Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

“Laurie,” I went on, “they’re preparing the online news portfolios back home. I swear they are. I actually talked to them. Did I tell you that? The boobs at the agency. Did I tell you? I talked to them, and so they are up to speed. On the developments. Anyway, you can bet they know about this. They have their ways, apparently, of knowing everything that’s going on. They have their overflights. Just keep breathing, that’s it. Push a little harder now. This is the hard part, Laurie, just push a little harder. On Earth people are going to be making films about this, and writing testimonials, singing songs.”

“Jed,” she said, “please be quiet?”

I was thinking about Ginger, I guess. I was assisting, but I was thinking about my daughter. I was wondering if Ginger was worrying, because Ginger kept up on the Mars mission. Or she used to. Maybe now her teenage life was too consuming, with its many gossipy e-mails and videoconferencing conversations rocketing around the globe, conversations her mother wasn’t keeping up on.

Perhaps it will come as no surprise that I was late for Ginger’s birth. Let me use this space to atone. I was in the armed forces at the time. I left behind a spring offensive in Tajikistan, where we were guarding the natural-gas pipelines with 50,000 NATO troops under German command. I’d been involved in covert operations but had been wounded in action. In a ridiculous way. A scimitar had been applied to me as I walked down a busy street in that nation’s capital. There’d been some haggling over a black market case of vodka. The outcome of this haggling did not favor the peddler. Anyway, this injury, which left a rather sexy scar on my left shoulder blade, was enough to allow me to return home to see the miraculous birth of Ginger Stark-Richards. Have I mentioned how much I loved my wife, Pogey Stark-Richards, in those days? My wife’s strength was immense; she just put up with a lot, in her pursuit of this idea of family, kids. She put up, I mean, with me.

I knew that there was much about me that repelled the average person, things that I seemed powerless to correct, no matter my efforts. My wife still looked at me with a brightened smile when I came home from whatever dangerous foreign adventure I was on. I’d seen guts spilling out of every friend and enemy. I’d seen men tortured until they begged to die. There were things about my character that were annealed in the foundry of international conflict, things that resisted civilizing. I was, moreover, responsible for my brother’s death, or that was the burden that I had carried around so many years, on bombing raids near and far. My wife was the only one who could see through the craggy, dangerous straits of my character to know of my many regrets and my earnest desire to improve.

Maybe she would have hung in there a little longer had I turned up to see the baby whelped. But there were a solid twenty-four hours’ worth of flights required to get me from Tajikistan to Gainesville, FL, where we were living. It took blizzard conditions in only one of the relevant locations to make the trip a bust. But in addition to blizzard conditions, I spent three hours in an airport in Estonia, doubled over on a commode, wondering which bits of my brains were being shat out. By the time I changed planes in New York, I had that feeling that everything boorish about me had been evacuated. And yet despite all this, I did come running into the delivery room to find little Ginger, fully rinsed of her glutinous body shampoo and wrapped in some baby’s textile, resting on my wife’s bosom. My wife was smiling her exhausted smile, and she welcomed me though I deserved no welcome.

Back here on Mars, Laurie gave one last mighty heave in her pelvic girdle, straining at her ligaments, and the shoulders of the child seemed to pass through. So it seemed from where I knelt, which admittedly was not an obstetrical angle. Arnie’s demeanor, at once methodical and professional, lightened considerably, as the rest of the child transited quickly out. Soon there was a bloody papoose in Arnie’s lap, by which humankind proved that it could, after all, be Martian.

He said, while toweling off the dumpling, “Jed, help her with the afterbirth, please.” There was the requisite cutting of the cord. And Arnie plunged his little girl into a bucket. Pulled her out of the bath and then warmed her in his arms until she gasped her first breath.

I suppose I was not prepared for the amount of efflux that still remained to pass from the mother, attached to the cord, and probably this is because I had conspired to miss out on Ginger’s birth. Laurie elected again to bite down on a piece of rawhide that had been produced from some interplanetary valise, and in this posture she rid herself of the afterbirth. She was sweating and weeping. With joy, I suppose.

“It’s a girl?” I said.

“It’s a girl,” Arnie said.

“It’s a girl,” Laurie said, as if somehow reassuring herself. “Just what we don’t need around here, more men .”

I took to cleaning up the various rags and towels. Out the window of the greenhouse, I could see Phobos, looking every bit the Idaho potato, crossing east over our city of the plains. “Does she have a name?”

“She does,” Arnie said, suturing up a spot in Laurie, who was holding the baby and managing to be uncomplaining.

“And are you going to tell me the name?”

Arnie said, “Her name is Prima.”

He told me to make sure to lock the door on the way out, and this was news to me — that doors on Mars locked now. He had ingeniously found a way to install a lock in the greenhouse. You just popped a button and walked out. So old-fashioned. The two of them called weak thanks to me as I left. I slammed the door firmly, to be sure that they were sequestered in their prelapsarian Mars, while I went out east of Eden.

RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Ginger, I’m just checking in here, because things have been a little slow on Mars lately. Not a lot going on. The weather has taken a turn for the worse. We’re worried about dust storms again.We’re just passing the warmest part of the summer, and that means the days when it’s possible to be outside without wearing a whole lot of protective covering are also going to come to an end. It’s fifty below at night sometimes.

GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: Daddy, I miss you. Do you think you can send me some video, even if it’s a really shaky picture or something? I hate not seeing you for so long. I don’t care how long it takes, how shaky it is. I like to have a picture in my mind so that when I’m rebelling against everything you stand for I know what you look like. School is the same, and I’m doing okay in math, even though it’s not like I care about it. Hey, to totally change the subject, I’ve been thinking about college, and I’m wondering if I can go abroad for school. I think it would be good to go to some foreign countries and see some stuff. (Emoticon.)

RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Wait. Am I speaking to the right teenager? This just doesn’t sound like the Ginger Stark-Richards I remember, whose most ambitious trip was to the mall to get some unusual color of hair dye or nail polish. If you’re my daughter you’re going to have to prove it with some classified information.

GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: Easy! The most important political issue as far as you are concerned is campaign finance reform, money is what makes us us, and you think the best period of music was the 1970s, even though you don’t want anyone to know that’s what you really think, hahaha.

RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: I have no choice but to believe you, though my mind is riddled with doubts. Now I have a few serious things to say, if that’s okay with you. Ginger, I was thinking of you a lot today, for reasons that will be clear soon enough in the press, and I wanted you to know that you really are the best thing that ever happened to a man like me. I’ll get busy with things now and then, because I’m just not terribly smart about life — I wish I were smarter — and I’ll put my head down, and I’ll just blunder through. But then there are days like today, when I know that I have had one remarkable blessing and that’s you. On Mars, I spontaneously recall these things we have done together, like the time I drove up and down the block with you looking for your pet robot, calling to it in that language you designed, and then it turned out that it was under your bed the whole time. Under the circumstances, these things feel quite profound to me. Your secret language, your self-designed encryption algorithms, your emoticons.