Robert Butler - Hell

And Hatcher is whole in body again, though naked and curled tightly into a fetal position inside a succubus in a double-wide in Hell. But not inside a succubus for long. Lulu stops humming the Rolling Stones and spreads her legs and props herself up on her elbows and lifts her hips and she begins to daaa-daaa-daaa-da-dummmm the brass fanfare for dawn in Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” At this very moment, somewhere in the Great Metropolis, Strauss and Friedrich Nietzsche and Stanley Kubrick are locked in a tiny room together listening to the 190 decibel version of the same passage for the ten thousandth straight time. At the other end of the room, Lilith rolls her eyes at Lulu’s flair for the dramatic. She jiggles the new snow globe in her hand. Hatcher’s own special snow swirls around a small, hand-painted plastic bust of the anchorman. And Hatcher himself suddenly feels a squeezing upon him, and his curled body begins to move.

Lulu stops da-dumming, because even succubi suffer in Hell and this is one of those times, with every cell in Lulu’s body feeling as if it is in a vise and being squeezed to pulp, and she screams wordlessly for a while until she manages, “She’s crowning!”

“It’s just that man who was here,” Lilith says.

“Fuck you,” Lulu cries.

“Pant pant blow,” Lilith says.

“Fuck you,” Lulu reiterates, and to distract herself from the impression that her body is being split up the middle by a white-hot gutting knife, she briefly does her best to imitate the horn section of the Berlin Philharmonic, returning to Strauss to introduce what she expects to be her daughter into the world.

Hatcher’s whole head emerges between Lulu’s legs, and Lulu pauses her pushing and stops the music. Hatcher looks at the ceiling and tries to squinch the muck from his eyes.

Lulu pushes again, and as Hatcher’s shoulders pry her open and as the gutting knife renews its work with a special focus on her treasured private parts, she screams “I’ll make you pay for this forever, you little bitch!”

And Hatcher moves faster and faster, torso and hips and legs all folded together, and with a splashing all about him and a loud sucking-shut behind him, he slides onto the bed between Lulu’s legs.

Lulu falls back flat. Both mother and faux child pant for a while, the latter slowly trying to move his stiffened limbs and the former renewing her pledge to make this daughter of hers forever regret having put her mother through this torture.

Finally, though, Lulu is ready to face the little bitch and she struggles to sit up, just as Hatcher has struggled to sit up between her legs, and they come face to face.

Lulu says, “Oh fuck. Not again,” and she fists up her right hand and punches Hatcher square on the nose. He flies across the room, landing about halfway along, and slicked up by Lulu’s bodily fluids, he skims the rest of the way to Lilith, who calmly lifts one fat and furry foot — pedicured meticulously, however, in French tips — to bring Hatcher to a halt.

The trip back to the city has certain uncomfortable complications. The sun has risen. It was a short night, this time. And Lulu no longer clasps Hatcher to her body in flight. As they fly off, she holds him painfully by the scruff of the neck, at arm’s length, with him dangling full-frontally over the passing landscape. And she’s in no rush. And she begins to sing. Defying the fact that she’s technically pretty nearly a baritone, in a key intended for a pop-diva soprano, failing painfully but still succeeding in conveying a sobby self-pity, she sings: “All by myself. Don’t wanna be all by myself anymore.”

She swoops low through a dry riverbed, and in the broken prow of a ship that resembles the Titanic , a woman stands shackled and wrapped in furs before the hot sun and she is herself singing — compelled to, as a matter of fact — about how her heart will go on forever, no doubt wishing otherwise, and when she sees Lulu and Hatcher, she stops her song and looks up and is unable to look away. Lulu circles her quite closely and continues to circle until Lulu has sung “All by Myself” six times, from tremulous beginning to excruciatingly botched glory-note climax to simulated studio fade, and from the first bars of the first go-around, Hatcher recognizes the singer on the ship prow, and whatever she is suffering for these thirty-one minutes and eighteen seconds, Hatcher would argue that being dangled naked before Celine Dion is worse.

Then Lulu finally veers away and flies off straight. They swoop up out of the riverbed, still flying quite low. The city is suddenly upon them, spreading from the left horizon to the right. Now, at the city limits, the crowded streets begin abruptly. As the shadow of Lulu and Hatcher passes along the jostling throng, like a coordinated wave in a sport’s stadium, the faces of people rise, and Lulu is so low that Hatcher can even see the movements of all the eyes to the dangling part of this dangling man.

It takes him a long few moments of this to get a bright idea. He calls out over his shoulder to Lulu, “Thanks for flying low. I’m afraid of heights.”

The brain of a succubus, even at its best, is far from quick-flowing, but post-coital it is downright sludgy. Lulu, still pissed at Hatcher for not being a daughter, beats her wings heavily at this and they shoot straight up until the faces below recede into indistinguishability, as does, Hatcher hopes, his own naked body.

Finally Lulu dumps Hatcher in the mouth of his alley and flies off, dissatisfied as always, with the way these things end. Like all succubi — and many others — she is puzzled how the ravenous sexual desire she so recently felt has turned trivial and empty now that it’s sated. She is also puzzled how she forgets this feeling each time and is thus puzzled anew when each man is done with. This is a great deal of self-reflection for Lulu, and as a result, she distractedly flies into a light standard along Grand Peachtree Parkway.

Meanwhile, Hatcher is nakedly beating it down the alleyway and up his circular stairs and along the outer corridor of his apartment building, hoping mightily to sail past a closed Hopper apartment door. He is disappointed on both scores. The door is open, and as he approaches it, his limbs become heavy and his movements turn into an exaggerated slow motion. Peggy and Howard are sitting in their chairs.

“There’s the famous TV person,” Peggy says. “Try not to be rude.”

“Rude my ass,” Howard says.

“You never used to use language like that with me,” she says.

“What difference does it make anymore?” he says.

“Plenty.”

“Plenty?”

“Plenty.”

Howard shrugs, “It’s not such a terrible word. And you criticize me for saying the word but you don’t even notice that the famous TV person’s ass is bare?”

“I notice,” she says.

“But no matter. I’m the one who’s wrong.”

“He probably has his reasons,” Peggy says.

“Reasons? I’ve got reasons too.”

“Good evening,” Peggy says to Hatcher.

“Good evening,” Hatcher says.

“Forgive my husband,” she says.

“Forgive my ass,” Hatcher says.

Peggy giggles.

Howard looks sharply at her. He clearly has an opportunity to score big in this argument. But her giggle runs deeper in him now. He can’t place the exact moment, but that same giggle once bubbled up sweetly between them, early on. Was it their wedding night? He can’t quite bring back the room, the touch, the few words before, after. He thumps his forehead with the butt of his palm. That moment is long gone. That woman is long gone. It’s all over long ago.