Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

Everyone was listening now.

Burdmoore smiled. “That’s true. It was us. But we turned him down.”

“Zabriskie Point?” John Dogg said from the end of the table. “You can give him my name if he’s casting for something.”

“And didn’t you guys have a kind of sit-in in front of the UN, with your faces wrapped in bandages, pretending you were survivors from a platoon that had been accidentally napalmed in a Vietnamese jungle by an American bomber?”

“We were bringing the war home. Would it have been better not to stage our dissent?”

“But that’s exactly it! You ‘staged’ your dissent — just as you say. I’m remembering more now. I heard about it from someone who was there. You all removed the bandages from your faces as this coordinated act of protest, strip by strip, ever so slowly.” Didier gestured with his hands, as if lifting bandages from his own face.

“Reporters all around you. There to see the terrible damage as you unveiled yourselves, the few survivors who managed to plunge themselves in a river, jellied gasoline clinging to their cheeks and arms and ribs, the smell of charred flesh—”

“Sounds practically like you were there, Didier,” Ronnie said.

“No, Ronnie. I just think it’s important to draw distinctions between real violence and theater. So there you all were, screaming, ‘Look at us! Look at our faces!’ The bandages fell away. And surprise: no one was burned. You didn’t go to Vietnam. None of you did. It was a hoax.”

“It wasn’t a hoax,” Burdmoore said quickly. “It was theater. Real theater. Like Brecht.”

“What does Brecht have to do with it? I think you should leave Brecht out of this—”

“The people who watched? They wanted to see our burned faces. And if we’d shown them burned faces they would have turned their heads away and flinched, but left satisfied that we were burned, end of story. We thwarted their expectations, left them disappointed . The observers are promised disfigurement, are led to the crime of having wanted to see it. And then a question lingers: where is the violence going to show itself? By removing the thing the mask is meant to cover, we were making a point. The thing the mask is meant to cover can’t be covered or seen: it’s everywhere.”

“Blah-blah-blah,” Didier said. “My advice would have been to give up the street theater and drop below the radar. Go underground. Isn’t that what they’re doing in Italy, Sandro?”

“I don’t keep up on it, Didier,” Sandro said. “And I’m not sure what you mean. There’s a youth movement. It’s out in the open.”

“Don’t play dumb, Sandro,” Didier said. “I’m not talking about students . I mean the factory militants.”

“The Red Brigades,” Burdmoore said. “We never could have been like that. Our trip was not about rigor and self-sacrifice. Anyhow, those people are Leninists. We were more like libertines.”

“Followers of the great windbag Moishe Bubalev,” Didier said.

“Say what you want, Didier,” Burdmoore said. “He was the main thinker advocating a shift from theory to action in the late 1960s. A lot of people were reading his stuff.”

“I’ve got a good story about that guy Bubalev,” Ronnie said. “There was a certain group looking for guidance. A famous group. They had a hostage and needed insight on how to proceed. This is in Bubalev’s diaries. This group showed up at his place, pestering him. They brought liquor and a good-looking female, stayed for the afternoon. Drank as the girl waggled her ass around. When it was time for them to go, Bubalev was sad they were taking the pretty girl away, but at least they left their liquor behind. That’s all he says about them: they took the girl but left the booze. It was the Symbionese Liberation Army, with Patty Hearst.”

“Since when do you read Moishe Bubalev?” Didier asked Ronnie.

“Since never, Didier. Someone told me that story, actually. I have no idea if it’s true.”

“Could be true,” Burdmoore said. “But look, Bubalev wasn’t a priest. He was a professor and probably didn’t get a lot of brainwashed chicks visiting him in faculty housing. It’s best not to look at personal conduct. Take Allen Ginsberg, decent poet, had an important moment. But when you actually know him, a complete charlatan. He hung around our scene. One night, this rich kid shows up at Gem Spa with ten thousand bucks in cash. He wants to burn it in Tompkins Square Park, to take that share of capital out of the system. He was trying to convince me and Fah-Q to come watch him burn this money. We all troop over to the park, thinking there’s no way he’ll really do it, but it was our job to encourage extreme acts. So we’re saying, burn it, go ahead . Allen Ginsberg was in the park that night. Someone told him the kid planned to set this large sum of money on fire and Ginsberg, in his loose, cotton guru clothes, goes rushing over, trying to convince the kid in a rabbinical and pushy tone to give him the money. In the end, the kid decided not to burn it. He gave it to me and Fah-Q.”

“So what happened?” Didier asked him. “You guys had ten thousand bucks. Followers. Energy.”

“Ten thousand bucks was nothing to us. We had steady sources of funding.”

“From where?”

“Can’t say. But it was very steady and very generous. We had accounts all over town that we withdrew from, ten, twenty, thirty thousand bucks a pop. We gave a lot of it away. The reason we pulled the plug had nothing to do with money. Things got hot and some of us split. Went to the Sonoran Desert and lived on horseback.”

“Like real Marlborough men,” Didier said.

Burdmoore laughed. “Hardly. We weren’t peddling addiction as rugged independence. It wasn’t nearly so romantic. A couple of us almost died from hypothermia. Another barely survived a bobcat mauling. We were attacked by wolves. Fire ants. Chiggers. We suffered scabies. Impetigo. Rope burn. Hong Kong flu. Paranoia. Near-starvation. It ruined my marriage, the end of me and Nadine.”

“Nadine?” I asked.

I had never seen her again, after the night with her and Thurman and Ronnie.

“My former wife,” Burdmoore said. “Ronnie knows her. Didier knows her.”

Didier cleared his throat. “I knew her once. Just in passing.”

“Dogg knows her.”

We looked over at John Dogg, who was saying his good-byes. He approached Didier and handed him a business card, determined to make his connection before the night was over and it was too late. “I am not at all opposed to working with art writers,” he said to Didier, “if you’d like to do a project with me. I mean write about my work.”

“I think they’re involved,” Burdmoore said after John Dogg had left. “Which is fine. It’s been a long time. Too much happened.”

Nadine had told me practically her entire life story over the course of that evening, and now her voice came back. High and soft. Her voice and her legs and her long hair, strawberry blond, like ale. The ex she had complained about. It was Burdmoore. Burdmoore who had told her that after the revolution everyone would work two or three hours a week. That’s all that would be needed, with all the robots and automation. “I don’t know if it’s revolutionary not to work,” she had told me, “but it’s better. When you sell your body you are what you do. You’re yourself and you get paid for it,” or so she had thought at the time, still semi-brainwashed by the ideas of her husband’s group. He and his friends said hookers and children were the only people in the world who logically should be idle. Children because they were busy being children, and hookers because the labor happened on the surface of their body. The labor was their body. A man who does what he is is useless, her husband said. Despicable. Though he’d hoped to become despicable, and to survive doing nothing. Nadine had told me it wasn’t a bad time in her life. She loved walking on Hollywood Boulevard, where a banner said, “Wake up in the Hollywood Hills.” An ad for condominiums. And she’d looked up at it and thought, yeah, that’s right — that’s what I do! But waking up in the Hollywood Hills sounded better than it was, she said. She had almost died. “I was slapped,” she said. “Punched. Shaken. Hung from a balcony over the 101 freeway, and yet look.” She’d leaned toward me, revealing nothing more, just plain beauty, magnified. “I am still… so… pretty . Let’s not pretend. I don’t have to fake modesty. I have other problems. I am still pretty, never mind that I was burned with cigars. Raped. I snorted Drano by accident. But the really messed-up thing is that I am still. So. Pretty. After all that? How is it possible?”