The Mars Room

by Rachel Kushner

  At the end of The Brothers K, Alyosha asks the children to always remember the good feeling they share, in praising and celebrating the life of their beloved dead friend, the lost child.

  Remember this always, Alyosha says, and he means, as an antidote. Retain the innocence of the most wholesome feeling you ever had in your life. Part of you stays innocent forever. That part of you is worth more than the rest.

  * * *

  Sanchez was in prison and would die there. She had told Gordon she’d never had a visitor. Few of the women he knew got visits. When he asked, they made excuses. There was embarrassment that no one came to see them. It did not occur to them that it wasn’t a reflection on them, wasn’t their fault that traveling to the prison required a reliable car, time off work, money for gas and meals and a hotel, and for the high-priced vending machines in the visiting room.

  He kept looking, searched others.

  He knew, at a certain point, that he was doing it to forestall looking up the person about whom he was most curious, and most hesitant to betray.

  It would be easy because her name was not common.

  It was hard for him to let go of his guilt for having been the one to tell her about her son. He didn’t like the way it made him feel. As if he had power over this woman now, on account of her needs. In class, the thoughts ceased, because in person she was not needy. She was the student he could rely on to answer a question in a generative manner, so that he could tell himself the students were with him, and not lost, not against him. She laughed at his jokes and spoke in a way that confirmed his arguments about the worth of what he was doing, because she obviously benefited from having literature to read and discuss. But that was all a grand lie, even if true. He was attracted to her, and she was forbidden. He thought about her frequently, since his fantasies were not patrolled by the corrections department.

  “Did you ever see the green flash,” she asked him after class, “down at Ocean Beach?”

  He had not, he told her. She explained that it was an optical effect at sunset, when rays from the top of the sinking sun turned green. She had never seen it either, she said.

  “Are you sure it isn’t a story cooked up by the Irish drunks who live out there?”

  She laughed. They were standing outside the school trailer. It was a June evening when the sun sets late. The light was gold from valley haze and low, slanting into her eyes, filling the irises.

  Looking at someone who is looking at you was a drug as strong as any other.

  “Move it, Hall!” an officer yelled. It was time for evening count. “Move your ass, now! I said go!”

  * * *

  He researched the green flash of a setting sun. It existed. There were websites with lengthy explanations of the physics of light. He did not type the three words of her name. Instead, he kept on with the others. Betty LaFrance, who asked the guards to reserve a parking space for her hairdresser. Betty, whose letter he’d sent, and when Gordon asked how her boyfriend was, she said, “I had him strangled.” He was sure she was lying but when she said it the hairs on his arms stood up. He found her page on a prison pen pal site.

  “Single and ready to mingle, an old-fashioned gal who likes champagne, yachts, gambling, fast cars, VERY expensive thrills. Can you afford me? Write to find out.”

  There was a list of standard questions Betty LaFrance was obliged to answer on the site, for its users.

  Do you mind relocating? (No).

  Are you serving a life sentence? (No).

  But at the bottom, under On death row? she’d had to check (Yes).

  Of Candy Peña, Gordon learned that her mother had worked concessions at Disneyland in Anaheim. Candy Peña had worked at a McDonald’s. Her manager testified for the defense that she had never given him any problems. The mother of Candy’s murder victim, the little girl, that mother had cheered in the courtroom when the death penalty verdict was announced. “YEAH!” she’d yelled.

  And then Gordon found another quote, later, from the victim’s mother, who said she felt for Candy Peña’s mother, knowing herself what it was like to lose a child.

  London: at first he found nothing. They called London Conan, or Bobby. He typed in “Bobby London,” and found a Yelp page for a restaurant in Los Angeles. The top three reviews of it all started the same way: Fuck you, Bobby London!

  He remembered that the first name was Roberta. Bingo. “Woman who masqueraded as man convicted and sentenced to men’s prison for armed burglary.” Another headline: “State Goofs.” London was not masquerading but one of the most natural people Gordon had ever met. London was London.

  It seemed London had already served for the burglary, had gotten two strikes for it, and was on a third, for fraud. London was doing life for having written a bad check.

  This gallery of people.

  Every name he could think of, to avoid typing Romy Leslie Hall.

  Geronima Campos, who had painted Gordon’s portrait: Geronima had apparently dropped her husband’s torso off a bridge somewhere in the Inland Empire. They found it and later the head, which had a bullet in it from a gun registered to Geronima. Geronima had no alibi. Her husband’s blood was in her bathtub, in her car, and on the clothes she’d worn the day of his disappearance.

  Geronima was involved with a peer counseling group and taught human rights law to any prisoner who wanted to learn it. Geronima was a prison elder. She had associate degrees by mail order and a flawless disciplinary record. Geronima had gone up for parole eight times and been denied every time, despite her file of service and support from people on the outside who organized to help her. There was an internet campaign page, to advocate for Geronima’s next parole. Those who signed the petition included their reason for doing so.

  Geronima has done her time.

  She is no longer a threat to society.

  Free Geronima.

  She is a survivor of spousal abuse.

  Geronima is an indigenous elder lesbian who is being unjustly held at Stanville Correctional Facility.

  Being a lesbian is not illegal.

  She is needed in her community.

  She has served her time.

  She is not a threat.

  Free Geronima.

  She had indeed served her time. She had done the time the court had given her. And Gordon knew Geronima. She was an old woman who liked to paint. Everything was true. It was time for Geronima to go home. She had served the sentence they gave her.

  Every time Geronima went before the parole board, which Gordon pictured as a series of Phyllis Schlaflys all in a row, frowning, with stiff hair, in industrial pantyhose and little rippling American flag pins like Republican candidates wore for political debates, she told the board she was innocent. Her supporters said she’d done her time and was no longer a threat. She faced the parole board and said, I’m innocent. It made no sense. But Gordon understood why she said it.

  Whatever space Geronima would have needed to find a way to face what she had done was not provided in prison. Prison was a place where you had to be strong to get through each day. If you thought about some awful act you’d committed, every day, in graphic detail, enough to prove to a parole board that you had insight, the proverbial insight they wanted, needed, to let you go home, you might lose your mind. To stay sane, that was the thing. To stay sane you formed a version of yourself you could believe in.

  And if she did show insight, tell them what was on her mind the day she killed her husband, why and how she did it and what she felt after, excitement, guilt, denial, fear, revulsion, if she showed the board how honest and precise she could be in her knowledge of her crime and why she committed it, if she spoke openly about the impact it had on her victim and on others, on society, if she trotted out the whole horror of it, she would, at the same time, freshly reactivate for the parole board all the reasons why they had wanted to lock her up. You could not convince them. There was no way to win.

  Just let her go home. Free Geronima.

  But t
he contradiction, that Geronima faced the parole board and said, “I’m innocent,” while her advocates outside said, “She’s done her time. She is no longer a threat”: that bothered Gordon.

  Still. Geronima, and Sanchez, and Candy, all of them were people who suffered and along the way of their suffering they made others suffer, and Gordon could not see that making them suffer lifelong would accrue to justice. It added new harm to old, and no dead person ever came back to life that he had heard about.

  * * *

  Alex had been calling, e-mailing, but Gordon had nothing to say to him because all he thought about was women in prison and it wasn’t fun conversation. He was in some kind of exile.

  He felt hopeless as he sat in Baressi’s and envied the others at the bar, men in construction and farming, who made it seem as if the Central Valley was not about prison, and for them it wasn’t.

  “Aw, come on, there’s plenty of hope,” Alex might have rejoined, playing Kafka, “no end of hope, but none for you, Gordon.”

  There was a new singer on the piano. She was good, or maybe just Stanville-good. Gordon got a bit drunk without meaning to, walked over and put a twenty-dollar bill in the big brandy snifter, the international standard piano-tip container.

  “Would you like anything special?” Her voice was happy and light.

  He could not think of a single song to request. He’d tipped her because he could. “Sing your favorite? What you sing alone, when no one can hear.”

  “ ‘Summertime,’ then,” she said without a pause.

  Walking back to his seat, he wondered if asking her to sing for a stranger what she sang in private was creep territory. Some people violate others regularly as the natural course of the day, of life. He knew this. He was not those people. Still, he wondered.

  As she sang, he understood that whether or not it was her private song, she gave him nothing. She was performing. She was a performer by profession. She sang “Summertime,” and Gordon was swept away by the passionate range of her mediocre voice.

  * * *

  “I’m sorry about your fiancé,” he said one night as Romy Hall lingered after class. He was stacking photocopies in an unnecessarily fastidious way to draw out their few minutes together, before a guard oversaw the students’ transfer through work exchange.

  “What happened?” It was easy, he found, to affect the concerned tone of an advisor, when really he was fishing for information, to know if there were competitors.

  “He wasn’t my fiancé. And he’s not dead. He moved on.”

  She said there were women on her unit who got married to men they met through the mail. “Jimmy wasn’t a loser like that,” she said. “He had a life. I’m sure he’s out there living it.”

  She made fun of the crafting craze in prison, but said it was good to work with her hands. She was doing jewelry, she told him, in explanation for what she asked Gordon to bring her. He didn’t entirely believe her, but in a sense he did, because he didn’t let himself speculate. He was all done speculating. He would be leaving Stanville soon. He was going back to school, to get a master’s in social work. It was probably an improvident time to quit a job, with the economy tanking, but the rhythms of the world did not always coordinate with the rhythm of the person.

  * * *

  How’s the life of nature and captivity? Alex asked by e-mail.

  This morning I saw a peregrine falcon eating babies from a sparrow’s nest, he replied. A lot of commotion. High drama in the Sierra Nevada.

  Oh, I bet those are delicious, Alex wrote back. There’s a little songbird eaten whole, bones and everything, by French aristocrats. Illegal, and, by custom, enjoyed with a cloth over the face and head, like an executioner’s hood. Maybe what we lack is tradition and elegance in our relentless destruction of nature. So when are you coming back?

  * * *

  The day after he gave her what she wanted, Gordon drove into town. He parked on Stanville’s main street, which featured storefronts with soaped windows. There was a small Catholic church on the end of the block. An old building with thick adobe walls. The doors were open. It looked cool inside.

  Our Lady of the Valley smelled like the lining of an old woman’s purse. Our Lady’s Pocketbook, which had been collecting powdery makeup residue and mold spores for decades. Gordon had no religion, though the idea of mercy, offered by churches, a Christian god, but never the state, had been in his thoughts. He sat down at the end of a row of pews. On the other side of the aisle was a confession booth. The sinner’s side had a screen for talking to the priest. The screen was a metal plate randomly hole-punched. It looked like a road sign riddled with bullets.

  Wind was moving through the church, from a single propped door in the back. Papers somewhere lifted and flapped, suggesting presence, but then again not. Suggesting wind stirring papers, and no one present, except Gordon. He stared into the vents, from his seat on the pew.

  There were real, epistemological limits to knowledge. Also, to judgment.

  I can only know myself, if I can know anyone. I can only judge me.

  * * *

  It was Thoreau who’d said that first.

  I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

  Why was Thoreau Thoreau, while Ted Kaczynski was Ted? One stayed formal in Gordon’s mind, the other, strictly first-name basis. Ted.

  It was more familiar to be angry and bad. Maybe that was why.

  * * *

  Norman Mailer had not smuggled wire cutters into a prison to give to Jack Henry Abbott. Norman Mailer wrote letters, used influence. Mailer bragged that Abbott’s release was his doing, bragged until suddenly it was a liability to have his name involved, and then denied his role, and then could not resist bragging again, said he’d do it all over for art, for the sake of art. It was 1981 and they put poor Abbott in a halfway house on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He was surrounded by junkies and sleaze and took to carrying a weapon for protection. He knew nothing of living in society and mistook one thing for another, thought he was being threatened in the old way, the jailhouse way. Took out his knife and stuck it deep in his attacker’s heart. You don’t have much time to fight in prison, and so your moves are gambits, prearranged. Guy died immediately, there on First Avenue. Jack Henry Abbott went back to prison and so much for dinners with celebrities and writers and good-looking women with names like Norris. Who the fuck names their wife Norris? He means their daughter. Gordon knows you don’t name a wife.

  * * *

  Gordon’s cabin was mostly packed. Two cartons of books, some cook pots, a Melitta thing you place over a cup, clothes in garbage bags. He put a log in his stove, watched the gold-blue liquid updraft, to be sure it caught, and then he typed her name. He had made rules, and this was one, to look only now.

  Romy Leslie Hall.

  Nothing. No entries found.

  Romy L Hall. Hall prison Stanville. San Francisco life sentence Hall.

  He looked and looked, as the wood burned down, shifted softly, embers making their mealy tick.

  Jimmy San Francisco teach Art Institute. Nothing. He spent hours looking through the faculty lists. There was a James Darling in the film department. Googled James Darling. Film festivals. Artist’s statement. But he wasn’t even sure this was the guy.

  He listened to a dog bark, somewhere down the mountain.

  People in that area made nature domestic, and also hostile, with their guard dogs, their beware-of dogs. German shepherds. Dobermans.

  The dog barked and barked, down the mountain, echoing up it. An excavating three a.m. bark, digging and digging at nothing.

  25

  The next summer I set a booby trap intended to kill someone, but I won’t say what kind or where, because if this page is ever found, the trap might be harmlessly removed. I also strung a neck-height wire for motorcyclists across the divide trail above Rooster Bill Creek, after roaring motors spoiled a hike for me. Later I found
that someone had wrapped the wire safely around a tree. Unfortunately I doubt anyone was hurt by it.

  * * *

  Up South Fork Humbug, I shot a cow in the head with my .30-30 and then got the hell out of there. I mean a rancher’s cow, not an elk cow. I also went down at dawn and smashed my neighbor’s mailbox with my axe in such a way that it looked as if some vehicle might have hit it.

  * * *

  The following November I traveled from Montana back to the Chicago area, mainly for one reason: So that I could more safely attempt to murder a scientist, businessman, or the like. I would also like to kill a communist.

  * * *

  I emphasize that my motivation is personal revenge on those who deprive or threaten to deprive my own autonomy. I don’t pretend to have any kind of philosophical or moralistic justification.

  26

  Sammy’s date was coming up. We’d been in prison together almost four years. It was October and every day the sky was the same blue dome, us, under it, also in blue. Some would get release dates and go. Sammy would go, and good for her. The forever feeling on main yard, of thousands of women in blue, would stay, and I would stay.

  The mountains beyond the yard were forever, too, but they were not the automated concrete prison forever. I dreamed of ancient worlds up there, a lost civilization of people who would give me a chance. It was a childish dream that came from a book we read in Hauser’s class. The mountains, brownish purple on a winter afternoon. People in a hut where a fire crackles. They take in the stranger and teach her to live. In some of my daydreams, Jackson was already there with those friendly strangers, waiting for me. He was among the people who would give me my chance. He was dirty and strong, a feral boy who had made his way bravely. He was there in the hut, waiting with the others for my arrival, my rehabilitation, to use the language of this place. They don’t help you with it. You have to do it yourself.