“The Hand of the past”
“It’s been a long day,” thought Dr. Morton as he sat alone on the back of the number 6 New York City Transit subway train writing in his notebook. He shifts his weight as the train stopped at the 116th street station to pick up other passengers. 116th street was only a block or so from the Central Park North entrance. A woman wearing a waitress uniform gets on the train, caring a bag full of groceries. She had the look of someone who has lived a hard life without even living at all. Her face gave her the look of seventeen or maybe eighteen. He wondered where she lived and if she had a child.
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DR. MORTON had always been good with faces, when he was studing for his degree in Anthropology from Illinois State University he would use this talent to try to understand who his class mates where. But there was only one girl that really kept his attention for vary long. She was a junior studing children’s psychiatry. Morton would have never had the nerve to ask her out. But it seemed as if fate put them together, she ended up living in the same apartment building as Morton and he soon found out her name was Joan Saunders.
One night as Morton was walking home it started raining, and as he turned the corner of the apartment building, he saw Joan clinging to the front door franticly searching for her keys. Morton noticed she had no umbrella and realized that the rain must have caught her by surprise as it had him. The way she looked standing they’re all drenched by the rain is an image Morton has never for got. It put a smile on his face, and smiling wasn’t something he did vary often.
Looking at her, he saw she was standing in the light over the door; but she must have felt his eyes upon her, so she turned to look at him. “It’s all right, I have a key,” he said. She nodded and thanked him, when he got to the door. She was taller then he had expected, but not as tall as him. Her face, though it was more triangular than heart-shaped, reminded him of a painting he had once seen in the gallery of necropolis called Voedayon. Perhaps it was her great green eyes, with her lips shaded with a dark red, and black hair that, forming a V far down her forehead, suggesting the hood of a cloak. Whatever the reason, he loved her at once, but being only a young man, he didn’t know it.
Her dark hand, cold, wet, and impossibly small, touched his as he helped her inside. She smiled, and he felt as he had, when as a child, been out side in the cold for too long and had come inside to a warm room and food. She had very white teeth in a wide smile; her eyes, each as deep as the clearest pools of water, shone when she smiled.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t hear you.”
The smile came again and she tilted her lovely head to one side. “I told you how happy I was to see someone with a key, I might have been out there for hours if not for you saving me, and I asked if you would like to drink some hot tea in my apartment.”
“No. No, I have no wish to insult your home,” He told her. “By dripping water all over it.” She smiled and reminded him she was soaked as well. He found it easy to talk with Joan, which was unusual for him.
Even in the orphanage he grew up in, he had trouble making friends. He was a loner and preferred his books to the company of other people. That made him the top of his class, and by his nature, a perfectionist. He would have horrible episodes of anxiety just before a test, and he would isolate himself from the world and become immersed in his studies, and if he were to receive anything other then an “A” he would plunge into bouts of depression that could last for days.
But all that changed on that rainy day. As Morton followed Joan through the door of her apartment, he couldn’t help but feel at ease.
“Won’t you come in?” She told him. Then he realized he had been standing in her doorway staring at her. He knew he must look awkward, and quickly took off his jacket and closed the door. “If I had finished unpacking, I could offer you better comfort. Unfortunately, I haven’t found the time.” He shook his head. “Here, I have no refreshments to offer you but this.” She told him as she handed him a small cup filled with warm chamomile tea. He thanked her and let the tea heat his hands as she left the room to put dry cloths on. When she returned in a deep red silk nightgown with black lace accenting the edges, he was so lost in her beauty that he only heard something about a robe in her bathroom for him. After he dried off and had putt on her fuzzy white robe, he bravely walked into the room where Joan sat sipping her tea. When she looked up at him, she almost busted out with laughter. At first, this made Morton feel embarrassment, and his face turned red. But then she apologized and he felt himself smile and start to laugh as well.
They talked and sipped tea for hours, and Morton was very impressed with Joan’s knowledge of Aristotle and Immanuel Kant, and the fact that she had the deepest green eyes he had ever seen help too. She put him at ease very quickly and calmed his awkward nervousness. They talked about theories and politics, until they came to the subject of Roman poetry where Joan excelled, and Morton listened in amazement. From then on, they became best friends and then lovers. Joan was the first person who could talk to him when he was having one of his “episodes”. She could make him laugh and smile, and he fell deeply in love with her. Every Sunday night they would go out to eat and spend hours walking through the city until they came to a little park by their apartments, where they would no longer talk but just sit there looking up at the stars. One night as they sat in the cool February air Morton asked Joan to be his wife, and with tears running down her face, Joan said yes. After all, they seemed to be meant for each other. Morton was the brain and Joan was the heart. They where young dreamers, passionate lovers, and they lived in a world of there own making. After three beautiful years of bliss, Joan became pregnant and for the first time in Morton’s life, he was truly happy.
But when Joan was in labor, the Doctors told him he had to leave the delivery room. They said the baby’s fine but his mothers fading fast. Morton Fell to his knees in the hallway and with tears streaming down his face he did something he had never done before, he prayed. He prayed with all his heart, promising God that he would do anything if he would let his wife live. He told God to take his life but not hers. He was still on his knees when the doctor came out of the delivery room two hours later. Morton didn’t even need to hear what the doctor had to say he could see it on the man’s face, that his wife was dead. Morton got up off the floor wiped the tears from his face and simply walked past the doctor without saying a word.
He drank heavily that night and it wouldn’t be the last night either. Hatred for God turned into hatred for any person unlucky enough to run into him while he was in one of his drunken stupors. From then on, he was either drunk or trying to get that way. He never went to see his son only signed him over to Joan’s sister Janet who was married to s fine man named John Walker. John and Janet had been trying to get pregnant when Joan died, but without any luck. He knew he could never raise a child without Joan, he didn’t even see how he could live his day-to-day life without her. She was his place of peace, his soul mate and now she was gone. Dr. Morton Chambers who had succeeded in anything he wished, could not over come his wife’s death, and it was a heart breaking scene when the tall, dark haired man with glasses crumbled under the weight of his own grief.
There is a point where, when a man’s love dies that in his grief he will either stand tall and over come the pain, or become bitterly angry and self destructive, and self destructive, is just what Morton had become. Almost as if his will to live died with Joan, Morton simply didn’t care any more for anything. As he saw it, life was a cruel joke without Joan to hold in his arms. He sold their house and everything but the clothes on his back to try and ease the pain of her memory. He even emptied out there savings and gave it all to Janet. He only kept what he needed for a plane ticket to New York and six hundred dollars.
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“NEXT STOP Grand Concourse at 149th Street. ” crackled over the trains intercom system. This brought Morton back to the present. This was his stop and he smiled to the lady in the waitress uniform as he got off the train. He made his way through the dark streets of the Bronx until he came to the steps of his home. “Home”, was a cramped basement apartment with no windows. There was a sense of darkness even when he turned the lights on, and hung his coat up. After pulling out a bottle of whisky from the freezer, he went to his desk, took out a pen and piece of paper, and sat them on the desk. He then took out an object covered in cloth and held it in his hand.
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HE CLOSED his eyes and aloud him self to think back to when he had arrived in New York and applied for a job at the popular New York Museum of Natural History. He was given a position as a researcher of the ancient Mayan’s with his main focus to be on the artifacts that had all ready been excavated from southern Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. The job should have kept him from falling even deeper into his depression but it didn’t. He was even more a loner then ever before, refusing to talk with anyone other then Tom his boss. Tom had liked Morton mostly because they went to the same university although Morton did have more education then most of the staff Tom had hired put together.
Tom Dickinson was a large man and imposing character. He always wore a light blue suit that was thought, by most people to be the only one he had. He had done well with landing his job as head of research, no doubt due to his father who had made millions in the stock market. Tom’s father had given a large donation to the museum and the board had hired Tom, who was previously denied the job due to his grades in college. Tom would try to talk with Morton about his historic findings sometimes, Morton would reply with the textbook anser, and Tom would stand there nodding his balding head as every word flew over his head. But no matter how dumb Morton thought, Tom was he was still his boss. But for the most part they where friends, or at least he was the only person Morton wouldn’t immediately insult, and he had almost a reasonable amount respect for Tom.
Morton was a hard worker for the most part. He would arrive to work on time and usually stay later then anyone else. He poured himself into his work, researching pictures of plazas, monoliths, temples and pyramids, each decorated with drawings and hieroglyphs, all hidden in the dense Guatemalan rainforest. He studied ideographic and phonetic scripts written on stelae (stone monuments) that recount civil events and record their calendric and astronomical knowledge. He became fascinated with a book called the Dresden Codex. It was one of the few books that survived the bout of a religious self-righteous Spanish priest who visited Mexico on a charitable mission, but after finding in a cave, aspects of their practices, particularly human sacrifices, he destroyed five thousand Mayan statues and decided that their books were also the devil’s work and saw to it that they were burned, with only three books surviving. Morton believed that the Codex contained detailed astrological tables, which calculated the year to be 365.2420 days long, more accurate than the Julian calendar that we use today. He said, that he had managed to crack the code of the Mayan calendar, and that he could even translate the dated inscriptions found on buildings, stelae and other ancient Mayan artifacts.
But it seemed that Morton’s grip on sanity was slipping. He became increasingly paranoid and vary distant even to Tom himself. Morton drank more often and after twenty years, he was sent home three different times in one month for being too drunk to work. So there was nothing Tom could do when Morton came into his office raving about how he had found evidence that the world would end. Tom was forced to fire him. But Tom felt bad for Morton’s and let him work as a janitor if he promised to see Tom’s therapist twice a week and never talk about the world ending again.
Morton rolled his eyes, but agreed and started seeing Tom’s therapist who’s name was Dr. Greg Stone. Dr. Stone put him on anti-depression meds and told him to sleep. But after five years Morton didn’t get any better, and in fact, he seemed to be even more convinced that the world would end. He stayed up late researching his “work”. He would carry a notebook with him everywhere. Writing in it at subway stations and while in line at the grocery store. He became obsessed with his work and soon refused to take his meds. Saying they made his head to foggy, and that he couldn’t concentrate while on them.
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HE OPENED his eyes and sat back in his wooden chair. He unfolded the object he was holding, and stared at the handgun in his hands for a few minutes. He checked to make certain it was loaded, and then sat it on his desk. He took a gulp of the whisky sitting next to the gun and started writing. He was intently focused on what he wrote. His forehead and hands started to sweat with every flick of his pen. When he had finished, he wiped his hands off and picked up the letter to read it.
9/22/2010
I feel as if I were the only one who knows about a global catastrophe. But everyone takes me for a fool. It has cost me everything just because I know the truth, that something will shake the earth to its core. I know that the world might survive, but humanity might not. For this knowledge, I have lost my Job as an anthropologist and my degree is worthless because no one will hirer me. So now, I’m working as a janitor. Here in my darkest moments, I drink myself to sleep every night just so my brain will stop repeating the words “your wrong”. The only thing I have going for me is a small article that I write for a website that’s main focus is on conspiracy theories. With all my sanity ripped from me, only the feeling of always being watched hunts me now. This is how my life has become. So, I have chosen to end it. I will not live with this indignity. My wife is dead, and I can know longer live with the feeling of amenity and doom. Maybe I’ll find peace in the end, or maybe my redemption is to high a price to pay even for a God.
Dr. Morton Chambers
After reading it he sat it back down and grabs the 9mm berretta that his father gave him before his death two years ago, he took another gulp of the whisky finishing the bottle and put the gun into his mouth, as he had done so many times before. Then he put his finger on the trigger, he could taste the gun oil on his tongue and the sent in his nostrils. His hands start to shake and his head pounds as his heart races, pumping even more blood to his head. He starts to pull the gun back out, as his hands shake uncontrollably. But at this bleak time in his life, when pain has him by the throat, grace smiles on him. A tear rolls down his face and with a firm hand, he putts the gun barrel back in his mouth just like all the other times.
But this time, Morton finds the strength to pull the trigger, refusing to back out this time. With more force than he had used to scream his lungs out to try and ask God not to take his wife, adrenalin pumps into his veins, and the hammer of the berretta strikes the primer on the 9mm casing with a ping followed by a loud crash. With the sound of thunder the hollow point explodes from the back of the barrel filling his mouth with it gasses of burning sulfur, replacing the taste of gun oil with smoke.
The force of the gasses expanding makes his checks bulge and flap as if he had stuck his head out of a fast moving car. The back of the hollow point expands pressing its side’s agents the rifling groves along the insides of the barrel. This sends the hollow point into a spiral as it racing out of the gun.
The bullet strikes one of his back molars fragmenting the tooth along with the bullet sending pieces of bone and metal through the right side of his face and up through the thin tissue protecting his brain. His head jerks back and pieces of the hollow point rips though the soft mass of brain matter more like a shot gun blast than a single bullet. The brain feels no pain, so he only feels brief pressure on the side of his face followed by an odd tug on his scalp as what’s left of the bullet, exits the back of his head.
With a thud, he hears the pieces of bullet hit the wall behind him. Then the sensation of warm crimson blood running down that, which is left, of the right side of his face and the back of his head. His face hits with enough force agents the deck in front of him that the gun drops to the floor. His eyes remain open but hazy and glazed.
The colors in the room start to change and become brighter. Colors like blue and white become radiant. It’s beautiful; and the light is so bright now that it drain’s all color from the room. He can almost feel the last Electro’s firing in his brain as the room becomes so bright that it’s blinding and he wishes he could close his eyes.
There’s a since of euphoria that sweeps over Morton and he become weightless and dizzy. The room spins, slow at first then wildly out of control. Crimson blood pours out of his wounds running across the desk staining the corner of the letter he wrote. There’s an overwhelming sound like an old boat horn in his ears and the light in his eyes become even brighter. Just when the sound couldn’t get any louder or the light any brighter with a loud click the sound stops and the room turns to pitch black.
The number that has hunted Morton for the last eight years burns itself into the darkness, twisting his soul one last time. Like a street-sign, shining in the dark, it reads “2012”…
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