Robert Butler - Hell

Hatcher readily passes the Hoppers’ closed door, but his legs go heavy and his movements turn lugubriously slow as he approaches his own apartment. Not long ago, he would have heard the old, aggrandizing voice-over narrator in his head. But not anymore. He simply thinks: I am taking Anne away now to lose her. And there is a sad silence inside him, and he stands before his door, and his hand is pausing on the knob. And he thinks: But if that’s so, then not to take her away would make keeping her meaningless. He opens the door. It does not even occur to him to call out their ritual darling-I’m-home. She is not in sight. He does call “Are you ready?”

She appears from the bedroom and sucks the air from his lungs and up flutteringly into his throat and head. She is wearing a gossamer white Edwardian tea dress, all cobweb linen and openwork lace with a scarlet ribbon tied at her waist, and her hair is done up beneath a wide-brimmed straw French sailor hat with a silk band in matching scarlet. He wants to say he was wrong. The address he has is wrong. He has no idea where Henry is. But her eyes are bright with expectation. It is not for him. There’s no going back.

“I haven’t seen that,” he says, nodding at her dress, though he realizes its appropriateness for where they are headed.

She looks down at herself and raises her face with a faintly puzzled expression, as if she hasn’t seen it either. She opens her mouth to speak but doesn’t know what to say.

“You look beautiful,” he says, and even he hears the sadness in his own voice.

She clearly doesn’t, for she brightens at once. “Thank you,” she says.

The Raffles Hotel in Hell sits in the desert outside of the Great Metropolis, facing the mountains, blindingly bone-white in the sun. Like its progenitor in Singapore, it is done in French Renaissance-cum-tropics style but on a vast scale, with six stories of arched and ornamented windows growing narrower and narrower as they ascend toward the hipped and balustraded roof until, in Hell’s version, on the top layer, they become federal prison slits, though with scrolled finials. At most of the thousands of those windows along the hotel’s half-mile front façade, the guests press their faces against the glass. Many of them were colonial empire builders, and they are sealed, cooking, in their suites and are serenaded endlessly by Satan’s cockroaches singing “Rule Britannia” to the Dutch and “Deutschland Über Alles” to the Brits and “Het Wilhelmus” to the Germans and so forth.

There are some who are condemned to roam the hotel, though that group slowly changes over time. These denizens often linger on the wide veranda beside the front entrance. They sit on sulfur-soggy rattan furniture and drink caustic gin slings, many of the men in claret-stained linen suits and many of the women in lingerie dresses not unlike Anne’s, but dingy and smelling of semen from encounters they cannot remember. Old, imperialist-white-man punkah wallahs stand nearby fanning the hot air over everyone with thin, burningly weary arms. There is no shade. The sun drills into every corner of the place, on all four sides at once. And there is a bar-lounge featuring all the stand-up comics of Hell — which is, it should be clear by now, tantamount to all the stand-up comics who have ever lived and died — and presently headlining Jerry Seinfeld. The audiences are plucked temporarily from the sealed rooms and inevitably find themselves even less amused by the comics than they have been by the singing cockroaches.

It is in front of this hotel that Dick Nixon roars up in the Fleetwood, trailing a vortex of desert dust, and fishtails to a stop. All along the veranda, the arrival draws attention. For instance, Jefferson Davis, wearing a long black dress with a fan-front bodice and pagoda sleeves and with a black shawl over his head in hopes of eluding capture, ceases swatting Abraham Lincoln’s hand from his knee, and he and Abe, whose linen suit is stained with blood, look toward the car. And the tiny, waist-cinched Gibson Girl in the far corner — Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, known in her mortal life as Mother Teresa — and the florid-faced, high-collared professional snark, Christopher Hitchens, separate their lips, having felt compelled for quite some time to neck, and they wipe hard and yuckingly at their mouths. She squints to see who might emerge from the car, while Hitchens, with her attention diverted, quietly swoops up what’s left of Teresa’s gin, downs it, and replaces the glass in front of her.

Anne and Hatcher step from the backseat of the Cadillac. They go up the steps, aware of all the attentive faces, both of them nodding slightly in the same reflex, got-no-time-thanks-for-noticing way that earthly queen and news anchor learned to affect with the public. They push through the wide front doors and into a brutally bright lobby lit by the sun pouring down a six-story atrium.

They pause, shield their eyes, and move to the registration desk, where Sally Sue Plunkett, former front-desk girl at the Motel 6 in Des Moines, Iowa, known behind her back as Surly Sally, is hating this job as much as she did that one. At the approach of these two, she lowers her face and fiddles with a dozen brass keys, representing recent departures for other quarters of Hell.

Hatcher and Anne arrive and stand shoulder to shoulder before this early fortyish woman with curly hair the color of an Iowa corn-fed beef-steak. They wait a beat or two, but the woman is not looking up.

“Miss,” Hatcher says.

Sally is arranging the keys in a circle.

“Can you help us?” Hatcher says.

Sally opens the circle at the bottom and makes the outline of a straight, long hairdo of the sort she always wanted.

Anne slams her hand on the counter.

Sally jumps and raises her face snarling. “What the fuck do you want?” she says.

Hatcher lifts his powder-blue tie at her.

She clearly recognizes it but simply glowers, saying nothing more.

Hatcher says, “We’re here to see Henry…I’m not sure how he’d be known here. Henry Tudor. Or Henry VIII.”

Anne quickly adds, “By the Grace of God, King of England and France, Defender of the Faith, Lord of Ireland.”

Sally shoots Anne another what-the-fuck look. “He’s not in his room,” she says.

“You know this from your head?” Anne says.

“What of it?” Sally says.

“Do you know where he is?” Hatcher says.

“Yes,” Sally says, but no more.

Hatcher puffs. Basic interrogatives. Elemental interviewing. He didn’t think he’d have to jump through that hoop with a clerk at the front desk. He attributes this to Hell, though in truth, he would have had to do this with her in Des Moines as well. “ Where is he?” he says.

“He went in to catch the Seinfeld,” Sally says, nodding across the lobby.

Hatcher turns and follows the nod to the door of the Ass in a Sling Lounge.

“Henry is mine,” Sally says. “I plan to marry him.” And her head instantly falls off, disappearing behind the desk with a thud on the floor.

Hatcher and Anne pull away from the front desk and move across the floor toward the lounge. He can feel her seething. He cares about Anne and wants to say something reassuring, but this is all too strange and complicated for that. It is enough that he’s brought her here.

They step in at the back of the lounge. The room is dark and filled with cigarette smoke and the dim shapes of denizens from the hotel. At the far end of the room is a klieg-lit Jerry Seinfeld on a tiny stage, the familiar, wryly conspiratorial smile in that long, narrow face held there by willpower, getting a little trembly around the edges. Because the place is utterly silent except for a scattering of deep smoker’s coughs. It is a silence that Hatcher can instantly sense has not been broken at all. They are not between guffaws here. Seinfeld hasn’t elicited so much as a snicker. He is dying up there.