Hell (25 page)

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.

“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.