And inside Peggy, her own voice speaks, unknown to Satan or to Howard either or even to herself, most of the time, and when it is known to herself, it serves only to torture her: This must be hard on him even with our door shut against the sulfur out there pouring down, the smell gets in anyway and it’s bad and he’s got a nose on him and I don’t know how he got it but he’s always had it, like early on, maybe our fourth or fifth date, and I know we’re going to kiss and it’s night and we’re racing along the Hudson in his Ford Roadster and he’s sniffing at the air and I say what and he says dogwood and I can’t even pick it up, and later we’re parked and we’re kissing and he puts his nose against my throat and he says rose and he says jasmine and he says there’s something smoky, like an animal, and he hopes it’s okay, his saying this, he hopes this doesn’t make me mad, and it doesn’t, it’s actually something okay in a way that I can’t even begin to put into words, but I slap him a little just the same and for Peggy this is so long ago and utterly lost and whatever was okay is so very difficult to think about that she says now, aloud, “You’ve always been so rude,” and he says, “Me rude? You never stopped yammering long enough for me even to begin to be rude,” and they start up, while outside, Hatcher passes their closed door and approaches his own.
He hopes Anne was safely in the apartment for the rain. If she’s waiting inside for him, he has to figure out now what to tell her about her own mind. He stops before the door. He recognizes the assumption he just made. Perhaps this privacy of mind he has isn’t universal. Maybe it’s a rare gift. Like good hair and straight teeth and a killer broadcast voice. Maybe if he lets anyone know about it who doesn’t have the gift, Satan will find him out through that other mind and deal with him.
He opens the door and steps in. Anne is not in sight. “Darling, I’m home,” he says.
She appears from the bedroom, head attached, wearing jeans and a TUDOR HOOLIGAN T-shirt. As soon as her eyes fall on Hatcher, she gapes and gasps such that Hatcher wonders if the rain misted into the backseat and he wasn’t aware and he is standing before her half dissolved.
“It was your investiture,” she says.
“What?”
“When they grabbed you full stark naked, I worried for your fate. But it was to… ” She pauses, trying to find a word, but both her hands have come up, their fingers fluttering at him.
He looks down. He is clad still in the powder-blue jumpsuit of a minion. Of course he is. He was hustled into the car after the interview and borne along like this. He lifts his arms, rotates his hands, considers himself up and down. Has he become a minion? Is this how it’s done?
“…enable you,” Anne says, finding the word she wanted. “Is this so? Did they give you new powers, my darling?”
He looks at Anne. Her T-shirt now reads GOVERN NAKED.
“No,” Hatcher says. “I don’t know.”
Anne angles her head to the side ever so slightly, narrows her eyes and smiles faintly. “Even Henry goes about in mufti. He is a king no more. And my anchorman, powerful already, entering every dwelling in Hell, is elevated even higher now.” She has begun to purr.
Hatcher looks down once more at his uniform. Everyone in Hell knows what this means. Perhaps this will help him too, in what he must do. He feels Anne drawing near, and he is happy suddenly about his apparent new status. Maybe real status. He thinks to pat at his hair. It’s been restored to its normal anchorman length without Anne ever being reminded of the first man she had sex with. All is well. He lifts his eyes and Anne’s T-shirt reads KISS ME, I’M A BRIT IN HELL and she is upon him, putting her arms around his neck and her mouth on his.
Hatcher wonders if minions get to have satisfying sex. He wonders if the thing that actually makes the sex go bad in Hell is the notion that an immortal is not only watching but listening to every intimate thought. He wonders if that often didn’t apply back on earth as well. He recalls that it certainly did apply in the back of the Pittsfield American Legion Hall a week after the first Kennedy funeral when he was driven to bind together the passion for a girl with the passion of world events and the girl was driven to listen for God, who was inside her mind telling her to look at her dirty little self and feel ashamed. He even recalls the impression on that night that JFK was there with him, not just watching but inside Hatcher’s head where they could talk, and Hatcher asked Mr. President, do you mind? and Kennedy said You should proceed with vigah and Hatcher wonders if Anne even considers Satan’s putative presence in her head, wonders if maybe for her it’s Henry VIII in there listening all the time. And with all this wondering and recalling, of course, Hatcher is missing quite a bit of kissing. His lips are working but he’s missing their primary intended effect.
And Anne recalls with the first kiss of her newly invested Hatcher how her first kiss with Henry was at Hampton Court in the King’s Long Gallery and how he wore a robe of Venetian damask and silver tissue and gold cloth and no one in the realm could wear such a thing but him — it was all his power draped upon him — and she wonders at how a man’s power gives off a palpable emanation, a thing in the air that enters through her very gown — not to mention through her very Bangladeshi jeans — and goes straight to all the excitable spots on her body and excites them. And she wonders at how that excitement is like the excitement of seeing a beautiful snake suddenly among the flowers, crimson and black, and its beauty is made vivid by the poison you think is in its fangs and you want to touch it and it coils for you and its round-tipped little head rises and swoops for you and then it bites and you go quite numb and you lose all the excitement, and then you stop and ask yourself why you shouldn’t be the one who bites. And Anne, wishing to make this thing go right for herself at last, is moved to bite her semipowerful man on the lip and he cries out and they both remember the last time her teeth got involved in sex between them and she suddenly can’t understand why she wants this anyway and she lets go and backs off. Her T-shirt now reads HELL IS LOSING YOUR HEAD.
From the bedroom Brünnhilde in the Götterdämmerung begins to send Wotan’s ravens home in her final aria before riding her horse into her own flaming funeral pyre, sung, however, in this version, by a very large chorus of Satan’s cockroaches directed by Richard Wagner himself, which is to say that Hatcher’s cell phone rings. He knows who it is. He steps past Anne, who is looking a little distracted, the look she often has before removing her head.