Hell

Judas starts backing away. He says, “I’m sure of it this time. We’re all of us sure.”

And he vanishes into the crowd.

Hatcher gets the car just in case he can figure out the wild seething inside himself. He sits in the backseat and does not yet tell Dick Nixon where to go. He’s unsure why he’s hesitating. Judas’s druggie persona, perhaps. His own unworthiness. But I’m still a newsman, he tells himself. I need to step back and observe and report. I at least should go watch the others being taken away from here, even if I am not worthy. Or watch as they watch and nothing happens. Even for that. Judas seems to believe deeply that a Harrowing is imminent. As, apparently, do the others from the Book. And all the prophets were wild-talking eccentrics. Judas is from that tradition. Trying to think it out, Hatcher finds himself panting and restless in the backseat of the Fleetwood. I have to stop thinking, he thinks. I have to stay in the moment and in this body and I have to act.

He leans forward and is about to knock on the partition and head for the corner of Peachtree Way and Lucky Street. But if it’s true. If this turns out to be true. He can’t go without Anne. He knocks on the partition. It slides back. And Hatcher directs Dick Nixon to swing briefly by the apartment. The car leaps forward. Hatcher still seethes inside, but now from an intense awareness that he is heading in the opposite direction from a way out of Hell. He turns his eyes to the window. He watches the flying, broken bodies as he cuts a great thumping swath through all the damned in order to get Anne and escape.

Hatcher dashes up the circular stairs and along the corridor and he’s embarrassed to wonder this, but he wonders if he’s running along this corridor for the last time, for the last time ever, and he sees the Hoppers’ door is open, up ahead, and he does not want to slow down for anything and he pushes his legs, and this time they stay strong and quick even as they pass the Hopper apartment. But in his peripheral vision he sees the couple sitting there in their overstuffed chairs. And he stops himself. And he steps back, and he stands in their doorway.

Peggy is saying to Howard, “It’s true. It’s always been true. From the first time on. You never tell me you…” And she catches on the word.

Howard says, “There you are. How can I be expected to tell you something that you can’t even remember yourself what it is.”

“Pardon me,” Hatcher says.

The two Hopper faces turn to him.

“You should come with me…” Hatcher begins.

“Oh we couldn’t do that,” Peggy says instantly.

“No,” says Howard. “Thanks, but never.”

“We can’t get up,” she says.

“Not at all, ever,” he says.

“This is where we are,” she says.

“Right here,” he says.

“I understand,” Hatcher says and he moves to his own door and he’s surprised at himself over the impulse he just followed and he tells himself there’s nothing he can do for anyone else. He can do only for Anne now, if this is real, the best he can do is for Anne and for himself.

He touches the knob to his door. And the Hoppers suddenly terrify him: Will Anne go?

He steps in.

Anne is near the bedroom door, her back to him. Her head is on. That’s good. She is wearing still another Edwardian tea dress. That’s not good.

“Anne,” he says.

She turns to him and she consciously puts on a little smile. She has something to say and he is very glad he has something to say first, and because it is the only way to keep her, he leaps fully into faith. It’s real, he tells himself. It’s going to happen.

“Wouldn’t it be better,” he says, “to leave Hell altogether, with me?” She looks at him wide-eyed, as if the axman has just been called off. “Can you do this?” she says.

“Yes,” he says. “But we have to go now.”

She does not say another word but is beside him and they are rushing along the corridor, perhaps for the last time.

And once again Hatcher finds himself grateful for Richard M. Nixon’s merciless driving. But as they plow into the writers’ neighborhood, the impulse that put Hatcher in the Hoppers’ doorway comes upon him again, with an even stronger moral imperative. He does not think it out but leans forward and knocks on the partition and directs Nixon to an address nearby, and they soon pull up in front of a grimy brick tenement. He tells Nixon to keep the engine running.

“Where are you going?” Anne says, the first audible words she’s spoken since the apartment.

“I owe somebody something,” he says.

When they first got in the car, Hatcher told Anne where they were heading and with only a nod of recognition to him she began to quietly pray for absolution, softly pounding her chest in mea culpas. Now, as he opens the door, she says, “Do we have time?”

“Yes,” he says, though, in fact, he’s not so sure. But he does owe Beatrice.

He dashes for the entrance, realizing this is the street-side front of the tenement that Virgil led him to a few nights ago. He pushes through the door and he staggers to a stop and he has to consciously adjust his center of gravity to keep from falling down. The whole place is tilted to the left, and mounting before him is a wide staircase paneled in William and Mary oak and with an iron banister with grillwork of ormolu garlands, and a steam horn sounds in the distance and a ship’s bell is ringing and a multitude of voices are crying out, wordlessly, far off, and a smell of salt water fills his head and he feels a chill on his feet — a rare sensation in Hell — and he looks down and water is spreading out from the deep shadows on either side of him, lapping at his shoes, and Hatcher knows this is the Grand Staircase in the first class section of the Titanic. No, he cries to himself. This is, in fact, a typical, cheap illusion, a movie setting in Hell of the Grand Staircase in the first class section of the Titanic.

Nevertheless, Hatcher’s first reflex is to run. To turn around and bolt from this place and get back in the car instantly and take off. But he tells himself not to play the game. He doesn’t have to play the game. He has a mind that is free. But movie illusion or not, this is the only staircase he has to work with, so he dashes up, past the bronze cherub holding a lamp, onto the landing and up another flight, a vast cut-glass dome above, and he is not looking closely but he can see that all of it — banister and paneling, cherub and stairs and dome — are covered in a thin coat of green slime and he’s smelling mold now and rot and he goes up to the fourth floor and cuts down the corridor.

The carpet is thicker under his feet and the walls are paneled oak but it’s the same layout as the film noir tenement, and the corridor — the whole tenement — lurches a bit and his own free and independent brain isn’t doing a fucking thing to make this all go away and he sprints for the door at the far end and he arrives, breathless not from the sprint but from a rising fear as cold as the North Atlantic. If he gets sucked into this little Hell game, he may miss the Harrowing. The door says 4D. There are vague rustling sounds inside. He knocks. The sounds stop but no one is coming to the door and no one is talking and he calls out, “Beatrice.” And there is silence.

He does not have time for this and so he tries the knob on the door and it turns and he pushes in. Not to a first class state room on the Titanic but to the same seedy tenement apartment 4D as before, with the same sagging couch in the center of the floor. But the room is tilting. It is full of the smell of the ocean. And on the couch is Beatrice, naked, on her back, her legs hooked over the shoulders of the dingy-white naked marble body of Publius Vergilius Maro, also known as Virgil, who continues quietly to pound away Roman style at Dante’s girlfriend.

They do not stop their fucking but they do both turn their faces to Hatcher. The faces show no trace of pleasure, of course.

Hatcher finds himself compelled to shoot his cuffs. He pats his pockets, but he can find no smokes, so he simply squares his shoulders and says, “I thought we had an understanding, doll. But what do you expect in this crazy world? I don’t blame you. You figured you had a chance for happiness and you took it. Me, I can only offer you a long shot. The longest of long shots. A way out of Hell. So here I am. But you have to make up your mind now. Because chances have a way of disappearing on you. Especially when the odds are long.”

Hatcher hears himself. He’s not saying this quite the way he expected.

But Beatrice seems to get it. And she doesn’t. “I can’t go with you,” she says, her voice quaking from the boffing being administered by Virgil. “I can’t. The ship’s going down and all the lifeboats have sailed.”

From behind the closed closet door, where last time a Renaissance Pope imitated a police car siren, Celine Dion begins to sing, “My heart will go on.”

And Hatcher backs out of the room, closes the door, turns, and takes one stride and another down the hallway, passing the door behind which, if he stopped to listen, he could hear the beating of his own heart.

When the Fleetwood takes the sharp left turn as Peachtree Avenue Street Street turns into Peachtree Way on the run up to the corner of Lucky Street, Hatcher opens the driver compartment partition and sees the back of a crowd up ahead. Before they pound through the candidates for Heaven, he tells Dick Nixon to pull over to the curb and stop.

Hatcher grabs Anne’s hand and throws the door open and they slide out of the car and move quickly up the street. The back of the crowd is all cloaks and animal skins and sackcloth tunics, and as Anne and Hatcher approach, they can hear a clamorous bleating as if from a vast drove of goats, and Hatcher thinks of animal sacrifice — this has been an ongoing theme of the past few days — and he wonders if there are actual goats now being slaughtered to buy the Old Ones a way out of Hell.

But that’s not it at all. He and Anne reach the back of the crowd and start pushing their way through the rough cloth and the skins and the fetid stink of ancient bodies, and it’s instantly clear that the sounds are coming from the Old Ones themselves. They are huddling hard together and lifting their faces and crying like goats, and it’s tough pushing through, the bodies are thick and unyielding, and Hatcher vaguely remembers a Bible verse about the Son of God coming in glory and separating the sheep from the goats, and Hatcher feels in his chest and in his arms and in his throat and behind his eyes a powerful swelling of belief. He believes. Yes. He believes that a way out of Hell is just ahead, and he presses in front of Anne and holds her hand even more tightly and he puts his shoulder heavily ahead of him and he pushes hard and they are moving, the bodies are sliding aside, parting like the sea, and he and Anne break at last from the drove and into an empty stretch of street, empty but for half a dozen bearded men in tunics cracking whips and driving back this crowd found unworthy of Heaven.

One of these goatherders cocks his head in surprise at seeing these two Moderns fly out of the crowd, but he does not try to stop them. And Hatcher and Anne rush on toward another crowd of the Old Ones in front of the Automat. Hands are shooting up and waving and falling and shooting up again and the cries of this crowd are “Me!” and “Me!” and “Save me Lord!” and “I am worthy!” and “I am worthier!” and “I am worthiest!” and a body — a very old man in a bear skin — comes hurtling out of the crowd and he is carried along toward the drove of the damned faster than his feet are moving, and he is already bleating, and another body flies out, a woman in a long dark robe and with a scarf covering her face and her goat voice is thin and full of vibrato.

Hatcher and Anne reach this other crowd and stop. Hatcher looks around for Judas. He is about to call for him, but Anne pulls at Hatcher’s hand. “Over there,” she says, and she draws him to a thickening of this crowd, and the two of them stretch up and they look and they can barely see the very top of a liver-brown head of hair in the empty center of this crowd — distance is being kept from this man — and the man cries in a loud voice, “Ye fed me!” and another man’s voice yelps in joy, and the loud voice cries, “Go ye forth to the Chariot of Fire,” and Hatcher can see the tops of the heads of the far part of the inner circle of the crowd open for the chosen one making his way toward Lucky Street. And then the loud-voiced man cries, “Ye gave me no meat!” and another voice wails in anguish but the wail quickly morphs into a goat cry and a body flies from the crowd and back down Peachtree Way. Hatcher and Anne look at each other with the same thought. Are we hearing the voice of the Son of God? Even as they think this, Hatcher also thinks the voice sounds faintly familiar and he tries to remember some moment, somewhere in his earthly life — did he have a miraculous encounter? — did he actually hear the voice of Jesus in his life?

“We have to get closer,” Anne says.

Hatcher takes her hand and steps before her and reaches forward to try to part the bodies in front of him. But he feels Anne’s hand wrench out of his. He looks back to her.

“You need both hands,” she says. “I’ll be right behind you.”

He nods and begins to turn.

“Wait,” she says, wrenching him around. “This,” she says and she lays her hand on his tie.

He looks down. The powder-blue shocks him like blood from an unexpected wound.

He grabs at the knot at his throat and tears it open, untangles the tie, and stuffs it in his jacket pocket. “I never did…,” he says. “I never even… I never.”

“That’s for Him to decide,” Anne says.

They look at each other and then in unison they strike their chests three times in the mea culpa.

And Hatcher is ripping and shoving and punching and pounding his way through the crowd, one layer, and another, and once, he glances quickly back and Anne is there, shoving away, and another goat is identified up ahead, and another sheep — Hatcher is no longer listening to the words of the Son of God, not till he can stand before Him, not till then, but he knows the work of winnowing is going on and Hatcher plays over a little litany of I-nevers as he struggles with the crowd, which still has many layers before him.

Now a voice nearby says, “He’s on the move,” and another takes it up, louder, “He’s moving!” and another shouts, “He’s done! He’s leaving!” and then a wild chorus of “No, Lord!” and “Take me too, Lord!” and even “I’m more faithful than that camel turd you just chose!” and even “You’ll understand if you just read my book!”

And the crowd surges and carries Hatcher along and he senses his crowd skills are still good, though they let him slide out of the flow, not with it, but that might be okay, to get to the margin of the crowd and head for the Chariot on his own, but as he feels he needs to make a move to the side and get out, he reaches back for Anne and grabs a hairy man’s arm — Esau’s, in fact — which pulls away, and Hatcher looks over his shoulder and Anne is nowhere in sight and the crowd is surging forward and she is nowhere and he calls out “Anne!” but the sound is lost in the din of the men all around him.

She’s gone. She’s lost to him for now. So he presses toward the edge of the crowd, angling through the seams, and as he moves readily, he thinks that maybe it’s for the best, surely it’s for the best, surely she will have a better chance if she’s not in the company of Satan’s anchorman, but surely he has a chance too, surely the Son of God has seen into his heart in Hell and knows he’s been trying to separate himself from the spirit of the place, and didn’t he do something pretty good against the odds down here? Hatcher thinks so, but he can’t remember now, he can’t quite remember what it was, exactly, but surely God knows, surely God can see into his heart, can hear his mind.

And as Hatcher pops out of the crowd and tumbles to the pavement and skids along, it comes to him in a terrible rush: if Satan can’t hear our thoughts, can’t read our deep inner selves, maybe God can’t either. Maybe it takes meat.

He scrambles to his feet. The crowd is surging past him and around the corner. He is standing before the door to the Automat. But it’s a little late, he knows, to go in and effectively not buy a lamb chop. He takes a step toward the corner and his hands are at his sides and suddenly his left palm feels a complicated metal something. He lifts the hand and finds two car keys on a looped key ring with a heavy bronze fob engraved D CK. Nixon is disappearing around the corner up ahead.

Hatcher follows and he turns the corner and the crowd thickens and he keeps his head down and works hard to push through, and then, as with the first crowd, he breaks into a sudden sizable empty space. Another line of whip wielders is trying to keep order, and again they ignore a Modern coming through, and ahead are the chosen, queuing up. Dick Nixon is hustling toward the line, and now Hatcher feels something, a large physical presence, and he stops and turns his face and looks up, and across the street, sitting in the rubble-filled lot at the corner, looming high over everyone, is a vast, primitive rocket ship, an amped-up Wernher-von-Braun-model V-2 with an extra pair of wings mid-body and portholes all along the side and a door at its base, a narrow door — though wider than the eye of a needle — with a metal staircase ascending to it.

At the bottom of the stairs leading to the door of the rocket, his back to Hatcher, is a man in a flowing crimson robe, the man with the liver-brown hair, which hangs down to his shoulders, the man of the loud voice, the Son of God, guiding the line of the chosen, placing a gentle hand in the small of each passing back. Including Dick Nixon, who enters even as Hatcher watches. Nixon made it. Hatcher tries in his mind to put Jesus with this machine, and again he looks up the long, gray body of the rocket. It is streaked in black, as if with reentry scorch marks. And up near the nose of the rocket is a word in Old German typeface, running at right angles to the ground. Hatcher angles his head to the side to read it: Herausforderer. He can’t figure the word out by cognates. But he thinks perhaps this is the hand of Wernher von Braun showing itself. And if von Braun is in Heaven making chariots of fire and if Dick Nixon has made it as well, then maybe Hatcher and Anne have a chance.

Anne. Hatcher snaps his head back toward the crowd, but he can see only bearded male faces. He takes a step in that direction. He is about to call out her name. Then suddenly she’s beside him.

“We can approach our savior together,” she says.

“Anne.” He tries to take her in his arms, but she presses away with her hands stiffly on his chest.

“There’ll be time for that later,” she says.

He pulls back his hands.

“You have to get me out first,” she says.

“You may do better going to Him alone,” he says.

Her brow furrows as she contemplates that.

“I’ll follow,” he says.

They turn toward the Chariot of Fire. Jesus is bouncing along the line now, coming in this direction, his exhortations not quite audible from this distance. He has one hand on his beard as he rushes along. His hair does not flow with his steps. Something seems off.

“It’s all about our minds, man,” a voice says behind Hatcher. “It’s all about the human mind.”

Hatcher turns. It’s Judas.

“What we remember,” Judas says in a rush. “What we forget. We choose those things for ourselves and it all has to do with what we want. And what we fear. You know? What drives us. What we gotta have. What we’re scared shitless to have. And they can always fuck with us, the powers that be. The powers can fuck with us because of our minds.”

“Isn’t He going to take you?” Hatcher says.

Judas ignores the question and he talks ever faster. “See, our minds aren’t really us. They’ve got their own agendas. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds, if only we could pluck out our brains and see only with our eyes.”

And now behind Hatcher he can hear the voice of Jesus, that familiar voice. “Hurry, my lambs. Hurry. It’s time.”

And Judas says with sudden, calm slowness, “I’ve been through this before, man. I remember now.”

Jesus’s voice is very close and Hatcher begins to turn.

“A hundred times,” Judas says.

And Hatcher is facing Jesus, who is very near. And the liver-brown hair is a bad wig. And the beard is fake. Plastic, hooked loosely over the ears. And inside the overlarge robe is a small, dark-skinned man with a smarmy voice that Hatcher remembers from a special exposé they ran on the alleged fakery and fraud of his miracle services. Jesus is a creepy little self-denominated evangelist named Benny Hinn. Hinn looks Hatcher in the eyes and he says, “Come along, my lamb. Come along.” He looks at Anne. “You too, my dear.” And Hinn turns and he starts pushing the people at the back of the line, and the chosen ones stampede forward for the rocket ship.

“It’s a different dude each time,” Judas says softly. He’s standing at Hatcher’s side now. “They always seem to actually believe they’re the Man Himself while it’s going on.”

Hatcher looks toward Anne, who is standing in absolute stillness at his other side, her mouth tight and drawn down.

And so the three remain for a while. Hatcher McCord, Anne Boleyn, and Judas Iscariot watch as the last of Benny Hinn’s chosen lambs enter the door of the rocket, and then Hinn himself steps in, turning at last in the doorway to make the sign of the cross before disappearing into the darkness and closing the door behind him. Faces appear at the portholes. One of them is Dick Nixon. One of them is Carl Crispin, whose fingers appear beside his chin and wiggle farewell to Hatcher. Then the rocket begins to make a deep, thunderous sound, and it begins to tremble, and great plumes of black smoke roll from its exhaust port, and the rocket begins slowly to lift from the ground, and it rises and rises and the three observers tilt their heads far back watching and Judas says, “We need to go inside now. Quickly.”

And Judas leads them along Lucky Street toward the Automat, even as all the other petitioners for Heaven are surging past them toward the place where the rocket took off. But at the corner, Hatcher stops and turns and looks up at the distant Chariot of Fire with flaming exhaust, soaring high into the powder-blue sky of Hell, glinting in the faux sunlight. And suddenly the rocket vanishes in a vast, booming bloom of white smoke.

“Hurry,” Judas says, pulling at Hatcher’s arm, and the two of them and Anne push through the Automat’s doors just in time to avoid the dense, flaming rain of metal shards and body parts falling all over the neighborhood.

Through it all, through the clanking and thwacking and squinching in the street and through the cries of the Old Ones left behind as they stagger in from the carnage outside, Hatcher and Anne and Judas sit at a back table and say nothing. Eventually, after all the pieces of the Herausforderer and its passengers have finished falling from the sky, and after the ones who were not chosen and who escaped maiming and burying under body and rocket parts out there are sobbing and wailing inside the Automat, Anne turns to Hatcher and says, “I have to go now.”

Hatcher does not look at her. He knows where she must go.

He feels the Cadillac’s keys in his pocket. He knows Dick Nixon is scattered around the neighborhood.

“I’ll take you,” he says softly.

And they rise.

Judas reaches up and touches Hatcher on the arm. “I’m sorry, man,” he says.

Hatcher wants to say something encouraging to Judas, and he begins, “The next time…” but he realizes he doesn’t know how to finish the sentence. Perhaps with “…it will really be him and he’ll know you.”

But before Hatcher can find those words, Judas finishes the sentence himself. “…I will have forgotten all about this.”

Hatcher nods. “Good luck,” he says.

“I hope you’ll remember not to believe me,” Judas says.

“If I do, I’ll remind you,” Hatcher says.

“Deal,” Judas says, and he makes a fist and extends it. Hatcher does too, and they bump knuckles. When he pulls away, Anne is already waiting at the door.

Hatcher crosses the floor, and Anne is looking outside. He stops beside her and she touches the door handle.

“Wait,” Hatcher says. She pulls her hand back. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his powder-blue tie. He lifts his collar, puts the tie around his neck, lowers the collar, and ties a perfect Windsor knot, growing sadder with each wrap and tuck.

Driving the Cadillac Fleetwood, his head is full of the red and black flying bugs named after the word that is never spoken in Hell, known in some places as honeymoon flies. Hatcher can’t even remember when it was or why he was there, but he was driving a rental car along a highway in northern Florida, and it was the season for these bugs, and when they reach maturity, each finds a spouse and the two of them begin to fuck and they never stop. They attach their bodies, male and female, at the tip and then spend the rest of their lives together fucking. Awake or asleep, sitting on fence posts or flying around, they never stop fucking. And even when the male dies, which, in the natural course of events, always occurs first, the two of them continue to stay sexually connected, the female dragging the dead male’s body around until she lays her eggs. And in their season, they fill the skies, flying around in coupled pairs. You drive your car to a constant ping and ping and ping, the sound of death as you hit and crush the mated couples. And there is no way to avoid this. For you to live, for you to move from one place to another, means you are the bringer of death, the creator of thousands of tragic romances.

It’s the sound Hatcher thinks of now as he drives the Fleetwood. He is driving fast to a constant thump and thump and thump of bodies in the crowded streets of the Great Metropolis. He has to drive fast. He’s sorry to be visiting pain on these denizens, but if it wasn’t him it would be something else. And he knows now that this is it forever. Nothing makes any difference about anything and you always get put back together to be hurt some more, so he might as well get this over with quickly. He must, in fact. Because inside the car there is only silence. Anne is sitting next to him, and they have nothing to say to each other, and this simple silence now between them as he drives her to the Raffles Hotel to be with Henry for eternity, this silence is the worst torture he has experienced in Hell. If only he could die and have her drag him around forever. Or if they could die together in a rush of wind and a car horn and they could just stay dead, coupled and dead.

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

“It won’t be long,” he says.

She does not answer.

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

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

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

“Yes,” she says.

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You are not a crook,” Hatcher says.

“I know,” Nixon says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A short time later Hatcher finds himself standing in the middle of Grand Peachtree Parkway, exhausted, achy, dazed, and near him are Isabella Andreini and William W. Ross and Jason Stanley and Jezebel and they are likewise exhausted and achy and dazed and these five are conscious of each other, they look into each other’s eyes and then quickly away again, vaguely aware that there was something between them but they don’t know what, exactly, though Hatcher works at remembering, and he does, briefly — like remembering a dream upon awaking and then forgetting it utterly a few moments later — Hatcher briefly remembers the shared longings, the shared selves, and he thinks he understands, he thinks it is only in pain that we are all truly connected, and when the pain ends, we are alone. Utterly alone in our heads. And as soon as he thinks this, he forgets it. But only in his mind. His hands flex and they remember. The crowd begins slowly to flow forward. His legs move and they remember. The others push among Hatcher and Isabella and William and Jason and Jezebel and the five disperse in the crowd, their bodies separating, their minds and hearts separating. And in their minds it is as if this never happened.

And Hatcher slides across the crowd as it flows onward and he emerges onto the sidewalk in front of empty bookstores. One of them has a sandwich board outside: Hell’s Belles Lettres. He is at the alley mouth where Virgil led him to Beatrice. Is this a bookstore that’s surviving? He steps to it, but the door is locked and the blind is down. No. Nothing lasts in Hell but the promise of pain. And he lifts his eyes, and there, on the corner on other side of the alley, its red neon sign spewing bright sparks, bright even in the mid-day sunlight, is the establishment called BURGERS.

Hatcher snaps straight upright. BURGERS.

BURGERS is open for business.

BURGERS.

He crosses the alley mouth and stops and turns and faces the door that leads into the only hamburger joint in Hell. He lifts his hands before him and he looks at them and he flexes them and he looks at the door. He steps to it and puts his hand to the knob and he turns it and he pushes and the door swings open and his legs move. Inside, there is a sizzle in the air, things frying, pungently meaty things, out of sight, and yet the place is empty. He closes the door behind him and he steps farther in. He stands in the center of a linoleum floor full of Formica-top tables, all of it white, achingly white from bright fluorescence overhead. He waits and he realizes there is no way in Hell he is going to figure out what this is about. He just has to move across the floor and through the door before him.

But he waits. He waits and he listens to the faint buzz of the ballasts above him and he realizes that he can no longer hear the perpetual street roar. Grand Peachtree Parkway is just behind him and he can hear nothing but the buzz of the light fixtures and a distant sizzle. And a doorknob rattling. Also behind him. But the knob is not yielding. Hatcher slowly twists around toward the sound, but by the time he can see the front door, whoever was trying to get in is gone.

He turns back to where he now feels strongly he must go. He squares his shoulders. He shoots his cuffs. And laughs just a little at himself for this. And he moves forward. He puts his hand on the knob and he opens the door, and he finds himself in a short, white-walled corridor, with another buzzing fluorescent bulb and another door straight ahead, only a dozen paces away. He does not hesitate. He moves on. Passing on the left is a door marked WOMEN and two paces farther, on his right, a door marked MEN. There is nothing else. The entrance ahead, he assumes, is into the kitchen.

And he is before it. And still another knob yields to him, though this door feels very heavy as he starts to push, and it is faintly luminous, he sees, and he pushes hard to get it to move and it does, barely, he puts his shoulder against it and it is cool to the touch, it is emanating a coolness onto his face, a sweet coolness, and once the door starts to move, it feels not as heavy and now less heavy still and now actually easy and now the door is so light it feels as if it is opening itself and it swings suddenly wide, carrying him shoulder-forward for a step and then he takes another, just to keep himself from falling, and he rights himself and he stops, and the door thumps heavily closed behind him, and he is standing in a kitchen. A classic, compact, stainless-gleaming, fast-food kitchen with deep fryers and grills and bun toasters and sinks.

And it is air-conditioned. The hamburger grills are sizzling loudly and Hatcher can see the rows of burgers there, and it’s real meat — the air is full of the smell of all-beef patties — but there is no heat, there is only a soft undulant coolness all around. And there are no people.

Hatcher steps farther in. “Hello?” he calls.

But there is no answer.

He looks at the burger grill, beside him now. All the patty tops are pink. They have only recently been put there. But even as he watches, all the burgers rise in unison from the grill and rotate themselves in the air and they descend, and they hiss and pop and fry noisily on.

Hatcher lifts his face and breathes deeply into his body the cool conditioned air. Not since he died has he felt this. Not since he died. And he does not let himself think. He calls out once more, “Hello?”

Nothing.

He walks forward and emerges from the kitchen to find himself behind the order counter. Before him are rows of free-standing molded plastic booths in red and yellow. The window posters push Happy Meals and Quarter Pounders with Cheese. The windows themselves are storefront, looking out on the sidewalk of a city street with a glass office building façade directly across the way. Halfway to the front door, a to-go bag with the Golden Arches sits in the middle of a booth table. What Hatcher does not see is another person. Not in the restaurant. Not passing by outside. He steps around the order counter and suddenly senses someone to his right and he looks and he jumps back at a wild head of red hair and a red nose and a broad red mouth and he has been away from his life on earth long enough that it has taken him this brief moment to recognize Ronald McDonald, in yellow jumpsuit and red-and-white-striped shirt, and another brief moment to understand that the clown, though life-sized, is not real. He is molded plastic. He stands watching over the dining area with his right arm extended and his hand cupped, perpetually ready to administer a comradely hug. And suddenly a rich, deep, mellifluous male voice speaks from the general direction of the clown, “Welcome.”

Hatcher comes near to Ronald. This is clearly no sentient being. But someone might be watching through the clown from some remote place. Hatcher says, “Hello?’

But Ronald says no more.

“Hello? Anyone there?”

Nothing. No one.

Hatcher looks out into the street. The air in the dining area is cool, the smell of the hamburgers is very good, and the silence feels like his head is lying on a down pillow. What part of Hell is this? And he knows the answer. He knows the answer to that, but he does not let even his deep inner voice speak it.

He moves toward the front doors. When he passes the to-go bag, he can feel it radiating heat. Not like any heat he’s felt in these past many risings and settings of the faux sun of Hell, but the heat of putting your feet up on your desk and unloosening your tie and somebody steps in and sits and you talk about the Yankees or the Jets with that heat kissing your fingertips through a bun and sweetly stirring your tongue, and this to-go bag is giving off not only heat but the smell of two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun. And Hatcher stops. And he knows this is for him. He picks up the bag.

He steps into the street. In the air is a hint of ripe peaches. And of coffee brewing. He looks up and down. No people. No cars. No birds, either. The sun is high but it feels mellow on his head. He walks toward the corner, and across the way is an urban park lush with live oaks whose broad limbs wear a dense cloak of Spanish moss.

And he is standing in front of Starbucks. And he steps in. And there is no one. But sitting on the center of the first table to the left of the door is a Venti that he knows — instinctively now — is a Toffee Nut Latte with extra foam. He knows it’s for him. He picks it up and it is sweetly warm in his hand, and he steps back outside, and he crosses the street and begins to follow a fieldstone path, and it is rising gently toward the center of the park, and he stops suddenly. He sets his McDonald’s to-go bag and his coffee down on a stone, and he steps off the path. There is no grass in Hell. Even at Satan’s hunting lodge it was fake. This appears to be real.

The broad, flat, dark green blades of Saint Augustine grass. He kneels down and puts his palms on the ground and it is soft and it yields and the smell of the soil and the real grass well up into him, and he stretches out forward and presses his chest and the side of his face into this living ground. He lies there for a long moment and then slowly rises, and he does not brush himself off but picks up his bag and his cup, and he continues along the curving path up the rise. And at the top is a chair. A familiar chair.

A low-slung Toshiyuki Kita recliner, the “Wink,” exactly the same as his reading chair after becoming the anchor of the Evening News from Hell, the first thing he bought strictly for himself in his Dakota apartment. He shared that apartment with someone. Someone who wasn’t crazy about this chair, but he was, and he bought it. It makes no difference who didn’t like it. He approaches the chair slowly, and he touches the twin yellow headrests, which always felt to him like his own two hands clasped comfortably behind his head, and he crouches down and eases onto the chair, settling into the broad sitting groove of its purple body. And he looks out at a wide azure pond in the center of the park, and beyond is a dense stand of water oak, and beyond the trees is a stacking of high-rise buildings, a cityscape of glass, with the sunlight reflecting there, but softly, and one skyscraper rises high above it all, its lean dusky brown facade a stacking of vertical piers going up to a gilded pyramid of open latticed girders that seem stuffed with the baby blue sky.

Hatcher eats his Big Mac. Pittsfield Kobe. He drinks his Starbucks latte. The caffeine rushes in him and he lets the foam evaporate on his lips. And when he finishes eating and drinking, he rubs the heels of his hands on the arms of the chair. And his thumb thinks to look for something, a little rub spot on the right arm. And he finds it. This is his chair. His. And he knows he is in Heaven.

And he has still seen no one else. He lifts his head a little. He looks off to the trees on the right. He looks off to the trees on the left. He looks at the pond, and he scans the far tree line. There is no one. And there is silence. Which is all right. He feels his body letting go. He lays his head back into the two soft hands of the chair. And he sleeps.

He wakes to stars. The night has come, and it is cool, and the air is full of the smell of Confederate jasmine. The tall buildings beyond the trees are dark, but the pyramid atop the skyscraper is lit brightly in gold. It floats in the sky before him like a fiery crown. Hatcher rises from his chair, and he walks back down the path, and there are bright lights all along this thoroughfare. He has always felt most comfortable in big cities. He steps in at Starbucks, and his evening latte is waiting on the table.

He goes back outside, and he stands in the center of the street, and he feels luxuriously slow inside. He sips his coffee. He takes his time. His coffee stays hot to the last drop, but not so hot that he can’t sip it as deeply as he wants, which he does, even at the very last, filling his mouth full and holding it warmly there and then letting it slide down. And all the while, he watches the bright golden crown floating above this Great Metropolis of Heaven.

And when he is finished with his coffee, he knows simply to open his hand, and he does, and the empty cup drifts off. And with a bit of a shock he realizes, as he stands there, that nothing hurts. There is not a single part of his body that isn’t feeling sweetly fine. And still he can’t take his eyes off the Great Skyscraper of Heaven. And suddenly the building below the pyramid, merely implied till now in the darkness, begins to come alive with light. The windows. The thousands of windows before him begin to flare into golden brightness. Quickly, in no discernible pattern, high and low and middle, left to right and right to left, the windows burst into light like the explosion of a Fourth of July rocket. It’s all for him, he feels. He begins to walk toward the building. And part of him is thinking: That’s where everyone is.

Hatcher passes through a street of restaurants and he sees all his favorite cuisines. Indian and Italian, Afghan and Vietnamese, even Eritrean. All the restaurants are brightly lit, all of them are empty of people, and each of them, he suspects, has his favorite dishes waiting in the center of a table. He passes through a street of clothing retailers. All lit. All empty. And then he enters a residential street of ornate, rusticated limestone urban mansions in Renaissance and Classical revivals, and he laughs at himself for thinking of these as architectural revivals. Everything’s a revival in Heaven. It’s a bland and esoteric little wisecrack he has made to himself but he laughs out loud. He can laugh now, even at bland and esoteric wisecracks. And his voice echoes in the street. He stops, struck once again by the silence. The houses are all dark. But they are suddenly less dark. Not from within but from without. They are beginning to lighten before his eyes. From the darkness, balustrades and friezes and Corinthian columns and Ionic columns and parapets and French doors are emerging. Softly, quickly, quietly, night is turning into day.

And he walks on, and soon, in the full light of morning, he is standing at a broad, maple-lined setback before the Great Skyscraper. Red maples. The building is vast above him, pulling his chest upward as he lifts his face to look. And then he walks beneath the maples. These are the trees of his time in Evanston, the trees that watched him holding… someone… in his arms. He can’t think who. He is under the maples. He is feeling peaceful. He approaches a high granite archway, and he pushes through the doors and crosses a marble lobby, his footsteps echoing all around him. And again, there are no people. He had the thought they might be here. Perhaps they still are, up above.

Hatcher enters an elevator. He has fifty-five floors to choose from. He starts with a middle one. He pushes 27 and the elevator fills with sound — the music of Brian Eno — the muted trickle of electronic sighs and cries and drippings. Music that once enchanted Hatcher. Music he played often. Music that drove someone crazy, he thinks, though he can’t think who. He can’t even think of some choices of who. He doesn’t feel the elevator moving, but the lights for the floors are flashing quickly upward. And then 27. The doors open. He steps onto plush carpeting. A broad window to the left looks out on the city. That interests him, but he’s more interested in this nagging thought that there are other souls quietly waiting somewhere. Or is it a hope? Thought, he thinks. Just a thought. He heads the other way and moves around a large desk in front of a wide reception wall that has no company name. Nothing.

He heads down a corridor of offices, the doors all standing open, the windows inside showing the tops of other buildings, the offices flashing by looking identical. Mid-corridor he stops at one. He stands in the doorway. It has a desk and a high-backed leather chair and a computer, with its screen dark. It has in-and-out trays with nothing going in or out and an empty pen holder on the desktop and a potted ficus standing in a corner. But there is not one personal item. And it’s the same in all the other offices, he’s certain. There is no sign of any other soul. He wants to look out at the Great Metropolis of Heaven, and he thinks to step to this window now, but he doesn’t. The absence of any apparent human touch pushes him away.

He turns and strides back along the corridor and past the reception desk and out the door and along to the elevator. He pushes the UP button and the elevator he arrived in opens up instantly. He steps in. He pushes 55.

And floor 55 turns out to be entirely unpartitioned and unfurnished, one vast carpeted space with wide, tall windows, and Heaven to its horizon is out there waiting for him. He crosses the floor, heading for the center of the far wall where he can see the bright concentration of morning light. East, he presumes.

Hatcher arrives at the window and draws close, his breath showing up faintly there, and he looks out: the sun is still low, where it’s rising, and he can see a horizon, at least a place where sight ends, and it seems lushly green at that far point. Hatcher stares directly at the sun — a liquid golden orb that appears more luminous than thermonuclear — and its light touches his eyes like a soft breeze. Hatcher looks sharply downward, and nearby is a clustering of lower high-rises, their roofs pristine and their glass facades crystalline, and farther out is a broad park, dense with trees — a park different from the one with his recliner, this being the opposite side of the city — and beyond the park is another neighborhood of freestanding mansions, from this height mostly dormers and pitched roofs and parapets and stacked chimney caps and turrets. And lifting his eyes beyond the mansions, Hatcher finds an abrupt end of the city. A rolling green landscape that he does not take in at once.

Instead, he looks back down on his new Great Metropolis. Something clearly noticeable is there but it waits, still, to claim his attention. Slicing through all that he is seeing of the city is a web of broad, immaculate thoroughfares, laid out straight and true, and he has been taking them in, these streets, as he notices the neighborhoods, but now he sags forward against the window with a realization. He presses his face there and lays his palms against the glass as he understands that the streets are utterly empty. He has seen this in one way or another over and over since he’s arrived, but only now has it finally accumulated into a deep and overwhelming and unmitigated conviction. This building is empty. All the buildings are empty. All the shops. All the houses. All the streets. Heaven is you, alone. I am alone.

Can this be? he asks inside his head. It is not a rhetorical question for himself. He is speaking to God, a thing he has not done in a long time. There is no answer. Not even in Heaven. It was not long ago that he skidded to this conclusion. No one is listening. No one. Alone, indeed. But there’s coffee and cheeseburgers and good weather and a good chair. Heaven. Somebody would assume he’s a happy man now. Somebody. He tries to remember who said something like that. Said he’s happier alone. Something. Someone. He doesn’t know who. He even feels himself losing hold of the notion that anyone at all said anything like that. He tracks the empty boulevards with his eyes now. He looks up and down and up and down. He searches every one of them. Someone else should be here. But he can’t remember any faces to imagine down there. He’s even losing an image of crowded streets of any kind. He gasps. He knocks his head against the glass. Hard. And again, harder. It doesn’t hurt at all.

And now he lifts his eyes beyond the city. That rolling countryside. There’s something about it. But it’s distant and he can’t see. And as soon as he thinks this, he realizes that there is an object standing next to him. He turns. A telescope. He steps behind and puts his eye to the viewer, and the instrument is already focused exactly where he wishes to look. And he sees 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. It is exactly the scene from his book, from his favorite book when he was little Hatchy, little little Hatchy, somebody’s perfect little nookykins. Somebody.

Hatcher rears back from the telescope and deep in his throat he makes a guttural grinding whatthefuckisgoingon sound, probably not heard before in Heaven. But no one is listening anyway. He puts his eye to the viewer once more. The truck. When he was a little boy reading this book over and over in the window seat in his room with the sun falling on the pages and when he was taking delight in that truck, he thought someone was driving it. Who? He can’t recall. It was part of the delight, once upon a time. For someone in particular to be driving. He looks at the truck. The truck is moving but it doesn’t seem to be any farther along on the road. It is moving when he looks at it, but when he compares it to the landscape, it is opposite the near edge of the cornfield. Which is where it was a moment ago. Okay. Okay.

Hatcher backs away from the window. He turns and he jogs across the wide floor and out into the hallway and he punches the elevator call button and the doors open and he gets in and he heads for the lobby, thinking somehow this place will grant his present wish.

And it does. In the form of a 2006 fire-engine red Maserati Spyder, Hatcher’s last car, sitting at the curb outside the skyscraper. Hatcher gets in, puts the top down, and starts the engine, revving the Hell out of it and thrilling to the red-line roar going up his accelerator leg and into his crotch. And he rips into gear and takes off, peeling down the street along the setback and fishtailing a right turn and screaming past the high-rises and through the park, and then the Italian Renaissance mansions and the Chateauesque mansions and the Beaux Arts mansions all vanish in a blur as he Maseratis through the empty streets of this city without stoplights, and he is into the countryside and he’s leaping the sweet little green hills and racing past the farmhouse and the barns, and the cornfield is up ahead and so is the blue truck, and Hatcher downshifts and he comes up fast on the back of the truck and he shifts down again and he brakes, and they are doing twenty, he in his Maserati and the bread truck.

The road is narrow. Too narrow to pass. And so they drive like this for a while and the cornfield does at last go by but then another cornfield begins and when that one is gone, there is another, and he can go on like this for as long as he wants, he realizes, following the blue bread truck through the perfect countryside. Hatcher can smell the bread for a moment. He has a warm lolling in his limbs. Now the air smells of fresh cut grass. He feels as if he’s sitting in his recliner on the top of the rise. Even the Maserati has stopped complaining about second gear.

Hatcher wonders: why am I doing this? Why did I race out here to catch the blue truck? It’s okay. It’s pleasant, following the truck. It’s very pleasant. And what’s that new smell? Teaberry gum. It smells like Teaberry gum out here. Whatever happened to Teaberry gum? And he knows if he opens the glove box, he will find packs of Teaberry gum. His head is so sweetly mellow he can hardly think. But some little unadjusted something in him cries out, in a wee tremulous voice: what the fuck?

He pounds his head against the steering wheel. No pain but he jars a little something loose: the driver of the bread truck. It’s about the driver. And Hatcher lays on the horn. He honks it loud and hard and he stops his car and he wants the truck to stop, and it’s Heaven, so he gets what he wants. The truck stops.

Hatcher gets out of his car and closes the door with a tight little thunk, and this sound thrills him as it always did. But he fights off the invitation to mellow out about that. He is standing in the middle of his childhood landscape. The car is ticking as loudly as his Krazy Kat clock with its big black eyes restlessly darting back and forth. And he knows what’s happening. He’s forgetting the ones in Hell. In Heaven, there’s no place for the memories of the damned. They have been judged. They have been placed where they belong in their own torment. The sharp shards of them that still stick in you are things that need to be plucked out. They would only fester. They are the sins of the world. They are the pain and the suffering and the imperfections and they are fading away, happily so, happily happily happily. Hatcher is forgetting everyone.

But not yet. He moves forward, heading for the cab of the truck. He passes before the BREAD and the smell of it fills him up so achingly full that he has to stop, he cannot move his legs, he is chewing the air, it is so thick with the smell of the bread, and he knows he can stand here for as long as he wants, he has eternity, he can linger for centuries chewing the smell of bread in the air and it will be as the blinking of an eye and it will only be Hatcher and the bread and the gentle sunlight. And that little voice again: fuck this, who’s driving? And Hatcher’s legs are moving again and he approaches the cab and he is panting, he is this far into Heaven and he is summoning up anxiety and he knows he needs it, he knows that when he fully lets go of the fear and the trembling and the pain, he will lose everyone forever, and his little Heaven voice pipes up that’s good, that’s good, you’re perfected at last and you are pleasing to the one who created you and that’s all you need but he stops by the panel truck door and his heart is pounding and that’s also good, that’s better for now.

The windows are tinted. He cannot see in. He clasps the door handle. And he knows the truck will be empty. There is no one else in Heaven. No one else. Surely the truck is driving itself. Neither was there a driver in the bread truck in the book in the window seat with the sunlight while Hatcher’s… someone was downstairs, and with his… other someone off somewhere… Hatcher pounds at his head with the heel of his hand, trying to remember. And he does. With his mother downstairs. With his father off somewhere. And when the father comes home, he will be worthy of Hell. And Hatcher twists the handle. He opens the bread truck door.

And his father is sitting there. The old man’s hands are clenching the steering wheel hard and he is dressed in a brown uniform with a hat on his head like a police patrolman’s hat and his face turns to Hatcher and the hat has BREAD written across it and Hatcher’s father says, “You crazy motherfucker what the fuck do you think you’re doing chasing me down and honking your fucking horn you motherfucker I have half a mind to jump out of this truck and kick your fucking ass.”

And Hatcher says, “It’s me, Dad. It’s just me.”

And the old man’s eyes narrow. He can’t quite focus his eyes. “Hatcher?” he says.

“Yes.”

“Where have you been?” his father says. “You’re all grown up.” But there are flames licking up from his father’s shirt collar now, and the face is dissolving, it’s vanishing in the flames, and it is gone, his father has gone back to Hell, and the bread man’s uniform crumples into the seat.

And Hatcher is filled with the smell of bread. And above him is a beautiful blue sky. And up the road is a perfect little village. And he wonders if perhaps there are even people there to give bread to. Hatcher reaches out and picks up the hat. He puts it on his head. He can drive away now in the bread truck. Drive away into eternity.

And on the outskirts of the Great and Placid Metropolis of Heaven, there is the sound of an engine. Not a bread truck. A Maserati. Wailing to the red line and racing like a sonofabitch into town, past the mansions, through the park, past the high-rises and the Great Skyscraper and past all the great shopping and great eating, and Hatcher McCord, along with the great automotive passion of his life, screams to a stop in front of Starbucks. And Hatcher jumps out of the car and he does not get his coffee, which is waiting for him, but instead he dashes up the block and he pushes through the doors of McDonald’s and he whisks past his Big Mac sitting in the center of the center table and past Ronald McDonald who says “Welcome” and Hatcher is around the order counter and one stride into the kitchen before he tosses a “Fuck you” over his shoulder to Ronald. And Hatcher races by the grills and the fryers and he is at the back door and wrenching its handle and it is heavy, this door, fucking heavy, but Hatcher finds the strength and he pulls and pulls and it’s getting easier and the door is open and he is beneath the glare and the buzz of the fluorescent light and dashing along the little back corridor as the door to Heaven thumps heavily and forever shut behind him, and he is opening one more door and he flings himself in, and he stops, panting, in the center of the floor of the only hamburger joint in Hell, and all along its baseboards, ten thousand cockroaches are cheering. Hatcher nods at them and they nod back.

He catches his breath. He is sweating, and his legs are cramping up. But it’s okay. Hatcher moves to the front door, and he opens it, and he steps out. Grand Peachtree Boulevard is jammed with the damned, and they are howling and they are cursing and they are flowing always onward toward something they want but can never name and can never have.

And Hatcher McCord, anchorman for the Evening News from Hell, opens his arms wide, and he cries out above the din, “I love you all.”