Hell

by Robert Olen Butler

  And now he’s back on air and he’s introducing the Clinton piece, and his mind is so thoroughly his own again that he can exercise a talent from his mortal professional life: he can roll out the appropriate broadcast-ready words from his mouth while his mind is somewhere else entirely. So as he does his introduction flawlessly, his thoughts slide back to how pathetic he is trying to do a thing or two to qualify himself to be taken out of Hell, and then he thinks no, it’s not pathetic at all, it’s another example of his self-important arrogance, that he expects to make a couple of selfless gestures and muscle ahead of all the great religious figures waiting in line to get out of Hell.

  But Bill Clinton is on thirty-two of the monitors now, and on the central four is Hatcher, beginning to listen to this man, intently, as he always did. Bill is sweating in his cheap hotel room, in his shirtsleeves, his tie askew, and after Hatcher has asked, “Why do you think you’re here?” Bill looks sharply away, toward the door, and says, “Is that someone?” And he immediately answers his own question. “No. It’s nothing.”

  Then Bill Clinton composes himself and looks into the camera, and he smiles a small, sneery, Elvis Presley smile, and he says, “The short answer is: Satan is a Republican. But before they stuck me in this room to wait, I personally saw Kenneth Starr around, and Rush Limbaugh, and Newt Gingrich, and quite a few of the others, so I’m afraid that dog won’t hunt. Therefore, taking this hotel room into consideration, and what it is I find myself waiting for, and trying to be honest about what the ‘is’ is, I’d be inclined to say I’m here because I wanted . . . what’s the word? Let’s see . . . I must be getting old, not to think of that word. Let’s say warm affection. That’s all I ever wanted with all the women. I need a lot of warm affection. And as for the sex? Well, in the most intense parts of that, I never inhaled. So it wasn’t about the sex.”

  Bill stops talking for a long moment. He tries the Elvis smile, briefly, but it soon fades. Then he says, “What’s the point of lying in Hell? Especially to myself. Why I’m here wasn’t about me wanting sex. But it wasn’t about . . . that other thing, either, which is maybe why I can’t even remember the word. I’m not stupid. If I was after either of those, I would’ve said to Paula Jones, for instance, when she came to my hotel room in Little Rock, ‘Darling, I am in a sexless marriage without . . . warm affection, and I adore that remarkable nose of yours.’ That nose being the thing she has no doubt always hated in her face. She would’ve been in my bed in nothing flat, ready to give me both sex and affection, and she never would’ve spoken a word about it. But the truth is, with her and with all of them, it was really about the moment when I knew what I was going to do and they didn’t, and it was about the next moment, when I dropped my pants or grabbed their tits and they gasped. It was about the exercise of power. So I suppose that’s it. I’m here for the same reason that when I was sixteen and I shook John Kennedy’s hand in the White House Rose Garden, I knew I would do anything to have what he had, and I mean the power. And it’s for the same reason that if a woman ever does walk through that door over there, I will rise and I will face her and I will drop my pants, and being as it’s Hell, I know I will pay for that big-time, but I will still do it.”

  Then it’s back to Hatcher, and he is happy to start the segue into the final feature, actually helped for the moment by the teleprompter, which does make sense just often enough to get the news from one segment to another. Reading instead of improvising makes it even easier for Hatcher’s mind to drift while he speaks, as he retains just enough awareness to realize if the teleprompter is about to take him way off course. And so he goes over his plan again to head straight to Deborah after the broadcast, as he reads, “That was the former President of the United States, Bill Clinton. And I know there are countless millions of you out there asking the same question, ‘Why am I here?’ Even if you were quiet, abject failures, even if you never amounted to enough in your mortal life to make the slightest public mark on human history, you have to wonder why.”

  Hatcher’s reading slows as he realizes what he’s saying. But he doesn’t know how to adjust this, and these same countless millions face worse pain in the street every day. Still, he thinks to try to improvise away from Beelzebub’s script. But the worst is already out, and he ends up simply continuing to read: “So our new entertainment reporter will expose the private lives of those who have actually accomplished something in the wider world so you can feel superior, no matter for how brief a time or with what pathetic self-delusion. Now here he is, the former Cyberspace Sultan of Self-Righteousness, the Swami of Superiority, the Parasite of Prominence . . .” And the text ends with no name following, not even his screen name, which he is said to remember. But the thirty-two monitors cut to a man in a crowded street with a microphone. His face is hidden by a black and white keffiyeh wrapped sloppily into a terrorist’s mask with a square, stubble-chinned white man’s jaw exposed at the bottom.

  “Yes, Hatcher, hello. I can hear you,” the reporter says in a faintly poncy, British whine, “Mineisbigger reporting. But not only can I hear you, I can see you as well, as it turns out. This morning the denizens moving along Peachtree Street Street Avenue Street had a bit of shock when a certain quite famous Evening News from Hell presenter appeared, flying overhead, stark naked. Fortunately someone had a camera and we have some splendid footage of the presenter presenting his genitals. I daresay you’ll recognize them, Hatcher. They are, of course, yours.”

  And Mineisbigger goes on for quite a long while with extensive footage and snarky analysis, but Hatcher sees none of it. He lays his hands flat on the desktop before him and lowers his face just enough so he can’t see the screens, and he concentrates on making his mind—his true private part in Hell—go blank. He does hear Mineisbigger’s coloratura shrieks of agony at the end of the report, as the reporter has likely burst into flames, but Hatcher does not even lift his face to watch.

  Dick Nixon and his Cadillac are at the curb in front of Broadcast Central when Hatcher emerges with a camcorder. Hatcher’s first thought is Great, we’ll make good time and he doesn’t catch himself until he is in the backseat and Dick is revving his engine and Hatcher realizes he’ll get everything he wants done this day only because a wide swath of denizens will be tossed and battered and crushed by the former president’s merciless driving. Hatcher tells himself If he weren’t driving me, he’d be driving someone else; if it weren’t Dick Nixon torturing them, it would be someone or something else. And to his credit, Hatcher realizes how, in the freedom of his mind, he is invoking a ghastly classic line of human reasoning. He also hears how that line of reasoning is directed at himself but is also offered as a defense to some higher authority who is presumed to be keeping spiritual accounts for reward and punishment. Will using Dick Nixon to get around in this world keep him from qualifying for the next Harrowing? Indeed, how many of the millions out there in the streets of Hell are here in part because they voted for Dick Nixon? Am I, in my inner freedom, going mad? Am I, in my freedom, simply renewing my credentials for eternal damnation? Or am I, in my freedom, making progress toward an everlasting release from this suffering? These seem to be familiar questions from another life. But just moments before he begins, in frustration, to jabber nonsense sounds aloud in the backseat, Hatcher goes Aw fuckit, I don’t know what’s right, but I want to see Deborah and let Anne do what she needs to do. So Hatcher gives Dick Nixon the address of his second wife, and Dick burns rubber and takes off. And having made that decision, Hatcher’s mind turns to another, smaller-scale anxiety, which expresses itself in a vague appeal to that vague spiritual accountant: Oh please don’t let her have watched the news today.

  Hatcher’s dead and damned second wife lives in a vast, stark, modernist concrete public high-rise housing complex, its dim, jammed corridors a constant, torturously high-decibel cacophony of hip hop and easy listening, klezmer and salsa, grand opera and sea chanteys and blues, cantopop and Nederpop and Hindipop and twee. But Hatcher barely notices al
l this. He is focused now on his quest. He moves through the crowd on the fourteenth floor fluttering his powder-blue minion tie before him, which readily clears a path until he is standing at the door of Deborah Louise Becker, who remained Deborah Louise Becker even after her marriage to Hatcher McCord, which shortly followed his divorce from Mary Ellen McCord, which was put into motion after several months of a covert affair with Deborah Louise Becker, which began with their having sex on his office couch immediately after she’d interviewed him for New York magazine, which was also the first time they’d ever met. Who had initiated the sex on that day and what exactly had been done was a matter of considerable—though, in Hatcher’s view, wildly inaccurate—detail in Deborah’s post-divorce memoir, Jerk. Her subsequent novel, Fool, though more advanced in its irony—the “fool” being somewhat ambiguous, applicable in different ways to both the fictional husband-anchorman and wife-journalist—had a strikingly similar depiction of its couple’s first sex scene, on his office couch after a magazine interview.

  For all the strident criticism of Hatcher in Deborah’s books, which he did read out of self-defense, painful though it was, he still needs to knock on this door. He feels in her books she got him wrong, but he suspects that the actual process of writing helped create the distortions. In person, perhaps he can get at something legitimate she knows about him. Because his mother also got him wrong, of course. As much as part of him wants to believe she didn’t, she did. He was—is—far from perfect. You think? his voice below his thinking suddenly says. You’re in Hell, asshole. I’d fucking say so. Hatcher knocks at Deborah’s door.

  There is no answer. Hatcher is afraid she’s out somewhere in the street. He knocks again. Nothing.

  “Deborah?” he says, loud, over the music all around him.

  Nothing.

  “Deborah?” he calls, louder.

  “She’s not in there,” a woman’s voice says, just behind Hatcher.

  Hatcher turns. She’s very old and stooped and bony and bewhiskered and her skin is jaundiced the color of a heavy smoker’s teeth. She sees Hatcher’s tie, and her eyes narrow and she pulls back a bit.

  “It’s all right,” Hatcher says. “I was married to her.”

  “Which demon of a husband were you?” she says.

  “Her second.”

  “The one on the television set.”

  “That one.” Hatcher did not keep up with Deborah after they split, though he was aware she’d married and divorced once more after him, having also had a too-young marriage before him. He feels a brief pulse of pleasure at her apparent ranting about husbands other than him. He wishes they’d rated books. “Do you know where she is?” he says.

  “She threw herself off her balcony about five minutes ago,” the old woman says.

  “What?” His first thought is that she did it in response to seeing him naked on TV.

  “I live next door,” the old woman says. “She does this almost every day.”

  “Thanks,” Hatcher says, telling his inner voice to stuff it, as it is about to give him a hard time for thinking his naked body could inspire a suicide for any possible reason. He focuses on Deborah lying broken outside and he moves off quickly.

  The old woman watches him go: Leap, yes leap, my friend, I have leapt too, we all of us in the balcony rooms leap and leap and O if I could but seal off that end of my room, the terrible open end, the wide sky beyond, I dream of my cell in the convent, the narrow walls, the high, small, knifeprick of sky, the bed, the bowl, the cup, only these. And I remember—though it has been a long long time now—the days of my one husband, my own demon, the baron of . . . where? Sussex. Yes, some baron of Sussex. It is torture, this fading of my memory. O if I could but picture his face more clearly so I could hate him all the more. My husband who put me aside with lies so I was left with only death or the cloister before me. And the ringing takes up, the ringing in my head: the Sanctus bell, the Host rising, the only man’s body for my last many years, His holy body. He was my last husband, who looked the other way, I always thought, whenever I laid my mortal body down with the body of my Abbess in the warming house in winter where we covered ourselves in ash, and in the granary in summer where the wheat clung to us in our sweat. But even my last husband put me aside in the end, in spite of my prayers in the final moments to be forgiven. And though it’s true that even as I prayed, if I’d had the strength and the chance I would have sought her sweet kisses once more, He should still have forgiven this body of mine with its terrible weakness, for His Father created my body this way and if His Father could not resist creating it thus, how could I resist thus living in it?

  The hundred apartment buildings in the housing project float on a sea of concrete. Hatcher rounds the corner of Deborah’s building and enters the fifty-yard-wide margin reachable by jumpers from the balconies, a place called The Landing Strip by the denizens. It is splashed with dark stains. The crowds between the buildings mill about in clusters that shape up and fist fight or knife fight or simply scream and foam and rage and then break apart and form new clusters, always stumbling about in the shadow of the buildings, but never ever moving into The Landing Strip. So from the moment Hatcher turns the corner, he sees Deborah up ahead. He rushes toward her.

  She lies broken in a widening pool of blood, her cheek pressed hard against the concrete, her eyes open, seemingly sightless but blinking, her arms at elbow-flared angles, her legs cracked and splayed but bent under her at the knees so that her back and butt are lifted slightly. Her left hand is twitching. Hatcher arrives beside her and kneels in her blood so he can extend a hand and gently palm the side of her head just above her ear. Her hair was always soft and thick, and it still is, though it is gray. She did not kill herself at the end of her mortal life. That she’s doing this now, over and over, makes his hand tremble against her.

  “Debbie,” he says.

  Her eyes move slightly toward him, and they close.

  He does not know how to take this. But he keeps his hand on her, even as her blood continues to gather around his knees.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  Her eyes move beneath her closed lids as if she were dreaming. Hatcher and Deborah stay like this for a long while, until finally her blood stirs around him, even drawing itself out of his pants legs, and her body begins to jerk and shiver and the blood flows back into her and her body straightens and mends, and Hatcher takes his hand from her head as she moves and slowly flexes her limbs and finally gathers herself into a sitting position. He shifts from his knees and sits beside her.

  She says, though softly, “Leave it to you to show up when I’m at my worst.”

  “It was unintentional,” he says.

  “It was instinctive,” she says.

  She still isn’t sounding as angry as Hatcher would expect. But he has no answer for this.

  “Sorry for what?” she says.

  “Whatever I did to us.”

  Deborah humphs at this. “I hear that in the hallways around here once in a while, and it always surprises me.”

  “Hear what?”

  “‘I’m sorry.’”

  Hatcher looks away, beyond the Landing Strip. There are skirmishes all over. Immediately before him, several gangs of young men, black and white, have been forced to swap some of their past styles and are murderously fighting over it: the whites are in the zoot suits and the hoodies and the sagging pants and the bucket hats and the neck bling and the do-rags and the dreadlocks, and the blacks are in the leisure suits and the chinos and the boaters and the Hush Puppies and the ascots and the crew cuts. Beyond them are old people jostling and wailing and cursing. And Hatcher recognizes an instance of what he has come to understand as his own arrogant self-absorption, for it never occurred to him that others in Hell are apologizing. Surely Hell is never having to say you’re sorry. But Deborah apparently has heard it—no doubt because here in the projects, the crowds are always upon her—and so, once in a while, someone says I’m sorry, even as they think
Satan is listening in, even as they expect to be punished for it. Hatcher’s chest fills with a complicated warmth about these people before him now, though they are fighting and cursing each other. They are struggling on, even in Hell, and sometimes they regret what they do or what they have done, and they say so. Hatcher is breathless now over all of them, and he turns to Deborah and he lifts his hand to touch her head again. She bats his hand away, though lightly.

  “What are you doing here?” she says.

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” he says.

  “Oh please. You think I’d ever wonder about that? I mean here.” She flips her chin at the apartment building.

  “Trying to figure out what I’m doing in Hell.”

  “Read my book.”

  “I did. I didn’t believe it.”

  “Then I can’t help you.”

  This isn’t what Hatcher expected. He expected her to defend the truth of what she wrote. He expected a heated renewal of all that. “You don’t believe it either,” he says.

  “Of course I did,” she says.

  “Did. But not now.”

  “You were a shit.”

  “I believe that.”

  “Are a shit.”

  “Just not that particular shit,” he says.

  “What difference does it make anymore?” she says.

  “I don’t know.”

  He lifts his hand again toward her.

  “Stop,” she says.

  He stops.

  “Go away now,” she says.

  Hatcher turns his face from her. He sees a young black man in an Arrow button-down shirt and Birkenstocks and a Brylcreemed pompadour who is faced off with a young white man in Ben Davis gorilla cuts and a Michael Jordan jersey and dreads. They are pushing each other in the chest.