Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

* * *

“This is my wife,” the nasal man in elegant clothes said as I sat down next to them at the bar. “Nadine.”

He said it again. “Nay- deeen, ” and looked searchingly at her.

She ignored him, as if she were used to this audible pondering of her Nadine-ness in bars, for the benefit of strangers.

“We were at a wedding,” Nadine said, turning to me. “They asked us to leave. They asked Thurman to leave, I mean. But I don’t like weddings anyway? They make my face hurt?”

That was how she spoke.

“Why did they want you to leave?” I asked, but I could sense why. Something about their presence in an empty bar many levels below what the man’s clothes might suggest.

“Because Thurman lay down in the grass?” Nadine said. “He started taking pictures of the sky. Just blue sky, instead of the bride and groom. He’d had a few too—”

“I did not have a few too . I was looking for something decent to photograph. Something worth keeping. For posterity.”

“Oh, posterity,” Nadine said. “Sure. Great. If you can afford it. You could have just told Lester you didn’t want to be the picture taker.”

There was a camera sitting in front of him on the bar, an expensive-looking Leica.

“You’re a photographer?” I asked him.

“Nope.” He smiled, revealing a tar stain between his two front teeth.

“But the camera—” I couldn’t think of how to say it. You have a camera but you aren’t a photographer. I sensed he would only keep meandering away, like something you are trying to catch that continually evades your grasp.

“Better to say yes,” Thurman said, “and then disappoint people. I mean really let them down.”

“Lord knows you’re good at that,” Nadine said in a quiet voice.

“I’m talking about building a reputation.”

“So am I,” she said.

“All I want,” Thurman said, “is for people to stop asking me to come to their weddings. And funerals.”

“I don’t mind funerals?” Nadine said. “Except when they buried my daddy in a purple casket. That was awful.” She turned to me. “Thurman knew my daddy? Daddy was a mentor to him? A teacher?”

“A mentor,” I repeated, hoping this might lead somewhere, to some explanation of who she and Thurman were. Because they were someone or something, I was sure of it.

“Well, my daddy was a, I guess you could say pimp. Pimp is acceptable — I mean now that he’s dead. And you know what? People don’t say procurer anymore.”

I thought of the narrow wing tips in tropical bird colors. Who knew what was true.

“And my mother was a whore, so they got along perfect.”

Probably nothing was true, but I liked the challenge of trying to talk to them. I had spoken to so few people since arriving that it felt logical to interact in this manner. It was direct and also evasive, each in a way that made sense to me.

“May he rest in peace,” Thurman said. “A gentleman. I wanted to ask him for your hand in marriage. You were fourteen and goddamn. I wanted to just marry the pants off you.” He grinned and showed the ugly stain on his teeth. “But then there was no point. It wasn’t marrying to get in your pants, since you were allowing it. Not with me. That motherfucker you did marry, later on.”

Nadine frowned. “Do you want a purple casket, Thurman? Because Blossom might have one all picked out for you. With a copper millennial vault, to preserve your—”

He got up, walked to the end of the bar, and aimed his camera at a sign above the register. SORRY, NO CREDIT.

Three or four drinks in, still they hadn’t asked me anything. But what interesting thing did I have to tell? I was content to listen to their stream of half reports on people I’d never heard of, stories I could not follow, one about a baby named Kotch. “This lady was nursing him,” Nadine said, “and then another lady and you begin to think, wait a minute, whose baby is Kotch? I don’t know who was his mother and who was a wet nurse—”

“I’ll make you a wet nurse, ” Thurman said as he grabbed Nadine and put his hand between her legs. She twisted away and then she was prattling about a McDonald’s she once went to in Mexico. I had been in a McDonald’s commercial when I was in high school, and I thought, as Nadine spoke, that it might be a story I could share with them.

“McDonald’s is supposed to be the same everywhere, right? Well, not in Mexico. They Mexicanize it. Hamburguesa con chile . No fries— fri-jol-es . I was with my ex. We were starving and I was ready to eat beans. We’re at the counter and find out we have no money. He had lost his wallet.”

She went on about this ex, the revolution he had been fomenting that never took place and had led to their harsh and vagrant life in the mountains of northern Mexico, the hole in his pocket that his wallet wriggled through, leading to his inability to provide for her the most fundamental thing — a McDonald’s hamburger. That was how she put it, that he couldn’t provide even a hamburger . After which she left him and went to Hollywood, where the nightmare really began, a series of episodes and hard luck that involved rape, prostitution, and an addiction to Freon, the gas from the cooling element in refrigerators.

“What you get,” Thurman said when she was finally finished, “for marrying a motherfucker.”

“I don’t want to talk about him. And stop calling him that, would you?”

“You brought him up.”

“Only to tell her about the Mexican McDonald’s.”

“I was in a McDonald’s commercial,” I said.

“Oh, you’re an actress!”

“No, I just did the one thing, I was sixteen and it was just something, an ad our coach answered and—”

“Thurman, she’s an actress.”

“Well, I… we did act, I guess. But that’s not… they needed a girl who could ski, and so I—”

“You’re an actress and a skier! I never meet anyone who skis.”

“Do you ski?” I asked, only vaguely hopeful.

“Do I ski. No, honey.”

The commercial’s director and crew had come to Mount Rose, where we trained. They talked to our coach and ended up choosing me and a racer named Lisa, a quiet girl no one really knew. There was a long day of takes and retakes. They wanted two girls with hair flying, snow bunnies on a brisk, sunny afternoon. A week later they flew us both to Los Angeles, to a strange McDonald’s in the City of Industry where they only filmed commercials. It looked like a regular McDonald’s, with cashiers in paper hats, a menu board, the plastic bench tables where Lisa and I sat across from each other and smiled as if we were friends although we weren’t, each of us holding a hamburger in our fingers with hot lights on us, in this fake restaurant that looked real except they didn’t serve customers. I tried to explain this to Nadine, but she kept interrupting me.

When we finished shooting the ad, I flew home to Reno. Lisa was supposed to be on the flight but she wasn’t. She was eighteen, an adult, and I didn’t wonder. She had apparently gone to a bar near the fake McDonald’s in the City of Industry. No one ever heard from her again.

“Freaky,” Nadine said. “There’s no telling. Once I met the serial killer Ted Bundy. Can you believe it? He was real handsome. Real smooth. I was on a beach and here comes this hunky college guy. I was this close to ending up like the gal in that commercial with you.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that Lisa had been murdered. I assumed she’d been impatient to meet her future and had just fled into it and never bothered to let anyone know where she was and what she was doing. The representative who paid me could not track her down. He called to ask if I knew anything and I’d said no.