The Mars Room_A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

* * *

  You run until you find a safe place and that tree was mine.

  The forest at night is true dark. I had to feel my way out of the tree. Outside, I was under a glitter of stars. I heard a rustle, from wind. I heard those little birds settling down under the bush, or doing whatever they do.

  I saw the thick path of the Milky Way or what I guessed was it above me. I’d never seen it. Or had I? I knew what it was. There were bright stars among the scatter of dimmer ones. The sky is junked with stars and if you live in a city, you don’t know. If you live in a prison you do not see a single star, on account of the lights. Here, I was halfway into the sky. Where people are gone, the world opens. Where people are gone, the night falls upward, black and unmanned.

  * * *

  Light beams crisscrossed the forest.

  They were here.

  I heard a helicopter overhead. Jerky searchlights swept the ground.

  Grandma’s closet, the kids used to say. That was what they called a wind shelter where you retreated to light a joint. Under the stadium stairs or in a bus shelter. The piss-stink shelter at Forest Hill. Grandma’s closet. Any place could work.

  All the talk of regret. They make you form your life around one thing, the thing you did, and you have to grow yourself from what cannot be undone: they want you to make something from nothing. They make you hate them and yourself. They make it seem that they are the world, and you’ve betrayed it, them, but the world is so much bigger.

  The lie of regret and of life gone off the rails. What rails. The life is the rails. It is its own rails and it goes where it goes. It cuts its own path. My path took me here.

  I wish Jackson could see these trees. I never took him here. I didn’t know this place. That it was. Is. He saw redwoods at Point Reyes. These are the other kind, bigger, stranger. Do people know these trees are here? He might see trees like this or something else—like this—in being not known, and not expected, either.

  There are some good people out there. Some really good people.

  The helicopter came low. A voice echoed, like from the PA on main yard.

  Hall. You’re out of bounds, Hall.

  The life is the rails and I was in the mountains I dreamed of from the yard. I was in them, but nothing stays what you see from far away when you get up close.

  Yes I think I’m special. That’s on account of me being myself. I have no one else to regard except Jackson, who I regard. Believe me. They called him Güero but he wasn’t a blond. They called him Güero because they loved him. They didn’t love me and they didn’t have to. There was no need for it. They loved him, and I loved him.

  The damp from fog, like now, it’s inside me. I’m safe from it. Doesn’t even make me shiver. That kind of cold forms the deepest layer of my memories, from growing up there, treeless streets built on sand and the bad ocean, the broken bottle ocean with its big curve of concrete wall. Fatal Drownings Occur Here, the signs said on each stairwell down. Stairway to bonfire, to spray paint, to fistfight. Grandma’s closet at the beach was any car. Or behind a car. Or depending on the wind, in those stairwells. Fatal drownings occur here.

  We swam in our clothes. We never once worried about drowning. Death was not in our future. No person lives in the future. The present, the present, the present. Life keeps on being that.

  Hall, we have you surrounded.

  They were talking to me. Sounded like yard orders.

  Telling me to rejoice that Jackson was not here. That life does not go off the rails because it is the rails, goes where it goes.

  Barking of dogs. Closer now.

  Lights bathed the forest, everything bright as day.

  Hands up, they said. Step out slowly with your hands where we can see them.

  If Jackson were here, I could not protect him. He is safe from this.

  I emerged from the tree and turned into the light, not slow. I ran toward them, toward the light.

  * * *

  He is on his path as I am on mine. The world has gone on for a long, long time.

  I gave him life. It is quite a lot to give. It is the opposite of nothing. And the opposite of nothing is not something. It is everything.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For her wisdom and expertise on the visible and invisible net of the penal zone of the world—and for the thousands of other things she miraculously knows—I am grateful to Theresa Booboo Martinez.

  I thank Mychal Concepción, Hakim, Tracy Jones, Elizabeth Lozano, Christy Clinton Phillips, and Michele Rene Scott for everything I’ve learned from them. Thanks also to Ayelet Waldman; Molly Kovel; Joanna Neborsky; Maya Andrea Gonzalez; Amanda Scheper; Justice Now of Oakland, California; and Paul and Lori Sutton.

  I thank Susan Golomb for so many kinds of incredible support, and Nan Graham for her belief in me and for her crucial and unerring editorial guidance on this novel.

  I thank Michal Shavit and Ana Fletcher for editorial input, as well as Don DeLillo, Joshua Ferris, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Emily Goldman, Mitch Kamin, Remy Kushner, Knight Landesman, Zachary Lazar, Ben Lerner, James Lickwar, Cynthia Mitchell, Marisa Silver, Dana Spiotta, and most of all, Jason Smith, for what feels like an endless supply of intellectual generosity.

  I thank Emily for bearing witness in multiple ways.

  Thanks to Susan Moldow, Katie Monaghan, Tamar McCollom, Daniel Loedel, and everyone at Scribner.

  James Benning’s Two Cabins project and his film Stemple Pass directly inspired my thinking on Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski. I thank James for his friendship and his help, his willingness to engage in extensive dialogues over the past several years, and for the use of his Ted diaries.

  The Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Civitella Ranieri each provided vital support while I wrote this book.

  A Scribner Reading Group Guide

  THE MARS ROOM

  Rachel Kushner

  This reading group guide for The Mars Room includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

  Introduction

  From twice National Book Award–nominated Rachel Kushner comes a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America. It’s 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision. Unflinching, electric, and deeply empathetic, The Mars Room is a masterful meditation on what in people is breakable, what is unbreakable, as well as the existential meanings of class, and criminality, and the impossibility of forgiveness in our prison system.

  Topics & Questions for Discussion

  1. At the beginning of the book, before she is incarcerated, Romy Hall, the central protagonist of The Mars Room, says, “I said everything was fine but nothing was. The life was being sucked out of me. The problem was not moral. It had nothing to do with morality. These men dimmed my glow. Made me numb to touch, and angry” (page 26). What role do morality and virtue play in the telling of Romy’s story? Does morality factor into who is judged guilty and who is judged innocent?

  2. The San Francisco depicted in this book is perhaps not a classic one of, as Romy puts it, “rainbow flags or Beat poetry or steep crooked streets,” but “fog and Irish bars and liquor stores all the way to the Great Highway” (page 33). Was the San Francisco depicted in the novel a surprise to you? What significance do you read into the scene with the �
��Scummerz” and the young boy making noodles on the stove? Why is everyone from her past and all her memories so remote and vanished? Is this the nature of childhood and the erasure of cities, or something else more complicated and individual to do with Romy?

  3. The overwhelming majority of people, and certainly middle-class people, will never spend a single day of their lives in jails and prisons. Should those who don’t have that dark destiny worry for those who do? What impression do you have, after reading The Mars Room, about individual agency, and who goes to prison in this country and who doesn’t?

  4. “Sammy was my big sister and I was Button’s, and Conan was something like the dad. We had a family” (page 241). In order to cope with their difficult surroundings the women of Stanville create familial bonds with each other. Do these women nurture one another or is their “family” more of an alliance of protection? What are the benefits of a “family” arrangement? The risks?

  5. After recounting an emotional story from childhood, Conan says, “There are some good people out there . . . some really good people” (page 252). Discuss the acts of generosity in this novel. Which ones stand out? These women seem to start at disadvantages. They take wrong turns. The prison system lacks mercy or a shot at redemption. Would many of these characters’ lives have been different with more, or greater, acts of generosity?

  6. Straining the edges of a reader’s compassion perhaps is the character Doc, the “dirty cop” who had been involved with Betty LaFrance and is eventually strangled by his cellmate. Why do you think Kushner included him and his story in the book? Does he achieve a kind of unexpected likability, and if so, how?

  7. Romy says, “To stay sane you formed a version of yourself you could believe in” (page 269), and earlier, “Jackson believed in the world” (page 156). Kushner makes a connection between the wide-eyed optimism of youth and the crushing realities of what the world can be for those born without power or wealth, and for those who have made irreversible mistakes. Discuss the role that Jackson serves in the novel. What does he symbolize to Romy?

  8. “Part of the intimacy with nature that you acquire is the sharpening of the senses. Not that your hearing and eyesight become more acute, but you notice things more” (page 299). This is presumably the voice of Ted Kaczynski, but its placement suggests a link to Romy’s escape into nature. Why does she end up alone in the woods? What does this say about the human need for connection with the outside? In what other ways does Romy seem to be shut off from the outside world? What role could a connection with nature play in rehabilitation?

  9. What role does gender play throughout the novel? What differences did you see between the experiences of incarcerated men and incarcerated women? How did gender factor into Romy’s trial and sentencing?

  10. Serenity Smith is a transgender woman whose presence generates an outsized reaction from the women of Stanville. Discuss the controversy among the prisoners concerning this character. How do their surroundings contribute to their reaction to her? And what does Serenity’s predicament say about the structure of prison? What is society to do with people who cannot assimilate into the caged spaces allotted for them?

  11. Hauser can be seen in different lights. Was he a predator, or was he a man who meant well but could not resist temptation? Discuss the effects of his actions on Romy.

  12. The Mars Room comes from the name of the strip club where Romy works before she is incarcerated. What does the phrase “Mars Room” bring to mind? What do these two worlds—a central California women’s prison and a San Francisco strip club—share?

  13. In the final moments of the book, Romy is in the forest, bathed in light: “I emerged from the tree and turned into the light, not slow. I ran toward them, toward the light” (page 336). There is something both heavenly and hellish in this description. Discuss the dichotomies: Is the scene ultimately despairing or hopeful?

  14. In the final paragraph of the book, Romy reflects on giving Jackson life. She calls giving life “everything.” Is this a comment on her own life, or some manner of reinterpreting life as extending into other regions beyond the one she’s been given and that has been taken away? Is it some way of being part of something in the world that is larger than she is and that goes beyond her? What is the import of the final sentence? Is your sense that the world, at the end, is a human world, a natural world, both, or neither?

  Enhance Your Book Club

  1. Discuss the works of Henry David Thoreau and how his essays and transcendental ideas might relate to The Mars Room. In a similar fashion, consider the crimes, anger, and solitude of Ted Kaczynski. What does it mean to be a misanthropist? And what does it mean to be a misanthropist with rigid ideas about society and how it should be organized?

  2. Watch a classic prison film, such as Cool Hand Luke, starring Paul Newman, or Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law.

  3. Kushner is an accomplished author and journalist, with a wide range of interests. Get to know more of her work by taking a look at her previous novels, Telex from Cuba and The Flamethrowers.

  4. Kushner was interviewed by the New Yorker about her novel The Mars Room. Share the article with your group to learn more about Kushner’s inspiration, her process, and her views: https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/fiction-this-week-rachel-kushner-2018-02-12.

  5. Get involved in helping members of your community who are impacted by incarceration: you can send books to prisoners through numerous organizations, or offer aid to family members of prisoners, such as through Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, or find an individual plan that appeals to you to help others. If you or someone you know has been impacted by incarceration, share your story with your book group. After reading The Mars Room, perhaps they will be primed to listen carefully, without judgments.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  © CHLOE AFTEL

  Rachel Kushner is the bestselling author of The Flamethrowers, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Folio Prize and a New York Times top ten book of 2013. Her first novel, Telex from Cuba, was also a finalist for the National Book Award and was reviewed on the cover of the New York Times. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Harper’s. Her novels have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

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  ALSO BY RACHEL KUSHNER

  Telex from Cuba

  The Flamethrowers

  The Strange Case of Rachel K

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Rachel Kushner

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Scribner hard
cover edition May 2018

  Excerpts adapted from Ted Kaczynski’s coded diary, deciphered by James Benning. The epigraph on p. vii is from “Entrückung” by Stefan George, translated by Carl Engel.

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  Interior design by Kyle Kabel

  Jacket design: Peter Mendelsund

  Jacket photograph: Nan Goldin, Amanda in the Mirror, Berlin, 1992

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kushner, Rachel, author.

  Title: The mars room / Rachel Kushner.

  Description: New York, NY : Scribner, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017061764 | ISBN 9781476756554 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Women prisoners—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / General. | FICTION / Crime.

  Classification: LCC PS3611.U7386 M37 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061764

  ISBN 978-1-4767-5655-4