“Oh, damn it,” Arnie said. “Damn it to hell. What the hell?”
“That’s the least of it,” Jim said, “but we can’t really afford to have Jed out of action, can we? I mean, a man’s got to have a thumb. He won’t even be able to do the dishes without that thumb.”
As Arnie was examining the fingers in the bag, and (subsequently) unrolling my gauze club, he asked what I was doing for pain relief, and I hate to say it but I was completely high that day, as well as in the days afterward. I was flying on some synthetic opiate that NASA had sent along with us, and the stars in the Martian sky at dawn, and the moons, they all looked fabulous to me, like a backdrop that some filmmaker had gussied up to impress the crowds at the late show on Saturday night. The stars seemed like little neurons in my skull, in the vastness of my own intelligence. I told Arnie what I was on and how much, and he nodded approvingly, said something hackneyed about staying ahead of the pain curve. And then, in the course of his preliminary examination, he managed to recognize the numerical discrepancy between the number of fingers in the bag and the number of stumps on my hand.
“Aren’t you short a digit here?” he said.
“Couldn’t find the other one,” I said.
“It’s always something,” Arnie offered.
For those who are curious: synthetic opiates are not enough for microsurgery. And even if microsurgery, with the aid of nanotechnology, is routine back where you are, and even if Arnie had done a few reattachments in his past, doing it on Mars, on a table, in a greenhouse, with pretty rudimentary surgical equipment, when you’re waiting for a madman to appear to hack you to death again, and again, and again, well, it makes for a difficult surgery. They had to hold me down. The three of them. They strapped me down with cargo belts like I was a raving lunatic. Laurie was holding my arm, and Jim was holding my head, and I was scared. I have been scared on this mission before, there have been many opportunities, and I am not the most courageous man on the mission, and I never will be. I am here to be organized, detail oriented, a good communicator, a utility infielder who can do a lot of things reasonably well. I know that I felt the little vascular connections being reattached, I felt every one of them, I don’t care what they say about local anesthetic obliterating the feelings. I felt the venous and arterial material transiting through me, felt the torn muscles back where they belonged, and the hours it took seemed doubly or triply agonizing. And I wet myself, and I wept bitterly and begged for Arnie to be through long before he was, and when it was done, and Jim hauled me up onto my feet, Arnie said, “Jed, I’d like to promise you that those fingers are going to stay on there, but I can’t promise you anything of the sort. While I doubt they will become gangrenous, because we just haven’t seen much evidence of that sort of thing here on Mars, you might have such bad circulation in there that they have to be taken off again. Keep the sutures clean, use soap and water, let me know if you have reduced sensation as the days go forward.”
“Well, Arnie,” I said, “I’m just grateful to you,” and then my knees buckled again.
Under the circumstances, I did a pretty good job at the funeral. And for this I can only thank drugs. My problem with these things, and I’m ashamed to say I have had occasion to sample many of the available opiates, is that you just can’t think straight in the same way. This was apparently as true on Mars as on Earth. I was moved to tears by the surgery because there’s a desolation that goes with having had a bunch of your fingers lopped off and then sewn back on by a gardener on a dusty desert planet, when you are still a year or more from making it home, and your new friend has just been slaughtered, and your lover will no longer recognize that you are together; I guess there were many reasons to be moved to tears.
But I had even more to consider when I got back to the Excelsior after the funeral, when I was wide awake with opiate insomnia, watching Jim Rose sleep. Kids, it was about time that someone sat down and began to describe the systematic decompensation of the emotional lives of everyone on Mars. It was time that someone made an attempt to study this decompensation, in an effort to describe it for the historical literature, and perhaps, in this way, to shed light on what we could next expect from Brandon. And from ourselves.
It seemed to me that there were only two possibilities. The first possibility was that the long-term separation from Earth did in fact engender something along the lines of interplanetary disinhibitory disorder, in an aggravated or acute form, such that people just couldn’t seem to keep their emotions in check. Do you need concrete examples? First, there was my relentless and humiliating neediness around Jim Rose. Evidently my homosexual romantic instincts were just not as graceful as my heterosexual instincts. I didn’t know how to stop wanting his attention; I didn’t know how to stop feeling that even his really peculiar habits, like the strange grunting thing he did while reading, were somehow endearing or even handsome. I didn’t know how to stop feeling flushed and warm inside when he was nearby. And I didn’t know how to stop pushing him on this, even though there had been moments recently when I actually worried that he was perhaps capable of battery.
This was the first example. A mostly normal heterosexual man becomes a wanton and pandering lothario of gay love. Then there was Debbie Quartz, of whom enough has been said. And Steve Watanabe, whose free fall into muteness already seemed to me to foretell dread things ahead. Jim Rose, who had started the mission as an upbeat high school quarterback of a guy and who now had more in common with Moses or Saint Jerome. And then there was the weird saccharine domesticity of Laurie and Arnie, though both were parents back home, and in Arnie’s case, happily married (or so it was said). Now, if they’d had a chance, they would have found a Martian golden retriever with which to adorn their playhouse. Of Abu, we had no example of eccentricity yet, except sculpture, but perhaps time would tell. He was just a very reliable person. And Brandon had evidently become quite insane.
Interplanetary disinhibitory disorder, that was one possibility of what we were seeing. The other possibility, and I admit that completely high on pain medication as I was, it was possible this was more a figment of my rather delusional mind, was that Brandon had already been infected with M. thanatobacillus. What I intended to research online, while I had the strength and was awake enough, was whether there was any kind of comparable bacterial infection that I could find from the medical literature on Earth that would give me an idea of what we were going to experience in the course of infection. Ordinarily, on Earth, with your new bacterial infections, when they were first making their way through the general population, there was a tendency for the infections to be fatal, and spectacularly so. Think of necrotizing fasciitis. Or hantavirus, which the overdevelopment of the desert cities had brought into the megalopolis. These bugs made you bleed everywhere and die within hours, begging for mercy.
M. thanatobacillus, on the other hand, may have had a preliminary effect that was only apparent in the character of the afflicted individual. Like rabies. I remember hiking in the Smoky Mountains with my daughter not too many years ago, when, at the summit of the mountain, we saw the most adorable skunk wandering around. Not the least bit afraid of us! Willing to walk right up to us! My daughter just adored skunks, and it was she who saw it first. She was getting ready to feed the rodent when I let out one of those parental howls that is intended to require immediate attention. No doubt the skunk was hydrophobic. It is possible that M. thanatobacillus has just this kind of a trajectory, wherein there are first character effects, and then only later do the somatic aspects of the infection begin to appear, the part of the disease where you disassemble. There was a sort of a hybrid of Marburg and dengue fever that the United States stockpiled during the Central Asian police actions a decade or so ago, and which were used in a very hushed-up way against rebel groups in the Caucasus region. I may have known more about this than I can say right now, and it’s possible that this hemorrhagic hybrid, which has a long acronym of a name that I can’t put my finger on right now, is a good model for the initial infection cycle of M. thanatobacillus. We found hardened warlords from the rebel groups wandering in the mountains, carrying daisies and singing to themselves. It was not difficult to neutralize these combatants, and that was before the onset of somatic symptoms.