Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

We lay on the bed in the entrance room. It was five in the morning and the streets were silent, nothing but the sound of one basketball bouncing in the courts across the street, occasionally bonking the backboard. It was my habit to picture a lone person playing with the single ball, dribbling, bringing it to the netless hoop, retrieving it. Someone unable to sleep who had gone out with his ball to pensively shoot baskets. There could have been two or three or even a whole team of people shuffling around in the dark, dribbling, passing, shooting, and yet whenever I heard a ball echoing on the little court I thought it was the sound of a single player.

Sandro stared at me as if to confirm we were in the same register. I stared back, unsure what the register was. It seemed important to convey that I understood. Isn’t that what intimacy so often is? Supposing you understand, conveying that you do, because you feel in theory that you could understand, and you want to, and yet secretly you don’t? Then he was pulling my underwear off and I didn’t need to understand. In that large open room, my thoughts wandered as Sandro descended, his breath against my thighs, a sensation that always embarrassed me a little, as if I were a frigid teenager. I had the vague feeling that consenting meant approving of his act of violence and I did not approve, but then again this was simply sex, not approval or forgiveness, and I’d already decided I wasn’t going to reciprocate. Too tired, too late, I didn’t feel like it. Sandro never cared about reciprocity. Sex is not about exchange values, he said. It’s a gift economy. I relaxed and let my mind wander. I was thinking about the woman in the movie, her snowy face. Daintily sipping her beer in its short glass. I was half-removed from what was happening, from Sandro’s mouth, an asymmetry that was meant to be read as connection, a man’s face, tongue, and focus, between a woman’s legs, and her focus on fruition. Not gratitude, not intimacy, just fruition.

The woman in curler time, sipping her beer, was readying to lose herself. She would do it. She was not afraid.

The sky lightened through the loft windows, the trucks on Grand Street beginning their daylong stream of bangs and rumbles as they hit the large steel plates that lay over the street.

Sandro had waited with the mugger, he told me, a fourteen-year-old kid with a shattered hand. I was quiet. He took my silence as an accusation. A guy with a knife was threatening us, he said. How could we have known he wouldn’t harm us? There was no way to know. The only sure thing was the revolver, which, because of Sandro’s demonstration for Didier, was loaded.

When the ambulance wailed toward them, Sandro left the scene. He went walking down Houston to Allen. Down the Allen Mall, as we called the pedestrian walkway between north and south traffic, to Delancey. Past Ratner’s, which was filled with late-night diners. He climbed the steps of the Williamsburg Bridge and began to cross. He could see the yellow neon of the sugar refinery across the East River, the halogen safety lights of the Navy Yard, the electrical substation to the south of the Navy Yard, its dark smokestacks blinking red. He’d forgotten how magnificent that view could be. But passing along the graffiti-pasted walkway he felt the gun in his pocket and began to wonder if he was going to be mugged again. Surely it couldn’t happen twice in one night. The odds were totally against it. It should have been impossible, given that it had already happened. He saw a clump of dark figures lurking on the walkway at the next concrete anchorage and decided that being mugged had nothing to do with odds. Nothing to do with what had already taken place. He had no desire to use that gun again. He turned around, descended the steps of the bridge, and wandered into Chinatown, over the hose-sprayed sidewalks in front of closed fish and produce markets. He found a bakery on Hester Street that had its interior lights on, the windows slicked with a veil of white steam, so much steam it was collecting in rivulets that ran down the interior of the glass. Inside, workers were filling display cases from large bakery pans. He rapped on the window and talked them into selling him a lotus paste bun. It was just out of the oven and its warmth and aroma, he said, transported him to me. Nothing mattered except coming home to see me.

“And there you were,” he said. “In your cotton-underweared splendor. Your leggy splendor.”

* * *

Helen Hellenberger called in the morning with the name of a lawyer for Sandro.

How does she already know what happened? I asked.

Sandro rubbed his head like he was overwhelmed by technicalities and the trauma of the incident and said, “I telephoned her when I got home. But what does it matter? The whole thing is a kind of blur. A fuckup and calamity. I’m really mad at myself.”

He put his head in his hands, and then I was busy comforting him and told myself not to be paranoid about Helen.

The lawyer informed Sandro he would have to choose, either go to the police and tell them exactly what happened, or decide not to go, to do nothing.

“But what happens to me if I turn myself in?” Sandro asked him.

The lawyer explained that Sandro had it all wrong. There was no reason to worry. They would want to make him a hero. Hero vigilante chases down mugger, takes back night.

Sandro relayed all this to me at the Ukrainian diner we liked to go to on Second Avenue and Ninth Street. Then we drifted east down Ninth toward Tompkins Square Park. It was a beautiful fall day, a quiet morning, oak trees with their leaves going burgundy, the smell of woodsmoke from someone’s fireplace.

We were near the strange little storefront congregation that gave out free doses of DMT, communion for anyone hoping to get closer to God. Ronnie had pointed it out to me — a door with an ugly brown mandala painted on it, a place you had to already know about in order to find. He’d once gone in for the experience, not God, just DMT. He said the preacher was “fair,” meaning he gave everyone and himself the same amount. Ronnie had taken his hit, which was instant and hard. He floated up to the ceiling. He wanted to come down but it was too late and the preacher and his congregation were haranguing him from below, yelling something at him about Jesus and the true inner light. It was terrifying, he said, really unpleasant, and there was nothing he could do but wait it out up there on the ceiling. “If that’s God,” Ronnie said, “he’s deranged.”

Sandro and I passed the ugly mandala of the little DMT church. Beyond it, a group of hippies sat against the chain-link fence of an abandoned lot, drinking beer out of clear forty-ounce bottles.

The impulse to shoot someone in the hand. To hide a gun in your boot. What was it? I felt free of that. Like I could float up to the ceiling, unweighted by the burden of a male ego. I would float on up and not be afraid.

“So that’s what we’ll do, okay?” Sandro was talking, and I had not been listening.

“Call them as soon as we get back. Because they’re Italians and you have to plan things months in advance and deal with tons of bureaucracy.”

I should go ahead and schedule the publicity tour with the Valera team, and he would come along.

I was happy. I had never really considered not going, but Sandro supporting it made everything so much easier, even if his sudden support was about him, the mugging, and had little to do with me.

“You can protect me,” he joked, “from Italy. I’ll hide behind you. Cling to you in a way that will drive you nuts.”

* * *

Sandro had a show at Helen’s in February and wanted to leave right after. The tour with the Valera team was supposed to begin in March. We could use his mother’s country place as a base. I would go to Monza and then other racetracks in northern Italy, and possibly France and Germany. I would make a film about the tour, about my own encounter with speed.