Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

After we helped the others prepare, the three of us shut ourselves into the Excelsior and waited. We had dinner as we did most nights. And then we played cards. José was complaining that he kept losing, and that the two of us were ganging up on him. He said this in a good-natured way, not like the José of old. It occurred to me, because there are idle moments in life when you think about these things, that perhaps the José of old just never would exist again. With a serious head injury, you get these alterations in personality. They’re just rarely this pleasant. But then I made note of an even more interesting hypothesis. What if, kids, José had never injured his head at all? What if José Rodrigues was looking for some graceful way out of the military-industrial straitjacket that NASA had fitted upon him? It was a straitjacket that other Mars mission sociopaths still seemed to feel they needed to wear, but maybe José had had an interplanetary change of heart, a space epiphany. It was possible this new José was the more genuine one. I didn’t say this aloud, not while beating him at cards. There were many more months to live together. Who knew how many?

We prepared for bed. Or at least Jim prepared for bed, because he always went to bed earliest, preferring to wake just as it was light. Like a monk. Jim had been complaining about sleep for some time, had begun relying on a certain sleep preparation, which I believed was going to run out before long. I was worried about him becoming habituated to the medication. He may have begun already, which would account, perhaps in part, for his short temper with me.

For example, he was prone to complaining about how I chewed my food. I had, at some point in my youth, taken to heart advice I’d read that suggested that you should chew every mouthful of food thirty-two times. I had lived some of my life on Earth in a careless way where this kind of advice was concerned. Because of the dearth of food we actually were permitted to consume on the Mars mission, I had begun counting, nearly obsessively, each and every mastication. I almost felt guilty, somehow, if I swallowed before I had chewed the proper number of times. Then, one day, in a whimsical mood, I’d made the mistake of boasting about this to Jim. Since then, he had watched me eat, when he could bring himself to do so, with ever increasing amounts of agitation. Apparently, he had started counting my mastications as well. His other complaint referred to the wounded expression he said I wore each night when he elected to go to sleep and to leave José and me to do as we wished. No wonder he resorted to sleep aids. On the night in question, Jim, perhaps by reason of narcotics, was soon snoring the delightful little rasps that were his nocturnal communication.

An hour or so later, after I had written my nightly bulletin post to Ginger and read a little bit of Marcus Aurelius, I found myself so drowsy that I fell asleep with my cabin suit still on, reading glasses still pinched onto my nose, having failed to brush my teeth, which was something I had started to fail to do, in the past weeks, because of the scurvy that was commencing to afflict me. Once your teeth start becoming loose, who gives a royal shit about them? Unless Arnie was going to give me some of the green peppers he was hiding away, I was just going to lose some of my teeth, and that would be that!

The light went off down in the cargo bay, and then night was upon us. The Martian night, which by virtue of the lack of streetlamps and other light pollutants was of a fearsome intensity. We could hear the wind outside the Excelsior , in our dreamless and lonely states of unconsciousness, and we could hear the sand pelting the sides of the capsule, drifts of it accumulating. Or that is how I’m reconstructing it, since I was already asleep.

A commotion awoke me. A scuffle of some kind. I didn’t know the hour. What difference do particular times make to a Martian colonist? Clocks are for the pointy heads back on Earth. Anyway, it was night and I heard something, and it was kind of quiet at first, but then it seemed a lot louder, a struggle nearly, an altercation. Astronauts pitted against others. Soon I was awake, and I was running, somewhat disoriented, down to the cargo bay, carrying a penlight. Of course I bodily fell down the ladder and landed in a heap on the lower floor. No bones broken. Banged up horribly. I gathered myself up on the way to the light switch.

I noticed the cargo hatch door was open, obviously. There was dust and wind howling into the open hatch. The sand was blowing into the capsule, likewise the frigidness, that affrontery, which was bound to freeze up a lot of the electronics in the cargo bay if I didn’t work quickly, which naturally I did, without taking the time to see what had caused the breach of protocol. But at this point I did notice the two men struggling, those men whose identities you have now surmised. They danced into view. One of them was as dark as the night, or at least a dark mahogany, perhaps from coming this way in the storm. His space suit, which had once been polar bear white, was Egyptian henna, and his beard was longish and ragged. Brandon Lepper. I don’t know what had brought him to this, if this was interplanetary disinhibitory disorder or some bizarre conception of duty to the nation, but whatever the cause, he was now indisputably here.

“Brandon, what the hell are you doing?”

It took him a moment to register that he had now two assailants he was going to have to deal with, and in that interval, José, still in his blue capsule pajamas, managed to wrench himself free.

José said to me, “Jed, get out of here. I’ll deal with it.”

“No, you will not!”

“Go get Jim. Go, go!”

Brandon intended to employ a weapon, a homemade blade of his own devising. He’d sharpened up some industrial aluminum, no doubt harvested from one of the piles of space junk that he now called home, and he brandished it as if it were a twenty-first-century machete. Kids, I have had hand-to-hand-combat training. So have many of the astronauts on the Mars colony, since many of us came from branches of the military. Men had fallen before me on the fields of battle, dispatched by my hand. Brandon, meanwhile, was a welterweight boxer, and in this case he was a pugilist with a long, shiny blade. I called for Jim. I ran to the bank of monitors in the cargo bay, hit the intercom, and called for Jim again, cursing his medicaments. When I returned, Brandon had José pinioned beside the ultralight, and had the machete perilously close to his face. All of this took place in a curious silence. With the kind of progress that you can make in a lower-gravity environment, I was on him in a couple of bounding steps.

I swear I could hear Jim snoring upstairs as Brandon flung me off his back. Brandon, in a bulky space suit minus the helmet, was having trouble maneuvering. José gave him a good smack in the jaw, a roundhouse, I suppose, and then winced with the pain of it, instantly clutching his right hand. In some kind of low-gravity thrall, I watched Brandon then raise up the machete, with a vigorous backswing that I associated with the best tennis players, and it was almost as if I saw my own heroics before they happened, the juncture in which I flung myself into the line of the backswing and held up my left hand — and thank heavens this was not my dominant hand. Just as José himself pivoted out of reach of his attacker, Brandon’s blade sliced clear through the thumb and first two fingers of my left hand. My fourth finger, with my bittersweet wedding band, likewise my pinkie, remained. In a silence marked only by the grunt of my own stunned shock, and by Brandon’s hiss of murderous intention, we all watched the fingers fly free. I then turned my gaze to the stumps, which had begun to fountain with blood, after which I collapsed onto the floor, clutching the mangled hand with the remaining good one.