Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

She was beautiful, it was true. With large hazel eyes, speckled like brook trout, and the hair, reddish-gold around her white face. But I had seen, the night I met her, that her beauty was going to leave her like it does all women. For the face, time relays some essential message, and time is the message. It takes things away. But its passage, its damages, are all we have. Without it, there’s nothing.

III.

We shared a common drunkenness departing the Kastles’ loft together, as if the group of us — Ronnie, Didier, Burdmoore, Sandro, his cousin, and I — carried a heavy blanket or rug over our heads, each supporting a little of the weight, which rested on all of us, and resulted in our slack words, our swaying and knocking against one another in the freight elevator. Time had stretched like taffy, the night a place we would tumble into and through together, a kind of gymnasium, a space of generous borders. Or else why would we have gone, at one in the morning, to Times Square? I didn’t know why, or whose idea it was, only that the night felt roomy and needed to be filled.

We broke into two groups, climbing into taxis, and reconvened on Forty-Second Street, where red light leaked like a juice from the theater entrances. A giant thermometer rising along one side of the Allied Chemical building shifted eerily from red to violet, red to violet. Below it was a frozen planet Earth cradled by a polar bear.

My group — Ronnie, Burdmoore, and I — stood under a marquee on a broad wedge of pink carpet that flopped out to the sidewalk like a tongue, creating a semi-indoors, almost domestic ambience. There were posters lining the entrance, a woman’s face and bare shoulders against a black background, Behind the Green Door . It was all over town, the advertisement for that film. She looked like a nude astronaut floating in space, too sensual for anything like a breathing tube. A stark, look-at-me expression, solemn possibility. I used to be a nice girl. That was required, the just recently having been one. The actress had been a laundry flakes model for a brand of soap that was extra-gentle for baby’s tender bottom.

You had to look the part for such a spectacular fall. I had never looked the part. The gap between my two front teeth, as Ronnie said, spoiled my cake-box appeal. Or as Sandro put it, gave a certain impression of mischief. I never thought I looked mischievous, but I’d always been told this. I could see this kind of thing in women with slightly crossed eyes, some breach in symmetry suggesting another kind of breach, in judgment or morals. Like the actress Karen Black, one eye slightly amiss in its focus. The women in Hustler cartoons were drawn with crossed eyes like Karen Black’s. The mind is off duty but the body is open. There was that movie where poor Karen Black utters the fatal question at dinner with her lover’s higher-class family: Is there any ketchup? At the end, she waits as the man goes into a service station bathroom while their gas is being pumped. A logging truck pulls up between the gas pumps and the restroom. When the man emerges from the restroom, the logging truck is there, blocking her view of him. He approaches the truck’s driver. We hear only the freeway and the idle of the truck as he and the driver speak. He gets into the cab of the truck. It pulls out, climbs the highway on-ramp in low gear. The woman waits in the man’s car. Gets out, looks around, waits some more. The credits roll.

“Triple X,” a man said to us, pointing toward another entrance, large photographs of women stretching upward and backward like pythons. Why did snakes rear up like that? Every moment, poised for killing.

“We got only the hardest-core rating,” the man called out. “Trip pel X.”

“Triple X isn’t a rating,” Ronnie said. “They rate themselves that. To make the movies sound better.”

Burdmoore had wandered off, and came around the corner toward us, light flashing over his noble profile and matted beard. He looked like Zeus lost in a casino.

A taxi pulled up, and Sandro, his cousin, and Didier got out. I glanced at Burdmoore, whose face registered the cousin’s beauty. He watched her with interest, but also caution. It was the expression of a man who had handled beautiful women and could still admire them but never wanted to handle them again.

She bounded toward us, not at all aloof, as I expected her to be. I hadn’t said two words to her at the Kastles’.

“Come on! Who’s coming in?” she asked. “I want to see a show.” She turned to Ronnie.

“Not my kind of thing,” Ronnie said.

“What is your kind of thing?” she asked.

“That’s a tough one,” Ronnie said.

“Why?” She sparkled her dark eyes at him. He seemed not to notice.

“Because there’s no market for what I want to see.”

“Then it can’t be that bad,” she said. “For the worst things, there’s a market.”

“You’re probably right about that.” He looked at her as if he were making a new assessment, now that she’d said something possibly smart.

I thought of the girl in the photo in Ronnie’s studio, the one on layaway. She was probably waiting for him this very moment, somewhere downtown. Checking the clock, applying lipstick, concentrating herself into an arrow pointed at Ronnie. Doing the various things women did when they had to wait for something they wanted.

Sandro was counting bulbs on the marquees. He was never waiting for someone else, he was simply in the world, doing, acting on his interests. He said that Times Square was all soft rhomboids, that this was part of the experience, the shapes of modern stamping technology reproduced here, in the shapes of signs and marquees, all rectangles with softened corners, streamlining as an attitude.

“It’s funny they call it Times Square,” Sandro said. “There’s a nude magazine in Italy called Le Ore . The hours.”

“Makes sense, actually,” Ronnie said. “Pornography as a way to mark time. You dictate when and how. There’s no chance in it. It’s clockwork. Daily habits. Control. It’s the opposite of sex. Which is pure freedom, in all its horror. You never know when you’re actually going to sleep with someone, and when it does happen, the character is of surprise: this is actually happening . There is no surprise in simply getting off. It’s scheduled activity. Three p.m. Midnight. The morning shower. You know those marital aids, so-called? The thing about those products is they promise enhanced sensitivity, increased pleasure, and it’s just numbing cream, to make you go longer. They add time . That’s all they do.”

Sandro and Ronnie speculated on whether you could love pornography simply as a cinephile, and on the unit of the quarter, because everything here was twenty-five cents. A quarter to peek through a quarter-size hole. Ronnie said the peep show was based on the Advent calendar. That it was a Christian tradition, this kind of looking, opening a window onto Jerusalem, a peek at the manger for each day of December. Sandro laughed, as if Ronnie were full of it, but also as if nothing pleased him more.

“You see it all through a hole,” Ronnie said.

“Then I’m an Adventist,” Didier replied. “I believe in that kind of isolated viewing, the focus on parts. Metonymy. Does anybody have quarters?”

A change man heard him and moved toward Didier in his coin-dispensing belt.

“Adventist,” Ronnie said with faked wonder. “Does that mean you believe the end of the world is… imminent?”

Sandro had told me that Ronnie had a long-standing grudge against Didier, something to do with a negative review Didier had once written of Ronnie’s work.

“Everything and nothing are imminent,” Didier said. He handed the change man a five-dollar bill, cupping his hands for that amount in quarters. “This moment now? Imminent. Wait. Oh, gosh. Now, past. It all depends on how you experience time. Time is a function of pleasure, as you just crudely pointed out. The experience of it, I mean.”