Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

At daybreak, I was on the edge of a small town. It had a park with a trash can where I stashed my state clothes. I had on the others, a man’s stiff, rough jeans and T-shirt. I practiced walking, not running, acting legal, not illegal, like a person who had a right to walk along a road.

There were no more orchards here, no more gridded roads. The road curved past trees and outcroppings of rocks and open grassland. I found a secluded clump of bushes and slept under them. I slept on and off, until it was dusk. I was weak but forced myself to walk as night fell. I’d had no water since the drainage ditch, and no food.

I heard an animal cry out. My heart had been pounding since I left the prison yard, pounding out my alertness to fear, to cops, to any sign they were gaining on me. Now, I was afraid of the dark, too. Of this animal, which shrieked again. Its cry was almost human, but in the almost human manner of an animal in the wild.

I had walked for a long time when I saw lights. It was a crossroads with a gas station, and a road that wound upward toward the mountains. It was the middle of the night. The gas station was open.

A pickup truck pulled in. The driver got out to pump. A man alone. I sensed this was right. That he was the person to ask. I walked over.

“What’s up,” he said. Chubby guy in an acid-wash Marlboro jacket.

“I need a ride.”

“A ride. Maybe. Maybe. You married?”

“I’m not married.”

“You got a dude hiding around here, you guys gonna jump me or what?”

I said I was alone.

“Where you headed?”

“Up.” I nodded toward the mountains.

“How far?”

“To the top.”

“Sugar Pine Lodge, you work up there or something?”

“Yeah.”

“All right. Let me just refill this. You can have a ride .” He said it in a singsong voice, as if random women at remote gas stations were always begging favors, and he was once again consenting.

He grabbed a soda container from the seat of his truck. It was gallon-sized and said Thirst Destroyer.

He turned the heat up to eighty-eight degrees and sipped from his huge stupid drink and chattered about how he was going to get into vending machines. The gash had opened back up and I was bleeding on the seat of his truck. I was dizzy with thirst. But if I made that clear to him, how badly I needed him to share his drink, he might know.

I watched him drink from the straw, thick as a gas can nozzle, and tried not to faint.

“All you got to do is make the investment and restock them, collect the money.” From there he would take his profits and buy a franchise. “Takes forty-five K to buy a Dunkin’ Donuts. A Taco Bell is more. What you do is start with the vending machines, then you get a Dunkin’ Donuts, pull the equity from that, and then you buy a Taco Bell.”

We swooped left and right up and around hairpin turns. He drank from his soda. Belched.

“I got a lot of plans. I want to get into real estate. You know what they say?”

He was waiting for me to answer.

“No.”

“If you can flip an ounce, you can flip a house. That’s pretty cool, right? Just ’cause no one’s hiring, doesn’t mean you can’t find a hustle. You got to know what opportunity looks like. Have you seen those posters, We Buy Ugly Houses Dot Com? Those guys are raking in bank, turning a bad situation to their advantage, right? Here’s another one: a man who thinks outside the box, stays outside the box. That’s deep.

“And: tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are. I don’t fraternize with losers. I’m on the program. Hey, I got to take a leak.”

He slowed to a stop on the shoulder, put the car in park. He did not step out. The motor was running. He stared at me.

“You like to party?”

“No.”

“You might party with me, though.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You asked me for a ride and all.”

“Because I needed one.”

“Well then, we can make it win-win.”

“You take me up to the mountains, and we’ll see what happens.”

“All right then. That’s cool. Okay.” He got out, walked to the road’s edge, and unzipped his fly. He had finished about half his gallon-sized Thirst Destroyer.

I slid into the driver’s seat while he pissed into the underbrush. I put his truck in gear and drove.

One night Kurt Kennedy followed Vanessa as she left the Mars Room. He wasn’t any kind of creep. He was just so attached to this girl that he needed to be sure she was getting home safe. He watched as she got in a Luxor cab, and he followed that Luxor cab, on his motorcycle, to a residential hotel on Taylor Street. It was on the upper edge of the Tenderloin, at Nob Hill, the Tenderknob, a skeezier building than he would have pictured but it was where she lived. He watched her go in that night. And some other nights. A lot of other nights.

There were times she went to some scumbag’s house, an apartment in North Beach, instead of her own. Guy seemed a likely homosexual from Kurt’s point of view, and she didn’t go over there often enough for things to be serious.

He felt it was his job to watch out for her. It was a responsibility. He parked near her building some mornings, around the corner, on O’Farrell, with a good view of the entrance. Sometimes all day Sundays, since the Mars Room was closed. If she came out, he put his face shield down, circled on his bike, and was able to follow if she got on the Geary Street bus. Or if she got in a Luxor cab. Why did she only ride in Luxor cabs? He was worried the driver was another boyfriend or some guy trying to get in her pants, but he confirmed, through this work he was doing, that they were random, different drivers.

If she walked someplace instead of taking a cab, he circled, and kept up by going slow. Sometimes she emerged from the building with a little boy. Holding his hand. Isn’t that sweet. Like a mom, except he was sure she wasn’t the boy’s mother. It didn’t fit. Maybe the kid lived in the building. Once, she was with the kid and another woman and two other kids; Kurt thought it was a good bet all three kids were the other woman’s, it explained things. It bothered him that aspects of Vanessa’s life were walled off from him, even as he trailed her and knew exactly what she did, where she went, on a given day. As long as he could watch her leave the building, see where she was going, and know when she returned, he had not entirely lost the thread.

Keeping the line there, keeping track, staying focused on her, that was what he did, and wanted.

At first she had no idea. It was cleaner then. Those were the early days. But he encountered a period of time where she didn’t show up to the Mars Room, so he naturally wanted to talk to her. Was that so bad? It seemed like a small thing to him. He just wanted to say hello. He could not see her at the Mars Room, so he orbited closer to her home. Found her nearby. She acted like he was doing something illegal by shopping in her shitty little corner market. A store is public. Anyone can go to a store.

After she saw him in the store and got huffy and left, when she was finally back at work and he did his whistle thing in the Mars Room, his pssst, to get her to come sit, she ignored him, went down the aisle of the theater and sat with some other guy. Every day, same thing. No company. His money was suddenly not good enough. He kept showing up, kept trying. Waiting by the stage for her to dance.

Boy did he miss her. He really missed her. He tried to tell her. All he could do was keep trying. He sat with Angelique, gave her sweaty dollar bills, not even fives.