March 26, 2026
If I didn’t say so before, there is the constant danger of hypothermia on the planet Mars. While I occasionally speak of people opening and closing their visors and breathing the atmosphere, I think I should reiterate that this happens almost never. Breathing here is like asphyxiating in your friend’s garage in Greenland. This makes it even more inexplicable, based on our experience, that Abu would attempt to take off his regulation threads, while out working on his sculptures behind the power plant, and thus fall prey to a really aggravated case of hypothermia. Unless he was afflicted with the character illness we have so far found among ourselves. Whose name, again, is interplanetary disinhibitory disorder.
This was last week, and since then Abu has been in and out of consciousness. Arnie has been looking after him in the greenhouse, and I should report, while I’m speaking of the greenhouse, that Abu’s situation came to light a mere twenty-four hours after we learned of our first fully vine-ripened interplanetary tomato. Laurie thought it would be incredibly small because there are not the right nutrients for a tomato in the soil we brought with us, and she was right. Nor were the appropriate nutrients to be found here in the Martian soil. However, what a Martian tomato lacks in size it more than makes up in taste. I am willing to believe that it was the total absence of tomato (or most anything else among fruits and vegetables, excepting soy) and a shortage of vitamin pills that resulted in my losing a front tooth last week. But let us brush, so to speak, across my dental woes. Let us move directly to the celebration of this Martian tomato.
The spice trade, kids, began because people were stultified by their traditional cuisine. If we could have managed a spice trade on Mars, we would have embarked on it immediately. Cumin! Mustard! Coriander! Allspice! The tomato came into our lives the way these spices, and the Dutch East India Company, revolutionized medieval Europe, by despoiling Africa and Asia of their resources. The historical spices distracted fetid, malodorous religious zealots from popping the smallpox on their gin-blossomed noses long enough to give way to the Renaissance! Let’s hope the tomato does the same on Mars!
In fact, my last conversation with Abu was about the tomato. It had been a couple of weeks since Laurie had espied the little green fruit on the vine, and Abu and I were over looking at it. The tomato was like a big museum show back on Earth. It was a blockbuster that no one wanted to miss. I had been over to see it on several occasions, as though I might somehow watch the tomato grow.
“I don’t even like tomatoes very much,” Abu observed. “We didn’t eat them much in my childhood. There is only occasional call for them in Yemeni dishes. As an American, however, I appreciate ketchup. Just not tomatoes.”
“Textural thing?”
“Exactly.”
“Rice pudding? Same kind of problem?”
“Reminds me of… of… well… a yeast infection,” Abu said.
“Space food must be hard.”
“Space food is okay if it has ketchup.”
“Ketchup,” I said, “offers important vitamins. Same with fancy relish. Some of these vitamins are not found in the source vegetable. Ketchup is misunderstood.”
Laurie was doing pelvic exercises on the floor of the greenhouse, because Arnie had her on an exercise regimen and a prenatal relaxation program. He was even trying to whip up some folic acid — iron combo vitamin for her.
“Still, you’re excited to try a tomato now,” Laurie said to Abu, grimacing prenatally with her exertion.
“What are we going to do? Divide it into six?”
“That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
“Supposedly the apple in the Garden of Eden, the one that caused all the post-prelapsarian difficulty, was a tomato. That’s what some scholars believe.”
Abu alone thought this was the funniest thing he had ever heard.
“Are we going to have the tomato plain, sliced, lightly salted?” I further inquired.
“No basil,” Laurie replied, grunting as she attempted to touch her toes — with difficulty owing to her increased girth.
“And what about some of the related menu items? I don’t exactly have a Martian recipe book. But I have recollective skills. As regards marinara.”
Arnie, from back in the residence, appeared at this point and volunteered that he was attempting to compile just such a tome, a Martian recipe book, which would take into account the dietary needs of interstellar space and the shortages of various vitamins and minerals, which he believed could account in part for Steve’s depression, for example, and for some of the violent mood activity of all the Martians. (Perhaps, he opined, interplanetary disinhibitory disorder was just a dietary affliction that would remit under vigilance.) As per our earlier discussion about jointly owned literary properties, Arnie was prepared to cede the better portion of the cookbook proceeds to the Mars colony as a whole, his own take being designated instead for his heir, the first Martian native, whenever he or she should appear, or perhaps if not him/her, his kids on Earth.
I asked Abu how his sculptures were going. (And I should say: I was now in my second week of pilfering from the supply of pain relief medication to be found onboard the Excelsior, and while this had begun as a way of dealing with the pain, physical and then spiritual, of my missing and reattached digits, it now seemed as though it might in fact be treating the gaping loneliness of finding myself a Martian, and whereas Jim seemed to manipulate every such problem into an opportunity for growth and intellectual investigation, to me this loneliness was just a slow, murderous inevitability, making its way through me like infectious rot, and what helped was not coming up with new and better ways for Martians to communicate among themselves about their favorite recipes, although I admired the attempt at collegiality that was implied. What helped was being potted, tanked, obliterated, high, so that drool issued from me in a steady stream and I occasionally wet myself and was unable to sit up. This was difficult to achieve, but I was resourceful. For the time being, I had taken to lower doses, maintenance doses, which could also be orally administered, thus alleviating the problem of needle tracks. Moreover, under these circumstances I was a better conversationalist and a generally less uptight member of the Mars population. Therefore, I saw no reason to refrain. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that while high I had no compunction about continuing to deplete the resources we had in the area of pain relief, though there were obviously some situations that would require pain relief for the others soon enough, for example, active labor. When I was intoxicated, I didn’t really worry about the future. Nor was I good at interpsychic perception, or, as it is commonly known, empathy. Laurie was one of those people who would prefer a natural labor, though it would be logical under the circumstances to ask what a “natural” childbirth on Mars would look like, nature here being more inhospitable than back home. There would be no accoucheur or midwife with carafe of olive oil to speed her delivery.)