The Mars Room

by Rachel Kushner

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.

We were not kleptomaniacs. That’s a term for rich people who steal by compulsion. We were finding innovative ways to acquire makeup and perfume and purses and clothes—all the normal things a girl would be expected to have and want, and which we could not afford.

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.

When you see lights even higher than stadium lights, you are at prison.

Everything in prison is addressed to the woman for whom the red wedge is painted on the clock face, the imbecile. I’ve never met her. Plenty I have met in prison cannot read, and some cannot tell time, but that doesn’t mean they are not shrewd and superior individuals who can outsmart any egghead. People in prison are clever as hell. The imbecile the rules and signs are meant to address is nowhere to be found.

The way the stars flickered unevenly, from bright to dimmer to brighter, reminded him of car headlights. A car at night, moving along a tree-lined road, lights shining intermittently. But stars were wondrous, and headlights could be sinister. Stars were nature. Cars were unknown human intent.

Even the educated people in jail didn’t know. It’s like these places don’t exist until we bomb them.

She wouldn’t cry. It was hard not to. I vowed to quit.

Things are more complicated than some can admit. People are stupider and less demonic than some can admit.

No one runs on the track, since this was women’s prison and we were not training to kill. No one except Conan, who jogged past me and Sammy.

Conan said to no one in particular, his usual audience.

I felt desperate, but not in the way Victor was desperate.

You can’t own someone for a dollar.

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.

In the primitive part of the mind, violence was body-to-body, punching and clubbing and cutting. Those people went to prison.

If you were from Richmond, or East Oakland, or, like Sanchez, South LA, you might be trained from birth practically to represent your block, your gang, to rep hard, to have pride, to be

hard. Maybe you had a lot of siblings to watch and possibly you knew almost nobody who had finished school, or worked a stable job. People from your family were in prison, whole swaths of your community, and it was part of life to eventually go there. So, you were born fucked.

All children are looking for a positive self-image. All children want that. It is obtained in different ways.

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.

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.

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

When someone had a release date coming, enemies would try to draw that person into trouble, to ruin her chances.

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.

He is on his path as I am on mine. The world has gone on for a long, long time. I gave him life. It is quite a lot to give. It is the opposite of nothing. And the opposite of nothing is not something. It is everything.