Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

Burdmoore went with him, taking Nadine, but only to evade the police. Burdmoore believed still in the city, which he felt sure was the only place for love and violence. Whoever goes into exile exiles, he told himself on the day of their hasty departure. Does not the stranger who leaves take with him the inhabitable city? I take it with me, he thought, and I will return it and myself in due time. At the right moment. History, Bubalev said, happens in cities. Not elsewhere.

In the meantime, with sixty-eight charges between them, it was time to go.

* * *

Six months into their hardship, Nadine having ditched him for a ride to Los Angeles, Burdmoore lucked out and found legal aid. Returned to New York and worked out a deal with the DA. Regrouped and waited for the rupture he knew was coming.

With or without him, it would come.

It was simply our night. People were mugged every night of the week in SoHo, where the streets were dark and empty — no streetlights, no open stores, just deserted loading docks.

We’d walked with a kind of pall over us, Sandro annoyed at Talia for letting Ronnie goad her into punching herself in the face, annoyed at me for announcing to him that I was going to Monza, which was what I said on the street, outside Rudy’s, drunk and pushing the limits.

“I’m going,” I said. “I was invited and it’s not about you. It’s about me.”

“Great,” he said. “That’s great. Maybe for your next act you can show them your tits.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

“It’s as nice as the Valera Company gets,” he said. “Actually, it’s nicer, because it’s a region of human qualities. Of females. But never mind.”

We walked along in the dark, our silence thick with two minds that were not going to reconcile easily. He wanted me to forgo the trip, and I thought it was unfair to pretend that my driving the Spirit of Italy was nothing. It was not nothing, it was actually incredible. And yet I was being forced to choose, now, between a genuine opportunity and Sandro. The more I thought about it the angrier I got, and then our mugger emerged from a doorway.

He was holding a knife out in front of him like it was something hot, flashing it at us in jabs. He demanded our wallets.

Sandro reached for his, in his back pocket, and instead withdrew the cap-and-ball pistol.

“Drop the knife.”

The mugger didn’t.

“You aren’t going to shoot me,” he said to Sandro. “What the fuck is that man—”

He reached toward Sandro. Sandro pulled the hammer back and fired.

A ball of smoke went up. The knife clattered to the sidewalk.

The mugger shrieked, holding his hand, his body folded around it. He looked up at Sandro from his crouched position, clutching his hand.

“You fucking shot me! I can’t believe you fucking shot me!”

I felt the mugger’s horror as mine, too.

I said I was going to call 911 and get the guy an ambulance. We were only a block from our loft. “You better wait with him,” I said.

“Sure,” Sandro said, and shrugged like I was making a minor and fussy request, asking him to retrieve a candy wrapper he’d just dropped on the ground.

I was on hold, 911 flooded with calls on a Saturday night, New York so full of emergencies that the wait was ten minutes.

“Did you see the gunman?” the operator asked me.

“The gunman?”

“The person who shot the victim,” she said.

The victim?

“Hello? You’re going to have to make a report—”

I hung up the receiver. Cooked old spaghetti, and as the water boiled I heard the ambulance.

I kept expecting Sandro. He didn’t return. I wasn’t sure what to do. I ate the spaghetti and drank a glass of warm white wine because these were what we had and it was late and there had been a lot of drinking and I was hungry for a second dinner. The ambulance had come and gone and now I heard nothing. I decided I’d better go back out. There was no one on the street. It was dark and quiet, as if we’d never been there getting mugged. I walked down to Houston Street, where an occasional taxi sped past. Returned home and waited.

I sat on a daybed in the living room, a plywood platform that Sandro had built, listening through the open windows to the airy tone of the sleeping city. Not a single car disturbed the loose cobblestones on our street. I turned on the television. The three a.m. movie was just starting. A baby crying in the arms of a woman whose face was puffy from sleep, her hair matted and pillow-dented. The scene was familiar but I could not place it. The camera moved to a prettier woman on a couch. She sat up, thin and blond with a weedlike vitality, looked out the window at a front-loader pushing coal waste around. I realized I’d seen this movie in a theater with Sandro. The prettier woman had ditched her husband and kids and was about to set off on a series of sketchy adventures with a jumpy, anxious man. The point of the film was not the stark life in a coal-mining town, although that was how Sandro had read it, the human element of industry. It was about being a woman, about caring and not caring what happens to you. It was about not really caring.

Coal came in different sizes, Sandro had explained after we saw the film. Names like lump, stoker, egg, and chestnut. Sandro liked knowing those kinds of things. He and Ronnie both did, although, as Ronnie joked, Sandro owned factories and Ronnie had worked in them. Or at least that was what Ronnie said, that he’d worked in a textile mill. But sometimes he said he’d only ever worked on boats. And yet the stories Ronnie told about working in the textile mill seemed real. I decided that if he hadn’t worked in one, well, someone had. Someone had lived the experience Ronnie narrated to us. “We pissed behind the dye house,” he said. “Because there were old lushes hiding in the bathrooms, hovering and waiting for you to pull out your young cock.” Ronnie’s job was stirring a dye vat. He worked with another kid, tall and skinny with a goiter on his neck the size of a tennis ball. One week, Ronnie said, this kid with the big goiter on his neck didn’t show up and Ronnie stirred the dye vat alone. The next week the kid was back, a large bandage where the goiter had been. Ronnie said they had a secret medical clinic in the subbasement of the mill so that no one would file workers’ comp. “When my hand got caught in a roller,” he said, “these guys wheeled me down there and left me for dead with a big male nurse who fed me MREs and morphine.”

“Is he telling the truth?” I asked Sandro. “He’s complicated,” Sandro said. “You have to listen closely. He’ll say something perfectly true and it’s meaningless. Then he makes something up, but it has value. He’s telling you something .”

The woman in the movie goes to court and tells the judge she’s no good, her kids are better off without her. Her calm and snowy face: a person quietly letting her life unravel. Because of her beauty, there would be no unnecessary detours through vanity.

I have other problems, Nadine had said.

The woman in the film was already beautiful and had to confront her life directly. She was driven to destroy herself, and because of her beauty, free to do so.

She tries to collect the rest of her pay at a sweatshop.

What can I do for you, lover? The shift boss in thick glasses, his eyes big jelly orbs rolling over her.

Behind him, centering the frame, the employee punch clock. Ronnie and Sandro’s friend Sammy punched a time clock on the hour every hour twenty-four hours a day for a year. Sandro said it was one of the great artworks of the century, that and Ronnie’s declared project to photograph every living person. Sammy who had lived outside for a year, which was far more grueling, more extreme, than driving a land speed vehicle. But both meant shaping your life around an activity and calling it a performance. And so why should I not go to Monza?