Hell (15 page)

Shortly thereafter, Hatcher sits down in the recording studio and finds a script waiting for him. Beyond the glass window, Dan Rather is fidgeting in work overalls and a Lone Star Feed & Fertilizer ball cap, trying to figure out the mixing board before him. The former CBS anchor has been around Broadcast Central for a while, but Hatcher hasn’t known where he’s been working, exactly, and when he’s seen him in the halls, Hatcher can never approach him. Rather is clearly banished from the air, and whenever anyone seems to be approaching him, he backs frantically away, crying, “I don’t know the frequency!” With the glass partition between him and Hatcher, however, he stays put but fumbles around at the knobs and sliders on the board.

Hatcher looks at the script. It’s for the Satan interview. There is a brief introduction—the segment isn’t even called an interview here—and there is the final “Satan wept.” Hatcher is simply to record his voice and the piece will be assembled, with someone else no doubt stepping in technically after Rather has suffered long enough.

Hatcher puts his headphones on. Rather notices this and reaches to remove his cap. He instantly starts wrenching mightily at it—he’s tried unsuccessfully to do this before—but the cap won’t budge. Finally, Rather puts his headset on over the cap, leans forward, and presses the talk button. “Courage,” Rather says.

Hatcher doesn’t quite know what he means by this, never did quite know when Rather occasionally used it to sign off from his evening news.

Rather’s hands are fluttering and hesitating and fluttering again over the mixing board. He says, with his best West Texas twang, “Me and this job are like a hen trying to hatch a cactus,” though the remark seems not to be directed outward.

“Dan,” Hatcher says.

Rather looks up.

“Good to catch up with you,” Hatcher says. He’s not sure Rather recognizes him, though they spent years vying for the same viewers.

“I’m Hatcher McCord.”

“I know who you are.”

They look at each other through the glass for a long moment. “Can I ask you a question, Dan?”

Rather nods, but he instantly asks his own question. “Are we all here?”

“We?”

“The newsmen. In Hell.”

“I haven’t seen everybody.”

“Murrow?”

This is a sad thing for Hatcher. “So they say. When I asked about him, Beelzebub said he was smoking.”

“Why don’t I think this has to do with Ed’s cigarettes?”

Hatcher nods at Rather with his face scrunched to say, I know what you mean.

Rather thinks for a moment and then says, “You know, there wasn’t a single person on earth who didn’t have millions of other people expecting them to go to Hell.”

Hatcher hasn’t thought of it this way. “You’re right,” he says.

“Courage,” Rather says.

“Courage,” Hatcher says. This was the question he had for Rather, about this word. Oddly now, it feels apt.

“I think I can start this thing up,” Rather says.

Hatcher picks up his script. “All right.”

Rather nods and Hatcher begins to read, “When I visited your great Father, the Supreme Ruler of Eternity, in his comfy cozy . . . ”

Hatcher stops. “Let me start again,” Hatcher says into the microphone.

Rather’s hands move to the board, and he says, “Whenever you’re ready.” Hatcher looks at the words before him. Until a short time ago, whenever they gave him something to say, he’d read it out as is. He dared do nothing else. But all of a sudden, with this typically overwrought script before him plumping up Satan—like so many that Hatcher’s done before—he can barely make his mouth shape itself around the words. He knows it’s because he feels his thoughts are his own. This is a serious danger, he realizes. Breathe free and get burned. He still can’t make his publicly verifiable deeds his own. He still dare not change a thing in his work. He topples his head forward in this recognition. Then he lifts his face once more, takes a deep breath, and looks Rather in the eyes.

“Hatcher McCord take two,” Rather says.

And Hatcher starts over. “When I visited your great Father, the Supreme Ruler of Eternity, in his comfy cozy living room, he greeted me with a hug, so typical of his magnanimity.”

The script asks him to pause. He does. Then he reads, “Not that he didn’t charmingly remind me who was the boss.”

Another pause. “Then he spoke with passionate eloquence.”

Another pause, and now the big climax. Hatcher summons his will, unctions-up his voice, and says, “Satan wept.”

He stops. He looks through the glass, and Dan Rather gives him the thumbs-up. Then Dan looks sharply down at his mixing board with acute concern. “Whoa Nellie,” he says. “It’s doing something.”

This could mean anything. This could be a routine step in the editing process. The technology around the station often seems to have a mind of its own, or at least an automated sophistication that its surface—in this case, a rather old-fashioned mixing board—does not fully reveal. Or it could easily mean the onset of a bizarre and intensely painful incident typical of life in Hell. Hatcher is calm inside as he waits to see which it is, and this is new. He realizes the isolated privacy of his mind is what lets him wait for the pain without the thrashing panic, but he’s not sure why. Courage.

And it turns out to be the routine step. “It seems to have just edited itself,” Rather says.

The two men look at each other and then Rather does the obvious thing. He plays it. Each of them turns his face to his own monitor.

The comfy cozy stuff is spoken over an establishing shot of the lodge’s great room, empty.

The magnanimous hug shows Hatcher from behind with only Satan’s arms around him, pounding him manfully on the back, and little fragmented glimpses of Satan’s head bussing Hatcher’s cheeks. These glimpses seem off somehow, but they are gone too quickly for Hatcher to figure out why.

The charming reminder of who’s the boss is spoken over a shot of Hatcher with his hair on fire.

Then, as Hatcher says that Satan spoke with passionate eloquence, a face comes up on the screen, framed against the lodge’s walk-in fireplace, and it begins to speak. The face is the face of Hatcher’s father.

“Come to me, my little ones,” the face says. “I want you. I want you all. I choose you, my darlings. I do so because I want you. It’s what makes us all down here one big modern extended family. I want you in my family. We have to help each other. Doesn’t that warm the cockles of your heart? Isn’t this a Hallmark moment? Send me a card now, all of you. Go find a sweet little greeting card with family thoughts and mail it to me.”

The face—Hatcher’s father—blows a kiss.

Hatcher’s father says, “I feel for you all, my little children. I do care.” And he digs knuckles into the corners of both eyes. Then he abruptly drops his hands and lifts his face. Hatcher’s father closes his eyes.

“Satan wept,” Hatcher says in the voice-over.

The face freezes in its pose for a moment before the frame fades to a roiling bright red. Then the monitor goes blank.

“Some part of me always suspected as much, given the banality of evil,” Dan Rather says.

Hatcher is still trying to deal with the shift from routine step in the editing process to bizarre and intensely painful incident, so he does not respond.

Rather says, “That Richard M. Nixon was Satan himself.”

Which means everyone will see his or her own personally tailored image when Satan speaks. Like the “Your Stuff” commercials. And right now Hatcher is so full of his dad that he simply takes off the headphones, rises, and goes out of the studio without another glance at Dan Rather, who is swelling with pride at having once stood up snarkily to Satan himself in the White House pressroom. Literally swelling. But Hatcher does not hear the dull pop, as he is not only down the hall but also on the front porch of his boyhood home in Pittsfield, Illinois:
Fireflies in the dark yard and the smell of tar and gravel dust from the pavers having gone through the neighborhood that afternoon and my dad’s home early for a Friday and I don’t get up and get the hell away like I should when he comes and sits beside me on the porch while I’m thinking about something he’d despise—Adlai Stevenson maybe having a real chance to win the second time, now that they’ve nominated him to try again—and I made the mistake of speaking up about politics at dinnertime earlier in the week, saying what a relief it’d be to have a man with an actual brain in the White House, this after my dad gave me a bad whipping in the back-yard for not going out to shoot a whitetail, which he claimed was about my not minding him instead of my not shooting, though he said I should easily guess what he thought of my piss-ant little girl’s ass about that, and now he’s back from the bar by nine or so and I’ve seen that before, when he gets an early start with business slow and the deliveries done and with the McCord Hardware Transtar pickup parked at the door of The Pitt, advertising his drunkenness, and tonight he sits down beside me and he’s quiet for a while and I’m not letting him drive me off and then he says, almost softly, “Your mother thinks you’re goddam perfect, you can do no wrong.” I don’t answer. What he says is true but I don’t let myself think about that and still I just wait like an idiot for what’s next. Do I actually think it will be any different? “She’s wrong, you know,” he says. I don’t answer. He says, “She’s a goddam woman, so who is she to measure a man? She sees herself in you and so of course you’re perfect. I’m a man, and I see that you’ll never be enough of a man to spit past the end of your dick. You’re doomed, boy. You’ll never be anywhere near what you’re supposed to be.” He says all this low, which is rare, and, except for the one small outburst of metaphor, he says it with a veneer of logic, which is even rarer. Still, I’m taking a little bit of comfort in its being Friday night. And he seems to read my mind. “You think I’m saying this drunk,” he says. “Come here.” And he leans across to my chair and reaches out and grabs me by the back of the head. He yanks me right up to his face. “Smell my breath, boy.” And I do. There is no liquor there whatsoever. None.

After the news, Hatcher goes to his steel-gray cubicle and phones J. Edgar Hoover’s office.

“Minion Hoover’s office.” The husky female voice on the other end is instantly familiar, though he’s heard only a few words from it before. Beelzebub’s succubus.

“Lily?” he says.

“Lulu,” the voice says. “I’m Lily’s sister.”

“Lulu, hello,” Hatcher says in his best swooping, hello-upscalegroupie tone, trying to figure a plan already. “I’m Hatcher McCord, anchorman for the
Evening News from Hell
.”

“I’m Lulu, spawn of Grand Mater Lilith,” she says, putting on his tone and then giggling. “I was expecting your call.”

“Ah. Bee-bub,” he says.

Lulu giggles again. This giggle of hers is more like a little trilling in the deep back of her throat, as if she’s gargling something back there. “Bee-bub,” she says. And again. “Bee-bub.”

“You have an enchanting laugh, Lulu.”

She giggles some more. “I watch you on TV every whenever,” she says. “Do you sleep well?”

“You thinking of a little visit, you sexy Lulu?” he says.

Her voice goes instantly clear and reedy fine. “You bet your squeezable ass, anchorman,” she says.

Hatcher’s breath snags. She seems to him the only clear way to get the addresses he wants. But there may be a heavy price to pay, he realizes. “We’ll have to talk about all that,” he says.

“Ohhhhh yeahhhhh,” she says, extending the words like a tongue down his throat.

“I’m a minion now,” Hatcher says.

“This I know,” she says. Then she adds, with one more giggle, “Bee-bub.”

“Well, good. I want to interview . . .”

“There’ll be a car ready for you right after your broadcast,” she says. “Do linger a moment at my desk, minion McCord.”

Hatcher finds a 1932 Duesenberg LaGrande Dual Cowl Phaeton sitting in front of Broadcast Central, and he steps up onto the running board and through the back door. A hand-held camcorder lies on the seat. He takes this as an encouraging nuance of his minionhood. He is on his own with the camera. All the other off-site “Why Do You Think You’re Here?” interviews involved somebody being tortured by don’t-dare-move-the-fucking-thing camera duty. Martin Scorsese was the last one, for the recent Bill Clinton episode—yet to run—shot in a cheap hotel room where the former president is presently eternally waiting in vain for a young woman to arrive, any young woman. On the way to Clinton and on the way back, Scorsese wouldn’t stop talking about how he himself could have avoided all this if he’d gone to the seminary as he’d once planned, and nothing Hatcher said about Hell’s vast population of priests and pastors, monks and magi, rabbis and imams and shamans, both minor and major, from all the world’s religions would assuage his regret, though night came upon them and Scorsese’s agony shifted from his abandoned vocation to not having a camera of his own when the sun went down because this was so clearly his kind of town.