Hell

by Robert Olen Butler

  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

  And with this, Anne finds she can pick up her head, which she does, and she sets it upon her neck. Hatcher is happy for this. He knows how things work. Looking into Anne’s eyes he had a feeling that one might consider tender or pleasurable, but there is always a dreadful mitigation. He was filled with desire for her, but that desire, after all—he is acutely aware—was while her severed head was sitting on a tabletop. Now she is restored. She closes her eyes and lifts her chin and swivels her head, first to the right and then slowly swinging back to the left. This is a graceful movement, and he is glad to be in this kitchen, and he is glad she sits before him, but now that she is whole, the rush of his desire for her subsides. He feels it sliding away, and he stifles a curse at Satan so that he might avoid worse, though surely Satan also recognizes the thing being stifled, and surely Satan doesn’t have a policy of withholding suffering just because you can suppress your inner criticism of him. He can’t give a rat’s ass about that, surely.

  Hatcher crosses to the table, and he draws the other chair near to Anne, and he sits beside her. She is still swiveling her head back and forth. There is a scurrying behind him, the roaches gathering to listen to the conversation. This is a curious thing. The place is full of roaches, but Anne is oblivious to them, given the century of her upbringing. And as a boy, and even later as a man, he himself never had a serious aversion to the other creatures living around him, no matter how traditionally despised. He once appalled Naomi in their apartment at the Dakota by gently gathering up a large, sluggish, confused, dumb-shit roach from the bathtub with a paper towel and carrying it to the window and setting it free.

  He looks over his shoulder now. The countertop beside the sink is full of roaches, a thousand roaches, all of them sitting up on their back legs like begging pups, their heads cocked. Hatcher puts on his best Evening News from Hell voice. “Good evening,” he says to the roaches. “Tonight, a kitchen table conversation and then one more futile attempt at satisfying sex.”

  And in a chorus of tiny, brittle voices, the roaches cry, “Poopy butt.”

  Then they laugh.

  Hatcher turns to Anne. She is still swiveling her restored head, humming a bit of a pavane from her youth, hearing lutes and tambourines. He touches her hand just as, in Anne’s mind, the courtyard of the Low Countries palace of Princess Margaret, filled with dancing figures and music, dissolves in screaming as a baited bear breaks its chains and charges in, ripping flesh and spattering blood with the wide swiping of its claws. Anne screams.

  Hatcher clutches at Anne’s thrashing hand. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s only
me. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “The bear,” Anne says.

  “It’s all right,” Hatcher says.

  “No it’s not,” the roaches cry.

  Anne looks in their direction. “They’re right,” she says, though calmly now.

  “We’re right,” they cry.

  “It’s all the same here,” she says, “whether the horror is in my mind or on the countertop.”

  “We’re not horrible,” the roaches cry.

  Hatcher turns on them. “No you’re not. You’re pathetic. So shut the fuck up.”

  Each cockroach eye has two thousand lenses, and now, as one, four million lenses widen in shocked hurt feelings on the countertop, and all the roaches begin to weep, boohooing loudly. And yes, at this, Hatcher is filled with an acute regret. The roaches slump down from their puppy-begging pose and, weeping ostentatiously still, they all pour off the countertop and into the dark joins of the sink and cabinets and the cracks in the wall, and in a few moments they are gone.

  The kitchen rings with the sudden silence. Hatcher is slump-shouldered with guilt, and the gravity pull grows even heavier as disgust with himself sets in for feeling guilty about hurting the feelings of a chitinous chitter of roaches. Satan’s own roaches, yet. And then he realizes the silence is much larger than the kitchen. Outside, there is silence now as well. It’s happening.

  Hatcher jumps up and crosses to the door and through to the outside corridor. All down the way, denizens are emerging from their apartments in the dimness of the long twilight. Like them, Hatcher leans out over the iron railing and turns to the street end of the alley, where the passing crowd has also stopped and is turning to look. The sun is not visible to Hatcher from where he stands. But he does see the sky beyond the distant mountains, unchanged still in its twilight pallor. And now the railing, the corridor, the building, the alley, the whole city begins to tremble, and all the denizens cover their ears with their hands, though it never does any good: a sharp blade-stroke of sound punches into their heads—the monumental solar boom of sundown—and everything goes black.

  The absolute darkness pushes heavily on Hatcher’s eyes for a long while. Everyone waits. Scattered in the distance are the cries of newcomers, unaware of what’s next. Then the night sigh of Satan blows through the city—a deep exhaling, as if it were his very breath—and all around, lights come on. In the side streets and alleys, the light is dim, scattered, open flames stinking of kerosene or burning rotted wood, bare bulbs putting out piss-puddles of illumination—when the elder George Bush arrived in the midst of a long night and Hatcher found him in an alley and interviewed him, he would only mutter on and on about the thousand points of light. And in the thoroughfares, stretches of mugger darkness are broken by rotten-orange oases of sodium vapor lamps that fill all the twenty-first-century dead with the sadness of interstate rest stops.

  Hatcher steps back into his apartment. Anne sits where he left her, by the table, dressed in green velvet, her head attached. She turns her eyes to him, darker than the moment after sundown in Hell.

  “Let’s begin this again,” she says.

  “All right,” Hatcher says.

  He backs out the door, closes it. He opens the door and steps in. “Darling, I’m home,” he says.

  Anne Boleyn rises from the kitchen chair. “Darling,” she says, and her voice is sad as sad can be.

  Later, much later, they still are sitting at the kitchen table and cannot summon an impulse to move. Night is here. “I can’t find Catherine Parr,” Anne says. “Is she in Heaven, do you conjecture?”

  “It’s crowded here,” Hatcher says.

  “The sanctimonious bitch,” Anne says.

  “Just because you can’t find her . . .”

  “She was a papal puppy.”

  “That doesn’t mean she’s not here.”

  Anne looks Hatcher in the eyes. “So were they right? Is that it?”

  “Who?”

  “The Papists. I overthrew the power of the Pope. They called it the Reformation after I was killed by the king. I started that. Henry and I.”

  “There were others.”

  “Not that he did it for God.”

  “Martin Luther.”

  “I did it for God,” she says.

  “And others.”

  “Is Luther here?”

  “So I understand.”

  “You see?”

  Hatcher leans to her, pats her hand on the tabletop. “But Hell is also full of popes.”

  “Borgia and his like,” Anne says.

  “You’d be surprised.”

  Anne sighs loudly. “I should’ve just prayed the rosary and kept my mouth shut.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Hatcher says.

  She turns her face to him.

  He says, “If you really believe God gives a damnation over the dogma, then, for instance, how could John XXIII and John Paul II both be in Heaven?”

  “I don’t know those,” Anne says.

  “They can’t, is the answer. I’ve seen one of them around town.”

  “It’s crowded here,” she says.

  “Yes it is. Maybe they’re both in Hell.”

  Anne sighs again.

  “I need to interview a pope,” Hatcher says.

  “Interview me.” Anne flutters her dark dark eyes at him.

  “I’ve interviewed you already,” he says.

  “‘Interview’ in the Tudor sense,” she says, reaching out and plucking at his left earlobe.

  “Ah,” he says. “A Tudor sense to ‘interview.’ This is linguistic news to me.”

  “I’d like to die,” she says.

  “You’re dead,” he says, running his fingertip down the bridge of her nose.

  “In the Elizabethan sense,” Anne says.

  “You died before there was an Elizabethan sense.”

  Anne laughs. “Many times.”

  The two of them have begun this, and they have begun it often before, and so they are both waiting to see how it will go wrong. For Hatcher, it begins to go wrong now. He has now inadvertently prompted her to think of her previous orgasms, which prompts her to think of Henry, and Hatcher watches her eyes go a little blank before him, and he knows the king just strode into her mind—which is to say, strode into this room—and it will be difficult to get him to stride out again.

  But Hatcher tries to banter on. “I would, dear queen, that you could die now in Hell.”

  “It once was easy for me, the dying,” she says.

  “But not now.”

  “Not now.”

  “Because you’re thinking of the past,” he says.

  This is where it goes wrong for Anne. When a man takes your virginity, you might throw off his memory for your present paramour. But if a man takes your head, you need to be left the fuck alone if you want to obsess about him.

  “Because thy member,” she says, her voice gone queenly hard, “sleeps when I am awake and wakes when I am asleep.”

  “Because Satan does not sleep, and he has power over all the members of this club.”

  “Ah. Satan is the reason. Are you sure it’s not my severed head that repulses you?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “It’s Satan, you say.”

  “Satan.”

  “Not my head.”

  “Not if you keep it on.”

  “I never take my head off when we try to play at the beast with two backs.”

  Another Elizabethanism. Hatcher’s jealousy ratchets up some more. “Have you been hanging around with Shakespeare again?”

  “He’s insufferable,” Anne says.

  “You sound more and more like him.”

  “He complains all the time.”

  “About his member?”

  “He weeps for quill and ink.”

  “Please.”

  “His hard drive keeps crashing and he loses his plays.”

  “We all have to keep up,” Hatcher says.

  “If only you could
,” she says.

  They fall silent. They are each deciding whether to try now. It’s less bad when they don’t talk first, though that brings its own problems, of course. The night will go on. Sleep in Hell is rare and brief and fitful. And they both know that once Anne finds herself in full Tudor garb, she tends to unlayer herself only very slowly. Not now.

  Anne puts her hand on Hatcher’s. “It’s Satan,” she says.

  “I adore your head,” he says.

  “In its place,” she says.

  Hatcher sits in the kitchen after Anne has gone into the other room. The TV is on now. It’s the stretch between news broadcasts, and the same made-back-on-earth episode of a commentary show called The O’Reilly Factor has been running over and over for a long while now, full of intense shared sneerings between the emotionally gaunt Bill O’Reilly and a gaunter guest named Ann Coulter. These were opinionators in Hatcher’s time, but he never watched them. He ignored most of the rightist ranters. These two are in Hell now but are banned from all but earthly reruns. He understands they arrived together, locked, according to Carl Crispin’s report, in a coital embrace in the first class suite of a crashed superjumbo Air-bus. This show will continue to run to the exclusion of all else but the news for a long while, Hatcher knows. It replaced the long run of an episode of Gilligan’s Island, wherein Gilligan bumps his head and subsequently sees everything upside down.

  But now this iteration of the O’Reilly episode ends, and Hatcher turns his face toward the sound of the TV. The news will return for a one-minute spot. Beelzebub puts on his most dulcet tone and says, “And now the News Digest from Hell, with Jessica Savitch.” Hatcher hurts for Jessica already.

  “Good evening,” she says. “Good evening.”

  In his mind, he can see her face constrict, as it does every time. She lets the other two good-evenings pass, and then—he understands just how her brain is compelled to work—the good-evenings end, and she expects news text to scroll up, and she reads by reflex.