Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

No Tank Tops, the sign had said at Youth Guidance. Because it was presumed the parents didn’t know better than to show up to court looking like hell. The sign might have said Your Poverty Reeks.

Gordon’s knowledge of murder had been, for most of his life, confined to literature. Raskolnikov killed the old pawnbroker. It was a feverish decision of Raskolnikov’s to destroy his own life and shift into dreamtime, a dream that would not break, as a fever might. He was a miserably poor graduate student, like Gordon had been. It was almost funny, how everything in Dostoevsky’s novels came down to rubles. A word that sounded like something heavy and made of brass. Rubles. Put them in a sock, like you’d put a padlock, and swing.

At the end of The Brothers K , Alyosha asks the children to always remember the good feeling they share, in praising and celebrating the life of their beloved dead friend, the lost child.

Remember this always, Alyosha says, and he means, as an antidote. Retain the innocence of the most wholesome feeling you ever had in your life. Part of you stays innocent forever. That part of you is worth more than the rest.

Sanchez was in prison and would die there. She had told Gordon she’d never had a visitor. Few of the women he knew got visits. When he asked, they made excuses. There was embarrassment that no one came to see them. It did not occur to them that it wasn’t a reflection on them, wasn’t their fault that traveling to the prison required a reliable car, time off work, money for gas and meals and a hotel, and for the high-priced vending machines in the visiting room.

He kept looking, searched others.

He knew, at a certain point, that he was doing it to forestall looking up the person about whom he was most curious, and most hesitant to betray.

It would be easy because her name was not common.

It was hard for him to let go of his guilt for having been the one to tell her about her son. He didn’t like the way it made him feel. As if he had power over this woman now, on account of her needs. In class, the thoughts ceased, because in person she was not needy. She was the student he could rely on to answer a question in a generative manner, so that he could tell himself the students were with him, and not lost, not against him. She laughed at his jokes and spoke in a way that confirmed his arguments about the worth of what he was doing, because she obviously benefited from having literature to read and discuss. But that was all a grand lie, even if true. He was attracted to her, and she was forbidden. He thought about her frequently, since his fantasies were not patrolled by the corrections department.

“Did you ever see the green flash,” she asked him after class, “down at Ocean Beach?”

He had not, he told her. She explained that it was an optical effect at sunset, when rays from the top of the sinking sun turned green. She had never seen it either, she said.

“Are you sure it isn’t a story cooked up by the Irish drunks who live out there?”

She laughed. They were standing outside the school trailer. It was a June evening when the sun sets late. The light was gold from valley haze and low, slanting into her eyes, filling the irises.

Looking at someone who is looking at you was a drug as strong as any other.

“Move it, Hall!” an officer yelled. It was time for evening count. “Move your ass, now! I said go!”

He researched the green flash of a setting sun. It existed. There were websites with lengthy explanations of the physics of light. He did not type the three words of her name. Instead, he kept on with the others. Betty LaFrance, who asked the guards to reserve a parking space for her hairdresser. Betty, whose letter he’d sent, and when Gordon asked how her boyfriend was, she said, “I had him strangled.” He was sure she was lying but when she said it the hairs on his arms stood up. He found her page on a prison pen pal site.

“Single and ready to mingle, an old-fashioned gal who likes champagne, yachts, gambling, fast cars, VERY expensive thrills. Can you afford me? Write to find out.”

There was a list of standard questions Betty LaFrance was obliged to answer on the site, for its users.

Do you mind relocating? (No).

Are you serving a life sentence? (No).

But at the bottom, under On death row? she’d had to check (Yes).

Of Candy Peña, Gordon learned that her mother had worked concessions at Disneyland in Anaheim. Candy Peña had worked at a McDonald’s. Her manager testified for the defense that she had never given him any problems. The mother of Candy’s murder victim, the little girl, that mother had cheered in the courtroom when the death penalty verdict was announced. “YEAH!” she’d yelled.

And then Gordon found another quote, later, from the victim’s mother, who said she felt for Candy Peña’s mother, knowing herself what it was like to lose a child.

London: at first he found nothing. They called London Conan, or Bobby. He typed in “Bobby London,” and found a Yelp page for a restaurant in Los Angeles. The top three reviews of it all started the same way: Fuck you, Bobby London!

He remembered that the first name was Roberta. Bingo. “Woman who masqueraded as man convicted and sentenced to men’s prison for armed burglary.” Another headline: “State Goofs.” London was not masquerading but one of the most natural people Gordon had ever met. London was London.

It seemed London had already served for the burglary, had gotten two strikes for it, and was on a third, for fraud. London was doing life for having written a bad check.

This gallery of people.

Every name he could think of, to avoid typing Romy Leslie Hall.

Geronima Campos, who had painted Gordon’s portrait: Geronima had apparently dropped her husband’s torso off a bridge somewhere in the Inland Empire. They found it and later the head, which had a bullet in it from a gun registered to Geronima. Geronima had no alibi. Her husband’s blood was in her bathtub, in her car, and on the clothes she’d worn the day of his disappearance.

Geronima was involved with a peer counseling group and taught human rights law to any prisoner who wanted to learn it. Geronima was a prison elder. She had associate degrees by mail order and a flawless disciplinary record. Geronima had gone up for parole eight times and been denied every time, despite her file of service and support from people on the outside who organized to help her. There was an internet campaign page, to advocate for Geronima’s next parole. Those who signed the petition included their reason for doing so.

Geronima has done her time.

She is no longer a threat to society.

Free Geronima.

She is a survivor of spousal abuse.

Geronima is an indigenous elder lesbian who is being unjustly held at Stanville Correctional Facility.

Being a lesbian is not illegal.

She is needed in her community.

She has served her time.

She is not a threat.

Free Geronima.

She had indeed served her time. She had done the time the court had given her. And Gordon knew Geronima. She was an old woman who liked to paint. Everything was true. It was time for Geronima to go home. She had served the sentence they gave her.

Every time Geronima went before the parole board, which Gordon pictured as a series of Phyllis Schlaflys all in a row, frowning, with stiff hair, in industrial pantyhose and little rippling American flag pins like Republican candidates wore for political debates, she told the board she was innocent. Her supporters said she’d done her time and was no longer a threat. She faced the parole board and said, I’m innocent. It made no sense. But Gordon understood why she said it.