The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  It was some time before he realized that there was another occupant next to him in the men’s room, also standing at the mirror, and Antoine could feel, as he had in these days of sleeplessness, a certain belated perception cresting, and the perception expressed itself in language but not in a phrase that fulfilled a social obligation like “Hey, how are you doing?” Rob understood, in this phase of language failure, long after lips and pharynx and larynx had begun assembling themselves into the preliminary words of a sentence, that it would be a good thing to say something sociable to his superior Vance Gibraltar, who ordinarily did not grace the men’s room with his presence, although there were certain legendary stories about the kind of unselfconscious and performative shitting that Gibraltar had enacted there when he was a younger and more arrogant employee.

  Gibraltar too was surprised to reckon with another life-form here in the restroom. Rob could see his boss, who reminded him of his father, if only in his capacity to withhold most kindness, looking at his, Rob’s, hair. Antoine could feel that in some way his upcoming performance review would touch on the issue of his hair. If Rob could just improve his hairstyle, then it seemed Gibraltar would support him again, and yet Rob believed with nearly evangelical certitude that his hair was just how it was. Even if Gibraltar sent him tomorrow to the overcrowded office of unemployment, so that Rob would be back in Kentucky living in a trailer behind his mother’s house, writing computer programs for video-gaming simulations, even then Gibraltar would not leave off Rob’s brushing-up of the forelock. But how long, exactly, had he been standing here, having this thought, and how much of it had he actually verbalized to the back-channel kingmaker of NASA?

  “I had a thought,” Rob said. At a minimum.

  “They’re in short supply,” Gibraltar observed.

  “Maybe it was several short thoughts. In sequence.”

  Antoine, impervious to hurt, or so attenuated by sleeplessness that he could have withstood any array of taunts and scarcely remembered to worry, stopped for a moment to consider the teardrop shape of a certain puddle of water on the counter before him, and then he listened astonished as the thought, which he had not yet fully admitted to himself, began to form in the air.

  “Have we completely considered whether Jed is filming that bank of monitors for a reason?”

  “We’ve considered many things,” Gibraltar said, reaching some fingers behind his front teeth to ensnare a particle. “The man is ill. He’s probably reduced to some proto-hominid condition where he is too stupid to figure out how to eject himself. He’s not in a place where he’s able to make creative decisions about his video feed.”

  “How do you know?” Rob said, warming to the argument in turn. “How do you know that this is not some symbolic repository of mission information, gleaned from his earlier life, lingering in him, a part of him that is able to make these signifying decisions, in an automatic way, so that they can be interpreted by us, as direct communication, communication that might affect the reentry process?”

  “He’s sending us messages, Rob?”

  Antoine turned to the mirror again and, breathing in the urine reek and an abundantly masculine cloacal perfume, which all men secretly recognize as their signature scent, he actually fluffed the combed-over forelock and said, “Why ignore a message if it’s staring us in the face?”

  Gibraltar gave the notion a long, ambiguous pause.

  “If it’s really a message.”

  Once this had settled in, the two of them left the men’s room together, repairing down the long, sterile corridor, their worn, comfortable shoes like the universally recognized sound effect for horses’ hooves. They made for the nearest video monitor. Because this was much more than a not-bad idea; this was a new idea. Rob Antoine was actually attempting to type into his wrist assistant as he went, summoning staff to the conference room; he was sending the feed there—have the design specifications available, please. By the time the two of them were in that conference room, having executed a number of joint decisions in an unusual symbiosis, a father-son lockstep, the feed was already up on the wall monitor. Rob had the laser pointer fired up, and he pointed at certain indicators illuminated in the image there.

  “Our theory has been that this camera setup is devoid of meaningful project-related information. But what if there is another kind of symbol making at work? One that we have only begun to consider? You know, for example, how certain kinds of primates have been taught to use symbolic manipulation. They are shown pictures of objects, and from these they make syntactical units, sentences, paragraphs, out of a sequential juxtaposition of photo images. If M. thanatobacillus has as part of the course of its infection the gradual erosion of higher-order linguistic dexterity, then Richards, who himself witnessed multiple cases of the infection, would have known this—”

  The room had begun to fill, and among its experts now were members of the team that had designed the capsule interior, who had stacked the solid-state computer systems on the wall rack in the shot. If they didn’t quite understand Antoine’s sleepless monologue, they began to understand it through the vehemence of his performance.

  “What if this is object-oriented syntactical manipulation? What if by assembling a sort of line-by-line message, we can divine a syntagmatic declarative statement? That’s what I’m trying to say! For example, who can tell me what this panel right here controls? Can someone remind me? Is that water level and water flow in the capsule?”

  “Exactly right,” said one sandal-wearing, dreadlocked young engineer. “Water levels are monitored in such a way that they recirculate wastewater produced by the astronaut and funnel some of this water out through the onboard catchment systems and then redissolve it into capsule air, to keep humidity at a comfortable level. On the way out we did find that we had trouble keeping the air wet enough, which resulted in skin problems for nearly everyone. We made adjustments in the direction of greater humidity.”

  “Your name is?”

  “Fielding.”

  “First or last?”

  “First.”

  “Fielding, what can you tell me about what you’re reading on this monitor?”

  “What I’m seeing is that there’s a really unusual amount of water available in the system. A very unusual amount. It looks as though he has completely shut off the humidifier and has allowed as much water into the catchment system as it can reasonably store. The short version, I guess, is that he’s not drinking very much. Certainly not enough for someone who wants to remain healthy and comfortable.”

  “So what is this telling us?”

  “I don’t know, sir. Hydrophobia? That his condition is somehow related to hydrophobia?”

  Gibraltar, from a chair by the monitor where he had now settled himself, arms folded, grumbled, “You’re going to have to do better than hydrophobia.”

  “We’re getting warmed up. Let me continue, if you would. Could someone tell me what’s below the water monitor here in the feed?”

  “That would be oxygen levels, sir.” This was Amin, the designer whom Rob liked to talk to when he had to be in the engineering department, which mostly he avoided. Engineers only understood things in literal ways. Engineers were always blaming mission failures on human error and deflecting any responsibility away from their laborious and convoluted designs.

  “Amin, what does the oxygen monitor do?”

  “It does exactly what you’d think it would do. It monitors the oxygen levels in the cabin. It automatically makes corrections when the CO2 dips below a baseline that would inhibit robust functioning of the astronauts.”

  The assembled experts now knew something that Rob didn’t grasp himself. The designers had been schooled in the use and interpretation of these monitors long before management. Rob, and by extension Gibraltar, needed someone to spell it all out, and here was how it was spelled, rather dramatically:

  “The thing is,” Amin said, “the oxygen monitor must not be working or something. Because if it was working, th
at red indicator would be telling us that—”

  “What?”

  “Well, that the colonel can’t possibly be alive. Because the oxygen level in the capsule is so low that he would eventually suffocate, it’s…”

  “Did no one think to look at this level at any other point in the past three days? Amin, aren’t you supposed to monitor this? People, I know we’re all tired. But has this been sitting right in front of us?”

  Amin replied, “Sir, I think we’ve selected for monitoring pulse and respiration and all of that—life-support systems—and those are still going. I mean, as I understand it, and here I defer to the medical team, he’s not going to do any jumping jacks, but he is still alive.”

  A hand in the rear of the room went up. One of the mission doctors, Kathleen Fales. Since luck and superstition had crept into the hard science of the Mars mission in recent days, he wished he could call on someone else. Because of her surname.

  “Kathy.”

  “Rob, there’s no easy way to say this, but the short version is that we find ourselves with a medical contradiction here, because if what we are learning from all the external monitoring data is true, then there would seem to be no way that Colonel Richards is still alive. He has effectively shut off the oxygen in the room, as though he is trying to starve himself of it somehow, and the same could be said of the water supply. And yet he still has some kind of pulse activity, and we have a Gaussmeter that indicates electromagnetic impulses coming from him consistent with nervous system function as we understand it. If I had my choice, I’d say he’s dead, or at least very close to death, and perhaps just hanging on because he has turned the temperature down inside to forty-seven degrees. You can’t see it on this image, really. It’s the blurry monitor way off to the left. He’s refrigerating himself. As far as I’m concerned, he’s not really alive in the conventional sense, certainly not to such a degree that he could communicate with us.”

  Rob stalled, sifting through his perceptions. “In that sense, perhaps, you might say that he’s both dead and not dead?”

  “I suppose,” said Dr. Fales. “I’d try to formulate an intermediate terminology, something in the cryogenic family, something less quaint than undead.”

  “Kathy, I’m going to say that I think you’re leading the witness here, and that I’m not sure your conclusion helps us in the matter of decoding possible communicative sequences in Richards’s environment. I’m not, in the final analysis, preoccupied with the semantics of life or death. I am, however, wondering if he’s trying to tell us something. So I’m wondering if we can move on a little bit to the monitor that’s directly under the environmental controls here, and I’m wondering if we can address this for a second—”

  A hush in this place of worry, this place of consternation and ignominy. It was unclear to those who were there if it was the hush of Debra Levin entering, in a maroon, understated knee-length dress, with a sense of perfect timing, at least if her goal was to gut the last few NASA programs extant. Or perhaps the hush was because everyone in the room knew what the monitor underneath the environmental controls was, and there was a sort of gasp when all considered the video image that Richards had haphazardly preserved in moving the camera out of his face. He had perfectly centered the image so that it was capturing the—

  “Auto-destruct and fail-safe sequencer,” Gibraltar remarked, from his chair. It was rare that the budgetary director knew or understood these particular mechanisms. It was counterproductive when he got into this kind of micromanagement. But Rob never underestimated Gibraltar’s grasp of the basic engineering principles of space exploration.

  “That’s right,” Rob said. “I saw it in my mind’s eye. I saw that auto-destruct timer in my mind’s eye, and I wondered, if he were just an animal now, or a disassembling body, or whatever it is we think he is, would he have situated this camera so that at its dead center we would see the auto-destruct sequencer? Can someone review for us?”

  The kid called Fielding again: “An auto-destruct sequence can be begun at either of two locations, on the craft or remotely, at Mission Control—”

  “Because?” Rob asked.

  “Because no one mission team should have the ability to abort, but by having the go-ahead from the other party, by having mutual agreement, the craft can in effect auto-destruct.”

  “Though it’s also true, I believe,” said Debra Levin, silent until now, “that the space administration arrogates to itself the right to oversee any and all auto-destruct sequences, correct?”

  “Of course, Madam Director. If we—”

  “The world may have passed on to another news cycle, but the world recognizes that only one man has gone to Mars and attempted to return to speak of it, Mr. Antoine, and that man comes from the United States of America, and while there’s still a chance that our man from Mars may be returned for the hero’s welcome he deserves, the administration prefers to think that our reputation as the country of innovation will enable us to treat this man, to bring him back from the scourge with which he suffers. We discovered the polio vaccine here, Mr. Antoine; we mapped the five different strains of Marburg virus. It is this country that landed Colonel Richards on Mars in the first place, and it seems to me we ought to be the ones who are able to bring him home. When some other nation has the record of innovation and heroism that this country has, why then, Mr. Antoine—”

  “With all due respect, Madam Director,” said Antoine, trying to avoid some kind of ceaseless nationalistic prose poem, “having just arrived, you missed the tedious beginning of the conversation, where I was describing my theory that a kind of primitive linguistic statement has been prepared for us, rather carefully, it seems, by Colonel Richards, in this feed that we have here. Before you came in, I was pointing out that it was possible that he had specifically calibrated these monitors before video-capturing them for us. I think what’s noteworthy about the auto-destruct sequence is not that it requires our input, or your input, before it can be effected, but, rather, and correct me if I’m wrong here, Fielding, that Jed has actually already engaged his end. Am I reading this monitor correctly?”

  “It’s the preliminary subroutine,” Fielding muttered. “He has given himself one hour on the clock.”

  “And we have how much time left before splashdown?”

  “About twice that much.”

  How had it grown so late? How had it grown so late? How had years of preparation and endlessly redundant plans come down to this? It had grown late while the Mars mission pondered, again and again, a list of possible responses without arriving at one that it could collectively stomach, and now it was nearly too late.

  “Which means,” Rob said, “that we have how long if we’re trying to insure that pieces of the craft burn up in the outer atmosphere?”

  The question hung like a cloud over a blasting site, and while the crowd murmured and prepared to return to its workstations, Rob Antoine, still relying on some auxiliary tank of energy that he had long since used up, gave the image on the screen one last look. That was when he saw the fuzzy onboard video monitor way over on the left side of the feed. Because of Rob’s nearness and the screen’s fuzzy resolution, the monitor was very hard to make out. It was a blur of primary colors.

  “Wait, wait!” Rob called to those who would exit. “Anyone look at this? Right here?” He indicated with the pointer.

  “A personal monitor,” said Fielding Ayler. “That’s just whatever he’s watching on the idiot box. Or was.”

  “Just for my own edification, Fielding, do you happen to know what’s on his idiot box?”

  “As you know, sir, we can’t see what’s on their personal screens. For reasons of privacy. However, sir, there is a work-around, insisted on by security personnel.”

  “Is that right?” Antoine replied.

  “We do have, for example, a record of web-related transactions by the employees, just like with anyone here on staff. They are networked to us, after all, even at a distance. Anything th
at’s been watched would have been cached in a file folder for the individual astronaut, and that material, unless they uploaded it from a flash drive, which they shouldn’t have, is contained on the server right here.”

  “I’m guessing, Fielding, that you have seen a few reports about individual usage.”

  “I’m guessing, sir, that everyone with clearance has.”

  “What does everyone with clearance know about the viewing habits of our courageous voyagers?”

  “That Captain Jim Rose liked gay porn, sir, that Arnie and Laurie follow professional tennis, and ballet, and that Colonel Richards, well, sir, he’s sentimental about his daughter.”

  “You’re saying what, exactly?”

  “Unless I miss my guess, sir, that blurry image is Colonel Richards’s daughter at a dance. A recent high school dance. Uploaded by her to his e-mail box about six weeks ago. She’s a good dancer apparently. Very, uh, flamboyant.”

  In this way Rob Antoine came to wonder about the mysteries of syntax, of language. Had he learned, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Colonel Jed Richards was trying to tell him something? No, he didn’t believe he’d learned any such thing. Over all meanings was the shadow of unmeaning. In all utterances was the exasperated sigh of those lapsing into silence. Where one man was certain about what he had just said, beside him was a Vance Gibraltar, or others like him, who had heard no such thing, who had heard, in fact, nothing at all. Woe to the words and sentences and paragraphs that were not even understood as such, for they faded from recollection like trash blowing across a glass-strewn vacant lot. This, however, did not prevent Rob Antoine from divining with tea leaves, and perhaps this was because of his fixation upon the long, slow march of truth across the canvas of the boring. What was boring was somehow more elegant, more perfect, for it was incontrovertible. The boring was everything that certainly was. The boring was everything that had stood the test of time. The boring was that set of truths that were so long fixed that erosion had begun to sand them down. The boring was geological; the boring was universal. The boring, therefore, was preferable. And so when the meeting attendants had agreed to research and return in half an hour, the room emptied, so that all the Mars mission team managers could go to their workstations to prepare for what came next, if not auto-destruct. Rob Antoine was still looking at the image, and that was when the syntax of the remark—for that was what he had come to call it in his fuzzy mind, the remark—appeared to him, with the blunt force of an equation, something perfect and mathematical—what Jed Richards was trying to tell him, trying to tell Rob Antoine, another husband and father whose family had left him while he attempted to learn the truth that the stars and the planets were bent upon announcing: