HADES AND GENTLEMEN is in the midst of its riotous second act. Rooney and Doodle, as carpenters in hell, sing a song to Dolores del Río as Beelzebub.
Doodle:
They say it’s hot as Hades
In Hades, but it isn’t.
For the fire here
Is chilly, dear,
Compared to when we’re kissin’.
Rooney and Doodle:
Oh, I love you, you little devil,
So cute is my Old Scratch.
But how could I know, ma’am,
When I first became damned,
That we’d be such a match?
As if on cue, a match is lit backstage and held to a varnished flat. It catches; almost instantly, the entire set is in flames and falls into the audience. The fire is fast and brutal. That the theater seats are cheap, made from polyurethane from IG Farben, upholstered with isoprene and coated with plasticized gasoline, means the theater has a low flash point and even a simple spark could set the house ablaze in an instant. “It was an unnecessarily flammable choice of materials,” said Irwin Chello of American Seats. “We know that now. But hindsight is twenty-twenty.”
Rooney and Doodle remain miraculously unscathed due to their asbestos “tortured soul” costumes, but twelve hundred audience members and stage crew die.
From Variety:
Hades and Gentlemen lived up to its name last night when the Shubert Theatre was transformed into a fiery inferno, burning 1,200 people to agonizing death. Stars Rooney and Doodle survived, but they may as well be dead because they’ll never work in the entertainment business again. Theater manager Morton Klipp is quoted as saying, “Those two? They’ll never work in the entertainment business again. They have burned all bridges. And I don’t mean the Bridge to Hades set that was onstage at the time of the incident. Although I also mean that. They’re through, I tell ya. Through.”
Doodle puts down the Variety and looks across the table to his partner.
“I feel bad about this.”
“Me, too.”
“All those people out on a Friday night to have a good time after a hard workweek.”
“I know. I feel bad. I already said.”
“And it looks like things are bad for us, too. It’s not like we got out of this unscathed.”
“Except physically.”
“Except that way.”
“What are we gonna do? The Perforphanage didn’t really prepare us for anything else.”
“Did you take Crime Pays?”
“The ‘How to Get Cast as a Criminal’ class?”
“Yeah.”
“I learned a fair amount about criminal enterprise in that class.”
“It did seem pretty accurate.”
“That’s true. They had that retired yegg come in and lecture.”
“Fingers O’Grady!”
“Nice fella.”
“Loved him. Crime seems like a job you can get without much education.”
“O’Grady never went to school. Not even a school for performing arts.”
“So we have a leg up there.”
“A leg on the yegg!”
“Ha ha.”
“Ha ha. Too bad we can never use that joke now that we’re barred from entertainment. It’s a good one.”
“It is too bad. I’ll write it down, just in case.”
“We need to change our names. Rooney and Doodle don’t sound like criminal names.”
“True. What are some criminal teams?”
“Bonnie and Clyde. Leopold and Loeb. Burke and Hare.”
“Boy, you really have those at your fingertips.”
“I do. Thompson and Bywaters.”
“Hmm. It’s gotta sound serious.”
“Rood and Doone?”
“I like that.”
“It’s good.”
“I’d be scared of Rood and Doone.”
“Rood and Doone it is.”
“Or Roon and Dood?”
“Maybe. Yeah.”
“We don’t have to be killers, though, right?”
“I don’t really want to kill any more people, if it can be avoided.”
“No more killing. Just robbing.”
“The robbers Rood and Doone.”
“Roon and Dood?”
“OK, sure.”
BARASSINI LETS ME sleep in his sock drawer, which, for reasons that remain unclear to me, is enormous. Or is it that I’ve shrunk even more? I can’t get to my doorjamb to check. It is fairly comfortable on all those balled-up socks, and it’s both dark and quiet. The only problem is that I need someone to let me out in the morning. This means I am unable to get up and pee at night, which generally I have to do at least twice. With some embarrassment, I inform Barassini of my bladder issues and ask if we could leave the drawer open so I can climb out as needed. He says no and gives me a plastic orange juice container “like the long-haul truckers use.” Those who are beggars are not permitted to be the ones who are allowed to choose things, as the old adage, I believe, goes.
“OK, shoot.”
I’m in a cave. The meteorologist is here, too, fiddling with a massive machine composed of vacuum tubes, dials, flashing lights, and hundreds of cables. It’s an ancient computer, and it wraps completely around the perimeter of this enormous space. A series of drawings are spit out of a printer at one end and automatically photographed by a mounted still camera.
Dissolve to the meteorologist sitting on a hardback chair in the cave before a small movie screen projecting an animation: In it, a drawing of the meteorologist sits at his desk, writing in his notebook. A rudimentary electronically synthesized voiceover (the meteorologist’s?) accompanies the animation:
“The largest hurdle, of course, is still the limitation of the human brain. If I could devise a sophisticated-enough electronic calculating machine, I might be able to compute the results in close to real time and possibly at some point even faster. Only then would I have a proper predicting machine.”
A snap of fingers and I’m back in Barassini’s office.
“Oh!” says Barassini. “It’s meteorologist not meaty horologist. I get it now.”
I have no idea what he’s talking about.
Tsai sits behind the desk doing a crossword and snapping her gum. God, she’s repugnant—everything I hate in a woman crammed into one nauseous sack of flesh. How has it come to this for us?
“Wow,” says Barassini, “so let me get this straight, then. The meteorologist is watching an animated version of himself doing and thinking precisely what we’ve seen him doing and thinking previously.”
“Yes. Predicted now by the computer, which continues to expand on his original calculations from the wind tunnel experiment. All this the result of the leaf hitting the glass wall.”
“That’s trippy,” says Barassini. “It’s kind of like from any single moment the future in its entirety can be predicted.”
“Yes, duh, that’s precisely what it’s like.”
“Meaty horologist kind of works, too. Do you see that?”
“Of course I see that. What do you take me—”
Tsai interrupts.
“Do either of you know a twenty-nine-letter word for fear of the—”
“Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia!” I bark, before anyone else in the room can say it.
“Really?”
“Fear of the number six-six-six is what you were looking for, right? Am I right? Am I? Tell me!”
“Yeah.”
“Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia. H-e-x-a-k-o-s-i-o-i-h-e-x-e-k-o-n-t-a-h-e-x-a-p-h-o-b-i-a.”
“How do you know that?”
“I once wrote an extremely long monograph on the subject of—as well as employing—extremely long words, which was entitled, if I remember correctly, Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones But Words Will Never Hurt Me? Not So! A Brief History of the Power of Words to Inflict Harm with Emphasis on Extremely Long Words Since with Extremely Long Words the Pain Inflicted Is Protracted as It Is Spread Out Over Many, Many, Many Syllables for The Journal of Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, which is, as you may or may not know, defined as a fear of extremely long words, in case you didn’t know. So that is how I know. In addition, I minored in the number of the beast studies in college, which was Harvard. Six-six-six is the number of the beast, although in actuality, it is six-one-six, which perhaps not coincidentally is also the area code for the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, which is perhaps not coincidentally the onetime area code of Betsy DeVos and her evil brother Erik Prince, whom I call Betsy DeVour and Erik Prince of Darkness, respectively.”
“Wow,” she says. “Could you spell it again?”
“H-e-x-a-k-o-s-i-o-i-h-e-x-e-k-o-n-t-a-h-e-x-a-p-h-o-b-i-a.”
“The sock drawer working out OK?” asks Barassini, trying, I assume, to change the subject.
“Hmm?”
I am lost in reverie. Memories of number of the beast classes fill my head. Old, gruff, kind Professor DeMarcus with his old, gruff kindliness, always demanding the best from us.
“Three Maccabees 2:29,” he would shout. “Contemporary parallels?”
And we’d all whip out our slide rules, calculating madly.
“Barcodes?” one of us would say, most likely the apple-polishing MacDougall.
“Just so, MacDougall,” DeMarcus would say, the gleam of paternal love for MacDougall in his eye.
“The sock drawer OK?”
“What?”
“The sock drawer? OK?”
“Oh. Yeah. Fine.”
And like that my memories of DeMarcus disappear in a literal puff of smoke, for some reason. Now I am considering how at one point I would’ve given anything to sleep in Tsai’s sock drawer amidst her socks. Now her sock drawer is directly next to the one I sleep in and there is a window between them and I don’t care. I look under the desk and at her socked feet. They do nothing for me anymore. They are feet. Horrible, monstrous human feet. Nothing does anything for me anymore.
I am, when all is said and done, an old man who sleeps in a hypnotist’s sock drawer. This is not how I, as a child, pictured my life turning out.
I thought I would be successful: a doctor, a lawyer, an indigenous people’s chief, someone who would do good in the world, of whom my parents could be proud. Passionate, valued, kind. Even, perhaps, a simple carpenter, someone who works with his (her, thon) hands to create something useful. Jesus was a carpenter, of course; there is no shame in it. Someone made this dresser. Someone made it large enough to house a shrinking man, knowing, perhaps, that at some point, a small, broken man would need it for that very thing, knowing that at some point, it might just save that man’s life.
Barassini says good night and closes the drawer.
In darkness, I drift off and find myself, as I do every night, back in the Brainio city Abbitha had created. She is, of course, no longer here. It is a shell of the dream, the detritus left behind. I search empty buildings with no real hope of ever seeing her again. I wish I could have other dreams. Any other dreams, but at night, this is my prison: an empty city, a sock drawer, professional failure.