All the parts of Hatcher’s body are beginning to stir now. Lulu puts her hand on the great mound of her distended belly. She smiles, then turns her face, leans off the side of the bed, and throws up for a while. Just as certain physical sufferings in Hell exceed the power of language to describe, so too does succubus vomit, which is just as well. Though Jackson Pollock, in a circumstance similar to Hatcher’s, having occasion a little further along in this process to observe the effusion of Lulu’s sister Lily, remarked, at its color and form on the floor, “Holy shit. I am profoundly humbled.”
This has always been a poignant, though somewhat delusional, time for Lulu. After her ersatz morning sickness passes, she lies back and puts a hand once more on her belly as, within, a reconstitution begins, in this case Hatcher’s. She begins to hum “Sympathy for the Devil”, though softly, even sweetly, not the Rolling Stones version at all, and Hatcher can hear her from inside, as once did, in this same circumstance, the briefly famous, newly arrived British reality-TV music critic, Simon Cowell, who cried out, desperate to curry Lulu’s favor, “Brilliant, you’ve made it your own.” And within Lulu: My little baby, how boisterous you are, I know you will be a girl this time, I can feel it. A mother knows. I can feel your sweet downy wings trying to unfurl, but that will have to wait just a little longer, my darling, there will be time for that. I will teach you to fly in good time. We will rise together into the hot, sulfurous sky, and we will soar, you close at my side, and we will fly to the great city, and as we approach, I will show you the men below, scattering at the passing of our shadows — how adorable your little shadow is — and we will find a small and lively one for you already here in Hell — a Genghis Khan or a Yasser Arafat or a Sammy Davis Jr. — and you will begin. And you will learn, my daughter. Through them. You will understand who you are. It’s what men are for. And so I will also find you a small and thoughtful one — a Voltaire or a Mahatma Gandhi or a Jean Paul Sartre — they are not as lively but they will give you depth — wait until you swallow Jean Paul’s sweet brain, my darling, he knows a thing or two about your world — and you will move on from him, of course, you will grow and grow and you will have full-size kings and billionaires and serial killers — but you will always have me to guide you, you won’t have some desperate old bitch of a mother who didn’t teach you a thing worth knowing and then grasps at everything that’s yours. Hell is other succubi, my darling.
And inside Lulu, as Hatcher begins quickly now to reassemble, he also considers parenthood: Summer, my little child of dumb-shit flower children wannabes — that was your mother and me — we went a little mad and you suffered for that, and then we went abruptly sane and you suffered for that. And Angie, my little child of a face on TV, my TV face was so much less loving than Mr. Rogers’s, so much less charming than Kermit the Frog’s. How could I compete with them when I had to bring you the four-car pile-up on I-70 or the fog at Lambert Airport or the latest from the St. Louis County Council meeting? I wonder if I would’ve been better for you both if you’d been boys. But no. My distraction, my obliviousness would have hurt you even more deeply. As girls you had your mother, who was more important for you, and I was glad for that, I excused myself for that. I did what I did to become what I became and I am so fucking sorry.
And Hatcher is whole in body again, though naked and curled tightly into a fetal position inside a succubus in a double-wide in Hell. But not inside a succubus for long. Lulu stops humming the Rolling Stones and spreads her legs and props herself up on her elbows and lifts her hips and she begins to daaa-daaa-daaa-da-dummmm the brass fanfare for dawn in Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” At this very moment, somewhere in the Great Metropolis, Strauss and Friedrich Nietzsche and Stanley Kubrick are locked in a tiny room together listening to the 190 decibel version of the same passage for the ten thousandth straight time. At the other end of the room, Lilith rolls her eyes at Lulu’s flair for the dramatic. She jiggles the new snow globe in her hand. Hatcher’s own special snow swirls around a small, hand-painted plastic bust of the anchorman. And Hatcher himself suddenly feels a squeezing upon him, and his curled body begins to move.
Lulu stops da-dumming, because even succubi suffer in Hell and this is one of those times, with every cell in Lulu’s body feeling as if it is in a vise and being squeezed to pulp, and she screams wordlessly for a while until she manages, “She’s crowning!”
“It’s just that man who was here,” Lilith says.
“Fuck you,” Lulu cries.
“Pant pant blow,” Lilith says.
“Fuck you,” Lulu reiterates, and to distract herself from the impression that her body is being split up the middle by a white-hot gutting knife, she briefly does her best to imitate the horn section of the Berlin Philharmonic, returning to Strauss to introduce what she expects to be her daughter into the world.
Hatcher’s whole head emerges between Lulu’s legs, and Lulu pauses her pushing and stops the music. Hatcher looks at the ceiling and tries to squinch the muck from his eyes.
Lulu pushes again, and as Hatcher’s shoulders pry her open and as the gutting knife renews its work with a special focus on her treasured private parts, she screams “I’ll make you pay for this forever, you little bitch!”
And Hatcher moves faster and faster, torso and hips and legs all folded together, and with a splashing all about him and a loud sucking-shut behind him, he slides onto the bed between Lulu’s legs.
Lulu falls back flat. Both mother and faux child pant for a while, the latter slowly trying to move his stiffened limbs and the former renewing her pledge to make this daughter of hers forever regret having put her mother through this torture.
Finally, though, Lulu is ready to face the little bitch and she struggles to sit up, just as Hatcher has struggled to sit up between her legs, and they come face to face.
Lulu says, “Oh fuck. Not again,” and she fists up her right hand and punches Hatcher square on the nose. He flies across the room, landing about halfway along, and slicked up by Lulu’s bodily fluids, he skims the rest of the way to Lilith, who calmly lifts one fat and furry foot — pedicured meticulously, however, in French tips — to bring Hatcher to a halt.
The trip back to the city has certain uncomfortable complications. The sun has risen. It was a short night, this time. And Lulu no longer clasps Hatcher to her body in flight. As they fly off, she holds him painfully by the scruff of the neck, at arm’s length, with him dangling full-frontally over the passing landscape. And she’s in no rush. And she begins to sing. Defying the fact that she’s technically pretty nearly a baritone, in a key intended for a pop-diva soprano, failing painfully but still succeeding in conveying a sobby self-pity, she sings: “All by myself. Don’t wanna be all by myself anymore.”
She swoops low through a dry riverbed, and in the broken prow of a ship that resembles the Titanic, a woman stands shackled and wrapped in furs before the hot sun and she is herself singing — compelled to, as a matter of fact — about how her heart will go on forever, no doubt wishing otherwise, and when she sees Lulu and Hatcher, she stops her song and looks up and is unable to look away. Lulu circles her quite closely and continues to circle until Lulu has sung “All by Myself” six times, from tremulous beginning to excruciatingly botched glory-note climax to simulated studio fade, and from the first bars of the first go-around, Hatcher recognizes the singer on the ship prow, and whatever she is suffering for these thirty-one minutes and eighteen seconds, Hatcher would argue that being dangled naked before Celine Dion is worse.