Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

“The joke is that it almost makes you say fuck, right? But then what is a ruddfucker? They make this stuff up and we all pretend these places exist, like, in history. Like Fuddruckers is some kind of grand family tradition.”

“My family has always gone there,” Laura Lipp said in a corrective tone, as she sprayed with her Roundup bottle.

“We went to Hooters,” Conan said.

“With your family ?” Laura shook her head.

“My girl and her kids,” Conan said. “They have a good children’s menu. But hey, you ever notice the o in Hooters is the same O like in IHOP? I was a cook at IHOP. To make the pancakes, you add water to a mix. It’s the International House of Just Add Water.”

I had been a waitress at an IHOP right after I graduated high school. It was one of the many things Conan and I bonded over. I was waitress 43, and the cooks would call, Forty-three! Your order is up! Which, as I only saw later, had been preparing me for here.

To work at IHOP, you first go to Walmart or a place like it to get work shoes. Where you see, if you didn’t already know, that most of the adult-sized shoes they sell are for working on construction sites or in hospitals, prisons, restaurants, and schools, and the children’s shoes are starter versions of the same. Waitress shoes and medical assistant shoes and work boots. Cheap factory knockoffs for people whose choices are to work these crap jobs or crack up and go to a much lower grade of low-grade shoe, made by prison industries.

This new cop pulled Sammy aside and started asking her questions. He was treading a familiar road: I want to get to know you. That is how cops here do things, they all say the same thing in the same way: I want to get to know you.

There are cops and staff who want the girlfriend experience with a prisoner. Sammy already had a getting-to-know thing with the head of maintenance, a civilian who took her around in his truck, brought her staff cafeteria hamburgers, and in exchange they went to a drainage ditch where he rummaged in her state-issue jeans. She had a male nurse at the skilled nursing facility (“Sniff” is how we say it) who checked her breasts weekly, and gave her tobacco. Conan had female guards who might have been lesbians or straight girls who found Conan convincingly male.

“You remind me of someone,” Garcia said to Sammy. “Back home in Philadelphia. Where you from?”

“Philadelphia, huh,” Conan cut in. “You ever notice something about that Liberty Bell? It has a crack in it. And no one cares. They display it like they’re proud and the thing is cracked.”

Garcia turned from Sammy to Conan. It was obvious what he wanted to say: get away while I work on this chick.

“Are those regulation clothes you’ve got on, ma’am? Because I see boxer shorts, which are not allowed here. I could write you up for that.”

I was exiting work exchange when I ran into the GED teacher, G. Hauser. I had gotten into a scuffle in work exchange, where they said I was setting off the metal detector and went through all my stuff. They even tore apart the bologna sandwich in the sack lunch they give us outside chow hall, to take to work. I had to strip out and endure a search in the little curtained area of work exchange, and I was boiling with anger as I left. But when I saw Hauser, something flipped in me, a switch. I called out a friendly hello. You don’t decide to intentionally alter your tone of voice. It happens automatically. Needs are the gearbox of the voice. Needs shift approach, adjust tone to something higher, more sympathetic. It wasn’t calculated, but everything had changed for me since I’d seen him last.

“Hey,” I said, “I was wondering if I’d run into you.”

I had forgotten all about him. I had not thought of him once.

“I’m on C yard,” I said, “and I’ve been thinking about your offer to get me some reading material. That would be great.”

He was excited, like I was doing him a favor by asking for one myself. We chatted and in his growing excitement, he said, “Why don’t you take my class?”

“All they teach is GED prep here. Which is the education level of our guards.”

“Yeah.” He laughed quickly, covertly. “But since it’s the only thing offered, I structure it around reading. We read and talk about books. Try it out. I’d love to have you join us.” He told me how to sign up.

Sammy was right that having a job would keep me from falling apart. It did. It kept my mind off things. Instead, I concentrated, like everyone else, on what there was to be exploited.

Conan was crafting dildos in woodshop. He began working on them as soon as our shop supervisor commenced his marathon reading sessions at his desk. Every day the supervisor brought a novel to work, settled in, and read compulsively. The book covers featured lurid images with raised-letter titles, like Killed Twice . They were all water-damaged paperbacks you would find in a free box. The supervisor read at them for seven hours straight, day after day, while Conan used sanders and chamfering tools to taper his creations. He and Teardrop had a rivalry going over who could craft the better dildo. They both also had contacts at central kitchen for illicit sale of cucumbers. The unit kitchens get their cucumbers prequartered, to prevent nonintended and illegal use of provisions, i.e., as dildos. Prisoners who worked in central kitchen sold cucumbers uncut out the back door.

The Norse made wooden swastikas and pentagrams. My own innovation was the lunch meat. At meal breaks, I began toasting my bologna slice with the branding iron we used for all our products. It said CALPIA, California Prison Industry Authority, and I was in charge of it. I branded my lunch meat on both sides with the iron, and then my sandwich bread as well. The iron toasted the bread and the meat perfectly. I toasted other people’s sandwiches in exchange for baggies of instant coffee. I learned to hide the coffee for strip-out, after work. This was how it was going to be. Hustling for every little thing.

On Saturdays they let us go to the library. All they had for us to check out were Bibles. King James or International Version was the complete range of reading choices. Sammy and I went weekly to research who I could send letters to, about Jackson. Exiting one afternoon, I ran into Hauser again. I would be starting his class soon.

There isn’t anything to read here, I told him.

“I know. That’s why I ordered you some books. They haven’t arrived yet? I had to get them from Amazon, since we can’t give you books directly.”

I pictured Sammy’s hands, reeling in the line, cultivating a victim. Slowly, she’d said, you’ve got to do it slowly.

“I haven’t got them yet,” I told him, but things took a while. They had to sort the mail for three thousand women.

I continued to call Johnson’s lawyer because he was the only person I could contact, since he had Global Tel Link. He mostly avoided answering, but once, he picked up. He had news, he said. He was retiring, after thirty years as a public defender, and I would no longer be able to reach him at that office.

The way things were closing in on me: it was hard to accept that this was real life. No one but me cared about the fate of Jackson. I didn’t know where he was. I had no way to talk to him. I was trapped in a prison in the Central Valley, under the baked expanse of sunny sky, gazing into the warble above the razor wire, counting how long it took the perimeter truck to circle our big enclosure. Picturing tough and beautiful Angel Marie Janicki getting herself through the fence.