Hell by Robert Olen Butler Read Free Book Online Page A

shudders to think of the meat in those. He is grateful that, of all the things he is compelled to do in this place—knowing even as he does them how badly they will turn out—he is not compelled to eat the hamburgers of Hell. And this thought scares him. He braces himself for that very impulse now, to go in there and order the double cheeseburger as a punishment for thinking he has something to be grateful for.
    But the impulse does not come. Hatcher can imagine Satan having his little laugh. He won’t let his subjects anticipate him. And the fear of punishment is torture aplenty. Satan knows what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. And with that thought, Hatcher recognizes the contradictions of trying to remember how to find this alley again. If the Old Man wants him to find Beatrice, he will. If he doesn’t, Hatcher’s remembering these landmarks will do no good.
    Meanwhile, struggling along at the near edge of the passing crowd, approaching Hatcher, is a deeply disgruntled Jezebel, former wife of King Ahab of Israel. Though personal age can shift abruptly in any direction in Hell, she is perpetually dressed in rags and she is old, as she was when she was pushed from her balcony by eunuchs and then eaten by dogs, and inside her, a voice is always speaking. It’s not the Tishbite Elijah or his false god who has put me here, never, his people are here too, in abundance. As are mine, but I was as true to my gods as he was to his, and his god was an angry old man who adored the waste of the desert, and he was a savage god. My husband spoke of these traditions of his: the rape and murder of every man, woman, and child of any nation in the path of their wandering—Midian and Bashan and Heshbon and Makkedah and Libnah and Lachish and Gezer and many more. And I built sweet gardens where my gods dwelled among the almond trees and the pomegranate trees and we worshipped naked in beds of narcissus and crocus and henna and we consecrated the poplar and the palm and the tamarisk, as Baal would have us do to join like a newlywed with the sweetly, blessedly burgeoning world around us. And for this, the foul old man stinking in haircloth spoke as if he were a god himself and cursed us with a long drought, raping and murdering even the flowers and the trees. And how powerful was the god he spoke for? Even after the Tishbite took my husband and all my priests up to Mount Carmel and worked some magic trick with the weather upon them and then slaughtered all eight hundred and fifty of my devout holy men, my simple woman’s wrath scared him away for years. Elijah fled at the mere threatening of his life. What was the point of a stroke of lightning from his god and some cooked bullock and the murder of eight hundred and fifty sincerely devout men, if the triumphant effects lasted half a day? And even years later, after his people finally succeeded in murdering my husband, their king, I ruled his Israel for fourteen years, and when I knew they were finally coming for me, I died with dignity, painting my eyes with black kohl and anointing my skin with opal balsam. Okay. We did our share of slaughtering. Okay. But so did they all, in all the following millennia as well, apparently, because they’re all here in Hell, the big shots of all the religions. So then who is the true god who judges us all so harshly? He gave me my time and my place to be born and a daddy who was a king and a priest and who stroked my hair and kissed my brow and who I had no alternative but to believe, when he said what life was about. Whoever that god is, he set me up to be who I was. So why for eternity do I have to wear rags and stink like a Tishbite? And why oh why am I compelled to figure out how to do e-mail?
    Keeping up with advances in technology is one of the great tortures of Hell for the old-timers, and as Jezebel’s mind works itself around to this, her increased agitation makes her veer from the edge of the crowd and she steps heavily on the foot of a