Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

Anyway, so my wife and I got into my car, and between bursts of yelling at each other, we tried to reconstruct where Ginger might have been. Ginger was just at that age when she was wearing those fashionable short shorts, through which you could practically see her labia, and there were the piercings I already mentioned, and the subcutaneous, cranially implanted jewelry, which went with the partially shaved head, and she hadn’t yet realized that she was no longer the innocently unsexed girl, but was now becoming the sex machine of puberty, the desiring machine. I had to avoid looking at Ginger sometimes, because I was embarrassed about how proud I was of her very adult body. This all made it that much more terrifying not to know her whereabouts. My wife was on the wrist assistant, dialing up Ginger’s friends and their mothers, and that horrible walkie-talkie bleep those things make was driving me insane, and then it hit me! It was obvious: Ginger was back at the campus, not at oboe lessons, not at ballet. And we drove all the way back to the family center at Cape Canaveral in silence, scarcely a family in our sub-mini coupe that was just big enough to fit two people whose marriage was falling apart.

We found Ginger with Debbie Quartz. In fact, the two of them were in stellar engineering, which is a simulation program that Debbie helped to design. You gather up a certain amount of liquid hydrogen, and a certain amount of stellar dust, add some gravitation, a little bit of galactic convection, and so forth, and you make up a star and a star name. You watch to see how your star will affect the gravitational fields of the stars around it. Maybe you try to spin off some planets; maybe you attempt to terraform. It’s a helluva game. Debbie was in on the ground floor with this one, had a percentage on it, which was why she had a waterfront house and a palm grove. She had a friend trying to market the product to the big game behemoths from China and India. But that’s not the part I’m remembering. The part I’m remembering is that I found my daughter, Ginger Stark-Richards, with Debbie Quartz, sitting by a console, designing a solar system, and when I started in on Ginger, like a dad will do sometimes, asking her why she hadn’t called either of us (even though it was probably all my fault), Debbie said, “Jed, Ginger and I had this appointment on the books for a couple weeks, and I just forgot to tell you. I’m awfully sorry about that.”

Some people just have that smile, the one with the many constituent hues. The rainbow coalition of smiles. Not only a smile because there’s no longer a problem, but also a smile because the person smiling somehow knows more about the situation than you do; it makes her happy not to require recognition of her kindness, because she actually cares about you and doesn’t care about her own glory; it’s a generous smile, a confident smile, a happy smile, but also a smile with a gradient that indicates there’s not much left to smile about these days; we do the best we can . Only a sad person can smile so memorably. That was Debbie Quartz’s smile, especially when she took my wife’s hand, and said, “Pogey, I should’ve called. I’m really very sorry. I have just been so excited about this stellar modeling, and Ginger was the very first young person I wanted to try it out on.”

Ginger didn’t say anything. No one was going to let on about where the fib started and ended. That was how Debbie Quartz was. Generous, but also impenetrable. Wasn’t a couple of weeks later, when I leased out the Stark-Richards house to cover mortgage payments and child support, that I started sleeping on her couch.

It was in this vein that Dr. Anatoly Thatcher went on about how great Debbie was, saying, “She was an absolutely committed astronaut.” And then he started in with the guff that was designed to indemnify the agency against legal action. This line of reasoning had to do with Space Panic: “Ladies and gentlemen, you all know how unpredictable a deep-space voyage is, and how uncertain we are about the long-term effects of weightlessness, exposure to gamma rays, and so forth. In addition to these risks, there is another subject about which we previously knew very little, and that is the psychological effects of increasing distance from the home planet. Since the first sign of trouble with Deborah Quartz, which occurred soon after launch at t-zero, the psychology team here at Mission Control began profiling Debbie and the rest of the crew and have begun projecting our revised mission expectations. What we want to present to you is the possibility that there may, in fact, be a sort of disinhibiting disorder that comes from interplanetary travel. We don’t know how this is going to play out over the course of a very long mission, but we do know that none of you, according to our evaluations so far, has been free of affective overreaction to mission stimuli. We solicit your opinions on this subject, naturally, but this is our sense of things. Earlier missions have suggested this possibility to us, and we are not surprised to find that the symptoms are exaggerated the longer and more distant the flight. Remember the mutiny on Spacelab, for example, or the incident of interspecies violence on the Mir. You will recall that these events were summarized in some of your prelaunch reading. All we want to say about this is that under the circumstances, you are the ones who are going to have to adapt and facilitate treatment and remediation of these mental-health complaints. You are the ones who can make your interpersonal experiences more agreeable, more harmonious. If you are unable to remember that your own motivation may be somewhat clouded by Space Panic, or interplanetary disinhibitory disorder , as we are now calling it here, perhaps you can nonetheless extend your sympathy and understanding to your fellow crew members, and in this way we can prevent further difficulty. The mission has lost one of its best, finest, and most trusted astronauts, and we cannot afford to lose anyone else. We are willing to sacrifice the odd satellite; we are willing to lose an unmanned rocket here and there. Hardware is expensive, but there is always something learned from the reversals. We are not, however, willing to lose manpower. NASA is about humankind’s aspirations. Not about technology. We protect our people. You should do the same. I urge you all to be mindful of what I’ve brought up tonight. Over and out.”

Jim Rose and I sat there as the screen went blue again, and in stunned silence we pondered the meanings of this communication. Everything was so much worse than they knew on the ground, but maybe Dr. Anatoly Thatcher had a point. Maybe there was some kind of interplanetary menarche , some periodic self-slaughtering impulse, and now we were at its mercy. The question was whether we could survive the experience. If our bodies could survive, might it be our personalities, our hearts, that gave out? Did terms like heart and soul have any meaning beyond the surface of the home planet? Were these convenient metaphors dependent on a certain level of atmospheric pressure? A water-based ecosystem?

Jim said, “That certainly did not make a public servant feel confident about his job.” He had these worry lines. At the corners of the eyes. If anything, they had become worse on the Mars mission. Additionally, there was the tendency, with weightlessness, for a body to hold water above the waist. Whatever the cause, in times of great stress, worry lines broke out on Jim like a series of fermatas over the symphonic score of his personality.

“Do you notice any of it?” I asked.

“What? Disinhibitory whatever?”

“Roger that.”

“I notice that I am not sleeping,” he said, and fell into a conspiratorial whisper. “I notice that certain people here in our neighborhood do not seem trustworthy any longer to me, and I notice that I cannot shake the idea that we are just going to Mars to pick up the minerals necessary for some new kind of explosive something-or-other. And I don’t know if that’s what I signed up for, or if I want to be a part of that. I still don’t know what I want to do about it. What do you think?”