“He’s insufferable,” Anne says.
“You sound more and more like him.”
“He complains all the time.”
“About his member?”
“He weeps for quill and ink.”
“Please.”
“His hard drive keeps crashing and he loses his plays.”
“We all have to keep up,” Hatcher says.
“If only you could,” she says.
They fall silent. They are each deciding whether to try now. It’s less bad when they don’t talk first, though that brings its own problems, of course. The night will go on. Sleep in Hell is rare and brief and fitful. And they both know that once Anne finds herself in full Tudor garb, she tends to unlayer herself only very slowly. Not now.
Anne puts her hand on Hatcher’s. “It’s Satan,” she says.
“I adore your head,” he says.
“In its place,” she says.
Hatcher sits in the kitchen after Anne has gone into the other room. The TV is on now. It’s the stretch between news broadcasts, and the same made-back-on-earth episode of a commentary show called The O’Reilly Factor has been running over and over for a long while now, full of intense shared sneerings between the emotionally gaunt Bill O’Reilly and a gaunter guest named Ann Coulter. These were opinionators in Hatcher’s time, but he never watched them. He ignored most of the rightist ranters. These two are in Hell now but are banned from all but earthly reruns. He understands they arrived together, locked, according to Carl Crispin’s report, in a coital embrace in the first class suite of a crashed superjumbo Air-bus. This show will continue to run to the exclusion of all else but the news for a long while, Hatcher knows. It replaced the long run of an episode of Gilligan’s Island, wherein Gilligan bumps his head and subsequently sees everything upside down.
But now this iteration of the O’Reilly episode ends, and Hatcher turns his face toward the sound of the TV. The news will return for a one-minute spot. Beelzebub puts on his most dulcet tone and says, “And now the News Digest from Hell, with Jessica Savitch.” Hatcher hurts for Jessica already.
“Good evening,” she says. “Good evening.”
In his mind, he can see her face constrict, as it does every time. She lets the other two good-evenings pass, and then — he understands just how her brain is compelled to work — the good-evenings end, and she expects news text to scroll up, and she reads by reflex.
“Poopy butt,” Jessica Savitch says. “Poopy butt.” Hatcher shakes his head sadly. He can hear Jessica make a strangling sound in the next room. Then she improvises. “Motherfuckers,” she cries. “Motherfuckers. Can’t you motherfuckers act like professionals?”
Hatcher knows the answer to her question. He thinks of poor Carl. And he wonders how Carl went wrong on the Harrowing story. Carl’s ongoing torment — designed by Satan, of course, not only to torment Carl but Hatcher as well — could have deep ironies built in. Perhaps Carl was made to lie about lying. Hatcher rises. All right. He’ll find Peachtree Way and Lucky Street for himself. He bangs his perpetually bruised thigh on the corner of the kitchen table and moves toward the door. “I’m going out for a while,” he calls to Anne.
“Motherfucker,” Anne calls in return, but rather sweetly, in a Tudor sense perhaps.
Hatcher hopes that the Hoppers’ door is closed so he can just move past without pausing. But his legs drag him to a stop, and he looks in.
They are sitting in their chairs.
They are still arguing. They both glance his way, but Peggy finishes her point to Howard, “If you looked forward to being alone for eternity, how did we end up in Boca together?”
“Boca wasn’t forever,” Howard says.
“It felt like it.”
“Now you complain.”
“I thought all I ever did was complain, to hear you tell it.”
“And where would you have gone if not to Boca?”
“To my sister’s.”
“Without me.”
“Of course without you.”
“To Scranton, Pennsylvania, you’d go?”
“Yes, to Scranton.”
“Instead of Florida.”
Hatcher struggles to lift his feet, to put one foot in front of the other and just keep going.
“You’re doing it again,” Peggy says.
“What?”
“You’re being rude to the famous TV personality.”
“Me rude? You talk about him in the third person right in front of him. You think he’s deaf?”
Peggy turns her face to Hatcher and she says, her voice abruptly faint, “He had feelings for me once.”
There is a long moment of silence. Both Hoppers are looking at Hatcher, though they are seeing through him to a slow page-turning of images from their life together. Howard’s voice also has waned. “Who said so?”
“You did.”
They fall silent once more. Hatcher struggles to move.
“Yeah, but what feelings?” Howard says, low.
Peggy looks at him. She struggles with something in her mind. “I can’t think of the word,” she says.
And Hatcher can move. He does. He walks off without a word. He puts the Hoppers behind him. Even in the dark he can see that his alley is wide now, and at the far end is the orange glow of light from the Parkway.
Hatcher McCord, anchorman for the Evening News from Hell, descends the staircase of his back alley apartment, picks his way through moaning shapes in the dark, and approaches the tumult of Grand Peachtree Parkway. He intends voluntarily to take a long walk through Hell. He will do this for the sake of a story. Sometimes in his head, when things get particularly intimidating, Hatcher runs bits of voice-over narration to his afterlife. This impulse he’s now following, for instance, the passage from his own neighborhood to Peachtree Way and Lucky Street, is intimidating. Of course, Satan knows what he’s doing. Satan probably is the one who’s doing the prompting. And behind that prompting may be torture of some carefully tailored sort. But Hatcher also knows a few things about how it works down here. And he’s aware he has certain privileges. He had privileges in his life on earth for much the same reason. Hatcher McCord is famous, his narrator says. This inner voice helps. At that very moment, Hatcher has approached a barrier to the street — a kneeling, twitching body calling out “Mama”—and he leaps over it with something he feels is no less than lithe grace.
On the other side of the body, however, he goes abruptly empty. He pauses. He turns. He looks back. The body is crawling off quickly and it vanishes in the darkness. Hatcher wonders why he has turned. He wonders why he is standing here. If his newsman’s instincts are aroused, Hatcher McCord will never let a good story die. Hatcher turns back to the bright orange glow, the tumbling, veering, bumping, compressing, stalling, lurching, rushing, outcrying crowd on Grand Peachtree Parkway. Hatcher McCord does have privileges, thanks to his fame and his importance to society.
Some other voice in Hatcher’s head sighs. Not some other. Also his. Also Hatcher McCord. Idiot. Hell is full of famous people without privileges. I’m useful. Useful to Satan. If you’re listening, Chief, and I’m sure you are, I have to stress that I’m not being ungrateful. You see the anguish I’m in, so surely that makes it all right. I’m useful to you — the Lord of the Flies, the Former Most Beautiful Angel in Heaven, the Infamous Big Cheese — and that’s like winning the sweeps with a fifty share. That creature I so gracefully leaped over — I’m right, aren’t I, O Supreme One? I was quite wonderfully graceful? — that creature might have been Mick Jagger or Dwight Eisenhower or Dan Rather — not Henry VIII, I suppose — why do you let him flounce around as a young man? — but of course it’s to torture me — and Anne too, I suppose — I hope it’s torture for her — I leaped over that body quite elegantly, whoever it was, didn’t I?