The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  “Jed,” he offered, “did I tell you about the time I was fighting welterweight back in the city, against a bunch of gangster kids from the—”

  “You did,” I said. Because he had. It seems that Brandon felt he had nothing going for him but that he was not a hurricane transplant, like the waves of the disenfranchised who populated Houston, TX, his hometown, because of the mismanagement of successive generations of politicians. “As I recall, you had already been knocked down when—”

  He said, “When I pulled out a technical knockout in the last—”

  “Brandon, my shift’s almost over,” I said.

  “What’s the word from the Geronimo?”

  “They’re playing a lot of cards.”

  “Have you talked to Debbie?”

  I punched the disengage button, and his face went black. I would let the other ship go till the next day. After all, they could call over here at any time. The ominous thing I’d heard, however, was that Debbie, on the Geronimo, very likely had Planetary Exile Syndrome. This unpleasantness, kids, has been described in the NASA literature, though widely hushed up during the space station period, as well as during the Apollo missions. Once the crowded, polluted, warlike planet on which you live is far enough from the spacecraft, certain astronauts, no matter how sturdy they seemed in the training phase of the expedition, will begin to exhibit symptoms of intense homesickness, verging on the completely unstable, falling victim to convulsive weeping, fits of rage, and so forth. You have to watch them very closely, lest they injure themselves or the mission. Even though Debbie had been trying to focus on experiments she was going to conduct on Martian water purification with some fast, cheap, and dirty tools given to us by corporations back home, she had instead been talking about how the trip wasn’t worth it, and how it had crossed her mind to turn around and head back for Earth. In fact, NASA provided instructions on this. The first part of the instructions involved immobilizing any member of the crew who exhibited long-term symptoms of PES, with shackles and/or rubberized restraints. If that was insufficient, Plan B was that you loaded them up with a synthetic opiate for a couple of weeks. The last option was to eject the astronaut. If they became a serious danger to the mission.

  After mission communications, I watched Jim sleeping for a while. He had strawberry-blond hair and strawberry-blond eyebrows, and if he weren’t so by the book, I would probably have thought he was kind of attractive. For example, when he was sleeping on his wall cot, with his favorite music on the headphones (choral music, and country and western), he held his hands in a certain way, as if they were flippers, not hands. He pursed his lips as though he were dreaming of citrus wedges. His features were masculine and decisive, but the sleeping Jim Rose was, well, a lot like a rose.

  How frail was humankind, kids, out in this little soda can, just a thin skin of some alloy keeping us from the absolute zero of all creation. Asteroids could carve a hole in any of us, and then there was radiation from the Van Allen belt. Cosmic rays, you name it. How frail, how desperate, and yet how resilient. We had come so far, and we had so much farther to go. Jim got a warm blast on his seat warmer, which was the way they elected to wake us, and he rubbed his eyes and said, “Still here?”

  It was unlikely I’d be anywhere else.

  October 21, 2025

  “What’s your biggest regret in life?” Jim asked. On the cusp of our first space walk of the mission.

  I was going through the prep list. We had to don the inner layer of the space suit, which took about half an hour, and then we had to start on the outer layer, which got really bulky. It weighed eighty pounds on Earth, and we had trained for eighty pounds, but we were weightless here. I helped him with the second glove, screwing it onto the wrist coupling, and then he did the same for me, and then there was the double layer of sun visors. Easy to go blind out there if you didn’t take precautions, you know. Once he had the visor and helmet on, I heard his voice through the static of the intercom—through the override that enabled a low-intensity transmission, or, as we called it, suit to suit. He locked my helmet onto me.

  “Look,” I said, “we’re going to go out there and repair the couplings on the solar panels, and we are going to tether ourselves, and then we’re coming right back in. I don’t accept that we need to address ourselves to the big questions.”

  “I’m cool as a cucumber,” Jim said, deflecting my deflection, and I think I know now the expression that he would have been wearing on his face when he asked what he asked, the expression of inscrutable distraction and expedience. “But the extremes of space lend… well, a little poetry to things.”

  In fact, in these first three weeks in the capsule, because of how little stimulation there was beyond the bland seductions of a radio-transmitted Internet signal, I too had occasion to wonder about these matters of the heart, the sentimentalities. Instead of thinking about making it to the Red Planet, which had finally become unmistakable off one side of the capsule, or wondering if we would ever make it back to Earth, I thought about what I might have done. Interpersonally. Despite the hackneyed qualities of these sentiments, I was helpless before them. I might, for example, have told my parents more about how grateful I was; I might have explained to my wife that the thing for me was the work, that the work had to come first. I regretted, I might have told her, that I ever made it seem otherwise. I regretted that I barely knew my daughter. I regretted any time I was ever timid, when I might have been more forthright and more direct. I regretted instances of simulation and deceit. I regretted sunsets and flowers unobserved, children unhugged, all times when I didn’t pull over and admire the view. I regretted the astronauts I had stomped on, in making my way onto the roster of the Mars mission. I regretted the times I lived in, and my inability to live in them completely and willfully. Not that I was going to come clean about any of this.

  “There are some obvious choices,” I told Rose. “I’m darned upset that I didn’t keep up with my Arabic lessons, which I took all the way through first year in college. I couldn’t understand those long sections of the Qur’an. And anyhow, that course of study wasn’t considered patriotic by the guys in the fraternity. They were primarily interested in automobile racing. Mostly I regret failures in the sack. What about you?”

  Jim thought carefully, and then he said, suit to suit, “There are the men I killed.”

  “Look, Jim, you don’t want to be talking about that.” Jim flipped up the visor again. He had a sort of glazed look. “Get yourself together, because we’re about to open that hatch. You need to be completely ready.”

  “I trained for this. I have traveled millions of miles from my home just to do this.”

  “Good.”

  He gave the lever on the hatch a turn and called down through the open frequency. “Preliminary hatch, and that’s a Code One.” Which meant that José was obliged to stay where he was and monitor us. Once the air lock was open, the hatch was exposed to the vacuum of space, and it was a protocol of the mission that under those circumstances someone always had to stay with the ship. I hoisted myself into the air lock behind Jim Rose and closed the hatch that led back into the cabin. Then Jim reached the second door. The B hatch. His voice crackled from the intercom, “Feel like you’re seeing the faces of the people you lost? In the stars?”

  I said: “I calculate my pay every day. I think about how much money I’m saving by being up in a capsule. I haven’t eaten out, I haven’t bought a new jet pack, I haven’t gone on any expensive vacations.” And yet in my heart, I knew what Jim was saying. There was a raw, inconsolable quality about the void of these expanses. Take the case of Jim Rose: I knew that his four kids were the most important thing in his life, and that his unquenchable need to explore the universe amounted to a contradiction. He was a family man, and he’d never read a novel in his life. But up here he was one hundred percent daydreamer. He went careening from one strangely grandiose non sequitur to another.

  The analogy NASA made about our journey was that i
t was like trying to get a basketball to go through a hoop from 36 million miles away. If so, the mission navigators must have been exceptionally good hoops players. As the hatch opened, the enormity of our journey was manifest to those of us on board the Excelsior. We had already seen, and would continue to see, things that had been seen only by robots and satellites. The novelty of limitlessness was our daily bread. As the hatch opened, there was an emptying out of words like here and there, and down and up, and here and back, and before and after. Jim Rose stuck his leg out into the soup of stars and nebulae, of Monaco 37 and like-minded relatives, of dark matter, of black holes, of creation’s indifference. I could hear his breathing, and his breathing was fast. He was gasping. He attached the tether from his space suit onto the buckles on the surface of the Excelsior, and he arced outward gently, slowly, centimeters at a time. I watched him drift. He was a citizen of Earth, a man nowhere near where he belonged but who was here in this place nonetheless. After his brief but interminable drift, his metallic boots clunked soundlessly against the surface of the hull.

  “Excelsior, I’ve exited the craft, and I’m heading for the solar array, as requested.”

  “That’s a roger,” José said from indoors. “Houston, you receiving?”

  “I’ve seen some pretty night skies in my day,” Jim remarked, “but this beats them all. Jed, you’re clear to proceed.”

  There was a moment when I didn’t know if I wanted to proceed, when I thought that maybe the human conception of space travel was just so much froth, like elves and dragons but more expensive. An intoxicant meant to distract the miserable inhabitants of Earth from their circumstances. Why go? Why go out there? There was no such place as space, because a location couldn’t be an absence of locations, and the vacuum wasn’t a true vacuum, lest it should subsume into it even the notion of vacuum. These latitudes just couldn’t be as mysterious and ancient as they plainly were. The night sky was a fresco that one of the old masters painted on the ceiling of the world, back in the quattrocento! I didn’t want to go wading in the real thing. But before I gave in to my adolescent anxiety, I was out, and here is how slow things go in space, kids—in the time it takes you to read this sentence, I had drifted only a foot or so. It’s not like there were tailwinds! In a minute or so I could see my foot approaching the surface of the craft. You could do several flips, out there, and it would be nothing, but then you would be well out of control and could go spinning off, on the tethers. And who knew, really, how tethers behaved at temperatures approaching absolute zero.

  And yet, since by Terran nightfall you were meant to have footage of us, out here, attempting to work a screwdriver and other power tools with these clumsy gloves, we had to keep moving. NASA had us on their leashes too. It was a while before Rose and Richards, the Martian voyagers, stood at the far end of the Excelsior, listening to some Earth-bound engineer remind us how to effect the repairs.

  It wasn’t until we were hunched down over the solar panels and fiddling with the electricals that Jim mumbled, “I’m not trusting him either; I’m not trusting José.” If Jim Rose was worried, well, there was real cause for worry.

  “Last night, before you woke,” Jim said, “he got some kind of transmission from Mission Control. I just happened to see it appear in his in-box. What would have happened if I hadn’t? The substance of the transmission was this: we’re changing the landing coordinates. Does that seem sensible to you? We train for three years to land on the southern pole, we announce to the world that we’re going to land there, because we’re going to do experiments with water. Water, water pressure, water freezing and evaporating. Tests and more tests. That’s the whole purpose of landing on the poles, right? We have to have enough water to last twelve months, we hope, and most of the planet is completely barren. And suddenly there’s this plan, that José hasn’t even mentioned yet, to try to see if we can’t fly the ultralights down into the canyon.”

  “The canyon?”

  The canyon he referred to, in case you haven’t heard, is the biggest known canyon in the universe, the Valles Marineris, which is 3,117 miles long (as far across as North America), 75 miles from wall to wall, and, get this, over six miles deep. It makes the Grand Canyon look like a surface scratch.

  “That’s what the transmission said.”

  “Did you get confirmation? From Mission Control?”

  We had the mission directives on pocket-sized electronic clipboards. We got them as digital downloads. Normally this stuff came in the evening, so we could talk it over while eating. The few moments when we were all awake. Also: we needed something to do at mealtime because the food was so bad.

  “Why would we have such a substantial change of plans at this point? And why weren’t we warned about the possibility?”

  “And how the heck are we supposed to get out of the canyon once we’re in it?” I asked. “Do we have enough fuel for these trips in the ultralights?”

  “No details, obviously.” He kept it all to a whisper, suit to suit.

  “He’s pretty good at letting us know when he doesn’t have to do his regular rotation on the laundry duty or waste reprocessing. That’s about all he’s good at. There’s some kind of parallel mission track going on here.”

  Palace intrigue was much more interesting, but there was no choice, having suited up for a solid hour, but to stand out there in space and repair the solar panels, which are essential to the circulation of oxygen, redundant computer systems, the operation of our thrusters, all of which made it possible for us to fly this soda can across the solar system. And even though we have layers upon layers of solar panels, the kind that you probably have running your hot water, there is the ever present possibility of asteroids or microscopic meteors. We couldn’t let the panels deteriorate. In the next half hour or so, Jim and I were doing just what we had trained to do. And, frankly, this was the moment when I started to see what a good guy Jim Rose was. We had the years of training, the months of vomiting in the zero-gravity training, all of that stuff, we had dinner together, our families, at one of those chains near Jim’s place in Florida, but I never quite thought I knew the guy. There was always his reserve. His wife, Jessica, had that look that wives get when they’re trying their hardest to appear like the women behind the men. Chafing at the burdens the whole way. And the four kids were mute, perfectly dressed, almost starchy, obscenely well behaved. Jim strode among and around them as if he had no idea they were there. At the salad bar, I saw him get the thousand-light-year stare, and he attacked this solar panel with the same kind of intensity. He didn’t just fix a solar panel, he applied himself to a solar panel as though it were a codex from a tomb in ancient Egypt that was going to tell of the secret prehistory of man. All I did was hand him the appropriate tools. That said, there’s nothing like standing out in space with someone.

  When he had finished, Jim said, reopening the com channel, “Excelsior, solar array is back online. Houston, repairs complete; we’re heading for the hatch door. Please confirm.”

  After a long delay, one of the innumerable faceless voices from Houston came over the open frequency. “Roger, Captain Rose. We hear you. Fine work.”

  He handed me the power drill and I holstered it.

  “How sturdy you think these tethers are, Jed?”

  I used to know the load rating, because it was in the manual somewhere, and I was good at memorizing this stuff. Supposedly, we could tow an entire extra ship on one of them if we had to, because in space nothing really weighs anything. But that didn’t mean I didn’t panic a little when Jim said, “Let’s live a little, Jed.” After which he jumped.

  He was feeding out the tether, you see, and I watched as he drifted off the Excelsior, my bunkmate. I watched as he swam around, like a circus clown in limitless space. His breathing was in my ears, as if he were whispering innuendoes to me. And I didn’t realize how long it had been since he talked, how captivating his gymnastic demonstration was, until he said, “Come on and join me, my friend.”

/>   May I digress for a moment? Because I have a tale to tell along these lines. A tale I cannot avoid telling. About how much trouble I had learning to swim. This is another of the things that I might not have entirely confided to the NASA people, back when I was filling out the psychological profiles. This story takes place back on the Jersey Shore, kids, which is where we used to go in the summer when I myself was a stripling (my father was a night watchman, and my mother was a math teacher in an elementary school). Well, kids, there’s no easy way to tell this story, so I will tell you what I remember, because this is what I thought of out in space, I thought about how I used to attempt to go swimming with my brother, Nick, and how Nick was always the stronger swimmer, and how one day in a riptide, I just looked up to watch my brother carried out to sea. At first, it was sort of a funny thing. At first he fought a little bit against the rip, laughing and waving, and I watched him bob there, and then his laughing gave way to yelps and cries, and I looked back behind me for the lifeguard, who was far enough down the beach that I would have to run for him. Or I could try to swim for my brother, and at first I did try to get into the water, and I shrieked to the people on the beach with me, My brother is being carried away, my brother, my brother, and there were large men bellowing and there were women in bikinis running down the shore to fetch the lifeguard, and I could see Nick’s hand waving, I could see his little digits just above the waves, the five fingers of his hand. As long as I could see his hand, his palm facing me, then he was there, and if the seconds passed as I waited, the spume of the waves gathering around me, at least he was still there. We shared a small room, Nick and I, and we knew a lot about each other, like I knew that Nick hated sports, and Nick felt that he was letting my father down, all the time. Although he wasn’t doing anything of the kind. He was a swimmer, he was a strong swimmer, except on that day, on the Jersey Shore, nobody was a good swimmer, and people were shouting at him to head parallel to the shore, Don’t try to swim in, these people called, Swim along the shore! Nick felt that he was letting our father, the night watchman, down, but no one was letting the old man down like I was letting him down, and I ran to the snack bar, and I called my parents, because I could hear someone else calling the paramedics on another phone, a pay phone, and the two conversations were rubbing up against each other and making it impossible for me to talk to my mother, who always thought we were safe on the beach because there were lifeguards on the beach, and we had grown up beside the beach, at least in summer. I couldn’t hear the questions my mother was asking, because the other conversation was happening, and some guy with a really big belly and shorts that sagged below his belly was yelling at the 911 people, and I kept telling my mother that Nick was out there and couldn’t get back in, and a man on a surfboard began trying to thread his way between the waves, and another lifeguard was running up the beach, and people were gathering, and the lifeguard nearest plunged into the water, and I thought if I could still see the five fingers of Nick’s hand, I thought if I could see his hand, then things were all right. I suppose I imagined that I could still hear him laughing, I thought I could hear the laugh that I had heard before, and all the conversations I had had with him that very morning, but in fact I couldn’t see him anymore, because you know what they say happens in those circumstances, what they say happens is that you get tired, you get tired from all the swimming, and then you just can’t keep your head above water, and it doesn’t matter how strong a swimmer you are. Eventually, there is that moment when you know what is going to happen but you are no longer able to forbid it from happening. I didn’t want to think about this, that day, and I didn’t want to think that I couldn’t see Nick’s hand waving to me, and I didn’t want to think that if I had been a stronger swimmer I could have gone out there after him, and I didn’t want to think about where he had gone, because he had gone someplace where they couldn’t find him, down the fathoms, and even the men in the speedboats, and the men on the Jet Skis, they couldn’t find him, until later, much later, when he washed up. I think it was Sandy Hook, where he washed up, or maybe it’s just the poetry of that name, because if you are going to have a place of shame and self-hatred and loss, and the sense that what was good about life is all gone, then that place should have some kind of lovely name, so that you are not prone to forget it, and that’s why when I think about having been a brother and being a brother no longer, kids, I think about Sandy Hook. (He had to be identified by his dental records.) And they named a football stadium after him at our high school. I often dreamed that I was running into my brother’s arms. Long after. In my dream, my brother, Nick, was standing waist-deep in the water, as I had been, and my brother was standing in the water and he was so happy, and I went running into his arms.