“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.”