Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

Mont Blanc, above, was still and serene. A steep white desert peopled only by clouds and snow. Jagged and stark. It refused my question, Where is he?

* * *

Late afternoon. The opening in the clouds closed, obscuring the top of Mont Blanc. Snow was coming down. Windows glowed yellow. Two children ran, shrieked, looked up, mouths open to melt falling flakes on their tongues.

How long was I meant to wait?

* * *

Dusk, and my feet numb as I paced at the bottom of Les Planards, the run going dimly gray, harder and harder to see.

The yellow lights of Chamonix were blazing now. There was a smell of woodsmoke.

The woman in the movie who had thrown her life away had waited, but for nothing specific. In hair curlers, sitting in a bar. For a man to pick her up, buy her a beer, take her somewhere. The curlers that meant some occasion to come, not yet named.

I wasn’t in that kind of time, curler time.

I didn’t know if Gianni had ditched me, or had an accident, fallen into a crevasse. I knew only to wait.

Soft clumps of snow dropped from tree branches. I heard a door open and shut. A bus motored by, with external slots filled with skis, black clouds of diesel behind it, illuminated by an orange streetlamp.

It was almost dark now, and much colder. I could see the jagged lines of Mont Blanc’s peak, its steeples and snow-filled cracks. A huge mountain, dark and present, but nothing like human presence. It was a monolith of doubt.

You can think and think a question, the purpose of waiting, the question of whether there is any purpose, any person meant to appear, but if the person doesn’t come, there is no one and nothing to answer you.

It’s dark. I hear a small group of men call to one another in German, see them pass by, their pom-pom ski hats bobbing, a squeak of fresh snow under their boots.

They’re gone now. The wind whistles through the trees, branches floating up and down with slow, wild elegance.

I’m alone at the base of the run, almost too cold to move.

The answer is not coming.

I have to find an arbitrary point inside the spell of waiting, the open absence, and tear myself away.

Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.

I would like to thank Susan Golomb, Nan Graham, Marisa Silver, Nam Le, and most especially Jason Smith, each for invaluable insights. Thank you also to Daniel Burgess, Claudio Guenzani, Hedi El Kholti, Rémy Kushner, Knight Landesman, James Lickwar, Vittorio Morfino, Susan Moldow, Katie Monaghan, Gianluca Pulsoni, and the Santa Maddalena Foundation.

* * *

The monologues of the character Marvin are inspired by the voice-over in Morgan Fisher’s elegiac and beautiful 1984 film Standard Gauge .

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The cover image is from issue 10 of I Volsci (March 1980), a newspaper of the Autonomia Operaia group I Volsci, named after its headquarters on Via dei Volsci in San Lorenzo, Rome.