The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  I knew that there was much about me that repelled the average person, things that I seemed powerless to correct, no matter my efforts. My wife still looked at me with a brightened smile when I came home from whatever dangerous foreign adventure I was on. I’d seen guts spilling out of every friend and enemy. I’d seen men tortured until they begged to die. There were things about my character that were annealed in the foundry of international conflict, things that resisted civilizing. I was, moreover, responsible for my brother’s death, or that was the burden that I had carried around so many years, on bombing raids near and far. My wife was the only one who could see through the craggy, dangerous straits of my character to know of my many regrets and my earnest desire to improve.

  Maybe she would have hung in there a little longer had I turned up to see the baby whelped. But there were a solid twenty-four hours’ worth of flights required to get me from Tajikistan to Gainesville, FL, where we were living. It took blizzard conditions in only one of the relevant locations to make the trip a bust. But in addition to blizzard conditions, I spent three hours in an airport in Estonia, doubled over on a commode, wondering which bits of my brains were being shat out. By the time I changed planes in New York, I had that feeling that everything boorish about me had been evacuated. And yet despite all this, I did come running into the delivery room to find little Ginger, fully rinsed of her glutinous body shampoo and wrapped in some baby’s textile, resting on my wife’s bosom. My wife was smiling her exhausted smile, and she welcomed me though I deserved no welcome.

  Back here on Mars, Laurie gave one last mighty heave in her pelvic girdle, straining at her ligaments, and the shoulders of the child seemed to pass through. So it seemed from where I knelt, which admittedly was not an obstetrical angle. Arnie’s demeanor, at once methodical and professional, lightened considerably, as the rest of the child transited quickly out. Soon there was a bloody papoose in Arnie’s lap, by which humankind proved that it could, after all, be Martian.

  He said, while toweling off the dumpling, “Jed, help her with the afterbirth, please.” There was the requisite cutting of the cord. And Arnie plunged his little girl into a bucket. Pulled her out of the bath and then warmed her in his arms until she gasped her first breath.

  I suppose I was not prepared for the amount of efflux that still remained to pass from the mother, attached to the cord, and probably this is because I had conspired to miss out on Ginger’s birth. Laurie elected again to bite down on a piece of rawhide that had been produced from some interplanetary valise, and in this posture she rid herself of the afterbirth. She was sweating and weeping. With joy, I suppose.

  “It’s a girl?” I said.

  “It’s a girl,” Arnie said.

  “It’s a girl,” Laurie said, as if somehow reassuring herself. “Just what we don’t need around here, more men.”

  I took to cleaning up the various rags and towels. Out the window of the greenhouse, I could see Phobos, looking every bit the Idaho potato, crossing east over our city of the plains. “Does she have a name?”

  “She does,” Arnie said, suturing up a spot in Laurie, who was holding the baby and managing to be uncomplaining.

  “And are you going to tell me the name?”

  Arnie said, “Her name is Prima.”

  He told me to make sure to lock the door on the way out, and this was news to me—that doors on Mars locked now. He had ingeniously found a way to install a lock in the greenhouse. You just popped a button and walked out. So old-fashioned. The two of them called weak thanks to me as I left. I slammed the door firmly, to be sure that they were sequestered in their prelapsarian Mars, while I went out east of Eden.

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Ginger, I’m just checking in here, because things have been a little slow on Mars lately. Not a lot going on. The weather has taken a turn for the worse. We’re worried about dust storms again.We’re just passing the warmest part of the summer, and that means the days when it’s possible to be outside without wearing a whole lot of protective covering are also going to come to an end. It’s fifty below at night sometimes.

  GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: Daddy, I miss you. Do you think you can send me some video, even if it’s a really shaky picture or something? I hate not seeing you for so long. I don’t care how long it takes, how shaky it is. I like to have a picture in my mind so that when I’m rebelling against everything you stand for I know what you look like. School is the same, and I’m doing okay in math, even though it’s not like I care about it. Hey, to totally change the subject, I’ve been thinking about college, and I’m wondering if I can go abroad for school. I think it would be good to go to some foreign countries and see some stuff. (Emoticon.)

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Wait. Am I speaking to the right teenager? This just doesn’t sound like the Ginger Stark-Richards I remember, whose most ambitious trip was to the mall to get some unusual color of hair dye or nail polish. If you’re my daughter you’re going to have to prove it with some classified information.

  GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: Easy! The most important political issue as far as you are concerned is campaign finance reform, money is what makes us us, and you think the best period of music was the 1970s, even though you don’t want anyone to know that’s what you really think, hahaha.

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: I have no choice but to believe you, though my mind is riddled with doubts. Now I have a few serious things to say, if that’s okay with you. Ginger, I was thinking of you a lot today, for reasons that will be clear soon enough in the press, and I wanted you to know that you really are the best thing that ever happened to a man like me. I’ll get busy with things now and then, because I’m just not terribly smart about life—I wish I were smarter—and I’ll put my head down, and I’ll just blunder through. But then there are days like today, when I know that I have had one remarkable blessing and that’s you. On Mars, I spontaneously recall these things we have done together, like the time I drove up and down the block with you looking for your pet robot, calling to it in that language you designed, and then it turned out that it was under your bed the whole time. Under the circumstances, these things feel quite profound to me. Your secret language, your self-designed encryption algorithms, your emoticons.

  GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: Are you okay, Daddy? Is there something wrong?

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: There’s always something wrong on Mars, if you want to know the truth. It’s never easy. It’s like living in medieval times or worse. I’ve lost a couple of teeth, I’m a little bit malnourished. But just when you think it’s all too much, and you can’t wait until the months have passed and it’s time to get back into the Excelsior and start for home, there’s some arresting view, some overpowering landscape such as you have never seen before. For example, honey, Captain Rose and I were traveling by ultralight to the Meridiani Planum recently, where they are certain there have been very recent water flows, based on the satellite imaging we’re getting, and you wouldn’t believe the geological beauty of these ice deposits. They’re like some kind of curvilinear shelves, like the fronds of a fan, like the steps on some ancient cathedral, which is what this place is, a cathedral.

  GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: Exciting news here is that there’s a plan to build a really big seawall at the edge of the beach to protect against the ocean, which is rising like crazy. Some people are in favor of this, I guess, and then there are other people saying that the ocean levels aren’t going to rise at all. There are other people who are just leaving, because they think there are too many hurricanes around. I say okay leave Florida to those of us who are really from here, and who really care about the state however it is. (Emoticon.) But, Daddy, I have another question, because what they were saying online, you know, was that certain astronauts on the mission were killed in the line of duty. Can you just promise me that you aren’t taking any kinds of risks? Please? Why are you losing teeth? Can you please tell me?

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Where in the pr
ess did you see that? They really shouldn’t be printing stories like that. Ginger, I do what I can to be safe, to make sure I can get home to you, and, hopefully, to your mother too, if she’ll have me. I’m really not involved in any of the difficult research anyway, since my responsibility is primarily in the area of communications, and in command and control. That kind of thing. Lately, since the situation has changed, I’ve been overseeing power generation. It’s not very complicated. We have a simple nuclear power plant here, you know, a graphite-moderated turbine, and lately Arnie has been using it to do some chemistry where we take hydrogen fuel and solid carbon dioxide, which you can get in a frost state around here pretty easily, and then you fuse them and you get water and some other stuff. I don’t totally understand it, but the main thing is that this produces more power. I need to look after myself, honey, in order to run the power plant, so that’s what I’m going to do. Look after myself.

  GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: Is it true that you don’t age as fast as I do? I read that somewhere recently. And is it lonely there? Do you feel lonely? And, Dad, I have this other question. Can you tell me what this expression Code 14 means?

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Where did you hear that expression?

  GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: Code 14? It’s just something that people are saying a lot. It’s like it’s sort of become this cool expression, you know, people just say it around a lot. Somebody told me that it was this expression that came from the Mars mission. Like maybe it’s somebody else whose parents work at Cape Canaveral or something. Somebody told me it’s what people say on the Mars mission when one of the astronauts has gone out of control or something.

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Ginger, this is kind of important, I need for you to tell me if you heard this from someone at NASA. Is there anyone who was over at the house on weekends? Maybe visiting your mother or something? Maybe that guy, Mr. Gibraltar, was over there? Or maybe he said this to you?

  GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: Don’t get all paranoid, Daddy. (Emoticon.) I told you where I heard it. It’s like something people say now, like at school, and it means that the situation is all f——up or something. I’m trying to avoid swearing. Like when the situation has gone all crazy or something, people will say “Code 14! Code 14!” But are they saying this because there’s someone up there that was a Code 14? You’d tell me if the situation was dangerous?

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: You don’t have to worry about that at all. They wouldn’t be putting us in these conditions if they didn’t have an exit strategy for your dad and the other people on the mission.

  GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: But what about those astronauts who got killed in the other missions?

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: We’ve been over this. There haven’t been any hardware mishaps on any manned Mars missions. There was a chimpanzee who died for his country on the way here, sixteen years ago. And there were some guys who got killed during the second round of Mars shots. A few other small things. But it was the failures in those situations that prompted the agency to take dramatic steps to improve their safety record. Now what I want you to do is find your mother. Is your mother in the house? Can you have her get on here, so I can talk to her for a minute?

  GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: I don’t want her using my account. I have stuff on here that isn’t appropriate for people her age. She can access her own account.

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: I’m not kidding around. Now means now.

  (And here the delay was longer than usual. It was a pretty long delay, in fact, and mostly I filled these delays with intoxicants of various kinds, and with preconceptions about the conversation to come. So that I was already on edge when the screen beeped, and there was another message upon it.)

  PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: What’s the problem?

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: What are you telling her? Are you telling her things that you are hearing over at NASA? Where does she get all this type of thing? I’m really irritated about it. You can’t just let her live her life without filling her head full of all this stuff? Dangers of interplanetary travel? And what took you so long to get to the computer?

  PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: Jed, there’s a lot of rumor and innuendo going on about the Mars mission. The press is onto other things, because they forget things, but there’s still a lot of gossip kicking around online. Some of this is easy to control and some of it is not.

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: What if her future is contingent upon her not being contaminated with this kind of nonsense? Wouldn’t you do what was necessary to protect her?

  PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: The father who has not only abandoned the family, but abandoned it all the way off the planet, is trying to get all interested now in how his daughter is parented? Do you want to help with the homework, Jed? Do you want to start doing that? Because most of her homework is done on the computer console that the school loans her, and the geometry teacher, for example, grades the pieces very promptly as soon as Ginger hits send. I’m sure that NASA, in their wisdom, who have made it possible for you to read the newspapers and play simulation games with ex-cons from Indiana and the like, could make it possible for a deadbeat like you to review your daughter’s homework once in a while. Did you know, Jed, that your daughter is having particular trouble with trigonometry? I don’t suppose you do. Well, if you want to start talking about how I’m supposed to be raising her, while you’re off scraping rock samples off the floor of a crater, then start today. I’ll be happy to relinquish some of the responsibility. I guess you won’t be able to pick her up three days a week, like this separation agreement I have here says you are supposed to do, so that I can have a day off now and then. And I guess you won’t be able to see her two weekends and one Sunday a month, and you won’t be able to maintain a room for her at your domicile, will you, Jed? Unless you’re going to have her fired up into space. Am I right about that, Jed?

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Don’t bring up that agreement. Don’t do that. You don’t need to do that. I’m under a lot of stress here right now, and it’s natural that I would be a little short-tempered about things I can’t control back home. But you can believe me, Pogey, when I say that I intend to address all of this when I get back. I’m a changed person, in many ways, a more philosophical and thoughtful person. I will make that clear to you and Ginger when I am able. I will prove it.

  PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: That’s very sweet of you to say, Jed, but it is possible, you know, that things have changed here a little bit too. You’ve been gone for over six months, and there were times when I was younger when that would not have been a real burden to me, when separations were a part of our being together. But I’d already moved into Dan’s place before you left, Jed, I don’t expect you have forgotten that. And now six months have passed, and I have met someone else. I wish there were a better time to tell you this, but there isn’t a better time, so there it is.

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: What are you saying to me?

  PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: I’m saying what it looks like I’m saying. I’m saying that I’m seeing someone else.

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Who is the someone else?

  PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: I thought you were against the short replies, what with the delay? What difference does it make who it is? It’s no one you know. The point is that now I’m realizing how much suffering I was doing, while hoping you would be someone else, or do something else, and I don’t want to suffer as much, or not in the same way, anymore. I want to try to be happy.

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: A man or a woman?

  PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: What are you talking about?

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Is it someone from NASA? Are you sleeping with someone from NASA?

  PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: What difference would it make if I were? I didn’t choose him, or you, or any other man I’ve ever been involved with, based on professional credentials. If I had
, I’d have left you long ago, Jed.

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: You’re sleeping with someone from NASA? You have the audacity to say to me that it doesn’t matter what the person does? Do you have any idea what you have done? Has it not occurred to you that NASA could have some powerful reasons for wanting to compromise you in that way? What have you told him about me? Have you told him about any conversations we have had lately, or anything I said to you before?

  PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: Jed, you’re beginning to sound… I don’t know… kind of crazy. Like I said, people are not sitting around checking any weekly video updates about the Mars mission. Everyone at the agency knows that the Mars mission is not being cooperative. You said as much yourself.

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: You just have no idea what you’re talking about right now. Who is this person? Is it the flight director, what’s his name, Rob Antoine, toupée guy, are you sleeping with him?

  PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: You don’t know him. He’s assistant manager of propulsion systems, if you have to know, and the most he has to do with you is that he’s figuring out ways to make the trip home faster. Because the payload is lighter.

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Because of all the dead people. He has told you that the payload is going to be lighter not just because most of the hydrogen is going to be left behind, but also because most of the astronauts are dead? Has he told you that? I bet you’re lying on your bed, our bed, right now with him looking over your shoulder, and he’s reading all of this aloud to that Rob Antoine fellow, as fast as I type it out here in the lightless, oxygen-deficient interior of a nuclear power plant on this desert planet that is rapidly falling into winter where we’re all liable to be dead, if you want to know the truth.