Idle Hands: The devil is in the details in the haunting novel about the choices we make

by Cassondra Windwalker

Honestly, I’m not the bad guy here. If you want to assign dubious motives to anyone, you should start with the Creator who set this game in motion in the first place, who trapped your strange little wandering souls in flesh-cages and then demanded you look away from the material. I’m the one trying to persuade you to fully exist in the space you’ve been given, to enjoy every possible sensation to its fullest. I’m here to remind you who you are, not who you could be. I’m about the immediate, the tangible, the tasty ⁠— the personal.

How do we know where lust comes from? Is it from God and a gift? From Satan? What is the origin of lust? Why be given orgasms if there are so many rules around the experience of them? Why so “naughty” to speak of a biological process? We have nerve endings in erogenous zones to create the highest pleasure to the human body.

After all, nothing fascinates you — or me — so much as identity. You’re constantly figuring out who you are and laying claim to the name of the hour. You define whole periods of your life by these efforts and yet never seem to actually finish it. You’re testing your boundaries as teenagers, you’re indulging in mid-life crises a few decades later, and then there’s the new and somehow undreamt-of tragedy of empty-nesting or retirement.

Who am I now compared to 5 years ago? Who will I be in five years? How many heartaches and how many heavens from identity exploration?

The Creator set you up with this notion that on some level, your life is about relationships. You gauge your own worth by how good a mother, a friend, a daughter, a worker you are.

My therapy sessions are primarily about this. I am so concerned with being “good enough” to those around me that I allow situations that make me feel destroyed because I don’t want to rock the boat. Decisions that haunt me and I disagreed with because I wanted to “be good”.

offer a different perspective. I want to know you for your own sake. I want a quiet moment, away from all those people with their needs and wants and demands and expectations, to hear what you want. What you need. What you expect and long for and ache without. If you give me the chance, I can offer you everything They tell you to sacrifice. I just need a moment alone with you.

Do I keep busy to prevent this? Indeed, idle hands…

Sometimes I truly have no idea what you’re about to do. And neither does that Maker of yours, no matter what anyone tells you about how They always have a plan. What silliness. Why would They bother with a game whose every move was predetermined? Your whole appeal to any of us lies in your unpredictability.

I think about this constantly. I wish I didn’t think about this. I wish this thought wasn’t in my brain. Will I be punished because my brain has created this thought? The idea of redetermination and prayer spin me in circles. This is one of the largest questions of my life.

The one thing I’ll grant you about Perdie is that she was fierce. That might seem oxymoronic — a fierce, battered wife? But they’re more common than you think. She’d had her reasons for staying, and she knew what they were. Now that she’d been given a bigger reason for leaving, nothing was going to deter her from that path, certainly not her own fear and inadequacy. One of my favourite things about you humans is how willingly you will run pell-mell into situations you are entirely unequipped to handle. As often as not, you even prevail through sheer obstinacy. Perdie was one of those sorts.

Which is where I should shine, but you so often manage to ruin even that for me. You scrimp and save and work toward some goal — a spa day, a cruise, even just a weekend with the family. Invariably you spend at least half of the time that ought to be consumed with pleasure and sensation dreading the return to work, the arrival of the bill. The benefit to me is that the angst-riddled person is most likely to seize on whatever next delight I proffer. Still, the cycle is exhausting. I’d love for you to choose my path for its own sake and actually breathe the air there for a moment. The beauties of this world are already so terribly brief, and you shorten them even more with your incessant dissatisfaction. It’s a quality neither I nor your Creator much enjoy.

Relatable

Contrary to what the Sunday school teachers may tell you, I have no interest at all in those of you who are swallowed up in selfishness. I live in the tension, in the dilemma, in the crossroads. The meth-head and the murderer are, for the most part, as boring to me as they are intriguing to you. Known quantities. But give me an addict considering rehab or a woman torn between killing her husband in his sleep and running away, and now you’ve piqued my interest.

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Christ refused what I offered, he wasn’t refusing a temporary and subordinate level of power in favour of an eternal one. He was refusing cold water sliding over parched lips on a hot, dry day. He was refusing that rush of strength and power that fills your muscles after an intense workout. He was refusing the scent of lilacs and spruce trees on a frosty spring morning. He was refusing the fierce pleasure of a fist striking flesh and feeling it relent. He was refusing the comfort of a friend’s embrace when words are not enough. He was refusing the delightful burning disconnect of whiskey hitting the belly. He was refusing the butt of a dog’s head against his palm, the stroke of a sarcastic cat against his calf. He was refusing the salt of the sea, the glitter of the desert, the icy loneliness of the summits, the fury of the storm, the constant caress of the wind. He was refusing all the pleasures he had only barely begun to taste, most of which in his thirty years he would never reach.

I’ve never thought about it this way…

Do you think people would wax poetic about rainbows if they hung in the sky twenty-four hours a day? If swimming with the dolphins was the only way to get to work in the morning, would you still want to go swimming on the weekends? If snow never melted, would you still go dancing in the snowfall and catch the flakes on your tongue?

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Any time a parent chooses quality of life over quantity of money, I lose ground.

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School children aren’t like real children — they’re like a family pet that has been lost and finds itself running with a pack of now-feral dogs. They exist for the hunt, for that wretched running-down of a wounded beast, for the smell of blood in their nostrils and the taste of flesh in their teeth. Merely a whiff of weakness has them circling their prey.

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The rest is details. All those incredibly petty, mundane minutiae on which you hang the whole of your expectations, while the gusto and grief of life pass you by unnoticed. Just thinking about them now bores me silly. God is the one who pays attention to that nonsense. Every sparrow that falls and all the hairs of your head and all that. I’m here for the rollercoaster, baby, for the lights and the colours and the screams.

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Now that’s how I like to see someone. In my vast experience, the nearer you are to claiming responsibility for someone else’s happiness or misery, the closer you are to me. Whether you admit it or not, every one of you has a God complex.

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But all of that is bunk. Have you ever seen death yourself? There’s nothing beautiful or peaceful about it. It’s ugly, rotten, with a horror so insurmountable that you make movies and write books to try and coax it into a bearable familiarity, but you can’t succeed. Have you ever watched the light go out of someone’s eyes? If you have, you know that’s a literal expression, not a poetic one. All the light, all the humanity ekes away into nothing and leaves a vacuous, gaping, stuffed sack of horror in its place. Those eyes don’t glaze, they don’t dim, they fill with a horrible, inhuman darkness.

This is true. Watching death come is horrific and haunting.

I’d worked so hard to get her alone, but in the end, Perdie built her own solitude. Grief has a way of doing that. When most of you need community to survive, you withdraw, retreat, like a dumb beast who prefers to die untouched rather than wrapped in the solace of those who loved it. Even in that forlornness, though, you hope for something, some comfort, some answer. And I am a marvellous peddler of somethings.

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mean, seriously. Are you kidding me? “Everything happens for a reason?” What reason would that be? You can’t cling to this lovely notion of free will and still think that God is micro-managing every falling leaf and crashing car. The reason the vast majority of “things happen” is selfishness, pure and simple.

Again the greatest question of my life: free will versus predetermined

A mother’s love is a raw and dangerous thing. Given the chance, it will devour everyone in its path, without hesitation or remorse. In my experience, men suffer much more agony over a choice between mother and child than any woman suffers over a similar choice between father and child. Women don’t even register the dilemma. The child simply wins,

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Generally speaking, though, you don’t care for the realities of the alternative, either. A woman’s odds of being killed by an abusive partner increase astronomically when she makes the decision to leave. And there are all the dynamics of being a single mother — likely to require some sort of government assistance, absolutely guaranteed to be largely absent from the children’s daily lives. If she’s going to work and put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads, she’s not going to be the Super-PTA mom, too, showing up with treats at parent—teacher conferences, cooking breakfast in the morning, helping with homework in the afternoons, tucking them into bed at night. She’s a loss in your estimation, no matter which way she turns — either her children are poorly supervised runabouts lacking discipline and oversight, or she’s the monster who forces them to live in a home of violence and fear.

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The obvious truth is that it’s not fair to even ask for forgiveness until you’ve demonstrated repentance; but preachers don’t often say that, and abusers never do.

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You might be tempted to think of Tad as a young man, being fourteen and all, but that’s not really the case. Boys remain young so much longer than girls do, you know. Regardless of what your tropes teach you, girls are the realists, boys the idealists. They cling to dreams and fantasies so much longer. Maybe that’s because, while they’re slaying dragons and clearing post-apocalyptic towns on big screens, their sisters are measuring out their real, live blood in toilets and pads and accepting the reality that their bodies can produce and host a life entirely separate from its own. Maybe it’s because boys will become men who need desperately to believe in fairy tales in order to be able to survive the expectations society holds for them, while girls must clean up the mess of those expectations. Maybe it’s just a weird biological tic.

This is an incredibly powerful and true statement.