Hell (8 page)

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

She closes her eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tonight the mattress is gravelly hard. He ignores this.

They have gotten this far before.

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

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

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

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

“You’re pulling my hair,” she says.

“Sorry.”

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

“I’m sorry.”

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

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

She turns her eyes to him.

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

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

He pulls his arm out.

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

“Someone’s singing,” Anne says.

“They’re weeping,” Hatcher says.

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

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

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

“That little trilling sob.”

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

“It sounds like Mary Ellen crying.”

“I couldn’t hear.”

“Listen.”

And they both listen. But the alley is silent.

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

“We were trying,” Anne says.

“Yes.”

“I’m actually sleepy,” she says.

“You’re never sleepy,” he says.

“I am now.”

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

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

Then, rare as well, Hatcher falls asleep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

“Look at him.”

“That’s why?”

“His mother put him in that.”

“How do you know his mother did it?”

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

The younger waiter nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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