Hell

by Robert Olen Butler

  Hatcher turns from the window and crosses Hoover’s office—the man sits behind his desk and waits, and whoever is under there waits—and Hatcher is out the door and instantly vast furry bat wings enfold him and press him into hot naked rippling womanflesh.

  But only for one dart of a tongue halfway down his esophagus and then an unfolding of wings and a quick float back to the desk and a putting on of the horn-rims and a fluffing up of papers. Hatcher stifles a faint gagging still going on down his throat, and he steels himself and moves to her desk.

  “Well,” he says. “You said to stop by the desk.”

  “Oui oui,” she says.

  “Are you French, Lulu?”

  “No. Lily and I did a three-way nooner with the prime minister of France. So we oui oui ouied all the way home.” She giggles her deep throat giggle and winks. “So. I want to take you home to meet Mama.”

  “Mama.”

  “I know what you’re thinking.”

  She couldn’t possibly, of course. Not just because of what Hatcher now understands. But also because his mind has basically shut down about what he’s getting into for the sake of these addresses. And yet he can’t think of a better way to proceed. But oh my. Mama.

  “She’s old as can be,” Lulu says. “But sexy as Hell.” And clearly Lulu believes Hell to be sexy.

  Hatcher has no choice but to push on. “Would you do me one little favor, Lulu?”

  Lulu flutters her bleached-blond eyebrows at him. “What would you like?”

  “I’ve got some interviewing to do. Denizens. It’d help if I can get a few addresses.” He nods to the computer behind her.

  “Wellll,” she says, cocking her head to the side, laying the tip of her forefinger into the center of her cheek, lifting her eyes to the ceiling, and then twirling the finger. “Since it’s you. But no screaming when I bite a little.”

  She is already whirling in her chair and her hands flash over the keyboard, calling up the directory. Hatcher is panting in panic, but one pain is like another in Hell, when it comes down to it. And so he gives her all the names he can think of that he might need to find the back door, and to understand why he is here, which may not be unrelated if another Harrowing is truly imminent. Virgil and Dante. And Beatrice, in case her back-alley noir apartment was temporary. Hatcher’s three wives. These names come quickly. And then he says his father’s name, who turns out to have no address at the moment but is out somewhere stuck perpetually in traffic, roadraging at other drivers. Hatcher has a little surge of relief that he won’t have to find the old man. And he says his mother’s name. They are all of them in Hell. And now he’s glad he thinks of this, for Sylvia: Adrienne Monnier. Then he hesitates. But yes. If it’s what Anne needs, to resolve things one way or another. He says Henry VIII, King of England.

  Hatcher steps into the elevator at the end of Hoover’s corridor. His head is buzzing with Lulu’s promise to come for him soon, to meet Mama. As the doors are about to close, there are hurried footsteps and then a trim man with an elongated face and broad-bridged nose slips in. At first his dark eyes sharply focus on Hatcher, but they quickly go blank. He wears a cream linen suit and a wing collar and spectator shoes. There is a smear of blood at the corner of his mouth. He turns and stands shoulder to shoulder with Hatcher as the doors close. A hunch shoves even Lulu to the back of Hatcher’s mind for a moment.

  “Mr. Tolson?” Hatcher says.

  The man turns his face to Hatcher. “Yes.”

  This is Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s longtime assistant at the FBI and his intimate companion for more than four decades.

  “I’m Hatcher McCord.”

  “I know.”

  Hatcher nods at the blood beside Tolson’s mouth.

  Tolson takes out a handkerchief and dabs there and looks at the spot of red sadly.

  Hatcher says, “It never quite works down here, does it.”

  Tolson looks sharply at Hatcher. But then he smiles a faint half smile, puffing once through his nose. “Never,” he says.

  The two men look back to the front of the elevator until the door opens, and they part without a word, Tolson heading deeper into the building on the ground floor and Hatcher going out the front.

  The Duesenberg sits at the curb. The sun is still high. Hatcher is in the center of the city. He crosses the plaza to the car and reaches into the backseat and lays the camera there and then moves to the front passenger door and leans in at the window. Porphyrius Calliopas is staring intently down the hood of the car at Pegasus leaping. My horses. How long has it been? My palms and my waist are wrapped tight with the reins, the crowd bellows, I fly behind my horses and two of them are loaned to me by Neptune himself I am sure, with their wings tucked secretly away they came to me as Parthians, my sweet palomino Pyrros and my cranky chestnut Euthynikos, they are my legs, they are my breath, they are my fame, I call to them and they fly, and though others are running near us and many voices cry out my name, the moments that I am lashed to them move slowly, I can count the beats of my heart, I can smell their dank earth smells, I can feel their heavy sweat against my face, one drop and another and another, and I am certain that when we die, we will die together, the three of us, trying to make the far sharp turn in the Hippodrome, on the inside lane with a clot of chariots around us, but I am wrong: Pyrros dies beneath my grieving body in a stall and Euthynikos bolts and runs alone and is found later, and I am cursed to die in a bed as an old man and then I am quickened again in this place and I cannot find them and that is the worst of the tortures, that for all this eternity already and forever more, they are nowhere to be found, there are no horses at all, no horses.

  “Driver,” Hatcher says.

  Porphyrius rears at this and his hands flail and he turns his face to Hatcher and he calms down. But Hatcher hardly sees these things. He is focused on what he must do and he sees the driver looking at him and it occurs to him to ask, “How do you find the streets, when you are driving someone?”

  Porphyrius reaches to the glove box and opens it and pulls out a folded map.

  “May I have it?” Hatcher asks.

  Porphyrius hesitates.

  “You’ll wait for me till I return,” Hatcher says.

  Hatcher can see the man thinking. Porphyrius looks at the map.

  “You know who I am?” Hatcher says, touching his powder-blue neck-tie for emphasis.

  Porphyrius nods. He reaches his hand across the seat and extends the map, his brow knit tight, his hand trembling slightly. Hatcher reaches into the car, takes hold of the map, pulls it free. And the hand of Porphyrius bursts into flames, roiling, heavy flames that rush instantly up his arm.

  Hatcher recoils, pulls his own hand and arm and the map safely out of the car. There is no possibility of giving the map back. The driver is vanishing utterly in the flames that race wildly up his arm and over his shoulders and head and down his torso and legs, and then as abruptly as it flared up, the fire vanishes, leaving only a pile of ashes and a chauffeur’s cap.

  Hatcher stares at them, stunned for a moment but happy to have the map in his hand. The ashes are beginning to stir a bit. Reconstitution is beginning. But Hatcher uses his newsman’s instincts: the source gave what he gave, which he shouldn’t have given, and he paid the price. But you’ve got what you need for the sake of the story. Hatcher walks off.

  Before he leaves the empty plaza of Administration Central, Hatcher pauses and looks more closely at the map. It is a map he knows. A thumb-smudged Standard Oil gas station map with a detailed drawing in blue, red, and white. The image once shaped a fantasy in his thirteen-year-old mind: beneath the Standard Oil sign the gas station guy in his Standard Oil ball cap and bow tie holds one end of an unfolded map, with the other end in the grasp of a Tuesday-Weld-cute blond behind the wheel of her convertible. They are both looking at the place on the map where she’s going to drive right now and wait for him till he gets off from work. Sometimes it’s in the woods along the river. Sometimes his bachelor pad over t
he paint store downtown. A few years later, Hatcher even spent a summer pumping gas at the Pittsfield Standard station, and at the back of his mind, he was always waiting for that Ford Fairlane convertible to roll in and the blond to honk her horn and ask him directions.

  Hatcher begins to unfold the map from the Duesenberg. It unfolds and unfolds. He opens his arms wide to hold it and backs up to give himself plenty of room on the empty concrete. He lays the map out and kneels before it. The Great Metropolis, a vast tapestry of Peachtrees. He lifts the map and turns it over, and on the other side is a tiny-print index of all the streets. He bends forward, bringing his face close to the print, as if he were praying toward Mecca. He can make the names out clearly. He finds the coordinates for Peachtree Way and Lucky Street, lifts and turns the map again, locates the place of the Old Harrowing and Admin Central and plots his course.

  His destination turns out to be quite close. The trick is to turn down Peachtree Street Street Avenue off Peachtree Way, and a few hundred yards along, Peachtree Street Street Avenue renames itself Peachtree Avenue Street Street and then makes a sharp left turn and instantly takes on the name Peachtree Way while the parallel stretch of the previous Peachtree Way goes for a couple of blocks under the name Robert. Meanwhile, back on the new Peachtree Way, the intersection of Lucky Street should be coming up soon.

  Hatcher walks between dingy brick urban warehouse facades with boarded windows and three-story pilasters mounted by terra cotta demon faces, and the crowd here has lessened only slightly. The street is still full of people pressing ardently onward. But they mostly have long beards and wear rough-cloth cloaks and animal skins. This is an old neighborhood, of course. Ahead is the place where it is understood that long ago the Harrowing occurred, when this was the site of merely a foul, sulfurous well and an edge-of-town campsite for some of the standoffish Old Ones. And now Hatcher approaches the very place: Peachtree Way and Lucky Street.

  On three of the corners, the intersecting streets’ grimy buildings end in gaping rubble-filled lots, one concertina-wired, the other two open basement pits. On the fourth corner is a low, curve-edged, metal-fronted deco building. Hatcher pushes through a revolving door beneath a large gilt sign: AUTOM AT.

  Inside, the two non-street walls are full of small, glass-doored food dispensers. In the center of the floor is a change booth barely as wide as the man within, who is beardless but massively mutton-chopped and dressed in frock coat, high collar, and wide-ribbon bow tie. Hatcher does not recognize Cornelius Vanderbilt. Above Vanderbilt’s barred window is an official sign, nickels, and propped on the floor against the front of the booth is a cardboard sign with fading handwritten letters promising MEAT TOMORROW. From its dinginess, it has obviously been sitting there for a long, long time. All around are tables filled with intently conversing groups of mostly men wearing sackcloth tunics and with the hair at their temples unrounded and the edges of their beards unmarred. A smell of stewed carrots and creamed spinach and sweat and goat hair fills the air. Surveying the room, Hatcher finally turns his gaze to the table in the corner at the window. One man sits there alone, his isolation perhaps due to the fact that he is the only customer dressed in suit and tie. The face is bowed as the man moves his fingertip in a spread of salt on the tabletop before him, the shaker sitting nearby. The top of his head, with its tight right-side part and faint cow-lick, is familiar.

  “Carl?” Hatcher says.

  Carl Crispin looks up. His gaunt face draws even tighter in a flat facsimile of a smile. “Hatcher.”

  Hatcher moves to the table and sits across from his reporter.

  Carl answers what he assumes will be Hatcher’s first question. “Once I finally found it, I didn’t want to lose it again.”

  Hatcher looks at the salt. Carl has lettered there: TAKE ME.

  When Hatcher looks back up, Carl shrugs and backhands the salt from the table in a single stroke.

  “A little ritual,” Carl says. “We all of us here are searching for the right one.”

  Hatcher doesn’t know what to say.

  Carl goes on. “Salt, see. Lot’s wife looked back on Sodom and this is what she became. So salt has to be powerful, right? I shouldn’t be saying this. I’m going to pay now.”

  And Carl is pulled up from the chair and he stands straight and his body lifts off the floor and a dozen holes open in the top of his head, two dozen, and his body rotates until he is precisely inverted and he begins to jerk up and down as if an invisible hand is shaking him. From the holes in his head a fine gray powder flows out. His brain, no doubt.

  Hatcher wonders what would have happened if he’d reached out his hand at Carl’s first rising and held his arm and told him that no one is listening. Would the punishment have stopped?

  As it is, though, Carl rotates back to an upright position and descends to the chair. His eyes are empty.

  Hatcher waits. And, in time, the gray powder stirs and gathers from the chair, the tabletop, the floor, and rushes back into the top of Carl’s head. His eyes come alive.

  Hatcher says, “So, Carl. You do believe another Harrowing is imminent.”

  Carl shrugs and looks out the window. “I’m an awful liar, Hatcher.”

  “But you can lie about lying then.”

  “I can lie about anything.”

  “On air, about this not being a possible story, for instance.”

  Carl looks back intently to Hatcher. “Or I can lie to myself. I can lie to you about lying because I’ve lied to myself about lying to you about lying but I could be lying to myself about lying to myself about lying to you about lying which means I lied in the first place.”

  “The first place being . . .”

  “About the new Harrowing. Is there a smudge on my cheek?”

  Hatcher looks. “Yes.”

  “Gray?”

  “Gray.” Hatcher draws out his handkerchief and lifts his hand. “Should I . . . ?”

  “No.” Carl is emphatic. “Don’t you know what that is?”

  Hatcher’s hand recoils. Of course.

  “I have to stop with the salt,” Carl says. “It’s cursed. Of course it’s cursed. Pretty soon I won’t have enough brain left to lie.”

  “You didn’t actually make up the new Harrowing,” Hatcher says.

  “No. I didn’t make it up.”

  “So was your source . . .”

  “He could have lied to me. Or he could have lied to himself. Or he could have . . .”

  “I get it,” Hatcher waves his hand to stop Carl and sits back in his chair. Of course it could all be a lie. He knows this. He always knows this. And yet Hatcher had some sort of intuition about the neo-Harrowing story. And still does. The news nose knows. The freshman J-Schoolers in a couple of adjoining rooms in Elder Hall at Northwestern would chant that out the windows at the passing coeds. Hatcher’s free mind is drifting now, he realizes. It’s also free to nurture hope and free to despair in the hope. But he’s always felt he has the nose. And it knows.

  Carl says, “Hell, the first Harrowing might be a lie. You’d be surprised who’s still here. Though the biggest guys are mostly out of sight. They’re in their own condo somewhere, jammed in bunks with the biggest guys from all the other religions.”

  Hatcher nods. “I’ve heard about that too. I figure it’s because all the rest of the denizens suffer more if they think somehow they got it wrong. If they suspect nobody got it right, there could be some sort of comfort in that.”

  “Is that what you suspect?” Carl says. “That everybody is here?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes. Suspect, perhaps. But nobody can say if they’re all here. And if all the big guys are indeed in Hell, it doesn’t mean some little guys didn’t get spared.”

  The two fall silent a moment. Hatcher looks around the Automat. “Do you know these people?”

  Carl says, “Today it’s the writers’ workshop. They’ve all got books. None of them made it into the Big One. Over there, the central table, it’s Tobit and Baruch and
Ben Sira. They got into the Catholic Bible, but needless to say that’s cold comfort for them, like being with a university press when they think they deserve Knopf. These three don’t read each other’s work anymore. They just kvetch. If you stand up and look to the far corner, you’ll see somebody these three should have with them, to be fair, since the Catholics published her too. But not only is she a woman, she has a constant companion.”

  Hatcher rises and looks across the room. He sees a table with a woman in a gray tunic and headscarf reading from a scroll to a blackhaired, bearded, severed head sitting in the center of the table. The eyes of the man are widening and narrowing and widening again in disgust at the woman’s reading and he interrupts, saying something that she listens to without reaction, and when he stops, she starts reading again.

  “That’s Judith,” Carl says. “And that’s the Babylonian general Holofernes, who she seduced and beheaded. I don’t think he keeps his comments constructive.”

  While he’s standing, Hatcher looks more closely at the other tables. Many of them have scrolls being read. “You’ve got quite a few Gnostics,” Carl says. “They churned the books out, I tell you. And there’s some guys from Old Testament times who got screwed by the weather or earthquakes or whatever. The Book of Amittai, for instance. The Book of Ishmerai. Lost to the elements. And there are others. They never had a chance. Don’t get those guys started or you’ll be getting the begats and the goat-slaughter procedures all day and night, and they’re all desperate to hear they’re as good as the other guys.”

  Hatcher moves his gaze to a nearby table. Three men and a woman. One of the men is reading from a codex and he’s lanky and intense and his long hair falls over his face.

  Carl sees where Hatcher is looking. “They didn’t make it into the New Testament. The Gospel of Rhoda. Her last scroll was dropped down a well by Paul himself, who never did trust women. The Gospel of Festus got eaten by a camel. The letters of Silas. Don’t get him going on the first century post office. And the guy reading. That’s Judas Iscariot.”