Hell (31 page)

The two Hopper faces turn to him.

“You should come with me . . .” Hatcher begins.

“Oh we couldn’t do that,” Peggy says instantly.

“No,” says Howard. “Thanks, but never.”

“We can’t get up,” she says.

“Not at all, ever,” he says.

“This is where we are,” she says.

“Right here,” he says.

“I understand,” Hatcher says and he moves to his own door and he’s surprised at himself over the impulse he just followed and he tells himself there’s nothing he can do for anyone else. He can do only for Anne now, if this is real, the best he can do is for Anne and for himself.

He touches the knob to his door. And the Hoppers suddenly terrify him: Will Anne go?

He steps in.

Anne is near the bedroom door, her back to him. Her head is on. That’s good. She is wearing still another Edwardian tea dress. That’s not good.

“Anne,” he says.

She turns to him and she consciously puts on a little smile. She has something to say and he is very glad he has something to say first, and because it is the only way to keep her, he leaps fully into faith. It’s real, he tells himself. It’s going to happen.

“Wouldn’t it be better,” he says, “to leave Hell altogether, with me?” She looks at him wide-eyed, as if the axman has just been called off. “Can you do this?” she says.

“Yes,” he says. “But we have to go now.”

She does not say another word but is beside him and they are rushing along the corridor, perhaps for the last time.

And once again Hatcher finds himself grateful for Richard M. Nixon’s merciless driving. But as they plow into the writers’ neighborhood, the impulse that put Hatcher in the Hoppers’ doorway comes upon him again, with an even stronger moral imperative. He does not think it out but leans forward and knocks on the partition and directs Nixon to an address nearby, and they soon pull up in front of a grimy brick tenement. He tells Nixon to keep the engine running.

“Where are you going?” Anne says, the first audible words she’s spoken since the apartment.

“I owe somebody something,” he says.

When they first got in the car, Hatcher told Anne where they were heading and with only a nod of recognition to him she began to quietly pray for absolution, softly pounding her chest in mea culpas. Now, as he opens the door, she says, “Do we have time?”

“Yes,” he says, though, in fact, he’s not so sure. But he does owe Beatrice.

He dashes for the entrance, realizing this is the street-side front of the tenement that Virgil led him to a few nights ago. He pushes through the door and he staggers to a stop and he has to consciously adjust his center of gravity to keep from falling down. The whole place is tilted to the left, and mounting before him is a wide staircase paneled in William and Mary oak and with an iron banister with grillwork of ormolu garlands, and a steam horn sounds in the distance and a ship’s bell is ringing and a multitude of voices are crying out, wordlessly, far off, and a smell of salt water fills his head and he feels a chill on his feet—a rare sensation in Hell—and he looks down and water is spreading out from the deep shadows on either side of him, lapping at his shoes, and Hatcher knows this is the Grand Staircase in the first class section of the
Titanic.
No, he cries to himself. This is, in fact, a typical, cheap illusion, a movie setting in Hell of the Grand Staircase in the first class section of the
Titanic.

Nevertheless, Hatcher’s first reflex is to run. To turn around and bolt from this place and get back in the car instantly and take off. But he tells himself not to play the game. He doesn’t have to play the game. He has a mind that is free. But movie illusion or not, this is the only staircase he has to work with, so he dashes up, past the bronze cherub holding a lamp, onto the landing and up another flight, a vast cut-glass dome above, and he is not looking closely but he can see that all of it—banister and paneling, cherub and stairs and dome—are covered in a thin coat of green slime and he’s smelling mold now and rot and he goes up to the fourth floor and cuts down the corridor.

The carpet is thicker under his feet and the walls are paneled oak but it’s the same layout as the film noir tenement, and the corridor—the whole tenement—lurches a bit and his own free and independent brain isn’t doing a fucking thing to make this all go away and he sprints for the door at the far end and he arrives, breathless not from the sprint but from a rising fear as cold as the North Atlantic. If he gets sucked into this little Hell game, he may miss the Harrowing. The door says 4D. There are vague rustling sounds inside. He knocks. The sounds stop but no one is coming to the door and no one is talking and he calls out, “Beatrice.” And there is silence.

He does not have time for this and so he tries the knob on the door and it turns and he pushes in. Not to a first class state room on the
Titanic
but to the same seedy tenement apartment 4D as before, with the same sagging couch in the center of the floor. But the room is tilting. It is full of the smell of the ocean. And on the couch is Beatrice, naked, on her back, her legs hooked over the shoulders of the dingy-white naked marble body of Publius Vergilius Maro, also known as Virgil, who continues quietly to pound away Roman style at Dante’s girlfriend.

They do not stop their fucking but they do both turn their faces to Hatcher. The faces show no trace of pleasure, of course.

Hatcher finds himself compelled to shoot his cuffs. He pats his pockets, but he can find no smokes, so he simply squares his shoulders and says, “I thought we had an understanding, doll. But what do you expect in this crazy world? I don’t blame you. You figured you had a chance for happiness and you took it. Me, I can only offer you a long shot. The longest of long shots. A way out of Hell. So here I am. But you have to make up your mind now. Because chances have a way of disappearing on you. Especially when the odds are long.”

Hatcher hears himself. He’s not saying this quite the way he expected.

But Beatrice seems to get it. And she doesn’t. “I can’t go with you,” she says, her voice quaking from the boffing being administered by Virgil. “I can’t. The ship’s going down and all the lifeboats have sailed.”

From behind the closed closet door, where last time a Renaissance Pope imitated a police car siren, Celine Dion begins to sing, “My heart will go on.”

And Hatcher backs out of the room, closes the door, turns, and takes one stride and another down the hallway, passing the door behind which, if he stopped to listen, he could hear the beating of his own heart.

When the Fleetwood takes the sharp left turn as Peachtree Avenue Street Street turns into Peachtree Way on the run up to the corner of Lucky Street, Hatcher opens the driver compartment partition and sees the back of a crowd up ahead. Before they pound through the candidates for Heaven, he tells Dick Nixon to pull over to the curb and stop.

Hatcher grabs Anne’s hand and throws the door open and they slide out of the car and move quickly up the street. The back of the crowd is all cloaks and animal skins and sackcloth tunics, and as Anne and Hatcher approach, they can hear a clamorous bleating as if from a vast drove of goats, and Hatcher thinks of animal sacrifice—this has been an ongoing theme of the past few days—and he wonders if there are actual goats now being slaughtered to buy the Old Ones a way out of Hell.

But that’s not it at all. He and Anne reach the back of the crowd and start pushing their way through the rough cloth and the skins and the fetid stink of ancient bodies, and it’s instantly clear that the sounds are coming from the Old Ones themselves. They are huddling hard together and lifting their faces and crying like goats, and it’s tough pushing through, the bodies are thick and unyielding, and Hatcher vaguely remembers a Bible verse about the Son of God coming in glory and separating the sheep from the goats, and Hatcher feels in his chest and in his arms and in his throat and behind his eyes a powerful swelling of belief. He believes. Yes. He believes that a way out of Hell is just ahead, and he presses in front of Anne and holds her hand even more tightly and he puts his shoulder heavily ahead of him and he pushes hard and they are moving, the bodies are sliding aside, parting like the sea, and he and Anne break at last from the drove and into an empty stretch of street, empty but for half a dozen bearded men in tunics cracking whips and driving back this crowd found unworthy of Heaven.

One of these goatherders cocks his head in surprise at seeing these two Moderns fly out of the crowd, but he does not try to stop them. And Hatcher and Anne rush on toward another crowd of the Old Ones in front of the Automat. Hands are shooting up and waving and falling and shooting up again and the cries of this crowd are “Me!” and “Me!” and “Save me Lord!” and “I am worthy!” and “I am worthier!” and “I am worthiest!” and a body—a very old man in a bear skin—comes hurtling out of the crowd and he is carried along toward the drove of the damned faster than his feet are moving, and he is already bleating, and another body flies out, a woman in a long dark robe and with a scarf covering her face and her goat voice is thin and full of vibrato.

Hatcher and Anne reach this other crowd and stop. Hatcher looks around for Judas. He is about to call for him, but Anne pulls at Hatcher’s hand. “Over there,” she says, and she draws him to a thickening of this crowd, and the two of them stretch up and they look and they can barely see the very top of a liver-brown head of hair in the empty center of this crowd—distance is being kept from this man—and the man cries in a loud voice, “Ye fed me!” and another man’s voice yelps in joy, and the loud voice cries, “Go ye forth to the Chariot of Fire,” and Hatcher can see the tops of the heads of the far part of the inner circle of the crowd open for the chosen one making his way toward Lucky Street. And then the loud-voiced man cries, “Ye gave me no meat!” and another voice wails in anguish but the wail quickly morphs into a goat cry and a body flies from the crowd and back down Peachtree Way. Hatcher and Anne look at each other with the same thought. Are we hearing the voice of the Son of God? Even as they think this, Hatcher also thinks the voice sounds faintly familiar and he tries to remember some moment, somewhere in his earthly life—did he have a miraculous encounter?—did he actually hear the voice of Jesus in his life?

“We have to get closer,” Anne says.

Hatcher takes her hand and steps before her and reaches forward to try to part the bodies in front of him. But he feels Anne’s hand wrench out of his. He looks back to her.

“You need both hands,” she says. “I’ll be right behind you.”

He nods and begins to turn.

“Wait,” she says, wrenching him around. “This,” she says and she lays her hand on his tie.

He looks down. The powder-blue shocks him like blood from an unexpected wound.

He grabs at the knot at his throat and tears it open, untangles the tie, and stuffs it in his jacket pocket. “I never did . . . ,” he says. “I never even . . . I never.”

“That’s for Him to decide,” Anne says.

They look at each other and then in unison they strike their chests three times in the mea culpa.

And Hatcher is ripping and shoving and punching and pounding his way through the crowd, one layer, and another, and once, he glances quickly back and Anne is there, shoving away, and another goat is identified up ahead, and another sheep—Hatcher is no longer listening to the words of the Son of God, not till he can stand before Him, not till then, but he knows the work of winnowing is going on and Hatcher plays over a little litany of I-nevers as he struggles with the crowd, which still has many layers before him.

Now a voice nearby says, “He’s on the move,” and another takes it up, louder, “He’s moving!” and another shouts, “He’s done! He’s leaving!” and then a wild chorus of “No, Lord!” and “Take me too, Lord!” and even “I’m more faithful than that camel turd you just chose!” and even “You’ll understand if you just read my book!”