Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

After a pause, Stanley’s recorded voice began to sing to us from the machine:

Oh, dreams coming true in Quin-ta-na Roo

Where we will cut off what’s making you blue.

We’ll take it away, and you will feel whole.

Oh, dreams coming true

in Quin-ta-na Roo.

Stanley got up and fast-forwarded the reel. His voice became a high-pitched ribbon until he lifted his finger and it quavered back down to the speed of regular talking.

“The great thing is, it’s a buyer’s market right now,” his voice said from the machine. “Then again, if you want to sell, it’s a great time to do so, because it’s a seller’s market right now, too.

“ Home . We say ‘home,’ not ‘house.’ You never hear a good agent say ‘house.’ A house is where people have died on the mattresses. Where pipes freeze and burst. Where termites fall from the sink spigot. Where somebody starts a flu fire by burning a telephone book in the furnace. Where banks repossess. Where mental illness takes hold. A home is something else. Do not underestimate the power in the word home . Say it. ‘Home.’ It’s like the difference between ‘rebel’ and ‘thug.’ A rebel is a gleaming individual in tight Levi’s, a sneering and pretty face. The kind Sal Mineo wet-dreams. A thug is hairy and dark, an object that would sink to the bottom when dropped in a lake. A home is maintained. Cared for. Loved. The word home is savory like gravy, and like gravy, kept warm. A good realtor says ‘home.’ Never ‘house.’ Always ‘cellar’ and never ‘basement.’ Basements are where cats crap on old Santa costumes. Where men drink themselves to death. Where children learn firsthand about sexual molestation. But cellar. A cellar is where you keep root vegetables and wine. Cellar means a proximity to the earth that’s not about blackness and rot but the four ritual seasons. We say ‘autumn,’ not ‘fall.’ We say ‘The leaves in this area are simply magnificent in autumn.’ We say ‘simply magnificent,’ and by the way, ‘lawn,’ not ‘yard.’ It’s ‘underarm’ to ‘armpit.’ Would you say ‘armpit’ to a potential buyer? Say ‘yard’ and your buyer pictures rusted push mowers, plantar warts. Someone shearing off his thumb and a couple of fingers with a table saw. A tool shed where water-damaged pornography and used motor oil funneled into fabric softener bottles cohabitate with hints of trauma that are as thick and dark as the oil. I’m not talking about Playboy or Oui . Harder stuff. Amateur. Pictorials featuring married people with their flab and bruises and smallpox vaccines, doing things to each other in rec rooms and sheds like the one housing these selfsame magazines. Middle-aged couples who get trashed on tequila and document with a supply of flash cubes. You have to be careful about words. You’re thinking about your commission, your hands are starting to shake at the idea of the money, and meanwhile your client hears ‘yard’ and sees himself nudging icky amateur porno with his foot, potato bugs scattering from their damp hideout underneath. Again, it’s ‘lawn.’ ‘Lawn’ means crew-cut grass. It means censorship, nice and wholesome. It means America. And you know what I mean by America, and by the way, ‘cul-de-sac.’ Not ‘dead end.’ If I have to explain that, you’ll never pass the exam to get your license. We say ‘dinner.’ Never ‘supper.’ ‘Dinner’ is the middle class, semi-religious… Christian… Christian esque . ‘Dinner’ is a touch-tone doorbell with a little orange light glowing from within the rectangular button. The bell is there for expected guests. People carrying warm dishes covered with gingham checked cloth — the cloth, needless to say, has been laundered with stain remover. The type of people with stained old dishrags are not going to press this doorbell. No one with a beard. No one with a grievance. Only people who share the values of the hosts. ‘Thank you for having us to dinner in your lovely home.’ Say ‘dinner.’ Say ‘home.’ Say ‘lawn.’ Don’t be afraid. Like prayer, through repetition and habit, these words will begin to—”

Stanley shut off the reel-to-reel machine.

“Indeed, indeed,” Didier said, nodding at Stanley and stubbing a cigarette butt into his food. He retrieved another and lit it, blowing smoke across the table but waving it from in front of his own face as if it were something unwelcome that someone else had just put there. He continued to nod at Stanley, smoke going up in a tight spiral from the end of his held cigarette. Everyone else was quiet, waiting for Didier to make his comment.

Stanley peered at him as if from a great distance. “Why do you look so amused, Didier?”

“Because I enjoyed your little ramble there, Stanley. And I know what you’re getting at.”

“What am I getting at, Didier? Because I’m actually not sure myself.”

“The power and emptiness of words. And yet they rule us nonetheless. Are the sole horizon. Language as the house of being. The home of being, excuse me.”

“That wasn’t my point. I, uh, don’t know what my point was, except that men over fifty can’t stop talking. It’s an illness, I mean a real epidemic, and I’m trying to cure myself with this recording project, sicken myself of talking by talking it all out, like the Schick Center method for quitting smoking. But since you bring it up, Didier, you know what I think of language? That it’s a fake horizon and there’s something else, a real truthful thing, but language is keeping us from it. And I think we should torture language to stop fucking around and tell it to us. We should torture language to tell the truth.”

Gloria let out a long, dramatic not-this-again sigh.

I felt Sandro looking at me. I always could. I turned and met his gaze. His mouth slightly curled in amusement. “ We should torture it to tell us the truth, ” he whispered to me much later that night, or rather, it was close to dawn by the time he whispered that in his feather-light accent, as I lay next to him, feeling his warm breath on my bare shoulder, his arms wrapped around me. Let’s torture it.

People began to chat in subsets. Gloria served dessert. Didier rested his cigarette on the edge of his plate of almond cookies, dispersing ashes and cookie crumbs and insisting that Freud was correct that language was the only route to the unconscious. Stanley countered that language was given to man to hide his thoughts, and that all you could do with words was turn them on their sides like furniture during a bombardment.

Sandro got up to greet his cousin Talia, a woman I’d never met whose late arrival he had been expecting. Gloria led her in, and she and Sandro embraced.

That first moment, as I watched them, her dark eyes shining at Sandro, I knew that Talia Valera was going to take something away from me. Burdmoore was watching them, too, and I had the disturbing sense that he was sharing my thought, knew by his long experience with trouble that it had arrived, but specifically for me.

Sandro brought his cousin Talia around the table. Her hair was short and carelessly chopped, as if she’d cut it herself, but she was pretty enough that it didn’t diminish her. She had a husky voice and dirt under her fingernails. She wore a black tank top and karate pants. The effect was meant to seem boyish and nonchalant but something else came through, a refinement maybe, a kind of calculation.

I should have gotten up to speak with her, but I stayed where I was and focused on Burdmoore, who was talking again about the Lower East Side. He said that while I might think it was the same, rubble piles and squats and graffiti, dope dealers and artists, that it could not be more different. They’d had it all mobilized . Even the bums, he said, were their own cadre — WFF, Winos for Freedom — with a cache of weaponry scared up by Fah-Q, a comrade in the group who Burdmoore kept mentioning. He and Fah-Q were the lost children, as Burdmoore put it. They were awake, he said, while most of America slept. And those awake are the nightmare of the sleepers. “We were their nightmare,” he said.