by Glen Duncan
Yes, me holding forth again, I’m afraid, though my heart isn’t really in it. I’ve got chronic gut-rot, to tell you the truth, and a slight but deeply personal headache behind my eyeballs. I’ve been feeling . . . off . . . ever since the journey in the Rolls with Harriet. Ever since . . . Well.
‘Eight Out of Ten,’ I continue, as something happens in Gunn’s guts, some sour faecal fish does a somersault. ‘A resonant proportion, verified, as I know you’ll remember, by the long-running and highly successful Whiskas campaign. Eight out of every ten human beings, I thought. I’ll settle for that. I’m not a perfectionist.’
They’re not here for this, the Lucifer shtick; they’re here for the clairvoyance, though they feign interest and chuckle in all the right places. I’m just about to pluck something from the privacy of the English poet sitting cross-legged in the room’s darkest corner, when Gunn’s partying bowels and quivering hoop send me an urgent neural telegram: Get to a john now, or forget socializing for the rest of the month. Original Apostate and Ruler of Hell you may be, Bub, but dump this load in your pants in public, and you’re going straight off the A-list into celeb Coventry.
All that rich food, I’m thinking – much in the way you lot do, consigning all the fags, drink and drugs (not to mention quite a quantity of hygienically suspect XXX-Quisite rimming) to the irrelevance category. Must be all that dreadfully rich food.
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I say. ‘Would you excuse me for a moment? I’m afraid there’s something . . . yes. I’ll be back momentarily.’
‘Oh God,’ I hear Lysette say, as I exit, clutching my solar plexus, ‘are we really being expected to talk amongst ourselves?’
It’s touch and go, even then. Half-a-dozen broom closets and walk-in wardrobes later, at a point where my anus is engaged in some kind of voodoo salsa or go-go shimmy all of its own, I finally find a door that opens into the forgiving whites of a bathroom, where, after a much-haste-no-speed conflict with the suddenly arcane fastenings of my trousers, I launch myself at the crapper.
There’s a good deal of ooohing and aaahing from me, not surprisingly, a good many cartoon faces. I discover cold sweats, tears, shivers, clenchings, and a vocal palette that might belong to a senile animal impersonator. Oh you’d be tickled pink if you saw me there on the can, puffing and blowing at both ends, the false finales, the triple-endings, the beatific relief cruelly betrayed by the bowels’ wicked whimsy . . . Oh yes, I do look a sight, slumped like a depressed and molested orang – but that’s not what I mind. I’ve signed on for that, I know. Do unto your body as you would have your body do unto you. Fair enough. No, what bothers me is the feeling of . . . I don’t know . . . There’s something, some nagging suspicion that I’m being watched, as, decently dressed once more I lean at the sink on the heels of my hands, peering with mischievous penitence at my mortal reflection in the Guitar God’s mirror. Maybe he’s got closed circuit cameras in the joint, I’m thinking, but even thinking it I know I’m having myself on. That’s not the kind of Being Watched I’m talking about.
‘You have of late – wherefore you know not . . .’
As I spin on my Guccis I’m almost sure I catch, peripherally, a quick shudder in the mirror’s glass, a warp, a wobble, some bulge or bruise from a passing incorporeal presence.
The bathroom’s empty, but for me and the olfactory fallout from my thermonuclear bum-blast. Call me overly imaginative, but I’m sure I hear the rustle of . . .
‘That’s very funny,’ I say, aloud, returning to the mirror, the taps, the Camay. ‘That is really, really hil-fucking-hairyarse . . .’
The English poet (whose publishing house the Axe Wizard has just bought so that he, the Axe Wizard, can publish his, the Axe Wizard’s, poetry – and may God have mercy on your souls) is troubled. He’s troubled by the suspicion that he would do terrible things in certain hypothetical carte blanche situations.
‘But if it’s a choice between torturing some poor bastard because you’re following orders,’ Trent Bintock is saying as I return, ‘I mean what if you’re going to be tortured if you don’t do it?’ He gnashes his way through all this with relish and a brilliant smile. He’s thinking it would make a better dramatic dilemma if it wasn’t simply that you –
‘No no,’ the poet says. ‘This is a situation where you’re in control, totally. You are the camp commandant, you see.’
‘But I wouldn’t be the camp commandant,’ Lysette says. She’s not kidding and she’s not lying, either. She’d be too busy managing the government’s publicity. She’d be too busy securing political endorsements from attractive female tennis stars.
‘But how can you say you’d never get to be camp commandant?’ the generously smiling Trent wants to know, as the pipe comes his way. ‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because I’d join whatever group was against the group that even had such things as camp commandants,’ Jack interrupts, without a shred of honesty. ‘Because I’d get out of the fucking country.’
I wouldn’t, the internally honest English poet thinks, tossing back another vodka on the rocks, miserably.
‘You’re given authority, you see,’ Todd Arbuthnot of the Washington connections says. ‘If you’re given the right framework . . . Authority from a higher power and a closed community within which to exercise it . . .’
‘It’s Milgram’s electric shock test,’ Jack says.
Trent Bintock, having just inhaled, massively, beams and tears noisily into a new pack of Marlboro Lights. ‘Who’s Milgram?’ he says, in a helium-swallower’s squeak.
‘Back in the early sixties,’ Todd picks up. ‘In New Haven. Stanley Milgram ran an experiment designed to test human willingness to obey orders, even when those orders caused suffering to others.’
I don’t know who this Milgram cunt is, the English poet is thinking, but I know how I’d come out of his fucking experiment . . .
I’m sitting quietly in the shadows through this, nursing not just my ravaged bowels and traumatized hoop, but my outraged sense of sportsmanship . . .
‘So,’ Todd Arbuthnot continues, ‘the volunteers for the experiment are told by the “scientist”, the guy in the white coat, that they’re taking part in an experiment about learning. They’re told that the “learner” next door is hooked up to electrodes, and that every time he gives a wrong answer to a question, the volunteer is to give him an electric shock by throwing a switch. Obviously, there’s no actual electric shock – but this learner acts as if there is, every time the volunteer throws the switch.’
‘What a disgusting experiment,’ the poet says, on the edge of hysteria. ‘What a predictable experiment.’
‘So anyway,’ Todd says (I rather like Todd’s voice; it’s dry, and calm, and oaky with ancient New England wealth), ‘Naturally, some of the volunteers started to, you know, baulk, when they heard the learner next door protesting, kicking on the wall, demanding to be released, screaming . . . But the man in the white coat told them to continue, and most of them did. Thing is, you know, to give the shocks they had to pull the switch through a number of positions from 15 to 450 volts. These switch positions were marked like “slight shock”, “moderate shock”, “strong shock” and so on, all the way up to things like “intense shock”, “extreme intensity shock”, “danger: severe shock”, and, finally, at 450 volts, the switch position was marked “XXX 450 volts”. More than half the volunteers carried on all the way through the shock register.’
‘Fuck,’ Trent says, heartily enjoying all this, seeing, in fact, the whole thing unfolding dramatically, seeing the camera angles, the pull-backs, the close-ups. ‘That’s fucking scary, man.’
‘What’s worse,’ says Todd, ‘is that when they repeated the study at Princeton, they got a figure of eighty per cent total obedience from volunteers.’
‘Eight out of ten,’ the English poet, says, huskily – then, with a guilty eye-flash at Trent’s fags – ‘Could I have one of those?’
‘Yeah but what’s really
cool?’ Todd continues, with that American turn-a-statement-into-a-question intonation, ‘Is that one guy in the experiment refused – point blank refused – to administer even the first shock. Just wouldn’t do it.’
Bastard, the English poet is thinking. Lucky bastard . . .
‘Sure,’ Todd says. ‘And do you know who that one guy was?’ Everyone except me looks blank.
‘Who?’ Lysette Youngblood asks.
‘Ron Ridenhour,’ Harriet says, to my surprise. Hadn’t realised she was historically clued-up. Presumably she optioned the rights to his story.
‘Who the fuck is Ron Ridenhour?’ Trent demands, with a stellar smile.
Todd and I smile at each other through the gloom, as if Ron Ridenhour might be our son. ‘He’s the guy who later blew the lid on the My Lai massacre in Nam,’ Todd says. ‘Without him there’s a good chance the whole thing would’ve been covered up for ever.’
‘Still,’ Trent says – and I know that through the opium he’s thinking about getting My Lai into the script, some flash-forward, some satanic prophecy – ‘eighty per cent’s pretty fucking depressing, right? I mean that’s only two out of ten good guys, right?’
‘There’s ten of us here,’ Jack points out. ‘Who’s who? Who here knows they’d be in the ethical twenty per cent? Let’s take a secret ballot!’
Oh yes, the English poet is thinking, yes let’s. What a brilliant fucking idea . . .
I never believed I’d get anywhere near eighty per cent. Nothing like. Of course it tripped off the tongue in Hell, of course it sounded fantastic – ‘Eight out of every ten. Do you hear me? I accept no less. We must work in the garden, my dears, we must work hard in the garden . . .’ but the truth is I’d’ve settled for fifty per cent. Hell I’d’ve been happy enough with twenty. That, actually, was my real number, twenty per cent. Two out of every ten. Would’ve been enough to get the Old Man’s goat. He must be positively cheesed off with today’s numbers. Serves him right. It’s His own fault. Oh yes. Those Commandments. How about those Commandments, though, eh? Thou shalt honour thy father and mother. Er . . . eeyah. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife. Excuse me – have you seen my neighbour’s wife? Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself . . . I remember thinking even at the time, He’s not serious. He can’t, surely, be serious. Thou shalt not kill. (If only you’d kept that one! The Crucifixion – the entire New Covenant would have been impossible! All my work would’ve been done for me.) Thou shalt not bear false witness. Oh stop, I thought, you’re killing me. Thing was: nobody was actually going to Heaven.
I remember St Peter getting his new uniform and ticketpunch. Time passed. He wished he’d brought a magazine. The turnstile booth grew . . . oppressively familiar. Whereas we were taking on extra staff downstairs. Every day a gala day. I was down to a three-and-a-half-hour week. Spent the rest of my time lying in a hot hammock and dabbing away tears of mirth.
I sent Him a telegram. Far be it from me to tell You Your Own business and all that, but . . . Stony silence. Still no sense of humour. On the other hand, it wasn’t long after that regrettably indulgent quip that I noticed the goalposts were on the move. Without so much as a nod or a wink. It was the coveters first, peeling off to Purgatory when they should have been hurtling straight down to us. Then every other onetheft-only thief. The odd regretful adulterer. Whole generations with a beef against Mum and Dad. Hang on a minute, I thought. This is a bit . . . I mean you can’t just suddenly . . . Oh but He could. And did. Dear Lucifer, He should have replied, thanks so much for your helpful suggestions . . . I could have respected that. But no, not a word. And it’s me who’s the petulant one.
Similar chestnuts come up, now and again, après déjeuner in Hell. You know the setting: belts loosened, brains on the cusp of drunkenness, hash-smoke genie presiding, the air wreathed in the scent of port and brandy, an expansiveness of body, a provocatively meandering mind or two . . . ‘What is the greatest evil?’ someone will say. Thammuz, usually, who’s of an infuriatingly reflective bent, or Asbeel, who just loves to argue. They’re so hung up on torture, you know? On creating individual instances of despair. I tell them – eventually, after they’ve prattled for hours of thumbscrews, hot boots and racks – I tell them that what we need is Systems. Without Systems, without Seeing the Big Picture, without setting up a machine that runs itself, our work is mere vandalism.
Take torture, for example. What do you want from torture? You want the suffering of the victim, obviously, the bouquet of fear, the parfum of pain; you want the gradual revelation of the body’s thraldom to physics, the careful journey back to the flesh’s sovereignty over the spirit. You want his appalled grasp of the inescapable ratio: your motivation is pleasure; your pleasure increases proportional to his suffering; your capacity for pleasure exceeds his capacity for suffering; no amount of his suffering, therefore, is ever going to be sufficient. (What kills me about torture is how long it takes the victim to understand the impossibility of transaction. There’s nothing the torturer wants from him except his suffering. Yet on and on the victim blabs and whimpers, naming names, offering up secrets, promises, bribes. Language compels him – if he has it at his disposal, if his tongue hasn’t already been snipped or broiled – to persist in the belief that it can help him. The victim’s voluntary retreat into silence, barring screams and moans, is always a sign that he’s made the shift, fully realised his situation, got it.) You want, too, his degradation in his own eyes; you want him to observe the dismantling of his own personhood, his astonished shift from subject to object. It’s why the classier torturers force their victims into a relationship with the instruments of torture before those instruments have been torturously employed: the whip is drawn caressingly over the shoulder or loins; the rods and prods, the ferruled canes, the probes, the nightsticks, the crops – must be kissed, fondled, or otherwise venerated by the torturee, as if they themselves are sentient subjects while he is a mere object of their intention. You want him to see that in the universe you now control, in your universe, all prior hierarchies are void.
Sooner or later (you humans can’t help it, it’s the way you’re made) this leads to despair. The victim’s despair. The torturee’s preference, after a certain point has been perspiringly passed, for death over life. The impossible ideal for the torturer, of course, is that the victim remains alive in this state of craving-but-not-being-given death forever. We don’t call it an impossible ideal in Hell. We call it routine.
Yes yes yes, despair is good, and torture a sure-fire way of bringing it out – but I have to keep reminding them – the boozers are nodding off by this point, the dullards daydreaming or picking their teeth – that flavoursome though these prison cell episodes may be, the real prize is in achieving a state where despair can flourish with barely any interference from us, when they do it to and for themselves, when that’s the way the world is.
Uffenstadt, Neiderbergen, Germany, 1567. Marta Holtz stands naked and shivering in the village church. She’s beginning to have an idea of why Bertolt has accused her. The Inquisitors – three Franciscans led by Abbot Thomas of Regensberg – are seated in a rough semi-circle of mahogany high chairs between the altar rail and the first pew. A brazier burns with occasional pops and snaps, tinting the rough carvings with petals of orange light. Jimbo’s crucifixion to the left of the altar releases a pterodactyl of shadow, and there’s a compact and vivid eruption of daffodils from the vase at the Virgin’s feet. The smell (I imagine) is of incense and chilled stone. The first pew used to be the fourth; the brothers have had three pews removed to make room. Marta, who isn’t stupid (that’s one of the reasons she’s here), has more than an inkling of what they might need room for. This more than an inkling began life in her feet and knees, but soon scurried up into her loins and belly, thence ribs, breasts, throat and face. Now this more than an inkling is all over her like a host of hairy spiders. She’s beginning to have the idea that Bertolt accused her because that is his job. Bertolt came to Uffenstadt three
months ago. She’s barely had any dealings with him. Once, he helped her catch a piglet that had got loose. Another time she gave him a taste of the damson cake she had baked for her sister’s birthday. On neither of these occasions did she have the slightest sense that he had any feelings about her beyond the one shared by most of the men in the village: that she was a desirable woman and that Günter Holtz was a lucky sonofabitch. (At this moment – this moment of Marta’s realisation that Bertolt works for the Franciscans, and that with the first three pews removed there will be plenty of room for the good Fathers’ manoeuvres – Günter is being informed by the Regensberg accountant that should Marta be found guilty of witchcraft her execution will be followed by Church confiscation of any property belonging – even jointly or by virtue of marriage – to her, not to mention an itemized bill – implements, fuel, labour – for the cost of the interrogation. At this moment Günter is looking at the accountant’s broad and porous face and wondering how its cheek came by those three silver scars like fishbones. He’s thinking, too, of Marta’s pale and downy midriff, of her sloe eyes and oddly deep voice, of her habit of making him laugh at his own struggle to be a manly man, of the small mole at the back of her left knee, of her wheaty breath when she comes, of the pear-sized baby in her thickened womb. He’s thinking that he’ll kill this accountant, no matter what. The accountant and Bertolt. With the heavy scythe. Bertolt first. He’s thinking these and many other things, none of which is of any use to Marta, who having been clumsily shaved by Brother Clement, is now being hand-examined by the trio, who bring to bear a predictably excessive investigative zeal when it comes to her vagina, breasts and anus.) Marta – who, somewhere beneath all this, is trying to single out a jewel of memory to take to her grave, something of hers and Günter’s, like the warm night in summer they swam and made love in the Donau, skimmed by ghostly fish and overarched by fierce constellations – has never met a Pope. She’s never heard of Pope Pious XXII, who, nudged in the small and heartburning hours by yours truly, granted formal power to the Inquisition back in 1320. She’s never heard of Pope Nicholas V, who, 130 years later, extended its authority, nor of Pope Innocent (don’t you love these names? Pious? Innocent?) VIII, whose Bull, which I might as well have dictated, commanded secular authorities to co-operate fully with Inquisitors and to cede judiciary and executive powers in matters pertaining to heresy and witchcraft. Marta’s never heard of any of these good prelates, nor of Bulls (except the ones that cover cows, precariously, standing on their little back legs) nor, indeed, of theology. Marta, as a matter of fact, can’t read or write. (Neither can Günter, for the record.) She has absolutely no idea that the coals in the brazier, the branding irons, the thumbscrews, the lances, the cat o’nine tails, the bullwhip, the hammers, the pliers, the nails, the ropes, the hot chair, the manacles, the knives, the hatchet, the skewers – she has absolutely no idea that her impending relationship with these items has been facilitated by Vatican scribes and a string of Popes, some shrewd, some spooked, all quick to catch on to the remunerative potential of witchhunting. Marta has never heard of Brothers Sprenger and Kramer, my star students among the German Dominicans, whose labour of love, the Malleus Maleficarum published eighty-one years earlier, drew a minutely detailed diagram of how to detect, interrogate and execute nubiles deemed suspect. She’s never been to a Sabbat, nor signed in blood, nor sacrificed babies, nor delivered the acolyte’s ‘infamous kiss’ (the tonguing, thank you my dear, of His Satanic Majesty’s slack and gamy butthole), nor flown on a broomstick, nor – I’m sorry to say – copulated with me or any of my hircine proxies. Truly, Marta’s venials make a paltry list: stole an orange; wished Frau Grippel would get a fever; called Helga a farting sow; sucked Günter’s cock (and a formidable bratwurst it is, I can tell you); admired the beauty of my arms in the Donau; thought I’m the prettiest girl in Uffenstadt.
