The Four Fingers of Death (23 page)

In order even to write about the sentence, I had to copy it from a document that they sent earlier, a contract I had to sign, agreeing that I had no rights over the sentence. I didn’t
write
the sentence, the contract indicates, and I cannot use it or sign my name to it, once having uttered it. Any royalties accruing from the sentence belong to NASA itself. The sentence, in fact, is copyrighted and trademarked. Maybe because of this, kids, I can’t remember the goddamn sentence at all. When I’m trying to fall asleep, I drill myself on it, reading it aloud, repeating it again and again, and every single time, I screw it up. In fact, I think there have been occasions when I have added an
a
. For example, I think I might have said, “This planet was named for
a
god of war.” What’s the problem here? Utter inability to remember the one bit of serious business I alone have on the Mars mission?

It’s night now, and we are going into orbit in a mere twelve hours, and we could
bounce off
the Martian atmosphere and pogo into interstellar space, which would
not
be good. Such things depend on the aerobrakes, which were manufactured at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory by a project manager called Simon who is very unpleasant. He could easily have sabotaged the aerobrakes. In fact, while I was recently pondering Simon and his capacity for sabotage, I was saying the sentence over and over like it was a mantra from Falun Dafa. Except that I don’t know if Falun Dafa really has mantras and the like. Is the Buddha involved? Maybe if I practiced Falun Dafa, the way José practices it, I would facilitate the memorization process, and, upon our return to the planet Earth, prosperity would wash over me, along with a great wave of Asian air pollution.

Jim was meant to be waking in an hour or so, and José would be too. We were intended to be asleep simultaneously tonight, so that we would all be awake in the morning. For the aerobraking. It’s the rare night when we are all meant to be asleep, and so it was even more singular when Jim appeared by the side of my bed. If an astronaut can be said to be drifting nervously, then Jim was doing just that. Drifting. Nervously. I didn’t even hear him at first because I was wearing headphones that were playing recordings of interstellar radio waves, which I find kind of beautiful.

“Are you worried about tomorrow?” I said. It was awkward, him by my side. In my heart, for example, it was especially awkward.

Jim nodded.

“You’re a great pilot. One of the best pilots in the universe.” This was a mere pleasantry, since Jim wouldn’t have to do that much piloting. There is so much automation. “You’ll do great.”

“No slouch yourself.”

“I manage,” I said. In truth, I fly an ultralight, and a few models of fighter planes that no one bothers with anymore. The Mars mission has redundancy in pilots and in engineers. Everyone also knows some first aid.

Jim was not by my side to discuss piloting. There’s really no other way to put it except to tell you the truth. Suddenly Jim Rose grabbed my head and began to kiss me. I suppose I would call this the tomorrow-you-may-die style of kissing, the there-is-no-other-time-than-now kissing, the burn-me-at-the-stake-if-you-must kissing, the fair-is-foul-and-foul-is-fair kissing, the desert-island-hunger-and-thirst kissing, the drive-your-cart-over-the-bones-of-the-dead kissing, the may-I-burn-eternally kissing, the don’t-ask-don’t-tell kissing. And it was a
big shocker
. As I may have already said, I am a heterosexual military man living in Florida with an estranged wife and a daughter, and I have shunned any number of homosexuals. Sometimes I have put the military hurt on them, throttled not a few, especially military homosexuals, which is not to say that I don’t respect them. But I have had little actual experience with this kind of thing, excepting a few friends when I was prepubescent. That was just transitory and experimental.

There are some details that you should know about interplanetary kissing. Shaving, as I have indicated, is made very difficult by the low-gravity water problem and the recirculation of capsule resources. We just don’t shave often, and Jim hadn’t shaved in the last day or two. He was kind of scratchy and kind of, well, musky, too, which I couldn’t fail to notice because this was a stick-a-fork-in-me-because-I’m-fully-cooked sort of kiss. We were holding each other’s heads, it was a death grip, and we didn’t care if we were not exactly shaved, or if the full expression of masculinity entailed the sandpapering of faces; we were devouring; this was interplanetary disinhibitory
devouring
; and I could hear him, as if over an intercom, whispering and moaning; it was a low moan, a moan that I recognized, namely the moan of months without being touched by another human being. Likely, you could hear this moaning coming from the beds of all the astronauts of the mission, even the beds of astronauts whom you did not favor with esteem; you felt great sorrow and sympathy for the fact of these astronauts being untouched, and as the weeks went by, you
did
feel as though you might touch them, the others, just because it was ridiculous; the drought of human affection was ridiculous; and so this moment was about the incredible gratitude of that drought coming to an end. Jim’s eyes were bloodshot, and his hair was a mess, but that didn’t stop me from wanting Jim Rose. I wanted Jim Rose, the pilot of our ship, and I wanted to kiss him some more, and I wanted to be kissed some more by Jim Rose, enough so that I almost didn’t care if José heard.

Apparently, I have some skills that I never knew I possessed. Well, maybe
skill
is not the right word. Maybe it is more like an acumen. My particular acumen was that I could verify immediately the arousal of Jim Rose, my interplanetary fuck buddy. Jim Rose was rather stunning in one of the lightweight garments that we wear when we sleep here on the
Excelsior
, sort of a baby-blue union suit. Anyone would admit that he was stunning. But I wanted more, and I could already see more. I could see that underneath his baby-blue union suit, Jim Rose was fully aroused by the stolen kisses, the interplanetary kisses, he was a mighty satyr, he was an epic from the classical era of forbidden kisses, the grunting, heaving, moaning, masculine kisses that we exchanged onboard the
Excelsior
. Before we could proceed, I pointed at the cough button, and Jim whispered huskily that he’d “Already got it,” meaning he wanted me, he wanted me, he was thinking about me before he arrived at my bedside, he was thinking about it maybe for days, and perhaps I was thinking about it too, and just not doing a very good job admitting it to myself. But seeing that Jim was, according to the argot of connoisseurs,
rock hard
played havoc with my self-deception. Jim was
rock hard
, and by the standards of the Mars mission, he was, dare I even say it, rather large.

He unstrapped me gently from my bed, and I began unfastening pieces of his capsule pajamas. We disrobed each other, that is, and for now we were thankful—this is perhaps the one time that we were thankful—that NASA had not undertaken the considerable expense of adding a centrifugal device that would have enabled low gravity in the capsules of the Mars mission. Because once I was unstrapped from bed, we were free to wrestle with each other in the capsule, drifting around, colliding with multibillion-dollar computer systems, like the one that monitors life support, likewise the kitchen gear, and then we were up at the ceiling, and we were French-kissing, and I had never quite realized before how that tongue-sucking business was really aphrodisiacal. Soon we were less than partially clad, Captain Jim Rose and Colonel Jed Richards, and we were the warriors of space, and everything about us was lean and hard and murderous, and I had never before seen how glorious it is, the perfect beauty of ambition and self-assurance that is
being male
, and all I wanted to do, in that moment, yes, was to have his staff in my mouth. At least, that was my first thought, and my second one dealt with my uncertainty about the circumcision issue, because I had never really spent any time with a cock that was uncircumcised, and if Jim’s
space arm
, as I had begun to call the thing in my head, was uncircumcised, it was going to require some additional effort on my part. I recognize that there are certain tree-hugging types, environmentalists, free-love advocates, children of that long-ago and historically debunked period known as the
Summer of Love
, who believe that this age-old variety of genital mutilation is somehow problematic, but I figured if I was circumcised, everyone was circumcised, and these thoughts were racing around in me. Would I even know what to do with it, the
space arm
, if it was uncircumcised? Would I know what to do with it at all? And there were other questions that you would have if you were a man-love neophyte. Would his body be like my body? How hirsute would it be?

And yet my inclinations were outpacing my philosophical and psychological quandaries, because I was drifting between his legs. Happily so. Before I could answer the questions, I had the
space arm
before me. I spit in my hand, except that this was not such a superlative idea, because, as with most liquids in the capsule, my saliva sort of went spraying around in little balls. “Well, that’s going to be a little complicated,” I muttered, as I tried to catch some of the spit, with which I then began servicing Jim Rose.

The circumcision issue was no issue at all. I just wanted him! And I wanted him however he was, which happened to be unsheathed according to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Much more fascinating to me was the pumping-leg motion and the mild muscular contractions that I was able to bring about in Jim, despite the fact that this was the first time in, well, thirty years that I had been amorous in the presence of another male. Of course, I have snuck the odd peek at my daughter’s sex-education textbooks, and I know that there are particular response curves to masculine sexuality. Muscular contraction is part of it, as well as contraction of the sphincter. My observations indicated that Captain Jim Rose was in the early phase of sexual release with me, Colonel Jed Richards, and that meant he was probably experiencing desire for me, and feelings of warmth and esteem for my person. Because I was feeling the same way, because I was not feeling lonely and doomed for perhaps the first time on the mission, I knew that it was therefore time to go a little further. I was imagining that I would, in fact, put the
space arm
in my mouth.

“Jed, you’re just like the coeds I used to buttfuck back at the state school,” he said. On any other day, I think it’s fair to say that this would
not
have been a romantic remark, not of the sort that I was accustomed to.
Buttfuck
, it’s just an awful word, when you think about it. It’s amazing that anyone could come to love a word so guttural and so unpleasant. But as Jim began huffing and puffing from my exertions, I recognized that something had truly shifted in me, because now the word
buttfuck
made the sinews in my groin glut with corpuscular activity. I had to have the
space arm;
it was like some alien life-form that had to be mine.

“Jim, I’m no coed. I’m no little girl in a French maid’s outfit, but I would be if you wanted me to be. I would be whatever you want me to be.” We whispered these enticements. A little hyperbole was no problem. I wanted to say all the words that needed to be said, as I drifted down below him, and the
space arm
was orbitally injected ever deeper into my mouth and toward my throat. The
space arm
was behaving like a nasty little Orion-class rocket, moving recklessly around in the atmosphere of my wet, spittle-filled mouth and lips. I gagged a little. I tried to say something, but my mouth was full. I could say nothing. I cupped the rest of his bounteous tackle, and he held the back of my head.

Jim said, “Do you think it’s just the sickness?”

I tried to say, “Do you mean Space Panic?” I wasn’t sure if I was entirely understood. Jim sighed a sigh of romantic anomie, and then he nodded. “Yes. Space Panic.”

I pulled him out and looked up, licking the dainty walnuts of his testes. “I agree with you. It’s not my kind of sport, or at least it was not my kind of sport on Earth, Jim. But, Jim, we aren’t
on
Earth anymore. Maybe where we are going, this is the norm. Maybe Mars is the planet where the love between men is not only accepted, but is a hallowed and sacred thing. Who are we? Are we now earthlings? Or are we now the forerunners of a brave new class, men who are not afraid of love and power among themselves?” And with that, I introduced a forefinger into his tight, imperturbable anus, and he moaned in a way that revealed some of the more brute varieties of wildlife.