The Mars Room

by Rachel Kushner

  “You study real good, Hall. You prove everybody wrong. Show the world you ain’t all bad.”

  McKinnley clomped down the hall in his huge boots.

  * * *

  If I’d understood how much guards hated civilian staff, I might have been nicer to G. Hauser, which was the name on the ID pinned to the GED instructor’s shirt. The guy sat down in a chair next to my birdcage with a stack of worksheets. He was about my age or a little older, with a non-ironic mustache and ugly running shoes.

  “Let’s start with something simple.” He read the first question on the math worksheet. “Four plus three equals (a) eight, (b) seven, (c) none of the above.”

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  “Is that (a) eight, (b) seven, or (c) none of the above? It sometimes helps to use your fingers, if you need to count it out.”

  “It’s seven,” I said. “I think we can move to something more challenging.”

  He flipped pages. “All right, how about a word problem. If there are five children and two mothers and one cousin going to the movies, how many tickets do they need? (a) seven, (b) eight, (c) none of the above.”

  “What movie are they going to?”

  “That’s the wonderful thing about math, it doesn’t matter. You can count without knowing the details.”

  “It’s hard for me to imagine these people without seeing who they are, and knowing what movie they’re going to.”

  He nodded, like my response was reasonable, not at all a problem.

  “Maybe we got a little ahead of ourselves. How about we make up a question,” he said. “Or rather, we take the question, and simplify it.”

  This guy had the patience of a genuine idiot.

  “There are three adults and five children: How many tickets do they need?”

  There was no sarcasm in his voice. G. Hauser was so determined to work with whoever he thought I was that I could not play along.

  “If the theater lets kids in free, how can I know how many tickets they need? And, depending on what kind of people they are, what theater this is—are they ghetto, or are they squares like you? Because maybe they let in one of the adults, like that cousin, through an emergency side door, after they pay for two tickets.”

  I saw the plush stained carpet of the multiplex out by the Oakland airport, the one where a cousin would push in through the emergency exit instead of pay. It’s probably gone, like all the other theaters I used to know. The Strand on Market, where as kids Eva and I drank Ripple wine with grown-ups. The Serra, in Daly City, which showed Rocky Horror. The Surf, out by the beach, where I went with my mother when I was young for a movie starring the actress I’m named after. The movie kept showing the same car accident in slowed segments. I guess I asked too many questions, because finally my mother yanked me from my seat and said we were leaving. I had ruined the film for her.

  “They’re squares,” G. Hauser said. “Like me.”

  “The kids all have to have tickets?”

  He nodded.

  “The answer is eight.”

  “Excellent,” he said.

  “You just congratulated a twenty-nine-year-old woman for adding three plus five.”

  “I have to start somewhere.”

  “What makes you think I can’t count?”

  “There are women here with innumeracy. Who have trouble adding sums. I can give you a GED practice test, and if you’re confident you’ll pass, I’ll schedule you to take it.”

  “I don’t need a GED,” I said. “I’m here because I was called out here.”

  “You might think you don’t need a degree, but in the future, when you are facing your release, you’ll be glad to have it.”

  “I’m not getting out,” I said.

  He went into a calm and semi-robotic spiel about people who don’t have release dates and the numerous long-termer programs for which I’d be eligible with a GED. I didn’t explain that I was a high school graduate. I said I’d think about it and was taken back to the cell.

  * * *

  Jimmy Darling used to do math with Jackson, for fun. It started with a lesson about the history of counting, at the picnic table on the ranch in Valencia. Jimmy drew a circle on a piece of paper. “This is a stable where the man keeps his animals,” Jimmy said. He drew three circles for the animals. “What kind of animals?” Jackson asked. I guess we both liked to know the irrelevant information. “Sheep, how about,” Jimmy said. “The farmer has three sheep, and they each have names: Sally, Tim, and Joe. Every morning the farmer lets the sheep out to graze. In the evening, he herds them back into the pen. Since there are only three, he can easily go over the short list of their names and confirm that Sally, Tim, and Joe are all safely back in their enclosure for the night, where they won’t be eaten by wolves.

  “But let’s say the farmer has ten sheep, instead of three. If he names each one, he has to remember ten names when they return. He has to recognize ten sheep. Each name goes with a specific sheep. If Sally is the pregnant sheep, then he can recognize her broad belly and check her name off when she returns from grazing. But let’s say the farmer has thirty sheep. Too many to name, right? So he gets a basket of rocks, exactly enough so that he has one rock for each sheep. He takes a rock out of the basket for every animal that leaves the enclosure in the morning. As each one returns in the evening, he puts a rock in the basket. When all the rocks have been moved back into the basket, he knows that all of his sheep are safely home. The sheep don’t need names anymore. The farmer just has to know how many there are.” He explained to Jackson that numbers started with counting and counting started with names. It was like prison, from a name to a number. Except my number was more like a name than the rock that went with the animal, because the rock could go with any animal, and my number went only with me. Although we had count every day. Count was a total count for the number of people in prison, and not by inmate numbers. So we were both: animals that did not graze, and individuals who could not be confused.

  * * *

  When they escorted us out for the weekly yard time, we could see down into the caged area of death row. Sammy hollered from the catwalk.

  “Candy Peña, I love you! Betty LaFrance, I love you!”

  Candy looked up. Her face dimpled into a sad smile. They were down there on their sewing machines, sewing a seam onto burlap, then moving the fabric ninety degrees, another seam, turning the material again to run a third seam, before tossing the piece on a pile. I didn’t see Betty, who often refused to work and lost her privileges.

  They sewed sandbags on death row. Nothing else. They had six machines and they sewed sandbags for flood control. If you see a pile of sandbags along the side of a California road, they have been touched by the hands of our celebrities.

  Payment is five cents an hour, minus fifty-five percent restitution, and the work is repetitive and lacks the satisfaction of making even a single finished thing. They are not completed. They still have to be filled.

  Who completes the bag? My guess is men. Men fill it with sand, and close up the top.

  * * *

  Other times when we showered they were on the two phones down there on death row, or waiting for the phones. Talking to journalists and lawyers, Sammy explained. The women on death row worked the media and were always communicating with folks in the outside world. They knew all kinds of people on account of who they were. They led people on and suggested they might consent to interviews or visits, promises they did not plan to keep. They weren’t interested in doing interviews. They were interested in having people to call, people who wanted something from them; it felt good to be pursued. It was a game to get attention. A game that was not a game because it was all they had.

  We were not allowed mail or phone calls in ad seg. Still, I felt lucky compared to those women downstairs talking to the Fresno Bee. My mother would come to the prison with Jackson as soon as I was allowed a visit, after I was done with this ad seg term, and transferred—mainlined—to gen
eral population. She would put money on my books so that I could buy what I needed, coffee and toothpaste and stamps, in order to survive. Sammy kept telling me how important it was to have someone on the outside, but I didn’t let her know I had support. Or that I had two life sentences plus a six-year enhancement. It was no one’s business but mine. Like in the dressing room at the Mars Room, you don’t give your real name. You don’t offer information. You don’t talk about yourself because there is nothing to be gained from it.

  Sammy had been back in ad seg the night that Candy Peña received her execution papers. Candy had to choose which method she preferred, and sign the form. Sammy listened to Candy Peña cry as she read the paper that offered her gas or injection. “We turned out our lights to protest,” Sammy said, “and everyone on ad seg refused their dinner tray. It creates a lot of paperwork for the staff. They have to fill out forms for every person who refuses her tray and turns out her security light. Candy was screaming over and over. Everyone on ad seg and death row was crying. Even the guards were crying. There was one handicapped lady who accepted her dinner tray, but I think she just didn’t understand what was going on. Candy chose lethal injection.”

  Candy Peña had knifed a little girl. She was out of her mind on meth and PCP when it happened. She prayed daily, hourly, minute by minute, at the altar she’d made in her death row cell, to honor the little girl. She cried and signed the papers and Sammy was a human if sometimes a bully and she felt for Candy. You go to ad seg and you don’t stop having feelings. You hear a woman cry and it’s real. It’s not a courtroom, where they ask all the pertinent and wrong questions, the niggling repeated demands for details, to sort contradiction and establish intent. The quiet of the cell is where the real question lingers in the mind of a woman. The one true question, impossible to answer. The why did you. The how. Not the practical how, the other one. How could you have done such a thing. How could you.

  * * *

  Sammy’s crime was that she’d wet the bed. She told me all about it. I know I said you don’t give out personal data in prison, but Sammy told me everything.

  “When I was four we lived in a trailer and there was no electricity because my mother was an addict and had to spend whatever money she could get on dope. At night, I would pee in the bed to warm it up. I got a rash on my legs. A neighbor saw my legs and called CPS.”

  Child Protective Services took Sammy away. She was in and out of group homes and wound up in Youth Authority, where she learned to fight. “You get a lot of skills there you’ll need for prison.” By twelve she was out of YA, back with her mom and turning tricks to support her mother’s habit. The men liked young company. Her first sugar daddy was a bail bondsman named Maldonado. She eventually got strung out herself, was arrested, took a narcotics number, a never-never number she called it, and had been in and out of prison ever since, on sales and trafficking charges. Her mother was long dead. Many people she’d been in YA with were here at Stanville. Her network was extensive. It was a lifetime of prison connections.

  Sammy had paroled six months earlier. Her time out of prison had been brief. She was eager to mainline in order to reclaim her possessions. She had a television, a personal fan, a stinger to heat water. Her friend Reebok had her eye mask. “It’s got little piggies on it,” she said, “and I want it back.” She’d given things away but on the condition that if she returned she’d be able to repossess. She knew her leaves from prison were just that, not departures but vacations.

  But she had not expected to be back quite so soon. Sammy had been released to a new husband, a guy she met through the mail. It all started with a letter he wrote, but not to Sammy. He’d written the letter to another woman inside Stanville, and that woman treated the letter as currency, something to sell to another prisoner who wanted a pen pal. People were always looking for pen pals. Someone would surely pay to start an exchange with this guy. The letter had been read by so many women when it got to Sammy that its pages were tearing on the crease lines where it had been folded and refolded. The letter and its writer, Keath Something—I never caught the last name—had potential, and so the woman who had received his letter kept raising the price. When the letter got to Sammy, bidding for it had risen to over fifty dollars. The high bidder would get the envelope with Keath’s return address. Sammy told me that as soon as she started to read it she knew the letter was worth more than fifty dollars, a lot more.

  “His writing was like a third grader’s,” she said with a grave tone, as if to suggest that such a thing denoted immense value.

  “Even his own name was misspelled,” she said. “K-e-a-t-h? Who the fuck spells it that way?”

  Keath had victim written all over him and his misspelled name.

  The woman selling the letter had used a photo of a high school beauty queen on her prison pen pal page. People put up photos they found or traded, someone’s daughter, someone’s cousin, someone. Not themselves. It was crucial to have runners—people who sent you money inside. One way to get runners was to find men to write to you. Keath had written to what he thought was this high school beauty queen, but was merely a woman who had used that photo. She was an elderly prisoner who’d suffered throat cancer and had a mechanical larynx. She held a battery-operated box to her neck to negotiate a price with Sammy, who offered her CD player as payment. The woman handed over the envelope with Keath’s address.

  Sammy wrote to Keath and introduced herself, said she’d felt an instant connection when she’d read his letter. A courtship began. She was paroling in a few months and needed not your typical runner, but someone to go home to. An apartment, financial stability, and proof of gainful employment, or the parole board would never let her free. Sammy had an old boyfriend named Rodney who might set her up at his place in Compton, but Rodney hit her, she told me, and she was done with that. Keath started to seem like the answer.

  Keath said he had been in the air force and flew planes and had a good military pension. When he came to the prison for the first time, he proposed to Sammy. He was a big, lumbering, and doughy white boy with a wandering eye. She said yes but could not bring herself to let him kiss her in the visiting room. Like the rest of us, she’d done all kinds of sex work, but she couldn’t let this innocent dope plant one on her cheek. She told him she’d lost her privileges and could not hug or kiss. Keath believed it. “Oh, golly, I don’t want to get you in trouble,” he said, “why don’t we just shake hands.” She paroled. They married at a county courthouse not far from Stanville, in Hanford, a dusty farming town where Keath’s father sold tractor equipment. His family had fixed up an apartment for them and made everything in it blue, because Sammy had said it was her favorite color. Blue curtains, blue couch, blue microwavable bowls. She didn’t have a favorite color. She was just saying things to Keath that she thought he wanted to hear. She’d said blue because it was what she was wearing that day in the visiting room, like every other prisoner in the visiting room.

  There she was, a Mexican girl from Estrada Courts in East LA, living in a small town in the Central Valley with a corny white husband who, it turned out, had never flown planes, never been in the air force, and instead spent all day watching car racing on TV. He said he was going to Daytona, talked incessantly about Daytona. Once a month he filled out his SSI forms with his left hand, so the government would think he was slow, even slower than he already was. His big doughy small-town family didn’t know anything about Sammy, and didn’t ask where it was Keath had met her. He took her to a picnic down the I-5. It was a gathering for people who liked to pretend they were fighting the Civil War. There were log cabins where women in old-timey clothes were making biscuits. Keath wanted Sammy to join the other women. Sammy had never made anything but prison spreads. She could whip up a prison cheesecake from Sprite and nondairy creamers, or tamales from canteen Doritos that were soaked in water and hand-pulped to masa. She stood awkwardly, wishing she had worn long sleeves to hide her prison tattoos. “I love your tan,” one of the white wome
n told Sammy as she rolled out her white biscuit dough. The men were firing cannons. One blew into a bugle. Keath was a pretend captain in the pretend army and won a real sword that day. He had to get rid of it, Sammy explained while they were on the long drive back to Hanford. She was a level four on parole: no firearms, and no knives over ten inches long, or she would go right back to prison. “Aw, durnit.” Keath blew air and flapped his lips like a child. Like a Keath Something who lives in a dream. Gets himself a sureña from Stanville, takes her to a picnic where white people admire her tan.

  But after that, Keath never took her anywhere. He only left the house himself one evening a week, Sundays, when he worked as a volunteer security guard at the Red Cross. He made a big deal about it. Always took a briefcase with him, and said it held important documents that he needed to study for his next Daytona run. It wasn’t really a briefcase. It was the emptied container for a backgammon set. Once, Sammy opened it. It was filled with candy bars.

  Sammy had no money, no car, was trapped with a meatheaded half-wit in an apartment next to a feedlot. Keath spent his days swiveling left and right in a chair, like he was on the racetrack that was inside his TV. He wore a shiny Daytona race shirt that said PENZOIL over the shoulder. Sammy started asking him for money. He reluctantly gave her a few ones. She would walk to the dollar store, buy a quart of malt liquor, drink it while talking to the farmworkers who lived in the shacks behind the parking lot. One night she came home drunk. Keath was swerving in his chair as race cars jerked around the track on TV. Sammy could not take it anymore. She picked up a heavy glass ashtray and beaned him with it, then ran from the apartment.

  She was a fugitive with no place to go. At a railroad crossing she heard a siren in the distance. She hid behind a switching box, waiting for the sound to fade, and then followed the train tracks. She got to the freeway and stood on the southbound shoulder until she found a ride.