Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

“This one is from Tiny, up at Pelican Bay, for Lulu, aka Bonita Blue Eyes. Tiny wants to tell Lulu he loves you more than anything, and his heart will always be yours. He’s there for you through and through, and he is never going anywhere.”

“That’s ’cause the motherfucker doing life,” Conan said.

An oldies song came on. The trills and dollops of the singer’s voice pelted me with unwanted sensations of longing. I drank another cup of punch.

At the next unlock, people crowded into the room. Laura Lipp put her pillow over her head and tried to ignore us. Conan played booty music and Button danced for us.

Later I danced for us, too, but I didn’t have a clear memory of it. Just Conan telling me, after, “Sometimes you see something and got to have it.”

Conan was strong, and muscular—he had that name for a reason—and he made me laugh. I stopped laughing when I ended up in his bunk that night, and the soft army of his tongue went to work. Jesus Christ , I kept whispering. Instead of his usual comic retort, he went deeper. We were still at it when I heard an incredible bang. The noise shocked the hell out of Conan, who reared up and gashed his head on the upper bunk. It was Officer Garcia, who was on night watch in our unit, banging on the window with his billy club.

The mood was ruined, so Conan and I cut out the unexpected bunk session. I wrapped his wound, which was bleeding, and we drank more punch. Everyone crowded into the bathroom, which the cops can’t see into from the observation glass.

Maybe because she was young and small, Button was the most sideways. She started talking about God. She said it was God who was in the guard tower on the yard. Which tower, someone asked, Tower One or Tower Two? She said, “He’s got the high field on us. He sees us.”

Conan said, “That’s not God. That’s Sergeant Rintler, one more Elmer Fudd up there, taking naps, jerking off. Duck-hunting motherfuckers.”

Conan adopted a cowboy twang. “Ma’am, step back, ma’am. Don’t make me write you up, ma’am.”

Button started to cry. “But they control the whole sky. This is the world now. If He’s not in the towers, where is God? Where is He?”

Laura Lipp walked into the bathroom. We stopped talking and stared. She looked like the Exorcist. She’d snuck punch from us. She was loaded.

“I’m from Apple Valley,” she said.

“We know,” everyone shouted. Sammy stood to push Laura out of the bathroom.

“But I never knew. I didn’t listen. Didn’t hear. I never understood what that means. The valley of apples. It’s about temptation. Right? Sin. See? Poisoned fruit. Oh, it feels so good,” she said, “to have a place to put your anger, to punish someone like you’ve been hurt. That is the truth and every woman like me knows it. The one who hits her child with a hanger or a belt or who shook a baby, it’s all the same. You do it because it feels good. They won’t say. They won’t tell you how it is. They don’t have the courage. I’m telling you. The devil goes in us and we do it to feel good. I wish they had stopped me but no one did. God, He stopped the hand of Abraham. He intervened . But where was He when I needed him? He wasn’t there. No one helped me. No one.” She stumbled like a blind person, kneeled on the floor on her hands and knees, and sobbed.

I took the liberty of sleeping in Conan’s bunk that night. Things had gotten so weird that I needed the company of someone not-insane.

I dreamed I had just won on The Price Is Right . There was a crushing sound of applause, cheers, and whistles when my name was called. It was a deafening waterfall of clapping and screaming. I was trotting toward the stage in this pounding noise, the cheers of the studio audience, when I woke.

Conan was already up, dabbing wet toilet paper where he’d bled from his head wound. I adjusted his bandages.

“My head is killing me,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep because I kept being woken by this zrrrrp, zrrrrrp, like someone was trying to restart a car that was already idling.”

“I dreamed I won on The Price Is Right .”

“It’s… a new car! The thing about that show is the woman doesn’t come with the car. You don’t get her. Just the car.”

We all suffered pill hangovers at work that day. “I feel like Blacula,” Conan said. “That final scene where the sun hits him, and he’s just greasy layers of smoke rising up from the clothes he had on.”

At lunchbreak in the woodshop, Conan gave me the “I’m not actually into snow bunnies” talk. I loved Conan, but not like that. It was play incest in my play family and we were just friends.

Officer Garcia passed by the shop. Conan yelled, “Yo!” He pointed at his own bandaged head and glared at Garcia.

I ran into Hauser while waiting to go through work exchange.

I have some news for you, he said.

He had been able to find out who Jackson’s case manager was. I started thanking him profusely and he said thanks were not appropriate.

But you went out of your way, I said.

“Your parental rights were terminated. I’m not sure if you were aware?”

“Terminated meaning what?”

“I was told they do this so a child can be fast-tracked for adoption. So that children can join new families. I wasn’t even supposed to be told this. The woman was doing me a favor by looking up the case. All she could say is that on account of the length of your sentence your rights were terminated and the child is in the system.”

“I’m in the system. Jackson is a little boy. He doesn’t belong in a system.”

“What I was told is that he is a ward of the state. I think that means he’s in foster care.”

“Where, do you know? Can I write to him?”

“I don’t think you understand,” he said. “And I didn’t either, until it was explained to me. But finding out where your kid is, inside the child welfare bureaucracy, it’s like trying to find out information about a complete stranger. Except the stranger, in this case, leaves no accessible records, on account of all the layers of privacy rules for minors.”

“But I’m his mother. They can’t tell me I’m not his mother. He needs a mother. Why are they doing this?”

I was aware of the tone of my voice, the look on my face, a sense that I was coming at this guy, the messenger, as if the news he brought me were his fault, but I could not stop myself from filling the air with my emergency.

We were on lockdown that night, so I could not talk to Sammy. I was stuck in my room. I went to Conan. Back to Conan. That I had to cry helplessly and not be the protector for my child put me back into the drifting unreality I had felt that first night in county jail. I had done something that could not be reversed. But Jackson, he did nothing. He was innocent. And now he was lost, spit into the world with no love, no one.

When I was able to calm down, Conan told me a story.

“My little brother and I stayed with my grandmother when we were little. She lived up in Sunland. There were horse farms there. She had a yard. It was almost the country. We loved her, and we loved living with her. My mom came one day to take me and my brother away from our grandmother. She said we were moving in with her. We barely knew our mom. She didn’t raise us. My grandmother and my mom got into a fight. My mother beat our grandmother, right in front of us. Beat her up in her own kitchen. There was nothing we could do. We cried. We were scared. I was seven and my brother was five.

“We had to go live with my mom and her boyfriend in Bell Gardens. Her boyfriend was an A-one bastard. He picked on my brother. Why, I don’t know. Maybe because he was a boy. When I turned eleven he started picking on me, but in a different way. Motherfucker raped me. And not just once. It became, like, a regular thing. So me and my brother, when I was twelve and he was ten, we left. We had this idea to go to our grandma in Sunland. We had not seen her in years because she and our mom did not talk. I remembered the house. I knew exactly where it was, off the main boulevard up there. We caught a bus. It took a long time to get there, because we kept getting on the wrong buses. Finally we were close. We walked to her place and my brother was so excited, he kept talking about our grandma, trying to remember things she cooked, her funny and old-fashioned way of talking. How she slept in a chair. We never saw her go to bed. It was like she was on a vigil, to watch us, and she never let herself take time off. Woman slept in a chair, waiting for us to need something.