Hell

by Robert Olen Butler

  Nixon’s singing would be torturing Hatcher too, except Hatcher has found the solid mahogany door to his mind at last and shut it and he’s taking no calls. He is aware of the rock-naked slopes and crests and cliff faces passing by and then the flat, arid run up to the city, and he is aware the sun is now vast and high overhead and he knows the forecast for noontime from last night’s news—scattered sulfurous fiery storms—but all of that is vague in him for now as he sits in the prime corner office of his mind and all is silence there. What to do with this freedom in my head, what to do. I got away from my old man. On the pre-dawn morning when I was supposed to kill a whitetail with a shotgun out in the river bottoms and start growing up like he wanted, me his only son, his only child, carrying all of his hopes, I burrowed deep into the absolute dark of the back corner of the attic guest-room closet with the smell of old wool and mothballs and shoe leather and I huddled up tight and I wasn’t afraid of him and I knew I could think what I liked and I interviewed President Eisenhower in my mind—grilled him about the Suez and the Eisenhower Doctrine and I wouldn’t let him off the hook about actually taking military action to stop communists merely on the suspicion of a problem—and I could hear my dad calling downstairs, but I was going to think what I wanted. And it may have led me straight to Hell. He would have predicted that. But now I’m huddled up and free to think again, and I saw my dad here in Hell once, trapped inside his traffic-jammed Studebaker, giving the finger all around, and I didn’t care one way or the other, really, that he was here too—of course he was—and I didn’t even try to catch his eye. That’s one thing I can do with my freedom. I don’t have to expect it to be torture if I want to figure out why I’m here. And if I do and if somebody really is coming to take a few souls away to wherever else there is, then maybe I can know how to be one of those to go. And maybe even Beatrice and her boyfriend are right. Maybe there’s a back door somewhere. I can think my way through that. And nobody can hear me. Not a word. Faces flashing at my window now and they can’t hear me. The sky has gone black but I’m in Satan’s own Cadillac. The sulfur rains are starting to pour down out there and the eyes at my windows are widening, the mouths are opening to cry out, and now the flesh dissolves all around and the eyes melt and there is only bone and tooth and then not even that and it’s getting a little warm in here but the car rushes on and I am thinking and thinking and it’s too bad what’s happening out there but it’s high noon in Hell and there’s nothing to be done about that and one way or another I’ve just got to figure out how to get the fuck out of here.

  Hatcher waits quietly in the Cadillac in his alleyway until the rain ends

  and the steaming puddles that are the denizens who were outside begin

  to coagulate back into bodies. Then he steps from the car and goes up

  the staircase. Ahead of him, the Hoppers’ door is closed, and behind it,

  Howard and Peggy are sitting in their overstuffed chairs. They are out-

  wardly silent. But inside Howard, there is a voice speaking, unheard even

  by Satan: The rugs have gone threadbare in Yonkers, the back door sticks in the

  heat, she talks nonstop through breakfast and lunch about every little thing that

  can possibly go wrong in the kitchen cabinets and in the world, and at dinner she

  will pause only to look out the window at the maple trees, which she’s been wor-

  rying about for years though we’ve never seen even a trace of the blight, and she’ll

  say “I’m sad,” and I’m supposed to do something about it, and I know what she’s

  thinking right now, that if I was worthless then, think how worse than worthless

  I am in Hell, but in Yonkers I go down to the basement to spend another long

  sweet Saturday restoring vintage fountain pens in silence and I am applying the

  heat gun to open a turquoise Waterman Lady Patrician I bought in an estate sale

  and she slips into the room, the woman of the Patrician, whoever she was, long

  ago she carried the pen in her purse with her powder and her lipstick and her

  handkerchief and her perfume—her perfume—the heat awakens the smell of her

  perfume—her smell—rose and moss and patchouli—and she is beside me, I have

  resurrected her, she is alive again and I breathe her into me.

  And inside Peggy, her own voice speaks, unknown to Satan or to Howard either or even to herself, most of the time, and when it is known to herself, it serves only to torture her: This must be hard on him even with our door shut against the sulfur out there pouring down, the smell gets in anyway and it’s bad and he’s got a nose on him and I don’t know how he got it but he’s always had it, like early on, maybe our fourth or fifth date, and I know we’re going to kiss and it’s night and we’re racing along the Hudson in his Ford Roadster and he’s sniffing at the air and I say what and he says dogwood and I can’t even pick it up, and later we’re parked and we’re kissing and he puts his nose against my throat and he says rose and he says jasmine and he says there’s something smoky, like an animal, and he hopes it’s okay, his saying this, he hopes this doesn’t make me mad, and it doesn’t, it’s actually something okay in a way that I can’t even begin to put into words, but I slap him a little just the same and for Peggy this is so long ago and utterly lost and whatever was okay is so very difficult to think about that she says now, aloud, “You’ve always been so rude,” and he says, “Me rude? You never stopped yammering long enough for me even to begin to be rude,” and they start up, while outside, Hatcher passes their closed door and approaches his own.

  He hopes Anne was safely in the apartment for the rain. If she’s waiting inside for him, he has to figure out now what to tell her about her own mind. He stops before the door. He recognizes the assumption he just made. Perhaps this privacy of mind he has isn’t universal. Maybe it’s a rare gift. Like good hair and straight teeth and a killer broadcast voice. Maybe if he lets anyone know about it who doesn’t have the gift, Satan will find him out through that other mind and deal with him.

  He opens the door and steps in. Anne is not in sight. “Darling, I’m home,” he says.

  She appears from the bedroom, head attached, wearing jeans and a TUDOR HOOLIGAN T-shirt. As soon as her eyes fall on Hatcher, she gapes and gasps such that Hatcher wonders if the rain misted into the backseat and he wasn’t aware and he is standing before her half dissolved.

  “It was your investiture,” she says.

  “What?”

  “When they grabbed you full stark naked, I worried for your fate. But it was to . . . ” She pauses, trying to find a word, but both her hands have come up, their fingers fluttering at him.

  He looks down. He is clad still in the powder-blue jumpsuit of a minion. Of course he is. He was hustled into the car after the interview and borne along like this. He lifts his arms, rotates his hands, considers himself up and down. Has he become a minion? Is this how it’s done?

  “ . . . enable you,” Anne says, finding the word she wanted. “Is this so? Did they give you new powers, my darling?”

  He looks at Anne. Her T-shirt now reads GOVERN NAKED.

  “No,” Hatcher says. “I don’t know.”

  Anne angles her head to the side ever so slightly, narrows her eyes and smiles faintly. “Even Henry goes about in mufti. He is a king no more. And my anchorman, powerful already, entering every dwelling in Hell, is elevated even higher now.” She has begun to purr.

  Hatcher looks down once more at his uniform. Everyone in Hell knows what this means. Perhaps this will help him too, in what he must do. He feels Anne drawing near, and he is happy suddenly about his apparent new status. Maybe real status. He thinks to pat at his hair. It’s been restored to its normal anchorman length without Anne ever being reminded of the first man she had sex with. All is well. He lifts his eyes and Anne’s T-shirt reads KISS ME, I’M A BRIT IN HELL and she is upon him, putting her arms around his neck and
her mouth on his.

  Hatcher wonders if minions get to have satisfying sex. He wonders if the thing that actually makes the sex go bad in Hell is the notion that an immortal is not only watching but listening to every intimate thought. He wonders if that often didn’t apply back on earth as well. He recalls that it certainly did apply in the back of the Pittsfield American Legion Hall a week after the first Kennedy funeral when he was driven to bind together the passion for a girl with the passion of world events and the girl was driven to listen for God, who was inside her mind telling her to look at her dirty little self and feel ashamed. He even recalls the impression on that night that JFK was there with him, not just watching but inside Hatcher’s head where they could talk, and Hatcher asked Mr. President, do you mind? and Kennedy said You should proceed with vigah and Hatcher wonders if Anne even considers Satan’s putative presence in her head, wonders if maybe for her it’s Henry VIII in there listening all the time. And with all this wondering and recalling, of course, Hatcher is missing quite a bit of kissing. His lips are working but he’s missing their primary intended effect.

  And Anne recalls with the first kiss of her newly invested Hatcher how her first kiss with Henry was at Hampton Court in the King’s Long Gallery and how he wore a robe of Venetian damask and silver tissue and gold cloth and no one in the realm could wear such a thing but him—it was all his power draped upon him—and she wonders at how a man’s power gives off a palpable emanation, a thing in the air that enters through her very gown—not to mention through her very Bangladeshi jeans—and goes straight to all the excitable spots on her body and excites them. And she wonders at how that excitement is like the excitement of seeing a beautiful snake suddenly among the flowers, crimson and black, and its beauty is made vivid by the poison you think is in its fangs and you want to touch it and it coils for you and its round-tipped little head rises and swoops for you and then it bites and you go quite numb and you lose all the excitement, and then you stop and ask yourself why you shouldn’t be the one who bites. And Anne, wishing to make this thing go right for herself at last, is moved to bite her semipowerful man on the lip and he cries out and they both remember the last time her teeth got involved in sex between them and she suddenly can’t understand why she wants this anyway and she lets go and backs off. Her T-shirt now reads HELL IS LOSING YOUR HEAD.

  From the bedroom Brünnhilde in the Götterdämmerung begins to send Wotan’s ravens home in her final aria before riding her horse into her own flaming funeral pyre, sung, however, in this version, by a very large chorus of Satan’s cockroaches directed by Richard Wagner himself, which is to say that Hatcher’s cell phone rings. He knows who it is. He steps past Anne, who is looking a little distracted, the look she often has before removing her head.

  “Please keep it on,” he says in passing.

  “Okay okay,” she says, trailing her hand along the blue sleeve of the passing minion jumpsuit.

  He goes into the bedroom and flips open his cell phone. It’s Beelzebub. “Showtime,” he says and is gone.

  Since they sometimes do several cycles of the Evening News from Hell before evening actually comes again—the hot afternoons often linger for a long, long while—the cell phone call Hatcher has just received is his routine summoning for work. Always in the past, he has left quickly to get to Broadcast Central after the summoning, but he has often gotten there only after long delays on the Parkway. And yet there never seems to be an issue of time. When he arrives, they prepare. But he has never willfully hesitated in his progress. He has his own investigative agenda now. There are some stops he could make along the way to work. Dare he do it? He knows his inner thoughts are his own. But is he always being watched? And listened to when he speaks? These might be separate matters.

  He is pacing and twitching around the bedroom floor, he realizes. What further consequence is there to fear when he has already been dismembered and incinerated and acidly dissolved? Pain is life here. There is always the reconstituting to be available for more pain. His hands fly into the air, clutching at nothing. He says aloud, “Pain pain pain fuck fuck fuck.” A figure is in the bedroom doorway. He stops. Anne watches him, her brow furrowed. Her T-shirt is blank. Pure white. Wordless.

  “What is it?” she asks, softly.

  He could tell her now, what he knows about minds in Hell. But maybe it’s only his own. Maybe he’s special. Maybe he’s unique. To make her think she can think might be dangerous for her.

  “It’s time to go to work,” he says.

  “You’re special now,” she says.

  He starts. Did she read his mind? No. He realizes she’s referring to his apparent minionhood.

  “No reason to be anxious,” she says.

  “Thanks,” he says. “No.”

  “I’m sorry for biting,” she says.

  “It’s okay.”

  “My head is on.”

  “Yes. Thanks.”

  “I’m sad,” she says.

  Hatcher’s hands fly up again. He twitches. But in excitement now. He might be able to do something about her sadness. If he finds a way out, he will take his Anne with him.

  A few moments later Hatcher is standing in front of the open closet, a little surprised at how reluctant he is to even temporarily remove his blue jumpsuit, when Brünnhilde begins to sing again, in his pocket. This time, however, she is rendered by Michael Jackson in a seriously inadequate falsetto interrupted shortly by a banging of metal and guttural German cursing—interpretable, if Hatcher were so inclined, as Wagner flailing away at the King of Pop, who is dressed in full Brünnhildean armor for his ring-tone recording session. Hatcher answers the phone. It’s Beelzebub again, who says, “Business suit, comrade. And wear your new tie,” and he’s gone.

  Oops. Hatcher feels as if his mind was just read. He flushes as hot as a sulfurous rain. But. But. All that really suggests is Beelzebub knows about Hatcher’s minion suit. It would be a simple thing that he was told. Bee-bub and Old Scratch surely are both adept at guessing what their subjects are thinking, like bebangled fortune tellers in a carnival. Beelzebub knows in conventional ways that Hatcher just got home and how he was clad. He knows Hatcher’s facing the choice of doing the news in anchorman suit and tie or the minion uniform. In spite of the little scare, Hatcher still believes he’s right about omniscience. And now he even thinks to try a first test of Satan’s omnipresence. Hatcher lifts his face and says aloud, “Fuck you, Bee-bub.” He waits. Nothing happens. “Fuck you, I said.” Nothing. “And your boss too. Fuck you, Satan.” He gives the finger to the north, south, east, and west, to the ceiling and to the floor. He braces himself. Nothing.

  Hatcher takes a deep breath. The fear is subsiding. He’s cool as mortal life inside. And now Beelzebub’s throwaway bit of fashion advice finally registers on him. What new tie? Hatcher steps into the closet doorway and peers inside. Hanging directly in front of him on a hook in the shadows of the back wall is a tie. He puts his hand to it and takes it out. It is powder blue. It’s official. He takes off his jumpsuit of exactly the same color and rolls it carefully and tucks it deep in an upper shelf corner of the closet.

  The writers’ neighborhood is on the way to Broadcast Central and Hatcher is making good time along the edge of the throng in the Parkway. The smell of sulfur is still strong in the air, but the puddles in the street have vanished—reconstituted—and the city is teeming in a way that feels almost comfortable to Hatcher in its tortured normalcy. He has a little bit of evidence that not only is Satan not hearing everything, he’s not seeing everything either. Hatcher thinks about Virgil. The poet guide is a good place to start in his quest for Hell’s back door.

  Along the street, a few of the transitory bookstores are open, and as Hatcher is wondering how to go about looking for Virgil, he sees a hand-lettered sign in a bookshop window: SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY. He stops and goes in.

  The bookshelves here are full, unlike those in most of the shops along the street, though Hatcher does not glance at the
titles. He is immediately struck by a figure sitting at a desk at the back of the shop, a small woman with thick, wavy hair cut off at the collar of a tattered brown velvet jacket. In a sitting area near the desk are a couch and several chairs, all empty, all canary yellow or avocado green Naugahyde, gashed and covered by what appear to be piss stains. Before Hatcher wanted to be Walter Cronkite, he wanted to be Ernest Hemingway, so he instantly recognizes Sylvia Beach. He approaches her.

  Sylvia looks up at him. “Are you a writer?” she asks, rising from her chair a little in hopefulness.

  “No,” he says. “Sorry.”

  She sinks back down.

  “Well,” he says, “I published a memoir once, partial, from childhood to forty or so, but I didn’t actually write it and it was full of invented anecdotes.”

  Sylvia furrows her brow and cocks her head.

  “The writer called it ‘creative nonfiction,’” Hatcher says.

  “I don’t understand that term,” Sylvia says.

  “I hear he lives in this neighborhood.”

  “I hear there are many writers around here.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “They don’t come in.”

  “This is Hell, Ms. Beach.”

  “I only get book reviewers. They come in and sit around, and they all seem unaware of who or where they are. I don’t know them. They clearly read too fast and in the wrong frame of mind. They miss so much. Perhaps that’s why they’re here.”