Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

It was the beginning of night. If they wore their thermal jumpsuits, there was the chance that the ionic reflectors sewn into them would be visible from space. By these means, anyone with a brain in his head would be able to track them. On the steep slope up onto the plateau, Steve did his best to keep the rover from toppling. Likewise he did his best to keep Brandon from falling out. They were making a lot of noise, the kind of noise that, if the wind were to die down, would be echoing up and down the canyon for kilometers.

Yet Steve felt a profound exhilaration, a giddy sense of accomplishment, when they had ascended to the vertiginous shelf and could look down upon it, as into the very center of the Red Planet’s formation, its most show-offy line drawings, to know that they had once again thwarted the desire of Mars to squash any eruption of life . The sun was just now over the line of the horizon, and the Milky Way was splashed across the canvas of the galaxy, and they had only this illumination to get them out into the center of the plateau, four or five kilometers off from the cliff wall, where Steve shut down the engine, sputtering from a shortage of fuel. It was here that an urgent and unlikely-to-succeed plan began to formulate. Steve suggested that he and Brandon get under the rover and put on oxygen tanks and masks and see, thus arrayed, if they could keep each other warm. Under the rover , that is, in case they were being watched from above.

Which they were, kids. Being watched. I have passed the point in the story that I assembled from Steve Watanabe’s notes. In any event, his notes, his dispatches from his lowly position as a miner of silicon oxide and water crystals on Mars, were not composed in such a way as to convey detailed or meaningful editorializing about his predicament. These notes, in fact, could be boiled down to a few simple words, words that any reader, such as yourself, would have been able to fathom, if you were a flunky at NASA reading them: Help us, please! That’s what he was attempting to convey in the days before he found himself, according to these conjectures, sleeping outside in the Martian night, next to a fellow who may or may not have been infected with some dire germ, such as M. thanatobacillus , the germ that was reputed to cause higher life-forms to disassemble . Huddling up, he and Brandon looked sort of the way our companion species, our pair of felines, our dog and cat, look when they are nestled together. For whatever reason, Steve Watanabe kept thinking of Debbie Quartz (this is how I reconstruct it), Debbie rappelling out into the vastness of space, Debbie quickly becoming a speck, and how quickly gone, and he wondered if her body was preserved exactly as it was at the instant she made her decision, and how far out? Was it out toward Jupiter? Did it have insufficient thrust to get that far? Did the thrust of one of those oxygen tanks enable any so-called head of steam at all? Maybe it would be possible in some way to figure out where her body was on the way back . Maybe it would be possible someday, when interplanetary travel was more routine, to find Debbie Quartz’s body and to return it to her cousins and nephews, which was what remained, as he understood it, of the Quartz family. But he kept imagining, in his delirious semi-sleep, that it was Debbie whose physique was being disassembled , until he included Brandon too in this ugly bit of dream work, Brandon, right beside him, disassembling. When Steve woke, according to the fantasy, Brandon’s body would be a splatter of blood and guts beside him, like what’s left after a tomato is heaved at a cement wall, and worse, what if it was somehow communicable, the germ , what if mere contact with the blood and guts, the tomato leavings, was somehow enough to pass on the disassembly to himself, just by the mere touching? What if that was enough? Was it somehow the interaction between the germ and some carbon-based cellular material that activated a new bit of disassembly? Was it somehow radioactive too, like so much on the surface of the planet? Because the course of the illness certainly resembled radiation sickness. The infected body just started to fail at the molecular level, the stomach and intestines began to liquefy and to spill their contents into the body cavity, the liver began to shudder to a halt and to seize up, squirting poisons into the bloodstream; it was just like in that rash of polonium killings that swept through the Russian Republic before the beginning of Cold War II. Maybe it, the germ, was like that, it was like radiation sickness. Maybe Steve just shouldn’t have been spooning so close to Brandon Lepper. Maybe character changes, psychological distress and disturbance, were the leading edge of the infection, along with that change in skin pigment. Although everyone on the Mars mission had a change in skin pigment, even Abu had had one, and then that led Steve back to Abu, and the horror of Abu, and how could he have done what he’d done to Abu, unless he too was already infected . Abu was a peace-loving guy, a fervent Muslim, despite his parents’ being these renowned astrophysicist types, and why was it that he, Steve, who had never prevailed in any physical confrontation, had crept up on Abu while he was out working on his sculptures and contused him? Was that part of the interplanetary disinhibitory syndrome , or was it more like the kind of character changes that were associated with the early stages of the bacterial infection? Every time he thought about the space suit that contained Debbie Quartz spinning out into the beyond, there was a different body in it; at first it was Debbie, and then it was José, and then after José it was Abu Jmil, whom he’d known since they roomed together during training, and how could he have done what he’d done, except by reason of the unremitting loneliness of this place? You could feel it every step you took outside one of the capsules, the loneliness assaulted you, like the cosmic rays, like the dust devils, like the howling winds. And the fact that Abu just didn’t seem to feel this, and didn’t seem at all affected by interplanetary disinhibitory syndrome , it just was too much to take, with his renowned parents back there in Kansas City or wherever it was he came from. And they hobnobbed with politicians, his parents, and they appeared on the evening news as expert commentators. Every time there was an asteroid that looked like it was going to strike the Earth. Every time there was talk of some new space initiative, Dr. Jmil was there with his perfect British accent and his equally brilliant and talented wife. Abu could whistle all the Brandenburg Concertos, and he spoke five different languages, and he tried to solve difficult problems in mathematics when he was bored, and nothing bothered him on the Mars mission, not having a soldering iron pointed at his eye, not forecasts of an infectious agent, not the dwindling of the food supply and the nonappearance of a resupply capsule. Abu said the lack of food was good for them, because in controlled studies, rats who were fed less lived that much longer. The most irritating part of the whole thing was that Abu never seemed to feel lonely, not even once. Nor did he seem ever to have sex with anyone, not Debbie or Laurie or any of the men. As far as Steve could tell he didn’t even masturbate. There was no girl back on Earth; there were only mathematics problems, and Brandenburg Concertos, and sculptures. Steve felt as though he’d been driven to it. He’d been driven to take Abu down because the absolute liberty of space demanded it. Everything high was brought low, and everything low was briefly, ephemerally high, before being toppled once again. And in Steve’s semisleep, he saw Abu in Debbie Quartz’s space suit, and Abu was drifting out toward Jupiter, except that Abu seemed unconcerned, even serene, about the wending of his way. If it was his lot on the mission to drift as far as Jupiter, then he would drift as far as Jupiter, and he would keep a running commentary of his own death, except that it was not to be so easy for Steve, observing this space suit and its hapless victims, because he too would have to wear it, and that was what he did, at some point in the middle of the night, he saw himself in the space suit, looking out, and he saw the two ships, uncoupling and heading off, and he felt the last of the oxygen, and he wanted to clutch at his lungs as he breathed in some more carbon dioxide, and then some more, and then he began to tumble into the long sleep in which he was never to be recovered by human history.