“Pathetic,” Lily says, and it’s clear to Hatcher she’s referring to more than his refusal of a treat.
He just keeps on moving, toward Beelzebub’s inner office. The number-two demon sees Hatcher coming and he rises from behind his desk. “Hello, my boy. I’m very pleased with the J. Edgar stuff. I do like a good epiphany, you should excuse the expression.”
“Thanks,” Hatcher says.
“It’s Clinton airing today?”
“Bill. Yes.”
“And the other Clinton?”
“She’s coming up.”
“Splendid. Do they blame each other?”
“No.”
“Ah. Too bad.”
“I’ve found out where Henry VIII is located,” Hatcher says. “I’d like to do him. He’s got lots of reasons to understand why he’s here, but it’ll be interesting to see which ones are on his mind.”
“Well well well,” Beelzebub says. “Your girlfriend’s old flame. That should be painful for you, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Good. You intrigue me, McCord.”
“I need a car.”
“You got it. I like what you’re doing with this series. Self-reflection is hell.” He chuckles.
Beelzebub doesn’t go out of his way to give compliments, and hearing this one gives Hatcher an idea. So he says, “You want me to clear each one with you? There are sometimes targets of opportunity.”
Beelzebub gives this only a flicker of a thought. Hatcher feels keenly the power of his secret: this is going to work because Bee-bub can’t imagine Hatcher feeling free to have a covert agenda inside his head.
“I’ll put Dick Nixon at your disposal for the series. Anytime.”
Hatcher restrains his elation, but he does flip Beelzebub a jaunty little salute, in effect dismissing himself.
Beelzebub raises a hand to stop him. “One other thing. You’ve got a new entertainment reporter. He’s been cooking for a while, but I think he’s ready for work. He was the mastermind behind an Internet gossip site specializing in Manhattan media gossip. Then he moved up to celebritygenitals.com and was shot dead by a rapper with a tiny dick.”
“Who is he?” Hatcher says.
“I’d rather not say. He can still only remember his screen name, and I’m enjoying that.”
Having been stopped once, Hatcher waits. Beelzebub says, “Go. Go.”
Hatcher does. Lily is staring thoughtfully into her box, and he tries to move by her quickly and quietly. But as he’s passing, Lily lifts the box toward him. There are only two left. Milk chocolate balls. She says, “Please.”
He hurries past her, saying, “No thanks.”
“They’re presidential,” she says.
And Hatcher, who should be interested in the way the nation went immediately after his demise, hustles down the hall trying to think of anything but.
In the commercial break just before the Clinton “Why Do You Think You’re Here,” Hatcher ponders how painful it might indeed be, later this afternoon, when he takes Anne to Henry. But he also finds himself wondering if he might get a little spiritual credit for the act, something to begin to qualify him for a one-way ticket at the next Harrowing. That thought immediately seems pathetic to him, but it lingers, working on him, nonetheless. It’s why he’s seeking out his wives, after all, and he’s already planning to use the car to find another one, Deborah, who is nearby.
And now he’s back on air and he’s introducing the Clinton piece, and his mind is so thoroughly his own again that he can exercise a talent from his mortal professional life: he can roll out the appropriate broadcast-ready words from his mouth while his mind is somewhere else entirely. So as he does his introduction flawlessly, his thoughts slide back to how pathetic he is trying to do a thing or two to qualify himself to be taken out of Hell, and then he thinks no, it’s not pathetic at all, it’s another example of his self-important arrogance, that he expects to make a couple of selfless gestures and muscle ahead of all the great religious figures waiting in line to get out of Hell.
But Bill Clinton is on thirty-two of the monitors now, and on the central four is Hatcher, beginning to listen to this man, intently, as he always did. Bill is sweating in his cheap hotel room, in his shirtsleeves, his tie askew, and after Hatcher has asked, “Why do you think you’re here?” Bill looks sharply away, toward the door, and says, “Is that someone?” And he immediately answers his own question. “No. It’s nothing.”
Then Bill Clinton composes himself and looks into the camera, and he smiles a small, sneery, Elvis Presley smile, and he says, “The short answer is: Satan is a Republican. But before they stuck me in this room to wait, I personally saw Kenneth Starr around, and Rush Limbaugh, and Newt Gingrich, and quite a few of the others, so I’m afraid that dog won’t hunt. Therefore, taking this hotel room into consideration, and what it is I find myself waiting for, and trying to be honest about what the ‘is’ is, I’d be inclined to say I’m here because I wanted… what’s the word? Let’s see… I must be getting old, not to think of that word. Let’s say warm affection. That’s all I ever wanted with all the women. I need a lot of warm affection. And as for the sex? Well, in the most intense parts of that, I never inhaled. So it wasn’t about the sex.”
Bill stops talking for a long moment. He tries the Elvis smile, briefly, but it soon fades. Then he says, “What’s the point of lying in Hell? Especially to myself. Why I’m here wasn’t about me wanting sex. But it wasn’t about… that other thing, either, which is maybe why I can’t even remember the word. I’m not stupid. If I was after either of those, I would’ve said to Paula Jones, for instance, when she came to my hotel room in Little Rock, ‘Darling, I am in a sexless marriage without… warm affection, and I adore that remarkable nose of yours.’ That nose being the thing she has no doubt always hated in her face. She would’ve been in my bed in nothing flat, ready to give me both sex and affection, and she never would’ve spoken a word about it. But the truth is, with her and with all of them, it was really about the moment when I knew what I was going to do and they didn’t, and it was about the next moment, when I dropped my pants or grabbed their tits and they gasped. It was about the exercise of power. So I suppose that’s it. I’m here for the same reason that when I was sixteen and I shook John Kennedy’s hand in the White House Rose Garden, I knew I would do anything to have what he had, and I mean the power. And it’s for the same reason that if a woman ever does walk through that door over there, I will rise and I will face her and I will drop my pants, and being as it’s Hell, I know I will pay for that big-time, but I will still do it.”
Then it’s back to Hatcher, and he is happy to start the segue into the final feature, actually helped for the moment by the teleprompter, which does make sense just often enough to get the news from one segment to another. Reading instead of improvising makes it even easier for Hatcher’s mind to drift while he speaks, as he retains just enough awareness to realize if the teleprompter is about to take him way off course. And so he goes over his plan again to head straight to Deborah after the broadcast, as he reads, “That was the former President of the United States, Bill Clinton. And I know there are countless millions of you out there asking the same question, ‘Why am I here?’ Even if you were quiet, abject failures, even if you never amounted to enough in your mortal life to make the slightest public mark on human history, you have to wonder why.”