Robert Butler - Hell

“Thanks,” she says, real low.

Hatcher feels a hot tidal wave of unfocused regret wash over him. He aches.

Bogey says, “So you want us to locate this boyfriend and find out what he knows.”

“I just want out,” the dame says, lifting her face and blowing a thin plume of smoke into the shadows above her. “You figure out how.”

“It won’t be easy,” Bogey says.

“If it was easy I’d do it myself,” she says.

“This town,” Bogey says.

“Yeah,” she says.

“The walls have ears,” he says.

“Don’t I know it,” she says.

“So you have to figure somebody already knows you’re trying to blow the joint.”

“Maybe.”

“And he knows we’re supposed to help.”

“I don’t care. I’ll take that chance.”

“But will I?”

Hatcher looks at them. He understands that they’re talking about Satan. A chill passes through him, a physical reaction that’s rare in Hell. It occurs to him that perhaps this whole scene isn’t just another fleeting fabricated form of torture. Perhaps this is Bogey’s ongoing life here, and the dame’s. So why the chill? It’s the newsman’s chill, he realizes. As if there is a story. A big one. A way out. The young woman’s face is angled toward Bogey, partly eclipsed in dark shadow. “What’s your name?” Hatcher asks.

She turns to him, her full face flaring bright. She takes a long drag on the cigarette and blows the smoke out through her nose, never moving her dark eyes — as dark as Anne’s — off his. “Beatrice Portinari,” she says.

“You’re Dante’s girl,” Bogey says.

“In a manner of speaking,” she says.

Hatcher says, “He’s the guy who’s supposed to know a way out?”

“That’s right.”

“He lied,” Hatcher says. Maybe there’s not a story here after all.

Beatrice shrugs. “He’s a poet.”

“He made the whole inferno thing up.”

“But the lies were true,” she says.

Hatcher wags his head at this paradox he has never understood. “That’s why I hate interviewing writers.”

“Down here he’s trying to write a novel,” she says.

Inside Hatcher’s head, he is answering himself: You understand the journalist’s paradox well enough. That truths can be put together to make a lie.

“Look,” Beatrice says. “He came and he went. You think his fourteenth century audience would have understood the real Hell? You should have seen this place when I arrived. Not that electric lights and the Internet haven’t made things just as bad in their own way. But back then it was a nightmare version of the same life we all already knew. You think Dante could have written about what really goes on? All of us huddled together in the long night in a walled city burning our filthiest rags soaked in animal fat from who knows where and everybody compulsively reciting bad poetry in broken meters. With the smell and the sound of that stuff filling you up, you’d just throw yourself in the Lake of Fire to clear your head. But back in Florence they would’ve laughed that off. That can’t be Hell. That’s just daily life in Siena. Dante gave them the tortures they could believe in. But it was still torture.”

Hatcher feels his newsman’s twitch again. Maybe Dante really knew something. And maybe even the neo-Harrowing thing is related. This little noir scene has quickened him to the possibility of the biggest story in Hell. And he knows to try to turn off his brain, though it may already be too late. Satan is listening.

The police siren is wailing louder now.

Beatrice closes her eyes and pinches her mouth and shakes her head. At first Hatcher thinks she’s just remembering Hell from the old days. But she stands up abruptly, turns, and moves to a door at the end of the room. She throws it open. Inside is a naked old man, his hands racing up and down his body scratching some terrible itch. He is howling like the police siren on about a 1941 Ford.

“Will you shut the fuck up?” Beatrice cries.

The man immediately shuts the fuck up, though his fingers continue to dig furiously at his body.

Beatrice slams the door and returns to her chair and sits.

She shakes her head in disgust. “He won’t say which one, but he claims he’s a pope. Boniface VIII is my guess.”

The room is absolutely silent. There isn’t even the buzz of a silent room in anyone’s ears. Hatcher can’t remember actual silence since he came to Hell. All three of them stir uncomfortably. They all three think they can hear Satan listening.

Then Bogey says, “Fuck you, Old Man.”

Beatrice and Hatcher brace themselves. That will do it. A whirlwind of flaming sulfur will rush through the window now and they’ll have to decompose and recompose in agony for a while and then get back to the old chaos. But the silence goes on. And on.

Beatrice whispers, “See?”

“What?” Hatcher says, low.

“They’d never have understood this.”

“I’m not sure I do either,” Bogey whispers.

Beatrice says, “We’re still alive.”

They all rustle around a little in their skin to verify that.

“So it seems,” Hatcher says.

“That’s the real torture,” Beatrice says. “Just that.”

Bogey says, “You’ve been eating too many flaming hearts, sister.”

“Get me out of here,” she says.

“We’ll do what we can,” Bogey says. He looks at Hatcher and nods toward the door.

“How can we find you?” Hatcher says.

Beatrice smiles faintly and blows smoke into the air between them. She looks past Hatcher. “You know what I’m about to say, don’t you?”

Bogey puts a heavy, searingly hot hand on Hatcher’s shoulder. “Don’t let her say it.”

Beatrice smiles.

“I could smack a woman around a little in life,” Bogey says to Beatrice.

“Think what I can do in Hell.”

“You won’t touch me,” Beatrice says. “You’re soft inside. Face the facts. The problem of one little man finding his dame doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in Hell.”

Bogey pulls at Hatcher’s shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.” But Hatcher can’t seem to move and neither can Bogey.

Beatrice looks at Hatcher. “If you want me,” she says, “just whistle,”

Bogart moans.

“You know how to whistle, don’t you?” she says. Bogey’s hand, which has been burning hotly into Hatcher’s shoulder all this while, goes suddenly cold. “You just put your lips together and blow.”

The two men find they can move. They cross the room and go out the door. They head down the dark hall, not saying a word. But all around them now, sounds are coming from behind the passing apartment doors. Moaning sounds. Keening sounds. Classic gnashing-of-teeth sounds. And then, from behind the last door this side of the stairwell, comes the pittering of a computer keyboard. Hatcher slows and stops. Bogey goes on around the corner. The neighborhood is full of writers. Hatcher has the impulse to open this door. He does.

The room is black except for the radiance from a computer monitor. In profile, a man’s head hangs in the light, the darkness shrouding the rest of him. It’s not even clear there is a rest of him — as if he were like Anne, arrived in Hell from a beheading — though the sound of furious typing clatters from the dark where his hands and keyboard would be. He is a bald man with the fringe of his hair cut very short and with a faintly aquiline nose. He does not take his eyes from the computer screen.

Hatcher understands that the man is a writer, and he seems vaguely familiar for some reason or other, though maybe not for his writing exactly — from tabloids and gossip columns, perhaps — maybe there was a woman involved somehow — but Hatcher can’t place him.