The Flamethrowers

by Rachel Kushner

Through the familiar orbit east of Reno, the brothels and wrecking yards, the big puffing power plant and its cat’s cradle of coils and springs and fencing, an occasional freight train and the meandering and summer-shallow Truckee River, railroad tracks and river escorting me to Fernley, where they both cut north.

I come from reckless, unsentimental people.

pretending as they waited that time had no value and what a lie. A lie they didn’t mind. They were on the clock, being paid to forsake time’s value by standing under the sun like they had all day.

On that day, nothing could have seemed more romantic to me, no other scenario more like real courtship, than a Chinese movie and a hand job under a coat.

The woman senses that time is more purely hers if she squanders it and keeps it empty, holds it, feels it pass by, and resists filling it with anything that might put some too-useful dent in its open, airy emptiness.

What happens between bodies during an insurrection is more interesting than the insurrection itself.

and it is easier to like difficult people when they are leaving, or already gone.

Giddle showed up. She and Burdmoore were no longer together. He was too sincere, she said. It had started to drive her nuts. He always wanted to get to the bottom of things. Get to the heart of things.

“The three passions,” Stanley had said to me that morning, “are love, hate, and ignorance. Ignorance is the strongest.”

“To show you the uselessness of the truth,” he said.

You couldn’t hate someone who saw the world so differently.