Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

“Now everybody says, but be reasonable . We never pandered to that reasonableness bullshit. ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable’—that’s John F. fuckin’ Kennedy. A clown who didn’t do shit but he was right about that one thing. Plus,” Burdmoore said, “he had a pretty cool wife. I still think urban insurrection is the only way, but not in New York City. Not at the moment.”

There were still some major issues to be worked out, he said, and I nodded, wanting to hear what they were, but unsure what it was we were talking about, worked out for what purpose.

“A lot of people think the city is decadent emptiness,” Burdmoore said, “empty of potential. It’s dead now, I mean currently. But the day will come when the people of the Bronx wake up, the sisters and brothers out in Brooklyn, and I can hardly wait.”

Sandro’s cousin had seated herself next to Ronnie and was asking him what he did.

“Have you seen those signs around town, green and yellow with red lettering, and they say Blimpie?” he asked her.

“No,” she said with a laugh. “I guess I missed those.”

“Well, then it won’t mean as much to you. But that’s my family — we make the tastiest sandwiches in New York City. You might be the Valeras, but we — see, we’re the Blimpies. My name is actually Ronnie Blimpie but I changed it. Because we own a sandwich empire and I didn’t want to forever be the sandwich guy. I can tell you because you don’t have us yet wherever you live.”

“London,” she said.

“Yeah, we’re not in London yet. At the moment we’re not expanding. We’re focusing on subsidiaries. Like how Valera isn’t just tires, we have another business, which is actually enormous. You know those plaid plastic laundry bags that are ubiquitous in Third World countries, crappy plaid bags that you see in every town from one end of the African continent to the other, and in Asia, and all over Latin America, too? Rectangular bags with zippers? Which Gypsies drag around and live out of, in First World countries? And people cart from project housing to Laundromats? Well, we make those, all of them. There are huge profits in semi-disposal goods like that.”

“You’re joking,” she said.

“It’s true. I mean it’s true that I’m joking. We don’t own the Blimpie chain. And we don’t manufacture those bags, but whoever does is making a killing. We’re Fontaine. We don’t own anything. But I was not raised Fontaine. I was really at sea.”

“Everyone’s like that when they’re young,” she said.

“No, I mean I was actually at sea. On a boat.”

Didier de Louridier and Sandro had stood, as Didier inspected Stanley’s collections of bric-a-brac on the small tables that lined the room. Didier paused before the cap-and-ball pistol.

“Pick it up,” Sandro said. “Nothing to be afraid of. You’d have to shoot someone in the eye to actually hurt them.”

Didier picked it up and looked down into the barrel.

“What about the others in your gang?” I asked Burdmoore. “Are they still around?”

“There are remnants,” he said. “Remnants and debris. Fah-Q lives with his retired father in Miami, got so paranoid he can’t do anything but throw pots. He’s really into that, making pottery. One guy became an anti-fluoride crusader. Another is a Guardian Angel. Those guys are complete psychos. They’ve adopted state power as volunteers .” As Burdmoore spoke, he was watching Sandro explain to Didier how the cap-and-ball pistol worked.

“Your boyfriend likes guns,” Burdmoore said.

“It belonged to his father,” I said. “His family used to manufacture that gun. There’s a logic.”

“Right. A logic.”

“He doesn’t use it. It’s not stuffed in the cuff of his boot.”

“And yet I’d wager he is the type of man who would enjoy the feeling of that,” Burdmoore said.

He leaned his chair back on its hind legs and looked at me. The chair was creaking and I worried he might hurt it and that it would gouge marks into the soft wood of Gloria and Stanley’s pine-plank floor.

“And I think you might be… oh, never mind,” he said.

“I might be what?”

“I think you might be the sort of sister who likes that type,” he said.

His chair kept creaking. I was convinced it would break from the strain of bearing his weight on its hind legs.

“You like a guy who puts a gun in his boot,” he whispered, “ don’t you ?”

* * *

In fact I had once watched Sandro put a gun in his boot. I did not admit this to Burdmoore. We had been in Washington, DC, for Sandro’s show at the Corcoran Gallery. DC had some kind of weapons ban that Sandro was secretly protesting by showing up to his own opening armed.

His interest in guns had never bothered me. I was around them all the time growing up. My uncles, my cousins, all shot guns. Reno’s main thoroughfares were lined with pawnshops, and I understood the pawnshop to be a kind of forge that liquidated objects into money. The things that could be most quickly converted were guns. When someone in our family died, the big inheritance question was who would get the guns. Relatives would stake a claim based on sentiment. “Your dad’s nickel-plated Browning meant a lot to me,” Andy had said after my father died. “First gun I ever shot.” He knew my father better than I did, because Andy was older than I, and my father had left Reno when I was three, had gone to Ecuador to build log cabins on someone’s get-rich-quick scheme, and when that didn’t work out, had gone on to other get-rich-quick schemes. I didn’t know him and I didn’t want his guns. I gave them to Andy. A few days later they were in a pawnshop window downtown.

Click-click. We watched as Sandro showed Didier how to pull the cylinder and unscrew the nipples on the cap-and-ball pistol, how to load the chamber.

“Black gunpowder goes first,” Sandro said. “Then you press the lead ball down into the chamber.”

Didier asked what the attraction was to such an antiquated thing.

There was a loophole, Sandro said. Anyone could own one. Carry it concealed.

“It’s not considered a gun,” he said. “But it is one. And it fires very, very straight.”

Burdmoore didn’t say anything more, but I felt a need to explain away Sandro’s interest in guns.

“His work is all objects that are what they are, and something else, at the same time,” I said. “A gun can be an idea, a threat, or a thing. As Sandro would put it, imaginary, symbolic, or real, all at once.”

“Oh, sure,” said Burdmoore. “I mean, it sounds good. Except you can’t brandish a gun and shoot it.”

Didier was directly behind us now, practicing quickdraws with Sandro’s cap-and-ball pistol like a Western gunslinger, gazing into the mirror that hung on the wall behind Burdmoore.

“A gun is either symbolically enlisted or it’s enlisted enlisted,” Burdmoore said, watching Didier, who froze with the gun drawn, admiring his own reflection. “Threats are for people who aren’t willing to risk anything.”

Didier laughed. “Oh, right,” he said, turning to Burdmoore. “But wasn’t it someone from your little gang who shot at me with blanks? Is that not a kind of hysterical threat?”

“That was… it just happened. You were not on our list of targets.”

“But what was the purpose, if not for intimidation? Obviously you didn’t intend to kill me. Or you would have used real bullets.”

“Look, man. You fainted, is what I heard. Which, for an esoteric guy like you, is a kind of death.”

“A kind of death — what crap,” Didier said. “You guys were a bunch of image-obsessed poseurs. Sorry. If I recall correctly, Antonioni wanted to put you in his youth cult film, the one with the Pink Floyd soundtrack. Or am I mistaking you for some other group of cinema-ready toughs?”