The Mars Room(88)

I saw the thick path of the Milky Way or what I guessed was it above me. I’d never seen it. Or had I? I knew what it was. There were bright stars among the scatter of dimmer ones. The sky is junked with stars and if you live in a city, you don’t know. If you live in a prison you do not see a single star, on account of the lights. Here, I was halfway into the sky. Where people are gone, the world opens. Where people are gone, the night falls upward, black and unmanned.



* * *



Light beams crisscrossed the forest.

They were here.

I heard a helicopter overhead. Jerky searchlights swept the ground.

Grandma’s closet, the kids used to say. That was what they called a wind shelter where you retreated to light a joint. Under the stadium stairs or in a bus shelter. The piss-stink shelter at Forest Hill. Grandma’s closet. Any place could work.

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.

The lie of regret and of life gone off the rails. What rails. The life is the rails. It is its own rails and it goes where it goes. It cuts its own path. My path took me here.

I wish Jackson could see these trees. I never took him here. I didn’t know this place. That it was. Is. He saw redwoods at Point Reyes. These are the other kind, bigger, stranger. Do people know these trees are here? He might see trees like this or something else—like this—in being not known, and not expected, either.

There are some good people out there. Some really good people.

The helicopter came low. A voice echoed, like from the PA on main yard.

Hall. You’re out of bounds, Hall.

The life is the rails and I was in the mountains I dreamed of from the yard. I was in them, but nothing stays what you see from far away when you get up close.

Yes I think I’m special. That’s on account of me being myself. I have no one else to regard except Jackson, who I regard. Believe me. They called him Güero but he wasn’t a blond. They called him Güero because they loved him. They didn’t love me and they didn’t have to. There was no need for it. They loved him, and I loved him.

The damp from fog, like now, it’s inside me. I’m safe from it. Doesn’t even make me shiver. That kind of cold forms the deepest layer of my memories, from growing up there, treeless streets built on sand and the bad ocean, the broken bottle ocean with its big curve of concrete wall. Fatal Drownings Occur Here, the signs said on each stairwell down. Stairway to bonfire, to spray paint, to fistfight. Grandma’s closet at the beach was any car. Or behind a car. Or depending on the wind, in those stairwells. Fatal drownings occur here.

We swam in our clothes. We never once worried about drowning. Death was not in our future. No person lives in the future. The present, the present, the present. Life keeps on being that.

Hall, we have you surrounded.

They were talking to me. Sounded like yard orders.

Telling me to rejoice that Jackson was not here. That life does not go off the rails because it is the rails, goes where it goes.

Barking of dogs. Closer now.

Lights bathed the forest, everything bright as day.

Hands up, they said. Step out slowly with your hands where we can see them.

If Jackson were here, I could not protect him. He is safe from this.

I emerged from the tree and turned into the light, not slow. I ran toward them, toward the light.



* * *



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.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


For her wisdom and expertise on the visible and invisible net of the penal zone of the world—and for the thousands of other things she miraculously knows—I am grateful to Theresa Booboo Martinez.

I thank Mychal Concepción, Hakim, Tracy Jones, Elizabeth Lozano, Christy Clinton Phillips, and Michele Rene Scott for everything I’ve learned from them. Thanks also to Ayelet Waldman; Molly Kovel; Joanna Neborsky; Maya Andrea Gonzalez; Amanda Scheper; Justice Now of Oakland, California; and Paul and Lori Sutton.

I thank Susan Golomb for so many kinds of incredible support, and Nan Graham for her belief in me and for her crucial and unerring editorial guidance on this novel.

I thank Michal Shavit and Ana Fletcher for editorial input, as well as Don DeLillo, Joshua Ferris, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Emily Goldman, Mitch Kamin, Remy Kushner, Knight Landesman, Zachary Lazar, Ben Lerner, James Lickwar, Cynthia Mitchell, Marisa Silver, Dana Spiotta, and most of all, Jason Smith, for what feels like an endless supply of intellectual generosity.

I thank Emily for bearing witness in multiple ways.

Thanks to Susan Moldow, Katie Monaghan, Tamar McCollom, Daniel Loedel, and everyone at Scribner.

James Benning’s Two Cabins project and his film Stemple Pass directly inspired my thinking on Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski. I thank James for his friendship and his help, his willingness to engage in extensive dialogues over the past several years, and for the use of his Ted diaries.

The Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Civitella Ranieri each provided vital support while I wrote this book.