“Hurry,” Judas says, pulling at Hatcher’s arm, and the two of them and Anne push through the Automat’s doors just in time to avoid the dense, flaming rain of metal shards and body parts falling all over the neighborhood.
Through it all, through the clanking and thwacking and squinching in the street and through the cries of the Old Ones left behind as they stagger in from the carnage outside, Hatcher and Anne and Judas sit at a back table and say nothing. Eventually, after all the pieces of the Herausforderer and its passengers have finished falling from the sky, and after the ones who were not chosen and who escaped maiming and burying under body and rocket parts out there are sobbing and wailing inside the Automat, Anne turns to Hatcher and says, “I have to go now.”
Hatcher does not look at her. He knows where she must go.
He feels the Cadillac’s keys in his pocket. He knows Dick Nixon is scattered around the neighborhood.
“I’ll take you,” he says softly.
And they rise.
Judas reaches up and touches Hatcher on the arm. “I’m sorry, man,” he says.
Hatcher wants to say something encouraging to Judas, and he begins, “The next time…” but he realizes he doesn’t know how to finish the sentence. Perhaps with “…it will really be him and he’ll know you.”
But before Hatcher can find those words, Judas finishes the sentence himself. “…I will have forgotten all about this.”
Hatcher nods. “Good luck,” he says.
“I hope you’ll remember not to believe me,” Judas says.
“If I do, I’ll remind you,” Hatcher says.
“Deal,” Judas says, and he makes a fist and extends it. Hatcher does too, and they bump knuckles. When he pulls away, Anne is already waiting at the door.
Hatcher crosses the floor, and Anne is looking outside. He stops beside her and she touches the door handle.
“Wait,” Hatcher says. She pulls her hand back. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his powder-blue tie. He lifts his collar, puts the tie around his neck, lowers the collar, and ties a perfect Windsor knot, growing sadder with each wrap and tuck.
Driving the Cadillac Fleetwood, his head is full of the red and black flying bugs named after the word that is never spoken in Hell, known in some places as honeymoon flies. Hatcher can’t even remember when it was or why he was there, but he was driving a rental car along a highway in northern Florida, and it was the season for these bugs, and when they reach maturity, each finds a spouse and the two of them begin to fuck and they never stop. They attach their bodies, male and female, at the tip and then spend the rest of their lives together fucking. Awake or asleep, sitting on fence posts or flying around, they never stop fucking. And even when the male dies, which, in the natural course of events, always occurs first, the two of them continue to stay sexually connected, the female dragging the dead male’s body around until she lays her eggs. And in their season, they fill the skies, flying around in coupled pairs. You drive your car to a constant ping and ping and ping, the sound of death as you hit and crush the mated couples. And there is no way to avoid this. For you to live, for you to move from one place to another, means you are the bringer of death, the creator of thousands of tragic romances.
It’s the sound Hatcher thinks of now as he drives the Fleetwood. He is driving fast to a constant thump and thump and thump of bodies in the crowded streets of the Great Metropolis. He has to drive fast. He’s sorry to be visiting pain on these denizens, but if it wasn’t him it would be something else. And he knows now that this is it forever. Nothing makes any difference about anything and you always get put back together to be hurt some more, so he might as well get this over with quickly. He must, in fact. Because inside the car there is only silence. Anne is sitting next to him, and they have nothing to say to each other, and this simple silence now between them as he drives her to the Raffles Hotel to be with Henry for eternity, this silence is the worst torture he has experienced in Hell. If only he could die and have her drag him around forever. Or if they could die together in a rush of wind and a car horn and they could just stay dead, coupled and dead.
And the constant thumping stops. They are free of the city streets and rushing through the desert and the Raffles is not far. And the closer they get to Henry, the more deeply this ongoing mystery settles into Hatcher: why, in life and in afterlife, we seek — we even create — the things that hurt us.
“It won’t be long,” he says.
She does not answer.
He glances at her. She is looking out the side window at the passing wasteland.
“This is the last of us,” he says, softly.
In his periphery he can tell that she turns her face toward him. But he does not look at her. He cannot bear to do that right now.
“Yes,” she says.
“He cut off your head,” Hatcher says, even more softly.
“Yes.”
Then why are you his forever? That’s what Hatcher wants to know. But he cannot summon the energy to ask.
She waits a long while before she speaks. “Will says that April is the cruelest month.”
“That was a later guy who said that. He’s here too, somewhere.” Anne shrugs this off. If she can shrug off Henry taking her head, she can shrug off Shakespeare stealing a good line.
Anne is silent for a moment, and then she says, “Well, January is the kindest month. The world outside you fits what’s inside. It’s a grim place, the world, but it’s the world. At least you’re not a freak, at least you’re part of it.”
And that’s all Anne and Hatcher say to each other.
Hatcher turns in at the road to the Raffles and he drives them fast in a great whirlwind of dust, but as the vast white sprawl of the hotel looms ahead, he throttles back drastically, he squeezes the steering wheel hard, and he slows the car down. He regrets this now. He wishes he could have just walked out of the Automat and left her there to do what she had to do but not be a fucking part of it, not carry her here himself. But as soon as he wishes this, he knows there was a deeper imperative. He had to seek out the thing that hurts him most.
And they are stopped in front of the Raffles Hotel and the engine is off and the car is ticking and the blood on the grill and on the windshield is flying away and Anne is opening her door and she is getting out of the car and he is sitting behind the wheel and he is not moving and though there is no death in Hell, he knows that he and Anne are dead to each other.
Hatcher drives back to the city and parks the Fleetwood on Peachtree Way in the same spot where Dick Nixon parked for the Harrowing. Hatcher gets out and walks toward Lucky Street. The rubble of body parts and rocket parts is all gone. The street is full of the bearded men in tunics and animal skins pressing on to nowhere. Hatcher barely looks before him as he walks but instead scans the passing crowd. He reaches the Automat and takes a few steps beyond so he can see up and down both streets. He does not notice Judas Iscariot, who is curled up and sleeping fitfully in the bright sun in the center of the rubble-strewn lot from whence the Fiery Chariot departed, remembering the event of this afternoon now as his Master’s first return and a promise made to come back for him someday. But Hatcher isn’t looking for Judas.
He goes back and pushes through the revolving door into the Automat. The writers’ groups have resumed. The group in the Catholic Bible but not the mainstream one, the prolific Gnostics, the Old Ones whose books were lost, Judith taking criticism from a severed head, and all the rest. The New Testament writers who got dumped or lost. But that’s not Judas with his back to the door. It’s the man Hatcher is looking for. Hatcher approaches the table, and Dick Nixon is explaining to Festus and Silas and Rhoda how his mother was a saint, a Quaker saint, and so was his wife, and how if he’d been at the foot of the cross, he wouldn’t have run away, and Hatcher puts his hand on Nixon’s shoulder.