The Pier Falls: And Other Stories

by Mark Haddon

  After lunch she goes to find Mikal. They’re doing an EVA later in the day to work on the Long Array, not much more than a slow walk for a kilometre and a half carrying two titanium poles and a rock drill, but a hundred ways to die en route. On her first outing her oxygen supply failed after forty metres. She lost consciousness halfway back and Per saved her life by dragging her to the airlock.

  They now have a 73-point checklist to work through before they call in Per and Jon to get suited and booted. They take their helmets out of the lockers and lay them on the table. They take our their thermal underwear and lay it on the table.

  “Suki tells me Jon is not feeling well,” says Mikal. “So if you’re thinking of having a heart attack it might be wise to postpone it till tomorrow.”

  “A heart attack would be a good way to go, don’t you think?” says Clare.

  “Not in the immediate future, I hope.”

  Per and Suki are, in the best possible way, psychopaths. They have retained pretty much every piece of information they’ve been given and they have never been visibly tired or frightened, but Clare has absolutely no idea what is going on in their minds. She suspects, sometimes, that for long periods there is nothing going on in their minds, that they sleep like sharks, on autopilot, shutting down half their brain at a time. Arvind pays for his buoyancy with periods of darkness which he tries hard to keep from the rest of them, so that Clare holds him at a distance for fear of becoming infected, as they all do. Jon, the crew’s doctor, is constantly positive, a whipper-up of good cheer, and while she enjoys playing backgammon with him or helping him swab down one of the units she is uncomfortable with his relentless need for activity, for noise, for distraction. But she can sit in a room with Mikal for hours and his silent presence puts her at ease in the way that dogs and horses once put her at ease. He has a piratical beard, bends every rule a little and treats his previous life as a deep well of entertaining stories. They have sex sometimes. She never used to like it much, one of the reasons her relationship with Peter faltered. She doesn’t like it much now, but the testosterone which stops her bones turning to powder gives her discomfiting dreams unless she relieves her raised libido every now and then. Of all times this is the one she finds hardest, when they are lying together afterwards, the way he runs his hand through her hair, the way three years and three hundred thousand kilometres seem like a curtain she could step through.

  They take out their boots. “There was a beech wood just below the sawmill,” says Mikal. “It was the most astonishing place in spring. Yellow rapeseed to one side, bluebells coming up through the dead leaves.” They visually check the airtight joints at the ankles, knees and pelvis, rotating each one through 360 degrees. “I was chased by a forester once. A huge man. He had a gun. It was tremendously exciting.”

  Suki appears in the doorway, noiselessly as always. There is a look on her face that Clare has never seen before. “You need to come.”

  “I have pain moving from my stomach down to my right iliac fossa.” Jon is finding it hard to speak. “I have no appetite. I’ve been vomiting. I have a temperature of forty-one and I have rebound tenderness. I think it’s fairly obvious without doing a white blood cell count.”

  “Antibiotics?” asks Per.

  “I’m taking them.”

  “When do we have to make a decision?”

  “Now would be good,” says Jon.

  Everyone looks at Clare. She’s never done an appendectomy.

  Per turns back to Jon. “Tell her everything she needs to do. Suki, get into a blue suit, sterilise West 2, put new air filters in. Arvind, set up the equipment. Mikal, we need references, photos, notes, diagrams. Jon, morphine or ketamine?”

  Everyone else leaves the room and Jon and Clare are alone. He says, “Well, this is an adventure.”

  She did military medical in Florida, four years of college compacted into six months. No time for surgery. In 403 days they would be joined by Dr. Annie Chen. In the end all you could do was to rank the conceivable emergencies in order of likelihood, draw a red line where time and money and the capacity of the human brain came to an end and hope you encountered nothing on the far side.

  “Sofanauts” was the word they coined, people willing to be fired into space on top of a 700-tonne firework then spend the rest of their lives playing Scrabble and cleaning toilets. You had to get pretty close to the Venn diagram to see where those two circles overlapped.

  She had very little to tie her down. Her parents were dead. Three years with Peter convinced her that she did not possess a talent for intimacy. He wanted children but the rough end of her father’s anger had warned her against the dangers of that particular relationship.

  She had two degrees in physics and a job as a lab technician. People told her that she should be more ambitious but it didn’t seem like something one could change. Less sympathetic people said that she was detached and uninterested. Then she found her niche. Vasco da Gama, Shackleton, Gagarin. Was it stupid to hope that your name might be remembered in four hundred years’ time?

  Jon lies on his back with his right arm tucked up out of the way. He is intubated and Mikal is hand-ventilating him. She stands on his right, Suki on his left, both of them masked and blue-suited. Laid out on a second table are scalpels, six retractors, a couple of clamps, an electrocauter, suture, needles, saline and antiseptic gel. Behind the instruments are two tablets, one showing images of the skin and muscles in the abdomen, the other showing the notes she made from Jon’s instructions. Before he was anaesthetised Jon drew a 4 cm diagonal line on his own abdomen with a Sharpie to show her where to begin cutting. She washes the area and swabs it with green gel.

  Suki’s and Mikal’s eyes are unreadable above their masks. Through the one porthole she can see the layered shale slopes of Mount Sharp and the featureless carbon dioxide sky. She ratchets her focus down. Be calm. Pause before every new action. Detail, detail, detail.

  Mikal says, “You can do this.”

  She picks up a 12-blade scalpel and cuts into the abdominal wall. The blood starts to flow. Suki hooks the tube into the lower end of the wound to pump it out. Clare can see the three layers of which the flesh is composed: the outer skin, the fatty layer of Camper’s fascia and below that the membranous Scarpa’s fascia. She cauterises the bleeding from the bigger blood vessels. It smells like bacon frying. The heart monitor chirps. 78 bpm. Mikal squeezes and releases the clear plastic ball. She makes a second incision and refers back to the diagram. She has reached the upper layer of stomach muscle. The parallel fibres run north-west to southeast. This is where the hard part begins. She makes an incision along the fibres, pushes two clamps into the slit and uses a retractor to crank it open. She is surprised by the force she has to exert and the fact that the muscle doesn’t rip. The resulting hexagonal hole is shockingly small.

  Under the muscle she can see the peritoneum. She takes hold of it carefully with the Metzenbaum scissors and cuts into it making an even smaller hole. Mikal asks if she needs any help. She tells him she doesn’t. She hears the snappiness in her voice. She stops and takes three long, slow breaths. Twenty-four minutes, but doing it right is more important than doing it fast.

  She checks her notes. She has to find the ascending colon and the longitudinal muscles around it. She scrolls through the pictures. Nothing seems to correlate. She is going to have to move the colon around using clamps. She is unsure of how much pressure she can apply before the glossy membrane tears. Gently pinching, she moves it to the left, shifting the clamps one over the other in turn as if she is hauling on a wet rope. Then she moves to the right in the same way. She can see them now, the taenia coli. She follows them downwards and there it is. The inflammation is all too visible.

  Arvind comes in, masked and blue-suited and takes over from Mikal who leaves the room.

  Clare uses the rounded metal end of a clamp to guide the appendix gently up and out through the hole. She puts a clamp on the junction between the appendix and the colon, squee
zing it shut until it catches on the first notch and holds, then a second clamp beside it. There is an artery in that little isthmus of flesh around which she is going to tie the sutures. She stretches her hands and fingers to loosen them. Suki gives her the first length of suture. She threads it round the neck of flesh between the clamps and ties it tight with a reef knot. She cuts the loose ends away. She ties a second suture next to it. To make absolutely sure she ties a third. Slowly she releases the clamp on the appendix side of the suture.

  She hadn’t thought to ask Jon what the appendix contained. Pus, presumably, but how liquid, and under what pressure? She asks Suki to soak several swabs in antiseptic gel and pack the opening to protect the peritoneal cavity. She uses a new scalpel to cut through the pinched flesh between the sutures and the clamp. It is tougher than she expects and when it finally gives she slips and slices through one of the swabs right into the muscle.

  “Fuck.”

  She waits and breathes. She examines the fresh wound. She hasn’t punctured the peritoneum. Luckier still, the swollen appendix has come away with no leakage. She drops it into a tray then cauterises the bunched flesh where it was attached.

  She releases the second clamp. The sutures hold. She is going to wait for five minutes. She wants to be absolutely certain. There is no noise except the hush and crumple of the air bag. Four minutes, four minutes thirty seconds, five minutes. She rinses the wound with saline. She pulls the two sides of the cut peritoneum together and clamps them. Suki threads a curved needle and hands it to her. She stitches, moves the clamp, stitches again and moves the clamp. When she has finished she prods the peritoneum on either side of the wound. The stitches are not tidy but they hold. She washes them with saline.

  She clamps and stitches the muscle. She clamps and stitches the fasciae. She clamps and stitches the skin. She washes the wound with saline.

  It has been three and a half hours.

  Suki says she’ll clean up and keep an eye on Jon.

  Arvind says, “That was an extraordinary piece of work.”

  Clare steps outside, removes her gloves and lowers her mask. Mikal comes up to her and puts his arms around her. Per is standing beside them. It is the first time Mikal has shown her physical affection in front of another person. “You were heroic.”

  Jon dies the following morning. Suki has brought him some warm oatmeal and a weak coffee. He hoists himself up the bed so that he can eat and drink more easily and this must be the moment when the sutures break. He asks for Clare. Suki doesn’t understand what is happening.

  He tells Clare that it is his fault. He should have told them earlier that he was feeling ill. The sheet under him is red. He asks for morphine. Everyone is in the room now. Arvind, Mikal, Per. Between the pain and the growing fog there are five minutes of clarity.

  Per stands up straight and sticks out his chest. “I would like to say on behalf of all of us—”

  Jon says, “Oh, do fuck off.”

  Arvind laughs and catches himself.

  Jon lies back and closes his eyes. “I want to listen to some music.”

  “What music?” asks Mikal.

  “Bluegrass,” says Jon.

  He is unconscious by the time Mikal returns. Mikal puts the music on anyway. No one knows what else to do. There is nothing in the Protocol which deals with this situation. Leaving the room seems wrong, talking seems wrong, but standing quietly doing nothing makes it seem prematurely like a funeral. Suki holds Jon’s hand for a while but he does not respond so she drops it again. Arvind stares out of the window so that no one can see his face. Jon dies listening to “My Lord Keeps a Record” by Carl Story and his Rambling Mountaineers.

  Per says, “Let’s concentrate on the small things.”

  They strip Jon’s body, plug it and wrap it in the bloody sheet. Recycling is so axiomatic that Clare cannot help thinking how wasteful it is to discard an object containing so much fluid and so many calories. They lay him in the airlock ready for the morning. They don’t want to be outside with night falling.

  Mikal and Clare tidy Jon’s room. They fold the clothes, put them away and make the bed. Clare opens Jon’s Ark and takes out a crucifix of palm fronds, a fossil trilobite and a green toy Ferrari with one tyre missing. She arranges them beside Jon’s little zoo of origami animals. In the bottom of the Ark she finds a dog-eared and faded photo of a young woman aged eighteen or nineteen lying naked on a bed. She is dark-skinned with shaggy coal-black hair, big breasts, utterly at ease. There is an open bottle of red wine on the carpet and the bottom of a film poster Clare cannot identify above the headboard. She puts it back in the box and they seal the room to save energy.

  They bury Jon the following morning. They have no vehicle so Mikal and Arvind have to carry him slung between them. The EVA suits make it hard to get up after a fall so they move slowly and rest often. It takes them twenty-five minutes to reach the site a couple of hundred metres south of the base which has already been quietly earmarked as a graveyard. They return for spades. The soil is not as deep as they had hoped. They lay Jon in a shallow trough. They have been outside for more than two hours by this time. Per tells them to return to the base but they insist on completing the job, gathering stones and building a long, low cairn so that Jon’s body is not uncovered by the wind. When they return they have been outside for more than five hours. They are exhausted.

  Per says, “I know that this is a difficult situation but we mustn’t allow emotion to undermine discipline.”

  Mikal and Arvind remove their suits and everyone eats lunch together.

  Arvind says, “I would like to recite a poem.”

  Per says, “That would be acceptable. If no one has any objections.”

  Arvind stands up. “Maranare tuhu mamo shyamo saman meghabaran tujha, megha jotajuta, raktakamalkara, rakta adharaputa…”

  Suki asks what the poem is.

  “It is Tagore,” says Arvind. He does not offer a translation or a title. Clare suspects that he is trying to show more grief than the rest of them.

  Mikal tells stories about Jon, how he played noughts and crosses on the Argo with floating grids of rye crackers, the monitor he made to predict Suki’s fits, his God-awful singing voice.

  Per says, “I think it would be a good idea if we were to carry on with this afternoon’s timetable as usual.”

  Suki says, “We have years ahead of us. Perhaps we should each of us decide how best to spend the rest of the day.”

  They write reports for Geneva and give video testimonies. They are not allowed to discuss these with one another in advance. They are given pre-prepared scripts to learn and perform for a media package. They are encouraged to edit these to make them seem more personal. They take psychological tests which have been devised for them in the event of the death of a crew member.

  Previously when she tired of company she retired to her room. Conversely when she felt lonely she sought the others out. Now she hungers for some indefinable third option. She has become the crew doctor. She tells Mikal that she does not want to have sex. He asks if he can simply hold her. As he is doing so she wonders if she was frightened of loving Peter too much, if that was why the relationship failed. Loving someone too much, not loving someone enough. Was it possible to mistake one of those for the other?

  One evening Per is absentmindedly humming “My Lord Keeps a Record” to himself as he prepares his supper. Arvind says, “What the fuck are you doing?” She has never heard Arvind be anything less than courteous. Per has no memory of where the tune comes from. Arvind calls him a robot. Per puts his hand high on Arvind’s chest but not quite around his neck. He says, “This mission is more important than you or your feelings.”

  Clare says, “We are all upset. We just express it in different ways.”

  After a pause Per takes his hands off Arvind and says, “You are right, of course.”

  She gives Arvind diazepam, 6 mg a day with a slow taper. She makes him increase his exercise regime by 50 percent. She sees h
im every evening to assess his mood. He is allowed to record and receive more videos to and from his extended family in New Haven and Chennai.

  Per asks to talk to her in private and says that now might be a good moment to share with her the contents of the Kent Protocol. She says that Arvind will get better. It was a temporary aberration. She will read the Protocol if and when it becomes necessary.

  Life refinds its equilibrium. Per, Mikal, Suki and Arvind take turns doing EVAs to the Long Array. Clare is no longer allowed to take part in potentially dangerous activities. Instead she measures heart rates and blood pressure and lung capacity and muscle tone and bone mass and visual acuity. She gives reaction tests and scans for tumours. She reads Neil Gaiman. She reads George R. R. Martin. Christmas comes and goes and the fact that none of them are practising Christians prevents the party atmosphere thickening to something more sombre. Arvind finishes his course of Valium and seems stable.

  It is early February when the Halcyon is lost. There is a brief audio message from Anne-Marie Harpen to Geneva saying that they have detected heightened oxygen levels and will be performing a 95 percent electrical shutdown while they find the leak. Contact is never resumed. They wake the black box from Geneva. An hour after Anne-Marie’s message the internal temperature rose rapidly to unsurvivable levels and remained there for seventeen minutes. There is no subsequent electrical activity anywhere on the main vessel. If anyone has managed to survive in a sealed section they will be taking their Moxin to avoid a longer, less comfortable death. There is no change of trajectory, so the ship is still heading in their direction. Nine months later, on 4 or 5 September, if it strikes the atmosphere at the right time of day they will see it burn up overhead like a shooting star.