Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: Jed, it’s me. You don’t have to give me the party line. I get enough of that down here. Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on? Is everyone okay? Are you okay?

RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: It’s impossible to explain what’s going on here, that’s all I can say. It’s not like Earth . It’s a different place. The language is changing already. The language already applies to Martian things in different ways. I don’t know if I can tell you in a way that will make sense. We belong to a different planet, whose culture is rapidly evolving in ways that will be hard to understand back on the home planet. Our ethics and legal system are already beginning to diverge.

PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: I really hate it when you say I can’t understand things. It’s so condescending. But it’s not really for myself that I’m asking anyway. I’m worried about Ginger. She hears things around. At school, on the base (when she’s there), she doesn’t know what to think. She’s mostly too independent to ask you these kinds of things herself, or that’s what I think. But she wants to know. I think you ought to talk to her. More than you’re doing now.

RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Well, I’m fine . That’s all she needs to know. I can’t run the risk that our communications are being monitored by Mission Control. I’m sure they are, as a matter of fact. We intend to solve the issues, the problems, internally, the ones you’re alluding to. There’s a lot going on, and the situation is fluid, changing by the day. If you can give me a sign that you are you, and that you are not being used by other people at this moment, I can reassure you a little bit. So maybe you can remind me about the illustration on your lower back?

PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: The tattoo?

RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Don’t waste time with two-word responses.

PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: St. Theresa in ecstasy. Like the sculpture.

RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Why did you leave your husband?

PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: What do you mean? I left my husband because he left me. Long ago. In all the symbolic ways. If you really want to know, if this is really how you want to deal with this question now, I’ll say that my husband is so broken, so lost, that he’s incapable of opening up to anyone on Earth, least of all me. So I hope he is better at opening up to people on Mars. His impenetrability makes him very effective at certain kinds of military operations, where human emotions just clog up the system. Where emotions just get in the way of things. There was a time when I was able to see through all this to the person within him. Then he felt exposed, he didn’t want me, he walled himself off, he was too walled off to be able to want me.

RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Okay, I believe that you are you. I thank you for your credible information. The following is what I have to say to you, for Ginger, and for the Mars mission people, who will likely force you to give them a transcript of this exchange. There are forces in the universe that make havoc of the human personality as we understand it. The human personality is a tendency to respond to certain planetary stimuli in certain predictable ways. In the absence of predictable planetary stimuli, the personality no longer acts or organizes itself according to any therapeutically based model. Talk show lingo just does not apply here. We found these things on the crossing. The movement out of ourselves into some new dynamic of identity was slow but undeniable. You could see it in the others if not in yourself. The watery planet is an orderly place, despite its apparent systemic chaos. Elsewhere, like here in the arctic desert of Mars, feelings run out onto the empty canvas. They evaporate like water vapor, or carbon dioxide, which, here, goes straight from a solid to a gas. Nothing is explicable. Murderous rage is as common as dark matter. Nothing in the color wheel of emotions is not experienced regularly here. Often at the same time. What does this mean about those left behind? Our loved ones? What it means is that never a day goes by when we are not convulsed in confusion and loss, with the sense that we have been so profoundly changed that the selves that we were will not make it back to the watery planet intact. Mars is a place of death. It is fascinatingly dead. Its death is so complex as to be more lively than life. I miss Ginger more than I can say, Pogey, and I want to make up to you what I have failed to do as a person. I was a better person when you first met me. But this ends my communication for now, because I have official responsibilities to see to.

If I didn’t say so before, there is the constant danger of hypothermia on the planet Mars. While I occasionally speak of people opening and closing their visors and breathing the atmosphere, I think I should reiterate that this happens almost never. Breathing here is like asphyxiating in your friend’s garage in Greenland. This makes it even more inexplicable, based on our experience, that Abu would attempt to take off his regulation threads, while out working on his sculptures behind the power plant, and thus fall prey to a really aggravated case of hypothermia. Unless he was afflicted with the character illness we have so far found among ourselves. Whose name, again, is interplanetary disinhibitory disorder .

This was last week, and since then Abu has been in and out of consciousness. Arnie has been looking after him in the greenhouse, and I should report, while I’m speaking of the greenhouse, that Abu’s situation came to light a mere twenty-four hours after we learned of our first fully vine-ripened interplanetary tomato. Laurie thought it would be incredibly small because there are not the right nutrients for a tomato in the soil we brought with us, and she was right. Nor were the appropriate nutrients to be found here in the Martian soil. However, what a Martian tomato lacks in size it more than makes up in taste. I am willing to believe that it was the total absence of tomato (or most anything else among fruits and vegetables, excepting soy) and a shortage of vitamin pills that resulted in my losing a front tooth last week. But let us brush, so to speak, across my dental woes. Let us move directly to the celebration of this Martian tomato.

The spice trade, kids, began because people were stultified by their traditional cuisine. If we could have managed a spice trade on Mars, we would have embarked on it immediately. Cumin! Mustard! Coriander! Allspice! The tomato came into our lives the way these spices, and the Dutch East India Company, revolutionized medieval Europe, by despoiling Africa and Asia of their resources. The historical spices distracted fetid, malodorous religious zealots from popping the smallpox on their gin-blossomed noses long enough to give way to the Renaissance! Let’s hope the tomato does the same on Mars!

In fact, my last conversation with Abu was about the tomato. It had been a couple of weeks since Laurie had espied the little green fruit on the vine, and Abu and I were over looking at it. The tomato was like a big museum show back on Earth. It was a blockbuster that no one wanted to miss. I had been over to see it on several occasions, as though I might somehow watch the tomato grow.

“I don’t even like tomatoes very much,” Abu observed. “We didn’t eat them much in my childhood. There is only occasional call for them in Yemeni dishes. As an American, however, I appreciate ketchup. Just not tomatoes.”

“Textural thing?”

“Exactly.”

“Rice pudding? Same kind of problem?”

“Reminds me of… of… well… a yeast infection,” Abu said.

“Space food must be hard.”