Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

I kept going over a scene, from when Jackson was five. It was autumn, and my mother came with us to Tilden Park, in the East Bay. There were trees above us that had turned a color I might have dyed my hair, a bright, rich magenta. There were trees with gold and scarlet leaves. You don’t see a lot of that in California. My mother and Jackson and I sat and watched the wind shake these bright-painted trees. Jackson was enchanted.

“All that beauty and for nothing,” my mother said. “They’ll fall off tomorrow.”

“But after they fall off,” Jackson said, “the tree will grow new leaves, Grandma, and then those will turn colors, like these ones.” It would keep happening over and over, Jackson said, through all the years. The leaves falling off meant new ones were coming. My mother looked at him like she wondered what planet he was from.

He was born an optimist, and he didn’t get it from her, or from me. When Jackson was three, he asked me how the Earth formed. “How did it get here?” I said no one knew for sure but maybe there was an explosion and they called it the Big Bang. “But where did they put everyone while the explosion was happening?” In his mind there were always people. People taking care of other people.

The lawyer had given me the phone number of child welfare, which he said might tell me the name of Jackson’s case manager, but I could only contact people with a Global Tel Link account. I wrote letters and tried not to go insane. I sent one to Eva’s old address, and one to her at her father’s address, but I had little faith that either would reach her. I called Jimmy Darling, but the call did not go through, since he didn’t have Global Tel Link. I told myself if I ever got out, I’d blow up Global Tel Link.

I got a package. Like one of the lucky women who have family, outside help, I, Hall, got called to receiving and release to pick up my package. Hauser had gotten me three books: My Ántonia , I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , and To Kill a Mockingbird .

“That’s what he got you?” Sammy said, stifling a laugh. “Even I read those already.” I felt sad and a little protective of the teacher for not knowing better. I planned on keeping them, even if I didn’t especially want to read them. They were a link to the outside world. But a woman in my unit offered me shampoo and conditioner in exchange for all three. The state gives us indigents only a gritty powdered soap for body and hair. Being able to properly wash and condition my hair made me feel happy, at least for an evening, in a way I had not experienced since before I was arrested, three years earlier.

I had been in Hauser’s class for a couple of weeks when he stopped me after and asked if I’d enjoyed the books.

“I enjoyed reading them,” I said, “when I was fourteen years old.”

I didn’t plan on saying that. It certainly wasn’t tactical for reeling in a Keath.

“God. I’m sorry. That’s embarrassing.”

“It’s okay. You just don’t know me.”

He asked me what I wanted to read and I said I didn’t know. I said I had a lot on my mind and it was hard to concentrate.

He got me more books. One, called Pick-Up , was about two drunks in San Francisco in the 1950s. I started reading it and could not stop. When I finished it, I read it again. Scenes came into view for me, even though the character in the book doesn’t name many locations except Civic Center, and Powell and Market, where the cable car turns around, which fascinated Jackson as it did all toddlers. I would take him down there to watch the street musicians. Some of them were friends of Jimmy Darling’s. Jimmy knew all sorts of people in a way I didn’t, and the night would go differently if by chance he and I ran into someone and they invited us to a concert or a party or a screening of a film.

When I was a kid there was a large Woolworth’s at Powell and Market, with a wig department in the center of the store. Eva and I would go in and pretend we were wig shopping. The old ladies who worked there helped us pin our hair up in special nets and fitted us with grand and curly hairdos. We laughed and played around in the mirrors, sneaked makeup and hair products into our purses, and took pictures in the photo booth that was inside the store. Sometimes we went to Zim’s on Van Ness afterward, ordered a lot of food and left without paying. It was something different from dining and dashing at the more familiar Zim’s on Taraval. We felt sophisticated downtown. Sometimes we went into the museum, up Van Ness, to hide after booking from Zim’s. There was a painting inside that Eva liked. It was called The Girl with Green Eyes . Among the kids we knew, you weren’t supposed to be into going to museums, but Eva was into whatever she was into, this painted girl with a long neck that looked like it was squeezed into a napkin ring. She stared at us, and we stared back.

The whole long era of my childhood I had run around like a street urchin, no more rooted than the teenagers on the posters in the Greyhound station on Sixth Street. Tall figures in silhouette, like long shadows, and the words RUNAWAYS, CALL FOR HELP. A hotline number. My childhood was the era of the hotline. But we never called any, except as a prank, and I wasn’t a runaway. I even had a mother. I might have gotten to know her, but I had not, not really. By the time I was sixteen, it was too late for me and my mother. When I went to prison, it seemed really and finally too late. But I was wrong. It was only too late when she died.

I told Hauser I read Pick-Up . He asked what I thought.

“That it was good and bad at the same time.”

“I know what you mean. The end is a surprise, right? But it makes you want to reread the book, to see if there were earlier clues.”

I told him I’d done that. And that it was good to read a book about San Francisco, that I was from there.

“Oh, me too,” he said.

He didn’t seem like it to me, and I said so.

“I mean, near there. I’m from just across the Bay, Contra Costa County.” He named the town, but I hadn’t heard of it.

“It’s an armpit behind an oil refinery. It’s not glamorous, like being from the city.”

I said I hated San Francisco, that there was evil coming out of the ground there, but that I liked Pick-Up because it reminded me of things about the city that I missed.

He had gotten me two other books, Charles Bukowski’s Factotum and Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson. I would read the others next, I told him.

“ Factotum is one of the funniest books ever written.”

I said I knew of the other book, the Jesus one, because I saw the movie. Which was good except the people in it were supposed to be living in the seventies. “The girl in it, she’s got her midriff showing, and wears a leather jacket with a fur collar like San Francisco hipsters in the nineties.”

“But those people you’re describing—maybe you, I don’t know—they’re all borrowing from the seventies to begin with.”

It was true. I told him how Jimmy Darling used to go to this bookstore in the Tenderloin to buy 1970s-era copies of Playboy , which they had in stacks on the floor in the back. An old man once tapped Jimmy on the shoulder and whispered, “Sonny, they have the new ones up here,” nodding in the direction of the plastic-sleeved monthlies, Busty and Barely Legal , which were on display in the front of the store.

“And Jimmy is—”

“My fiancé. He teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute.”