Hell (12 page)

Hatcher McCord’s interview with Satan is an unparalleled journalistic landmark, and the irony is that he has to keep his biggest investigative break to himself. Fuck you, Satan, he says casually in his head. Hatcher’s head is a precious haven in the midst of the maelstrom of Hell.

“Not that it pleases me,” Satan says. “I sometimes get a bellyful of the malfunctions. I feel for you all, my little children. You are all so pathetic. I do care.” And Satan digs knuckles into the corners of both eyes. “Boo hoodie hoo,” he says.

Satan abruptly drops his hands and lifts his face. He closes his eyes in faux agony and cries, “Satan wept.”

Hatcher McCord, whose likeability rating even at the time of his death was second only to Oprah Winfrey . . .

Satan opens his eyes and lowers his face. Hatcher is not so far gone in the overvoice of his life that he misses this moment. He sorts quickly through what’s been going on and recaptures enough at least to say, “Wonderful. Yes.”

“Of course,” Satan says. “Of course. But as the broadcast interview ends—and that will be the end, that touching moment right there—I want you to do a voice-over thing, and you say it just that way.”

Hatcher nods knowingly at Satan, though there’s a rustling of panic in his chest because he’s not quite sure what “that way” is. Worse, he’s not even sure what the “it” is.

“Say it,” Satan says.

“Yes,” Hatcher says.

“Now.”

“Of course,” Hatcher says.

Satan is waiting. Hatcher is in high, blinding panic. But he is free to scramble around in his own head, he knows now. He can find a way to finesse this. One of his other great newsman talents has always been the ability to act as if you know a lot when, in fact, you know very little. Satan is such a fucking poseur. And Hatcher says, “You are so brilliantly expressive. I want to study that one more time so I can capture every nuance.”

Satan cocks his head. Hatcher braces himself for more fire. At least he might get rid of this long hair.

And then Satan smiles a vast, radiant smile. “Good. Yes. Oh I chose you well, Hatcher McCord. We should work on this. Of course, I’m totally fucking insincere, you know. I don’t really give a very hot damn about you all. But I want you all to think I do. If I want to be
seen
as sincere, then that’s basically the same thing as
being
sincere. I respect the image and want it for myself and I care that you think I’m sincere and so that shows respect for you and so it all adds up to the same thing, yes? Of course yes. Here we go.”

Satan lifts his face, closes his eyes, and he says, “Satan wept.”

Hatcher gets it. “I’m very moved,” he says.

“I knew you would be,” Satan says.

“I’m ready,” Hatcher says, preparing his most telling, throbbing, compassionate anchorman’s voice—nightly employed back on earth for the final two-minute feature with the dying child or the starving laid-off worker or the courageous amputee athlete—by using the voice in the privacy of his own mind:
Little does Satan know that the experienced and brilliant newsman can, for the sake of a story, feign respect even as he knows his subject to be a fool
.

Satan lifts his face and closes his eyes.

And Hatcher says, with aching mellifluousness, “Satan wept.”

Satan squeezes his eyes more tightly shut and scrunches up his shoulders in appreciation. Then his eyes pop open and he says, “I could kiss you.” He leaps up and levitates Hatcher from his chair. Hatcher’s feet grope for the floor and find it as Satan grabs him and ends the interview with a flurry of cheek bussing and back-thumping, and he personally elbow-hustles Hatcher past Leni Riefenstahl standing at severe attention just out of arm’s reach of the camera.

She moves her eyes slightly to the two men as they pass, but she looks inward:
It was February and it was cold in Berlin, it was very cold and the snow was drifted up and when the speech was done I had the urge to strip off my clothes—every shred till there was only my quaking naked body—and leap into a snow-drift to sweetly temper the intense heat I was feeling from him, and this was at the Sportpalast where he spoke and I was near the front of the crowd, a little to his left, looking up at him from an angle that made me tremble, the angle of a daughter with a father, I know, the angle of all of us as a nation in our needy submissive solidarity, and what ghost may have passed through me of my commonplace father my bourgeois Kaiserreich father my keep-your-place-girl, quick-with-his-fists father, this ghost passed on instantly now as this man strode to the podium and saluted us, drawing his flat open hand straight from his heart and out to us all, and I looked up at him and I saw him from this angle below as if through the lens of a camera and he beamed sternly all around and he was the father of us all and then he began to speak, and he had me at “Fellow Germans.”

Hatcher is alone in the back of the car as it comes down the mountain. Beyond the privacy partition, Dick Nixon is driving fast. Alone in the front seat, with no bodies threatening to touch him, he can relax. He looks forward to driving the crowded streets ahead, plowing through them, though he knows to try to squelch the pleasure of that thought, fearing Satan, who Dick assumes knows every thought. But at this point in time, all is good for Dick Nixon, considering where he is. He lifts his face and begins to sing “Big wheel keep on turnin’, proud Mary keep on burnin’” and somewhere ahead, in a back alley of the Great Metropolis, Ike Turner sits before his TV set, unable to move. He watches Richard M. Nixon singing this song, though on the screen, Dick is not driving a 1948 Cadillac Fleetwood, he is on a stage vibrating his thighs in a miniskirt. Ike cannot look away from the screen no matter how hard he tries.

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.