The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  They would announce boarding at any moment. Going back to Italy would be the death of him, and he was ready for it. Eager, even. His own casket, like the one the factory workers carried for his father. He’d have to occupy a role, be his mother’s adored son now that her firstborn was gone.

  Probably that girl, Ronnie’s castoff, was relieved. He couldn’t have been much fun to be around. Moody. Quiet. Domineering. A winning combination. Her curious, catlike autonomy had reminded him in unpleasant ways of his imploded relationship. How badly he’d fucked everything up. The disastrous moment at the tire plant. Even if he had tried to explain himself, explain about Talia, apologize, fix everything, it wouldn’t have worked. He’d wrecked things, and maybe it was intentional, by letting his cousin take him back to the place he’d been so many times in his youth. She had been his lover and it was like going home. When were people not attracted to cousins? It had been his right to act on it when he was in his twenties, Talia sixteen, but such an old sixteen. He had tried to distance himself when she showed up in New York. Look, he said, I’m living with someone. And Talia had responded with raucous laughter. You think I want to live with you, Sandro? Don’t be an idiot. You’re my cousin, for fuck’s sake. He had managed to stay away. He told her no like you talk to a dog. No, he’d said firmly, and she had smiled, content in her knowledge that the firmness was for him, not for her, a firmness for his own benefit, a reminder of limits he was trying to impose.

  * * *

  The horror of that day, of having to be in the car with the novelist, that old faggot, not actually gay, so be it, who dared to place his hand on Sandro’s mother’s thigh and right in front of him. Sandro and Roberto and Talia in the back. Good God. Like children, sibling warfare all over again. Roberto ducking, convinced he was going to be gunned down in his mother’s Mercedes. Sandro had said, you’re being ridiculous. No one gives a shit about you, he wanted to say but didn’t. It would have justified Roberto’s fears, that no one cared much if he lived.

  Driving in through the gates. Valeras at Valera, and everything he had left Italy to escape was on offer for him. The only thing that wasn’t from that Milanese world was Talia. Because she had an English father and had gone to boarding school in the States, and spoke with a slight English accent that reminded him of a recording he’d once heard of the poet Sylvia Plath reading a short, cunning thing that began,

  First, are you our sort of person?

  The lilt of Sylvia Plath’s voice. A question she repeated that became the poem’s refrain, Will you marry it? intoned in a way that was gentle and severe and knowing. Will you marry it? He’d fused that stern, sexy voice with Talia’s, and this was later, after they’d already been lovers and the combination made her almost a part of him.

  How about this suit—

  Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.

  Will you marry it?

  It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof

  Against fire and bombs through the roof.

  Believe me, they’ll bury you in it.

  Talia became a thing he could not reject when it arrived periodically on offer. She talked like Sylvia Plath and looked a bit like her. And her pushy and insistent sexuality—he liked that, too. It became a habit he relied on. Her pale skin and moon face and the hair, black like an Ardito’s cockerel feathers. She didn’t offer the kind of wretched devotion Italian girls didn’t know better than to supply, they wanted to win your heart by adoring you, cooking you a meal, sleeping with you as maternal care. It was a nightmare. I don’t want maternal care. I can care for myself, and in New York he met these . . . viragos, who wanted servicing, like Stanley’s wife, and what a relief it was. A vacation from the self, to attend to their needs. Like Giddle, the so-called best friend, but a betrayer who barely had a self, who had a sociopathic freedom from any need for relating. He enjoyed that kind of thing. On occasion. Or rather, he let himself be enjoyed by these women who dictated. He needed a break from his devoted girlfriend, who submitted to his generosity and demanded so little. She was like a daughter. Young Reno. She was both innocent and ambitious and looked to Sandro for direction, and fine, but not all the time. Sometimes he just wanted to forget himself. Doesn’t everyone? Talia was something different, not like an American girl, either. Proof against fire and bombs through the roof. They went out together that afternoon at the factory for air, that was what she said, “for air.” And once outside, with no one around, she had taken the opportunity. Gone right for the zipper. Reached in with such forthright disregard that it made him sad for his sweet young girlfriend who did not know you just reach in and grab it and it’s not cheap or crass, it just is, a hand on a cock, that’s all it was and some women knew what to do, his own black-haired cousin among them. If young Reno, unlike his mean mother and cruel extended family, if she’d known to be rude on occasion, to just take, he might not have strayed. But that was a lie, too, because the truth was that he had liked her as she was, the way she had looked up at him so wide-eyed, searching for some sense of herself, a cue.

  He wasn’t worth looking up to. Talia understood this, Talia, who didn’t look to anyone for anything. She was unafraid. She didn’t need to please others. She didn’t love herself or anyone else. She knew better than that. She was an evolved human, a Shrapnel. And he understood it. He liked people who didn’t give a shit but you can’t surround yourself with that, it was only for sometimes. Like a day when he was exactly where he didn’t want to be, a Valera at Valera, and Talia had unzipped his trousers and put her hand on his cock and she, it, had promised escape.

  He wasn’t choosing to wreck his relationship. He couldn’t have known his American girlfriend would have found her way to the drab industrial outskirts of Milan, and be there at the factory, right there. How could he have? He never could have predicted her appearance. Just as she surely had no idea what it felt like to be him in that moment.

  He had hurt the person he did not hate. A person he might have loved. He didn’t want to say he loved her, because is that how you treat someone you love? He might have loved her. Leave it at that. Something that might have been but was not, that he could have sustained but didn’t.

  * * *

  His father had said to him, “As you get older, you tolerate less and less well women your own age.” “You mean you do,” Sandro had said. “Yes, I,” his father said. “That’s right. And I used to think it was because I’d escaped time and women didn’t. But that’s not the reason. It’s because I’m stunted. Many men are. If you are that kind of man when you grow up, Sandro, you’ll understand. You’ll go younger in order to tolerate yourself.”

  That’s what it was about, at the end of the day. His father was right. It’s what you can stand of yourself.

  He’d grown up to be at times an asshole, he supposed. And it was so much easier to call yourself that after you’d acted like one, rather than to trot out a lot of remorse and do all the work needed to distance yourself from the acts that defined you. In that way, he and Ronnie were perhaps not opposites but twins, or becoming so.

  He’d looked at her face, so sad and angry. And he had thought, I’m an asshole. Which was a kind of remorse, but not the kind with any hope in it.

  Maybe the way she had insinuated herself—by accident, he understood—with the company, staying with them in Utah, or Nevada, wherever it was, had not been much to his liking. And then the publicity tour, derailed, so be it. She’d disappeared, he didn’t know where. One of his mother’s employees, the groundskeeper, had gone off to look for her that day at the factory. He said he’d take her back to the villa in Bellagio, but he had not. Probably she’d insisted on going elsewhere. She and the groundskeeper had not been there when he returned. Sandro hung around the villa for a week, alone with the servants and the thump of giant moths against the windows at night. Where was she? She never came back. He telephoned Ronnie in New York, who told him Time magazine’s cover that week was a plate of spaghetti with a gun in it and the words “Visit Italy.” />
  * * *

  A boarding announcement for his flight. He stood up from his seat as the blanketing echo of many small conversations ricocheted around the high-ceilinged terminal, Trans World. A great white puff through which sailed both swallows and the underside of modernity. Even if the association was not direct. Because TWA was not Oscar Niemeyer but Saarinen. Still, its melted meringue lines told him Brasília equaled death, a nasty little message, private, from the terminal to Sandro.

  “Stupidest people on earth,” his father said of the rubber tappers in the Amazon, who made him rich, whose slavery paid for the stunning paean to modernism like the one he was in, the terminal. So dumb and uncivilized that they had weighted their souls with stones. An act whose grave sophistication still impressed Sandro. It suggested they understood what was at stake, how fragile presence, true and felt and lived presence, really was.

  Sandro and M, his Argentine friend, once had a long conversation about culture and violence. He should call M, he thought. M would understand the position Sandro was in and what happened to his brother. But why have that kind of conversation? While waiting around the villa that week she never returned, he had seen the images in the newspaper of the demonstrations, the tanks in Bologna, the masses of people in Rome, human foam filling the Piazza Esedra, and he felt nothing. Or rather, he did feel something. A reminder that he was born on the wrong side of things. The anger and radical acts of the young people in Rome were a kind of electricity, an act and a refusal and a beauty, something Italian that was, for once, magnificent. But it was against him as long as he occupied his role as a Valera. It was against him and he had no right to take part.

  * * *

  After that week alone at the villa, he had returned to New York. Resumed his life, but single. Then Roberto was kidnapped, and Ronnie’s castoff had somehow been around in all the right moments, one of those women who had a skill for that, good timing. Ronnie had hurt her and made her cry and was grateful not to have her following him around anymore. Then suddenly Roberto was dead. And his mother caught him and called him out. You don’t love them.

  Now Sandro was going back to Italy alone. The flight was boarding.

  He was in his window seat, ready for the strange, intermittent sleep he’d have on a jet whistling through the night. Hurtled along in a dark sky, so many thousands of feet up that the Earth was an abstraction, a nothing. The periodic waking—no place, no place, no place, and then the approach, Heathrow. He took off his blazer, the one jacket he owned, rolled it up and placed his cheek against it. Looked out the window, tried to ignore a passing memory, Ronnie’s comment that airplane windows were toilet seats, they were the same shape, which had led, at the time, to a declaration that the Guggenheim looked like a toilet and everyone knew it but was afraid to say. I won’t hang my work in a toilet, Ronnie had said, and it was that attitude that would get him a show there eventually, Sandro knew.

  They were on the runway, in line for takeoff. He pressed his forehead to the glass, the plastic, whatever it was, and looked out at those melancholic yellow signs, glowing and numbered, that indicated runways.

  The sad yellow signs clicked off. They were gone, all at once, lost to darkness. The entire disorganized smattering of runway lights was off. Also, the lights from the terminal. And the ones that had flashed in an arc from the control tower.

  Everything was off, everything dark. The lights on the plane were on, but it was a plane in a sea of black.

  The airport had lost power. They would wait until it came back on. There was no telling, the cabin attendant said. It could be just a few moments. Please be patient. And everyone was. The plane wasn’t hurtling yet, but it was already in the no place they had to pass through to get to where they were going.

  20. HER VELOCITY

  Le Alpi,” he’d said when the subject of skiing came up.

  He’d asked if I liked the mountains and I said sure, that I used to ski-race, and he nodded in his grave way like he nodded gravely at everything and I said, “Do you?”

  “What?” he said.

  “Do you ski?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Le Alpi, he’d said. We’ll go together.

  I hadn’t known he was serious. That he meant sometime soon.

  We’ll go to the Alps.

  * * *

  Maybe Gianni himself hadn’t known what he meant. Hadn’t known it would be later that same day, when I’d been snagged on the wrong side of some kind of argument, and Bene had all but forced me to stick with Gianni in an obscure divide between them, between him and Bene.

  But he must have known. Because he told me to bring my passport before we left the apartment. I always carried it anyhow. The carabinieri loved to stop me for some reason and you were expected as an American to have it on you even if you were just out for a quick walk.

  It wasn’t at all like Bene seemed to think. She had practically steered me into his arms but nothing had ensued. It was all extremely proper and in that I almost, for a moment, wondered why, simply because anything else was so foreclosed by Gianni. He dictated what our association was and it was proper and stayed that way. Just as when he had taken me from the tire factory parking lot, me in tears, the rain pouring, and hadn’t looked at me, said little, I felt from him only privacy and respect.

  We were at the trattoria downstairs, where they often ate, that group. The owner is a comrade, they all said.

  I was nervous about running into Bene. Maybe it was not a bad idea to go, as he said, to the Alps. Go somewhere.

  We saw Durutti just outside the trattoria.

  “It’s time,” Durutti told Gianni.

  It was evening, already dusk, a flat violet-colored light descending over the ugly buildings of San Lorenzo, with their hatchwork of TV antennas.

  Accompanied by Durutti, we got into Gianni’s white Fiat for the second time that day and drove to a bourgeois district that was unfamiliar to me.

  We were in a large and beautiful apartment, bookshelves to the ceiling along every wall, glass windows that were double-paned so you didn’t hear any traffic, just the creak of the rambling apartment’s old wood floors, the papers on a desk stirred to rustle by a ceiling fan. The man who’d led us in seemed like a professor type, wire-rimmed glasses, gray hair and sideburns, a certain way of rubbing his cheeks before he spoke.

  Durutti said Gianni needed to disappear. The man took Gianni into another room. The door, as soundproofed as the windows, it seemed, was shut behind them.

  Durutti had a nervous energy, like a young boy who has been asked to sit but is not physically capable of maintaining that kind of stillness. He bobbed his knee up and down. Whistled. Picked a book up off the coffee table as if he had never read one before, looked at the cover, looked at the back, whirred the pages under his thumb like it was a flipbook, and then set it back down.

  He looked at me. “It’s mostly just sitting around,” he said.

  What is, I asked.

  “The life,” he said. “Being underground.”

  We sat quietly.

  “And trying to stay invisible. Seen, but not noticed. Gianni is visible now, so it’s a good thing he’s got you.”

  “Me,” I said.

  “I wish I had cover like that. The wife of a Crespi, say. They own the newspapers. Shit. If you want to get things done, you have to find a way to get the police off your back.”

  He took a lighter from his pocket and began flicking it lit, flicking it lit, flicking it lit. Then he burned his thumb, because the metal flint wheel had gotten too hot.

  “Actually, no. You know what this life mostly is? Not Gianni’s,” he said, “but mine. Gianni is some other thing, no one knows what, really. The rest of us play pinball. A lot of it. Too much. You get very good. It’s insane how good we get at pinball. Racking up eight hundred thousand, nine hundred thousand points. And if you’re top score at the bar on the Volsci, you get to put your name up on the side of the machine. But we can’t put up our names. So all the to
p scorers, the list there, are made up. None of those people exist.”

  He was bobbing his knee and looking at me as if I were meant to respond.

  “But Gianni doesn’t play,” I said.

  “No, no,” he said, shaking his head. “Gianni is more like, ah, more like this: Turn the pinball machine on its side. Produce from nowhere, by magic, a bit of plastic explosive. Also by magic, from nowhere, a roll of duct tape. Wire. A timer. And—”

  He looked up and began to whistle his tune again. Gianni and the gray-haired professor were emerging from the other room. Durutti sewed his knee up and down, not nervously, just spastically. Maybe he was eighteen. Maybe he was sixteen. Suddenly I couldn’t tell. I’d lost the ability to know who was a child and who was an adult.

  Gianni, though. Gianni was an adult.

  The man went to a drawer and began to retrieve things.

  “Even if you’re a novice,” he said to Gianni, “you just push along. And watch out for cliffs.” He smiled. “I joke, but you must be very careful about crevasses. And there are seracs, which will be starting to shift and melt since it’s now late March. Don’t stand under one, in other words.”

  He had maps that he spread on a table. He showed Gianni and Durutti how Gianni should go. The man was calm but serious, tracing a line over the map with a pencil.