The hundred apartment buildings in the housing project float on a sea of concrete. Hatcher rounds the corner of Deborah’s building and enters the fifty-yard-wide margin reachable by jumpers from the balconies, a place called The Landing Strip by the denizens. It is splashed with dark stains. The crowds between the buildings mill about in clusters that shape up and fist fight or knife fight or simply scream and foam and rage and then break apart and form new clusters, always stumbling about in the shadow of the buildings, but never ever moving into The Landing Strip. So from the moment Hatcher turns the corner, he sees Deborah up ahead. He rushes toward her.
She lies broken in a widening pool of blood, her cheek pressed hard against the concrete, her eyes open, seemingly sightless but blinking, her arms at elbow-flared angles, her legs cracked and splayed but bent under her at the knees so that her back and butt are lifted slightly. Her left hand is twitching. Hatcher arrives beside her and kneels in her blood so he can extend a hand and gently palm the side of her head just above her ear. Her hair was always soft and thick, and it still is, though it is gray. She did not kill herself at the end of her mortal life. That she’s doing this now, over and over, makes his hand tremble against her.
“Debbie,” he says.
Her eyes move slightly toward him, and they close.
He does not know how to take this. But he keeps his hand on her, even as her blood continues to gather around his knees.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
Her eyes move beneath her closed lids as if she were dreaming. Hatcher and Deborah stay like this for a long while, until finally her blood stirs around him, even drawing itself out of his pants legs, and her body begins to jerk and shiver and the blood flows back into her and her body straightens and mends, and Hatcher takes his hand from her head as she moves and slowly flexes her limbs and finally gathers herself into a sitting position. He shifts from his knees and sits beside her.
She says, though softly, “Leave it to you to show up when I’m at my worst.”
“It was unintentional,” he says.
“It was instinctive,” she says.
She still isn’t sounding as angry as Hatcher would expect. But he has no answer for this.
“Sorry for what?” she says.
“Whatever I did to us.”
Deborah humphs at this. “I hear that in the hallways around here once in a while, and it always surprises me.”
“Hear what?”
“‘I’m sorry.’”
Hatcher looks away, beyond the Landing Strip. There are skirmishes all over. Immediately before him, several gangs of young men, black and white, have been forced to swap some of their past styles and are murderously fighting over it: the whites are in the zoot suits and the hoodies and the sagging pants and the bucket hats and the neck bling and the do-rags and the dreadlocks, and the blacks are in the leisure suits and the chinos and the boaters and the Hush Puppies and the ascots and the crew cuts. Beyond them are old people jostling and wailing and cursing. And Hatcher recognizes an instance of what he has come to understand as his own arrogant self-absorption, for it never occurred to him that others in Hell are apologizing. Surely Hell is never having to say you’re sorry. But Deborah apparently has heard it — no doubt because here in the projects, the crowds are always upon her — and so, once in a while, someone says I’m sorry, even as they think Satan is listening in, even as they expect to be punished for it. Hatcher’s chest fills with a complicated warmth about these people before him now, though they are fighting and cursing each other. They are struggling on, even in Hell, and sometimes they regret what they do or what they have done, and they say so. Hatcher is breathless now over all of them, and he turns to Deborah and he lifts his hand to touch her head again. She bats his hand away, though lightly.
“What are you doing here?” she says.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” he says.
“Oh please. You think I’d ever wonder about that? I mean here.” She flips her chin at the apartment building.
“Trying to figure out what I’m doing in Hell.”
“Read my book.”
“I did. I didn’t believe it.”
“Then I can’t help you.”
This isn’t what Hatcher expected. He expected her to defend the truth of what she wrote. He expected a heated renewal of all that. “You don’t believe it either,” he says.
“Of course I did,” she says.
“Did. But not now.”
“You were a shit.”
“I believe that.”
“Are a shit.”
“Just not that particular shit,” he says.
“What difference does it make anymore?” she says.
“I don’t know.”
He lifts his hand again toward her.
“Stop,” she says.
He stops.
“Go away now,” she says.
Hatcher turns his face from her. He sees a young black man in an Arrow button-down shirt and Birkenstocks and a Brylcreemed pompadour who is faced off with a young white man in Ben Davis gorilla cuts and a Michael Jordan jersey and dreads. They are pushing each other in the chest.
“Please,” Deborah says.
Hatcher does not intend to ignore her. He just feels utterly inert inside. He can’t bring himself to ask the questions he wants to ask. But he can’t bring himself simply to walk away now either. All he finds he can do is focus on the two young men. Just as he expects the thing between them to escalate, the young black simply grabs one of the white youth’s dreads and tugs it, but not hard, and he shakes his head in outsized disgust.
“Hatcher,” Deborah says, knowing he won’t answer. She closes her eyes and her shoulders droop. He has come to her in Hell simply as a reminder that her insignificance is eternal. Who better.
The young white reaches out and musses up the black’s pompadour and jerks his hand away, exaggeratedly wiping at the grease. The two of them look at each other and start to laugh.
Deborah hears the laughter. Her irritation at Hatcher fades and she turns to the rare sound. They will pay, she knows. The two young men stop and give each other an oh-shit look, and they take a deep breath, and the hair on each of their heads bursts into flames.
Hatcher turns from the two men flailing in pain. Does it have to go that way?