Audio: Rachel Kushner reads.

If his students could learn to think well, to enjoy reading books, some part of them would be uncaged. That was what Gordon Hauser told himself, and what he told them, too. But there were days, like when a woman walked into the prison classroom and flung boiling sugar water into the face of another woman, when he did not believe it. There were days when it seemed as though the real purpose of the work he was doing was to destroy his own life by trying to teach people who wanted to burn each other’s faces off. The guards made everything more difficult, with their contempt for the women and their hostility toward free-world staff like Gordon. The guards had been forced to undergo sensitivity training and were furious about it. “It’s because you cunts cry and demand explanations,” they said. “Everything with you bitches is why, why, why.” They all reminisced about better times, when they had worked in men’s facilities, where they’d observed high-blood-volume stabbings on closed-circuit monitors from the safety of the watch office, and dealt with prisoners who lived by strictly self-enforced convict codes. Female prisoners bickered with the guards and contested everything, and the guards seemed to find this more treacherous than having to subdue riots. No guard wanted to work in a women’s prison. Gordon had not understood this until he got to Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, which he’d chosen because working with women prisoners seemed less threatening to him than working with men.

His first placement had been with juveniles in San Francisco. He’d done that for six months, but it was too depressing. Kids in cages telling him stories about their foster homes, about sexual abuse, all kinds of abuse. Most didn’t have parents but some did. Gordon saw them in the court’s waiting area, before he passed through a sally port to get to his classroom: people with holes in their sweatpants, T-shirts emblazoned with random logos, inadequate shoes—poor people with chaotic lives. Couldn’t the juvenile judges understand, from looking at the guardians, that the kids didn’t stand any kind of fair chance?

There were notices instructing juveniles to pull up their pants, because to wear them low was disrespectful. One of Gordon’s students was always getting into trouble for wearing his pants too low, a big white boy whose eyes were set close together in the center of his face. “You talk like you’re black,” a black kid had said to him, “but you look like you’re retarded.” “No Bare Feet,” a sign at the building entrance warned. As if someone would try to walk into a detention center and court, a municipal building on a bleak, windy corner, far from the beach, without shoes. Another sign: “No Tank Tops.” Under it, typically, an entire three-generation family, all in tank tops, flesh spilling out. What was it about shoulders? Why did law enforcement fear them?

When you Google the town of Stanville, faces pop up: mug shots. After the mug shots, an article that cites Stanville as having the highest percentage of minimum-wage workers in the state. Stanville’s water is poisoned. The air is bad. Most of the old businesses are boarded up. There are dollar stores, gas stations that serve as liquor outlets, and coin-op laundromats. People without cars walk the main boulevard in the hottest part of the day, when it’s a hundred and thirteen degrees outside. There are no sidewalks, so they amble along in the gutters, scooting empty shopping carts, piercing the dead zone of late afternoon with a loose metallic rattle.

Gordon found a place to rent sight unseen, a cabin up the mountain from Stanville proper, in the western Sierra foothills. The cabin was a single room with a woodstove. It would be his Thoreau year, he wrote to his friend Alex, sending him the realty link.

“Your Kaczynski year,” Alex wrote back, after looking at the photos of the cabin.

“True, both lived in one-room huts,” Gordon responded. “But I don’t see much connection between them.”

“Reverence of nature, self-reliance. K was even a reader of Walden,” Alex wrote. “It’s on the list of books from his cabin. Also R. W. B. Lewis, your idol.”

“Aren’t you kind of oversimplifying?”

“Yes. But also: both died virgins.”

“Kaczynski’s not dead, Alex,” Gordon wrote back.

“You know what I mean.”

Over goodbye beers at their bar on Shattuck Avenue, Alex gave Gordon, as a kind of joke, a Ted Kaczynski reader. Gordon had looked at the manifesto. Everyone had. The guy had once been an assistant professor at Berkeley.

They toasted Gordon’s departure. “To my rustication,” Gordon said.

“Isn’t that when they boot you from Oxford?”

“They just send you down to the country for a while.”

His mountain place also had a poisoned water supply, but not from agriculture. There was naturally occurring uranium, so you had to bring in bottled water. He liked the cabin. It smelled of fresh-planed pine. It was logical in its compactness. Cozy, even. It was up on stilts, on a steep hill with few neighbors, and had an expansive view of the valley.

He spent the week before the new job started unpacking his meagre belongings and chopping wood. Went for walks. Nights, he fed logs to his stove and read.

Ted Kaczynski, Gordon learned, ate mostly rabbits. Squirrels, Ted reported, didn’t seem to like bad weather. His diaries were mostly concerned with how he lived and what he saw happening in the wilderness around him, and Gordon acknowledged that comparing him to Thoreau was not as crude as he’d first thought. But Kaczynski would never have written this: “Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.”

Gordon’s new neighbors were all white, Christian, and conservative. People who tinkered with trucks and dirt bikes and made assumptions about Gordon that he did nothing to dispel, because he knew that those assumptions would work in his favor if he needed their help. It snowed up there. Roads closed, cutting off access to supplies. Trees fell and knocked down power lines. Gordon did not enjoy the grinding zing of dirt bikes’ two-stroke motors, which echoed down the valley on weekends, but that was the country: not a pure and untrammelled world of native wildlife and songbird calls but people who cleared the trees off their property with chainsaws and cut paths through the woods for motocross courses and snowmobiling. Gordon withheld judgment. These people knew much more than he did about how to live in the mountains. How to survive winter and forest fires and mud flows from spring rains. How to properly stack wood, something Gordon’s neighbor from down the hill had patiently showed him, after his two cords of chunk wood were dumped in the driveway by a guy named Beaver, who was missing most of his fingers. Gordon learned to split logs. Part 1 of his rustication.

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One morning, Sergeant McKinnley yelled through the door that my G.E.D. prep session was that afternoon.