What the Hand: A Novel About the End of the World and Beyond

by Stockwell, Todd

  Now, any guilty party with courage or a conscience would have confessed right then and there. But I had neither, so I let my brothers suffer, meanwhile acting quite indignant about the whole mess. Heck, I probably would have blamed it on my kid sister if I thought anyone would have bought it.

  ***

  My father’s theory of punishing everyone, guilty or not, was also quite popular during the Spanish Inquisition, but it wasn’t very effective for getting at the truth. It did, however, garner lots of bogus confessions. Not too many people can have their fingernails pulled off, their eyes gouged out, or their testicles crushed without admitting something, even if it never actually happened.

  ***

  Nonbelievers loved using the Spanish Inquisition as an example to attack Christianity. How could a loving God cause such cruelty, they would ask? Answer: He didn’t. That stuff had nothing to do with Christianity. It was all about power, greed, fear, and just plain meanness. It was also about demons whispering in people’s ears.

  People on the Old Earth loved their free will as long as they didn’t have to think about it too much, or as long as they could blame God when it didn’t work in their favor. The truth was that free will was God’s greatest gift. What would be the point of anything without it? Everything would be meaningless. We would be nothing more than a bunch of robots. God, of course, understood this when He created us. But what most people didn’t understand about free will is this: you can’t have it both ways. You can’t do whatever you want to do, but then have someone stop you from messing it up all the time. That’s not free will.

  Another thing people didn’t like or understand about free will is this: people who lie, steal, torture, maim, kill, and are otherwise knuckleheads get to have it, too.

  Still, God didn’t leave us sitting around with our free will like unsupervised children in a fudge factory. He gave us abundance and the know-how to find food, shelter, and to create prosperity. He spoke through the prophets, offered guidance and laws so we could function together, helped us to fend off demons and all manner of enemies, sent angels and visions, even performed miracles.

  But it didn’t matter. Once the problems were solved, the battles fought, the thirst quenched, the bellies full, most people forgot about Him. They forgot about the guidance, the help, and all the visions and miracles because they lacked faith. Such is the nature of man with a choice.

  So people separated themselves from God; they become self-righteous or unrighteous or cold or lukewarm or oblivious or great or stupid—it was their choice, their free will.

  We were all once the chosen people, God’s children, created out of pure love. But most of us decided it wasn’t enough; we decided we’d rather be selfish, lie, steal, overindulge, and commit all manner of vicious acts against whomever.

  So, how many burning bushes could he appear in? How many Red Seas did you want Him to part? How much water turned to wine? How many blind men made to see? How many brought back from the dead? He was already stretching free will to the limit as it was.

  Finally, He just said the heck with it, and came up with a plan so no one could say He didn’t know how hard it was to live as a human, to suffer as a human, to experience loss, and to avoid sin. He had Himself and His son born in the flesh as one person, planted that flesh in the middle of what was arguably the most ruthless empire in history, and then He told everyone who He was. All the while knowing full well this would get Him spit upon, beaten, whipped, and nailed to two pieces of wood until He bled to death; knowing full well He would be tortured to death; knowing full well He would have to watch His own son die. And He did it all to give us the greatest gift of all—the gift of forgiveness, love, salvation, free will, and eternal life.

  God never asked us to start a bunch of religions and torture or murder everybody who wouldn’t accept a particular doctrine. He never asked us to travel the world, beating and otherwise forcing so-called heathens into becoming Christians. He never asked us to start a bunch of pointless wars on his behalf. He never asked us to strap on bombs and blow each other to kingdom come. He never asked us to worship an old guy in a big pointy hat. He never asked us to tell other people they were going to hell. He never asked us to start a television show just to solicit money from the faithful. He never asked us to stop sinning. He just asked us to accept His gift. What could be easier than that?

  And yet, few of us could manage even this. I know I didn’t manage it very well. Still, at the last second, He gave me another shot. God is pretty generous that way. Everybody gets lots and lots of shots.

  ***

  I love this one, too. Some atheist or God hater would inevitably say this when discussing Christianity: “Well, I didn’t ask to be born.” As if the gift of life were somehow worthless. And these were always the people most involved in the worldly goings-on, so caught up in life they never bothered to seek and wonder what it was all about.

  ***

  I’m one to talk. No one was more involved in the nonsense of the Old Earth. I guess the only difference between an atheist and myself was that the truth was somewhere inside, gnawing at me all the time, and I chose to ignore it—which is much, much worse.

  ***

  My oldest brother, Gerry, went into the den first, ready to give a false confession just to end the whole mess. My father, however, had his ace in the hole, which was the pink frosting, a detail he had not yet disclosed. Gerry, bless his heart, could not win. If he admitted the theft without the crucial frosting detail, he would be whipped for lying; if he didn’t confess or finger one of us, he would be whipped anyway. Soon he was back in the bedroom crying and rubbing his behind. Geoff was next, and he came back shortly with the same result. Finally, it was my turn. I was blubbering and shaking long before I got to the den. I was a pretty frail kid and nothing scared me more than the thought of a whipping from my father.

  ***

  As little as ten years later, this kind of bare ass whipping with a heavy belt could have been persecuted as a felony, but back then it was all part of good parenting and memory building.

  ***

  My father hadn’t uttered a syllable before I began confessing. I told him about the color and the cake, and even reminded him about the little white coconut flakes, and I winced and I waited for my beating. It didn’t happen.

  My father had something else in mind. I don’t know where he came up with this stuff, but it was brilliant. His punishment was worse than any whipping, for it caused not only pain, but humiliation and excommunication. Like King Solomon himself, my father pointed a finger at me, passing his bold judgment without expression. “George,” he said, “you will have to tell your brothers what you’ve done.”

  ***

  Next, my brothers beat the crap out of me.

  6

  It was good my brothers knocked me silly now and again. If they hadn’t, I probably would have turned out much worse. As it was, I began to rack up an unimpressive record of delinquent behavior. Now I wasn’t exactly a known criminal, or even an unknown one, but for no good reason I was always involved in lies, thieving, scams, and run-ins with law enforcement. I stole money from my parents and neighbors. I was suspended for vandalism in the sixth grade. My first arrest came in the ninth grade when undercover cops nabbed my buddy Larry and me after we went streaking through an X-rated movie theater.

  ***

  Two vice detectives sat munching on popcorn, keeping an eye out for wankers and other perverts, when Larry and I ran naked in front of the screen. One of the officers choked on his popcorn before they hurtled four rows of seats and bolted out the door after us. We were trying to put our clothes back on when they tackled us in the parking lot like we’d just mugged their mothers.

  We weren’t weirdos or anything, but we felt like it, standing there mostly naked trying to explain ourselves to the detectives. What we were guilty of was being stupid enough to listen to Larry’s older brother, who had beguiled us with stories from the sixties about orgies and streaking and
whatnot. And since we didn’t know any girls or even how to talk to them, and it would’ve been easier to talk ourselves out of a pimple than a girl into an orgy, we thought streaking through a porno theater might offer the requisite thrills.

  My father picked me up from the jail with a disgusted look. When I got home he called me a pervert and grounded me for two months. He’d stopped whipping me the year before.

  ***

  I would have preferred a whipping to my father calling me a pervert any day. Of all the things a kid would not want to be called by his dad, pervert had to be the top of the list.

  ***

  My father died of cancer soon after I turned twenty. Before he died, he went to a doctor to see about a dark growth on his leg. The doctor told him it was melanoma, a form of cancer, which had traveled to his lymph nodes. The doctor also told him he had two years to live. Two years later—almost to the day—he died.

  ***

  Doctors were always telling people they were going to die on the Old Earth, although there was lots of evidence that doing so would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hope kept many people alive, but some doctors didn’t believe in anything they couldn’t learn in medical school or read about in a medical journal. Doctors spent lots of time and hard work getting their degrees and their medical licenses, so most of them hated being wrong.

  ***

  A year before my father died, he had to quit working at Hughes Aircraft because the cancer was eating his lungs alive. He had been working there twenty-nine years and was just a year from retirement and his full pension. What did old Howard’s company do to reward him for all those years of service? They gave him half his pension. Not only did he never get to enjoy any of his retirement after all that work, he went to the grave with the knowledge that his wife would have to struggle after he was gone. For a man like my father, that was much worse than any pain and death sentence combined.

  ***

  It wasn’t Howard’s fault. He was up in heaven biding his time while his tent was being prepared in the New Kingdom. Besides, he had given up the reins of his company to a board of directors with no soul long before he died.

  ***

  My father hated his job at Hughes Aircraft and always talked about quitting and starting his own mail order business. He even drew up logos for the new company. I never did find out what he was planning to distribute through the mail. Maybe his plan never got that far. Anyway, he had a family to support, and he would never have taken such a risk. That was the difference between my generation and his. If we didn’t like something we’d just quit—everyone be dammed.

  So my father continued on, leading his life of loud desperation, and I know, in a way, I hated him for it; such was the degree of my selfishness. I must have wished him dead a hundred times because of the whippings and the constant yelling, and because I thought he didn’t like me. But when he was dying, I cried like a baby. The big man was down, wasted on morphine, unable even to wipe the drool from his own mouth.

  . ***

  I’d always believed I was a complete disappointment to my father. But when I asked him about it after I finally got around to seeing him here, he said I was only a minor disappointment. Of course, he never got to see what an upstanding citizen I became. Had he known my complete history on the Old Earth, he surely would have downgraded his assessment.

  ***

  No, he had no idea what happened to me after he died. People on the Old Earth were always saying stuff like, “This person or other is up there looking down on you,” or “So and so is with you,” or “That family member is watching you,” like all your dead relatives had nothing better to do but spy on you. It wasn’t like that at all. They were in heaven, for goodness’ sake. Why the heck would they want to pay attention to all the nonsense on the Old Earth even if they could? It would be like going to an amusement park to watch television.

  ***

  Now ghosts were a different story. They were lurking all over the Old Earth. That was about the third thing I looked up at the Hall of Knowledge. There were about two million TV shows dealing with ghosts or ghost hunting. I must have seen half of them. And they were all the same. Some ghost hunter or psychic would be knocking around an old house, or castle, or insane asylum, or someplace or other, in the middle of the night, loaded down with cameras, microphones, infrared lights, all manner of ghost-chasing gadgets, trying to get evidence of the existence of one of these things. Invariably, they would film an orb of light or a shadow, or record some static that sounded like human voices or children laughing, or some other barely audible noise. Still, it must have impressed the heck of a lot of people because these shows got huge ratings.

  I was pretty impressed myself. I just couldn’t understand where these disembodied souls fit into Christianity and heaven and hell and everything, but I went to the Hall of Knowledge to find out. And that’s exactly what they were: disembodied souls. I read all about it in this book titled The Ghosts of the Old Earth.

  It turns out people didn’t lose their free will just because they were dead. All that stuff about going toward the light was true, but the light was still a choice. Borderline souls, people like me, who didn’t exactly live exemplary lives, might fear the light, or just decide they weren’t quite ready, so they would just hang around the Old Earth in their spirit form clinging to places they once knew.

  The problem was that the spirit realm was full of dead demons and such. These evil characters were always fishing for lost souls hanging around, so they could jump in and possess them. When one of these “paranormal investigators” heard an angry voice saying, “Get out,” that wasn’t the voice of a human soul, but that of the possessing demon trying to get rid of the ghost hunter, just so they wouldn’t bring in some wacky medium who might try and guide the poor soul to the light.

  Unfortunately, a lot of these lost souls were children. The reason being, although all children had angels to guide them toward the light after they died, they didn’t lose their free will. And some of these were the type of kid who would shoot spit wads at you all during class or stab you in the neck with a pencil or something, so a kid like that might just be mischievous enough to run from their guiding angel at the last second. They’d find some place familiar, and there they would hang as ghosts until they were ready for the light.

  These souls would eventually make it into heaven with or without mediums to show them the way. Mediums and the like were completely unnecessary. That’s exactly why the Bible warned people to stay away from occult activities, because the useless medium and the ghost hunter would be just as likely to have a demon jump in and possess them as would a lost soul.

  ***

  There were a few other arrests beside the one outside the porno theater, for stupid junk mostly, fighting in a bar and showing a fake ID to a police officer. I won’t bore everyone with all the details of those, but the last time I was arrested was for bookmaking. I was taking sports bets from other students at the local college (where I was studying who knows what) to supplement my student loans and pay for my nightly bar ventures. The campus police got wind of it and sent a bunch of vice cops from the LAPD to my mom’s house where I was freeloading. Fortunately, she wasn’t home at the time, but I was put in jail for the night and expelled from school, and I broke the poor woman’s heart. Had my dad been alive, he would have beaten the living crap out of me; my mom just kicked me out of the house.

  ***

  People who grew up later on the Old Earth wouldn’t have believed that the police would raid a house with guns drawn over a gambling complaint. Because by the mid-1990s, every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a computer could bet on any sport on the planet or play any casino game for real money from the comfort of their living rooms.

  Gambling and other vices like prostitution and drugs were becoming the norm on the Old Earth. This was all part of the Illuminati plan. The destruction of every great civilization began with the loosening of morality. And the modern world would be no different.<
br />
  Youth would always mock the moral gauges of their elders in America and elsewhere. Every generation was the same in that regard—it was just a matter of degree. There had always been vice and immorality on the Old Earth—such was the nature of man—but there was also a level of shame to keep things in check. With each passing generation, that level would diminish as the Illuminati broke down the family and the Church. Even when I was growing up, there was very little shame, but near the end, it became obscene.

  Way back when, a guy like me who wanted to do something creepy like visit a prostitute, blow the family grocery money at a casino, or get high or stupid drunk or something would have to sneak around and lie about it. But just before the Rapture it became a free-for-all. Parents would smoke weed and do other drugs with their kids, married couples would hang out in strip clubs to get lap dances together, families would go to casinos, teachers would sleep with their students, a mother would put her daughter on the pill, a father would take his son to a prostitute and get himself one at the same time, and on and on.

  A kid hardly had a chance. They couldn’t turn on a television, open a magazine, or listen to a song without being bombarded by images of sex, orgies, drug use, violence, and all manner of immorality.

  Any sense of morality and any convictions related to Christian mores had been slowly dismantled by the Illuminati. In America, the last real bastion of the Christian Church, this was accomplished under the auspices of free speech and separation of church and state.

  ***

  America had largely been successful because it was founded on, and because Americans lived, for the most part, by Judeo-Christian principles. God had been on America’s side since its inception, but with each passing generation, more and more Americans were rejecting God, and American society was losing the battle with immorality. As goes America, so goes the world, was the theory. And it was correct. The Illuminati plan was right on schedule. The new Roman Empire had arrived and was ripening for the fall.