Hell (6 page)

“How can we find you?” Hatcher says.

Beatrice smiles faintly and blows smoke into the air between them. She looks past Hatcher. “You know what I’m about to say, don’t you?”

Bogey puts a heavy, searingly hot hand on Hatcher’s shoulder. “Don’t let her say it.”

Beatrice smiles.

“I could smack a woman around a little in life,” Bogey says to Beatrice.

“Think what I can do in Hell.”

“You won’t touch me,” Beatrice says. “You’re soft inside. Face the facts. The problem of one little man finding his dame doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in Hell.”

Bogey pulls at Hatcher’s shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.” But Hatcher can’t seem to move and neither can Bogey.

Beatrice looks at Hatcher. “If you want me,” she says, “just whistle,”

Bogart moans.

“You know how to whistle, don’t you?” she says. Bogey’s hand, which has been burning hotly into Hatcher’s shoulder all this while, goes suddenly cold. “You just put your lips together and blow.”

The two men find they can move. They cross the room and go out the door. They head down the dark hall, not saying a word. But all around them now, sounds are coming from behind the passing apartment doors. Moaning sounds. Keening sounds. Classic gnashing-of-teeth sounds. And then, from behind the last door this side of the stairwell, comes the pittering of a computer keyboard. Hatcher slows and stops. Bogey goes on around the corner. The neighborhood is full of writers. Hatcher has the impulse to open this door. He does.

The room is black except for the radiance from a computer monitor. In profile, a man’s head hangs in the light, the darkness shrouding the rest of him. It’s not even clear there is a rest of him—as if he were like Anne, arrived in Hell from a beheading—though the sound of furious typing clatters from the dark where his hands and keyboard would be. He is a bald man with the fringe of his hair cut very short and with a faintly aquiline nose. He does not take his eyes from the computer screen.

Hatcher understands that the man is a writer, and he seems vaguely familiar for some reason or other, though maybe not for his writing exactly—from tabloids and gossip columns, perhaps—maybe there was a woman involved somehow—but Hatcher can’t place him.

“I don’t know who you are,” Hatcher says.

“Neither do I,” the man says. The head floats closer to the screen, the eyes narrowing. “Though I yearn to.”

The typing, fast already, begins to accelerate, faster and faster until the individual keystrokes blur together into a low moan. “I’m in here somewhere,” the man says.

Hatcher watches for a moment, thinking to go but once again is unable to move. Then, even as the typing moans louder, the writer turns his face to Hatcher and says, “Back out of the room now and gently close the door.”

Hatcher backs out of the room and gently closes the door. He steps into the stairway landing, and Bogey is gone. He listens for the man’s footsteps below, but hears nothing. “Bogey?” he calls. There’s no answer. Even the corridor behind him is quiet. They’re all suffering in silence now, and it’s time to move on.

He calls again, in the dark outside the alley door of Beatrice’s tenement, but this time for Virgil. Anything Dante knew about Hell, Virgil knows it too. Hatcher tries to stop overtly thinking about the matter any further: he focuses on the distant din of Grand Peachtree Parkway. This back-alley episode seems to be finished, and maybe Virgil is gone. But he found Hatcher out there in the street. He’s of that realm too. “Virgil,” he calls again. “Publius Vergilius Maro!” Hatcher cries. But still there is no answer. Except from the invisible rats of Hell. All around him he hears the stirring of their feet, the clatter of their scrabbling claws like the sound of computer keyboards, a million keyboards, all the writers in Hell typing frantically away.

Hatcher hurries off in the direction of the Parkway.

When he emerges from the alley, he makes note of the place. The whistle crap was simply to torture Bogey. Hatcher might want to try to find Beatrice again. Of course it’s possible for anything suddenly to change in Hell. But for the most part, change is gradual, and the quotidian details—from backed-up toilets to confusing street names—stay torturously the same. So. Directly opposite, in the Parkway median, full of construction rubble and gouged earth, some concrete blocks mount narrowly upward to a twisted tangle of rebar—all of it vaguely in the taunting shape of a tree. There are no trees in Hell. To his left is a run of bookstores, the nearest with its name on a tattered standing sandwich board: Hell’s Belles Lettres. To his right is a shop with a red neon sign jutting over the sidewalk, bloodily illuminating the area, spewing sparks: BURGERS. He shudders to think of the meat in those. He is grateful that, of all the things he is compelled to do in this place—knowing even as he does them how badly they will turn out—he is not compelled to eat the hamburgers of Hell. And this thought scares him. He braces himself for that very impulse now, to go in there and order the double cheeseburger as a punishment for thinking he has something to be grateful for.

But the impulse does not come. Hatcher can imagine Satan having his little laugh. He won’t let his subjects anticipate him. And the fear of punishment is torture aplenty. Satan knows what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. And with that thought, Hatcher recognizes the contradictions of trying to remember how to find this alley again. If the Old Man wants him to find Beatrice, he will. If he doesn’t, Hatcher’s remembering these landmarks will do no good.

Meanwhile, struggling along at the near edge of the passing crowd, approaching Hatcher, is a deeply disgruntled Jezebel, former wife of King Ahab of Israel. Though personal age can shift abruptly in any direction in Hell, she is perpetually dressed in rags and she is old, as she was when she was pushed from her balcony by eunuchs and then eaten by dogs, and inside her, a voice is always speaking.
It’s not the Tishbite Elijah or his false god who has put me here, never, his people are here too, in abundance. As are mine, but I was as true to my gods as he was to his, and his god was an angry old man who adored the waste of the desert, and he was a savage god. My husband spoke of these traditions of his: the rape and murder of every man, woman, and child of any nation in the path of their wandering—Midian and Bashan and Heshbon and Makkedah and Libnah and Lachish and Gezer and many more. And I built sweet gardens where my gods dwelled among the almond trees and the pomegranate trees and we worshipped naked in beds of narcissus and crocus and henna and we consecrated the poplar and the palm and the tamarisk, as Baal would have us do to join like a newlywed with the sweetly, blessedly burgeoning world around us. And for this, the foul old man stinking in haircloth spoke as if he were a god himself and cursed us with a long drought, raping and murdering even the flowers and the trees. And how powerful was the god he spoke for? Even after the Tishbite took my husband and all my priests up to Mount Carmel and worked some magic trick with the weather upon them and then slaughtered all eight hundred and fifty of my devout holy men, my simple woman’s wrath scared him away for years. Elijah fled at the mere threatening of his life. What was the point of a stroke of lightning from his god and some cooked bullock and the murder of eight hundred and fifty sincerely devout men, if the triumphant effects lasted half a day? And even years later, after his people finally succeeded in murdering my husband, their king, I ruled his Israel for fourteen years, and when I knew they were finally coming for me, I died with dignity, painting my eyes with black kohl and anointing my skin with opal balsam. Okay. We did our share of slaughtering. Okay. But so did they all, in all the following millennia as well, apparently, because they’re all here in Hell, the big shots of all the religions. So then who is the true god who judges us all so harshly? He gave me my time and my place to be born and a daddy who was a king and a priest and who stroked my hair and kissed my brow and who I had no alternative but to believe, when he said what life was about. Whoever that god is, he set me up to be who I was. So why for eternity do I have to wear rags and stink like a Tishbite? And why oh why am I compelled to figure out how to do e-mail?

Keeping up with advances in technology is one of the great tortures of Hell for the old-timers, and as Jezebel’s mind works itself around to this, her increased agitation makes her veer from the edge of the crowd and she steps heavily on the foot of a man standing at the mouth of an alley. This is Hatcher McCord, whose foot suddenly flares wildly in pain, the source of which, an old woman in a bundle of rags, lurches against him and seems about to tumble to the ground, where she will be routinely crushed by the crowd. Though the pain she has caused is shooting up his leg and making his knee cap feel as if it is about to explode, Hatcher’s hands rush out and gently hold the old woman at the shoulders, which squish and shift as if he has grabbed handfuls of maggots. But he perseveres in his hold in order to keep her from falling, and she steadies herself and passes on without a word or a glance at him.

He watches her go.

Something just happened, he realizes vaguely, this gesture with someone who has just hurt him, something that he should stop and consider. But things are getting muddled in his head. Satan’s work. The Old Man doesn’t like too much thinking. Everyone understands that. Though Hatcher stands there thinking about how he can’t think. He wants to stop. Not for Satan’s agenda but his own. He wants to stop thinking in order to fully experience something important to think about. The immediate physical and emotional encounter with life in Hell sometimes begins to add up in certain ways, and maybe this should yield the most important ideas.
It all has to come back to these ways we exist in our moment to moment encounters with consciousness—even into eternity—even if the moments leap and circle and combine, we are still along for the ride, and we have company—like the woman who stepped on my foot—and we have to figure out how to deal with all that. But Satan won’t let me think about not thinking,
Hatcher thinks, and so he stops.

And what’s next? The night is young. He has a story to pursue off in the direction of Peachtree Way and Lucky Street, one that got as far as the official
Evening News from Hell
lineup. Satan seems to be going along with this for now. He turns to the right and rides along with the crowd.

The night streets teem with bodies and screams, though the screamers are different from the screamers before the setting of the sun. These are the denizens with night terrors, taking over from those with the anguish of twilight. There are cars now as well, the automotive technology often retro, the center of the street jammed and blaring with Cords and Fords and Moons, with Vauxhalls and Maxwells and Fiats and BMWs, with Hondas and Renaults and Zims, their drivers and passengers sealed inside, banging on the windows and crying out in rage at the drivers and passengers in the cars around them, and none of them moving, except intermittently to lurch forward several feet to crush a few pedestrians in the eddies flowing around them, only to stall again, while beneath their tires and body frames, the crushed denizens wail away until the next lurch of traffic allows them to rise and reconstitute.

For a time, Hatcher loses his knack for mobility and gets sucked from the margin of the flowing crowd and toward its center. He wonders if this means his Big Boss has now decided this story should be dropped. There are never editorial meetings as such. Things come up. Things get pursued until something—often painful—occurs to stop them. Being crushed in the center of a nighttime crowd would be one of the simpler terminations to a story. Hatcher figures the initial tolerance of the neo-Harrowing item was simply to build false hopes anyway. Even if, as Hatcher’s news nose faintly whiffs, there is some sort of something true behind this, it would involve such a small number of denizens that covering it would have a torturous effect on the vast numbers once again left behind. But it wouldn’t have to be true to be torture. Maybe this was all simply to arrange that public, humiliating disavowal of the story by Carl. And the news nose whiff will be a purely private disappointment.