Abu answered that the sculptures were going swell, that he was beginning to feel that his sculptures were reflecting the landscape in which he lived, instead of being recollections of an earthly landscape. So it was possible that he was answering the question about what the medium of sculpture would look like here on this planet. This sculpture would be severe, he said, it would be free of comedy and irony, so that it better reflected the earnest striving of this place, this planet that perhaps wanted life, craved life, and craved especially the capacity of life to know itself, though this planet had so far been thwarted in its longing for vivacity.
While we were conducting this agreeable conversation, Arnie brought out the knife, a little serrated thing, and I watched as Laurie prepared to harvest the tomato, which was not entirely ripe. We could probably be forgiven for eating the tomato before it was at its peak, so desperate were we for the overpowering novelty of a tomato.
“You’re not going to wait for Jim?” I asked, hoping sincerely that she would not agree to wait. “Or Steve? Does Steve like tomatoes?”
“I saw Steve this morning,” Arnie said. “I think it’s safe to cut a portion for him that we can refrigerate until he’s ready for it.”
“We could save Jim some too,” I said. “As we know, many civilizations were founded when important thinkers of the day retreated into the wilderness in order to make themselves ready to receive wisdom and understanding. I imagine Jim is receiving messages out there. We should not distract him from the reception of these messages.”
Arnie gave me a look that suggested to me the possibility that my drug abuse was not going entirely unnoticed.
I continued. “Jim Rose is effective in a leadership capacity. My only regret is that I am not so effective myself.”
Arnie seemed on the verge of disagreeing with this, but the point passed without challenge. It was agreed then that a slice of tomato would also be set aside for Jim. To nourish him when he got back. Then Laurie said darkly, “But I’m not going to save a piece for him.” By which she meant a certain other member of the mission.
A dark cloud of worry hovered over the subject of Lepper. All were involved in prognosticating as to his intent. It was clear, I thought, that Brandon and José had been privy to military-industrial conspiracy on behalf of large defense contractors from back home. As, perhaps, had been Debbie Quartz, whose lecture to Abu, with soldering gun in hand, had concerned a certain bacterium. At the time, her speeches had seemed hysterical, pathological. Not now.
As I have said, I was able to monitor Brandon’s movements, with the locator that was built onto the all-terrain rover, and this information I passed on to the others each morning. I gave Brandon’s position and the amount of time he had spent at each location; I conjectured as to his activities. Before eating the tomato, in fact, I gave a very brief update, so that we could put Brandon behind us: Lepper was still at the eastern end of the canyon, and it was reasonably certain that he was mining something there, and that the nature of this ore, or this slurry, was the concealed reason for our trip to Mars. The question was whether it was, in fact, mineral, or, well, vegetable, by which I suppose I meant: M. thanatobacillus.
“And that is enough of that,” I said.
“Yep,” Laurie said. “Because we have this tomato, and we are going to eat this tomato, and I’m going to pick the seeds from it, and I’m going to plant the seeds, and through the use of some transgenetic horticultural techniques, I’m going to try to boost the tomato yield here in the greenhouse.”
Laurie was the only astronaut on the roster who could flash a smile while talking about horticultural yields. She made the tomato into six equitable slices, and these fell away from the center of the tomato all at once, and she picked out the greater part of the seeds and left these on the metal cutting board. Little promises of what was to come. The Martian tomato. And then the four of us gathered around, and we each bore up to our mouths the first fruit of Martian agriculture. Now, kids, if this tomato amounted to some knowledge of good and evil on Mars, it was lost on me, because in the flush of the Martian tomato it seemed to me that good and ill were impossible to distinguish each from each, especially when survival was as difficult as it was in this place. For me, the important part of this moment was just putting the tomato in my mouth, or at least cutting it up into tiny little subdivisibles that would make it last longer and which would not require more robust molars than I really had in my head. We were all doing it, cutting up our tiny tomato slivers. It was quite spectacular, the tomato, and I swear my faith in the future surged for a few moments, on some bounty of vitamins A, C, and E.
“My God!” Abu agreed. “I had no idea! My God! It’s the best tomato I’ve ever had in my life. How could it taste so much better here?”
Laurie was licking some of the juices of the tomato from her chin. She seemed to feel the same way. Triumphant. Though it is hard to compare gastronomical events with sexual encounters, I think we all kind of felt that the tomato was easily on par with any heights of ecstasy we’d ever experienced, and that included the binges of compulsivity that came with interplanetary disinhibitory disorder. If it was because of the shortage of tomatoes, so be it.
And yet there was only so much silence this tomato could fill. Then Abu had to go back over and file the hourly report on the reactor, which was, after all, responsible for the climate control in the greenhouse. The reactor was helping to generate oxygen through some rather complicated chemistry. Arnie and Laurie meanwhile had to try to germinate the tomato seeds we had just harvested, and to write a memorandum on the subject of our harvest. And I had to—
“Jed,” Abu said. “Why don’t you come over and see the sculptures tomorrow. I finished a couple of new ones since you last came. You have such a great eye. It’d be an honor for me if you could come over and take a look.”
“That’s sweet of you, Abu. I’d love to.”
Was this invitation proffered by a man who was going to go out, after dark, remove his protective gear, and attempt to lie down on the frigid and wind-blasted rock of a crater on Mars to be frozen to death?
I passed another night alone in the Excelsior, another night in a series of nights in which I had gradually allowed a total disdain for military protocol to sweep through me. Clothes and towels and empty food packets lay wherever they landed; reports went unfiled. Arnie Gilmore claimed that it would be possible to carry mildew from Earth to Mars, and no one except me had yet claimed to have smelled any.
If Jim was now avoiding the Excelsior, did I have anyone but myself to blame for it? It was a subject that I considered. I was an infantile romantic on these questions, and I never disliked myself more deeply than when I was an infantile romantic. What was it that made me need people, and then once they were contracted, lined up, what made me then want to jettison them out the air lock of my life so that I could watch them spinning into the emptiness? Once I was freed of these beloveds, there was no problem romanticizing what was lost, aggrandizing it. I was good at exulting over what once was, in ways that were no less genuine for their belatedness. But what about while these hostages were still present in my life? Was there a frozen part of me? A part that was ordained by fate to come to a barren and frigid planet? Jim knew only the needy, incessantly worrying, jealous part of Colonel Jed Richards, the part that had given myself to him precisely because to do so was an expression of both love and shame. In my shame, I could now know an absence of love that was unlike any before.