Hell Read online

  And Hatcher has caught his falling cigarette. But it has tumbled around and the tip of it touches his palm and the fire sears through his eternal skin and into his eternal capitate bone. Hatcher drops the cigarette and grits his teeth against the pain and tries not to cry out. He knows it would ruin the scene. He stays quiet. He’s a trooper. Then abruptly the pain stops, and he’s panting. But the dame doesn’t seem to notice. He takes a deep breath and stubs the cigarette out with the toe of his wing tip brogue.

  He starts over. “So?”

  The dame shrugs. “You already said that.”

  Hatcher shoots his cuffs. “Listen, babe, you got something to say, say it.”

  “I need your help,” she says.

  “Everybody needs help in this town.”

  “I want to get out.”

  Hatcher answers her with a short guttural laugh, like hawking up phlegm from the back of the throat.

  “Go ahead and laugh, wise guy,” she says. “But there’s a way out.”

  “Yeah? Who told you that?”

  “My ex-boyfriend.”

  “And how does he know?”

  “He did it once.”

  “So he’s gone?”

  “No. He’s back.”

  “Why doesn’t he go out again?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he forgot how. Memories are short around here.”

  “And there are plenty of liars.”

  She shrugs. “That’s why you private dicks stay in business. To sort out the lies.”

  “So where is he now?”

  “I don’t know. I try to avoid him.”

  “I’d think you’d want to stay close. In case he breaks out again.”

  “I avoid him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because whenever I get near him, I have to reach into his chest and pull out his heart, and it bursts into flames, and when it’s done burning, I eat it.”

  For a moment, not surprisingly, what film theorists call the “aesthetic distance” has been broken for Hatcher. This is, after all, still Hell.

  But before Hatcher can think further about this, Bogey is beside him again. “So you’re that kind of dame, are you?” he says.

  The dame rolls her thin shoulders, which makes Hatcher reach inside his coat pocket and pull out a pack of cigarettes. “I guess I am,” she says.

  Somewhere far off a police siren wails.

  Hatcher pops a cigarette, puts it in his mouth, stuffs the pack—his brand is Lucky Strikes—back into his coat, and he finds matches in a side pocket. He strikes one. He lifts the flame to the tip of his cigarette, and he realizes the conversation has stopped. Both Bogey and the dame are watching him. Hatcher takes the cigarette out of his mouth and turns it around, elegantly, and offers it to the dame. She opens her mouth slightly. Gently he puts the sucking end between her lips. She closes them on the cigarette, and they brush the tip of his finger. He draws his hand away slowly.

  “Thanks,” she says, real low.

  Hatcher feels a hot tidal wave of unfocused regret wash over him. He aches.

  Bogey says, “So you want us to locate this boyfriend and find out what he knows.”

  “I just want out,” the dame says, lifting her face and blowing a thin plume of smoke into the shadows above her. “You figure out how.”

  “It won’t be easy,” Bogey says.

  “If it was easy I’d do it myself,” she says.

  “This town,” Bogey says.

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “The walls have ears,” he says.

  “Don’t I know it,” she says.

  “So you have to figure somebody already knows you’re trying to blow the joint.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And he knows we’re supposed to help.”

  “I don’t care. I’ll take that chance.”

  “But will I?”

  Hatcher looks at them. He understands that they’re talking about Satan. A chill passes through him, a physical reaction that’s rare in Hell. It occurs to him that perhaps this whole scene isn’t just another fleeting fabricated form of torture. Perhaps this is Bogey’s ongoing life here, and the dame’s. So why the chill? It’s the newsman’s chill, he realizes. As if there is a story. A big one. A way out. The young woman’s face is angled toward Bogey, partly eclipsed in dark shadow. “What’s your name?” Hatcher asks.

  She turns to him, her full face flaring bright. She takes a long drag on the cigarette and blows the smoke out through her nose, never moving her dark eyes—as dark as Anne’s—off his. “Beatrice Portinari,” she says.

  “You’re Dante’s girl,” Bogey says.

  “In a manner of speaking,” she says.

  Hatcher says, “He’s the guy who’s supposed to know a way out?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He lied,” Hatcher says. Maybe there’s not a story here after all.

  Beatrice shrugs. “He’s a poet.”

  “He made the whole inferno thing up.”

  “But the lies were true,” she says.

  Hatcher wags his head at this paradox he has never understood. “That’s why I hate interviewing writers.”

  “Down here he’s trying to write a novel,” she says.

  Inside Hatcher’s head, he is answering himself: You understand the journalist’s paradox well enough. That truths can be put together to make a lie.

  “Look,” Beatrice says. “He came and he went. You think his fourteenth century audience would have understood the real Hell? You should have seen this place when I arrived. Not that electric lights and the Internet haven’t made things just as bad in their own way. But back then it was a nightmare version of the same life we all already knew. You think Dante could have written about what really goes on? All of us huddled together in the long night in a walled city burning our filthiest rags soaked in animal fat from who knows where and everybody compulsively reciting bad poetry in broken meters. With the smell and the sound of that stuff filling you up, you’d just throw yourself in the Lake of Fire to clear your head. But back in Florence they would’ve laughed that off. That can’t be Hell. That’s just daily life in Siena. Dante gave them the tortures they could believe in. But it was still torture.”

  Hatcher feels his newsman’s twitch again. Maybe Dante really knew something. And maybe even the neo-Harrowing thing is related. This little noir scene has quickened him to the possibility of the biggest story in Hell. And he knows to try to turn off his brain, though it may already be too late. Satan is listening.

  The police siren is wailing louder now.

  Beatrice closes her eyes and pinches her mouth and shakes her head. At first Hatcher thinks she’s just remembering Hell from the old days. But she stands up abruptly, turns, and moves to a door at the end of the room. She throws it open. Inside is a naked old man, his hands racing up and down his body scratching some terrible itch. He is howling like the police siren on about a 1941 Ford.

  “Will you shut the fuck up?” Beatrice cries.

  The man immediately shuts the fuck up, though his fingers continue to dig furiously at his body.

  Beatrice slams the door and returns to her chair and sits.

  She shakes her head in disgust. “He won’t say which one, but he claims he’s a pope. Boniface VIII is my guess.”

  The room is absolutely silent. There isn’t even the buzz of a silent room in anyone’s ears. Hatcher can’t remember actual silence since he came to Hell. All three of them stir uncomfortably. They all three think they can hear Satan listening.

  Then Bogey says, “Fuck you, Old Man.”

  Beatrice and Hatcher brace themselves. That will do it. A whirlwind of flaming sulfur will rush through the window now and they’ll have to decompose and recompose in agony for a while and then get back to the old chaos. But the silence goes on. And on.

  Beatrice whispers, “See?”

  “What?” Hatcher says, low.

  “They’d never have understood this.”

  “I’
m not sure I do either,” Bogey whispers.

  Beatrice says, “We’re still alive.”

  They all rustle around a little in their skin to verify that.

  “So it seems,” Hatcher says.

  “That’s the real torture,” Beatrice says. “Just that.”

  Bogey says, “You’ve been eating too many flaming hearts, sister.”

  “Get me out of here,” she says.

  “We’ll do what we can,” Bogey says. He looks at Hatcher and nods toward the door.

  “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 anointi
ng 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.