Hell

“Ohhhhh yeahhhhh,” she says, extending the words like a tongue down his throat.

“I’m a minion now,” Hatcher says.

“This I know,” she says. Then she adds, with one more giggle, “Bee-bub.”

“Well, good. I want to interview…”

“There’ll be a car ready for you right after your broadcast,” she says. “Do linger a moment at my desk, minion McCord.”

Hatcher finds a 1932 Duesenberg LaGrande Dual Cowl Phaeton sitting in front of Broadcast Central, and he steps up onto the running board and through the back door. A hand-held camcorder lies on the seat. He takes this as an encouraging nuance of his minionhood. He is on his own with the camera. All the other off-site “Why Do You Think You’re Here?” interviews involved somebody being tortured by don’t-dare-move-the-fucking-thing camera duty. Martin Scorsese was the last one, for the recent Bill Clinton episode — yet to run — shot in a cheap hotel room where the former president is presently eternally waiting in vain for a young woman to arrive, any young woman. On the way to Clinton and on the way back, Scorsese wouldn’t stop talking about how he himself could have avoided all this if he’d gone to the seminary as he’d once planned, and nothing Hatcher said about Hell’s vast population of priests and pastors, monks and magi, rabbis and imams and shamans, both minor and major, from all the world’s religions would assuage his regret, though night came upon them and Scorsese’s agony shifted from his abandoned vocation to not having a camera of his own when the sun went down because this was so clearly his kind of town.

Now, however, Hatcher is on his own. With, of course, his driver, who is dressed in a button-over leather coat and leggings and a visored chauffeur’s cap and is staring fixedly down the long hood of the Duesenberg to its chrome-plated bronze leaping Pegasus hood ornament. He is Porphyrius Calliopas, the greatest charioteer of the Eastern Roman Empire, whose vast bronze commemorative statue at the Hippodrome in Constantinople was the only one ever erected while its subject was still racing and who personally incited the biggest riot in chariot-racing history, with ten thousand Green and Blue team hooligans killing each other.

Hatcher is ready, and he waits, and then he says to the driver, “You know where we’re going, yes?”

Porphyrius snaps his head around to Hatcher, tries to focus. “Yessir,” he says. He looks back out past Pegasus at the crowd blocking the way before him, squeezes his steering wheel tightly, and they move off, creeping through the clogged streets, the charioteer never having been able to figure out how to drive fast enough in Hell even to shift out of first gear.

Eventually they arrive at Administration Central, another neoclassic, deco-pimped, marble-block building near the center of the city, not far, Hatcher realizes, from the Old Harrowing site of Peachtree Way and Lucky Street that he’d set off for earlier. Hatcher takes up his camera and steps out of the car and walks across an empty plaza — even the dense flow of denizens eddies away from this place — and into a reception hall and elevator corridor so similar to Broadcast Central that he expects to see Albert stuck up on the wall.

Hoover’s office is on the top floor at the end of a hallway. Hatcher hesitates before the outer door. He knows who waits inside. But he also knows what he needs from her. He opens the door.

Lulu rises from her desk instantly, rises above the desk, actually, levitating so that Hatcher has to crane his neck upward to see her. Lulu’s bat wings are folded across her body like a button-over coat. They, unlike Lily’s, have raven streaks in their bleached-blond fur. “Ooooh, Hatcher McCord,” she gurgles, and she opens her wings to flash her naked body. Hatcher concentrates on her beaming face, consciously not looking directly at her body, though he is very aware of it, nonetheless — a peripheral blur of massive breasts and other swellings and ripplings and gapings.

“Business first,” she says and closes her wings. She descends to her desk sits, and her arms emerge from beneath her wings to put on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and, with a serious pout, pick up some blank papers before her and shuffle them around. “Impressive, oui?” she says. “How I am so very efficient an executive secretary?”

Hatcher is listening to Lulu but thinking about the addresses. Over her shoulder he is aware of her computer. The monitor presently shows the Windows Blue Screen of Death, though this does not alarm him, as the BSoD is the universal screen saver in Hell.

“Oui?” Lulu repeats, with an edge.

“Ah. Mais oui, Mademoiselle Lulu,” Hatcher says. “Très efficient.”

Lulu giggles. “Creep up on the door and go right on in,” she says. “Don’t knock.”

Hatcher goes to the door — not quite creeping, but he is quiet — and faces a little dilemma. Lulu seems to have an agenda. To embarrass Hoover, no doubt. Hatcher doesn’t like to think what Hoover might be doing in there alone. Hatcher is hesitating, and he hears a faint hiss from Lulu. He looks at her. She puts a long, scarlet-tipped forefinger to her lips to insist on silence, and then she shoo-shoos the hand to get him to go in. At this point, he’d rather irritate Hoover than Lulu, so he pushes open the door.

At first glance, Hoover does not seem to be in the office. But four strides away, at the far wall, is Hoover’s massive desk, and the high-backed executive chair is turned with its back to the door. From the other side come gurgly squishy sounds that Hatcher does not want to hear. So he clears his throat loudly. The chair jerks and there are scuffling sounds and one sharp bark of pain and then some whimpering and some more scuffling and some ruffling and chair squeaking, but the chair does not turn for a long moment, and then it swivels quickly and Hoover is dressed in a wide-lapeled dark gray suit and white shirt and powder-blue minion tie and he has set his face in its stern Mr. G-man pose, this whole effect undercut only by the neon red lipstick on his mouth, applied, by all appearances, with meticulous precision.

“McCord,” Hoover says, ducking his chin a little to find his manliest tone.

“Mr. Director,” Hatcher says.

“You look good in a suit,” Hoover says.

Hatcher goes a little icky at this, and whoever or whatever is under the desk apparently acts up, with a brief thumping and rustling, and Hoover squirms a bit in his chair as if he’s kicking something under there.

Hatcher says, “I’m sure you’re busy,” and he makes sure to say this respectfully and without lowering his eyes to the desk. No sense getting into a pissing match with J. Edgar Hoover. He gestures slightly with the camera. “We should get started.”

Hoover pushes back and rises. “Over there,” he says, nodding to a wall covered in wide, floor-to-ceiling drapes. He moves to one end and pulls a cord, and the drapes open to a twentieth-floor panorama of the center of the Great Metropolis.

Hatcher moves to the window and looks out: the sun is still high, denizens throng the web of streets between rubble-strewn rooftops, dense black smoke plumes up from the complex of tanks and pipes and furnaces of the Central Power Station, a vast building-top motley of stone and wood and brick sprawls toward the sawtooth horizon bearing unseen multitudes, and a jumper falls past the window — suicides often come to Administration Central to replay their grief — and then another flashes past, a thin woman feet first with her skirt collapsed over her upper body like a cheap umbrella on a windy day, and Hatcher thumps his forehead hard against the glass trying to follow her, though he can’t see anything immediately below from the angle and she quickly plummets out of his view, and he lifts his face to the nearest street, overflowing with souls, and he strains to look more closely, trying to resolve the dense mosaic into hats and hair and even tiny pointillist suggestions of faces. If your mind is bugged and an Immortal with attitudes and preferences is eavesdropping, how do you go about experiencing the very moment you’re in the midst of living, the thereness of the landscape all about you and the grinding yearnings of the people nearby? If the He or She or It is listening in, you are bent, bullied, persuaded, muddled, and intimidated into certain feelings, and you don’t have a clue whether they’re actually yours or not. But now, looking out this window in the privacy of his mind, Hatcher feels a hot swelling inside him, as if every pore on his body is dilating, and at first he thinks it’s the start of an Immortal’s rage, it will be judgment and pain and more pain. But no. He watches the people in the street and he knows that each head down there is carrying within it its own throng of people and places and feelings from a mortal life once lived through a billion rich and complex moments. And the swelling in Hatcher opens into a bloom of sadness. Because he knows his mind is his own, he knows he is alone, and so he is free to feel this now. He spreads his arms wide and leans heavily against the window, and if one could weep in Hell out of pity, he would be weeping now, but his body won’t do that. Nevertheless, there is a strange stopping inside him, a settling, a fleeting moment’s feeling that in mortal life he would have called contentment. This is Hell as far as you can see. It is Hell for everyone. We are all utterly alone, but we are alone together.

“How about here,” Hoover says.

Hatcher looks at him. Hoover has struck a pose with the city as backdrop and his hands clasped behind him.

“That’s fine, Mr. Director,” Hatcher says, and he wonders if Hoover really intends to do the interview with his lips painted. “Before we begin…” Hatcher hesitates. He doesn’t know how to ask this, and he regrets even trying — why the fuck should he care if the man chooses to appear like this? — but Hatcher is looking at Hoover’s lips and Hoover suddenly realizes what this is about.

“Ah,” Hoover says. “Of course.” He pulls a handkerchief from an inside coat pocket and half turns and wipes the lipstick off his mouth. He puts the handkerchief away and strikes his pose again.

Hatcher lifts the camera and Hoover is looking fiercely determined to do whatever manly G-man thing he needs to do, but from his lips, which barely move, comes a soft, clear, “Thanks.”

Hatcher, perhaps still under the influence of that moment of contentment, says, “You look good.”

Hoover pushes his lower lip up ever so slightly — into a little pout of thanks — and then he hardens again and nods, “Ready.”

Hatcher turns his camera on and says, “There’s just one question and you can talk for as long as you wish. Why do you think you’re here?”

And J. Edgar Hoover says, “I was needed. Can you imagine how many Communists there are down here? Do you want Hell being run by Communists? They’d destroy us. Satan was an angel. He had a falling out with his father, but who hasn’t? Some fathers just up and go crazy. Others have it out for you. Satan was set up, if you want to know the truth of it. Somebody had to deal with the vast hordes of damned humanity. The proof is out that window. Look at the citizens he has to deal with. Look at the elements within that citizenry. Now look at the organization Satan has built. He knows everything about everybody. All the time. Every second. You think there’s a question about why I belong here? What would I do in a place where everyone is so high and mighty and perfect? You think I’m not needed here? You don’t think it’s lonely for men like Satan and me? We understand each other. I have to suffer like the rest of you. You don’t think I deserve it? You don’t think a real man can’t like something a little frilly? You don’t think I look stunning in a feather boa and a tasteful basic-black dress?”

Hoover stops. He hears where he’s gone with this. Hatcher lifts his face from the camera and Hoover looks at him and then at the camera and then back to Hatcher. “Nothing we can do,” Hoover says.

“I have no control once it goes in,” Hatcher says.

Hoover nods. “I guess I’m done.” He turns and moves off to his desk.

Hatcher looks out the window once more. The streets are full of thousands of years of souls endlessly pressing on to destinations they do not know, from promptings they do not understand. Hatcher has a brief, sweet, newsman’s fantasy: he scores the greatest scoop in history — the discovery of a back door out of Hell — and he breaks the story on the Evening News from Hell and they all go, every last soul, they all escape from Hell. And he wins an Emmy. And then a Pulitzer Prize.

Hatcher turns from the window and crosses Hoover’s office — the man sits behind his desk and waits, and whoever is under there waits — and Hatcher is out the door and instantly vast furry bat wings enfold him and press him into hot naked rippling womanflesh.

But only for one dart of a tongue halfway down his esophagus and then an unfolding of wings and a quick float back to the desk and a putting on of the horn-rims and a fluffing up of papers. Hatcher stifles a faint gagging still going on down his throat, and he steels himself and moves to her desk.

“Well,” he says. “You said to stop by the desk.”

“Oui oui,” she says.

“Are you French, Lulu?”

“No. Lily and I did a three-way nooner with the prime minister of France. So we oui oui ouied all the way home.” She giggles her deep throat giggle and winks. “So. I want to take you home to meet Mama.”

“Mama.”

“I know what you’re thinking.”

She couldn’t possibly, of course. Not just because of what Hatcher now understands. But also because his mind has basically shut down about what he’s getting into for the sake of these addresses. And yet he can’t think of a better way to proceed. But oh my. Mama.

“She’s old as can be,” Lulu says. “But sexy as Hell.” And clearly Lulu believes Hell to be sexy.

Hatcher has no choice but to push on. “Would you do me one little favor, Lulu?”

Lulu flutters her bleached-blond eyebrows at him. “What would you like?”

“I’ve got some interviewing to do. Denizens. It’d help if I can get a few addresses.” He nods to the computer behind her.

“Wellll,” she says, cocking her head to the side, laying the tip of her forefinger into the center of her cheek, lifting her eyes to the ceiling, and then twirling the finger. “Since it’s you. But no screaming when I bite a little.”

She is already whirling in her chair and her hands flash over the keyboard, calling up the directory. Hatcher is panting in panic, but one pain is like another in Hell, when it comes down to it. And so he gives her all the names he can think of that he might need to find the back door, and to understand why he is here, which may not be unrelated if another Harrowing is truly imminent. Virgil and Dante. And Beatrice, in case her back-alley noir apartment was temporary. Hatcher’s three wives. These names come quickly. And then he says his father’s name, who turns out to have no address at the moment but is out somewhere stuck perpetually in traffic, roadraging at other drivers. Hatcher has a little surge of relief that he won’t have to find the old man. And he says his mother’s name. They are all of them in Hell. And now he’s glad he thinks of this, for Sylvia: Adrienne Monnier. Then he hesitates. But yes. If it’s what Anne needs, to resolve things one way or another. He says Henry VIII, King of England.

Hatcher steps into the elevator at the end of Hoover’s corridor. His head is buzzing with Lulu’s promise to come for him soon, to meet Mama. As the doors are about to close, there are hurried footsteps and then a trim man with an elongated face and broad-bridged nose slips in. At first his dark eyes sharply focus on Hatcher, but they quickly go blank. He wears a cream linen suit and a wing collar and spectator shoes. There is a smear of blood at the corner of his mouth. He turns and stands shoulder to shoulder with Hatcher as the doors close. A hunch shoves even Lulu to the back of Hatcher’s mind for a moment.

“Mr. Tolson?” Hatcher says.

The man turns his face to Hatcher. “Yes.”

This is Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s longtime assistant at the FBI and his intimate companion for more than four decades.

“I’m Hatcher McCord.”

“I know.”

Hatcher nods at the blood beside Tolson’s mouth.

Tolson takes out a handkerchief and dabs there and looks at the spot of red sadly.

Hatcher says, “It never quite works down here, does it.”

Tolson looks sharply at Hatcher. But then he smiles a faint half smile, puffing once through his nose. “Never,” he says.

The two men look back to the front of the elevator until the door opens, and they part without a word, Tolson heading deeper into the building on the ground floor and Hatcher going out the front.

The Duesenberg sits at the curb. The sun is still high. Hatcher is in the center of the city. He crosses the plaza to the car and reaches into the backseat and lays the camera there and then moves to the front passenger door and leans in at the window. Porphyrius Calliopas is staring intently down the hood of the car at Pegasus leaping. My horses. How long has it been? My palms and my waist are wrapped tight with the reins, the crowd bellows, I fly behind my horses and two of them are loaned to me by Neptune himself I am sure, with their wings tucked secretly away they came to me as Parthians, my sweet palomino Pyrros and my cranky chestnut Euthynikos, they are my legs, they are my breath, they are my fame, I call to them and they fly, and though others are running near us and many voices cry out my name, the moments that I am lashed to them move slowly, I can count the beats of my heart, I can smell their dank earth smells, I can feel their heavy sweat against my face, one drop and another and another, and I am certain that when we die, we will die together, the three of us, trying to make the far sharp turn in the Hippodrome, on the inside lane with a clot of chariots around us, but I am wrong: Pyrros dies beneath my grieving body in a stall and Euthynikos bolts and runs alone and is found later, and I am cursed to die in a bed as an old man and then I am quickened again in this place and I cannot find them and that is the worst of the tortures, that for all this eternity already and forever more, they are nowhere to be found, there are no horses at all, no horses.

“Driver,” Hatcher says.

Porphyrius rears at this and his hands flail and he turns his face to Hatcher and he calms down. But Hatcher hardly sees these things. He is focused on what he must do and he sees the driver looking at him and it occurs to him to ask, “How do you find the streets, when you are driving someone?”

Porphyrius reaches to the glove box and opens it and pulls out a folded map.

“May I have it?” Hatcher asks.

Porphyrius hesitates.

“You’ll wait for me till I return,” Hatcher says.

Hatcher can see the man thinking. Porphyrius looks at the map.

“You know who I am?” Hatcher says, touching his powder-blue neck-tie for emphasis.

Porphyrius nods. He reaches his hand across the seat and extends the map, his brow knit tight, his hand trembling slightly. Hatcher reaches into the car, takes hold of the map, pulls it free. And the hand of Porphyrius bursts into flames, roiling, heavy flames that rush instantly up his arm.

Hatcher recoils, pulls his own hand and arm and the map safely out of the car. There is no possibility of giving the map back. The driver is vanishing utterly in the flames that race wildly up his arm and over his shoulders and head and down his torso and legs, and then as abruptly as it flared up, the fire vanishes, leaving only a pile of ashes and a chauffeur’s cap.

Hatcher stares at them, stunned for a moment but happy to have the map in his hand. The ashes are beginning to stir a bit. Reconstitution is beginning. But Hatcher uses his newsman’s instincts: the source gave what he gave, which he shouldn’t have given, and he paid the price. But you’ve got what you need for the sake of the story. Hatcher walks off.

Before he leaves the empty plaza of Administration Central, Hatcher pauses and looks more closely at the map. It is a map he knows. A thumb-smudged Standard Oil gas station map with a detailed drawing in blue, red, and white. The image once shaped a fantasy in his thirteen-year-old mind: beneath the Standard Oil sign the gas station guy in his Standard Oil ball cap and bow tie holds one end of an unfolded map, with the other end in the grasp of a Tuesday-Weld-cute blond behind the wheel of her convertible. They are both looking at the place on the map where she’s going to drive right now and wait for him till he gets off from work. Sometimes it’s in the woods along the river. Sometimes his bachelor pad over the paint store downtown. A few years later, Hatcher even spent a summer pumping gas at the Pittsfield Standard station, and at the back of his mind, he was always waiting for that Ford Fairlane convertible to roll in and the blond to honk her horn and ask him directions.

Hatcher begins to unfold the map from the Duesenberg. It unfolds and unfolds. He opens his arms wide to hold it and backs up to give himself plenty of room on the empty concrete. He lays the map out and kneels before it. The Great Metropolis, a vast tapestry of Peachtrees. He lifts the map and turns it over, and on the other side is a tiny-print index of all the streets. He bends forward, bringing his face close to the print, as if he were praying toward Mecca. He can make the names out clearly. He finds the coordinates for Peachtree Way and Lucky Street, lifts and turns the map again, locates the place of the Old Harrowing and Admin Central and plots his course.

His destination turns out to be quite close. The trick is to turn down Peachtree Street Street Avenue off Peachtree Way, and a few hundred yards along, Peachtree Street Street Avenue renames itself Peachtree Avenue Street Street and then makes a sharp left turn and instantly takes on the name Peachtree Way while the parallel stretch of the previous Peachtree Way goes for a couple of blocks under the name Robert. Meanwhile, back on the new Peachtree Way, the intersection of Lucky Street should be coming up soon.

Hatcher walks between dingy brick urban warehouse facades with boarded windows and three-story pilasters mounted by terra cotta demon faces, and the crowd here has lessened only slightly. The street is still full of people pressing ardently onward. But they mostly have long beards and wear rough-cloth cloaks and animal skins. This is an old neighborhood, of course. Ahead is the place where it is understood that long ago the Harrowing occurred, when this was the site of merely a foul, sulfurous well and an edge-of-town campsite for some of the standoffish Old Ones. And now Hatcher approaches the very place: Peachtree Way and Lucky Street.

On three of the corners, the intersecting streets’ grimy buildings end in gaping rubble-filled lots, one concertina-wired, the other two open basement pits. On the fourth corner is a low, curve-edged, metal-fronted deco building. Hatcher pushes through a revolving door beneath a large gilt sign: AUTOM AT.

Inside, the two non-street walls are full of small, glass-doored food dispensers. In the center of the floor is a change booth barely as wide as the man within, who is beardless but massively mutton-chopped and dressed in frock coat, high collar, and wide-ribbon bow tie. Hatcher does not recognize Cornelius Vanderbilt. Above Vanderbilt’s barred window is an official sign, nickels, and propped on the floor against the front of the booth is a cardboard sign with fading handwritten letters promising MEAT TOMORROW. From its dinginess, it has obviously been sitting there for a long, long time. All around are tables filled with intently conversing groups of mostly men wearing sackcloth tunics and with the hair at their temples unrounded and the edges of their beards unmarred. A smell of stewed carrots and creamed spinach and sweat and goat hair fills the air. Surveying the room, Hatcher finally turns his gaze to the table in the corner at the window. One man sits there alone, his isolation perhaps due to the fact that he is the only customer dressed in suit and tie. The face is bowed as the man moves his fingertip in a spread of salt on the tabletop before him, the shaker sitting nearby. The top of his head, with its tight right-side part and faint cow-lick, is familiar.

“Carl?” Hatcher says.

Carl Crispin looks up. His gaunt face draws even tighter in a flat facsimile of a smile. “Hatcher.”

Hatcher moves to the table and sits across from his reporter.

Carl answers what he assumes will be Hatcher’s first question. “Once I finally found it, I didn’t want to lose it again.”

Hatcher looks at the salt. Carl has lettered there: TAKE ME.

When Hatcher looks back up, Carl shrugs and backhands the salt from the table in a single stroke.

“A little ritual,” Carl says. “We all of us here are searching for the right one.”

Hatcher doesn’t know what to say.

Carl goes on. “Salt, see. Lot’s wife looked back on Sodom and this is what she became. So salt has to be powerful, right? I shouldn’t be saying this. I’m going to pay now.”

And Carl is pulled up from the chair and he stands straight and his body lifts off the floor and a dozen holes open in the top of his head, two dozen, and his body rotates until he is precisely inverted and he begins to jerk up and down as if an invisible hand is shaking him. From the holes in his head a fine gray powder flows out. His brain, no doubt.

Hatcher wonders what would have happened if he’d reached out his hand at Carl’s first rising and held his arm and told him that no one is listening. Would the punishment have stopped?

As it is, though, Carl rotates back to an upright position and descends to the chair. His eyes are empty.

Hatcher waits. And, in time, the gray powder stirs and gathers from the chair, the tabletop, the floor, and rushes back into the top of Carl’s head. His eyes come alive.

Hatcher says, “So, Carl. You do believe another Harrowing is imminent.”

Carl shrugs and looks out the window. “I’m an awful liar, Hatcher.”

“But you can lie about lying then.”

“I can lie about anything.”

“On air, about this not being a possible story, for instance.”

Carl looks back intently to Hatcher. “Or I can lie to myself. I can lie to you about lying because I’ve lied to myself about lying to you about lying but I could be lying to myself about lying to myself about lying to you about lying which means I lied in the first place.”

“The first place being…”

“About the new Harrowing. Is there a smudge on my cheek?”

Hatcher looks. “Yes.”

“Gray?”

“Gray.” Hatcher draws out his handkerchief and lifts his hand. “Should I…?”

“No.” Carl is emphatic. “Don’t you know what that is?”

Hatcher’s hand recoils. Of course.

“I have to stop with the salt,” Carl says. “It’s cursed. Of course it’s cursed. Pretty soon I won’t have enough brain left to lie.”

“You didn’t actually make up the new Harrowing,” Hatcher says.

“No. I didn’t make it up.”

“So was your source…”

“He could have lied to me. Or he could have lied to himself. Or he could have…”

“I get it,” Hatcher waves his hand to stop Carl and sits back in his chair. Of course it could all be a lie. He knows this. He always knows this. And yet Hatcher had some sort of intuition about the neo-Harrowing story. And still does. The news nose knows. The freshman J-Schoolers in a couple of adjoining rooms in Elder Hall at Northwestern would chant that out the windows at the passing coeds. Hatcher’s free mind is drifting now, he realizes. It’s also free to nurture hope and free to despair in the hope. But he’s always felt he has the nose. And it knows.

Carl says, “Hell, the first Harrowing might be a lie. You’d be surprised who’s still here. Though the biggest guys are mostly out of sight. They’re in their own condo somewhere, jammed in bunks with the biggest guys from all the other religions.”

Hatcher nods. “I’ve heard about that too. I figure it’s because all the rest of the denizens suffer more if they think somehow they got it wrong. If they suspect nobody got it right, there could be some sort of comfort in that.”

“Is that what you suspect?” Carl says. “That everybody is here?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes. Suspect, perhaps. But nobody can say if they’re all here. And if all the big guys are indeed in Hell, it doesn’t mean some little guys didn’t get spared.”

The two fall silent a moment. Hatcher looks around the Automat. “Do you know these people?”

Carl says, “Today it’s the writers’ workshop. They’ve all got books. None of them made it into the Big One. Over there, the central table, it’s Tobit and Baruch and Ben Sira. They got into the Catholic Bible, but needless to say that’s cold comfort for them, like being with a university press when they think they deserve Knopf. These three don’t read each other’s work anymore. They just kvetch. If you stand up and look to the far corner, you’ll see somebody these three should have with them, to be fair, since the Catholics published her too. But not only is she a woman, she has a constant companion.”

Hatcher rises and looks across the room. He sees a table with a woman in a gray tunic and headscarf reading from a scroll to a blackhaired, bearded, severed head sitting in the center of the table. The eyes of the man are widening and narrowing and widening again in disgust at the woman’s reading and he interrupts, saying something that she listens to without reaction, and when he stops, she starts reading again.

“That’s Judith,” Carl says. “And that’s the Babylonian general Holofernes, who she seduced and beheaded. I don’t think he keeps his comments constructive.”

While he’s standing, Hatcher looks more closely at the other tables. Many of them have scrolls being read. “You’ve got quite a few Gnostics,” Carl says. “They churned the books out, I tell you. And there’s some guys from Old Testament times who got screwed by the weather or earthquakes or whatever. The Book of Amittai, for instance. The Book of Ishmerai. Lost to the elements. And there are others. They never had a chance. Don’t get those guys started or you’ll be getting the begats and the goat-slaughter procedures all day and night, and they’re all desperate to hear they’re as good as the other guys.”

Hatcher moves his gaze to a nearby table. Three men and a woman. One of the men is reading from a codex and he’s lanky and intense and his long hair falls over his face.

Carl sees where Hatcher is looking. “They didn’t make it into the New Testament. The Gospel of Rhoda. Her last scroll was dropped down a well by Paul himself, who never did trust women. The Gospel of Festus got eaten by a camel. The letters of Silas. Don’t get him going on the first century post office. And the guy reading. That’s Judas Iscariot.”

Hatcher looks at Carl.

Carl says, “You were still alive when his lost codex came to light, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” Hatcher says. “Sadly. It’s embarrassing to get scooped by the National Geographic Society. You weren’t alive then.”

“No.”

“You know a lot about all this, Carl.”

Carl shrugs and turns his face to the window. “I may be a liar, but I’m a good reporter.”

Outside the window, Jezebel’s eight hundred and fifty slaughtered priests of Baal are crowding past, all their wounds still open and running. Unseen to Carl and Hatcher, Elijah is being borne along, squeezed tightly in their midst, cloaked in their blood.

“I can see that you are,” Hatcher says.

Carl lifts his face and then nods toward Judas. “He’s my source on the Harrowing.”

“Judas?”

“Yes.”

Hatcher takes this in. “Would you mind if I talk to him directly?”

Carl laughs softly and cocks his head at Hatcher. “You’re standing on journalistic protocol down here? Asking me?”

Hatcher sees how this would seem odd. He’s not sure he would have asked his reporter for permission only a short time ago.

“Of course,” Carl says. “Go ahead.”

“Thanks,” Hatcher says, and he moves off toward the New Testament table.

As he approaches, Judas has stopped reading, and Rhoda is offering a critique. “Everyone assumes it’s Gnostics because you did it in the third person. You need to rewrite it in the first person.”

“Good suggestion,” Festus says, giving Rhoda a little wink. “Make them wonder. We heard he hanged himself right away. But he took time to write this.”

“Not to mention the irony,” Silas says, also winking at Rhoda.

“What irony?” Festus says with a little more heat than one might reasonably expect. “That’s all you ever say. What’s irony got to do with it?”

Hatcher is beside the table now and the two men abruptly stop their bickering. All four look up at the newcomer in the suit.

“I’m sorry to interrupt. I’m Hatcher McCord.”

“I watch you all the time,” Rhoda purrs.

Festus and Silas both scowl. Judas glances over to Carl and then back to Hatcher. He rises. “I’ll talk to him,” Judas says to the others, and then to Hatcher, “Got nickels?”

Hatcher feels in his pockets. “Yes.”

“Come on,” Judas says, and he leads them to the back wall. He peers through the window of a food compartment and then another and another, moving along the row. “Not much choice today,” he says. “But there never is.” He stops and turns to Hatcher.

“Give me thirty nickels and I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” Judas says.

Hatcher is thrown by this for a moment.

“Just kidding,” Judas says. “I need three. For spinach. We can get two forks.”

Hatcher gives Judas three nickels, and the ex-apostle feeds them into a slot by one of the dispensing doors. “I’m good about sharing,” he says.

They bear their creamed spinach and forks out among the crowded tables, and ahead, a couple of Old Testament guys at a table for two suddenly burst into flames and leap up and run together out the front door. Judas nods to the newly vacated table. “Someone is looking out for us,” he says.

They sit.

Judas sticks one of the forks in Hatcher’s side of the white china Horn & Hardart bowl and pushes it slightly toward him. The dark green of the spinach can be seen in striations beneath the cream, but the cream itself is faintly wriggling. Judas takes a bite and grimaces. “Jesus Christ, this tastes bad,” he says.

He and Hatcher look at each other, stopped by the expletive. Judas laughs loudly. “The Master doesn’t mind. He likes a good irony.”

“He’s coming back here?” Hatcher says.

“For me. It’s the deal.”

“When did he tell you that?”

“His last night. When he asked me to do this thing for him. Somebody had to do this thing so all the rest of you would come to realize who he was. But see, then he couldn’t take me out of Hell the first time round. I just barely got here, and for him to end up being what he had to be, I had to take the heat for a long while. He was crucified for your sins, but I was vilified for your sins. You see what they write about me?” Judas rolls his head. “Oy,” he says. Then he motions at the spinach. “Eat up.”

“No thanks.”

“I don’t blame you. It’s nothing but vegetables, world without end.”

Hatcher nods toward the change booth. “The sign says meat tomorrow.”

“That sign’s always there and it never happens. Just about everyone in this room thinks they’re getting out of here on the next go-round. Most of them are convinced it’s about sacrifice. They didn’t kill enough goats or bullocks, so they need the animals. They need to do their ritual thing to be worthy. The management keeps promising, but come on. It’s not going to happen. Me, however. The Man and I had an arrangement. He needed me to do what I did. I knew His powers. You think I’d send myself to a place like this for thirty pieces of silver? You think anybody’s that stupid? He was the Man. I didn’t have the preaching skills or the church-building skills, but I had the skill to do what needed to be done, even if it was dirty work.”

And what’s going on in Hatcher’s nose? The smell of animate creamed spinach, certainly. And perhaps that is affecting the workings of his deeply intuitive, Northwestern-J-School-trained, field-tested, Emmy-Award-winning appendage, but hearing Judas Iscariot talk of his expectations, hearing his thoroughly adapted voice, Hatcher isn’t sniffing the story so strongly now. Not to mention the irony. Hatcher tries to reason with his nose. Maybe it’s the irony that’s causing the doubt. Judas Iscariot keeping his faith in Hell. Shouldn’t that actually give him credibility? And he’s adjusted over the years, as everyone is torturously required to do. Hatcher’s own Anne rarely sounds the way she must have sounded in the sixteenth century. They all are compelled to watch television, after all. If Judas had the skills he claims were necessary to do what he had to do in his mortal life, then those same skills would turn him into the Judas Iscariot sitting across from Hatcher right now, keeping his faith, talking wise-ass. And gobbling down the rancid creamed spinach.

“You sure you don’t want yours?” Judas asks as he finishes exactly half.

“I’m sure.”

Judas compulsively eats on, though every bite is clearly intensely unpleasant to him. Finally he presses his wrist against his mouth and jumps up and runs out the front door. Hatcher sits and waits and lets the possibilities of this story renew themselves. He looks around at all the others here. Also keeping the faith in their own ways, apparently.

Judas returns and sits. He says, “It’s not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man but that which cometh out.”

He waits a beat, as if he expects Hatcher to react. Hatcher doesn’t.

“Just kidding,” Judas says. “Man, if I’m to be judged by what just came out of my mouth, forget about it.”

“How do all these others expect to make their sacrifice? Do they think they’ll get a shot at the animals before the kitchen deals with them?”

“They’re not thinking clearly, most of them,” Judas says. “A few think putting their nickels in and pulling out a great piece of roast lamb and then throwing it away would do the trick, under the circumstances.”

“And do you think he’s coming back only for you?”

Judas shrugs. “Who knows? We can only account for ourselves in the end, right?”

There’s one more bite of creamed spinach in the china bowl. Judas has been poking at it with his fork. Now he scoops it up and puts it in his mouth and squeezes his eyes shut at its taste. He swallows hard. “Why’d I do that?” he says.

“You thought someone knew and expected it,” Hatcher says.

“Someone always knows,” Judas says.

Hatcher does not reply.

Judas leans intently forward. “That’s why I’m going to get out. What I did at Gethsemane. He knows why.”

“When will he come for you?”

“Soon.”

“How do you know?”

“There are signs.”

“Like what?”

“I came to learn them secretly,” Judas says. “I’m not at liberty to say. But they’re happening. Patterns of the pain. Certain arrivals to this place. Cadging nickels, how that goes. Things to come. A screaming in the night sky. You have to understand, man. There’s a bunch of holy, picked-out-by-God people still here. Published. And the main players in the books too. All big time. The biggest. Still here. He’s coming for them, right?”

“I thought he got them before.”

“So it was said.”

“He didn’t?”

Judas shrugs.

Hatcher presses him. “He didn’t take them out of Hell?”

“Nobody down here knows for sure. I can tell you there’s a bunch of shit-if-I’m-here-and-he’s-here-who-isn’t going on. But I’ve got the faith, man. I’ve got it.”

“So you figure there’ll be quite a few going out next time?”

“Like you said, you’d think the big boys would be gone by now. But they’re not. The direct-from-the-source guys. The holy destroyers of unbelieving nations. The scourge of the infidels and the heretics. And I’m talking the scourgers from both sides, from all sides. You’d figure somebody got it right. Not a chance. But my guy was full of surprises, don’t forget. He could pick any tax clerk or hothead with fishing tackle off the street. Just get your own shit together is my advice.”

Judas suddenly stiffens and looks down at his stomach. It swells rapidly and presses tight against his tunic and a wriggling begins there, as if the things in the cream of the spinach have suddenly grown up and are ready to raise a ruckus. “Oh fuck,” he says. “I shouldn’t have been saying all this.”

Judas jumps up and turns and careens around and past the tables and through the front door.

Hatcher sits and tries to be still and think on all this, and he begins to feel a darkness in his head and a faint weakness in his limbs. But these are just his own private feelings going on, he realizes. His body is simply reflecting on these matters as it waits for what he wants it to do next. Hatcher rises and moves to the front of the Automat. Carl is gone. Someone somewhere in the room shouts, “Not convincing? Convince this, shmecklesucker!” Hatcher steps into the street and turns back the way he came.

Behind him, Judas has not burst asunder with his bowels gushing out, which has happened to him before, the most recent time after he spoke to Carl Crispin of many of these very same things. This time, as he rushed headlong into the street, his stomach stopped wriggling and shrank back and he staggered around the corner and sat down on the sidewalk, his back to the metal wall of the diner, and he pulled his knees up under his chin, and now within him, it is the night on Mount Zion, outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem: The others have gone ahead to the upper room of this house and the Master has let them go up first and I wait upon him and he touches my arm and says “Come with me” and I do and we go around to the side of the house in the dark and the air smells of a wood fire and the Master smells of spikenard and I know Mary the Drastically Redeemed has been at him already and I’m thinking he’s too easily pampered, he’s getting too soft, there’s hard work to be done, man’s work, and I know he knows what I’m thinking, so I say “I’m sorry, Master” and he says “It’s almost over” and it’s me now who knows what he’s thinking and I say “So we’re not going to fight it out” and he says “You know the answer to that” and I do and he says “The stones of this house took long rubbing one against the other before they fit together” and I say “You mean the boys upstairs” and he says “The boys upstairs” and I say “Not enough rubbing” and he says “That would take till I’m gone and come back and gone and come back again” and he laughs and I laugh and I know what’s next and he says “I will ask you to do a thing now that will make you wish you’d never been born” and I say “If it’s what you need” and he puts his hand on my shoulder and even in the dark I can see the tears in the Master’s eyes.

Up the street, Hatcher is moving quickly. Soon he draws near to Administration Central. The Duesenberg is still sitting at the curb, and though he waited for Hatcher to reappear, since his orders were simply to chauffeur him, Porphyrius is not happy to see the TV minion’s approach. He’s starting to feel a little hot under the collar already.

Hatcher nods through the window at Porphyrius in his long-practiced, warm, famous-person-encountering-service-person manner and moves to the back door. He pauses and checks the sky. The sun is stalled high up in what Hatcher now sees as a powder-blue sky. He’s still not certain about a new Harrowing, but Judas’s words are stuck in his head. Get your own shit together. Hatcher climbs into the backseat of the Duesenberg and opens the map, ignoring Porphyrius’s glare in the rearview mirror. He finds the location of his nearest wife and gives his driver directions. They creep off into the crowded street.

And though Hatcher feels that this train of thought is wildly dissociated from what he has just experienced at the Automat — overlooking, as he does, the two underlying associative motifs of a striving for Heaven and books — his deep inner voice remembers: a magic bus, a book with large colored pictures about a bus full of travelers that flies away and I couldn’t have been more than three or four years old, and I was sitting in a window seat in my room with bright sun coming in and there was a page where a little boy discovers a golden button on the dashboard of a bus and he says to the driver, Push the button, please, sir, push the button, and the driver does, and the bus lifts off the street to the delight of all the passengers inside and, outside, to the surprise of a little girl and a puppy and a passing bird. And the rest of the book has vanished from within me, except for one two-page spread of artwork, and this has returned in dreams and in the moments drifting toward dreams, perhaps two dozen times over the many years since, and the image is this: the boy is looking out the window of the bus — though his looking out was established on an earlier page, for all these years I’ve simply known that the boy has pressed himself hard against the window and the other people have vanished for him — and on these two pages is just what he sees, from a great height: a rolling countryside with trees and a farmhouse and barns and a cornfield and, far ahead, a little village with a church steeple and a school and a neighborhood of white houses and the sun high in the sky and, most importantly, there is a truck, a bright blue panel truck with big round fenders and it is on the road through the countryside and it is heading for the little village and on the side of the truck is the word BREAD and when I was a child I imagined that it was my father driving that truck, it was my father, the friendly Bread Delivery Man who smiles all the time and whose breath smells of fresh bread, and later, when I dreamed of this scene, the father part had vanished, the driver simply drove anonymously, invisibly, and it was just the bread truck, but it was still in the perfect countryside, and I knew it was heading toward the place where I wanted to be.

Mary Ellen McCord — formerly Mary Ellen Gibson but Mary Ellen McCord even after her divorce from Hatcher as he was being promoted from anchorman of the evening news in St. Louis, Missouri, to network correspondent in Washington, D.C., and Mary Ellen McCord even to the day of her not-really-intentional-but-now-that-it-seems-to-be-happening-oh-what-the-fuck death by drowning off the Cayman Islands on a Golden Years Singles Cruise with two other unmarried sixty-something women friends — is being borne along as one of the multitude thronging Peachtree Street Road Circle. She is trying to get back to her apartment in the Career Mother neighborhood of the Great Metropolis in Hell now that she has been reconstituted after enduring the noontime sulfurous rain that she seems always to get caught in because she seems almost always to be in the street crowd for reasons she can’t even begin to figure out. But this time she actually recognizes the intersection with Peachtree Circle Court Loop and she actually fights her way to the edge of the crowd and actually breaks free to move abruptly into the mouth of the street where she lives just in time to be knocked off her feet and run over by a turning 1932 Duesenberg being driven by the greatest charioteer of the Eastern Roman Empire and bearing her ex-husband.

Hatcher sits on the running board of the Duesenberg, with Mary Ellen’s twisted, broken body a few feet away, and he waits for her to reconstitute. If he had a pack of cigarettes, he’d smoke one now. This is taking an unusual length of time, with her not showing any signs whatsoever of snapping back. After the initial recognition of who she is, he hasn’t quite looked at her. Finally it all feels terribly familiar: he hurts her and then doesn’t really look at what’s happened; he just waits for things to go back to normal.

He makes himself see her. Not her crumpled, jackknifed body, but her face. He angles his head to the left, sharply, and still more, until his face and hers are aligned across this space between them, eye to eye, nose to nose, mouth to mouth. She looks young. As she was when he was courting her at Northwestern. Suddenly her eyes open. But it’s not clear to Hatcher that she is seeing anything. A moment later her eyes close and they begin to move beneath her lids, as if she is dreaming.

And within Hatcher: She and I stand on the tiny beach at the curve of Sheridan Road near Fisk Hall, the lake the color of car exhaust, the air stinking from the alewives that mysteriously die in large numbers every spring and wash up along the shore, and we’re shoulder to shoulder, she and I, but not holding hands, and we’re expecting something from each other in light of our imminent graduation, and in light of all the sweet times sneaking her up to the third floor of my rooming house in the still prudish early sixties and clinging to each other very quietly in my narrow bed with the tops of the red maples outside, and I say, “Your folks will be down?” and she says, “You asked that this morning,” and I say, “I’m not thinking clearly,” and she says, “I’m not either,” and I say, “We need to think clearly,” and she says, “We need not to think,” and I accept this and I say, “Since we’re not thinking, let’s get married,” and she laughs, low, and I let the back of my hand touch the back of hers and her hand is warm and she turns it and I turn mine and we hold hands and the gesture is like a scarlet leaf on the maple outside my window in October and it’s the first one to fall and you’d think that would be the most beautiful secret moment of all for the tree — its quaking with red leaves like it’s on fire and this first leaf letting go and floating away, free — but it really means that winter is coming in and all the beautiful things will fall away and die and the tree will soon be stark and cold.

And behind Mary Ellen’s closed and dream-restless eyes: Twilight is coming on and he and I are standing on the little beach near the J-School building and we’ve never said a word about it but the time is now nearly upon us when we either go on together or we don’t, and the lake is dark, nearly the color of his eyes and as deep, and he smells of the drug store aftershave he adores — bay rum, the clove smell of an old man — and I know he will someday get a thing like that right without my having to suggest it, and he says, “Your parents will be down?” and I say, “You keep coming back to that. What’s really on your mind?” and I turn my face to him and he turns his face to me and he takes my hand and we both look out to the water and he says, “It’s not a matter of my mind,” and I say, “We need to think clearly,” and he says “No we don’t,” and this makes me happy and then he says, “I want to marry you,” and I lift his hand and I kiss it and it smells of rubber cement from him cutting and pasting his final story for the newspaper, and if I was thinking clearly I’d know this is as good as it’s going to get and I should just kiss that hand one more time and let it go and walk on down the beach and out into the lake and just keep walking till I vanish.

She opens her eyes. She finds her body restored and the promise of more pain perched on the running board of an old automobile. She sits up.

Hatcher rises. Mary Ellen has reconstituted, but her face has turned old, as old as she was when she finally let it all go in the Caribbean Sea. Hatcher makes a vague gesture to help Mary Ellen to her feet, but she waves it off. She stands.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“For what?” she says.

“Running you over.”

“Which time?” she says.

Hatcher shrugs. Not from indifference, but she can’t see that, of course.

“Right,” she says.

“Please,” he says. “Any time. All the times. That’s why I’m here.”

“We’re in Hell, my darling,” she says. “It’s a little late for anything like that.”

“Can’t we talk a bit?” Hatcher says.

Now Mary Ellen shrugs, wishing to be indifferent. That she isn’t, she takes simply to be fresh torture in the afterlife she’s living. She turns and walks off along her street. Hatcher follows.

The street narrows abruptly into an alleyway of tenements not unlike his own. The outside corridors stacked at the back of the buildings are crowded with women wandering singly up and down or coming together into small groups and then breaking apart, filling the air with cries of “After all I did for them!” and “I’m a person too!” and “This isn’t Hell, I know from Hell already!” But as Hatcher moves along behind Mary Ellen, a murmur starts up, and by the time she begins to ascend one of the circular iron staircases with Hatcher following, all the women above are nudging each other and leaning out over the railings and pointing at him. Now they are crying “He’s on TV!” and “What’s a man doing here?” and “Who’s that motherfucker?”

When Mary Ellen reaches her corridor, she steps out of the staircase but instantly pauses and waits for Hatcher to emerge. She steels herself and offers her arm for him to take. “Stay close,” she says. “They’ll tear you to pieces. They kept a lot inside in that other life.”

Hatcher looks at the gauntlet of faces before him, some once beautiful and some not but all of them leveled now by jowl and wrinkle and blotch and pallor and by the utter ingratitude of men who moved on and children who moved on. Mary Ellen guides Hatcher forward and he takes the pinches and the spit and the hissed words with “Sorry” and “I’m sorry” and “I’m very sorry” until she pulls him in at a doorway and they enter a cramped little room with its walls covered by empty snapshot picture frames. They sit down shoulder to shoulder on a tattered couch that smells, to Hatcher, like dead fish and has always smelled, to Mary Ellen, like bay rum.

“You’re chock-full of apologies down here, aren’t you,” Mary Ellen says.

“Lately,” Hatcher says. She’s right and this surprises him, but he lets it pass.

“Is that why you’ve come to me?”

“Sort of.”

“Of course. It’s a clever torture, isn’t it?”

“I don’t intend to…”

“In all your self-important arrogance, that’s one of the weirdest examples, right there. What do your intentions have to do with it? You think I’d assume you’re the one devising the tortures in Hell?”

“This isn’t going well,” Hatcher says, reflexively trying one of his little rhetorical tricks from their life together long ago. Play against her anger with understatement.

Mary Ellen knows the trick and simply snorts wearily at it.

They sit silently for a moment. She can’t let it alone. But she just feels sad now. “Not well,” she says, low. “It’s Hell, my darling.” She stops. Twice she’s called him “darling.” With irony, certainly. But also without irony. This makes her even sadder. Which is part of the torture, of course. The “darling” thing was her own similar rhetorical trick from that life together. And it tortured her in much the same way even then.

“I never was religious,” she says.

“No.”

“This doesn’t feel religious, exactly, all this.”

“No.”

“While I was drowning,” she says, “just before the last darkness, I felt peaceful. I wasn’t suicidal, really, but I was looking forward to an end to all the crap. I didn’t expect to end up anywhere.”

Hatcher is about to reply, “Especially not sitting on this couch with me,” but he catches himself and does not say anything.

“You’re thinking it’s about you again,” she says.

If it’s not Satan inside your head, it’s your ex-wife. He tries to mitigate his offense with her. “The crap part,” he says, and he hears how sorrowful he sounds and he knows Mary Ellen hears it too and she puffs and turns her face away from him.

“Fuck you,” she says, very low, and because she has paused briefly before saying it and because he can feel her brace herself ever so slightly, he knows who she’s actually talking to.

He reaches out and finds her hand resting on her thigh and he holds it, firmly. He wants to say, “He can’t hear you.” But he’s still not certain everyone has privacy of mind and there’s so much yet for him to do. He does say, “Don’t let it happen.”

He can feel her hand growing quickly warm and he squeezes it tighter. He’ll go up in flames with her if need be. “Stop,” he says.

She looks at him, her eyes restless again, searching his face, and he looks at her steadily, inviting her to read his mind.

Her hand is intensely hot, her whole body radiates the heat, but there are no flames yet. Her face streams perspiration. But no flames. He holds her hand and her eyes close and still there are no flames. They sit like this for a long while, and at last the heat abates and she opens her eyes.

He lets go of her hand.

“There,” he says.

“What do you mean?” she says.

“You didn’t let it happen,” he says.

“What are you talking about?”

“What you just went through. It wasn’t so bad this time.”

Mary Ellen’s mouth sags open in wonder. “Oh my darling, you are such a man. Such a stupid man. That was one of the worst.”

Hatcher doesn’t understand.

Mary Ellen says, “Whenever he doesn’t like what I think or say, he gives me a hot flash. The mother of all hot flashes.”

Hatcher should know by now that intense suffering is a personal thing, even in Hell. Especially in Hell. But his face is still a little uncomprehending.

Mary Ellen says, “The flames are inside.”

Still he’s lagging behind.

And so she says, “Remember when I was pregnant with Angie…”

And she stops.

It has not yet arisen that Hatcher McCord in his mortal life had two daughters, Angela Marie — Angie — and earlier, in his and Mary Ellen’s brief but intense Age of Aquarius phase, Summer Meadow. His children have not been in his mind because he has not wanted Satan to get even a faint whiff of them and because — especially with significant time clearly having passed, given the arrivals of Bush and Clinton and others — he could not let himself even begin to wonder if the girls have arrived here themselves. Hell is indifferent to torture based on concern for the welfare of others, so this effectively kept them out of his head altogether when he thought his head belonged to the Old Man. Hatcher’s children were living adults when he died. But he has heard rumors that beyond the mountains on the horizon, cut off forever from the denizens of the Great Metropolis, there is even a Great Amusement Park where all the souls that died in the bodies of children clog the roller coasters and theme rides. So what are the chances for Angie and Summer? He can’t bear to consider this possibility. They are not children anymore. He has let them go. His old method returns: he doesn’t look; he waits for that matter of things in his head to go back to normal. Which it quickly does.

Mary Ellen too has been fighting off thoughts of her daughters, though she hasn’t yet quite gotten around to the impression that everyone is in Hell. The pain of the empty picture frames is sufficient unto the day. She cut herself off in invoking her second pregnancy because the man she called “darling” then with no irony whatsoever sits beside her in Hell on a couch that stinks of the aftershave of his youth and because she is looking even more drawn and haggard and wattled and creased for him than she did for herself on that last morning in the bathroom mirror in her cabin on the cruise ship.

The silence of the unfinished sentence about her pregnancy with Angie yammers away in each of them, and to stop it, Mary Ellen says, “You wouldn’t understand.”

Hatcher does not dispute this, even to say he wants to understand, because he knows she will not understand. And so they sit for a long while saying nothing, not looking at each other. And that was the wrong thing to do as well, it seems to him, for she finally breaks the silence by saying, “You know, I don’t even think it’s about the public adulation with you. You would be perfectly happy if you were the only person in the world.”

Hatcher realizes this is the moment to declare his past feelings for Mary Ellen, and not just because the declaration would surprise the shit out of her and thus undercut her anger, another of his recognized rhetorical tricks. He would actually like to recover that moment by recalling it. He would like to start fixing whatever was so broken in him before. He would like to have a shot at getting out of Hell. So he turns his face to her profile and says, “You may not remember this, you may not believe it now, but I did…”

He cannot fill in the appropriate word. But like a fatally wounded animal who lies on the ground still moving its legs, trying to run, he starts again, “Really, Mary Ellen, I did…”

She turns to look at him now. Surprisingly, her face has not gone hard at his hesitation. She might be expected easily to fill in the missing word in her own head, the one she would assume Hatcher cannot bring himself to say because he’s trying another of his old tricks and is so miserably and arrogantly insincere that he can’t even make himself shape the sound in his mouth. But the truth is, she doesn’t know what the word is he’s looking for. She realizes she should know, but she doesn’t. She realizes this is a crucial word, so crucial that she might even find herself inclined to try to give the man she once married a little help, if it’s such a crucial fucking word, but she can’t think what it is.

Meanwhile, Hatcher says, “Mary Ellen, I…” And here he tries just to run directly up on it. Push that sucker out. He can’t. In spite of his mind being his own private thing even in Hell, it still is Hell he’s in. There are limits. And in Hell the four-letter word he’s looking for is not spoken, is not thought. Mary Ellen, I did fuck you. Not a problem. Mary Ellen, I did Roto-Rooter your bodacious cunt. Go for it. But not the thing Hatcher wants to say. It is dangerous even for it to be written here. Let’s call it the ‘L-word’. And when the L-word is truly called for, not even lesser, permitted words of affection can come to mind.

So Hatcher and Mary Ellen sit shoulder to shoulder, eye to eye, and they each easily recognize the other and they each wonder Who is this stranger before me? And then he thinks What was I trying to say? and she thinks What was it I was trying to think of? And then Hatcher says, “I have to go,” and he understands this is so only as he says it. And at that moment their bodies tremble and the couch trembles and the room trembles and the building trembles and the whole of the Great Metropolis trembles and all of Hell trembles as from the horizon comes the grand solar boom of sunset, and the room goes black.

On the slow trip back to Hatcher’s apartment, the rear seat of the Duesenberg is dark and the car shudders from the jostling of the night crowd. He struggles to learn something about himself from his visit to Mary Ellen. What. He was arrogant. He was arrogant and self-absorbed. So what was the deal with her marrying him? He must have changed along the way. Arrogant and self-absorbed and stupid. Stupid like a man. But taking these things out of their conversation doesn’t do jack shit for him. These are just abstractions. He lived his life with her — made his mistakes — in a body, in the moment, and he doesn’t know which moments were the telling ones, and there were so many of them that he can’t even recall, and they are all gone, anyway, and there are no more to be had with her. And no one is listening. He would be happy if he was alone in the world, she says. The street is stuffed with bodies, the windows all around him are filled with an ever-changing mosaic of faces. He doesn’t see them. He closes his eyes. Half a dozen moon-white geisha faces smear past and are gone, and a Chattanooga Baptist Youth bowling team, and a cornrowed Snoop Dogg trying to mark the Dizzle’s rear whizzle but howling from the sizzle of his pizzle. Fo shizzle.

At last Hatcher steps from the car, his camcorder in hand. He hurries into the dark of his alley and along beneath the tenements and he climbs the circular staircase and emerges into his corridor. He certainly does not want to be the only person in the world tonight. He certainly longs to absorb himself in Anne. He will try not to be stupid with her. He even has Henry’s address to offer. Can that possibly be self-absorbed? He passes the Hoppers’ apartment, and their door is closed. He’s happy about that. But that doesn’t mean it’s all about him or that he wants the doors to be closed on everyone so he can be alone. He puts his hand to his own door and turns the knob.

“Darling, I’m home,” he cries even before the door is fully open.

And now it is.

Anne sits, in jeans and halter top, at one side of the kitchen table. Lulu, in nothing but her skin and furry wings, sits at the other. Hatcher thinks there might be something quite appealing about this only-person-in-the-world stuff after all.

He’s ready to back out of the door, but he understands that’s not possible now. He pretty much knows what’s on Lulu’s mind, so he focuses on Anne to try to read what has transpired and what her attitude is about it.

All he would have to fear from Anne is that she thinks he is anything but forced to go with Lulu. But Anne has never shown a trace of jealousy. It has always been him, and his jealousy has always been of that strange retrospective variety.

He can’t read her eyes. But she has her hand upon her throat, thumb to one side, her fingers to the other side, and she’s stroking herself there, out and back, out and back, like a man thoughtfully stroking his beard. She probably has never seen a succubus. May not have known they exist.

And in spite of the strange circumstances before him, his free and private mind takes this moment to reflect: my retrospective jealousy, isn’t that somehow a desire to be the only person in the world, with the only exception being the woman by whom my cosmic exclusivity is measured?

Anne says, “This lady claims she has an appointment with you.”

Lulu giggles her deep-throat giggle. “Oh you dear. Calling me a lady. She’s so very sweet, Hatcher.”

He can only nod.

Lulu says, “And aren’t I très discreet? ‘Appointment,’ my titties.”

Anne turns to the faux-Frenchified succubus and says, “I’m not stupid, dear.”

Lulu does not giggle at this. She reaches across the table and takes Anne’s hand, and Hatcher fears what Lulu might do. The two women look at each other steadily, and Lulu says, “I had an ‘appointment’ with your King Henry, once upon a time.”

“Did he keep it?”

“They all must, you know.”

“You’re lucky he didn’t marry you.”

Again Lulu doesn’t giggle. To distract the succubus from doing harm to Anne because of her snarkiness and, indeed, to satisfy his own newsman’s curiosity, Hatcher puts on the playful voice of their first meeting and asks, “Who else have you done we’d be surprised to know about, you naughty Lulu you?”

“As rotten a fuck as Henry?” she says, still looking at Anne.

“Yes,” Hatcher says, calling on all his interview savvy to shift to the subject’s preferred tone. “You poor Lulu you.”

“Poor Lulu,” she says.

“What she has to go through for her work,” Hatcher says.

Lulu turns her face to him and she nods again and sighs a loud, booming sigh. She lets go of Anne’s hand. She says, “For about a hundred years I was the official harvester of your presidents. We like to use the seed of the big boys all around the world to make our little domestic demons. So you name the guy, from McKinley on through, and I did him, and it all went the way it should go, right through Bush the First. But after that, things started to get freaky.”

“Freaky for you?” Hatcher says, his incredulity involuntary and dangerous. But he gets away with it.

Lulu nods, pouting. “I have feelings too, mon cheri. With the live ones we’re supposed to come in the middle of the night and dope-whisper any companions into a temporary coma and do the boy while he’s still snoozing. With your President Bill Clinton, his wife’s alone in the master bed, and by the time I can get myself oriented, I’m face to face with a very wide-awake Mr. President.”

Lulu pauses for effect.

Hatcher prompts her. “Freaky, Lulu?”

“He took one look at me and dropped his pajama bottoms.”

Somehow this doesn’t surprise Hatcher, and that must show on his face.

“Only the dead and damned are supposed to go for it, my dear. And then, the next time, I went off to do Al Gore.”

“Wait. Al Gore wasn’t elected.”

“Hello. Poor Lulu had to figure out the fucking electoral college. And after I did, I had to go do a guy whose seed they took one look at and tossed. At that point, I’d had enough.”

Lulu digs a knuckle into the corner of a dry eye. A little trick she picked up from her boss. “Boohoo,” she says. And then abruptly she flares the hand at her eye and smiles brightly and says, “I am so glad you are dead and damned, Hatcher McCord. You will help make up for the shit work.”

And now, without Hatcher even registering her rise and approach, Lulu is in his face, and she gently takes the camcorder from him, and then there is a great flurry of her hands and in a seeming instant Hatcher McCord is standing naked at his front door, his clothes flung about the room, his camcorder, though, perched safely on the kitchen table, his blue minion tie folded neatly beside it, and beside the tie is Anne, her eyes wide and her mouth gaping.

And in the next instant his naked body is pressed against Lulu’s naked body, her two powerful arms clamping him there, and they are out the door and leaping into the air and her great bat wings open wide and beat fiercely and Lulu and Hatcher shoot straight up into the dark and he barely has a chance to turn his head and look behind him as the Great Metropolis spreads open beneath him like the time-lapse blooming of a vast black flower, and Lulu veers, and in the moment that they hurtle over the center of the city, Hatcher at last finds brief voice for all that is happening to him. He screams.

And far below, curled up in the gutter at the side of the Automat on the corner of Peachtree Way and Lucky Street, a sleeping figure snaps awake. Judas Iscariot turns his face upward. He has heard a screaming in the night sky, as it was prophesied, and his faith is renewed.

The city passes away, and below Hatcher there is darkness, and against him there is the massive febrile thumping of a heart — Lulu in excitation, from flight, from him, from Mama waiting — and inside him his own heart beats as feverishly fast as Lulu’s, from all that is about to happen, and from Lulu’s heart, its ravenousness clear to him.

After a time, he feels them descending, though everything is still black, and then Lulu banks and turns as if deliberately to show him this: red klieg lights scanning the sky from the roof of an eighty-foot Buccaneer Buena Vista double-wide lit bright white from within. He can see in the spill of the light that the place sits in the crotch of two sharp slopes. He is in the mountains again.

Lulu wheels around and then plummets and lands running, and she and Hatcher are abruptly at the front door of the double-wide. She knocks the match-in-the-gas-tank-boom-boom knock. “Tootle ootle, Mama,” Lulu cries, and she opens the door.

Inside the trailer, Hatcher is briefly blinded by the light — a thousand naked filaments in a thousand lightbulbs in glass display cases lining the one large room of the double-wide’s interior. The light refracts and flares from thousands of snow globes densely packing the cases. And taking up the far twenty feet of the eighty-footer and stretching as wide as the walls is Mama Lilith’s bed with Lilith herself sitting with legs spreadeagled, wings unfurled, toes wiggling, and her succubus privates open and steaming like a vaporizer. She is just about to pop into her mouth — with little finger extended — a Toblerone from a box beside her. At the sight of her daughter and the naked Hatcher McCord, Lilith’s hand stops and falls, and with slow and meticulous care, she places the chocolate back in the box. Hatcher pulses with foreboding from this gesture.

“Here he is,” Lulu says, lifting Hatcher and turning him around and setting him before her for Lilith’s frontal inspection.

“There he is,” Lilith says even as she levitates from the bed, closing her legs, lifting her wings, and rotating her body forward. She floats toward him, quite slowly really, with the same contemplative air she had putting away the chocolate, and that continues, rightly, to scare the shit out of Hatcher.

Lilith drifts past the display cases. Hatcher has registered the snow globe collection only generically. He has never been a collector of things, and these are snow globes, after all, and he has been understandably riveted by other features of the room. So he has not seen that each snow globe contains an image of a man, the form varying greatly, with Dwight Eisenhower, for instance, being represented in one of these cases by the two-and-a-half inch white plastic figure from the set of Marx Toys Presidents of the United States that Hatcher adored as a boy. The white shakable substance lying at the bottom of each globe, however, is not the powder of fake snow but a dehydrated rendering of something quite personal to the man represented. Lilith, on the other hand, being a collector, is keenly aware of each of these carefully accumulated, classifiable artifacts of her life, and she is twittering with delight at them as she approaches this new man.

Lilith in features and stature is clone-similar to her daughters. But as she draws near to Hatcher, the millennia are obvious upon her. Her all-over bleach job looks more white than blond and her flesh is pasty and liver-spotted. Though she has had a great deal of work done: her face is mostly unlined but forever fixed in a wide-eyed, leering rictus of lust.

“Now, Mama, he’s mine,” Lulu says, as Lilith arrives before Hatcher and settles onto her feet. Hatcher is filled with the smell of Lilith’s perfume: rose and jasmine, both synthetic, and sulfur and semen, both organic.

She looks past him now to her daughter. If her face could physically register an emotion other than lust, it would be doing it now. “My dear,” Lilith says, “you must learn to share.”

“I am sharing,” Lulu says. “I’m here, aren’t I? You get to watch.”

“Oh, darling daughter, haven’t I always been a good mother? How many three-ways have we had, my sweet? Men of my own acquisition, yes?”

“Mama, you got off on that big time,”

“You see what children do?” Lilith says, looking Hatcher in the eyes abruptly. “They twist your maternal generosity and affection into something selfish.” Lilith looks back to Lulu. “If what you say is true, then there has never been an unselfish act in the history of creation. Can I take no legitimate pleasure from my generous act? Must I feel displeasure being generous in order for the act to be truly generous? Then are you saying that the only truly generous acts can come from ungenerous spirits?”

“Mama, you just want to fuck this man. But he’s mine.”

“At least, my darling, a little of his essence for my collection? That’s the vigorish, dear. I am the house.”

“I could have taken him anywhere.”

“You’ll give nothing but some quarters for a peep show to your mother who birthed you and raised you and taught you everything?”

Hatcher feels Lulu shudder behind him.

“Oh all right,” Lulu says. “Have some diddling. But I get him last. I get to bite.”

“Of course, darling. That’s for the young anyway.”

At some point Hatcher tried to convince himself that in the final analysis, since pain was so extreme in Hell, one pain was pretty much like another. He had to get his addresses from Lulu, but on this point about what he would pay for them, he is realizing he was wrong. He should have known. He has never understood the attitude in people that “It’s only sex.” That’s like saying, “It’s only death.” There’s something uniquely intense about all this, in whatever form.

No more so than in Lilith’s double-wide, for she instantly lifts him up and tucks him under an arm and in a flash he is at the other end of the room and he is slammed onto the bed on his back and he closes his eyes and he thinks of England. Literally so. Involuntarily. It’s 1968 and the Grosvenor Square protests are just over and the vacationing young journalist has seized the day and taken smart, edited-in-the-camera footage with his Kodak Instamatic and he will soon add a cassette-taped voice-over and win his first broadcast journalism job, and he and Mary Ellen are wandering Piccadilly and she breaks off to go into a bookstore and he is excited by what he knows he will do and he lets her go browse while he wanders on and he passes a cobblestone alley and just off the street a young man is kneeling alone in an army-green field jacket and he is dousing himself with gasoline, and Hatcher pauses, and perhaps all this isn’t quite registering on him but now the young man is striking a match and there are no words and no signs, this is a very private act, and perhaps that’s why Hatcher still watches and does not think to move, but the privacy does not stop him — nascent newsman that he is — from simply raising his Instamatic, and he films the tiny flare of the flame and the dropping of the match and the man has rested backward a bit on his heels and so the match falls on his lap and the bloom of flame starts from the young man’s crotch.

And that’s the England Hatcher thinks of as he closes his eyes passively to the sex being visited upon him, because his own quick scorching flame of pain is very much starting in the same place, and the notion flashes through him that perhaps this will be something of an atonement for his newsman’s sins, and another pain — damp acid-burn pain — dabs itself again and again all over him — the touch of parts of Lilith’s body that he wills himself not to identify — and his own central body part in all this turns abruptly into an unending fount, a great soaring Old Faithful in more ways than one, with the flow geyser-hot, feeling as if the inside channel of him is being ripped up in the process and expelled as well, and now he is aware of a struggle above him, shoving and succubus-hissing and snorting and a sharp “all right you little bitch” from Lilith, and Hatcher knows Lulu has taken over, and a new pain grabs his cheek, a fierce clamping, and he presses his eyes more tightly shut and he could count her teeth if he chose — each is a separate twisting flaming knife blade — and the clamps of pain move down his chest, his abdomen, down and down, heading for Old Faithful as it pours searingly on with the image in Hatcher’s head turning from steaming geyser to flamethrower, but Lulu navigates around that spot and down his thighs, the clamp and clamp and clamp of new pain intensifying until it stops for a moment with his right ankle, the last step in a long trail of ongoing pain — the day-after deep throb of puncture wounds — and now he feels his right foot being taken up whole into a wet razor-lined cavern and held for one brief moment and then he hears himself crying out — perhaps he has been crying out all along unawares but now he hears as if from afar his own cry as it fills the room and probably the mountains outside as well — and there is the snapping of bone and the tearing of flesh.

The physical torments of Hell do not allow for the convenient side-door exit of unconsciousness. And so Hatcher McCord, anchorman for the Evening News from Hell, newly invested but free-thinkingly subversive minion of Satan, in full consciousness begins to suffer in ways that go rather beyond the poor powers of language to describe, as one foot is devoured and then the other, one leg done in four bites and then the other, the torso done in a dozen large chunks, the throat taken in one bite, and Hatcher McCord’s head — including his universally recognizable face — is swallowed whole. And then, last but not least, the famous anchorman’s penis remains utterly alone in the center of the bed, spouting on manfully, bravely. After making rather thorough use of this final part for a time, Lulu finally looks at it thoughtfully and then swallows it one gulp. All of Hatcher’s parts have now vanished down the wide-gaping throat and into the ever-expanding stomach of the redoubtable Lulu, succubus spawn of Grand Mater Lilith, as the Mater herself flutters nearby watching, having already collected more than enough of his essence for the Hatcher McCord snow globe.

Lulu belches.

“Cover your mouth, dear, when you do that,” Lilith says.

Lulu farts.

Lilith rolls her eyes and shakes her head, and with her cupped palm full of Hatcher, she floats off to her arts and crafts corner at the other end of the trailer.

Lulu — her belly vastly distended — lies back on the bed. She pulls a pack of Lucky Strikes from under a pillow and lights a cigarette. She blows a smoke ring and reflects: I adore having a man inside me. Even if they don’t appreciate it and just want to shoot their little load and then roll off you and turn their back and act like you’re not even there. And you’re so like them, Mama. Deep down, you prefer to watch. The Internet is all you really need. And when you do them, it’s just to add to your collection. Oh I did this one. And I did that one. For me, this is the real moment. I cannot hold you close enough, my darling. Come inside me, my darling. We are one, my darling,

Lulu belches again. This time, with no one to see, she covers her mouth.

Meanwhile, jumbled inside the one large room that is the double-wide of Lulu’s inner body, Hatcher also reflects: In mortal life as well, how often sex went terribly wrong. No. Not always “terribly wrong,” sometimes quite subtly wrong and sometimes wrong and right both but mixed so thoroughly that you couldn’t tell the difference. But not really “often” wrong either. In fact it always went wrong, somehow, on some level, even if it was the itch on the heel of your right foot, or what’s that distant siren out the window up Riverside Drive or down F Street, or is a two-parter on personal tax deductions during February sweeps a sure thing or a bad risk, all the while you’re having sex with a woman who you’re never going to see again and you should try to remember or you expect to see for the rest of your life — well, who knows, maybe not that long but certainly indefinitely since you’re married to her — and you should try to stay connected to her. And sometimes it was:

Was it good for you?

Yes, was it good for you too?

Yes.

Was it as good for you as it was for me?

How do I know?

Was it the best you ever had?

It was good.

Oh shit.

And sometimes it was:

Are you asleep?

Trying.

Now?

Yes.

Can’t we talk?

I’m exhausted.

I want to get pregnant.

Oh shit.

Or instead of “I want to get pregnant” it’s “I want it to be like it was” or “I want to get away for a week, alone” or “I want to be famous too”—no, that’s too honest — that one wasn’t even a question, it was “You never ask me for my opinion” or “What are you really doing for the world” or “I was watching Rather tonight.” Or Frank Reynolds. Or, once, Connie Chung. Connie Chung. Oh shit.

And now Lulu shifts on the bed and Hatcher’s parts jumble around and his roughly detached head oozes from between chunks of his thighs and his face pops up tightly against Lulu’s soft inner flesh. His valiant attempt to remain rational falters: She is on my arm, my darling Lulu, we enter the conference room and I lay my cheek against her naked shoulder, and the men in the room all rise at our entering and they are pure white from head to toe — faces and hands and suits and ties and hair — as white as the bones of some man that my darling has picked clean in the desert, and I say, “Gentlemen, we’ve had many fine discussions, the six of us, and Mamie has always been a very gracious hostess, and now I’d like you to meet my darling Lulu — Lulu, this is President Dwight Eisenhower, he’s raising both arms to you in electoral triumph, and the man with glasses nodding at you is Harry Truman” and at this Truman lifts both his hands and spreads them as if to measure quite a long penis indeed, and he says, “The fuck stops here” and the Presidents are gone and Lulu and I are crossing the square in Pittsfield, heading for the Rainbow Restaurant for cheeseburgers and cherry Cokes and we pass beneath the awning of the storefront Hotel Parkway and Lulu says, “Let’s go in there and fuck” and I say “You bet” but just now my father steps out of the Rainbow and his face is smeared with ketchup and he’s popping a final French fry into his mouth and Lulu does a double take and she says “Even better” and she is upon him instantly and his clothes are flying and I really really want to look away before I see my father’s cock, especially in the grip of my darling Lulu, and someone taps me on the shoulder and I turn and it’s Mamie Eisenhower — the whiteness of her face and hair and pearl necklace and modest fitted woman’s suit is dazzling there in the sunlight in Pittsfield — and she lifts her hands and offers me a cup of tea even as my father’s voice fills the square shouting “Fuck me, Lulu, yes!” and Lulu cries “At last a real man!” and I drop Mamie’s teacup and I run, I run across the square and past the courthouse and on and on till I slam into our front door and I go up the steps three at a time and I find my mother — her late-October-afternoon gray eyes turning on me and brightening — and I sit beside her on the bed where she hugs a terry cloth robe tight around her and I take her hand and I begin to pat it and I pat it and I pat it and she says to me, quite low but quite clearly, “It’s all right, my darling. You have everything to give to the world. And everything about you is perfect. Do you hear me? You don’t need to worry. You’re perfect.”

All the parts of Hatcher’s body are beginning to stir now. Lulu puts her hand on the great mound of her distended belly. She smiles, then turns her face, leans off the side of the bed, and throws up for a while. Just as certain physical sufferings in Hell exceed the power of language to describe, so too does succubus vomit, which is just as well. Though Jackson Pollock, in a circumstance similar to Hatcher’s, having occasion a little further along in this process to observe the effusion of Lulu’s sister Lily, remarked, at its color and form on the floor, “Holy shit. I am profoundly humbled.”

This has always been a poignant, though somewhat delusional, time for Lulu. After her ersatz morning sickness passes, she lies back and puts a hand once more on her belly as, within, a reconstitution begins, in this case Hatcher’s. She begins to hum “Sympathy for the Devil”, though softly, even sweetly, not the Rolling Stones version at all, and Hatcher can hear her from inside, as once did, in this same circumstance, the briefly famous, newly arrived British reality-TV music critic, Simon Cowell, who cried out, desperate to curry Lulu’s favor, “Brilliant, you’ve made it your own.” And within Lulu: My little baby, how boisterous you are, I know you will be a girl this time, I can feel it. A mother knows. I can feel your sweet downy wings trying to unfurl, but that will have to wait just a little longer, my darling, there will be time for that. I will teach you to fly in good time. We will rise together into the hot, sulfurous sky, and we will soar, you close at my side, and we will fly to the great city, and as we approach, I will show you the men below, scattering at the passing of our shadows — how adorable your little shadow is — and we will find a small and lively one for you already here in Hell — a Genghis Khan or a Yasser Arafat or a Sammy Davis Jr. — and you will begin. And you will learn, my daughter. Through them. You will understand who you are. It’s what men are for. And so I will also find you a small and thoughtful one — a Voltaire or a Mahatma Gandhi or a Jean Paul Sartre — they are not as lively but they will give you depth — wait until you swallow Jean Paul’s sweet brain, my darling, he knows a thing or two about your world — and you will move on from him, of course, you will grow and grow and you will have full-size kings and billionaires and serial killers — but you will always have me to guide you, you won’t have some desperate old bitch of a mother who didn’t teach you a thing worth knowing and then grasps at everything that’s yours. Hell is other succubi, my darling.

And inside Lulu, as Hatcher begins quickly now to reassemble, he also considers parenthood: Summer, my little child of dumb-shit flower children wannabes — that was your mother and me — we went a little mad and you suffered for that, and then we went abruptly sane and you suffered for that. And Angie, my little child of a face on TV, my TV face was so much less loving than Mr. Rogers’s, so much less charming than Kermit the Frog’s. How could I compete with them when I had to bring you the four-car pile-up on I-70 or the fog at Lambert Airport or the latest from the St. Louis County Council meeting? I wonder if I would’ve been better for you both if you’d been boys. But no. My distraction, my obliviousness would have hurt you even more deeply. As girls you had your mother, who was more important for you, and I was glad for that, I excused myself for that. I did what I did to become what I became and I am so fucking sorry.

And Hatcher is whole in body again, though naked and curled tightly into a fetal position inside a succubus in a double-wide in Hell. But not inside a succubus for long. Lulu stops humming the Rolling Stones and spreads her legs and props herself up on her elbows and lifts her hips and she begins to daaa-daaa-daaa-da-dummmm the brass fanfare for dawn in Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” At this very moment, somewhere in the Great Metropolis, Strauss and Friedrich Nietzsche and Stanley Kubrick are locked in a tiny room together listening to the 190 decibel version of the same passage for the ten thousandth straight time. At the other end of the room, Lilith rolls her eyes at Lulu’s flair for the dramatic. She jiggles the new snow globe in her hand. Hatcher’s own special snow swirls around a small, hand-painted plastic bust of the anchorman. And Hatcher himself suddenly feels a squeezing upon him, and his curled body begins to move.

Lulu stops da-dumming, because even succubi suffer in Hell and this is one of those times, with every cell in Lulu’s body feeling as if it is in a vise and being squeezed to pulp, and she screams wordlessly for a while until she manages, “She’s crowning!”

“It’s just that man who was here,” Lilith says.

“Fuck you,” Lulu cries.

“Pant pant blow,” Lilith says.

“Fuck you,” Lulu reiterates, and to distract herself from the impression that her body is being split up the middle by a white-hot gutting knife, she briefly does her best to imitate the horn section of the Berlin Philharmonic, returning to Strauss to introduce what she expects to be her daughter into the world.

Hatcher’s whole head emerges between Lulu’s legs, and Lulu pauses her pushing and stops the music. Hatcher looks at the ceiling and tries to squinch the muck from his eyes.

Lulu pushes again, and as Hatcher’s shoulders pry her open and as the gutting knife renews its work with a special focus on her treasured private parts, she screams “I’ll make you pay for this forever, you little bitch!”

And Hatcher moves faster and faster, torso and hips and legs all folded together, and with a splashing all about him and a loud sucking-shut behind him, he slides onto the bed between Lulu’s legs.

Lulu falls back flat. Both mother and faux child pant for a while, the latter slowly trying to move his stiffened limbs and the former renewing her pledge to make this daughter of hers forever regret having put her mother through this torture.

Finally, though, Lulu is ready to face the little bitch and she struggles to sit up, just as Hatcher has struggled to sit up between her legs, and they come face to face.

Lulu says, “Oh fuck. Not again,” and she fists up her right hand and punches Hatcher square on the nose. He flies across the room, landing about halfway along, and slicked up by Lulu’s bodily fluids, he skims the rest of the way to Lilith, who calmly lifts one fat and furry foot — pedicured meticulously, however, in French tips — to bring Hatcher to a halt.

The trip back to the city has certain uncomfortable complications. The sun has risen. It was a short night, this time. And Lulu no longer clasps Hatcher to her body in flight. As they fly off, she holds him painfully by the scruff of the neck, at arm’s length, with him dangling full-frontally over the passing landscape. And she’s in no rush. And she begins to sing. Defying the fact that she’s technically pretty nearly a baritone, in a key intended for a pop-diva soprano, failing painfully but still succeeding in conveying a sobby self-pity, she sings: “All by myself. Don’t wanna be all by myself anymore.”

She swoops low through a dry riverbed, and in the broken prow of a ship that resembles the Titanic, a woman stands shackled and wrapped in furs before the hot sun and she is herself singing — compelled to, as a matter of fact — about how her heart will go on forever, no doubt wishing otherwise, and when she sees Lulu and Hatcher, she stops her song and looks up and is unable to look away. Lulu circles her quite closely and continues to circle until Lulu has sung “All by Myself” six times, from tremulous beginning to excruciatingly botched glory-note climax to simulated studio fade, and from the first bars of the first go-around, Hatcher recognizes the singer on the ship prow, and whatever she is suffering for these thirty-one minutes and eighteen seconds, Hatcher would argue that being dangled naked before Celine Dion is worse.

Then Lulu finally veers away and flies off straight. They swoop up out of the riverbed, still flying quite low. The city is suddenly upon them, spreading from the left horizon to the right. Now, at the city limits, the crowded streets begin abruptly. As the shadow of Lulu and Hatcher passes along the jostling throng, like a coordinated wave in a sport’s stadium, the faces of people rise, and Lulu is so low that Hatcher can even see the movements of all the eyes to the dangling part of this dangling man.

It takes him a long few moments of this to get a bright idea. He calls out over his shoulder to Lulu, “Thanks for flying low. I’m afraid of heights.”

The brain of a succubus, even at its best, is far from quick-flowing, but post-coital it is downright sludgy. Lulu, still pissed at Hatcher for not being a daughter, beats her wings heavily at this and they shoot straight up until the faces below recede into indistinguishability, as does, Hatcher hopes, his own naked body.

Finally Lulu dumps Hatcher in the mouth of his alley and flies off, dissatisfied as always, with the way these things end. Like all succubi — and many others — she is puzzled how the ravenous sexual desire she so recently felt has turned trivial and empty now that it’s sated. She is also puzzled how she forgets this feeling each time and is thus puzzled anew when each man is done with. This is a great deal of self-reflection for Lulu, and as a result, she distractedly flies into a light standard along Grand Peachtree Parkway.

Meanwhile, Hatcher is nakedly beating it down the alleyway and up his circular stairs and along the outer corridor of his apartment building, hoping mightily to sail past a closed Hopper apartment door. He is disappointed on both scores. The door is open, and as he approaches it, his limbs become heavy and his movements turn into an exaggerated slow motion. Peggy and Howard are sitting in their chairs.

“There’s the famous TV person,” Peggy says. “Try not to be rude.”

“Rude my ass,” Howard says.

“You never used to use language like that with me,” she says.

“What difference does it make anymore?” he says.

“Plenty.”

“Plenty?”

“Plenty.”

Howard shrugs, “It’s not such a terrible word. And you criticize me for saying the word but you don’t even notice that the famous TV person’s ass is bare?”

“I notice,” she says.

“But no matter. I’m the one who’s wrong.”

“He probably has his reasons,” Peggy says.

“Reasons? I’ve got reasons too.”

“Good evening,” Peggy says to Hatcher.

“Good evening,” Hatcher says.

“Forgive my husband,” she says.

“Forgive my ass,” Hatcher says.

Peggy giggles.

Howard looks sharply at her. He clearly has an opportunity to score big in this argument. But her giggle runs deeper in him now. He can’t place the exact moment, but that same giggle once bubbled up sweetly between them, early on. Was it their wedding night? He can’t quite bring back the room, the touch, the few words before, after. He thumps his forehead with the butt of his palm. That moment is long gone. That woman is long gone. It’s all over long ago.

And Hatcher moves past the Hoppers’ door.

He opens his own.

Anne is standing in the center of the floor, facing him, and she is also naked.

“Is someone here?” Hatcher says, his mind following by a few beats the instant suspicion of his body, a few beats in which Anne’s face darkens.

“No,” she says.

“What is it?” he says.

“My head is on,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Are you glad?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t have furry wings,” she says.

“That’s good.”

“It is?” The darkness is gone from her face. Her eyes fill with tears.

“Yes. Very good.”

“I am small and dark.”

“That’s very good too.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“I know what she is.”

“I had to go,” Hatcher says.

“Yes,” Anne says. “I believe that.”

“But it still hurt you?”

“Did it?” she asks, seeming not to have thought of this.

“Apparently so.” Hatcher is struck by how he seems attuned to her, seems to be saying the right things for once.

“Perhaps worried me,” she says.

“Worried this way,” he says, gently, nodding at her body.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m naked.”

“I’m naked too,” Hatcher says.

“I noticed,” Anne says.

He comes near to her. But they don’t touch. It’s this next step where things always somehow go wrong.

Anne says, “But she came here so openly. I know she can do that because you’re dead. But there seemed to be more to it than she was a fan of yours from TV and happened to be in the neighborhood.”

Hatcher hears Anne’s voice starting to ice up. He could try to press forward with regards to their mutual nakedness, but the trouble has already begun and he knows it would quickly go very bad. So he says, “She had information I needed, information I couldn’t figure out how else to get. I didn’t anticipate what the price would be.”

Anne cocks her head at him.

“You can believe this too,” he says.

“What kind of information?” she says.

He plays his trump card. “Henry’s whereabouts.”

Anne stiffens, though her voice goes soft. “My Henry?”

Hatcher pauses a moment to absorb the body blow of that possessive pronoun. But he can’t simply endorse it. “Henry VIII, former king of England,” he says softly.

“You did that for me?” she says.

“Yes.”

“Why? I know this drives you crazy.”

“If it’s what you need.”

Anne lifts a hand and lays her palm on his cheek. For a moment he thinks that they will have sex now and it will be good. But the gesture is simply gratitude, he quickly realizes, and the sudden, visible heaving of her chest is about something else.

She drops her hand from his face. “When can I go?”

Hatcher hasn’t thought this out. He knows where Henry is and he knows she could never get there on her own.

“I’ll have to go with you.” This actually sinks in only as he says it.

“Now?” she says.

Hatcher, for several reasons and in several ways, is suddenly feeling thoroughly drained. He has gone weak in the legs and heavy in the chest, and he says, “I’ve had a bad night.”

“Then when?”

“I have to lie down now.”

“When can we go?”

“After the evening news,” Hatcher says.

This arrangement, uncomfortable for both, floats between them for a long moment. Then Anne says, quite softly, “Thank you.”

And Hatcher has never been sadder that the sex between them has never been good.

When Hatcher arrives at Broadcast Central, he heads toward Beelzebub’s office. It can’t be avoided. He needs a car. He strides along the corridor and he’s hoping mightily that Lily is on a sex break. He does not want to face Lulu’s sister today. He turns in at the door of the outer office and Lily is there, eating from a box of what one would normally assume are chocolates — small balls, some dark, some milk, some white — but, as has been previously noted, this is Hell and this is a succubus, and so when she smiles slyly at Hatcher and offers one, he declines with something less than gracious reluctance.

“Pathetic,” Lily says, and it’s clear to Hatcher she’s referring to more than his refusal of a treat.

He just keeps on moving, toward Beelzebub’s inner office. The number-two demon sees Hatcher coming and he rises from behind his desk. “Hello, my boy. I’m very pleased with the J. Edgar stuff. I do like a good epiphany, you should excuse the expression.”

“Thanks,” Hatcher says.

“It’s Clinton airing today?”

“Bill. Yes.”

“And the other Clinton?”

“She’s coming up.”

“Splendid. Do they blame each other?”

“No.”

“Ah. Too bad.”

“I’ve found out where Henry VIII is located,” Hatcher says. “I’d like to do him. He’s got lots of reasons to understand why he’s here, but it’ll be interesting to see which ones are on his mind.”

“Well well well,” Beelzebub says. “Your girlfriend’s old flame. That should be painful for you, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Good. You intrigue me, McCord.”

“I need a car.”

“You got it. I like what you’re doing with this series. Self-reflection is hell.” He chuckles.

Beelzebub doesn’t go out of his way to give compliments, and hearing this one gives Hatcher an idea. So he says, “You want me to clear each one with you? There are sometimes targets of opportunity.”

Beelzebub gives this only a flicker of a thought. Hatcher feels keenly the power of his secret: this is going to work because Bee-bub can’t imagine Hatcher feeling free to have a covert agenda inside his head.

“I’ll put Dick Nixon at your disposal for the series. Anytime.”

Hatcher restrains his elation, but he does flip Beelzebub a jaunty little salute, in effect dismissing himself.

Beelzebub raises a hand to stop him. “One other thing. You’ve got a new entertainment reporter. He’s been cooking for a while, but I think he’s ready for work. He was the mastermind behind an Internet gossip site specializing in Manhattan media gossip. Then he moved up to celebritygenitals.com and was shot dead by a rapper with a tiny dick.”

“Who is he?” Hatcher says.

“I’d rather not say. He can still only remember his screen name, and I’m enjoying that.”

Having been stopped once, Hatcher waits. Beelzebub says, “Go. Go.”

Hatcher does. Lily is staring thoughtfully into her box, and he tries to move by her quickly and quietly. But as he’s passing, Lily lifts the box toward him. There are only two left. Milk chocolate balls. She says, “Please.”

He hurries past her, saying, “No thanks.”

“They’re presidential,” she says.

And Hatcher, who should be interested in the way the nation went immediately after his demise, hustles down the hall trying to think of anything but.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing.

“Deborah?” he calls, louder.

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

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

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

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

“Her second.”

“The one on the television set.”

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

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

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

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

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

The old woman watches him go: Leap, yes leap, my friend, I have leapt too, we all of us in the balcony rooms leap and leap and O if I could but seal off that end of my room, the terrible open end, the wide sky beyond, I dream of my cell in the convent, the narrow walls, the high, small, knifeprick of sky, the bed, the bowl, the cup, only these. And I remember — though it has been a long long time now — the days of my one husband, my own demon, the baron of… where? Sussex. Yes, some baron of Sussex. It is torture, this fading of my memory. O if I could but picture his face more clearly so I could hate him all the more. My husband who put me aside with lies so I was left with only death or the cloister before me. And the ringing takes up, the ringing in my head: the Sanctus bell, the Host rising, the only man’s body for my last many years, His holy body. He was my last husband, who looked the other way, I always thought, whenever I laid my mortal body down with the body of my Abbess in the warming house in winter where we covered ourselves in ash, and in the granary in summer where the wheat clung to us in our sweat. But even my last husband put me aside in the end, in spite of my prayers in the final moments to be forgiven. And though it’s true that even as I prayed, if I’d had the strength and the chance I would have sought her sweet kisses once more, He should still have forgiven this body of mine with its terrible weakness, for His Father created my body this way and if His Father could not resist creating it thus, how could I resist thus living in it?

The hundred apartment buildings in the housing project float on a sea of concrete. Hatcher rounds the corner of Deborah’s building and enters the fifty-yard-wide margin reachable by jumpers from the balconies, a place called The Landing Strip by the denizens. It is splashed with dark stains. The crowds between the buildings mill about in clusters that shape up and fist fight or knife fight or simply scream and foam and rage and then break apart and form new clusters, always stumbling about in the shadow of the buildings, but never ever moving into The Landing Strip. So from the moment Hatcher turns the corner, he sees Deborah up ahead. He rushes toward her.

She lies broken in a widening pool of blood, her cheek pressed hard against the concrete, her eyes open, seemingly sightless but blinking, her arms at elbow-flared angles, her legs cracked and splayed but bent under her at the knees so that her back and butt are lifted slightly. Her left hand is twitching. Hatcher arrives beside her and kneels in her blood so he can extend a hand and gently palm the side of her head just above her ear. Her hair was always soft and thick, and it still is, though it is gray. She did not kill herself at the end of her mortal life. That she’s doing this now, over and over, makes his hand tremble against her.

“Debbie,” he says.

Her eyes move slightly toward him, and they close.

He does not know how to take this. But he keeps his hand on her, even as her blood continues to gather around his knees.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

Her eyes move beneath her closed lids as if she were dreaming. Hatcher and Deborah stay like this for a long while, until finally her blood stirs around him, even drawing itself out of his pants legs, and her body begins to jerk and shiver and the blood flows back into her and her body straightens and mends, and Hatcher takes his hand from her head as she moves and slowly flexes her limbs and finally gathers herself into a sitting position. He shifts from his knees and sits beside her.

She says, though softly, “Leave it to you to show up when I’m at my worst.”

“It was unintentional,” he says.

“It was instinctive,” she says.

She still isn’t sounding as angry as Hatcher would expect. But he has no answer for this.

“Sorry for what?” she says.

“Whatever I did to us.”

Deborah humphs at this. “I hear that in the hallways around here once in a while, and it always surprises me.”

“Hear what?”

“‘I’m sorry.’”

Hatcher looks away, beyond the Landing Strip. There are skirmishes all over. Immediately before him, several gangs of young men, black and white, have been forced to swap some of their past styles and are murderously fighting over it: the whites are in the zoot suits and the hoodies and the sagging pants and the bucket hats and the neck bling and the do-rags and the dreadlocks, and the blacks are in the leisure suits and the chinos and the boaters and the Hush Puppies and the ascots and the crew cuts. Beyond them are old people jostling and wailing and cursing. And Hatcher recognizes an instance of what he has come to understand as his own arrogant self-absorption, for it never occurred to him that others in Hell are apologizing. Surely Hell is never having to say you’re sorry. But Deborah apparently has heard it — no doubt because here in the projects, the crowds are always upon her — and so, once in a while, someone says I’m sorry, even as they think Satan is listening in, even as they expect to be punished for it. Hatcher’s chest fills with a complicated warmth about these people before him now, though they are fighting and cursing each other. They are struggling on, even in Hell, and sometimes they regret what they do or what they have done, and they say so. Hatcher is breathless now over all of them, and he turns to Deborah and he lifts his hand to touch her head again. She bats his hand away, though lightly.

“What are you doing here?” she says.

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” he says.

“Oh please. You think I’d ever wonder about that? I mean here.” She flips her chin at the apartment building.

“Trying to figure out what I’m doing in Hell.”

“Read my book.”

“I did. I didn’t believe it.”

“Then I can’t help you.”

This isn’t what Hatcher expected. He expected her to defend the truth of what she wrote. He expected a heated renewal of all that. “You don’t believe it either,” he says.

“Of course I did,” she says.

“Did. But not now.”

“You were a shit.”

“I believe that.”

“Are a shit.”

“Just not that particular shit,” he says.

“What difference does it make anymore?” she says.

“I don’t know.”

He lifts his hand again toward her.

“Stop,” she says.

He stops.

“Go away now,” she says.

Hatcher turns his face from her. He sees a young black man in an Arrow button-down shirt and Birkenstocks and a Brylcreemed pompadour who is faced off with a young white man in Ben Davis gorilla cuts and a Michael Jordan jersey and dreads. They are pushing each other in the chest.

“Please,” Deborah says.

Hatcher does not intend to ignore her. He just feels utterly inert inside. He can’t bring himself to ask the questions he wants to ask. But he can’t bring himself simply to walk away now either. All he finds he can do is focus on the two young men. Just as he expects the thing between them to escalate, the young black simply grabs one of the white youth’s dreads and tugs it, but not hard, and he shakes his head in outsized disgust.

“Hatcher,” Deborah says, knowing he won’t answer. She closes her eyes and her shoulders droop. He has come to her in Hell simply as a reminder that her insignificance is eternal. Who better.

The young white reaches out and musses up the black’s pompadour and jerks his hand away, exaggeratedly wiping at the grease. The two of them look at each other and start to laugh.

Deborah hears the laughter. Her irritation at Hatcher fades and she turns to the rare sound. They will pay, she knows. The two young men stop and give each other an oh-shit look, and they take a deep breath, and the hair on each of their heads bursts into flames.

Hatcher turns from the two men flailing in pain. Does it have to go that way?

He and Deborah face each other once more.

“Look,” she says, “I don’t know what you want from me. Absolution?”

“No.”

“It wasn’t your fault I was so unhappy. Okay? You helped. But it wasn’t all about you. At first, you were so important — in the world — it made me important too. I was trying to be somebody, and you already were somebody. Then I wasn’t becoming what I hoped to be. You had your work and I admired you so much for it. Until I hated you for it. You know I still try to write? Even here. What’s that about? I have to do it in spray paint on my walls. Maybe you wouldn’t have been able to help me through all that, back when we were alive. But you never thought to try. You were oblivious. You were so… you.”

They sit in silence for a long moment in the middle of the Landing Strip, unaware of the din nearby, aware only of the beating of their own immortal hearts, thumping heavily in their immortal chests, aware of the slip of rancid air into their immortal lungs.

Hatcher thinks: We only hurt each other. “Why are we here?” he says, softly.

“We were always here,” she says.

“Yes,” he says.

“I wish I were dead,” she says.

And just then there is a whoosh of air upon them and a cracking thump and they are spattered with thick wetness. They look. The medieval nun who lives next to Deborah has jumped, and her broken body is beside them and her blood is upon them.

And this puts an end to Hatcher’s time with his second wife. She crawls to the nun, to touch her, speak low to her. He stands up.

“Please,” Deborah says. “No more.”

She says it softly and without looking at him, so he thinks she’s speaking to the old woman. And maybe she is. But then he realizes she’s talking to him as well.

“I’ll just wait a moment for her,” he says. His clothes and face are maculate with her blood, and he does not know how near he has to be for it to find its way back to her. So he stands close by while Deborah strokes the old woman’s head, and Hatcher has the urge to touch his wife again. But he doesn’t. He can’t. She is done with him. All that is done.

But inside her: The Mayor’s office at City Hall and Ed Koch presiding, mugging his way through, and Hatcher says “I do” and I’m fluttering inside and I’m ready, but before Koch turns to me he twinkles at Hatcher like he famously does and he says “How am I doing?” and my friends and Hatcher’s friends all laugh and Hatcher says “Great. How am I doing?” and Koch says “Great!” and everybody laughs again and Koch turns to me and as much as I am happy that I rate the Mayor of New York City as I marry the hot young anchor who beat Rather and Mudd-Brokaw and Reynolds-Robinson-Jennings six weeks running in the Nielsens this spring, I understand with a terrible sudden grinding in my head that nobody has the slightest clue who I am, who I really am, not the Mayor of New York, not these friends laughing, not the media waiting in the street, not the vast public out there reading and listening and watching, not the famous man who is about to become my husband. Nobody. And no matter how much I try, they never will. Deborah squeezes her eyes shut hard, and her mind with it, even as she continues to stroke the head beneath her hand.

Meanwhile, Hatcher has looked away, briefly, to the crowd, grappling on. And then he looks back to the apartment building. Sometimes you can see something but not see it, and then once you do, it is overwhelmingly clear. He looks to the next building down and to the one beyond the crowd. And it is all the same. He turns his face once more to Deborah’s building: The walls are jammed with words, outside on all the surfaces reachable from the ground or from the windows or balconies, and inside too, he recalls now, in the corridors, on every inch of the inner walls and the ceilings and the floors. Everywhere, the housing project is teeming with handwritten words. And like the crowds of Hell themselves, the words are a wild profusion of shapes and forms, bubble letters and rustic capitals, cuneiform and cyrillic, Spencerian and wildstyle. They are spray-painted and brush-painted and knife-bladed and charcoaled everywhere. And what they are not is political or religious, they are not angry or profane. They are names. Just personal names. Just simple assertions of self on the walls of Hell. BLADE and BJÖRK, KILROY and AJIT, TAKI 183 and CELADUS CRESCENS, MAMA DIVINE and DAZE, JULIO 204 and NOVELLIA PRIMIGENIA OF NUCERIA, S. MAGEE and W. M. McCOY, SERGEI and MAHMOUD and CHAN.

Hatcher cannot find the tears he wants to shed. He cries out. Wordless. Just an animal sound, trying to name a thing that has no name. The sound of a Neanderthal, who is filled with a terror and a longing and a grace he cannot understand about his mate or his child. And the blood of the nun is stirring on Hatcher’s face and hands and clothes. And it flies away from him. And he turns and he goes and he rounds the corner of the building and he hurries along and he passes BUFFY and DAFYDD and BUBBA and MENACHEM and LADY PINK and FLY. Hatcher stops, trembling. He looks at the wall. A space. A small space in the crotch of the V in EVA 62. He pounds around on his chest feeling for a pen. He’s wearing his anchorman suit and has one somewhere. There. Fallen into the bottom of an inner coat pocket. He digs out his Bic ballpoint and moves to the wall and he leans into Eva and is deeply grateful for the space inside her. He scratches and inks and scratches until the pen tip is no good for ink but it can still scratch and he puts his name on the wall: HATCHER.

Hatcher readily passes the Hoppers’ closed door, but his legs go heavy and his movements turn lugubriously slow as he approaches his own apartment. Not long ago, he would have heard the old, aggrandizing voice-over narrator in his head. But not anymore. He simply thinks: I am taking Anne away now to lose her. And there is a sad silence inside him, and he stands before his door, and his hand is pausing on the knob. And he thinks: But if that’s so, then not to take her away would make keeping her meaningless. He opens the door. It does not even occur to him to call out their ritual darling-I’m-home. She is not in sight. He does call “Are you ready?”

She appears from the bedroom and sucks the air from his lungs and up flutteringly into his throat and head. She is wearing a gossamer white Edwardian tea dress, all cobweb linen and openwork lace with a scarlet ribbon tied at her waist, and her hair is done up beneath a wide-brimmed straw French sailor hat with a silk band in matching scarlet. He wants to say he was wrong. The address he has is wrong. He has no idea where Henry is. But her eyes are bright with expectation. It is not for him. There’s no going back.

“I haven’t seen that,” he says, nodding at her dress, though he realizes its appropriateness for where they are headed.

She looks down at herself and raises her face with a faintly puzzled expression, as if she hasn’t seen it either. She opens her mouth to speak but doesn’t know what to say.

“You look beautiful,” he says, and even he hears the sadness in his own voice.

She clearly doesn’t, for she brightens at once. “Thank you,” she says.

The Raffles Hotel in Hell sits in the desert outside of the Great Metropolis, facing the mountains, blindingly bone-white in the sun. Like its progenitor in Singapore, it is done in French Renaissance-cum-tropics style but on a vast scale, with six stories of arched and ornamented windows growing narrower and narrower as they ascend toward the hipped and balustraded roof until, in Hell’s version, on the top layer, they become federal prison slits, though with scrolled finials. At most of the thousands of those windows along the hotel’s half-mile front façade, the guests press their faces against the glass. Many of them were colonial empire builders, and they are sealed, cooking, in their suites and are serenaded endlessly by Satan’s cockroaches singing “Rule Britannia” to the Dutch and “Deutschland Über Alles” to the Brits and “Het Wilhelmus” to the Germans and so forth.

There are some who are condemned to roam the hotel, though that group slowly changes over time. These denizens often linger on the wide veranda beside the front entrance. They sit on sulfur-soggy rattan furniture and drink caustic gin slings, many of the men in claret-stained linen suits and many of the women in lingerie dresses not unlike Anne’s, but dingy and smelling of semen from encounters they cannot remember. Old, imperialist-white-man punkah wallahs stand nearby fanning the hot air over everyone with thin, burningly weary arms. There is no shade. The sun drills into every corner of the place, on all four sides at once. And there is a bar-lounge featuring all the stand-up comics of Hell — which is, it should be clear by now, tantamount to all the stand-up comics who have ever lived and died — and presently headlining Jerry Seinfeld. The audiences are plucked temporarily from the sealed rooms and inevitably find themselves even less amused by the comics than they have been by the singing cockroaches.

It is in front of this hotel that Dick Nixon roars up in the Fleetwood, trailing a vortex of desert dust, and fishtails to a stop. All along the veranda, the arrival draws attention. For instance, Jefferson Davis, wearing a long black dress with a fan-front bodice and pagoda sleeves and with a black shawl over his head in hopes of eluding capture, ceases swatting Abraham Lincoln’s hand from his knee, and he and Abe, whose linen suit is stained with blood, look toward the car. And the tiny, waist-cinched Gibson Girl in the far corner — Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, known in her mortal life as Mother Teresa — and the florid-faced, high-collared professional snark, Christopher Hitchens, separate their lips, having felt compelled for quite some time to neck, and they wipe hard and yuckingly at their mouths. She squints to see who might emerge from the car, while Hitchens, with her attention diverted, quietly swoops up what’s left of Teresa’s gin, downs it, and replaces the glass in front of her.

Anne and Hatcher step from the backseat of the Cadillac. They go up the steps, aware of all the attentive faces, both of them nodding slightly in the same reflex, got-no-time-thanks-for-noticing way that earthly queen and news anchor learned to affect with the public. They push through the wide front doors and into a brutally bright lobby lit by the sun pouring down a six-story atrium.

They pause, shield their eyes, and move to the registration desk, where Sally Sue Plunkett, former front-desk girl at the Motel 6 in Des Moines, Iowa, known behind her back as Surly Sally, is hating this job as much as she did that one. At the approach of these two, she lowers her face and fiddles with a dozen brass keys, representing recent departures for other quarters of Hell.

Hatcher and Anne arrive and stand shoulder to shoulder before this early fortyish woman with curly hair the color of an Iowa corn-fed beef-steak. They wait a beat or two, but the woman is not looking up.

“Miss,” Hatcher says.

Sally is arranging the keys in a circle.

“Can you help us?” Hatcher says.

Sally opens the circle at the bottom and makes the outline of a straight, long hairdo of the sort she always wanted.

Anne slams her hand on the counter.

Sally jumps and raises her face snarling. “What the fuck do you want?” she says.

Hatcher lifts his powder-blue tie at her.

She clearly recognizes it but simply glowers, saying nothing more.

Hatcher says, “We’re here to see Henry…I’m not sure how he’d be known here. Henry Tudor. Or Henry VIII.”

Anne quickly adds, “By the Grace of God, King of England and France, Defender of the Faith, Lord of Ireland.”

Sally shoots Anne another what-the-fuck look. “He’s not in his room,” she says.

“You know this from your head?” Anne says.

“What of it?” Sally says.

“Do you know where he is?” Hatcher says.

“Yes,” Sally says, but no more.

Hatcher puffs. Basic interrogatives. Elemental interviewing. He didn’t think he’d have to jump through that hoop with a clerk at the front desk. He attributes this to Hell, though in truth, he would have had to do this with her in Des Moines as well. “Where is he?” he says.

“He went in to catch the Seinfeld,” Sally says, nodding across the lobby.

Hatcher turns and follows the nod to the door of the Ass in a Sling Lounge.

“Henry is mine,” Sally says. “I plan to marry him.” And her head instantly falls off, disappearing behind the desk with a thud on the floor.

Hatcher and Anne pull away from the front desk and move across the floor toward the lounge. He can feel her seething. He cares about Anne and wants to say something reassuring, but this is all too strange and complicated for that. It is enough that he’s brought her here.

They step in at the back of the lounge. The room is dark and filled with cigarette smoke and the dim shapes of denizens from the hotel. At the far end of the room is a klieg-lit Jerry Seinfeld on a tiny stage, the familiar, wryly conspiratorial smile in that long, narrow face held there by willpower, getting a little trembly around the edges. Because the place is utterly silent except for a scattering of deep smoker’s coughs. It is a silence that Hatcher can instantly sense has not been broken at all. They are not between guffaws here. Seinfeld hasn’t elicited so much as a snicker. He is dying up there.

But he goes on. “Have you noticed? Everyone seems to be here in Hell. What’s up with that? I ran into my sweet little Aunt Rachel the other day. She always had a good word for everyone, even for my Aunt Sophie, who had hairs growing out of her chin and encouraged her Pekinese to chase the neighborhood kid in the wheelchair as he rolled by, the way the big dogs in the street would chase cars. Aunt Sophie is in Hell, of course. Too bad her dog isn’t. I saw her out on the Parkway last week. She was on all fours running alongside Stephen Hawking and barking at his wheels. But Aunt Rachel — who also had hairs growing out of her chin, come to think of it — so chin hairs are either irrelevant in Hell or really really crucial — but chin hairs notwithstanding, Aunt Rachel was sweet as can be. I’d go to her house for lunch and I’d try to leave the end crust of my hot dog bun, which was hard as a brick. She always bought out-of-date buns at the day-old store. How do you get into the stale bread and donut business anyway? What makes you think of that? Maybe it’s that certain kind of underachiever kid we all know. See, he’s content to eat hard bun ends. So he has a childhood epiphany at the dinner table. He picks this thing up to gnaw on and he looks at it and he goes — someday I can do this. But Aunt Rachel would see me scooting the end of my bun away and she’d say, ‘Don’t you know there are starving children in the world who’d be happy to have that? Clean up your plate.’ So I’d say, ‘Then by all means, let’s get an envelope and mail this thing to some kid who’d appreciate it.’ And Aunt Rachel would just roll her eyes. She was that sweet. But there she was the other day, over at the Lake of Fire with her shoes off and her feet turning the color of a boiling lobster from the hot sand. So I say to her, ‘Aunt Rachel. What are you doing here?’ And she says, ‘It was all your fault. I let you waste food.’ It’s bad enough I’m in Hell. I’ve got to feel guilty on top of it? And what good is guilt down here anyway? What’s going to happen? I’m going to go to Hell? Well, I hate to say it, but look around. And about Aunt Sophie’s Pekinese. Yitzchak. You’d think he’d be here, wouldn’t you? You know some dogs are just made for Hell. But have you seen any dogs? There’s not one. I think it’s because they always cleaned up their plates. You ever see a dog leave a shred of food behind? And cat poop is their favorite. Right at the top of the doggie nutritional pyramid. Just ahead of snotty tissue. The Recommended Daily Allowance of cat poop for a dog is 225 grams. That’s the size of a Burger King Double Whopper. And it’s especially desirable if the poop’s been buried in the yard for a while. Day-old is fine with them. Month-old? Not a problem. It’s like vintages to them. Oh, here’s an impressive little calico poop from May. And this April tabby has a splendid bouquet. And they eat it all up. Every morsel. That’s why they’re in Heaven. If I had my life to live all over again, I’d eat cat poop at every opportunity. And I wouldn’t leave a bit on my plate.”

All through this, at every beat when a laugh was possible, Seinfeld paused ever so slightly, the stand-up’s subtle elbow in the ribs of his audience. But the room has remained absolutely silent, save for the coughing and an occasional hawking of a phlegmy throat. This time, though, Seinfeld draws out the pause. He looks around, blinking in the light, and he waits and waits. Anne, meanwhile, has been peering into the darkness, looking for Henry. Hatcher thinks the act is over, and he has to decide whether to stay or to go when these two reunite, which will be torture either way.

But Seinfeld resumes, in the same monologist’s bright tone, “See, what I’m thinking is, we always misunderstood religion. All the religions of the world were, in fact, just these great big objects of performance art. Like going to Lincoln Center or the Met. So whatever religions knew about the universe, it was all metaphor. But how we all ended up here is that we’ve got this irresistible urge to turn metaphor into dogma. Like we read Huckleberry Finn and we become Twainists and we go, Every year you’ve got to lash some logs together and float down a river or you’ll end up in Hell. And if you don’t do the river thing, if, for instance, you’ve read Moby Dick and you’re a Melvillean and you think to save your soul you’ve got to go fishing every Sunday instead of floating on a raft, then I’m going to hate your infidel ass. And you’re going to hate mine. And if I don’t have a religion? Well, I’ve got the antidogma dogma going and I’ll hate your ass anyway. That’s why we’re all in Hell. And speaking of asses, I’m working mine off here with second-rate material while you just work the loogies out of your fucking throats.”

Instantly, someone from the darkness shouts, in a thick British upper-class accent, “You can’t say ‘fuck’.” And a heavy glass ashtray flies into the spotlight and catches Seinfeld on the left temple. He staggers back and another ashtray hits him bloodily in the nose. A dozen more ashtrays fly at him and he covers his head with his arms and he turns and staggers off the stage and disappears into the darkness.

The lights come up. The crowd stirs and rises — all men in morning dress — and they flow around Hatcher and Anne muttering “Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.” Anne studies the faces going by, and Hatcher is watching her watching them when the crowd thins and she shifts her gaze and her eyes widen and she stiffens. Hatcher looks. Two men are dawdling up from the front table, talking to each other. They are both dressed in iron-gray, single-breasted cutaways with pearl-gray vests and silk top hats, which they are patting into place. They are moving this way. One of the men is slender and narrow-faced and is wearing a black patch on his right eye. The other man, hobbling painfully, is vast and thick-necked and red-faced, and in spite of the fact that his specially tailored vest and coat could hold at least three of the eye-patched man, the fat man still threatens to burst from them. And though he is clean-shaven except for a small mustache with waxed twists at the end, and though the reddish-gold hair that has just disappeared under his hat is parted in the middle and lacquered with Wildroot, it is clearly Henry.

This is not the slender, strapping young Henry of Anne’s girlhood. Or even the notably expanding Henry of their marriage. This is the bloated and syphilitic end-of-his-life Henry that Anne, wide-eyed, is seeing now. Satan is not exactly known for never closing a door without opening a window, but Hatcher understands the primary torture here will be for Anne and Henry, and this will be a benefit for him. Let them both suffer a voice somewhere in him says. Hisses, really. And Hatcher feels light. He feels he can just bound out the door and go sit on the veranda and cross his legs and sip a gin sling and stare contentedly into the desert. And the drink will taste very good, while these two rancorously finish with each other, for all eternity.

Henry and the other man are upon them. As soon as the king sees Anne, his face bloats in a smile that is instantly lost in the folds of chin and cheek. He cries, “My once mistress, once friend, my once wife, once betrayer — or was it I who betrayed you? — my once joy, once torment, have you found me in Hell to torment me truly now so as to have your righteous revenge? For yes, I betrayed you, and to understand that betrayal is hell heaped upon Hell, my once wife. How’s that pretty throat? I’m sorry to allude thus now to your final wound, a wound I ordered, it is true, a wound I later conjured before my mind’s eye many a time as if it was our first fuck, and I am sorry to allude to that as well, but I find in this place that I cannot choose my own words and I cannot leave from speaking, except when I am listening to comedy that is not comedy at all and that leads me to yearn anew for my axman so that I might silence these solitary jesters who come before me, but I cannot find an ax when I need it, I can only find, as I listen to them, rotten pustulous things in the back of my throat, which surely rise from these poxed and cankered legs of mine, the legs that ruined me. O my legs, my once queen, my later queens had to deal with them, but at least you were spared the burden of my pus.” And all these words rush from Henry as if in a single breath, and he still does not pause but turns his face to his companion and moves seamlessly from pus to command. “Sir Francis, my dear Vicar of Hell, take this man to the veranda and provide him with drink, I must have a word now with this once inadequate womb before me, this slut, this girl-yielding cunt, though the girl she yielded had quite a reign, as I’ve heard, a greater reign than mine, they say.” And Henry begins to quake even as he talks on and the man called Francis has Hatcher by the elbow and Hatcher is happy to go, for the rancor soars now on strongly beating wings.

And so Hatcher crosses the lobby of the Raffles Hotel with Sir Francis Bryan, Henry VIII’s longtime drinking buddy and master of the henchmen, poet and roving diplomat, sent to the Pope when Henry first sought a Catholic divorce for the sake of Anne, and a master of jousting as well, which is how he lost his eye. The eye is unrestored in the afterlife, though Bryan has come to see that as an ironic benefit — one less body part to hurt when it is time for everything to hurt. “Sir Francis Bryan, at your service,” he says.

“Hatcher McCord, presently at your disposal.”

Bryan chuckles. “He will do that.”

“You’re his vicar?”

“Lay vicar, I must stress.”

They step out onto the veranda. A table at the front is being vacated by an elderly couple in hunting jodhpurs who stagger off the veranda and out into the desert, clutching at their stomachs.

“Some people shouldn’t drink,” Bryan says.

The two men move toward the vacated table, and on the way, Hatcher is surprised to find Bill and Hillary Clinton sitting together. She’s staring vacantly out to the mountains. Bill’s mouth is drawn down sadly and he’s stirring his gin with the tip of a forefinger. Hatcher stops beside them. Hillary ignores him, but Bill looks up from the slow swirling of his drink. “Hello, Hatcher,” he says.

“Mr. President. You escaped the hotel room.”

Bill Clinton tilts his head very slightly in the direction of his wife. “She showed up.”

“I see.”

“It seems it was her I was waiting for all the time.”

Hatcher doesn’t ask the question that instantly springs to mind. Hillary is still quietly averting her eyes from both men. Bill licks the tip of his finger and returns to stirring his drink with it.

Hatcher looks toward Sir Francis Bryan, who is claiming the vacated table. Hatcher is about to move off, but he is still a journalist, after all, and he must ask the question.

“Mr. President,” Hatcher says.

Bill looks up.

“Did you drop your pants when she arrived?”

Bill smiles. “It surprised the hell out of her.”

And with this, though she continues to look out across the desert as if she were alone, Hillary extends her hand and lays it on Bill’s arm. Bill looks at his wife’s hand, and Hatcher cannot see — but rightly assumes — the faint lingering of the smile.

Hatcher heads off to the table, and he knows that the tender gesture he just saw pass between the presidential couple will, in this place, only lead to larger pain and mutual torture. But in the freedom of his mind, Hatcher holds the gesture apart from all that will surely follow, and he too smiles a small smile.

He sits down with Sir Francis Bryan, and they are both facing the mountains. A monocled and mutton-chopped white man, a former Governor-General of India, wearing a dhoti overhung with a starvationdistended belly, instantly arrives with a tray and two gin slings, which he puts on the table. He bows deeply and backs away.

Hatcher nudges the drink away with his knuckle, shuddering at what the Raffles Hell might be substituting for the cherry brandy. He looks at Bryan, who has taken off his top hat and placed it on the table in preparation for his drink. Bryan is a bald man with the fringe of his hair close-cropped and with a faintly aquiline nose. He swirls the dingy ice in his gin sling, takes out the swizzle stick, and compulsively downs about a third of it in one gulp. He turns away to gag and cough and spit. When he has recovered somewhat and is sitting upright again, his hand still clutching at his burning throat, he glances at Hatcher’s drink, untouched, migrated toward the center of the table, and he looks at Hatcher and narrows his good eye while raising the eyebrow over his bad one.

“Some people shouldn’t drink, vicar,” Hatcher says.

“I thought we all must, in this place,” Bryan says.

Hatcher understands. His freedom of mind is showing, but he does not take up the gin. “It’s torture for me not to touch the stuff,” Hatcher says.

This satisfies Bryan. “Of course,” he says. “You know how I came to that nickname with His Majesty?”

“Not because you were of holy demeanor.”

Bryan laughs. “Indeed not. His Majesty and I and Thomas Wyatt and Nicholas Carew and George Boleyn and some others were great companions and full of jests, and His Majesty once asked me as we sat at dinner, ‘What sort of sin is it to ruin the mother and then the daughter?’ And I replied, ‘Sire, it is a sin like that of eating a hen first and its chick afterwards.’ The King laughed loud and heartily at this and said when he was done, ‘Well, you certainly are my vicar of Hell.’ And we all laughed louder and more heartily still, and the name was imprinted upon me thereafter.”

Hatcher has been forcing his mind away from what might be happening inside the hotel. But what he has heard in this anecdote is the power of sexual privilege possessed by the truly prominent and wealthy, experienced to some extent by Hatcher in his earthly demi-celebrity, but not nearly as strongly as by kings and billionaires. He turns his mind to the likelihood that he will leave this place alone today.

And inside Sir Francis Bryan: Sire, Geoffrey Plantagenet married Matilda, granddaughter of William the Conqueror, and they begat Henry II, King of England, who begat Eleanor Plantagenet, who married Alphonso IX, King of Castile, who begat Eleanor of Castile, who married Edward I, King of England, who begat Edward II, King of England, who begat Edward III, King of England, who begat Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, who begat Lady Anne Plantagenet, who married Sir William Bourchier, who begat Sir John Bourchier, who begat Sir Humphrey Bourchier, who begat Lady Margaret Bourchier, who married Sir Thomas Bryan, who begat me. My blood is the blood of four kings of England and our Norman conqueror, and through them my blood is the blood of Charlemagne the Great and Clovis the Great and Boadicea, our great Briton queen who rose up against the Romans before there was an England. And yet it is the way of mortal life that I was destined to end up merely playing the role of Your Majesty’s jester and go-between instead of you playing mine. But Hell is oddly comforting in that regard, sire, for it appears that we are all of us here, all the seed of all the righteous, world-bestriding, wealth-wielding, nation-making, genocidal men since the beginning of time. And they themselves are all here too. And as for the drastic differences of privilege and power that make human beings so inescapably and arbitrarily unequal for that brief mortal span? Those differences are mere surface ornamentations now to our eternal suffering. Thus sayeth your vicar, sire.

Unbeknownst to Sir Francis Bryan — and unnoticed by Hatcher — Bryan’s own seed, twelve begats along, sits a few tables over, a man with an aquiline nose writing in a Moleskine sketchbook with a Waterman 494 sterling silver Bay Leaf fountain pen. With Noodler’s Antietam red ink, flexing the Waterman’s nib, thickening the downstrokes, the man writes: “It has been long enough.” And he pauses. He turns and says to his table companion, a bent and liver-spotted Graham Greene, whose mind has wandered in the few seconds of silence that has fallen between them, “What were we saying?” Greene is thinking about the Nobel Prize never won and about the lost bougainvillea and white-washed villa walls in Anacapri. He turns his face to the man with the Waterman, which is still poised in the air. “I don’t remember,” says Greene. “Neither do I,” says the other man.

And a few tables down, Hatcher thinks: It has been long enough. And Hatcher pardons himself and rises and turns and heads for the door into the hotel. As he passes the Clintons, Bill catches him by the arm, stops him. “She’s wrong about how I won,” Bill says.

“I’m not wrong,” Hillary says, still scowling out at the desert.

“You’re wrong,” Bill says.

Hillary looks at Hatcher. “It’s not about smart. It’s not about articulate. You look at your working masses, the ones who really decide, and those qualities are actually disadvantages. He won because of the cheeseburger. Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger. He famously ate cheeseburgers. He ate fucking cheeseburgers for them all. He ate cheeseburgers and they believed in him.”

Bill says, “It’s not that which goeth into the mouth empowereth a man but that which cometh out. It was me. My words. Me.”

“All those cows died for you,” Hillary says.

Hatcher gently pulls Bill’s hand off his arm and he moves away. At the door, he hesitates. But he pushes through into the lobby, and up ahead he sees the hurried veering of people around low-to-the-floor activity lit brightly in the center of the atrium, activity he does not recognize at first glance from this distance. There is no rubbernecking in Hell. Suffering splashes over, spills out, spreads immediate contagion, and everyone knows just to look the other way and move quickly on. But Hatcher hurries quickly toward the pain, for he begins to see what it is.

It is Henry lying massively on his back, his pants off, his legs bare. Anne is crouched beside him, on the far side. She is stripped down to a handkerchief-linen teddy. But in spite of Hatcher’s impulse to expect the worst in this realm, it is instantly clear to him that what’s happening here is not about sex. He draws near and can see that Henry’s massive legs are haphazardly swathed in strips torn from Anne’s tea dress. She is quickly, quakingly wrapping the last bit of it around Henry’s right calf. The pieces of the dress are going dark from a profuse flow of fluid.

Hatcher stops before the two of them. He can see between the bandages that Henry’s legs are a patchwork of ulcerous sores pumping out a thick, striated mixture of blood and pus. Anne is panting and moaning and wrapping, and her hands are smeared with Henry’s fluids and she can’t keep up, this last bit of her dress is in place and his suppuration goes on and on and she cries out and she lifts upright on her knees and she strips off the teddy and she is naked, utterly naked, and she begins tearing at the linen, pulling it into strips and bending down to Henry again and wrapping his legs.

And Henry’s head is to the side, and his eyes are closed, and he is singing, softly but clearly, the song he wrote as a young man, the one Anne thought she heard a few nights ago outside the window. “Pastime with good company, I…” and he hums across the word no one can think of in Hell and he sings on “…and shall until I die. Company is good and ill, but every man has his free will.”

And Anne is moaning, fumbling with the cloth, unable to go on. Hatcher hesitates. But now he circles Henry’s legs to the other side and goes down on his knees next to Anne. He bends to her ear. “You’ll never keep up,” he says, gently. “It’s Hell, my darling. You’ve done what you can.”

She looks at Hatcher, her eyes wide, restless, uncomprehending. Her hands are trembling furiously, full of the strips of her teddy. Hatcher takes the end of one of the strips and pulls at it. Her hand is clenched tight, and he tugs the cloth firmly and she lets it go. He turns to Henry and finds a patch of his ulcerous flesh, oozing profusely, on the side of his calf. Hatcher lifts the leg and the pus flows over his hands and he lays the strip of cloth on Henry’s leg and he wraps it around and half around once more and that’s as far as it goes, and he eases the leg back down, and Henry sings “Pastime with good company I… sway… I swoon… I swisser my swatter…” and Hatcher turns to Anne, who is staring at him, steadily. When his eyes meet hers, she glances at Henry’s legs and back to him. He takes the end of another strip of cloth and pulls gently at it. Anne holds on tight. “I caused this,” she says.

“No you didn’t,” Hatcher says.

“Not in life. Now, I mean,” she says and her voice is steady.

“It’s what we all do,” he says.

“He cut off my head,” she says.

“Yes,” he says.

“Let’s go,” she says.

Hatcher’s chest pumps up instantly full at this and lifts him and he cups her elbow and they stand up together. He strips off his suit coat and puts it around her shoulders, pulling the coat to, buttoning the buttons so it will cover her loins, and she bends into him and they move around Henry, and before they are halfway across the lobby floor, all of Henry’s bodily fluids have lifted away from them and flown back to the former king.

At the Cadillac, Hatcher opens the back door and sees the camcorder lying in the shadows. The pretext that got him here was to do an interview with Henry, and he utterly forgot. With a mind free to think and plan for itself, he realizes this absorption with his own agenda is a grave danger. He reaches in and takes the camera, and he turns to Anne. “I still have this to do,” he says. “I’ll have Dick take you home.”

She nods.

He guides her into the backseat and tucks his suit coat around her.

“Can you do this alone?” he says.

“Yes,” she says. “Thank you.”

He moves to the driver window. Inside, Dick Nixon has fallen asleep, his head sharply angled to the side, as if his neck is broken. Hatcher raps at the window. Nixon snaps upright, and he rolls down the window. “I am not a crook,” he says.

“Mr. President. Are you awake?”

“I am not asleep,” he says.

But Hatcher isn’t sure. He waits a few moments while Nixon blinks and looks around and then back to Hatcher.

“Are you ready to go?” Nixon says, clearly focusing now.

Hatcher says, “Take Anne back to the apartment and return here for me.”

Nixon nods and rolls up his window and the motor instantly revs to life and the tires dig wildly and the Cadillac shoots off, leaving Hatcher standing in a cloud of desert dust.

He’s glad Nixon will hurry. He doesn’t look forward to lingering here.

Hatcher turns and goes up onto the veranda and through the doors. Ahead in the foyer, Henry is still on the floor. Hatcher approaches. Sir Francis is holding Henry’s pants and waiting for the king to stand up. But Henry sits, fully reconstituted but unable or unmotivated to rise. This interview doesn’t have to be good. Hatcher just has to have something for the record. He crouches before Henry and looks at the former king through the viewfinder. Henry seems not quite aware of where he is. But Hatcher thinks his state might actually be a good thing for this feature. He starts the camera.

“Sire, I’m here at the request of Beelzebub himself and for the sake of Our Supreme Ruler’s own TV station. I have one question to ask you, and you can talk for as long as you wish. Why do you think you’re here?”

In spite of what he has just gone through and his post-reconstitution daze, Henry begins speaking at once. That and the seeming indirection of Henry’s words make Hatcher think that he really hasn’t heard the question, “O meats, my abundant meats, I miss your pleasures deeply in this afterlife, where once, in life, I had faith to believe I would have you yet again, my lamb and ox, my rabbit and deer, my partridge and peacock and pig, my hedgehog and heron and swan, my bustard and black-bird and hart, all of you and more. Those of you who ran free, I hoped to hunt you down, to set a pack of hounds of Heaven or Hell, whichever was my fate, upon a great rangale of red deer, or by my own hand with longbow or crossbow to pierce the heart of a wild boar, and then to sit at table and tear your sweet flesh with my hands and eat. I am ravenous yet for my meats, but I know now that every arrow shot, every dog unleashed, every hawk set forth, every side pierced and throat cut and belly sliced open, I should have done them all in the name of God, I should have made each a sacrifice to the God who was hungrier even than I, and if I had done so, perhaps I would be eating meat now in Heaven instead of starving in this meatless Hell.”

Henry looks straight into the camera and wipes the back of his hand heavily across his mouth. He heard the question. And Hatcher thinks of cheeseburgers, of Bill Clinton winning his presidency by eating cheeseburgers, and how sad a figure he is in Hell without them.

Hatcher finds a far corner of the veranda and puts his back to everyone, wanting to be alone now, making his mind go blank, feeling he knows very little about himself, really, and not expecting to learn much from the one wife left to see. But he will try. He will try. He does not have long to wait before he hears the rush of the Fleetwood and the grinding of its brakes. He goes to the car and gives Dick Nixon Naomi’s address.

Naomi Jean Delancey — later Naomi Jean Rutherford, the not-yet-forty trophy widow of a didn’t-quite-get-to-seventy shipping magnate, and then, three years later, the third and final wife of network anchorman Hatcher McCord — lives in a warren of alleyways next to the Central Power Station, the narrow passages twisting and always dark from the shadow of the buildings and from the vast, lolloping, pitch-black plumes of power station smoke, the natural color of Naomi’s hair in her prime. Hatcher moves along a shabby-carpeted inner corridor redolent of piss, its darkness broken only by three widely spaced bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling on fraying cords. As he passes, doors open and women peek out, haggard faces with hair disarranged, but disarranged, Hatcher realizes, from former haute coiffure. He knows this neighborhood. This is the Central Park West of Hell. High society. Naomi adored her Chanel and Dolce&Gabbana and also her Lagerfeld and Westwood and Mugler. She adored the Dakota. She adored Hatcher, mostly, though he came to feel that was largely for the opportunity he gave her to radiate at parties, in her couture, in the presence of Hatcher’s most important news subjects, presidents and ambassadors and movies stars and kings.

He is at her door now. He hesitates. Can she shed any light on his sins? She was no trophy at all to him — he knew she was smart — and she knew he knew it and she clearly appreciated that, but she finally did leave him a couple of years before he died and it wasn’t for another man, but for the death of him he can’t remember why, exactly. They ran down, she didn’t like his cigars, she was too smart, finally, to stay interested in primarily glittering in her clothes. Something. They both had affairs — that may have been it, but it was quietly mutual, and surely that was a symptom, not a cause. She was dating a U.S. Senator when Hatcher’s heart stopped, and he wonders if she came to the funeral — he wonders if any of his wives came to his funeral.

He knocks on the door. There is no answer, but he thinks he hears sounds inside, a vague scuffling. He knocks again. He can hear nothing now. Nevertheless — perhaps this comes with a free mind in Hell — he senses her just on the other side of the door. He could be wrong. He knocks again.

“Naomi?” he says.

Naomi is, indeed, on the other side of the door, terrified, always, about being in Hell, particularly because she is wearing a polka-dot pink summer dress with an elastic waist that would have cost twenty-five bucks out of the Sears catalog in the year she married the anchorman, and she has not been able to take this dress off for many risings and settings of the sun and the pink has turned mostly gray now from the grit which settles through the ceiling and walls from the power station. At the sound of Hatcher’s voice, which she recognizes at once, she lays her forehead quietly against the door: Not like this. I am not who I am, wearing this. I am not who I am in the company of the person who has just now slipped into the bedroom. But in this dress, in this society, I am this other. And I was another I, once. I chose myself and dressed me in myself and I was I. Though I had to make do at times. My sweet young self, debuting in the Continental Ballroom in the Peabody Hotel in Memphis in a white satin gown that Mama and her Memphis-Main-Street tailor and I figured out, and it had a strapless bodice and a ruched midriff and lace appliques, and I put the me of that dress on and I melted perfectly into the floor in a full court bow before the society of my mama’s boozy peroxide-bleached friends and the U of M’s boozy sun-bleached Sigma Chis and the Citadel boys in their uniforms and buzz cuts, and it wasn’t until later that I realized how not-me I was, though in a way that was me at nineteen, I suppose, but I was more me later, much more, I was me in a power-black Thierry Mugler with wide shoulders and collar points and flame cutouts and a waist corseted down to breathlessness, to breathless dominating otherness, and I was in the society of the people who ran the world. The world. The world that came and went. And now I am I in another world. I am forever a cheap cotton dress the color of Pepto-Bismol.

Hatcher knocks again. “Naomi? It’s Hatcher,” he says.

“I’m not here,” she says.

“Then let me in and I’ll wait for you,” he says.

“I don’t expect to show up ever again,” she says.

“Is there someone else I can talk to?”

“You don’t want to.”

“I do.”

“Believe me, you don’t.”

“It’s your worst about me I’m looking to hear,” he says.

“It’s worse than that,” she says.

“I don’t care,” he says. There is a long pause. “It’s Hell,” he says, trying to put the shrug that just went through his upper body into his voice.

He feels exhausted. He leans his head against the door. Though he sensed her here even before she spoke, he does not sense that his right temple is lying against the exact spot on the door where, inside, the center of Naomi’s forehead, just below the hairline, is touching.

They both stand there like that in silence for a time. Finally, he says once more, softly, “Naomi?”

And she opens the door.

He sees her dingy polka dots and knows how she is suffering.

She sees his powder-blue tie, and her hands claw at the bodice of her Sears dress, bunching the cloth, pulling it toward her throat. “So,” she says. “You’re still traveling in the right circles.”

This time she can see his shrug.

They don’t move. She is blocking the doorway with her body.

“May I?” he says.

She looks around her, a little uncomprehending. She turns her body to the side.

He steps in. She closes the door.

There are a few pieces of tattered Goodwill-bargain-back-room furniture and there are a thousand roaches crowding along the baseboards like the people in the streets. As soon as Hatcher sees them, they all stop, rise up on their back feet, and look in his direction. He knows how they must torture Naomi. He lifts his tie at them. The whole throng of roaches sings out in unison, “Cheese it! The cops!” and they instantly flow into the join of the baseboard at the floor and vanish.

Naomi has watched this and turns her face to him. Her eyes — still darkly beautiful in spite of the age lines — are wide with surprise.

“The right circles,” Hatcher says.

“Thank you,” Naomi says.

She closes the door, and the two stand awkwardly where they are.

“Can we talk for a few minutes?” Hatcher says, looking toward the little setting of spring-sprung and stained metallic tweed sectionals. He misses Naomi’s eyes sliding away to the bedroom door and then back again.

“Okay, Hatcher,” she says, and he doesn’t catch how she says his name just loudly enough to be heard in the other room. “You can stay for a few minutes.”

They sit at right angles on a two-piece sectional sofa, with a matching chair at the other angle. Naomi has her arms crossed over her chest, covering as much of her dress as possible, her hands laid on her throat as if she were about to choke herself.

Hatcher is trying to shape the question in his head and wondering if he should begin with an apology. The apology set Mary Ellen off from the beginning, though he learned some things along the way.

But before he can speak, Naomi says, “You freaked me out today.”

Hatcher’s mind starts to sputter. He feared this with Mary Ellen and at least that bit turned out okay. But Deborah saw the news broadcast.

“How…?” she says, and then she hesitates, searching for a way to finish the question. Her hands descend from her throat and squeeze at the polka dot dress. And some other part of her finishes the question in a way her conscious mind, which she has been consulting, cannot. “How can you be you in just your skin?” she says.

Neither of them knows what to say next.

And then Hatcher’s mother bursts in from the bedroom. “You freaked me out too!” she cries, based on no consultation at all with her conscious mind. “What a pathetic dick. Dangling there like that. Your father’s was so much more interesting. How could I ever have thought you perfect?”

His mother is standing straddle-legged before him now in her terry cloth robe, her arms akimbo, her storm-cloud gray eyes looming before him, and Hatcher has lifted his feet onto the seat cushion and is crawling his butt up the back of the sectional couch and wishing the sulfur rain was pouring down outside so he could escape into it.

His mother cries, “I haven’t seen that part of you since your were a little boy in the bathtub. But what a wretched disappointment. Of course, I should have known. You’re in Hell. I’m here too, and it’s all your fault. You were supposed to be perfect. I thought you were. Because I knew I was. You were a reflection of me. But you weren’t perfect after all, and so you turned this into my destiny as well. And it was probably because of your miserable dick. You could never be worthy of this.”

Hatcher has reached the top of the sectional and as his mother grabs each side of her robe and begins to rip it open, he falls backward off the couch. He quickly rights himself and stays low, scrambling along the floor on hands and knees, making straight for the door. Down here he sees he’s being observed from along the baseboard by a row of cockroaches shaking their heads in disgust.

“Come here,” his mother is calling. “Face facts.”

And he’s up on his feet and wrenching the door open and careening down the dim hallway. And not for a moment does he think this was planned by Satan. Even the Prince of Darkness isn’t wickedly smart enough to have invented this torture for him. He could only have done this to himself.

When Hatcher bursts from the downstairs door of Naomi’s tenement, the alley is black with night. He pulls up sharply. When did this happen? There was no sudden silence, no trembling city, no solar boom of sundown. For night to have come when he was windowless and deeply distracted and he missed its coming, that should be closer to the expectations he brought with him from life, should provide a little bit of wistful relief, but in fact this sneaky night he has rushed into scares the shit out of him. He gropes along, bumping into passing bodies, seeing very little, just a dull red glow at a distant turning of the alley, and a heavy shoulder thumps against him and Hatcher says “Sorry,” and he does not remember ever saying that before in the jostling crowds in Hell. He’s been saying it a great deal lately, he realizes, but to the women from his life. Except to his mother. Not to his mother. He shivers now and he rushes faster away from the tenement, and a bump and sorry and another bump and sorry again, and he turns at the red glow and there’s another red glow at another turning ahead, and for all the sorrying he has sorried since he knew he had a free mind, he has done nothing, he’s afraid, to earn his way out of Hell, if such a thing is even possible, and Mary Ellen’s voice trails through him you’d be perfectly happy if you were the only person in the world and maybe his sin was as simple and as basic as that, maybe taking that one step back to report on the people of the world was the same as not being among them, he was in a separate universe, one that was superior in its separateness, and he was happy being alone there, and you were supposed to take women to you and so he slept with them and he married them, and you were supposed to make children and he did, but maybe all that was simply to avoid facing the truth about himself, maybe he went through the motions of connection — fucking and marrying and fathering — so he could live with his precious aloneness and not feel damned. But he was damned. He was damned indeed. And maybe it’s why we’re all of us damned, he thinks. Maybe a mother can join herself to an image of a son until she can’t, and a man can join with a woman till he can’t, and the can’t part of it means it’s not doing the mother or the husband any good anymore, for herself, for himself, for his arrogantly self-absorbed self, you just want to get away from the other and you’ll stop at nothing till you do. And with all this thinking, he finally thinks none of it sounds right, none of it, and he thinks maybe the thinking itself is the problem, your mind is free but it’s free all to itself, you’re never more alone than in your mind. Only in our bodies are we together. Maybe it’s all about the thereness, there’s nothing more there than every moment lived in these tortured bodies in Hell, and there was nothing more there than the life we led in these bodies on earth. And the problem was, we tried to think it out when we should have just held on to each other, and if we held on, all the pain and all the pleasure was the same, it was all one complex thing that was okay, that was really okay, but it was okay only if you took all of life in through your senses and stayed in the moment, holding on. But even as he thinks this now, even as he thinks of the alternatives to thinking because he thinks the problem is thinking, it feels untrue in just the same way again. And he thinks: Fuck me. And he thinks: Fuck you. Fuck us all. And he is at the corner and the glow isn’t there anymore and he turns and far ahead is another turning and the glow is there, the red glow from the power station in the center of the Great Metropolis in Hell, and he thumps into a dark figure, a man’s chest as hard as the boulders in the mountains, and Hatcher says “Sorry” and he puts his hands out and grabs the figure at the arms, as if he’s afraid he’ll knock him down, when in fact it’s Hatcher who reels, whose air thumps out of him, and he gasps another sorry and he means it, and he veers away, veers away and moves on.

And behind Hatcher, the hard-chested man stands where he has stopped. He realizes it was Hatcher McCord, anchorman for the Evening News from Hell, he has just bumped into. But that is of no consequence to him. He pauses for his own leisurely purpose. He reaches into the inside pocket of his tweed sport coat with suede elbow patches, and he pulls out a pack of Luckies. He pops one up, puts it into his mouth, and snaps his fingers. A flame licks up from the tip of his thumb, and he lights his cigarette, his face briefly illuminated, still the faintly jowly face of an overreaching politician who could only manage three percent in the Iowa caucus. Satan waves the flame away from his thumb and blows a careful series of smoke rings, invisible in the dark. And he looks around him, seeing everything: I move unseen among you, my children, and I can smell you as you stumble along in the dark. You stink of your humanity, and it is very good, for so very many of you are perfect: you despise yourselves, and yet at the same time you are full of self-righteousness. And you do not recognize your own shape-shifting sanctimony. You do not understand it is the life force of your anger and your hatred and your violence and your aloofness and your indifference and your pride and your intolerance. And the ones among you who seem not to be perfectly mine, who are wise enough to know that self-righteousness is my life’s breath inside you all, you roil with anger at my perfect ones, you hate them, and you take comfort in your superiority to them, and so, in your wisdom, you become perfect as well. You all have my sweet stink about you. In your own unique ways you are all perfect, my darlings.

Satan takes a last drag on his Lucky Strike. He blows the smoke out his nose and his ears, and he flips the butt, its glowing red end tumbling through the dark.

After Hatcher finds his way to the Fleetwood and then to his apartment, the night is thick upon the Great Metropolis, and in the back alleys of Hatcher’s neighborhood, the weepings and thrashings are muted behind closed doors. Even the Hoppers’ door is shut and the snarking is soft, and he opens his own door to a dark apartment. He steps in but does not speak. He feels his heart begin to pound in his throat. He should have come straight home with Anne after she broke away from Henry. Fuck the interview. Fuck his cover story for Beelzefuckingbub. At least he should have rushed here after filming Henry, instead of tracking down still another wife. His wives are dead to him. Anne is the woman he wishes to be part of. And he staggers at the thought. What’s the angle in that for his alleged self-absorption? Though it’s impossible to be alone while in Hell, he is free to acknowledge the desire to be. And yet.

He gropes in the air for the pull cord to the hanging bulb. He finds it. Pulls. The room dimly presents itself, and he turns his eyes toward the kitchen table. He recoils. Her body sits there in her green velvet Tudor dress and her neck is ragged along the axman’s line and her head is gone. He looks at the tabletop. It’s not there. He looks around the room. Nothing. Her body is motionless, her hands crossed in her lap.

“Anne?” he calls.

There is no answer.

“Darling, I’m home,” he cries.

No answer.

He draws near to her body. He leans forward and picks up one of her hands. It’s warm. He bends to it and kisses the knuckle on her middle finger. The hand does not respond. He puts it gently back on top of the other one.

Anne’s head is not on the floor near the chair or under the table. It is not on the kitchen counters or in any of the cabinets. He sweeps around their little living room and it is not on or beside or behind their couch, their chairs. He is doing this systematically, going outward from the body that had to find its sightless way to the kitchen table.

He goes into the bedroom, which is dark. The TV is off. He shuffles his feet gently to the end table and turns on the lamp. Her head is nowhere to be seen, not on the floor, not on the bed, nowhere. Hatcher moves to the closet and opens the door.

And he is looking directly into Anne’s face. Her head sits on the shelf. Her great, dark eyes are full of tears. Her cheeks are wet.

“Anne,” he says.

She closes her eyes and squeezes out a rush of tears.

“I wanted to do more,” she says.

“I know,” Hatcher says.

“I wanted to be more,” she says.

Hatcher lifts his hand, reaches out, draws the back of his fingers across her wet cheek.

“Motherfucker,” she says, softly, sadly. She closes her eyes. And after a moment, she says, “Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.”

And Hatcher makes a loose fist and thumps his right forearm on his chest. And again. And a third time. On her behalf. And his own.

After this, Anne lets Hatcher put her back together and she takes off her gown and he takes off his suit and they lie beside each other naked in the bed in the dark, and on this night they do not even try to have sex. They lie listening to each other breathe until they both, surprisingly, fall asleep.

And the next day, from Broadcast Central in the Great Metropolis where all rivers converge, all storms make a beeline, all the levees look a little fragile, and the anchorman, Hatcher McCord, is looking particularly fragile tonight, the Evening News from Hell is well under way. Cerberus has rabies again and is raging his way through Everland, the densely occupied molester estate on the edge of the city. Michael Jackson and Gary Glitter inadvertently swap severed penises in the aftermath. Bobby Fischer, though always playing white, is mated for the thousandth straight time by a chess-playing computer named Hadassah. The Chicago Cubs lose.

And with the news finished and the preview aired of the Barbara Walters-Oprah Winfrey boiling-tar-pit naked wrestling match and with the eventual end of a classic This-Is-What-You-Want-But-You-Can’t-Have-It-In-Hell commercial — a long, relooping version of the McDonald’s commercial where everything the Hamburglar touches turns into a McDonald’s Cheeseburger, including his own head — Hatcher goes to a live remote with the new entertainment reporter, who thinks he has finally remembered his own name, although only the first one. Hatcher improvises the lead-in: “Now, at the site of the free Power to the Denizens Concert, our only partially brain-dead entertainment editor is reporting live. Take it away, Nick.”

The entertainment reporter formerly known as Mineisbigger and now known as Nick, still unable to remove his terrorist mask, is standing in a bright light with his microphone. Behind him is a welter of bodies lunging and fighting and slashing — there are obviously sharp weapons involved because there are pulsing plumes of blood everywhere and flying body parts — and beyond, distantly, is the stage, also crowded with a brawling mob. Nick says, “Yes, Hatcher, the vast crowd here at the free concert finally couldn’t contain its anger. They’ve listened for several hours to the All Star Polka Choir made up of Presley and Hendrix, Joplin and Marley and Jagger, Cobain and Shakur and Lennon and Madonna, Houston and Selena and Coolio and Morrison — both Morrisons — all dressed in lederhosen and Alpine hats and playing accordions and fighting among themselves about who will sing lead vocals on such classics as ‘The Polish Sausage Polka’ and ‘In Heaven There Is No Beer.’ As you can see, the crowd couldn’t take it anymore, the flash point being Madonna’s version of ‘Who Stole the Kishka.’ But Hatcher, I’ve got an exclusive interview here and some hot news about the Evening News from Hell.”

And with this, Nick looks off camera and makes a motion, and Robert Redford, dressed in white shirt, dark suit, and bright red tie and beaming a fixed smile that makes the deep creases of his face seem somehow boyish, steps into frame beside Nick.

Nick says, “Bob. I understand you’re in negotiations to become the new face of the Evening News from Hell.”

Redford nods gravely. “That’s right, Nick. I’ve always wanted to play a network anchorman.”

And now the crowd behind them swells, and a tsunami of blood and body parts washes over Nick and Bob and the camera.

Hatcher, with absolute, suave anchorman cool, says, “Thanks, Nick. That was Nick Mineisbigger reporting live, though presently decomposed, from the Power to the Denizens Concert.”

And Hatcher goes on with the news and he finishes the news and not once does he give his bosses even a tiny, corner-of-the-mouth twitch of a clue that he is concerned about his job. Nor does he show even a brief eye-sparkle of a clue that he is pleased to be thus torturing Satan and Beelzebub over their inability to read their subjects’ minds. And he is surprised at himself over his inner calm. He does not want to give up this chair. But he knows whatever is afoot may end up with him keeping his job and thereby torturing Nick and Bob primarily and him only if he lets it. But any way it plays out, he is ready to accept that and go on.

So when he steps out of Broadcast Center, he finds Judas Iscariot crouching near the door. The ex-apostle leaps up at the sight of him and rushes forward. He talks very fast, his hands fluttering before him. “You’re here. That’s good. At last. I had a hard journey to get to you and it’ll be a hard journey back and there’s not much time, there’s no time, man, time is slipping into the future. I figured I owe you this. But just for you, you know, off the record, deep background. You understand? Deep throat stuff. So here’s the deal. I heard the screaming in the night. A bunch of the other signs had already occurred and that was a big one. I heard a screaming in the night sky and there was just one more thing and that one thing came to pass today. You know what finally shows up at the Automat? Lamb chops. Lamb chops. Behind every little door. Every last one of them is lamb chops. Only three nickels away. And nobody’s buying. We’re all crying, ‘Sacrifice! Sacrifice!’ And we all just sit there fasting when there’s finally meat, and we’re all righteous at last. Then one dumb shit — Thomas, of course — he puts his three nickels in and we’re all going, Don’t do it, man, but he’s doing it, and we’re white-knuckled and gritting our teeth, but it’s okay, the righteous thing is only about us, see, about each one of us individually. Thomas can fuck himself over if he wants to, but that’s just him and it’s not about us. So Thomas sits down and he starts eating, and after a moment he jumps up and he cries out, ‘It’s tofu! It’s just tofu!’ Like he would know tofu, right? Like they can make a whole lamb chop out of tofu, right? I don’t think so. I don’t think so. And so the old boys tear him apart. Limb from limb. And they throw his parts into the street. And that’s according to the prophecy as well. Trust me. So it’s going to happen. Soon. Real soon. He’s coming back for us. Come to the Automat and look at those chops and turn away quick. Maybe you can hitch a ride out of here.’