Read Online Hell by Robert Olen Butler - Free Book Online Page A

room, sitting in a chair, filing its fingernails, is Anne’s headless naked body.
    Hatcher does exactly the wrong thing. He screams and jumps up. Anne’s head—having limited motor skills and, in its detached state, being more prone than usual to being startled—clamps its mouth tightly shut. Hatcher leaps about the room now, knocking into the bed stand, the window, the wall, Anne’s head whipping up and down and back and forth with each movement. This being Hell, there is nothing to prevent Anne’s teeth from actually biting clean through Hatcher’s distressed member, for him subsequently to be reassembled. It occurs to him that this would actually be preferable, in that it would put a clear end to the present ordeal. In this instance, however, Anne’s head bites only hard enough to hold on, and so Hatcher—though movement is not in his ongoing best interest—compulsively continues to leap and spin and pirouette and, within the confines of this very small room, even execute two unmistakable grand jetés, one from the window to the opposite wall and then another back again.
    At last he lands in front of Anne’s body, and with great force of will he holds himself steady and grasps her head between his two hands and pleads for her to release him and reattach. Anne’s hands do rise now, and they grasp her head, and she releases Hatcher, who crumples to the floor. Anne puts her head onto her body, stretches her neck, looks down at Hatcher, and says, her tone criticizing him and not her, “Nothing I ever do in bed is right.”

    Meanwhile, in the alleyway, the voice that Hatcher and Anne heard is still silent. It both cried and sang, though not like Hatcher’s ex-wife and not King Henry’s “Pastime with Good Company.” Ernest Hemingway stands even now out there in the dark. He is looking for a good bar—he has been looking for a good bar for pretty much as long as he’s been in Hell—and he can’t find one and, as it often does, his failure has made him weep for a time. A little girlishly, it’s true. This is Hell. And while he wept, he sang in a mumbly, untuned voice, easy to misunderstand from a distance, it’s true. But the song, in fact, was from the Spanish Civil War, “A las Barricadas,” the hymn of the Anarcho-Syndicalists. And now Ernest Hemingway stands in an alleyway in Hell and his head is full of words.
    It was late and everyone had come into the café. The place was dim and full of bullfighters and Gulf fishermen and boxers and Upper Peninsula Indians and some boys from the Lincoln Battalion who died at Jarama. No one could see anyone’s face, the bar was so dark. The old man sat at a table by the window. The only light in the place came from a lamp on the street and it shone on the old man. He was dressed in a white poplin empire dress.
    The two waiters inside the café watched him. “He committed suicide,” the older one said.
    “Why?”
    “Look at him.”
    “That’s why?”
    “His mother put him in that.”
    “How do you know his mother did it?”
    “Who else? If he wished it for himself, he wouldn’t be wearing it here.”
    The younger waiter nodded.
    The old man wanted another drink. He wanted a first drink. But there was nothing to drink here. There were only all the men he ever knew or ever thought about. Then his wives came into the café. He knew they would come. And the women he slept with and didn’t marry but wanted to. And the women he didn’t sleep with but wanted to. And the women he slept with but didn’t want to. Everyone was here. Everything he’d ever done was here, inside his skull. What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was an everything that he knew too well. It was all in darkness but it was all here, and it needed that, the dark, and the heat.
    The light in the street went out and he was in darkness now too. He had always been in darkness. He knew it was all todo y pues todo y todo y pues todo. Our todo who art in todo, todo be thy name, thy