The Mars Room_A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  Sammy knew skid row, had survived there on and off between prison stints, and that was where she went. It was a place where a person could disappear if she was careful. She managed to elude arrest for several months, but eventually got picked up in a sweep. Keath pressed charges, but they never went through a divorce proceeding, and as far as Sammy knew, she was still married to this idiot country boy living right close by.

  * * *

  On our weekly hour in the paved outdoor cage, I spotted the GED teacher through the razor wire. He was on a path going into the ad seg housing block. I yelled a hello. He called back through the barbed coils. “Have you given any more thought to whether you want to work toward the GED?”

  I said I had not.

  “Let the administration know if you want to take the test. The questions were easy for you, and that’s a good indicator. Although I didn’t give you a reading assessment.”

  I know how to read, I told him. And I graduated from high school.

  He nodded. “I didn’t realize.”

  “I could have gone to college. I got into UC Berkeley.” I wasn’t much of a liar before I got to prison. The instinct to lie to staff and guards is automatic. They fucked with us, we fucked with them.

  “No kidding, really? That’s where I went to school.”

  I gave him a story about how sad I was not to be able to enroll, because my father was ill and so I had to take care of him. “I really miss reading,” I said. “I love to read books.” Not a lie.

  “I’d be happy to get you some reading material, if you’d like. And now that I know you’re at a higher level, it won’t be GED workbooks, I promise. What do you like to read?”

  * * *

  “What do you like to read,” Sammy said, imitating him, after he’d walked away. “That guy looks like a serious vic. Could be your own personal Keath.” Sammy made a motion like reeling in fishing line. “Do it slow, do it right, and you’re looking at Keath II.”

  I pretended to be interested in reeling in the GED instructor, but only because I felt sorry for Sammy, who had to look at everyone as a possible victim, when victim meant savior.

  * * *

  The turkeys I’d seen from the prison bus the morning after Chain Night, their feathers wind-plucked and swirling in the car lanes, had not been headed for Stanville.

  Thanksgiving Day marked one month in ad seg. We had our holiday meal shoved through the flap. I looked at my tray. On it sat a large and meaty drumstick. Unusually large. I had never seen a drumstick so large.

  “Every year here it’s like this,” Sammy said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oversized Thanksgiving meat. People say it’s emu.”

  Emus are big, ugly, aggressive birds that rise to six feet when they stretch upward. The neighbor next door to the ranch where Jimmy Darling stayed had emus. They sometimes got onto the property and wandered around. They were like people, violent and unpredictable, with brains the size of walnuts.

  After the disgusting meal, McKinnley let us on the caged concrete square, a special privilege on account of the holiday. It was freezing. The sky was the bleak white of old kitchen appliances. Wind blew dust into our eyes as we sat on the ground, waiting to watch staff or guards walk by on the other side of the razor wire. Such was the excitement we lived for. A nurse ran past. Then, two more. Conan yelled, “Save a life!” The way he yelled it made their mission less of an emergency. Made it funny. Life didn’t matter much. It was something for Conan to yell while watching the breasts of the nurses bounce up and down.

  I was hungry. I had not eaten my emu. Sammy hadn’t eaten hers, either.

  “If I wasn’t stuck in ad seg I could have sold that drumstick,” Sammy said. “Black girls will add it to stuffing mix and canned corn. I saw a black chick smuggle a big bird leg from chow last year. Got a blistering burn on the inside of her thigh.”

  “Why you got to be so racist?” Conan said. “Black girls this. Black girls that. Just because we run this prison.”

  “We could have ran this place,” Sammy said, meaning Latinas, “if most of us weren’t high.”

  “Good idea, though, to trade up for a spare drumstick, mix it with corn and stuffing,” Conan said. “Maybe squeeze in some nacho cheese, add pickled jalapeños. They weren’t fucking around with that piece of meat. It was serious. That was no Mortimer portion.”

  Mortimer was supposedly a woman at Stanville who sued the prison. Because of her, they had to serve us exactly 1,400 calories a day, so that we could not sue them for our fatness like Mortimer did. The Mortimer portion is not enough food. But instead of blaming the prison, the staff tells us to blame Mortimer, who ruined things for the rest of us by filing a 602 inmate complaint that became a frivolous lawsuit. There were a lot of rules like that, with a prisoner’s name attached to them. To get medication, you stood in an Armstrong box. The Armstrong box is a red square painted on the floor around the pill counter. It’s for privacy. If you were not called to the window, if you were even just walking down the hall and your foot went over the red line of the box, you got a 115, thanks to a paranoid named Armstrong.

  We hated the prisoners who ruined it for everybody else, but these people probably didn’t exist. Sammy told me where 602s actually went: into a paper shredder in the assistant litigator’s office. I doubted a prisoner could make history, get her name attached to a new rule, when it was impossible to even lodge a complaint in the first place.

  * * *

  People say holidays are depressing in prison. It’s true. It’s because you cannot help but think of the life you once had, or did not have. Holidays are an idea of how life should be.

  My last free-world Thanksgiving I had squandered. I worked day shift at the Mars Room. Men don’t holiday from their addictions. Holidays are busy, because the men need to escape from their real lives into their really real lives with us, their fantasies.

  No one forced me to spend Thanksgiving at the Mars Room. I didn’t need the money that badly, on that particular day. Why didn’t I do something with Jackson? I’d given him to my neighbor to watch. She and some friends made a meal. The kids had fun. I sat with Kurt Kennedy in a dark theater. At that point I’d eased myself into the hustle of having a regular. I was by instinct against it, but it had presented itself as a novel certainty. He would be there on my shift. He would choose me automatically. I would not scan the room and circle, waiting for someone who had decided on his lunch hour, in his dark fiefdom, the Mars Room, that I was the one he felt like paying, for company.

  They get what they need or see something better, someone else, and tell you to go away. With a regular, that moment doesn’t come. I was someone’s choice before I even got to the theater, before he got there. Kennedy’s choice. He would hand me, over the course of a few hours, several hundred dollars. All he wanted was to pretend I was his girl.

  You’re my girl, right? The rough, dry skin of his hands on my thighs. The gravelly voice. He did most of the talking. He’d been shot in the leg while doing his job, and that was why he limped. He said he was a detective or something, but later he said that wasn’t really true and talked for a long time about his actual job and I wasn’t listening and didn’t care what he did, nor if he lied or told the truth. He was on disability and had too much free time. He wanted to take me out on his boat. I hate boats, I didn’t say. Sure. That sounds like a lot of fun. You have no idea how much it costs to pay for a slip in that harbor. I sure don’t. It’s twenty thousand a year, he said, handing me another twenty. Uh-huh. Do you like to be spanked? I want to spank you. Passed me another twenty. Sometimes his bills were new, and had a crisp, smooth feel that made me want to check to be sure they were real. Money is money. The great neutralizer: that is work, and this is payment. I’d like to make your ass red. Oh god I mean bright fucking red. Slapping it lightly with his rough hand. The lightness of his slap: he was lost in thought. If you called that thought. There would not be any spanking sessions. There was no need. I was his
virtual reality machine, as I pushed my ass into his clothed lap, to empty his wallet. When the wallet was empty either he would go to the bank machine in the lobby of the Mars Room and get more or he wouldn’t, but if he didn’t he would be back tomorrow.

  * * *

  A few days after Thanksgiving, Sergeant McKinnley said there was a message for me in the program office.

  I walked, cuffed, with McKinnley and another cop behind me.

  At the program office, I faced Lieutenant Jones.

  “You have a deceased relation,” Jones said.

  “Relation?”

  “Your mother is what it says.”

  There are three thousand women at Stanville. It happens all the time that you get the wrong information, you’re HIV positive, when you’re not. Or they give you someone else’s mail. I was sure Jones had something wrong. Or that she was tormenting me because it was her role, to torment.

  I said I didn’t believe her.

  “Gretchen Becker, it says here. Died in a car accident last Sunday, November thirtieth.”

  “No,” I said. “No. That can’t be right.”

  “She and a child were both admitted to San Francisco General Hospital,” Jones mechanically read. “Child sustained non-life-threatening injuries.”

  “That’s my son,” I said. “He’s only seven. He doesn’t have anyone else. I need to get there.”

  “You need to get there? You have two indeterminate state commitments, Hall. You aren’t going anywhere.”

  “That’s my son. He’s in the hospital, I—”

  “Hall, if you’d wanted to be someone’s mother, you should have thought of that before.”

  I lunged toward the paper in Jones’s hands. I had to see it.

  McKinnley grabbed me. I tried to get away from him. I needed to see the paper.

  McKinnley pushed me to the floor. I was restrained gently by his large boot pressing on my shoulder, holding me down. I knew McKinnley didn’t want to hurt me. I could feel it. But Jones was a lieutenant, his superior. His boot pressed into me. His boot said, Your mother is gone. My mother was gone. It was just me and this, this war.

  “Let me see the paper,” I said. “Please.”

  I was not calm, it’s true. When I said please, I screamed it. Please. Please. Give it to me. Give me the fucking paper.

  “I used to feel sorry for you bitches,” Jones said. “But if you want to be a parent, you don’t end up in prison. Plain and simple. Plain and simple.”

  I tried to get up. More cops were on me. I bit a hand, I didn’t know whose. They pushed my head into the floor. I wedged it sideways and spit. I spit at McKinnley, and got a baton in the back of the head. An alarm sounded. The noise of the alarm bleated in my ears, and all I could do was struggle. “That’s my family! It’s my son! It’s my son!”

  I tried to lift my head, bucked upward, thrashed my feet until they were pinned, until every part of me was pinned.

  II

  12

  Doc had been an early corruptor, among detectives at the Rampart Division of the LAPD. He was capering, as he thought of it, long before they got their bad reputation. For that, Doc thought of himself as ahead of his time. The time he was serving was life without, on the Sensitive Needs block at New Folsom.

  The Sensitive unit had built-in concrete stepped seating and a broad stage on which the day room dramas took place before a set of automated doors, all blue, each with a small monitor window. Doc’s cell was eight by ten like everyone else’s, and like everyone else, he shared it. You don’t choose your roommate. And in Sensitive Needs at New Folsom, there is a one hundred percent likelihood your roommate is a child rapist, a snitch, or a transsexual, since that’s who Sensitive Needs was built to house. A transsexual cellmate—Doc would be fine with that. He didn’t mind men with titties. He’d had a few, not frontally or anything, mostly fondled and explored from behind; an experience that, like everything in life, made sense in its moment. The transsexuals on his unit played powder puff softball and Doc liked watching the games just as much as the next red-blooded male. They all liked it. Who wouldn’t, if you were a straight guy stuck in the joint for life with a bunch of other men? Suddenly, you’ve got these creatures with big asses and actual, real boobies bouncing around under their knit cotton state-issue jerseys as they run bases and jump up and down, cutely helpless at the batter’s plate, or run after, and never catch, a ball that came their way. They were fun and stupid and uncoordinated and smelled good, just like women, and like women, they had pea-brains and spoke in soft, squeaky voices.

  He would have bunked with one no problem. Instead he got housed with an unsavory character who had raped his own daughter. The guy said she was a stepdaughter, when Doc demanded the new cellmate’s paperwork, a custom that was mandatory on sensitive yards. Okay, we all have our stories. Doc talked openly about being raped himself, as a child, by his foster father. He didn’t hassle his roommate. This is prison. No one is friends. You don’t need to deal with their feelings. You make rules for the cell and stay out of each other’s way. Doc’s rules were mostly cleaning protocols. A lot of the guys on Sensitive Needs at New Folsom had cleaning protocols. The concrete in the common area gleamed like glass, it was so polished and repolished; it was just layers of clean and gleam and perfection. The smell of Cell Block 64 brand cleaning solution in Doc’s unit was overpowering. It moved beyond an omnipresent scent to a totalizing sensation, smell as the means of breathing, thinking, being. Doc, a porter on the block, had access. He had his own personal supply of Cell Block 64. He might have used it as cologne but Doc had money on his books and used actual cologne and not Old Fucking Spice, either. Good cologne by an Italian name-brand designer he can never remember. But then he remembers: Cesare Paciotti. It always takes him a minute to retrieve that name. The Cell Block 64 was strictly for keeping dust and dirt off his personal stuff, meaning his contraband. Any property in your cell, if they do a raid or extraction, and you didn’t buy it and have the records to prove it, you will lose. Anything in your cell not explicitly allowed by the CDC, the California Department of Corrections, is contraband. Excuse them, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, a word they added just this year. But there is no new programming. There is just this bullshit letter—R.

  * * *

  Doc lies on his bunk going through his files to find a good image. There’s no pornography allowed. They don’t have the internet, of course. The mind is where you stash your stroke material. Doc flips through the images he keeps in store. He steps by a wide margin over the memory of the last woman he had sex with, Betty LaFrance, who put him here. He focuses on the era before she hung him out to dry.

  He sees himself cruising the streets in an unmarked car. If he can get into his old life, he can jump-start a good scenario.

  There was that button-nosed cocktail waitress. The bar in Eagle Rock he liked to go to, place called Toppers.

  Plainclothes cop walks into a bar.

  He never could remember any follow-through on that joke.

  Plainclothes cop walks into a bar. Nothing more. It didn’t go anywhere.

  There was the night the cocktail waitress at Toppers was so drunk and high she did not take offense when Doc slipped a two-dollar Canadian bill—worth less even than two American dollars—into the side of her panties. Ha ha ha. Why was a cocktail waitress wearing nothing but panties? It was part of the mystery of Toppers. It was the only mystery of Toppers. He cracked the mystery, brought her back to his unmarked car. Pulled down the panties and put his hand against her crotch. She had used hair remover or wax and felt like a child down there, which was unacceptable to Doc, who was a protector and defender of children. The sensation of her hairless pussy alarmed him and he’d had to pull his hand away; he’d forgotten that part when he selected this file from the mental Rolodex. He’d thrown a crumpled twenty-dollar bill at her and told her to get out of his car. Now his mind is creeping into the territory of bad men and innocent children and inst
ead of conjuring some sexy striptease thing or a woman begging him to put his cock in her mouth, he is dreaming about painting the landscape with an Uzi. Painting the whole huge landscape of child molesters.

  Uzis. There was that kid in tiny, Sweet Tart–pink shorts who nicked off her instructor in Las Vegas. Everyone watched the news story on their personal TV, tens of thousands of men all over the state doing life without parole, like Doc, lying back with cheap tinny headphones connected to their world-machine, hoping to get a glimpse of the moment this child in the candy-color shorts guns down a grown man with an Uzi. The news showed her engagement, then a pause, and the instructor gives an encouraging “All right!” Like, Way to go, this kid’s okay. And then she goes back to blasting but the news cuts away before she clips him. They never show it, but everyone on Sensitive Needs keeps watching that segment, hoping they will. As if by watching the segment, each time it replays, they produce the possibility that the news footage might, just might, by some fluke of technology, some glitch of the universe, lead straight into where it is not supposed to go, the part where she fragments her instructor’s brain to meat and shards.

  Doc gently steers himself away from that. He can have anything he wants. It is important to remember this when you are flipping through your storehouse. But sometimes too many choices is a tyranny.

  The tyranny of choice, that’s not exactly what people think of as the number one problem in prison. And yet Doc cannot settle on an image right now. His roommate will be gone until the door pops on schedule and he’d like to use this time productively.

  Back to when he was still a detective, cruising undetected, up to his mischief on a balmy night. Doc had become a great connoisseur of the bars in Los Angeles where prostitution took place in a frank and natural manner. The Polished Knob on Wilshire in Koreatown, a medieval-themed restaurant with a dungeon in the basement. Bobby London on Beverly and Western, which catered only to Korean men and LAPD, and only LAPD as bribery, and only Doc of the LAPD, and technically it wasn’t bribery it was blackmail.