Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

To the north! Lonzi shouted, raising his mangled, plastered hand. To progress! he added, which is always right. It may be a traitor, thief, murderer, or arsonist, but it is always right.

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

* * *

They returned en masse, Valera, too, who vowed privately to out-Pope Pope, whoever he was, the American who had designed Valera’s bike, whose name meant “pope” in English, and Valera found this wonderfully funny, that some guy in America had the name Pope. He, Valera, would design the fastest, most unique and elegant motorcycle yet, and his father had pledged the money to put it into production if his prototype was a success.

Milan was the same city Valera had experienced as a boy arriving from Egypt, but now the trams and their intricate overhead wires seemed beautiful. Neon was electric jewelry on the lithe body of the city, and he and the little gang were the marauders of this body. They zoomed over it, their engines roaring, their horns ricocheting against the high buildings along narrow lanes. The city was theirs, with all its metal and glass and auto traffic, its cranes and diggers and smokestacks. Lonzi talked of a future in which the city would be built to the size and scale of machines and not of men. Houses would be razed to make way for car racing and airplanes. Speed, Lonzi said, gives us, at last, divinity in the form of the straight line. We reject sluggish rivers and zigzagging humans and their flophouse designs! Lonzi said harebrained things about straightening the rivers of Europe, the Rhine, the Danube, the Po. The gang joined a racing club at a track on the wooded outskirts of Milan. They argued over the exact terms for the sensation of cornering, their motorcycles feeling as if they would split in two, accelerating out of turns as speed come to life, a violent but controlled surplus of itself. This was the difference between Valera and his gang. Valera was the only one with the training to conceptualize speed. The only one who truly appreciated the fine lubricated violence of an internal combustion engine, as he understood precisely how one worked. 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: of putting a motor together, clamping it to a frame, filling its tank with gas, and riding the thing. Lonzi and the others scribbled poems that made the sounds of guns, while Valera was busy designing cycle mounts for actual guns. He himself never wanted to enlist in war again. But he saw money in designing the machines for it.

Valera still pictured Marie on the back of that beastly crude bike built by Hildebrand & Wolfmüller of München. He had recovered from his youthful lust, her rabbit’s foot foot, his haversack keepsake. He was thirty-two years old and had experienced many other women by now, mostly for hire but some for free, and he couldn’t have cared less about Marie, understanding that she was, in any case, surely no longer the person he’d desired. Not burgeoning youth. Probably she’s squeezing out children, he thought, her big breasts heavy with milk. While I am changed only for the better. And still a lover of girls. Ready for Marie’s daughter, soon enough. Women were trapped in time. This was why men had to keep going younger. Marie’s daughter, or someone else’s. Because men, Valera understood, moved at a different velocity. And once they felt this, their velocity, all they had to do was release themselves from the artifice of time. Break free of it to see that it had never held them to begin with.

A month after the night I met the people with the gun and gave one of them my stolen Borsalino, I answered Marvin and Eric’s ad in the Village Voice . I wasn’t planning to. It had sounded so odd I’d read it out loud to Giddle, who was behind the counter at the Trust E.

YOUR FACE AS UNIVERSAL STANDARD Young, good posture, good grooming, with rudimentary film knowledge, able to follow directions please apply.

“You do have nice skin,” Giddle said, looking at me in an assessing way that made me blush.

“But what is it?”

“Modeling of some kind is my guess,” Giddle said.

“You don’t think it’s nude, do you?”

“Would you have a problem with that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you shouldn’t,” she said. “All kinds of things can happen in people’s lives. You can’t predict and you might as well keep your options open.”

She went to take someone’s order.

“Oh, cheer up,” she said when she returned. “I was kidding. I don’t think they want you to pose nude. That’s a legitimate film lab. I’ve heard of it.”

Giddle offered to help with the good grooming part, and although it was a little condescending of her to presume I needed that sort of help, I was eager for friendship, and it was a next step. She came to my apartment bearing hot rollers, a hair dryer, and a small red vinyl suitcase filled with makeup. We had mostly been on either side of a counter from each other, and suddenly she was leaning over me, so close I could smell her perfume, cucumber oil that rubbed off on me and infused the whole experience of applying for the job with her smell. She separated portions of my hair with a fine-toothed comb and then rolled each section onto a hot roller and secured it with a metal clip. It felt ticklish and a little erotic to have her touching my scalp with the plastic teeth of her comb. But I think she forgot about me as she was doing this, lost deep in the act of transforming hair. Never mind whose hair, for what purpose. I ended up with a kind of beehive, all the stray hairs plastered like icing around the shape of the hive with aerosol spray. It wasn’t clear why I needed a beehive to apply for a job at a film lab, but that’s how it was with Giddle. She got lost in what she was doing, and practical questions were beside the point and in the wrong spirit.

“You look so gay!” Giddle said when she’d finished my makeup and the final adjustments of my hair. In the word gay I suddenly saw Catherine Deneuve’s bright-colored raincoats and matching little dresses, her sad songs and delicate joy in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg .

“I’m gay!” I said back. “Oh, so gay!” And I flew through my tiny apartment like a young girl in a French movie running to meet her lover and accidentally broke a cup. I paused to look in the mirror at the new, gay me. Giddle rushed in and drew a beauty mark near my mouth, painted more gloss on my lips with a brush, and blotted my face with a powder puff the size of a rat terrier.

“Rice powder,” she said, “just a dusting.”

It gave my skin a kind of moon glow, and my lips seemed redder. We looked at me in the mirror. Something had changed in my face, or in what I saw there. It wasn’t that I was prettier, exactly. It was that the whole charade of getting me ready to be looked at by whoever had placed that ad had exposed me to something. In myself. I looked at me as if I were someone else looking at me, and this gave me a weightless feeling, a buoy of nervous energy. I wanted to be looked at. I hadn’t realized until now. I wanted to be looked at. By men. By strangers. Giddle must have known.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Your chin cleft is showing — look, it’s so prominent!”

I had never noticed I had a chin cleft, prominent or not.