Hell Read online

  “Pee-kow. Pee-kow.” Satan is still shooting his invisible rifle. His bullets apparently are ricocheting. And then he abruptly stops and falls back into his overstuffed chair, the fire behind him flaring up, the flames rushing out of the fireplace to lollop over Satan’s head for a moment and then recede. “I feel so much better after that,” Satan says. He leans toward Hatcher, narrowing his eyes at him, smiling faintly, and he wiggles his eyebrows. “We all have so much satisfying fun inside our heads, don’t we.”

  By Hatcher’s deepest reflexive assumptions, this should reinforce his conviction that Satan is hearing every thought. But it doesn’t. To his surprise. On the contrary.

  This new impression is oddly reinforced by Satan now saying, “You don’t want me to say ‘shoot’ again, do you? You know how I can go on.” Hatcher does indeed know how the Old Man can go on. But his throwing it in now suddenly seems like a shrewd guess at Hatcher’s thoughts, the kind of thing a self-conscious manipulator can use to feign insight, or an immortal ruler to feign omniscience.

  But Hatcher doesn’t have the luxury of considering this further at the moment. Satan does have his powers. He waves his hand and the jumpsuit begins to burn and itch.

  So Hatcher begins. “Why you?” he asks. “Why this job? We all want to know about ourselves, but let’s start with you. Why are you here?” As soon as he asks the question, the jumpsuit stops burning and itching and, in fact, even stops troubling his mind, which, however, troubles his mind.

  “I’ve got father issues,” Satan says. “Oh boo hoo. Oh boo fucking hoo, you say. You’ve got your own father issues. Everybody down here has father issues. Yes. It’s true. And mother issues. Boy, don’t even ask me about that. Think of me and women. Talk about an absent mother. Think of poor me. But think of poor you. All of you. Parents. Holy shit. What a mess. It’s what makes us all down here one big modern extended family. We have to help each other. Give me a hug. Huggiehuggiehuggie.”

  And Satan jumps up and throws his arms open wide.

  Hatcher knows he has no choice in the matter. He stands and as soon as he’s on his feet, Satan is upon him, holding him, pounding in a manly way on his back with both hands, bussing him on both cheeks. To Hatcher’s surprise, none of this is physically painful. It’s just the lumpy awkward thereness of a drunken-party farewell. Satan continues to pound and buss and Hatcher doesn’t know what to do with his hands. Do you hug Satan? What could it hurt now? Your fate is already sealed. Hatcher lifts his arms and puts them around Satan and gives the Old Man a couple of light pats on the back.

  Instantly Satan stops. He says, “Good. There. Doesn’t that feel better? I’m okay, you’re okay. It’s all about family values.” And Satan throws himself back down into his chair. Hatcher sits.

  “Next question,” Satan says.

  “Can I ask you to talk a little more about your father, how that went wrong?”

  Satan rolls his head and digs a knuckle into the corner of an eye. “It always goes wrong, doesn’t it? Somehow? It’s just some sons deal with it more indirectly, more hypocritically, if you will, though far be it from me to criticize. You mortals have to play your little games. But me and my dad. I was his Lucifer. I was young and beautiful. He made his face to shine upon me. He made my face to shine. Yes. He made me the man I am today. He made it all, don’t forget. I just do his dirty work. See, he doesn’t have an editor in his brain. Things pop out and he makes things go in a certain way and then the next moment he steps back and goes whatthefuck. When that happens, he can blame it on me. Sometimes he goes whatthefuck and then a moment later he just goes wellfuckit and takes the credit for it. Same kind of shit, either way. He and I talk all the time. ‘Here, you want the credit for this one?’ he says. ‘Nah,’ I say. ‘Not that.’ ‘Really,’ he says, ‘this one’s yours.’ ‘Okay okay,’ I say. But I don’t have any choice. What kind of relationship is that? When it comes down to it, he can do no wrong and I can never do anything right. Fucking shit happens in the world, but if he does it, fine. That’s Dad’s holy fucking will. If I do it, then it’s, ‘I’m so disappointed in you.’ Fuck that. Next question.”

  Hatcher’s philosophy of smart interviewing employs a process he thinks of as reincorporation. Get some things on the record in one realm and then reincorporate them when you get to the questions about a different but inconspicuously related realm, the latter being what you’re more interested in. So Hatcher’s instinct now is to press Satan on his own reasons for being in Hell. He says, “But things did change between you. Was there some event . . .”

  Satan waves his hand to stop Hatcher from completing the question. Hatcher clenches in anticipation of some sort of serious pain. Punishment for presuming to press the Prince of Darkness himself for personal information. Go ahead, Old Man. Hatcher waits. Satan hesitates. Then, on a dangerous impulse fed by a number of little clues—Satan’s mistaking him for a hunter being the most recent—Hatcher’s inner voice goes on. Don’t you hear me, motherfucker? Give me your best shot. Bring it on.

  But Satan begins to answer Hatcher’s question. “So we were sitting around the dinner table, and he’s going, ‘The whole meat thing, the burnt offering thing, the cut-the-throat-this-way and the drain-the-blood-that-way thing, I’ve had a bellyful of that.’”

  Satan himself is working one realm to get at another, and it would be wise for Hatcher to listen carefully if he wants real answers, but instead, he’s got a new line of inquiry shaping up and he’s testing it some more. He keeps his face earnestly fixed on Satan raving on, but mostly focused on his own inner voice, which keeps trash talking. You can hear me, Old Scratch. Old Scratch-your-crotch. Old Scratch-up-your-butt. Blow my head off. Toss me in that fire behind you. I dare you.

  But Satan raves some more. “So I go, ‘Eat, old man. Eat your meat. Yum.’ And he goes, ‘Maybe all this sacrifice shit has got to stop.’ And I go, ‘You’re just saying every dumbshit thing that comes into your infinite fucking mind. And since it’s infinite, there’s going to be some major dumbshit things that come up.’”

  Go ahead and fix my ass good for these fuck-you thoughts I’m having. Do something to show me what an immortal omnipotent omniscient bad-ass you are.

  “And of course it wasn’t too long before the old man came back around. Kill the other guy. Kill yourselves. Kill anything that moves. That’s the way to please You-know-who and get to You-know-what.”

  Whoa. You can’t hear me.

  “But it was too late for him and me.”

  We all assume you know what we’re thinking.

  “He realized I saw through him and he didn’t like it.”

  But you don’t.

  Satan suddenly leaps up from his chair. His face flushes as red as the throat blood of a bullock before a tabernacle.

  Hatcher gasps and recoils. I’m wrong. Now it comes. The worst thing ever.

  But Satan simply cries, “I did it in defense of the double cheeseburger! Those cows died for you!” And he throws himself back into his chair. His face turns white. “Next question.”

  Hatcher is panting. This is a dangerous moment, he knows.

  Satan sees the state Hatcher is in. He cocks his head at him, and again Hatcher fears he’s been wrong.

  But Satan says, “Yes. Exciting. It’s all very exciting. Ray Kroc’s in the kitchen even as we speak. Cooking up a firestorm of Big Macs. Calm down now and ask me the next fucking question.”

  Hatcher has to put aside what he’s learned unexpectedly and go on as he’d intended. He takes a deep breath, quells the panting, and says, “There are so many of us . . .”

  “A multitude. A teeming multitude. Your brothers and sisters. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Yearning, I tell you. I lift my lamp beside the flaming door.” He’s on his feet again, and suddenly a torch appears in his hands. A torch with a flame of what looks like red neon, but throwing out great swirling clusters of sparks. “Sacrifice. Kill. Pray. Come to me, my little ones.”r />
  A spray of sharp pointillist pain rains onto Hatcher’s forehead. The sparks from the torch. He cries out and he smells his hair burning and he beats at his head with his hands.

  “Oh pardon,” Satan says, and instantly Hatcher’s pain ceases. “Pardon. Breathe free and get burned. Always the way, yes? Always.”

  The torch has vanished.

  Once more, Hatcher starts to doubt what he thinks he’s come to understand. Breathe free and get burned. This is a warning. But why such indirection? Hatcher can’t worry now. Interview. “So you invite your multitude, yes?” Hatcher hears himself reflexively picking up the Old Man’s locutions. “Do you have to take the souls you’re given?”

  “Have to? I want you. I want you all. I choose you, my darlings.”

  “Doesn’t he decide who gets in?”

  The fire behind Satan flares up, rushes forward over Satan and all the way to Hatcher, does a bullwhip snap at the top of Hatcher’s head and sets his hair on fire again. This time Satan simply watches as the top of Hatcher’s head rages in such pain that his sight shuts down and his brain is about to. Then Satan says, “Okay. Okay.”

  The flames go out and Hatcher can see again: the thin, hard, upturned line of Satan’s mouth, his narrowed eyes. Hatcher’s head still aches and smolders and his hair is gone for now, but his brain is working again. He is exhilarated. How quick Satan was to punish him for pressing the point about his father’s higher authority. Hatcher takes this as proof of the privacy of his own thoughts. Prove me wrong, asshole.

  And Satan doesn’t. He says, “Don’t go ‘he’ with me. He he he—I’m not laughing. He he fucking he. It is I. I who choose. I do so because I want you. I want you in my family. Doesn’t that warm the cockles of your heart? Not to mention the top of your head. I want you all.” Satan looks straight into the camera. “Isn’t this a Hallmark moment? Send me a card now, all of you. Go find a sweet little greeting card with family thoughts and mail it to me.” Satan blows a kiss. He turns back to Hatcher. “Next.”

  “Your power is so great,” Hatcher begins.

  “Now you’ve got it,” Satan says. “Good interview technique. Win the heart of your subject with noble cosmic truths about his power.”

  Hatcher says, “How do you choose?”

  “You mean how did I choose you,” Satan says.

  This time Hatcher has not even a flicker of worry. He swells with the importance of the place of a journalist—his place—in any life or afterlife, ennobled by the fundamental right and need of all people to be fully informed. He straightens his spine and in spite of his charred and denuded head still wispily smoking, he says, “I’m a newsman.” with the intention of going on to explain how he speaks for everyone.

  But before he can, Satan cries, “Right! Righteously right! And an exemplary newsman you are, my boy. Look what you’ve done. You’ve been able to ask the Great Dark Lord all these questions and you only had one little hairdo malfunction along the way. And I’ll make that up to you.”

  Instantly, the pain on the top of Hatcher’s still-smoking head ceases, as does the smoke, and he becomes intensely aware of every hair follicle dilating and excreting. His hair grows and grows and he feels it descending over his ears, the back of his neck, his forehead, and into his eyes, and it falls on his shoulders and finally stops.

  “You see? All fixed. Your girlfriend will absolutely adore it. The first man she fucked had hair just like that. You can both reminisce. Such fond memories. We all have such memories. I sat on a cloud once, metaphorically speaking. I hate sitting on clouds. Fucking idiotic. Strum strum on your harp. Flap your wings. What bullshit. But I have memories just like your headstrong, footloose girlfriend. Or should I say footstrong, headloose.”

  Hatcher brushes the hair out of his eyes. Already he’s wondering who Anne’s fuck with the long hair was and starting to churn about it. I won’t let you do this, Old Man. And the power of having the privacy of his thoughts actually helps him move away from his retrospective jealousy. And this was good, this challenge to him. He needed the reminder that Satan can still see and know. Almost everything, no doubt. He’s just not listening.

  “You’ve been a great newsman today, Hatcher,” Satan says. “What integrity. Doesn’t that make you proud? I haven’t had such fun since I brought old Billy Graham out here—he’s a crack shot—and the son of a bitch tried to get me to do an altar call.”

  Hatcher McCord pictures the aged preacher trying to convert the Devil himself, and inside, Hatcher laughs wryly, sadly, at the quixotic pathos of the human condition.

  “That led to some serious malfunctions of various sorts, I can tell you,” Satan says. “Don’t ask.”

  Hatcher McCord’s interview with Satan is an unparalleled journalistic landmark, and the irony is that he has to keep his biggest investigative break to himself. Fuck you, Satan, he says casually in his head. Hatcher’s head is a precious haven in the midst of the maelstrom of Hell.

  “Not that it pleases me,” Satan says. “I sometimes get a bellyful of the malfunctions. I feel for you all, my little children. You are all so pathetic. I do care.” And Satan digs knuckles into the corners of both eyes. “Boo hoodie hoo,” he says.

  By the genius of his interviewing, he has learned a secret that is both dangerous and empowering.

  Satan abruptly drops his hands and lifts his face. He closes his eyes in faux agony and cries, “Satan wept.”

  Hatcher McCord, whose likeability rating even at the time of his death was second only to Oprah Winfrey . . .

  Satan opens his eyes and lowers his face. Hatcher is not so far gone in the overvoice of his life that he misses this moment. He sorts quickly through what’s been going on and recaptures enough at least to say, “Wonderful. Yes.”

  “Of course,” Satan says. “Of course. But as the broadcast interview ends—and that will be the end, that touching moment right there—I want you to do a voice-over thing, and you say it just that way.”

  Hatcher nods knowingly at Satan, though there’s a rustling of panic in his chest because he’s not quite sure what “that way” is. Worse, he’s not even sure what the “it” is.

  “Say it,” Satan says.

  “Yes,” Hatcher says.

  “Now.”

  “Of course,” Hatcher says.

  Satan is waiting. Hatcher is in high, blinding panic. But he is free to scramble around in his own head, he knows now. He can find a way to finesse this. One of his other great newsman talents has always been the ability to act as if you know a lot when, in fact, you know very little. Satan is such a fucking poseur. And Hatcher says, “You are so brilliantly expressive. I want to study that one more time so I can capture every nuance.”

  Satan cocks his head. Hatcher braces himself for more fire. At least he might get rid of this long hair.

  And then Satan smiles a vast, radiant smile. “Good. Yes. Oh I chose you well, Hatcher McCord. We should work on this. Of course, I’m totally fucking insincere, you know. I don’t really give a very hot damn about you all. But I want you all to think I do. If I want to be seen as sincere, then that’s basically the same thing as being sincere. I respect the image and want it for myself and I care that you think I’m sincere and so that shows respect for you and so it all adds up to the same thing, yes? Of course yes. Here we go.”

  Satan lifts his face, closes his eyes, and he says, “Satan wept.”

  Hatcher gets it. “I’m very moved,” he says.

  “I knew you would be,” Satan says.

  “I’m ready,” Hatcher says, preparing his most telling, throbbing, compassionate anchorman’s voice—nightly employed back on earth for the final two-minute feature with the dying child or the starving laid-off worker or the courageous amputee athlete—by using the voice in the privacy of his own mind: Little does Satan know that the experienced and brilliant newsman can, for the sake of a story, feign respect even as he knows his subject to be a fool.

  Satan lifts his face and closes his eyes.r />
  And Hatcher says, with aching mellifluousness, “Satan wept.”

  Satan squeezes his eyes more tightly shut and scrunches up his shoulders in appreciation. Then his eyes pop open and he says, “I could kiss you.” He leaps up and levitates Hatcher from his chair. Hatcher’s feet grope for the floor and find it as Satan grabs him and ends the interview with a flurry of cheek bussing and back-thumping, and he personally elbow-hustles Hatcher past Leni Riefenstahl standing at severe attention just out of arm’s reach of the camera.

  She moves her eyes slightly to the two men as they pass, but she looks inward: It was February and it was cold in Berlin, it was very cold and the snow was drifted up and when the speech was done I had the urge to strip off my clothes—every shred till there was only my quaking naked body—and leap into a snow-drift to sweetly temper the intense heat I was feeling from him, and this was at the Sportpalast where he spoke and I was near the front of the crowd, a little to his left, looking up at him from an angle that made me tremble, the angle of a daughter with a father, I know, the angle of all of us as a nation in our needy submissive solidarity, and what ghost may have passed through me of my commonplace father my bourgeois Kaiserreich father my keep-your-place-girl, quick-with-his-fists father, this ghost passed on instantly now as this man strode to the podium and saluted us, drawing his flat open hand straight from his heart and out to us all, and I looked up at him and I saw him from this angle below as if through the lens of a camera and he beamed sternly all around and he was the father of us all and then he began to speak, and he had me at “Fellow Germans.”

  Hatcher is alone in the back of the car as it comes down the mountain. Beyond the privacy partition, Dick Nixon is driving fast. Alone in the front seat, with no bodies threatening to touch him, he can relax. He looks forward to driving the crowded streets ahead, plowing through them, though he knows to try to squelch the pleasure of that thought, fearing Satan, who Dick assumes knows every thought. But at this point in time, all is good for Dick Nixon, considering where he is. He lifts his face and begins to sing “Big wheel keep on turnin’, proud Mary keep on burnin’” and somewhere ahead, in a back alley of the Great Metropolis, Ike Turner sits before his TV set, unable to move. He watches Richard M. Nixon singing this song, though on the screen, Dick is not driving a 1948 Cadillac Fleetwood, he is on a stage vibrating his thighs in a miniskirt. Ike cannot look away from the screen no matter how hard he tries.