Hatcher’s reading slows as he realizes what he’s saying. But he doesn’t know how to adjust this, and these same countless millions face worse pain in the street every day. Still, he thinks to try to improvise away from Beelzebub’s script. But the worst is already out, and he ends up simply continuing to read: “So our new entertainment reporter will expose the private lives of those who have actually accomplished something in the wider world so you can feel superior, no matter for how brief a time or with what pathetic self-delusion. Now here he is, the former Cyberspace Sultan of Self-Righteousness, the Swami of Superiority, the Parasite of Prominence…” And the text ends with no name following, not even his screen name, which he is said to remember. But the thirty-two monitors cut to a man in a crowded street with a microphone. His face is hidden by a black and white keffiyeh wrapped sloppily into a terrorist’s mask with a square, stubble-chinned white man’s jaw exposed at the bottom.
“Yes, Hatcher, hello. I can hear you,” the reporter says in a faintly poncy, British whine, “Mineisbigger reporting. But not only can I hear you, I can see you as well, as it turns out. This morning the denizens moving along Peachtree Street Street Avenue Street had a bit of shock when a certain quite famous Evening News from Hell presenter appeared, flying overhead, stark naked. Fortunately someone had a camera and we have some splendid footage of the presenter presenting his genitals. I daresay you’ll recognize them, Hatcher. They are, of course, yours.”
And Mineisbigger goes on for quite a long while with extensive footage and snarky analysis, but Hatcher sees none of it. He lays his hands flat on the desktop before him and lowers his face just enough so he can’t see the screens, and he concentrates on making his mind — his true private part in Hell — go blank. He does hear Mineisbigger’s coloratura shrieks of agony at the end of the report, as the reporter has likely burst into flames, but Hatcher does not even lift his face to watch.
Dick Nixon and his Cadillac are at the curb in front of Broadcast Central when Hatcher emerges with a camcorder. Hatcher’s first thought is Great, we’ll make good time and he doesn’t catch himself until he is in the backseat and Dick is revving his engine and Hatcher realizes he’ll get everything he wants done this day only because a wide swath of denizens will be tossed and battered and crushed by the former president’s merciless driving. Hatcher tells himself If he weren’t driving me, he’d be driving someone else; if it weren’t Dick Nixon torturing them, it would be someone or something else. And to his credit, Hatcher realizes how, in the freedom of his mind, he is invoking a ghastly classic line of human reasoning. He also hears how that line of reasoning is directed at himself but is also offered as a defense to some higher authority who is presumed to be keeping spiritual accounts for reward and punishment. Will using Dick Nixon to get around in this world keep him from qualifying for the next Harrowing? Indeed, how many of the millions out there in the streets of Hell are here in part because they voted for Dick Nixon? Am I, in my inner freedom, going mad? Am I, in my freedom, simply renewing my credentials for eternal damnation? Or am I, in my freedom, making progress toward an everlasting release from this suffering? These seem to be familiar questions from another life. But just moments before he begins, in frustration, to jabber nonsense sounds aloud in the backseat, Hatcher goes Aw fuckit, I don’t know what’s right, but I want to see Deborah and let Anne do what she needs to do. So Hatcher gives Dick Nixon the address of his second wife, and Dick burns rubber and takes off. And having made that decision, Hatcher’s mind turns to another, smaller-scale anxiety, which expresses itself in a vague appeal to that vague spiritual accountant: Oh please don’t let her have watched the news today.
Hatcher’s dead and damned second wife lives in a vast, stark, modernist concrete public high-rise housing complex, its dim, jammed corridors a constant, torturously high-decibel cacophony of hip hop and easy listening, klezmer and salsa, grand opera and sea chanteys and blues, cantopop and Nederpop and Hindipop and twee. But Hatcher barely notices all this. He is focused now on his quest. He moves through the crowd on the fourteenth floor fluttering his powder-blue minion tie before him, which readily clears a path until he is standing at the door of Deborah Louise Becker, who remained Deborah Louise Becker even after her marriage to Hatcher McCord, which shortly followed his divorce from Mary Ellen McCord, which was put into motion after several months of a covert affair with Deborah Louise Becker, which began with their having sex on his office couch immediately after she’d interviewed him for New York magazine, which was also the first time they’d ever met. Who had initiated the sex on that day and what exactly had been done was a matter of considerable — though, in Hatcher’s view, wildly inaccurate — detail in Deborah’s post-divorce memoir, Jerk. Her subsequent novel, Fool, though more advanced in its irony — the “fool” being somewhat ambiguous, applicable in different ways to both the fictional husband-anchorman and wife-journalist — had a strikingly similar depiction of its couple’s first sex scene, on his office couch after a magazine interview.
For all the strident criticism of Hatcher in Deborah’s books, which he did read out of self-defense, painful though it was, he still needs to knock on this door. He feels in her books she got him wrong, but he suspects that the actual process of writing helped create the distortions. In person, perhaps he can get at something legitimate she knows about him. Because his mother also got him wrong, of course. As much as part of him wants to believe she didn’t, she did. He was — is — far from perfect. You think? his voice below his thinking suddenly says. You’re in Hell, asshole. I’d fucking say so. Hatcher knocks at Deborah’s door.
There is no answer. Hatcher is afraid she’s out somewhere in the street. He knocks again. Nothing.
“Deborah?” he says, loud, over the music all around him.
Nothing.
“Deborah?” he calls, louder.
“She’s not in there,” a woman’s voice says, just behind Hatcher.
Hatcher turns. She’s very old and stooped and bony and bewhiskered and her skin is jaundiced the color of a heavy smoker’s teeth. She sees Hatcher’s tie, and her eyes narrow and she pulls back a bit.
“It’s all right,” Hatcher says. “I was married to her.”
“Which demon of a husband were you?” she says.
“Her second.”
“The one on the television set.”
“That one.” Hatcher did not keep up with Deborah after they split, though he was aware she’d married and divorced once more after him, having also had a too-young marriage before him. He feels a brief pulse of pleasure at her apparent ranting about husbands other than him. He wishes they’d rated books. “Do you know where she is?” he says.
“She threw herself off her balcony about five minutes ago,” the old woman says.
“What?” His first thought is that she did it in response to seeing him naked on TV.
“I live next door,” the old woman says. “She does this almost every day.”
“Thanks,” Hatcher says, telling his inner voice to stuff it, as it is about to give him a hard time for thinking his naked body could inspire a suicide for any possible reason. He focuses on Deborah lying broken outside and he moves off quickly.
The old woman watches him go: Leap, yes leap, my friend, I have leapt too, we all of us in the balcony rooms leap and leap and O if I could but seal off that end of my room, the terrible open end, the wide sky beyond, I dream of my cell in the convent, the narrow walls, the high, small, knifeprick of sky, the bed, the bowl, the cup, only these. And I remember — though it has been a long long time now — the days of my one husband, my own demon, the baron of… where? Sussex. Yes, some baron of Sussex. It is torture, this fading of my memory. O if I could but picture his face more clearly so I could hate him all the more. My husband who put me aside with lies so I was left with only death or the cloister before me. And the ringing takes up, the ringing in my head: the Sanctus bell, the Host rising, the only man’s body for my last many years, His holy body. He was my last husband, who looked the other way, I always thought, whenever I laid my mortal body down with the body of my Abbess in the warming house in winter where we covered ourselves in ash, and in the granary in summer where the wheat clung to us in our sweat. But even my last husband put me aside in the end, in spite of my prayers in the final moments to be forgiven. And though it’s true that even as I prayed, if I’d had the strength and the chance I would have sought her sweet kisses once more, He should still have forgiven this body of mine with its terrible weakness, for His Father created my body this way and if His Father could not resist creating it thus, how could I resist thus living in it?