Hell (4 page)

“Good evening,” she says. “Good evening.”

In his mind, he can see her face constrict, as it does every time. She lets the other two good-evenings pass, and then—he understands just how her brain is compelled to work—the good-evenings end, and she expects news text to scroll up, and she reads by reflex.

“Poopy butt,” Jessica Savitch says. “Poopy butt.” Hatcher shakes his head sadly. He can hear Jessica make a strangling sound in the next room. Then she improvises. “Motherfuckers,” she cries. “Motherfuckers. Can’t you motherfuckers act like professionals?”

Hatcher knows the answer to her question. He thinks of poor Carl. And he wonders how Carl went wrong on the Harrowing story. Carl’s ongoing torment—designed by Satan, of course, not only to torment Carl but Hatcher as well—could have deep ironies built in. Perhaps Carl was made to lie about lying. Hatcher rises. All right. He’ll find Peachtree Way and Lucky Street for himself. He bangs his perpetually bruised thigh on the corner of the kitchen table and moves toward the door. “I’m going out for a while,” he calls to Anne.

“Motherfucker,” Anne calls in return, but rather sweetly, in a Tudor sense perhaps.

Hatcher hopes that the Hoppers’ door is closed so he can just move past without pausing. But his legs drag him to a stop, and he looks in.

They are sitting in their chairs.

They are still arguing. They both glance his way, but Peggy finishes her point to Howard, “If you looked forward to being alone for eternity, how did we end up in Boca together?”

“Boca wasn’t forever,” Howard says.

“It felt like it.”

“Now you complain.”

“I thought all I ever did was complain, to hear you tell it.”

“And where would you have gone if not to Boca?”

“To my sister’s.”

“Without me.”

“Of course without you.”

“To Scranton, Pennsylvania, you’d go?”

“Yes, to Scranton.”

“Instead of Florida.”

Hatcher struggles to lift his feet, to put one foot in front of the other and just keep going.

“You’re doing it again,” Peggy says.

“What?”

“You’re being rude to the famous TV personality.”

“Me rude? You talk about him in the third person right in front of him. You think he’s deaf?”

Peggy turns her face to Hatcher and she says, her voice abruptly faint, “He had feelings for me once.”

There is a long moment of silence. Both Hoppers are looking at Hatcher, though they are seeing through him to a slow page-turning of images from their life together. Howard’s voice also has waned. “Who said so?”

“You did.”

They fall silent once more. Hatcher struggles to move.

“Yeah, but what feelings?” Howard says, low.

Peggy looks at him. She struggles with something in her mind. “I can’t think of the word,” she says.

And Hatcher can move. He does. He walks off without a word. He puts the Hoppers behind him. Even in the dark he can see that his alley is wide now, and at the far end is the orange glow of light from the Parkway.

Hatcher McCord, anchorman for the
Evening News from Hell
, descends the staircase of his back alley apartment, picks his way through moaning shapes in the dark, and approaches the tumult of Grand Peachtree Parkway. He intends voluntarily to take a long walk through Hell. He will do this for the sake of a story.
Sometimes in his head, when things get particularly intimidating, Hatcher runs bits of voice-over narration to his afterlife. This impulse he’s now following, for instance, the passage from his own neighborhood to Peachtree Way and Lucky Street, is intimidating. Of course, Satan knows what he’s doing. Satan probably is the one who’s doing the prompting. And behind that prompting may be torture of some carefully tailored sort. But Hatcher also knows a few things about how it works down here. And he’s aware he has certain privileges. He had privileges in his life on earth for much the same reason.
Hatcher McCord is famous
, his narrator says. This inner voice helps. At that very moment, Hatcher has approached a barrier to the street—a kneeling, twitching body calling out “Mama”—and he leaps over it with something he feels is no less than lithe grace.

On the other side of the body, however, he goes abruptly empty. He pauses. He turns. He looks back. The body is crawling off quickly and it vanishes in the darkness. Hatcher wonders why he has turned. He wonders why he is standing here.
If his newsman’s instincts are aroused, Hatcher McCord will never let a good story die.
Hatcher turns back to the bright orange glow, the tumbling, veering, bumping, compressing, stalling, lurching, rushing, outcrying crowd on Grand Peachtree Parkway.
Hatcher McCord does have privileges, thanks to his fame and his importance to society.

Some other voice in Hatcher’s head sighs. Not some other. Also his. Also Hatcher McCord.
Idiot. Hell is full of famous people without privileges. I’m useful. Useful to Satan. If you’re listening, Chief, and I’m sure you are, I have to stress that I’m not being ungrateful. You see the anguish I’m in, so surely that makes it all right. I’m useful to you—the Lord of the Flies, the Former Most Beautiful Angel in Heaven, the Infamous Big Cheese—and that’s like winning the sweeps with a fifty share. That creature I so gracefully leaped over—I’m right, aren’t I, O Supreme One? I was quite wonderfully graceful?—that creature might have been Mick Jagger or Dwight Eisenhower or Dan Rather—not Henry VIII, I suppose—why do you let him flounce around as a young man?—but of course it’s to torture me—and Anne too, I suppose—I hope it’s torture for her—I leaped over that body quite elegantly, whoever it was, didn’t I?

Hatcher blinks and shakes his head furiously as if a hornet has flown into his ear. He is still subject to great pain, of course, personal and public. Like this. How simple this little inner dialogue is, but it is torture to him. He does know that he can move from one place to another without being waylaid and savaged mercilessly like most denizens.
He is damned, but he is still a journalist. Or, as Hatcher McCord himself might rephrase that as he tries to answer the enduring question of this place—why are you here?—he is damned, so he is still a journalist. Or even, he is a journalist, so he is damned. He will move now as a journalist through the main thoroughfare of the Great Metropolis, and he has the journalist’s classic place in the world: he is part of the suffering humanity all around him but really he is not, he is an observer, his pulse quickening at the pain he observes, his deep brain sparking in delight at the possibility of a story and at the gravitas of that, the importance of that.

“Shut the fuck up,” Hatcher says aloud, addressing himself.

He waits. He has indeed seemed in his head to have shut the fuck up.

And so he stands in the mouth of his alley and waits as a megabyte of Internet gossip bloggers lurches by, the men in starlet-at-the-beach bikinis with celluloid-ravaged thighs and acid-seeping hard-ons, the women paunchy droopy naked but for Speedo trunks, weighed heavily about their necks with molten-hot gold pop-star bling, and all of them—a thousand or more—pass by in a long, dense gaggle, pinching and punching at each other. Hatcher’s neighborhood has many journalists, and this gossip-blogger group lives at the very edge, at a distant turning of the Parkway where other denizens never actually go in person, where only this subset of bloggers huddle together over laptop screens, zinging each other. At last they pass, and Hatcher pushes onto Grand Peachtree Parkway, turns toward the place of the Ancient Harrowing, and presses into an unsorted crowd of denizens.

He is soon carried into the adjacent neighborhood, where many of the poets and playwrights and fiction writers dwell. He is moving more or less steadily now in a narrow corridor of space at the edge of the great flowing street crowd, squeezing along storefronts and piss-stained apartment stoops, the way often pinching shut from the veering of the crowd but then opening again. He passes by bookstore after bookstore, their windows dark, their shelves full of long-unsold remainders of all the local writers. The stores will open with hopeful new owners at the next sunrise and will be out of business by the next sundown.

Then in front of Hatcher a man lurches from the darkness of a doorway into a sudden flare of orange sodium vapor light. He is draped in a toga that perhaps long ago was white but now is dark with stains and spattered with what appear to be bird droppings, though Hatcher has never seen a bird in Hell. The man’s hair is cropped close and his face is pasty and he has no nose, only a jagged outline of one in the center of his face as if he were an ancient marble statue.

“Please, denizen,” he cries. “I am here to guide you.” His hands flutter up in front of him as if he will grab at Hatcher.

Hatcher pulls back and wonders if he needs to defend himself. But it is more thought than instinct, and so he hesitates.

The man’s hands fall, and he says, “Please. I know the way.”

“Who are you?” Hatcher says.

“Publius Vergilius Maro.”

The name sounds vaguely familiar to Hatcher, but he can’t place it.

“I was a poet for the great Augustus,” the man says.

“You’re Virgil,” Hatcher says.

“The Emperor is not so great now.”

“Why do I connect you to Hell already?”

“But neither am I. I am but a broken image of myself.”

Hatcher remembers. “
The Inferno
.”

Virgil wags his head sharply, fighting off thoughts of his own past greatness, and he refocuses on Hatcher. “I’ll guide you,” he says.

“Like Dante,” Hatcher says, meaning it as a little literary joke.

Virgil rolls his eyes. “Oh please. He was a pain in the neck.”

Hatcher doesn’t understand. “He was really here?”

“You’d never guess it from his poem.”

“What Hell was it that you showed him?”

Virgil shrugs. “This one. But low-tech.”

“He really came here?”

“And then he lied.”

“He’s back, isn’t he.”

“He doesn’t go out much. He’s still obsessed with the girl, always dreaming of joining her in Paradise.”

“His Beatrice.”

Virgil steps very close to Hatcher now. He is a surprisingly tall man, for his era, his face fully in Hatcher’s. He reeks of rotten sardelles and Cyprian garlic. “You need to come with me,” Virgil says.

Hatcher realizes this is one of those oh-right-I’m-in-Hell-and-thisisn’t-really-a-matter-of-choice moments. He and Virgil look at each other. The crowd is jostling noisily by, but Hatcher can clearly hear the Roman’s whistley breathing through his fragment of a nose. “Okay,” Hatcher says.

Virgil turns abruptly and moves off. Hatcher follows. The poet turns in at the next alleyway.

In the narrow passage, the sounds from the Parkway abruptly cease. Hatcher hears only the scrape of his shoes on the pavement. This alley feels almost pristine beneath his feet—none of the offal squinch underfoot of his own alley—this sound echoes back from the tenements in the dark on either side. And somewhere far off he can hear the sound of a police siren. He has never heard that sound in Hell before. Virgil suddenly veers left and vanishes in the shadows. Hatcher stops, and instantly Virgil’s voice urges him on. “In here,” he says.

Hatcher steps into the blackness. Dimly he can see the poet’s toga ahead, and he hears a knock. A door opens, and standing framed there in the jaundiced glow of bare bulb light is a man in a snap-brim and wide-lapeled suit. His face is in deep shadow.

Virgil says to the man, “He’s here.”

“Thanks,” the man says. And from the timbre of the voice and the shibilant “s”, Hatcher instantly knows who it is. Humphrey Bogart turns to the side to clear the door. The light falls on his creviced face, and even though his eyes are still in the shadow of his hat brim, Hatcher can see their sad, dark depth.

Virgil vanishes in the shadows. Hatcher steps forward.

“You’re late,” Bogey says.

Hatcher moves past him and into the back staircase landing of a tenement. The lightbulb juts nakedly from a fixture in a side wall, and mounting the opposite wall is a vast dark shadow of the staircase banister. Hatcher looks around him with the panic of an actor’s dream. He’s on and he doesn’t know his lines.

Bogey steps up beside him. “Her note said 4D.”

“4D,” Hatcher says.

“One more thing.”

“Yes?”

“Put your hat on.”

Hatcher realizes there’s something in his hand. He looks down. He holds a gun-metal gray snap-brim fedora. He puts it on.

The rasp and hiss of a match turns his face to Bogey, who is lighting a cigarette. Bogey drags once and exhales. He reaches into his inner coat pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He flicks one partway out. It’s a Camel. He offers it to Hatcher.

Hatcher actually hesitates because he smoked as a teenager and then stopped in J-School and he is reluctant to start again. For his health.