Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

Lately, he’d also been turning in kind of early. Maybe this was an indication of my TMCT, my total Mars conspiracy theory , in which everyone on the mission was on the payroll of some foreign intelligence service. Or everyone had allegiance to some governmental agency, and no one was talking or sharing information, and when we got to the surface of the planet, we’d all head off in different directions to contact our disparate patrons. Maybe that’s what Debbie was doing right now, from out in space somewhere, radioing out to aliens about the malevolent humans.

Kids, I had just a couple of days left to perfect my delivery of the line I was supposed to proclaim when I got out of the ship, commencing in this way the important “flags and footprints” portion of the Mars mission. You know what I mean, right? If something went wrong, if the mobile factory that had already landed on the surface (to mill the liquid hydrogen and to make propellant-grade methane) wasn’t working properly, and we had to turn right around, it was nonetheless important to get the human footprint in the sand as quickly as possible and to get the flagpole erected. I had to have my sentence ready to utter during the Mars landing sequence. The proclamation needed to be effected quickly, confidently, safely.

I’m not supposed to give it away early, the history-making sentence, so you can bet that this diary entry is going to be heavily censored by NASA. But I don’t have any secrets from you! Tomorrow I could be crushed during orbit insertion! So let me be the first to tell you that this piece of oratory was obviously written by a committee of speechwriters, many of them from the NASA public-relations office. I mean, what do you expect from a government agency? You get stiff, middle-American prose. So here it is, kids, the line you will never hear ahead of the big day: “This planet was named for the god of war, but with our small settlement, may our neighbor planet now be colonized in peace.” Feel free to comment among yourselves. Send responses to the Mars mission home page.

You know the big controversy about the Apollo missions, right? The moon landings? Neil Armstrong and the famous sentence that he botched? He was supposed to say: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Neil got a lot of credit for that sentence, but the fact of the matter is, he mangled it good by leaving out the article. For these reasons, NASA is very insistent that I practice my line, so as to avoid making any similar mistake. Moreover, you’ll notice that the sentence doesn’t have the article a in it. Maybe NASA became concerned about the article. They have never quite recovered from its loss. They have further warned about adding in unnecessary verbiage, as though an a , left over from the Apollo missions, floating around in space, might have drifted out to the fourth planet, where we are about to go into orbit, and this a will attach itself to me somehow, standing for aphasia , or atom bomb , or adultery , or I don’t know what, and I will mangle the sentence that they have so carefully constructed after months and months of meetings and consultants’ fees paid to advertising executives and public-relations experts.

In order even to write about the sentence, I had to copy it from a document that they sent earlier, a contract I had to sign, agreeing that I had no rights over the sentence. I didn’t write the sentence, the contract indicates, and I cannot use it or sign my name to it, once having uttered it. Any royalties accruing from the sentence belong to NASA itself. The sentence, in fact, is copyrighted and trademarked. Maybe because of this, kids, I can’t remember the goddamn sentence at all. When I’m trying to fall asleep, I drill myself on it, reading it aloud, repeating it again and again, and every single time, I screw it up. In fact, I think there have been occasions when I have added an a . For example, I think I might have said, “This planet was named for a god of war.” What’s the problem here? Utter inability to remember the one bit of serious business I alone have on the Mars mission?

It’s night now, and we are going into orbit in a mere twelve hours, and we could bounce off the Martian atmosphere and pogo into interstellar space, which would not be good. Such things depend on the aerobrakes, which were manufactured at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory by a project manager called Simon who is very unpleasant. He could easily have sabotaged the aerobrakes. In fact, while I was recently pondering Simon and his capacity for sabotage, I was saying the sentence over and over like it was a mantra from Falun Dafa. Except that I don’t know if Falun Dafa really has mantras and the like. Is the Buddha involved? Maybe if I practiced Falun Dafa, the way José practices it, I would facilitate the memorization process, and, upon our return to the planet Earth, prosperity would wash over me, along with a great wave of Asian air pollution.

Jim was meant to be waking in an hour or so, and José would be too. We were intended to be asleep simultaneously tonight, so that we would all be awake in the morning. For the aerobraking. It’s the rare night when we are all meant to be asleep, and so it was even more singular when Jim appeared by the side of my bed. If an astronaut can be said to be drifting nervously, then Jim was doing just that. Drifting. Nervously. I didn’t even hear him at first because I was wearing headphones that were playing recordings of interstellar radio waves, which I find kind of beautiful.

“Are you worried about tomorrow?” I said. It was awkward, him by my side. In my heart, for example, it was especially awkward.

Jim nodded.

“You’re a great pilot. One of the best pilots in the universe.” This was a mere pleasantry, since Jim wouldn’t have to do that much piloting. There is so much automation. “You’ll do great.”

“No slouch yourself.”

“I manage,” I said. In truth, I fly an ultralight, and a few models of fighter planes that no one bothers with anymore. The Mars mission has redundancy in pilots and in engineers. Everyone also knows some first aid.

Jim was not by my side to discuss piloting. There’s really no other way to put it except to tell you the truth. Suddenly Jim Rose grabbed my head and began to kiss me. I suppose I would call this the tomorrow-you-may-die style of kissing, the there-is-no-other-time-than-now kissing, the burn-me-at-the-stake-if-you-must kissing, the fair-is-foul-and-foul-is-fair kissing, the desert-island-hunger-and-thirst kissing, the drive-your-cart-over-the-bones-of-the-dead kissing, the may-I-burn-eternally kissing, the don’t-ask-don’t-tell kissing. And it was a big shocker . As I may have already said, I am a heterosexual military man living in Florida with an estranged wife and a daughter, and I have shunned any number of homosexuals. Sometimes I have put the military hurt on them, throttled not a few, especially military homosexuals, which is not to say that I don’t respect them. But I have had little actual experience with this kind of thing, excepting a few friends when I was prepubescent. That was just transitory and experimental.

There are some details that you should know about interplanetary kissing. Shaving, as I have indicated, is made very difficult by the low-gravity water problem and the recirculation of capsule resources. We just don’t shave often, and Jim hadn’t shaved in the last day or two. He was kind of scratchy and kind of, well, musky, too, which I couldn’t fail to notice because this was a stick-a-fork-in-me-because-I’m-fully-cooked sort of kiss. We were holding each other’s heads, it was a death grip, and we didn’t care if we were not exactly shaved, or if the full expression of masculinity entailed the sandpapering of faces; we were devouring; this was interplanetary disinhibitory devouring ; and I could hear him, as if over an intercom, whispering and moaning; it was a low moan, a moan that I recognized, namely the moan of months without being touched by another human being. Likely, you could hear this moaning coming from the beds of all the astronauts of the mission, even the beds of astronauts whom you did not favor with esteem; you felt great sorrow and sympathy for the fact of these astronauts being untouched, and as the weeks went by, you did feel as though you might touch them, the others, just because it was ridiculous; the drought of human affection was ridiculous; and so this moment was about the incredible gratitude of that drought coming to an end. Jim’s eyes were bloodshot, and his hair was a mess, but that didn’t stop me from wanting Jim Rose. I wanted Jim Rose, the pilot of our ship, and I wanted to kiss him some more, and I wanted to be kissed some more by Jim Rose, enough so that I almost didn’t care if José heard.