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lithe grace.
    On the other side of the body, however, he goes abruptly empty. He pauses. He turns. He looks back. The body is crawling off quickly and it vanishes in the darkness. Hatcher wonders why he has turned. He wonders why he is standing here. If his newsman’s instincts are aroused, Hatcher McCord will never let a good story die. Hatcher turns back to the bright orange glow, the tumbling, veering, bumping, compressing, stalling, lurching, rushing, outcrying crowd on Grand Peachtree Parkway. Hatcher McCord does have privileges, thanks to his fame and his importance to society.
    Some other voice in Hatcher’s head sighs. Not some other. Also his. Also Hatcher McCord. Idiot. Hell is full of famous people without privileges. I’m useful. Useful to Satan. If you’re listening, Chief, and I’m sure you are, I have to stress that I’m not being ungrateful. You see the anguish I’m in, so surely that makes it all right. I’m useful to you—the Lord of the Flies, the Former Most Beautiful Angel in Heaven, the Infamous Big Cheese—and that’s like winning the sweeps with a fifty share. That creature I so gracefully leaped over—I’m right, aren’t I, O Supreme One? I was quite wonderfully graceful?—that creature might have been Mick Jagger or Dwight Eisenhower or Dan Rather—not Henry VIII, I suppose—why do you let him flounce around as a young man?—but of course it’s to torture me—and Anne too, I suppose—I hope it’s torture for her—I leaped over that body quite elegantly, whoever it was, didn’t I?
    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