The Mars Room_A Novel Read online

  You’re going to be all right, I kept telling the girl. It wasn’t true, since she was in prison, but I comforted her as best I could, until more cops streamed in and yanked me away from her and put me in restraints. They were not attending to the girl in labor; she was alone and crying out in pain.

  Fernandez, like Conan, was courageous. They sprayed her and she didn’t seem to notice. She kept resisting them until they Tasered her and put her in a cage.

  I was put in a cage, too. The cages were not quite big enough and I had to keep my head low on my neck. I had become the turkey on the freeway. Conan was practically stuffed into the thing. Conan in a cage was even worse than Conan in a muumuu. He filled the cage, all glare and rippling muscle. We were all three going to administrative segregation.

  My first day in prison, and I had already blown my parole board hearing, which was in thirty-seven years.

  * * *

  Medical had arrived but it was too late to move the girl; she was fully in labor. She had the baby in receiving. It let out a cry that echoed through the concrete room, a piercing shriek of existence.

  A birth should be joyous. This was a lonely birth. The mother was in the hands of the state, and so was the baby, and they each only had that one tie, to bureaucracy. The correctional officers seemed to think it was funny to see a baby in receiving. There aren’t supposed to be any babies. The baby was contraband.

  Jones was shaking her head, as if a birth here in her unit was one more example, further proof, of our inability to live in society. The medics put the girl on a stretcher. She asked to hold her baby but her request was ignored by the medics, one of whom held the little newborn away from his body like it was a sack of garbage that might leak.

  * * *

  Jackson was born at SF General, where they have to take you even without insurance. The nurse put him on my chest and he looked up at me, a wet wild creature who had crawled from a swamp, all eyes, eyes wide, and his cry was not hysterical, not a lament, but an earnest question: Are you here? Are you here for me?

  I was crying, too, and I kept answering, I’m here, I’m right here. A nurse cleaned him up and put him in a clear plastic box and all night different nurses and orderlies came in and out, prodding and poking and bothering him. I was there, as I’d promised, but I was not his protector.

  Jackson’s dad was a doorman at the Crazy Horse, a club down the street from the Mars Room where I also worked on occasion. He went out with his friends the night his own son was born, instead of hanging out with me in the miserable recovery room, which I shared with another woman who also had no companion and watched television all night. Every time Jackson’s dad came around to my apartment, in the days and weeks after Jackson was born, I yelled at him for being a deadbeat, which he was, so he stopped visiting. I didn’t want him around, but when I heard he died of an overdose, I could not look at poor little Jackson without feeling rotten. He’d lost his loser dad. He had only one person to rely on. He bobbled his head on his neck, his big wet blue eyes gazing at me in myopic wonder, his hair a crown of fuzz standing at attention, and he did not know he was fatherless. He knew only that I was the one. I was the one.

  I was living out in the avenues then. When Jackson was three months old, the owner sold my apartment building. New management cleared the tenants to raise the rent. The city was changing. Rents were high. It was either live with my mother, who never offered that, probably because we fought and she was tired of me, or move to the Tenderloin, where you could still get an affordable studio, if you could tolerate the atmosphere in those buildings. I moved to Taylor Street. Eva-land, as I thought of it. I went back to the Mars Room and paid my new neighbor to watch Jackson. My neighbor had a three-year-old and was in a similar situation. No money, raising her daughter alone. She watched Jackson a lot, especially after I started dating Jimmy Darling.

  * * *

  We three hovered in our turkey cages while Jones bullied the other prisoners into sitting down for the rest of their orientation. Everyone was agitated. People were crying. Jones told them to shut up and reminded them that they had made choices, that Sanchez, as she called the girl who’d had the baby, had made really poor choices, and should have thought about her baby’s future before she broke the law.

  Jones summoned porters, two gloomy white girls with cornrowed hair and abraded skin, to clean up from the birth. It was impossible to know if they were sad about the situation at hand, or in a general and permanent sort of way.

  The gloomy porters squirted state cleaners and blasted hoses. Soapy runoff filled the drains.

  The baby’s shriek stayed in my head as I sat in my cage, long after it and its mother were gone. They were in no hurry to deal with us. Incapacitated, in cages, we could be left to wait, to stare at the dirty pink walls while someone slowly, slowly filled out paperwork for our transfer from receiving to administrative segregation, which was even worse than regular prison.

  Unfortunately for that baby, it was a girl.

  8

  PLEASE PROVIDE EMPLOYMENT HISTORY OVER LAST FIVE YEARS

  PLEASE BE THOROUGH AND DETAILED

  On the job experience section of the form, the suspect wrote that she had experience as an employee. The intake officer explained that this would not be sufficient.

  * * *

  On the transcript of the suspect’s interview with homicide detectives, when asked what kind of work he normally did, the suspect answered, “Recycling.”

  Quality Control, she wrote for type of work.

  I’m an employee, he’d told them, but seemed unable to specify what kind.

  * * *

  Recycler.

  Maintenance crew.

  Retail.

  Wholesale.

  Flyer distribution.

  Warehouse distribution.

  Dollar Store.

  Dollar Tree.

  Distribution warehouse.

  Walmart.

  He said he handed out flyers.

  He had written recycler.

  They both worked with a crew that handed out flyers.

  He delivered free newspapers, but not regularly.

  He worked at a distribution warehouse.

  She wrote quality control.

  He said he worked part-time helping a friend who cleaned dollar stores after hours.

  Cashier.

  Unemployed.

  Not currently employed.

  QC, which she explained meant quality control.

  Truck unloader.

  Package handler.

  He unpacked crates, he told them, at a distribution warehouse.

  When asked what she did for a living, the suspect said she worked.

  Recycling, he’d written.

  He brought recycling to a redemption center, he explained.

  Recycler.

  Recycler.

  Recycler.

  Recycler.

  Redemptions, he told them.

  Redeemer was what she wrote.

  * * *

  The suspect said she had mostly made her living by collecting bottles and cans.

  9

  When you google the town of Stanville, faces pop up: mug shots. After the mug shots, an article that cites Stanville as having the highest percentage of minimum-wage workers in the state. Stanville’s water is poisoned. The air there is bad. Most of the old businesses are boarded. There are dollar stores, gas stations that serve as liquor outlets, and coin op laundry. People without cars walk the main boulevard in the hottest part of the day, when it’s 113 degrees outside. They amble along in the gutter of the road, scooting empty shopping carts, piercing the dead zone of late afternoon with the carts’ loose metallic rattle. There are no sidewalks.

  Stanville is synonymous with its prison. Like Corcoran is, and Chino, Delano and Chowchilla and Avenal, Susanville and San Quentin, scores of towns that house prisons and share a name, up and down the state.

  * * *

  Gordon Hauser found a place to rent sight unseen,
a cabin up the mountain from Stanville proper, in the western Sierra foothills. The cabin was one room with a woodstove. It would be his Thoreau year, he wrote to his friend Alex, sending him the realty link.

  Your Kaczynski year, Alex wrote back, after looking at the photos of the cabin.

  True both lived in one-room huts, Gordon responded. But I don’t see much connection between them.

  Reverence of nature, self-reliance. K was even a reader of Walden, Alex wrote. It’s on the list of books from his cabin. Also R.W.B. Lewis, your idol.

  Aren’t you kind of oversimplifying?

  Yes. But also: both died virgins.

  Kaczynski’s not dead, Alex, Gordon wrote back.

  You know what I mean.

  But Thoreau was worried about trains, Gordon replied. Ted K lived in the time of the atomic bomb. He lived through the technological destruction of the world.

  I confess that is of course a significant difference. Can’t remove either from historical context. Plus, Thoreau would have made a deeply inadequate mail bomb. His inflammatory act of resistance was not getting a welcome mat for his place.

  For goodbye beers at their bar on Shattuck Avenue, Alex gave Gordon, as a kind of joke, a Ted Kaczynski reader. Gordon had looked at the manifesto. Everyone had. The guy had briefly been a young professor at Berkeley.

  They toasted Gordon’s departure. “To my rustication,” Gordon said.

  “Isn’t that when they boot you from Oxford?”

  “They just send you down to the country for a while.”

  * * *

  Gordon left downtown Oakland in the late afternoon, and drove east, and south. Tunneling through the dark and flat expanse of big agriculture along Highway 99, a burnt smell of synthetic fertilizer coming into the air vents, even on recirculate, he began to see an orange glow way off the freeway, a huge nimbus surrounded by darkness. A mysterious light source, as if there were a large factory out in the middle of the night-black fields. It was them, he knew: the women, three thousand of them. Just like at NCWF, it was a place where there could be no night because security was twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  He checked in at a Holiday Inn. He would meet the property manager in the morning, get the keys to his new place. He wanted to ask the girl behind the hotel desk if she knew anyone who worked at Stanville Prison. He did not ask. He asked if the tap water in town was okay to drink. “I’m not the type of person who drinks tap water?” the girl said, upward lilting. He asked if she could recommend a place to eat.

  “Now, are you a fried shrimp lover?” Apparently that was also a type.

  * * *

  Gordon’s mountain place had a poisoned water supply. Not from agriculture. There was naturally occurring uranium, so you had to bring in bottled water. He liked the cabin. It smelled of fresh-planed pine. It was logical in its compactness. Cozy, even. It was up on stilts, on a steep hill with few neighbors, and had an enormous view of the valley.

  He was meant to report to his new job in a week. He spent his days unpacking his meager belongings and chopping wood. Went for walks. Nights, he fed logs to his stove and read.

  Ted Kaczynski, Gordon learned, ate mostly rabbits. Squirrels, Ted reported, didn’t seem to like bad weather. The Ted diaries were mostly concerned with how he lived and what he saw happening in the wilderness around him, and Gordon could see that comparing him to Thoreau was not as crude as he’d first suspected. But Ted would never write this: Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

  Gordon’s new neighbors were all white, Christian, and conservative. People who tinkered with trucks and dirt bikes and made assumptions of Gordon that he did nothing to dispel, because he knew those assumptions would work in his favor if he needed their help. It snowed up there. Roads closed, cutting off access to supplies. Trees fell and knocked down power lines. In summer and autumn, fires raged through. Gordon did not enjoy the grinding zing of dirt bikes’ two-stroke motors, which echoed down the valley on weekends, but that was the country: not a pure and untrammeled world of native wildlife and songbird calls, but country people, who cleared the trees off their property with chain saws and paved, or laid Astroturf, cleared paths through the woods for motocross courses and snowmobiling. Gordon withheld judgments. These people knew much more than he did about how to live in the mountains. How to survive winter and forest fires and mud flows from spring rains. How to properly stack wood, as Gordon’s neighbor from down the hill had patiently showed him, after his two cords of chunk wood were dumped in the driveway by a guy named Beaver who was missing most of his fingers. Gordon learned to split logs. Part one of his rustication.

  The guy down the road who helped Gordon stack his wood had a wife or a girlfriend. Gordon had not met her, but he’d heard the two of them arguing. Voices echoed up the hills.

  One night in those early days of his new life in the mountains, Gordon was woken by what he thought was a woman’s scream from out in the deep dark. He fumbled for the lamp. He was sure it was the neighbor’s wife. Their place was down the hill maybe three hundred yards. He heard another scream. A frightened shriek. This time, closer. It sounded like someone in trouble.

  He went out on the deck in his underwear. There were no lights on at his neighbor’s place. He stood for a long time but heard nothing more. He decided he could not take the chance. He put on clothes and walked down his hill in the direction from which the sound had come. He stood on the road and tried to listen.

  There was no moon and his eyes did not adjust. He could see almost nothing, just the vaguest outline where the tops of the tallest pines met the sky.

  The way the stars flickered unevenly, from bright to dimmer to brighter, reminded him of car headlights. A car at night, moving along a tree-lined road, lights shining intermittently. But stars were wondrous, and headlights could be sinister. Stars were nature. Cars were unknown human intent.

  Air sent the trees hissing and rushing, and he wondered if wind was what made stars flicker, a wind out there that was continuous with this wind here.

  He heard it again, the woman’s shriek, farther away now.

  He called out. “Is anyone there? Are you okay?”

  He stood in the cold and waited. He heard only wind.

  He walked up the hill and got back into bed. Tried to sleep and could not.

  10

  Out walking in the bitter cold I spotted a porcupine in a tree and shot it. At first it seemed to be dead, but then I noticed that it was still breathing. Because of the thick hair and quills, I couldn’t see where the brain area of its head was. I put my gun against what I guessed should be about right and fired. It was difficult to butcher because the skin didn’t pull away from the flesh cleanly and I had to watch out for quills. It had many tapeworms inside its abdomen, so after cleaning it I washed my hands and my knife thoroughly in a strong solution of Lysol. Naturally I will cook the meat very well.

  This morning I went wading in the snow for a couple of hours. When I got back I boiled the rest of my porcupine (heart, liver, kidneys, a few lumps of fat, and a large clot of blood taken from the chest). I ate the kidneys and part of the liver, which were delicious. I also ate part of the blood clot, which tasted good enough but had a dry texture that I didn’t care for.

  * * *

  After first thaw, dynamite blast began booming all over the hills. Occasionally audible at my cabin. Exxon conducting seismic exploration for oil. Couple of helicopters flying over the hills, lowering a thing with dynamite on cables, make blast on ground. Instruments measure vibrations. In late spring I went and camped out, hoping to shoot up a helicopter in the area east of Crater Mountain. This proved harder than I thought, because a helicopter is always in motion. Only once had half a chance. Two quick shots, as copter crossed a space between trees. Both missed. When I got back to camp, I cried, partly from frustration at failing. But mostly from grief about what is happening to this countryside. It is so beautiful. But if they find oil, disaster.r />
  11

  “Okay, flush!” Sammy Fernandez was teaching me how to pass things through the toilet. You run a line on the riser, to send things up or down. Burritos. Twinkies. Cigarettes. Pruno in a shampoo bottle.

  Sammy and I were sharing a cell in administrative segregation for the next ninety days, the punishment we both got for refusing officers’ commands. We were in a six-by-eleven-foot room with a toilet and two concrete beds with plastic mattresses. We talked to each other, and took turns standing at the little window in our door to watch the hallway, otherwise known as Main Street, where, if you were lucky, you could see some other person on ad seg being hustled to the showers in handcuffs with two cops behind her, which is ad seg protocol. We were confined twenty-four hours a day, except for the two times a week that we each got taken down the hall for a shower, and once a week when we were given an hour of yard time in an outdoor cage.

  Death row was underneath us, in the same building. The cops call them “grade A.” They say it about fifty times a day and probably the prison administration thought it was bad for staff morale to say “death row” over and over.

  On our plumbing riser, one floor down, was an old friend of Sammy’s, Betty LaFrance. Betty LaFrance, like the other women on death row, had access to canteen and contraband. We had access to Betty, through the toilet and the air vent, and thank goodness, because Betty did not speak to just anyone, much less transmit burritos or bunk-distilled liquor. She and Sammy had been in county jail together years earlier, when Betty was fighting her case.