Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

I will be posting these diary entries on the web, every day, or as often as is feasible, along with some video feed when circumstances permit. I was playing online chess with some guys in Cleveland earlier, and they kicked my Anglo-Irish posterior. Jim is not a chess player and thinks that the entire notion of playing games with people back on Earth is not consistent with universal exploration. But I thought I would play chess on Mars, so that I could be the first chess player on Mars, as I would be so many other firsts.

Did I forget to describe our dinners? Jim Rose had peculiar tastes in food, as if he were still trying to provoke his parents. He often mixed together dehydrated packets of miso soup and peanuts and raisins into one dish and just squeezed some gel from one of the gelpaks. He would eat this mush all at once, along with some small cubed pieces of beef sprinkled on top. When he ate this mélange, he got a very serious expression on his face, as though someone intended to take his rations away from him. Now, we were, you may have heard, allowed certain personal requests for what had been packed into the food storage area on the capsule, and Jim specifically asked for miso soup, because it was easy and contained protein. I asked for ribs, though I knew I wouldn’t get them. José, who often ate by himself while calibrating distances and fuel requirements for the rovers, wouldn’t tell us what foods he had asked for specifically. Like he wouldn’t tell us much else. It was all written in stone well before we the astronauts got here, the exact number of calories we were going to consume, the days on which we would be allowed to trim our hair, when we would fire sludge out into space, et cetera.

You may be interested to know about sleep cycles. True: we were not meant, throughout the trip, to be awake at the same time. That is a waste of resources. Once we were on course and had settled into the routine of weightlessness, we would begin sleeping in shifts. At this point, the regimented dimming of cabin lights would become temporary, for whoever needed to get a little shut-eye. We’d be overlapping for a couple hours. I was scheduled to be on the swing shift for a while, or at least I thought it was the swing shift, but these terminologies seemed pointless. I didn’t really know the date until the web portal I was using told me so.

José just came up from his hatch to discuss the latest results in X-treme lacrosse, the contest sweeping the nation. I wasn’t sure who was playing.

“Come on, my man,” said José. “You aren’t telling me that you don’t know who’s playing in the finals of X-treme lacrosse?”

José looked disappointed, because we still had two months and a few weeks before we even reached the Red Planet, and then a year while we waited for the orbits of Mars and Earth to near each other again, and then six months back. If we had nothing to say to one another in all that time, if we actively despised one another, it was going to be a long trip. But there was a season for discord and a season for rapprochement.

I could tell there was something going on in José’s science lab that he wasn’t telling us. We were supposed to be making crystals for use in satellite navigation, telemetry, and so forth. Crystals are better manufactured in the vacuum of space, as you know. We were intending to create the groundwork for a crystal-manufacturing laboratory in space, in fact, that would be staffed sort of like the oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Workers would have tours of duty. This was another attempt by NASA to turn a profit. José claimed that he was doing these kinds of experiments, but he showed no results. Just yesterday, when Jim was asleep, José scuttled up the hatch to say, “Look, brother, you know that the search for life beneath the poles is the military priority of the trip, right?”

Why did he keep saying this sort of thing? He stood there looking at me, and his eyebrows were so grown together that they looked like they could take flight from his forehead. And that unsightly scar of his constituted a second smile, a malevolent, snickering intention.

“José, you do your job and I’ll do mine. I may have to smell you, but that doesn’t mean I have to make small talk with you.”

“Hey, they’re listening in Houston! Show a man some respect!”

“They won’t hear this conversation for, oh, about ten minutes. If they are awake and taking an interest.” Because that’s how long it takes radio waves to get back to Earth, ten minutes. From this distance. By the time you read this blog, José might very well have moved on to another topic entirely. Though he had so few. In fact, when the conversation didn’t go any further, he turned his back on me and rappelled back down the ladder to his warren of scientific contraptions, which may or may not be about the search for life under the ice caps at the poles, depending on your level of twenty-first-century paranoia.

And now some more facts. Our craft is called the Excelsior , and as I’ve said, is one of three ships. Each night at 1700 hours, Earth time, I was accorded the good fortune, as communications officer, to talk to the astronauts from the other vessels, namely the Pequod and the Geronimo . The total number of astronauts on those vessels, as you would expect, was six, two of them being women — the science officer on the Geronimo , Debbie Quartz, and the first officer on the Pequod , Laurie Corelli. Without being offensive, if at all possible, I would like to note that after a week of having failed to see a single woman up close, I did start to have little fantasies about each of them, in my naps, and in my semi-sleep. Did Debbie and Laurie really exist? Were they as soft as I remembered? Yes, there was something soft in my recollections, and let us say that this thing was a woman! It was only occasionally that they were brisk and peremptory and did their jobs better than the rest of us.

On the night I want to tell you about, it was Laurie who signed on first from the Pequod . She hailed in the usual way, before asking how I was doing.

“Not bad,” I replied. Actually, my wife, who, as I have indicated, had lately been cohabiting with her restaurateur brother, had remarked in a recent message that she was proud of me, though I tend to think that this message was staged by the people at NASA. This note actually made me feel a little lonelier than before.

“The novelty has kind of worn off,” I remarked to Laurie, “but what’s new over there? Still looking at our taillights?”

“We haven’t picked up any speed on you yet,” Laurie said. This kind of scripted banter nauseated me. Laurie looked, on the video screen, as if she hadn’t been able to wash her hair much. It was dark brown and pulled back, a little disarranged. Behind her, in the rear of the camera’s fish-eye view of the Pequod , I could see that Brandon Lepper, the one guy on the mission I found even more suspect than José, was trying to edge into the shot. You know how in space movies there was always one guy who got eaten by the aliens? I hoped that Brandon Lepper would be that guy. In the videoconference uplink, he was doing curls with some free weights, which was stupid, because they didn’t actually weigh anything, and wouldn’t until we got to Mars. Laurie was elaborating on the virtues of Olympus Mons. She really wished we were landing there instead of near the southern pole. “It’d really be something to tell my son that I was going to be on a mountain that is 69,000 feet high.” This was a scripted comment, since I happen to know that Laurie’s son has some developmental problem, like many other kids these days, and despite his uncanny ability to compose serious orchestral music on his computer, he wants, by all accounts, almost no interaction with his mother.