Hell

by Robert Olen Butler

  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.

  Now, however, Hatcher is on his own. With, of course, his driver, who is dressed in a button-over leather coat and leggings and a visored chauffeur’s cap and is staring fixedly down the long hood of the Duesenberg to its chrome-plated bronze leaping Pegasus hood ornament. He is Porphyrius Calliopas, the greatest charioteer of the Eastern Roman Empire, whose vast bronze commemorative statue at the Hippodrome in Constantinople was the only one ever erected while its subject was still racing
and who personally incited the biggest riot in chariot-racing history, with ten thousand Green and Blue team hooligans killing each other.

  Hatcher is ready, and he waits, and then he says to the driver, “You know where we’re going, yes?”

  Porphyrius snaps his head around to Hatcher, tries to focus. “Yessir,” he says. He looks back out past Pegasus at the crowd blocking the way before him, squeezes his steering wheel tightly, and they move off, creeping through the clogged streets, the charioteer never having been able to figure out how to drive fast enough in Hell even to shift out of first gear.

  Eventually they arrive at Administration Central, another neoclassic, deco-pimped, marble-block building near the center of the city, not far, Hatcher realizes, from the Old Harrowing site of Peachtree Way and Lucky Street that he’d set off for earlier. Hatcher takes up his camera and steps out of the car and walks across an empty plaza—even the dense flow of denizens eddies away from this place—and into a reception hall and elevator corridor so similar to Broadcast Central that he expects to see Albert stuck up on the wall.

  Hoover’s office is on the top floor at the end of a hallway. Hatcher hesitates before the outer door. He knows who waits inside. But he also knows what he needs from her. He opens the door.

  Lulu rises from her desk instantly, rises above the desk, actually, levitating so that Hatcher has to crane his neck upward to see her. Lulu’s bat wings are folded across her body like a button-over coat. They, unlike Lily’s, have raven streaks in their bleached-blond fur. “Ooooh, Hatcher McCord,” she gurgles, and she opens her wings to flash her naked body. Hatcher concentrates on her beaming face, consciously not looking directly at her body, though he is very aware of it, nonetheless—a peripheral blur of massive breasts and other swellings and ripplings and gapings.

  “Business first,” she says and closes her wings. She descends to her desk sits, and her arms emerge from beneath her wings to put on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and, with a serious pout, pick up some blank papers before her and shuffle them around. “Impressive, oui?” she says. “How I am so very efficient an executive secretary?”

  Hatcher is listening to Lulu but thinking about the addresses. Over her shoulder he is aware of her computer. The monitor presently shows the Windows Blue Screen of Death, though this does not alarm him, as the BSoD is the universal screen saver in Hell.

  “Oui?” Lulu repeats, with an edge.

  “Ah. Mais oui, Mademoiselle Lulu,” Hatcher says. “Très efficient.”

  Lulu giggles. “Creep up on the door and go right on in,” she says. “Don’t knock.”

  Hatcher goes to the door—not quite creeping, but he is quiet—and faces a little dilemma. Lulu seems to have an agenda. To embarrass Hoover, no doubt. Hatcher doesn’t like to think what Hoover might be doing in there alone. Hatcher is hesitating, and he hears a faint hiss from Lulu. He looks at her. She puts a long, scarlet-tipped forefinger to her lips to insist on silence, and then she shoo-shoos the hand to get him to go in. At this point, he’d rather irritate Hoover than Lulu, so he pushes open the door.

  At first glance, Hoover does not seem to be in the office. But four strides away, at the far wall, is Hoover’s massive desk, and the high-backed executive chair is turned with its back to the door. From the other side come gurgly squishy sounds that Hatcher does not want to hear. So he clears his throat loudly. The chair jerks and there are scuffling sounds and one sharp bark of pain and then some whimpering and some more scuffling and some ruffling and chair squeaking, but the chair does not turn for a long moment, and then it swivels quickly and Hoover is dressed in a wide-lapeled dark gray suit and white shirt and powder-blue minion tie and he has set his face in its stern Mr. G-man pose, this whole effect undercut only by the neon red lipstick on his mouth, applied, by all appearances, with meticulous precision.

  “McCord,” Hoover says, ducking his chin a little to find his manliest tone.

  “Mr. Director,” Hatcher says.

  “You look good in a suit,” Hoover says.

  Hatcher goes a little icky at this, and whoever or whatever is under the desk apparently acts up, with a brief thumping and rustling, and Hoover squirms a bit in his chair as if he’s kicking something under there.

  Hatcher says, “I’m sure you’re busy,” and he makes sure to say this respectfully and without lowering his eyes to the desk. No sense getting into a pissing match with J. Edgar Hoover. He gestures slightly with the camera. “We should get started.”

  Hoover pushes back and rises. “Over there,” he says, nodding to a wall covered in wide, floor-to-ceiling drapes. He moves to one end and pulls a cord, and the drapes open to a twentieth-floor panorama of the center of the Great Metropolis.

  Hatcher moves to the window and looks out: the sun is still high, denizens throng the web of streets between rubble-strewn rooftops, dense black smoke plumes up from the complex of tanks and pipes and furnaces of the Central Power Station, a vast building-top motley of stone and wood and brick sprawls toward the sawtooth horizon bearing unseen multitudes, and a jumper falls past the window—suicides often come to Administration Central to replay their grief—and then another flashes past, a thin woman feet first with her skirt collapsed over her upper body like a cheap umbrella on a windy day, and Hatcher thumps his forehead hard against the glass trying to follow her, though he can’t see anything immediately below from the angle and she quickly plummets out of his view, and he lifts his face to the nearest street, overflowing with souls, and he strains to look more closely, trying to resolve the dense mosaic into hats and hair and even tiny pointillist suggestions of faces. If your mind is bugged and an Immortal with attitudes and preferences is eavesdropping, how do you go about experiencing the very moment you’re in the midst of living, the thereness of the landscape all about you and the grinding yearnings of the people nearby? If the He or She or It is listening in, you are bent, bullied, persuaded, muddled, and intimidated into certain feelings, and you don’t have a clue whether they’re actually yours or not. But now, looking out this window in the privacy of his mind, Hatcher feels a hot swelling inside him, as if every pore on his body is dilating, and at first he thinks it’s the start of an Immortal’s rage, it will be judgment and pain and more pain. But no. He watches the people in the street and he knows that each head down there is carrying within it its own throng of people and places and feelings from a mortal life once lived through a billion rich and complex moments. And the swelling in Hatcher opens into a bloom of sadness. Because he knows his mind is his own, he knows he is alone, and so he is free to feel this now. He spreads his arms wide and leans heavily against the window, and if one could weep in Hell out of pity, he would be weeping now, but his body won’t do that. Nevertheless, there is a strange stopping inside him, a settling, a fleeting moment’s feeling that in mortal life he would have called contentment. This is Hell as far as you can see. It is Hell for everyone. We are all utterly alone, but we are alone together.

  “How about here,” Hoover says.

  Hatcher looks at him. Hoover has struck a pose with the city as backdrop and his hands clasped behind him.

  “That’s fine, Mr. Director,” Hatcher says, and he wonders if Hoover really intends to do the interview with his lips painted. “Before we begin . . .” Hatcher hesitates. He doesn’t know how to ask this, and he regrets even trying—why the fuck should he care if the man chooses to appear like this?—but Hatcher is looking at Hoover’s lips and Hoover suddenly realizes what this is about.

  “Ah,” Hoover says. “Of course.” He pulls a handkerchief from an inside coat pocket and half turns and wipes the lipstick off his mouth. He puts the handkerchief away and strikes his pose again.

  Hatcher lifts the camera and Hoover is looking fiercely determined to do whatever manly G-man thing he needs to do, but from his lips, which barely move, comes a soft, clear, “Thanks.”

  Hatcher, perhaps still under the influence of that moment of contentment, says, “You look good.”

&n
bsp; Hoover pushes his lower lip up ever so slightly—into a little pout of thanks—and then he hardens again and nods, “Ready.”

  Hatcher turns his camera on and says, “There’s just one question and you can talk for as long as you wish. Why do you think you’re here?”

  And J. Edgar Hoover says, “I was needed. Can you imagine how many Communists there are down here? Do you want Hell being run by Communists? They’d destroy us. Satan was an angel. He had a falling out with his father, but who hasn’t? Some fathers just up and go crazy. Others have it out for you. Satan was set up, if you want to know the truth of it. Somebody had to deal with the vast hordes of damned humanity. The proof is out that window. Look at the citizens he has to deal with. Look at the elements within that citizenry. Now look at the organization Satan has built. He knows everything about everybody. All the time. Every second. You think there’s a question about why I belong here? What would I do in a place where everyone is so high and mighty and perfect? You think I’m not needed here? You don’t think it’s lonely for men like Satan and me? We understand each other. I have to suffer like the rest of you. You don’t think I deserve it? You don’t think a real man can’t like something a little frilly? You don’t think I look stunning in a feather boa and a tasteful basic-black dress?”

  Hoover stops. He hears where he’s gone with this. Hatcher lifts his face from the camera and Hoover looks at him and then at the camera and then back to Hatcher. “Nothing we can do,” Hoover says.

  “I have no control once it goes in,” Hatcher says.

  Hoover nods. “I guess I’m done.” He turns and moves off to his desk.

  Hatcher looks out the window once more. The streets are full of thousands of years of souls endlessly pressing on to destinations they do not know, from promptings they do not understand. Hatcher has a brief, sweet, newsman’s fantasy: he scores the greatest scoop in history—the discovery of a back door out of Hell—and he breaks the story on the Evening News from Hell and they all go, every last soul, they all escape from Hell. And he wins an Emmy. And then a Pulitzer Prize.