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

by Stockwell, Todd

  ***

  I read the Bible for a little bit each morning and prayed before I went to bed; she read and prayed much of the day and often well into the night. Her faith was getting stronger while mine remained stagnant.

  Some nights, I would hear her speaking a language I couldn’t understand. I knew her, so I knew it wasn’t evil. I figured she must be speaking in tongues, though I never asked her about it for some reason.

  ***

  The gift of speaking in tongues was given to the very devout while deep in prayer. The Holy Spirit of God would speak through the individual in the language of the angels, strengthening and solidifying their faith and relationship to God.

  ***

  Whatever it was, something odd was happening to Danny. The burns on her face, which should have left deep scars, began to heal at a rapid pace. Within a week of my hearing her speak the strange language, her wounds had completely healed. And we didn’t have to spend a lot of time hunting or gathering food because, even in the relative wasteland left by the asteroid, she would lead us right to it with stunning precision. And then one day she pretty much stopped talking to me.

  ***

  At first, I wasn’t too concerned. I figured she was deep in thought with everything going on. I mean I wasn’t that big of a talker myself. I once appreciated a little silence on the Old Earth, what with so many people you didn’t even know relaying to you every moment of their lives from birth to their last trip to the cleaners, when you had only asked them to pass you the ketchup or something. Still, we had grown so much closer, especially in the last few weeks, so I began to feel awkward around her, and hurt.

  This went on for about a week, until out of the blue she told me she wanted to talk. She sat me on the ground facing her. “I know you think I’m ignoring you,” she said.

  “I guess.”

  She smiled. “Don’t pretend. We’re friends, right?”

  “Yeah…of course we are,” I said.

  “I just don’t know what to say anymore.”

  “Okay.”

  She could tell I was sour. “Don’t be mad.”

  I didn’t say anything. “Don’t be mad,” she said again, and she got right in my face, smiling with eyes wide, demanding I smile, too.

  I looked at her and forced a smile. “I can’t believe how you’ve healed,” I said.

  It’s a miracle, George,” and the way she spoke, with a soft yet careless joy that reminded me of a hippie I once saw being interviewed at Woodstock.

  “I know it is,” I said.

  “You do and you don’t, George,” she said. “It’s not that I don’t have anything to say to you. I could talk to you all day long. But I’m done with small talk. And we’ve talked over and over again about God and faith and what we need to do. You know what we should do. You have to let go of this world. And after everything that’s happened, after your vision, after the demons, what more do we need to know? Let’s go. Let’s try to save a few if we can. What do we have to lose?”

  “How do you even know anyone is left?” I said, but I knew her answer before I finished asking.

  “Stop, George. Come on. You know the Book of Revelation just as much as I do…probably more…that’s all you ever read, practically.”

  I was stuck. I couldn’t move, and I didn’t have any other arguments. She knew my public stance on martyrdom, but she also knew the truth. Plain and simple: I was a coward.

  She sat there awhile looking at me, not in any judgmental way, just smiling. She stood, pulling me up with her, and hugged me for a long time.

  “Please don’t go.” I was crying and heartbroken and disgusted with myself.

  “I love you, George. Goodbye.”

  ***

  Although I had somehow managed to pass the test with the demon, my objections toward martyrdom, my reluctance to embrace God—to quit hiding, to go down the mountain to spread the Gospel, facilitating my own death, were symptoms not only of cowardice, but of an incomplete faith.

  Like most things, I did faith half-assed on the Old Earth. I didn’t go to church when I could have, I read the Bible sparingly even in the caves, I prayed mostly when I needed something, I worshiped with at least one foot firmly planted in the world, and I failed to build a relationship with God.

  The Bible referred to people like me as “lukewarm”. It was easy to go through the motions of church, Bible study, and even prayer. It was a hard thing to let go of the things of the Earth and to truly give it all up to God, a long process of sacrifice and unwavering faith that most danced around because it was too difficult, especially in the beginning when the faith was still weak against the resistance and outright ostracism of relatives, friends, coworkers, and people who didn’t even know you.

  But the reward was happiness, a certain perfect bliss, a contentment that could never be shaken, and there were relatively few people on the Old Earth who had experienced that deep relationship with God. Danny got there after Roger’s death. What did it look like? In her it looked divine. She glowed and smiled, and she looked peaceful and sounded joyful when she went down the mountain to die.

  ***

  People on the Old Earth would often mock that joy, the look of serenity, the excitement in the voices of the truly faithful speaking about their relationship to God. They would call these enthusiastic Christians phonies, nut-jobs, right-wing fanatics, Jesus freaks, or all of the above, rolling their eyes at the very sight or mention of their jubilance. Or they would shake their heads and feel sorry for “that poor Jane” or someone or other having “gone off the deep-end.”

  What they couldn’t understand, and what I didn’t understand until it was too late, was that these Christians’ relationships with God were more real than anything the Old Earth had to offer, and the faithful couldn’t help but glow over and express that magnificent bond to anyone who would listen. The mocking and the pity affected them not one bit—it was they who had been sorry for us.

  ***

  So I continued to beat her up about it even though it was pointless. God was with Danny, and she had given herself completely to Him. Nobody could talk her out of her fate. She took her Bible, waved goodbye, and stepped lightly into the woods.

  24

  Except for regular visits to my daughter’s big house and frequent trips to the Hall of Knowledge, I rarely ventured farther than a few blocks from my neighborhood in paradise, till one day, and I’m not sure exactly why, I decided to visit New Jerusalem.

  ***

  Built in the blink of an eye, the city, five times the size of Manhattan, was rumored to be magnificent, but mostly by those who had never been there. Because most of those, like my daughter, who had been to New Jerusalem, simply would not talk about it. For them it was like a Christmas present, the surprise of which would be spoiled by even the slightest hint. Of course, like any impatient child, I pleaded with Sophie to tell me its secrets. It didn’t work. She is much more disciplined than I.

  ***

  Until recently, very few people from my neck of the woods had visited New Jerusalem. Maybe we were afraid we’d run into Jesus or Moses or someone and have to explain ourselves. Before I left, I got to thinking about Danny and the others, how I had kept them on the mountain because of my cowardice, and the awful thing I had done after she went to face martyrdom. Maybe it wasn’t Jesus I was afraid to bump into, but Danny. In any case, I couldn’t much stand myself, so I figured what the heck and took off walking toward the distant glow that was the city.

  ***

  It would be a long journey, and I could have taken a bus, taxi, train, or any manner of vehicle, but my daughter had insisted I walk the first time. It was the way it was done, she said, like a vision quest or pilgrimage. Besides, I had lots of time, and the new bodies never tired.

  ***

  Vehicles in the New Kingdom looked pretty much like vehicles on the Old Earth, except they didn’t have wheels and rode about three feet off the ground most of the time. They were also noiseless, nee
ding no gasoline, diesel, or any other smelly, polluting, combustible liquid.

  ***

  What amazed me about the Old Earth was how technological progress had mysteriously left behind the automobile. I mean everybody walked around with their tiny cell phones, chatting away into space like they were on Star Trek or something. And this from smoke signals in less than 200 years. Technology had progressed rapidly, even miraculously, in most areas, yet, right up to the end, we were all driving the same basic clunker of an automobile invented near the turn of the previous century.

  I found out at the Hall of Knowledge that the genius, Nicola Tesla, had invented a noiseless, fuel-less vehicle way back in 1923. He also invented free electricity. He tried to tell everyone about his great inventions, which could have gone a long way toward building a more utopian and peaceful society on the Old Earth. But the powers that be didn’t want to listen to anything sensible, especially if it had the word free in it, squashing any innovation that might limit the sale of gas or electricity.

  People hardly complained, continuing to ride around in the same stinky, dirty, gas-guzzling dinosaurs for more than a hundred years, amid all the sleek, smooth, and ever-changing technology, like a bunch of hobos at a dinner party with one eye on the silverware.

  So what did Nicolai get for his genius, innovation, generosity, and hard work? He was ridiculed, ruined, and eventually suffocated in his New York apartment by goons of the Illuminati, who then stole all the papers detailing his brilliant inventions. What a world it was.

  ***

  Strolling along the gold highway of the New Kingdom toward New Jerusalem, I passed the factories and farms where people toiled joyfully at their labors. Unlike the Old Earth, where many people avoided work, especially menial labor, people in the New Kingdom love work more than most anything, and the harder the work, the better we feel.

  I have a pretty good job loading trucks at one of the big warehouses where food is distributed to grocery stores across the New Kingdom. All the great jobs like farming and construction had already been taken.

  But we don’t work for money. There isn’t any money in the New Kingdom, no currency whatsoever. The stores are filled with food and clothes and all manner of necessity, there for the taking. There is abundance in the New Kingdom.

  There was abundance on the Old Earth, too, enough to go around for everyone a thousand times over. But people just didn’t share enough. Men were jealous and selfish and greedy and power hungry. They would collect as much food or cash or jewelry or cars or boats or women as they could, storing them someplace where no one else could get to them. There was once even a bumper sticker which read:

  He who dies with the most toys wins.

  Congratulations!

  ***

  Why do the people here love hard work so much? Because hard work breeds humility, and humility is bliss.

  ***

  Instead of rewarding people for hard work on the Old Earth, the Illuminati came up with the idea of rewarding people for not working. The idea was to make it easy for everyone to participate in well-meaning programs like welfare, food stamps, free health care, free tuition, farm and energy subsidies, bailouts, and on and on; until enough people became like babies, coddled in the arms of the state, unmotivated and unproductive and completely dependent on their huge, out-of-control governments.

  ***

  I, too, would avoid work whenever I could on the Old Earth, preferring to sit at home watching the History Channel, or reruns of a cartoon about a family with a diabolical two-year-old and a talking dog, or a reality show about a group of people fighting to survive on a deserted island in front of a film crew and a catering truck, or sometimes the boring, rehashed news loaded with Illuminati propaganda and acts of senseless violence.

  ***

  I came to a fork on the golden road. I couldn’t tell which way to go because the glow of the city in the distance filled much of the horizon. I spotted a gentleman 200 yards away, harnessed to a plow in a great field. I hollered and waved to get his attention, so I could ask him for directions. He immediately ran over to assist.

  ***

  That’s just how it is in the New Kingdom. If you waved to a stranger on the Old Earth, they’d often as not pretend they didn’t hear you or ignore you all together. People were too busy, too lazy, too selfish, or perhaps too afraid to help each other, being that you could be a serial killer or just your average, run-of-the-mill nutcase.

  ***

  The gentleman farmer moved gracefully and speedily in his new body, which was “maxed out” like mine. Maxed out was the term we used for those who had reached or been granted the perfect body age of thirty-three. I would have thought the perfect body age to be somewhere in the mid-twenties before I came here, but that’s because I was already a slouch by the time I turned thirty on the Old Earth.

  ***

  I tried to guess when he lived on the Old Earth. He was wearing a pair of overalls popular in the early 20th century, only that didn’t mean much. You could find outfits from any period in history, and people didn’t necessarily choose from their own time. I mean you didn’t see a lot of people running around in sheepskin or 15th century tights. Once people saw others wearing more practical clothing, they changed styles rather quickly. Besides he was farming.

  You could sometimes tell if a person was really old in the New Kingdom by their eyes, which could hold the great wisdom of someone who had been around centuries. I guessed that this man had existed at least two or three hundred years. But it was just a guess, and quite incorrect as it turned out—as the saying went: Some men are wise beyond their years.

  ***

  When he was close enough he smiled. “You want to know which road to take to New Jerusalem? I get that all the time.”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “It looks like both roads might get me there?”

  “‘Two roads converged in a wood, and I—I took the one less travelled by,’ ” he offered, with not a little drama.

  I remembered it from some long forgotten English course. “Robert Frost, right?” I said proudly.

  “Good, young man!” said the stranger. “What is your name, sir?”

  “George,” I said. “And you?”

  “Millard Tobias Sinclair,” he said, wiping the nonexistent sweat from his face out of habit with an embroidered handkerchief he pulled from a back pocket.

  “I see the initials,” I said, pointing to the neatly woven letters on his handkerchief. “That’s a fine cloth. You don’t see many like it these days.”

  “I had a bunch recreated to look like the ones I carried when I was a young man on the Old Earth,” said Millard.

  Since he had referenced Robert Frost, I realized he was much younger than I had first assumed. “When was that?”

  He chuckled to himself and began to speak with pride and melancholy. “I saw the first two World Wars, my friend. I saw a dozen or more presidents come and go. I watched the world slide into debauchery and mayhem until I couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “Debauchery and mayhem—you were around near the end, then?” I asked, but immediately realized it would have been impossible.

  “No,” Millard said. “I died of a heart attack in 1971.”

  ***

  The mayhem and debauchery he’d been referring to had happened during the 1960s, when, for him, all hell did break loose. All hell didn’t really break loose; that would come later. No, this was simply the decade known for the hippie movement. Some well-meaning college students, weary of corrupt politicians and war and parents and suits and short hair, decided it would be good to stage a few protests. But what might have been an opportunity for real change became an excuse to quit school, quit work, riot, get loaded, fornicate all over kingdom come in the name of free love, and to destroy the family while they were at it.

  All this fun ended around the same time a loveable vagabond named Charles Manson talked some of his hippie “family” into massacring a pregnant actress and her hou
seguests in 1969.

  Manson’s family consisted mostly of runaway young girls and other gullible types. They all lived together in a drug-fueled haze on an old western movie set where they practiced their “free love.” One day, Manson became bored with all the orgies and drug taking and whatnot, and decided he would start a race war by butchering white people so it would be blamed on black people.

  ***

  Free love was an expression used during the hippie movement as a euphemism for premarital sex, extramarital sex, sex with multiple partners, sex with the same gender, sex on alcohol, sex on drugs, group sex, and casual sex. It wasn’t free and it wasn’t love.

  ***

  Manson sent his right-hand man, the cowardly Tex Watson, and some of his “girls” over to the actress Sharon Tate’s home in the Hollywood Hills to begin his idiotic and horrific plan. One of the houseguests saw Tex coming up the driveway and asked him who he was and what he was doing there. Old Tex replied, “I am the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s business.” He was only half right.

  Tate, pleading for her baby’s life, was answered with three bullets and forty-one stab wounds.

  The next night, Manson, Tex and some of the other family members drove over to the home of Leno and Mary LaBianca. Manson tied the innocent couple up, ordered Tex and company to make a mess of them, and fled the scene.

  Before Tex and the girls left, they scribbled the words “Helter Skelter” in blood on the door of the LaBiancas’ refrigerator. That was a line from a Beatles song Manson stole as the title to his race war.

  Tex and the girls involved were tried and convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. All through the trial, they snickered and laughed, continuing to follow Manson, believing in his race war and other nonsense.

  Manson never cared about any race war. He was a lifelong criminal, con artist and control freak, seeking infamy and revenge for his failed life, preying on the gullibility of Tex and the young girls.

  After several years, the harsh reality of prison life and the looming specter of their own executions set in for Tex and the girls. They finally came to the conclusion they had been hoodwinked by a madman and began to feel the weight of their ugliness.