The Flamethrowers

by Rachel Kushner

have Rosalynn Carter with her glassy voice and her big blunt friendly face, glowing with charity. It was Pat who moved me. People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You’re driven to love them. People who want their love easy don’t really want love.

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

push too hard, you can bend the hands of the clock.” There were tacit rules with these people, and all the people like them I later met: You weren’t supposed to ask basic questions. “What do you do?” “Where are you from?” “What kind of art do you make?” Because I understood he was an artist, but you weren’t allowed to ask that. Not even “What is your name?” You pretended you knew, or didn’t need to know. Asking an obvious question, even if there were no obvious answer, was a way of indicating to them that they should jettison you as soon

in February and wanted to leave right after. The tour with the Valera team was supposed to begin in March. We could use his mother’s country place as a base. I would go to Monza

about Didi, but then Sandro and Talia pulled up. They emerged from Sandro’s mother’s Mercedes with a burst of energy vibrating between them, Talia’s hoarse voice, a conspirator’s laugh. She was tearing off small pieces of a long baguette wrapped in brown paper and throwing each piece underhand