Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

The four of us, from power and infrastructure, stood for a minute in the dusk until the sun dipped away and we walked back toward our rovers. It was Abu who opened the subject, the subject we all knew we would have to address. I suppose we were putting it off.

“How should we go about dealing with him?”

“I think we ought to talk to NASA about it, even if we can’t trust them. Let’s see if they give away anything we need to know,” I said.

“And when they don’t give us anything?”

“We fabricate some unlikely plan of attack, leak it to them, see if it gets back to him.”

Jim nodded solemnly. Though it was clear that he was thinking about something else entirely. And Steve, still ghostly, passive, was taciturn too. If it was going to be the drugged-up guy with his arm in the sling who did all the talking, the outcome was liable to be uncertain.

And that reminds me. I forgot to say that Arnie managed to reattach two of my fingers! I didn’t properly re-create the scene after I managed to cross the hold and swing shut the air lock behind Brandon. I didn’t manage to re-create the moment when Jim finally stumbled down the ladder and into the cargo bay, to see blood everywhere and his shipmates laid out on the floor of the hold. The first thing he did was to attempt to revive José, and I can’t blame him for that. There was a lot of hopeless beating on José’s chest.

When it was clear that CPR was not going to work, we placed a tarp over the body in the cargo hold and I showed Jim my hand, I held up my hand, and I asked — if he had time — if he would help me look around the cargo hold. The thumb was easy to find because it was right there on the floor, not far from one of the tires of the ultralight aircraft. And after we turned up the thumb, we worked a little harder for the index finger, which had apparently skidded far across the cargo bay, because it was over by the trash-compacting area of the cargo hold. But what of my middle finger? Kids, we looked high and low, we looked under things and over things, we looked in places where a finger could not have been. And we simply couldn’t come up with the middle finger. I suppose I was in shock from the blood loss, and I would have wandered around looking for my finger indefinitely if Jim hadn’t put a stop to the looking. The only line of speculation that seemed plausible was that the middle finger had somehow left the Excelsior with Brandon. Maybe Brandon had plucked it up from the floor, oozing slightly, and put it into his front pocket. As a little prize that he would be able to put on a necklace of his own manufacture and wear later during his reign of blood .

After all, at the present temperature, the finger would keep for a very long time on the Martian surface. (We were intending to do some experiments to answer this very question, in fact. Since there were no or few microbes on the sterile surface of the planet, it followed that the whole planet was a sort of refrigerator. It would be hard to get meat and vegetable products to Mars, but once you got them here, they’d keep forever.)

In the morning, when the sun came up, after I had another injection, Jim drove me over to see Arnie. I had the thumb and the index finger in a small plastic bag on ice. Not that we needed it. And my hand was wrapped in a great bandage that had severely depleted our stock of gauze on the Excelsior . The Martian dawn was just breaking as we pushed through the air lock into the greenhouse to wake the others. I felt a strange uncertainty about this trip, as if our bad news was so bad that it made the impoliteness of waking Laurie and Arnie even worse. But they were making coffee.

Jim said, “We’re going to need some advanced medicine.”

After a suitable pause he launched into the explanation. I could see Laurie and Arnie pass through various stages of disbelief. I could see the shimmering of Planetary Exile Syndrome in them, in which they did not want to believe. I could feel the heavy metals of Brandon’s rampage seep into the groundwater of the room. When no one quite knew what to suggest, Jim wordlessly laid the plastic bag down on the table in the greenhouse. The club of gauze at the end of my arm hadn’t even really registered for Arnie.

I said, “Do you think you have enough tools here to do a bit of reattachment?”

“Oh, damn it,” Arnie said. “Damn it to hell. What the hell?”

“That’s the least of it,” Jim said, “but we can’t really afford to have Jed out of action, can we? I mean, a man’s got to have a thumb. He won’t even be able to do the dishes without that thumb.”

As Arnie was examining the fingers in the bag, and (subsequently) unrolling my gauze club, he asked what I was doing for pain relief, and I hate to say it but I was completely high that day, as well as in the days afterward. I was flying on some synthetic opiate that NASA had sent along with us, and the stars in the Martian sky at dawn, and the moons, they all looked fabulous to me, like a backdrop that some filmmaker had gussied up to impress the crowds at the late show on Saturday night. The stars seemed like little neurons in my skull, in the vastness of my own intelligence. I told Arnie what I was on and how much, and he nodded approvingly, said something hackneyed about staying ahead of the pain curve. And then, in the course of his preliminary examination, he managed to recognize the numerical discrepancy between the number of fingers in the bag and the number of stumps on my hand.

“Aren’t you short a digit here?” he said.

“Couldn’t find the other one,” I said.

“It’s always something,” Arnie offered.

For those who are curious: synthetic opiates are not enough for microsurgery. And even if microsurgery, with the aid of nanotechnology, is routine back where you are, and even if Arnie had done a few reattachments in his past, doing it on Mars, on a table, in a greenhouse, with pretty rudimentary surgical equipment, when you’re waiting for a madman to appear to hack you to death again, and again, and again , well, it makes for a difficult surgery. They had to hold me down. The three of them. They strapped me down with cargo belts like I was a raving lunatic. Laurie was holding my arm, and Jim was holding my head, and I was scared. I have been scared on this mission before, there have been many opportunities, and I am not the most courageous man on the mission, and I never will be. I am here to be organized, detail oriented, a good communicator, a utility infielder who can do a lot of things reasonably well. I know that I felt the little vascular connections being reattached, I felt every one of them, I don’t care what they say about local anesthetic obliterating the feelings. I felt the venous and arterial material transiting through me, felt the torn muscles back where they belonged, and the hours it took seemed doubly or triply agonizing. And I wet myself, and I wept bitterly and begged for Arnie to be through long before he was, and when it was done, and Jim hauled me up onto my feet, Arnie said, “Jed, I’d like to promise you that those fingers are going to stay on there, but I can’t promise you anything of the sort. While I doubt they will become gangrenous, because we just haven’t seen much evidence of that sort of thing here on Mars, you might have such bad circulation in there that they have to be taken off again. Keep the sutures clean, use soap and water, let me know if you have reduced sensation as the days go forward.”

“Well, Arnie,” I said, “I’m just grateful to you,” and then my knees buckled again.

Under the circumstances, I did a pretty good job at the funeral. And for this I can only thank drugs. My problem with these things, and I’m ashamed to say I have had occasion to sample many of the available opiates, is that you just can’t think straight in the same way. This was apparently as true on Mars as on Earth. I was moved to tears by the surgery because there’s a desolation that goes with having had a bunch of your fingers lopped off and then sewn back on by a gardener on a dusty desert planet, when you are still a year or more from making it home, and your new friend has just been slaughtered, and your lover will no longer recognize that you are together; I guess there were many reasons to be moved to tears.