Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

“About the disinhibitory excuses? Or about the military-industrial complex? I never believed we were up to any good. I only believed I wanted to travel. I like to see the lines of the superhighway disappear beneath me.”

“But do you notice any symptoms of interplanetary disinhibitory disorder? ”

“I would have to have strong feelings about my character in the first place,” I said. “And I do not. Disinhibition might make me less ill-tempered. This might improve my outlook.”

The video game we played blinked away on the screen on the table in front of us. I unhooked myself from the seat where I had been perched and allowed myself to roam freely across the capsule, the better to avoid his eyes, which seemed to have some probing quality.

Despite a wish to avoid further disclosure, I went on. “I’m the perfect astronaut. I have no native qualities. I’m the guy you want to have on your team because I have no needs. I take the orders. If you want to know the truth, the only disinhibiting I’ve noticed concerns my dislike of José. It blossoms.”

Perhaps I thought I was winning Jim over with this remark.

Jim Rose unhooked himself from the table and swam toward me. Despite my blue mood, my poor conversational skills, the dark forecasts from home, his presence beside me lightened my mood. He said, “You aren’t afraid?”

“Of what’s to come?” I said.

“Well,” said Captain Jim Rose, the linebacker, the most-likely-to-succeed astronaut, the pilot, the future political candidate, the hero to the economically deprived young men of the Wild West, “I am. I am afraid.”

That was when he first took my hand.

We just celebrated the first Christmas of the Mars mission! Only one or two more to go! Before we’re back on Terran terra firma! I have to say it was good to have ham . I’d almost forgotten what ham was like. It had a voluptuous stink that was just unlike anything else we had here on the Excelsior . Oh, the little frivolities of life. They enabled you to go on. We called over to the Pequod , to wish them a very merry holiday. So far no response. I contacted Houston not long after to ask if everything was all right on the other ships, and then I waited. To be sure, things were hard on the Pequod . They were shorthanded. Arnie Gilmore wasn’t meant to be doing the first officer stuff, the management stuff, but he was trying to do it, and Laurie was brushing up on piloting, which involved some daily lessons from Mission Control. Talk about your steep learning curve. She had three days, now, to figure out how to coordinate landing the Pequod , which was meant to be the last ship to land. Before that, we needed to secure the location of the cargo that had been launched at Mars in the last couple years, like the liquid hydrogen, so as to avoid losing the hardware components of the Earth Return Vehicle that were in the Pequod cargo hold, and which would be assembled into that craft for our trip home. Maybe the stress of piloting explained why Laurie wasn’t communicating. And yet the same was true of the Geronimo . I gave a yell over to Steve, to see how he was holding up, how his son’s strep throat was.

Abu sent a text message later that said they had gifts for Jim and José and me, but we’d have to wait till we were camped safely at Valles Marineris before they’d give them to us. Can you guess? Some more dehydrated ham?

Then my daughter called to wish me a merry Christmas, and while I would like to say that this was a joyous thing, and that I was very happy to be contacted by my daughter, Ginger, whose partially shaved head and cranial subdermal implants were clearly visible in the little postage-stamp-sized video feed, this was not exactly true. My daughter had achieved the time-honored goal of adolescents: she’d got rid of one of her parents. She had shipped one of her parents about 40 million miles away. While she did not cause this relocation, she could at least reap the benefits. She could feel abandoned, she could detest my personal grooming habits, she could do whatever the hell she liked at least 50 percent of the time. When I looked at her, in the little postage-stamp-sized video feed, I saw a mirror image of myself. I saw the me who attempted to keep himself apart from his crewmates. And that person, that person who was not appearing in NASA-related promotional material, was socially uncomfortable, not a gifted small-talker; that person was a mumbler; that person tried to avoid talking to people when they came to the door; that person spent inordinately long periods of time in the bathroom (even on the Excelsior ) because he was assured of being undisturbed there; that person wanted the acclaim of the world and disliked the world in equal measure. It was while I was watching this replica of myself, with shaved head and subdermal cranial implants and lots of piercings, that Ginger began to weep, remarking how hollow Christmas seemed to her now, I don’t see what all of this is for; it’s just some big lie, especially now they have this ad online saying how it’s your duty as a patriot to buy more at Christmas, or some horseshit, Dad , and she said this with her bitter adolescent irony, the tears glistening on her cheeks. I bet the reindeer can’t stand temperatures near absolute zero, Dad, and they need oxygen, and they don’t like cosmic radiation or solar winds, and there’s no company store for the elves . And then my daughter produced a ukulele (her ability to play this instrument was news to me), and she began singing a little song, to ukulele accompaniment. It sounded faintly Hawaiian, if you ask me; I mean, that’s how you’d describe it. She’d written this out-of-tune melody, which she then sang in a husky, throaty voice: Daddy, merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, Daddy. The Earth misses you. The chimney misses you, Daddy. The stockings miss you. The mouse needs his cheese. Merry Christmas, Daddy. You’re lucky you didn’t see my report card. I got nothing good for Christmas, Daddy. Come home soon , and then, before she could finish, she started crying so hard that there was a little balloon of watery snot coming out of the nostril that had the nose ring in it. Soon my ex-wife appeared in the shot and whispered something to Ginger, who then allowed herself to be lured away to plum pudding with trans fats, after which my daughter’s wobbly voice was audible off-camera, We miss you!

A reasonable question might be: Does this kind of message really help? Does it build character? Or does it just make a guy like me feel worse? As far as I was concerned, human civilization at this moment consisted of nine persons. Well, make that eight persons, since one had floated away. Eight persons on a flotilla of ships. And this flotilla had nothing to do with Christmas, as far as I could tell. Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t crucified on Mars. That’s the big lesson of Christmas: Peace on Earth .

Meanwhile, Steve and Abu had Brandon Lepper under round-the-clock surveillance. They wouldn’t leave him alone on any shift. In the brief opportunities I had to talk to Steve, he wouldn’t tell me what had happened, because, I think, he was worried about what Brandon was doing or would do with the information. Then there was José here, who had begun practicing strange breathing exercises that he said were part of the Chinese national religion known as Falun Dafa. José assumed these praying mantis positions before and after he used the exercise bicycle. And he agitated from one leg to another, caroming off the capsule walls. We could hear him down in the cargo bay, singing Mandarin-language pop music. His beard seemed very, very long. I don’t know if Falun Dafa had recruited him to begin spreading a message of truthfulness, benevolence, and forbearance to the planet Mars, but it was not impossible. They were, after all, one of the most popular religions on Earth, if by popular you meant having the greatest number of adherents, not to mention basilicas in Mongolia and Cape Verde. I kept expecting a dinner at which José explained to me, using acronyms, how “Millions and millions of EPs, in the most prosperous nation on Earth, the PRC, are mobilizing every day in government-sponsored RAs to learn how to channel these simple APMs into abundance and well-being, especially when they’re guided by members of the party; however, ROTP insures that I cannot pass on to you the five basic principles, because you are a WC.”