Hell

by Robert Olen Butler

  They let go of each other, and they lie down, side by side.

  And soon Anne is asleep. To thrash and dream badly, of course.

  Then, rare as well, Hatcher falls asleep.

  And after a time, he rises to wakefulness from another rare thing. Indeed, a first for him in Hell. He is having an unmitigatedly good sexual feeling. He opens his eyes, and he is on his back and staring at the glowing filament of the bare lightbulb hanging above him. Instantly, he knows three things: he is awake, Anne is not beside him, and he is presently the recipient of an ardent and expert blow job. He closes his eyes again. He thinks briefly of his boyhood in Pittsfield: a shower nozzle, stove-warmed Vaseline on an oven mitt, an actual girl from a double-wide out along the Illinois River. But he is with a queen now. So he opens his eyes and lifts his head slightly and looks down his naked torso to Anne, her mouth working expertly, her beautiful eyes looking back up along his torso into his own. Then her eyes close and release his gaze, which drifts up and slightly to the left, and there, across the room, sitting in a chair, filing its fingernails, is Anne’s headless naked body.

  Hatcher does exactly the wrong thing. He screams and jumps up. Anne’s head—having limited motor skills and, in its detached state, being more prone than usual to being startled—clamps its mouth tightly shut. Hatcher leaps about the room now, knocking into the bed stand, the window, the wall, Anne’s head whipping up and down and back and forth with each movement. This being Hell, there is nothing to prevent Anne’s teeth from actually biting clean through Hatcher’s distressed member, for him subsequently to be reassembled. It occurs to him that this would actually be preferable, in that it would put a clear end to the present ordeal. In this instance, however, Anne’s head bites only hard enough to hold on, and so Hatcher—though movement is not in his ongoing best interest—compulsively continues to leap and spin and pirouette and, within the confines of this very small room, even execute two unmistakable grand jetés, one from the window to the opposite wall and then another back again.

  At last he lands in front of Anne’s body, and with great force of will he holds himself steady and grasps her head between his two hands and pleads for her to release him and reattach. Anne’s hands do rise now, and they grasp her head, and she releases Hatcher, who crumples to the floor. Anne puts her head onto her body, stretches her neck, looks down at Hatcher, and says, her tone criticizing him and not her, “Nothing I ever do in bed is right.”

  Meanwhile, in the alleyway, the voice that Hatcher and Anne heard is still silent. It both cried and sang, though not like Hatcher’s ex-wife and not King Henry’s “Pastime with Good Company.” Ernest Hemingway stands even now out there in the dark. He is looking for a good bar—he has been looking for a good bar for pretty much as long as he’s been in Hell—and he can’t find one and, as it often does, his failure has made him weep for a time. A little girlishly, it’s true. This is Hell. And while he wept, he sang in a mumbly, untuned voice, easy to misunderstand from a distance, it’s true. But the song, in fact, was from the Spanish Civil War, “A las Barricadas,” the hymn of the Anarcho-Syndicalists. And now Ernest Hemingway stands in an alleyway in Hell and his head is full of words.

  It was late and everyone had come into the café. The place was dim and full of bullfighters and Gulf fishermen and boxers and Upper Peninsula Indians and some boys from the Lincoln Battalion who died at Jarama. No one could see anyone’s face, the bar was so dark. The old man sat at a table by the window. The only light in the place came from a lamp on the street and it shone on the old man. He was dressed in a white poplin empire dress.

  The two waiters inside the café watched him. “He committed suicide,” the older one said.

  “Why?”

  “Look at him.”

  “That’s why?”

  “His mother put him in that.”

  “How do you know his mother did it?”

  “Who else? If he wished it for himself, he wouldn’t be wearing it here.”

  The younger waiter nodded.

  The old man wanted another drink. He wanted a first drink. But there was nothing to drink here. There were only all the men he ever knew or ever thought about. Then his wives came into the café. He knew they would come. And the women he slept with and didn’t marry but wanted to. And the women he didn’t sleep with but wanted to. And the women he slept with but didn’t want to. Everyone was here. Everything he’d ever done was here, inside his skull. What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was an everything that he knew too well. It was all in darkness but it was all here, and it needed that, the dark, and the heat.

  The light in the street went out and he was in darkness now too. He had always been in darkness. He knew it was all todo y pues todo y todo y pues todo. Our todo who art in todo, todo be thy name, thy kingdom todo thy will be todo in todo as it is in todo.

  And in the dark of an alley in Hell, Ernest Hemingway whispers aloud, “Forgive us our todo as we forgive the todo who todos against us.” With this, Ernest looks into the darkness above him, thinking about who might be hearing his words—he has always wanted at least to be heard—and his hand goes reflexively up and palms the back of his head, which he once blew off with his favorite Boss 12-gauge shotgun. Then the hand falls and he lowers his face. He begins to cry once more and he begins to sing once more, but he does both things very softly, so softly that no one around can hear.

  What appears to be the sun in what appears to be the sky in Hell usually teases its way up in the morning, repeatedly tantalizing and disappointing the denizens, showing just the merest upper edge of its corona, drawing a trickling blood-flow of light from the dark above the mountains, brightening the streets and the windows ever so slightly, just enough to be noticed, but then falling back, snuffing it all out, only to almost appear again and then vanish again. It behaves this way over and over before it finally provides an actual dawn—having suckered the denizens each time—and it does all this after what is always a long, long night. So when Anne reattaches her head and folds her arms across her naked chest and closes her eyes and when Hatcher is able to quit writhing in pain and rise and stagger into the other room to sit, naked still, at the kitchen table, their reasonable expectation is that they will sleep almost not at all but sink into bored stupefaction and that they will have plenty of warning that the night is beginning to struggle to an end.

  But not this time. They doze inopportunely. And the sun comes up abruptly. And their apartment booms with heavy hands on their door. Hatcher has time only to convulse awake and jump up to full dangly nakedness as the door slams open and in rush Robin and Maurice Gibb in powder-blue jumpsuits. They leap apart to frame the open door, striking mirror disco poses, their outer arms lifted up, their outer legs cocked, and they sing, in intensely vibrating falsettos, “Staying alii-i-ive, staying alive.” The powder-blue jumpsuits are a common uniform for the official minions in Hell. That the Gibb brothers have already attained this status tells Hatcher something he suspected on earth about the ascendance of disco in an era of rock and roll. The brothers Gibb fall silent and shakily hold their poses. It now registers on Hatcher that it is dawn and it is time to go to the interview with Satan. As the dead disco dandies totter in embarrassment—even Hell’s minions, of course, are still subject to torture—Hatcher will shortly regret not taking this opportunity to slip into the bedroom and grab some clothes. But before this thought has a chance to form, into the open doorway, also wearing a powder-blue jumpsuit, steps the former director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover.

  He takes two steps into the room, placing the Gibb brothers in the position of backup singers, strikes the same disco pose as theirs, and sings, “What you doin’ on your back, aah?” The room fills with drum machine thumping and brass-section riffing and the Gibbs’ background quavering, all in service to J. Edgar Hoover’s lead vocal, which is complete with echo chamber effects. Hoover ratchets up his falsetto with “You should be dancin’, yeah,” and the three do a perfectly synchronized arm
and leg switch and sing on.

  At some point in his tenure in Hell, Hatcher noticed how, though many millions—indeed, no doubt, billions—of the dead are teeming around the place from all the eras and places in the history of the planet, the ones who primarily come his way tend to be the people he is in some way familiar with. Though freshly rendered interpersonal torture does occur—Anne Boleyn’s with him, for instance—that tends to be rarer. The torture of the familiar is the norm. And so, given the musical sensibilities Hatcher treasured in his earthly life, it is hard to exaggerate the severity of his torture at standing naked in his tiny kitchen in Hell as former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sings a Bee Gees disco song backed by a full studio orchestra and Robin and Maurice. Hatcher wants to run and hide. He wants at least to go put some clothes on. But he is unable to move, even through the dance interlude, where the three do a line hustle together, pumping their arms furiously, and through the endless repeats of the you-should-be-dancing chorus, and even as Hoover and the Gibbs simulate a studio fade, singing in smaller and smaller voices until they are silent.

  Now Hatcher tries again to move but can only teeter.

  “Oh no you don’t,” J. Edgar says. “You’re coming with me.”

  Hoover steps to him, crushes Hatcher’s elbow in a fist, and guides him, naked, out the door, down the spiral staircase, and into the backseat of a waiting 1948 Cadillac Fleetwood limousine as black as the night that has just passed.

  Once inside the Cadillac, Hatcher understands the unique infernal possibilities of being shut up naked in a tight private space with J. Edgar Hoover, given the long-understood but dangerous-to-pursue story of the man, which even included rumors that the Mafia had photos of him flouncing in a feather boa and a little black dress at a private party. Indeed, Hoover instantly begins to sing in a tiny falsetto, “Nobody gets too much heaven no more,” and Hatcher tucks his private parts out of sight, tightly crosses his legs, and slides over against the door.

  Beyond the black privacy window separating the driving compartment there is a scuffling sound and chirpings of pain as the Gibb brothers crowd in. The unseen driver grinds the car into gear and Hatcher is thrown back from the acceleration down the alleyway and then thrown toward Hoover with a sharp turn into Grand Peachtree Parkway. He quickly recovers his ball-crushingly modest pose. Alarmingly, though, Hoover has stopped singing and is now panting heavily. Hatcher presses his face hard against the window and squeezes his legs painfully together. He has no chance to stop the thought to Satan: Come on, Old Man, I’m just trying to let you say what’s on your mind and you have to turn it into this. “Oh shit,” Hatcher says aloud, certain that his rashly critical thought will now prompt Satan to fully unleash the libido of the former director of the FBI.

  But instead, Hoover’s panting stops with a groan. He cries, “And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee” and Hatcher does not listen to the sounds that follow this but concentrates on the extraordinary rate of speed the driver is maintaining through the dense crowd in Grand Peachtree Parkway, the thumping of bodies against the car coming so fast as to blend into a low roar.

  Behind the wheel, Richard M. Nixon could be expected to draw some pleasure from the carnage he is wreaking—perceiving, as he does, all the denizens of Hell as his personal enemies—but in fact he is distracted by the acute discomfort of physical contact with the Gibb brothers, who are pressed against him, obsessively jutting their hips and hustle-stepping and shooting their arms up in disco poses that are gradually crushing all the bones in their hands against the roof of the car, their falsetto screams ringing in the driver’s compartment. And inside Dick Nixon: My old man’s cheeks and forehead would flush bright red and my saint of a mother knew what was coming and his fists rose and I backed out of the kitchen door and I put my hands over my ears because of the sound that would follow, and even the touch of my own hands startled me, nauseated me, made me drop them, and then there was only the running away from the sound. What a coward I was. I ran as fast as I could, but I knew I would be tough someday, I knew I would never back down. And this is perfectly clear. I am not an abuser. With Pat it wasn’t about being tough, it was about touching. When I hit her, it was about touching, and it was about touching whenever I sought out the backseat of White House limo SS100X, my favorite, the one I always insisted on. I was the President. It was the restored midnight-blue Lincoln Continental where Kennedy was shot. I would ride around right in that same backseat. The very spot. They touched him there. And they could touch me if they wanted to. I wasn’t going to run away.

  And up ahead, among the denizens in the crowd only a few moments away from suffering the blunt trauma of Dick Nixon, is Patricia Dankowski, once known professionally as Trixie Smith, a Chicago prostitute from Avondale, reared only a few blocks from Saint Hyacinth’s Basilica in a brick semidetached where she was touched for a few years by her father—he’s now, unbeknownst to her, in the basement of a brick semidetached in a very rough neighborhood of Hell where the rapists perpetually rape each other—and she is oblivious to the indiscriminate touching all around of the jostling throng of denizens. She squeezes an arm out of the press of bodies and runs a hand through her over-bleached hair, great clumps of it tearing loose in her fingers, but she does not notice, as she is thinking of the night of September 26, 1960, when she was touched for a brief time by the future President of the United States: Call me Jack, he says, and he smiles a lot of teeth at me and he’s a good looking man, even better looking than his photos, and we’re at the Ambassador East, which isn’t a first for me, though it’s not a place I’ve been in lately since they’ve come to know me by sight and I advise against it for any clients, so as to avoid a scene. Not that I’ve ever been in the Presidential Suite, where they’ve put him, and he’s got Peggy Lee playing on a phonograph when I come in, though he switches it off as soon as he motions to the bedroom door, which is too bad because I’d like to hear her go on singing “I Got It Bad, and That Ain’t Good” while I’m working Jack Kennedy, and he asks me “Do you have a TV, Trixie” and I say “Yes, I do, Jack” and he says “I’m going to debate that fellow Dick Nixon on TV in about an hour and a half” and I say “I didn’t just fall off the hay wagon, Jack” and he laughs and he says “Well then, what do you think I should do about Quemoy and Matsu” and I say “Nuke ‘em, Jack” and he laughs again and he’s naked real quick and so am I and I’d just as soon take a little bit longer because when John Fitzgerald Kennedy is inside me I get it in my head that I’m somebody after all but I’m only somebody for what’s got to be less than sixty seconds and then I’m nobody again, just like my old man always said afterwards, but when I’m dressed and passing through the sitting room I get up the nerve to ask Jack to play my favorite song and he waves off all his men already coming in from the other bedroom and he smiles and he goes to the phonograph and he puts the needle on the vinyl and he and I stand there together and Peggy sings to me about how a man is always going to end up making you sing the blues in the night. And now there is, very nearby, a roaring engine and then a wild flinging of bodies and Patricia Dankowski is hit and shattered by Satan’s chauffeur. She tumbles over the right front fender and along the side of the car, and for a very brief moment, as she hurtles past, she and Hatcher look each other in the eyes.

  Having seen the eyes of this woman flying past, Hatcher turns his face from the street. Hoover is moaning—not yet reconstituted from his eyeplucking—and so Hatcher closes his own eyes and waits, and waits. Eventually, the sucking and tucking and zipping sounds of a reconstitution begin and Hoover falls silent. Outside, the roar of body-thumps eventually ceases and there is only the sound of the engine for a while. And when Hatcher finally opens his eyes to look once again upon Hell, he is no longer in the Great Metropolis.

  The car is climbing a narrow, curving, empty road into the mountains that Hatcher heretofore has seen only on the horizon. He puts his face to the glass and tries to look back to the city. He sees the slick
gray lumpings and soarings and plungings of the mountains as the car twists with the road. And then Hatcher gasps as the city jumps into his eyes: a vast sudden everything: the far horizon and the extreme periphery of his vision, as if he has been plucked into the middle of the air and he dangles before the immense compressed jumble of a billion rooftops and tenement facades and webs of streets and all of it shimmering—not shimmering, quaking—not quaking, writhing—writhing with vast throngs of bodies, tiny from this distance, but Hatcher knows what these great stretches of huddling masses are: millennia of individual bodies and minds and hearts born into life and cast now into this place, shimmering, yes,I shimmering from his view in the mountains of Hell like a scrub fire on a vast plain. He hangs and sees and hangs and he tries to figure out where his body is so he can pull back, and then the city vanishes and it’s just cliff faces and the huddling of boulders until at last the car rushes into a great level plain hidden among the mountain peaks. And there are stands of trees and a vast grassy meadow, or what appear to Hatcher as these things, which he did not know existed in Hell.

  He feels a slight nudge on his arm and Hatcher looks to Hoover, who has averted his face. But the G-man is holding an upturned hand to him with a stack of three golden-brown squares. “You’ll need these,” Hoover says. “Honey cakes for the dog.”

  Hatcher takes them and they are densely heavy and sticky and their smell is so sweet that it makes Hatcher’s teeth ache. He holds them in his palm and puts his other hand over them just as the Cadillac brakes sharply and fishtails to a stop. Before him is a rustic-style hunting lodge—classically shaped in one story of stacked rough logs with a low-pitched gable roof—but even from where Hatcher sits, a hundred yards away, the lodge is so massive as to utterly fill his sight, the rough wood trunks of its walls as large as sequoias. Hatcher has an instant stab of sadness, realizing that the seeming utter absence of nonverminous animal life and growing things in Hell has always given him a sweet little dangerous pulse of pleasure, that whatever the reasons are for a very high percentage of humanity seeming to be here, there is some code of justice—however severe—at work, since the nonhuman living things of that previous life are spared from this place. What were the sins of these trees? he wonders now, with the bloom of a sharp pain behind his eyes.