The Mars Room(42)

Those days on suicide watch, I understood how it was that someone might come to believe that the way to get back at these people would be to kill yourself. Being given only spoons and soft food, no forks or knives, forced the mind to wonder in what way a forbidden utensil might be useful. Being given no sheets or pillow summoned a question into the room, of how to asphyxiate yourself, with what, and tied to what. But I was not suicidal. I was thinking about Jackson, and what to do, now that we were orphaned.

Jackson was the grain of reality in the center of my thoughts. I could see his sweet open face, made even more open by the cowlick that gave him an old-fashioned, almost Brylcreemed hairstyle. He didn’t brush his hair. It swooped naturally off his broad forehead. Jackson was handsome like his father had been. Unlike his father, he was always looking to find a way to be happy.

When we’d first moved to LA, Jackson heard the horn of the vegetable truck that parked on our street and went running outside to see what the commotion was. The man who drove the vegetable truck got out and opened the back. The old women lined up in their house smocks to buy groceries from the back of the truck. I felt like the truck was a Mexican thing, and Jackson and I would just go to Vons and shop the regular white-people way. But Jackson insisted we get in the line. We bought avocados, mangos, eggs, bread, and sausages the vendor had hanging from the ceiling of his truck, and the food was half what it cost at Vons. That was how we met all our neighbors.

Jackson believed in the world. I searched his face with my closed eyes. Felt the dewy touch of his hand in my hand. I heard his voice, felt the warmth of his body when he wrapped his arms around my waist.

I focused on the grain of Jackson, the sensation of him. Nothing they did could touch that grain. Only I could touch it, touch it and stay close.

There was no way to contact him. They wouldn’t tell me anything. He needed me and there was nothing I could do. I lay in my tiny bare cell and tried to see Jackson, to visit with him.

Jackson wanted me to know things that he knew, to study what he studied, and so he tested me on columns when he learned about them in a Greek coloring book my mother gave him. If there were a bunch of designs at the top, I knew to guess, “Corinthian.” He asked questions like I was someone he could rely on for the truth. “Is the heel this whole area of my foot, or just this part on the bottom?” He nodded when my answers corresponded to the world he was building in his mind, with correct names and definitions, with facts. Testing out his facts. “Mommy, that cat might not belong to anyone, because she doesn’t have a collar.” When a man came down Alvarado Street swinging a golf club, hitting telephone poles and then the side of the bus shelter, Jackson said the man had a problem inside his brain, that it was a sickness and he hoped the man got better.

Jones, who was my assigned intake counselor, came to check on me. Counselor doesn’t mean someone who counsels. Your prison counselor determines your security classification and when and if you get mainlined to general population. Your counselor keeps tabs on you and reports to the parole board, if you are headed for parole. Counselors have enormous power over what happens to us, and they are always assholes.

I asked Jones if there was some way to find out if Jackson was okay. Was he in a hospital still? What were his injuries?

“There are privacy rules in hospitals, Hall,” Jones said.

“Do you have children, Lieutenant Jones?”

“Only his legal guardian or a court-appointed advocate can verify that he’s in a hospital,” Jones said. “You are not his guardian, Hall.”

“But who is his guardian? I need to find out the condition my son is in.”

She was walking away from my cell. I adjusted my tone of voice, hoping to summon her back.

“Please, Lieutenant Jones. Please.”

It was happening. I was pleading with a sadist in a little girl voice.

Jones stopped, pretended to react with decency.

“Ms. Hall, I know it’s tough, but your situation is due one hundred percent to choices you made and actions you took. If you’d wanted to be a responsible parent, you would have made different choices.”

“I know it,” I said, tears landing on the floor of my cell. I was on the ground, on all fours, with my face to the food flap in my cell door, which was the only way to communicate with people in the hallway.

I tried to think of what Sammy might do. She wouldn’t cry. It was hard not to. I vowed to quit.

I focused on getting out of the mental ward, and back to ad seg, and out of ad seg, and mainlined, so that I could try to make phone calls, find a lawyer, get information, do something.

I dreamed one night that I was in Jimmy Darling’s bed, at the ranch in Valencia. Jackson was asleep on a cot. Jimmy had just had a bad dream, he said, in which the police took me away. He held on to me, glad it wasn’t real. I was glad, too, but then I woke up, with caged white lights buzzing in the ceiling above me.

Jimmy didn’t love me like that. When the police in real life took me away, he moved me to the past. I’d known it when I heard his voice over the county jail phone.



* * *



You can’t remain on suicide watch forever, and you can’t stay in ad seg forever. They need the cells for other people they want to put in ad seg. Three months after my mother died, and four months after Chain Night, I was put in general population, on C yard, in unit 510.

A unit is 260 women, on two floors with an open common area and a guard station—a cop shop—in the center. The rooms were big, much bigger than an ad seg cell, and crammed with bunk beds. Each room was designed for four women but had eight.