Robert Butler - Hell

Hatcher has to put aside what he’s learned unexpectedly and go on as he’d intended. He takes a deep breath, quells the panting, and says, “There are so many of us…”

“A multitude. A teeming multitude. Your brothers and sisters. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Yearning , I tell you. I lift my lamp beside the flaming door.” He’s on his feet again, and suddenly a torch appears in his hands. A torch with a flame of what looks like red neon, but throwing out great swirling clusters of sparks. “Sacrifice. Kill. Pray. Come to me, my little ones.”

A spray of sharp pointillist pain rains onto Hatcher’s forehead. The sparks from the torch. He cries out and he smells his hair burning and he beats at his head with his hands.

“Oh pardon,” Satan says, and instantly Hatcher’s pain ceases. “Pardon. Breathe free and get burned. Always the way, yes? Always.”

The torch has vanished.

Once more, Hatcher starts to doubt what he thinks he’s come to understand. Breathe free and get burned. This is a warning. But why such indirection? Hatcher can’t worry now. Interview. “So you invite your multitude, yes?” Hatcher hears himself reflexively picking up the Old Man’s locutions. “Do you have to take the souls you’re given?”

“Have to? I want you. I want you all. I choose you, my darlings.”

“Doesn’t he decide who gets in?”

The fire behind Satan flares up, rushes forward over Satan and all the way to Hatcher, does a bullwhip snap at the top of Hatcher’s head and sets his hair on fire again. This time Satan simply watches as the top of Hatcher’s head rages in such pain that his sight shuts down and his brain is about to. Then Satan says, “Okay. Okay.”

The flames go out and Hatcher can see again: the thin, hard, upturned line of Satan’s mouth, his narrowed eyes. Hatcher’s head still aches and smolders and his hair is gone for now, but his brain is working again. He is exhilarated. How quick Satan was to punish him for pressing the point about his father’s higher authority. Hatcher takes this as proof of the privacy of his own thoughts. Prove me wrong, asshole.

And Satan doesn’t. He says, “Don’t go ‘he’ with me. He he he — I’m not laughing. He he fucking he. It is I. I who choose. I do so because I want you. I want you in my family. Doesn’t that warm the cockles of your heart? Not to mention the top of your head. I want you all.” Satan looks straight into the camera. “Isn’t this a Hallmark moment? Send me a card now, all of you. Go find a sweet little greeting card with family thoughts and mail it to me.” Satan blows a kiss. He turns back to Hatcher. “Next.”

“Your power is so great,” Hatcher begins.

“Now you’ve got it,” Satan says. “Good interview technique. Win the heart of your subject with noble cosmic truths about his power.”

Hatcher says, “How do you choose?”

“You mean how did I choose you ,” Satan says.

This time Hatcher has not even a flicker of worry. He swells with the importance of the place of a journalist — his place — in any life or afterlife, ennobled by the fundamental right and need of all people to be fully informed. He straightens his spine and in spite of his charred and denuded head still wispily smoking, he says, “I’m a newsman.” with the intention of going on to explain how he speaks for everyone.

But before he can, Satan cries, “Right! Righteously right! And an exemplary newsman you are, my boy. Look what you’ve done. You’ve been able to ask the Great Dark Lord all these questions and you only had one little hairdo malfunction along the way. And I’ll make that up to you.”

Instantly, the pain on the top of Hatcher’s still-smoking head ceases, as does the smoke, and he becomes intensely aware of every hair follicle dilating and excreting. His hair grows and grows and he feels it descending over his ears, the back of his neck, his forehead, and into his eyes, and it falls on his shoulders and finally stops.

“You see? All fixed. Your girlfriend will absolutely adore it. The first man she fucked had hair just like that. You can both reminisce. Such fond memories. We all have such memories. I sat on a cloud once, metaphorically speaking. I hate sitting on clouds. Fucking idiotic. Strum strum on your harp. Flap your wings. What bullshit. But I have memories just like your headstrong, footloose girlfriend. Or should I say footstrong, headloose.”

Hatcher brushes the hair out of his eyes. Already he’s wondering who Anne’s fuck with the long hair was and starting to churn about it. I won’t let you do this, Old Man. And the power of having the privacy of his thoughts actually helps him move away from his retrospective jealousy. And this was good, this challenge to him. He needed the reminder that Satan can still see and know. Almost everything, no doubt. He’s just not listening.

“You’ve been a great newsman today, Hatcher,” Satan says. “What integrity. Doesn’t that make you proud? I haven’t had such fun since I brought old Billy Graham out here — he’s a crack shot — and the son of a bitch tried to get me to do an altar call.”

Hatcher McCord pictures the aged preacher trying to convert the Devil himself, and inside, Hatcher laughs wryly, sadly, at the quixotic pathos of the human condition.

“That led to some serious malfunctions of various sorts, I can tell you,” Satan says. “Don’t ask.”

Hatcher McCord’s interview with Satan is an unparalleled journalistic landmark, and the irony is that he has to keep his biggest investigative break to himself. Fuck you, Satan, he says casually in his head. Hatcher’s head is a precious haven in the midst of the maelstrom of Hell.

“Not that it pleases me,” Satan says. “I sometimes get a bellyful of the malfunctions. I feel for you all, my little children. You are all so pathetic. I do care.” And Satan digs knuckles into the corners of both eyes. “Boo hoodie hoo,” he says.

By the genius of his interviewing, he has learned a secret that is both dangerous and empowering.

Satan abruptly drops his hands and lifts his face. He closes his eyes in faux agony and cries, “Satan wept.”

Hatcher McCord, whose likeability rating even at the time of his death was second only to Oprah Winfrey…

Satan opens his eyes and lowers his face. Hatcher is not so far gone in the overvoice of his life that he misses this moment. He sorts quickly through what’s been going on and recaptures enough at least to say, “Wonderful. Yes.”

“Of course,” Satan says. “Of course. But as the broadcast interview ends — and that will be the end, that touching moment right there — I want you to do a voice-over thing, and you say it just that way.”

Hatcher nods knowingly at Satan, though there’s a rustling of panic in his chest because he’s not quite sure what “that way” is. Worse, he’s not even sure what the “it” is.

“Say it,” Satan says.

“Yes,” Hatcher says.

“Now.”

“Of course,” Hatcher says.

Satan is waiting. Hatcher is in high, blinding panic. But he is free to scramble around in his own head, he knows now. He can find a way to finesse this. One of his other great newsman talents has always been the ability to act as if you know a lot when, in fact, you know very little. Satan is such a fucking poseur. And Hatcher says, “You are so brilliantly expressive. I want to study that one more time so I can capture every nuance.”

Satan cocks his head. Hatcher braces himself for more fire. At least he might get rid of this long hair.

And then Satan smiles a vast, radiant smile. “Good. Yes. Oh I chose you well, Hatcher McCord. We should work on this. Of course, I’m totally fucking insincere, you know. I don’t really give a very hot damn about you all. But I want you all to think I do. If I want to be seen as sincere, then that’s basically the same thing as being sincere. I respect the image and want it for myself and I care that you think I’m sincere and so that shows respect for you and so it all adds up to the same thing, yes? Of course yes. Here we go.”