Robert Butler - Hell

And behind Mary Ellen’s closed and dream-restless eyes: Twilight is coming on and he and I are standing on the little beach near the J-School building and we’ve never said a word about it but the time is now nearly upon us when we either go on together or we don’t, and the lake is dark, nearly the color of his eyes and as deep, and he smells of the drug store aftershave he adores — bay rum, the clove smell of an old man — and I know he will someday get a thing like that right without my having to suggest it, and he says, “Your parents will be down?” and I say, “You keep coming back to that. What’s really on your mind?” and I turn my face to him and he turns his face to me and he takes my hand and we both look out to the water and he says, “It’s not a matter of my mind,” and I say, “We need to think clearly,” and he says “No we don’t,” and this makes me happy and then he says, “I want to marry you,” and I lift his hand and I kiss it and it smells of rubber cement from him cutting and pasting his final story for the newspaper, and if I was thinking clearly I’d know this is as good as it’s going to get and I should just kiss that hand one more time and let it go and walk on down the beach and out into the lake and just keep walking till I vanish.

She opens her eyes. She finds her body restored and the promise of more pain perched on the running board of an old automobile. She sits up.

Hatcher rises. Mary Ellen has reconstituted, but her face has turned old, as old as she was when she finally let it all go in the Caribbean Sea. Hatcher makes a vague gesture to help Mary Ellen to her feet, but she waves it off. She stands.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“For what?” she says.

“Running you over.”

“Which time?” she says.

Hatcher shrugs. Not from indifference, but she can’t see that, of course.

“Right,” she says.

“Please,” he says. “Any time. All the times. That’s why I’m here.”

“We’re in Hell, my darling,” she says. “It’s a little late for anything like that.”

“Can’t we talk a bit?” Hatcher says.

Now Mary Ellen shrugs, wishing to be indifferent. That she isn’t, she takes simply to be fresh torture in the afterlife she’s living. She turns and walks off along her street. Hatcher follows.

The street narrows abruptly into an alleyway of tenements not unlike his own. The outside corridors stacked at the back of the buildings are crowded with women wandering singly up and down or coming together into small groups and then breaking apart, filling the air with cries of “After all I did for them!” and “I’m a person too!” and “This isn’t Hell, I know from Hell already!” But as Hatcher moves along behind Mary Ellen, a murmur starts up, and by the time she begins to ascend one of the circular iron staircases with Hatcher following, all the women above are nudging each other and leaning out over the railings and pointing at him. Now they are crying “He’s on TV!” and “What’s a man doing here?” and “Who’s that motherfucker?”

When Mary Ellen reaches her corridor, she steps out of the staircase but instantly pauses and waits for Hatcher to emerge. She steels herself and offers her arm for him to take. “Stay close,” she says. “They’ll tear you to pieces. They kept a lot inside in that other life.”

Hatcher looks at the gauntlet of faces before him, some once beautiful and some not but all of them leveled now by jowl and wrinkle and blotch and pallor and by the utter ingratitude of men who moved on and children who moved on. Mary Ellen guides Hatcher forward and he takes the pinches and the spit and the hissed words with “Sorry” and “I’m sorry” and “I’m very sorry” until she pulls him in at a doorway and they enter a cramped little room with its walls covered by empty snapshot picture frames. They sit down shoulder to shoulder on a tattered couch that smells, to Hatcher, like dead fish and has always smelled, to Mary Ellen, like bay rum.

“You’re chock-full of apologies down here, aren’t you,” Mary Ellen says.

“Lately,” Hatcher says. She’s right and this surprises him, but he lets it pass.

“Is that why you’ve come to me?”

“Sort of.”

“Of course. It’s a clever torture, isn’t it?”

“I don’t intend to…”

“In all your self-important arrogance, that’s one of the weirdest examples, right there. What do your intentions have to do with it? You think I’d assume you’re the one devising the tortures in Hell?”

“This isn’t going well,” Hatcher says, reflexively trying one of his little rhetorical tricks from their life together long ago. Play against her anger with understatement.

Mary Ellen knows the trick and simply snorts wearily at it.

They sit silently for a moment. She can’t let it alone. But she just feels sad now. “Not well,” she says, low. “It’s Hell, my darling.” She stops. Twice she’s called him “darling.” With irony, certainly. But also without irony. This makes her even sadder. Which is part of the torture, of course. The “darling” thing was her own similar rhetorical trick from that life together. And it tortured her in much the same way even then.

“I never was religious,” she says.

“No.”

“This doesn’t feel religious, exactly, all this.”

“No.”

“While I was drowning,” she says, “just before the last darkness, I felt peaceful. I wasn’t suicidal, really, but I was looking forward to an end to all the crap. I didn’t expect to end up anywhere .”

Hatcher is about to reply, “Especially not sitting on this couch with me,” but he catches himself and does not say anything.

“You’re thinking it’s about you again,” she says.

If it’s not Satan inside your head, it’s your ex-wife. He tries to mitigate his offense with her. “The crap part,” he says, and he hears how sorrowful he sounds and he knows Mary Ellen hears it too and she puffs and turns her face away from him.

“Fuck you,” she says, very low, and because she has paused briefly before saying it and because he can feel her brace herself ever so slightly, he knows who she’s actually talking to.

He reaches out and finds her hand resting on her thigh and he holds it, firmly. He wants to say, “He can’t hear you.” But he’s still not certain everyone has privacy of mind and there’s so much yet for him to do. He does say, “Don’t let it happen.”

He can feel her hand growing quickly warm and he squeezes it tighter. He’ll go up in flames with her if need be. “Stop,” he says.

She looks at him, her eyes restless again, searching his face, and he looks at her steadily, inviting her to read his mind.

Her hand is intensely hot, her whole body radiates the heat, but there are no flames yet. Her face streams perspiration. But no flames. He holds her hand and her eyes close and still there are no flames. They sit like this for a long while, and at last the heat abates and she opens her eyes.

He lets go of her hand.

“There,” he says.

“What do you mean?” she says.

“You didn’t let it happen,” he says.

“What are you talking about?”

“What you just went through. It wasn’t so bad this time.”

Mary Ellen’s mouth sags open in wonder. “Oh my darling, you are such a man. Such a stupid man. That was one of the worst.”

Hatcher doesn’t understand.

Mary Ellen says, “Whenever he doesn’t like what I think or say, he gives me a hot flash. The mother of all hot flashes.”

Hatcher should know by now that intense suffering is a personal thing, even in Hell. Especially in Hell. But his face is still a little uncomprehending.

Mary Ellen says, “The flames are inside.”