Robert Butler - Hell

All he would have to fear from Anne is that she thinks he is anything but forced to go with Lulu. But Anne has never shown a trace of jealousy. It has always been him, and his jealousy has always been of that strange retrospective variety.

He can’t read her eyes. But she has her hand upon her throat, thumb to one side, her fingers to the other side, and she’s stroking herself there, out and back, out and back, like a man thoughtfully stroking his beard. She probably has never seen a succubus. May not have known they exist.

And in spite of the strange circumstances before him, his free and private mind takes this moment to reflect: my retrospective jealousy, isn’t that somehow a desire to be the only person in the world, with the only exception being the woman by whom my cosmic exclusivity is measured?

Anne says, “This lady claims she has an appointment with you.”

Lulu giggles her deep-throat giggle. “Oh you dear. Calling me a lady. She’s so very sweet, Hatcher.”

He can only nod.

Lulu says, “And aren’t I très discreet? ‘Appointment,’ my titties.”

Anne turns to the faux-Frenchified succubus and says, “I’m not stupid, dear.”

Lulu does not giggle at this. She reaches across the table and takes Anne’s hand, and Hatcher fears what Lulu might do. The two women look at each other steadily, and Lulu says, “I had an ‘appointment’ with your King Henry, once upon a time.”

“Did he keep it?”

“They all must, you know.”

“You’re lucky he didn’t marry you.”

Again Lulu doesn’t giggle. To distract the succubus from doing harm to Anne because of her snarkiness and, indeed, to satisfy his own newsman’s curiosity, Hatcher puts on the playful voice of their first meeting and asks, “Who else have you done we’d be surprised to know about, you naughty Lulu you?”

“As rotten a fuck as Henry?” she says, still looking at Anne.

“Yes,” Hatcher says, calling on all his interview savvy to shift to the subject’s preferred tone. “You poor Lulu you.”

“Poor Lulu,” she says.

“What she has to go through for her work,” Hatcher says.

Lulu turns her face to him and she nods again and sighs a loud, booming sigh. She lets go of Anne’s hand. She says, “For about a hundred years I was the official harvester of your presidents. We like to use the seed of the big boys all around the world to make our little domestic demons. So you name the guy, from McKinley on through, and I did him, and it all went the way it should go, right through Bush the First. But after that, things started to get freaky.”

“Freaky for you ?” Hatcher says, his incredulity involuntary and dangerous. But he gets away with it.

Lulu nods, pouting. “I have feelings too, mon cheri. With the live ones we’re supposed to come in the middle of the night and dope-whisper any companions into a temporary coma and do the boy while he’s still snoozing. With your President Bill Clinton, his wife’s alone in the master bed, and by the time I can get myself oriented, I’m face to face with a very wide-awake Mr. President.”

Lulu pauses for effect.

Hatcher prompts her. “Freaky, Lulu?”

“He took one look at me and dropped his pajama bottoms.”

Somehow this doesn’t surprise Hatcher, and that must show on his face.

“Only the dead and damned are supposed to go for it, my dear. And then, the next time, I went off to do Al Gore.”

“Wait. Al Gore wasn’t elected.”

“Hello. Poor Lulu had to figure out the fucking electoral college. And after I did, I had to go do a guy whose seed they took one look at and tossed. At that point, I’d had enough.”

Lulu digs a knuckle into the corner of a dry eye. A little trick she picked up from her boss. “Boohoo,” she says. And then abruptly she flares the hand at her eye and smiles brightly and says, “I am so glad you are dead and damned, Hatcher McCord. You will help make up for the shit work.”

And now, without Hatcher even registering her rise and approach, Lulu is in his face, and she gently takes the camcorder from him, and then there is a great flurry of her hands and in a seeming instant Hatcher McCord is standing naked at his front door, his clothes flung about the room, his camcorder, though, perched safely on the kitchen table, his blue minion tie folded neatly beside it, and beside the tie is Anne, her eyes wide and her mouth gaping.

And in the next instant his naked body is pressed against Lulu’s naked body, her two powerful arms clamping him there, and they are out the door and leaping into the air and her great bat wings open wide and beat fiercely and Lulu and Hatcher shoot straight up into the dark and he barely has a chance to turn his head and look behind him as the Great Metropolis spreads open beneath him like the time-lapse blooming of a vast black flower, and Lulu veers, and in the moment that they hurtle over the center of the city, Hatcher at last finds brief voice for all that is happening to him. He screams.

And far below, curled up in the gutter at the side of the Automat on the corner of Peachtree Way and Lucky Street, a sleeping figure snaps awake. Judas Iscariot turns his face upward. He has heard a screaming in the night sky, as it was prophesied, and his faith is renewed.

The city passes away, and below Hatcher there is darkness, and against him there is the massive febrile thumping of a heart — Lulu in excitation, from flight, from him, from Mama waiting — and inside him his own heart beats as feverishly fast as Lulu’s, from all that is about to happen, and from Lulu’s heart, its ravenousness clear to him.

After a time, he feels them descending, though everything is still black, and then Lulu banks and turns as if deliberately to show him this: red klieg lights scanning the sky from the roof of an eighty-foot Buccaneer Buena Vista double-wide lit bright white from within. He can see in the spill of the light that the place sits in the crotch of two sharp slopes. He is in the mountains again.

Lulu wheels around and then plummets and lands running, and she and Hatcher are abruptly at the front door of the double-wide. She knocks the match-in-the-gas-tank-boom-boom knock. “Tootle ootle, Mama,” Lulu cries, and she opens the door.

Inside the trailer, Hatcher is briefly blinded by the light — a thousand naked filaments in a thousand lightbulbs in glass display cases lining the one large room of the double-wide’s interior. The light refracts and flares from thousands of snow globes densely packing the cases. And taking up the far twenty feet of the eighty-footer and stretching as wide as the walls is Mama Lilith’s bed with Lilith herself sitting with legs spreadeagled, wings unfurled, toes wiggling, and her succubus privates open and steaming like a vaporizer. She is just about to pop into her mouth — with little finger extended — a Toblerone from a box beside her. At the sight of her daughter and the naked Hatcher McCord, Lilith’s hand stops and falls, and with slow and meticulous care, she places the chocolate back in the box. Hatcher pulses with foreboding from this gesture.

“Here he is,” Lulu says, lifting Hatcher and turning him around and setting him before her for Lilith’s frontal inspection.

“There he is,” Lilith says even as she levitates from the bed, closing her legs, lifting her wings, and rotating her body forward. She floats toward him, quite slowly really, with the same contemplative air she had putting away the chocolate, and that continues, rightly, to scare the shit out of Hatcher.

Lilith drifts past the display cases. Hatcher has registered the snow globe collection only generically. He has never been a collector of things, and these are snow globes, after all, and he has been understandably riveted by other features of the room. So he has not seen that each snow globe contains an image of a man, the form varying greatly, with Dwight Eisenhower, for instance, being represented in one of these cases by the two-and-a-half inch white plastic figure from the set of Marx Toys Presidents of the United States that Hatcher adored as a boy. The white shakable substance lying at the bottom of each globe, however, is not the powder of fake snow but a dehydrated rendering of something quite personal to the man represented. Lilith, on the other hand, being a collector, is keenly aware of each of these carefully accumulated, classifiable artifacts of her life, and she is twittering with delight at them as she approaches this new man.