Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

Button crawled into her bunk with her rabbit’s little shirt that she had sewn. She stayed that way for a day.

“Are you sick?” a unit cop shouted at her.

Button, face in her pillow, did not answer.

“If you are not sick, and not going to your assigned program, I’m writing you up, Sanchez.”

The way Button clutched the little shirt reminded me of how Jackson held his stuffed ducky when he slept. He had been sleeping with the ducky since he was a baby. He would grip it tight, all night long. The last time I saw the ducky was the night I was arrested. Jackson, crying, police all around him. Holding his ducky and screeching, Mommy! Mommy!

“You can get another rabbit,” I told Button. “You’re good with them.”

Eventually she did, and trained it, put the same clothes on it, gave it the same name.

Only once had Button talked to me about her own baby. She told me what happened. From prison they took her to a hospital, where they stored her in a room with an armed guard. The guy even followed her to the bathroom, where she tried, in cuffs, a waist chain, and ankle shackles, to clean herself, wash the blood and afterbirth from the insides of her legs, put on the postpartum underwear and giant maxi-pad they tossed her way.

“They had somebody on me the whole motherfucking time.”

I pictured a cop standing over the newborn, already half criminalized, the cop watching it to be sure of no sudden movements.

Button had been badly torn up by the birth, and could barely walk from the stitches a doctor had given her. “A woodpecker,” she said, “with a do-rag that had American flags all over it. Not one flag, but many flags, all different sizes. All I could see was that pattern on his head as he sewed me up. These fucking flags. I said, How many stitches am I getting? He goes, Try not to think of it like that.”

A nurse gave Button a squeezy bottle with stuff to squirt on her stitches so she would heal right. Button was shackled to the bed, but the nice nurse held the baby girl up to her. Button had forty-eight hours to find someone to claim her. Button wasn’t sure she knew anyone who had a working car and could get to Stanville to take a baby. She watched the baby breathe, in its hospital crib. Stared at the baby’s perfect little face as she slept, the closed violet eyelids, the little mouth. In her exhaustion, Button slept, too. Woke up and her baby was gone. The guards said to get dressed. She put on her prison clothes. They said she could not take the squeezy bottle for her stitches. She was shoved in a van cage, where she bled all over the hard plastic seat and was in so much pain from her torn-up crotch that she had to sit on one buttock for the entire ride back to prison.

Jackson had asked me where his ducky came from. “Your dad gave it to you,” I said. He looked at his ducky with love and wonder. Kissed it.

His dad never gave him anything. That kid Ajax from the Mars Room had stolen it for me in an airport gift shop, on his way back from visiting his family in Wisconsin. I’ll give it to my son, I’d said. He looked confused, like he’d forgotten I even had one, but I kept Ajax at a distance and he and Jackson had never met.

I told Hauser I read Jesus’ Son , and asked him why he chose that book. I was paranoid he thought I was a no-good ex-junkie like the characters in the stories.

He said he gave it to me because it was excellent. That it was one of his favorite books.

There was one story where two guys strip copper wire out of a house, and the main guy sees the other guy’s wife floating in the sky and thinks he’s entered the other guy’s dream and it all made sense to me, I told Hauser. I said I knew people who did that, stole copper. Some of them were like the guys in the book, drug fiends looking for quick money, but there were others who did it like it was a profession.

Hauser kept getting me books, and after I read them, I passed them to Sammy, who read them, too. Sammy and I had both skipped seventh grade. We didn’t either of us turn out honors students, so it’s a strange coincidence. I’d gone to schools with Mexican girls, and we shared attitudes and a certain look: black chinos, Chinese shoes, the Maybelline eyeliner you heat with a lit match, and so I could reminisce with Sammy to pass time. On weekends I’d sometimes go to her housing unit and look at her photo collection. I’d get to see the visuals of all the stories she’d told me when we were locked up in ad seg together. Pictures of her when she was young, and of other people, friends of hers from over the years. Her at CIW, a women’s prison down south, which Sammy called CI Wonderful . “It was before mass incarceration,” she said, as if mass incarceration were some kind of natural disaster. Or a cataclysm, like 9/11, with a before and after. Before mass incarceration.

They’d had a swimming pool at CI Wonderful. There were bathing suits, state-issue, but you had to wear your underwear inside them because they were shared. I reveled in these details of prison the old way, before now. I’m sure it was lousy but according to Sammy some people had goldfish in tanks. They didn’t have huge towers with gunners and miles of electric fence. It wasn’t concrete living. The rooms had wood shelves, and wood cabinets. They had green grass. Their canteen was stocked with makeup you could buy, and everyone’s favorite was a lipstick called purple flame. There was a golf course next to the prison grounds, she said, and someone’s boyfriend had dragged a batting machine onto the golf course and batted balls stuffed with heroin and jewelry into the prison’s main yard. When I felt low, Sammy would tell me stories about CI Wonderful. It was paradise before the fall.

Sammy’s whole collection of pictures was prison photos. One was of a sad, beautiful girl named Sleepy who was life without parole. It was Sleepy’s only photo of herself, Sammy said. Sleepy gave it to her when Sammy was released to Keath. This girl Sleepy had no one. She gave the picture of herself to Sammy because she wanted to be sure someone free remembered her, thought of her from time to time. I never met Sleepy. She was transferred north before I arrived. But I knew why Sleepy gave that photo to Sammy, what she wanted from her. There was something about Sammy that came from, and stayed in, the world—the old one, the free one. Poor Sleepy had probably thought that if she could live in Sammy’s heart, she could live. It made me so depressed I wanted to tear up the photo when Sammy wasn’t looking.

There was nothing to celebrate but sometimes we had parties. It was Conan’s passion to plan them in our room. He had been getting everyone to set aside psych meds. What you do is buy peanut butter from canteen, or, if, like me, you have no money for canteen, you share Conan’s peanut butter. Put a dab of it on the roof of your mouth before you go to pill call. When you open your mouth like a horse to show them you properly swallowed your meds, you’re cleared, but the pill is in the peanut butter, unswallowed. Those with dentures hide the pill under them. Some people just cheek it really well. People from all over unit 510 had contributed. Conan unveiled the stash of pills after evening count. He mashed them with the bottom of a shampoo bottle and made “punch,” which is pills dissolved in a container of iced tea. It’s a short island iced tea. Sammy snuck over to our unit and came to the room during unlock, when the big hand on the clock was in the imbecile’s red wedge.

“I’m feeling streaky,” Conan said, and mixed the punch.

I wasn’t myself feeling exactly happy as I gulped my share. Sammy refused her cup. She was staying clean, she said. I knew I could stay clean and still drink punch. We aren’t all the same. It was a Sunday night. Conan put on the radio to Art Laboe’s request and dedication show, which was everyone’s weekly favorite.