Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

I did not see any doom in the road. I was at least away from Kurt Kennedy, and Jackson seemed happy.

I witnessed doom, though. It was around me. But at the time, I thought the bad luck of other people reaffirmed that I was doing okay.

Take the plumber. This girl I was subletting from had a plumber who was always coming around. He was from Guatemala and really friendly. Too friendly. He had a lot of plans for me. Do you like it when your plumber has a lot of plans for you socially? He made it seem like he and the girl whose place it was had been good buddies and so he expected the same from me. I was trying to start a new life, and this plumber kept calling me to talk about how one Saturday he was going to take me to Home Depot so I could pick out my own sink console, which the landlord was supposed to pay to install, and I said I don’t care, just bring one over, I’m a subletter, Victor (that was the plumber’s name), what does it matter. But Victor said, as if out of consideration for me and for what I really wanted (whenever people do that, beware), no, no, we’ll go together. I’ll take you, it’s no problem, really.

It was a problem to me because I didn’t want to spend my Saturday with Victor. He showed up on the agreed day wearing a shiny patterned shirt and soaked in cologne. So much cologne he seemed to be tapped into the original fount, the place from which it all flows. I dropped Jackson off with the Martinez family, and the grandmother, whom Jackson was starting to call Abuela, looked at Victor and nodded like she understood everything.

Victor and I went to get the sink and the hours doing that were lost for me, because I didn’t want to be in his van. I didn’t want to be subjected to his happiness, which seemed to be based on nothing, a thin layer of good cheer stretched over emptiness. I missed Jackson, I missed Jimmy. I wanted a life I did not have. But I also was not ready to admit that. I wanted to get rid of Victor so I could drink beer on my porch as the ice cream truck broadcast its warped and moronic tinkle, and Jackson and the neighbor kids all lined up for type 2 diabetes. It was good to be a stranger in Los Angeles. It was bad to be a stranger in Los Angeles with the company of another stranger in a loud shirt. If everything were so great for this Victor, why was he wasting his Saturday blindly ignoring the blunt and unwelcoming cues from a woman who had no interest in him? I felt desperate, but not in the way Victor was desperate.

After unloading the sink at my apartment, he tried to get me to go drink flaming margaritas with him at a Mexican place on Sunset. I said those give me a headache. They use butane to make them burn, I told him, although that’s probably not true. And he says we can have white wine, figuring I was that classy white wine type. Because I’m a nice person, I lied and said I had to work, although I was not working that whole weekend; I was planning to spend a lot of time thinking, sitting on the edge of this gone-to-Alaska girl’s bed with my chin in my palm, hearing the ice cream truck, sitting with a blank mind, which might fill later with thoughts on how to live like an adult. I was busy with that. It was important to me. No one bothering me, watching me, harassing me, calling me, following me, sneaking up on me. I’d had that for months with Creep Kennedy, and now I was free and did not want this Victor shading in.

When he heard the lie that I had to work, Victor wanted to take me salsa dancing after I got off. I said no, and after several rounds of his pushiness, I finally got rid of him.

A week later, Victor called me and said, “Romy, are you okay?”

I’m fine, I said. What business was it of his whether I was okay or not?

“I had this terrible dream about you.”

Whenever anyone dreams about you, the dream tells you about them, not about you. It’s their own private fantasy life and they give it away by announcing who they dreamed about. But Victor was superstitious and was convinced that he should be worried about me on account of his dream.

Victor died in a car crash shortly after that phone call, in the van we’d taken to Home Depot to get the sink.

He’d had the bad dream about the wrong person.

Shortly after Victor died, a neighbor, a young guy named Conrad, overdosed. I knew Conrad was a junkie. He sometimes helped Victor as an assistant, but it was charity on Victor’s part. Every day, Conrad’s sister came to our street and stood before the wrecked pile across from my place, where Conrad and his spooky mother lived. Every morning the sister called her brother’s name for the whole neighborhood to hear.

Conrad’s mother, Clemence, had knocked on my door when I first moved in, to tell me not to order any pizzas. I looked at her and she said, “You know those black vinyl containers the delivery boys carry? The pizza warmers? They bring in evil. You see those warmers, and evil is on the way in.”

After her pizza box warning, she started talking about J. Edgar Hoover and Jimi Hendrix, and all the other “well-known individuals” who had passed through the neighborhood and to whom her family was connected. She was vague and ominous about her super-heavy connections, these well-known individuals. Okay, lady. I excused myself and went inside. I rarely saw her and I didn’t see Conrad much either, but every day I heard Conrad’s sister call his name. Every day she stood on the sidewalk and yelled it. Then one day she did not, because Conrad had apparently died the night before. No more Conrad. Still it did not occur to me that the street was cursed, although I did feel a start, a kind of shiver, when I saw a delivery boy get out of his car with a huge black pizza warmer in his hands.

Not long after both Conrad and Victor died, I was at home, busy doing nothing until it was three p.m. and time to pick up Jackson, when I heard the neighbor next door screaming something over and over. It took me a moment to realize the word he was screaming was my name. I went out to see what he wanted. He was standing on the sidewalk with a towel wrapped around his hand, and the towel was raining blood all over the sidewalk.

“You have to take me to the hospital,” he said.

When I first arrived, these neighbors had tried to be friendly to me but I kept my distance. They were hard to look at. Shaved eyebrows, sallow skin, dyed black hair, black painted fingernails, a vintage black hearse. Victor did some plumbing work over there and said they kept a baby coffin in the kitchen for their canned foods. They had just bought their building, a fourplex, and were systematically evicting the tenants in order to raise the rent. They were goth slumlords. Two of their tenants had cleared out, but the family in the third unit was not moving. These tenants had nowhere to go. The husband was a diabetic and had just undergone a foot amputation. He was on crutches and insisted on driving himself to the hospital, and his leg got infected and had to be amputated higher up, at the knee. The wife worked cleaning houses, and had asthma and no sense of smell from the toxic products her employers forced her to use. They were poor people without documents, from Mexico, with three children. I knew all this because a few days before the goth neighbor was screaming my name with his hand in a bloody towel, the woman he was trying to evict asked if she could speak to me. I let her in. She sat on my couch and cried and told me about her family and their situation. She said the landlord was trying to evict her and her husband for being alcoholics. “We are Seventh-Day Adventists,” the woman said. “We do not drink.” I felt so bad for this woman that I looked up a tenants’ rights organization and helped her set up an appointment to speak to an advocate. She left and thanked me and I didn’t feel any better. Her husband was missing a leg. She had to live underneath these landlords who, she said, made unchristian sounds in the night.