The door to the apartment just before his is standing open. The place is utterly empty but for two overstuffed chairs sitting side by side in the center of the floor, slightly angled toward each other. Mr. and Mrs. Hopper. Howard and Peggy. From Yonkers. Hatcher finds his legs growing heavy, dragging to a halt, as they always do when he passes this door. He stops. He nods. Howard and Peggy look at him. Today they are paunchy and creviced and stooped, as they were in their retirement years in Boca Raton.
“Good evening,” Hatcher says.
“I’m with my wife,” Howard says.
“He is,” she says.
“Forever,” he says.
“And I’m with you,” she says.
Howard makes a little choking sound deep in his throat. Tears begin to stream down Peggy’s face, though she makes no effort to wipe them away.
“Excuse him,” she says to Hatcher. “He is always very rude. Good evening.”
“You didn’t say it either,” Howard says.
“You didn’t say it first.”
“How was I first? Why wasn’t it you who didn’t say it first?”
Hatcher is happy to find his feet unsticking from where they are, his legs lightening. “Good-bye,” he says, but the Hoppers are unaware of him, debating on about each other’s culpability.
He moves to the next door, his own, and he goes in.
Anne sits on a cane back chair beside the heavy oak kitchen table. She has reverted to wearing Tudor dress, a gown of forest green velvet with hugely puffed oversleeves of gold brocade and a wide, deep neck-line showing her dusky skin, but her naked upper chest rises to her throat and then ceases: her head sits on the kitchen table looking at her own body.
“Anne,” Hatcher whispers. “Not again.”
She raises her hands and frames her head but does not lift it. She simply swivels her head on the tabletop to look at him. Her enormous black eyes flutter and focus on him and his knees go weak enough to make him nearly collapse there from his desire, and behind his own eyes, he ponders their first moments: She came to me wearing this voluminous green velvet dress, barely fitting into the tiny studio at Broadcast Central to tape the Why-You’re-Here, and she turned those black eyes on me and her eyes were some unidentified deep-space phenomenon, they had a gravitational pull certainly, but I didn’t fall into them, they simply stood me up and roused every rousable part, and they gave off light somehow — a dark light that would not lose itself in the crimson light of Hell — and they gave off heat — but a heat quite palpably different from the ghastly ongoing ambient heat of this place — all of which instantly created in me a thing, a feeling, whose name I cannot remember — and I know this forgetfulness is because I’m in Hell — and she sits and we are ready and she begins to speak about her husband and the church and slander, and the voice of the Queen of England is firm and hard-edged but her eyes are deep and soft and she keeps them on mine and will not take them from me, so I slide closer to the camera but I do not stop her, I do not ask her to look into the lens — I want her to keep looking only at me — and now she speaks of the children she carried in her body and how all but one died there and the one was unacceptably a girl and when she speaks of the children, the voice softens, softens and breaks, and I am in Hell — this is a thing I’ve learned is foremost in all our minds to the exclusion of everything else — the I, the I, the I am, the I am in Hell — but at that moment in our first meeting it strikes me hard: she also is in Hell, this Anne Boleyn of the darkly celestial eyes that will not move from mine, she is in Hell and I ache for that, I want to take her up and carry her somewhere else
And as these words run deeply in Hatcher, Anne’s head sits on the tabletop and looks across the room at the anchorman of the Evening News from Hell and she considers another man: I was but twelve years old when I saw Henry youthful and lank, as I saw him today, and he was the author of all the lies that destroyed me, I know that now, and I am sorry to have been found thus, separated from my body again, by this other man who has entered my life and who powerfully enters into every life in every dwelling place in this nether realm — though it is my understanding that all the others do not experience him directly, as I do — I have learned many new things and ways over the seeming eternity I have already been here — I have learned that a man like this has more power than an earthly king — how Henry would have ruled all the world if he could have but strode into every dwelling each day — and I went to this new man at his bidding, and though I have also learned to wear my cheap, loin-crushing jeans and my shapeless T-shirts with the itchy labels at the back of the neck, on that day it was given me to wear the sort of dress to which I was accustomed in my earthly life and this was a comfort as I came before Lord Hatcher McCord’s devices, and even as I told my story, as I have done so many times in my own mind this past eternity, I watched him, Lord McCord, his eyes were the gray-blue of an autumn London sky and they clouded and ached for me — I could see that clearly — they ached for me, for me, for me here in this place, for me, for this solitary, beheaded me
And with this, Anne finds she can pick up her head, which she does, and she sets it upon her neck. Hatcher is happy for this. He knows how things work. Looking into Anne’s eyes he had a feeling that one might consider tender or pleasurable, but there is always a dreadful mitigation. He was filled with desire for her, but that desire, after all — he is acutely aware — was while her severed head was sitting on a tabletop. Now she is restored. She closes her eyes and lifts her chin and swivels her head, first to the right and then slowly swinging back to the left. This is a graceful movement, and he is glad to be in this kitchen, and he is glad she sits before him, but now that she is whole, the rush of his desire for her subsides. He feels it sliding away, and he stifles a curse at Satan so that he might avoid worse, though surely Satan also recognizes the thing being stifled, and surely Satan doesn’t have a policy of withholding suffering just because you can suppress your inner criticism of him. He can’t give a rat’s ass about that, surely.
Hatcher crosses to the table, and he draws the other chair near to Anne, and he sits beside her. She is still swiveling her head back and forth. There is a scurrying behind him, the roaches gathering to listen to the conversation. This is a curious thing. The place is full of roaches, but Anne is oblivious to them, given the century of her upbringing. And as a boy, and even later as a man, he himself never had a serious aversion to the other creatures living around him, no matter how traditionally despised. He once appalled Naomi in their apartment at the Dakota by gently gathering up a large, sluggish, confused, dumb-shit roach from the bathtub with a paper towel and carrying it to the window and setting it free.
He looks over his shoulder now. The countertop beside the sink is full of roaches, a thousand roaches, all of them sitting up on their back legs like begging pups, their heads cocked. Hatcher puts on his best Evening News from Hell voice. “Good evening,” he says to the roaches. “Tonight, a kitchen table conversation and then one more futile attempt at satisfying sex.”
And in a chorus of tiny, brittle voices, the roaches cry, “Poopy butt.”
Then they laugh.
Hatcher turns to Anne. She is still swiveling her restored head, humming a bit of a pavane from her youth, hearing lutes and tambourines. He touches her hand just as, in Anne’s mind, the courtyard of the Low Countries palace of Princess Margaret, filled with dancing figures and music, dissolves in screaming as a baited bear breaks its chains and charges in, ripping flesh and spattering blood with the wide swiping of its claws. Anne screams.