The Mars Room

by Rachel Kushner

  “When I get out of this place maybe I can try to do something for you,” Sammy said.

  I knew she meant what she said, but Sammy was in and out of prison and barely able to help herself. She was a loyal person with problems of her own.

  I’d written probably forty letters to the case manager. The case manager sent only one letter back, a short note saying that my rights had been terminated and suggesting I get a family court lawyer if I was attempting to appeal the termination, but that I should understand terminations were almost never overturned.

  * * *

  Serenity Smith had been in protective custody almost a year now. Some had given up the fight, figuring they would never mainline her. Laura Lipp kept it up. It was her passion. There were people who felt that Laura Lipp was not a good leader for the group, since she had murdered her own child, an infant, to get revenge on a man. Two young women, newbies looking to make names for themselves, beat up Laura and cut off all her hair.

  Laura kept a low profile after that. The movement grew against Ms. Smith, newly validated by its loss of Laura as leader. The Norse was involved. The Norse informed on women who held hands, which was illegal at Stanville. So was hugging, or any kind of sustained physical contact between inmates. “This is all out,” the Norse said. “I ain’t living with deviants. They want to throw a man in the pen with us and expect us to take it.” The Norse talked about Stanville as if she were its redneck protector of family values, a proud defender of the institution’s standards, and not just one more pathetic and angry prisoner. Teardrop, too, got involved, probably because for Teardrop aggression and beating on people were a good outlet. Teardrop and Conan, historically road dogs, got into it over the issue. “How can you not want to protect a sister?” Conan asked, meaning a black sister. Teardrop said the last thing she needed was ghetto motherfuckers up in her grill. They fist-fought in the port-a-potties on main yard and Conan won. Teardrop was moved out of our room.

  * * *

  “Has anyone gotten past an electric fence?” I asked Sammy. We were walking our track, out of listening range from the watch office microphones.

  “Two guys at Susanville.”

  “But how.”

  “They used something wood to wedge up the bottom of the fence and went underneath. A broom handle, I think. Dude at Salinas Valley climbed. He grounded himself somehow. Almost got over and they shot him down.”

  Conan jogged toward us. “I was running, and over near the bathrooms I saw this white figure, a man, with his arms open. He was in white clothes, the pants kind of belled at the bottom. I thought it was Elvis, you know, from the wild years, when he got fat and had those stupid sunglasses. But when I got closer, it was the trash bins.”

  Conan’s vision was going bad from his diabetes. He had an appointment to see a medical technician’s assistant, which was our version of doctor, in eight months’ time.

  “Hey what did Elvis drive?” Conan asked me.

  I hadn’t laughed about him mistaking the trash bins for Elvis. He always turned to cars when he knew I’d gone bleak.

  “A Stutz,” I said, but with no life in the words or in me. “He drove a Stutz Blackhawk.”

  * * *

  Jimmy Darling had gone to Graceland with a camera and said there was nothing to film there. Nothing to see. Except for the graffiti on the wall surrounding it.

  Isn’t it all made to look glitzy and impressive? I asked.

  Yeah, he said, it is.

  What about the car?

  The car, he said, was like the Virgin Mary on toast. Try to photograph it, and the miracle vanishes. He’d paid extra to see the airplanes. Elvis’s private jets. Inside one was a double bed. Stretched across it, over the covers, a super-wide airplane seat belt. Looking at the belted bed, and the one executive’s chair, near the window, Jimmy Darling felt the spirit of Elvis in the plane, up late, inside the night, hurtling across the sky, lonely as hell, no one with him in his darkest hour. Jimmy Darling was visited, in the airplane, by the wind of Elvis’s empty soul.

  * * *

  Hauser, too, knew the mechanical museum at Ocean Beach. “See Susie Dance the Can-Can,” he said, as proof. The Camera Obscura, where a large dish showed the froth of the waves. Kelly’s Cove, which in my group wasn’t about surfing, just drinking, and boys. A huge sign that announced Playland, but no Playland around. Only the sun-bleached sign next to a fake cliff, man-made, which people said was there to trick the Japanese during the war.

  There’s a pizza place up Irving, Hauser said. They spin the dough in the windows.

  I saw everything. The stretching floury disks that collapsed on the hands of the dough makers in their chef’s hats, fists working the disks around, dough growing in girth, orbit, then back up in the air. I saw the huge wreath of flowers that hung from the closed entrance one morning, announcing the death of the old man, the pizza patriarch. I’d never seen a wreath that large. I was eight or nine. Not yet into trouble. I linked flowers with death. That huge wreath connected them for me.

  I saw the shining lid of the ocean from Irving Street, the way it rose, on a clear day, like something that breathed, that was alive, down at the end of the avenues.

  My son likes churches, I told Hauser. When I brought Jackson into Grace Cathedral he had a natural instinct to quiet in the home of someone’s god, not his, as we weren’t religious. He gazed around and then said to me, in a whispering happy voice, like he’d landed on something, an idea, “Mommy, when I grow up, I think I might want to be a king.”

  He was never once a brat, I told Hauser, but as I said it I tried to dampen the instinct to talk up Jackson too much. People should know that some kids are not just nice people, but superior to most adults. But I didn’t want Hauser to pull back, suspect I was foisting an adoptee on him. Even as that was my plan. It was the only option I could imagine actually working. People in prison were full of dumb fantasies about how their futures might go. My own were all I had. “You’ve got something with him,” Sammy said. “Most of them don’t get involved with prisoners. Too jaded. We’ll just be getting over on them. But he is open.”

  Hauser had a lost quality. He wasn’t someone who seemed to have much happening outside work. Not that he discussed his life with us. He did not. At Stanville, he was an oddball to the rest of the staff. The guards made fun of him, mostly as a way to make fun of us. Go teach those dumb bitches to read, Mr. Hauser. Teach those cows two plus two. They thought what he spent his life doing was pointless, not a worthy endeavor like watching us on security monitors or masturbating in a guard tower.

  Hauser wasn’t an idiot. He was no Keath. But sometimes he acted like one. When I asked him to bring wire cutters to the library, I was pretty sure he’d do it. I had no plans to use them. I did it to test him.

  Candy Peña bragged that Hauser was her boyfriend, that he got her “a whole grip” of knitting supplies. Anything she wanted, Candy told whoever came back to ad seg and was on her vent. If she wasn’t on death row Candy would know you don’t brag about something like that. You keep it to yourself and you cultivate it.

  * * *

  Jackson’s twelfth birthday was on a Tuesday, the 18th of December. I woke up that day and looked at the picture of a seven-year-old, which was all I had, from the last time I’d seen my son, more than four years earlier, when my mother brought him to the county jail. I’d met with them through scratched Plexiglas. He’d already grown so much. He was five when I was arrested. I didn’t know what he looked like now.

  I hid the photo in my bra. All through class time that afternoon I thought about what I was going to say to Hauser, what words I would use to pressure him to help me with Jackson. I didn’t follow the class discussion, never once raised my hand. I was focused on the moment I would give him the photo.

  I knew things weren’t going right when he looked up from his desk, as the others filed out. He was not happy to see me: that was the clue.

  “Today is my son’s birthday.”

  I
put the picture down, to show him what a beautiful kid Jackson was. No one ever said Jackson wasn’t beautiful.

  He barely looked at the photo.

  “This is him,” I soldiered on. “You can have it.”

  It was Jackson’s class picture from second grade. He was kneeling on a fake log with a fake autumn background. Smiling and shiny like his face was a polished apple.

  Hauser did not pick up the photo. “I can’t accept it.”

  “I’m giving it to you. I want you to have it.”

  “I know you do, but it’s not right. Save it for yourself.”

  Didn’t he at least want to see what Jackson looked like? I asked, trying to control my tone, because anger would get me nowhere. I was ready to lay things out, to ask for his help. I started to, and he interrupted.

  “I’m really sorry about your son, but I can’t be involved.”

  * * *

  It was the Christmas holidays, a joy-free time for us at Stanville.

  In January, when classes were scheduled to resume, we were told continuing education was suspended. Hauser had quit his job, or been fired. Whatever happens to staff they don’t tell us. Rumors fly but no one cared much about Hauser except Candy Peña. Candy hollered up the vent to Teardrop, when Teardrop did a stretch in ad seg, that Hauser had been walked off because of his overfamiliarity with Candy.

  * * *

  I’d hit a dead end. It was me alone with my pictures of Jackson, the newest of them almost five years out of date. I had the wire cutters Hauser had given me, back when he was behaving like he was supposed to. I had a large dowel I’d made in woodshop. I hid them both on the yard, beyond Tower One. I dug with my hands. I’d seen the Native American women do that, to hide their tobacco on main yard. It had rained, which was when people buried things. Patiently clawing, using their fingernails, their hands, as tools, to dig. I stayed behind Tower One a long time, as long as it took to bury the dowel and the wire cutters. No one reprimanded me, or saw. Perhaps Sammy was right, that it was a blind spot. It was just dreaming. If that dream came true, it was a dream of death. I’d get fried on the fence like the rabbits that got too close.

  A coyote died on the fence, hung there for everyone to see.

  Coyotes had lived in the alley behind the place I’d sublet in Los Angeles. They trotted along the sidewalk past our house in the middle of the day. At night Jackson and I could hear their cascade of yips. Jackson would act scared and clamp on to me but in a pretend way, because it was fun to be scared of wild animals that were outside if you were inside with your mom. I remembered Jackson telling me coyotes have a longer snout than a wolf, that this was the main difference, the shape of the face.

  We were on lockdown while the guards turned off the fence in order to pull off the dead coyote. The time of Angel Marie Janicki was over. No one was getting out.

  * * *

  Sammy’s release was soon. She planned to parole to a halfway house, a strict reentry program where she could be trained for employment. She was seldom up for the yard now. Stayed in her room, out of the mix. When someone had a release date coming, enemies would try to draw that person into trouble, to ruin her chances.

  A television crew came inside the prison to film Button and a handful of other people who had been convicted as juveniles. Button spent all her time preparing for the filming, as if it was a beauty contest. “You need to look sad,” I told her. “Young. Innocent.” But it was her big moment and she wanted to look fabulous. She tailored clothes in return for a hair treatment in the cosmetology training salon. She stole makeup from a woman in the room next to ours, a loner who was afraid of her. She slapped the woman doing her hair for curling her bangs incorrectly. She’d become a punk and we wanted her out of our room.

  The crew filmed all day during visiting hours, Saturday and Sunday. On Sunday I was on the yard with the other lowlifes who had no visits, which was the majority of us. Some visited with church people, strangers who volunteered contact from the goodness of their hearts. The women I knew who met with them did it to have visitors, and to be able to graze the vending machines. I sat on the yard and made fun of the phonies who pretended to be indigenous so they could do sweat lodge ritual with the real indigenous women. There was no mistaking who was from a tribe, since they controlled the tobacco trade and shopped canteen with their tribal funds.

  That Sunday night, Button would not shut up about the documentary film. Everyone was going to know her story.

  “I should not even be in this place,” she said.

  “What makes you so special?” I’d had enough of her.

  “I was fourteen when my crime got committed. The brain is not fully developed at that age.”

  Probably it was true, about a kid’s brain. Everything here is about choices, decisions, as if people are making them when they commit a crime. A fourteen-year-old is not making choices. She’s in the prison of the present tense. When I was that young, I could not imagine anything beyond that day, the next. But Button still pissed me off, separating herself from the rest of us like that.

  There was a prisoner named Lindy Belsen who had been convicted as a juvenile and had her sentence commuted by the governor. She was famous at Stanville. A team of volunteer lawyers had gathered around her. They built up her case as a story of human trafficking. She’d shot her pimp in a motel room. He’d groomed her for prostitution from the age of twelve. It was a sad story, and maybe she deserved to go free, but the way her lawyers positioned her as an undisputed innocent was difficult for the rest of us. Lindy Belsen was an ideal face for free-world activists who wanted a model prisoner to fight for. She was pretty, and spoke like an educated person. But most important, she could be depicted, convincingly, as a victim, not a perpetrator. A lot of people in the prison resented Lindy Belsen, because what did her story, the story her lawyers told, say about the rest of us? Few were happy for her when she left.

  * * *

  They mainlined Serenity Smith to general population. They put her on B yard, but close custody. In a regular unit, but confined, with seven other close custody prisoners, unable to come and go from their room. Eventually they would lift her confinement, move her to a regular room. Conan and his transgender counseling group were committed to protecting Serenity. They had meetings about it. They were on her side. Other people were making weapons to fight them. Conan and his group planned to surround Serenity, a butch security force, to keep her safe from Teardrop and all the other dangerous people who wanted to hurt her.

  Sammy said a prison riot was an awful thing. There had been one at CIW, north against south. It was a meat grinder, she said.

  To prevent organized violence on the yard, the cops wouldn’t say when they were lifting Serenity’s close custody.

  It wasn’t my issue. Life went back to normal. After Hauser left, our continuing education options were healing groups that met in the gym: Self-Esteem. Anger Management. Transitional Living (only for women with release dates), and Relationships 101. There were budget cuts and other changes. Woodshop was no longer available for level fours, like me. I started working in the cafeteria, where cops put their hands on me as I slopped Mortimer portions. The kitchen supervisor wore a big button that said DON’T EVEN TRY IT. Don’t even think of attempting to manipulate me with your sob stories and needs. That was how a lot of the staff was. Those who were open didn’t want to help us. They wanted to make cash for smuggling contraband.

  I got a letter from Eva’s father. I’d written about ten letters to his address to try to locate Eva and this was the first news back, after five years in prison.

  “Eva died last year. I had been collecting your letters and was planning on giving them to her but could not locate her. I thought you should know that you can stop attempting to reach her.”

  Sometimes I imagined that Hauser would write me. He’d ask to be put on my visiting list. Now that he wasn’t working at Stanville, the fraternization rules wouldn’t apply. He’d be out there in the free world and ready t
o start something up. Even though I wasn’t remotely attracted to him, we’d get married and have conjugal visits with Jackson. Hauser was earnest and gentle. He would have made a good father. I had no way to get in touch with him to tell him so, and the joke had been on me, even as I thought I was using and manipulating him.

  * * *

  One night, I had two dreams about water. In the first one, I was with Hauser. At least I think it was Hauser. It was a placeholder man who was connected to me, obligated to me somehow. There was a rainstorm and we watched as the LA River rose. It went over the concrete banks. Hauser dove in to swim, but without having noticed the swift speed of the water. It carried him downstream. I wondered if he could swim strongly enough to grab a tree branch or root, hold on to something and pull himself out. I went to a store. I told the clerk that my friend had gone into the water. She said, “The river is rushing ninety-one miles an hour.” I felt that Hauser was dead or hurtling toward death. I woke up.

  When I fell back asleep I had a different dream. I was driving an old car. The clutch was rough and the brakes jerky and the gas slightly delayed, the steering clumsy, but I was familiar with the car and knew how to handle it to make it respond. Something was happening up ahead. I stopped and got out. There was a man threatening to kill himself. There was a young woman trying to talk him down. Then the three of us were walking together along a sea wall or embankment. It was Ocean Beach. Huge waves swelled and fell, as if the water were at an incline, not level. It was steep water. The man started going out onto the embankment. The young woman was suddenly me. The man looked at me, who was not me, but the responding person to him in the dream, he looked at this me and began to go out into the water. I said, No, don’t. As I said it, I realized that he was luring me into the water, by suggesting he would end his life he was luring me to end mine. I woke up and worried that Jackson was thirsty and that there wasn’t a cup of water next to his bed, but then I realized I was in my lower bunk in room fourteen of unit 510 of C yard.