The Flamethrowers Part 10

"Indeed, indeed," Didier said, nodding at Stanley and stubbing a cigarette b.u.t.t into his food. He retrieved another and lit it, blowing smoke across the table but waving it from in front of his own face as if it were something unwelcome that someone else had just put there. He continued to nod at Stanley, smoke going up in a tight spiral from the end of his held cigarette. Everyone else was quiet, waiting for Didier to make his comment.

Stanley peered at him as if from a great distance. "Why do you look so amused, Didier?"

"Because I enjoyed your little ramble there, Stanley. And I know what you're getting at."

"What am I getting at, Didier? Because I'm actually not sure myself."

"The power and emptiness of words. And yet they rule us nonetheless. Are the sole horizon. Language as the house of being. The home of being, excuse me."

"That wasn't my point. I, uh, don't know what my point was, except that men over fifty can't stop talking. It's an illness, I mean a real epidemic, and I'm trying to cure myself with this recording project, sicken myself of talking by talking it all out, like the Schick Center method for quitting smoking. But since you bring it up, Didier, you know what I think of language? That it's a fake horizon and there's something else, a real truthful thing, but language is keeping us from it. And I think we should torture language to stop f.u.c.king around and tell it to us. We should torture language to tell the truth."

Gloria let out a long, dramatic not-this-again sigh.

I felt Sandro looking at me. I always could. I turned and met his gaze. His mouth slightly curled in amus.e.m.e.nt. "We should torture it to tell us the truth," he whispered to me much later that night, or rather, it was close to dawn by the time he whispered that in his feather-light accent, as I lay next to him, feeling his warm breath on my bare shoulder, his arms wrapped around me. Let's torture it.

People began to chat in subsets. Gloria served dessert. Didier rested his cigarette on the edge of his plate of almond cookies, dispersing ashes and cookie crumbs and insisting that Freud was correct that language was the only route to the unconscious. Stanley countered that language was given to man to hide his thoughts, and that all you could do with words was turn them on their sides like furniture during a bombardment.

Sandro got up to greet his cousin Talia, a woman I'd never met whose late arrival he had been expecting. Gloria led her in, and she and Sandro embraced.

That first moment, as I watched them, her dark eyes shining at Sandro, I knew that Talia Valera was going to take something away from me. Burdmoore was watching them, too, and I had the disturbing sense that he was sharing my thought, knew by his long experience with trouble that it had arrived, but specifically for me.

Sandro brought his cousin Talia around the table. Her hair was short and carelessly chopped, as if she'd cut it herself, but she was pretty enough that it didn't diminish her. She had a husky voice and dirt under her fingernails. She wore a black tank top and karate pants. The effect was meant to seem boyish and nonchalant but something else came through, a refinement maybe, a kind of calculation.

I should have gotten up to speak with her, but I stayed where I was and focused on Burdmoore, who was talking again about the Lower East Side. He said that while I might think it was the same, rubble piles and squats and graffiti, dope dealers and artists, that it could not be more different. They'd had it all mobilized. Even the b.u.ms, he said, were their own cadre-WFF, Winos for Freedom-with a cache of weaponry scared up by Fah-Q, a comrade in the group who Burdmoore kept mentioning. He and Fah-Q were the lost children, as Burdmoore put it. They were awake, he said, while most of America slept. And those awake are the nightmare of the sleepers. "We were their nightmare," he said.

"Now everybody says, but be reasonable. We never pandered to that reasonableness bulls.h.i.t. 'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable'-that's John F. f.u.c.kin' Kennedy. A clown who didn't do s.h.i.t but he was right about that one thing. Plus," Burdmoore said, "he had a pretty cool wife. I still think urban insurrection is the only way, but not in New York City. Not at the moment."

There were still some major issues to be worked out, he said, and I nodded, wanting to hear what they were, but unsure what it was we were talking about, worked out for what purpose.

"A lot of people think the city is decadent emptiness," Burdmoore said, "empty of potential. It's dead now, I mean currently. But the day will come when the people of the Bronx wake up, the sisters and brothers out in Brooklyn, and I can hardly wait."

Sandro's cousin had seated herself next to Ronnie and was asking him what he did.

"Have you seen those signs around town, green and yellow with red lettering, and they say Blimpie?" he asked her.

"No," she said with a laugh. "I guess I missed those."

"Well, then it won't mean as much to you. But that's my family-we make the tastiest sandwiches in New York City. You might be the Valeras, but we-see, we're the Blimpies. My name is actually Ronnie Blimpie but I changed it. Because we own a sandwich empire and I didn't want to forever be the sandwich guy. I can tell you because you don't have us yet wherever you live."

"London," she said.

"Yeah, we're not in London yet. At the moment we're not expanding. We're focusing on subsidiaries. Like how Valera isn't just tires, we have another business, which is actually enormous. You know those plaid plastic laundry bags that are ubiquitous in Third World countries, c.r.a.ppy plaid bags that you see in every town from one end of the African continent to the other, and in Asia, and all over Latin America, too? Rectangular bags with zippers? Which Gypsies drag around and live out of, in First World countries? And people cart from project housing to Laundromats? Well, we make those, all of them. There are huge profits in semi-disposal goods like that."

"You're joking," she said.

"It's true. I mean it's true that I'm joking. We don't own the Blimpie chain. And we don't manufacture those bags, but whoever does is making a killing. We're Fontaine. We don't own anything. But I was not raised Fontaine. I was really at sea."

"Everyone's like that when they're young," she said.

"No, I mean I was actually at sea. On a boat."

Didier de Louridier and Sandro had stood, as Didier inspected Stanley's collections of bric-a-brac on the small tables that lined the room. Didier paused before the cap-and-ball pistol.

"Pick it up," Sandro said. "Nothing to be afraid of. You'd have to shoot someone in the eye to actually hurt them."

Didier picked it up and looked down into the barrel.

"What about the others in your gang?" I asked Burdmoore. "Are they still around?"

"There are remnants," he said. "Remnants and debris. Fah-Q lives with his retired father in Miami, got so paranoid he can't do anything but throw pots. He's really into that, making pottery. One guy became an anti-fluoride crusader. Another is a Guardian Angel. Those guys are complete psychos. They've adopted state power as volunteers." As Burdmoore spoke, he was watching Sandro explain to Didier how the cap-and-ball pistol worked.

"Your boyfriend likes guns," Burdmoore said.

"It belonged to his father," I said. "His family used to manufacture that gun. There's a logic."

"Right. A logic."

"He doesn't use it. It's not stuffed in the cuff of his boot."

"And yet I'd wager he is the type of man who would enjoy the feeling of that," Burdmoore said.

He leaned his chair back on its hind legs and looked at me. The chair was creaking and I worried he might hurt it and that it would gouge marks into the soft wood of Gloria and Stanley's pine-plank floor.

"And I think you might be . . . oh, never mind," he said.

"I might be what?"

"I think you might be the sort of sister who likes that type," he said.

His chair kept creaking. I was convinced it would break from the strain of bearing his weight on its hind legs.

"You like a guy who puts a gun in his boot," he whispered, "don't you?"

In fact I had once watched Sandro put a gun in his boot. I did not admit this to Burdmoore. We had been in Washington, DC, for Sandro's show at the Corcoran Gallery. DC had some kind of weapons ban that Sandro was secretly protesting by showing up to his own opening armed.

His interest in guns had never bothered me. I was around them all the time growing up. My uncles, my cousins, all shot guns. Reno's main thoroughfares were lined with p.a.w.nshops, and I understood the p.a.w.nshop to be a kind of forge that liquidated objects into money. The things that could be most quickly converted were guns. When someone in our family died, the big inheritance question was who would get the guns. Relatives would stake a claim based on sentiment. "Your dad's nickel-plated Browning meant a lot to me," Andy had said after my father died. "First gun I ever shot." He knew my father better than I did, because Andy was older than I, and my father had left Reno when I was three, had gone to Ecuador to build log cabins on someone's get-rich-quick scheme, and when that didn't work out, had gone on to other get-rich-quick schemes. I didn't know him and I didn't want his guns. I gave them to Andy. A few days later they were in a p.a.w.nshop window downtown.

Click-click. We watched as Sandro showed Didier how to pull the cylinder and unscrew the nipples on the cap-and-ball pistol, how to load the chamber.

"Black gunpowder goes first," Sandro said. "Then you press the lead ball down into the chamber."

Didier asked what the attraction was to such an antiquated thing.

There was a loophole, Sandro said. Anyone could own one. Carry it concealed.

"It's not considered a gun," he said. "But it is one. And it fires very, very straight."

Burdmoore didn't say anything more, but I felt a need to explain away Sandro's interest in guns.

"His work is all objects that are what they are, and something else, at the same time," I said. "A gun can be an idea, a threat, or a thing. As Sandro would put it, imaginary, symbolic, or real, all at once."

"Oh, sure," said Burdmoore. "I mean, it sounds good. Except you can't brandish a gun and shoot it."

Didier was directly behind us now, practicing quickdraws with Sandro's cap-and-ball pistol like a Western gunslinger, gazing into the mirror that hung on the wall behind Burdmoore.

"A gun is either symbolically enlisted or it's enlisted enlisted," Burdmoore said, watching Didier, who froze with the gun drawn, admiring his own reflection. "Threats are for people who aren't willing to risk anything."

Didier laughed. "Oh, right," he said, turning to Burdmoore. "But wasn't it someone from your little gang who shot at me with blanks? Is that not a kind of hysterical threat?"

"That was . . . it just happened. You were not on our list of targets."

"But what was the purpose, if not for intimidation? Obviously you didn't intend to kill me. Or you would have used real bullets."

"Look, man. You fainted, is what I heard. Which, for an esoteric guy like you, is a kind of death."

"A kind of death-what c.r.a.p," Didier said. "You guys were a bunch of image-obsessed poseurs. Sorry. If I recall correctly, Antonioni wanted to put you in his youth cult film, the one with the Pink Floyd soundtrack. Or am I mistaking you for some other group of cinema-ready toughs?"

Everyone was listening now.

Burdmoore smiled. "That's true. It was us. But we turned him down."

"Zabriskie Point?" John Dogg said from the end of the table. "You can give him my name if he's casting for something."

"And didn't you guys have a kind of sit-in in front of the UN, with your faces wrapped in bandages, pretending you were survivors from a platoon that had been accidentally napalmed in a Vietnamese jungle by an American bomber?"

"We were bringing the war home. Would it have been better not to stage our dissent?"

"But that's exactly it! You 'staged' your dissent-just as you say. I'm remembering more now. I heard about it from someone who was there. You all removed the bandages from your faces as this coordinated act of protest, strip by strip, ever so slowly." Didier gestured with his hands, as if lifting bandages from his own face.

"Reporters all around you. There to see the terrible damage as you unveiled yourselves, the few survivors who managed to plunge themselves in a river, jellied gasoline clinging to their cheeks and arms and ribs, the smell of charred flesh-"

"Sounds practically like you were there, Didier," Ronnie said.

"No, Ronnie. I just think it's important to draw distinctions between real violence and theater. So there you all were, screaming, 'Look at us! Look at our faces!' The bandages fell away. And surprise: no one was burned. You didn't go to Vietnam. None of you did. It was a hoax."

"It wasn't a hoax," Burdmoore said quickly. "It was theater. Real theater. Like Brecht."

"What does Brecht have to do with it? I think you should leave Brecht out of this-"

"The people who watched? They wanted to see our burned faces. And if we'd shown them burned faces they would have turned their heads away and flinched, but left satisfied that we were burned, end of story. We thwarted their expectations, left them disappointed. The observers are promised disfigurement, are led to the crime of having wanted to see it. And then a question lingers: where is the violence going to show itself? By removing the thing the mask is meant to cover, we were making a point. The thing the mask is meant to cover can't be covered or seen: it's everywhere."

"Blah-blah-blah," Didier said. "My advice would have been to give up the street theater and drop below the radar. Go underground. Isn't that what they're doing in Italy, Sandro?"

"I don't keep up on it, Didier," Sandro said. "And I'm not sure what you mean. There's a youth movement. It's out in the open."

"Don't play dumb, Sandro," Didier said. "I'm not talking about students. I mean the factory militants."

"The Red Brigades," Burdmoore said. "We never could have been like that. Our trip was not about rigor and self-sacrifice. Anyhow, those people are Leninists. We were more like libertines."

"Followers of the great windbag Moishe Bubalev," Didier said.

"Say what you want, Didier," Burdmoore said. "He was the main thinker advocating a shift from theory to action in the late 1960s. A lot of people were reading his stuff."

"I've got a good story about that guy Bubalev," Ronnie said. "There was a certain group looking for guidance. A famous group. They had a hostage and needed insight on how to proceed. This is in Bubalev's diaries. This group showed up at his place, pestering him. They brought liquor and a good-looking female, stayed for the afternoon. Drank as the girl waggled her a.s.s around. When it was time for them to go, Bubalev was sad they were taking the pretty girl away, but at least they left their liquor behind. That's all he says about them: they took the girl but left the booze. It was the Symbionese Liberation Army, with Patty Hearst."

"Since when do you read Moishe Bubalev?" Didier asked Ronnie.

"Since never, Didier. Someone told me that story, actually. I have no idea if it's true."

"Could be true," Burdmoore said. "But look, Bubalev wasn't a priest. He was a professor and probably didn't get a lot of brainwashed chicks visiting him in faculty housing. It's best not to look at personal conduct. Take Allen Ginsberg, decent poet, had an important moment. But when you actually know him, a complete charlatan. He hung around our scene. One night, this rich kid shows up at Gem Spa with ten thousand bucks in cash. He wants to burn it in Tompkins Square Park, to take that share of capital out of the system. He was trying to convince me and Fah-Q to come watch him burn this money. We all troop over to the park, thinking there's no way he'll really do it, but it was our job to encourage extreme acts. So we're saying, burn it, go ahead. Allen Ginsberg was in the park that night. Someone told him the kid planned to set this large sum of money on fire and Ginsberg, in his loose, cotton guru clothes, goes rushing over, trying to convince the kid in a rabbinical and pushy tone to give him the money. In the end, the kid decided not to burn it. He gave it to me and Fah-Q."

"So what happened?" Didier asked him. "You guys had ten thousand bucks. Followers. Energy."

"Ten thousand bucks was nothing to us. We had steady sources of funding."

"From where?"

"Can't say. But it was very steady and very generous. We had accounts all over town that we withdrew from, ten, twenty, thirty thousand bucks a pop. We gave a lot of it away. The reason we pulled the plug had nothing to do with money. Things got hot and some of us split. Went to the Sonoran Desert and lived on horseback."

"Like real Marlborough men," Didier said.

Burdmoore laughed. "Hardly. We weren't peddling addiction as rugged independence. It wasn't nearly so romantic. A couple of us almost died from hypothermia. Another barely survived a bobcat mauling. We were attacked by wolves. Fire ants. Chiggers. We suffered scabies. Impetigo. Rope burn. Hong Kong flu. Paranoia. Near-starvation. It ruined my marriage, the end of me and Nadine."

"Nadine?" I asked.

I had never seen her again, after the night with her and Thurman and Ronnie.

"My former wife," Burdmoore said. "Ronnie knows her. Didier knows her."

Didier cleared his throat. "I knew her once. Just in pa.s.sing."

"Dogg knows her."

We looked over at John Dogg, who was saying his good-byes. He approached Didier and handed him a business card, determined to make his connection before the night was over and it was too late. "I am not at all opposed to working with art writers," he said to Didier, "if you'd like to do a project with me. I mean write about my work."

"I think they're involved," Burdmoore said after John Dogg had left. "Which is fine. It's been a long time. Too much happened."

Nadine had told me practically her entire life story over the course of that evening, and now her voice came back. High and soft. Her voice and her legs and her long hair, strawberry blond, like ale. The ex she had complained about. It was Burdmoore. Burdmoore who had told her that after the revolution everyone would work two or three hours a week. That's all that would be needed, with all the robots and automation. "I don't know if it's revolutionary not to work," she had told me, "but it's better. When you sell your body you are what you do. You're yourself and you get paid for it," or so she had thought at the time, still semi-brainwashed by the ideas of her husband's group. He and his friends said hookers and children were the only people in the world who logically should be idle. Children because they were busy being children, and hookers because the labor happened on the surface of their body. The labor was their body. A man who does what he is is useless, her husband said. Despicable. Though he'd hoped to become despicable, and to survive doing nothing. Nadine had told me it wasn't a bad time in her life. She loved walking on Hollywood Boulevard, where a banner said, "Wake up in the Hollywood Hills." An ad for condominiums. And she'd looked up at it and thought, yeah, that's right-that's what I do! But waking up in the Hollywood Hills sounded better than it was, she said. She had almost died. "I was slapped," she said. "Punched. Shaken. Hung from a balcony over the 101 freeway, and yet look." She'd leaned toward me, revealing nothing more, just plain beauty, magnified. "I am still . . . so . . . pretty. Let's not pretend. I don't have to fake modesty. I have other problems. I am still pretty, never mind that I was burned with cigars. Raped. I snorted Drano by accident. But the really messed-up thing is that I am still. So. Pretty. After all that? How is it possible?"

She was beautiful, it was true. With large hazel eyes, speckled like brook trout, and the hair, reddish-gold around her white face. But I had seen, the night I met her, that her beauty was going to leave her like it does all women. For the face, time relays some essential message, and time is the message. It takes things away. But its pa.s.sage, its damages, are all we have. Without it, there's nothing.

III.

We shared a common drunkenness departing the Kastles' loft together, as if the group of us-Ronnie, Didier, Burdmoore, Sandro, his cousin, and I-carried a heavy blanket or rug over our heads, each supporting a little of the weight, which rested on all of us, and resulted in our slack words, our swaying and knocking against one another in the freight elevator. Time had stretched like taffy, the night a place we would tumble into and through together, a kind of gymnasium, a s.p.a.ce of generous borders. Or else why would we have gone, at one in the morning, to Times Square? I didn't know why, or whose idea it was, only that the night felt roomy and needed to be filled.

We broke into two groups, climbing into taxis, and reconvened on Forty-Second Street, where red light leaked like a juice from the theater entrances. A giant thermometer rising along one side of the Allied Chemical building shifted eerily from red to violet, red to violet. Below it was a frozen planet Earth cradled by a polar bear.