Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

“Keep looking,” Thurman said.

“Ha-ha. Right. But you would never be tempted to chrome a.44 Magnum, Thurm. That’s strictly for rednecks and off-duty cops. My point is that compared to the humble little folks-wagon, the GM seems guiltier, more dissolute, and yet there’s no genocide or forced labor camps under this leather upholstery. Just cotton-wool batting. Itself, unlike the beautiful car, not built to last. But these days, only people in the ghetto think it’s uptown to drive a Cadillac. In fact, only people in the ghetto think in terms of uptown and downtown. Are you aware there’s an oil crisis? I don’t even drive my Bug anymore, with the price of gas,” the friend said. “I got my little Harley.”

“I ride motorcycles,” I said. “I mean I used to, but I sold mine.”

He looked at me. I was seated sideways on his lap.

“You do have a kind of tomboy allure, I might call it. Yeah.”

Okay, I told myself. Something is starting to happen.

“What kind?”

“What?” I asked.

“What kind of bike did you ride?”

“Oh, a Moto Valera.”

“See? This fits in with my general thesis. It just so happens I know one of them, though he’s not involved with the company. I like to rib him about those calendars they print. They pretend this name, Valera, is about firm Italian tits and desmodromic valves, but actually, they used Polish slave labor to make killing machines for the Nazis. Perhaps not specifically. Not exactly. But they used some kind of X to make a Y; fill in your human cost and slick modern contraption of choice.”

“Mine was a ’65,” I said. “Way after the war.”

“Which makes it innocent,” he said. “Just like you.” He touched his hand to my cheek, quick and glancing. “You don’t have it anymore? The Moto Valera?”

“I sold it to move here.”

“X for Y.”

He had placed his hand on my waist, and I felt heat issue from it, and with that heat, something else, something sincere flowing from him to me, a message or meaning that was different in tone from the way he spoke.

I turned toward him.

“Do you want to know something funny?” I said quietly, not wanting Nadine and Thurman to hear.

“Yes,” he whispered back, and moved his hand from my waist to my leg. There wasn’t really any other place for him to put it in that crowded backseat. And yet I read the gesture of his hand on my leg as exactly that. A man’s hand on a woman’s leg, and not a hand that had no other place to rest itself.

“I don’t remember your name,” I whispered.

“That is funny,” he whispered back.

* * *

It seemed we’d been driving for quite a while, the teenage chauffeur working the wheel smoothly, readjusting the comb that was wedged in his Afro like a knife in a cake, as if he’d trained his whole life to drive an enormous Cadillac and retouch his hair simultaneously, and in white gloves whose fingers sagged at the tips, too large for his young hands. We must have been traveling in circles. Only later did I realize we were on Twenty-Third Street in Chelsea, just a few blocks north of where we’d started.

We carried our drinks into a crowded bar, a Spanish place on the ground floor of a hotel, full of color and noise and people they knew. A man called Duke, with root beer — colored chandelier lusters hooked onto his shirt, came rushing toward us. He said the lusters were from the Hotel Earle.

“You’re the Duke of Earle,” Nadine said.

“I’m the Duke of Earle,” he said, and shimmied his crystals.

People crowded around them to say hello. I had the sudden feeling they would shed me. I was a stranger they had picked up in an empty bar, and I was irrelevant now that they’d found their place in a familiar scene. I scanned the faces, wondering if this were the sort of place I might find Chris Kelly. I wasn’t completely sure I’d recognize him. Pale skin, dark hair over one eye. This might be a place he’d go to. I asked Thurman and Nadine’s friend if he knew an artist named Chris Kelly. “Who?” he said, cupping his ear. I repeated the name. “Oh, right,” he said. “Sure, Chris.”

“You know him? He’s from Reno. I’ve been trying to find him.”

“Chris the artist, right?”

It took me a moment to realize he was joking. As I did, I felt that he and his friends were unraveling any sense of order I was trying to build in my new life, and yet, strangely, I also felt that he and his friends were possibly my only chance to ravel my new life into something.

He steered us to an empty booth. I slid in next to him. The Duke of Earle joined us. We ordered drinks and the friend punched in selections on the remote jukebox console. Roy Orbison’s voice entered the room like a floating silk ribbon.

“My mother had his records,” I said to the friend.

“Your mother had good taste, Reno. That voice. And the hair. Black as melted-down record vinyl.”

Someone passed the duke a big bottle of soap solution, and he and Nadine took turns dragging on their cigarettes and then blowing huge, organ-shaped bubbles. The bubbles were filled with milk-white smoke from their cigarettes, quivering and luminous, floating downward as Thurman photographed them. The next table over wanted the soap. The duke blew one final bubble of plain lung air. It was clear and shiny, and everyone watched it as it drifted and sank, popping to nothing on the edge of our table.

“You chose this, didn’t you,” Thurman said to their friend as a new song came on.

It was “Green Onions” by Booker T. and the M.G.’s.

“It’s still a good song,” the friend said. “Even if it was stuck in my head for almost a decade.” He turned to me and said he’d been in jail. Not a decade, just thirty days.

I asked what for. He said for transporting a woman across state lines, and Nadine erupted in laughter. I smiled but had no sense of the coordinates, of what was funny and why.

“The Mann Act,” he said. “ Impure intent : what is impure intent? I did some time. And then I was free but my head was jailed in this song, so it was like I did a lot more time.”

He hummed along with “Green Onions,” nodding his head.

“At first, it wasn’t so bad. ‘Green Onions’ was this special secret. Something I was hiding, like a pizza cutter up my sleeve. I was pulling one over on them, jamming out to ‘Green Onions’ while my fellow inmates were getting their cold shower, eating their pimento loaf, reading letters from women who wanted husbands on a short leash. A really short leash. The men wrote back to these lonely women and did push-ups and waited for the women to come a-courting on visitors day, with their fried chickens and their plucked eyebrows.”

He had helped the other inmates write their letters to the women. “ Reach out to your loved ones, 39 cents, a sign in the common room said. You got an envelope, paper, and a stamp. These guys would be working away with a little pencil like they give you for writing down call numbers at the public library. ‘How do you spell pussy ?’ they’d ask. ‘How do you spell breasts ?’ ‘Does penis have an i in it?’ ”

“What was the pizza cutter for?” Nadine asked.

“For cutting pizza, sweet Nadine.” He gave her a puppy-dog smile.

“When I got out, I thought, okay, unlike a lot of my friends, I know what the inside of a prison is like. Most people don’t even know what the outside of a prison is like. They’re kept so out of sight. You only know signs on the highway warning you in certain areas not to pick up hitchers. While I know about confinement and boredom and midnight fire drills. Amplified orders banging around the prison yard like the evening prayer call from the mosques along Atlantic Avenue. I know pimento loaf. Powdered eggs. Riots. The experience of being hosed down with bleach and disinfectant like a garbage can. I know about an erotics of necessity.”