Hell (2 page)

Then the fat women begin to speak, one after the other, and Hatcher undoes his lapel mike and wanders off the set into the fetid dark behind the cameras. A tight gaggle of dozens of raggedy bodies, barely visible in the darkness, shuttle out of his way, murmuring softly “Good evening” and “Now the weather” and “A new Wal-Mart opened today.” These are the TV news anchors who never got out of local stations, a new group of them each night, Hatcher suspects. They are always huddling nearby, sweating heavily, hair mussed, clothes tattered, unprepared. Hatcher has learned to ignore them.

He thinks how there is always time here for all the news in depth—at last there’s time—and how that’s hell, as one of the fat women drones on about the mistreatment of the working classes, and another recounts her dream of Fellini riding her on her hands and knees and lashing her bare butt with a horse whip, and another simply screams for her sixty seconds, and the others come on one by one, and as Hatcher stands here in the dark, he finds he can quiet his mind a bit, let Anne go. He will see her when the broadcast is done and his torment can continue then, but for now he has the news.

Though tonight there’s less of it than he expected. When the time comes for the big follow-up story about a possible new Harrowing, Hatcher has to move on to other news while the remote crew tries to find his investigative reporter, Carl Crispin, who’s dealing, of course, with torments of his own. Crispin was sent to the center of the city, to the intersection where tradition has it the first Harrowing began, the place where Jesus arrived to begin harvesting the elders of the Old Testament to take them to Heaven. Back then, it was a dusty rural crossroads. Now, it is the corner of Peachtree Way and Lucky Street.

Finally, there are no more stories and Beelzebub is chortling softly in Hatcher’s earpiece, and they begin the nightly “Lessen the Pain” feature. Tonight’s advice, in a grainy black-and-white film clip: when the noontime sulfur and fire storm rains down, just duck and cover, slide under a piece of furniture, or throw yourself into a ditch and curl up and cover your head with your hands.

The piece ends and Beelzebub is breathing heavily in Hatcher’s ear. “Guess what I’m wearing,” he whispers.

But Hatcher knows his tricks. He keeps his face Cronkitedly calm and fatherly. The end of the show always is a test of wills. He stares into the camera, placid, waiting.

“Oh, you’re so good,” Beelzebub says. “So here’s your boy.”

Crispin’s face suddenly surrounds Hatcher’s on the monitors. It is a gaunt and pasty face. Crispin’s eyes are swollen nearly shut from crying and tears are streaming down his cheeks.

“And now,” Hatcher says, “reporting live from the corner of Peachtree Way and Lucky Street, Carl Crispin. Carl?”

Carl jerks at the sound of Hatcher’s voice and snaps his hand-held microphone upwards, slamming it into his mouth. He tips his head forward for a moment, taking the microphone away, and then he lifts his face and spits out half a dozen broken teeth.

“Carl,” Hatcher says. “Are you all right?”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Hatcher,” Carl says. “We’re in fucking Hell.”

“That’s right, Carl. And we’re doing the news. You’re standing in the spot where . . .”

“This fucking spot,” Carl says. “Do you know how many Peachtrees there are in Hell, Hatcher? I was most recently at the corner of Peachtree Trace and Lucky Court. Before that Peachtree Trail and Lucky Boulevard, or maybe that was Lucky Street also. And even those seemed relatively distinguishable. There are seven Peachtree intersections along Lucky Street itself, including Peachtree Street Avenue Lane and Peachtree Avenue Lane Street and Peachtree Street Street Avenue. I tried to hurry but I couldn’t move my legs to run.” Carl starts to sob.

“Carl. It’s okay. You’re there now. Carl.”

Carl shakes his head hard and wipes his face with his wrist, dragging the buttons of his suit coat sleeve through his eyes. “Well, shit. I’ve done that again,” he says. “I may not be able to see the camera for a while, Hatcher.” And indeed, Carl is looking off camera to the right now, turning almost entirely into profile.

“That’s all right, Carl.” Hatcher picks up the sheaf of blank paper from the desk and holds on tight, trying to fight a twitching that wants to start in his hands.

Off mike, the voice of the cameraman calls to Carl, who turns toward the sound, blinking. He is more or less in place now and Hatcher takes a deep breath. He mellows his voice into his best top-of-the-news tone.

“All right, Carl. On our last broadcast you reported on the rumors of a new Harrowing. Certain veterans of the last one were seeing the same signs . . .”

“I lied about all that, Hatcher,” Carl says.

Hatcher’s throat knots up tight.

“You know I’m a compulsive liar,” Carl says.

Beelzebub is chortling again, still softly.

Hatcher sees his own face in the center four screens. It is the face of a man he does not know but has seen around a few times. It’s a sad face, he thinks. Sad in the furrowed brow and the tremblingly inverted smile.

Hatcher wedges into the street in front of Broadcast Central. Grand Peachtree Parkway. Teeming with denizens at this hour, whatever that hour is, the air filled with a loud roar of voices and cries. He looks off to the sun hanging behind the sawtooth mountains on the horizon beyond the city. The illusion of the sun, of course. Or a time-fractured view of it. The eye of Satan. Whatever it is. It’s been hanging there a long while. He’s done several cycles of
Evening News
—he can’t think how many, exactly—without its moving. However long that would suggest. Days, by the reckoning of his earthly life. However long ago that life was. His brain is trying to cope, now that he doesn’t have the broadcast for a focus. Three bearded men stinking of motor oil and sardines, arms linked, shouting wordlessly at each other, barrel into him and he nearly falls—Hatcher doesn’t want to fall—the crowd always surges onto you if you fall—so he tries at least to throw himself a little backward and thumps hard into the stone archway of Broadcast Central, but he keeps his feet, and he tries to fight off a fuckthisfuckthisfuckthis run in his head. Satan relishes that. Worse things always follow. Not yet, Old Man, Hatcher says in his head. Not yet. I’m not going there. Hatcher straightens and focuses on the upcoming interview. He can ask about the sun. He steps into the swift roiling current of the crowd and floats on toward his apartment. He can ask why he’s here.

His alley is tight this time, barely wider than his shoulders, and the unidentifiable crunching and sliming beneath his feet would be worse than usual if he was aware of it, but he isn’t. He is still turning questions over in his mind for Satan, and he goes up the iron circular staircase and down the outside corridor full of wailing and panting and the squealing of bed-springs and the shattering of glass.

The door to the apartment just before his is standing open. The place is utterly empty but for two overstuffed chairs sitting side by side in the center of the floor, slightly angled toward each other. Mr. and Mrs. Hopper. Howard and Peggy. From Yonkers. Hatcher finds his legs growing heavy, dragging to a halt, as they always do when he passes this door. He stops. He nods. Howard and Peggy look at him. Today they are paunchy and creviced and stooped, as they were in their retirement years in Boca Raton.

“Good evening,” Hatcher says.

“I’m with my wife,” Howard says.

“He is,” she says.

“Forever,” he says.

“And I’m with you,” she says.

Howard makes a little choking sound deep in his throat. Tears begin to stream down Peggy’s face, though she makes no effort to wipe them away.

“Excuse him,” she says to Hatcher. “He is always very rude. Good evening.”

“You didn’t say it either,” Howard says.

“You didn’t say it first.”

“How was I first? Why wasn’t it you who didn’t say it first?”

Hatcher is happy to find his feet unsticking from where they are, his legs lightening. “Good-bye,” he says, but the Hoppers are unaware of him, debating on about each other’s culpability.

He moves to the next door, his own, and he goes in.

Anne sits on a cane back chair beside the heavy oak kitchen table. She has reverted to wearing Tudor dress, a gown of forest green velvet with hugely puffed oversleeves of gold brocade and a wide, deep neck-line showing her dusky skin, but her naked upper chest rises to her throat and then ceases: her head sits on the kitchen table looking at her own body.

“Anne,” Hatcher whispers. “Not again.”

She raises her hands and frames her head but does not lift it. She simply swivels her head on the tabletop to look at him. Her enormous black eyes flutter and focus on him and his knees go weak enough to make him nearly collapse there from his desire, and behind his own eyes, he ponders their first moments:
She came to me wearing this voluminous green velvet dress, barely fitting into the tiny studio at Broadcast Central to tape the Why-You’re-Here, and she turned those black eyes on me and her eyes were some unidentified deep-space phenomenon, they had a gravitational pull certainly, but I didn’t fall into them, they simply stood me up and roused every rousable part, and they gave off light somehow—a dark light that would not lose itself in the crimson light of Hell—and they gave off heat—but a heat quite palpably different from the ghastly ongoing ambient heat of this place—all of which instantly created in me a thing, a feeling, whose name I cannot remember—and I know this forgetfulness is because I’m in Hell—and she sits and we are ready and she begins to speak about her husband and the church and slander, and the voice of the Queen of England is firm and hard-edged but her eyes are deep and soft and she keeps them on mine and will not take them from me, so I slide closer to the camera but I do not stop her, I do not ask her to look into the lens—I want her to keep looking only at me—and now she speaks of the children she carried in her body and how all but one died there and the one was unacceptably a girl and when she speaks of the children, the voice softens, softens and breaks, and I am in Hell—this is a thing I’ve learned is foremost in all our minds to the exclusion of everything else—the
I
, the
I
, the
I
am, the
I
am in Hell—but at that moment in our first meeting it strikes me hard: she also is in Hell, this Anne Boleyn of the darkly celestial eyes that will not move from mine, she is in Hell and I ache for that, I want to take her up and carry her somewhere else

And as these words run deeply in Hatcher, Anne’s head sits on the tabletop and looks across the room at the anchorman of the
Evening News from Hell
and she considers another man:
I was but twelve years old when I saw Henry youthful and lank, as I saw him today, and he was the author of all the lies that destroyed me, I know that now, and I am sorry to have been found thus, separated from my body again, by this other man who has entered my life and who powerfully enters into every life in every dwelling place in this nether realm—though it is my understanding that all the others do not experience him directly, as I do—I have learned many new things and ways over the seeming eternity I have already been here—I have learned that a man like this has more power than an earthly king—how Henry would have ruled all the world if he could have but strode into every dwelling each day—and I went to this new man at his bidding, and though I have also learned to wear my cheap, loin-crushing jeans and my shapeless T-shirts with the itchy labels at the back of the neck, on that day it was given me to wear the sort of dress to which I was accustomed in my earthly life and this was a comfort as I came before Lord Hatcher McCord’s devices, and even as I told my story, as I have done so many times in my own mind this past eternity, I watched him, Lord McCord, his eyes were the gray-blue of an autumn London sky and they clouded and ached for me—I could see that clearly—they ached for me, for me, for me here in this place, for me, for this solitary, beheaded me