Judas starts backing away. He says, “I’m sure of it this time. We’re all of us sure.”
And he vanishes into the crowd.
Hatcher gets the car just in case he can figure out the wild seething inside himself. He sits in the backseat and does not yet tell Dick Nixon where to go. He’s unsure why he’s hesitating. Judas’s druggie persona, perhaps. His own unworthiness. But I’m still a newsman, he tells himself. I need to step back and observe and report. I at least should go watch the others being taken away from here, even if I am not worthy. Or watch as they watch and nothing happens. Even for that. Judas seems to believe deeply that a Harrowing is imminent. As, apparently, do the others from the Book. And all the prophets were wild-talking eccentrics. Judas is from that tradition. Trying to think it out, Hatcher finds himself panting and restless in the backseat of the Fleetwood. I have to stop thinking, he thinks. I have to stay in the moment and in this body and I have to act.
He leans forward and is about to knock on the partition and head for the corner of Peachtree Way and Lucky Street. But if it’s true. If this turns out to be true. He can’t go without Anne. He knocks on the partition. It slides back. And Hatcher directs Dick Nixon to swing briefly by the apartment. The car leaps forward. Hatcher still seethes inside, but now from an intense awareness that he is heading in the opposite direction from a way out of Hell. He turns his eyes to the window. He watches the flying, broken bodies as he cuts a great thumping swath through all the damned in order to get Anne and escape.
Hatcher dashes up the circular stairs and along the corridor and he’s embarrassed to wonder this, but he wonders if he’s running along this corridor for the last time, for the last time ever, and he sees the Hoppers’ door is open, up ahead, and he does not want to slow down for anything and he pushes his legs, and this time they stay strong and quick even as they pass the Hopper apartment. But in his peripheral vision he sees the couple sitting there in their overstuffed chairs. And he stops himself. And he steps back, and he stands in their doorway.
Peggy is saying to Howard, “It’s true. It’s always been true. From the first time on. You never tell me you…” And she catches on the word.
Howard says, “There you are. How can I be expected to tell you something that you can’t even remember yourself what it is.”
“Pardon me,” Hatcher says.
The two Hopper faces turn to him.
“You should come with me…” Hatcher begins.
“Oh we couldn’t do that,” Peggy says instantly.
“No,” says Howard. “Thanks, but never.”
“We can’t get up,” she says.
“Not at all, ever,” he says.
“This is where we are,” she says.
“Right here,” he says.
“I understand,” Hatcher says and he moves to his own door and he’s surprised at himself over the impulse he just followed and he tells himself there’s nothing he can do for anyone else. He can do only for Anne now, if this is real, the best he can do is for Anne and for himself.
He touches the knob to his door. And the Hoppers suddenly terrify him: Will Anne go?
He steps in.
Anne is near the bedroom door, her back to him. Her head is on. That’s good. She is wearing still another Edwardian tea dress. That’s not good.
“Anne,” he says.
She turns to him and she consciously puts on a little smile. She has something to say and he is very glad he has something to say first, and because it is the only way to keep her, he leaps fully into faith. It’s real, he tells himself. It’s going to happen.
“Wouldn’t it be better,” he says, “to leave Hell altogether, with me?” She looks at him wide-eyed, as if the axman has just been called off. “Can you do this?” she says.
“Yes,” he says. “But we have to go now.”
She does not say another word but is beside him and they are rushing along the corridor, perhaps for the last time.
And once again Hatcher finds himself grateful for Richard M. Nixon’s merciless driving. But as they plow into the writers’ neighborhood, the impulse that put Hatcher in the Hoppers’ doorway comes upon him again, with an even stronger moral imperative. He does not think it out but leans forward and knocks on the partition and directs Nixon to an address nearby, and they soon pull up in front of a grimy brick tenement. He tells Nixon to keep the engine running.
“Where are you going?” Anne says, the first audible words she’s spoken since the apartment.
“I owe somebody something,” he says.
When they first got in the car, Hatcher told Anne where they were heading and with only a nod of recognition to him she began to quietly pray for absolution, softly pounding her chest in mea culpas. Now, as he opens the door, she says, “Do we have time?”
“Yes,” he says, though, in fact, he’s not so sure. But he does owe Beatrice.
He dashes for the entrance, realizing this is the street-side front of the tenement that Virgil led him to a few nights ago. He pushes through the door and he staggers to a stop and he has to consciously adjust his center of gravity to keep from falling down. The whole place is tilted to the left, and mounting before him is a wide staircase paneled in William and Mary oak and with an iron banister with grillwork of ormolu garlands, and a steam horn sounds in the distance and a ship’s bell is ringing and a multitude of voices are crying out, wordlessly, far off, and a smell of salt water fills his head and he feels a chill on his feet — a rare sensation in Hell — and he looks down and water is spreading out from the deep shadows on either side of him, lapping at his shoes, and Hatcher knows this is the Grand Staircase in the first class section of the Titanic. No, he cries to himself. This is, in fact, a typical, cheap illusion, a movie setting in Hell of the Grand Staircase in the first class section of the Titanic.
Nevertheless, Hatcher’s first reflex is to run. To turn around and bolt from this place and get back in the car instantly and take off. But he tells himself not to play the game. He doesn’t have to play the game. He has a mind that is free. But movie illusion or not, this is the only staircase he has to work with, so he dashes up, past the bronze cherub holding a lamp, onto the landing and up another flight, a vast cut-glass dome above, and he is not looking closely but he can see that all of it — banister and paneling, cherub and stairs and dome — are covered in a thin coat of green slime and he’s smelling mold now and rot and he goes up to the fourth floor and cuts down the corridor.
The carpet is thicker under his feet and the walls are paneled oak but it’s the same layout as the film noir tenement, and the corridor — the whole tenement — lurches a bit and his own free and independent brain isn’t doing a fucking thing to make this all go away and he sprints for the door at the far end and he arrives, breathless not from the sprint but from a rising fear as cold as the North Atlantic. If he gets sucked into this little Hell game, he may miss the Harrowing. The door says 4D. There are vague rustling sounds inside. He knocks. The sounds stop but no one is coming to the door and no one is talking and he calls out, “Beatrice.” And there is silence.