Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

“Every time I have a randy thought, every time I feel that tug, I feel like I’m defaulting on my leadership responsibilities, I feel like I’m thinking only of myself, when I have so much else to think about. Do I have room in my heart for the kind of outlandish behavior we undertook up there, or is that just part of space itself, part of the voyage, not part of life here among the desperate few—”

And then, while he was in the middle of the thought, he tore himself from me violently, and standing some feet away, he flung off his helmet, and I heard the hiss of oxygen, and then there was a groan of such mortal intensity that I wondered if he didn’t rip himself apart from the inside as he did it, whether to wrestle me to the ground or to embrace me I didn’t know, not at first, but I cried out to tell him not to run that terrible risk. Still, there was no choice but to do the same, to remove my helmet. There we were, two oxygen-deprived, frostbitten men who loved each other. Two men who had been driven as far from the dictates of heterosexual civilization as anyone ever had been. All that needed to be done was to accept where we were and what we had between us. Here was my lover on his knees in the Martian desert, clutching my leg and sobbing, driven from all earthly human civilization. The crown so heavy on his fevered brow.

He gasped, “I have lost everything!”

“It’s not so,” I whispered, faint of breath. “We don’t ever have to be together again, if only I can know that you care. It’s enough, Jim. If I just know that we’re in this together, and that I’m not dreaming about what happened. That’s enough. What I want is to feel like I have given myself to something or someone of substance. We can do this together. We can do it.”

He collapsed onto his backside. And as if it would somehow convince him of the seriousness of the situation, he grabbed a fistful of Martian topsoil and watched the orange dust blow free of his glove. Then I helped him to his feet. And then, because we were already in danger from exposure and hypoxia, we put back on the helmets and trudged homeward.

The following dialogue has been taking place for ten days or so. On the bulletin board application on our clipboards. I have vacillated about uploading the file because of how incomplete the exchange is, but ultimately, I have decided that it’s a good example of the way life is lived on the Mars colony, as well as being an interesting document of the times, and so I include it today.

GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: Dad, I have a little time cuz the homework is done. I had to do a report on women in politics over the last hundred years. Women are making all these great strides because there are more of them in congress and stuff, but I think maybe some of them are making strides if they don’t go into politics. I mean, why would you bother? So, anyway, what’s up on Mars?

RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Darling. Just seeing your handle on the computer log makes me want to cry. There’s so much back home I feel like I’m missing. Maybe that’s a defining feature of my time on Mars. Mars is where you go to miss out on things.

GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: You’re not missing much at all! A guy got killed playing X-treme lacrosse last night. A big head injury. And a governor of somewhere resigned after it came out he was trafficking in sex slaves. Someone tried to flatten Armenia with bombs last week. Can’t remember who.

RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: It’s you who I’m missing. I want to know everything. So tell me how much you’ve grown, what clothes you’re wearing. What the latest fashions are. What young people do about skin blemishes. And can you catalogue some of the slang for me?

GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: I think I’m the same size. I’m hoping that I kind of develop at least some boobs, you know? I mean, I don’t care if I have big gigantic breasts or anything. But at least some. By the way, I am kind of thinking that I might get nipple rings, which is maybe too much information. Mom says no. People are getting nipple rings that glow pale blue. If I pay with my own money from the job, she can’t complain.

RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: What job?

GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: Concessions at the gator refuge. I sit at this little booth. I watch when the little kids get this light in their eyes and come running over to the gift shop. I don’t understand why kids almost always want to see the toy animal as much as the real animal. Anyway, I get a lot of reading done at work. Space travel books. That’s what I like. By the way. The cool expression is “exploding viscera.”

RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Space travel books?

GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: The kind where people sail out into space and never look back. Some of them are about Mars, I guess. But Mars, to me, it kind of feels like going to Greenland, or something. It’s not so strange and unusual, because Mars is actually very close. And you’re there. I’m more interested in speed-of-light type things.

RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: I could give you some recommendations. And I could tell you some more about what it’s like traveling in space. Do you want to know more about this? It’s like being stuck in the trunk of a Cadillac on your way to being rubbed out. The mobster drives you around for months. And you feel like you’re going to throw up or dump in your pants.

GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: Thanks for sharing! I go to the observatory, you know, at the university, and also NASA lets me come down there pretty often and I go to the control room. Maybe once a week, even tho it’s a longish drive. I look at the surface of the planet, and I look at the pictures everyone has taken. Then I feel a little less worried. Hey, what happened to your blog anyway?

RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: I’m writing this sentence at 4:00 A.M., my time, honey. I have the alarm working so anytime there’s a communication on the computer log, it toggles this strobe light, and then I wake up to write you and hopefully I don’t bother the others. I don’t want to miss a chance. By the way, we’re doing fine. The biggest danger is boredom. When someone drills into a rock and finds something besides lava, that’s a big day. Half the time we don’t know what we’re finding until we hear back from NASA. As you can imagine, we’re not always first to hear. Many times, I’ve had to learn about us by reading the digest of the NASA website, which they send along in the morning mail. Abu and Steve, for example, from the Geronimo , have apparently found another good way to create oxygen as a by-product of chemical reactions they’re doing with the reactor. This is good news for us, because the air is thin, and we don’t have a limitless supply of the stuff.

GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: Dad, I guess I did want to ask you about things I heard, because I guess people have been saying some things, and I don’t know what’s true.

RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Like what? What are people saying?

GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: Some people were saying that NASA can’t control the Mars mission. You guys aren’t doing what you’re supposed to be doing, and they don’t know if you’re ever going to come back.

RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Who said that? Who told you that?

GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: One of the other kids.

RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Which one?

GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: I guess he’s Debbie’s nephew or something. I’ve been calling him up some, trying to help him feel better about what happened, you know?

RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Listen, Ginger, the thing I can tell you is that Mars is not just a distant outpost of Earth. It’s not just a rock that Earth is going to annex or that the NAFTA countries are going to annex. It’s not like if they annex it they’ll send a bunch of construction guys out (and a few hookers), and in eighteen months there will be golf courses. It’s not like that. Once you get here, once you go through the long journey, and you go through the experience of being separated from the home planet, you are changed , and you feel different. You feel, well, I guess you feel a little more free. What you find is that the freedom of this place, the blankness of this place, the clean slate of it, well, that’s what makes you feel differently. You feel like you are starting something new. And you feel that everything old and worn was kind of a mistake, and that if you have a chance to be part of what’s new, the society that is adapted to this place, to the severity of this place, then you don’t need all the mistakes of the past, the mistaken ways of doing things.