Hell

by Robert Olen Butler

  He’s glad Nixon will hurry. He doesn’t look forward to lingering here.

  Hatcher turns and goes up onto the veranda and through the doors. Ahead in the foyer, Henry is still on the floor. Hatcher approaches. Sir Francis is holding Henry’s pants and waiting for the king to stand up. But Henry sits, fully reconstituted but unable or unmotivated to rise. This interview doesn’t have to be good. Hatcher just has to have something for the record. He crouches before Henry and looks at the former king through the viewfinder. Henry seems not quite aware of where he is. But Hatcher thinks his state might actually be a good thing for this feature. He starts the camera.

  “Sire, I’m here at the request of Beelzebub himself and for the sake of Our Supreme Ruler’s own TV station. I have one question to ask you, and you can talk for as long as you wish. Why do you think you’re here?”

  In spite of what he has just gone through and his post-reconstitution daze, Henry begins speaking at once. That and the seeming indirection of Henry’s words make Hatcher think that he really hasn’t heard the question, “O meats, my abundant meats, I miss your pleasures deeply in this afterlife, where once, in life, I had faith to believe I would have you yet again, my lamb and ox, my rabbit and deer, my partridge and peacock and pig, my hedgehog and heron and swan, my bustard and black-bird and hart, all of you and more. Those of you who ran free, I hoped to hunt you down, to set a pack of hounds of Heaven or Hell, whichever was my fate, upon a great rangale of red deer, or by my own hand with longbow or crossbow to pierce the heart of a wild boar, and then to sit at table and tear your sweet flesh with my hands and eat. I am ravenous yet for my meats, but I know now that every arrow shot, every dog unleashed, every hawk set forth, every side pierced and throat cut and belly sliced open, I should have done them all in the name of God, I should have made each a sacrifice to the God who was hungrier even than I, and if I had done so, perhaps I would be eating meat now in Heaven instead of starving in this meatless Hell.”

  Henry looks straight into the camera and wipes the back of his hand heavily across his mouth. He heard the question. And Hatcher thinks of cheeseburgers, of Bill Clinton winning his presidency by eating cheeseburgers, and how sad a figure he is in Hell without them.

  Hatcher finds a far corner of the veranda and puts his back to everyone, wanting to be alone now, making his mind go blank, feeling he knows very little about himself, really, and not expecting to learn much from the one wife left to see. But he will try. He will try. He does not have long to wait before he hears the rush of the Fleetwood and the grinding of its brakes. He goes to the car and gives Dick Nixon Naomi’s address.

  Naomi Jean Delancey—later Naomi Jean Rutherford, the not-yet-forty trophy widow of a didn’t-quite-get-to-seventy shipping magnate, and then, three years later, the third and final wife of network anchorman Hatcher McCord—lives in a warren of alleyways next to the Central Power Station, the narrow passages twisting and always dark from the shadow of the buildings and from the vast, lolloping, pitch-black plumes of power station smoke, the natural color of Naomi’s hair in her prime. Hatcher moves along a shabby-carpeted inner corridor redolent of piss, its darkness broken only by three widely spaced bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling on fraying cords. As he passes, doors open and women peek out, haggard faces with hair disarranged, but disarranged, Hatcher realizes, from former haute coiffure. He knows this neighborhood. This is the Central Park West of Hell. High society. Naomi adored her Chanel and Dolce&Gabbana and also her Lagerfeld and Westwood and Mugler. She adored the Dakota. She adored Hatcher, mostly, though he came to feel that was largely for the opportunity he gave her to radiate at parties, in her couture, in the presence of Hatcher’s most important news subjects, presidents and ambassadors and movies stars and kings.

  He is at her door now. He hesitates. Can she shed any light on his sins? She was no trophy at all to him—he knew she was smart—and she knew he knew it and she clearly appreciated that, but she finally did leave him a couple of years before he died and it wasn’t for another man, but for the death of him he can’t remember why, exactly. They ran down, she didn’t like his cigars, she was too smart, finally, to stay interested in primarily glittering in her clothes. Something. They both had affairs—that may have been it, but it was quietly mutual, and surely that was a symptom, not a cause. She was dating a U.S. Senator when Hatcher’s heart stopped, and he wonders if she came to the funeral—he wonders if any of his wives came to his funeral.

  He knocks on the door. There is no answer, but he thinks he hears sounds inside, a vague scuffling. He knocks again. He can hear nothing now. Nevertheless—perhaps this comes with a free mind in Hell—he senses her just on the other side of the door. He could be wrong. He knocks again.

  “Naomi?” he says.

  Naomi is, indeed, on the other side of the door, terrified, always, about being in Hell, particularly because she is wearing a polka-dot pink summer dress with an elastic waist that would have cost twenty-five bucks out of the Sears catalog in the year she married the anchorman, and she has not been able to take this dress off for many risings and settings of the sun and the pink has turned mostly gray now from the grit which settles through the ceiling and walls from the power station. At the sound of Hatcher’s voice, which she recognizes at once, she lays her forehead quietly against the door: Not like this. I am not who I am, wearing this. I am not who I am in the company of the person who has just now slipped into the bedroom. But in this dress, in this society, I am this other. And I was another I, once. I chose myself and dressed me in myself and I was I. Though I had to make do at times. My sweet young self, debuting in the Continental Ballroom in the Peabody Hotel in Memphis in a white satin gown that Mama and her Memphis-Main-Street tailor and I figured out, and it had a strapless bodice and a ruched midriff and lace appliques, and I put the me of that dress on and I melted perfectly into the floor in a full court bow before the society of my mama’s boozy peroxide-bleached friends and the U of M’s boozy sun-bleached Sigma Chis and the Citadel boys in their uniforms and buzz cuts, and it wasn’t until later that I realized how not-me I was, though in a way that was me at nineteen, I suppose, but I was more me later, much more, I was me in a power-black Thierry Mugler with wide shoulders and collar points and flame cutouts and a waist corseted down to breathlessness, to breathless dominating otherness, and I was in the society of the people who ran the world. The world. The world that came and went. And now I am I in another world. I am forever a cheap cotton dress the color of Pepto-Bismol.

  Hatcher knocks again. “Naomi? It’s Hatcher,” he says.

  “I’m not here,” she says.

  “Then let me in and I’ll wait for you,” he says.

  “I don’t expect to show up ever again,” she says.

  “Is there someone else I can talk to?”

  “You don’t want to.”

  “I do.”

  “Believe me, you don’t.”

  “It’s your worst about me I’m looking to hear,” he says.

  “It’s worse than that,” she says.

  “I don’t care,” he says. There is a long pause. “It’s Hell,” he says, trying to put the shrug that just went through his upper body into his voice.

  He feels exhausted. He leans his head against the door. Though he sensed her here even before she spoke, he does not sense that his right temple is lying against the exact spot on the door where, inside, the center of Naomi’s forehead, just below the hairline, is touching.

  They both stand there like that in silence for a time. Finally, he says once more, softly, “Naomi?”

  And she opens the door.

  He sees her dingy polka dots and knows how she is suffering.

  She sees his powder-blue tie, and her hands claw at the bodice of her Sears dress, bunching the cloth, pulling it toward her throat. “So,” she says. “You’re still traveling in the right circles.”

  This time she can see his shrug.

  They don’t move. She is blocking the door
way with her body.

  “May I?” he says.

  She looks around her, a little uncomprehending. She turns her body to the side.

  He steps in. She closes the door.

  There are a few pieces of tattered Goodwill-bargain-back-room furniture and there are a thousand roaches crowding along the baseboards like the people in the streets. As soon as Hatcher sees them, they all stop, rise up on their back feet, and look in his direction. He knows how they must torture Naomi. He lifts his tie at them. The whole throng of roaches sings out in unison, “Cheese it! The cops!” and they instantly flow into the join of the baseboard at the floor and vanish.

  Naomi has watched this and turns her face to him. Her eyes—still darkly beautiful in spite of the age lines—are wide with surprise.

  “The right circles,” Hatcher says.

  “Thank you,” Naomi says.

  She closes the door, and the two stand awkwardly where they are.

  “Can we talk for a few minutes?” Hatcher says, looking toward the little setting of spring-sprung and stained metallic tweed sectionals. He misses Naomi’s eyes sliding away to the bedroom door and then back again.

  “Okay, Hatcher,” she says, and he doesn’t catch how she says his name just loudly enough to be heard in the other room. “You can stay for a few minutes.”

  They sit at right angles on a two-piece sectional sofa, with a matching chair at the other angle. Naomi has her arms crossed over her chest, covering as much of her dress as possible, her hands laid on her throat as if she were about to choke herself.

  Hatcher is trying to shape the question in his head and wondering if he should begin with an apology. The apology set Mary Ellen off from the beginning, though he learned some things along the way.

  But before he can speak, Naomi says, “You freaked me out today.”

  Hatcher’s mind starts to sputter. He feared this with Mary Ellen and at least that bit turned out okay. But Deborah saw the news broadcast.

  “How . . . ?” she says, and then she hesitates, searching for a way to finish the question. Her hands descend from her throat and squeeze at the polka dot dress. And some other part of her finishes the question in a way her conscious mind, which she has been consulting, cannot. “How can you be you in just your skin?” she says.

  Neither of them knows what to say next.

  And then Hatcher’s mother bursts in from the bedroom. “You freaked me out too!” she cries, based on no consultation at all with her conscious mind. “What a pathetic dick. Dangling there like that. Your father’s was so much more interesting. How could I ever have thought you perfect?”

  His mother is standing straddle-legged before him now in her terry cloth robe, her arms akimbo, her storm-cloud gray eyes looming before him, and Hatcher has lifted his feet onto the seat cushion and is crawling his butt up the back of the sectional couch and wishing the sulfur rain was pouring down outside so he could escape into it.

  His mother cries, “I haven’t seen that part of you since your were a little boy in the bathtub. But what a wretched disappointment. Of course, I should have known. You’re in Hell. I’m here too, and it’s all your fault. You were supposed to be perfect. I thought you were. Because I knew I was. You were a reflection of me. But you weren’t perfect after all, and so you turned this into my destiny as well. And it was probably because of your miserable dick. You could never be worthy of this.”

  Hatcher has reached the top of the sectional and as his mother grabs each side of her robe and begins to rip it open, he falls backward off the couch. He quickly rights himself and stays low, scrambling along the floor on hands and knees, making straight for the door. Down here he sees he’s being observed from along the baseboard by a row of cockroaches shaking their heads in disgust.

  “Come here,” his mother is calling. “Face facts.”

  And he’s up on his feet and wrenching the door open and careening down the dim hallway. And not for a moment does he think this was planned by Satan. Even the Prince of Darkness isn’t wickedly smart enough to have invented this torture for him. He could only have done this to himself.

  When Hatcher bursts from the downstairs door of Naomi’s tenement, the alley is black with night. He pulls up sharply. When did this happen? There was no sudden silence, no trembling city, no solar boom of sundown. For night to have come when he was windowless and deeply distracted and he missed its coming, that should be closer to the expectations he brought with him from life, should provide a little bit of wistful relief, but in fact this sneaky night he has rushed into scares the shit out of him. He gropes along, bumping into passing bodies, seeing very little, just a dull red glow at a distant turning of the alley, and a heavy shoulder thumps against him and Hatcher says “Sorry,” and he does not remember ever saying that before in the jostling crowds in Hell. He’s been saying it a great deal lately, he realizes, but to the women from his life. Except to his mother. Not to his mother. He shivers now and he rushes faster away from the tenement, and a bump and sorry and another bump and sorry again, and he turns at the red glow and there’s another red glow at another turning ahead, and for all the sorrying he has sorried since he knew he had a free mind, he has done nothing, he’s afraid, to earn his way out of Hell, if such a thing is even possible, and Mary Ellen’s voice trails through him you’d be perfectly happy if you were the only person in the world and maybe his sin was as simple and as basic as that, maybe taking that one step back to report on the people of the world was the same as not being among them, he was in a separate universe, one that was superior in its separateness, and he was happy being alone there, and you were supposed to take women to you and so he slept with them and he married them, and you were supposed to make children and he did, but maybe all that was simply to avoid facing the truth about himself, maybe he went through the motions of connection—fucking and marrying and fathering—so he could live with his precious aloneness and not feel damned. But he was damned. He was damned indeed. And maybe it’s why we’re all of us damned, he thinks. Maybe a mother can join herself to an image of a son until she can’t, and a man can join with a woman till he can’t, and the can’t part of it means it’s not doing the mother or the husband any good anymore, for herself, for himself, for his arrogantly self-absorbed self, you just want to get away from the other and you’ll stop at nothing till you do. And with all this thinking, he finally thinks none of it sounds right, none of it, and he thinks maybe the thinking itself is the problem, your mind is free but it’s free all to itself, you’re never more alone than in your mind. Only in our bodies are we together. Maybe it’s all about the thereness, there’s nothing more there than every moment lived in these tortured bodies in Hell, and there was nothing more there than the life we led in these bodies on earth. And the problem was, we tried to think it out when we should have just held on to each other, and if we held on, all the pain and all the pleasure was the same, it was all one complex thing that was okay, that was really okay, but it was okay only if you took all of life in through your senses and stayed in the moment, holding on. But even as he thinks this now, even as he thinks of the alternatives to thinking because he thinks the problem is thinking, it feels untrue in just the same way again. And he thinks: Fuck me. And he thinks: Fuck you. Fuck us all. And he is at the corner and the glow isn’t there anymore and he turns and far ahead is another turning and the glow is there, the red glow from the power station in the center of the Great Metropolis in Hell, and he thumps into a dark figure, a man’s chest as hard as the boulders in the mountains, and Hatcher says “Sorry” and he puts his hands out and grabs the figure at the arms, as if he’s afraid he’ll knock him down, when in fact it’s Hatcher who reels, whose air thumps out of him, and he gasps another sorry and he means it, and he veers away, veers away and moves on.

  And behind Hatcher, the hard-chested man stands where he has stopped. He realizes it was Hatcher McCord, anchorman for the Evening News from Hell, he has just bumped into. But that is of no consequence to him
. He pauses for his own leisurely purpose. He reaches into the inside pocket of his tweed sport coat with suede elbow patches, and he pulls out a pack of Luckies. He pops one up, puts it into his mouth, and snaps his fingers. A flame licks up from the tip of his thumb, and he lights his cigarette, his face briefly illuminated, still the faintly jowly face of an overreaching politician who could only manage three percent in the Iowa caucus. Satan waves the flame away from his thumb and blows a careful series of smoke rings, invisible in the dark. And he looks around him, seeing everything: I move unseen among you, my children, and I can smell you as you stumble along in the dark. You stink of your humanity, and it is very good, for so very many of you are perfect: you despise yourselves, and yet at the same time you are full of self-righteousness. And you do not recognize your own shape-shifting sanctimony. You do not understand it is the life force of your anger and your hatred and your violence and your aloofness and your indifference and your pride and your intolerance. And the ones among you who seem not to be perfectly mine, who are wise enough to know that self-righteousness is my life’s breath inside you all, you roil with anger at my perfect ones, you hate them, and you take comfort in your superiority to them, and so, in your wisdom, you become perfect as well. You all have my sweet stink about you. In your own unique ways you are all perfect, my darlings.

  Satan takes a last drag on his Lucky Strike. He blows the smoke out his nose and his ears, and he flips the butt, its glowing red end tumbling through the dark.

  After Hatcher finds his way to the Fleetwood and then to his apartment, the night is thick upon the Great Metropolis, and in the back alleys of Hatcher’s neighborhood, the weepings and thrashings are muted behind closed doors. Even the Hoppers’ door is shut and the snarking is soft, and he opens his own door to a dark apartment. He steps in but does not speak. He feels his heart begin to pound in his throat. He should have come straight home with Anne after she broke away from Henry. Fuck the interview. Fuck his cover story for Beelzefuckingbub. At least he should have rushed here after filming Henry, instead of tracking down still another wife. His wives are dead to him. Anne is the woman he wishes to be part of. And he staggers at the thought. What’s the angle in that for his alleged self-absorption? Though it’s impossible to be alone while in Hell, he is free to acknowledge the desire to be. And yet.