Robert Butler - Hell

But he goes on. “Have you noticed? Everyone seems to be here in Hell. What’s up with that? I ran into my sweet little Aunt Rachel the other day. She always had a good word for everyone, even for my Aunt Sophie, who had hairs growing out of her chin and encouraged her Pekinese to chase the neighborhood kid in the wheelchair as he rolled by, the way the big dogs in the street would chase cars. Aunt Sophie is in Hell, of course. Too bad her dog isn’t. I saw her out on the Parkway last week. She was on all fours running alongside Stephen Hawking and barking at his wheels. But Aunt Rachel — who also had hairs growing out of her chin, come to think of it — so chin hairs are either irrelevant in Hell or really really crucial — but chin hairs notwithstanding, Aunt Rachel was sweet as can be. I’d go to her house for lunch and I’d try to leave the end crust of my hot dog bun, which was hard as a brick. She always bought out-of-date buns at the day-old store. How do you get into the stale bread and donut business anyway? What makes you think of that? Maybe it’s that certain kind of underachiever kid we all know. See, he’s content to eat hard bun ends. So he has a childhood epiphany at the dinner table. He picks this thing up to gnaw on and he looks at it and he goes — someday I can do this. But Aunt Rachel would see me scooting the end of my bun away and she’d say, ‘Don’t you know there are starving children in the world who’d be happy to have that? Clean up your plate.’ So I’d say, ‘Then by all means, let’s get an envelope and mail this thing to some kid who’d appreciate it.’ And Aunt Rachel would just roll her eyes. She was that sweet. But there she was the other day, over at the Lake of Fire with her shoes off and her feet turning the color of a boiling lobster from the hot sand. So I say to her, ‘Aunt Rachel. What are you doing here?’ And she says, ‘It was all your fault. I let you waste food.’ It’s bad enough I’m in Hell. I’ve got to feel guilty on top of it? And what good is guilt down here anyway? What’s going to happen? I’m going to go to Hell? Well, I hate to say it, but look around. And about Aunt Sophie’s Pekinese. Yitzchak. You’d think he’d be here, wouldn’t you? You know some dogs are just made for Hell. But have you seen any dogs? There’s not one. I think it’s because they always cleaned up their plates. You ever see a dog leave a shred of food behind? And cat poop is their favorite. Right at the top of the doggie nutritional pyramid. Just ahead of snotty tissue. The Recommended Daily Allowance of cat poop for a dog is 225 grams. That’s the size of a Burger King Double Whopper. And it’s especially desirable if the poop’s been buried in the yard for a while. Day-old is fine with them. Month-old? Not a problem. It’s like vintages to them. Oh, here’s an impressive little calico poop from May. And this April tabby has a splendid bouquet. And they eat it all up. Every morsel. That’s why they’re in Heaven. If I had my life to live all over again, I’d eat cat poop at every opportunity. And I wouldn’t leave a bit on my plate.”

All through this, at every beat when a laugh was possible, Seinfeld paused ever so slightly, the stand-up’s subtle elbow in the ribs of his audience. But the room has remained absolutely silent, save for the coughing and an occasional hawking of a phlegmy throat. This time, though, Seinfeld draws out the pause. He looks around, blinking in the light, and he waits and waits. Anne, meanwhile, has been peering into the darkness, looking for Henry. Hatcher thinks the act is over, and he has to decide whether to stay or to go when these two reunite, which will be torture either way.

But Seinfeld resumes, in the same monologist’s bright tone, “See, what I’m thinking is, we always misunderstood religion. All the religions of the world were, in fact, just these great big objects of performance art. Like going to Lincoln Center or the Met. So whatever religions knew about the universe, it was all metaphor. But how we all ended up here is that we’ve got this irresistible urge to turn metaphor into dogma. Like we read Huckleberry Finn and we become Twainists and we go, Every year you’ve got to lash some logs together and float down a river or you’ll end up in Hell. And if you don’t do the river thing, if, for instance, you’ve read Moby Dick and you’re a Melvillean and you think to save your soul you’ve got to go fishing every Sunday instead of floating on a raft, then I’m going to hate your infidel ass. And you’re going to hate mine. And if I don’t have a religion? Well, I’ve got the antidogma dogma going and I’ll hate your ass anyway. That’s why we’re all in Hell. And speaking of asses, I’m working mine off here with second-rate material while you just work the loogies out of your fucking throats.”

Instantly, someone from the darkness shouts, in a thick British upper-class accent, “You can’t say ‘fuck’.” And a heavy glass ashtray flies into the spotlight and catches Seinfeld on the left temple. He staggers back and another ashtray hits him bloodily in the nose. A dozen more ashtrays fly at him and he covers his head with his arms and he turns and staggers off the stage and disappears into the darkness.

The lights come up. The crowd stirs and rises — all men in morning dress — and they flow around Hatcher and Anne muttering “Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.” Anne studies the faces going by, and Hatcher is watching her watching them when the crowd thins and she shifts her gaze and her eyes widen and she stiffens. Hatcher looks. Two men are dawdling up from the front table, talking to each other. They are both dressed in iron-gray, single-breasted cutaways with pearl-gray vests and silk top hats, which they are patting into place. They are moving this way. One of the men is slender and narrow-faced and is wearing a black patch on his right eye. The other man, hobbling painfully, is vast and thick-necked and red-faced, and in spite of the fact that his specially tailored vest and coat could hold at least three of the eye-patched man, the fat man still threatens to burst from them. And though he is clean-shaven except for a small mustache with waxed twists at the end, and though the reddish-gold hair that has just disappeared under his hat is parted in the middle and lacquered with Wildroot, it is clearly Henry.

This is not the slender, strapping young Henry of Anne’s girlhood. Or even the notably expanding Henry of their marriage. This is the bloated and syphilitic end-of-his-life Henry that Anne, wide-eyed, is seeing now. Satan is not exactly known for never closing a door without opening a window, but Hatcher understands the primary torture here will be for Anne and Henry, and this will be a benefit for him. Let them both suffer a voice somewhere in him says. Hisses, really. And Hatcher feels light. He feels he can just bound out the door and go sit on the veranda and cross his legs and sip a gin sling and stare contentedly into the desert. And the drink will taste very good, while these two rancorously finish with each other, for all eternity.

Henry and the other man are upon them. As soon as the king sees Anne, his face bloats in a smile that is instantly lost in the folds of chin and cheek. He cries, “My once mistress, once friend, my once wife, once betrayer — or was it I who betrayed you? — my once joy, once torment, have you found me in Hell to torment me truly now so as to have your righteous revenge? For yes, I betrayed you, and to understand that betrayal is hell heaped upon Hell, my once wife. How’s that pretty throat? I’m sorry to allude thus now to your final wound, a wound I ordered, it is true, a wound I later conjured before my mind’s eye many a time as if it was our first fuck, and I am sorry to allude to that as well, but I find in this place that I cannot choose my own words and I cannot leave from speaking, except when I am listening to comedy that is not comedy at all and that leads me to yearn anew for my axman so that I might silence these solitary jesters who come before me, but I cannot find an ax when I need it, I can only find, as I listen to them, rotten pustulous things in the back of my throat, which surely rise from these poxed and cankered legs of mine, the legs that ruined me. O my legs, my once queen, my later queens had to deal with them, but at least you were spared the burden of my pus.” And all these words rush from Henry as if in a single breath, and he still does not pause but turns his face to his companion and moves seamlessly from pus to command. “Sir Francis, my dear Vicar of Hell, take this man to the veranda and provide him with drink, I must have a word now with this once inadequate womb before me, this slut, this girl-yielding cunt, though the girl she yielded had quite a reign, as I’ve heard, a greater reign than mine, they say.” And Henry begins to quake even as he talks on and the man called Francis has Hatcher by the elbow and Hatcher is happy to go, for the rancor soars now on strongly beating wings.