Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

John Dogg was not a complete idiot. He had merely seemed like one. It was wanting something a great deal that made people embarrassing — which was why I’d hidden my wants around Sandro and his friends, and Giddle, too, pretended I didn’t want an art career when I did. Pretended I wasn’t jealous of Gloria, of Helen Hellenberger, of Talia, when I was.

I wove through the crowd, heading for the fire stairs. Giddle was flirting with John Chamberlain, who made precarious sculptures of crushed-up car parts. She was drunk and kept asking him if he had a driver’s license. That was a particular mood of Giddle’s, heckling as flirtation. When that didn’t work, she said she knew his secret, his dirty secret.

“What is it?” he said, suddenly interested, looking her up and down in stark assessment.

“You used to be a shampoo girl,” she said.

He laughed, grinning at her broadly. “So come on back to my place and I’ll shampoo you.”

I passed Ronnie. He was talking to a girl I didn’t know. “Have you had any contact recently with people from other planets?” he asked her. His voice got louder as I passed. He turned in my direction.

The stairs were behind the water tower, where the drinks table was. Nadine was there alone. She poured wine into a keg cup all the way to the top. It was dark and she didn’t see me. I watched as she drank the entire thing in one quick and continuous series of gulps, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, looked around nervously like a hungry animal eating some other animal’s food, and refilled the cup.

Don’t you remember me, Nadine?

Don’t you?

But why would she. She was on her way down, or up, or down, and not looking for friends. She wasn’t shopping for experience. She was trying to survive. I was the one shopping for experience. I who remembered her and everything she had said to me, and that was enough. It was enough that I remembered her.

* * *

The bike would not start. I couldn’t get it to turn over. I pushed it off the centerstand and figured I would try to bump start it, coast and get some speed and hopefully it would catch. It had been fouling spark plugs. Maybe that was it.

“Engine trouble?”

I realized, hearing his voice, that I had hoped Ronnie would follow me out. He bent down. “Could be this.”

One spark plug lead was dangling. A simple thing that anyone could see. He plugged it back into the cylinder head.

“Thanks, Ronnie.”

“Well, maybe you could give me a ride. I mean, if you can start it.”

“I can start it.”

I’d given rides back in Reno, when I’d had the other, older Moto Valera. A lot of passengers didn’t understand that you leaned with and not against the driver. That you put your hands on her waist, never on her shoulders. But Ronnie had ridden plenty. He owned that Harley when I met him, and he knew how to be a passenger, to lean with me when I cornered. He held me snugly, his arms tight around my waist, his chest pressed to my back. I couldn’t tell if this was deliberate or not. Scott and Andy had told me that boys became connoisseurs of breast size, shape, feel, having girls pressed against their backs as they cornered and braked. Andy said if you weren’t sure, you stopped short, so that your passenger mashed into you, which gave you a good idea of what was underneath her sweater.

I drove Ronnie to his place on Broome Street. “You can come up,” he said, hopping off. His tone wasn’t exactly enthusiastic. It was as he said, you can if you want to.

It had been two full years since the night I’d spent with him, a night that had opened out, self-expanding, into a world of infatuation and innuendo and games, and finally, the two of us in my old apartment on Mulberry Street, innuendo had turned to assertion. We had lain down. Faced each other and let our lips touch, and I had felt like we were two shirtless kids, sibling and casual, done with our paper routes and relaxing on the grass. Later, our bodies entwined, we weren’t casual, or like siblings. I had been sure it meant something. Even if he had shown no vulnerability, nothing even close to it. I had mistaken physical passion for passion.

Ronnie’s loft had the same high ceilings and industrial grime as Sandro’s, but it was more cluttered. The cakey smell from the fortune cookie factory on the ground floor filled the room, a rising sweetness in the middle of the night. The floor Ronnie occupied had been an Asian import foods warehouse before Ronnie took it over, and he had kept a lot of what had been left behind. Huge barrels that said MSG on them, where he stored the clothes he bought and wore and then threw away instead of laundering. Against one wall were crates of canned lychee packed in heavy syrup, whose labels he said he found beautiful, and meant to do something with at some point. There was a 1954 calendar on the wall, an Asian woman whose prettiness was meant to promote some product, her face faded to grayish-green, smiling under all that lapsed time.

I opened Ronnie’s refrigerator. He had gold boxes of Kodak film and three cans of Schlitz. We each opened a can and joked about how no one had food in the refrigerator. I would have thought married people like Stanley and Gloria might have food in their refrigerator, but no. Film canisters, margarine, and Kraft Fluff. Generic brands had just begun appearing on the grocery store shelves. What would they call Fluff? Ronnie wondered. Schlitz could be “Beer,” and Fritos “Corn Chips.” But Fluff was its name and what it was. “Whipped Marshmallow Puree?” I said. Maybe, he replied, but it lost the effect of simplicity. It sounded like an industrial product.

He was telling me about the state the loft was in when he signed his lease. “These guys did not believe in banks.” He bent down and opened a door hidden in the wall. “A safe is an adjective as a noun. Probably a very old concept.”

He could have been talking to anyone. Where I had felt his attentions at the opening, now I felt the old distracted and performing Ronnie.

“What do you keep in there?”

“Secrets,” he said, shutting it. “And deeds. This guy whose boat I worked on as a kid gave me some land and money. I never claimed any of it. I keep the deeds in this safe.”

“Why didn’t you claim it?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Like all your stories.”

“This is the longest. But listen, I think I need to hit the hay.”

I said I should go anyhow, it was late. But I hesitated, hoping for some way to make it through the distance, to reach him.

“The guy in Rikers with your name,” I said. “It’s about Tim, isn’t it.”

I detected a faint crease of irritation in his face.

“That’s right. It’s about Tim,” he said. “Guy I shared a childhood with.”

“Why can’t you just say, ‘I feel bad about my brother’?”

“I feel bad about my brother,” Ronnie repeated in a robotic tone. “I feel bad about my brother.”

I stayed quiet.

“You think you’re the first person to think of that? That I feel bad about my brother? Let me introduce you to a concept. Two concepts, actually. Important tools for surviving the human condition. One is called irony. Say it with me. Eye-ron-eee . Now, the next is harder to pronounce, but let’s try. Diss-sim-you-lay-shon . Giving the false appearance that you are not some thing. Like a hustler pretends that he is not a skilled player of pool. One may, in a quite different circumstance, give the false appearance that he does not suffer from guilt about his own brother’s incarceration, but instead, simulates an interest in the incarceration of not his kin but phantom subjects with which he has only one tenuous but coherent link: a name.”

He lay down on the couch.