Brandon didn’t twist, gyrate, cry out, or anything of this sort. His was a smooth death. He fell with a remarkable lack of resistance. He could have been a sack of grapefruit or a pile of wet towels. He fell, and then he was dead. He carried a little piece of me with him.
Jim turned from the edge of the cliffside, as soon as he assured himself that his thirst for this moment was now slaked, and then he began his long walk.
What simple, uncomplicated perceptions were his during the march that followed? Were even the simplest grammars still relevant to his primitive consciousness? We can assume that sunlight, glorious and perfect, which, despite its cosmic radiation, was still a lovely thing on Mars, was part of his sensory perceptions. Jim was happy at the appearance of sunlight, each and every day, after the nights he spent out in the elements, trying to stay warm in his Martian jumpsuit, which was leaking oxygen and which properly ought to have killed him days before. This fact — that he ought to have been dead — was probably lost on Jim. The sunlight warmed him, and the sunlight was good. Trudging along the Ius Chasma for days, without food or water, even this was somehow satisfying, because he became, in a way, part of the Ius Chasma. In different kinds of light, the canyon was perceptibly different, and there were layers of bedrock that he hadn’t seen the day before. He didn’t recognize this, but he recognized that the canyon belonged to him somehow; he had assumed ownership. The danger of it was like his own menace, and this was reassuring. Eventually, he repaired the ultralight to a barely workable condition and traversed the outflow portion of the Valles Marineris until he crash-landed it somewhere outside of base camp. Which is to say that he walked in. A representative of the walking dead. There were only these simple commands coming from the back brain, keep going, don’t stop, keep going. It’s fair to say now, kids, that there was some kind of homing beacon in him, and I employ the word home with the full sense of its meaning.
I was in the power station when he finally turned up, dragging himself, dragging a leg that looked as though it would not stay attached to him for another five steps, and bleeding, garishly, in many spots, bleeding chiefly from the eye sockets. It was the most shocking illness I’d seen in my life, and I have seen some horrible things. I have seen what weaponry can do; I have watched men drown in their own wounds. I don’t know how to describe what I saw. I am still trying to figure out what I saw. It was as if Jim had emerged from the Dark Ages, from some savage and merciless eon, and when he thundered on the door, and I attempted to admit him, I was not really sure that I ought to have done so. Because I had given myself over to thinking that it was all about the germ, that the Mars mission was now all about the germ, no matter what they told us. And I didn’t know if the germ was communicable, and I didn’t want the germ. But once I saw him, and I saw the confusion on his face, a confusion that plainly wondered what had happened, what had become of him (when his intentions had once been so noble), I had no choice but to admit him.
He didn’t need to say anything. I knew enough to know what he felt. And I filled a bucket with water that was warm from the reactor, and I found a rag, and I began to try to bathe his wounds, the many, many wounds on the sallow, fetid body of Captain Jim Rose. He lay there, soundlessly, on the floor. Whenever a wound was rinsed, a fresh gurgle of corpuscular material seemed to bubble forth from it. I felt his forehead, kids, and his forehead was cold, horribly cold.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked him. “Is there something I can do for you? Do you want me to talk to NASA and tell them what’s happened?”
Jim said nothing.
“Do you even know what’s happened? Because I’m not sure I know what’s happened.” And I didn’t know. I had my surmises. But I had not yet assembled the dossier of reports and video footage and satellite images that would enable me to re-create the end of the Mars mission for you kids. I was still mulling over the crisscrossing of disinformation that was being fed to us by a government agency that was so wound up in the budgetary conflicts and the rapacious needs of independent contractors that it couldn’t give a straight story to any taxpayer, no matter how earnest his entreaties.
Jim managed, with some great effort, to struggle to his feet, and he wandered back and forth in the control room of the power station, as though he were looking for something specific, even though I couldn’t imagine what it was. He would linger in front of some computer screen, gazing upon it as though he had never seen a computer screen before, and then he would press a bloody palm down on some surface, look at the handprint, and then in his disturbed way, he would begin wandering again. As if he couldn’t stop. He seemed stunned by an array of tools that was stored on one wall. He looked at a whisk broom for a while. There was a gas mask, and for a second it seemed that he was going to try to fit the gas mask onto his face, to replace that cracked helmet and visor he’d left out on the front step.
Then he found the Taser.
Somehow Jim still knew very well what the Taser was for. Not only did he know what the Taser was for, but he knew how to set it on the setting that would inflict the maximum amount of damage. It occurred to me, kids, and I am not proud of saying it, that he was going to use the Taser on me. My survival skills had become uppermost. I was working hard at staying out of trouble, but now trouble had come to my door.
“Jim, pal, you’re not going to use that on me? Are you? There’s no reason you’d want to use that on me, right? I guess I have only a few reasons left to want to stick around, or maybe just one reason, and that reason is Ginger. I was just thinking maybe it would be possible for me to get back to Earth so I could see my cat, Havoc, and Ginger, and maybe I could watch Ginger graduate or something like that. I mean, I understand that I have not been the best member of the Mars mission, and I have not always leaped to defend your plans, your philosophies, and all of that, but I think we have been friends for a long time, and I would like to ask you to think carefully about what you’re about to do.”
He closed in on me, kids, he backed me toward the door that led into the inner sanctum where the graphite-moderated uranium was percolating away, and I didn’t really want to go in there. I hadn’t really gone in there yet, and I didn’t want to start now. I was tired of all the science. I was tired of it all. Jim held the Taser in one bloody hand, and he came toward me, and I was going to do what I could to disarm him, but my heart wasn’t even up to the fight.
And then, he came right up close to me to, well, it didn’t have anything to do with the Taser, kids. He dropped the Taser. It wasn’t that kind of moment. It wasn’t the kind of moment when a man does another man wrong. It was the kind of moment when a person kisses another person. Which is quite the opposite of someone doing another man wrong. So the weary, lost Jim Rose, who had almost nothing left in his wracked body, all but emptied even of his soul, moved, as if drifting some inches above the floor, near to me. And his face came close to mine, and his lips were cracking and bleeding, and his poor eyes had tears in them, at least I prefer to think that his eyes had tears in them, rather than just droplets of blood. And he collected me into his arms, as I sort of tried to do the same to him, in a state of astonishment, and then he was kissing me, the kiss of death, maybe, but a kiss nonetheless, a kiss for a pair of men who were expiring for lack of love, for lack of the things that connect one person to another. Jim held me, and I held him, and his lips were one with my lips; I expect before Jim I didn’t really know what kissing was for, or: I was so used to disappointing people, disappointing women, disappointing everyone, that I often forgot to kiss because I didn’t want the recipients of my meager affections to feel bad, because that was what I thought I brought to these kisses, a lot of conflicted feeling, and a lot of regret, and a lot of destitution; and yet the kind of destitution I had then, back on the home planet, was nothing like what I had here; this new destitution was grander, was the kind that made an African living on a dollar a day and perishing of malaria and HIV seem fortunate, and this despite the fact that my destitution cost billions upon billions, so that men (and women) such as myself could come here to this godforsaken place and rot from the inside out; kids, let me tell you, if you want a kiss you will remember, a kiss that you can take with you to tell your children and grandchildren about, have one of those kisses that is about how hopeless your situation is; add to this the fact that you are likely never to see again the person you are kissing; now this makes for a rather spectacular kiss; these are the moments that we stick around for, and apparently Jim had stuck around for this, for the two of us crying like we were teenagers, and holding each other, and I still had a lot of, well, a lot of his blood all over me when he pulled himself away, and I could see the complex of things going through his face, as though his face were a projector, and these were slides projected upon him: photographs of his past, of his children, of his first wife and his second wife, of the myriad places he had traveled; I watched as these stills were removed from the carousel of slides in him, so that he was no longer their steward.