Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

On the TV above her was handheld footage of a city taken over by a Shiite militia, men and boys in white face masks ripping past the camera on motor scooters, piles of debris burning casually in the background. Someone asked the bartender to put on minor league baseball. Gordon would read about the militia when he got home. The war was private. It was between each man and his computer. Gordon might have opted for a more ascetic life and skipped getting DSL, but the previous tenant already had it installed. The landlord said he was one of the lucky ones. Many addresses on the mountain could not get service.

I’ll send Simone a postcard, he thought. Be oblique. Not disclose that he hoped to make her cry out like that puma on his mountain, in the scene he imagined. Simone, having come down to his cabin in the woods, his books in little stacks along the dirty floor, his bottle of whiskey on the kitchen counter. A woman there to witness his solitary life, his acquired taste for valley beauty—to the untrained eye, not beautiful. The valley was a brutal, flat, machined landscape, with a strange lemonade light, thick with drifting topsoil and other pollutants from farm equipment and oil refineries. It was a man-made hell on earth but then again a real valley, with mountain ranges on either side. It was the size of industrial agriculture, scaled for that. It was difficult to imagine what it had looked like before it was farmed. It was hard even to imagine what it had looked like farmed in the old-fashioned way, by people. Machines shook the almond trees in synchronous violence. Their fruit fell to the ground with every mechanical jolt. Other machines swept the unhulled almonds into furrows, and yet other automated contraptions sucked the almonds up chutes and into hoppers. That all happened very quickly once a year, the September harvest. Most of the time the huge parcels of almond orchard were empty and quiet.

He paid his tab and walked to the gas station next door. The gas station was the main booze outlet in town and there was a line, men and boys squinting under the harsh lights as they waited to buy their malt liquor and Mad Dog. Gordon retrieved a small Perrier from the refrigerator cases, for the trip up the mountain. The carbonation helped him stay alert while driving. The kid in line behind him gazed at Gordon’s drink as he set it on the counter. “What is that?” he asked. The green, pear-shaped glass bottle looked suddenly comely and exotic. Gordon understood the kid had mistaken it for something alcoholic. “It’s uh, this French water.”

“French water .” The kid tsked. “I thought it was some new kind of drank.”

They had no postcards at the gas station. Try the Dollar Tree, the cashier suggested. He found no postcards of Stanville. Apparently it wasn’t a place you commemorated and if he wanted to be in touch with Simone he could just send her an e-mail like a normal person.

That Christmas, his week off, he drove up to Berkeley to sleep on Alex’s couch.

“How’s your one-room life?” Alex asked.

Gordon did not contact Simone. He and Alex made the nostalgia circuit: the used bookstores, the Irish cafeteria in the flats, the coffeehouses on Telegraph that were filled with good-looking women who worked hard at appearing effortless and natural. The barbecue place on Shattuck and the blues club next door, which could have had a sign, when they were in college, Smokiest Tavern on Earth, but no one smoked in bars now; it was illegal. Alex and Gordon talked about the war. They both checked the same websites obsessively, Informed Comment for analysis and iCasualties for metrics. Found the same things funny and the same things heinous. It was all heinous, but some of it was funny. The way Bush talked about “Mr. Maliki,” whom the CIA had installed as president. “I’m trying to help the man!” Bush said with real but clueless desperation, at a failed press conference.

Trying to help the man! Alex kept repeating.

Just after Christmas, the new Iraqi government hung Saddam Hussein. Gordon and Alex watched it on the internet.

“He was pretty dignified,” Alex said. “He was being heckled as he died and yet I feel he got the last word.”

Gordon went over the bridge to San Francisco alone, ate at a Vietnamese restaurant downtown that his student Romy Hall had told him about. Not that she was recommending it to him. She listed it among places she missed. The cook, she’d said, has this funny habit. After he uses them, he bangs his cooking tongs twice, and tugs on his shirt. His smock has a big grease splotch where he does that. And his father sits chain-smoking and chopping meat, upstairs, where the bathrooms are. The cook was there, on Gordon’s visit. He banged the tongs twice and pulled on his shirt. The father was upstairs, chain-smoking and chopping a huge pile of meat.

On New Year’s, he and Alex went to a party in Oakland, a typical situation of people jammed in a kitchen and asking pointless questions like, What do you do? And, Where are you from? The women paid extra attention to Gordon, not knowing already what the problem was with him, as they had already established with the other single men at that party, according to Alex. Some of them were former grad students who’d branched off from the English or Rhetoric or Comp Lit departments into psychoanalysis. Not just undergoing it but putting out a shingle. Alex said that he’d been labeled a male hysteric, which mostly meant the woman who blithely diagnosed him wanted to sleep with him but found him too wily and little-brotherish for an actual relationship.

When Gordon hesitantly mentioned what he did for work, after being asked several times, the women in the kitchen were on him like a plague of locusts.

“Really? A prison. That must be hard.”

“Prison guards. I wouldn’t be able to look at those people.”

“They don’t even wear their own clothes. Like cops, but even worse. What a fucked-up life.”

Much discussion among the women about the scum of the earth who worked as guards. He did not have the courage, or maybe it was the will, to ask if these women had ever known a prison guard. And why would he defend prison guards? He hated them himself. But if a person got outside their own bubble they would see that prison guards were poor people without reasonable options. One had just blown his head off in a guard tower at Salinas Valley. He could have told them this, engaged in corrective arguments with these women at the party. But wasn’t it obvious? Didn’t even wear their own clothes. The interaction brought back anxieties from grad school, the way his peers could casually criticize others they didn’t know anything about.

As the first and only member of his family to pursue so-called higher education, maybe Gordon was prone to hypersensitivity. He had encountered people in graduate school who were eager to declare working-class pedigree, and they maybe had one parent with less education, or the family had been “poor,” but college-educated. Either way, if someone was insisting loudly on their own authentic origin, this was generally taken by Gordon as evidence they weren’t actually working-class. If they were from a background like Gordon’s, they would know to hide it, the way Gordon did, because the fact of his pioneering status was itself proof of just how tenuous his escape was.

Some people he knew showed up at the party, friends from the department who had gotten post-docs and talked about their upcoming job interviews, the details of their academic book contracts, as if these were interesting subjects. The women were doing that grad school thing of air-quoting to install distance between themselves and the words they chose, these bookish women with an awkwardness he used to find cute. Gordon did not want to discuss his life with these people. He drank, as a temporary salve for his alienation.