SYNOPSIS:

It’s summer. Salvitore (38), is a tall dark haired man with the beginning of an alcohol induced bulbous nose. He is drunkenly sits at a bar. He ogles the women there who are dressed up fancifully. A woman taps on his shoulder to get by. He tries to steal a smooch. “I know your wife.” “Everyone knows. I don’t bother even taking it off.” A woman walks by. He grabs her ass. He laughs. “Come on, what? It’s nothing. It’s nothing.” He grabs another ass. He laughs again. He gets tapped on the shoulder by a nightstick. He tries to kiss it. “Oh, I kissed the shaft! Hahaha!” Sal wakes up in the police department. There’s a man sleeping in the cell with him. His arm shakes. A police officer walks by. “What was it this time, Freddy?” “Grabbing asses again, Sal...I would too, if my wife wouldn’t kill me.” “Were they good ones?” He nods. “Nice.” -Sal. A hand slaps Sal across the face. It’s Addison. Addison apologizes. Expecting he deserved it, Sal lets it go. It happens again. Addison apologizes again. “It’s not that I don’t want to; You should punished for grabbing those girls. This is the hand of judgement. Or pleasure sometimes.” He explains that his hand compulsively does something his conscious mind represses. Salvitore gets a visit from his wife and his sister. While his wife begs him to promise he won’t do it again before she agrees to bail him out, he flirts with his wife’s sister. The two swap hats, let their hair down/put it up, dab off make up/put on make up. Turns out his wife was her sister, vice versa. “I knew it! That’s why I was flirting with you, baby.” But then he winks at the sister. So they leave without bailing him out. He shares a cell with Addison for a couple more days. His jerks off when he’s sleeping, since his repressed hand can when he’s not in control. They have some conversation about the pros and cons of having a hand that will do anything it wants. Moral qualms about stealing? No problem. Groping girls. Not my fault, he thinks. Sal asks him how he got his alien hand. He explains he had a stroke. Sal is bummed. It also comes up that Addison was only thrown in jail for what his right hand did (which was?) When Sal gets out of prison, he waits outside for Addison to get out as well. He convinces him to come with him to get food at a bar a town over, as his friend dresses up as a doctor taking them out on a field trip from a hospital. Sal pretends he has alien hand syndrome and gropes women and steals beer, blaming all of it on his hand. Sal goes home and has sex with his wife. He is very bored during it. He goes to work at a grapefruit warehouse. He commodifies women by picturing grapefruits as the women’s breasts and weighing them, then pricing them. But bored again, he drives home. He starts working on his shaky alien hand by flipping people off, and making other lewd gestures. He goes to wife’s sister’s house and continue an on-again-off-again tryst. He excitedly has sex with her. He whistles, and does the dishes for her. He sings love songs to her. Sal goes out with Addison and his buddy again to do the same old thing. He sadly explains his wife doesn’t get mad when he hits her with his left hand. In a rage, he hit her with his right earlier that day. He drinks heavily, bordering on depressed. Sal realizes that he doesn’t need Addison for their excursions anymore. He is very good at his hand shake, and twitchy impulsive actions. He comes home to his wife. She tells him she’s ready to make things work. She wears her sister’s make-up, perfume and hairstyle. At first, Sal excitedly carries her to bed, singing opera to her. However, during sex, her make-up wears off revealing some (very beautiful) birthmark. He loses his erection. She starts crying. Through tears, she tells him how she remembers when he first saw her naked he called her the image of Venus, that he could look at her for the rest of his life. “I thought I could!” he yells frustratedly. He says something about how once something becomes normal it no longer excites him. (“It’s not your body’s fault, It’s my brain’s fault.”) Every experience is a shade of its previous version in time. Repetition removes meaning for Sal. Sal smokes a cig and drags around a suitcase. He comes upon a grapefruit stand. He gets an erection. Drinking beers in the woods with his friend. “I love breaking rules,” Say says. “Too bad you have no rules to break anymore.” “No rules!” But Sal looks troubled. Almost a year later (shown how?) His nose is worse. Sal moves away, and finds a job in government work. Sal breaks small rules by filing files in the heading; secretly eating at his desk; smoking under the no smoking sign outside. After work, Sal goes home to a motel. He tapes the smoke detector and burns government receipts at random. He feeds a mangy cat living in a cardboard box in his room. The cat claws receipts. Sal calls him a kindred spirit. He shares a spiritual moment with the cat. Sal picks up food at a shitty convenience store. Two college bleached blonde girls come in. He shakes his hand, and reaches for one of their breasts. He explains his condition, “alien-hand syndrome.” They say its okay. He asks to come to their party. They refuse. He follows them on his bike. Once inside, they become terrified of him--Sal smiles. He’s still smiling as he’s hit, and shoved out of the house. Back in his motel, he shows his bruise off to his cat. Bruised over his eye, Sal smokes a joint underneath the no smoking sign and reads a newspaper. He rips a page out of the classifieds. The cat paws at his knee. He blows some smoke in the cat’s face. He purs. Sal takes the cat inside with him, covering him with his jacket. The cat shreds receipts under the desk. He paws at Sal for another when he’s done. Sal consents. Sal overhears someone noticing the missing receipts. Sal goes home and pouts at the mirror. He puts lipstick on and admires himself. He starts wiping it off. “What?” he says defensively to the cat on the bed. He picks up the newspaper, and dials a number on his phone. Sal goes to an interview. A jewelry wearing guido tells him, “Oh, you look great. You’ll do just fine.” Sal asks him who else he’s represented. There are pictures of celebrities on his wall, cut out of magazines. “These are all mine.” “You did these?” Sal asks, and whistles. “You’ve got great potential,” he tells Sal. He explains how you have to pay to have a photo shoot. Sal’s smile fades. “Oh, I see.” Sal explains to the guido that he’s in government and could shut him down. Sal leverages it for a job recruiting suckers, at commission. The guido agrees. At his government desk, Sal gums his mouth with cocaine. The cat paws his pant leg. “Too hard for you,” Sal tells him. The cat hisses at him. An auditor comes in with a brigade of black suited men in sunglasses. Sal collects his stuff and walks out the back door, nervously. The cat hisses at the auditors and runs after Sal. Sal drives off. It is now fall. Sal’s beard has grown out, and looks half-professional. Sal frequents a bar. He doesn’t look while his “alien hand” steals drinks. He hands out business cards to the nicely dressed people, and explains the modeling business. He sees a man who has done work to make him look like a Ken Doll. Excitedly, Sal goes over to him and gives him a card. Ken Doll comes into the photography scam for an interview. Mid-sentence, Sal touches the man’s lips. “I have a condition,” Sal starts to explain. “I didn’t ask,” the Ken Doll responds. “It’s alien-hand syndrome.” Ken Doll responds, “It’s okay to be curious.” Sal asks “Why did you do it?” Ken Doll explains, “Metamorphosis, to change into something new...and together, create a new standard of beauty.” “Right on,” Sal says. “But didn’t it hurt?” “Oh, of course it hurt. That was part of the draw?” “Yeah?” “You know, taking pleasure in purging yourself of... imperfections.” NICK and Sal talk about indian people who represent deities? They take pictures of the Ken Doll. He pays for 3 separate photo shoots. The guido is watching from the corner. Sal comes up next to him. Unprompted, he says, “We get all sorts of anomalies of life blowing through these warehouses.” Later, the guido goes to the mirror and checks himself out, and vainly combs his hair. Sal walks to the bus stop and waits there. There is a man who taps every metal pole six times as he walks away. Sal tries to start a conversation with him. Sal walks to his car holding a bag of groceries, a cigarette hanging limply from his mouth. A man in a suit confronts him. Sal drops his bags. “Christ.” “Salvitore Marino?” Sal mutters, “Yeah, I guess that’s me.” Sal is interviewed by the man. “What do you like, Sal?” “Uhum. I like rules.” “Good, that’s good. What do you think about running for office. Plenty of rules.” “Yeah, I don’t know. Why me?” “You were the only one to get off scot free in the Cisco Fiasco.” “What?” “The corruption. Loads of undocumented spending.” “Oh, I see.” “Got any secrets we should know about?” “Uhum, I burned a bunch of receipts.” “So...you covered your tracks.” “I cheated on my wife.” “Good. You’re not a closet homosexual.” “With her sister.” “Love at all odds. A hopeless romantic.” “I worked at grapefruit business for almost ten years.” “That’s a secret?” “I thought you should know.” “You were a local businessman.” “I was the lowest level employee. I spent more time jerking off in the bathroom.” “You’re a man of simple pleasures.” “I have deviant desires!” “Who doesn’t?” “I have this condition. Alien hand syndrome.” “Call a doctor.” The interviewer starts collecting his things. “We’ll have a press conference later this week.” Sal goes to the photo scam place. His nose is noticeably worse. He whispers to the guido, who is combing his hair impulsively now. “What are we still doing here?” “Ken Doll is actually making money...on the legitimate end.” “Yeah?” “People love him. I’ve sold his stuff three times this week.” Sal is happy. The next morning, Sal excitedly finds a newspaper stand, and picks out a magazine with Ken Doll on the cover. The caption is “Freak!” Sal is immediately depressed again. He holds his nose. Sal sits, shaking his legs on the high school bleachers at a basketball game. He watches the cheerleaders being tossed in the air. Sal is sitting at a bus stop. A homeless man walks from light pole to light pole, tapping each pole exactly 7 times. A man in a business suit sits there too. Sal tries to make small talk with him. The man just stares at his phone and smirks a little. When the homeless man passes them, Sal says, “That man sure is crazy, huh?” The man smirks. Sal stands up and hits the business man over and over again, with each blow, he says, “Treat. Me. Like. A. Hu. Man. Being!” He walks home. Sal opens the door to find his cat watching television alertly. It’s television Christian special. The cat paws at the screen. “What are you watching?” he asks the cat. “I need someone...to cheat on, but you don’t care.” He burns pictures of himself made up in drag. Sal goes to the photo shop. Ken Doll is walking around with the advertisement, showing it off proudly. A Barbie Doll girl sits in Sal’s office. He is immediately turned on. He informs her of the pricing. She gets the friends discount since Ken referred her. While he fills out the paperwork, he fondles her breast. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I have a psychological condition. It’s called alien hand syndrome.” “Okay.” “It does what I repress. Something about you...” “Okay.” Sal smiles at her. “Want to get a drink and talk about the photoshoot? I could tell you some really good tips and secrets, tricks of the trade.” “Okay.” The Barbie Doll is talking to a friend, Penny. She explains how she read various philosophers and decided if there was no clear meaning in life, she would pick her own and truly fulfill it, since people never fulfill their dreams. She wanted to be the most desirous woman. “I understood the world from a young age. And if we’re talking about being desirous, it’s always on their terms. You have to understand their desires.” “It pays well,” Penny asks. “Yes. Yes, it does. You reductionist.” “I perform self-denial,” she says alluding to her main goal in life. She tells the Barbie how you have to listen to others in life. They are watching jazz musicians perform. Halfway through, the Barbie goes up on stage and snaps the drummer’s drum sticks, pushes the the upright bass over, and ruffles the piano player’s hair. “You, continue,” she says. “Sometimes you have to give up your autonomy to realize your dreams.” Penny is a protestor. She wears a poppy in her hair. Everyone wears a poppy. They become a whole field of poppies. She is underneath the bed of poppies. She swims under, among the stems. She comes up for breath. She looks down on the flowers. A line of policeman in riot gear stand at attention. On the reflection of one the visors and riot shields, there is a group of angry animals. On another, there are a bunch of swinging slabs of meat. On another, there is group of protestors marching. On another, there is a field of poppies. Penny, among the protestors, says, “I will gladly take up space in the fight against oppression.” Other protestors pour paint over her body. She accepts it all. She walks home in a sort of ecstasy. Ken Doll jogs by her in yoga pants. He is a mutual friend of the Barbie’s. He asks what happened to her. “I am a blank canvas.” She asks him everything he got work done on. “Go ahead. You can ask...about my penis. It’s natural.” He tells her how he uses his body to express his inner self. She stresses the importance of consciousness over external representation. “Go back to grad school with that kind of talk,” he tells her. Sal goes out to a bar with the Barbie. Sweaty, he tries to tell her about different ways to pose. She asks him if he wants to pose her himself. He does, trying hard to contain his excitement. She asks him if he wants to go back his place. Sal examines the Barbie’s body, amazed at how accurate the proportions are. They have sex. “Not there,” he says to her. She repeats it back to him. Halfway through, he stops, bewildered, as if he’s heard a sound from the other room. He leaves. The Barbie remains posed as she was. He sees a young boy eyeing a Barbie. The young boy plays with it. Then, he undresses the Barbie. Hesitantly, he starts to examine its crotch. A mother comes in the opposite door, and shames him, taking the barbie out of his hands. The mother is at church. The preacher speaks on the ten commandments. The mother is reverent. The father is writing musical notes into his journal. He looks down at the young boy sitting between them and smiles. The young boy picks out fruit with his mother and father in an outdoor market. The father puts on a record, and dances with the mother in the living room. She is overwhelmed but happy. He kisses her passionately. He playfully taps her butt. “Not in front of the kid!” she screeches. The opera music continues playing. The three of them are at the opera. The mother is captivated by the stage performers wearing bright costumes. The young boy looks on wide-eyed. The father is playing an imaginary violin with his left hand. The Barbie pretends to sleep with her lips puckered. Sal stares up at the ceiling. The Barbie is talking with Penny. She complains that Sal didn’t play with her after he finished. She’s worried that she’s not completely desirable anymore. “Maybe he’s not as socially liberated as you thought.” “No, he is. Trust me.” Penny asks her if this makes her rethink her placing value on being desirous to others. She says ‘not at all.’ She is a realist, and following Locke, knows that others are only a representation of their true selves in her brain. And she in theirs. Penny looks frightened, “So all this time, I’ve been the faithful, hopeful one?” Sal reads a prepared speech at the press conference. Photographers snap pictures of him. It’s now winter. The photoshop scam place is much busier than it was before. He looks on bored as the Barbie poses naked. The other men swoon. She wraps a towel around herself once finished. Someone comes into Sal’s office and tells him to come outside. “Feminists are protesting! Going topless!” Hesitantly, Sal goes outside. He looks on, shaken up. Someone says, “I love exhibitionists.” Sal turns away. “Too much for you to handle, Sal?” “No. All these women. Ruined for me! Walking around like their breast are just their chests. Their chests! Those nipples aren’t even hard for us, they’re just cold!” Penny is outside protesting. She can’t understand what they’re chanting. She looks up at the sign she’s holding. It’s gibberish. She is confused. She looks around and sees men watching. They are holding forks and knives, with napkins tucked into their shirts. She looks down at her breasts. She walks on, now defiantly. It’s Spring. Sal’s comes home wearing his political suit. His cat is waiting outside his motel door, lounging on a beach towel. “How’d you get out here?...Who are you?” The cat meows at him. “Mother?” He goes inside. The cat follows him inside. “I can’t do anything anymore. I don’t even have the strength to shed a single receipt.” The cat drops a receipt out of his mouth. “Or beat off. There are no rules anymore.” Sal goes to the Doctor’s office for his nose. “Guess you’re gonna tell me to put down the bottle? Gonna tell me if I don’t want to be ugly, I better stop drinking?” “No, they’re not related. It’s a common misconception. Though alcoholism can trigger rhinophyma, but it’s not a correlation.” Sal is at his government job doing paperwork. He absent-mindedly fondles his assistant’s breast. Blankly, he stamps his approval on paperwork crossing his desk. He sees a picture of just a hand as the applicant for something. He reads. It is Addison and his hand. Sal knocks on Addison’s door. Addison opens it, and his left hand closes it. He opens it again, and his left tries to close it again, but Sal catches it before he can. Apologetically, Addison welcomes Sal inside. Sal asks him why he is trying to file his hand as a separate person. “It has to do with the church. I can’t go to hell because of my hand.” “Don’t they tell you to cut off you’re hand. If that’s the case. Finally applicable.” “Priests tell me a stub could be just as dangerous. Knock over chemicals. EX.s. Plus, no doctor will cut off a healthy arm. They say I have to fix the psychology of it, my consciousness.”... “Doesn’t God forgive all anyways?” “Yes, praise him. But not suicide.” He explains that his left hand is trying to kill him. “I’m sure he could make an exception for your condition.” “Rules are rules.” Sal asks him why his hand is trying to kill him. Addison tells him that his wife died. Sal asks, “You didn’t...?” “No.” Despite his best efforts, he can’t keep the thought of her death out of his head. Addison asks Sal how the alien-hand excuse is going for him. “I’ve felt a lot of breasts. And now there’s nothing left,” he says sadly. It’s summer. Barbie brings Penny to her next photo shoot. She has a conversation with Sal, who is still wearing a political suit. “I tend to see things as what they mean, instead of what they actually are. And meaning is never the same from every angle.” “You have a condition?” “Yeah, I guess.” “I have a condition, ” After a long pause. He exhales. HERE? “I’m a dirty old pervert. And there’s no excuse.” Sal goes to the opera. He cried profusely. His sobs are auditory in the opera hall, even above the voices of the singers. Sal, distraught and crying, goes back to his old house where his wife still lives. He knocks and she has a realistic reaction to him coming back. “You look like you’re dying,” she says. Sal replies, “A have this condition...I’m a dirty old pervert. And there’s no excuse. Not medical, I mean.” Later: “I only thought of what you were to me.” She tells him she is too hurt to let him back. “I’m ready to change,” he cries. He tries singing opera to her. She wishes him the best of luck and tells him to leave. Sal and the cat sit in his motel together. He is serenely depressed. “You’re just a cat...but I love you.” Sal smokes a cigarette in the early morning. The mist hovers low against the ground. Birds chirp at each other. Sal watches on good-naturedly.

ALIEN HAND AND OTHER STORIES