Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

“Wait,” I said.

He looked stricken. As though I were going to draw a permanent halt to our space explorations! But I had no such intention. Petrolatum was an important product on the Excelsior , because our skin was patchy and flaky for lack of moisture in the pressurized, recirculated air of the cabin. There was even an official supplier of petrolatum to the Mars mission, and as with other licensing firms, I’m discouraged from naming it, though you will find its banner advertising throughout the site. Nor am I allowed to remark that the official sponsor of petrolatum to the Mars mission was about to serve as the lubricant for Uranian delights.

By my bed, on the little overhead shelf where my personal effects were Velcro’d down, was a precious tube of the stuff. I brandished it, as if I already knew how these props of the trade became fetish objects in their own right.

Jim was stroking his space arm while he waited for me, and making some noises that sounded like a bull elephant in the midst of toppling banyan trees, and this was both deeply shameful and not at all feminine, and about the most exciting thing I had ever heard. The cry of the heron lifting off from the swamps, that prehistoric and laughable squawk, didn’t hold a candle to Jim Rose in the moment of ecstatic celebration. I urged him to apply the petrolatum, if possible, without any getting loose in the cabin. The place already felt like the inside of an immemorial triple-X film emporium, where the patrons were all lacquered with their juices. Jim was only too happy to oblige.

“How do we do it?” he asked.

“How complicated can it be?” I said. “They were doing it in ages past. Well before the combustion engine, for example.”

He reached down and took hold of me, as though he had neglected my own little reentry hose coupling. “Are you going to do me too?”

“Is that what you want, you Southern prince?”

“I’ve been thinking about it for days.”

“You first.”

“Which?”

“In me.”

And I turned, so that I was facing the reinforced windscreen of the capsule, and beyond the windscreen, in the foreground of the great mass known as the Milky Way, was our imminent destination, the Red Planet , like the hide of a great mother to whom we were soon going to apply ourselves for nourishment, and as I took note of the massed dry ice of the North Pole, I could feel the space arm , hungering at the opening of me, and then the space arm , plunging in. I would like to say, kids, that this is nothing but a pleasant sensation, and that when you love someone enough it is a consensual and loving act, but if I’m being honest, this is not how I experienced it. There was a sharp intake of breath, as though I were somehow responsible for inspiring all the oxygen in the capsule, and then there was a sharp stabbing sensation, sort of how I imagine it must feel to find your innards impaled on a pike, and this coincided with Jim driving in harder and deeper, till I was sure he was going to stir up that evening’s ham somewhere, up in my stomach. I’m afraid I just couldn’t get the hang of it, the first time, and it smelled a little rank too. They just don’t tell you about that in all the pornographic literature.

For a second, therefore, I needed him to pull the space arm out, while I got myself better situated. After all, we were drifting around, and the only thing stabilizing us was Jim hanging on to my hips, and that made it hard for me to feel like much but his pincushion, his voodoo doll. After one last gigantic thrust, in fact, we went careening across the capsule and smacked our heads on the hatch to the upper air lock. That was going to result in contusion . Jim was all overheated, however, and he did not want to stop, as men never want to stop, I suppose. As I myself, on many an occasion, did not want to stop. But by grabbing on to a maintenance step by the hatch coupling, I did manage to unimpale myself briefly. Unfortunately, Jim Rose was at the segment of the curve of masculine desire known as the point of no return , and he could not stop, and he whimpered like a kicked mutt, and from out of the space arm issued a torrent of celestial blobs. Given what I have already explained to you, kids, it would have been a lot better, from virtually every point of view, if this spunk had been fired off into some kind of receptacle, like my mouth or some other opening. Because now Jim’s issue was scattering in many directions at once, toward all the walls of the capsule, according to the very physical properties of explosions. This was the Big Bang of interplanetary sex.

“My God in the heavens!” Jim said. The last few drops expelling themselves from his cock, now withering. “Oh, man, we gotta do something about this! Will you help me…” Immediately, he set about rappelling from side to side of the capsule, trying, vainly, to capture droplets of jism. But in order to put them where, exactly? Kids, it’s like trying to keep still the little marbles of mercury.

“Just eat it,” I said, with the weariness of the just-fucked.

“Eat it?”

“Put it in your mouth, for godsakes,” I said. And then the two of us breaststroked around the capsule, attempting to swallow down the afterglow of our profane and inadvisable entanglement.

There was a lot to do during the orbital insertion, kids. Next morning, we had that fellow with the sibilant s’ s from Houston on the line, reminding us how things were going to proceed, and where and when Jim was going to have to monitor the aerobraking system, to insure that the computer-automated pilots were performing according to instructions from Mission Control — whose messages, I should say, were now reaching us with a thirty-something-minute delay. If something were going wrong, it was going to be a long time before we could do anything about it.

The nearer we got to the planet, the more unnerving the whole business became. As long as we were looking at Mars from a distance, it still resembled an artist’s rendering, something from the forty years of public-television programming, or the kind of thing they put on postage stamps, back when there were actual postage stamps. Maybe it was just some bonbon out there suspended in the heavens. Still, the closer we got, the more likely it was we would have to land. That big, inhospitable desert that could freeze you to death at high noon, that was where we were going to land, amid the unfiltered solar and interstellar radiation, which even as we spoke was making the likelihood of certain varieties of cancer that much likelier.

You know, kids, that the famous storms of Mars have been visible as far back as the nineteenth century, right? There just isn’t that much on Mars but dust. And there’s so much temperature swing on the planet that the seasonal changes, particularly in late summer, spawn massive storms. Also, because the gravity isn’t as strong as on Earth, the size of the stuff that’s liable to go blowing in the dust storms… Well, when you get right up close to the surface, and you can see down to the craters, the dust begins to compel your attention.

At about 0800 hours (six hours before the Geronimo and twelve hours before the Pequod ), we got the confirmation from Houston. We were, indeed, to begin braking in ten minutes. They gave us an opportunity to talk to the other ships, and Steve from the Geronimo came on the screen almost immediately, wishing godspeed.

“We’ll be seeing you down there,” I replied, “before long. Make sure that reactor is working properly, okay?” A nervous reminder, and thus an unprofessional one. For what else was he to do?