The Mars Room

by Rachel Kushner

  This feeling didn’t seem like it derived from something I could fix or improve. It was simply who I was compared to who Jimmy was, which put my life in negative relief. But it would not have comforted me to date someone who was worse off than I was. Right after I moved to LA, I ran into a guy from San Francisco, a guitar player who dated a girl I knew and had been in a band that everyone thought was cool. He told me fifteen horror stories about his relapses into heroin and his roommate overdosing and his brother overdosing, too, and something about someone named Noodles, a girl who had tried to pin the roommate’s death on him, claiming he was at fault for supplying the drugs, and how finally now he was putting his life together, how glad he was to be out of San Francisco, we should hang out, et cetera. He had tattoos I didn’t remember from when I’d known him, monster faces up his arms. They seemed like gargoyles meant to ward off bad energy, except he was radiating it, and I wanted to get away from him as quickly as possible.

  * * *

  The apartment I’d sublet was near Echo Park Lake, on a curving street of collapsing Victorians just above downtown. It belonged to a girl I knew from San Francisco, a stripper who was away in Alaska, working up there at the gentlemen’s clubs. Lots of girls would go to Alaska to make money, but they never came home with much. They made a lot at the clubs, but life was so dull and confining that everyone drank all the time, and the drinks were expensive like everything there was expensive. Girls returned with an experience of Alaska and no money saved. This girl had a nice apartment because at home in LA she made great money at the clubs in the San Fernando Valley. They had a reputation and, as I discovered, it held up. Discovered, that is, after a rocky start, at clubs in Hollywood that were just havens for tourists, couples who were there to gawk and had no intention of paying for a lap dance. There is nothing worse than when people your own age come along and jeer. It’s always better to deal exclusively with customers who know the rules and play by them. The ones who are looking for the game, pretending there are girls in rhinestones and canary-yellow stilettos who truly get off on drowning the faces of middle-aged men with their breasts. The customers we want are those who believe that the girls choose the rhinestones and stilettos because they are the type to wear them, and not because they are merely pretending that type exists. Once I found the right places to work, I was cleaning up. But in terms of exact figures, keep in mind that every service worker paid in tips, whether they are a bartender or waiter or stripper, exaggerates what they make. It seems to be human nature. People don’t outright lie. They take their very best day ever, their most outstandingly lucrative shift, historically, and they tell you it is what they average. Everyone does this. So I can tell you how much I made on a Friday night in the Valley, as if it were a typical shift, but I’m quoting my best Friday of all time, which was not typical. The lunch shifts, what I was given when I started, were not great money. Men came for the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, and not for company. I sat in the back of the theater, bored, trying not to smell the sweet and sour pork, as I listened to David Lee Roth say, All you got to do is jump. “He designed his own clothes for the video,” another stripper told me about six times. It seemed to be the only fact she had on hand, or knew.

  Jackson’s school was a block away from the sublet, so I could walk him there in the morning. And if I was working, my new neighbors, a large family with four children who all attended that same school, would pick him up and watch him for me. Quickly he was transforming from Jackson into Güero, which was what they called him. The grandmother was from Mexico and ironed every article of the entire family’s clothing, including socks and underwear. They were loving people who probably didn’t quite understand what I was about, but children involved no judgment or need to understand.

  I did not see any doom in the road. I was at least away from Kurt Kennedy, and Jackson seemed happy.

  I witnessed doom, though. It was around me. But at the time, I thought the bad luck of other people reaffirmed that I was doing okay.

  * * *

  Take the plumber. This girl I was subletting from had a plumber who was always coming around. He was from Guatemala and really friendly. Too friendly. He had a lot of plans for me. Do you like it when your plumber has a lot of plans for you socially? He made it seem like he and the girl whose place it was had been good buddies and so he expected the same from me. I was trying to start a new life, and this plumber kept calling me to talk about how one Saturday he was going to take me to Home Depot so I could pick out my own sink console, which the landlord was supposed to pay to install, and I said I don’t care, just bring one over, I’m a subletter, Victor (that was the plumber’s name), what does it matter. But Victor said, as if out of consideration for me and for what I really wanted (whenever people do that, beware), no, no, we’ll go together. I’ll take you, it’s no problem, really.

  It was a problem to me because I didn’t want to spend my Saturday with Victor. He showed up on the agreed day wearing a shiny patterned shirt and soaked in cologne. So much cologne he seemed to be tapped into the original fount, the place from which it all flows. I dropped Jackson off with the Martinez family, and the grandmother, whom Jackson was starting to call Abuela, looked at Victor and nodded like she understood everything.

  Victor and I went to get the sink and the hours doing that were lost for me, because I didn’t want to be in his van. I didn’t want to be subjected to his happiness, which seemed to be based on nothing, a thin layer of good cheer stretched over emptiness. I missed Jackson, I missed Jimmy. I wanted a life I did not have. But I also was not ready to admit that. I wanted to get rid of Victor so I could drink beer on my porch as the ice cream truck broadcast its warped and moronic tinkle, and Jackson and the neighbor kids all lined up for type 2 diabetes. It was good to be a stranger in Los Angeles. It was bad to be a stranger in Los Angeles with the company of another stranger in a loud shirt. If everything were so great for this Victor, why was he wasting his Saturday blindly ignoring the blunt and unwelcoming cues from a woman who had no interest in him? I felt desperate, but not in the way Victor was desperate.

  After unloading the sink at my apartment, he tried to get me to go drink flaming margaritas with him at a Mexican place on Sunset. I said those give me a headache. They use butane to make them burn, I told him, although that’s probably not true. And he says we can have white wine, figuring I was that classy white wine type. Because I’m a nice person, I lied and said I had to work, although I was not working that whole weekend; I was planning to spend a lot of time thinking, sitting on the edge of this gone-to-Alaska girl’s bed with my chin in my palm, hearing the ice cream truck, sitting with a blank mind, which might fill later with thoughts on how to live like an adult. I was busy with that. It was important to me. No one bothering me, watching me, harassing me, calling me, following me, sneaking up on me. I’d had that for months with Creep Kennedy, and now I was free and did not want this Victor shading in.

  When he heard the lie that I had to work, Victor wanted to take me salsa dancing after I got off. I said no, and after several rounds of his pushiness, I finally got rid of him.

  A week later, Victor called me and said, “Romy, are you okay?”

  I’m fine, I said. What business was it of his whether I was okay or not?

  “I had this terrible dream about you.”

  Whenever anyone dreams about you, the dream tells you about them, not about you. It’s their own private fantasy life and they give it away by announcing who they dreamed about. But Victor was superstitious and was convinced that he should be worried about me on account of his dream.

  Victor died in a car crash shortly after that phone call, in the van we’d taken to Home Depot to get the sink.

  He’d had the bad dream about the wrong person.

  * * *

  Shortly after Victor died, a neighbor, a young guy named Conrad, overdosed. I knew Conrad was a junkie. He sometimes helped Victor as an assistant, but it was charity on Victor’s part. Every day, Conr
ad’s sister came to our street and stood before the wrecked pile across from my place, where Conrad and his spooky mother lived. Every morning the sister called her brother’s name for the whole neighborhood to hear.

  Conrad’s mother, Clemence, had knocked on my door when I first moved in, to tell me not to order any pizzas. I looked at her and she said, “You know those black vinyl containers the delivery boys carry? The pizza warmers? They bring in evil. You see those warmers, and evil is on the way in.”

  After her pizza box warning, she started talking about J. Edgar Hoover and Jimi Hendrix, and all the other “well-known individuals” who had passed through the neighborhood and to whom her family was connected. She was vague and ominous about her super-heavy connections, these well-known individuals. Okay, lady. I excused myself and went inside. I rarely saw her and I didn’t see Conrad much either, but every day I heard Conrad’s sister call his name. Every day she stood on the sidewalk and yelled it. Then one day she did not, because Conrad had apparently died the night before. No more Conrad. Still it did not occur to me that the street was cursed, although I did feel a start, a kind of shiver, when I saw a delivery boy get out of his car with a huge black pizza warmer in his hands.

  Not long after both Conrad and Victor died, I was at home, busy doing nothing until it was three p.m. and time to pick up Jackson, when I heard the neighbor next door screaming something over and over. It took me a moment to realize the word he was screaming was my name. I went out to see what he wanted. He was standing on the sidewalk with a towel wrapped around his hand, and the towel was raining blood all over the sidewalk.

  “You have to take me to the hospital,” he said.

  When I first arrived, these neighbors had tried to be friendly to me but I kept my distance. They were hard to look at. Shaved eyebrows, sallow skin, dyed black hair, black painted fingernails, a vintage black hearse. Victor did some plumbing work over there and said they kept a baby coffin in the kitchen for their canned foods. They had just bought their building, a fourplex, and were systematically evicting the tenants in order to raise the rent. They were goth slumlords. Two of their tenants had cleared out, but the family in the third unit was not moving. These tenants had nowhere to go. The husband was a diabetic and had just undergone a foot amputation. He was on crutches and insisted on driving himself to the hospital, and his leg got infected and had to be amputated higher up, at the knee. The wife worked cleaning houses, and had asthma and no sense of smell from the toxic products her employers forced her to use. They were poor people without documents, from Mexico, with three children. I knew all this because a few days before the goth neighbor was screaming my name with his hand in a bloody towel, the woman he was trying to evict asked if she could speak to me. I let her in. She sat on my couch and cried and told me about her family and their situation. She said the landlord was trying to evict her and her husband for being alcoholics. “We are Seventh-Day Adventists,” the woman said. “We do not drink.” I felt so bad for this woman that I looked up a tenants’ rights organization and helped her set up an appointment to speak to an advocate. She left and thanked me and I didn’t feel any better. Her husband was missing a leg. She had to live underneath these landlords who, she said, made unchristian sounds in the night.

  The goth landlord was screaming my name because he’d seen my car on the street. He needed help and knew I was home. He had sheared off two fingers and a thumb with his own table saw. He had the severed parts in a garbage bag. I drove him to Kaiser Hospital in Hollywood, the Burger King of health care, running my horn through intersections along Sunset Boulevard, as the guy bled on the seats in my car, which was a drag because that was a nice car—my Impala. I was stuck with him in the emergency room until his girlfriend could get there from her job. They had him shirtless and tubed with IV pain medication. I was forced to look at his tattoo, a chest-sized upside-down cross.

  “Got this to spite my brother,” he said, his words thick from pain medication. “He’s a minister.”

  You sure showed him, I did not say.

  * * *

  Victor dead, Conrad dead, the goth neighbor with half a hand. His tenants facing misery, amputation, deportation, the streets.

  Bad luck was all around me, although my neighbor and his table saw, that was more like karma. But maybe the worst omen was the veteran, all in black like a grackle. A shadow that crossed my path in the form of a man.

  I had taken my car to the shop to have the radiator rodded. The auto shop I went to was off Glendale, and it was an easy bus ride home. The bus I wanted was the 92. I was waiting when this man strolled up, VIETNAM tattooed vertically up his neck. Black felt hat, black clothes, black shoes with no socks, little tinted sunglasses, stylish in an unwholesome way. “I was a POW,” he said to me, showing me his home-inked hand: POW.

  There are two planes of time: the time of waiting for the bus, and the time when the bus finally pops into view. I was in the wrong plane of time, and stuck with a crazy. Soft heat and exhaust blasted my bare legs as cars accelerated up the hill.

  “They cut the head off my penis,” the POW said.

  “Don’t tell me about that.”

  “I apologize,” he said. “Hey, could you spare anything?”

  I handed him a dollar, because there was still no sign of the bus and I wanted him to move away. He took the dollar, opened his wallet, but before putting the bill in, he turned the wallet around, so that I would not see what other bills he had in there. It’s always this way. Crazy people only lose their cunning last, if they ever lose it.

  The bus arrived. I sat in the back. The ghost of my childhood lives in the back of buses. It says, What’s up, juts its chin. The POW sat in the handicapped seats up front, struck up a conversation, bothered someone else. He got off at the Arco farther down Glendale, where heroin is bought and sold. I was watching him out the window. I craned my neck to see if he was scoring dope. But what gave me the goddamned right to take note of what he did and where he went? You can’t own someone for a dollar.

  * * *

  Thanks to Jimmy the Beard and his idea of a practical joke, Kurt Kennedy drove his motorcycle all the way to Los Angeles. Parked it between two cars. He waited on my porch behind a thick screen of bougainvillea, so that he was invisible from the street.

  That morning, a Sunday, it was ninety degrees when I got up. Jackson and I went to the beach with Jimmy Darling. I’d never been to the Venice boardwalk, and perhaps taking me there was Jimmy Darling’s own idea of a practical joke.

  We strolled along, past the sword swallowers and tattoo parlors and piercing salons. The tables with pineapple incense, blueberry incense, and melon oil. Mango and strawberry hookahs. Crunk and old-school hip-hop blared as hippies danced recklessly, swinging their waist-length beards and beads. Homeless senior citizens slept in pools of urine. Shirtless Rollerbladers, fake-baked and sweaty, weaved among the crowds and the indiscreet piles of vomit. People shoved. Children cried.

  This is awful, I said.

  Jimmy Darling put his arm around me and said that he liked to think of it as the very best California had to offer. We walked over to the skateboard park because Jackson wanted to watch the teenagers riding around in its concrete pools. When we got there an argument was erupting between two skateboarders. One cracked the other over the head with his board. People came out of nowhere, and suddenly there was a crowd of shirtless men, fighting.

  Jimmy picked up Jackson and ran. I followed them. We found our car and got in it and sat. I was upset. That crack, board to skull. Jimmy calmed me down. We took Jackson into a bar away from the beach, ate hamburgers and watched a Dodgers game. After the game, as we said goodbye, it felt like I had someone I could rely on. We kissed through the window of Jimmy’s truck until I pulled away and said goodbye.

  I drove home. Jackson fell asleep in the backseat. It was probably nine p.m. when I parked on my street. I know it was nine p.m. because every minute was later accounted for.

  I mounted my stairs
, carrying my slumped little boy over my shoulder.

  On my porch, in my porch chair, sat Kurt Kennedy. Kennedy, with his dented and bald head, the square freckles, the neckroll, the hoarse voice, the persistence, here he was.

  To have moved away, and felt free of him for the first time in months. And to come home and find him waiting for me.

  I had the bad luck, too.

  19

  Candy Peña made baby blankets with the yarn Gordon Hauser had brought her. The blankets were collected by a unit officer and placed in the office of receiving and release. Whenever Gordon passed the office he saw them there, in a giant leaf bag, the colors of the yarn that he had chosen peeking out, garish and sad. One day he asked the officer in R and R about their status. The officer was a scalded blonde with a tight ponytail, brusque, ex-military. She snorted. “These? Nobody wants ’em. I keep forgetting to tell the porters to take them out to the trash.”

  That same officer supervised family visits, when inmates got thirty-six hours in the prison’s version of an apartment, with blood relatives.

  Blood relatives. It sounded so violent. Or was Gordon losing perspective, everything warped by what was around him.

  Was it difficult to watch them say goodbye? Gordon had asked the R and R officer, before he knew better. He had witnessed, passing family visiting, small children clinging to their mothers and crying hysterically. Someone had painted a lavender hopscotch pattern on the walkway outside the family units.