The Flamethrowers

by Rachel Kushner

He gave us each that same smile, the children and adults who lined up at Harrah’s. We weren’t individuals but a surface he moved over, smiling and remote.

Thurman was laughing. I understood she was his airy nonsense-maker, a bubble machine, and occasionally he would be in the mood for that.

What had he meant? No one cared. They cheered.

Valera spent his time designing his cycle and made plans to open a factory with his father’s backing. The others went to the track to race their cycles but less and less often, as they were too busy writing poems about motorcycle racing, busy making paintings of the velocity they’d felt. None was interested in generating actual speed:

Love is awful. It ruins every normal thing, everything but itself. It makes you crazy and for nothing, because it’s so disappointing. But good luck with that.

The future, for Sandro, was a place, and one that he was capable of guiding himself to.

“The problem with the bruises is they make you not anonymous,” Eric chimed in. “You’re not supposed to evoke real life. Just the hermetic world of a smiling woman holding the color chart.” “Yeah. Anonymous. Friendly. Comely. Various -ly

They really did look like photos of outer space, but knowing they were his oven, the inky background and blurs of light made me think of Sylvia Plath more than of the universe.

We saw a future of people singing and dancing, making love and masturbating in the streets. No shame. Nothing to hide. Everyone sleeping in one big bed, men, women, daughters, dogs.

Sandro and Ronnie speculated on whether you could love pornography simply as a cinephile, and on the unit of the quarter, because everything here was twenty-five cents. A quarter to peek through a quarter-size hole. Ronnie said the peep show was based on the Advent calendar. That it was a Christian tradition, this kind of looking, opening a window onto Jerusalem, a peek at the manger for each day of December.

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them.

Her laughter penetrating his fake sincerity like carbonation.

Fah-Q and Burdmoore crossed streams of urine over the body of the singer, and Burdmoore knew that brotherly pacts ended badly. But he was in it to the end. He was ready for badly.

“He’s complicated,” Sandro said. “You have to listen closely. He’ll say something perfectly true and it’s meaningless. Then he makes something up, but it has value. He’s telling you something.

He looked at her in an almost tender way but did not remove the hat. He took a deep breath. I could feel it, the gearing up for a lecture. Stanley was so right about old men. Sandro and I joked about it. “What are you going to do,” Sandro asked me, “when I get to that stage when I won’t shut up?

Sandro said he couldn’t understand how his mother tolerated this ridiculous man in any capacity. I understood that she did tolerate him, and even why. She was lonely, and his ridiculousness was a form of vitality. It brought something to her life. In any case, many men were that way, but I couldn’t tell Sandro that men were ridiculous, and since his mother was not a lesbian they were her only option.

The guard, a former paratrooper in stiff, tight jeans, stood around smoking brown cigarettes and alternately touching his mustache and adjusting his balls in the tight jeans. Talia made fun of him, pretending to touch her own mustache, adjust her own balls. “He bleaches the crotch area of those jeans,” she said, “to give it a bulkier look.

It was just the two of us and before he began to speak, I felt a sudden tenderness for him and the burden he bore, of being trapped in his own long-winded narcissism, a burning need for others to listen. But this moment of unexpected tolerance may have bloomed in me because they were all finally scheduled to depart the next day, and it is easier to like difficult people when they are leaving, or already gone.

Fools love to declare that they don’t suffer fools.

I’d met him the previous September and now it was late April, almost May, and he had been reinvented. This happened in New York, and you could never point to the precise turn of events, the moment when the change in human currency took place, when it surged upward or plummeted. There was only the before and the after. In the after, no one was allowed to say, hey, remember when everyone rolled their eyes about John Dogg? Shunned him, thought he was an idiot? I understood all this now. Sandro disapproved of that kind of ambition, said there was no hurry, but it was a lie, a thing successful people said, having conveniently forgotten that they themselves had been in a rush.

Once you wedge the door open, push as much of yourself through as possible.

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.

Sandro understood that people only tended to allow their own contradictions, and not those of others.

Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.

That’s what artists are, his father said, those who are useless for anything else. That might seem like an insult, he said, but it wasn’t, and someday Sandro would understand. Each child was unique, and destined for something different, so why should they be treated the same?

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.