Hell

by Robert Olen Butler

  Hatcher looks at Carl.

  Carl says, “You were still alive when his lost codex came to light, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Hatcher says. “Sadly. It’s embarrassing to get scooped by the National Geographic Society. You weren’t alive then.”

  “No.”

  “You know a lot about all this, Carl.”

  Carl shrugs and turns his face to the window. “I may be a liar, but I’m a good reporter.”

  Outside the window, Jezebel’s eight hundred and fifty slaughtered priests of Baal are crowding past, all their wounds still open and running. Unseen to Carl and Hatcher, Elijah is being borne along, squeezed tightly in their midst, cloaked in their blood.

  “I can see that you are,” Hatcher says.

  Carl lifts his face and then nods toward Judas. “He’s my source on the Harrowing.”

  “Judas?”

  “Yes.”

  Hatcher takes this in. “Would you mind if I talk to him directly?”

  Carl laughs softly and cocks his head at Hatcher. “You’re standing on journalistic protocol down here? Asking me?”

  Hatcher sees how this would seem odd. He’s not sure he would have asked his reporter for permission only a short time ago.

  “Of course,” Carl says. “Go ahead.”

  “Thanks,” Hatcher says, and he moves off toward the New Testament table.

  As he approaches, Judas has stopped reading, and Rhoda is offering a critique. “Everyone assumes it’s Gnostics because you did it in the third person. You need to rewrite it in the first person.”

  “Good suggestion,” Festus says, giving Rhoda a little wink. “Make them wonder. We heard he hanged himself right away. But he took time to write this.”

  “Not to mention the irony,” Silas says, also winking at Rhoda.

  “What irony?” Festus says with a little more heat than one might reasonably expect. “That’s all you ever say. What’s irony got to do with it?”

  Hatcher is beside the table now and the two men abruptly stop their bickering. All four look up at the newcomer in the suit.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt. I’m Hatcher McCord.”

  “I watch you all the time,” Rhoda purrs.

  Festus and Silas both scowl. Judas glances over to Carl and then back to Hatcher. He rises. “I’ll talk to him,” Judas says to the others, and then to Hatcher, “Got nickels?”

  Hatcher feels in his pockets. “Yes.”

  “Come on,” Judas says, and he leads them to the back wall. He peers through the window of a food compartment and then another and another, moving along the row. “Not much choice today,” he says. “But there never is.” He stops and turns to Hatcher.

  “Give me thirty nickels and I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” Judas says.

  Hatcher is thrown by this for a moment.

  “Just kidding,” Judas says. “I need three. For spinach. We can get two forks.”

  Hatcher gives Judas three nickels, and the ex-apostle feeds them into a slot by one of the dispensing doors. “I’m good about sharing,” he says.

  They bear their creamed spinach and forks out among the crowded tables, and ahead, a couple of Old Testament guys at a table for two suddenly burst into flames and leap up and run together out the front door. Judas nods to the newly vacated table. “Someone is looking out for us,” he says.

  They sit.

  Judas sticks one of the forks in Hatcher’s side of the white china Horn & Hardart bowl and pushes it slightly toward him. The dark green of the spinach can be seen in striations beneath the cream, but the cream itself is faintly wriggling. Judas takes a bite and grimaces. “Jesus Christ, this tastes bad,” he says.

  He and Hatcher look at each other, stopped by the expletive. Judas laughs loudly. “The Master doesn’t mind. He likes a good irony.”

  “He’s coming back here?” Hatcher says.

  “For me. It’s the deal.”

  “When did he tell you that?”

  “His last night. When he asked me to do this thing for him. Somebody had to do this thing so all the rest of you would come to realize who he was. But see, then he couldn’t take me out of Hell the first time round. I just barely got here, and for him to end up being what he had to be, I had to take the heat for a long while. He was crucified for your sins, but I was vilified for your sins. You see what they write about me?” Judas rolls his head. “Oy,” he says. Then he motions at the spinach. “Eat up.”

  “No thanks.”

  “I don’t blame you. It’s nothing but vegetables, world without end.”

  Hatcher nods toward the change booth. “The sign says meat tomorrow.”

  “That sign’s always there and it never happens. Just about everyone in this room thinks they’re getting out of here on the next go-round. Most of them are convinced it’s about sacrifice. They didn’t kill enough goats or bullocks, so they need the animals. They need to do their ritual thing to be worthy. The management keeps promising, but come on. It’s not going to happen. Me, however. The Man and I had an arrangement. He needed me to do what I did. I knew His powers. You think I’d send myself to a place like this for thirty pieces of silver? You think anybody’s that stupid? He was the Man. I didn’t have the preaching skills or the church-building skills, but I had the skill to do what needed to be done, even if it was dirty work.”

  And what’s going on in Hatcher’s nose? The smell of animate creamed spinach, certainly. And perhaps that is affecting the workings of his deeply intuitive, Northwestern-J-School-trained, field-tested, Emmy-Award-winning appendage, but hearing Judas Iscariot talk of his expectations, hearing his thoroughly adapted voice, Hatcher isn’t sniffing the story so strongly now. Not to mention the irony. Hatcher tries to reason with his nose. Maybe it’s the irony that’s causing the doubt. Judas Iscariot keeping his faith in Hell. Shouldn’t that actually give him credibility? And he’s adjusted over the years, as everyone is torturously required to do. Hatcher’s own Anne rarely sounds the way she must have sounded in the sixteenth century. They all are compelled to watch television, after all. If Judas had the skills he claims were necessary to do what he had to do in his mortal life, then those same skills would turn him into the Judas Iscariot sitting across from Hatcher right now, keeping his faith, talking wise-ass. And gobbling down the rancid creamed spinach.

  “You sure you don’t want yours?” Judas asks as he finishes exactly half.

  “I’m sure.”

  Judas compulsively eats on, though every bite is clearly intensely unpleasant to him. Finally he presses his wrist against his mouth and jumps up and runs out the front door. Hatcher sits and waits and lets the possibilities of this story renew themselves. He looks around at all the others here. Also keeping the faith in their own ways, apparently.

  Judas returns and sits. He says, “It’s not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man but that which cometh out.”

  He waits a beat, as if he expects Hatcher to react. Hatcher doesn’t.

  “Just kidding,” Judas says. “Man, if I’m to be judged by what just came out of my mouth, forget about it.”

  “How do all these others expect to make their sacrifice? Do they think they’ll get a shot at the animals before the kitchen deals with them?”

  “They’re not thinking clearly, most of them,” Judas says. “A few think putting their nickels in and pulling out a great piece of roast lamb and then throwing it away would do the trick, under the circumstances.”

  “And do you think he’s coming back only for you?”

  Judas shrugs. “Who knows? We can only account for ourselves in the end, right?”

  There’s one more bite of creamed spinach in the china bowl. Judas has been poking at it with his fork. Now he scoops it up and puts it in his mouth and squeezes his eyes shut at its taste. He swallows hard. “Why’d I do that?” he says.

  “You thought someone knew and expected it,” Hatcher says.

  “Someone always knows,” Judas says.
r />   Hatcher does not reply.

  Judas leans intently forward. “That’s why I’m going to get out. What I did at Gethsemane. He knows why.”

  “When will he come for you?”

  “Soon.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There are signs.”

  “Like what?”

  “I came to learn them secretly,” Judas says. “I’m not at liberty to say. But they’re happening. Patterns of the pain. Certain arrivals to this place. Cadging nickels, how that goes. Things to come. A screaming in the night sky. You have to understand, man. There’s a bunch of holy, picked-out-by-God people still here. Published. And the main players in the books too. All big time. The biggest. Still here. He’s coming for them, right?”

  “I thought he got them before.”

  “So it was said.”

  “He didn’t?”

  Judas shrugs.

  Hatcher presses him. “He didn’t take them out of Hell?”

  “Nobody down here knows for sure. I can tell you there’s a bunch of shit-if-I’m-here-and-he’s-here-who-isn’t going on. But I’ve got the faith, man. I’ve got it.”

  “So you figure there’ll be quite a few going out next time?”

  “Like you said, you’d think the big boys would be gone by now. But they’re not. The direct-from-the-source guys. The holy destroyers of unbelieving nations. The scourge of the infidels and the heretics. And I’m talking the scourgers from both sides, from all sides. You’d figure somebody got it right. Not a chance. But my guy was full of surprises, don’t forget. He could pick any tax clerk or hothead with fishing tackle off the street. Just get your own shit together is my advice.”

  Judas suddenly stiffens and looks down at his stomach. It swells rapidly and presses tight against his tunic and a wriggling begins there, as if the things in the cream of the spinach have suddenly grown up and are ready to raise a ruckus. “Oh fuck,” he says. “I shouldn’t have been saying all this.”

  Judas jumps up and turns and careens around and past the tables and through the front door.

  Hatcher sits and tries to be still and think on all this, and he begins to feel a darkness in his head and a faint weakness in his limbs. But these are just his own private feelings going on, he realizes. His body is simply reflecting on these matters as it waits for what he wants it to do next. Hatcher rises and moves to the front of the Automat. Carl is gone. Someone somewhere in the room shouts, “Not convincing? Convince this, shmecklesucker!” Hatcher steps into the street and turns back the way he came.

  Behind him, Judas has not burst asunder with his bowels gushing out, which has happened to him before, the most recent time after he spoke to Carl Crispin of many of these very same things. This time, as he rushed headlong into the street, his stomach stopped wriggling and shrank back and he staggered around the corner and sat down on the sidewalk, his back to the metal wall of the diner, and he pulled his knees up under his chin, and now within him, it is the night on Mount Zion, outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem: The others have gone ahead to the upper room of this house and the Master has let them go up first and I wait upon him and he touches my arm and says “Come with me” and I do and we go around to the side of the house in the dark and the air smells of a wood fire and the Master smells of spikenard and I know Mary the Drastically Redeemed has been at him already and I’m thinking he’s too easily pampered, he’s getting too soft, there’s hard work to be done, man’s work, and I know he knows what I’m thinking, so I say “I’m sorry, Master” and he says “It’s almost over” and it’s me now who knows what he’s thinking and I say “So we’re not going to fight it out” and he says “You know the answer to that” and I do and he says “The stones of this house took long rubbing one against the other before they fit together” and I say “You mean the boys upstairs” and he says “The boys upstairs” and I say “Not enough rubbing” and he says “That would take till I’m gone and come back and gone and come back again” and he laughs and I laugh and I know what’s next and he says “I will ask you to do a thing now that will make you wish you’d never been born” and I say “If it’s what you need” and he puts his hand on my shoulder and even in the dark I can see the tears in the Master’s eyes.

  Up the street, Hatcher is moving quickly. Soon he draws near to Administration Central. The Duesenberg is still sitting at the curb, and though he waited for Hatcher to reappear, since his orders were simply to chauffeur him, Porphyrius is not happy to see the TV minion’s approach. He’s starting to feel a little hot under the collar already.

  Hatcher nods through the window at Porphyrius in his long-practiced, warm, famous-person-encountering-service-person manner and moves to the back door. He pauses and checks the sky. The sun is stalled high up in what Hatcher now sees as a powder-blue sky. He’s still not certain about a new Harrowing, but Judas’s words are stuck in his head. Get your own shit together. Hatcher climbs into the backseat of the Duesenberg and opens the map, ignoring Porphyrius’s glare in the rearview mirror. He finds the location of his nearest wife and gives his driver directions. They creep off into the crowded street.

  And though Hatcher feels that this train of thought is wildly dissociated from what he has just experienced at the Automat—overlooking, as he does, the two underlying associative motifs of a striving for Heaven and books—his deep inner voice remembers: a magic bus, a book with large colored pictures about a bus full of travelers that flies away and I couldn’t have been more than three or four years old, and I was sitting in a window seat in my room with bright sun coming in and there was a page where a little boy discovers a golden button on the dashboard of a bus and he says to the driver, Push the button, please, sir, push the button, and the driver does, and the bus lifts off the street to the delight of all the passengers inside and, outside, to the surprise of a little girl and a puppy and a passing bird. And the rest of the book has vanished from within me, except for one two-page spread of artwork, and this has returned in dreams and in the moments drifting toward dreams, perhaps two dozen times over the many years since, and the image is this: the boy is looking out the window of the bus—though his looking out was established on an earlier page, for all these years I’ve simply known that the boy has pressed himself hard against the window and the other people have vanished for him—and on these two pages is just what he sees, from a great height: a rolling countryside with trees and a farmhouse and barns and a cornfield and, far ahead, a little village with a church steeple and a school and a neighborhood of white houses and the sun high in the sky and, most importantly, there is a truck, a bright blue panel truck with big round fenders and it is on the road through the countryside and it is heading for the little village and on the side of the truck is the word BREAD and when I was a child I imagined that it was my father driving that truck, it was my father, the friendly Bread Delivery Man who smiles all the time and whose breath smells of fresh bread, and later, when I dreamed of this scene, the father part had vanished, the driver simply drove anonymously, invisibly, and it was just the bread truck, but it was still in the perfect countryside, and I knew it was heading toward the place where I wanted to be.

  Mary Ellen McCord—formerly Mary Ellen Gibson but Mary Ellen McCord even after her divorce from Hatcher as he was being promoted from anchorman of the evening news in St. Louis, Missouri, to network correspondent in Washington, D.C., and Mary Ellen McCord even to the day of her not-really-intentional-but-now-that-it-seems-to-be-happening-oh-what-the-fuck death by drowning off the Cayman Islands on a Golden Years Singles Cruise with two other unmarried sixty-something women friends—is being borne along as one of the multitude thronging Peachtree Street Road Circle. She is trying to get back to her apartment in the Career Mother neighborhood of the Great Metropolis in Hell now that she has been reconstituted after enduring the noontime sulfurous rain that she seems always to get caught in because she seems almost always to be in the street crowd for reasons she can’t even begin to figure out.
But this time she actually recognizes the intersection with Peachtree Circle Court Loop and she actually fights her way to the edge of the crowd and actually breaks free to move abruptly into the mouth of the street where she lives just in time to be knocked off her feet and run over by a turning 1932 Duesenberg being driven by the greatest charioteer of the Eastern Roman Empire and bearing her ex-husband.

  Hatcher sits on the running board of the Duesenberg, with Mary Ellen’s twisted, broken body a few feet away, and he waits for her to reconstitute. If he had a pack of cigarettes, he’d smoke one now. This is taking an unusual length of time, with her not showing any signs whatsoever of snapping back. After the initial recognition of who she is, he hasn’t quite looked at her. Finally it all feels terribly familiar: he hurts her and then doesn’t really look at what’s happened; he just waits for things to go back to normal.

  He makes himself see her. Not her crumpled, jackknifed body, but her face. He angles his head to the left, sharply, and still more, until his face and hers are aligned across this space between them, eye to eye, nose to nose, mouth to mouth. She looks young. As she was when he was courting her at Northwestern. Suddenly her eyes open. But it’s not clear to Hatcher that she is seeing anything. A moment later her eyes close and they begin to move beneath her lids, as if she is dreaming.

  And within Hatcher: She and I stand on the tiny beach at the curve of Sheridan Road near Fisk Hall, the lake the color of car exhaust, the air stinking from the alewives that mysteriously die in large numbers every spring and wash up along the shore, and we’re shoulder to shoulder, she and I, but not holding hands, and we’re expecting something from each other in light of our imminent graduation, and in light of all the sweet times sneaking her up to the third floor of my rooming house in the still prudish early sixties and clinging to each other very quietly in my narrow bed with the tops of the red maples outside, and I say, “Your folks will be down?” and she says, “You asked that this morning,” and I say, “I’m not thinking clearly,” and she says, “I’m not either,” and I say, “We need to think clearly,” and she says, “We need not to think,” and I accept this and I say, “Since we’re not thinking, let’s get married,” and she laughs, low, and I let the back of my hand touch the back of hers and her hand is warm and she turns it and I turn mine and we hold hands and the gesture is like a scarlet leaf on the maple outside my window in October and it’s the first one to fall and you’d think that would be the most beautiful secret moment of all for the tree—its quaking with red leaves like it’s on fire and this first leaf letting go and floating away, free—but it really means that winter is coming in and all the beautiful things will fall away and die and the tree will soon be stark and cold.