The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  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.

  March 26, 2026

  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.”

  “Space food is okay if it has ketchup.”

  “Ketchup,” I said, “offers important vitamins. Same with fancy relish. Some of these vitamins are not found in the source vegetable. Ketchup is misunderstood.”

  Laurie was doing pelvic exercises on the floor of the greenhouse, because Arnie had her on an exercise regimen and a prenatal relaxation program. He was even trying to whip up some folic acid—iron combo vitamin for her.

  “Still, you’re excited to try a tomato now,” Laurie said to Abu, grimacing prenatally with her exertion.

  “What are we going to do? Divide it into six?”

  “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

  “Supposedly the apple in the Garden of Eden, the one that caused all the post-prelapsarian difficulty, was a tomato. That’s what some scholars believe.”

  Abu alone thought this was the funniest thing he had ever heard.

  “Are we going to have the tomato plain, sliced, lightly salted?” I further inquired.

  “No basil,” Laurie replied, grunting as she attempted to touch her toes—with difficulty owing to her increased girth.

  “And what about some of the related menu items? I don’t exactly have a Martian recipe book. But I have recollective skills. As regards marinara.”

  Arnie, from back in the residence, appeared at this point and volunteered that he was attempting to compile just such a tome, a Martian recipe book, which would take into account the dietary needs of interstellar space and the shortages of various vitamins and minerals, which he believed could account in part for Steve’s depression, for example, and for some of the violent mood activity of all the Martians. (Perhaps, he opined, interplanetary disinhibitory disorder was just a dietary affliction that would remit under vigilance.) As per our earlier discussion about jointly owned literary properties, Arnie was prepared to cede the better portion of the cookbook proceeds to the Mars colony as a whole, his own take being designated instead for his heir, the first Martian native, whenever he or she should appear, or perhaps if not him/her, his kids on Earth.

  I asked Abu how his sculptures were going. (And I should say: I was now in my second week of pilfering from the supply of pain relief medication to be found onboard the Excelsior, and while this had begun as a way of dealing with the pain, physical and then spiritual, of my missing and reattached digits, it now seemed as though it might in fact be treating the gaping loneliness of finding myself a Martian, and whereas Jim seemed to manipulate every such problem into an opportunity for growth and intellectual investigation, to me this loneliness was just a slow, murderous inevitability, making its way through me like infectious rot, and what helped was not coming up with new and better ways for Martians to communicate among themselves about their favorite recipes, although I admired the attempt at collegiality that was implied. What helped was being potted, tanked, obliterated, high, so that drool issued from me in a steady stream and I occasionally wet myself and was unable to sit up. This was difficult to achieve, but I was resourceful. For the time being, I had taken to lower doses, maintenance doses, which could also be orally administered, thus alleviating the problem of needle tracks. Moreover, under these circumstances I was a better conversationalist and a generally less uptight member of the Mars population. Therefore, I saw no reason to refrain. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that w
hile high I had no compunction about continuing to deplete the resources we had in the area of pain relief, though there were obviously some situations that would require pain relief for the others soon enough, for example, active labor. When I was intoxicated, I didn’t really worry about the future. Nor was I good at interpsychic perception, or, as it is commonly known, empathy. Laurie was one of those people who would prefer a natural labor, though it would be logical under the circumstances to ask what a “natural” childbirth on Mars would look like, nature here being more inhospitable than back home. There would be no accoucheur or midwife with carafe of olive oil to speed her delivery.)

  Abu answered that the sculptures were going swell, that he was beginning to feel that his sculptures were reflecting the landscape in which he lived, instead of being recollections of an earthly landscape. So it was possible that he was answering the question about what the medium of sculpture would look like here on this planet. This sculpture would be severe, he said, it would be free of comedy and irony, so that it better reflected the earnest striving of this place, this planet that perhaps wanted life, craved life, and craved especially the capacity of life to know itself, though this planet had so far been thwarted in its longing for vivacity.

  While we were conducting this agreeable conversation, Arnie brought out the knife, a little serrated thing, and I watched as Laurie prepared to harvest the tomato, which was not entirely ripe. We could probably be forgiven for eating the tomato before it was at its peak, so desperate were we for the overpowering novelty of a tomato.

  “You’re not going to wait for Jim?” I asked, hoping sincerely that she would not agree to wait. “Or Steve? Does Steve like tomatoes?”

  “I saw Steve this morning,” Arnie said. “I think it’s safe to cut a portion for him that we can refrigerate until he’s ready for it.”

  “We could save Jim some too,” I said. “As we know, many civilizations were founded when important thinkers of the day retreated into the wilderness in order to make themselves ready to receive wisdom and understanding. I imagine Jim is receiving messages out there. We should not distract him from the reception of these messages.”

  Arnie gave me a look that suggested to me the possibility that my drug abuse was not going entirely unnoticed.

  I continued. “Jim Rose is effective in a leadership capacity. My only regret is that I am not so effective myself.”

  Arnie seemed on the verge of disagreeing with this, but the point passed without challenge. It was agreed then that a slice of tomato would also be set aside for Jim. To nourish him when he got back. Then Laurie said darkly, “But I’m not going to save a piece for him.” By which she meant a certain other member of the mission.

  A dark cloud of worry hovered over the subject of Lepper. All were involved in prognosticating as to his intent. It was clear, I thought, that Brandon and José had been privy to military-industrial conspiracy on behalf of large defense contractors from back home. As, perhaps, had been Debbie Quartz, whose lecture to Abu, with soldering gun in hand, had concerned a certain bacterium. At the time, her speeches had seemed hysterical, pathological. Not now.

  As I have said, I was able to monitor Brandon’s movements, with the locator that was built onto the all-terrain rover, and this information I passed on to the others each morning. I gave Brandon’s position and the amount of time he had spent at each location; I conjectured as to his activities. Before eating the tomato, in fact, I gave a very brief update, so that we could put Brandon behind us: Lepper was still at the eastern end of the canyon, and it was reasonably certain that he was mining something there, and that the nature of this ore, or this slurry, was the concealed reason for our trip to Mars. The question was whether it was, in fact, mineral, or, well, vegetable, by which I suppose I meant: M. thanatobacillus.

  “And that is enough of that,” I said.

  “Yep,” Laurie said. “Because we have this tomato, and we are going to eat this tomato, and I’m going to pick the seeds from it, and I’m going to plant the seeds, and through the use of some transgenetic horticultural techniques, I’m going to try to boost the tomato yield here in the greenhouse.”

  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 wa
s 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.