Hatcher blinks and shakes his head furiously as if a hornet has flown into his ear. He is still subject to great pain, of course, personal and public. Like this. How simple this little inner dialogue is, but it is torture to him. He does know that he can move from one place to another without being waylaid and savaged mercilessly like most denizens. He is damned, but he is still a journalist. Or, as Hatcher McCord himself might rephrase that as he tries to answer the enduring question of this place — why are you here? — he is damned, so he is still a journalist. Or even, he is a journalist, so he is damned. He will move now as a journalist through the main thoroughfare of the Great Metropolis, and he has the journalist’s classic place in the world: he is part of the suffering humanity all around him but really he is not, he is an observer, his pulse quickening at the pain he observes, his deep brain sparking in delight at the possibility of a story and at the gravitas of that, the importance of that.
“Shut the fuck up,” Hatcher says aloud, addressing himself.
He waits. He has indeed seemed in his head to have shut the fuck up.
And so he stands in the mouth of his alley and waits as a megabyte of Internet gossip bloggers lurches by, the men in starlet-at-the-beach bikinis with celluloid-ravaged thighs and acid-seeping hard-ons, the women paunchy droopy naked but for Speedo trunks, weighed heavily about their necks with molten-hot gold pop-star bling, and all of them — a thousand or more — pass by in a long, dense gaggle, pinching and punching at each other. Hatcher’s neighborhood has many journalists, and this gossip-blogger group lives at the very edge, at a distant turning of the Parkway where other denizens never actually go in person, where only this subset of bloggers huddle together over laptop screens, zinging each other. At last they pass, and Hatcher pushes onto Grand Peachtree Parkway, turns toward the place of the Ancient Harrowing, and presses into an unsorted crowd of denizens.
He is soon carried into the adjacent neighborhood, where many of the poets and playwrights and fiction writers dwell. He is moving more or less steadily now in a narrow corridor of space at the edge of the great flowing street crowd, squeezing along storefronts and piss-stained apartment stoops, the way often pinching shut from the veering of the crowd but then opening again. He passes by bookstore after bookstore, their windows dark, their shelves full of long-unsold remainders of all the local writers. The stores will open with hopeful new owners at the next sunrise and will be out of business by the next sundown.
Then in front of Hatcher a man lurches from the darkness of a doorway into a sudden flare of orange sodium vapor light. He is draped in a toga that perhaps long ago was white but now is dark with stains and spattered with what appear to be bird droppings, though Hatcher has never seen a bird in Hell. The man’s hair is cropped close and his face is pasty and he has no nose, only a jagged outline of one in the center of his face as if he were an ancient marble statue.
“Please, denizen,” he cries. “I am here to guide you.” His hands flutter up in front of him as if he will grab at Hatcher.
Hatcher pulls back and wonders if he needs to defend himself. But it is more thought than instinct, and so he hesitates.
The man’s hands fall, and he says, “Please. I know the way.”
“Who are you?” Hatcher says.
“Publius Vergilius Maro.”
The name sounds vaguely familiar to Hatcher, but he can’t place it.
“I was a poet for the great Augustus,” the man says.
“You’re Virgil,” Hatcher says.
“The Emperor is not so great now.”
“Why do I connect you to Hell already?”
“But neither am I. I am but a broken image of myself.”
Hatcher remembers. “The Inferno.”
Virgil wags his head sharply, fighting off thoughts of his own past greatness, and he refocuses on Hatcher. “I’ll guide you,” he says.
“Like Dante,” Hatcher says, meaning it as a little literary joke.
Virgil rolls his eyes. “Oh please. He was a pain in the neck.”
Hatcher doesn’t understand. “He was really here?”
“You’d never guess it from his poem.”
“What Hell was it that you showed him?”
Virgil shrugs. “This one. But low-tech.”
“He really came here?”
“And then he lied.”
“He’s back, isn’t he.”
“He doesn’t go out much. He’s still obsessed with the girl, always dreaming of joining her in Paradise.”
“His Beatrice.”
Virgil steps very close to Hatcher now. He is a surprisingly tall man, for his era, his face fully in Hatcher’s. He reeks of rotten sardelles and Cyprian garlic. “You need to come with me,” Virgil says.
Hatcher realizes this is one of those oh-right-I’m-in-Hell-and-thisisn’t-really-a-matter-of-choice moments. He and Virgil look at each other. The crowd is jostling noisily by, but Hatcher can clearly hear the Roman’s whistley breathing through his fragment of a nose. “Okay,” Hatcher says.
Virgil turns abruptly and moves off. Hatcher follows. The poet turns in at the next alleyway.
In the narrow passage, the sounds from the Parkway abruptly cease. Hatcher hears only the scrape of his shoes on the pavement. This alley feels almost pristine beneath his feet — none of the offal squinch underfoot of his own alley — this sound echoes back from the tenements in the dark on either side. And somewhere far off he can hear the sound of a police siren. He has never heard that sound in Hell before. Virgil suddenly veers left and vanishes in the shadows. Hatcher stops, and instantly Virgil’s voice urges him on. “In here,” he says.
Hatcher steps into the blackness. Dimly he can see the poet’s toga ahead, and he hears a knock. A door opens, and standing framed there in the jaundiced glow of bare bulb light is a man in a snap-brim and wide-lapeled suit. His face is in deep shadow.
Virgil says to the man, “He’s here.”
“Thanks,” the man says. And from the timbre of the voice and the shibilant “s”, Hatcher instantly knows who it is. Humphrey Bogart turns to the side to clear the door. The light falls on his creviced face, and even though his eyes are still in the shadow of his hat brim, Hatcher can see their sad, dark depth.
Virgil vanishes in the shadows. Hatcher steps forward.
“You’re late,” Bogey says.
Hatcher moves past him and into the back staircase landing of a tenement. The lightbulb juts nakedly from a fixture in a side wall, and mounting the opposite wall is a vast dark shadow of the staircase banister. Hatcher looks around him with the panic of an actor’s dream. He’s on and he doesn’t know his lines.
Bogey steps up beside him. “Her note said 4D.”
“4D,” Hatcher says.
“One more thing.”
“Yes?”
“Put your hat on.”
Hatcher realizes there’s something in his hand. He looks down. He holds a gun-metal gray snap-brim fedora. He puts it on.
The rasp and hiss of a match turns his face to Bogey, who is lighting a cigarette. Bogey drags once and exhales. He reaches into his inner coat pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He flicks one partway out. It’s a Camel. He offers it to Hatcher.
Hatcher actually hesitates because he smoked as a teenager and then stopped in J-School and he is reluctant to start again. For his health.
Hatcher laughs a sharp, ironic laugh at this and takes the cigarette.