Hell (33 page)

And the constant thumping stops. They are free of the city streets and rushing through the desert and the Raffles is not far. And the closer they get to Henry, the more deeply this ongoing mystery settles into Hatcher: why, in life and in afterlife, we seek—we even create—the things that hurt us.

“It won’t be long,” he says.

She does not answer.

He glances at her. She is looking out the side window at the passing wasteland.

“This is the last of us,” he says, softly.

In his periphery he can tell that she turns her face toward him. But he does not look at her. He cannot bear to do that right now.

“Yes,” she says.

“He cut off your head,” Hatcher says, even more softly.

“Yes.”

Then why are you his forever? That’s what Hatcher wants to know. But he cannot summon the energy to ask.

She waits a long while before she speaks. “Will says that April is the cruelest month.”

“That was a later guy who said that. He’s here too, somewhere.” Anne shrugs this off. If she can shrug off Henry taking her head, she can shrug off Shakespeare stealing a good line.

Anne is silent for a moment, and then she says, “Well, January is the kindest month. The world outside you fits what’s inside. It’s a grim place, the world, but it’s the world. At least you’re not a freak, at least you’re part of it.”

And that’s all Anne and Hatcher say to each other.

Hatcher turns in at the road to the Raffles and he drives them fast in a great whirlwind of dust, but as the vast white sprawl of the hotel looms ahead, he throttles back drastically, he squeezes the steering wheel hard, and he slows the car down. He regrets this now. He wishes he could have just walked out of the Automat and left her there to do what she had to do but not be a fucking part of it, not carry her here himself. But as soon as he wishes this, he knows there was a deeper imperative. He had to seek out the thing that hurts him most.

And they are stopped in front of the Raffles Hotel and the engine is off and the car is ticking and the blood on the grill and on the windshield is flying away and Anne is opening her door and she is getting out of the car and he is sitting behind the wheel and he is not moving and though there is no death in Hell, he knows that he and Anne are dead to each other.

Hatcher drives back to the city and parks the Fleetwood on Peachtree Way in the same spot where Dick Nixon parked for the Harrowing. Hatcher gets out and walks toward Lucky Street. The rubble of body parts and rocket parts is all gone. The street is full of the bearded men in tunics and animal skins pressing on to nowhere. Hatcher barely looks before him as he walks but instead scans the passing crowd. He reaches the Automat and takes a few steps beyond so he can see up and down both streets. He does not notice Judas Iscariot, who is curled up and sleeping fitfully in the bright sun in the center of the rubble-strewn lot from whence the Fiery Chariot departed, remembering the event of this afternoon now as his Master’s first return and a promise made to come back for him someday. But Hatcher isn’t looking for Judas.

He goes back and pushes through the revolving door into the Automat. The writers’ groups have resumed. The group in the Catholic Bible but not the mainstream one, the prolific Gnostics, the Old Ones whose books were lost, Judith taking criticism from a severed head, and all the rest. The New Testament writers who got dumped or lost. But that’s not Judas with his back to the door. It’s the man Hatcher is looking for. Hatcher approaches the table, and Dick Nixon is explaining to Festus and Silas and Rhoda how his mother was a saint, a Quaker saint, and so was his wife, and how if he’d been at the foot of the cross, he wouldn’t have run away, and Hatcher puts his hand on Nixon’s shoulder.

The ex-president looks up. Hatcher reaches down and puts the Cadillac keys in Nixon’s hand. Nixon looks at them.

“You are not a crook,” Hatcher says.

“I know,” Nixon says.

Hatcher climbs the circular iron staircase toward his apartment, slowly, the heaviness of his legs already upon him, the outer curving of the stairs blinding him over and over as he circles toward and away and toward the full, overhead sunlight in the alleyway. The day seems to be rewinding itself. It seemed later, earlier. And he emerges into the corridor. He stops. Ahead is the Hoppers’ closed door. And then his own empty apartment. Anne is gone. He stuffs his hands into his coat pockets, even before he realizes he’s searching for something. One last thing left undone before he’s ready to face the rest of eternity. In an inner pocket he finds the list of addresses.

He has seen his wives. And his mother. He shivers again at that. He has seen Beatrice and Virgil, whose delusional preoccupation when he came for them was of no consequence. They had no worse a fate than he, going down with a faux
Titanic
while having what surely turned out to be unsatisfying sex. He has not seen Dante, who, however, is a professional liar. Hatcher has no interest in finding him now. But there is one more address, from the impulse to help Sylvia Beach. The address of the former companion she longs for, Adrienne Monnier. She should have this.

Hatcher turns away from his apartment now and descends the stairs and rushes along the alleyway and into Grand Peachtree Parkway. He turns toward the neighborhood of the writers. He makes good time along the margin of the crowd, as always, until the run of store fronts and apartment stoops begins. He slows down and studies the windows going by and soon he finds himself before a hand-lettered sign: SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY. He stops. But a single glance inside makes him lay his forehead sadly against the glass. The store is empty. The shelves are bare. Sylvia, like all the other bookstore owners in Hell, has almost instantly gone out of business. He curses himself softly. He secured Adrienne’s address but not Sylvia’s. He thought he knew how to find her. And in the cursing of himself, Hatcher backs away from the shop and a shoulder bumps him, from the edge of the crowd, and he thinks to go to Adrienne, at least, and tell her that Sylvia is somewhere in the writers’ neighborhood, and this leads to more unfocused steps and then another shoulder and another step and he is drawn into the great, onflowing current of the street crowd.

And quickly Hatcher McCord is sucked toward the center, though he finds that he doesn’t care. He doesn’t have the energy to do it right now, but he knows he can always slide back out when he wants. But at this moment he is wedged front and back and right and left by these four denizens: Isabella Andreini, former actress and member of the Gelosi Commedia dell’Arte troupe of late sixteenth-century Italy; William W. Ross, former Fuller Brush door-to-door salesman of Altadena, California, and the 1948 Western Region Salesman of the Year; Spec 4 Jason Stanley of South Bristol, Maine, and former clerk-typist at the Long Binh base camp about thirty clicks up Highway 1 from Saigon; and Jezebel, former wife of King Ahab of Israel. And this moment happens also to be the very moment that a mid-day sulfurous rain begins.

A flaming spot flashes onto Hatcher’s face and he knows what’s happening and he has never before been caught in the rain, never, and he tries to move but the crowd implodes and it is too late and another flame on the forehead and a spray of pain, serrated blades, a thousand of them, ripping through his face and his shoulders and his chest and then the drenching of pain, and things slow down, things slow way down, as every cell in his body shreds and dissolves, and he feels each one separately, he could count each cell though they are as great a multitude as the stars and each one is raging as hot as the bright flaring center of a nova. And the four denizens pressed into Hatcher are also dissolving and they flow together, these five, and in the rain you never lose your consciousness and all the bodies dissolving around you are part of your body and your body is part of theirs, and inside Hatcher, even as he is dissolving, a voice speaks:
I am between wives and my ratings are high and I am with a tiny-boned woman with dark skin and a black bindi between her eyebrows and we are naked and she says she did not know who I am she says she never watches the evening news and outside the window a flare is falling from a guard tower on the perimeter somebody is nervous about Charlie and I look at Hoa which means flower and she has just stepped out of the black silk pantaloons that all the hooch girls wear and she is no whore she says and I say I know and I rip open my gown and I tear it from me as I go mad from the scorning of my passion and the eyes of my noble audience the Grand Duke of Tuscany and his bride grow wide and I am wrapped tight in a body stocking but their eyes are on me as if I am really naked and she is naked right there in my Fuller Brush Illustrated Catalog on page six and she has her hair pulled up and tied in a red ribbon and the very end of the handsomely designed unbreakable plastic handle of a number 401 Shower Brush is all that covers her nipple and just barely and he lays me down beneath an almond tree and we are naked and we share a quince before we touch I bite and he bites where I bit and I lick that place where he bit and bite in a new place and we make our mouths sweet make the very air we breathe from our bodies sweet before we kiss for the first time and this is before Ahab comes to me and brings his god whose breath stinks of old blood and if I never leave the almond grove without becoming the wife of this other man if I marry my own if I marry the body that first holds me and breathes sweetly and deeply into me then perhaps Baal can save me from the knock on the door and she has the look I’ve always wanted to see in a woman’s eyes she has that look even from the first moment and I sit with her on her couch and our shoulders are touching and she stops on page six and she smiles faintly and she touches her hair at the back and she orders a number 401 Shower Brush and she orders a number 386 Flesh Brush and she says its name slowly drawing the word out Flesh she says I want a Flesh Brush and I say number 386 and I write down her order and I shake her hand and I leave because I am the fucking Western Region Salesman of the Year and if I do what I think of doing when my gown is ripped and is falling at my feet if I take my hands and clutch the body stocking and dig my fingers deep and I pull it apart and rip it from my body so I can stand truly naked before the Duke and his bride perhaps I can be fully true at last to who I am for I went upon the stage so that I could be naked and I could be seen and she is naked and we touch and that is the last time and afterwards I don’t know where Hoa has gone and the other hooch girls shrug when I ask about her and I can only lie on my bunk and watch the flares in the night sky and dream of me coming home from the lobster boats and she is waiting for me my flower of a wife and she takes me to the bath and strips me naked and she scrubs the smell of fish off me with a brush and she takes the tip of her finger and she touches me in the same spot on my forehead as her bindi and she says that’s where all the experiences of your life have gone where you will find everything that you are and we touch and we touch and though we never say a word about it we both know we will never do this again but before she leaves she cooks for me she tears the chicken apart with her hands and she cooks with asafetida and it smells like tar it smells like Pittsfield when I was young and when everything was new it smells like the tar from the streets but it tastes wonderful and she is gone

And in this moment, all the souls in the streets of Hell are indistinguishable, they are shimmering primordial puddles that stink of sulfur and are full of regret, they are full of eternal regret.