Hell
Page 24
The broad, flat, dark green blades of Saint Augustine grass. He kneels down and puts his palms on the ground and it is soft and it yields and the smell of the soil and the real grass well up into him, and he stretches out forward and presses his chest and the side of his face into this living ground. He lies there for a long moment and then slowly rises, and he does not brush himself off but picks up his bag and his cup, and he continues along the curving path up the rise. And at the top is a chair. A familiar chair.
A low-slung Toshiyuki Kita recliner, the “Wink,” exactly the same as his reading chair after becoming the anchor of the Evening News from Hell, the first thing he bought strictly for himself in his Dakota apartment. He shared that apartment with someone. Someone who wasn’t crazy about this chair, but he was, and he bought it. It makes no difference who didn’t like it. He approaches the chair slowly, and he touches the twin yellow headrests, which always felt to him like his own two hands clasped comfortably behind his head, and he crouches down and eases onto the chair, settling into the broad sitting groove of its purple body. And he looks out at a wide azure pond in the center of the park, and beyond is a dense stand of water oak, and beyond the trees is a stacking of high-rise buildings, a cityscape of glass, with the sunlight reflecting there, but softly, and one skyscraper rises high above it all, its lean dusky brown facade a stacking of vertical piers going up to a gilded pyramid of open latticed girders that seem stuffed with the baby blue sky.
Hatcher eats his Big Mac. Pittsfield Kobe. He drinks his Starbucks latte. The caffeine rushes in him and he lets the foam evaporate on his lips. And when he finishes eating and drinking, he rubs the heels of his hands on the arms of the chair. And his thumb thinks to look for something, a little rub spot on the right arm. And he finds it. This is his chair. His. And he knows he is in Heaven.
And he has still seen no one else. He lifts his head a little. He looks off to the trees on the right. He looks off to the trees on the left. He looks at the pond, and he scans the far tree line. There is no one. And there is silence. Which is all right. He feels his body letting go. He lays his head back into the two soft hands of the chair. And he sleeps.
He wakes to stars. The night has come, and it is cool, and the air is full of the smell of Confederate jasmine. The tall buildings beyond the trees are dark, but the pyramid atop the skyscraper is lit brightly in gold. It floats in the sky before him like a fiery crown. Hatcher rises from his chair, and he walks back down the path, and there are bright lights all along this thoroughfare. He has always felt most comfortable in big cities. He steps in at Starbucks, and his evening latte is waiting on the table.
He goes back outside, and he stands in the center of the street, and he feels luxuriously slow inside. He sips his coffee. He takes his time. His coffee stays hot to the last drop, but not so hot that he can’t sip it as deeply as he wants, which he does, even at the very last, filling his mouth full and holding it warmly there and then letting it slide down. And all the while, he watches the bright golden crown floating above this Great Metropolis of Heaven.
And when he is finished with his coffee, he knows simply to open his hand, and he does, and the empty cup drifts off. And with a bit of a shock he realizes, as he stands there, that nothing hurts. There is not a single part of his body that isn’t feeling sweetly fine. And still he can’t take his eyes off the Great Skyscraper of Heaven. And suddenly the building below the pyramid, merely implied till now in the darkness, begins to come alive with light. The windows. The thousands of windows before him begin to flare into golden brightness. Quickly, in no discernible pattern, high and low and middle, left to right and right to left, the windows burst into light like the explosion of a Fourth of July rocket. It’s all for him, he feels. He begins to walk toward the building. And part of him is thinking: That’s where everyone is.
Hatcher passes through a street of restaurants and he sees all his favorite cuisines. Indian and Italian, Afghan and Vietnamese, even Eritrean. All the restaurants are brightly lit, all of them are empty of people, and each of them, he suspects, has his favorite dishes waiting in the center of a table. He passes through a street of clothing retailers. All lit. All empty. And then he enters a residential street of ornate, rusticated limestone urban mansions in Renaissance and Classical revivals, and he laughs at himself for thinking of these as architectural revivals. Everything’s a revival in Heaven. It’s a bland and esoteric little wisecrack he has made to himself but he laughs out loud. He can laugh now, even at bland and esoteric wisecracks. And his voice echoes in the street. He stops, struck once again by the silence. The houses are all dark. But they are suddenly less dark. Not from within but from without. They are beginning to lighten before his eyes. From the darkness, balustrades and friezes and Corinthian columns and Ionic columns and parapets and French doors are emerging. Softly, quickly, quietly, night is turning into day.
And he walks on, and soon, in the full light of morning, he is standing at a broad, maple-lined setback before the Great Skyscraper. Red maples. The building is vast above him, pulling his chest upward as he lifts his face to look. And then he walks beneath the maples. These are the trees of his time in Evanston, the trees that watched him holding . . . someone . . . in his arms. He can’t think who. He is under the maples. He is feeling peaceful. He approaches a high granite archway, and he pushes through the doors and crosses a marble lobby, his footsteps echoing all around him. And again, there are no people. He had the thought they might be here. Perhaps they still are, up above.
Hatcher enters an elevator. He has fifty-five floors to choose from. He starts with a middle one. He pushes 27 and the elevator fills with sound—the music of Brian Eno—the muted trickle of electronic sighs and cries and drippings. Music that once enchanted Hatcher. Music he played often. Music that drove someone crazy, he thinks, though he can’t think who. He can’t even think of some choices of who. He doesn’t feel the elevator moving, but the lights for the floors are flashing quickly upward. And then 27. The doors open. He steps onto plush carpeting. A broad window to the left looks out on the city. That interests him, but he’s more interested in this nagging thought that there are other souls quietly waiting somewhere. Or is it a hope? Thought, he thinks. Just a thought. He heads the other way and moves around a large desk in front of a wide reception wall that has no company name. Nothing.
He heads down a corridor of offices, the doors all standing open, the windows inside showing the tops of other buildings, the offices flashing by looking identical. Mid-corridor he stops at one. He stands in the doorway. It has a desk and a high-backed leather chair and a computer, with its screen dark. It has in-and-out trays with nothing going in or out and an empty pen holder on the desktop and a potted ficus standing in a corner. But there is not one personal item. And it’s the same in all the other offices, he’s certain. There is no sign of any other soul. He wants to look out at the Great Metropolis of Heaven, and he thinks to step to this window now, but he doesn’t. The absence of any apparent human touch pushes him away.
He turns and strides back along the corridor and past the reception desk and out the door and along to the elevator. He pushes the UP button and the elevator he arrived in opens up instantly. He steps in. He pushes 55.
And floor 55 turns out to be entirely unpartitioned and unfurnished, one vast carpeted space with wide, tall windows, and Heaven to its horizon is out there waiting for him. He crosses the floor, heading for the center of the far wall where he can see the bright concentration of morning light. East, he presumes.
Hatcher arrives at the window and draws close, his breath showing up faintly there, and he looks out: the sun is still low, where it’s rising, and he can see a horizon, at least a place where sight ends, and it seems lushly green at that far point. Hatcher stares directly at the sun—a liquid golden orb that appears more luminous than thermonuclear—and its light touches his eyes like a soft breeze. Hatcher looks sharply downward, and nearby is a clustering of lower high-rises, their roofs pris
tine and their glass facades crystalline, and farther out is a broad park, dense with trees—a park different from the one with his recliner, this being the opposite side of the city—and beyond the park is another neighborhood of freestanding mansions, from this height mostly dormers and pitched roofs and parapets and stacked chimney caps and turrets. And lifting his eyes beyond the mansions, Hatcher finds an abrupt end of the city. A rolling green landscape that he does not take in at once.
Instead, he looks back down on his new Great Metropolis. Something clearly noticeable is there but it waits, still, to claim his attention. Slicing through all that he is seeing of the city is a web of broad, immaculate thoroughfares, laid out straight and true, and he has been taking them in, these streets, as he notices the neighborhoods, but now he sags forward against the window with a realization. He presses his face there and lays his palms against the glass as he understands that the streets are utterly empty. He has seen this in one way or another over and over since he’s arrived, but only now has it finally accumulated into a deep and overwhelming and unmitigated conviction. This building is empty. All the buildings are empty. All the shops. All the houses. All the streets. Heaven is you, alone. I am alone.
Can this be? he asks inside his head. It is not a rhetorical question for himself. He is speaking to God, a thing he has not done in a long time. There is no answer. Not even in Heaven. It was not long ago that he skidded to this conclusion. No one is listening. No one. Alone, indeed. But there’s coffee and cheeseburgers and good weather and a good chair. Heaven. Somebody would assume he’s a happy man now. Somebody. He tries to remember who said something like that. Said he’s happier alone. Something. Someone. He doesn’t know who. He even feels himself losing hold of the notion that anyone at all said anything like that. He tracks the empty boulevards with his eyes now. He looks up and down and up and down. He searches every one of them. Someone else should be here. But he can’t remember any faces to imagine down there. He’s even losing an image of crowded streets of any kind. He gasps. He knocks his head against the glass. Hard. And again, harder. It doesn’t hurt at all.
And now he lifts his eyes beyond the city. That rolling countryside. There’s something about it. But it’s distant and he can’t see. And as soon as he thinks this, he realizes that there is an object standing next to him. He turns. A telescope. He steps behind and puts his eye to the viewer, and the instrument is already focused exactly where he wishes to look. And he sees a rolling countryside with trees and a farmhouse and barns and a cornfield, and far ahead, a little village with a church steeple and a school and a neighborhood of white houses and the sun high in the sky and, most importantly, there is a truck, a bright blue panel truck with big round fenders and it is on the road through the countryside and it is heading for the little village and on the side of the truck is the word BREAD. It is exactly the scene from his book, from his favorite book when he was little Hatchy, little little Hatchy, somebody’s perfect little nookykins. Somebody.
Hatcher rears back from the telescope and deep in his throat he makes a guttural grinding whatthefuckisgoingon sound, probably not heard before in Heaven. But no one is listening anyway. He puts his eye to the viewer once more. The truck. When he was a little boy reading this book over and over in the window seat in his room with the sun falling on the pages and when he was taking delight in that truck, he thought someone was driving it. Who? He can’t recall. It was part of the delight, once upon a time. For someone in particular to be driving. He looks at the truck. The truck is moving but it doesn’t seem to be any farther along on the road. It is moving when he looks at it, but when he compares it to the landscape, it is opposite the near edge of the cornfield. Which is where it was a moment ago. Okay. Okay.
Hatcher backs away from the window. He turns and he jogs across the wide floor and out into the hallway and he punches the elevator call button and the doors open and he gets in and he heads for the lobby, thinking somehow this place will grant his present wish.
And it does. In the form of a 2006 fire-engine red Maserati Spyder, Hatcher’s last car, sitting at the curb outside the skyscraper. Hatcher gets in, puts the top down, and starts the engine, revving the Hell out of it and thrilling to the red-line roar going up his accelerator leg and into his crotch. And he rips into gear and takes off, peeling down the street along the setback and fishtailing a right turn and screaming past the high-rises and through the park, and then the Italian Renaissance mansions and the Chateauesque mansions and the Beaux Arts mansions all vanish in a blur as he Maseratis through the empty streets of this city without stoplights, and he is into the countryside and he’s leaping the sweet little green hills and racing past the farmhouse and the barns, and the cornfield is up ahead and so is the blue truck, and Hatcher downshifts and he comes up fast on the back of the truck and he shifts down again and he brakes, and they are doing twenty, he in his Maserati and the bread truck.
The road is narrow. Too narrow to pass. And so they drive like this for a while and the cornfield does at last go by but then another cornfield begins and when that one is gone, there is another, and he can go on like this for as long as he wants, he realizes, following the blue bread truck through the perfect countryside. Hatcher can smell the bread for a moment. He has a warm lolling in his limbs. Now the air smells of fresh cut grass. He feels as if he’s sitting in his recliner on the top of the rise. Even the Maserati has stopped complaining about second gear.
Hatcher wonders: why am I doing this? Why did I race out here to catch the blue truck? It’s okay. It’s pleasant, following the truck. It’s very pleasant. And what’s that new smell? Teaberry gum. It smells like Teaberry gum out here. Whatever happened to Teaberry gum? And he knows if he opens the glove box, he will find packs of Teaberry gum. His head is so sweetly mellow he can hardly think. But some little unadjusted something in him cries out, in a wee tremulous voice: what the fuck?
He pounds his head against the steering wheel. No pain but he jars a little something loose: the driver of the bread truck. It’s about the driver. And Hatcher lays on the horn. He honks it loud and hard and he stops his car and he wants the truck to stop, and it’s Heaven, so he gets what he wants. The truck stops.
Hatcher gets out of his car and closes the door with a tight little thunk, and this sound thrills him as it always did. But he fights off the invitation to mellow out about that. He is standing in the middle of his childhood landscape. The car is ticking as loudly as his Krazy Kat clock with its big black eyes restlessly darting back and forth. And he knows what’s happening. He’s forgetting the ones in Hell. In Heaven, there’s no place for the memories of the damned. They have been judged. They have been placed where they belong in their own torment. The sharp shards of them that still stick in you are things that need to be plucked out. They would only fester. They are the sins of the world. They are the pain and the suffering and the imperfections and they are fading away, happily so, happily happily happily. Hatcher is forgetting everyone.
But not yet. He moves forward, heading for the cab of the truck. He passes before the BREAD and the smell of it fills him up so achingly full that he has to stop, he cannot move his legs, he is chewing the air, it is so thick with the smell of the bread, and he knows he can stand here for as long as he wants, he has eternity, he can linger for centuries chewing the smell of bread in the air and it will be as the blinking of an eye and it will only be Hatcher and the bread and the gentle sunlight. And that little voice again: fuck this, who’s driving? And Hatcher’s legs are moving again and he approaches the cab and he is panting, he is this far into Heaven and he is summoning up anxiety and he knows he needs it, he knows that when he fully lets go of the fear and the trembling and the pain, he will lose everyone forever, and his little Heaven voice pipes up that’s good, that’s good, you’re perfected at last and you are pleasing to the one who created you and that’s all you need but he stops by the panel truck door and his heart is pounding and that’s also good, that’s better for now.
And his father is sitting there. The old man’s hands are clenching the steering wheel hard and he is dressed in a brown uniform with a hat on his head like a police patrolman’s hat and his face turns to Hatcher and the hat has BREAD written across it and Hatcher’s father says, “You crazy motherfucker what the fuck do you think you’re doing chasing me down and honking your fucking horn you motherfucker I have half a mind to jump out of this truck and kick your fucking ass.”
And Hatcher says, “It’s me, Dad. It’s just me.”
And the old man’s eyes narrow. He can’t quite focus his eyes. “Hatcher?” he says.
“Yes.”
“Where have you been?” his father says. “You’re all grown up.” But there are flames licking up from his father’s shirt collar now, and the face is dissolving, it’s vanishing in the flames, and it is gone, his father has gone back to Hell, and the bread man’s uniform crumples into the seat.