Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

There was something else. She was a black girl, but she spoke, to Gordon, like a white girl. She lived in the honor dorm and carried a Bible everywhere she went. That he associated her Bible reading with bookishness, maybe it was a confusion, but maybe not.

Gordon started going weekly for haircuts. One day the corpulent pig of a yard captain passed by in his club car as Gordon was walking toward cosmetology.

“You’re going over there pretty often, aren’t you, Mr. Hauser? Didn’t I just see you getting a haircut last week ?”

The yard captain and the other officers, many of them too fat to walk, reminded Gordon of the obese twins in the Guinness Book of World Records , twins in cowboy hats who rode mopeds to get from the bedroom to the kitchen.

Gordon looked at the yard captain with mild contempt, and then beyond him, to the woman he was there to see, as she swept hair from the base of the last barber chair in the cosmetology school, the chair where he would sit, where she would soon be touching his head.

Too fat to walk, and most of them brought in lunch boxes the size of traveling luggage. They were containers with collapsible handles and wheels, too big to lift and carry. What business of the yard captain’s was it how often Gordon paid twelve dollars to have his head touched by this girl? It was none of his business.

He said to the yard captain that he guessed his hair must grow fast. The yard captain seemed satisfied that he had given Gordon a sufficiently hard time, made him a little nervous.

The captain rode away in his club car, his huge ass like a sideways letter B in his military pants.

Even people like Gordon’s father, who owned few books, had a copy of the Guinness Book of World Records in their home. The prison library had several copies. It was a bible for the bookless under God.

That Gordon equated the thinness of his beloved with knowledge because the fat corrections officers were stupid did not occur to him until much later. In fact, he never really felt that to be the truth. It was everything together that had resulted in his infatuation: his own snobbery, his alienation from the military culture of the place, a physical attraction to the girl. All of it built a feeling in him, a kind of hope centered on her, the promise of something, but not what actually happened.

There had been a girlfriend, Simone was her name, a teacher at the community college where he’d been an adjunct. She was nice-looking and plenty smart and didn’t talk too much. Most people talked to fill silence and didn’t know the damage they reaped. Simone spoke only when she had something to say, but he’d ended the relationship and there was sometimes no why. She’d liked him more than he wanted her to, maybe. He understood there were people who didn’t want to be the wanter, but he could not make himself feel that way. As soon as a woman turned to Gordon with a look of need, he was halfway gone. He occasionally missed Simone, but every time, right after feeling a desire to see her again, he was always relieved not to have to deal with her. If she could just appear at certain exact moments—when he was horny, or needed someone to talk to—that would have worked out fine, but people were not like that. There were hours built in where you had to hear someone express feelings about something that didn’t seem important, and you nodded and pretended that it was. You had to mask your own ambivalence and pretend to be in love one hundred percent of the time, and he’d rather swim in a lake of hellfire.

The girl acknowledged their familiarity as if she knew why he came so often to get his hair cut. But she gave him no indication of her feelings. Other women called him cutie, taunted him to flirt. This one did no such thing. She cut his hair and avoided his gaze. Answered his questions shyly, minimally. There was nothing in her body language that suggested they were flirting. This made the whole thing safe. It was limited to the feel of her comb on his scalp. Her quiet breath. The slow textured sound of scissors closing over wet hair. Her fingers brushing clippings from his shoulders.

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.

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.