The Mars Room

by Rachel Kushner

  I was aware of the tone of my voice, the look on my face, a sense that I was coming at this guy, the messenger, as if the news he brought me were his fault, but I could not stop myself from filling the air with my emergency.

  * * *

  We were on lockdown that night, so I could not talk to Sammy. I was stuck in my room. I went to Conan. Back to Conan. That I had to cry helplessly and not be the protector for my child put me back into the drifting unreality I had felt that first night in county jail. I had done something that could not be reversed. But Jackson, he did nothing. He was innocent. And now he was lost, spit into the world with no love, no one.

  When I was able to calm down, Conan told me a story.

  “My little brother and I stayed with my grandmother when we were little. She lived up in Sunland. There were horse farms there. She had a yard. It was almost the country. We loved her, and we loved living with her. My mom came one day to take me and my brother away from our grandmother. She said we were moving in with her. We barely knew our mom. She didn’t raise us. My grandmother and my mom got into a fight. My mother beat our grandmother, right in front of us. Beat her up in her own kitchen. There was nothing we could do. We cried. We were scared. I was seven and my brother was five.

  “We had to go live with my mom and her boyfriend in Bell Gardens. Her boyfriend was an A-one bastard. He picked on my brother. Why, I don’t know. Maybe because he was a boy. When I turned eleven he started picking on me, but in a different way. Motherfucker raped me. And not just once. It became, like, a regular thing. So me and my brother, when I was twelve and he was ten, we left. We had this idea to go to our grandma in Sunland. We had not seen her in years because she and our mom did not talk. I remembered the house. I knew exactly where it was, off the main boulevard up there. We caught a bus. It took a long time to get there, because we kept getting on the wrong buses. Finally we were close. We walked to her place and my brother was so excited, he kept talking about our grandma, trying to remember things she cooked, her funny and old-fashioned way of talking. How she slept in a chair. We never saw her go to bed. It was like she was on a vigil, to watch us, and she never let herself take time off. Woman slept in a chair, waiting for us to need something.

  “We got to her house, I was sure it was the place, but our grandmother didn’t live there anymore. The people in the house told us they moved in after she died. She’d died and we didn’t know. So there we were in Sunland, with no money, and no grandmother, nowhere to go. We slept in a park that night. The next day we started hitching. We ended up in Santa Barbara, and slept on the beach and dumpster dove for food. We snuck on Amtrak there, hid in the bathroom when the conductor came through, but then people were knocking so we risked it, took seats. My brother started to get sick. He was shitting his pants and vomiting on the train. He was ill and couldn’t control himself, and we didn’t have tickets. The conductor comes and says, you can’t stay on the train. So the train stops at the next station, and we were kicked off. My brother was a mess. He was burning up, lying on this train platform wherever we were, some town, and we were scared the police would get involved. They’d call our mother, and we would have to go back to her and that asshole she lived with.

  “A man offered to help us. He promised not to call the cops. He took us to the Salvation Army. The people there, they put my little brother in a bed, with sheets and everything. They took care of him. They said he had dysentery and that he could have died. They let him rest and helped him get better. They gave us clean clothes. They fed me spaghetti and meatballs.

  “There are some good people out there,” Conan said, “some really good people.”

  III

  23

  When Doc was a teenager, President Richard Nixon performed on the Grand Ole Opry. Doc and his foster father, Vic, had watched it together on television. It was spring of 1974 and Nixon had already been disgraced, which burned up mean old Vic, who was loyal to the end.

  President Nixon came out onstage at the big new theater in Nashville and greeted the people of Opryland, USA.

  When the crowd died down, President Nixon said that country music was the heart of the American spirit. It was traditional music that praised simple values, love of family, love of God, and love of nation. Country music was patriotic and Christian, Nixon said.

  “It started here, and it’s ours,” President Nixon told the Opryland audience. Those in TVland were listening, too, American boys with crew cuts and big ears, like Doc, who was seventeen, knob-limbed, horny, and depressed.

  “It isn’t something that we learned from some other people or nation, it’s not something we borrowed or inherited from somebody else. Country music is as native as anything American you could ever find. It reflects values that are essential to our character, at a time when America needs character. Country music comes from the heart of America, and it is the heart of America. God bless the Grand Ole Opry,” Nixon said, “and God . . . bless . . . America!”

  The Opryland crowd went wild.

  Nixon sat down at the piano and pounded out “God Bless America” in an ugly style, his hands like mechanical levers slamming up and down. As he finished, Roy Acuff appeared, a yo-yo unspooling from his palm.

  The big-eared boys in the theater audience, and those lying on rag rugs at home, all perked up to see Roy Acuff handle a yo-yo with such grace.

  A jug band from Mississippi began to play. The singer, a barrel-chested baritone, launched into a song about a pulpwood hauler who demolished a roadside beer joint with a chain saw.

  Why did he do it? The song explained why. The pulpwood hauler did it because the bartender called him a redneck and refused to serve him a cold beer. So he destroyed the place.

  Next, to entertain President Nixon, who loved wholesome country music, came Tammy Wynette, who sang “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”

  Roy Acuff did “Wreck on the Highway.”

  Charlie Louvin sang “Satan Is Real.”

  Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper performed “Tramp on the Street.”

  Porter Wagoner chose a crowd pleaser with “Rubber Room.”

  Loretta Lynn belted out “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’.”

  “Let’s have a moment of silence to remember our beloved brother, banjo picker David ‘Stringbean’ Akeman,” Grandpa Jones told the audience. “Stringbean should have been here tonight. He was my best friend. My neighbor. My hunting buddy. And most importantly, a fellow member of the family here at the Opry. Four months ago, as many of you know, he was murdered, along with his wonderful wife, Estelle, by two lowlifes from down Dickerson Road. Let’s remember this simple man, with his long shirt, his short pants, and his love of old-fashioned mountain music.”

  Nixon’s face turned to cold plastic as the room fell silent. He looked like a professional mourner, someone they’d brought in to set the dour and ceremonial temperament.

  The mood lightened when Cousin Minnie Pearl came out and told the crowd that after the Secret Service body-searched her for this special occasion, she got in line to let them do it again. She told jokes about inbreeding and incest, and sang a song about being so jealous, she got a bulldog to watch her lover while he slept.

  Del Reeves sang a number about a truck driver dreaming of what he’d like to do with a highway billboard’s almost naked girl.

  Porter Wagoner performed “The First Mrs. Jones.” Mr. Jones, the man in the song, has killed his first wife and is warning the second Mrs. Jones that she’ll go the same way as the first if she leaves him.

  There was a song about a moonshiner who outruns the police.

  Another in which a man murders and buries his wife, but he can still hear her nagging all night long.

  The Opryland audience erupted in riotous laughter.

  Nixon sat stage left, jowly, regal and stiff, president of this great, great country, his overly long arms gripping the sides of his chair like a tractor’s stabilizer bars.

  24

  In his essay celebrating the wonder of wild apples, Thor
eau concedes they only taste good out-of-doors. Even a saunterer, Thoreau says, would not tolerate a saunterer’s apple at a kitchen table. Their bitter flavor was best rationalized in the context of a beautiful autumn walk. Gordon Hauser walked whenever he could, up logging paths, through grazing meadows that were federal land and went on for miles. He found animal skulls, shotgun shells, an old landfill of antique bottles, some of them not even broken. On a cow trail above his cabin he came upon a paper wasp’s nest. It looked like a half-crushed helmet lying on the path. Gordon carried it inside and placed it on his table, this grand and mysterious, half-deflated, torn-open thing.

  He often stayed out until dark, to watch the slow transition to night. He liked to regard the entire process from start to finish. As the last light disappeared, he heard screech owls. Great horned owls. Sometimes barn owls. On a May evening, Gordon found an owl on the ground, flapping its feathers and shuddering. Its head was as large as a tomcat’s, and furry. It made a clicking noise, and tried to back away from Gordon with its huge thorny feet. The eyes were human, with round pupils like a person’s. Eyelids like a person’s, too. It blinked and stared. He assumed the owl was injured, and that if he didn’t do something, it would be eaten by a predator. He went home and made calls. Gordon and his phone calls. That was the extent of his personal life now. Contacting bureaucracies. A county ranger told him it was probably a young owl dropped from the nest, normal for this time of year. They shake off baby feathers and take flight, she said. Gordon went back and it was gone. Once he thought he saw it, between trees at dusk. Could have been any owl, but it was harmless to want to think it was the fledgling.

  After walking he’d fix dinner, a can of soup, the staple of his one-room life, and then he’d go online, where he had developed a bad habit, an addiction whose hooks had gone in painlessly and quick. He had started running their names, as the women would call that act. To run someone’s name was to have a contact on the outside google the person, or ask around.

  The prisoner who asked to have a name run was not looking to review the full file of sad details, to rove over the inopportune mug shot available to all, especially in Florida and California, where they were uploaded by county clerks, making it seem as if a disproportionate share of screw-ups came from those states. The images were all the same: sour light and custodial formatting offset by the wild eyes and mussed hair of people yanked from life, arrested, numbered, ingested, and exposed.

  The details of trauma and poverty that surrounded the crimes themselves—which were sometimes available if a case had media attention, or if the trial transcript or case summary was online—were not what the women inside needed or asked after, when they had a name run. What the women wanted to confirm was did their cellmate, unit mate, work partner, prayer group associate, friend, fuck friend, or enemy, did that person hurt a child, or turn state’s evidence. Those were the two types that needed to be verified, baby killers and snitches.

  Gordon’s search was more open-ended. He didn’t know what he was searching for. He hoped some equilibrium could be established from the process of obtaining facts. He also sensed that this thing about facts and equilibrium was a lie he told himself to go after squalid details that were none of his business.

  By their own social codes, you were not supposed to ask what people had been convicted of. It was common sense not to ask. But the opprobrium on asking was so deep it seemed to also bar speculating, even privately. You weren’t supposed to wonder about the facts that had determined people’s lives. He had in his mind something Nietzsche said about truth. That each man is entitled to as much of it as he can bear. Maybe Gordon was not seeking truth, but seeking to learn his own limits for tolerating it. He did not type some names. He resisted typing Romy Hall, diverted the temptation to other inquiries.

  The first one he looked up was Sanchez, Flora Martina Sanchez, whom the others called Button. Her case was all over the internet. Sanchez and two other teenagers had assaulted a Chinese college student near the USC campus. He was premed, and the one allotted child his family was state-sanctioned to have. According to the confession Sanchez provided, the student had tried to “karate chop” her. All three kids mentioned in their confessions that the victim cried in a foreign language as they hit him with a baseball bat. The bat was green aluminum, Worth brand. It had on it fingerprints of the two boys and Sanchez. Sanchez had waved her Miranda rights. They all waved them, gave confessions, went to trial, got life without parole.

  They didn’t know what they were doing. Gordon was sure of this as he read.

  When they tried to rob the student, they did not know what they were doing. When they killed the student, they knew even less. When they were picked up, each separately, the morning after, and brought in for questioning, and spoke freely, but each in self-interest, to homicide detectives, with no parents present, and no lawyers, they did not know what they were doing.

  They had chosen the victim, one of the boys said, because they assumed he was rich, since Asian. They had only wanted his backpack. They weren’t trying to kill him. The student managed to walk home. His roommate heard him snuffling from beyond her closed bedroom door. She figured he’d caught a cold. She didn’t know the reason he was snuffling was because he was aspirating blood.

  Gordon believed in a kind of Hippocratic oath, not just as a teacher but as a person, to do no harm. Maybe this snooping was harm. He did it anyway.

  All these details in the newspaper articles built a portrait, a set of impressions. Gordon had met Button on the other side, a lost little girl who looked twelve years old. Once, when Sanchez smiled as Gordon praised her in class, he saw her young essence. It was so wanting, and bright, he’d had to look away.

  The word violence was depleted and generic from overuse and yet it still had power, still meant something, but multiple things. There were stark acts of it: beating a person to death. And there were more abstract forms, depriving people of jobs, safe housing, adequate schools. There were large-scale acts of it, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in a single year, for a specious war of lies and bungling, a war that might have no end, but according to prosecutors, the real monsters were teenagers like Button Sanchez.

  In the primitive part of the mind, violence was body-to-body, punching and clubbing and cutting. Those people went to prison. Were not offered any kind of mercy. Signed up for Gordon Hauser’s class. Did or did not do the reading.

  After indulging in the difficult facts, he all at once grasped why these kids, Button and her friends, had killed the poor student and ruined their own lives.

  The student was not a person to them. That was the reason. They would not have harmed someone they knew was a full person. He was alien to them, his fluency in Mandarin something the kids never considered.

  The student had snuffled loudly. His roommate had told the courtroom, through tears, and through a Mandarin interpreter, that she thought he had a cold.

  There was one photo that Gordon looked at again and again, of little Sanchez and her codefendants in trial. They slumped with tough kid postures and they all wore glasses. He was her teacher and never once saw Sanchez put on glasses. Their public defenders probably insisted they order them and it was among the few health services you could get in county jail, a pair of prescription eyeglasses, or maybe the lawyers went to Walgreens and bought them one-strength-fits-all readers. The photo of them in their glasses, bored and distracted at their own murder trial, made Gordon hate Sanchez. The glasses were meant to alter the jury’s perception. To bend the truth. But he was disgusted with himself for this sudden hate, and maybe guilt and innocence were not even a real axis. Things went wrong in people’s lives.

  Reading about her case, Gordon felt he was trying to cross an eight-lane freeway on foot. He had his argument worked out, about why she was a victim, when he found an article that quoted a Youth Authority counselor who testified that he’d overheard Sanchez talking about the crime. “We didn’t even get anything off the nip,” San
chez had said.

  * * *

  Those were the worst nights. In the light of day his mood improved. As he drove the roads that wound down to Stanville, the hillside grasses green-tipped and mohair-soft, heart-shaped clots of mistletoe clustered in the branches of the oak trees like giant beehives, he knew that he could not judge. I cannot judge, because I do not know.

  Gordon was familiar, from his time at college and graduate school, with rich kids. If you grew up rich, you played a musical instrument, violin or piano. You were on the debate team. Preferred a certain brand of jeans cuffed just so, maybe you puffed a ciggie or smoked bowls with your friends in your dad’s Lexus, then were late to your SAT tutorial. But so many kids did it differently, and were done to differently. If you were from Richmond, or East Oakland, or, like Sanchez, South LA, you might be trained from birth practically to represent your block, your gang, to rep hard, to have pride, to be hard. Maybe you had a lot of siblings to watch and possibly you knew almost nobody who had finished school, or worked a stable job. People from your family were in prison, whole swaths of your community, and it was part of life to eventually go there. So, you were born fucked. But, like the rich kids, you too wanted to have fun on Saturday night.

  All children are looking for a positive self-image. All children want that. It is obtained in different ways.

  No Tank Tops, the sign had said at Youth Guidance. Because it was presumed the parents didn’t know better than to show up to court looking like hell. The sign might have said Your Poverty Reeks.

  * * *

  Gordon’s knowledge of murder had been, for most of his life, confined to literature. Raskolnikov killed the old pawnbroker. It was a feverish decision of Raskolnikov’s to destroy his own life and shift into dreamtime, a dream that would not break, as a fever might. He was a miserably poor graduate student, like Gordon had been. It was almost funny, how everything in Dostoevsky’s novels came down to rubles. A word that sounded like something heavy and made of brass. Rubles. Put them in a sock, like you’d put a padlock, and swing.