Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

Doc lies on his bunk going through his files to find a good image. There’s no pornography allowed. They don’t have the internet, of course. The mind is where you stash your stroke material. Doc flips through the images he keeps in store. He steps by a wide margin over the memory of the last woman he had sex with, Betty LaFrance, who put him here. He focuses on the era before she hung him out to dry.

He sees himself cruising the streets in an unmarked car. If he can get into his old life, he can jump-start a good scenario.

There was that button-nosed cocktail waitress. The bar in Eagle Rock he liked to go to, place called Toppers.

Plainclothes cop walks into a bar.

He never could remember any follow-through on that joke.

Plainclothes cop walks into a bar. Nothing more. It didn’t go anywhere.

There was the night the cocktail waitress at Toppers was so drunk and high she did not take offense when Doc slipped a two-dollar Canadian bill—worth less even than two American dollars—into the side of her panties. Ha ha ha. Why was a cocktail waitress wearing nothing but panties? It was part of the mystery of Toppers. It was the only mystery of Toppers. He cracked the mystery, brought her back to his unmarked car. Pulled down the panties and put his hand against her crotch. She had used hair remover or wax and felt like a child down there, which was unacceptable to Doc, who was a protector and defender of children. The sensation of her hairless pussy alarmed him and he’d had to pull his hand away; he’d forgotten that part when he selected this file from the mental Rolodex. He’d thrown a crumpled twenty-dollar bill at her and told her to get out of his car. Now his mind is creeping into the territory of bad men and innocent children and instead of conjuring some sexy striptease thing or a woman begging him to put his cock in her mouth, he is dreaming about painting the landscape with an Uzi. Painting the whole huge landscape of child molesters.

Uzis. There was that kid in tiny, Sweet Tart–pink shorts who nicked off her instructor in Las Vegas. Everyone watched the news story on their personal TV, tens of thousands of men all over the state doing life without parole, like Doc, lying back with cheap tinny headphones connected to their world-machine, hoping to get a glimpse of the moment this child in the candy-color shorts guns down a grown man with an Uzi. The news showed her engagement, then a pause, and the instructor gives an encouraging “All right!” Like, Way to go, this kid’s okay . And then she goes back to blasting but the news cuts away before she clips him. They never show it, but everyone on Sensitive Needs keeps watching that segment, hoping they will. As if by watching the segment, each time it replays, they produce the possibility that the news footage might, just might, by some fluke of technology, some glitch of the universe, lead straight into where it is not supposed to go, the part where she fragments her instructor’s brain to meat and shards.

Doc gently steers himself away from that. He can have anything he wants. It is important to remember this when you are flipping through your storehouse. But sometimes too many choices is a tyranny.

The tyranny of choice, that’s not exactly what people think of as the number one problem in prison. And yet Doc cannot settle on an image right now. His roommate will be gone until the door pops on schedule and he’d like to use this time productively.

Back to when he was still a detective, cruising undetected, up to his mischief on a balmy night. Doc had become a great connoisseur of the bars in Los Angeles where prostitution took place in a frank and natural manner. The Polished Knob on Wilshire in Koreatown, a medieval-themed restaurant with a dungeon in the basement. Bobby London on Beverly and Western, which catered only to Korean men and LAPD, and only LAPD as bribery, and only Doc of the LAPD, and technically it wasn’t bribery it was blackmail.

Cop walks into a brothel.

He could never remember that one, either.

There was Las Brisas on a rangily barren stretch of Sunset Boulevard near Dodger Stadium, where cars went seventy miles an hour. You could have sex with the bartender in the stockroom of Las Brisas, and she was gentle and maternal-sensual. She smelled of beef tamales and Fabuloso, a floral-oily fragrance that was not unlike the smell of Cell Block 64, come to think of it. His visits to Las Brisas started out with tight embraces and groin-to-groin hugs with various ladies who hookered at that establishment, but the visits always finished in the stockroom with the bartender who smelled like Cell Block 64. She squirted it in her hand and oiled Doc and herself and then they did the slippery in-out standing up, Doc pinning her against a stack of cases of canned beer. Generous lady always acted happy, like Doc’s orgasm was her pride, he was her big baby boy bringing her a dozen long-stemmed red roses by coming all over the insides of her thighs.

Doc takes a deep breath but quietly because the door has popped: it will remain unlocked for the next ten minutes, on automatic timer. His roommate returns, sits down on the bunk below.

Red roses. There were red roses going full bloom outside the gates of Old Folsom, where he had served time first. He saw them through the closed and secure prison bus window, flowers that were heavy and oversized, and he was sure he was smelling them, never mind the smell on the bus of bleach and body rank. He smelled those big lazy-headed roses. They were the scent of someone else’s freedom. The free world of elderly women in cat-eye glasses and cardigan sweaters. Women with upright pianos they do not play and photos of grandchildren who do not visit. Deceased husbands with pre–civil rights buzz cuts. The big, creased, flabby ears of retirees. Men with names like Floyd. Or Lloyd. The dead husbands of these elderly women with their needlepointed freedom and their perfect gatepost roses. Women who shook their heads as if saying no all the time, a tic of old age, or medication. Women who were permanently disapproving, like the ones in his own family, who did not love him and had given him to foster care.

They didn’t have Sensitive Needs back then, when he first arrived at Old Folsom. People had needs, sure, but there was no unit dedicated to protective custodizing a prison population of rats and cops. He didn’t wander out much. He’d gotten a threatening letter that was obviously somehow from Betty LaFrance even though she could not write to him directly, a letter in psycho blocky print from one Fred Fudge announcing that inmates on his yard would soon know he was nothing but a dirty cop. That was her thing. Come fuck me, dirty cop. And he’d gone for it. He was naive. It was her big mouth that had gotten them busted, and he was sure she was still talking to whoever would listen. He lay in his cell and dreamed of escape. The walls of Old Folsom were giant granite molars extending down into the ground farther than they rose, built by earlier convicts whom Doc resented and envied: their labor locked him in, and also, they’d been given something to do, an actual project. The American River was the rear boundary of the prison, boiling rapids with a guard tower perched over them.

“Folsom Prison Blues” had been a popular song when Doc was young. Doc was ambivalent on account of Vic, his foster dad, who loved it and was a sadist toward young Doc. Later, as a grown-up with a shotgun bolted to the floor of his squad car, a man with weapons and badges who could no longer be Vic’s punching bag, Doc heard that song again. It was on the jukebox at Toppers, and the part about shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die was a truth Doc knew better than most, because he had quite sincerely shot people for that exact reason, although never in Reno.