“From Broadcast Central in the Great Metropolis where all rivers converge,I all storms make a beeline, and all the levees look a little fragile, it’s the Evening News from Hell. And now here’s your anchorman, looking a little fragile himself, Hatcher McCord.” The voice of Beelzebub, Satan’s own station manager, mellifluously fills Hatcher McCord’s head from the feed in his ear. He squeezes the sheaf of papers with both hands, and he knows even without looking that they’re blank by now and he’ll be on his own—the last thing he wants is to rely on the teleprompter, though he will be compelled to try—and yes, he’s feeling a little fragile—and the three dozen monitors arrayed before him burst into klieg-light brightness with his face pasty and splashed with razor burn and dark around the eyes.
“Good evening,” Hatcher says, from the teleprompter. “Good evening, good evening, good evening,” he continues to read. “Poopy butt, poopy butt, poopy butt.” And he wrenches his eyes from the scroll that is about to drop its baby-talk irony and get into some serious obscenity. Hatcher has been allowed to keep his anchorman ability to improvise, though even in his earthly life when he had to do this, which he did most every night—to cut or to expand to fit the time hole—we’re eleven seconds heavy, we’re twenty seconds light—he churned with anxiety at the grasp of every phrase. He understands, of course, that this anxiety is why he’s allowed to keep the skill. And Satan does indeed seem to want the news to be the news every night. Hatcher knows he gets to pull this off, though that doesn’t lessen his worry.
“Tonight,” Hatcher says, “a follow-up to last night’s lead story: is Hell expecting a Heavenly visitor? Will there be a new Harrowing? Also, a tsunami on the Lake of Fire temporarily incinerates fifty thousand. We’ll have an exclusive interview with some of those immediately reconstituted on the beach—Federico Fellini and a dozen fat Italian women in diaphanous gowns carrying parasols. Later, in our ongoing series of interviews, ‘Why Do You Think You’re Here?’, we speak to the Reverend Jerry Falwell and to George Clemens, inventor of the electric hand dryer for public restrooms.”
With this, Hatcher suddenly has no more words. He is struck utterly dumb and he stares into his own face arrayed before him six screens high and six screens across, frozen in wide-eyed silence. He started this feature himself—the Why-You’re-Heres—and he knows Satan was pleased—the Old Man copied his laudatory e-mail to the “allhell” list—though of course Hatcher also knew that his own personal interest in the feature was transparent. But it serves Satan’s purpose to keep everyone worrying and regretting and puzzling, keep them torturing themselves. Hatcher as much as anyone. So he watches his own faces now, and all that cycles in his head is the same question—why the fuck are you here?—and he has no further words to say, even though there’s only dead-air going out to all the TVs in Hell. His brow and cheeks and nose before him are suddenly glistening bright with sweat. He opens his mouth and shuts it. He waits and waits, and then he knows he can continue.
“And tomorrow,” Hatcher says, “our newly arrived homemaking specialist will show you how to prepare organ meat. Your own. Eat your heart out with Martha Stewart. She’ll eat hers.”
“Commercial!” Beelzebub booms in Hatcher’s earpiece. “Now!”
Hatcher does not flinch. In his gravest evening tone he says, “But first these messages,” and he waits and he watches his own face waiting and waiting on the screens, going out like this into every corner of Hell, and just as he has become accustomed to the pain of Beelzebub’s shouting in his ear, he has come to wait out this inevitable delay of the cut-away with his lips set in a thin, knowing smile, his eyes steady. I’m learning, Hatcher thinks. I can control this. Because it’s trivial. Because it just gives me false hopes.
Finally the red light goes dark on his camera and his face disappears from all but the central four screens, replaced by the “Your Stuff” logo. Hatcher sees it written on lined tablet paper in Prussian Blue Crayola in his own hand as a child. The commercials are tailored for each viewer, reselling everyone all the stuff they ever owned in their mortal life, one piece at a time, but the toll-free order number turns out to be a litany of their childhood sorrows and they can’t hang up and they can’t take the phone from their ear. Hatcher forces his eyes away from the screens as his complete collection of Marx Toys Presidents of the United States comes up on the screen, all five series of two-and-a-half inch white plastic figures. He delighted in Series Five especially, Ike and his immediate predecessors. Hatcher had them all meet every day to discuss the previous day’s news, Ike and Truman and Hoover and Coolidge and FDR, who stood erect and unaided, his legs miraculously restored. And Mamie was there too, to serve coffee. But Hatcher keeps his eyes averted now because he knows about the toll-free order number firsthand. The last time, he tried to buy a book from his childhood, a Wonder Book about a magic bus that could fly, and he heard an hour riff on his father.