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

by Stockwell, Todd

  The code breaker is chased around Paris and everywhere else by this big bald albino guy who is murdering everyone and beating himself because he is so pious and all, and of course he can’t be caught because he doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb or anything. It turns out this albino guy is a member of a secret society within the Catholic Church that has vowed to protect the even bigger secret of Christ’s marriage and family.

  So let me get this straight. After knowing Christ personally, embracing His teachings, witnessing His miracles, death, and resurrection, the apostles are so blown away they spend the rest of their lives traveling the known world to spread His teachings; suffering through ostracism, exile, prison and torture; often dying horrible deaths—experiences which are documented—yet the whole time, they fail to mention to anyone that Jesus had been hiding a wife and kids and a Labrador retriever.

  The only thing remotely true about this movie was the existence of a secret society that had infiltrated the Catholic Church and a lot of other institutions. It was the same secret society that fabricated the whole story about Christ’s supposed family in the first place. What was that secret society? You guessed it.

  ***

  I honed in on a brunette walking slowly past one of the many motels lining the Sunset Strip. I was nervous as heck, but my hormones won out, so I pulled over and rolled down the window anyway. She immediately approached the vehicle, leaning in to have a look at me. She was older than I first thought, about thirty-five but still pretty, and she talked to me in a sweet voice that didn’t seem phony or anything, though I was gullible. “You’re a cutie-pie—what can I do for you, honey?”

  I don’t know what I expected, but for some reason I wasn’t expecting any questions, so I said the first thing that came to mind, “I want a date”. I must have heard someone call it that in a movie or something, and it seemed to work, anyway.

  “Sure, sweetie—how much you got?”

  “How much does it cost?” Even back then, I instinctively knew that one doesn’t show all their cards in a sales negotiation.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Everything,” I answered, having absolutely no idea what everything was.

  She just looked at me for a bit. Finally she said, “Sixty bucks.”

  “Ok.” That was the limit of my negotiation skills.

  She jumped in the station wagon, the same vehicle that had dropped us at school and Boy Scouts, had taken us to dinner, movies, parks and zoos, and on so many family vacations. “My room is up the street,” she said.

  ***

  The room was a ghastly brown, from the worn carpet to the thickly painted, pinewood ceiling, and it smelled of disinfectant, perfume, stale cigarette smoke, and who knew what else. But I didn’t care because I was too busy worrying about what was about to happen.

  She told me to take off my clothes, so I did. Then she unzipped and pulled her skirt away. She was wearing full-length panty hose, except she still had her blouse on for some reason. I didn’t say anything, though it was kind of weird, like I accidently walked in on an aunt or the neighbor lady getting ready to go out for dinner or something.

  The situation had me nervous and flaccid, and really just wanting to get the heck out of there by that point. But she knew what she was doing, I guess, and she got me to relax, and we didn’t do everything or much at all even, but I suppose we accomplished what I set out to do.

  ***

  The experience didn’t exactly turn me into Casanova, or even Woody Allen, not by a long shot; in fact, I was more nervous and messed up about sex than ever. It would have been better had I waited till I was married. It was an ideal far too often ignored, which led to failed relationships, broken marriages, shattered families, heartbroken and damaged children, abortion, and all manner of personal angst.

  ***

  I was responsible for two abortions during my short reign of romantic terror on the Old Earth—two beautiful children whom I sentenced to a violent death. They are here now, living with people who love and care for them, and they do not know me.

  ***

  No, my adventure in Hollywood didn’t land me any girlfriends or even one girlfriend. On the contrary, it sent me on a two-year cold streak broken only by frequent masturbation. But things began to change about the time I turned nineteen. In those two years, I had grown taller, a little wider, and somehow less dorky. Girls began to notice. And I noticed them noticing me.

  ***

  It was shortly thereafter that my friends and I applied for and received the birth certificates of some children who would have been twenty-one had they not died when they were still very little. With these we were able to acquire the fake IDs that opened up to us the world of bars and nightclubs two years before our time, carrying their good names through our drunken debauchery. Those years are mostly a blur. Still, I somehow managed to have a couple of girlfriends.

  Carla, a haunting beauty, looked like a grown woman, but acted like she was about fourteen. Her scumbag stepfather had drugged and raped her when she was twelve, and I never understood at the time just how destroyed she had been. After he was released from prison, he began calling her with death threats. I guess assault, rape, and ruining her life hadn’t been enough for him. One minute Carla would be ranting and raving, and the next, she’d be curled up in my arms whimpering like a kicked puppy. The whole thing was too much for me, and I broke up with her for some German girl who was only in town for two weeks. I was a real prince.

  Then I met this funny, Christian girl, Kimberly, who worked at some office where I was a temp. I even went to church with her a bunch of times. I have no idea what she saw in me, except she was recently divorced and temporarily out of her mind when we met. Her ex-husband worked in the film industry, traveling and cheating on her all over the place; otherwise, she would never have gotten divorced, let alone hooked up with somebody like myself. We dated for a long time, but all the while I had one foot out the door—I preferred being a clown, and besides, I knew she was too nice for me.

  Years later, she called me out of the blue. She was acting kind of strange, reminiscing about the past and everything. I was a little embarrassed because Renee was nearby, and I got off the phone in a hurry. I found out later she had inoperable breast cancer at the time she called and was dead within six months. She was only thirty-three. All she wanted to do was talk a little bit.

  ***

  Anyway, they had been better off without me. I went back to my couch and my childishness. Until one day, when one of my couch-providing friends suggested a trip to Hawaii. I said yes. I guess I thought I needed a vacation from lying around all day. We scraped and borrowed, managing enough for a cheap package vacation with a couple hundred bucks to spare for food and beer. What I didn’t know was the price of that trip would be marriage and divorce.

  ***

  Her name was Lanie Spencer, and I remember holding her close in a cool pool on the high roof of a hotel somewhere in Honolulu, and how, for a long time, that was the best day of my whole life. She lived in England, except she wasn’t pasty like most Brits. She was tall, exotic, dark skinned, the result of a South African mixed bloodline. She carried herself like a ballerina. When we met, she was only seventeen, except she had lied, telling me she was nineteen. I believed her because the average high school girl from England had eight times the sense and sophistication of any ten college coeds in America, at least the ones I knew.

  ***

  My stomach hurt, so I thought I was in love. After the trip, we wrote letters and ran up phone bills until I scraped up enough money to visit her at her home outside London. A year later, she came to the States, and we got married because we were madly in love and not because we were a couple of dumb kids or anything.

  But within a short time, working a terrible job at a two-bit auto insurance office, living in a dingy apartment, going nowhere, I began to realize I was just a dumb kid after all, and I didn’t want any responsibility. I kept sending her back and forth,
while I tried to get my life together. But I sent her home one too many times, and she met some guy with a good job and a nice place, and she divorced me and crushed me, even though I didn’t want her around.

  I drifted in a stupor of pain and self-pity I thought would never end after that. But she made me want something more out of life, want to make something of myself, so I could get married and have a family someday. And I did, sort of.

  ***

  I met Sophie’s mother at a nightclub. Looking back, I guess I met most of the girls I knew at nightclubs or bars. Why? Unless they made the first move, I pretty much had to be drunk just to talk to a girl.

  I was leaning against a bar somewhere with one of my friends, trying to look uninterested, like there was some great purpose to our being there besides groveling over women. Renee was standing in front of the bar with a group of her friends. She had the biggest mane of curly hair and the prettiest eyes you ever saw.

  They were laughing and ordering these drinks, which were all the rage at the time because they had these stupid and supposedly sexy names. Renee shouted out her order, which I won’t repeat. I thought the whole sexy drink name thing was pretty silly, so I rolled my eyes at her just when she happened to look my way. She stormed right over to tell me that no one rolled their eyes at her. I apologized, though I didn’t know then that the girls who laughed about stupid sexy drink names were the least casual about sex.

  And she was a good girl, Catholic, but not the fake kind like I was. She was tough and opinionated, she didn’t take my crap, and I loved that about her. We began dating and kissing an awful lot. I kissed Renee more than any girl I ever met. It was enough to kiss her, and I started thinking I could marry this girl. I even began throwing the word love around again. So we got engaged.

  Now everything should have been peachy-keen after that, with us being in love and all. Because that’s how love was supposed to work on the Old Earth, and there were plenty of great examples of beautiful romantic relationships leading to perfect marriages, only I can’t think of any.

  But, of course, it didn’t work out that way. Why not? Well, I can’t speak for the rest of the Old Earth, but in our case, she was hardheaded and I was still a child, so between her pride and my immaturity, we fought like a couple of blind cats trying to escape a dog kennel.

  So why did we stay together? Was it our mutual adoration, our starry-eyed romance, our deep undying love? No, neither of us wanted to admit defeat.

  ***

  I told you there was no such thing as romantic love and how I read all about it at the Hall of Knowledge. But don’t get me wrong; love was everything. God was love and God created out of love. It’s just that love and what we used to call romantic love have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.

  So what was the point of all those crazy feelings people on the Old Earth associated with love? There was none. God wanted men and women to be attracted to each other so they could create life, give that life a family, and experience the same love God knew for us. Except, as usual, we got away from God and messed the whole thing up.

  ***

  God could have just zapped babies and children into existence, but He wanted to give His gift of creation to us. Since men were physically stronger and more motivated to hunt and fish and all the other crap that bored the heck out of most women, and because women were more nurturing and all, He decided to let females conceive and carry life.

  After God gave men and women the means to create life, He needed to motivate them, otherwise the men would just stand around grunting, and the women would be inclined to beat the hairy numbskulls off with sticks. There would be too few births, and mankind would have been gone within a generation. So God gave them libidos, making the act pleasurable so people would “go forth and multiply” and such.

  But, as with most good and pleasurable things, man decided they wanted more—to take God’s gift, something intimate and beautiful, to gobble it up like so many cheeseburgers, to twist it and run it into the ground. The things they came up with were filthy and humiliating, frankly. So much so, that even the participants were embarrassed by their acts, until the last days when they wore their immorality like the proud parents of abomination they’d become.

  God saw it coming, of course, but that was the quandary of free will again. Why should He let the dirtbags ruin something so beautiful for the people who respected the gift, who grew close, built a relationship, cherished one another, became intimate, and made a family together?

  There was an order to things. God had shown the way, but, once again, man ignored His teachings, inventing an amalgamation of love, stolen and rewritten from God’s words, a fatal blend of love, attraction, passion, friendship, sex, lust, debauchery, gluttony, jealousy, and ego. It would begin innocently enough, with attraction and the simple act of courtship. Until the sin of jealousy kicked in, turning courtship to rivalry; then ego made it a competition, gluttony a sport, debauchery a game. The idea became to woo as many women as possible. Men became princes, poets, preeners, crooners, cads, cavorters, rascals, rogues, romantics, and other liars. So effective were their sad exploits, they were passed down the centuries through song, poem, literature and film, and believed by almost everyone.

  It excited people’s egos to think they were wanted desperately by someone, and in turn, their own desperate need to be wanted made them pretend to want someone back. This nonsense became the thing we call romantic love, and it made everyone act like a bunch of idiots. Even children succumbed to the madness of romantic love, and by the time they were ready to be married, they had absolutely no idea what they were doing. So what did they do? They got married anyway. And whom did they marry? Why the best liars, of course.

  Love is love. It is the same love between a man and a woman as it is between God and man, between parent and child, between friends, man and man, woman and woman, man and dog, between a woman and a bunch of stray cats. It varies in intensity, based on intimacy and a strong connection, but it is the same love. It was only when corrupt passions came into the mix that things became confused. Whether heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual, or whatever else, we all had our inclinations, propensities, hang-ups, eccentricities, or outright fetishes when it came to sex. None of it had anything to do with love—it was sin, plain and simple. It was only in the relationships where love existed.

  The best relationships, the best marriages were built on the building blocks of love: God, family, respect, compassion, and friendship. Without those, marriage was nothing more than a pack of lies, a sham, a manmade ideal as worthless and fragile as the paper that supposedly bound it.

  ***

  And Renee and I were no different. I lied to her and she lied to herself. And it was fun and games until Sophie came along. And it was then that God expected us to get over ourselves, to get over our selfishness, to become a family for our daughter, and to put the child first, just as Jesus had put us first. Renee, for the most part, did just that, while I hemmed and hawed and ruined my daughter’s life with good and not-so-good intentions.

  ***

  The great romantic, William Shakespeare, once wrote, “Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to be removed.” And he would have been exactly right, except he wasn’t talking about real love. No, he was just another liar, like me, promoting the myth of romantic love. So I let our love be altered and bent until it was unrecognizable, a meaningless venture of delusions destined for divorce.

  ***

  And that’s where I was headed again after meeting Danny, onto another victim of my enamoring. It was ironic that I wished to trade one kind of insanity for another: the insanity brought on by isolation for that of romantic love.

  15

  One of my favorite movies on the Old Earth was Jeremiah Johnson. It starred the actor Robert Redford as an ex-soldier who leaves the trappings of civilization to live in the majestic Rocky Mountains, which once spanned eight American States. He survives bears, host
ile Indians, starvation, and freezing weather, living off the land by his courage and wit.

  How much courage and wit had to do with my survival is up for debate. The hand of God and my books on survival had more to do with it than anything. Still, I did imagine myself a mountain man for a time, anxious to show my new guests the skills I had acquired during my many months in the wilderness.

  And my new guests were quite the captive audience, but only because they wanted to survive and because there wasn’t much else to do.

  ***

  I gave them a tour of my latest cave, showing them how I kept the supplies buried in case the Minions showed up. I learned my lesson after the Minions discovered my first cave and destroyed my possessions. After that, I had to sneak down into one of local towns and steal to replenish the essentials. Of course, I knew one of the Ten Commandments is “Thou shalt not steal,” and though I was trying to be a better Christian, I was still much more interested in my own survival. Not that keeping that particular commandment was high on God’s priority list during this juncture in history. I kept it to a minimum anyway, not out of adherence to God’s laws, but because it inevitably resulted in parties of Minions scouring the mountain searching for perpetrators. There had already been too many close calls.

  ***

  Next, I led my new friends around to the traps I’d set to show them how they were constructed. Two of the traps had snared rabbits that morning, while another held a captive squirrel. They were quite impressed with that, or at least very hungry.

  At any rate, we gathered up the catch and took it back to the cave, where I clubbed the rabbits and drowned the squirrel in a manner of minutes. Then I showed them how to properly dress and cook the varmints.

  I watched my guests, especially the women, for their reactions during all of this. Ida and Eva seemed pretty aghast, but Danny never even flinched. The men were also a bit taken aback by the whole thing, except for Roger who was transfixed and frothing at the mouth like I had just taken ribs out of the refrigerator, slathered them with sauce, and thrown them on the grill.