Robert Butler - Hell

What appears to be the sun in what appears to be the sky in Hell usually teases its way up in the morning, repeatedly tantalizing and disappointing the denizens, showing just the merest upper edge of its corona, drawing a trickling blood-flow of light from the dark above the mountains, brightening the streets and the windows ever so slightly, just enough to be noticed, but then falling back, snuffing it all out, only to almost appear again and then vanish again. It behaves this way over and over before it finally provides an actual dawn — having suckered the denizens each time — and it does all this after what is always a long, long night. So when Anne reattaches her head and folds her arms across her naked chest and closes her eyes and when Hatcher is able to quit writhing in pain and rise and stagger into the other room to sit, naked still, at the kitchen table, their reasonable expectation is that they will sleep almost not at all but sink into bored stupefaction and that they will have plenty of warning that the night is beginning to struggle to an end.

But not this time. They doze inopportunely. And the sun comes up abruptly. And their apartment booms with heavy hands on their door. Hatcher has time only to convulse awake and jump up to full dangly nakedness as the door slams open and in rush Robin and Maurice Gibb in powder-blue jumpsuits. They leap apart to frame the open door, striking mirror disco poses, their outer arms lifted up, their outer legs cocked, and they sing, in intensely vibrating falsettos, “Staying alii-i-ive, staying alive.” The powder-blue jumpsuits are a common uniform for the official minions in Hell. That the Gibb brothers have already attained this status tells Hatcher something he suspected on earth about the ascendance of disco in an era of rock and roll. The brothers Gibb fall silent and shakily hold their poses. It now registers on Hatcher that it is dawn and it is time to go to the interview with Satan. As the dead disco dandies totter in embarrassment — even Hell’s minions, of course, are still subject to torture — Hatcher will shortly regret not taking this opportunity to slip into the bedroom and grab some clothes. But before this thought has a chance to form, into the open doorway, also wearing a powder-blue jumpsuit, steps the former director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover.

He takes two steps into the room, placing the Gibb brothers in the position of backup singers, strikes the same disco pose as theirs, and sings, “What you doin’ on your back, aah?” The room fills with drum machine thumping and brass-section riffing and the Gibbs’ background quavering, all in service to J. Edgar Hoover’s lead vocal, which is complete with echo chamber effects. Hoover ratchets up his falsetto with “You should be dancin’, yeah,” and the three do a perfectly synchronized arm and leg switch and sing on.

At some point in his tenure in Hell, Hatcher noticed how, though many millions — indeed, no doubt, billions — of the dead are teeming around the place from all the eras and places in the history of the planet, the ones who primarily come his way tend to be the people he is in some way familiar with. Though freshly rendered interpersonal torture does occur — Anne Boleyn’s with him, for instance — that tends to be rarer. The torture of the familiar is the norm. And so, given the musical sensibilities Hatcher treasured in his earthly life, it is hard to exaggerate the severity of his torture at standing naked in his tiny kitchen in Hell as former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sings a Bee Gees disco song backed by a full studio orchestra and Robin and Maurice. Hatcher wants to run and hide. He wants at least to go put some clothes on. But he is unable to move, even through the dance interlude, where the three do a line hustle together, pumping their arms furiously, and through the endless repeats of the you-should-be-dancing chorus, and even as Hoover and the Gibbs simulate a studio fade, singing in smaller and smaller voices until they are silent.

Now Hatcher tries again to move but can only teeter.

“Oh no you don’t,” J. Edgar says. “You’re coming with me.”

Hoover steps to him, crushes Hatcher’s elbow in a fist, and guides him, naked, out the door, down the spiral staircase, and into the backseat of a waiting 1948 Cadillac Fleetwood limousine as black as the night that has just passed.

Once inside the Cadillac, Hatcher understands the unique infernal possibilities of being shut up naked in a tight private space with J. Edgar Hoover, given the long-understood but dangerous-to-pursue story of the man, which even included rumors that the Mafia had photos of him flouncing in a feather boa and a little black dress at a private party. Indeed, Hoover instantly begins to sing in a tiny falsetto, “Nobody gets too much heaven no more,” and Hatcher tucks his private parts out of sight, tightly crosses his legs, and slides over against the door.

Beyond the black privacy window separating the driving compartment there is a scuffling sound and chirpings of pain as the Gibb brothers crowd in. The unseen driver grinds the car into gear and Hatcher is thrown back from the acceleration down the alleyway and then thrown toward Hoover with a sharp turn into Grand Peachtree Parkway. He quickly recovers his ball-crushingly modest pose. Alarmingly, though, Hoover has stopped singing and is now panting heavily. Hatcher presses his face hard against the window and squeezes his legs painfully together. He has no chance to stop the thought to Satan: Come on, Old Man, I’m just trying to let you say what’s on your mind and you have to turn it into this. “Oh shit,” Hatcher says aloud, certain that his rashly critical thought will now prompt Satan to fully unleash the libido of the former director of the FBI.

But instead, Hoover’s panting stops with a groan. He cries, “And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee” and Hatcher does not listen to the sounds that follow this but concentrates on the extraordinary rate of speed the driver is maintaining through the dense crowd in Grand Peachtree Parkway, the thumping of bodies against the car coming so fast as to blend into a low roar.

Behind the wheel, Richard M. Nixon could be expected to draw some pleasure from the carnage he is wreaking — perceiving, as he does, all the denizens of Hell as his personal enemies — but in fact he is distracted by the acute discomfort of physical contact with the Gibb brothers, who are pressed against him, obsessively jutting their hips and hustle-stepping and shooting their arms up in disco poses that are gradually crushing all the bones in their hands against the roof of the car, their falsetto screams ringing in the driver’s compartment. And inside Dick Nixon: My old man’s cheeks and forehead would flush bright red and my saint of a mother knew what was coming and his fists rose and I backed out of the kitchen door and I put my hands over my ears because of the sound that would follow, and even the touch of my own hands startled me, nauseated me, made me drop them, and then there was only the running away from the sound. What a coward I was. I ran as fast as I could, but I knew I would be tough someday, I knew I would never back down. And this is perfectly clear. I am not an abuser. With Pat it wasn’t about being tough, it was about touching. When I hit her, it was about touching, and it was about touching whenever I sought out the backseat of White House limo SS100X, my favorite, the one I always insisted on. I was the President. It was the restored midnight-blue Lincoln Continental where Kennedy was shot. I would ride around right in that same backseat. The very spot. They touched him there. And they could touch me if they wanted to. I wasn’t going to run away.