Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

“That night, in a thatched hut on the island of Kokovoko, I woke with a start. I was disoriented in the dark hut and had to struggle to recall where I was. I listened to the squeak and rustle of palm fronds, the soft, crashing metronome of the sea. Images from my old life started rolling in, one by one, each welling up like sudden kelp in a wave break. I knew who I’d been when I was struck at the construction site: Ronald Franklyn Fontaine of 1331 Castle Peak Drive. Son of Lee Anne Fontaine, homemaker, and Fred Fontaine, Chevrolet salesman, and big brother of Tim Fontaine, who had not yet, but would later, rob several banks and a Brink’s vehicle.

“The commodore was always talking about sailing sense, and how many nights he’d woken, suddenly, having realized somewhere in the depths of sleep that the rhythm of water lapping the prow was different than what it should have been. He would get up and discover that his boat had sailed off course. I had a similar feeling lying there in the dark: the rhythm of the commodore and his wife was lulling and seductive but wrong. It was the wrong rhythm. Still, I felt a lot of regret. Because it wasn’t a bad life, this new one, even if it might have been more dignified to have remained a properly paid cabin boy, or to have at least resisted complying with the commodore’s requests, when complying gave me a bad feeling.”

Didier snickered. It didn’t seem funny to me, even if Ronnie was making it up.

“It’s just that kind of thing,” Ronnie said, pointing his chin at Didier, “that I associate with the commodore. A smirk. A muffled glee. He said everything he wanted me to do, or did to me, was for my good, but often it seemed like it was for his good. If it was for my good, why did he muffle his glee? Was I a slave of some kind? I suddenly wondered as I lay there in the dark between the two of them. All existence is slavery of one kind or another, right? Who isn’t a slave? And whatever dignity I sacrificed by accepting their gifts, by doing what they asked, still, I was sailing the world with only the smallest of worries: the water is a little cool for swimming this morning, and where do we keep the Band-Aids, because I spiked my toe on a bit of coral.

“I heard Artemio quietly snoring from his station on the floor, there in our hut, in case one of us needed a glass of water in the middle of the night. Did I have to reject this new life simply because something else had come before it? I had no chores and no homework. I swam whenever I wanted, and every so often explored a new port of call, with the paper currency of its government slipped into my pockets by the commodore and also by his wife, each of whom seemed to believe that they alone delighted in spoiling me. Did I want to sail the world, explore remote islands? Or did I want to mow the front lawn, jerk off to the illustration of the lady in the Hoover vacuum replacement bag manual, and get beaten on occasion with Dad’s leather belt? Obviously, these were two different realities. I could simply choose between them. And yet I felt the crushing sense that there was only one correct choice. And so I didn’t really have a choice, because I had to choose correctly.

“The natives were resealing the Reno . Once it was repaired we were onward to the Coral Sea and then the Cocos Islands. Who knew what the Fates had in store. I did not face them. I could not shake the feeling that I had wandered off the track when I chose the Reno from among the yachts that reared up in my vision that day. I could no longer suppress the old life. With its drab and dull brutalities, I knew it was the real one, my real life. I’d lost the toehold on my new life, with the commodore and his wife. I didn’t understand it anymore. Lying in the dark hut that night — an endless night, a night of great confusion — the commodore snuffled in his sleep and nuzzled close to me. I felt his humid breath on my shoulder, in two little streams from his nostrils. His wife stirred as well, and turned her face in my direction. They breathed on me asynchronously, as if it was their duty to cool me in their sleep. All of a sudden I panicked. Who are these people? I wondered. And why the hell are they naked? ”

We all should have laughed. Because if it wasn’t true, it was surely funny. But none of us did laugh. Outside, rain began to fall, but softly. Cooler air came in through the loft’s big open windows, and there was a sound of wet tires on the Bowery.

“I got up and crept out of the hut without waking them. The surf pounded like a heart. I walked barefoot along a dirt path until I found a larger hut with ceremonial shells hanging from the front door. The local tribal chief. I knocked and explained my situation the best I could. We walked over to the municipal government headquarters, where there was a switchboard, and I cabled my parents.

“As I waited for my mother and father to arrive, I pretended everything was normal. I swam open-eyed over the coral reef, which curled and fluttered along the seabed, fleshy and white as skate fish. I ate lobster and crab, cuttlefish and breadfruit. I lay in the hut and listened to the surf, dreaming up errands on which to send Artemio, as my hours of having a servant at my beck and call were dwindling. And here I could begin to invent and you guys might not notice, not even Stanley and his bullshit detector. I could tell you, for instance, that the commodore and his wife both died under mysterious circumstances, and lead you to believe that it was at my own innocent boy’s hands that they died, and I could even declare my reasons for murdering them in a way that would leave you satisfied, in fact more than satisfied, that I had done the right thing and that the commodore and his wife had met an appropriate end. Even if you weren’t convinced of their guilt, or didn’t believe in such a crude moral axis as that of guilt and innocence. Still, your judgment would be informed by a simple fact that we can all agree on: that the notion of the sea and sailors by itself suggests the notion of murder. What is sailing, after all, but an extreme form of criminality? I didn’t kill them. Like I said, I’m letting you know that I could start inventing. But even if I did kill them, you would feel no sympathy for the commodore in his suspiciously crisp clothes, his wife, calculating and lustful, calling to the drunk and obscene monkeys hanging above her in the trees, flashing their swollen red anuses while she opens her legs for the tribal chief of Kokovoko, who lifts her dress with one hand, and grips, in the other, a phallus of scrimshaw—”

“Ugh,” said Gloria. Nothing else. Just “ugh,” but Ronnie got the message.

“Okay, okay. As the facts stand, my parents came and took me home, end of it. I resumed my old life, Malt-O-Meal and Fruit of the Loom, model glue, cut grass. Feel of soft flannel and coarse denim, crackly leaf piles and thumbed comics. Our dog Ansich and our cat Fürsich. Everything was normal again, except that I suffered from occasional headaches. And when I twiddled the knob of my shortwave radio, tuning in to late-night transmissions under the blankets, the Tongan news hour or Sumatran music, I closed my eyes and rode the equator, like I was living my own lost life.

“Then, a few years ago, I was installing an artwork at Helen Hellenberger’s and this elderly woman walks into the gallery. She puts her old hands on either side of my face. ‘Julian, Julian, it’s you!’ she cries. ‘I’ve found you after all these years!’ Apparently, during our time on the boat, they named me after their dead son.”

“Heavy,” Gloria said.

“Or I think he was just dead to them, disowned or something, maybe for being gay. I can’t quite remember. We went to a restaurant together and over lunch she filled me in on the details of our brief life at sea. I had forgotten a great deal of it, in the interest of reconnecting with my family. She actually had a photo of me in her billfold. I looked like myself, but bronzed and barefoot, in ragged shorts. Also, this was the weirdest thing: I was wearing a sturdy-looking four-point leather harness over my chest.”