The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  But now I did know his name: Ronnie Fontaine.

  7. THE LITTLE SLAVE GIRL

  The year I turned four, Ronnie and Sandro were shining their flashlights along the planes of a young girl’s face.

  She was a Greek slave girl carved in marble. She held a dove in her hands that she drew toward her lips, as if she were about to kiss the light little bird. Sandro and Ronnie had studied the girl night after night, tracing her time-softened contours with the directed glow of their flashlight beams. They were night guards at the Metropolitan Museum, eighteen years old, and they spent their evenings roaming the echoing and dark galleries, looking and narrating. The slave girl was a shared object of contemplation and fascination, the thing that marked the birth of their friendship and lifelong conversation.

  We went together to see her, running through a downpour, water clattering from every shop awning, splashing us as taxis plowed through lakes of rain and barreled down Fifth Avenue, no one on the steps of the Met, the lobby filled with the echoes of people holding dripping umbrellas. It was our first outing as a threesome. Strangely, there was no awkwardness. I was sure Ronnie had said nothing to Sandro about his one night with me. Nor did I say anything. Ronnie had made it clear, in the purity of his smile that evening in Sandro’s loft, that it was not going to come up. We acted like we’d never met before we met through Sandro. Or as if whether we had or hadn’t was of no relation to the present.

  Which gave it, the past, a kind of mystery I couldn’t unknot, a certain meaning. Because if it meant nothing, why could it not be acknowledged? Why did it have to be erased?

  * * *

  We huddled in front her, this slave girl I’d already heard so much about from Sandro. She was a carved marble relief in full body profile. Thick, ancient feet in typical Greek sandals and a draping garment that attached to one shoulder. Ronnie and Sandro took turns speaking about her in serious tones, their voices somehow precisely calibrated to the low lights of the deserted hall where she was displayed. What fascinated them was a pocket of real air that flowed into and around the girl’s mouth and the dove in her hand, the bird’s small beak raised toward the girl’s lips.

  Sandro pointed to the little recess between the bird and her mouth.

  “This is the only part of the relief that’s three-dimensional. So what about the rest of her? Its flatness holds her away from us. She doesn’t share our space. She’s from another world, lost forever. Only that promise of the kiss shares our space.”

  It was the kiss of life, he said, of energy, somehow activated and eternal, and I looked and wanted to feel that, the life breath of a dead slave that somehow bonded these two men to whom I was also bonded and in ways that didn’t feel exactly simple.

  Ronnie said he loved her because she was so . . . modern. She interfered, he said, with the fantasy she was there to create. Slipping between the two, like everything in life worth lingering over. Real and false at once.

  I stared at the private space between her lips and the bird she held. I looked at the cord around her neck, adornment of the most modest sort. Every aspect of her a modesty. All I could think was “This is a young slave.”

  Later, when I said this to Sandro, he told me not to feel bad about her. Think of all the anonymous slaves in history, he said. This one has been immortalized. She made her way through an unthinkable chasm of time. We are talking about her now, he said, and that in itself was a rare and special kind of emancipation.

  * * *

  I spent a lot of time with them looking at art. My tutors, Giddle said condescendingly. Your tutors are here, she’d say, as Ronnie and Sandro hopped on stools at the counter of the Trust E. They started going there and that was perhaps my influence, making the Trust E into a kind of destination.

  Giddle treated them with patient indifference. They ordered hamburgers and coffee, always the same thing, and she attended to them last, gave them lousy service. That was yet another thing I misread, Giddle’s indifference to them. I attributed it to her general feelings in regard to the art world—that part of it where people made art, sold the art, got in return money, fame, recognition. Success was highly overrated, according to Giddle. “Anyone can be a success,” she said. “It’s so much more interesting to not want that.”

  As I started to get to know Sandro and Ronnie and their friends, exactly the group of successful artists Giddle considered most compromised, I had her standards in my head. Not as my own standards, just a voice. The voice of a woman who said the three most cowardly acts were to exhibit ambition, to become famous, or to kill yourself.

  * * *

  By the time Sandro introduced me to Helen Hellenberger on Spring Street, just before I was set to depart for Reno to pick up the Moto Valera, that voice of Giddle’s, my first friend and New York influence, was as quiet as the trees above me. I wanted to make artworks and show them in a gallery. It was what I’d moved to New York to do.

  It was through our conversations that I ended up wanting to go to the salt flats, but Sandro had his own ideas about roads and speed and land. He’d written a proposal when he was young, to make paintings by the yard to be laid out over the entire length of the Autostrada del Sole, which connected the north and the south of Italy. Practical and industrial methods in service to something of no use. The autostrada was built by the government with funding and encouragement from the Valera Company. Sandro had a photo of his father and the Italian prime minister standing together to celebrate its inauguration in 1956. Its name, Autostrada del Sole, made it sound hopeful in a fascist kind of way. Anything “of the sun,” Sandro said, was code for fascism. “My family helped ruin Italy,” he said, “by building this superhighway, Milan to Bologna to Florence to Rome to Naples, but it made us rich.” Sandro said highways primed us for a separation from place, from actual life. The autostrada replaced life with road signs and place names. A white background and black lettering. MILANO. A reduction, Sandro said, to nothing but names.

  “No different than here,” I said. “You might as well deplore all highways.”

  He conceded it was true, but said America was supposed to be a place ruined and homogenized by highways, that that was its unique character, crass and vulgar sameness.

  “It’s your destiny,” he said, smiling, his eyes filling with cold light.

  “What’s your destiny?” I replied.

  “To become an American citizen, of course.”

  * * *

  Sandro had encouraged the general drift of what I was after, doing something in the landscape relating to speed and movement. But when Ronnie suggested that Sandro should come through for me—use his connections to get me a Moto Valera to ride—Sandro’s enthusiasm all but ceased.

  The only legitimate way to go to the Bonneville Salt Flats was to ride something truly fast, Ronnie said. “It has to be like she’s testing out a factory bike.”

  Sandro was annoyed at Ronnie. I quietly hoped Ronnie would keep pressing him. I wanted to do a project at Bonneville, but I needed a bike. I didn’t have the money to buy one, nor did I want to ask Sandro myself. I wasn’t sure if Ronnie was advocating for me out of some old affection or if it was about Sandro, ribbing him. A form of competition. Ronnie had Moto Valera calendars tacked up as a kind of joke, the girls with big breasts straddling gleaming machines, an upholstering of flesh over the entire back wall of his studio. He claimed it was in homage to Sandro, but it was also a kind of mockery, to flaunt imagery that Sandro wanted to forget. Or maybe it was a love of something that Sandro himself could not appreciate in such a dumb and direct way. Which wasn’t heckling, exactly, but something else, to fetishize elements of a friend’s life that the friend could not see—Sandro, who pretended to mispronounce Italian dishes on a restaurant menu. Twice I had heard Sandro tell someone he was Romanian when they asked where his accent was from. He felt that Italy was a backwater. He claimed he had almost no connection to it.

  When I told him I’d loved Florence, where I had spent my junior year of college,
he said, sure, as an American woman it’s fine. But try being an Italian woman. It’s a piggish and abhorrent culture. If a man rapes you but is willing to marry you, the charges are dropped. Rape was not even a criminal offense but merely a “moral” one. He read about the country’s financial woes, some directly relating to Valera, the way my cousins and uncle read the statistics of a baseball team they weren’t rooting for, a team they hoped would lose, reveling in scandals and injuries and poor performances. With Sandro, it was Italy applying for an IMF loan. Inflation, unemployment. Valera getting hit especially hard by the oil crisis. Suffering work stoppages. Sabotage. Wildcat strikes. Sandro claimed that his older brother, Roberto, who ran the tire company, was as unknown to him as any other asshole businessman.

  Italy was too provincial, Sandro said, too closed and familiar, almost preordained, for someone like him, from a family like his. He’d been in New York almost twenty years, so long that his Italianness seemed merely a way to be a unique New Yorker, as if he were more that, a New York artist with a faint accent, than he was Italian. His English was perfect, his friends, mostly American. Sandro had left Italy as soon as he could, refused the money that flowed from the faucets of his name, and worked at the Met alongside Ronnie, from whose name no money flowed, since Ronnie came from a working-class family and was estranged from them anyhow, having been separated in his childhood in some mysterious way you weren’t supposed to bring up. Apparently he had worked on boats, but he never spoke about it. When I asked Sandro, he was protective of Ronnie, shook his head mildly, changed the subject.

  He and Ronnie shared something in their longing to reinvent themselves as having no provenance, no Pickwick. I, on the other hand, was known to them as being distinctly and precisely a girl from Reno. I was the girl they expected things of. I was meant to find some way to use my origin in an interesting manner. Not like Smithson’s spoof of the “real authentic West Coast artist,” chrome-plating motorcycle parts and refusing to think. I was meant to form a concept that had rigor. I would listen to them, discussing me as if I weren’t present but as a joke, for my amusement. “The girl,” Sandro said. “You mean Reno,” Ronnie replied, as if in direct taunt of the past—see, I can summon it, that’s how little it means. What now, Reno?

  Speed Week, when they ran various cars and motorcycles over the salt, was happening in September.

  One June morning I woke up to hear Sandro speaking quickly in Italian to someone on the telephone. He’d arranged for me to have a Moto Valera.

  “You can thank your friend Ronnie,” he said.

  8. LIGHTS

  When I crashed, darkness folded around me like thick felt. I’ve been waiting all my life for it, was my thought. For this darkness, an absolute silence.

  But then underneath it, the strangest, most curious scene came into view.

  I saw glowing yellow spheres. They were moving in an elaborate formation, garlanding their way down a mountain face. It was almost dusk, and alpenglow was tinting the snow-filled glades to blush pink. Stands of evergreens marched up the deep folds between each glade in steep triangular formations. The lights swung over a high peak and down the mountain in zigzag, from one side of an open ski run to the other. As the run split into two runs divided by a rock face, the pills of light became two streams and then three, some going around a clump of trees in one direction, and others in the other direction, streams splitting and spilling in a slow waterfall, the slowness giving the sense that these lights were performers in some kind of show.

  Night was verging. A last, thin vein of daylight hovered over the jags of the mountain’s crest. Those lights pouring down over the front of the mountain were brighter now, as the alpenglow disappeared and the snow faded to the blue-pale of moonlight.

  They were skiers, I realized. The lights were affixed to ski poles, a search party descending over the high peak.

  The hollows on the mountain’s face where trees huddled in their dark vigil had gone black.

  When snow slides from an upper branch down the lowers in a great laddered weight-collecting sweep, it’s enough to kill a person.

  Now it was dark. A cloud was settling in, blotting the moon and cottoning the mountain in damp. I heard the distant beep of snowcats. They appeared through the mist with their huge rolling paws, golden eyes in binocular movement, crawling up the mountain in rows. Night workers, grooming. Above, strung in steep lines, were chairlifts, empty midair silhouettes with their exact and repeating angled geometry, still lifes on steel cable.

  I remember a leather ski glove being rubbed over my frozen face. The sound of rubbing, loud, but no sensation of it. Then I was on the stretcher with the emergency blanket over my ski clothes. They had to get me down a mogul field. The patroller snowplowed right over the mogul’s tops but shunted the stretcher into the groove between them. I closed my eyes as he picked his line. Slide, plant, pivot. Slide, plant, pivot.

  I had fallen into the marrow of some other, long-ago emergency. The sensation of movement continued, me in the toboggan, bumping and sliding over hard-packed snow as the patroller took me down the hill. But as we slid, I heard people around me undoing the straps, as though we had come to a stop. I heard a loud zip, and the cutting of thick fabric with scissors. The sliding had ceased but I didn’t know when. Maybe I had stopped sliding a long time ago.

  “It might not be broken,” someone said.

  My body hurt. My eyes were closed, but I’d fallen back into myself with a hard thud.

  I heard the rip and tear of engines.

  “Hey.”

  A hand nudging my shoulder.

  “Hey, can you hear me? You’ve had an accident.”

  There were faces above me, backlit in brightness.

  My left ankle throbbed, but I could move my fingers and toes. Two men helped me to the side, across the oil line that marked the edge of the course. Race officials picked up pieces of fiberglass bodywork. The beautiful teal fairing. I was mortified to see it cracked and pulverized on the salt, turned to sudden garbage.

  The gust, they said, shaking their heads. You can’t fight wind like that. Eighty miles an hour.

  But I blamed myself, watching them stack the motorcycle’s fiberglass parts, which looked like cracked insect hulls now, and place them in the bed of a pickup truck.

  Staticky communications surged from the race techs’ radios. An ambulance siren wailed toward us from the direction of the start.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Just a little bruised up.” I’d be charged a fortune just to get looked at. Once they get you in the ambulance, it’s too late.

  “We’re supposed to have you examined by the medics,” one of them said. “It’s standard procedure.”

  “I’m here with the Valera team.”

  * * *

  It seemed only partly a lie, and the part that was a lie was quickly replaced by truth, because an hour later I was propped on pillows in the Valera mess trailer, and one of the team technicians had gone off to gather my knapsack from the timing officials’ shack.

  “You can feel this?” Tonino, their team doctor, was tapping the pads of my toes with his fingers in soft Morse code. He held an ice pack to my ankle, gently moving my foot this way and that. The Valera mechanics had already claimed the motorcycle and the pile of destroyed bodywork that went with it, as if picking up the pieces of my accident were part of their job, or some kind of instinctual chivalry I’d triggered. La ragazza, they kept saying. Me, la ragazza.

  “I need to go back to the crash,” I told Tonino as I pulled my camera from the retrieved knapsack.

  “Don’t be stupid. You’re injured. You have a bad sprain,” he said. “You need to keep it elevated.”

  I explained I was here to take photographs. I stressed this with Tonino, and afterward with all the other Valera people. Not only because without their help, I wouldn’t be able to make it over there to take photographs, but because it made me feel like less of an impostor. The truth was I didn’t know all that much about land
speed trials, and crashing proved this. I had owned one motorcycle, and I always needed Scott and Andy’s help to maintain it, unless the task was to change a simple spark plug. There was a whole range of knowledge and experience I lacked, and to these people whose life was motorcycles, I said I wasn’t really a motorcyclist, but an artist. I’d come to photograph my tracks as an art project. Which was the opposite of how I’d presented myself to Stretch, as a girl into motorcycles and nothing more.

  Tonino felt sorry for me and convinced one of the team technicians to ride me over to the inspection area on a little put-put bike they had for running errands in the pits. With my camera over my shoulder, I rode sidesaddle to the racecourse. Because of my crash the long course was still closed. I took photos at the start, hobbling on my sprain. I was ashamed to see the timing association people, remembering how calm and kind they’d been, imparting crucial information about gusts to someone who could not, it turned out, use their warning to prevent a mishap. But I faced them to get my photographs. I could not go home empty-handed. The Valera tech rode me along the side of the course’s oil line. A truck was just ahead of us, dragging a metal grader, probably to repair the surface where I went down. When we arrived at the crash site, I saw that I’d broken through. What seemed like endless perfect white on white was only a very thin crust of salt. Where the crust had been broken by the force of impact, mud seeped up. I photographed all this, a Rorschach of my crash.

  For five nights I slept in the Valera trailer, on a daybed in the lounge area next to the kitchen. I was visited by Tonino, ate the spaghetti their team cook brought to me on a paper plate, and practiced the Italian I’d learned on my year abroad, studying in Florence, and had been too embarrassed to use with Sandro (in any case, Sandro was so disinterested in Italy that my competence would not have impressed him). Tonino was amused by the way I spoke, the idioms I’d picked up. He wanted to know how I’d learned to speak such Florentine Italian. Telling him about Florence brought everything back. The biker crowd I had hung around with, who rode Triumphs and emulated a kind of London rocker look, unwashed denim and pompadours, the girls with liquid eyeliner and nests of teased hair. I had managed to meet Italians who weren’t all that different from the people I’d grown up with in Reno. I didn’t blend well with the other Americans who were there to study art history. They were mostly from the East Coast, from a culture I didn’t understand, wealthy girls who seemed to be in Florence to shop for leather goods. We were all housed with local families, and somehow the others were put in rambling homes with maids and had the spacious rooms of children who were away at college. I was put in a walk-in closet with a family who owned a fruit stand near the train station. Every morning when I went to use the bathroom it was opaque with the husband’s rank cigarette smoke. At dinner, the wife served tiny portions of fried rabbit and eyed me suspiciously to be sure I didn’t serve myself seconds. When the wife had gone to bed, the husband got drunk and tried to engage me in conversation about the beauty of women’s asses. I began avoiding dinner with them and instead ate french fries and drank tap beer at a pool hall near the train station called the Blue Angel, which often had British motorcycles parked in front. I started hanging around with the bikers and their girlfriends instead of going to my classes at the exchange program in which I was enrolled. We’d stroll the flea market at Le Cascine, drink at bars that seemed identical to the Blue Angel, or I’d go to their apartments, where we smoked hash and listened to records, Faces and Mott the Hoople. I wasn’t learning much about Masaccio and Fra Angelico, but my Italian was good by the time I left.