Hell (22 page)

The physical torments of Hell do not allow for the convenient side-door exit of unconsciousness. And so Hatcher McCord, anchorman for the
Evening News from Hell
, newly invested but free-thinkingly subversive minion of Satan, in full consciousness begins to suffer in ways that go rather beyond the poor powers of language to describe, as one foot is devoured and then the other, one leg done in four bites and then the other, the torso done in a dozen large chunks, the throat taken in one bite, and Hatcher McCord’s head—including his universally recognizable face—is swallowed whole. And then, last but not least, the famous anchorman’s penis remains utterly alone in the center of the bed, spouting on manfully, bravely. After making rather thorough use of this final part for a time, Lulu finally looks at it thoughtfully and then swallows it one gulp. All of Hatcher’s parts have now vanished down the wide-gaping throat and into the ever-expanding stomach of the redoubtable Lulu, succubus spawn of Grand Mater Lilith, as the Mater herself flutters nearby watching, having already collected more than enough of his essence for the Hatcher McCord snow globe.

Lulu belches.

“Cover your mouth, dear, when you do that,” Lilith says.

Lulu farts.

Lilith rolls her eyes and shakes her head, and with her cupped palm full of Hatcher, she floats off to her arts and crafts corner at the other end of the trailer.

Lulu—her belly vastly distended—lies back on the bed. She pulls a pack of Lucky Strikes from under a pillow and lights a cigarette. She blows a smoke ring and reflects:
I adore having a man inside me. Even if they don’t appreciate it and just want to shoot their little load and then roll off you and turn their back and act like you’re not even there. And you’re so like them, Mama. Deep down, you prefer to watch. The Internet is all you really need. And when you do them, it’s just to add to your collection. Oh I did this one. And I did that one. For me, this is the real moment. I cannot hold you close enough, my darling. Come inside me, my darling. We are one, my darling,

Lulu belches again. This time, with no one to see, she covers her mouth.

Meanwhile, jumbled inside the one large room that is the double-wide of Lulu’s inner body, Hatcher also reflects:
In mortal life as well, how often sex went terribly wrong. No. Not always “terribly wrong,” sometimes quite subtly wrong and sometimes wrong and right both but mixed so thoroughly that you couldn’t tell the difference. But not really “often” wrong either. In fact it
always
went wrong, somehow, on some level, even if it was the itch on the heel of your right foot, or what’s that distant siren out the window up Riverside Drive or down F Street, or is a two-parter on personal tax deductions during February sweeps a sure thing or a bad risk, all the while you’re having sex with a woman who you’re never going to see again and you should try to remember or you expect to see for the rest of your life—well, who knows, maybe not that long but certainly indefinitely since you’re married to her—and you should try to stay connected to her. And sometimes it was:

Was it good for you?

Yes, was it good for you too?

Yes.

Was it as good for you as it was for me?

How do I know?

Was it the best you ever had?

It was good.

Oh shit.

And sometimes it was:

Are you asleep?

Trying.

Now?

Yes.

Can’t we talk?

I’m exhausted.

I want to get pregnant.

Oh shit.

Or instead of “I want to get pregnant” it’s “I want it to be like it was” or “I want to get away for a week, alone” or “I want to be famous too”—no, that’s too honest—that one wasn’t even a question, it was “You never ask me for my opinion” or “What are you really doing for the world” or “I was watching Rather tonight.” Or Frank Reynolds. Or, once, Connie Chung. Connie Chung. Oh shit.

And now Lulu shifts on the bed and Hatcher’s parts jumble around and his roughly detached head oozes from between chunks of his thighs and his face pops up tightly against Lulu’s soft inner flesh. His valiant attempt to remain rational falters:
She is on my arm, my darling Lulu, we enter the conference room and I lay my cheek against her naked shoulder, and the men in the room all rise at our entering and they are pure white from head to toe—faces and hands and suits and ties and hair—as white as the bones of some man that my darling has picked clean in the desert, and I say, “Gentlemen, we’ve had many fine discussions, the six of us, and Mamie has always been a very gracious hostess, and now I’d like you to meet my darling Lulu—Lulu, this is President Dwight Eisenhower, he’s raising both arms to you in electoral triumph, and the man with glasses nodding at you is Harry Truman” and at this Truman lifts both his hands and spreads them as if to measure quite a long penis indeed, and he says, “The fuck stops here” and the Presidents are gone and Lulu and I are crossing the square in Pittsfield, heading for the Rainbow Restaurant for cheeseburgers and cherry Cokes and we pass beneath the awning of the storefront Hotel Parkway and Lulu says, “Let’s go in there and fuck” and I say “You bet” but just now my father steps out of the Rainbow and his face is smeared with ketchup and he’s popping a final French fry into his mouth and Lulu does a double take and she says “Even better” and she is upon him instantly and his clothes are flying and I really really want to look away before I see my father’s cock, especially in the grip of my darling Lulu, and someone taps me on the shoulder and I turn and it’s Mamie Eisenhower—the whiteness of her face and hair and pearl necklace and modest fitted woman’s suit is dazzling there in the sunlight in Pittsfield—and she lifts her hands and offers me a cup of tea even as my father’s voice fills the square shouting “Fuck me, Lulu, yes!” and Lulu cries “At last a real man!” and I drop Mamie’s teacup and I run, I run across the square and past the courthouse and on and on till I slam into our front door and I go up the steps three at a time and I find my mother—her late-October-afternoon gray eyes turning on me and brightening—and I sit beside her on the bed where she hugs a terry cloth robe tight around her and I take her hand and I begin to pat it and I pat it and I pat it and she says to me, quite low but quite clearly, “It’s all right, my darling. You have everything to give to the world. And everything about you is perfect. Do you hear me? You don’t need to worry. You’re perfect.”

All the parts of Hatcher’s body are beginning to stir now. Lulu puts her hand on the great mound of her distended belly. She smiles, then turns her face, leans off the side of the bed, and throws up for a while. Just as certain physical sufferings in Hell exceed the power of language to describe, so too does succubus vomit, which is just as well. Though Jackson Pollock, in a circumstance similar to Hatcher’s, having occasion a little further along in this process to observe the effusion of Lulu’s sister Lily, remarked, at its color and form on the floor, “Holy shit. I am profoundly humbled.”

This has always been a poignant, though somewhat delusional, time for Lulu. After her ersatz morning sickness passes, she lies back and puts a hand once more on her belly as, within, a reconstitution begins, in this case Hatcher’s. She begins to hum “Sympathy for the Devil”, though softly, even sweetly, not the Rolling Stones version at all, and Hatcher can hear her from inside, as once did, in this same circumstance, the briefly famous, newly arrived British reality-TV music critic, Simon Cowell, who cried out, desperate to curry Lulu’s favor, “Brilliant, you’ve made it your own.” And within Lulu:
My little baby, how boisterous you are, I know you will be a girl this time, I can feel it. A mother knows. I can feel your sweet downy wings trying to unfurl, but that will have to wait just a little longer, my darling, there will be time for that. I will teach you to fly in good time. We will rise together into the hot, sulfurous sky, and we will soar, you close at my side, and we will fly to the great city, and as we approach, I will show you the men below, scattering at the passing of our shadows—how adorable your little shadow is—and we will find a small and lively one for you already here in Hell—a Genghis Khan or a Yasser Arafat or a Sammy Davis Jr.—and you will begin. And you will learn, my daughter. Through them. You will understand who you are. It’s what men are for. And so I will also find you a small and thoughtful one—a Voltaire or a Mahatma Gandhi or a Jean Paul Sartre—they are not as lively but they will give you depth—wait until you swallow Jean Paul’s sweet brain, my darling, he knows a thing or two about your world—and you will move on from him, of course, you will grow and grow and you will have full-size kings and billionaires and serial killers—but you will always have me to guide you, you won’t have some desperate old bitch of a mother who didn’t teach you a thing worth knowing and then grasps at everything that’s yours. Hell is other succubi, my darling.

And inside Lulu, as Hatcher begins quickly now to reassemble, he also considers parenthood:
Summer, my little child of dumb-shit flower children wannabes—that was your mother and me—we went a little mad and you suffered for that, and then we went abruptly sane and you suffered for that. And Angie, my little child of a face on TV, my TV face was so much less loving than Mr. Rogers’s, so much less charming than Kermit the Frog’s. How could I compete with them when I had to bring you the four-car pile-up on I-70 or the fog at Lambert Airport or the latest from the St. Louis County Council meeting? I wonder if I would’ve been better for you both if you’d been boys. But no. My distraction, my obliviousness would have hurt you even more deeply. As girls you had your mother, who was more important for you, and I was glad for that, I excused myself for that. I did what I did to become what I became and I am so fucking sorry.

And Hatcher is whole in body again, though naked and curled tightly into a fetal position inside a succubus in a double-wide in Hell. But not inside a succubus for long. Lulu stops humming the Rolling Stones and spreads her legs and props herself up on her elbows and lifts her hips and she begins to daaa-daaa-daaa-da-dummmm the brass fanfare for dawn in Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” At this very moment, somewhere in the Great Metropolis, Strauss and Friedrich Nietzsche and Stanley Kubrick are locked in a tiny room together listening to the 190 decibel version of the same passage for the ten thousandth straight time. At the other end of the room, Lilith rolls her eyes at Lulu’s flair for the dramatic. She jiggles the new snow globe in her hand. Hatcher’s own special snow swirls around a small, hand-painted plastic bust of the anchorman. And Hatcher himself suddenly feels a squeezing upon him, and his curled body begins to move.

Lulu stops da-dumming, because even succubi suffer in Hell and this is one of those times, with every cell in Lulu’s body feeling as if it is in a vise and being squeezed to pulp, and she screams wordlessly for a while until she manages, “She’s crowning!”

“It’s just that man who was here,” Lilith says.

“Fuck you,” Lulu cries.

“Pant pant blow,” Lilith says.

“Fuck you,” Lulu reiterates, and to distract herself from the impression that her body is being split up the middle by a white-hot gutting knife, she briefly does her best to imitate the horn section of the Berlin Philharmonic, returning to Strauss to introduce what she expects to be her daughter into the world.

Hatcher’s whole head emerges between Lulu’s legs, and Lulu pauses her pushing and stops the music. Hatcher looks at the ceiling and tries to squinch the muck from his eyes.

Lulu pushes again, and as Hatcher’s shoulders pry her open and as the gutting knife renews its work with a special focus on her treasured private parts, she screams “I’ll make you pay for this forever, you little bitch!”

And Hatcher moves faster and faster, torso and hips and legs all folded together, and with a splashing all about him and a loud sucking-shut behind him, he slides onto the bed between Lulu’s legs.

Lulu falls back flat. Both mother and faux child pant for a while, the latter slowly trying to move his stiffened limbs and the former renewing her pledge to make this daughter of hers forever regret having put her mother through this torture.

Finally, though, Lulu is ready to face the little bitch and she struggles to sit up, just as Hatcher has struggled to sit up between her legs, and they come face to face.

Lulu says, “Oh fuck. Not again,” and she fists up her right hand and punches Hatcher square on the nose. He flies across the room, landing about halfway along, and slicked up by Lulu’s bodily fluids, he skims the rest of the way to Lilith, who calmly lifts one fat and furry foot—pedicured meticulously, however, in French tips—to bring Hatcher to a halt.