The Mars Room

by Rachel Kushner

  Even despite his obsession with this girl, he sometimes wanted out of the prison job, but change was such an elusive thing. A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost.

  As he was putting papers in his book bag one night, she came to his empty classroom with a program pass. She was not a student in his class. She shut the door behind her. The room had a small observation window, but Gordon knew an officer would not walk past for another ten or fifteen minutes.

  He would like to say that nothing happened. Especially because so little did, and he felt he was placed on the wrong end of justice. After she shut the door, she went close to him. Their lips touched. Yes, he kissed her and not only. His hand grazed the front of her shirt and then it grazed lightly between her legs, to see how she would respond, and the answer was in the correct manner, in the interested manner, and you might call that thinking, choosing, proceeding, but Gordon didn’t. It was not thinking. They were pressed together, nothing serious, fully clothed, for a minute, maybe less, and then it was night count and she had to get back to her unit.

  She filed a 602 inmate grievance, claiming that he groped her. This beautiful woman had targeted him. She did it, he later understood, for some complicated reason that had to do with the woman’s girlfriend, who was his student. It was his word against hers. The Investigative Services Unit contacted him, conducted interviews, and found nothing damning, but deemed him at risk of overfamiliarity. They advised he be reassigned to a different facility. They kicked him down the Central Valley like a can down a hallway. Transferred him to Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, where no one but no one wanted to work.

  5

  You may decide to link my fate to the night I found Kurt Kennedy waiting for me, but I link it to the trial, the judge, the prosecutor, my public defender.

  This is what I remember of the day I met my lawyer: Being put in an elevator that smelled of human sweat ionizing on stainless steel. The electric gloom of full-blast panel lighting. Courtroom room tone. Slippers that said LA County on the side of each shoe.

  When it was time, the bailiffs directed me down a hall. They walked and I shuffled in leg irons to the long glass box in department thirty where in-custody defendants see the judge. I was brought into the arraignment box, which had an opening at face level so defendants could speak to their lawyers. I had a full view of the courtroom. My mother was there. I was her daughter and her daughter was innocent. Her presence gave me childish hope. When she saw me she waved unhappily. A bailiff approached her and said something. No waving, probably.

  Signs in the courtroom said No lounging. No gum chewing. No sleeping. No eating. No cell phones. No children under ten unless state-subpoenaed as witnesses. In every courtroom where I had to sit as my case wound through the system, I tried not to read them. You have to project unbearable remorse every second that anyone might glance your way, a juror or victim’s relative, the judge. At every moment you have to look like you can’t live with yourself after what you have done. You can’t look bored or hungry or tired. You can only look relentlessly guilty, in order to seem possibly a little less guilty.

  I scanned for whoever might be my lawyer among the lawyers in the well before the judge’s bench.

  My case was after the defendant next to me, a person the court was calling Johnson, Johnson versus the People. I was anxious to meet my attorney, but since he or she had not appeared I watched as this Johnson tried to communicate with his lawyer, an old man with gray hair that flowed down his back.

  “My mom’s a sheriff,” Johnson said in labored speech. His face was wired so that he could barely open his mouth. He made throaty sounds like someone being gagged.

  “Mr. Johnson, your mother is a sheriff?” The old lawyer spoke in a fake-amazed tone. “Which division?”

  “Not mine. My girlfriend’s. It’s bail bonds.”

  “Your girlfriend works at a bail bonds business? Then perhaps she’s not a sheriff, Mr. Johnson?”

  “It’s her ma that own it.”

  “Your mother-in-law owns a bail bonds business? What’s it called?”

  “Yolanda’s.”

  “Located where, Mr. Johnson?”

  “They have it all over.”

  “So she works at a branch of it?”

  “She own it. I told you. YO-LAN-DA.”

  The prosecutor on Johnson’s case appeared before the judge. He gleamed like something pressure-washed.

  From that day forward, on every occasion that I was forced to spend in court, the prosecutors were consistently the most competent-looking people in the courtroom. They were handsome and slick and tidy and organized, with tailored clothes and expensive leather briefcases. The public defenders, meanwhile, were recognizable on account of their bad posture, their ill-fitting suits and scuffed shoes. The women wore their hair in short, ugly, practical cuts. The men had various styles or non-styles of long hair, and every one of them was guilty of exceeding width limits on their ties. The buttons on their shirts dangled, ready to fall off. The prosecutors all looked like rich, well-rested Republicans, while the public defenders were overworked do-gooders who arrived out of breath, late to court, dropping loose papers that already had the waffle marks of shoe prints on them from having been dropped before. Me, Johnson, everyone here with state counsel, I felt like we were screwed, just absolutely screwed.

  Johnson told the lawyer he needed his high blood pressure medication. He was without his psych meds. He needed painkillers. He had chronic aches from a gunshot wound. He lifted his jail shirt and showed the lawyer. I couldn’t see his chest. The lawyer reeled backward.

  “My goodness, Mr. Johnson. It’s amazing you’re even alive. And what’s the matter with your mouth?”

  The old lawyer was yelling, as if Johnson was hard of hearing, while I looked on, tense and alert because I was next.

  “It’s wired. My jaw broke. I’m a good citizen. I got a daughter.”

  The lawyer asked when she was born.

  “Nineteen eighty.”

  “Mr. Johnson, I believe that’s when you were born.”

  The defendant, this Johnson, was twenty-one years old. Gunshot wounds. High blood pressure. Chronic pain. He looked forty-eight. I watched as the facts of his life were exposed like pants pockets pulled inside out.

  “Okay, okay,” Johnson said. “They got me drugged. I’m sorry. Wait—”

  I watched as he lifted his leg and awkwardly rolled up his pants with his chained hands. The daughter’s birthday was tattooed on his calf. He read the date slowly as if trying to decipher a historic plaque.

  “The judge does not like residential burglaries, Mr. Johnson.”

  “Tell her I’m sorry,” Johnson slurred through his wired jaw.

  * * *

  In his own element, I wanted to think Johnson might be perfectly at home, a man on top of his game, whatever his game was. Life. On top of your game meant handling life. Doing it right. Being someone who inspired respect. Someone loved by women and feared by enemies, and now torn away from what made him shine. Either way, Johnson was fully a human being even if he could not remember when his daughter was born.

  After my own immersion in this new world of Johnson’s, I knew why he had seemed so dim in the arraignment box: the assholes had given him an involuntary injection of liquid thorazine. When certain types of inmates were slated for court transport, an invol by corrections officers made their own job easier. Drooling and high on unpleasurable brain-dullers, these defendants did not present well before a judge, or before their own public defender, who talked to them like they were three-year-olds.

  When his arraignment was over, the bailiffs put on their blue rubber gloves for handling Johnson. He struggled to walk in leg
irons. When they brought him past, the bailiffs held him as far away from their bodies as possible. Take it slow, one told him. They leapt out of the way when Johnson tripped. He fell on his broken face right there in the tank. No one helped him. His jumpsuit was brown, which meant medical. A county wristband indicated open wounds. He might spread bacterial infection, or something worse. Defiance. Depression. Dyslexia. HIV. Mental degradation. Rotten luck.

  * * *

  I was next but nothing was happening. The judge left the bench. I sat for maybe twenty minutes, a bailiff behind me, no lawyer calling my name, feeling my mother’s sadness, unable to meet her gaze, because if I did, this would be even harder. I inspected the eagle on top of the courtroom flagpole. The eagle hovered on the wooden flagpole as if what it had caught was the American flag that was attached to the pole. I have seen enormous flags ripple, strung high on towering poles. Car dealerships have them. Sometimes McDonald’s have them, huge flags that fly for commerce and announce “America.” Here in this courtroom, the flags hung limp and still, collecting dust. A flag needs wind, I thought, just as the judge was announcing my name and case number, and then again, my name and case number.

  I’d been told I would have my first contact with legal counsel at arraignment. I stood as the bailiff ordered me to, but no lawyer appeared.

  Johnson’s lawyer, with the flowing gray hair, limped up to me. What does he want, I wondered.

  “Miss Hall? Romy Hall? I’m your public defender.”

  * * *

  You can have sympathy for Johnson’s lawyer, if you must, but I don’t have to. He meant well. But he was an incompetent and overworked old man. Got me two life sentences and failed to make admissible the whole sordid history of Kurt Kennedy and his obsession with me.

  Kennedy had fixated. He had made it his life’s work to be outside my apartment building. To be in the garage where I parked my car. To lurk in the cramped aisles of my corner market. To follow me on foot and on his motorcycle. When I heard the motor of that cycle, which made a high-pitched whine, I flinched. He had a habit of calling me thirty times in a row. I changed my number. He got the new number. He came to the Mars Room, or he was already there. I asked Dart to eighty-six him and he refused. He’s a good customer, Dart said. I was expendable. Men who spent money were not. Kennedy hunted me and didn’t let up. But the prosecutor convinced the judge that the victim’s behavior was irrelevant. It did not establish an imminent threat on the night in question, and so the jury never learned a thing about it, not a single detail. It was the judge who disallowed the evidence, but I blamed the lawyer. I blamed the lawyer because he was supposed to help me and I felt he did not.

  “Why can’t I testify and explain?” I asked him. “Because you’ll get destroyed on cross-examination,” he replied. “I can’t let you do that to yourself. No competent lawyer would put you on the stand.”

  When I asked again, he fired questions at me. About the work I did to make a living. About my relationship to Kennedy and other customers. About the decision I made to pick up a heavy instrument. About the fact—the fact, he reiterated—that I struck a man sitting in a chair, a man who could not walk without two canes. I tried to answer his questions. He tore my answers apart and made them into questions, and I tried to answer those but struggled. When he asked another question, I screamed at him to stop.

  “You will not take the stand,” he said.

  What those twelve people knew was that a young woman of dubious moral character—a stripper—had killed an upstanding citizen, a veteran of the Vietnam War who had sustained a job-related injury and was permanently disabled. Because there was a kid present, they tacked on a charge of child endangerment. Never mind that it was my child, and the person endangering him was Kurt Kennedy.

  Johnson’s lawyer had tried to convince me to take a plea. I refused. I knew how the system worked, at least vaguely. Most cases never went to trial because prosecutors scared defendants into taking pleas, and lawyers encouraged that route for their own reasons of not wanting to lose a case. My situation was different. It had circumstances. Anyone who was there and knew the history would have understood what happened, and why, although no one was, or did.

  What I didn’t realize, at the time, was that most people took pleas because they did not want to spend their life in prison.

  * * *

  I never thought of him as my own lawyer. He was always Johnson’s, even as I never knew Johnson or thought about what happened to him; he was just another body jammed through the system, a Johnson of thousands. Still, I liked Johnson. His girlfriend’s mother was a sheriff and to hell with anyone who questions that.

  * * *

  In court, Johnson’s lawyer kept saying, “Strike that,” after half his sentences, “Strike that.” Maybe it was normal. I didn’t know. But every time he said it, my heart sank.

  * * *

  The jury did not learn what Kurt had done to me, the tireless stalking, the waiting, the following, the calling, the calling again, the surprise appearances. None of it was to be spoken of in court. What the jury knew was that a tire iron was used (People’s Exhibit #89). That the victim had been sitting in a patio chair when he received the first blow (People’s Exhibit #74), and that he had been heard crying out for help (Witness #17, Clemencia Solar).

  * * *

  How many autopsies have you performed, the prosecutor asked the coroner, his first witness.

  “More than five thousand, sir.”

  “How many with head trauma?”

  “Hundreds, I’d estimate.”

  The coroner located and pointed out in photographs two fatal wounds. The declared cause of death was severe cranial cerebral trauma. The coroner noted that Mr. Kennedy seemed to have vomited up a large amount of blood on the defendant’s porch.

  “How many impacts did Mr. Kennedy’s head receive?” the prosecutor asked.

  “At least four. Possibly five.”

  “Would there have been a fair amount of pain for Mr. Kennedy, receiving these injuries?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Are these other injuries on his arms and hands typical when someone is trying to defend himself?”

  “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “Isn’t it true that a person in his mid-fifties will require less force to fracture the skull than someone much younger?” This was asked by Johnson’s lawyer, on cross-examination.

  “I suppose so, but—”

  “Objection. Hypothetical.”

  “Sustained.”

  * * *

  The prosecutor called one of my other neighbors as a witness. Clemence Solar would say anything to get attention, such as tell them she heard Kurt cry out for help. She was a liar. A witness for the defense, a guy named Coronado, lived one house over from Clemence. He and I had never had a conversation. He only spoke Spanish and I only speak English. I remembered seeing him out there working on cars. Once, a car that belonged to him leaked an entire tank of gasoline onto the street, and another neighbor yelled at him. He had told the police he’d seen Kurt Kennedy pull up on his motorcycle, park, and wait. He heard arguing and was sure that what happened was self-defense. That was the plan. Johnson’s lawyer had interviewed him and the man was agreeable. He would provide testimony.

  “Mr. Coronado has bench warrants in San Bernardino County,” the prosecutor told the judge. “He’s had a series of DUIs over the years, and has done mandatory treatment.”

  An interpreter translated for the witness, my witness, my neighbor, Mr. Coronado, who turned to the judge and spoke. The interpreter translated.

  “Your Honor, I want to clear this up right now. I’m ready to clear it up. I will do whatever is necessary.”

  The judge and a court clerk consulted loudly about the man’s warrant, and which court took walk-ins, or didn’t.

  “Sir, your legal troubles are in San Bernardino County. You’ll have to take it up with them. It’s Friday and they don’t take walk-ins today. Go there on Monday morning.”
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  The man spoke again, seeming not to have absorbed what the interpreter told him.

  “Your Honor, I’m ready. I will pay the fees and serve the time. I want to clear this up right now. I’m ready, Your Honor. I want to clear this up.”

  That was our witness. A man who wanted to help me, but couldn’t.

  * * *

  On the day of closing arguments, Johnson’s lawyer seemed drunk. He shouted at the jury and stomped his foot. He addressed them in a scolding voice as if they, the jury, had done something wrong. The jury didn’t want anything to do with him, or me. They completed a form and handed it to the judge. There are two boxes on the form. The foreman checked one.

  6

  Children must be supervised, quiet, and behaved at all times, or guardians will be asked to remove them from the visiting area

  Inmates cannot handle vending machine cards

  Vending machines do not accept cash. You must buy a prepaid card in Visitor Processing

  Cards cost five dollars. Two dollars and fifty cents will be returned if your card is in reusable condition

  Inmates can stand no closer than three feet from vending machines

  One short hug is acceptable at the beginning of your visit, and one very brief hug at the end of the visit. No sustained bodily contact or the visit will be terminated

  Holding hands is sustained contact and not tolerated

  No high fives

  No hands under the table during your visit. Visitors and inmates must keep hands where officers can see them at all times

  No hands in pockets

  No yelling

  No raised voices

  No arguments

  No “horse play”

  No loud laughing or boisterousness

  Keep crying to a minimum