Hell

by Robert Olen Butler

  “Freaky for you?” Hatcher says, his incredulity involuntary and dangerous. But he gets away with it.

  Lulu nods, pouting. “I have feelings too, mon cheri. With the live ones we’re supposed to come in the middle of the night and dope-whisper any companions into a temporary coma and do the boy while he’s still snoozing. With your President Bill Clinton, his wife’s alone in the master bed, and by the time I can get myself oriented, I’m face to face with a very wide-awake Mr. President.”

  Lulu pauses for effect.

  Hatcher prompts her. “Freaky, Lulu?”

  “He took one look at me and dropped his pajama bottoms.”

  Somehow this doesn’t surprise Hatcher, and that must show on his face.

  “Only the dead and damned are supposed to go for it, my dear. And then, the next time, I went off to do Al Gore.”

  “Wait. Al Gore wasn’t elected.”

  “Hello. Poor Lulu had to figure out the fucking electoral college. And after I did, I had to go do a guy whose seed they took one look at and tossed. At that point, I’d had enough.”

  Lulu digs a knuckle into the corner of a dry eye. A little trick she picked up from her boss. “Boohoo,” she says. And then abruptly she flares the hand at her eye and smiles brightly and says, “I am so glad you are dead and damned, Hatcher McCord. You will help make up for the shit work.”

  And now, without Hatcher even registering her rise and approach, Lulu is in his face, and she gently takes the camcorder from him, and then there is a great flurry of her hands and in a seeming instant Hatcher McCord is standing naked at his front door, his clothes flung about the room, his camcorder, though, perched safely on the kitchen table, his blue minion tie folded neatly beside it, and beside the tie is Anne, her eyes wide and her mouth gaping.

  And in the next instant his naked body is pressed against Lulu’s naked body, her two powerful arms clamping him there, and they are out the door and leaping into the air and her great bat wings open wide and beat fiercely and Lulu and Hatcher shoot straight up into the dark and he barely has a chance to turn his head and look behind him as the Great Metropolis spreads open beneath him like the time-lapse blooming of a vast black flower, and Lulu veers, and in the moment that they hurtle over the center of the city, Hatcher at last finds brief voice for all that is happening to him. He screams.

  And far below, curled up in the gutter at the side of the Automat on the corner of Peachtree Way and Lucky Street, a sleeping figure snaps awake. Judas Iscariot turns his face upward. He has heard a screaming in the night sky, as it was prophesied, and his faith is renewed.

  The city passes away, and below Hatcher there is darkness, and against him there is the massive febrile thumping of a heart—Lulu in excitation, from flight, from him, from Mama waiting—and inside him his own heart beats as feverishly fast as Lulu’s, from all that is about to happen, and from Lulu’s heart, its ravenousness clear to him.

  After a time, he feels them descending, though everything is still black, and then Lulu banks and turns as if deliberately to show him this: red klieg lights scanning the sky from the roof of an eighty-foot Buccaneer Buena Vista double-wide lit bright white from within. He can see in the spill of the light that the place sits in the crotch of two sharp slopes. He is in the mountains again.

  Lulu wheels around and then plummets and lands running, and she and Hatcher are abruptly at the front door of the double-wide. She knocks the match-in-the-gas-tank-boom-boom knock. “Tootle ootle, Mama,” Lulu cries, and she opens the door.

  Inside the trailer, Hatcher is briefly blinded by the light—a thousand naked filaments in a thousand lightbulbs in glass display cases lining the one large room of the double-wide’s interior. The light refracts and flares from thousands of snow globes densely packing the cases. And taking up the far twenty feet of the eighty-footer and stretching as wide as the walls is Mama Lilith’s bed with Lilith herself sitting with legs spreadeagled, wings unfurled, toes wiggling, and her succubus privates open and steaming like a vaporizer. She is just about to pop into her mouth—with little finger extended—a Toblerone from a box beside her. At the sight of her daughter and the naked Hatcher McCord, Lilith’s hand stops and falls, and with slow and meticulous care, she places the chocolate back in the box. Hatcher pulses with foreboding from this gesture.

  “Here he is,” Lulu says, lifting Hatcher and turning him around and setting him before her for Lilith’s frontal inspection.

  “There he is,” Lilith says even as she levitates from the bed, closing her legs, lifting her wings, and rotating her body forward. She floats toward him, quite slowly really, with the same contemplative air she had putting away the chocolate, and that continues, rightly, to scare the shit out of Hatcher.

  Lilith drifts past the display cases. Hatcher has registered the snow globe collection only generically. He has never been a collector of things, and these are snow globes, after all, and he has been understandably riveted by other features of the room. So he has not seen that each snow globe contains an image of a man, the form varying greatly, with Dwight Eisenhower, for instance, being represented in one of these cases by the two-and-a-half inch white plastic figure from the set of Marx Toys Presidents of the United States that Hatcher adored as a boy. The white shakable substance lying at the bottom of each globe, however, is not the powder of fake snow but a dehydrated rendering of something quite personal to the man represented. Lilith, on the other hand, being a collector, is keenly aware of each of these carefully accumulated, classifiable artifacts of her life, and she is twittering with delight at them as she approaches this new man.

  Lilith in features and stature is clone-similar to her daughters. But as she draws near to Hatcher, the millennia are obvious upon her. Her all-over bleach job looks more white than blond and her flesh is pasty and liver-spotted. Though she has had a great deal of work done: her face is mostly unlined but forever fixed in a wide-eyed, leering rictus of lust.

  “Now, Mama, he’s mine,” Lulu says, as Lilith arrives before Hatcher and settles onto her feet. Hatcher is filled with the smell of Lilith’s perfume: rose and jasmine, both synthetic, and sulfur and semen, both organic.

  She looks past him now to her daughter. If her face could physically register an emotion other than lust, it would be doing it now. “My dear,” Lilith says, “you must learn to share.”

  “I am sharing,” Lulu says. “I’m here, aren’t I? You get to watch.”

  “Oh, darling daughter, haven’t I always been a good mother? How many three-ways have we had, my sweet? Men of my own acquisition, yes?”

  “Mama, you got off on that big time,”

  “You see what children do?” Lilith says, looking Hatcher in the eyes abruptly. “They twist your maternal generosity and affection into something selfish.” Lilith looks back to Lulu. “If what you say is true, then there has never been an unselfish act in the history of creation. Can I take no legitimate pleasure from my generous act? Must I feel displeasure being generous in order for the act to be truly generous? Then are you saying that the only truly generous acts can come from ungenerous spirits?”

  “Mama, you just want to fuck this man. But he’s mine.”

  “At least, my darling, a little of his essence for my collection? That’s the vigorish, dear. I am the house.”

  “I could have taken him anywhere.”

  “You’ll give nothing but some quarters for a peep show to your mother who birthed you and raised you and taught you everything?”

  Hatcher feels Lulu shudder behind him.

  “Oh all right,” Lulu says. “Have some diddling. But I get him last. I get to bite.”

  “Of course, darling. That’s for the young anyway.”

  At some point Hatcher tried to convince himself that in the final analysis, since pain was so extreme in Hell, one pain was pretty much like another. He had to get his addresses from Lulu, but on this point about what he would pay for them, he is realizing he was wrong. He should have known. He has never u
nderstood the attitude in people that “It’s only sex.” That’s like saying, “It’s only death.” There’s something uniquely intense about all this, in whatever form.

  No more so than in Lilith’s double-wide, for she instantly lifts him up and tucks him under an arm and in a flash he is at the other end of the room and he is slammed onto the bed on his back and he closes his eyes and he thinks of England. Literally so. Involuntarily. It’s 1968 and the Grosvenor Square protests are just over and the vacationing young journalist has seized the day and taken smart, edited-in-the-camera footage with his Kodak Instamatic and he will soon add a cassette-taped voice-over and win his first broadcast journalism job, and he and Mary Ellen are wandering Piccadilly and she breaks off to go into a bookstore and he is excited by what he knows he will do and he lets her go browse while he wanders on and he passes a cobblestone alley and just off the street a young man is kneeling alone in an army-green field jacket and he is dousing himself with gasoline, and Hatcher pauses, and perhaps all this isn’t quite registering on him but now the young man is striking a match and there are no words and no signs, this is a very private act, and perhaps that’s why Hatcher still watches and does not think to move, but the privacy does not stop him—nascent newsman that he is—from simply raising his Instamatic, and he films the tiny flare of the flame and the dropping of the match and the man has rested backward a bit on his heels and so the match falls on his lap and the bloom of flame starts from the young man’s crotch.

  And that’s the England Hatcher thinks of as he closes his eyes passively to the sex being visited upon him, because his own quick scorching flame of pain is very much starting in the same place, and the notion flashes through him that perhaps this will be something of an atonement for his newsman’s sins, and another pain—damp acid-burn pain—dabs itself again and again all over him—the touch of parts of Lilith’s body that he wills himself not to identify—and his own central body part in all this turns abruptly into an unending fount, a great soaring Old Faithful in more ways than one, with the flow geyser-hot, feeling as if the inside channel of him is being ripped up in the process and expelled as well, and now he is aware of a struggle above him, shoving and succubus-hissing and snorting and a sharp “all right you little bitch” from Lilith, and Hatcher knows Lulu has taken over, and a new pain grabs his cheek, a fierce clamping, and he presses his eyes more tightly shut and he could count her teeth if he chose—each is a separate twisting flaming knife blade—and the clamps of pain move down his chest, his abdomen, down and down, heading for Old Faithful as it pours searingly on with the image in Hatcher’s head turning from steaming geyser to flamethrower, but Lulu navigates around that spot and down his thighs, the clamp and clamp and clamp of new pain intensifying until it stops for a moment with his right ankle, the last step in a long trail of ongoing pain—the day-after deep throb of puncture wounds—and now he feels his right foot being taken up whole into a wet razor-lined cavern and held for one brief moment and then he hears himself crying out—perhaps he has been crying out all along unawares but now he hears as if from afar his own cry as it fills the room and probably the mountains outside as well—and there is the snapping of bone and the tearing of flesh.

  The physical torments of Hell do not allow for the convenient side-door exit of unconsciousness. And so Hatcher McCord, anchorman for the Evening News from Hell, newly invested but free-thinkingly subversive minion of Satan, in full consciousness begins to suffer in ways that go rather beyond the poor powers of language to describe, as one foot is devoured and then the other, one leg done in four bites and then the other, the torso done in a dozen large chunks, the throat taken in one bite, and Hatcher McCord’s head—including his universally recognizable face—is swallowed whole. And then, last but not least, the famous anchorman’s penis remains utterly alone in the center of the bed, spouting on manfully, bravely. After making rather thorough use of this final part for a time, Lulu finally looks at it thoughtfully and then swallows it one gulp. All of Hatcher’s parts have now vanished down the wide-gaping throat and into the ever-expanding stomach of the redoubtable Lulu, succubus spawn of Grand Mater Lilith, as the Mater herself flutters nearby watching, having already collected more than enough of his essence for the Hatcher McCord snow globe.

  Lulu belches.

  “Cover your mouth, dear, when you do that,” Lilith says.

  Lulu farts.

  Lilith rolls her eyes and shakes her head, and with her cupped palm full of Hatcher, she floats off to her arts and crafts corner at the other end of the trailer.

  Lulu—her belly vastly distended—lies back on the bed. She pulls a pack of Lucky Strikes from under a pillow and lights a cigarette. She blows a smoke ring and reflects: I adore having a man inside me. Even if they don’t appreciate it and just want to shoot their little load and then roll off you and turn their back and act like you’re not even there. And you’re so like them, Mama. Deep down, you prefer to watch. The Internet is all you really need. And when you do them, it’s just to add to your collection. Oh I did this one. And I did that one. For me, this is the real moment. I cannot hold you close enough, my darling. Come inside me, my darling. We are one, my darling,

  Lulu belches again. This time, with no one to see, she covers her mouth.

  Meanwhile, jumbled inside the one large room that is the double-wide of Lulu’s inner body, Hatcher also reflects: In mortal life as well, how often sex went terribly wrong. No. Not always “terribly wrong,” sometimes quite subtly wrong and sometimes wrong and right both but mixed so thoroughly that you couldn’t tell the difference. But not really “often” wrong either. In fact it always went wrong, somehow, on some level, even if it was the itch on the heel of your right foot, or what’s that distant siren out the window up Riverside Drive or down F Street, or is a two-parter on personal tax deductions during February sweeps a sure thing or a bad risk, all the while you’re having sex with a woman who you’re never going to see again and you should try to remember or you expect to see for the rest of your life—well, who knows, maybe not that long but certainly indefinitely since you’re married to her—and you should try to stay connected to her. And sometimes it was:

  Was it good for you?

  Yes, was it good for you too?

  Yes.

  Was it as good for you as it was for me?

  How do I know?

  Was it the best you ever had?

  It was good.

  Oh shit.

  And sometimes it was:

  Are you asleep?

  Trying.

  Now?

  Yes.

  Can’t we talk?

  I’m exhausted.

  I want to get pregnant.

  Oh shit.

  Or instead of “I want to get pregnant” it’s “I want it to be like it was” or “I want to get away for a week, alone” or “I want to be famous too”—no, that’s too honest—that one wasn’t even a question, it was “You never ask me for my opinion” or “What are you really doing for the world” or “I was watching Rather tonight.” Or Frank Reynolds. Or, once, Connie Chung. Connie Chung. Oh shit.

  And now Lulu shifts on the bed and Hatcher’s parts jumble around and his roughly detached head oozes from between chunks of his thighs and his face pops up tightly against Lulu’s soft inner flesh. His valiant attempt to remain rational falters: She is on my arm, my darling Lulu, we enter the conference room and I lay my cheek against her naked shoulder, and the men in the room all rise at our entering and they are pure white from head to toe—faces and hands and suits and ties and hair—as white as the bones of some man that my darling has picked clean in the desert, and I say, “Gentlemen, we’ve had many fine discussions, the six of us, and Mamie has always been a very gracious hostess, and now I’d like you to meet my darling Lulu—Lulu, this is President Dwight Eisenhower, he’s raising both arms to you in electoral triumph, and the man with glasses nodding at you is Harry Truman” and at this Truman lifts both his hands and spreads them as i
f to measure quite a long penis indeed, and he says, “The fuck stops here” and the Presidents are gone and Lulu and I are crossing the square in Pittsfield, heading for the Rainbow Restaurant for cheeseburgers and cherry Cokes and we pass beneath the awning of the storefront Hotel Parkway and Lulu says, “Let’s go in there and fuck” and I say “You bet” but just now my father steps out of the Rainbow and his face is smeared with ketchup and he’s popping a final French fry into his mouth and Lulu does a double take and she says “Even better” and she is upon him instantly and his clothes are flying and I really really want to look away before I see my father’s cock, especially in the grip of my darling Lulu, and someone taps me on the shoulder and I turn and it’s Mamie Eisenhower—the whiteness of her face and hair and pearl necklace and modest fitted woman’s suit is dazzling there in the sunlight in Pittsfield—and she lifts her hands and offers me a cup of tea even as my father’s voice fills the square shouting “Fuck me, Lulu, yes!” and Lulu cries “At last a real man!” and I drop Mamie’s teacup and I run, I run across the square and past the courthouse and on and on till I slam into our front door and I go up the steps three at a time and I find my mother—her late-October-afternoon gray eyes turning on me and brightening—and I sit beside her on the bed where she hugs a terry cloth robe tight around her and I take her hand and I begin to pat it and I pat it and I pat it and she says to me, quite low but quite clearly, “It’s all right, my darling. You have everything to give to the world. And everything about you is perfect. Do you hear me? You don’t need to worry. You’re perfect.”

  All the parts of Hatcher’s body are beginning to stir now. Lulu puts her hand on the great mound of her distended belly. She smiles, then turns her face, leans off the side of the bed, and throws up for a while. Just as certain physical sufferings in Hell exceed the power of language to describe, so too does succubus vomit, which is just as well. Though Jackson Pollock, in a circumstance similar to Hatcher’s, having occasion a little further along in this process to observe the effusion of Lulu’s sister Lily, remarked, at its color and form on the floor, “Holy shit. I am profoundly humbled.”