Hell (24 page)

In the commercial break just before the Clinton “Why Do You Think You’re Here,” Hatcher ponders how painful it might indeed be, later this afternoon, when he takes Anne to Henry. But he also finds himself wondering if he might get a little spiritual credit for the act, something to begin to qualify him for a one-way ticket at the next Harrowing. That thought immediately seems pathetic to him, but it lingers, working on him, nonetheless. It’s why he’s seeking out his wives, after all, and he’s already planning to use the car to find another one, Deborah, who is nearby.

And now he’s back on air and he’s introducing the Clinton piece, and his mind is so thoroughly his own again that he can exercise a talent from his mortal professional life: he can roll out the appropriate broadcast-ready words from his mouth while his mind is somewhere else entirely. So as he does his introduction flawlessly, his thoughts slide back to how pathetic he is trying to do a thing or two to qualify himself to be taken out of Hell, and then he thinks no, it’s not pathetic at all, it’s another example of his self-important arrogance, that he expects to make a couple of selfless gestures and muscle ahead of all the great religious figures waiting in line to get out of Hell.

But Bill Clinton is on thirty-two of the monitors now, and on the central four is Hatcher, beginning to listen to this man, intently, as he always did. Bill is sweating in his cheap hotel room, in his shirtsleeves, his tie askew, and after Hatcher has asked, “Why do you think you’re here?” Bill looks sharply away, toward the door, and says, “Is that someone?” And he immediately answers his own question. “No. It’s nothing.”

Then Bill Clinton composes himself and looks into the camera, and he smiles a small, sneery, Elvis Presley smile, and he says, “The short answer is: Satan is a Republican. But before they stuck me in this room to wait, I personally saw Kenneth Starr around, and Rush Limbaugh, and Newt Gingrich, and quite a few of the others, so I’m afraid that dog won’t hunt. Therefore, taking this hotel room into consideration, and what it is I find myself waiting for, and trying to be honest about what the ‘is’ is, I’d be inclined to say I’m here because I wanted . . . what’s the word? Let’s see . . . I must be getting old, not to think of that word. Let’s say warm affection. That’s all I ever wanted with all the women. I need a lot of warm affection. And as for the sex? Well, in the most intense parts of that, I never inhaled. So it wasn’t about the sex.”

Bill stops talking for a long moment. He tries the Elvis smile, briefly, but it soon fades. Then he says, “What’s the point of lying in Hell? Especially to myself. Why I’m here wasn’t about me wanting sex. But it wasn’t about . . . that other thing, either, which is maybe why I can’t even remember the word. I’m not stupid. If I was after either of those, I would’ve said to Paula Jones, for instance, when she came to my hotel room in Little Rock, ‘Darling, I am in a sexless marriage without . . . warm affection, and I adore that remarkable nose of yours.’ That nose being the thing she has no doubt always hated in her face. She would’ve been in my bed in nothing flat, ready to give me both sex and affection, and she never would’ve spoken a word about it. But the truth is, with her and with all of them, it was really about the moment when I knew what I was going to do and they didn’t, and it was about the next moment, when I dropped my pants or grabbed their tits and they gasped. It was about the exercise of power. So I suppose that’s it. I’m here for the same reason that when I was sixteen and I shook John Kennedy’s hand in the White House Rose Garden, I knew I would do anything to have what he had, and I mean the power. And it’s for the same reason that if a woman ever does walk through that door over there, I will rise and I will face her and I will drop my pants, and being as it’s Hell, I know I will pay for that big-time, but I will still do it.”

Then it’s back to Hatcher, and he is happy to start the segue into the final feature, actually helped for the moment by the teleprompter, which does make sense just often enough to get the news from one segment to another. Reading instead of improvising makes it even easier for Hatcher’s mind to drift while he speaks, as he retains just enough awareness to realize if the teleprompter is about to take him way off course. And so he goes over his plan again to head straight to Deborah after the broadcast, as he reads, “That was the former President of the United States, Bill Clinton. And I know there are countless millions of you out there asking the same question, ‘Why am I here?’ Even if you were quiet, abject failures, even if you never amounted to enough in your mortal life to make the slightest public mark on human history, you have to wonder why.”

Hatcher’s reading slows as he realizes what he’s saying. But he doesn’t know how to adjust this, and these same countless millions face worse pain in the street every day. Still, he thinks to try to improvise away from Beelzebub’s script. But the worst is already out, and he ends up simply continuing to read: “So our new entertainment reporter will expose the private lives of those who have actually accomplished something in the wider world so you can feel superior, no matter for how brief a time or with what pathetic self-delusion. Now here he is, the former Cyberspace Sultan of Self-Righteousness, the Swami of Superiority, the Parasite of Prominence . . .” And the text ends with no name following, not even his screen name, which he is said to remember. But the thirty-two monitors cut to a man in a crowded street with a microphone. His face is hidden by a black and white keffiyeh wrapped sloppily into a terrorist’s mask with a square, stubble-chinned white man’s jaw exposed at the bottom.

“Yes, Hatcher, hello. I can hear you,” the reporter says in a faintly poncy, British whine, “Mineisbigger reporting. But not only can I hear you, I can see you as well, as it turns out. This morning the denizens moving along Peachtree Street Street Avenue Street had a bit of shock when a certain quite famous
Evening News from Hell
presenter appeared, flying overhead, stark naked. Fortunately someone had a camera and we have some splendid footage of the presenter presenting his genitals. I daresay you’ll recognize them, Hatcher. They are, of course, yours.”

And Mineisbigger goes on for quite a long while with extensive footage and snarky analysis, but Hatcher sees none of it. He lays his hands flat on the desktop before him and lowers his face just enough so he can’t see the screens, and he concentrates on making his mind—his true private part in Hell—go blank. He does hear Mineisbigger’s coloratura shrieks of agony at the end of the report, as the reporter has likely burst into flames, but Hatcher does not even lift his face to watch.

Dick Nixon and his Cadillac are at the curb in front of Broadcast Central when Hatcher emerges with a camcorder. Hatcher’s first thought is
Great, we’ll make good time
and he doesn’t catch himself until he is in the backseat and Dick is revving his engine and Hatcher realizes he’ll get everything he wants done this day only because a wide swath of denizens will be tossed and battered and crushed by the former president’s merciless driving. Hatcher tells himself
If he weren’t driving me, he’d be driving someone else; if it weren’t Dick Nixon torturing them, it would be someone or something else
. And to his credit, Hatcher realizes how, in the freedom of his mind, he is invoking a ghastly classic line of human reasoning. He also hears how that line of reasoning is directed at himself but is also offered as a defense to some higher authority who is presumed to be keeping spiritual accounts for reward and punishment. Will using Dick Nixon to get around in this world keep him from qualifying for the next Harrowing? Indeed, how many of the millions out there in the streets of Hell are here in part because they voted for Dick Nixon?
Am I, in my inner freedom, going mad? Am I, in my freedom, simply renewing my credentials for eternal damnation? Or am I, in my freedom, making progress toward an everlasting release from this suffering?
These seem to be familiar questions from another life. But just moments before he begins, in frustration, to jabber nonsense sounds aloud in the backseat, Hatcher goes
Aw fuckit, I don’t know what’s right, but I want to see Deborah and let Anne do what she needs to do
. So Hatcher gives Dick Nixon the address of his second wife, and Dick burns rubber and takes off. And having made that decision, Hatcher’s mind turns to another, smaller-scale anxiety, which expresses itself in a vague appeal to that vague spiritual accountant:
Oh please don’t let her have watched the news today.

Hatcher’s dead and damned second wife lives in a vast, stark, modernist concrete public high-rise housing complex, its dim, jammed corridors a constant, torturously high-decibel cacophony of hip hop and easy listening, klezmer and salsa, grand opera and sea chanteys and blues, cantopop and Nederpop and Hindipop and twee. But Hatcher barely notices all this. He is focused now on his quest. He moves through the crowd on the fourteenth floor fluttering his powder-blue minion tie before him, which readily clears a path until he is standing at the door of Deborah Louise Becker, who remained Deborah Louise Becker even after her marriage to Hatcher McCord, which shortly followed his divorce from Mary Ellen McCord, which was put into motion after several months of a covert affair with Deborah Louise Becker, which began with their having sex on his office couch immediately after she’d interviewed him for
New York
magazine, which was also the first time they’d ever met. Who had initiated the sex on that day and what exactly had been done was a matter of considerable—though, in Hatcher’s view, wildly inaccurate—detail in Deborah’s post-divorce memoir,
Jerk
. Her subsequent novel,
Fool
, though more advanced in its irony—the “fool” being somewhat ambiguous, applicable in different ways to both the fictional husband-anchorman and wife-journalist—had a strikingly similar depiction of its couple’s first sex scene, on his office couch after a magazine interview.

For all the strident criticism of Hatcher in Deborah’s books, which he did read out of self-defense, painful though it was, he still needs to knock on this door. He feels in her books she got him wrong, but he suspects that the actual process of writing helped create the distortions. In person, perhaps he can get at something legitimate she knows about him. Because his mother also got him wrong, of course. As much as part of him wants to believe she didn’t, she did. He was—is—far from perfect.
You think?
his voice below his thinking suddenly says.
You’re in Hell, asshole. I’d fucking say so.
Hatcher knocks at Deborah’s door.

There is no answer. Hatcher is afraid she’s out somewhere in the street. He knocks again. Nothing.

“Deborah?” he says, loud, over the music all around him.

Nothing.

“Deborah?” he calls, louder.

“She’s not in there,” a woman’s voice says, just behind Hatcher.

Hatcher turns. She’s very old and stooped and bony and bewhiskered and her skin is jaundiced the color of a heavy smoker’s teeth. She sees Hatcher’s tie, and her eyes narrow and she pulls back a bit.

“It’s all right,” Hatcher says. “I was married to her.”

“Which demon of a husband were you?” she says.

“Her second.”

“The one on the television set.”

“That one.” Hatcher did not keep up with Deborah after they split, though he was aware she’d married and divorced once more after him, having also had a too-young marriage before him. He feels a brief pulse of pleasure at her apparent ranting about husbands other than him. He wishes they’d rated books. “Do you know where she is?” he says.

“She threw herself off her balcony about five minutes ago,” the old woman says.

“What?” His first thought is that she did it in response to seeing him naked on TV.

“I live next door,” the old woman says. “She does this almost every day.”

“Thanks,” Hatcher says, telling his inner voice to stuff it, as it is about to give him a hard time for thinking his naked body could inspire a suicide for any possible reason. He focuses on Deborah lying broken outside and he moves off quickly.