Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

Laurie was the only astronaut on the roster who could flash a smile while talking about horticultural yields. She made the tomato into six equitable slices, and these fell away from the center of the tomato all at once, and she picked out the greater part of the seeds and left these on the metal cutting board. Little promises of what was to come. The Martian tomato. And then the four of us gathered around, and we each bore up to our mouths the first fruit of Martian agriculture. Now, kids, if this tomato amounted to some knowledge of good and evil on Mars, it was lost on me, because in the flush of the Martian tomato it seemed to me that good and ill were impossible to distinguish each from each, especially when survival was as difficult as it was in this place. For me, the important part of this moment was just putting the tomato in my mouth, or at least cutting it up into tiny little subdivisibles that would make it last longer and which would not require more robust molars than I really had in my head. We were all doing it, cutting up our tiny tomato slivers. It was quite spectacular, the tomato, and I swear my faith in the future surged for a few moments, on some bounty of vitamins A, C, and E.

“My God! ” Abu agreed. “I had no idea! My God! It’s the best tomato I’ve ever had in my life. How could it taste so much better here?”

Laurie was licking some of the juices of the tomato from her chin. She seemed to feel the same way. Triumphant. Though it is hard to compare gastronomical events with sexual encounters, I think we all kind of felt that the tomato was easily on par with any heights of ecstasy we’d ever experienced, and that included the binges of compulsivity that came with interplanetary disinhibitory disorder . If it was because of the shortage of tomatoes, so be it.

And yet there was only so much silence this tomato could fill. Then Abu had to go back over and file the hourly report on the reactor, which was, after all, responsible for the climate control in the greenhouse. The reactor was helping to generate oxygen through some rather complicated chemistry. Arnie and Laurie meanwhile had to try to germinate the tomato seeds we had just harvested, and to write a memorandum on the subject of our harvest. And I had to—

“Jed,” Abu said. “Why don’t you come over and see the sculptures tomorrow. I finished a couple of new ones since you last came. You have such a great eye. It’d be an honor for me if you could come over and take a look.”

“That’s sweet of you, Abu. I’d love to.”

Was this invitation proffered by a man who was going to go out, after dark, remove his protective gear, and attempt to lie down on the frigid and wind-blasted rock of a crater on Mars to be frozen to death?

I passed another night alone in the Excelsior , another night in a series of nights in which I had gradually allowed a total disdain for military protocol to sweep through me. Clothes and towels and empty food packets lay wherever they landed; reports went unfiled. Arnie Gilmore claimed that it would be possible to carry mildew from Earth to Mars, and no one except me had yet claimed to have smelled any.

If Jim was now avoiding the Excelsior , did I have anyone but myself to blame for it? It was a subject that I considered. I was an infantile romantic on these questions, and I never disliked myself more deeply than when I was an infantile romantic. What was it that made me need people, and then once they were contracted, lined up, what made me then want to jettison them out the air lock of my life so that I could watch them spinning into the emptiness? Once I was freed of these beloveds, there was no problem romanticizing what was lost, aggrandizing it. I was good at exulting over what once was , in ways that were no less genuine for their belatedness. But what about while these hostages were still present in my life? Was there a frozen part of me? A part that was ordained by fate to come to a barren and frigid planet? Jim knew only the needy, incessantly worrying, jealous part of Colonel Jed Richards, the part that had given myself to him precisely because to do so was an expression of both love and shame. In my shame, I could now know an absence of love that was unlike any before.

Overnight, in an opiated insomnia, I engaged in role-playing animations with folks back on Earth, people with missing limbs and general paralysis, the only persons who could tolerate a thirty-odd-minute delay from an exiled respondent. There was a special game for these persons, as there was also a special web portal for them, as there was by now a special web portal for just about everyone, including consensual cannibals and people who believed that the members of the Mars mission were being filmed on a soundstage (in the watery city of Tampa, Florida). On this site where I slew time, disabled people, people with locked-in syndrome, were free to design bodies for themselves and to interact with one another. They flew and battered and fucked and killed, and thus overcame their disabilities, and I encouraged them. Are you as hot as you look here? Are you interested in trying to cum with me? said the double amputee from Lawrence, KS. I didn’t tell her that I was slow replying because I was on another planet. I didn’t tell her I was likely to perish here, and that I would undoubtedly fail to complete the conversation for that reason, whether from starvation, oxygen deprivation, or contamination by a hitherto unknown organism. I am a switch, baby, I can be a top or bottom, what I want is to be used so that I can feel something beyond what I have before me here . I was overdue to give myself another injection too. I could feel it, the sharp edge of disappointment beginning to force its way up through the lukewarm bath of opiated disinterest. The ritual of doping myself, the planning, the application of a tourniquet, the depressing of the plunger, these had laid bare my resistance to injection. But I was also thinking about trying to withdraw soon — which addict does not think of such things — before I had to go over to the Geronimo and steal some of their cache. The next day, when I would go to see Abu’s sculptures, would be an opportune moment to resupply. Why so dissatisfied with life? said the flying gryphon with the three shapely breasts, drifting over some self-designed Japanese rock garden where you could watch videos of bondage-loving sylphs. Thus had the digital realities become refractions of the unchecked marketeering of the first world, now drifting through empty space to the Red Planet. Because I live in a place where nothing green grows except underripe tomatoes and where there is no water, except water that has long since been made brackish from reuse, and there is no one here but white men bent on exterminating one another. I don’t know if I’ll ever find a way to get out with my skin . The gryphon performed a sort of a bowing and scraping gesture in my direction, one of the ninety-three physical responses permitted by the software module, and she said, Las Vegas? Mexico City? I pulled the syringe out of my leg, where there were some uncorrupted spots to hit, and my head swooned. Does that make me any less worthy of human kindness? The gryphon, after the delay, seemed to me to be emerging from the screen, moving into the cabin with me, holographically, as if she knew this was where I was. No human being is any less worthy. Have you ever loved a gryphon? I said, I have loved some very unusual people . She said, Such as? I said, I have loved an astronaut, in zero g’s. I have loved men and women behind enemy lines in Central Asia and the Caucasus . She said, Hot. Do you want to tell me about it while I work on you . The animation of the program permitted certain kinds of erotic contact, as long as the participants registered as consenting adults. A miming of safe sex was also required. Once the female role-player either elected to insert an animated diaphragm or IUD, had agreed to pop a little pill marked eat me , or had refused birth control outright, only then could the man have his choice of ribbed, texture-dotted prophylactics, or the ever popular digitally animated vasectomy, where a little pair of scissors would fall out of the blue sky and snip away. I was inclined to want to wear the condom, as it reminded me of my space suit. And so I picked a condom from the list of clothes I was permitted to wear by the game. The gryphon began lactating, jerkily, because of the time delay. Every few minutes, she would spontaneously fountain for a second or two.