The Mars Room

by Rachel Kushner

  “Unfortunately you can’t drink it while you’re on the plane.”

  Too late, he thought at her. He had drained both bottles, one at the gate, and the other just after takeoff.

  He pressured her to bring him another drink. Pointed out that there was another hour to go and he had a dry thing with his mouth.

  She was suddenly conciliatory, too much so. She’s scamming me, he knew, and indeed, she brought him a straight Coke, with no airplane bottle, claiming the drink had rum in it.

  There was a couple next to him turned inward to each other like they didn’t really want to talk but he tried anyway. Sometimes shooting the breeze with people kills time. He told them about his boat and he didn’t actually have a boat but he’d been talking for so long like he did have a boat that he basically, at this point, owned a boat. But they weren’t interested. So he turned to the kid across the aisle, started telling him about his boat. Sometimes he thought of people as kid, called grown men kid, but this kid was a kid-kid, Kurt realized.

  How old are you? he asked.

  “Thirteen.”

  “Nice.” Kurt said it with a way-to-go, all right, kind of tone. Kids liked to be encouraged. He was rewarding this kid for being thirteen. Thirteen was puberty, old enough to get off. He’d like to show the kid a picture of Vanessa. Let him in on the marvel of women who know how to act like women. Not like this stewardess and probably most of the women on this airplane, women everywhere these days, who hardly acted like women at all. If he had a picture of her he would show the kid. There was a porn actress who looked a bit like her, but he didn’t have a photo of the actress, either.

  A woman came up the aisle and leaned over the kid. Kid got up from his seat. A man came up the aisle and sat where the kid had been. They were a family and they were switching. Nice knowing you, Kurt said, and the kid said, You too.

  No one would talk to him, or rather, listen, so he got his book out, Chickenhawk, a Vietnam thing he’d been trying to read for three years. It interested him because he had begun long ago telling people he was in combat, but he never was. He was stationed in Germany. The book was about a helicopter pilot and Kurt wasn’t even halfway through. Because it was taking him so long to read, and was a secondhand copy with cheap paper, he kept it in a Ziploc bag. He read a few pages on the airplane as he sipped his rum and Coke with no rum thanks to the cunt stewardess, but reading was difficult for him. The problem with reading was how relentless it was. You managed to concentrate long enough to read a whole paragraph and then there was another one, and they just kept coming. He did it mainly as an act, for the other people on the plane, except no one was watching him or noticing. He put Chickenhawk back in the Ziploc. He could not get his screen to work so he closed his eyes and planned for when he’d be home and could go see Vanessa.

  * * *

  Fog was barreling down the street as he got out of his cab that night in front of his apartment. Sometimes the city was cold like no place on earth. He was wearing shorts like the tourists who lined up for the cable car on Powell. Morons never got the news about the weather in San Francisco. He knew it was cold. He’d had to wear shorts on the plane because his only pair of long pants smelled of piss.

  Next day he got up and went to the Mars Room. It was a Saturday and Vanessa always worked Saturdays.

  She wasn’t there.

  He had been gone one week in Cancún and while he was away, she apparently quit the Mars Room, according to the cashier in the lobby. Kurt didn’t know the cashier and figured the guy didn’t understand who he was, a regular who spent a lot of money in the club. He looked up—the cashier’s booth was on a platform like a chip dispensary at a casino—and told the cashier to get the manager. The platform dwarfed all who approached, and yet the cashier could have himself been a dwarf, the platform was that high, although it was unlikely. The manager came out and shook Kurt’s hand. Kurt was a regular and the manager wasn’t going to blow him off completely. But he said what the cashier said: we don’t have a Vanessa on the schedule. A Vanessa. As if there might be various Vanessas and none were working Saturdays, or even at all.

  * * *

  He went to Clown Alley for a burger, because he had nothing else to do. Clown Alley was in North Beach, around the corner from a place Kennedy used to frequent, when he didn’t know better. Didn’t know about the Mars Room, and about Vanessa.

  The place near Clown Alley was a stage with private booths. The women pranced around and play-touched themselves, while the men, in private booths along the edges of the stage, watched the women play-touch while they touch-touched themselves in their private booths. You could pick if you wanted two-way glass or one-way glass, so that the women who play-touched could see you, or not see you, touch-touch. If you wanted eye contact or were some kind of Henry the Flasher you could get what you needed but it cost, like everything in life does. He liked that place okay because he didn’t know better. After he started going to the Mars Room, on Market Street, he never went back to the place with the booths, but he still ate at Clown Alley because they cooked a good burger and he could park his motorcycle, a BMW K100, in front of the glass windows and be on watch in case some shit-for-brains knocked it over, one of those people, and there were a lot of them, who careened around the sidewalk like a zombie.

  He returned to the Mars Room that Saturday night, hoping she was working, but Vanessa was not on the schedule.

  Could she have changed her stage name? Some girls changed frequently. One week they were Cherry, or Secret, and the next week they were Danger, or Versace or Lexus or something stupid like that. Vanessa was a traditional and believable woman’s name and it suited her and she had not changed it, he didn’t think, because he paid the entrance fee and went in, spent an hour scanning the room, and didn’t find her, not that night or the next day or night, or on any of the ones following those.

  * * *

  The first time Kurt ever saw her, he had been keeping company with a hothead named Angelique. He and Angelique were dancing in the tunnel-thing at the back of the Mars Room. They called it dancing but the whole time you’re just trying to rub up on them. There was another couple in the tunnel thing, a businessman and Vanessa. Her body was pressed against the businessman. She danced with the guy like she really meant it. She was glued to this man in a suit, in her bra and underwear. Angelique said loudly that Vanessa was breaking a rule and was she high, what drug was she on, because you can’t fuck in the tunnel. It was fine to massage men’s laps with your buttocks but if you did that frontally, other girls would get on your case.

  “Yeah, I’m high,” Vanessa said, swaying into the businessman. “It’s a drug called happiness. You should try it sometime.” She continued to grind against the businessman, the man himself taking no notice of the argument between the two women and instead moving against pretty Vanessa like a man might dance with his wife on their golden anniversary, or in a TV commercial spotlighting an occasion like that, to sell Viagra.

  Kurt thought it was funny. Later Vanessa passed him on the aisle and he told her so. She said I don’t like to talk but if you want a lap dance I’m twenty a song. So he gave her an Andrew Jackson, as the girls called them, and that’s how it started. The usual way it started with any girl at the Mars Room, except this chick was not just using him for the money. Something was happening between them.

  They all did a stage show or were supposed to and when it was Vanessa’s turn, he sat closer to the stage than usual. When Angelique saw him alone and tried to offer company he told her to get lost.

  Vanessa had a song that was clearly hers to perform to. She moved inside the song like it was about her. The singer had a weird voice. Kurt didn’t know if it was a man or a woman and that seemed pretty odd but it fit with this chick even if she herself was one hundred percent girl. “Come on down to my place, baby, we’ll talk about love.” Vanessa wore mirrored sunglasses that gave a comic edge to her performance. She put her legs up and they were the most gorgeous legs he’d eve
r seen. Some of the girls there had pale and flabby legs, shapeless tubes that reminded him of glass syringes. Vanessa’s legs were leg-legs, long and tapered. It was a joke—comedy—that this world-class chick was onstage at the Mars Room. He was in on it, you better believe it. She was high on life the way everyone ought to try sometime but hadn’t or couldn’t because they were not free the way she was, this sexy chick with her amazing legs. Cute ass. Her tits were cute, too. Grab-able. Handful-sized. And then she showed the whole thing, bending upside down from behind. That was his favorite, the way it all looked suspended from behind, when they bend over. She was doing it just for him. She knew. This chick really knew. That was the thing about Vanessa. She wasn’t an idiot barking up the wrong tree. It was all the right tree. She understood how to turn him on and she was doing it.

  She sat with him when her stage show was over.

  “Know what I like about you?” It was a setup, for him to answer his own question. “Everything.”

  He liked to be the one to do the talking. He felt good with her. He felt comfortable. He loved to touch her. His hands were everywhere.

  He gave her twenty after twenty, went out and got more money, and gave her that, got more, and gave her that, too, because he really, really, really liked this girl.

  * * *

  He started going more frequently to the Mars Room. He was on workman’s comp and had a lot of free time. And he was under a spell. He spent everything on this girl. All she had to do was turn and look at him, seated in his lap, and he’d hand over the bills.

  Before he’d gotten his job as a process server, which paid well but almost killed him, he had worked security for the Warfield Theatre, which was a block down Market from the Mars Room. Boy, did he have stories. Eight nights of the Jerry Garcia band. Ten nights of Jerry Garcia. Pathetic hippies would camp out on the broad sidewalk, make their own disgusting street village, with drumming and people freaking out on drugs, and security had to keep clearing out their encampment and maintain order. He was still friendly enough with some of the security guys at the Warfield, and when he started going to the Mars Room, he parked in front of the theater and asked them to watch his bike.

  There were women in San Francisco who rode motorcycles. This bothered him. Because women, how did they understand the physics of it. If you don’t get physics you can’t be in control of speed. Wouldn’t catch Vanessa riding any motorcycle. She wore little high-heeled shoes and short dresses when she was leaving the Mars Room. He could put her on the back, though. Teach her how to hold on tight, lean with him as he leaned. So many broads didn’t even know how to be a passenger, leaned the wrong way when he cornered. Hold on like you’re part of this, he tried to explain, but they didn’t get it.

  He was supposed to be at home recovering from his accident, but he got bored at home. He’d crashed outside the projects on Potrero Hill and mangled his leg, slid all the way across the intersection with his knee trapped underneath the very large and heavy gas tank of his K100. Had four operations and walked now with a limp. They called it an accident but to Kurt it was attempted murder. Kids in the projects had dumped motor oil in the middle of the street so he would wipe out. He had tried to serve legal documents, simply doing his job, to an address in the projects repeatedly without luck. On his sixth visit, he knew, as soon as he hit the intersection and went into a slide, what they’d done to him. But there was no way to find the actual kids and prove it.

  He was stuck at home, waiting for his knee to heal. He was told it might not. His apartment on Woodside became a waiting room with no end to the waiting. He would shuffle around, sit on his couch, flip through a magazine, change the TV channel, stare into the fridge, watch cars move down the street, do his ten exercises, watch cars try to parallel park, hardly anyone knew how to properly parallel park, he’d sit on the bed, read the same sentence over and over in his book, Chickenhawk, realize he was doing that, put the book in its Ziploc, change TV channels, and finally, get up, ride over to the Mars Room, and limp in to see if Vanessa was working.

  He knew a lot of girls there now but the only one he liked was Vanessa. He told her he was a homicide investigator. It wasn’t a total lie. He wanted to investigate the kids who tried to kill him by putting a lake of motor oil in the intersection near the projects. He had learned not to tell people he was a process server because when he explained how you serve papers, the tactics you are forced to use, it didn’t sound noble. People treated him like he was some kind of scumbag repo man.

  He talked to Vanessa about all the tensions in his life without giving details. He talked and talked.

  He touched her bare skin with his hands and said things, expressed feelings, and got attached. He got attached to her.

  30

  I ran a row of almond trees. I went two over, and a row down, and two more over, and again down, down, down. My only option was to run. Run, and find a place to hide until night.

  Because of the mountains, I knew east. The lines in the orchard are straight, and when I got to the edge of one and met a road, I saw that the roads were also straight, which was how I remembered them from the bus into prison. I crossed and kept running, crossed and kept running. If they were already after me, they might have trouble locating me exactly, on account of my zigzagging. I zagged but kept eastward, toward the big mountains.

  I came upon a drainage ditch. It had an open pipe that I could fit into, where I could hide until it got dark.

  In the ditch I saw that I was bleeding. I hadn’t felt it, not even the wetness on my pants. The cold water seemed to stop the bleeding. There was a long gash in my thigh, from the razor wire.

  After listening for some time to the sound of the water, I was able to hear through it. To distinguish other sounds: Insects. A crow. The drafty whoosh of a car passing on the nearest road. I drank with my hands, from the water in the irrigation ditch.

  At nightfall, I got out of the pipe. I walked quickly in my wet and tattered prison clothes. I could not see the mountains, but I knew which direction they were. Everything was straight here. I was inside a giant grid; empty of people, but made by people. The whole world, at least this one, the Central Valley, from the mountains to the western horizon, was a gigantic prison. Orchards and power lines instead of razor wire and gun towers. Unmanned, and man-made.

  The grid helped me know where I was going. I could avoid getting lost, while staying off the roads, and instead travel the lanes of the orchards.

  I walked all night, slower and faster.

  Before dawn I came upon a house with old junked cars parked around it. The kitchen leaked a cold mercury light. A smell of guavas wafted from the yard. There was a laundry line with clothes on it. Clothes, I should take those clothes, but with that light in the kitchen it was dangerous. I heard a sound from inside and took off walking. I passed several more run-down shacks on that road, all dark, no clothes advertising themselves to be taken. After a long stretch of no houses, there was another, and it had clothes drying on plastic chairs next to the porch. I risked it, sneaked to the chairs and took pants and a shirt.

  * * *

  At daybreak, I was on the edge of a small town. It had a park with a trash can where I stashed my state clothes. I had on the others, a man’s stiff, rough jeans and T-shirt. I practiced walking, not running, acting legal, not illegal, like a person who had a right to walk along a road.

  There were no more orchards here, no more gridded roads. The road curved past trees and outcroppings of rocks and open grassland. I found a secluded clump of bushes and slept under them. I slept on and off, until it was dusk. I was weak but forced myself to walk as night fell. I’d had no water since the drainage ditch, and no food.

  I heard an animal cry out. My heart had been pounding since I left the prison yard, pounding out my alertness to fear, to cops, to any sign they were gaining on me. Now, I was afraid of the dark, too. Of this animal, which shrieked again. Its cry was almost human, but in the almost human manner of an animal in the wild.


  * * *

  I had walked for a long time when I saw lights. It was a crossroads with a gas station, and a road that wound upward toward the mountains. It was the middle of the night. The gas station was open.

  A pickup truck pulled in. The driver got out to pump. A man alone. I sensed this was right. That he was the person to ask. I walked over.

  “What’s up,” he said. Chubby guy in an acid-wash Marlboro jacket.

  “I need a ride.”

  “A ride. Maybe. Maybe. You married?”

  “I’m not married.”

  “You got a dude hiding around here, you guys gonna jump me or what?”

  I said I was alone.

  “Where you headed?”

  “Up.” I nodded toward the mountains.

  “How far?”

  “To the top.”

  “Sugar Pine Lodge, you work up there or something?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right. Let me just refill this. You can have a ride.” He said it in a singsong voice, as if random women at remote gas stations were always begging favors, and he was once again consenting.

  He grabbed a soda container from the seat of his truck. It was gallon-sized and said Thirst Destroyer.

  * * *

  He turned the heat up to eighty-eight degrees and sipped from his huge stupid drink and chattered about how he was going to get into vending machines. The gash had opened back up and I was bleeding on the seat of his truck. I was dizzy with thirst. But if I made that clear to him, how badly I needed him to share his drink, he might know.

  I watched him drink from the straw, thick as a gas can nozzle, and tried not to faint.

  “All you got to do is make the investment and restock them, collect the money.” From there he would take his profits and buy a franchise. “Takes forty-five K to buy a Dunkin’ Donuts. A Taco Bell is more. What you do is start with the vending machines, then you get a Dunkin’ Donuts, pull the equity from that, and then you buy a Taco Bell.”