Robert Butler - Hell

“I’m not wrong,” Hillary says, still scowling out at the desert.

“You’re wrong,” Bill says.

Hillary looks at Hatcher. “It’s not about smart. It’s not about articulate. You look at your working masses, the ones who really decide, and those qualities are actually disadvantages. He won because of the cheeseburger. Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger. He famously ate cheeseburgers. He ate fucking cheeseburgers for them all. He ate cheeseburgers and they believed in him.”

Bill says, “It’s not that which goeth into the mouth empowereth a man but that which cometh out. It was me. My words. Me.”

“All those cows died for you,” Hillary says.

Hatcher gently pulls Bill’s hand off his arm and he moves away. At the door, he hesitates. But he pushes through into the lobby, and up ahead he sees the hurried veering of people around low-to-the-floor activity lit brightly in the center of the atrium, activity he does not recognize at first glance from this distance. There is no rubbernecking in Hell. Suffering splashes over, spills out, spreads immediate contagion, and everyone knows just to look the other way and move quickly on. But Hatcher hurries quickly toward the pain, for he begins to see what it is.

It is Henry lying massively on his back, his pants off, his legs bare. Anne is crouched beside him, on the far side. She is stripped down to a handkerchief-linen teddy. But in spite of Hatcher’s impulse to expect the worst in this realm, it is instantly clear to him that what’s happening here is not about sex. He draws near and can see that Henry’s massive legs are haphazardly swathed in strips torn from Anne’s tea dress. She is quickly, quakingly wrapping the last bit of it around Henry’s right calf. The pieces of the dress are going dark from a profuse flow of fluid.

Hatcher stops before the two of them. He can see between the bandages that Henry’s legs are a patchwork of ulcerous sores pumping out a thick, striated mixture of blood and pus. Anne is panting and moaning and wrapping, and her hands are smeared with Henry’s fluids and she can’t keep up, this last bit of her dress is in place and his suppuration goes on and on and she cries out and she lifts upright on her knees and she strips off the teddy and she is naked, utterly naked, and she begins tearing at the linen, pulling it into strips and bending down to Henry again and wrapping his legs.

And Henry’s head is to the side, and his eyes are closed, and he is singing, softly but clearly, the song he wrote as a young man, the one Anne thought she heard a few nights ago outside the window. “Pastime with good company, I…” and he hums across the word no one can think of in Hell and he sings on “…and shall until I die. Company is good and ill, but every man has his free will.”

And Anne is moaning, fumbling with the cloth, unable to go on. Hatcher hesitates. But now he circles Henry’s legs to the other side and goes down on his knees next to Anne. He bends to her ear. “You’ll never keep up,” he says, gently. “It’s Hell, my darling. You’ve done what you can.”

She looks at Hatcher, her eyes wide, restless, uncomprehending. Her hands are trembling furiously, full of the strips of her teddy. Hatcher takes the end of one of the strips and pulls at it. Her hand is clenched tight, and he tugs the cloth firmly and she lets it go. He turns to Henry and finds a patch of his ulcerous flesh, oozing profusely, on the side of his calf. Hatcher lifts the leg and the pus flows over his hands and he lays the strip of cloth on Henry’s leg and he wraps it around and half around once more and that’s as far as it goes, and he eases the leg back down, and Henry sings “Pastime with good company I… sway… I swoon… I swisser my swatter…” and Hatcher turns to Anne, who is staring at him, steadily. When his eyes meet hers, she glances at Henry’s legs and back to him. He takes the end of another strip of cloth and pulls gently at it. Anne holds on tight. “I caused this,” she says.

“No you didn’t,” Hatcher says.

“Not in life. Now, I mean,” she says and her voice is steady.

“It’s what we all do,” he says.

“He cut off my head,” she says.

“Yes,” he says.

“Let’s go,” she says.

Hatcher’s chest pumps up instantly full at this and lifts him and he cups her elbow and they stand up together. He strips off his suit coat and puts it around her shoulders, pulling the coat to, buttoning the buttons so it will cover her loins, and she bends into him and they move around Henry, and before they are halfway across the lobby floor, all of Henry’s bodily fluids have lifted away from them and flown back to the former king.

At the Cadillac, Hatcher opens the back door and sees the camcorder lying in the shadows. The pretext that got him here was to do an interview with Henry, and he utterly forgot. With a mind free to think and plan for itself, he realizes this absorption with his own agenda is a grave danger. He reaches in and takes the camera, and he turns to Anne. “I still have this to do,” he says. “I’ll have Dick take you home.”

She nods.

He guides her into the backseat and tucks his suit coat around her.

“Can you do this alone?” he says.

“Yes,” she says. “Thank you.”

He moves to the driver window. Inside, Dick Nixon has fallen asleep, his head sharply angled to the side, as if his neck is broken. Hatcher raps at the window. Nixon snaps upright, and he rolls down the window. “I am not a crook,” he says.

“Mr. President. Are you awake?”

“I am not asleep,” he says.

But Hatcher isn’t sure. He waits a few moments while Nixon blinks and looks around and then back to Hatcher.

“Are you ready to go?” Nixon says, clearly focusing now.

Hatcher says, “Take Anne back to the apartment and return here for me.”

Nixon nods and rolls up his window and the motor instantly revs to life and the tires dig wildly and the Cadillac shoots off, leaving Hatcher standing in a cloud of desert dust.

He’s glad Nixon will hurry. He doesn’t look forward to lingering here.

Hatcher turns and goes up onto the veranda and through the doors. Ahead in the foyer, Henry is still on the floor. Hatcher approaches. Sir Francis is holding Henry’s pants and waiting for the king to stand up. But Henry sits, fully reconstituted but unable or unmotivated to rise. This interview doesn’t have to be good. Hatcher just has to have something for the record. He crouches before Henry and looks at the former king through the viewfinder. Henry seems not quite aware of where he is. But Hatcher thinks his state might actually be a good thing for this feature. He starts the camera.

“Sire, I’m here at the request of Beelzebub himself and for the sake of Our Supreme Ruler’s own TV station. I have one question to ask you, and you can talk for as long as you wish. Why do you think you’re here?”

In spite of what he has just gone through and his post-reconstitution daze, Henry begins speaking at once. That and the seeming indirection of Henry’s words make Hatcher think that he really hasn’t heard the question, “O meats, my abundant meats, I miss your pleasures deeply in this afterlife, where once, in life, I had faith to believe I would have you yet again, my lamb and ox, my rabbit and deer, my partridge and peacock and pig, my hedgehog and heron and swan, my bustard and black-bird and hart, all of you and more. Those of you who ran free, I hoped to hunt you down, to set a pack of hounds of Heaven or Hell, whichever was my fate, upon a great rangale of red deer, or by my own hand with longbow or crossbow to pierce the heart of a wild boar, and then to sit at table and tear your sweet flesh with my hands and eat. I am ravenous yet for my meats, but I know now that every arrow shot, every dog unleashed, every hawk set forth, every side pierced and throat cut and belly sliced open, I should have done them all in the name of God, I should have made each a sacrifice to the God who was hungrier even than I, and if I had done so, perhaps I would be eating meat now in Heaven instead of starving in this meatless Hell.”