The Mars Room

by Rachel Kushner

She turned around and lifted her jail shirt to show me her low back tattoo, her tramp stamp. It said Shut the Fuck Up

she had that grand and inappropriate grin. I didn’t like it. It made her seem like she had undergone partial brain removal surgery.

I sometimes think San Francisco is cursed. I mostly think it’s a sad suckville of a place.

The city to us was clammy fingers of fog working their way into our clothes, always those clammy fingers, and big bluffs of wet mist hurling themselves down Judah Street while I waited by sandy streetcar tracks for the N,

he acted like he’d never encountered that kind of contradiction, junkies who refuse non-organic juice. He was a little sheltered, like most people who come to the city from elsewhere.

The common man means the average man, a typical man, a decent hardworking person of modest dreams and resources. A common woman is a woman who looks cheap. A woman who looks cheap doesn’t have to be respected, and so she has a certain value, a certain cheap value.

The rest of us ripped out the sensors forcibly before leaving the store with our stolen loot.

You had to be from a conventional background to go full tilt into devil worship. My mother was an atheist and would have teased me if she thought I’d gone into religion, even a satanic one.

He was thin and lithe with hair as blondly colorless as lice egg casings.

But for Gordon, reading was his impulse. It made the world bigger.

If she could just appear at certain exact moments—when he was horny, or needed someone to talk to—that would have worked out fine, but people were not like that. There were hours built in where you had to hear someone express feelings about something that didn’t seem important, and you nodded and pretended that it was.

he realized quiet people can control you just as effectively as loud ones. They do it differently is all.

The word violence was depleted and generic from overuse and yet it still had power, still meant something, but multiple things. There were stark acts of it: beating a person to death. And there were more abstract forms, depriving people of jobs, safe housing, adequate schools. There were large-scale acts of it, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in a single year, for a specious war of lies and bungling, a war that might have no end, but according to prosecutors, the real monsters were teenagers like Button Sanchez.

The student was not a person to them. That was the reason. They would not have harmed someone they knew was a full person. He was alien to them, his fluency in Mandarin something the kids never considered.

he knew that he could not judge. I cannot judge, because I do not know.

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.

To stay sane you formed a version of yourself you could believe in.

The reentry program was on skid row and she was worried. “Hang around the barbershop long enough,” she said, “and you’ll end up with a haircut.”

No one would talk to him, or rather, listen, so he got his book out, Chickenhawk, a Vietnam thing he’d been trying to read for three years. It interested him because he had begun long ago telling people he was in combat, but he never was.

3 years! Time to give up.

The problem with reading was how relentless it was. You managed to concentrate long enough to read a whole paragraph and then there was another one, and they just kept coming.

Fog was barreling down the street as he got out of his cab that night in front of his apartment. Sometimes the city was cold like no place on earth. He was wearing shorts like the tourists who lined up for the cable car on Powell. Morons never got the news about the weather in San Francisco.

All the talk of regret. They make you form your life around one thing, the thing you did, and you have to grow yourself from what cannot be undone: they want you to make something from nothing. They make you hate them and yourself. They make it seem that they are the world, and you’ve betrayed it, them, but the world is so much bigger.

And the opposite of nothing is not something. It is everything.