Hell

“From Broadcast Central in the Great Metropolis where all rivers converge,I all storms make a beeline, and all the levees look a little fragile, it’s the Evening News from Hell. And now here’s your anchorman, looking a little fragile himself, Hatcher McCord.” The voice of Beelzebub, Satan’s own station manager, mellifluously fills Hatcher McCord’s head from the feed in his ear. He squeezes the sheaf of papers with both hands, and he knows even without looking that they’re blank by now and he’ll be on his own — the last thing he wants is to rely on the teleprompter, though he will be compelled to try — and yes, he’s feeling a little fragile — and the three dozen monitors arrayed before him burst into klieg-light brightness with his face pasty and splashed with razor burn and dark around the eyes.

“Good evening,” Hatcher says, from the teleprompter. “Good evening, good evening, good evening,” he continues to read. “Poopy butt, poopy butt, poopy butt.” And he wrenches his eyes from the scroll that is about to drop its baby-talk irony and get into some serious obscenity. Hatcher has been allowed to keep his anchorman ability to improvise, though even in his earthly life when he had to do this, which he did most every night — to cut or to expand to fit the time hole — we’re eleven seconds heavy, we’re twenty seconds light — he churned with anxiety at the grasp of every phrase. He understands, of course, that this anxiety is why he’s allowed to keep the skill. And Satan does indeed seem to want the news to be the news every night. Hatcher knows he gets to pull this off, though that doesn’t lessen his worry.

“Tonight,” Hatcher says, “a follow-up to last night’s lead story: is Hell expecting a Heavenly visitor? Will there be a new Harrowing? Also, a tsunami on the Lake of Fire temporarily incinerates fifty thousand. We’ll have an exclusive interview with some of those immediately reconstituted on the beach — Federico Fellini and a dozen fat Italian women in diaphanous gowns carrying parasols. Later, in our ongoing series of interviews, ‘Why Do You Think You’re Here?’, we speak to the Reverend Jerry Falwell and to George Clemens, inventor of the electric hand dryer for public restrooms.”

With this, Hatcher suddenly has no more words. He is struck utterly dumb and he stares into his own face arrayed before him six screens high and six screens across, frozen in wide-eyed silence. He started this feature himself — the Why-You’re-Heres — and he knows Satan was pleased — the Old Man copied his laudatory e-mail to the “allhell” list — though of course Hatcher also knew that his own personal interest in the feature was transparent. But it serves Satan’s purpose to keep everyone worrying and regretting and puzzling, keep them torturing themselves. Hatcher as much as anyone. So he watches his own faces now, and all that cycles in his head is the same question — why the fuck are you here? — and he has no further words to say, even though there’s only dead-air going out to all the TVs in Hell. His brow and cheeks and nose before him are suddenly glistening bright with sweat. He opens his mouth and shuts it. He waits and waits, and then he knows he can continue.

“And tomorrow,” Hatcher says, “our newly arrived homemaking specialist will show you how to prepare organ meat. Your own. Eat your heart out with Martha Stewart. She’ll eat hers.”

“Commercial!” Beelzebub booms in Hatcher’s earpiece. “Now!”

Hatcher does not flinch. In his gravest evening tone he says, “But first these messages,” and he waits and he watches his own face waiting and waiting on the screens, going out like this into every corner of Hell, and just as he has become accustomed to the pain of Beelzebub’s shouting in his ear, he has come to wait out this inevitable delay of the cut-away with his lips set in a thin, knowing smile, his eyes steady. I’m learning, Hatcher thinks. I can control this. Because it’s trivial. Because it just gives me false hopes.

Finally the red light goes dark on his camera and his face disappears from all but the central four screens, replaced by the “Your Stuff” logo. Hatcher sees it written on lined tablet paper in Prussian Blue Crayola in his own hand as a child. The commercials are tailored for each viewer, reselling everyone all the stuff they ever owned in their mortal life, one piece at a time, but the toll-free order number turns out to be a litany of their childhood sorrows and they can’t hang up and they can’t take the phone from their ear. Hatcher forces his eyes away from the screens as his complete collection of Marx Toys Presidents of the United States comes up on the screen, all five series of two-and-a-half inch white plastic figures. He delighted in Series Five especially, Ike and his immediate predecessors. Hatcher had them all meet every day to discuss the previous day’s news, Ike and Truman and Hoover and Coolidge and FDR, who stood erect and unaided, his legs miraculously restored. And Mamie was there too, to serve coffee. But Hatcher keeps his eyes averted now because he knows about the toll-free order number firsthand. The last time, he tried to buy a book from his childhood, a Wonder Book about a magic bus that could fly, and he heard an hour riff on his father.

Hatcher swivels in his chair and pops his earpiece. His cell phone is vibrating in his coat pocket, the phone bouncing around fiercely, banging the bruise on his thigh from where he walks into the corner of his kitchen table each morning. He grits his teeth at the inordinate pain and he stands up, trying to dig for the phone, which bounces on, briefly touching Hatcher’s crotch and initiating what will be an irreconcilable priapismic erection lasting way more than four hours. At last he drags the phone out of his pocket, and the vibrating instantly ends, and he sees from the missed call list that it’s Anne. His Anne. She’s hysterical still, he knows. He also knows he will never get a signal to call her back. Yet his hands move on their own, trying and trying to return the call, though he has never been able to get through to anyone. And still his hands try. Stop now, he tells his thumbs, which are pushing “end” and “call” over and over.

The phone also shows an unanswered voice mail. This is Satan. No one can get through to voice mail but him. Hatcher tells his thumbs to retrieve the voice mail, and this they finally obey.

The voice is smarmy smooth. “All right, McCord. Your latest e-mail persuaded me. This should be amusing, though I can’t promise what I’ll let you do with the thing. But tomorrow morning at dawn someone will pick you up at your place.”

The Prince of Darkness has never appeared on TV and may still resist — he’s notorious for staying out of direct sight — but at last he will do a one-on-one interview. The only unknown is when tomorrow morning will actually get around to occurring.

Hatcher’s mind slides away, full of worry about Anne, when the Fellini spot begins. Perhaps she caught sight of Henry in the street again. It’s always from a distance and he’s never the king she married, he’s always the young prince she first saw when she was in the care of Margaret of Austria at her palace in the Low Countries, when he was tall and still lithe and smooth of skin, and Hatcher holds very still not to cry out from the thrashing inside him, made more acute by his cell phone erection, as he thinks of Henry’s hands upon her and how she pants and lifts her eyes when she speaks of him even now, even though he had her head at last, and surrounding the four central monitors showing Hatcher close his eyes against his retrospective jealousy, thirty-two Fellinis are saying:

“The beach was full of the women I adore, the women of the variety shows on the street where I lived when I first came to Rome, San Giovanni, and they’d show films but afterwards there were the live variety acts and it was the women I waited for, the beautiful fat women with their naked thighs and their breasts flushed and moist and swelling out of their clothes, promising unseen nipples — I could only imagine how sweet — and I found them today beside the lake, these very women, the corpulent chorines of San Giovanni, and I arranged them on the shore, and the sea was saturated red, and then the wave came and my flesh and my bones dissolved even as the flesh and the bones of these women dissolved and we howled together in pain, the women of my past and I, and that felt very familiar: the way it feels to make a movie.”

Then the fat women begin to speak, one after the other, and Hatcher undoes his lapel mike and wanders off the set into the fetid dark behind the cameras. A tight gaggle of dozens of raggedy bodies, barely visible in the darkness, shuttle out of his way, murmuring softly “Good evening” and “Now the weather” and “A new Wal-Mart opened today.” These are the TV news anchors who never got out of local stations, a new group of them each night, Hatcher suspects. They are always huddling nearby, sweating heavily, hair mussed, clothes tattered, unprepared. Hatcher has learned to ignore them.

He thinks how there is always time here for all the news in depth — at last there’s time — and how that’s hell, as one of the fat women drones on about the mistreatment of the working classes, and another recounts her dream of Fellini riding her on her hands and knees and lashing her bare butt with a horse whip, and another simply screams for her sixty seconds, and the others come on one by one, and as Hatcher stands here in the dark, he finds he can quiet his mind a bit, let Anne go. He will see her when the broadcast is done and his torment can continue then, but for now he has the news.

Though tonight there’s less of it than he expected. When the time comes for the big follow-up story about a possible new Harrowing, Hatcher has to move on to other news while the remote crew tries to find his investigative reporter, Carl Crispin, who’s dealing, of course, with torments of his own. Crispin was sent to the center of the city, to the intersection where tradition has it the first Harrowing began, the place where Jesus arrived to begin harvesting the elders of the Old Testament to take them to Heaven. Back then, it was a dusty rural crossroads. Now, it is the corner of Peachtree Way and Lucky Street.

Finally, there are no more stories and Beelzebub is chortling softly in Hatcher’s earpiece, and they begin the nightly “Lessen the Pain” feature. Tonight’s advice, in a grainy black-and-white film clip: when the noontime sulfur and fire storm rains down, just duck and cover, slide under a piece of furniture, or throw yourself into a ditch and curl up and cover your head with your hands.

The piece ends and Beelzebub is breathing heavily in Hatcher’s ear. “Guess what I’m wearing,” he whispers.

But Hatcher knows his tricks. He keeps his face Cronkitedly calm and fatherly. The end of the show always is a test of wills. He stares into the camera, placid, waiting.

“Oh, you’re so good,” Beelzebub says. “So here’s your boy.”

Crispin’s face suddenly surrounds Hatcher’s on the monitors. It is a gaunt and pasty face. Crispin’s eyes are swollen nearly shut from crying and tears are streaming down his cheeks.

“And now,” Hatcher says, “reporting live from the corner of Peachtree Way and Lucky Street, Carl Crispin. Carl?”

Carl jerks at the sound of Hatcher’s voice and snaps his hand-held microphone upwards, slamming it into his mouth. He tips his head forward for a moment, taking the microphone away, and then he lifts his face and spits out half a dozen broken teeth.

“Carl,” Hatcher says. “Are you all right?”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Hatcher,” Carl says. “We’re in fucking Hell.”

“That’s right, Carl. And we’re doing the news. You’re standing in the spot where…”

“This fucking spot,” Carl says. “Do you know how many Peachtrees there are in Hell, Hatcher? I was most recently at the corner of Peachtree Trace and Lucky Court. Before that Peachtree Trail and Lucky Boulevard, or maybe that was Lucky Street also. And even those seemed relatively distinguishable. There are seven Peachtree intersections along Lucky Street itself, including Peachtree Street Avenue Lane and Peachtree Avenue Lane Street and Peachtree Street Street Avenue. I tried to hurry but I couldn’t move my legs to run.” Carl starts to sob.

“Carl. It’s okay. You’re there now. Carl.”

Carl shakes his head hard and wipes his face with his wrist, dragging the buttons of his suit coat sleeve through his eyes. “Well, shit. I’ve done that again,” he says. “I may not be able to see the camera for a while, Hatcher.” And indeed, Carl is looking off camera to the right now, turning almost entirely into profile.

“That’s all right, Carl.” Hatcher picks up the sheaf of blank paper from the desk and holds on tight, trying to fight a twitching that wants to start in his hands.

Off mike, the voice of the cameraman calls to Carl, who turns toward the sound, blinking. He is more or less in place now and Hatcher takes a deep breath. He mellows his voice into his best top-of-the-news tone.

“All right, Carl. On our last broadcast you reported on the rumors of a new Harrowing. Certain veterans of the last one were seeing the same signs…”

“I lied about all that, Hatcher,” Carl says.

Hatcher’s throat knots up tight.

“You know I’m a compulsive liar,” Carl says.

Beelzebub is chortling again, still softly.

Hatcher sees his own face in the center four screens. It is the face of a man he does not know but has seen around a few times. It’s a sad face, he thinks. Sad in the furrowed brow and the tremblingly inverted smile.

Hatcher wedges into the street in front of Broadcast Central. Grand Peachtree Parkway. Teeming with denizens at this hour, whatever that hour is, the air filled with a loud roar of voices and cries. He looks off to the sun hanging behind the sawtooth mountains on the horizon beyond the city. The illusion of the sun, of course. Or a time-fractured view of it. The eye of Satan. Whatever it is. It’s been hanging there a long while. He’s done several cycles of Evening News—he can’t think how many, exactly — without its moving. However long that would suggest. Days, by the reckoning of his earthly life. However long ago that life was. His brain is trying to cope, now that he doesn’t have the broadcast for a focus. Three bearded men stinking of motor oil and sardines, arms linked, shouting wordlessly at each other, barrel into him and he nearly falls — Hatcher doesn’t want to fall — the crowd always surges onto you if you fall — so he tries at least to throw himself a little backward and thumps hard into the stone archway of Broadcast Central, but he keeps his feet, and he tries to fight off a fuckthisfuckthisfuckthis run in his head. Satan relishes that. Worse things always follow. Not yet, Old Man, Hatcher says in his head. Not yet. I’m not going there. Hatcher straightens and focuses on the upcoming interview. He can ask about the sun. He steps into the swift roiling current of the crowd and floats on toward his apartment. He can ask why he’s here.

His alley is tight this time, barely wider than his shoulders, and the unidentifiable crunching and sliming beneath his feet would be worse than usual if he was aware of it, but he isn’t. He is still turning questions over in his mind for Satan, and he goes up the iron circular staircase and down the outside corridor full of wailing and panting and the squealing of bed-springs and the shattering of glass.

The door to the apartment just before his is standing open. The place is utterly empty but for two overstuffed chairs sitting side by side in the center of the floor, slightly angled toward each other. Mr. and Mrs. Hopper. Howard and Peggy. From Yonkers. Hatcher finds his legs growing heavy, dragging to a halt, as they always do when he passes this door. He stops. He nods. Howard and Peggy look at him. Today they are paunchy and creviced and stooped, as they were in their retirement years in Boca Raton.

“Good evening,” Hatcher says.

“I’m with my wife,” Howard says.

“He is,” she says.

“Forever,” he says.

“And I’m with you,” she says.

Howard makes a little choking sound deep in his throat. Tears begin to stream down Peggy’s face, though she makes no effort to wipe them away.

“Excuse him,” she says to Hatcher. “He is always very rude. Good evening.”

“You didn’t say it either,” Howard says.

“You didn’t say it first.”

“How was I first? Why wasn’t it you who didn’t say it first?”

Hatcher is happy to find his feet unsticking from where they are, his legs lightening. “Good-bye,” he says, but the Hoppers are unaware of him, debating on about each other’s culpability.

He moves to the next door, his own, and he goes in.

Anne sits on a cane back chair beside the heavy oak kitchen table. She has reverted to wearing Tudor dress, a gown of forest green velvet with hugely puffed oversleeves of gold brocade and a wide, deep neck-line showing her dusky skin, but her naked upper chest rises to her throat and then ceases: her head sits on the kitchen table looking at her own body.

“Anne,” Hatcher whispers. “Not again.”

She raises her hands and frames her head but does not lift it. She simply swivels her head on the tabletop to look at him. Her enormous black eyes flutter and focus on him and his knees go weak enough to make him nearly collapse there from his desire, and behind his own eyes, he ponders their first moments: She came to me wearing this voluminous green velvet dress, barely fitting into the tiny studio at Broadcast Central to tape the Why-You’re-Here, and she turned those black eyes on me and her eyes were some unidentified deep-space phenomenon, they had a gravitational pull certainly, but I didn’t fall into them, they simply stood me up and roused every rousable part, and they gave off light somehow — a dark light that would not lose itself in the crimson light of Hell — and they gave off heat — but a heat quite palpably different from the ghastly ongoing ambient heat of this place — all of which instantly created in me a thing, a feeling, whose name I cannot remember — and I know this forgetfulness is because I’m in Hell — and she sits and we are ready and she begins to speak about her husband and the church and slander, and the voice of the Queen of England is firm and hard-edged but her eyes are deep and soft and she keeps them on mine and will not take them from me, so I slide closer to the camera but I do not stop her, I do not ask her to look into the lens — I want her to keep looking only at me — and now she speaks of the children she carried in her body and how all but one died there and the one was unacceptably a girl and when she speaks of the children, the voice softens, softens and breaks, and I am in Hell — this is a thing I’ve learned is foremost in all our minds to the exclusion of everything else — the I, the I, the I am, the I am in Hell — but at that moment in our first meeting it strikes me hard: she also is in Hell, this Anne Boleyn of the darkly celestial eyes that will not move from mine, she is in Hell and I ache for that, I want to take her up and carry her somewhere else

And as these words run deeply in Hatcher, Anne’s head sits on the tabletop and looks across the room at the anchorman of the Evening News from Hell and she considers another man: I was but twelve years old when I saw Henry youthful and lank, as I saw him today, and he was the author of all the lies that destroyed me, I know that now, and I am sorry to have been found thus, separated from my body again, by this other man who has entered my life and who powerfully enters into every life in every dwelling place in this nether realm — though it is my understanding that all the others do not experience him directly, as I do — I have learned many new things and ways over the seeming eternity I have already been here — I have learned that a man like this has more power than an earthly king — how Henry would have ruled all the world if he could have but strode into every dwelling each day — and I went to this new man at his bidding, and though I have also learned to wear my cheap, loin-crushing jeans and my shapeless T-shirts with the itchy labels at the back of the neck, on that day it was given me to wear the sort of dress to which I was accustomed in my earthly life and this was a comfort as I came before Lord Hatcher McCord’s devices, and even as I told my story, as I have done so many times in my own mind this past eternity, I watched him, Lord McCord, his eyes were the gray-blue of an autumn London sky and they clouded and ached for me — I could see that clearly — they ached for me, for me, for me here in this place, for me, for this solitary, beheaded me

And with this, Anne finds she can pick up her head, which she does, and she sets it upon her neck. Hatcher is happy for this. He knows how things work. Looking into Anne’s eyes he had a feeling that one might consider tender or pleasurable, but there is always a dreadful mitigation. He was filled with desire for her, but that desire, after all — he is acutely aware — was while her severed head was sitting on a tabletop. Now she is restored. She closes her eyes and lifts her chin and swivels her head, first to the right and then slowly swinging back to the left. This is a graceful movement, and he is glad to be in this kitchen, and he is glad she sits before him, but now that she is whole, the rush of his desire for her subsides. He feels it sliding away, and he stifles a curse at Satan so that he might avoid worse, though surely Satan also recognizes the thing being stifled, and surely Satan doesn’t have a policy of withholding suffering just because you can suppress your inner criticism of him. He can’t give a rat’s ass about that, surely.

Hatcher crosses to the table, and he draws the other chair near to Anne, and he sits beside her. She is still swiveling her head back and forth. There is a scurrying behind him, the roaches gathering to listen to the conversation. This is a curious thing. The place is full of roaches, but Anne is oblivious to them, given the century of her upbringing. And as a boy, and even later as a man, he himself never had a serious aversion to the other creatures living around him, no matter how traditionally despised. He once appalled Naomi in their apartment at the Dakota by gently gathering up a large, sluggish, confused, dumb-shit roach from the bathtub with a paper towel and carrying it to the window and setting it free.

He looks over his shoulder now. The countertop beside the sink is full of roaches, a thousand roaches, all of them sitting up on their back legs like begging pups, their heads cocked. Hatcher puts on his best Evening News from Hell voice. “Good evening,” he says to the roaches. “Tonight, a kitchen table conversation and then one more futile attempt at satisfying sex.”

And in a chorus of tiny, brittle voices, the roaches cry, “Poopy butt.”

Then they laugh.

Hatcher turns to Anne. She is still swiveling her restored head, humming a bit of a pavane from her youth, hearing lutes and tambourines. He touches her hand just as, in Anne’s mind, the courtyard of the Low Countries palace of Princess Margaret, filled with dancing figures and music, dissolves in screaming as a baited bear breaks its chains and charges in, ripping flesh and spattering blood with the wide swiping of its claws. Anne screams.

Hatcher clutches at Anne’s thrashing hand. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s only me. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“The bear,” Anne says.

“It’s all right,” Hatcher says.

“No it’s not,” the roaches cry.

Anne looks in their direction. “They’re right,” she says, though calmly now.

“We’re right,” they cry.

“It’s all the same here,” she says, “whether the horror is in my mind or on the countertop.”

“We’re not horrible,” the roaches cry.

Hatcher turns on them. “No you’re not. You’re pathetic. So shut the fuck up.”

Each cockroach eye has two thousand lenses, and now, as one, four million lenses widen in shocked hurt feelings on the countertop, and all the roaches begin to weep, boohooing loudly. And yes, at this, Hatcher is filled with an acute regret. The roaches slump down from their puppy-begging pose and, weeping ostentatiously still, they all pour off the countertop and into the dark joins of the sink and cabinets and the cracks in the wall, and in a few moments they are gone.

The kitchen rings with the sudden silence. Hatcher is slump-shouldered with guilt, and the gravity pull grows even heavier as disgust with himself sets in for feeling guilty about hurting the feelings of a chitinous chitter of roaches. Satan’s own roaches, yet. And then he realizes the silence is much larger than the kitchen. Outside, there is silence now as well. It’s happening.

Hatcher jumps up and crosses to the door and through to the outside corridor. All down the way, denizens are emerging from their apartments in the dimness of the long twilight. Like them, Hatcher leans out over the iron railing and turns to the street end of the alley, where the passing crowd has also stopped and is turning to look. The sun is not visible to Hatcher from where he stands. But he does see the sky beyond the distant mountains, unchanged still in its twilight pallor. And now the railing, the corridor, the building, the alley, the whole city begins to tremble, and all the denizens cover their ears with their hands, though it never does any good: a sharp blade-stroke of sound punches into their heads — the monumental solar boom of sundown — and everything goes black.

The absolute darkness pushes heavily on Hatcher’s eyes for a long while. Everyone waits. Scattered in the distance are the cries of newcomers, unaware of what’s next. Then the night sigh of Satan blows through the city — a deep exhaling, as if it were his very breath — and all around, lights come on. In the side streets and alleys, the light is dim, scattered, open flames stinking of kerosene or burning rotted wood, bare bulbs putting out piss-puddles of illumination — when the elder George Bush arrived in the midst of a long night and Hatcher found him in an alley and interviewed him, he would only mutter on and on about the thousand points of light. And in the thoroughfares, stretches of mugger darkness are broken by rotten-orange oases of sodium vapor lamps that fill all the twenty-first-century dead with the sadness of interstate rest stops.

Hatcher steps back into his apartment. Anne sits where he left her, by the table, dressed in green velvet, her head attached. She turns her eyes to him, darker than the moment after sundown in Hell.

“Let’s begin this again,” she says.

“All right,” Hatcher says.

He backs out the door, closes it. He opens the door and steps in. “Darling, I’m home,” he says.

Anne Boleyn rises from the kitchen chair. “Darling,” she says, and her voice is sad as sad can be.

Later, much later, they still are sitting at the kitchen table and cannot summon an impulse to move. Night is here. “I can’t find Catherine Parr,” Anne says. “Is she in Heaven, do you conjecture?”

“It’s crowded here,” Hatcher says.

“The sanctimonious bitch,” Anne says.

“Just because you can’t find her…”

“She was a papal puppy.”

“That doesn’t mean she’s not here.”

Anne looks Hatcher in the eyes. “So were they right? Is that it?”

“Who?”

“The Papists. I overthrew the power of the Pope. They called it the Reformation after I was killed by the king. I started that. Henry and I.”

“There were others.”

“Not that he did it for God.”

“Martin Luther.”

“I did it for God,” she says.

“And others.”

“Is Luther here?”

“So I understand.”

“You see?”

Hatcher leans to her, pats her hand on the tabletop. “But Hell is also full of popes.”

“Borgia and his like,” Anne says.

“You’d be surprised.”

Anne sighs loudly. “I should’ve just prayed the rosary and kept my mouth shut.”

“It’s not that simple,” Hatcher says.

She turns her face to him.

He says, “If you really believe God gives a damnation over the dogma, then, for instance, how could John XXIII and John Paul II both be in Heaven?”

“I don’t know those,” Anne says.

“They can’t, is the answer. I’ve seen one of them around town.”

“It’s crowded here,” she says.

“Yes it is. Maybe they’re both in Hell.”

Anne sighs again.

“I need to interview a pope,” Hatcher says.

“Interview me.” Anne flutters her dark dark eyes at him.

“I’ve interviewed you already,” he says.

“‘Interview’ in the Tudor sense,” she says, reaching out and plucking at his left earlobe.

“Ah,” he says. “A Tudor sense to ‘interview.’ This is linguistic news to me.”

“I’d like to die,” she says.

“You’re dead,” he says, running his fingertip down the bridge of her nose.

“In the Elizabethan sense,” Anne says.

“You died before there was an Elizabethan sense.”

Anne laughs. “Many times.”

The two of them have begun this, and they have begun it often before, and so they are both waiting to see how it will go wrong. For Hatcher, it begins to go wrong now. He has now inadvertently prompted her to think of her previous orgasms, which prompts her to think of Henry, and Hatcher watches her eyes go a little blank before him, and he knows the king just strode into her mind — which is to say, strode into this room — and it will be difficult to get him to stride out again.

But Hatcher tries to banter on. “I would, dear queen, that you could die now in Hell.”

“It once was easy for me, the dying,” she says.

“But not now.”

“Not now.”

“Because you’re thinking of the past,” he says.

This is where it goes wrong for Anne. When a man takes your virginity, you might throw off his memory for your present paramour. But if a man takes your head, you need to be left the fuck alone if you want to obsess about him.

“Because thy member,” she says, her voice gone queenly hard, “sleeps when I am awake and wakes when I am asleep.”

“Because Satan does not sleep, and he has power over all the members of this club.”

“Ah. Satan is the reason. Are you sure it’s not my severed head that repulses you?”

“I’m sure.”

“It’s Satan, you say.”

“Satan.”

“Not my head.”

“Not if you keep it on.”

“I never take my head off when we try to play at the beast with two backs.”

Another Elizabethanism. Hatcher’s jealousy ratchets up some more. “Have you been hanging around with Shakespeare again?”

“He’s insufferable,” Anne says.

“You sound more and more like him.”

“He complains all the time.”

“About his member?”

“He weeps for quill and ink.”

“Please.”

“His hard drive keeps crashing and he loses his plays.”

“We all have to keep up,” Hatcher says.

“If only you could,” she says.

They fall silent. They are each deciding whether to try now. It’s less bad when they don’t talk first, though that brings its own problems, of course. The night will go on. Sleep in Hell is rare and brief and fitful. And they both know that once Anne finds herself in full Tudor garb, she tends to unlayer herself only very slowly. Not now.

Anne puts her hand on Hatcher’s. “It’s Satan,” she says.

“I adore your head,” he says.

“In its place,” she says.

Hatcher sits in the kitchen after Anne has gone into the other room. The TV is on now. It’s the stretch between news broadcasts, and the same made-back-on-earth episode of a commentary show called The O’Reilly Factor has been running over and over for a long while now, full of intense shared sneerings between the emotionally gaunt Bill O’Reilly and a gaunter guest named Ann Coulter. These were opinionators in Hatcher’s time, but he never watched them. He ignored most of the rightist ranters. These two are in Hell now but are banned from all but earthly reruns. He understands they arrived together, locked, according to Carl Crispin’s report, in a coital embrace in the first class suite of a crashed superjumbo Air-bus. This show will continue to run to the exclusion of all else but the news for a long while, Hatcher knows. It replaced the long run of an episode of Gilligan’s Island, wherein Gilligan bumps his head and subsequently sees everything upside down.

But now this iteration of the O’Reilly episode ends, and Hatcher turns his face toward the sound of the TV. The news will return for a one-minute spot. Beelzebub puts on his most dulcet tone and says, “And now the News Digest from Hell, with Jessica Savitch.” Hatcher hurts for Jessica already.

“Good evening,” she says. “Good evening.”

In his mind, he can see her face constrict, as it does every time. She lets the other two good-evenings pass, and then — he understands just how her brain is compelled to work — the good-evenings end, and she expects news text to scroll up, and she reads by reflex.

“Poopy butt,” Jessica Savitch says. “Poopy butt.” Hatcher shakes his head sadly. He can hear Jessica make a strangling sound in the next room. Then she improvises. “Motherfuckers,” she cries. “Motherfuckers. Can’t you motherfuckers act like professionals?”

Hatcher knows the answer to her question. He thinks of poor Carl. And he wonders how Carl went wrong on the Harrowing story. Carl’s ongoing torment — designed by Satan, of course, not only to torment Carl but Hatcher as well — could have deep ironies built in. Perhaps Carl was made to lie about lying. Hatcher rises. All right. He’ll find Peachtree Way and Lucky Street for himself. He bangs his perpetually bruised thigh on the corner of the kitchen table and moves toward the door. “I’m going out for a while,” he calls to Anne.

“Motherfucker,” Anne calls in return, but rather sweetly, in a Tudor sense perhaps.

Hatcher hopes that the Hoppers’ door is closed so he can just move past without pausing. But his legs drag him to a stop, and he looks in.

They are sitting in their chairs.

They are still arguing. They both glance his way, but Peggy finishes her point to Howard, “If you looked forward to being alone for eternity, how did we end up in Boca together?”

“Boca wasn’t forever,” Howard says.

“It felt like it.”

“Now you complain.”

“I thought all I ever did was complain, to hear you tell it.”

“And where would you have gone if not to Boca?”

“To my sister’s.”

“Without me.”

“Of course without you.”

“To Scranton, Pennsylvania, you’d go?”

“Yes, to Scranton.”

“Instead of Florida.”

Hatcher struggles to lift his feet, to put one foot in front of the other and just keep going.

“You’re doing it again,” Peggy says.

“What?”

“You’re being rude to the famous TV personality.”

“Me rude? You talk about him in the third person right in front of him. You think he’s deaf?”

Peggy turns her face to Hatcher and she says, her voice abruptly faint, “He had feelings for me once.”

There is a long moment of silence. Both Hoppers are looking at Hatcher, though they are seeing through him to a slow page-turning of images from their life together. Howard’s voice also has waned. “Who said so?”

“You did.”

They fall silent once more. Hatcher struggles to move.

“Yeah, but what feelings?” Howard says, low.

Peggy looks at him. She struggles with something in her mind. “I can’t think of the word,” she says.

And Hatcher can move. He does. He walks off without a word. He puts the Hoppers behind him. Even in the dark he can see that his alley is wide now, and at the far end is the orange glow of light from the Parkway.

Hatcher McCord, anchorman for the Evening News from Hell, descends the staircase of his back alley apartment, picks his way through moaning shapes in the dark, and approaches the tumult of Grand Peachtree Parkway. He intends voluntarily to take a long walk through Hell. He will do this for the sake of a story. Sometimes in his head, when things get particularly intimidating, Hatcher runs bits of voice-over narration to his afterlife. This impulse he’s now following, for instance, the passage from his own neighborhood to Peachtree Way and Lucky Street, is intimidating. Of course, Satan knows what he’s doing. Satan probably is the one who’s doing the prompting. And behind that prompting may be torture of some carefully tailored sort. But Hatcher also knows a few things about how it works down here. And he’s aware he has certain privileges. He had privileges in his life on earth for much the same reason. Hatcher McCord is famous, his narrator says. This inner voice helps. At that very moment, Hatcher has approached a barrier to the street — a kneeling, twitching body calling out “Mama”—and he leaps over it with something he feels is no less than lithe grace.

On the other side of the body, however, he goes abruptly empty. He pauses. He turns. He looks back. The body is crawling off quickly and it vanishes in the darkness. Hatcher wonders why he has turned. He wonders why he is standing here. If his newsman’s instincts are aroused, Hatcher McCord will never let a good story die. Hatcher turns back to the bright orange glow, the tumbling, veering, bumping, compressing, stalling, lurching, rushing, outcrying crowd on Grand Peachtree Parkway. Hatcher McCord does have privileges, thanks to his fame and his importance to society.

Some other voice in Hatcher’s head sighs. Not some other. Also his. Also Hatcher McCord. Idiot. Hell is full of famous people without privileges. I’m useful. Useful to Satan. If you’re listening, Chief, and I’m sure you are, I have to stress that I’m not being ungrateful. You see the anguish I’m in, so surely that makes it all right. I’m useful to you — the Lord of the Flies, the Former Most Beautiful Angel in Heaven, the Infamous Big Cheese — and that’s like winning the sweeps with a fifty share. That creature I so gracefully leaped over — I’m right, aren’t I, O Supreme One? I was quite wonderfully graceful? — that creature might have been Mick Jagger or Dwight Eisenhower or Dan Rather — not Henry VIII, I suppose — why do you let him flounce around as a young man? — but of course it’s to torture me — and Anne too, I suppose — I hope it’s torture for her — I leaped over that body quite elegantly, whoever it was, didn’t I?

Hatcher blinks and shakes his head furiously as if a hornet has flown into his ear. He is still subject to great pain, of course, personal and public. Like this. How simple this little inner dialogue is, but it is torture to him. He does know that he can move from one place to another without being waylaid and savaged mercilessly like most denizens. He is damned, but he is still a journalist. Or, as Hatcher McCord himself might rephrase that as he tries to answer the enduring question of this place — why are you here? — he is damned, so he is still a journalist. Or even, he is a journalist, so he is damned. He will move now as a journalist through the main thoroughfare of the Great Metropolis, and he has the journalist’s classic place in the world: he is part of the suffering humanity all around him but really he is not, he is an observer, his pulse quickening at the pain he observes, his deep brain sparking in delight at the possibility of a story and at the gravitas of that, the importance of that.

“Shut the fuck up,” Hatcher says aloud, addressing himself.

He waits. He has indeed seemed in his head to have shut the fuck up.

And so he stands in the mouth of his alley and waits as a megabyte of Internet gossip bloggers lurches by, the men in starlet-at-the-beach bikinis with celluloid-ravaged thighs and acid-seeping hard-ons, the women paunchy droopy naked but for Speedo trunks, weighed heavily about their necks with molten-hot gold pop-star bling, and all of them — a thousand or more — pass by in a long, dense gaggle, pinching and punching at each other. Hatcher’s neighborhood has many journalists, and this gossip-blogger group lives at the very edge, at a distant turning of the Parkway where other denizens never actually go in person, where only this subset of bloggers huddle together over laptop screens, zinging each other. At last they pass, and Hatcher pushes onto Grand Peachtree Parkway, turns toward the place of the Ancient Harrowing, and presses into an unsorted crowd of denizens.

He is soon carried into the adjacent neighborhood, where many of the poets and playwrights and fiction writers dwell. He is moving more or less steadily now in a narrow corridor of space at the edge of the great flowing street crowd, squeezing along storefronts and piss-stained apartment stoops, the way often pinching shut from the veering of the crowd but then opening again. He passes by bookstore after bookstore, their windows dark, their shelves full of long-unsold remainders of all the local writers. The stores will open with hopeful new owners at the next sunrise and will be out of business by the next sundown.

Then in front of Hatcher a man lurches from the darkness of a doorway into a sudden flare of orange sodium vapor light. He is draped in a toga that perhaps long ago was white but now is dark with stains and spattered with what appear to be bird droppings, though Hatcher has never seen a bird in Hell. The man’s hair is cropped close and his face is pasty and he has no nose, only a jagged outline of one in the center of his face as if he were an ancient marble statue.

“Please, denizen,” he cries. “I am here to guide you.” His hands flutter up in front of him as if he will grab at Hatcher.

Hatcher pulls back and wonders if he needs to defend himself. But it is more thought than instinct, and so he hesitates.

The man’s hands fall, and he says, “Please. I know the way.”

“Who are you?” Hatcher says.

“Publius Vergilius Maro.”

The name sounds vaguely familiar to Hatcher, but he can’t place it.

“I was a poet for the great Augustus,” the man says.

“You’re Virgil,” Hatcher says.

“The Emperor is not so great now.”

“Why do I connect you to Hell already?”

“But neither am I. I am but a broken image of myself.”

Hatcher remembers. “The Inferno.”

Virgil wags his head sharply, fighting off thoughts of his own past greatness, and he refocuses on Hatcher. “I’ll guide you,” he says.

“Like Dante,” Hatcher says, meaning it as a little literary joke.

Virgil rolls his eyes. “Oh please. He was a pain in the neck.”

Hatcher doesn’t understand. “He was really here?”

“You’d never guess it from his poem.”

“What Hell was it that you showed him?”

Virgil shrugs. “This one. But low-tech.”

“He really came here?”

“And then he lied.”

“He’s back, isn’t he.”

“He doesn’t go out much. He’s still obsessed with the girl, always dreaming of joining her in Paradise.”

“His Beatrice.”

Virgil steps very close to Hatcher now. He is a surprisingly tall man, for his era, his face fully in Hatcher’s. He reeks of rotten sardelles and Cyprian garlic. “You need to come with me,” Virgil says.

Hatcher realizes this is one of those oh-right-I’m-in-Hell-and-thisisn’t-really-a-matter-of-choice moments. He and Virgil look at each other. The crowd is jostling noisily by, but Hatcher can clearly hear the Roman’s whistley breathing through his fragment of a nose. “Okay,” Hatcher says.

Virgil turns abruptly and moves off. Hatcher follows. The poet turns in at the next alleyway.

In the narrow passage, the sounds from the Parkway abruptly cease. Hatcher hears only the scrape of his shoes on the pavement. This alley feels almost pristine beneath his feet — none of the offal squinch underfoot of his own alley — this sound echoes back from the tenements in the dark on either side. And somewhere far off he can hear the sound of a police siren. He has never heard that sound in Hell before. Virgil suddenly veers left and vanishes in the shadows. Hatcher stops, and instantly Virgil’s voice urges him on. “In here,” he says.

Hatcher steps into the blackness. Dimly he can see the poet’s toga ahead, and he hears a knock. A door opens, and standing framed there in the jaundiced glow of bare bulb light is a man in a snap-brim and wide-lapeled suit. His face is in deep shadow.

Virgil says to the man, “He’s here.”

“Thanks,” the man says. And from the timbre of the voice and the shibilant “s”, Hatcher instantly knows who it is. Humphrey Bogart turns to the side to clear the door. The light falls on his creviced face, and even though his eyes are still in the shadow of his hat brim, Hatcher can see their sad, dark depth.

Virgil vanishes in the shadows. Hatcher steps forward.

“You’re late,” Bogey says.

Hatcher moves past him and into the back staircase landing of a tenement. The lightbulb juts nakedly from a fixture in a side wall, and mounting the opposite wall is a vast dark shadow of the staircase banister. Hatcher looks around him with the panic of an actor’s dream. He’s on and he doesn’t know his lines.

Bogey steps up beside him. “Her note said 4D.”

“4D,” Hatcher says.

“One more thing.”

“Yes?”

“Put your hat on.”

Hatcher realizes there’s something in his hand. He looks down. He holds a gun-metal gray snap-brim fedora. He puts it on.

The rasp and hiss of a match turns his face to Bogey, who is lighting a cigarette. Bogey drags once and exhales. He reaches into his inner coat pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He flicks one partway out. It’s a Camel. He offers it to Hatcher.

Hatcher actually hesitates because he smoked as a teenager and then stopped in J-School and he is reluctant to start again. For his health.

Hatcher laughs a sharp, ironic laugh at this and takes the cigarette.

Bogey strikes another match. “I don’t expect much from her either,” he says, understanding the laugh in a way that Hatcher now also understands. What can this dame have to say?

Bogey holds the flame to the tip of Hatcher’s cigarette. Hatcher inhales. As with all the everyday earthly physical pleasures, in Hell there is only a niggling disappointment, though occasionally there is, of course, searing pain of one sort or another. With this drag on a cigarette, for Hatcher there is niggling disappointment. Followed by the brief searing pain of feeling like a teenager.

“Let me do the talking,” Bogey says.

Hatcher is suddenly all right. He nips with his thumb and forefinger at the tip of his snap brim. “Right,” he says.

The two men climb the stairs. The light at the landing draws the shadow of the banister posts across their bodies first one way and then, when they turn, the other way, as if they are pacing in their jail cell.

At the fourth floor, their two fedoras come up from the light below and into the dark at the top of the stairs. Hatcher and Bogart stop on the threadbare runner that trails down the center of the corridor. At the far end is a thin slice of light at the bottom of a doorway. Bogey nods toward it. They move to the door and Bogey knocks.

From inside, a woman’s voice says, “Come in.” It’s a high, thin, nasally voice.

Bogey draws a sharp breath. Hatcher looks at him, but his face is a mask of black in the dark corridor. Bogey pushes the door open.

The tenement apartment is one room, simple and seedy, as simple and seedy as a cheap hotel room in some dirty little working-class burg. A sagging couch, a desk, a few chairs, a blank wall where the Murphy bed hides, all of it in colors that don’t even deserve the name “color.” Dingy grays and tans. And rising from a chair in the center of all this is the dame. A tiny body, fragile, chiseled features and dark, feverish eyes. Her lips are scarlet, painted large, like Satan’s own butterfly.

Hatcher and Bogey are standing before the dame and she’s looking at the two of them, one at a time, back and forth, like she’s trying to figure out which one of them is going to throw her over his shoulder and carry her out of a burning building.

Hatcher waits for Bogey to do the talking, but his partner isn’t saying a word. He looks at Bogey, whose face is lambent with repressed anguish, though nobody in the room would know what “lambent” means, even Hatcher at that moment, who is now very much Bogey’s fellow private eye. Hatcher lifts an eyebrow and rolls his shoulders in his wide-lapeled suit, wondering what’s going through his partner’s mind. Bogey doesn’t act like this around dames.

Finally Bogey speaks. “You’re not who you said you were.”

“Who’d I say I was?”

Bogey hesitates. “Nobody.”

“That’s me,” she says.

“You’re not who I thought.”

“I got no control over what you think.”

Abruptly Bogey turns to Hatcher. “You talk to her.” And Bogey heads for the window, which looks out into utter darkness. “I thought she’d be someone else,” he says, low.

Hatcher looks at the dame. She looks at him. She’s wearing a flimsy little flower-print button-front dress, and the buttons are big and dazzling white, just asking to be undone.

Hatcher still doesn’t know his lines, but he’s catching on.

He takes a drag on his cigarette, and being a gentleman, he turns his head slightly, blowing the smoke just past the dame’s right ear. He flips his head at the chair behind her, and she does what she’s told. She sits. Hatcher stands over her, but he parks his Camel in the corner of his mouth, casually brushes his suit coat open, and eases his hands into his trouser pockets. Just to put her a little at ease.

“So?” he says. The cigarette loosens and starts to fall from his mouth.

Hatcher grabs for it.

Meanwhile, Bogey stares into the nothing out the window as if it was something, and the voice in his head speaks: I thought it was going to be her. I don’t have any reason in this forsaken town to expect anything to turn out right, but somehow I thought it was going to be Baby at last. What a sap I am. Of course this is the way it ends up. You drink a lot. You crack some heads. Even to get her, there was the price of running out on your wife, and then maybe you even run around a little on her, out in the middle of the ocean heading for Catalina. You wouldn’t have done that except for Baby getting seasick and never being able to go with you on the ocean in the boat you enjoy so much. Even if it’s a little screwy, you try to keep a kind of a code about things. And you try to do your job straight. And you’re true to your friends. You give away your last two fingers of bourbon. But you find yourself running into a brick wall. The thing they call your flawed humanity. So you end up in a cheap room in a hot climate and your cigarettes all taste like dust and it looks like you’ve got an extended booking. Still, I wanted it to be Baby real bad. I wanted her to have her back to me when I came through the door and there’s just that thin long body and the rip curls of her dirty blond hair and she waits a beat or two before turning. Baby is Bacall, after all. She has a swell sense of timing. So she turns, and the hair falls a little over her face but you can see both her beautiful eyes, those wide-set eyes, and she gives me that little half smile and we’re together again. That’s what I wanted real bad. I may be a sap but I’m not stupid. I know what I’m wishing for. That Baby is spending eternity in Hell. I should be wanting real bad never to see her again. I should want her to be in Heaven playing a harp and looking swell in a white gown and wings. But I don’t want that. I want her with me. Which probably is why I’m here.

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 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.

Hatcher keeps his mind thus desperately occupied amid the multitude of gropers and pinchers and farters and bleeders, the maggoty and the pustulant and the leprous and the Botoxically botulinal. He is worried because he knows they are entering Hell’s tenderloin, and soon all these bodies about him will begin to cast off their clothes and grow desperate with unscratchable itches. As unpleasant as the crush of bodies now is, it will get far worse when they are naked. Is Satan pissed with him? But now Hatcher feels himself twisted by an eddy of the crowd and borne to the margin, and he is dumped flat on his back in the mouth of a side street.

A long-bearded old man’s face appears, hovering over him. The man is clothed in a gunnysack, and he lifts a hand-scrawled sign on a stick and floats it before Hatcher. It once read “Repent. The end is nigh.” But one letter has been scratched out and replaced and a new word has been careted in, and the man now slides away to gyre endlessly on the corner urging the denizens to REPEAT. THE END IS NEVER NIGH.

Hatcher struggles to his feet and faces the Parkway. It is utterly clogged, the crowd ground now to a halt, the air above it filling with the rise and fluttering fall of shed clothing. Hatcher turns around and looks down the side street. It is a dead end leading to splashes of neon on a large building, obscured, from this distance, by the dark. He takes a step toward it, and from the darkness at the top of the building comes an abrupt bright red sparking flare and a clap of sharp sound. Hatcher hesitates, but the flame evaporates and the afterclap subsides, and he moves on.

Soon the building shows itself in the red glow of its neon signs: a wide ground-floor facade of colonnaded arches and two dark-windowed upper floors and minarets at the front corners rising into the night. The neon proclaims: LIVE! NUDE! THE HOUSE OF VIRGINS! YOU’VE MADE IT! 72 FOR U!

And now beside Hatcher is an unmistakable, forced, drawly chuckle: “Heh heh heh. If it isn’t Hatch the Snatch.”

Hatcher turns and finds the ship-anchor nose and narrow eyes and heavy brows of a familiar face. “Mr. President,” Hatcher says, reflexively using the honorific, though he likes the irony now. This was the last president he covered, and for a moment, at the very end of Hatcher’s life on earth, as his heart attack began, he felt his own imminent premature death would be mitigated by not having to live out this one’s full second term.

“Hatch the Snatch,” George W. Bush says.

“Mr. President.”

“Snatch the Hatch.”

“Welcome, Mr. President. I didn’t know you’d arrived.”

George turns his eyes to the House of Virgins. “He’s inside. I got him now.”

“Who’s that?”

“Osama. I got him now.”

From the House of Virgins, a wail begins — a man’s voice — and at first, briefly, it sounds like sexual fervor, but quickly the sound morphs, the voice clearly is crying in intense pain, and around his voice begins the sound of female voices, ululating together, a chorus of trilling excitement — a chorus of seventy-two, no doubt — and then suddenly a third-floor window flares bright with flame and an explosion punches through the air and the flames leap out of the window and carry with them disassembled male body parts — legs, arms, a torso, a wide-eyed head — that fall to the ground before the building. The flames flicker out in the window, the women’s voices fall silent, and the body parts lie motionless for a moment. Then abruptly the parts all rise into the air and reassemble into a naked, darkly bearded young man. As soon as his body is recomposed, he begins screaming again in pain but without a moment’s hesitation he dashes for the front door of the House of Virgins and disappears inside.

“That wasn’t him,” George says. “See, this happens every couple of minutes. Osama’s waiting his turn, like we used to in the back of Spunky’s in Crawford. How’s about that for pointyhead ironicky? My intelligence report says they have to wait in line for the seventy-two virgins.”

“Your intelligence report?”

“Somebody gave it to me when I got off the boat.”

“Who was that?”

“Some guy who met me right there at the dock. He says, ‘Mr. President, here is your intelligence briefing.’ See, I’m back in the saddle here, Hatch. A little heavenly reward.”

“Pardon me?”

“I’m just wondering how, if they keep doing the same seventy-two virgins over and over again, then you know, how they’re actually virgins when, like, the second guy does them and so on.”

“You mentioned a heavenly reward…”

“Well now, Hatch, a reward can’t be the explanation. See, that’s Hell you’re looking at there. Inside that Arab looking building. Osama and those virgins and those other boys are all in Hell.”

Hatcher turns to George. “Mr. President…”

“Though maybe you’re right. Satan could turn those girls back into virgins each time. That would certainly be Hell. Right, Hatch? Heh heh heh.” George’s chuckling ceases with another male voice baying in pain from the house and then the women ululating and then the exploding and the afterclapping and the thudding to the ground of the body parts. George watches in wonder.

“That’s not him either,” George says.

“Mr. President…”

“I’m sure glad I’m not in Hell,” George says.

“Sir, you are.”

“Looks pretty rough in there.”

“Mr. President, it’s Hell out here too. You’re in Hell.”

George turns to Hatcher. “Heh heh heh. You’ve got your disinformation all wrong there, Snatch.”

“That was the River Styx you came over on the boat.”

George puts on a you-poor-dumb-shit smirk. “The reports are clear. You see, we’re standing here in Heaven, and those boys inside that building over there are in Hell.”

“Look around,” Hatcher says. “Does this look like Heaven?”

George doesn’t move his eyes from Hatcher’s. “We’re searching now for the WMDs — Wings Made Divine — and we expect to find them soon.”

A man’s cries, the women’s cries, the explosion — louder this time — and George keeps his eyes on Hatcher, keeps the smirk fixed, and Hatcher feels a sharp hot burn on his forehead, his cheek — a splash of boiling liquid — and another — glowing red — and it’s falling on George too — a splashing of blood on his hair, his face, searing Hatcher and George — and the former president’s eyes widen, though he does not move a muscle. And then a small, flaming object plops onto George’s shoulder. It is a raggedly severed penis, smoking and glowing red, the flames dying at once. George moves his eyes very slightly to look at the object, and then he returns his eyes to Hatcher and waits. Soon the blood strips itself from the two men and coalesces in the air and the penis rises from George’s shoulder, and then the blood and the penis fly off to join the reassembling of the exploded man.

George’s smirk fades, and Hatcher knows the former president is realizing at last where he is. Then, after a long moment, George clears his throat. His voice is barely a whisper. “So this is where I am?”

“That’s right.”

George nods. “Have you seen my dad?”

“Yes.”

“And my mom?”

“I haven’t seen her.”

George nods again. “She’s probably in the other place.”

Hatcher holds his tongue.

“If she is here,” George says, “she’s going to find me and whip my ass. Heh heh heh.” This time the chuckle is small and sad.

Hatcher wants badly to move away from George now. But before he does, his journalist’s self makes him say, “I do the evening news here, Mr. President. When you get settled, stop by Broadcast Central and we can do an interview.”

George says, “I’m pretty much on my own here, right Hatch?”

“That’s right.”

George nods. “Thanks for asking, but I don’t think I’d know what to say.”

Hatcher mutters a good-bye and moves quickly up the street, thinking about the hell of not knowing who you are and the hell of suddenly knowing.

The Parkway is stalled, dense with naked bodies, their private parts jammed into the private parts of whatever body is pressed against them, wedged there and flaming. Nighttime is the wrong time for this journey, Hatcher realizes.

And the sadness of George Bush and the anguish of the jihadists and the priapic pain of the crowd before him turn Hatcher back toward his own neighborhood: Hatcher McCord understands that sometimes the time is right for a particular news story, and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes larger issues present themselves. He is, after all, spending eternity in the same place as George W. Bush. Who can tell him why? George certainly has refreshed this question, and in spite of the din of voices all around Hatcher and the sucking sounds and the fleshy squeegee rubbing sounds, when his voice-over pauses for dramatic effect, Hatcher’s head goes utterly silent for a long moment. Then: Naomi can. Wife number three. And Deborah. Wife number two. And Mary Ellen. Wife number one. They all would have thoughts on the subject of why he’s here. He might deny the reliability of these sources, but obviously he didn’t get it right, either. Here he is forever with Osama and George and all the rest. And with Naomi, surely. And Deborah. And Mary Ellen.

Surely these women are somewhere in town as well, or soon will be. If Hatcher McCord approaches the Big Why? as if it were a news story — and it is, in a certain way — the instinct he has to track down his former wives is a natural one, journalistically. But by now he knows this instinct in himself as something else: seek the fresh torture. Yes, he will try to find his ex-wives. He is the very model of an intrepid newsman. But also he is driven to suffer. There is a swelling of cheesy music in Hatcher’s head, and he is glad the voice-over is finished. That voice was right, however. He squares his shoulders. Okay, Old Scratch. You’ve got some new thing in mind for me. Scratch the Hatch. Hatch the Scratch. But fuckitfuckitfuckitfuckit, I’m going home to Anne first. He squeezes into the near margin of the crowd, his back to all the naked suffering, and he creeps off, thinking that Satan even wants this, of course, for him to go to Anne, old torture before fresh.

Anne is naked and whole in their bed in the dark, the TV and the hanging, bare, low-watt lightbulb both turned off, and she looks up at Hatcher as he crosses to her, her eyes so dark they register as light in the lesser dark of the room. As soon as he sees her, he is wanting her, wanting to touch her and finally finally die with her, but with the step before the step before the last step, he thinks how he is wanting her, wanting to touch her, and wanting finally finally to die with her but how this always goes wrong, and with the step before the last step he thinks how thinking about how the wanting her, wanting to touch her and wanting finally finally to die with her is often the very thing that makes it go wrong, and with the last step all he is doing is thinking about thinking about wanting her. And his body is no longer wanting her.

He stands there. She lies there. They look at each other.

“It went away,” she says.

“Yes,” he says.

Her eyes are so beautiful, he thinks.

“For me too,” she says.

“Yet again,” he says.

“I was in my mortal life a woman of strong will,” she says.

“Yes.”

“And you were a powerful man.”

“So I thought.”

“You still are.”

“No. Even on earth, I observed power. I spoke of it. Merely that. My own power was celebrity.”

“That is great power.”

“Only an illusion of power.”

“We are ourselves illusions now, forever.”

“And even those who had true power in life,” Hatcher says, “it was in a narrow alley and for a passing moment. They’re all here now, I think. All of them.”

“But I remember what it feels like, to have a strong will.”

Hatcher says, “What did it get you, though, my darling Anne. Look at how it ended. Henry’s will was even stronger, and yet even he could never get what he wanted, and now he’s in Hell like everyone else.”

She closes her eyes.

Hatcher squeezes at his forehead. He himself has brought up Henry. “Why did I say that?”

“Because you are powerless not to,” she says.

But her voice is soft, and Hatcher says, “You’re not angry.”

She thinks on this. She opens her eyes. “That’s true.”

“And I’m not jealous, even having brought up the king.”

Anne rises onto an elbow. “Render thyself naked now, Lord Hatcher, and come lie beside me. Quickly.”

He throws off his shirt and his pants, working his way down toward merely skin.

“No thinking,” Anne says. “Look me in the eyes.”

He does. He does. And he is naked and he is beside her.

Tonight the mattress is gravelly hard. He ignores this.

They have gotten this far before.

They both start to lift their arms to embrace and there is a clash of wrists and elbows. They stop and wait.

“You start,” she says, falling onto her back and putting her arms alongside her, as if she were in a coffin.

Hatcher twists around and slides an arm behind her at the shoulders, his hand vanishing there and instantly snagging on a coil of her unfurled hair. Anne gasps.

“Sorry,” he says, withdrawing the arm quickly.

“You’re pulling my hair,” she says.

“Sorry.”

“The headsman lifted me like that, just after.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Those very roots you just pulled. They held my head aloft.”

“No remembering,” Hatcher says. “Look me in the eyes.”

She turns her eyes to him.

Hatcher slides his arm under her, farther down, at the shoulder blades. She shifts a little toward him and a shot of nerve pain runs from his elbow down his arm and into his hand. He gasps.

“Did that hurt?” she says, lifting up. “I didn’t know.”

He pulls his arm out.

They both sit. They put their hands on each other, gingerly, at the shoulders. They are sweating. There is a sound from the alley. A voice.

“Someone’s singing,” Anne says.

“They’re weeping,” Hatcher says.

“No,” she says. “Listen. There. ‘Pastime with good company, I…’ something ‘… and shall until I die.’”

“It’s a woman crying,” he says. “There. Hear that?”

“Henry wrote that song, just after he became king.”

“That little trilling sob.”

“What was the word in the lyric? I what until I die?”

“It sounds like Mary Ellen crying.”

“I couldn’t hear.”

“Listen.”

And they both listen. But the alley is silent.

They look at each other. Their hands are still on each other’s shoulders. For a moment, they’re not sure why.

“We were trying,” Anne says.

“Yes.”

“I’m actually sleepy,” she says.

“You’re never sleepy,” he says.

“I am now.”

They let go of each other, and they lie down, side by side.

And soon Anne is asleep. To thrash and dream badly, of course.

Then, rare as well, Hatcher falls asleep.

And after a time, he rises to wakefulness from another rare thing. Indeed, a first for him in Hell. He is having an unmitigatedly good sexual feeling. He opens his eyes, and he is on his back and staring at the glowing filament of the bare lightbulb hanging above him. Instantly, he knows three things: he is awake, Anne is not beside him, and he is presently the recipient of an ardent and expert blow job. He closes his eyes again. He thinks briefly of his boyhood in Pittsfield: a shower nozzle, stove-warmed Vaseline on an oven mitt, an actual girl from a double-wide out along the Illinois River. But he is with a queen now. So he opens his eyes and lifts his head slightly and looks down his naked torso to Anne, her mouth working expertly, her beautiful eyes looking back up along his torso into his own. Then her eyes close and release his gaze, which drifts up and slightly to the left, and there, across the room, sitting in a chair, filing its fingernails, is Anne’s headless naked body.

Hatcher does exactly the wrong thing. He screams and jumps up. Anne’s head — having limited motor skills and, in its detached state, being more prone than usual to being startled — clamps its mouth tightly shut. Hatcher leaps about the room now, knocking into the bed stand, the window, the wall, Anne’s head whipping up and down and back and forth with each movement. This being Hell, there is nothing to prevent Anne’s teeth from actually biting clean through Hatcher’s distressed member, for him subsequently to be reassembled. It occurs to him that this would actually be preferable, in that it would put a clear end to the present ordeal. In this instance, however, Anne’s head bites only hard enough to hold on, and so Hatcher — though movement is not in his ongoing best interest — compulsively continues to leap and spin and pirouette and, within the confines of this very small room, even execute two unmistakable grand jetés, one from the window to the opposite wall and then another back again.

At last he lands in front of Anne’s body, and with great force of will he holds himself steady and grasps her head between his two hands and pleads for her to release him and reattach. Anne’s hands do rise now, and they grasp her head, and she releases Hatcher, who crumples to the floor. Anne puts her head onto her body, stretches her neck, looks down at Hatcher, and says, her tone criticizing him and not her, “Nothing I ever do in bed is right.”

Meanwhile, in the alleyway, the voice that Hatcher and Anne heard is still silent. It both cried and sang, though not like Hatcher’s ex-wife and not King Henry’s “Pastime with Good Company.” Ernest Hemingway stands even now out there in the dark. He is looking for a good bar — he has been looking for a good bar for pretty much as long as he’s been in Hell — and he can’t find one and, as it often does, his failure has made him weep for a time. A little girlishly, it’s true. This is Hell. And while he wept, he sang in a mumbly, untuned voice, easy to misunderstand from a distance, it’s true. But the song, in fact, was from the Spanish Civil War, “A las Barricadas,” the hymn of the Anarcho-Syndicalists. And now Ernest Hemingway stands in an alleyway in Hell and his head is full of words.

It was late and everyone had come into the café. The place was dim and full of bullfighters and Gulf fishermen and boxers and Upper Peninsula Indians and some boys from the Lincoln Battalion who died at Jarama. No one could see anyone’s face, the bar was so dark. The old man sat at a table by the window. The only light in the place came from a lamp on the street and it shone on the old man. He was dressed in a white poplin empire dress.

The two waiters inside the café watched him. “He committed suicide,” the older one said.

“Why?”

“Look at him.”

“That’s why?”

“His mother put him in that.”

“How do you know his mother did it?”

“Who else? If he wished it for himself, he wouldn’t be wearing it here.”

The younger waiter nodded.

The old man wanted another drink. He wanted a first drink. But there was nothing to drink here. There were only all the men he ever knew or ever thought about. Then his wives came into the café. He knew they would come. And the women he slept with and didn’t marry but wanted to. And the women he didn’t sleep with but wanted to. And the women he slept with but didn’t want to. Everyone was here. Everything he’d ever done was here, inside his skull. What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was an everything that he knew too well. It was all in darkness but it was all here, and it needed that, the dark, and the heat.

The light in the street went out and he was in darkness now too. He had always been in darkness. He knew it was all todo y pues todo y todo y pues todo. Our todo who art in todo, todo be thy name, thy kingdom todo thy will be todo in todo as it is in todo.

And in the dark of an alley in Hell, Ernest Hemingway whispers aloud, “Forgive us our todo as we forgive the todo who todos against us.” With this, Ernest looks into the darkness above him, thinking about who might be hearing his words — he has always wanted at least to be heard — and his hand goes reflexively up and palms the back of his head, which he once blew off with his favorite Boss 12-gauge shotgun. Then the hand falls and he lowers his face. He begins to cry once more and he begins to sing once more, but he does both things very softly, so softly that no one around can hear.

What appears to be the sun in what appears to be the sky in Hell usually teases its way up in the morning, repeatedly tantalizing and disappointing the denizens, showing just the merest upper edge of its corona, drawing a trickling blood-flow of light from the dark above the mountains, brightening the streets and the windows ever so slightly, just enough to be noticed, but then falling back, snuffing it all out, only to almost appear again and then vanish again. It behaves this way over and over before it finally provides an actual dawn — having suckered the denizens each time — and it does all this after what is always a long, long night. So when Anne reattaches her head and folds her arms across her naked chest and closes her eyes and when Hatcher is able to quit writhing in pain and rise and stagger into the other room to sit, naked still, at the kitchen table, their reasonable expectation is that they will sleep almost not at all but sink into bored stupefaction and that they will have plenty of warning that the night is beginning to struggle to an end.

But not this time. They doze inopportunely. And the sun comes up abruptly. And their apartment booms with heavy hands on their door. Hatcher has time only to convulse awake and jump up to full dangly nakedness as the door slams open and in rush Robin and Maurice Gibb in powder-blue jumpsuits. They leap apart to frame the open door, striking mirror disco poses, their outer arms lifted up, their outer legs cocked, and they sing, in intensely vibrating falsettos, “Staying alii-i-ive, staying alive.” The powder-blue jumpsuits are a common uniform for the official minions in Hell. That the Gibb brothers have already attained this status tells Hatcher something he suspected on earth about the ascendance of disco in an era of rock and roll. The brothers Gibb fall silent and shakily hold their poses. It now registers on Hatcher that it is dawn and it is time to go to the interview with Satan. As the dead disco dandies totter in embarrassment — even Hell’s minions, of course, are still subject to torture — Hatcher will shortly regret not taking this opportunity to slip into the bedroom and grab some clothes. But before this thought has a chance to form, into the open doorway, also wearing a powder-blue jumpsuit, steps the former director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover.

He takes two steps into the room, placing the Gibb brothers in the position of backup singers, strikes the same disco pose as theirs, and sings, “What you doin’ on your back, aah?” The room fills with drum machine thumping and brass-section riffing and the Gibbs’ background quavering, all in service to J. Edgar Hoover’s lead vocal, which is complete with echo chamber effects. Hoover ratchets up his falsetto with “You should be dancin’, yeah,” and the three do a perfectly synchronized arm and leg switch and sing on.

At some point in his tenure in Hell, Hatcher noticed how, though many millions — indeed, no doubt, billions — of the dead are teeming around the place from all the eras and places in the history of the planet, the ones who primarily come his way tend to be the people he is in some way familiar with. Though freshly rendered interpersonal torture does occur — Anne Boleyn’s with him, for instance — that tends to be rarer. The torture of the familiar is the norm. And so, given the musical sensibilities Hatcher treasured in his earthly life, it is hard to exaggerate the severity of his torture at standing naked in his tiny kitchen in Hell as former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sings a Bee Gees disco song backed by a full studio orchestra and Robin and Maurice. Hatcher wants to run and hide. He wants at least to go put some clothes on. But he is unable to move, even through the dance interlude, where the three do a line hustle together, pumping their arms furiously, and through the endless repeats of the you-should-be-dancing chorus, and even as Hoover and the Gibbs simulate a studio fade, singing in smaller and smaller voices until they are silent.

Now Hatcher tries again to move but can only teeter.

“Oh no you don’t,” J. Edgar says. “You’re coming with me.”

Hoover steps to him, crushes Hatcher’s elbow in a fist, and guides him, naked, out the door, down the spiral staircase, and into the backseat of a waiting 1948 Cadillac Fleetwood limousine as black as the night that has just passed.

Once inside the Cadillac, Hatcher understands the unique infernal possibilities of being shut up naked in a tight private space with J. Edgar Hoover, given the long-understood but dangerous-to-pursue story of the man, which even included rumors that the Mafia had photos of him flouncing in a feather boa and a little black dress at a private party. Indeed, Hoover instantly begins to sing in a tiny falsetto, “Nobody gets too much heaven no more,” and Hatcher tucks his private parts out of sight, tightly crosses his legs, and slides over against the door.

Beyond the black privacy window separating the driving compartment there is a scuffling sound and chirpings of pain as the Gibb brothers crowd in. The unseen driver grinds the car into gear and Hatcher is thrown back from the acceleration down the alleyway and then thrown toward Hoover with a sharp turn into Grand Peachtree Parkway. He quickly recovers his ball-crushingly modest pose. Alarmingly, though, Hoover has stopped singing and is now panting heavily. Hatcher presses his face hard against the window and squeezes his legs painfully together. He has no chance to stop the thought to Satan: Come on, Old Man, I’m just trying to let you say what’s on your mind and you have to turn it into this. “Oh shit,” Hatcher says aloud, certain that his rashly critical thought will now prompt Satan to fully unleash the libido of the former director of the FBI.

But instead, Hoover’s panting stops with a groan. He cries, “And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee” and Hatcher does not listen to the sounds that follow this but concentrates on the extraordinary rate of speed the driver is maintaining through the dense crowd in Grand Peachtree Parkway, the thumping of bodies against the car coming so fast as to blend into a low roar.

Behind the wheel, Richard M. Nixon could be expected to draw some pleasure from the carnage he is wreaking — perceiving, as he does, all the denizens of Hell as his personal enemies — but in fact he is distracted by the acute discomfort of physical contact with the Gibb brothers, who are pressed against him, obsessively jutting their hips and hustle-stepping and shooting their arms up in disco poses that are gradually crushing all the bones in their hands against the roof of the car, their falsetto screams ringing in the driver’s compartment. And inside Dick Nixon: My old man’s cheeks and forehead would flush bright red and my saint of a mother knew what was coming and his fists rose and I backed out of the kitchen door and I put my hands over my ears because of the sound that would follow, and even the touch of my own hands startled me, nauseated me, made me drop them, and then there was only the running away from the sound. What a coward I was. I ran as fast as I could, but I knew I would be tough someday, I knew I would never back down. And this is perfectly clear. I am not an abuser. With Pat it wasn’t about being tough, it was about touching. When I hit her, it was about touching, and it was about touching whenever I sought out the backseat of White House limo SS100X, my favorite, the one I always insisted on. I was the President. It was the restored midnight-blue Lincoln Continental where Kennedy was shot. I would ride around right in that same backseat. The very spot. They touched him there. And they could touch me if they wanted to. I wasn’t going to run away.

And up ahead, among the denizens in the crowd only a few moments away from suffering the blunt trauma of Dick Nixon, is Patricia Dankowski, once known professionally as Trixie Smith, a Chicago prostitute from Avondale, reared only a few blocks from Saint Hyacinth’s Basilica in a brick semidetached where she was touched for a few years by her father — he’s now, unbeknownst to her, in the basement of a brick semidetached in a very rough neighborhood of Hell where the rapists perpetually rape each other — and she is oblivious to the indiscriminate touching all around of the jostling throng of denizens. She squeezes an arm out of the press of bodies and runs a hand through her over-bleached hair, great clumps of it tearing loose in her fingers, but she does not notice, as she is thinking of the night of September 26, 1960, when she was touched for a brief time by the future President of the United States: Call me Jack, he says, and he smiles a lot of teeth at me and he’s a good looking man, even better looking than his photos, and we’re at the Ambassador East, which isn’t a first for me, though it’s not a place I’ve been in lately since they’ve come to know me by sight and I advise against it for any clients, so as to avoid a scene. Not that I’ve ever been in the Presidential Suite, where they’ve put him, and he’s got Peggy Lee playing on a phonograph when I come in, though he switches it off as soon as he motions to the bedroom door, which is too bad because I’d like to hear her go on singing “I Got It Bad, and That Ain’t Good” while I’m working Jack Kennedy, and he asks me “Do you have a TV, Trixie” and I say “Yes, I do, Jack” and he says “I’m going to debate that fellow Dick Nixon on TV in about an hour and a half” and I say “I didn’t just fall off the hay wagon, Jack” and he laughs and he says “Well then, what do you think I should do about Quemoy and Matsu” and I say “Nuke ‘em, Jack” and he laughs again and he’s naked real quick and so am I and I’d just as soon take a little bit longer because when John Fitzgerald Kennedy is inside me I get it in my head that I’m somebody after all but I’m only somebody for what’s got to be less than sixty seconds and then I’m nobody again, just like my old man always said afterwards, but when I’m dressed and passing through the sitting room I get up the nerve to ask Jack to play my favorite song and he waves off all his men already coming in from the other bedroom and he smiles and he goes to the phonograph and he puts the needle on the vinyl and he and I stand there together and Peggy sings to me about how a man is always going to end up making you sing the blues in the night. And now there is, very nearby, a roaring engine and then a wild flinging of bodies and Patricia Dankowski is hit and shattered by Satan’s chauffeur. She tumbles over the right front fender and along the side of the car, and for a very brief moment, as she hurtles past, she and Hatcher look each other in the eyes.

Having seen the eyes of this woman flying past, Hatcher turns his face from the street. Hoover is moaning — not yet reconstituted from his eyeplucking — and so Hatcher closes his own eyes and waits, and waits. Eventually, the sucking and tucking and zipping sounds of a reconstitution begin and Hoover falls silent. Outside, the roar of body-thumps eventually ceases and there is only the sound of the engine for a while. And when Hatcher finally opens his eyes to look once again upon Hell, he is no longer in the Great Metropolis.

The car is climbing a narrow, curving, empty road into the mountains that Hatcher heretofore has seen only on the horizon. He puts his face to the glass and tries to look back to the city. He sees the slick gray lumpings and soarings and plungings of the mountains as the car twists with the road. And then Hatcher gasps as the city jumps into his eyes: a vast sudden everything: the far horizon and the extreme periphery of his vision, as if he has been plucked into the middle of the air and he dangles before the immense compressed jumble of a billion rooftops and tenement facades and webs of streets and all of it shimmering — not shimmering, quaking — not quaking, writhing — writhing with vast throngs of bodies, tiny from this distance, but Hatcher knows what these great stretches of huddling masses are: millennia of individual bodies and minds and hearts born into life and cast now into this place, shimmering, yes,I shimmering from his view in the mountains of Hell like a scrub fire on a vast plain. He hangs and sees and hangs and he tries to figure out where his body is so he can pull back, and then the city vanishes and it’s just cliff faces and the huddling of boulders until at last the car rushes into a great level plain hidden among the mountain peaks. And there are stands of trees and a vast grassy meadow, or what appear to Hatcher as these things, which he did not know existed in Hell.

He feels a slight nudge on his arm and Hatcher looks to Hoover, who has averted his face. But the G-man is holding an upturned hand to him with a stack of three golden-brown squares. “You’ll need these,” Hoover says. “Honey cakes for the dog.”

Hatcher takes them and they are densely heavy and sticky and their smell is so sweet that it makes Hatcher’s teeth ache. He holds them in his palm and puts his other hand over them just as the Cadillac brakes sharply and fishtails to a stop. Before him is a rustic-style hunting lodge — classically shaped in one story of stacked rough logs with a low-pitched gable roof — but even from where Hatcher sits, a hundred yards away, the lodge is so massive as to utterly fill his sight, the rough wood trunks of its walls as large as sequoias. Hatcher has an instant stab of sadness, realizing that the seeming utter absence of nonverminous animal life and growing things in Hell has always given him a sweet little dangerous pulse of pleasure, that whatever the reasons are for a very high percentage of humanity seeming to be here, there is some code of justice — however severe — at work, since the nonhuman living things of that previous life are spared from this place. What were the sins of these trees? he wonders now, with the bloom of a sharp pain behind his eyes.

And having wondered about the unworthy sequoias, he suddenly finds himself face to muzzle with three dogs. Or, more precisely, the three heads of one dog, Cerberus. The faces of the Hound of Hell are not, as they are variously portrayed in the earthly life, like combinations of lion or bear or wolf or, in latter days, pit bulls. Cerberus is a rabid, grossly outsized Jack Russell terrier, slobbering and barking and leaping incessantly, his three heads each as big as a midsummer watermelon. For the moment, however, he has ceased his jumping and is concentrating on slobbering and barking at Hatcher’s window.

“Roll the window down just a bit and feed him,” Hoover says.

Hatcher grasps the window handle and starts slowly to turn it, bits of slobber instantly flying in and burning acutely on his forehead, the tip of his nose, his chest.

“Watch your fingers,” Hoover says.

Hatcher does, opening the window just enough to thrust the end of a cake out, averting his face from the slobber, and he starts feeding the heads. Each one falls silent in turn, and then Cerberus abruptly backs away and trots off, chewing laboriously at the sticky cakes.

“Now,” Hoover says and he pushes Hatcher’s shoulder.

Hatcher opens the door and steps into the driveway before Satan’s mountain lodge. He is acutely aware once more of his nakedness as two powder-blue jumpsuited minions rapidly descend the long front stairs and head toward him. He crosses his hands over his crotch and looks away. In the field to the side of the lodge he sees rows of pickup trucks, a hundred or more. And then gunfire flurries from behind the lodge. This brings Hatcher’s face back to the approaching minions, and the two mustaches are unmistakable. One a modified Walrus and one a classic Toothbrush. If asked which two people in history he would least wish to be naked before, Hatcher would probably have answered something like “my mother and Hillary Clinton.” But now that Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin are at each side of him and grabbing him firmly by the elbows and, at once, lifting him off the ground and reexposing him, he has a new respect for Satan’s insight.

Joe and Adolf tote Hatcher across the drive and up the steps and through the front door, and striding toward them, framed in the light from enormous veranda doors behind him, is Satan, wearing a red-and-blue-plaid flannel shirt, Armani jeans, and a RUTTIN BUCK camouflage hunting cap with tied-up fleece earflaps. Against his chest he carries a Ruger Deerfield 44 Magnum autoloading carbine with a smoking muzzle. Hatcher expected that through the anticipated long night he would have a chance to prepare himself for this moment. But the abruptness and the intensity of his gathering up and passage here, culminating in his hanging in dishabille six inches off the floor in the grip of two of the most prolific murderers in history, has prevented any preparation for what is, in fact, his first actual physical encounter with Satan. Till this moment he has had only the traditional earthly iconography and Satan’s e-mails and cell phone messages to conjure up the Prince of Darkness. And now: Hatcher thinks of some typical politician with whom he’s only vaguely familiar and who’s declared his candidacy for president and is scoring about four percent in the polls and Hatcher finally meets him in an American Legion hall in Dubuque or Cedar Rapids on a brutally cold December afternoon as the guy benightedly campaigns to win the Iowa caucus vote. That is say, a classic, middle-height, middle-age man with a squarish, slightly pasty, faintly jowly, smarm-ready, white-guy-in-power face. Except in the moment after this face registers on Hatcher, the face flares bright red — nothing else changing, not shape or jowls or even the smarm factor — but it all becomes instantly, luminously, arterial-blood red.

“This one’s late!” Satan roars. “Set him loose out back!”

And before Hatcher can quite get his mind around this, he’s being whisked past Satan and across the floor toward the veranda windows. This much is clear at once: Satan either is mistaking him for someone else or he’s pretending to.

As Hatcher passes through the doors and sees the field before him, he starts to understand. A hundred — or a bit fewer now — naked men, mostly white, mostly paunchy, are running madly in circles in a dozen acres of low, stubbly canebrake. Originally there was one man per pickup truck parked in the front of the lodge, but now there are a dozen or more bodies twitching here and there on the ground, each with a major magnum-hole in head or chest. No doubt, all were hunters in life. Hatcher is being taken for one of these.

“Wait!” he cries, twisting his head over his shoulder to try to address Satan. “I’m Hatcher McCord! Your anchorman! Your interview!”

Joe and Adolf are quickly descending the back steps, Hatcher flopping between them. At the bottom they rush on, across the yard toward the canebrake, and Hatcher is thinking this is what it’s always been about, doing this to him. He was getting to be too important in Hell. But why the hunting motif? He hunted with a couple of presidents over the years but only for show. He never even shot anything. Now he can see before him the whites of the eyes of the naked hunters running around making sounds of terror like the cries of wounded moose. Hatcher tries to reassure himself: it’s only more pain and humiliation. If it wasn’t this way, it would be some other.

But now Satan bellows from behind, “Wait!”

Joe and Adolf stop and turn around, Hatcher still hanging between them.

“Put him down,” Satan says.

They do.

In his desperate relief, something registers on Hatcher about what is beneath his feet, but not quite consciously.

Satan is standing at the top of the stairs to the veranda. His face is pasty white again. “Hatcher McCord!” he cries.

“Yes. That’s me,” Hatcher says aloud, while his inner voice declares The grass isn’t real.

“The anchorman.” Satan has stopped shouting. There is even a tone of dawning recognition in his voice.

“The Evening News from Hell. Hatcher McCord. I’m here for the interview.”

Perhaps the logs in the lodge aren’t real either.

Satan says, “I didn’t recognize you. In person, you’re naked.”

Hatcher is attuned to tones of voice. As an interviewer in his earthly life, he prided himself on being able to discern all the little audible clues that a subject is lying. Hatcher has the odd impression that Satan truly made a mistake about who Hatcher was. Certainly Satan would be adept at feigning his confusion. But why would he bother?

Satan begins to drum the fingers of his right hand in the air. “Come here,” he says. Hatcher is free of the grip of the two tyrants now, and he moves to the veranda and up the steps, Satan continuing to elaborate on his invitation: “Come. Come. Hustle along, Hatcher Thatcher Snatcher. Come to Papa do. Come along comealongcomealong. Here, boy.”

I’m spared for now, and at least trees are innocent.

As Hatcher reaches the top of the steps, Satan backs up a few paces and motions him to stop. “Now,” Satan says, “Hatcher, old bean. Tell me why you come to visit your Papa Satan in the nude.”

“Hoover…” Hatcher begins, and Satan waves his hand to silence him.

“Oh dear oh dear, have you been doing naughty things with Eddie?”

“No. No. Not at all. He burst in unexpectedly… Morning came…”

“Morning came,” Satan says. “Ah, morning came indeed. I made the morning to come, my boy.”

“I didn’t have a chance…”

“Please. Papa understands. Morning. The clarion call of the feathered creatures.” Satan pauses, lifts his face, and makes a bird call of some sort that Hatcher cannot recognize.

“Treedle eedle eedle oodle oodle!” Satan calls, and from behind Hatcher all the naked hunters in the canebrake are compelled to answer with the same call.

“I am riven with guilt at mistaking you,” Satan says. There is a sly overripeness to his tone that clearly signals his insincerity. Hatcher understands he knows nothing, really, but hearing the meaning of this tone makes him have about a twenty percent confidence in his previous impression of Satan’s confusion. There are things to think about in all this, but he does not have time.

“I’ll make it up to you,” Satan says, striding up to him and shoving the rifle into Hatcher’s hands. “Step aside.”

Hatcher does. He turns and watches as Satan lifts a hand and drums his fingers again, and Joe and Adolf approach at a trot. Satan stops them with a wave and then begins to point from one to the other and back again, moving his lips silently, doing an eeny-meeny-miny-moe. Stalin and Hitler begin to quake. Hatcher realizes that both of them have large, liquidy, creepily fetching, feminine eyes. Satan ends with his forefinger pointing at Hitler.

“Strip,” he orders.

Hitler tremblingly complies, peeling off his jumpsuit and then standing straight-spined and naked before Satan, his face rigid in terror. Hatcher, newsman though he be, consciously does not confirm the earthly reports that Hitler had only one testicle.

“Shoot him,” Satan says to Hatcher.

“Shoot him?”

“With the rifle in your hands,” Satan said. “Shoot Adolf Hitler. Shoot him in the face.”

Hatcher is trying to catch up with all this. He looks dumbly at the rifle.

“Are you more anti-Communist than anti-Fascist?” Satan asks. “You can do Joe instead.”

It’s not a preference for someone else that makes Hatcher hesitate. Hitler would do just fine, if he has to shoot someone in the face for Satan. But Hatcher feels some vast thing opening up in him.

Satan thumps his own forehead with the heel of his hand. “Of course. Ofcourseofcourseofcourse. Pillars of fire and smoke. Big TV news. Round the clock.” He throws his head back and does an inept fire engine siren impression—“Weeeooo weeeooo”—and then resumes, “You’re on. Smoking skyscrapers behind you. Undo your tie. The nation turns to Hatcher McCord.” And now in a high girlish voice, “Oh please do your face just that way again. So grave, so compassionate. We all ache together.” Abruptly he leans near to Hatcher — smelling, yes, generally of something burnt, of brimstone even, but also, from his breath, of Frosted Cherry Pop-Tarts and, from his face, of Old Spice After Shave — and his voice swoops down into a conspiratorial baritone: “You want Osama bin Laden? I’ll get him for you. It’ll only take a moment.”

“It’s not that,” Hatcher says.

“He’s small beans, though. Comparatively speaking, yes? Comparatively. Numbers, boy. Numbers.”

Hatcher does not understand his own hesitation. Adolf Hitler, after all. Big numbers.

“You’re a sportsman, is that it? Adolf. Run around.”

Hatcher looks at his rifle once more, the stock and the forearm a smoothly unbroken run of apparent walnut.

“You can do it,” Satan says. “You’re a great shot here. Just point and shoot. Squeeze, don’t pull. Point and shoot, anchorman.”

Hatcher lifts his eyes and Adolf Hitler is running around in circles twenty yards in front of him, with each circuit lifting that famous face to Hatcher with wide, frightened eyes. Adolf fucking Hitler. Hatcher puts the rifle to his shoulder and squeezes the trigger. Hitler’s head explodes in bloody fragments and the body falls.

Hatcher pants heavily. He trembles. All the muscles of his hands and arms and chest trill with jumpy happiness. “Go ahead,” Satan says.

Stalin turns his face from the fallen Hitler. He looks Hatcher in the eyes with that familiar avuncular smugness. Big numbers. And Hatcher pulls the trigger again. Stalin’s head vanishes in a pulpy red plume and the body falls.

Hatcher’s chest pumps up instantly full, as if he was drowning and has unexpectedly leapt into the air. The headless bodies of Hitler and Stalin lie shuddering beside each other. And now, before Hatcher can even lower his rifle, one of the hunters — a corpulent jowly man with a Brylcreem-rigid pompadour — dashes this way from the canebrake, as if to run up the veranda steps and past them and escape out the front door.

Satan rattles a rapid ID: “He shot his best friend to death in a planned hunting accident so he could fuck the wife in their double-wide with her twin eight-year-old girls locked outside in the snow.”

Hatcher hesitates. The man’s dash has suddenly turned into glutinous slow motion. Every one of us had the trying-to-run-but-can’t nightmare on earth, Hatcher thinks.

“One man or a million,” Satan whispers. “It’s the same. Fuck big numbers. The nova of a star or the splitting of an atom. In the great scheme of things, the difference is inconsequential.”

Hatcher hears this and it seems true and the pompadour’s best friend deserved better, but when it comes down to it, Hatcher is simply still holding that big, beautiful chestful of air from Stalin, and it needs a proper release. He pulls the trigger. The man flies backward, his belly blown open. Hatcher’s full chest huffs happily empty, and he breathes deep again as a lanky, hatchety-faced man leaps through the steam of the gut shot of the fallen hunter and heads for the veranda.

Satan says, “This one never ate a thing he killed. He just got off on seeing those cute little birdies explode.”

Hatcher pulls the trigger and catches the lanky man in a shoulder, spinning him around screaming.

“Again,” Satan says. “We shall not forget even one sparrow.” Hatcher shoots once more, cutting the man in half at the middle of his spine.

This time he sighs a calm, sweet, quiet sigh. Poor little birds.

Hatcher feels the rifle being gently tugged from his hands. He resists for a moment. But it’s Satan.

“Look how talented you are,” Satan says.

Hatcher lets go of the rifle.

“And righteous,” Satan says. He looks away from Hatcher, toward the lodge, and flicks his head to someone.

Hatcher is in a state of calm quietude, like after a sauna and a massage and about four glasses of wine with a Xanax dissolved in the first one. Hands are upon him, squaring him around at the shoulders, poking at the back of a knee. “Lift your leg,” a woman says. He does. “Now the other.” He does. His arms are lifted one at a time and there is a zipping.

His head begins to clear. He looks down. He is wearing a powder-blue jumpsuit.

They sit in the lodge great room with a walk-in fireplace roaring intensely behind Satan. Hatcher sinks deep into an overstuffed chair before the Old Man. He crosses his leg. He realizes he is also wearing powder-blue-coordinated Nike Dunks. Behind him is a top-of-the-line Sony HD Camcorder set up on a tripod. The camera was unattended when they sat down a few minutes ago and Satan has been rattling on and on ever since about how this is the first-ever interview he’s granted, that even William Randolph Hearst tried unsuccessfully to get an interview for the Hell Times Herald Examiner Journal Standard, which Hearst published for a long while until the Internet came along and he was forced to shut down and now Hearst’s off in a blogger cubicle writing about his own dick and its previous billionaire adventures, weeping at his loss all the while, and he can’t turn off his keyboard Caps Lock and is thus the object of severe and constant ridicule by his fellow bloggers for always shouting.

But Satan stops talking abruptly, looking at something over Hatcher’s shoulder. Hatcher turns. Adolf Hitler is standing beside the camera. His head has been reconstituted, but imperfectly, his face a maze of raw scars. An old, bleached-blond woman, her arms and face and neck a dense patchwork of liver spots, is hovering beside Adolf with a bottle of iodine and a dingy wad of cotton. She heavily doses the cotton, the burnt-orange liquid splashing everywhere, and she swipes at the join-lines of Adolf’s face. He cries out in pain and she cries out in the same pain, and she does the cotton again and they cry out together again. He seems unable to stop her from these painful ministrations, his hands hanging unmoving beside him, his head held rigid. Both Hitler and the woman are wearing blue jumpsuits — hers short-sleeved to feature her age-and-sun-ravaged arms.

“Stop stop stop!” Satan cries to the woman.

Hatcher expects that the woman will back away and Hitler will operate the camera. But it’s Hitler who bows. He takes the bottle and cotton from the woman, and he withdraws. The woman looks to Satan and Hatcher, for a moment blinking hard, trying to focus on them. The face seems familiar, but in a mid-seventies, heavily made-up, heavily nipped-and-tucked New York-to-Miami retiree way — his second wife Deborah’s people. The woman looks away to where Hitler is marching out of the room.

“Leni,” Satan says sharply. “Focus. Glory times have come for you again. This will be your masterpiece. Marching millions in the dark. Torchlight. And naked racing bodies. Leaping and soaring and running. All captured solely in my words. The grandiloquence of the Prince of Darkness. Now turn that thing on and back away and hold very still, you bitch. No fucking with the camera.”

And Leni Riefenstahl focuses. She bows from the waist and steps behind the camera. Hatcher turns to face Satan, whose eyes are lasered on Hatcher’s. He’s reading even this thought that I think he’s reading this thought, Hatcher thinks.

“Any time,” Satan says. “Shoot.” He laughs loud. “Shoot. Shoot. Quick.” Satan jumps up and pantomimes shooting and he roars on. “Point and squeeze. I’m out running in the canebrake. Shoot quick. Shoot me with your questions, Hatcher McCord. Shoot me with your 44-magnum brilliance.”

As Satan is going on, Hatcher tries to focus on the questions, the notes for which he left behind with his clothes. But it’s difficult. He has an image caught in his head: Adolf and Leni beside the camera. And what Hatcher is seeing are collegial powder-blue figures, minions of Satan, joined with the Old Man, and here Hatcher himself sits dressed in the jumpsuit of a minion and he’s about to willingly — eagerly — give Satan a wide, public voice. But. But. I’m a journalist. I do not judge. I report. Let the public judge. And it takes an informed public to make good judgments. This all suddenly sounds to Hatcher like bullshit of a very strange sort, and he shakes his head sharply back and forth.

“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.”

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.

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.

Nixon’s singing would be torturing Hatcher too, except Hatcher has found the solid mahogany door to his mind at last and shut it and he’s taking no calls. He is aware of the rock-naked slopes and crests and cliff faces passing by and then the flat, arid run up to the city, and he is aware the sun is now vast and high overhead and he knows the forecast for noontime from last night’s news — scattered sulfurous fiery storms — but all of that is vague in him for now as he sits in the prime corner office of his mind and all is silence there. What to do with this freedom in my head, what to do. I got away from my old man. On the pre-dawn morning when I was supposed to kill a whitetail with a shotgun out in the river bottoms and start growing up like he wanted, me his only son, his only child, carrying all of his hopes, I burrowed deep into the absolute dark of the back corner of the attic guest-room closet with the smell of old wool and mothballs and shoe leather and I huddled up tight and I wasn’t afraid of him and I knew I could think what I liked and I interviewed President Eisenhower in my mind — grilled him about the Suez and the Eisenhower Doctrine and I wouldn’t let him off the hook about actually taking military action to stop communists merely on the suspicion of a problem — and I could hear my dad calling downstairs, but I was going to think what I wanted. And it may have led me straight to Hell. He would have predicted that. But now I’m huddled up and free to think again, and I saw my dad here in Hell once, trapped inside his traffic-jammed Studebaker, giving the finger all around, and I didn’t care one way or the other, really, that he was here too — of course he was — and I didn’t even try to catch his eye. That’s one thing I can do with my freedom. I don’t have to expect it to be torture if I want to figure out why I’m here. And if I do and if somebody really is coming to take a few souls away to wherever else there is, then maybe I can know how to be one of those to go. And maybe even Beatrice and her boyfriend are right. Maybe there’s a back door somewhere. I can think my way through that. And nobody can hear me. Not a word. Faces flashing at my window now and they can’t hear me. The sky has gone black but I’m in Satan’s own Cadillac. The sulfur rains are starting to pour down out there and the eyes at my windows are widening, the mouths are opening to cry out, and now the flesh dissolves all around and the eyes melt and there is only bone and tooth and then not even that and it’s getting a little warm in here but the car rushes on and I am thinking and thinking and it’s too bad what’s happening out there but it’s high noon in Hell and there’s nothing to be done about that and one way or another I’ve just got to figure out how to get the fuck out of here.

Hatcher waits quietly in the Cadillac in his alleyway until the rain ends and the steaming puddles that are the denizens who were outside begin to coagulate back into bodies. Then he steps from the car and goes up the staircase. Ahead of him, the Hoppers’ door is closed, and behind it, Howard and Peggy are sitting in their overstuffed chairs. They are outwardly silent. But inside Howard, there is a voice speaking, unheard even by Satan: The rugs have gone threadbare in Yonkers, the back door sticks in the heat, she talks nonstop through breakfast and lunch about every little thing that can possibly go wrong in the kitchen cabinets and in the world, and at dinner she will pause only to look out the window at the maple trees, which she’s been worrying about for years though we’ve never seen even a trace of the blight, and she’ll say “I’m sad,” and I’m supposed to do something about it, and I know what she’s thinking right now, that if I was worthless then, think how worse than worthless I am in Hell, but in Yonkers I go down to the basement to spend another long sweet Saturday restoring vintage fountain pens in silence and I am applying the heat gun to open a turquoise Waterman Lady Patrician I bought in an estate sale and she slips into the room, the woman of the Patrician, whoever she was, long ago she carried the pen in her purse with her powder and her lipstick and her handkerchief and her perfume — her perfume — the heat awakens the smell of her perfume — her smell — rose and moss and patchouli — and she is beside me, I have resurrected her, she is alive again and I breathe her into me.

And inside Peggy, her own voice speaks, unknown to Satan or to Howard either or even to herself, most of the time, and when it is known to herself, it serves only to torture her: This must be hard on him even with our door shut against the sulfur out there pouring down, the smell gets in anyway and it’s bad and he’s got a nose on him and I don’t know how he got it but he’s always had it, like early on, maybe our fourth or fifth date, and I know we’re going to kiss and it’s night and we’re racing along the Hudson in his Ford Roadster and he’s sniffing at the air and I say what and he says dogwood and I can’t even pick it up, and later we’re parked and we’re kissing and he puts his nose against my throat and he says rose and he says jasmine and he says there’s something smoky, like an animal, and he hopes it’s okay, his saying this, he hopes this doesn’t make me mad, and it doesn’t, it’s actually something okay in a way that I can’t even begin to put into words, but I slap him a little just the same and for Peggy this is so long ago and utterly lost and whatever was okay is so very difficult to think about that she says now, aloud, “You’ve always been so rude,” and he says, “Me rude? You never stopped yammering long enough for me even to begin to be rude,” and they start up, while outside, Hatcher passes their closed door and approaches his own.

He hopes Anne was safely in the apartment for the rain. If she’s waiting inside for him, he has to figure out now what to tell her about her own mind. He stops before the door. He recognizes the assumption he just made. Perhaps this privacy of mind he has isn’t universal. Maybe it’s a rare gift. Like good hair and straight teeth and a killer broadcast voice. Maybe if he lets anyone know about it who doesn’t have the gift, Satan will find him out through that other mind and deal with him.

He opens the door and steps in. Anne is not in sight. “Darling, I’m home,” he says.

She appears from the bedroom, head attached, wearing jeans and a TUDOR HOOLIGAN T-shirt. As soon as her eyes fall on Hatcher, she gapes and gasps such that Hatcher wonders if the rain misted into the backseat and he wasn’t aware and he is standing before her half dissolved.

“It was your investiture,” she says.

“What?”

“When they grabbed you full stark naked, I worried for your fate. But it was to… ” She pauses, trying to find a word, but both her hands have come up, their fingers fluttering at him.

He looks down. He is clad still in the powder-blue jumpsuit of a minion. Of course he is. He was hustled into the car after the interview and borne along like this. He lifts his arms, rotates his hands, considers himself up and down. Has he become a minion? Is this how it’s done?

“…enable you,” Anne says, finding the word she wanted. “Is this so? Did they give you new powers, my darling?”

He looks at Anne. Her T-shirt now reads GOVERN NAKED.

“No,” Hatcher says. “I don’t know.”

Anne angles her head to the side ever so slightly, narrows her eyes and smiles faintly. “Even Henry goes about in mufti. He is a king no more. And my anchorman, powerful already, entering every dwelling in Hell, is elevated even higher now.” She has begun to purr.

Hatcher looks down once more at his uniform. Everyone in Hell knows what this means. Perhaps this will help him too, in what he must do. He feels Anne drawing near, and he is happy suddenly about his apparent new status. Maybe real status. He thinks to pat at his hair. It’s been restored to its normal anchorman length without Anne ever being reminded of the first man she had sex with. All is well. He lifts his eyes and Anne’s T-shirt reads KISS ME, I’M A BRIT IN HELL and she is upon him, putting her arms around his neck and her mouth on his.

Hatcher wonders if minions get to have satisfying sex. He wonders if the thing that actually makes the sex go bad in Hell is the notion that an immortal is not only watching but listening to every intimate thought. He wonders if that often didn’t apply back on earth as well. He recalls that it certainly did apply in the back of the Pittsfield American Legion Hall a week after the first Kennedy funeral when he was driven to bind together the passion for a girl with the passion of world events and the girl was driven to listen for God, who was inside her mind telling her to look at her dirty little self and feel ashamed. He even recalls the impression on that night that JFK was there with him, not just watching but inside Hatcher’s head where they could talk, and Hatcher asked Mr. President, do you mind? and Kennedy said You should proceed with vigah and Hatcher wonders if Anne even considers Satan’s putative presence in her head, wonders if maybe for her it’s Henry VIII in there listening all the time. And with all this wondering and recalling, of course, Hatcher is missing quite a bit of kissing. His lips are working but he’s missing their primary intended effect.

And Anne recalls with the first kiss of her newly invested Hatcher how her first kiss with Henry was at Hampton Court in the King’s Long Gallery and how he wore a robe of Venetian damask and silver tissue and gold cloth and no one in the realm could wear such a thing but him — it was all his power draped upon him — and she wonders at how a man’s power gives off a palpable emanation, a thing in the air that enters through her very gown — not to mention through her very Bangladeshi jeans — and goes straight to all the excitable spots on her body and excites them. And she wonders at how that excitement is like the excitement of seeing a beautiful snake suddenly among the flowers, crimson and black, and its beauty is made vivid by the poison you think is in its fangs and you want to touch it and it coils for you and its round-tipped little head rises and swoops for you and then it bites and you go quite numb and you lose all the excitement, and then you stop and ask yourself why you shouldn’t be the one who bites. And Anne, wishing to make this thing go right for herself at last, is moved to bite her semipowerful man on the lip and he cries out and they both remember the last time her teeth got involved in sex between them and she suddenly can’t understand why she wants this anyway and she lets go and backs off. Her T-shirt now reads HELL IS LOSING YOUR HEAD.

From the bedroom Brünnhilde in the Götterdämmerung begins to send Wotan’s ravens home in her final aria before riding her horse into her own flaming funeral pyre, sung, however, in this version, by a very large chorus of Satan’s cockroaches directed by Richard Wagner himself, which is to say that Hatcher’s cell phone rings. He knows who it is. He steps past Anne, who is looking a little distracted, the look she often has before removing her head.

“Please keep it on,” he says in passing.

“Okay okay,” she says, trailing her hand along the blue sleeve of the passing minion jumpsuit.

He goes into the bedroom and flips open his cell phone. It’s Beelzebub. “Showtime,” he says and is gone.

Since they sometimes do several cycles of the Evening News from Hell before evening actually comes again — the hot afternoons often linger for a long, long while — the cell phone call Hatcher has just received is his routine summoning for work. Always in the past, he has left quickly to get to Broadcast Central after the summoning, but he has often gotten there only after long delays on the Parkway. And yet there never seems to be an issue of time. When he arrives, they prepare. But he has never willfully hesitated in his progress. He has his own investigative agenda now. There are some stops he could make along the way to work. Dare he do it? He knows his inner thoughts are his own. But is he always being watched? And listened to when he speaks? These might be separate matters.

He is pacing and twitching around the bedroom floor, he realizes. What further consequence is there to fear when he has already been dismembered and incinerated and acidly dissolved? Pain is life here. There is always the reconstituting to be available for more pain. His hands fly into the air, clutching at nothing. He says aloud, “Pain pain pain fuck fuck fuck.” A figure is in the bedroom doorway. He stops. Anne watches him, her brow furrowed. Her T-shirt is blank. Pure white. Wordless.

“What is it?” she asks, softly.

He could tell her now, what he knows about minds in Hell. But maybe it’s only his own. Maybe he’s special. Maybe he’s unique. To make her think she can think might be dangerous for her.

“It’s time to go to work,” he says.

“You’re special now,” she says.

He starts. Did she read his mind? No. He realizes she’s referring to his apparent minionhood.

“No reason to be anxious,” she says.

“Thanks,” he says. “No.”

“I’m sorry for biting,” she says.

“It’s okay.”

“My head is on.”

“Yes. Thanks.”

“I’m sad,” she says.

Hatcher’s hands fly up again. He twitches. But in excitement now. He might be able to do something about her sadness. If he finds a way out, he will take his Anne with him.

A few moments later Hatcher is standing in front of the open closet, a little surprised at how reluctant he is to even temporarily remove his blue jumpsuit, when Brünnhilde begins to sing again, in his pocket. This time, however, she is rendered by Michael Jackson in a seriously inadequate falsetto interrupted shortly by a banging of metal and guttural German cursing — interpretable, if Hatcher were so inclined, as Wagner flailing away at the King of Pop, who is dressed in full Brünnhildean armor for his ring-tone recording session. Hatcher answers the phone. It’s Beelzebub again, who says, “Business suit, comrade. And wear your new tie,” and he’s gone.

Oops. Hatcher feels as if his mind was just read. He flushes as hot as a sulfurous rain. But. But. All that really suggests is Beelzebub knows about Hatcher’s minion suit. It would be a simple thing that he was told. Bee-bub and Old Scratch surely are both adept at guessing what their subjects are thinking, like bebangled fortune tellers in a carnival. Beelzebub knows in conventional ways that Hatcher just got home and how he was clad. He knows Hatcher’s facing the choice of doing the news in anchorman suit and tie or the minion uniform. In spite of the little scare, Hatcher still believes he’s right about omniscience. And now he even thinks to try a first test of Satan’s omnipresence. Hatcher lifts his face and says aloud, “Fuck you, Bee-bub.” He waits. Nothing happens. “Fuck you, I said.” Nothing. “And your boss too. Fuck you, Satan.” He gives the finger to the north, south, east, and west, to the ceiling and to the floor. He braces himself. Nothing.

Hatcher takes a deep breath. The fear is subsiding. He’s cool as mortal life inside. And now Beelzebub’s throwaway bit of fashion advice finally registers on him. What new tie? Hatcher steps into the closet doorway and peers inside. Hanging directly in front of him on a hook in the shadows of the back wall is a tie. He puts his hand to it and takes it out. It is powder blue. It’s official. He takes off his jumpsuit of exactly the same color and rolls it carefully and tucks it deep in an upper shelf corner of the closet.

The writers’ neighborhood is on the way to Broadcast Central and Hatcher is making good time along the edge of the throng in the Parkway. The smell of sulfur is still strong in the air, but the puddles in the street have vanished — reconstituted — and the city is teeming in a way that feels almost comfortable to Hatcher in its tortured normalcy. He has a little bit of evidence that not only is Satan not hearing everything, he’s not seeing everything either. Hatcher thinks about Virgil. The poet guide is a good place to start in his quest for Hell’s back door.

Along the street, a few of the transitory bookstores are open, and as Hatcher is wondering how to go about looking for Virgil, he sees a hand-lettered sign in a bookshop window: SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY. He stops and goes in.

The bookshelves here are full, unlike those in most of the shops along the street, though Hatcher does not glance at the titles. He is immediately struck by a figure sitting at a desk at the back of the shop, a small woman with thick, wavy hair cut off at the collar of a tattered brown velvet jacket. In a sitting area near the desk are a couch and several chairs, all empty, all canary yellow or avocado green Naugahyde, gashed and covered by what appear to be piss stains. Before Hatcher wanted to be Walter Cronkite, he wanted to be Ernest Hemingway, so he instantly recognizes Sylvia Beach. He approaches her.

Sylvia looks up at him. “Are you a writer?” she asks, rising from her chair a little in hopefulness.

“No,” he says. “Sorry.”

She sinks back down.

“Well,” he says, “I published a memoir once, partial, from childhood to forty or so, but I didn’t actually write it and it was full of invented anecdotes.”

Sylvia furrows her brow and cocks her head.

“The writer called it ‘creative nonfiction,’” Hatcher says.

“I don’t understand that term,” Sylvia says.

“I hear he lives in this neighborhood.”

“I hear there are many writers around here.”

“Oh yes.”

“They don’t come in.”

“This is Hell, Ms. Beach.”

“I only get book reviewers. They come in and sit around, and they all seem unaware of who or where they are. I don’t know them. They clearly read too fast and in the wrong frame of mind. They miss so much. Perhaps that’s why they’re here.”

“You haven’t had any writers at all?”

“Herman Melville came in.”

“Have you seen Virgil?”

“He’s working on a new novel.”

“Melville?”

“Yes.” Sylvia shrugs. “He can’t get past the first sentence. ‘Call me E-mail.’”

“The old-timers have trouble adjusting.”

Sylvia waves her hand vaguely at the shelves. “No wonder they stay away.”

Hatcher looks at the shelves. Each of the books, throughout the shop, has the same spine, a familiar segmented stacking of rectangles, differing only occasionally in color.

“Every volume I have. Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. It’s all I can get.” Sylvia begins to weep softly. “Is it because of Adrienne, do you suppose? That I’m here, with these?”

“Adrienne?”

“Monnier. The woman I was with for many years.”

“From all that I can tell…”

“My father the pastor…”

“…it would have been no different if she’d been man.”

“…perhaps he was right.”

“Your father’s probably here too. There seems to be a multitude of reasons, for all of us.”

Sylvia is crying harder and Hatcher steps close, puts his hand on Sylvia’s shoulder. She looks up. “You wouldn’t recognize Adrienne if you saw her? No, of course not.”

“No.”

“How about Ernest? Hemingway. Is he here?”

“I don’t know.”

“And Jim Joyce?”

“I haven’t seen either of them.”

“Perhaps they’ll find me.”

“Only if they can inadvertently bring you pain, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, I’m used to that,” Sylvia says. She pats Hatcher’s hand.

He says, “Virgil is here.”

“Of The Aeneid?”

“And The Inferno.”

“As a character. Yes.”

“He’s in a toga. His nose is mostly missing, like a statue. If you see him, please ask how Hatcher McCord can get in touch with him.”

“You’re on the television, aren’t you,” Sylvia says.

“Yes.”

“You seem a nice man,” she says. “Why are you in Hell?”

“I don’t know exactly,” he says. “But if you’re here, Ms. Beach, then I was a sure thing.”

She pats his hand once more and he gently pulls away. They say good-bye and he goes out her door and up the street, his mind still on the question she raised. The big Why. His second wife, Deborah, fancied herself a writer. Wrote a bad memoir about the two of them, full of lies. Wrote a bad novel about the two of them without enough lies. Creative nonfiction and uncreative fiction. She could be living nearby. Virgil could be nearby. There are people to find, but he isn’t going to do it stumbling into shops and leaving messages.

Hatcher is approaching the alley now where Virgil first took him. Up ahead, the neon BURGERS sign is popping and sparking and radiating brightly in spite of the intense sunlight all around. He slows. He stops. He waits, hoping for Virgil to appear again. But he knows this isn’t going to work. Then it occurs to him. If the upper management in Hell does not have omniscience and isn’t omnipresent, then they might need some sort of physical record-keeping. Somebody knows where the denizens are. Hatcher presses on toward Broadcast Central.

Hatcher enters the vast marble-block building that is Broadcast Central, and about three stories up inside the towering atrial reception hall, Albert Speer is chained to the back wall with large feathery wings strapped to his arms and a Nazi eagle’s head fitted on top of his own with the beak curving down in front of his eyes. Broadcast Central is based on a Speer architectural plan, and on most days he is up there explaining his innocence to anyone whose attention he can get. Hatcher glances up at him and Speer shouts down, “You have to understand. I didn’t know how bad it was.” Hatcher never knows how to respond, so he simply lowers his face and passes under the man and through the high arched doorway and down a long, dim marble hallway to the elevators.

On the top floor he steps from the elevator, neatly but barely missing the abrupt snapping shut of the doors — visitors often lose limbs here and have to wait for the elevator to return to be reconstituted — indeed, the floor underfoot feels blood-sticky even now — but instead of heading for the studio, Hatcher turns toward the corridor of offices. He treads lightly. He feels a blip of pleasure at treading lightly. It will do good to tread lightly so that Beelzebub will not know of his approach. No one will know. It’s Hatcher’s own little secret, moving from here to there. His mind is careening now. He is tiptoeing like a cartoon cat sneaking up on a mouse. He is enjoying this a little too much for his own good. But he settles down as he approaches Beelzebub’s outer door. And there are voices from within. He slows and stops and then eases forward. He is next to the open doorway.

From deep inside the office, faint but clear, is a man’s familiar voice. “Your situation is very similar.”

“The superior number two man,” Beelzebub replies.

“May I ask a blunt question?” the voice says. Hatcher feels close to identifying the speaker.

“I’ve brought you here for that very thing,” Beelzebub says.

“I’ve spent an awful long time already down a drill hole full of boiling oil.” Dick Cheney. It’s Dick Cheney.

“By way of initiation,” Beelzebub says. “You’ll suffer differently ” now.”

“But to speak like this, when… you know.”

“You’re with Beelzebub now. I’m the Supreme Ruler in this office.”

“All right,” Cheney says. “Let me ask this. How stupid is he?”

“Ah. Yes. Well.” Beelzebub hemming and hawing is a new thing for Hatcher to hear. The “he” must be Bee-bub’s boss.

“With mine, you kept waiting for the slightest glimmer,” Cheney says. “But.” Even outside the door, Hatcher can hear the shrug.

“Oh I know. I know,” Beelzebub says. “Mine is stupid. Yes. But crafty, I’d say. Smart in that way.”

“Ah,” Cheney says. “I didn’t have to deal with that.”

“Nevertheless.”

“We’d float the rumor that in private he was different from what he was in public. One-on-one he was so Texas-backslappy shrewd he was some sort of smart. He liked the reputation.”

“Flattery then?”

“Of course,” Cheney says. “But the fundamental process for men like you and me is this. The stupider the president — or any leader — the more power you arrange for him. And the more secretive you make him. Don’t disclose a thing. The insular, unitary leader. Finally he’s got so much in front of him but at the same time he’s so cozily private that even the stupid man who’s too stupid to realize he’s stupid will realize two things. He needs somebody to do the real work for him, and nobody will know the difference.”

“Yes, I see that,” Beelzebub says. “This is good. Reassuring. I think I’m on the right track.”

“If there’s anything I can do.”

“You were a hunter.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll set up a hunting date in the mountains with the Old Man. We can get that Texas attorney you already diddly-plugged and put him out in the canebrake.”

“Pardon?”

“No need. You’ll be found innocent down here.”

Hatcher backs quietly off, down the hall a ways, and then reapproaches noisily. He turns in at Beelzebub’s door.

Hatcher has only rarely visited this office. The last time, the secretary in the outer office was Messalina, empress of Rome and notable nymphomaniac. Now, crossed on the desktop, are the bottoms of a pair of wide, bare feet, each, however, cloven down the center. They are attached to a large bleached-blond woman with a round, heavily-made-up face rendered oddly beautiful by enormous dark eyes. In between, she is naked, with breasts the size of Iowa pumpkins, and when her eyes move to Hatcher, she demurely draws bleached-blond bat wings from behind her and folds them over her chest.

Emerging from an inner office are the former vice president of the United States, dressed in the blue jumpsuit of a minion, and the eternal vice president of Hell, dressed in a charcoal-gray pinstripe suit and white shirt with a neatly-knotted maroon tie sporting a McDonald’s Golden Arches motif. Beelzebub’s massive and cratered face bulges above his tightly buttoned collar, with deep-set neon-red eyes and lacquered black faux hair. He sees Hatcher and smiles. “Hatcher, my boy. I think you two know each other.”

Cheney has a faint red glow, and one side of his mouth pinches up into a smirky smile like his last boss. “My favorite debate moderator,” he says.

“My favorite puppeteer,” I say.

“Oh you boys,” Beelzebub says, and he looks past Hatcher. “Lily,” he says to the secretary. “Go to lunch.”

There is a stirring behind him and Hatcher turns his head to see. The naked, bat-winged blond rises from the chair, sets up a small desktop pedestal sign that says gone for sex, rises from the floor, and thinks of something. In midair she rotates to look at Beelzebub.

“Need anything?” she says in a venereally husky, chain-smoking, truck-stop-waitressy voice.

“No.”

“Fries? A Coke?”

“I’m fine,” Beelzebub says.

She nods and then gracefully drifts out of the office.

“She looks familiar,” Cheney says.

“She’s the girl of your dreams,” Beelzebub says.

Hatcher looks back in time to see the furrow of puzzlement pass over Cheney’s face.

“Literally,” Beelzebub says. “She’s a succubus.”

Cheney still doesn’t get it.

“She’s off now back to the mortal realm to fuck the new prime minister of France. In the middle of his dreams, you see.”

Cheney shrugs.

Hatcher says, “Perhaps the former vice president will do a ‘Why Do You Think You’re Here?’ interview.”

Beelzebub says, “Hatcher’s got the nose for news, doesn’t he? What do you say, Dick?”

Cheney shuffles his feet. “I have no comment on that, really. I had other priorities in life.” His face goes more or less blank, and he waits.

Beelzebub glances at Hatcher and winks. Then he says, “Well, Dick, thanks for stopping by. Go on out in the street now.”

Cheney nods and without another word or gesture slides past Hatcher and through the office door.

“So, my boy,” Beelzebub says. “Congratulations.”

It’s official. Hatcher takes a deep breath. “Thanks.”

“I see your minionhood has emboldened you to come by the office.” Beelzebub waits one beat and then another, clearly to make Hatcher worry about his attitude toward this.

Hatcher is exhilarated to realize that he doesn’t give a fuck. He keeps his face placid.

“I’m glad,” Beelzebub finally says. “What’s up?”

“I was interested in my encounter with J. Edgar Hoover.”

“Ah yes. He has his ways, doesn’t he?”

“Yes he does. I’d like to do a ‘Why Do You Think You’re Here?’ interview with him. In his office.”

Beelzebub takes this in, and his face begins to vibrate ever so slightly. His eyebrows are great, flaring arcs of needle-rigid hairs, and the right one lifts high while the left one sinks low. He leans toward Hatcher and cocks his head as if he’s reading Hatcher’s deepest thoughts.

Hatcher knows better. He cocks his own head now, lifting his own right brow and lowering his own left brow. He leans toward Beelzebub, splitting the slight remaining distance between them. After a long moment of silence between the two faces, Hatcher says, “Hoover and his earthly power are known to a great many of the denizens. Imagine how all-powerful it will make our Big Boss look for everyone in Hell to see Hoover whimpering around trying to understand his eternal damnation. On his own administrative turf.”

Beelzebub’s eyes widen. Both eyebrows pop up together as high as they will go. He pulls back a bit. “Dude,” he says. “You surprise me. Not surprise, of course. Delight. I am just delighted to see how you are coming along. The surprise I refer to is that your pansy-ass world is capable of now and then sending along someone with something on the ball.”

Hatcher returns his own eyebrows to their default position and he smiles an aw-shucks smile. “Thanks,” he says, thinking, If any office in Hell keeps track of where everyone is, it’s got to be Hoover’s.

Shortly thereafter, Hatcher sits down in the recording studio and finds a script waiting for him. Beyond the glass window, Dan Rather is fidgeting in work overalls and a Lone Star Feed & Fertilizer ball cap, trying to figure out the mixing board before him. The former CBS anchor has been around Broadcast Central for a while, but Hatcher hasn’t known where he’s been working, exactly, and when he’s seen him in the halls, Hatcher can never approach him. Rather is clearly banished from the air, and whenever anyone seems to be approaching him, he backs frantically away, crying, “I don’t know the frequency!” With the glass partition between him and Hatcher, however, he stays put but fumbles around at the knobs and sliders on the board.

Hatcher looks at the script. It’s for the Satan interview. There is a brief introduction — the segment isn’t even called an interview here — and there is the final “Satan wept.” Hatcher is simply to record his voice and the piece will be assembled, with someone else no doubt stepping in technically after Rather has suffered long enough.

Hatcher puts his headphones on. Rather notices this and reaches to remove his cap. He instantly starts wrenching mightily at it — he’s tried unsuccessfully to do this before — but the cap won’t budge. Finally, Rather puts his headset on over the cap, leans forward, and presses the talk button. “Courage,” Rather says.

Hatcher doesn’t quite know what he means by this, never did quite know when Rather occasionally used it to sign off from his evening news.

Rather’s hands are fluttering and hesitating and fluttering again over the mixing board. He says, with his best West Texas twang, “Me and this job are like a hen trying to hatch a cactus,” though the remark seems not to be directed outward.

“Dan,” Hatcher says.

Rather looks up.

“Good to catch up with you,” Hatcher says. He’s not sure Rather recognizes him, though they spent years vying for the same viewers.

“I’m Hatcher McCord.”

“I know who you are.”

They look at each other through the glass for a long moment. “Can I ask you a question, Dan?”

Rather nods, but he instantly asks his own question. “Are we all here?”

“We?”

“The newsmen. In Hell.”

“I haven’t seen everybody.”

“Murrow?”

This is a sad thing for Hatcher. “So they say. When I asked about him, Beelzebub said he was smoking.”

“Why don’t I think this has to do with Ed’s cigarettes?”

Hatcher nods at Rather with his face scrunched to say, I know what you mean.

Rather thinks for a moment and then says, “You know, there wasn’t a single person on earth who didn’t have millions of other people expecting them to go to Hell.”

Hatcher hasn’t thought of it this way. “You’re right,” he says.

“Courage,” Rather says.

“Courage,” Hatcher says. This was the question he had for Rather, about this word. Oddly now, it feels apt.

“I think I can start this thing up,” Rather says.

Hatcher picks up his script. “All right.”

Rather nods and Hatcher begins to read, “When I visited your great Father, the Supreme Ruler of Eternity, in his comfy cozy… ”

Hatcher stops. “Let me start again,” Hatcher says into the microphone.

Rather’s hands move to the board, and he says, “Whenever you’re ready.” Hatcher looks at the words before him. Until a short time ago, whenever they gave him something to say, he’d read it out as is. He dared do nothing else. But all of a sudden, with this typically overwrought script before him plumping up Satan — like so many that Hatcher’s done before — he can barely make his mouth shape itself around the words. He knows it’s because he feels his thoughts are his own. This is a serious danger, he realizes. Breathe free and get burned. He still can’t make his publicly verifiable deeds his own. He still dare not change a thing in his work. He topples his head forward in this recognition. Then he lifts his face once more, takes a deep breath, and looks Rather in the eyes.

“Hatcher McCord take two,” Rather says.

And Hatcher starts over. “When I visited your great Father, the Supreme Ruler of Eternity, in his comfy cozy living room, he greeted me with a hug, so typical of his magnanimity.”

The script asks him to pause. He does. Then he reads, “Not that he didn’t charmingly remind me who was the boss.”

Another pause. “Then he spoke with passionate eloquence.”

Another pause, and now the big climax. Hatcher summons his will, unctions-up his voice, and says, “Satan wept.”

He stops. He looks through the glass, and Dan Rather gives him the thumbs-up. Then Dan looks sharply down at his mixing board with acute concern. “Whoa Nellie,” he says. “It’s doing something.”

This could mean anything. This could be a routine step in the editing process. The technology around the station often seems to have a mind of its own, or at least an automated sophistication that its surface — in this case, a rather old-fashioned mixing board — does not fully reveal. Or it could easily mean the onset of a bizarre and intensely painful incident typical of life in Hell. Hatcher is calm inside as he waits to see which it is, and this is new. He realizes the isolated privacy of his mind is what lets him wait for the pain without the thrashing panic, but he’s not sure why. Courage.

And it turns out to be the routine step. “It seems to have just edited itself,” Rather says.

The two men look at each other and then Rather does the obvious thing. He plays it. Each of them turns his face to his own monitor.

The comfy cozy stuff is spoken over an establishing shot of the lodge’s great room, empty.

The magnanimous hug shows Hatcher from behind with only Satan’s arms around him, pounding him manfully on the back, and little fragmented glimpses of Satan’s head bussing Hatcher’s cheeks. These glimpses seem off somehow, but they are gone too quickly for Hatcher to figure out why.

The charming reminder of who’s the boss is spoken over a shot of Hatcher with his hair on fire.

Then, as Hatcher says that Satan spoke with passionate eloquence, a face comes up on the screen, framed against the lodge’s walk-in fireplace, and it begins to speak. The face is the face of Hatcher’s father.

“Come to me, my little ones,” the face says. “I want you. I want you all. I choose you, my darlings. I do so because I want you. It’s what makes us all down here one big modern extended family. I want you in my family. We have to help each other. Doesn’t that warm the cockles of your heart? 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.”

The face — Hatcher’s father — blows a kiss.

Hatcher’s father says, “I feel for you all, my little children. I do care.” And he digs knuckles into the corners of both eyes. Then he abruptly drops his hands and lifts his face. Hatcher’s father closes his eyes.

“Satan wept,” Hatcher says in the voice-over.

The face freezes in its pose for a moment before the frame fades to a roiling bright red. Then the monitor goes blank.

“Some part of me always suspected as much, given the banality of evil,” Dan Rather says.

Hatcher is still trying to deal with the shift from routine step in the editing process to bizarre and intensely painful incident, so he does not respond.

Rather says, “That Richard M. Nixon was Satan himself.”

Which means everyone will see his or her own personally tailored image when Satan speaks. Like the “Your Stuff” commercials. And right now Hatcher is so full of his dad that he simply takes off the headphones, rises, and goes out of the studio without another glance at Dan Rather, who is swelling with pride at having once stood up snarkily to Satan himself in the White House pressroom. Literally swelling. But Hatcher does not hear the dull pop, as he is not only down the hall but also on the front porch of his boyhood home in Pittsfield, Illinois: Fireflies in the dark yard and the smell of tar and gravel dust from the pavers having gone through the neighborhood that afternoon and my dad’s home early for a Friday and I don’t get up and get the hell away like I should when he comes and sits beside me on the porch while I’m thinking about something he’d despise — Adlai Stevenson maybe having a real chance to win the second time, now that they’ve nominated him to try again — and I made the mistake of speaking up about politics at dinnertime earlier in the week, saying what a relief it’d be to have a man with an actual brain in the White House, this after my dad gave me a bad whipping in the back-yard for not going out to shoot a whitetail, which he claimed was about my not minding him instead of my not shooting, though he said I should easily guess what he thought of my piss-ant little girl’s ass about that, and now he’s back from the bar by nine or so and I’ve seen that before, when he gets an early start with business slow and the deliveries done and with the McCord Hardware Transtar pickup parked at the door of The Pitt, advertising his drunkenness, and tonight he sits down beside me and he’s quiet for a while and I’m not letting him drive me off and then he says, almost softly, “Your mother thinks you’re goddam perfect, you can do no wrong.” I don’t answer. What he says is true but I don’t let myself think about that and still I just wait like an idiot for what’s next. Do I actually think it will be any different? “She’s wrong, you know,” he says. I don’t answer. He says, “She’s a goddam woman, so who is she to measure a man? She sees herself in you and so of course you’re perfect. I’m a man, and I see that you’ll never be enough of a man to spit past the end of your dick. You’re doomed, boy. You’ll never be anywhere near what you’re supposed to be.” He says all this low, which is rare, and, except for the one small outburst of metaphor, he says it with a veneer of logic, which is even rarer. Still, I’m taking a little bit of comfort in its being Friday night. And he seems to read my mind. “You think I’m saying this drunk,” he says. “Come here.” And he leans across to my chair and reaches out and grabs me by the back of the head. He yanks me right up to his face. “Smell my breath, boy.” And I do. There is no liquor there whatsoever. None.

After the news, Hatcher goes to his steel-gray cubicle and phones J. Edgar Hoover’s office.

“Minion Hoover’s office.” The husky female voice on the other end is instantly familiar, though he’s heard only a few words from it before. Beelzebub’s succubus.

“Lily?” he says.

“Lulu,” the voice says. “I’m Lily’s sister.”

“Lulu, hello,” Hatcher says in his best swooping, hello-upscalegroupie tone, trying to figure a plan already. “I’m Hatcher McCord, anchorman for the Evening News from Hell.”

“I’m Lulu, spawn of Grand Mater Lilith,” she says, putting on his tone and then giggling. “I was expecting your call.”

“Ah. Bee-bub,” he says.

Lulu giggles again. This giggle of hers is more like a little trilling in the deep back of her throat, as if she’s gargling something back there. “Bee-bub,” she says. And again. “Bee-bub.”

“You have an enchanting laugh, Lulu.”

She giggles some more. “I watch you on TV every whenever,” she says. “Do you sleep well?”

“You thinking of a little visit, you sexy Lulu?” he says.

Her voice goes instantly clear and reedy fine. “You bet your squeezable ass, anchorman,” she says.

Hatcher’s breath snags. She seems to him the only clear way to get the addresses he wants. But there may be a heavy price to pay, he realizes. “We’ll have to talk about all that,” he says.