The Mars Room

by Rachel Kushner

  He bought seeds for a student in his class who gardened. She had brought Gordon fresh mint as a present, and when Gordon asked her where she got it, she said it rode into the prison on old lumber, four-by-twelves they were using for construction. She’d replanted it, watered it. She told him she watched the sky and waited for birds to excrete seeds, and germinated them secretly in wet paper towels. Rules were such that no plants were supposed to grow. But the captain on D yard, where she lived, let her have her plants. She was a lifer. Gordon gave her a seed packet of California poppies. She put her hands to her face to hide her tears. “This is a God shot,” she said. “Thank you for this God shot.” Which started the cycle over again, the discomfort, their outsized gratitude. The packet of seeds had cost him eighty-nine cents.

  And so he had been sending books to Romy Hall. You go on Amazon. Click a button. What was twenty bucks to him, if spending it meant several weeks of freedom of thought for someone in prison? But looking into her personal life in the outside world, calling a number on her behalf: that was different. It was honest-to-god meddling, not just in her life but in his own, too.

  He put the paper she had given him on his coffee table. A phone number and the name of her child. He did not call, and to his relief, or his mixed relief, she did not ask him about it. They chatted, but about insignificant things. She thinks I won’t help her, that I don’t care. But he wanted her to know that he did care, and that it was not nothing to him that she had asked him that favor.

  He sat on his couch, picked up the scrap with the number, and put it back down. Instead of calling it, he went online and figured out how to order a new paint set for Geronima from a catalogue supplier. Something easy, that required no deep deliberating.

  Geronima brought the new paint set to class and worked diligently for several weeks before approaching Gordon.

  “I’d like to show you what I’ve been working on. Portraits, but the kind you probably prefer.”

  “That I prefer?”

  “Well, most people prefer.” She showed him. They were skillful illustrations, immediately recognizable. Herself. London. Gordon. Romy. Everyone in class. They had the economy of caricatures. She turned the page to an unfamiliar face staring from the paper, the cheeks streaked in tears. “That’s Lily, who lives on my unit and reminds me of my younger sister. I don’t have a picture of my sister, so I asked her to pose.”

  16

  In spring I began hearing disagreeable noises and machinery, sometimes surprisingly loud, depending upon meteorological conditions. Thawing winter meant otherwise pleasant excursions were ruined for me by the moaning and howling of these iron monsters, audible for miles over the hills. Made up my mind to get revenge. But it was difficult to determine just where the noise was coming from. Had to wait for summer anyway because my traps could have easily been fouled with snow. But later in spring, the noise stopped. I began hearing it again in summer. I followed the noise, to learn it came from a logging operation at Willow Creek drainage. Logging off one of my favorite wild spots. Pushing trees over with bulldozers instead of cutting with saws. I watched from a high rock where I wasn’t visible. After they’d finished for the day, the whole surface of the ground was stripped right off. I came down to the worksite after they’d gone. A five-gallon can of oil was sitting on the machine they used to pick up logs and load them on trucks. I poured oil over the machine’s engine and set fire to it. I spent a pleasant night sleeping on top of the mountain, and came home leisurely in the morning. I felt so good having done this, though a mite uneasy over the risk of being suspected.

  17

  Doc had been to Las Brisas the night he got the call about the burglary of a pawnshop on Beverly in Filipinotown. The pawnshop’s silent alarm was going off. Doc decided to pull up with no lights or sirens, in case the scene was still active.

  The suspect, he sees, is still there. The guy’s car, a beat-up Chevy Caprice, will not start. He keeps turning the key. The starter whines but won’t catch.

  Doc sneaks up on him, aims his service revolver at the guy’s head, and asks him politely to get out of the car. His voice, Doc’s, becomes gentle. Like the voice of Mr. Rogers, but not an imitation of someone on TV. It is a voice that fits Doc like a glove. Doc is clean-cut, looks more like a dentist than a cop. He thought of his image in terms of basketball: this was the early 1990s, and if there were guys on the force using street style and street language—like the Lakers in their knee-length shorts—Doc, as he thought of it, played for the Utah Jazz, a team whose point scorers were white men in fitted shorts. Men who, like Doc, also resembled dentists, and spoke intelligently about strategy and technique, unlike the retards who got on camera for postgame wrap and said they won by taking their time and picking their shots. Taking my time, picking my shots. That’s all most of the players ever said, like it was something they memorized. But really, it was a good formula. It was how Doc did things, too.

  Doc says, “Sounds like you’ve got car trouble.” Then he calmly asks the suspect how the burglary went.

  “The what?” The guy is confused. Black dude. In Doc’s line of work, black people give him the most trouble. Or rather, he gives them the most trouble.

  Doc puts the guy spread-eagle against his clunker and takes his stolen loot off the front seat, which is in a pillowcase like Doc remembered using to trick-or-treat when he was a boy, to get the most candy, fuck everybody else. The pillowcase is full of weapons, watches, jewelry, the usual. The guy has a gun on him, so Doc takes that as well. It’s a Glock. Doc is pleasantly surprised this guy in a trashed car that won’t start has a decent weapon that Doc might keep instead of sell.

  Doc’s police radio statics out a message: backup is on its way to Beverly and Vendome. Backup? He has not called for backup. But according to dispatch it is on its way. Maybe it’s a ghost patrol. That’s a scam people were running. The commissioner wants so many cars out in the division. Well, screw the commissioner: officers all over town were fooling dispatch into thinking they were out on calls while they sat around eating and gambling, or going to the gym, or banging box in an hourly joint down on Western, the Snooty Fox, a popular spot for guys on the force. It was clean, Doc wants you to know, not your typical Venus flytrap for rock smoking and five-dollar head. The Snooty Fox was classy, with suites and a good ice machine, and they had mirrors on the ceiling so you could watch yourself. (Doc considers it an oddity that a mirror would be for looking at anything but yourself. He would have these conversations with the guys down at Rampart, and Doc always said the same thing. “If I want to see what some whore looks like from behind I turn her over. I don’t need a mirror for that. What I can’t see without the mirror is me.”)

  Doc decides whatever squad car the backup is, they are probably down at the Snooty Fox getting their dicks wet.

  The suspect faces him, hands up.

  “Take it easy,” Doc says. “Look, neither one of us can squirm out of this, so let’s work with each other. I can make this easier. You’re going down to central booking. Tomorrow you’ll have an arraignment, and the court will appoint you a decent lawyer.”

  Or they wouldn’t, Doc knew.

  “At most you’ll serve a two-year sentence.”

  The suspect starts to sniffle.

  “Hey, I understand. You were just trying to pull a quick job.”

  The suspect stares at Doc, not unsuspiciously, because he’s scared, and he probably hates cops. “This is messed up,” he says.

  Doc hears sirens wailing toward the Virgil/Temple/Silver Lake/Beverly junction. Backup really is on its way. If the light is red, he has time while the squad car slows in order to navigate through that multi-lane intersection against oncoming traffic.

  Doc takes out a cigarette. “This kind of thing isn’t fun for me, either.”

  He offers one to the suspect, who eyes him warily and shakes his head, blinking back tears.

  “You can put your hands down,” Doc says, exhaling smoke.

  “I have you
r weapon, I know you’re not a threat. Just don’t do anything stupid. But relax. You’re making me nervous.”

  The suspect looks at him. He keeps his hands raised.

  “Relax, seriously. I’m going to let these other guys book you, the car that’s on its way. You know why? I hate sending people to jail. Now come on. I’m ordering you to put them down. I can tell you’re a good kid. I bet this was your first burglary, which is why you fucked it up so badly. Put your hands down and take a breather. In a moment these guys will cuff you, and the cuffs won’t feel good.”

  The suspect’s eyes shine with fear. He begins to bring his arms down a little.

  He wipes his wet face with the arm of his shirt.

  Remember the era when everyone wore those rugby shirts with thick vertical brashly colored stripes and an offset collar? That’s what the suspect had on.

  Doc hated those shirts.

  The suspect puts his hands all the way down.

  “That-a-boy,” Doc says. “Try not to worry. I know the officer on intake. I’ll ask him to go easy on you. You might even bond out tonight.”

  The suspect brings his arms not just down, but toward his pockets.

  At the moment when the suspect’s hands go into the pockets, Doc fires at his face. Twice, aiming upward.

  Backup arrives a few seconds later. Enough long seconds to stash the pillowcase Doc has inherited.

  Two officers from Central Division pull up.

  “Jesus. What happened here?”

  The suspect is slumped against the grille of his car. Behind him, a radius of blood speckles the car’s hood.

  “I tell him hands up,” Doc says, “and he goes straight for his pockets. I wasn’t taking any chances.”

  * * *

  He didn’t know why he’d done it. The child rapist could burn in hell, but why did he kill that kid on Beverly?

  If the kid had said to Doc, Why are you doing this? Doc might have stopped himself, because he did not know. The kid could not ask that, because Doc hadn’t given him time to.

  He and his old partner José, it’s true they tortured a victim, a manager at a gentleman’s club under the 605 freeway, and when they were done they dumped the body near the 710 freeway. But the guy had raped José’s girlfriend, so what were they supposed to do? The press made a big deal of the torture, but Doc is no sicko, nor serial killer. He did it to make it look as if someone of that type did the killing.

  * * *

  It wasn’t all like that. Doc was a popular detective, someone you might have envied if you spotted him out riding with a handful of other off-duty officers along the cliffs above Malibu on a mild windless day. There was a group of them that went up the Pacific Coast Highway. Doc was usually on his ’78 Sportster, not some full-dress late-model fagmobile, as you often see parked outside Neptune’s Net on the PCH, the rider handling it like with butler’s gloves because the thing is leased. Doc hates faggots who lease Harleys and for the record owned two, paid cash for both, the Sportster and a Softail, the Softail equally stripped down but with cowhide saddlebags for trips up to his place in Three Rivers, where he owned outright a plot of land with a stream running through it, another enviable feature of Doc’s old life. Beautiful high country, fantastic trout fishing, clean air. A rustic log cabin where he injected meth and fucked women he brought up from South LA.

  Three Rivers takes him to something intriguing: he sees hips and thighs splayed out. It’s what happens to a woman’s body when the clothing comes off, hips spreading against the spongy push-back of the lumpy mattress in his country place. He sees the cheap wood paneling. A hairy snatch, wet, relaxed-looking. He parts the lips with his fingers, uses the other hand to ready himself. This is working. He can’t see a face but he doesn’t need or want one. He sees the spread thighs and hears the squeak of that old bed frame as he shifts into position. Feels the heat of a still room on a summer day and this is working.

  All the sex he ever had. All that remained were these moments you looped.

  Hips, pushing, wood paneling, bed squeak. Hands on his backside (he’s a man, okay? It’s backside, not ass). He grabs hers. Grabs a handful of it. The way her hips spread out beneath him on that country mattress, that was what helped him get this going. He goes deep. The bed is squeaking like crazy; he’s at the finish and that noisy bed frame sounds like it’s being split apart with an axe.

  * * *

  But this one, which he sinks into, catching his breath, no. This bed is concrete. He lies back in the still heat of the cell, tries to sustain this feeling of the still heat of a summer day up in sequoia country.

  Warm enough his Harley requires no choke, just starter to idle in a liquid transition.

  On an afternoon like that he’d go to the biker bar in Three Rivers, leave the woman, whichever one, at the cabin, with confiscated drugs and satellite TV. He sits at the bar and drinks cold draft beer.

  People snub Budweiser for these dumb brands no one’s heard of, but Budweiser is the king of beers for a reason: it’s good.

  * * *

  His roommate is in the common area, plucking the strings of his big yellow guitar. Sounds like Led Zeppelin, but what white-guy bluesy finger work on an acoustic guitar doesn’t? The cellmate is a decent musician for a creep who fucked his own daughter. Everyone else is on the yard. Doc does not go on the yard. If you need it spelled out for you, the prison yard is no place for a cop, even the Sensitive Needs yard—unless it’s powder puff softball day, which Doc will risk himself in order to watch.

  Doc is feeding his pet lizard when his cellmate returns. He recently discovered that static cling sheets—orderable from Walkenhorst catalog supply—will function as mesh to cover the top of the lizard’s cardboard terrarium. The terrarium is made from a Nike shoe box. Doc only wears white sneakers, hospital clean, works on them several times a day with Cell Block 64 and goes through many pairs, thanks to what various people on the force pay him to keep quiet. He’s feeding the lizard little pieces of leaf from the cutting he is growing in a jar. He enjoys a bit of plant and animal life in the cell as long as it is tidy and clean and doesn’t introduce any weird stenches. He watches the lizard watch his big hand hold out the leaf, and then it—

  Something has reduced him to a question mark.

  He’s down, but coming to. The cellmate, wow. Has wacked him in the back of the head. With Doc doesn’t know what. Something major.

  He can’t get air. Doc is being choked now by a homemade garrote.

  Is there any other kind of garrote?

  The mind wanders, even at critical moments. They always say “homemade garrote.” Doc reaches for it—it’s strong, it’s made of—

  He cannot breathe!

  Dental floss? Guitar string?

  He is sputtering and grunting with an animal’s desire for life. Doc tries to—

  He can’t—

  18

  I felt free of Kurt Kennedy in Los Angeles, though several times I had to double-take men who shared his generally repulsive physical qualities, thick bunched calves, ruddy skin, bald and dented cranium, and once I mistakenly thought I heard the gravelly voice. But Los Angeles was a new planet, with Creamsicle sunsets, sandals in January, giant birds of paradise, supermarkets with gleaming rows of tropical produce. I began to relax, to feel free of the suffocating familiarity of San Francisco.

  In truth I moved me and Jackson to Los Angeles not only to get away from Kurt Kennedy, but so that I could be with Jimmy Darling after he got the teaching job in Valencia. The property he sublet belonged to an eccentric old painter who was away in Japan. Most of the structures on the ranch had burned in a forest fire, so the old painter lived in an Airstream trailer. He’d built a wood trellis over it that had vines on it, to keep the place cool. Jackson loved it there, because it was almost like camping. Off a ways from the trailer was a milk-green Andy Gump port-a-potty, its door permanently wired open. I went up there to lie in a hammock in the shade with Jimmy, eat purple prickly pear that grew along th
e property borders, and let Jackson feed apples and weeds to the retired Arabian mares that grazed in a big soggy pasture. We would spend the night but always left first thing in the morning and made the long drive back to my own borrowed place, my so-called reality. I didn’t want to live with Jimmy. He was not the sort of person you move in with, make a life with. He did his thing and I did mine, and every few days we got together and entertained each other but kept it light. We walked around the property. He and Jackson whittled together. Scratched the neck of a potbellied goat that was the old painter’s companion. When it rained up there, the abandoned swimming pool of the burned-down property next door was overtaken by frogs, whose chorus of croaks delighted Jackson. After I put Jackson to sleep on a mat on the trailer floor, Jimmy Darling and I would drink tequila at a picnic table under a tarp, and then have gratifying and drunken sex in the one bed in the trailer, both bed and trailer too small for two by intent and design.

  The painter who lived on the horse ranch was escaping the clutches of various women, Jimmy said. The port-a-potty was a message that women should not get too comfortable. The bed was a twin. Jackson and I only went there on weekends. Jackson was in kindergarten so it wasn’t practical to go during the week. The arrangement was fine with me, but sometimes, as I drove toward downtown LA with Jackson in the backseat, I felt I was going down into a solitude that was too airy and roomy. Jimmy, on the other hand, probably just went out into the old painter’s studio and started building and making, because he was a builder and maker and had little tendency toward destructive introspection. I would drive past the ugly power plant in Burbank and see the steam billowing from its reactor mouths and be faced with what I did not like to admit, which was that Jimmy Darling was free of worry, and he had a place in the world. He was a somebody. Take the inverse of that, and it was how I felt about myself.