Puerto Ricans with the sheer force of their hatred. Or maybe they would just remove all the Italian ice pushcarts and the pizza parlors and the Puerto Ricans would starve. The man sat there with his striped pole jutting over his shoulder like an outrigger, one leg crossed over the other, his sun-browned toes exposed in battered leather sandals. He smiled foolishly when the Italian kids asked what his pole was for. When he didn’t answer, they flicked cigarette butts at him. He kept smiling at them. Once, he walked past the Trust E Coffee Shop, holding the pole over his shoulder as if carrying construction materials to a work site. “There goes Henri-Jean,” Giddle said.