Hell by Robert Olen Butler Page B

interview ends—and that will be the end, that touching moment right there—I want you to do a voice-over thing, and you say it just that way.”
    Hatcher nods knowingly at Satan, though there’s a rustling of panic in his chest because he’s not quite sure what “that way” is. Worse, he’s not even sure what the “it” is.
    “Say it,” Satan says.
    “Yes,” Hatcher says.
    “Now.”
    “Of course,” Hatcher says.
    Satan is waiting. Hatcher is in high, blinding panic. But he is free to scramble around in his own head, he knows now. He can find a way to finesse this. One of his other great newsman talents has always been the ability to act as if you know a lot when, in fact, you know very little. Satan is such a fucking poseur. And Hatcher says, “You are so brilliantly expressive. I want to study that one more time so I can capture every nuance.”
    Satan cocks his head. Hatcher braces himself for more fire. At least he might get rid of this long hair.
    And then Satan smiles a vast, radiant smile. “Good. Yes. Oh I chose you well, Hatcher McCord. We should work on this. Of course, I’m totally fucking insincere, you know. I don’t really give a very hot damn about you all. But I want you all to think I do. If I want to be seen as sincere, then that’s basically the same thing as being sincere. I respect the image and want it for myself and I care that you think I’m sincere and so that shows respect for you and so it all adds up to the same thing, yes? Of course yes. Here we go.”
    Satan lifts his face, closes his eyes, and he says, “Satan wept.”
    Hatcher gets it. “I’m very moved,” he says.
    “I knew you would be,” Satan says.
    “I’m ready,” Hatcher says, preparing his most telling, throbbing, compassionate anchorman’s voice—nightly employed back on earth for the final two-minute feature with the dying child or the starving laid-off worker or the courageous amputee athlete—by using the voice in the privacy of his own mind: Little does Satan know that the experienced and brilliant newsman can, for the sake of a story, feign respect even as he knows his subject to be a fool .
    Satan lifts his face and closes his eyes.
    And Hatcher says, with aching mellifluousness, “Satan wept.”
    Satan squeezes his eyes more tightly shut and scrunches up his shoulders in appreciation. Then his eyes pop open and he says, “I could kiss you.” He leaps up and levitates Hatcher from his chair. Hatcher’s feet grope for the floor and find it as Satan grabs him and ends the interview with a flurry of cheek bussing and back-thumping, and he personally elbow-hustles Hatcher past Leni Riefenstahl standing at severe attention just out of arm’s reach of the camera.
    She moves her eyes slightly to the two men as they pass, but she looks inward: It was February and it was cold in Berlin, it was very cold and the snow was drifted up and when the speech was done I had the urge to strip off my clothes—every shred till there was only my quaking naked body—and leap into a snow-drift to sweetly temper the intense heat I was feeling from him, and this was at the Sportpalast where he spoke and I was near the front of the crowd, a little to his left, looking up at him from an angle that made me tremble, the angle of a daughter with a father, I know, the angle of all of us as a nation in our needy submissive solidarity, and what ghost may have passed through me of my commonplace father my bourgeois Kaiserreich father my keep-your-place-girl, quick-with-his-fists father, this ghost passed on instantly now as this man strode to the podium and saluted us, drawing his flat open hand straight from his heart and out to us all, and I looked up at him and I saw him from this angle below as if through the lens of a camera and he beamed sternly all around and he was the father of us all and then he began to speak, and he had me at “Fellow Germans.”

    Hatcher is alone in the back of the car as it comes down the