by Lorrie Moore
He was free to wander the vast burning meadows of Hell and to scale its fiery hills—and for many years he did—but it was much the same all over. What he was actually looking for was its Source, Hell’s bright engine room, its storm-tossed bridge. It had no engine room, there was no bridge, its energy, all its dreadful combustion coming perhaps from the cumulative, collective agony of the inmates. Nothing could be done.
He was distracted, as he was sure they all were (“Been to Heaven?” he’d managed to gasp to an old man whose back was on fire and the man had nodded), by his memory of Paradise, his long-distance glimpse of God. It was unbearable to think of Heaven in his present condition, his memory of that spectacular place poisoned by the discrepancy between the exaltation of the angels and the plight of the damned. It was the old story of the disappointment of rising expectations. Still, without his bidding, thoughts of Paradise force-fed themselves almost constantly into his skull. They induced sadness, rage.
He remembered the impression he’d had of celebrity when he’d stood looking in at Heaven from beyond the Pearly Gates, and he thought to look out for the historic bad men, the celebrated damned, but either they were kept in a part of Hell he had not yet been or their sufferings had made them unrecognizable. If there were great men in Hell he did not see them and, curiously, no one ever boasted of his terrible deeds or notoriety. Indeed, except for the outbursts of violence, most of the damned behaved, considering their state, in a respectable fashion, even an exemplary one. Perhaps, Ellerbee thought, it was because they had not yet abandoned hope. (There was actually a sign: “Abandon Hope, All Who Enter Here.” Ellerbee had read it.)
For several years he waited for May, for as long, that is, as he could remember her. Constant pain and perpetual despair chipped away at most of the memories he had of his life. It was possible to recall who and what he had been, but that was as fruitless as any other enterprise in the dark region. Ultimately, like everything else, it worked against him—Hell’s fine print. It was best to forget. And that worked against him too.
He took the advice written above Hellgate. He abandoned hope, and with it memory, pity, pride, his projects, the sense he had of injustice—for a little while driving off, along with his sense of identity, even his broken recollection of glory. It was probably what they—whoever they were—wanted. Let them have it. Let them have the straight lines of their trade wind, trade route, through street, thrown stone vengeance. Let them have everything. Their pastels back and their blues and their greens, the recollection of gratified thirst, and the transient comfort of a sandwich and beer that had hit the spot, all the retrospective of good weather, a good night’s sleep, a good joke, a good tune, a good time, the entire mosaic of small satisfactions that made up a life. Let them have his image of his parents and friends, the fading portrait of May he couldn’t quite shake, the pleasure he’d had from work, from his body. Let them have all of it, his measly joy, his scrapbook past, his hope, too.
Which left only pure pain, the grand vocabulary they had given him to appreciate it, to discriminate and parse among the exquisite lesions and scored flesh and violated synapses, among the insulted nerves, joints, muscle and tissue, all the boiled kindling points of torment and the body’s grief. That was all he was now, staggering Hiroshima’d flesh—a vessel of nausea, a pail of pain.
He continued thus for several years, his amnesia willed—There’s Free Will, Ellerbee thought—shuffling Hell in his rote aphasia, his stripped self a sealed environment of indifference. There were years he did not think the name Ellerbee.
And even that did not assuage the panic of his burning theater’d, air raid warning’d, red alert afterlife. (And that was what they wanted, and he knew it, wanting as much as they did for him to persist in his tornado watch condition, fleeing with others through the crimped, cramped streets of mazy, refugee Hell, dragging his disaster-poster avatar like a wounded leg.) He existed like one plugged into superb equipment, interminably terminal—and changed his mind and tried it the other way again, taking back all he had surrendered, Hell’s Indian giver, and dredged up from where he had left them the imperfect memories of his former self. (May he saw as she had once been, his breastless, awkward, shapeless childhood sweetheart.) And when that didn’t work either—he gave it a few years—he went back to the other way, and then back again, shifting, quickly tiring of each tack as soon as he had taken it, changing fitfully, a man in bed in a hot, airless room rolling position, agressively altering the surfaces of his pillow. If he hoped—which he came to do whenever he reverted to Ellerbee—it was to go mad, but there was no madness in Hell—the terrific vocabulary of the damned, their poet’s knack for rightly naming everything which was the fail-safe of Reason—and he could find peace nowhere.
He had been there sixty-two years, three generations, older now as a dead man than he had been as a living one. Sixty-two years of nightless days and dayless nights, of aggravated pain and cumulative grief, of escalate desperation, of not getting used to it, to any of it. Sixty-two years Hell’s greenhorn, sixty-two years eluding the muggers and evading the rapists, all the joyless joy riders out for a night on his town, steering clear of the wild, stampeding, horizontal avalanche of the damned. And then, spinning out of the path of a charging, burning, screaming inmate, he accidentally backed into the smoldering ruin of a second. Ellerbee leaped away as their bodies touched.
“Ellerbee?”
Who? Ellerbee thought wildly. Who?
“Ellerbee?” the voice repeated.
How? Ellerbee wondered. How can he know me? In this form, how I look . . .
Ellerbee peered closely into the tormented face. It was one of the men who had held him up, not the one who had shot him but his accomplice, his murderer’s accomplice. “Ladlehaus?” It was Ellerbee’s vocabulary which had recognized him, for his face had changed almost completely in the sixty-two years, just as Ellerbee’s had, just as it was Ladlehaus’s vocabulary which had recognized Ellerbee.
“It is Ellerbee, isn’t it?” the man said.
Ellerbee nodded and the man tried to smile, stretching his wounds, the scars which seamed his face, and breaking the knitting flesh, lined, caked as stool, braided as bowel.
“I died,” he said, “of natural causes.” Ellerbee stared at him. “Of leukemia, stroke, Hodgkin’s disease, arteriosclerosis. I was blind the last thirteen years of my life. But I was almost a hundred. I lived to a ripe old age. I was in a Home eighteen years. Still in Minneapolis.”
“I suppose,” Ellerbee said, “you recall how I died.”
“I do,” Ladlehaus said. “Ron dropped you with one shot. That reminds me,” he said. “You had a beautiful wife. May, right? I saw her photograph in the Minneapolis papers after the incident. There was tremendous coverage. There was a TV clip on the Six O’Clock News. They interviewed her. She was—” Ellerbee started to run. “Hey,” the accomplice called after him. “Hey, wait.”
He ran through the steamy corridors of the Underworld, plunging into Hell’s white core, the brightest blazes, Temperature’s moving parts. The pain was excruciating, but he knew that it was probably the only way he would shake Ladlehaus so he kept running. And then, exhausted, he came out the other side into an area like shoreline, burning surf. He waded through the flames lapping about his ankles and then, humiliated by fatigue and pain, he did something he had never done before.
He lay down in the fire. He lay down in the slimy excrement and noxious puddles, in the loose evidence of their spilled terror. A few damned souls paused to stare at him, their bad breath dropping over him like an awful steam. Their scabbed faces leaned down toward him, their poisoned blood leaking on him from imperfectly sealed wounds, their baked, hideous visages like blooms in nightmare. It was terrible. He turned over, turned face down in the shallow river of pus and shit. Someone shook him. He didn’t move. A man straddled and penetrated him. He didn’t move. His attacker groaned. “I can’t,” he panted, “I can’t—I can’t see myself in his blisters.” Th
at’s why they do it, Ellerbee thought. The man grunted and dismounted and spat upon him. His fiery spittle burned into an open sore on Ellerbee’s neck. He didn’t move. “He’s dead,” the man howled. “I think he’s dead. His blisters have gone out!”
He felt a pitchfork rake his back, then turn in the wound it had made as if the demon were trying to pry foreign matter from it.
“Did he die?” Ellerbee heard.
He had Free Will. He wouldn’t move.
“Is he dead?”
“How did he do it?”
Hundreds pressed in on him, their collective stench like the swamps of men dead in earthquake, trench warfare—though Ellerbee knew that for all his vocabulary there were no proper analogies in Hell, only the mildest approximations. If he didn’t move they would go away. He didn’t move.
A pitchfork caught him under the armpit and turned him over.
“He’s dead. I think so. I think he’s dead.”
“No. It can’t be.”
“I think.”
“How? How did he do it?”
“Pull his cock. See.”
“No. Make one of the women. If he isn’t dead maybe he’ll respond.”
An ancient harridan stooped down and rubbed him between her palms. It was the first time he had been touched there by a woman in sixty-two years. He had Free Will, he had Free Will. But beneath her hot hands his penis began to smoke.
“Oh God,” he screamed. “Leave me alone. Please,” he begged. They gazed down at him like teammates over a fallen player.
“Faker,” one hissed.
“Shirker,” said another scornfully.
“He’s not dead,” a third cried. “I told you.”
“There’s no death here.”
“World without end,” said another.
“Get up,” demanded someone else. “Run. Run through Hell. Flee your pain. Keep busy.”
They started to lift him. “Let go,” Ellerbee shouted. He rolled away from a demon poking at him with a pitchfork. He was on his hands and knees in Hell. Still on all fours he began to push himself up. He was on his knees.
“Looks like he’s praying,” said the one who had told him to run.
“No.”
“Looks like it. I think so.”
“How? What for?”
And he started to pray.
“Lord God of Ambush and Unconditional Surrender,” he prayed. “Power Play God of Judo Leverage. Grand Guignol, Martial Artist—”
The others shrieked, backed away from him, cordoning Ellerbee off like a disaster area. Ellerbee, caught up, ignoring them, not even hearing them, continued his prayer.
“Browbeater,” he prayed, “Bouncer Being, Boss of Bullies—this is Your servant, Ellerbee, sixty-two-year foetus in Eternity, tot, toddler, babe in Hell. Can You hear me? I know You exist because I saw You, avuncular in Your green pastures like an old man on a picnic. The angeled minarets I saw, the gold streets and marble temples and all the flashy summer palace architecture, all the gorgeous glory locked in Receivership, Your zoned Heaven in Holy Escrow. The miracle props—harps and Saints and Popes at tea. All of it—Your manna, Your ambrosia, Your Heavenly Host in their summer whites. So can You hear me, pick out my voice from all the others in this din bin? Come on, come on, Old Terrorist, God the Father, God the Godfather! The conventional wisdom is we can talk to You, that You love us, that—”
“I can hear you.”
A great awed whine rose from the damned, moans, sharp cries. It was as if Ellerbee alone had not heard. He continued his prayer.
“I hear you,” God repeated.
Ellerbee stopped.
God spoke. His voice was pitchless, almost without timbre, almost bland. “What do you want, Ellerbee?”
Confused, Ellerbee forgot the point of his prayer. He looked at the others, who were quiet now, perfectly still for once. Only the snap of localized fire could be heard. God was waiting. The damned watched Ellerbee fearfully. Hell burned beneath his knees. “An explanation,” Ellerbee said.
“For openers,” God roared, “I made the heavens and the earth! Were you there when I laid the foundations of the firmament? When I—”
Splinters of burning bone, incandescent as filament, glowed in the gouged places along Ellerbee’s legs and knees where divots of his flesh had flared and fallen away. “An explanation,” he cried out, “an explanation! None of this what-was-I-doing-when-You-pissed-the-oceans stuff, where I was when You colored the nigger and ignited Hell. I wasn’t around when You elected the affinities. I wasn’t there when You shaped shit and fashioned cancer. Were You there when I loved my neighbor as myself? When I never stole or bore false witness? I don’t say when I never killed but when I never even raised a hand or pointed a finger in anger? Where were You when I picked up checks and popped for drinks all round? When I shelled out for charity and voted Yes on the bond issues? So no Job job, no nature in tooth and claw, please. An explanation!”
“You stayed open on the Sabbath!” God thundered.
“I what?”
“You stayed open on the Sabbath. When you were just getting started in your new location.”
“You mean because I opened my store on Sundays? That’s why?”
“You took My name in vain.”
“I took . . .”
“That’s right, that’s right. You wanted an explanation, I’ll give you an explanation. You wanted I/Thou, I’ll give you I/Thou. You took It in vain. When your wife was nagging you because you wanted to keep those widows on the payroll. She mocked you when you said you were under an obligation and you said, ‘Indirectly. G-d damn it, yes. Indirectly.’ ‘Come on, sweetheart,’ you said, ‘you’re awfully g-d-damn hard on me.’”
“That’s why I’m in Hell? That’s why?”
“And what about the time you coveted your neighbor’s wife? You had a big boner.”
“I coveted no one, I was never unfaithful, I practically chased that woman away.”
“You didn’t honor your father and mother.”
Ellerbee was stunned. “I did. I always honored my father and mother. I loved them very much. Just before I was killed we were planning a trip to Phoenix to see them.”
“Oh, them. They only adopted you. I’m talking about your natural parents.”
“I was in a Home. I was an infant!”
“Sure, sure,” God said.
“And that’s why? That’s why?”
“You went dancing. You wore zippers in your pants and drove automobiles. You smoked cigarettes and sold the demon rum.”
“These are Your reasons? This is Your explanation?”
“You thought Heaven looked like a theme park!”
Ellerbee shook his head. Could this be happening? This pettiness signaled across the universe? But anything could happen, everything could, and Ellerbee began again to pray. “Lord,” he prayed, “Heavenly Father, Dear God—maybe whatever is is right, and maybe whatever is is right isn’t, but I’ve been around now, walking up and down in it, and everything is true. There is nothing that is not true. The philosopher’s best idea and the conventional wisdom, too. So I am praying to You now in all humility, asking Your forgiveness and to grant one prayer.”
“What is it?” God asked.
Ellerbee heard a strange noise and looked around. The damned, too, were on their knees—all the lost souls, all the gargoyles, all the demons, kneeling in fire, capitulate through Hell like a great ring of the conquered.
“What is it?” He asked.
“To kill us, to end Hell, to close the camp.”
“Amen,” said Ellerbee and all the damned in a single voice.
“Ha!” God scoffed and lighted up Hell’s blazes like the surface of a star. Then God cursed and abused Ellerbee, and Ellerbee wouldn’t have had it any other way. He’d damned him, no surrogate in Saint’s clothing but the real McCoy Son of a Bitch God Whose memory Ellerbee would treasure and eternally repudiate forever, happily ever after, world without end.
; But everything was true, even the conventional wisdom, perhaps especially the conventional wisdom—that which had made up Heaven like a shot in the dark and imagined into reality halos and Hell, gargoyles, gates of pearl, and the Pearl of Great Price, that had invented the horns of demons and cleft their feet and conceived angels riding clouds like cowboys on horseback, their harps at their sides like goofy guitars. Everything. Everything was. The self and what you did to protect it, learning the house odds, playing it safe—the honorable percentage baseball of existence.
Forever was a long time. Eternity was. He would seek out Ladlehaus, his murderer’s accomplice, let bygones be bygones. They would get close to each other, close as family, closer. There was much to discuss in their fine new vocabularies. They would speak of Minneapolis, swap tales of the Twin Cities. They would talk of Ron, of others in the syndicate. And Ladlehaus had seen May, had caught her in what Ellerbee hoped was her grief on the Six O’Clock News. They would get close. And one day he would look for himself in Ladlehaus’s glowing blisters.
1980–1990
Series editor Shannon Ravenel simplified The Best American Short Stories. She got rid of most of the lists and of the series editor’s foreword, keeping only the list of magazines and biographical notes. In 1987 she did, however, institute the contributors’ notes, brief essays by the stories’ authors describing their inspirations for their chosen pieces. Here they often revealed intimate truths about the writing process. Charles Baxter described “desk pounding, swearing, and pages flung into wastebaskets.” Madison Smartt Bell admitted, “I still sometimes wish I could have made [this story] just a little shorter.” Joy Williams wrote, “It is the unsayable which prompts writing in the first place.”
Ravenel referred to the 1980s as “another golden age” for short stories. Because of the growing number of MFA programs and literary journals, the latter made possible by a larger budget for literature in the National Endowment for the Arts and stronger state arts councils, the amount of short fiction published each year increased. And story collections and anthologies were more frequently reviewed in magazines and newspapers. In 1977 Ravenel read 900 short stories, in 1989 over 2,000. She said, “The short story in the 1980s was it.”
