Hell

by Robert Olen Butler

  “Please,” Deborah says.

  Hatcher does not intend to ignore her. He just feels utterly inert inside. He can’t bring himself to ask the questions he wants to ask. But he can’t bring himself simply to walk away now either. All he finds he can do is focus on the two young men. Just as he expects the thing between them to escalate, the young black simply grabs one of the white youth’s dreads and tugs it, but not hard, and he shakes his head in outsized disgust.

  “Hatcher,” Deborah says, knowing he won’t answer. She closes her eyes and her shoulders droop. He has come to her in Hell simply as a reminder that her insignificance is eternal. Who better.

  The young white reaches out and musses up the black’s pompadour and jerks his hand away, exaggeratedly wiping at the grease. The two of them look at each other and start to laugh.

  Deborah hears the laughter. Her irritation at Hatcher fades and she turns to the rare sound. They will pay, she knows. The two young men stop and give each other an oh-shit look, and they take a deep breath, and the hair on each of their heads bursts into flames.

  Hatcher turns from the two men flailing in pain. Does it have to go that way?

  He and Deborah face each other once more.

  “Look,” she says, “I don’t know what you want from me. Absolution?”

  “No.”

  “It wasn’t your fault I was so unhappy. Okay? You helped. But it wasn’t all about you. At first, you were so important—in the world—it made me important too. I was trying to be somebody, and you already were somebody. Then I wasn’t becoming what I hoped to be. You had your work and I admired you so much for it. Until I hated you for it. You know I still try to write? Even here. What’s that about? I have to do it in spray paint on my walls. Maybe you wouldn’t have been able to help me through all that, back when we were alive. But you never thought to try. You were oblivious. You were so . . . you.”

  They sit in silence for a long moment in the middle of the Landing Strip, unaware of the din nearby, aware only of the beating of their own immortal hearts, thumping heavily in their immortal chests, aware of the slip of rancid air into their immortal lungs.

  Hatcher thinks: We only hurt each other. “Why are we here?” he says, softly.

  “We were always here,” she says.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “I wish I were dead,” she says.

  And just then there is a whoosh of air upon them and a cracking thump and they are spattered with thick wetness. They look. The medieval nun who lives next to Deborah has jumped, and her broken body is beside them and her blood is upon them.

  And this puts an end to Hatcher’s time with his second wife. She crawls to the nun, to touch her, speak low to her. He stands up.

  “Please,” Deborah says. “No more.”

  She says it softly and without looking at him, so he thinks she’s speaking to the old woman. And maybe she is. But then he realizes she’s talking to him as well.

  “I’ll just wait a moment for her,” he says. His clothes and face are maculate with her blood, and he does not know how near he has to be for it to find its way back to her. So he stands close by while Deborah strokes the old woman’s head, and Hatcher has the urge to touch his wife again. But he doesn’t. He can’t. She is done with him. All that is done.

  But inside her: The Mayor’s office at City Hall and Ed Koch presiding, mugging his way through, and Hatcher says “I do” and I’m fluttering inside and I’m ready, but before Koch turns to me he twinkles at Hatcher like he famously does and he says “How am I doing?” and my friends and Hatcher’s friends all laugh and Hatcher says “Great. How am I doing?” and Koch says “Great!” and everybody laughs again and Koch turns to me and as much as I am happy that I rate the Mayor of New York City as I marry the hot young anchor who beat Rather and Mudd-Brokaw and Reynolds-Robinson-Jennings six weeks running in the Nielsens this spring, I understand with a terrible sudden grinding in my head that nobody has the slightest clue who I am, who I really am, not the Mayor of New York, not these friends laughing, not the media waiting in the street, not the vast public out there reading and listening and watching, not the famous man who is about to become my husband. Nobody. And no matter how much I try, they never will. Deborah squeezes her eyes shut hard, and her mind with it, even as she continues to stroke the head beneath her hand.

  Meanwhile, Hatcher has looked away, briefly, to the crowd, grappling on. And then he looks back to the apartment building. Sometimes you can see something but not see it, and then once you do, it is overwhelmingly clear. He looks to the next building down and to the one beyond the crowd. And it is all the same. He turns his face once more to Deborah’s building: The walls are jammed with words, outside on all the surfaces reachable from the ground or from the windows or balconies, and inside too, he recalls now, in the corridors, on every inch of the inner walls and the ceilings and the floors. Everywhere, the housing project is teeming with handwritten words. And like the crowds of Hell themselves, the words are a wild profusion of shapes and forms, bubble letters and rustic capitals, cuneiform and cyrillic, Spencerian and wildstyle. They are spray-painted and brush-painted and knife-bladed and charcoaled everywhere. And what they are not is political or religious, they are not angry or profane. They are names. Just personal names. Just simple assertions of self on the walls of Hell. BLADE and BJÖRK, KILROY and AJIT, TAKI 183 and CELADUS CRESCENS, MAMA DIVINE and DAZE, JULIO 204 and NOVELLIA PRIMIGENIA OF NUCERIA, S. MAGEE and W. M. McCOY, SERGEI and MAHMOUD and CHAN.

  Hatcher cannot find the tears he wants to shed. He cries out. Wordless. Just an animal sound, trying to name a thing that has no name. The sound of a Neanderthal, who is filled with a terror and a longing and a grace he cannot understand about his mate or his child. And the blood of the nun is stirring on Hatcher’s face and hands and clothes. And it flies away from him. And he turns and he goes and he rounds the corner of the building and he hurries along and he passes BUFFY and DAFYDD and BUBBA and MENACHEM and LADY PINK and FLY. Hatcher stops, trembling. He looks at the wall. A space. A small space in the crotch of the V in EVA 62. He pounds around on his chest feeling for a pen. He’s wearing his anchorman suit and has one somewhere. There. Fallen into the bottom of an inner coat pocket. He digs out his Bic ballpoint and moves to the wall and he leans into Eva and is deeply grateful for the space inside her. He scratches and inks and scratches until the pen tip is no good for ink but it can still scratch and he puts his name on the wall: HATCHER.

  Hatcher readily passes the Hoppers’ closed door, but his legs go heavy and his movements turn lugubriously slow as he approaches his own apartment. Not long ago, he would have heard the old, aggrandizing voice-over narrator in his head. But not anymore. He simply thinks: I am taking Anne away now to lose her. And there is a sad silence inside him, and he stands before his door, and his hand is pausing on the knob. And he thinks: But if that’s so, then not to take her away would make keeping her meaningless. He opens the door. It does not even occur to him to call out their ritual darling-I’m-home. She is not in sight. He does call “Are you ready?”

  She appears from the bedroom and sucks the air from his lungs and up flutteringly into his throat and head. She is wearing a gossamer white Edwardian tea dress, all cobweb linen and openwork lace with a scarlet ribbon tied at her waist, and her hair is done up beneath a wide-brimmed straw French sailor hat with a silk band in matching scarlet. He wants to say he was wrong. The address he has is wrong. He has no idea where Henry is. But her eyes are bright with expectation. It is not for him. There’s no going back.

  “I haven’t seen that,” he says, nodding at her dress, though he realizes its appropriateness for where they are headed.

  She looks down at herself and raises her face with a faintly puzzled expression, as if she hasn’t seen it either. She opens her mouth to speak but doesn’t know what to say.

  “You look beautiful,” he says, and even he hears the sadness in his own voice.

  She clearly doesn’t, for
she brightens at once. “Thank you,” she says.

  The Raffles Hotel in Hell sits in the desert outside of the Great Metropolis, facing the mountains, blindingly bone-white in the sun. Like its progenitor in Singapore, it is done in French Renaissance-cum-tropics style but on a vast scale, with six stories of arched and ornamented windows growing narrower and narrower as they ascend toward the hipped and balustraded roof until, in Hell’s version, on the top layer, they become federal prison slits, though with scrolled finials. At most of the thousands of those windows along the hotel’s half-mile front façade, the guests press their faces against the glass. Many of them were colonial empire builders, and they are sealed, cooking, in their suites and are serenaded endlessly by Satan’s cockroaches singing “Rule Britannia” to the Dutch and “Deutschland Über Alles” to the Brits and “Het Wilhelmus” to the Germans and so forth.

  There are some who are condemned to roam the hotel, though that group slowly changes over time. These denizens often linger on the wide veranda beside the front entrance. They sit on sulfur-soggy rattan furniture and drink caustic gin slings, many of the men in claret-stained linen suits and many of the women in lingerie dresses not unlike Anne’s, but dingy and smelling of semen from encounters they cannot remember. Old, imperialist-white-man punkah wallahs stand nearby fanning the hot air over everyone with thin, burningly weary arms. There is no shade. The sun drills into every corner of the place, on all four sides at once. And there is a bar-lounge featuring all the stand-up comics of Hell—which is, it should be clear by now, tantamount to all the stand-up comics who have ever lived and died—and presently headlining Jerry Seinfeld. The audiences are plucked temporarily from the sealed rooms and inevitably find themselves even less amused by the comics than they have been by the singing cockroaches.

  It is in front of this hotel that Dick Nixon roars up in the Fleetwood, trailing a vortex of desert dust, and fishtails to a stop. All along the veranda, the arrival draws attention. For instance, Jefferson Davis, wearing a long black dress with a fan-front bodice and pagoda sleeves and with a black shawl over his head in hopes of eluding capture, ceases swatting Abraham Lincoln’s hand from his knee, and he and Abe, whose linen suit is stained with blood, look toward the car. And the tiny, waist-cinched Gibson Girl in the far corner—Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, known in her mortal life as Mother Teresa—and the florid-faced, high-collared professional snark, Christopher Hitchens, separate their lips, having felt compelled for quite some time to neck, and they wipe hard and yuckingly at their mouths. She squints to see who might emerge from the car, while Hitchens, with her attention diverted, quietly swoops up what’s left of Teresa’s gin, downs it, and replaces the glass in front of her.

  Anne and Hatcher step from the backseat of the Cadillac. They go up the steps, aware of all the attentive faces, both of them nodding slightly in the same reflex, got-no-time-thanks-for-noticing way that earthly queen and news anchor learned to affect with the public. They push through the wide front doors and into a brutally bright lobby lit by the sun pouring down a six-story atrium.

  They pause, shield their eyes, and move to the registration desk, where Sally Sue Plunkett, former front-desk girl at the Motel 6 in Des Moines, Iowa, known behind her back as Surly Sally, is hating this job as much as she did that one. At the approach of these two, she lowers her face and fiddles with a dozen brass keys, representing recent departures for other quarters of Hell.

  Hatcher and Anne arrive and stand shoulder to shoulder before this early fortyish woman with curly hair the color of an Iowa corn-fed beef-steak. They wait a beat or two, but the woman is not looking up.

  “Miss,” Hatcher says.

  Sally is arranging the keys in a circle.

  “Can you help us?” Hatcher says.

  Sally opens the circle at the bottom and makes the outline of a straight, long hairdo of the sort she always wanted.

  Anne slams her hand on the counter.

  Sally jumps and raises her face snarling. “What the fuck do you want?” she says.

  Hatcher lifts his powder-blue tie at her.

  She clearly recognizes it but simply glowers, saying nothing more.

  Hatcher says, “We’re here to see Henry…I’m not sure how he’d be known here. Henry Tudor. Or Henry VIII.”

  Anne quickly adds, “By the Grace of God, King of England and France, Defender of the Faith, Lord of Ireland.”

  Sally shoots Anne another what-the-fuck look. “He’s not in his room,” she says.

  “You know this from your head?” Anne says.

  “What of it?” Sally says.

  “Do you know where he is?” Hatcher says.

  “Yes,” Sally says, but no more.

  Hatcher puffs. Basic interrogatives. Elemental interviewing. He didn’t think he’d have to jump through that hoop with a clerk at the front desk. He attributes this to Hell, though in truth, he would have had to do this with her in Des Moines as well. “Where is he?” he says.

  “He went in to catch the Seinfeld,” Sally says, nodding across the lobby.

  Hatcher turns and follows the nod to the door of the Ass in a Sling Lounge.

  “Henry is mine,” Sally says. “I plan to marry him.” And her head instantly falls off, disappearing behind the desk with a thud on the floor.

  Hatcher and Anne pull away from the front desk and move across the floor toward the lounge. He can feel her seething. He cares about Anne and wants to say something reassuring, but this is all too strange and complicated for that. It is enough that he’s brought her here.

  They step in at the back of the lounge. The room is dark and filled with cigarette smoke and the dim shapes of denizens from the hotel. At the far end of the room is a klieg-lit Jerry Seinfeld on a tiny stage, the familiar, wryly conspiratorial smile in that long, narrow face held there by willpower, getting a little trembly around the edges. Because the place is utterly silent except for a scattering of deep smoker’s coughs. It is a silence that Hatcher can instantly sense has not been broken at all. They are not between guffaws here. Seinfeld hasn’t elicited so much as a snicker. He is dying up there.

  But he goes on. “Have you noticed? Everyone seems to be here in Hell. What’s up with that? I ran into my sweet little Aunt Rachel the other day. She always had a good word for everyone, even for my Aunt Sophie, who had hairs growing out of her chin and encouraged her Pekinese to chase the neighborhood kid in the wheelchair as he rolled by, the way the big dogs in the street would chase cars. Aunt Sophie is in Hell, of course. Too bad her dog isn’t. I saw her out on the Parkway last week. She was on all fours running alongside Stephen Hawking and barking at his wheels. But Aunt Rachel—who also had hairs growing out of her chin, come to think of it—so chin hairs are either irrelevant in Hell or really really crucial—but chin hairs notwithstanding, Aunt Rachel was sweet as can be. I’d go to her house for lunch and I’d try to leave the end crust of my hot dog bun, which was hard as a brick. She always bought out-of-date buns at the day-old store. How do you get into the stale bread and donut business anyway? What makes you think of that? Maybe it’s that certain kind of underachiever kid we all know. See, he’s content to eat hard bun ends. So he has a childhood epiphany at the dinner table. He picks this thing up to gnaw on and he looks at it and he goes—someday I can do this. But Aunt Rachel would see me scooting the end of my bun away and she’d say, ‘Don’t you know there are starving children in the world who’d be happy to have that? Clean up your plate.’ So I’d say, ‘Then by all means, let’s get an envelope and mail this thing to some kid who’d appreciate it.’ And Aunt Rachel would just roll her eyes. She was that sweet. But there she was the other day, over at the Lake of Fire with her shoes off and her feet turning the color of a boiling lobster from the hot sand. So I say to her, ‘Aunt Rachel. What are you doing here?’ And she says, ‘It was all your fault. I let you waste food.’ It’s bad enough I’m in Hell. I’ve got to feel guilty on top of it? And what good is guilt down here anyway? What’s going to happen? I’
m going to go to Hell? Well, I hate to say it, but look around. And about Aunt Sophie’s Pekinese . Yitzchak. You’d think he’d be here, wouldn’t you? You know some dogs are just made for Hell. But have you seen any dogs? There’s not one. I think it’s because they always cleaned up their plates. You ever see a dog leave a shred of food behind? And cat poop is their favorite. Right at the top of the doggie nutritional pyramid. Just ahead of snotty tissue. The Recommended Daily Allowance of cat poop for a dog is 225 grams. That’s the size of a Burger King Double Whopper. And it’s especially desirable if the poop’s been buried in the yard for a while. Day-old is fine with them. Month-old? Not a problem. It’s like vintages to them. Oh, here’s an impressive little calico poop from May. And this April tabby has a splendid bouquet. And they eat it all up. Every morsel. That’s why they’re in Heaven. If I had my life to live all over again, I’d eat cat poop at every opportunity. And I wouldn’t leave a bit on my plate.”

  All through this, at every beat when a laugh was possible, Seinfeld paused ever so slightly, the stand-up’s subtle elbow in the ribs of his audience. But the room has remained absolutely silent, save for the coughing and an occasional hawking of a phlegmy throat. This time, though, Seinfeld draws out the pause. He looks around, blinking in the light, and he waits and waits. Anne, meanwhile, has been peering into the darkness, looking for Henry. Hatcher thinks the act is over, and he has to decide whether to stay or to go when these two reunite, which will be torture either way.

  But Seinfeld resumes, in the same monologist’s bright tone, “See, what I’m thinking is, we always misunderstood religion. All the religions of the world were, in fact, just these great big objects of performance art. Like going to Lincoln Center or the Met. So whatever religions knew about the universe, it was all metaphor. But how we all ended up here is that we’ve got this irresistible urge to turn metaphor into dogma. Like we read Huckleberry Finn and we become Twainists and we go, Every year you’ve got to lash some logs together and float down a river or you’ll end up in Hell. And if you don’t do the river thing, if, for instance, you’ve read Moby Dick and you’re a Melvillean and you think to save your soul you’ve got to go fishing every Sunday instead of floating on a raft, then I’m going to hate your infidel ass. And you’re going to hate mine. And if I don’t have a religion? Well, I’ve got the antidogma dogma going and I’ll hate your ass anyway. That’s why we’re all in Hell. And speaking of asses, I’m working mine off here with second-rate material while you just work the loogies out of your fucking throats.”