Hell (3 page)

And with this, Anne finds she can pick up her head, which she does, and she sets it upon her neck. Hatcher is happy for this. He knows how things work. Looking into Anne’s eyes he had a feeling that one might consider tender or pleasurable, but there is always a dreadful mitigation. He was filled with desire for her, but that desire, after all—he is acutely aware—was while her severed head was sitting on a tabletop. Now she is restored. She closes her eyes and lifts her chin and swivels her head, first to the right and then slowly swinging back to the left. This is a graceful movement, and he is glad to be in this kitchen, and he is glad she sits before him, but now that she is whole, the rush of his desire for her subsides. He feels it sliding away, and he stifles a curse at Satan so that he might avoid worse, though surely Satan also recognizes the thing being stifled, and surely Satan doesn’t have a policy of withholding suffering just because you can suppress your inner criticism of him. He can’t give a rat’s ass about that, surely.

Hatcher crosses to the table, and he draws the other chair near to Anne, and he sits beside her. She is still swiveling her head back and forth. There is a scurrying behind him, the roaches gathering to listen to the conversation. This is a curious thing. The place is full of roaches, but Anne is oblivious to them, given the century of her upbringing. And as a boy, and even later as a man, he himself never had a serious aversion to the other creatures living around him, no matter how traditionally despised. He once appalled Naomi in their apartment at the Dakota by gently gathering up a large, sluggish, confused, dumb-shit roach from the bathtub with a paper towel and carrying it to the window and setting it free.

He looks over his shoulder now. The countertop beside the sink is full of roaches, a thousand roaches, all of them sitting up on their back legs like begging pups, their heads cocked. Hatcher puts on his best
Evening News from Hell
voice. “Good evening,” he says to the roaches. “Tonight, a kitchen table conversation and then one more futile attempt at satisfying sex.”

And in a chorus of tiny, brittle voices, the roaches cry, “Poopy butt.”

Then they laugh.

Hatcher turns to Anne. She is still swiveling her restored head, humming a bit of a pavane from her youth, hearing lutes and tambourines. He touches her hand just as, in Anne’s mind, the courtyard of the Low Countries palace of Princess Margaret, filled with dancing figures and music, dissolves in screaming as a baited bear breaks its chains and charges in, ripping flesh and spattering blood with the wide swiping of its claws. Anne screams.

Hatcher clutches at Anne’s thrashing hand. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s only me. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“The bear,” Anne says.

“It’s all right,” Hatcher says.

“No it’s not,” the roaches cry.

Anne looks in their direction. “They’re right,” she says, though calmly now.

“We’re right,” they cry.

“It’s all the same here,” she says, “whether the horror is in my mind or on the countertop.”

“We’re not horrible,” the roaches cry.

Hatcher turns on them. “No you’re not. You’re pathetic. So shut the fuck up.”

Each cockroach eye has two thousand lenses, and now, as one, four million lenses widen in shocked hurt feelings on the countertop, and all the roaches begin to weep, boohooing loudly. And yes, at this, Hatcher is filled with an acute regret. The roaches slump down from their puppy-begging pose and, weeping ostentatiously still, they all pour off the countertop and into the dark joins of the sink and cabinets and the cracks in the wall, and in a few moments they are gone.

The kitchen rings with the sudden silence. Hatcher is slump-shouldered with guilt, and the gravity pull grows even heavier as disgust with himself sets in for feeling guilty about hurting the feelings of a chitinous chitter of roaches. Satan’s own roaches, yet. And then he realizes the silence is much larger than the kitchen. Outside, there is silence now as well. It’s happening.

Hatcher jumps up and crosses to the door and through to the outside corridor. All down the way, denizens are emerging from their apartments in the dimness of the long twilight. Like them, Hatcher leans out over the iron railing and turns to the street end of the alley, where the passing crowd has also stopped and is turning to look. The sun is not visible to Hatcher from where he stands. But he does see the sky beyond the distant mountains, unchanged still in its twilight pallor. And now the railing, the corridor, the building, the alley, the whole city begins to tremble, and all the denizens cover their ears with their hands, though it never does any good: a sharp blade-stroke of sound punches into their heads—the monumental solar boom of sundown—and everything goes black.

The absolute darkness pushes heavily on Hatcher’s eyes for a long while. Everyone waits. Scattered in the distance are the cries of newcomers, unaware of what’s next. Then the night sigh of Satan blows through the city—a deep exhaling, as if it were his very breath—and all around, lights come on. In the side streets and alleys, the light is dim, scattered, open flames stinking of kerosene or burning rotted wood, bare bulbs putting out piss-puddles of illumination—when the elder George Bush arrived in the midst of a long night and Hatcher found him in an alley and interviewed him, he would only mutter on and on about the thousand points of light. And in the thoroughfares, stretches of mugger darkness are broken by rotten-orange oases of sodium vapor lamps that fill all the twenty-first-century dead with the sadness of interstate rest stops.

Hatcher steps back into his apartment. Anne sits where he left her, by the table, dressed in green velvet, her head attached. She turns her eyes to him, darker than the moment after sundown in Hell.

“Let’s begin this again,” she says.

“All right,” Hatcher says.

He backs out the door, closes it. He opens the door and steps in. “Darling, I’m home,” he says.

Anne Boleyn rises from the kitchen chair. “Darling,” she says, and her voice is sad as sad can be.

Later, much later, they still are sitting at the kitchen table and cannot summon an impulse to move. Night is here. “I can’t find Catherine Parr,” Anne says. “Is she in Heaven, do you conjecture?”

“It’s crowded here,” Hatcher says.

“The sanctimonious bitch,” Anne says.

“Just because you can’t find her . . .”

“She was a papal puppy.”

“That doesn’t mean she’s not here.”

Anne looks Hatcher in the eyes. “So were they right? Is that it?”

“Who?”

“The Papists. I overthrew the power of the Pope. They called it the Reformation after I was killed by the king. I started that. Henry and I.”

“There were others.”

“Not that he did it for God.”

“Martin Luther.”

“I did it for God,” she says.

“And others.”

“Is Luther here?”

“So I understand.”

“You see?”

Hatcher leans to her, pats her hand on the tabletop. “But Hell is also full of popes.”

“Borgia and his like,” Anne says.

“You’d be surprised.”

Anne sighs loudly. “I should’ve just prayed the rosary and kept my mouth shut.”

“It’s not that simple,” Hatcher says.

She turns her face to him.

He says, “If you really believe God gives a damnation over the dogma, then, for instance, how could John XXIII and John Paul II both be in Heaven?”

“I don’t know those,” Anne says.

“They can’t, is the answer. I’ve seen one of them around town.”

“It’s crowded here,” she says.

“Yes it is. Maybe they’re both in Hell.”

Anne sighs again.

“I need to interview a pope,” Hatcher says.

“Interview me.” Anne flutters her dark dark eyes at him.

“I’ve interviewed you already,” he says.

“‘Interview’ in the Tudor sense,” she says, reaching out and plucking at his left earlobe.

“Ah,” he says. “A Tudor sense to ‘interview.’ This is linguistic news to me.”

“I’d like to die,” she says.

“You’re dead,” he says, running his fingertip down the bridge of her nose.

“In the Elizabethan sense,” Anne says.

“You died before there
was
an Elizabethan sense.”

Anne laughs. “Many times.”

The two of them have begun this, and they have begun it often before, and so they are both waiting to see how it will go wrong. For Hatcher, it begins to go wrong now. He has now inadvertently prompted her to think of her previous orgasms, which prompts her to think of Henry, and Hatcher watches her eyes go a little blank before him, and he knows the king just strode into her mind—which is to say, strode into this room—and it will be difficult to get him to stride out again.

But Hatcher tries to banter on. “I would, dear queen, that you could die now in Hell.”

“It once was easy for me, the dying,” she says.

“But not now.”

“Not now.”

“Because you’re thinking of the past,” he says.

This is where it goes wrong for Anne. When a man takes your virginity, you might throw off his memory for your present paramour. But if a man takes your head, you need to be left the fuck alone if you want to obsess about him.

“Because thy member,” she says, her voice gone queenly hard, “sleeps when I am awake and wakes when I am asleep.”

“Because Satan does not sleep, and he has power over all the members of this club.”

“Ah. Satan is the reason. Are you sure it’s not my severed head that repulses you?”

“I’m sure.”

“It’s Satan, you say.”

“Satan.”

“Not my head.”

“Not if you keep it on.”

“I never take my head off when we try to play at the beast with two backs.”

Another Elizabethanism. Hatcher’s jealousy ratchets up some more. “Have you been hanging around with Shakespeare again?”

“He’s insufferable,” Anne says.

“You sound more and more like him.”

“He complains all the time.”

“About his member?”

“He weeps for quill and ink.”

“Please.”

“His hard drive keeps crashing and he loses his plays.”

“We all have to keep up,” Hatcher says.

“If only you could,” she says.

They fall silent. They are each deciding whether to try now. It’s less bad when they don’t talk first, though that brings its own problems, of course. The night will go on. Sleep in Hell is rare and brief and fitful. And they both know that once Anne finds herself in full Tudor garb, she tends to unlayer herself only very slowly. Not now.

Anne puts her hand on Hatcher’s. “It’s Satan,” she says.

“I adore your head,” he says.

“In its place,” she says.

Hatcher sits in the kitchen after Anne has gone into the other room. The TV is on now. It’s the stretch between news broadcasts, and the same made-back-on-earth episode of a commentary show called
The O’Reilly Factor
has been running over and over for a long while now, full of intense shared sneerings between the emotionally gaunt Bill O’Reilly and a gaunter guest named Ann Coulter. These were opinionators in Hatcher’s time, but he never watched them. He ignored most of the rightist ranters. These two are in Hell now but are banned from all but earthly reruns. He understands they arrived together, locked, according to Carl Crispin’s report, in a coital embrace in the first class suite of a crashed superjumbo Air-bus. This show will continue to run to the exclusion of all else but the news for a long while, Hatcher knows. It replaced the long run of an episode of
Gilligan’s Island
, wherein Gilligan bumps his head and subsequently sees everything upside down.

But now this iteration of the O’Reilly episode ends, and Hatcher turns his face toward the sound of the TV. The news will return for a one-minute spot. Beelzebub puts on his most dulcet tone and says, “And now the
News Digest from Hell
, with Jessica Savitch.” Hatcher hurts for Jessica already.