Robert Butler - Hell

Hatcher climbs the circular iron staircase toward his apartment, slowly, the heaviness of his legs already upon him, the outer curving of the stairs blinding him over and over as he circles toward and away and toward the full, overhead sunlight in the alleyway. The day seems to be rewinding itself. It seemed later, earlier. And he emerges into the corridor. He stops. Ahead is the Hoppers’ closed door. And then his own empty apartment. Anne is gone. He stuffs his hands into his coat pockets, even before he realizes he’s searching for something. One last thing left undone before he’s ready to face the rest of eternity. In an inner pocket he finds the list of addresses.

He has seen his wives. And his mother. He shivers again at that. He has seen Beatrice and Virgil, whose delusional preoccupation when he came for them was of no consequence. They had no worse a fate than he, going down with a faux Titanic while having what surely turned out to be unsatisfying sex. He has not seen Dante, who, however, is a professional liar. Hatcher has no interest in finding him now. But there is one more address, from the impulse to help Sylvia Beach. The address of the former companion she longs for, Adrienne Monnier. She should have this.

Hatcher turns away from his apartment now and descends the stairs and rushes along the alleyway and into Grand Peachtree Parkway. He turns toward the neighborhood of the writers. He makes good time along the margin of the crowd, as always, until the run of store fronts and apartment stoops begins. He slows down and studies the windows going by and soon he finds himself before a hand-lettered sign: SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY. He stops. But a single glance inside makes him lay his forehead sadly against the glass. The store is empty. The shelves are bare. Sylvia, like all the other bookstore owners in Hell, has almost instantly gone out of business. He curses himself softly. He secured Adrienne’s address but not Sylvia’s. He thought he knew how to find her. And in the cursing of himself, Hatcher backs away from the shop and a shoulder bumps him, from the edge of the crowd, and he thinks to go to Adrienne, at least, and tell her that Sylvia is somewhere in the writers’ neighborhood, and this leads to more unfocused steps and then another shoulder and another step and he is drawn into the great, onflowing current of the street crowd.

And quickly Hatcher McCord is sucked toward the center, though he finds that he doesn’t care. He doesn’t have the energy to do it right now, but he knows he can always slide back out when he wants. But at this moment he is wedged front and back and right and left by these four denizens: Isabella Andreini, former actress and member of the Gelosi Commedia dell’Arte troupe of late sixteenth-century Italy; William W. Ross, former Fuller Brush door-to-door salesman of Altadena, California, and the 1948 Western Region Salesman of the Year; Spec 4 Jason Stanley of South Bristol, Maine, and former clerk-typist at the Long Binh base camp about thirty clicks up Highway 1 from Saigon; and Jezebel, former wife of King Ahab of Israel. And this moment happens also to be the very moment that a mid-day sulfurous rain begins.

A flaming spot flashes onto Hatcher’s face and he knows what’s happening and he has never before been caught in the rain, never, and he tries to move but the crowd implodes and it is too late and another flame on the forehead and a spray of pain, serrated blades, a thousand of them, ripping through his face and his shoulders and his chest and then the drenching of pain, and things slow down, things slow way down, as every cell in his body shreds and dissolves, and he feels each one separately, he could count each cell though they are as great a multitude as the stars and each one is raging as hot as the bright flaring center of a nova. And the four denizens pressed into Hatcher are also dissolving and they flow together, these five, and in the rain you never lose your consciousness and all the bodies dissolving around you are part of your body and your body is part of theirs, and inside Hatcher, even as he is dissolving, a voice speaks: I am between wives and my ratings are high and I am with a tiny-boned woman with dark skin and a black bindi between her eyebrows and we are naked and she says she did not know who I am she says she never watches the evening news and outside the window a flare is falling from a guard tower on the perimeter somebody is nervous about Charlie and I look at Hoa which means flower and she has just stepped out of the black silk pantaloons that all the hooch girls wear and she is no whore she says and I say I know and I rip open my gown and I tear it from me as I go mad from the scorning of my passion and the eyes of my noble audience the Grand Duke of Tuscany and his bride grow wide and I am wrapped tight in a body stocking but their eyes are on me as if I am really naked and she is naked right there in my Fuller Brush Illustrated Catalog on page six and she has her hair pulled up and tied in a red ribbon and the very end of the handsomely designed unbreakable plastic handle of a number 401 Shower Brush is all that covers her nipple and just barely and he lays me down beneath an almond tree and we are naked and we share a quince before we touch I bite and he bites where I bit and I lick that place where he bit and bite in a new place and we make our mouths sweet make the very air we breathe from our bodies sweet before we kiss for the first time and this is before Ahab comes to me and brings his god whose breath stinks of old blood and if I never leave the almond grove without becoming the wife of this other man if I marry my own if I marry the body that first holds me and breathes sweetly and deeply into me then perhaps Baal can save me from the knock on the door and she has the look I’ve always wanted to see in a woman’s eyes she has that look even from the first moment and I sit with her on her couch and our shoulders are touching and she stops on page six and she smiles faintly and she touches her hair at the back and she orders a number 401 Shower Brush and she orders a number 386 Flesh Brush and she says its name slowly drawing the word out Flesh she says I want a Flesh Brush and I say number 386 and I write down her order and I shake her hand and I leave because I am the fucking Western Region Salesman of the Year and if I do what I think of doing when my gown is ripped and is falling at my feet if I take my hands and clutch the body stocking and dig my fingers deep and I pull it apart and rip it from my body so I can stand truly naked before the Duke and his bride perhaps I can be fully true at last to who I am for I went upon the stage so that I could be naked and I could be seen and she is naked and we touch and that is the last time and afterwards I don’t know where Hoa has gone and the other hooch girls shrug when I ask about her and I can only lie on my bunk and watch the flares in the night sky and dream of me coming home from the lobster boats and she is waiting for me my flower of a wife and she takes me to the bath and strips me naked and she scrubs the smell of fish off me with a brush and she takes the tip of her finger and she touches me in the same spot on my forehead as her bindi and she says that’s where all the experiences of your life have gone where you will find everything that you are and we touch and we touch and though we never say a word about it we both know we will never do this again but before she leaves she cooks for me she tears the chicken apart with her hands and she cooks with asafetida and it smells like tar it smells like Pittsfield when I was young and when everything was new it smells like the tar from the streets but it tastes wonderful and she is gone