Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

“If we could get in,” Sandro said, “we could see about illicit use.”

It was cold, the light waning. I wanted to be someplace warm, and I resented this presumption that I would be willing. I saw how easy everything was for Sandro. I felt it, all at once. That he simply found a girl he liked and incorporated her. And because I was attracted to him, his charisma, his looks, and his knowledge, if I didn’t form an attachment it would be my loss.

We walked down West Street and viewed the building from the side, water slapping up against the pilings.

Sandro said the police tried to arrest Matta-Clark for the cuts he’d made, so Matta-Clark had fled the country, gone to Milan. There he found a recently closed Valera factory and sawed holes in the building, had an illegal show inside. Invited young kids to turn it into a squat. Sandro laughed as he told me about this.

“You don’t care?” I asked. “He’s squatting something that belongs to you?”

“Does it belong to me?” he asked. “More like I belong to it . I think it’s great,” he said, “that’s all it means to me. I think it’s great.”

We walked along the water, buffeted by wind, an occasional glass beer bottle rolling past like an escapee. Sandro bent to pick up a piece of paper, wet from the rain, a torn page from a magazine, an image of a picnicking couple, an advertisement for something but it wasn’t clear what. He’d give it to his friend Ronnie, he said, and carried the page between two fingers as we walked, absentmindedly waving it dry. Sandro liked to collect images and messages from the sidewalk. Some he gave away, but the best things he kept for himself, like the piece of paper he’d found on Canal Street, an awkwardly worded letter written by someone whose first language was not English, about selling something for a fair price and wiring payment to a sister in Switzerland. The letter was signed Alberto Giacometti.

We watched a huge container ship being towed by a tug. I noticed something in the waves, rising up and down with the sloshing wake of the container ship’s passage. The bobbing thing was a person in the water. A man.

“People swim here?” I asked.

“I’m not sure he’s swimming,” Sandro said.

Sandro waved his arms over his head stiffly, to get the man’s attention. “He can’t swim,” he said.

The man was barely keeping his head above the waterline. Only his face emerged, water rolling over it from the ship’s wake.

“He looks like he’s going to drown.”

Sandro took off his coat. The chivalrous coat, removed for the second time that day. There was no choice but to try to save this person. “Go call 911,” he said.

I ran until I found a pay phone that was not broken and dialed. The operator told me she couldn’t send anyone until I gave her the street address. The address is the Hudson River, I said, Gansevoort and West Streets. A man is drowning. She needed a street address. I repeated myself. She must have alerted someone because I heard sirens, louder and louder. When I got back to the pier, firemen were there. The sound of radios, of heavy coats and boots. The truck’s clattery, loose-valved idle.

“There’s a guy in the water?” one of them asked me in a Staten Island twang, nasal and flat, looking at me from crotch to neck.

Sandro had managed to secure the man to the edge. He’d found a length of wire and had used it to lasso the drowning man, but he couldn’t pull him out. The man was wearing so many layers of wet clothing that he weighed about four hundred pounds. Sandro was pulling on the wire around the man’s middle to try to keep him afloat when the firemen and I arrived. They swarmed around to take over. The man looked up at us. In his face I saw confusion and misery, and I understood that we had interrupted him. He’d been trying to kill himself. He looked up, helplessly alive, swaddled in his drenched clothes. He must have been wearing twelve overcoats. It could be that it was necessary to taste the experience of dying to know you wanted to live. Or that you didn’t want to live. The man’s face said he didn’t want to, but he’d had to come this far to learn it.

The firemen had secured a proper rope and were lifting him out, little by little. He dripped like one of those cars they winch from the end of a pier in television police dramas. Drip drip drip.

I picked up Sandro’s jacket.

“Let’s go,” I said.

* * *

The events of that first date with Sandro, the curious, distant intimacy in a Chinese movie, the almost-drowning, were two bars that crossed to form an X, and the X pinned us to each other. Sandro walked me home, kissed me on the side of the head, and said he was going to stand on Mulberry outside my building until it was time to see me again.

“You can give signals from the window,” he said. “Just a hand, a bare arm.”

I went upstairs, took a bath to warm myself, watched the light through the windows turn the bleached gray of winter dusk as the radiator, finally repaired by Mr. Pong, clanged and banged and hissed, its steam carrying a curious feeling of safety, of comfort, as well as the complete unknown thrill that love was, these things filling the room through the rattling valve on the radiator. (Later, Giddle’s response when I told her I was in love: “Oh God, I’m so sorry. 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.”) I let the bath drain while I was still in the tub, a habit I was attached to, the way the receding water pulled at the body, dragged it down while returning its substance, gravity, density, making the body heavier and heavier as the waterline sank. Finally, there was no water, just bones like lead.

Flushed from the hot bath and sleepy, I looked out the window. Two kids leaned against a car, an Italian boy and a Puerto Rican girl who lived in my building, one of the girls who practiced dance routines in the breezeway. She was on roller skates, and as she and the boy talked, she rocked silkily from side to side on her skates. Sandro was gone. I didn’t really expect him to stand there all night, and yet, at twenty-two years old, part of me was buoyant with silly fantasies, capable of disappointment that he had actually gone home.

* * *

To be young was to be more closely rooted to the thing that forms you, Sandro said to me on our second date. We were at an Italian restaurant in my neighborhood where he pretended to speak no Italian, pronouncing menu items with an accent that sounded like John Wayne, a voice Sandro always used to imitate an American way of speaking. We all sounded like John Wayne to him.

He wanted to know about me. Not just the usual things, small-town Reno stuff, giving out ribbons at rodeos, growing up with Scott and Andy, Uncle Bobby, who left the three of us, eight, nine, and ten years old, in the back of his car, gave us Cokes and cherry cigarettes to occupy us while he banged an old lady’s box, as he put it. Sandro liked those stories, but he also drew from me, that night in the Italian restaurant, things I hadn’t spoken about to anyone before. What I thought about as a child, the nature of my solitude, the person I was before I went through puberty and became more readably “girl.” The person I was before I became more readably “person.” We seemed to share certain ideas about what happens in childhood, when you have to place yourself under the sign of your own name, your face, your voice, your outward reality. When you become a fixed position, a thing to others and to yourself. There were times, I told him, at the age of five, six, seven, when it was a shock to me that I was trapped in my own body. Suddenly I would feel locked into an identity, trapped inside myself, as if the container of my person were some kind of terrible mistake. My own voice and arms, my name, seemed wrong. As if I were a dispersed set of nodes that had been falsely organized into a form, and I was living in a nightmare, forced to see from out of this limited and unreal “me.” I wasn’t so sure I occupied one place, one person, and Sandro said this made sense, this instinct of a child, to question the artificial confines of personhood.