The Mars Room

by Rachel Kushner

Certain women in jail and prison make rules for everyone else, and the woman insisting on quiet was one of those. If you follow their rules, they make more rules. You have to fight people or you end up with nothing.

Sometimes what other people want is wantable, briefly, before dissolving in the face of your own wants.

What I eventually came to understand, about San Francisco, was that I was immersed in beauty and barred from seeing it.

The thing is you keep existing whether you have a plan to do so or not, until you don’t exist, and then your plans are meaningless.

“You look like the kind of person who spends a lot of time in jails and prisons.” “Why you say that? ’Cause I’m black? At least I fit in here. You look like a Manson chick. No offense. I got nothing to hide. Here’s my file: counter-rehabilitatable. ODD. That’s oppositional defiant disorder. I’m criminal-minded, narcissistic, recidivistical, and uncooperative. I’m also a prunaholic and horndog.”

Did you ever notice that women can seem common while men never do? You won’t ever hear anyone describe a man’s appearance as common. 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.

You learn when you’re young that evil exists. You absorb the knowledge of it. When this happens for the first time, it does not go down easy. It goes down like a horse pill.

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.

A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost.

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.

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