Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

Jones, who was my assigned intake counselor, came to check on me. Counselor doesn’t mean someone who counsels. Your prison counselor determines your security classification and when and if you get mainlined to general population. Your counselor keeps tabs on you and reports to the parole board, if you are headed for parole. Counselors have enormous power over what happens to us, and they are always assholes.

I asked Jones if there was some way to find out if Jackson was okay. Was he in a hospital still? What were his injuries?

“There are privacy rules in hospitals, Hall,” Jones said.

“Do you have children, Lieutenant Jones?”

“Only his legal guardian or a court-appointed advocate can verify that he’s in a hospital,” Jones said. “You are not his guardian, Hall.”

“But who is his guardian? I need to find out the condition my son is in.”

She was walking away from my cell. I adjusted my tone of voice, hoping to summon her back.

“Please, Lieutenant Jones. Please.”

It was happening. I was pleading with a sadist in a little girl voice.

Jones stopped, pretended to react with decency.

“Ms. Hall, I know it’s tough, but your situation is due one hundred percent to choices you made and actions you took. If you’d wanted to be a responsible parent, you would have made different choices.”

“I know it,” I said, tears landing on the floor of my cell. I was on the ground, on all fours, with my face to the food flap in my cell door, which was the only way to communicate with people in the hallway.

I tried to think of what Sammy might do. She wouldn’t cry. It was hard not to. I vowed to quit.

I focused on getting out of the mental ward, and back to ad seg, and out of ad seg, and mainlined, so that I could try to make phone calls, find a lawyer, get information, do something.

I dreamed one night that I was in Jimmy Darling’s bed, at the ranch in Valencia. Jackson was asleep on a cot. Jimmy had just had a bad dream, he said, in which the police took me away. He held on to me, glad it wasn’t real. I was glad, too, but then I woke up, with caged white lights buzzing in the ceiling above me.

Jimmy didn’t love me like that. When the police in real life took me away, he moved me to the past. I’d known it when I heard his voice over the county jail phone.

You can’t remain on suicide watch forever, and you can’t stay in ad seg forever. They need the cells for other people they want to put in ad seg. Three months after my mother died, and four months after Chain Night, I was put in general population, on C yard, in unit 510.

A unit is 260 women, on two floors with an open common area and a guard station—a cop shop—in the center. The rooms were big, much bigger than an ad seg cell, and crammed with bunk beds. Each room was designed for four women but had eight.

I was happy to learn I was in Conan’s room and unhappy to learn it was also Laura Lipp’s room.

She approached as I was fitting a sheet to my mattress.

“Hi there, I’m Laura Lipp and I’m from Apple Valley.”

I kept making my bed.

“That’s in the Mojave Desert. It’s drier than any bone and there are no apples. Applebee’s, though.”

Laura Lipp didn’t remember our eight-hour bus ride together. I didn’t question it, wasn’t going to insist on familiarity.

I was putting my few possessions, the photos of Jackson, into my small locker, when another roommate came in. “Nuh uh!” she yelled, looking at me. “No hillbilly bitches in this room. Get the fuck out.” Her name was Teardrop. She was huge and would have destroyed me if I had to fight her, but Conan intervened on my behalf.

“She’s cool. I cosign her.” They went out to the hall to talk.

“Except I think the Applebee’s closed,” Laura went on like nothing had happened. “We’ve had a lot of changes. None of them for the better.”

I pulled a Fernandez and told her to shut the hell up.

“The town’s got history though,” she said, carefully moving away, out of fist-swinging range, just in case. “It was a fine place and it’s gone downhill. We used to be cowboy country. All the country and western people came because of Roy Rogers. He had a museum with a big display of all his fishing lures. He owned the Apple Valley Inn. My father took us there for Sunday dinners. It was a carefree time. There weren’t problems like now. You know what people were worried about? Static cling. That was the big fear on TV and in people’s hearts. Static cling.”

Conan and Teardrop returned. “Don’t leave nothing outside your locker!” Teardrop yelled at me, but in a slightly nicer tone, like she was resigned to letting me stay. “And nobody runs the fucking water, no tap and no flushing, until I get up in the morning.”

Button Sanchez, who had the baby in receiving, was also in our room. The other three roommates were what Sammy would call nondescrips. Women with short sentences, minding their own business and staying out of trouble.

How I was hillbilly and Laura wasn’t, I didn’t understand, until I figured out that Laura was paying Teardrop extorted rent money to stay in our room. As a baby killer, nobody wanted her, so it was possibly her only choice.

At dinner I saw Sammy in line at the chow hall and tried to talk to her. She looked at me and shook her head. A cop shined a light on me. “BUS YOUR TRAY,” his voice boomed over a microphone. They give you ten minutes to eat their shitty food and you have to do it in silence. Mostly it’s people who don’t have money who go to chow. Teardrop only ever ate in our room, from her personal supply of canteen food, ramen bowls that she added water to and heated with a stinger.

That evening I put my name on the sign-up sheet and waited in line for the phones in the common area. People were shouting into the phones because others were shouting next to them. The signs on the cinder-block walls were the same as in receiving, that cursive plea: Ladies, no whining Ladies, report to staff if you are experiencing signs of norovirus . Same dirty pink paint on the doors and railings, a color that was probably meant to relax us institutionalized knuckleheads. The line for the phones went fast because the people being called didn’t pick up. I dialed my mother. My mother had an account with Global Tel Link, the company that monopolized jail and prison calls. You can’t get through to a number that has no Global Tel Link account. I knew she was dead. Still, I had to try. I didn’t get through. The public defenders all have Global Tel Link, so I called Johnson’s lawyer but he didn’t answer.

For the next several days I signed up for phone calls and waited in line and dialed the lawyer. After my eighth try I finally reached him. I begged him to help me get information about Jackson.

He said he would try, and to give him a week at least. When I finally got through to him again, he said he’d been attempting to figure out who Jackson’s case manager was, but had been unable. This work, he said, was really for a dependency court lawyer.

Would the state provide one, I asked him, trying to control my tone, not sound angry and desperate.

“Oh, no,” he said, and in the gap where I might have pressed him, as if he were obliged to help me, he lunged into that silence before I could and said he was extraordinarily busy with his assigned caseload, and I was not on it, and that he had to get off the phone.

As soon as I was eligible, I tried to get a prison job. That was Sammy’s advice. Sammy wasn’t in my unit but she was on C yard, which meant we could hang out in our free time. “White girls get all the best jobs,” she said. “You can clerk, sit in air-conditioning and type letters, while us black and brown women pull used tampons from the septic tank screen for eight cents an hour. Take advantage.”