The Mars Room

by Rachel Kushner

And if someone did remember them, someone besides me, that person’s account would make them less real, because my memory of them would have to be corrected by facts, which are never considerate of what makes an impression, what stays in the mind after all these years, the very real images that grip me from the erased past and won’t let go.

Floyd and Lloyd, his uncles by marriage, never spoke to each other. They were men of zero words to anyone, ever. They were men who lay watching TV, making women and children feel skittish and in trouble for existing.

When I was in county, someone on my tier heard from her family that we’d invaded Iraq. I went around asking people if they knew where that is, and not one lady knew. Even the educated people in jail didn’t know. It’s like these places don’t exist until we bomb them.

Both trees had charred areas around their trunks, inside and out, wood burned black and dry, fractured into a geometry of crackles. Probably the trees had been hit by lightning. Whole forest burning up around them, and they had lived on because they lived on. Because they could. Maybe they were a thousand years old. Two thousand years old. To the tree, that might not be so long. Just life. Like life to a human is life-length. There were other scales of life. The tree was so tall I could not see up it, only to the baby arms, the small branches that began high, sky-height, tall enough that this tree stretched to another world, or to the end of this one. The future lasts forever. Who said that and what did it mean.