Hell

by Robert Olen Butler

  And what’s next? The night is young. He has a story to pursue off in the direction of Peachtree Way and Lucky Street, one that got as far as the official Evening News from Hell lineup. Satan seems to be going along with this for now. He turns to the right and rides along with the crowd.

  The night streets teem with bodies and screams, though the screamers are different from the screamers before the setting of the sun. These are the denizens with night terrors, taking over from those with the anguish of twilight. There are cars now as well, the automotive technology often retro, the center of the street jammed and blaring with Cords and Fords and Moons, with Vauxhalls and Maxwells and Fiats and BMWs, with Hondas and Renaults and Zims, their drivers and passengers sealed inside, banging on the windows and crying out in rage at the drivers and passengers in the cars around them, and none of them moving, except intermittently to lurch forward several feet to crush a few pedestrians in the eddies flowing around them, only to stall again, while beneath their tires and body frames, the crushed denizens wail away until the next lurch of traffic allows them to rise and reconstitute.

  For a time, Hatcher loses his knack for mobility and gets sucked from the margin of the flowing crowd and toward its center. He wonders if this means his Big Boss has now decided this story should be dropped. There are never editorial meetings as such. Things come up. Things get pursued until something—often painful—occurs to stop them. Being crushed in the center of a nighttime crowd would be one of the simpler terminations to a story. Hatcher figures the initial tolerance of the neo-Harrowing item was simply to build false hopes anyway. Even if, as Hatcher’s news nose faintly whiffs, there is some sort of something true behind this, it would involve such a small number of denizens that covering it would have a torturous effect on the vast numbers once again left behind. But it wouldn’t have to be true to be torture. Maybe this was all simply to arrange that public, humiliating disavowal of the story by Carl. And the news nose whiff will be a purely private disappointment.

  Hatcher keeps his mind thus desperately occupied amid the multitude of gropers and pinchers and farters and bleeders, the maggoty and the pustulant and the leprous and the Botoxically botulinal. He is worried because he knows they are entering Hell’s tenderloin, and soon all these bodies about him will begin to cast off their clothes and grow desperate with unscratchable itches. As unpleasant as the crush of bodies now is, it will get far worse when they are naked. Is Satan pissed with him? But now Hatcher feels himself twisted by an eddy of the crowd and borne to the margin, and he is dumped flat on his back in the mouth of a side street.

  A long-bearded old man’s face appears, hovering over him. The man is clothed in a gunnysack, and he lifts a hand-scrawled sign on a stick and floats it before Hatcher. It once read “Repent. The end is nigh.” But one letter has been scratched out and replaced and a new word has been careted in, and the man now slides away to gyre endlessly on the corner urging the denizens to REPEAT. THE END IS NEVER NIGH.

  Hatcher struggles to his feet and faces the Parkway. It is utterly clogged, the crowd ground now to a halt, the air above it filling with the rise and fluttering fall of shed clothing. Hatcher turns around and looks down the side street. It is a dead end leading to splashes of neon on a large building, obscured, from this distance, by the dark. He takes a step toward it, and from the darkness at the top of the building comes an abrupt bright red sparking flare and a clap of sharp sound. Hatcher hesitates, but the flame evaporates and the afterclap subsides, and he moves on.

  Soon the building shows itself in the red glow of its neon signs: a wide ground-floor facade of colonnaded arches and two dark-windowed upper floors and minarets at the front corners rising into the night. The neon proclaims: LIVE! NUDE! THE HOUSE OF VIRGINS! YOU’VE MADE IT! 72 FOR U!

  And now beside Hatcher is an unmistakable, forced, drawly chuckle: “Heh heh heh. If it isn’t Hatch the Snatch.”

  Hatcher turns and finds the ship-anchor nose and narrow eyes and heavy brows of a familiar face. “Mr. President,” Hatcher says, reflexively using the honorific, though he likes the irony now. This was the last president he covered, and for a moment, at the very end of Hatcher’s life on earth, as his heart attack began, he felt his own imminent premature death would be mitigated by not having to live out this one’s full second term.

  “Hatch the Snatch,” George W. Bush says.

  “Mr. President.”

  “Snatch the Hatch.”

  “Welcome, Mr. President. I didn’t know you’d arrived.”

  George turns his eyes to the House of Virgins. “He’s inside. I got him now.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Osama. I got him now.”

  From the House of Virgins, a wail begins—a man’s voice—and at first, briefly, it sounds like sexual fervor, but quickly the sound morphs, the voice clearly is crying in intense pain, and around his voice begins the sound of female voices, ululating together, a chorus of trilling excitement—a chorus of seventy-two, no doubt—and then suddenly a third-floor window flares bright with flame and an explosion punches through the air and the flames leap out of the window and carry with them disassembled male body parts—legs, arms, a torso, a wide-eyed head—that fall to the ground before the building. The flames flicker out in the window, the women’s voices fall silent, and the body parts lie motionless for a moment. Then abruptly the parts all rise into the air and reassemble into a naked, darkly bearded young man. As soon as his body is recomposed, he begins screaming again in pain but without a moment’s hesitation he dashes for the front door of the House of Virgins and disappears inside.

  “That wasn’t him,” George says. “See, this happens every couple of minutes. Osama’s waiting his turn, like we used to in the back of Spunky’s in Crawford. How’s about that for pointyhead ironicky? My intelligence report says they have to wait in line for the seventy-two virgins.”

  “Your intelligence report?”

  “Somebody gave it to me when I got off the boat.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Some guy who met me right there at the dock. He says, ‘Mr. President, here is your intelligence briefing.’ See, I’m back in the saddle here, Hatch. A little heavenly reward.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I’m just wondering how, if they keep doing the same seventy-two virgins over and over again, then you know, how they’re actually virgins when, like, the second guy does them and so on.”

  “You mentioned a heavenly reward . . .”

  “Well now, Hatch, a reward can’t be the explanation. See, that’s Hell you’re looking at there. Inside that Arab looking building. Osama and those virgins and those other boys are all in Hell.”

  Hatcher turns to George. “Mr. President . . .”

  “Though maybe you’re right. Satan could turn those girls back into virgins each time. That would certainly be Hell. Right, Hatch? Heh heh heh.” George’s chuckling ceases with another male voice baying in pain from the house and then the women ululating and then the exploding and the afterclapping and the thudding to the ground of the body parts. George watches in wonder.

  “That’s not him either,” George says.

  “Mr. President . . .”

  “I’m sure glad I’m not in Hell,” George says.

  “Sir, you are.”

  “Looks pretty rough in there.”

  “Mr. President, it’s Hell out here too. You’re in Hell.”

  George turns to Hatcher. “Heh heh heh. You’ve got your disinformation all wrong there, Snatch.”

  “That was the River Styx you came over on the boat.”

  George puts on a you-poor-dumb-shit smirk. “The reports are clear. You see, we’re standing here in Heaven, and those boys inside that building over there are in Hell.”

  “Look around,” Hatcher says. “Does this look like Heaven?”

  George doesn’t move his eyes from Hatcher’s. “We’re searching now for the WMDs—Wings Made Divine—and we expect to find them soon.”r />
  A man’s cries, the women’s cries, the explosion—louder this time—and George keeps his eyes on Hatcher, keeps the smirk fixed, and Hatcher feels a sharp hot burn on his forehead, his cheek—a splash of boiling liquid—and another—glowing red—and it’s falling on George too—a splashing of blood on his hair, his face, searing Hatcher and George—and the former president’s eyes widen, though he does not move a muscle. And then a small, flaming object plops onto George’s shoulder. It is a raggedly severed penis, smoking and glowing red, the flames dying at once. George moves his eyes very slightly to look at the object, and then he returns his eyes to Hatcher and waits. Soon the blood strips itself from the two men and coalesces in the air and the penis rises from George’s shoulder, and then the blood and the penis fly off to join the reassembling of the exploded man.

  George’s smirk fades, and Hatcher knows the former president is realizing at last where he is. Then, after a long moment, George clears his throat. His voice is barely a whisper. “So this is where I am?”

  “That’s right.”

  George nods. “Have you seen my dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “And my mom?”

  “I haven’t seen her.”

  George nods again. “She’s probably in the other place.”

  Hatcher holds his tongue.

  “If she is here,” George says, “she’s going to find me and whip my ass. Heh heh heh.” This time the chuckle is small and sad.

  Hatcher wants badly to move away from George now. But before he does, his journalist’s self makes him say, “I do the evening news here, Mr. President. When you get settled, stop by Broadcast Central and we can do an interview.”

  George says, “I’m pretty much on my own here, right Hatch?”

  “That’s right.”

  George nods. “Thanks for asking, but I don’t think I’d know what to say.”

  Hatcher mutters a good-bye and moves quickly up the street, thinking about the hell of not knowing who you are and the hell of suddenly knowing.

  The Parkway is stalled, dense with naked bodies, their private parts jammed

  into the private parts of whatever body is pressed against them, wedged there

  and flaming. Nighttime is the wrong time for this journey, Hatcher realizes.

  And the sadness of George Bush and the anguish of the jihadists and the priapic

  pain of the crowd before him turn Hatcher back toward his own neighborhood

  : Hatcher McCord understands that sometimes the time is right for a particular

  news story, and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes larger issues present themselves. He is,

  after all, spending eternity in the same place as George W. Bush. Who can tell him

  why? George certainly has refreshed this question, and in spite of the din of

  voices all around Hatcher and the sucking sounds and the fleshy squeegee

  rubbing sounds, when his voice-over pauses for dramatic effect, Hatcher’s

  head goes utterly silent for a long moment. Then: Naomi can. Wife number

  three. And Deborah. Wife number two. And Mary Ellen. Wife number one. They all

  would have thoughts on the subject of why he’s here. He might deny the reliability of

  these sources, but obviously he didn’t get it right, either. Here he is forever with Osama

  and George and all the rest. And with Naomi, surely. And Deborah. And Mary Ellen.

  Surely these women are somewhere in town as well, or soon will be. If Hatcher McCord

  approaches the Big Why? as if it were a news story—and it is, in a certain way—the

  instinct he has to track down his former wives is a natural one, journalistically. But by

  now he knows this instinct in himself as something else: seek the fresh torture. Yes, he

  will try to find his ex-wives. He is the very model of an intrepid newsman. But also he

  is driven to suffer. There is a swelling of cheesy music in Hatcher’s head, and

  he is glad the voice-over is finished. That voice was right, however. He squares

  his shoulders. Okay, Old Scratch. You’ve got some new thing in mind for me. Scratch

  the Hatch. Hatch the Scratch. But fuckitfuckitfuckitfuckit, I’m going home to Anne

  first. He squeezes into the near margin of the crowd, his back to all the naked

  suffering, and he creeps off, thinking that Satan even wants this, of course,

  for him to go to Anne, old torture before fresh.

  Anne is naked and whole in their bed in the dark, the TV and the hanging, bare, low-watt lightbulb both turned off, and she looks up at Hatcher as he crosses to her, her eyes so dark they register as light in the lesser dark of the room. As soon as he sees her, he is wanting her, wanting to touch her and finally finally die with her, but with the step before the step before the last step, he thinks how he is wanting her, wanting to touch her, and wanting finally finally to die with her but how this always goes wrong, and with the step before the last step he thinks how thinking about how the wanting her, wanting to touch her and wanting finally finally to die with her is often the very thing that makes it go wrong, and with the last step all he is doing is thinking about thinking about wanting her. And his body is no longer wanting her.

  He stands there. She lies there. They look at each other.

  “It went away,” she says.

  “Yes,” he says.

  Her eyes are so beautiful, he thinks.

  “For me too,” she says.

  “Yet again,” he says.

  “I was in my mortal life a woman of strong will,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “And you were a powerful man.”

  “So I thought.”

  “You still are.”

  “No. Even on earth, I observed power. I spoke of it. Merely that. My own power was celebrity.”

  “That is great power.”

  “Only an illusion of power.”

  “We are ourselves illusions now, forever.”

  “And even those who had true power in life,” Hatcher says, “it was in a narrow alley and for a passing moment. They’re all here now, I think. All of them.”

  “But I remember what it feels like, to have a strong will.”

  Hatcher says, “What did it get you, though, my darling Anne. Look at how it ended. Henry’s will was even stronger, and yet even he could never get what he wanted, and now he’s in Hell like everyone else.”

  She closes her eyes.

  Hatcher squeezes at his forehead. He himself has brought up Henry. “Why did I say that?”

  “Because you are powerless not to,” she says.

  But her voice is soft, and Hatcher says, “You’re not angry.”

  She thinks on this. She opens her eyes. “That’s true.”

  “And I’m not jealous, even having brought up the king.”

  Anne rises onto an elbow. “Render thyself naked now, Lord Hatcher, and come lie beside me. Quickly.”

  He throws off his shirt and his pants, working his way down toward merely skin.

  “No thinking,” Anne says. “Look me in the eyes.”

  He does. He does. And he is naked and he is beside her.

  Tonight the mattress is gravelly hard. He ignores this.

  They have gotten this far before.

  They both start to lift their arms to embrace and there is a clash of wrists and elbows. They stop and wait.

  “You start,” she says, falling onto her back and putting her arms alongside her, as if she were in a coffin.

  Hatcher twists around and slides an arm behind her at the shoulders, his hand vanishing there and instantly snagging on a coil of her unfurled hair. Anne gasps.

  “Sorry,” he says, withdrawing the arm quickly.

  “You’re pulling my hair,” she says.

  “Sorry.”

  “The headsman lifted me like that, just after.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Those ve
ry roots you just pulled. They held my head aloft.”

  “No remembering,” Hatcher says. “Look me in the eyes.”

  She turns her eyes to him.

  Hatcher slides his arm under her, farther down, at the shoulder blades. She shifts a little toward him and a shot of nerve pain runs from his elbow down his arm and into his hand. He gasps.

  “Did that hurt?” she says, lifting up. “I didn’t know.”

  He pulls his arm out.

  They both sit. They put their hands on each other, gingerly, at the shoulders. They are sweating. There is a sound from the alley. A voice.

  “Someone’s singing,” Anne says.

  “They’re weeping,” Hatcher says.

  “No,” she says. “Listen. There. ‘Pastime with good company, I . . .’ something ‘ . . . and shall until I die.’”

  “It’s a woman crying,” he says. “There. Hear that?”

  “Henry wrote that song, just after he became king.”

  “That little trilling sob.”

  “What was the word in the lyric? I what until I die?”

  “It sounds like Mary Ellen crying.”

  “I couldn’t hear.”

  “Listen.”

  And they both listen. But the alley is silent.

  They look at each other. Their hands are still on each other’s shoulders. For a moment, they’re not sure why.

  “We were trying,” Anne says.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m actually sleepy,” she says.

  “You’re never sleepy,” he says.

  “I am now.”