Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

“You’re just not being realistic.”

“We can call the… I’ll call right now. What’s-his-name. The surgeon. He’s got a… what do you call it? A round-the-clock service.”

“We’re not calling any surgeon today. The important part of today is what we’re doing right now.”

“That’s not the important part. The important part is where your life gets saved. The important part is that things go on as they’re going, with only modestly increased levels of sadness and disappointment.”

She said: “Maybe there’s something that’s against us, fate or history or luck or something. Maybe for some people, that’s not how it goes. You need to be ready for bad luck. If I have to go on that donor list again… Think about it. I just got this pair. And I feel feverish. I feel weak.”

“That’s a normal response. You don’t know. We can ask the doctor.”

“It’s time we started planning what we’re going to do. We have tried doctors, Monty. My whole life has been spent with doctors. I mean, when I got three months off from going to the doctor, in my teens, I felt like I was free in a totally new way, and as the care has got worse, you know, even more doctors, so that the worse the care got, the better I got to know them—”

“Darling, I—”

“What’s the right response? More doctors? Or is there maybe a better response that has to do with art and poetry and with just giving life a chance in the way it presents itself, even if it’s in a broken-down place like this? I’m not going to write about all this, Monty, I’m through with writing all this stuff down, and I don’t want to film myself for my website, and I don’t want to be on some compendium of footage of dying people, or friends of people with pulmonary disease, or whatever; I just want to be a young woman who is alive for a little while longer, and I want you to do whatever you need to do to start preparing for what happens when I’m not here to harass you any longer.”

How can these things come to pass? When on the surface everything was so serene? There were many things to be courageous about. War spreading around the globe until it was routine. I could list a half-dozen spots where civil war raged. Economic collapse among, for example, the Central European democracies. Religious violence. Poverty. Overpopulation. Hatred among all the peoples of the world. These were things to be courageous about. But I couldn’t be courageous about my wife, not a day longer. What had been asked of us was that we give up everything , all that we had built together and all the strength we had stockpiled, and now we were being asked to watch our contentment come to nothing? Some bits of bad luck you can work hard at accepting, and some bits bludgeon you. And the big lie you tell yourself is that you’re not going to be the one who gets bludgeoned, right up until the moment when the instrument meets the surface of your thick skull.

Next day, Tara went to see her surgeon, and they subjected her to a battery of diagnostic tests with high-powered magnets and proton emitters. These revealed the presence of the aforementioned fungus. Aspergillus . Antibiotics were increased, and Tara was moved into a hyperbaric tent a few hours each week. We stocked up on tanks for the home yet again. People around us, official people, began talking about months or even weeks.

What could I do? What could I do? What had I ever done?

I called D. Tyrannosaurus. Over the phone, he made his first move.

What does a man think about while he’s making history? A man thinks about his viscera. In the midst of the final countdown, on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, while Mission Control is counting back from the double to the single digits, he thinks about his bile, his adrenal glands, his hemoglobin, his pancreas, his bowels. Ignoble, I agree. You’d think that a guy like me, Colonel Jed Richards, would be thinking about the judgments of future generations or about the next phase of space exploration, the one in which we travel out beyond the solar system. Or perhaps I’d be thinking about the great religious questions, about who exactly stage-managed the Big Bang, from her loom casting off the whorl of dust and gas and stars, in turn spawning the tiny wisp of our universe, of which but one puny rock is Earth. But no. I was not thinking about interstellar space. As you probably know, the commonest inquiry of schoolchildren as regards space travel has to do with the disposal of human wastes. And since this is the inaugural day of my Martian blog, I am prepared to deal with the question of human wastes, with irritable bowel syndrome and related difficulties. Yes, IBS is just one of the idiosyncrasies I had to sweep under the rug during my long climb through the ranks of astronauts and technicians who peopled the Mars Mission Recruitment Initiative.

Mission Control reached “fifteen,” and “fourteen” quickly followed, and while I was thinking about using the suction device in the restroom that I would attach to my lower self, and how there would be no chance to do so for at least an hour, I was also whiling away some milliseconds considering the possibility of my own incineration. In case of launch mishap, temperatures would reach 3,000 degrees, owing to the nature of the solid fuel in the first stage. We would be cinders. As did the other members of my space confraternity, whom I’ll soon get around to introducing, I understood that the two parts of the voyage most likely to bring about our incineration were liftoff and landing. Of these, the more dangerous was the landing. On, for example, the surface of the Red Planet.

We’d already written letters to our loved ones, explaining that we knew of the numberless threats on this epic flight. Time slowed around “thirteen” and “twelve” as I reconsidered the text of my own video letter, hesitating over the irony thereof, upon which I will elaborate soon.

Massive public and private fiscal outlay (consider the fuel costs, e.g.) had been spent by our rickety and fiscally strapped government in order to make a desperation wager on the Red Planet, the specifics dating back to a halfhearted boast by a less-than-mediocre president nearly a quarter century ago. Could we do it? Could we bring pride and dignity to a multiethnic post-industrial third-rate economy? Could we redeem a nation before it defaulted on certain kinds of government payments? With this launch did we not ask: Can we do anything right?

The knots in my lower intestines dated to my tour of duty in the Central Asian conflict of 2011. It’s possible that I caught some kind of genetically enhanced bug in that ill-begotten war, because, as you know, the bugs in that “police action” were often encased in warheads. They had exotic equatorial origins. Whatever the cause, in moments of great social stress, which have included but are not limited to my recent talk show appearances, an address to a joint subcommittee on funding space programs, and illegal espionage missions in desert landscapes, I have worn absorbent undergarments.

Occasionally, I vomit uncontrollably. Mercifully, my experience of IBS, which is widespread among military veterans, has not extended to zero-gravity simulations or piloting. I have been free from symptoms during crisis. Most of the time, anyway. Oddly, one pragmatic approach to dealing with my IBS involves proximity to household pets. Rabbits are good, as are guinea pigs. My cat, Havoc, sat in my lap just two nights ago, when I was last at the house. I was again committing to memory the manual that NASA had given us, the manual that was meant to cover each and every eventuality — in which the hull flakes off during our trip through the atmosphere, in which the oxygen fails due to an asteroid strike on the craft, in which fruits and vegetables fail to grow in the greenhouse on the Red Planet due to excessive ultraviolet radiation and insufficient atmospheric pressure and we slowly starve to death. Havoc sat in my lap, and he purred as I reread what NASA, that beleaguered agency, would suggest if, for example, one of the men in the Mars flotilla suddenly went insane. My bowels throbbed not even once.