Hell by Robert Olen Butler Read Free Book Online Page B

man standing at the mouth of an alley. This is Hatcher McCord, whose foot suddenly flares wildly in pain, the source of which, an old woman in a bundle of rags, lurches against him and seems about to tumble to the ground, where she will be routinely crushed by the crowd. Though the pain she has caused is shooting up his leg and making his knee cap feel as if it is about to explode, Hatcher’s hands rush out and gently hold the old woman at the shoulders, which squish and shift as if he has grabbed handfuls of maggots. But he perseveres in his hold in order to keep her from falling, and she steadies herself and passes on without a word or a glance at him.
    He watches her go.
    Something just happened, he realizes vaguely, this gesture with someone who has just hurt him, something that he should stop and consider. But things are getting muddled in his head. Satan’s work. The Old Man doesn’t like too much thinking. Everyone understands that. Though Hatcher stands there thinking about how he can’t think. He wants to stop. Not for Satan’s agenda but his own. He wants to stop thinking in order to fully experience something important to think about. The immediate physical and emotional encounter with life in Hell sometimes begins to add up in certain ways, and maybe this should yield the most important ideas. It all has to come back to these ways we exist in our moment to moment encounters with consciousness—even into eternity—even if the moments leap and circle and combine, we are still along for the ride, and we have company—like the woman who stepped on my foot—and we have to figure out how to deal with all that. But Satan won’t let me think about not thinking, Hatcher thinks, and so he stops.
    And what’s next? The night is young. He has a story to pursue off in the direction of Peachtree Way and Lucky Street, one that got as far as the official Evening News from Hell lineup. Satan seems to be going along with this for now. He turns to the right and rides along with the crowd.

    The night streets teem with bodies and screams, though the screamers are different from the screamers before the setting of the sun. These are the denizens with night terrors, taking over from those with the anguish of twilight. There are cars now as well, the automotive technology often retro, the center of the street jammed and blaring with Cords and Fords and Moons, with Vauxhalls and Maxwells and Fiats and BMWs, with Hondas and Renaults and Zims, their drivers and passengers sealed inside, banging on the windows and crying out in rage at the drivers and passengers in the cars around them, and none of them moving, except intermittently to lurch forward several feet to crush a few pedestrians in the eddies flowing around them, only to stall again, while beneath their tires and body frames, the crushed denizens wail away until the next lurch of traffic allows them to rise and reconstitute.
    For a time, Hatcher loses his knack for mobility and gets sucked from the margin of the flowing crowd and toward its center. He wonders if this means his Big Boss has now decided this story should be dropped. There are never editorial meetings as such. Things come up. Things get pursued until something—often painful—occurs to stop them. Being crushed in the center of a nighttime crowd would be one of the simpler terminations to a story. Hatcher figures the initial tolerance of the neo-Harrowing item was simply to build false hopes anyway. Even if, as Hatcher’s news nose faintly whiffs, there is some sort of something true behind this, it would involve such a small number of denizens that covering it would have a torturous effect on the vast numbers once again left behind. But it wouldn’t have to be true to be torture. Maybe this was all simply to arrange that public, humiliating disavowal of the story by Carl. And the news nose whiff will be a purely private disappointment.
    Hatcher keeps his mind thus desperately occupied amid the multitude