The Mars Room(71)

Gordon believed in a kind of Hippocratic oath, not just as a teacher but as a person, to do no harm. Maybe this snooping was harm. He did it anyway.

All these details in the newspaper articles built a portrait, a set of impressions. Gordon had met Button on the other side, a lost little girl who looked twelve years old. Once, when Sanchez smiled as Gordon praised her in class, he saw her young essence. It was so wanting, and bright, he’d had to look away.

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. Were not offered any kind of mercy. Signed up for Gordon Hauser’s class. Did or did not do the reading.

After indulging in the difficult facts, he all at once grasped why these kids, Button and her friends, had killed the poor student and ruined their own lives.

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.

The student had snuffled loudly. His roommate had told the courtroom, through tears, and through a Mandarin interpreter, that she thought he had a cold.

There was one photo that Gordon looked at again and again, of little Sanchez and her codefendants in trial. They slumped with tough kid postures and they all wore glasses. He was her teacher and never once saw Sanchez put on glasses. Their public defenders probably insisted they order them and it was among the few health services you could get in county jail, a pair of prescription eyeglasses, or maybe the lawyers went to Walgreens and bought them one-strength-fits-all readers. The photo of them in their glasses, bored and distracted at their own murder trial, made Gordon hate Sanchez. The glasses were meant to alter the jury’s perception. To bend the truth. But he was disgusted with himself for this sudden hate, and maybe guilt and innocence were not even a real axis. Things went wrong in people’s lives.

Reading about her case, Gordon felt he was trying to cross an eight-lane freeway on foot. He had his argument worked out, about why she was a victim, when he found an article that quoted a Youth Authority counselor who testified that he’d overheard Sanchez talking about the crime. “We didn’t even get anything off the nip,” Sanchez had said.



* * *



Those were the worst nights. In the light of day his mood improved. As he drove the roads that wound down to Stanville, the hillside grasses green-tipped and mohair-soft, heart-shaped clots of mistletoe clustered in the branches of the oak trees like giant beehives, he knew that he could not judge. I cannot judge, because I do not know.

Gordon was familiar, from his time at college and graduate school, with rich kids. If you grew up rich, you played a musical instrument, violin or piano. You were on the debate team. Preferred a certain brand of jeans cuffed just so, maybe you puffed a ciggie or smoked bowls with your friends in your dad’s Lexus, then were late to your SAT tutorial. But so many kids did it differently, and were done to differently. 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. But, like the rich kids, you too wanted to have fun on Saturday night.

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

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.



* * *



Gordon’s knowledge of murder had been, for most of his life, confined to literature. Raskolnikov killed the old pawnbroker. It was a feverish decision of Raskolnikov’s to destroy his own life and shift into dreamtime, a dream that would not break, as a fever might. He was a miserably poor graduate student, like Gordon had been. It was almost funny, how everything in Dostoevsky’s novels came down to rubles. A word that sounded like something heavy and made of brass. Rubles. Put them in a sock, like you’d put a padlock, and swing.

At the end of The Brothers K, Alyosha asks the children to always remember the good feeling they share, in praising and celebrating the life of their beloved dead friend, the lost child.

Remember this always, Alyosha says, and he means, as an antidote. 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.



* * *



Sanchez was in prison and would die there. She had told Gordon she’d never had a visitor. 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.