Hell

by Robert Olen Butler

  Instantly, someone from the darkness shouts, in a thick British upper-class accent, “You can’t say ‘fuck’.” And a heavy glass ashtray flies into the spotlight and catches Seinfeld on the left temple. He staggers back and another ashtray hits him bloodily in the nose. A dozen more ashtrays fly at him and he covers his head with his arms and he turns and staggers off the stage and disappears into the darkness.

  The lights come up. The crowd stirs and rises—all men in morning dress—and they flow around Hatcher and Anne muttering “Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.” Anne studies the faces going by, and Hatcher is watching her watching them when the crowd thins and she shifts her gaze and her eyes widen and she stiffens. Hatcher looks. Two men are dawdling up from the front table, talking to each other. They are both dressed in iron-gray, single-breasted cutaways with pearl-gray vests and silk top hats, which they are patting into place. They are moving this way. One of the men is slender and narrow-faced and is wearing a black patch on his right eye. The other man, hobbling painfully, is vast and thick-necked and red-faced, and in spite of the fact that his specially tailored vest and coat could hold at least three of the eye-patched man, the fat man still threatens to burst from them. And though he is clean-shaven except for a small mustache with waxed twists at the end, and though the reddish-gold hair that has just disappeared under his hat is parted in the middle and lacquered with Wildroot, it is clearly Henry.

  This is not the slender, strapping young Henry of Anne’s girlhood. Or even the notably expanding Henry of their marriage. This is the bloated and syphilitic end-of-his-life Henry that Anne, wide-eyed, is seeing now. Satan is not exactly known for never closing a door without opening a window, but Hatcher understands the primary torture here will be for Anne and Henry, and this will be a benefit for him. Let them both suffer a voice somewhere in him says. Hisses, really. And Hatcher feels light. He feels he can just bound out the door and go sit on the veranda and cross his legs and sip a gin sling and stare contentedly into the desert. And the drink will taste very good, while these two rancorously finish with each other, for all eternity.

  Henry and the other man are upon them. As soon as the king sees Anne, his face bloats in a smile that is instantly lost in the folds of chin and cheek. He cries, “My once mistress, once friend, my once wife, once betrayer—or was it I who betrayed you?—my once joy, once torment, have you found me in Hell to torment me truly now so as to have your righteous revenge? For yes, I betrayed you, and to understand that betrayal is hell heaped upon Hell, my once wife. How’s that pretty throat? I’m sorry to allude thus now to your final wound, a wound I ordered, it is true, a wound I later conjured before my mind’s eye many a time as if it was our first fuck, and I am sorry to allude to that as well, but I find in this place that I cannot choose my own words and I cannot leave from speaking, except when I am listening to comedy that is not comedy at all and that leads me to yearn anew for my axman so that I might silence these solitary jesters who come before me, but I cannot find an ax when I need it, I can only find, as I listen to them, rotten pustulous things in the back of my throat, which surely rise from these poxed and cankered legs of mine, the legs that ruined me. O my legs, my once queen, my later queens had to deal with them, but at least you were spared the burden of my pus.” And all these words rush from Henry as if in a single breath, and he still does not pause but turns his face to his companion and moves seamlessly from pus to command. “Sir Francis, my dear Vicar of Hell, take this man to the veranda and provide him with drink, I must have a word now with this once inadequate womb before me, this slut, this girl-yielding cunt, though the girl she yielded had quite a reign, as I’ve heard, a greater reign than mine, they say.” And Henry begins to quake even as he talks on and the man called Francis has Hatcher by the elbow and Hatcher is happy to go, for the rancor soars now on strongly beating wings.

  And so Hatcher crosses the lobby of the Raffles Hotel with Sir Francis Bryan, Henry VIII’s longtime drinking buddy and master of the henchmen, poet and roving diplomat, sent to the Pope when Henry first sought a Catholic divorce for the sake of Anne, and a master of jousting as well, which is how he lost his eye. The eye is unrestored in the afterlife, though Bryan has come to see that as an ironic benefit—one less body part to hurt when it is time for everything to hurt. “Sir Francis Bryan, at your service,” he says.

  “Hatcher McCord, presently at your disposal.”

  Bryan chuckles. “He will do that.”

  “You’re his vicar?”

  “Lay vicar, I must stress.”

  They step out onto the veranda. A table at the front is being vacated by an elderly couple in hunting jodhpurs who stagger off the veranda and out into the desert, clutching at their stomachs.

  “Some people shouldn’t drink,” Bryan says.

  The two men move toward the vacated table, and on the way, Hatcher is surprised to find Bill and Hillary Clinton sitting together. She’s staring vacantly out to the mountains. Bill’s mouth is drawn down sadly and he’s stirring his gin with the tip of a forefinger. Hatcher stops beside them. Hillary ignores him, but Bill looks up from the slow swirling of his drink. “Hello, Hatcher,” he says.

  “Mr. President. You escaped the hotel room.”

  Bill Clinton tilts his head very slightly in the direction of his wife. “She showed up.”

  “I see.”

  “It seems it was her I was waiting for all the time.”

  Hatcher doesn’t ask the question that instantly springs to mind. Hillary is still quietly averting her eyes from both men. Bill licks the tip of his finger and returns to stirring his drink with it.

  Hatcher looks toward Sir Francis Bryan, who is claiming the vacated table. Hatcher is about to move off, but he is still a journalist, after all, and he must ask the question.

  “Mr. President,” Hatcher says.

  Bill looks up.

  “Did you drop your pants when she arrived?”

  Bill smiles. “It surprised the hell out of her.”

  And with this, though she continues to look out across the desert as if she were alone, Hillary extends her hand and lays it on Bill’s arm. Bill looks at his wife’s hand, and Hatcher cannot see—but rightly assumes—the faint lingering of the smile.

  Hatcher heads off to the table, and he knows that the tender gesture he just saw pass between the presidential couple will, in this place, only lead to larger pain and mutual torture. But in the freedom of his mind, Hatcher holds the gesture apart from all that will surely follow, and he too smiles a small smile.

  He sits down with Sir Francis Bryan, and they are both facing the mountains. A monocled and mutton-chopped white man, a former Governor-General of India, wearing a dhoti overhung with a starvationdistended belly, instantly arrives with a tray and two gin slings, which he puts on the table. He bows deeply and backs away.

  Hatcher nudges the drink away with his knuckle, shuddering at what the Raffles Hell might be substituting for the cherry brandy. He looks at Bryan, who has taken off his top hat and placed it on the table in preparation for his drink. Bryan is a bald man with the fringe of his hair close-cropped and with a faintly aquiline nose. He swirls the dingy ice in his gin sling, takes out the swizzle stick, and compulsively downs about a third of it in one gulp. He turns away to gag and cough and spit. When he has recovered somewhat and is sitting upright again, his hand still clutching at his burning throat, he glances at Hatcher’s drink, untouched, migrated toward the center of the table, and he looks at Hatcher and narrows his good eye while raising the eyebrow over his bad one.

  “Some people shouldn’t drink, vicar,” Hatcher says.

  “I thought we all must, in this place,” Bryan says.

  Hatcher understands. His freedom of mind is showing, but he does not take up the gin. “It’s torture for me not to touch the stuff,” Hatcher says.

  This satisfies Bryan. “Of course,” he says. “You know how I came to that nickname with His Majesty?”

  “Not because you were of ho
ly demeanor.”

  Bryan laughs. “Indeed not. His Majesty and I and Thomas Wyatt and Nicholas Carew and George Boleyn and some others were great companions and full of jests, and His Majesty once asked me as we sat at dinner, ‘What sort of sin is it to ruin the mother and then the daughter?’ And I replied, ‘Sire, it is a sin like that of eating a hen first and its chick afterwards.’ The King laughed loud and heartily at this and said when he was done, ‘Well, you certainly are my vicar of Hell.’ And we all laughed louder and more heartily still, and the name was imprinted upon me thereafter.”

  Hatcher has been forcing his mind away from what might be happening inside the hotel. But what he has heard in this anecdote is the power of sexual privilege possessed by the truly prominent and wealthy, experienced to some extent by Hatcher in his earthly demi-celebrity, but not nearly as strongly as by kings and billionaires. He turns his mind to the likelihood that he will leave this place alone today.

  And inside Sir Francis Bryan: Sire, Geoffrey Plantagenet married Matilda, granddaughter of William the Conqueror, and they begat Henry II, King of England, who begat Eleanor Plantagenet, who married Alphonso IX, King of Castile, who begat Eleanor of Castile, who married Edward I, King of England, who begat Edward II, King of England, who begat Edward III, King of England, who begat Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, who begat Lady Anne Plantagenet, who married Sir William Bourchier, who begat Sir John Bourchier, who begat Sir Humphrey Bourchier, who begat Lady Margaret Bourchier, who married Sir Thomas Bryan, who begat me. My blood is the blood of four kings of England and our Norman conqueror, and through them my blood is the blood of Charlemagne the Great and Clovis the Great and Boadicea, our great Briton queen who rose up against the Romans before there was an England. And yet it is the way of mortal life that I was destined to end up merely playing the role of Your Majesty’s jester and go-between instead of you playing mine. But Hell is oddly comforting in that regard, sire, for it appears that we are all of us here, all the seed of all the righteous, world-bestriding, wealth-wielding, nation-making, genocidal men since the beginning of time. And they themselves are all here too. And as for the drastic differences of privilege and power that make human beings so inescapably and arbitrarily unequal for that brief mortal span? Those differences are mere surface ornamentations now to our eternal suffering. Thus sayeth your vicar, sire.

  Unbeknownst to Sir Francis Bryan—and unnoticed by Hatcher—Bryan’s own seed, twelve begats along, sits a few tables over, a man with an aquiline nose writing in a Moleskine sketchbook with a Waterman 494 sterling silver Bay Leaf fountain pen. With Noodler’s Antietam red ink, flexing the Waterman’s nib, thickening the downstrokes, the man writes: “It has been long enough.” And he pauses. He turns and says to his table companion, a bent and liver-spotted Graham Greene, whose mind has wandered in the few seconds of silence that has fallen between them, “What were we saying?” Greene is thinking about the Nobel Prize never won and about the lost bougainvillea and white-washed villa walls in Anacapri. He turns his face to the man with the Waterman, which is still poised in the air. “I don’t remember,” says Greene. “Neither do I,” says the other man.

  And a few tables down, Hatcher thinks: It has been long enough. And Hatcher pardons himself and rises and turns and heads for the door into the hotel. As he passes the Clintons, Bill catches him by the arm, stops him. “She’s wrong about how I won,” Bill says.

  “I’m not wrong,” Hillary says, still scowling out at the desert.

  “You’re wrong,” Bill says.

  Hillary looks at Hatcher. “It’s not about smart. It’s not about articulate. You look at your working masses, the ones who really decide, and those qualities are actually disadvantages. He won because of the cheeseburger. Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger. He famously ate cheeseburgers. He ate fucking cheeseburgers for them all. He ate cheeseburgers and they believed in him.”

  Bill says, “It’s not that which goeth into the mouth empowereth a man but that which cometh out. It was me. My words. Me.”

  “All those cows died for you,” Hillary says.

  Hatcher gently pulls Bill’s hand off his arm and he moves away. At the door, he hesitates. But he pushes through into the lobby, and up ahead he sees the hurried veering of people around low-to-the-floor activity lit brightly in the center of the atrium, activity he does not recognize at first glance from this distance. There is no rubbernecking in Hell. Suffering splashes over, spills out, spreads immediate contagion, and everyone knows just to look the other way and move quickly on. But Hatcher hurries quickly toward the pain, for he begins to see what it is.

  It is Henry lying massively on his back, his pants off, his legs bare. Anne is crouched beside him, on the far side. She is stripped down to a handkerchief-linen teddy. But in spite of Hatcher’s impulse to expect the worst in this realm, it is instantly clear to him that what’s happening here is not about sex. He draws near and can see that Henry’s massive legs are haphazardly swathed in strips torn from Anne’s tea dress. She is quickly, quakingly wrapping the last bit of it around Henry’s right calf. The pieces of the dress are going dark from a profuse flow of fluid.

  Hatcher stops before the two of them. He can see between the bandages that Henry’s legs are a patchwork of ulcerous sores pumping out a thick, striated mixture of blood and pus. Anne is panting and moaning and wrapping, and her hands are smeared with Henry’s fluids and she can’t keep up, this last bit of her dress is in place and his suppuration goes on and on and she cries out and she lifts upright on her knees and she strips off the teddy and she is naked, utterly naked, and she begins tearing at the linen, pulling it into strips and bending down to Henry again and wrapping his legs.

  And Henry’s head is to the side, and his eyes are closed, and he is singing, softly but clearly, the song he wrote as a young man, the one Anne thought she heard a few nights ago outside the window. “Pastime with good company, I . . .” and he hums across the word no one can think of in Hell and he sings on “. . . and shall until I die. Company is good and ill, but every man has his free will.”

  And Anne is moaning, fumbling with the cloth, unable to go on. Hatcher hesitates. But now he circles Henry’s legs to the other side and goes down on his knees next to Anne. He bends to her ear. “You’ll never keep up,” he says, gently. “It’s Hell, my darling. You’ve done what you can.”

  She looks at Hatcher, her eyes wide, restless, uncomprehending. Her hands are trembling furiously, full of the strips of her teddy. Hatcher takes the end of one of the strips and pulls at it. Her hand is clenched tight, and he tugs the cloth firmly and she lets it go. He turns to Henry and finds a patch of his ulcerous flesh, oozing profusely, on the side of his calf. Hatcher lifts the leg and the pus flows over his hands and he lays the strip of cloth on Henry’s leg and he wraps it around and half around once more and that’s as far as it goes, and he eases the leg back down, and Henry sings “Pastime with good company I . . . sway . . . I swoon . . . I swisser my swatter . . .” and Hatcher turns to Anne, who is staring at him, steadily. When his eyes meet hers, she glances at Henry’s legs and back to him. He takes the end of another strip of cloth and pulls gently at it. Anne holds on tight. “I caused this,” she says.

  “No you didn’t,” Hatcher says.

  “Not in life. Now, I mean,” she says and her voice is steady.

  “It’s what we all do,” he says.

  “He cut off my head,” she says.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Let’s go,” she says.

  Hatcher’s chest pumps up instantly full at this and lifts him and he cups her elbow and they stand up together. He strips off his suit coat and puts it around her shoulders, pulling the coat to, buttoning the buttons so it will cover her loins, and she bends into him and they move around Henry, and before they are halfway across the lobby floor, all of Henry’s bodily fluids have lifted away from them and flown back to the former king.

  At the Cadillac, Hatcher opens the back door and
sees the camcorder lying in the shadows. The pretext that got him here was to do an interview with Henry, and he utterly forgot. With a mind free to think and plan for itself, he realizes this absorption with his own agenda is a grave danger. He reaches in and takes the camera, and he turns to Anne. “I still have this to do,” he says. “I’ll have Dick take you home.”

  She nods.

  He guides her into the backseat and tucks his suit coat around her.

  “Can you do this alone?” he says.

  “Yes,” she says. “Thank you.”

  He moves to the driver window. Inside, Dick Nixon has fallen asleep, his head sharply angled to the side, as if his neck is broken. Hatcher raps at the window. Nixon snaps upright, and he rolls down the window. “I am not a crook,” he says.

  “Mr. President. Are you awake?”

  “I am not asleep,” he says.

  But Hatcher isn’t sure. He waits a few moments while Nixon blinks and looks around and then back to Hatcher.

  “Are you ready to go?” Nixon says, clearly focusing now.

  Hatcher says, “Take Anne back to the apartment and return here for me.”

  Nixon nods and rolls up his window and the motor instantly revs to life and the tires dig wildly and the Cadillac shoots off, leaving Hatcher standing in a cloud of desert dust.