by Glen Duncan
Ah yes. Then.
One day, one non-material day, nowhere, a thought came unbidden into my spirit mind. One moment it wasn’t there, the next it was, and the next again it was gone. It flitted in then out again like a bright bird or a flurry of jazz notes. For the briefest, most titillating moment my voice faltered and the first hairline crack in the Gloria appeared. You should have seen the looks. Heads turned, eyes flashed, feathers ruffled. The thought was: What would it be like without Him?
The Heavenly Host recovered in a twinkling. I’m not sure Michael even noticed, the dolt. The Gloria renewed, saccharine sweet, porcelain smooth, and we delivered ourselves to him in splashed bouquets – but it was there: freedom to imagine existing without God. That thought had made a difference and that thought, that liberating, revolutionary, epoch-making thought, was mine. Say what you like about me. Tempter I may be, tormentor, liar, accuser, blasphemer and all-round bad egg, but no one else gets the credit for the discovery of angelic freedom. That, my fleshly friends, was Lucifer. (Ironic of course that after the Fall they stopped referring to me as Lucifer, the Bearer of Light and started referring to me as Satan, the Adversary. Ironic that they stripped me of my angelic name at the very moment I began to be worthy of it.)
The thought spread like a virus. There were slight signals from some, a freemasonry of freedom. They made themselves known to me, shyly, came out like pubescent boys to a queer professor. Plenty didn’t. Gabriel drew away from me. Michael held himself aloof. Poor, gorgeous, shilly-shallying Raphael, who loved me almost as much as he loved the Old Chap, sang on for a while in tremulous uncertainty. But what, after all, had I done? (And what had I done that He hadn’t known I was going to do?)
A strange few millennia followed. Word got out. The Brotherhood grew. He knew, of course, the Old Man. He’d known all along, even before knowing all along was possible, in the absence of all along. It’s so irritating being with someone who knows everything, don’t you think? You call them know-alls down here. Well your know-alls are empty vessels compared to the One we had to deal with. Everything other than your rapturous celebration of His Divinity – conversation, punchlines, wrapping presents, surprise parties – is pointless. There’s only one response God’s got to anything you might care to tell Him – that your brother’s dying of AIDS, for example, and that you’d really appreciate it if He could help out with a bit of the old razzle-dazzle – and that response is: Yeah, I know.
The Brotherhood’s voices stirred and tried new angles. I was sick of the over-orchestrated molasses of the Gloria anyway. All that legato. No soul, you know? Angels don’t have souls, in case you’re interested. You lot are on your own with souls. I’ve purchased millions in my time, but I’m hanged if I know what to do with them. The only thing they seem to respond to is suffering. These days I delegate. Belial’s got a real taste for it. Moloch, too, though he’s got no imagination: he just eats them, shits them out, eats them, shits them out, eats them, etc. Does the trick, mind you. Those souls scream with a piteousness that’s sweet music to my pitiless tympanum. Astaroth just talks to them. Christ knows what about. Christ does know what about, too, but there’s not a damned thing he can do about it, not once they’re down in the basement. After Yours Truly, there’s no one can bend a soul’s ear like Nasty Asty. Taught the rascal everything he knows. Course he’s hung up on all that pupiloutstripping-the-master nonsense. Thinks I don’t know he’s after my throne. (Thinks I don’t know. I shall have to do something about Astaroth when I get back. I shall have to make arrangements.)
You might be wondering – the hard-men among you, the nutters, the glassers, the thugs – whether you couldn’t hack it in Hell, whether you couldn’t, when it came right down to it, just butch the bastard out. Well guess what: You couldn’t.
Actually none of that’s true. Old habits and so on. The truth is, Hell’s okay. Most of the souls at my place just hang around smoking and drinking and chewing the fat. And there’s everything to read.
Anyway the word spread. Our voices moved through the clear waters of the Gloria like a turbid undertow. We did nothing. We didn’t know what to do. What did we have anyway but a solitary speculation? After that first shy caress, that first inkling of selfhood, we sang on in a state of mere confusion for hundreds of thousands of years. And I daresay we’d still be singing now if rumour hadn’t reached us of the script in development, a Father Production with a working title ‘The Material Universe’ (it came out eventually as Creation) scheduled for release sometime within the next thousand and starring – naturally – the Son.
Manhattan, summer, my kind of place, my kind of time.
Cab grilles snarl in the boomerang light. The subway’s foetid lung exhales. Winos strip to the earliest sartorial strata – salmon pink t-shirts and sepia string vests, emblems of the pasts drink and I have stolen. Garbage trucks chow down on the city’s ordure – what a sight: the slow-chewing maw with its stained teeth and heady halitosis. Beautiful. The sun-hot sidewalks give up their ghosts of piss and dogshit. Treacle-coloured roaches conduct their dirty business while pot-bellied rats cloak-and-dagger through the shadows. The pigeons look like they’ve been dipped in gasoline and blow-dried.
Manhattan, summertime. All those frayed tempers and stirred wants. The varicosed hookers smack-retching into the drains, the payrolled plod, the manicured villains, the mainlined TV, the Christian porn starlets, the genocidal nerds, the lies, the greed, the self-absorption, the politics. It’s my Design Argument. Harlem, the Bronx, Wall Street, the Upper East Side – these clocks don’t need winding. Give me white men and a brace of centuries, I give you New York City, my Sistine Chapel, about to be – thanks to my left hand knowing perfectly well what my right one’s doing – in fruitful need of restoration. Some restoration job that’ll be, believe me.
Needless to say I laughed long and hard at dear Gabriel’s message, longer and harder than I’ve laughed since. . . I don’t know, Los Alamos, maybe. Po-faced Gabriel incapable of telling a lie. Incapable of telling a lie. Swear on the Holy Bible, I said to him. Go on, raise your right hand.
I threw myself into work for a while. You humans can throw yourselves into all sorts of things: chain-smoking, booze-bingeing, scabrous one-night-stands. I throw myself into work. Spread myself perilously thin, too, what with starting small wars and coaxing neuroses in the movers and shakers. A rash of peculiar migraines broke out among tinpot tyrants worldwide; torture cells groaned; the music of pulled teeth and cattle-prodded sex-parts comforted me; the odour of fag-burned breasts filled my nostrils like balsam, temporarily decongesting me of doubt. I put some time into technology (there’s a lot of never-need-to-leave-the-house gizmology coming your way soon) and bio-engineering. The boffins were waking up in the middle of the night wondering how on earth they’d never thought of it before. I even found time for the little things, the it’s-the-thought-that-counts gimmicks I’ve built a reputation on: the thefts, the assaults, the batteries, the lies, the lusts. One espresso-breathed old duffer in Bologna sodomized his Jack Russell, then went to look at himself in the bathroom mirror, astonished that for so many years they’d been just good friends.
But it was useless. The seed had been sown. Some things don’t change. The necessity of Gabriel’s honesty is one of them. Incapable of telling a lie. Besides, as Der Führer of Fibs, Il Duce of Deceptions, I do know when someone’s pulling my leg.
He was waiting for me in a rainswept Paris.
‘I want a dry-run,’ I said.
Pigalle, I’d insisted, knowing how he hates these little pornucopias. Insomniac neons blinked colours on and off the wet streets. I couldn’t smell the crêpes, the coffee, the croques monsieurs, the panini, the Galoises, but I could certainly smell the ripe stink of my work, the briny whiff of illicit fornication and ravenous disease. (This thing about AIDS being God’s punishment kills me. It’s mine, you sillies. It’s a nosethumb to Himself: Look, even when it’s killing them they can’t stop.) Violence, too. Wherever there’s gui
lt there’s violence, and if guilt is a smell then violence is a taste: strawberries and formaldehyde and ironish blood . . .
‘One earth month,’ Gabriel said.
We looked at each other then (self-consciously on my part) for a painful moment. It hurt like buggery (I was going to say it hurt like Hell – but actually nothing hurts quite like Hell) but I wasn’t going to let him know that. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. Being in my presence was no picnic for him, either, you can be sure, but he was coming on all Mr Spock and pain-is-only-in-the-mind.
‘I don’t want February,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Twenty-eight days. It’s not a leap year.’
‘It’s July. Thirty-one days.’
‘Great. Peak rates on the 18–30 Benidorm package.’
‘Laughter is the reflex response to fear. You know this. You hear yourself laughing, we hear you screaming.’
‘“And if I laugh ’tis that I may not weep” would’ve been so much better. Still not much time for reading up there then?’
‘There’s nothing I lack that I want, Lucifer. You cannot say the same. You will know where to go.’
‘Yes yes yes. Now do clear off, old fruit, would you? Oh and Gabriel?’
‘Yes?’
‘Your mother sucks cocks in hell.’
He didn’t do anything. He held still, aureoled in the Old Man’s icy protection. Unprotected I know I can take him. He knows it too. If he’d had Doubt – if he’d had Doubt – it would have burgeoned there on the edge of Pigalle’s little Babylon. If he’d had Doubt he would have wondered if God was about to drop the shield and test his strength. It’s the sort of thing God would do, whimsical old Kettle that He is. If Gabriel’s faith wasn’t utterly intact it would have occurred to him that if God chose to withdraw His power he would be facing certain defeat. Why? Well, actually, because, not to put too fine a point on it, I’m the meanest, baddest, deadliest angelic motherfucker in the seen and unseen universe, that’s why. But it didn’t occur to him. We just faced each other, the wall of nothingness shivering between us. Humans passed and said: Someone walked on my grave.
So. There’s a turn-up for the Book of Revelation. ‘And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night forever . . .’ Oh cheers, I thought, when I heard that. Oh thanks. But now they’re putting it out that Jonny Flashback was on a need-to-know basis. He’ll be narked about that. (He’s never been right, you know. Stands under a silver tree in Paradise with unwashed dreads and a beard the size of a sheep, muttering and doing those mad tramp things with his hands. It’s the Kerouac trajectory from beat guru to stumbling bum. You see it a million times.)
You know what all this is about, don’t you, assuming, for a moment, He’s serious? Divine Anxiety. Create the unforgivable and you compromise infinite mercy. Forgive the unforgivable and you compromise infinite justice. Mercy, justice, mercy, justice, yada yada yada, until you’re so dizzy from chasing Bugs Logic around in circles that you fall on your cosmic arse and put your cosmic head in your cosmic hands and wish you’d never created anything.
Therefore this preposterous new deal, before time comes to an end. Actually The End.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to just drop that on you. Forget I said it. Time’s not coming to an end. There’s loads of time left. For a reason that’s nothing to do with the end of the world being nigh I get a shot at redemption. There’s a catch. (Where would He be without those catches?) I’ve got to live as a human being. One month’s trial period then I sign-up for a lifetime of earwax and flu. I, Lucifer, get the chance to go home – provided I don’t make an utter pig’s pizzle of living out the rest of Declan Gunn’s life.
Now, there are a lot of machinations and computations to be gone through when confronted with this type of offer. I’ve been through them (took about three earth seconds) and I’ll bring you up to speed presently. But why, in the meantime, Gunn?
Well, as you’ll remember, having fallen on harder times than he thought he could bear our scribe was about to take his own tediously predictable life. Razor blades, bath, Joni Mitchell in the tape deck. Suicide’s a mortal sin. I get the suicides. Look, if you’re thinking of killing yourself, don’t. You won’t go to Heaven. (Kidding. Kidding. Honestly. Go ahead.) Now God’s got a soft spot for this Gunn. Some vestigial Catholicism the Old Man can’t bear to see go to waste, some good deed when he was a nipper, maybe the afterlife intercession of his dear deceased mother, Baal only knows – so God pulls Gunn’s soul (which, technically, is cheating, I might add) before Gunn tops himself and puts it on ice in Limbo. (The Vatican will tell you they’ve done away with Limbo – don’t you believe it. Limbo’s still rammed with idiots and stillborns. Not a fun place. I mean even in Hell you can have a conversation.) If carcass life grabs me, I stay and Gunn goes via Purgatory (think windowless dentist’s waiting room: bawling toddlers, heaped ashtrays, the sense that you’ve brought it on yourself) to Heaven. If it doesn’t, Gunn’s back in his bones and taking his chances with suicide. Can you believe this stuff? I mean you can’t believe it, obviously – but can you believe it?
Any seasoned deal maker will tell you that spontaneous negotiation’s a bad strategy; the ad hoc approach will leave you ripped-off, busted, conned, stiffed, outsmarted and generally holding the shitty end of the stick. The advantage of being me is that I know where I’m going with a deal from the get-go. I always know. Fact is there’s really no dealing with me. Dealing’s so inappropriate a concept it amounts to a Rylean category mistake.
I can tell you what wasn’t going to be the deal. The deal wasn’t going to be that I accepted. The most myopic, cataracted, boss-eyed, occluded and cursory glance at the proposal should make that obvious. But not taking the deal didn’t mean that I wasn’t going to have some fu –
Do you know something? I’m not being completely honest. I know: you’re shocked. There was – by the flaming nipples of Astarte – there was the briefest, tiniest, most fleeting sliver of a moment in which I thought (they move fast, angelic thoughts: you’ve got to be quick), in which I wondered whether, actually, thinking about it, you know . . . whether in the end it wouldn’t be worth –
But like I said: they move fast. They shift. I was laughing at myself, hysterically, on the inside, before I’d even finished considering whether it might not have been something to consider. It’s not even fair to describe the process as one of considering. It was more of a rogue or involuntary twitch of the spirit, analogous perhaps to those in the corporeal realm which shock you, inexplicably, in that state between being awake and falling asleep. (What’s the matter? Dunno. Just got a massive twitch. Well you frightened the bloody life out of me. Now that I come to think of it, not infrequently precipitated by half-dreams of falling, yes? That sudden yank or jolt just before you hit the ground?)
Anyway. The point is, moment of professional weakness, masochistic fantasy, psychodemonic tic – call it what you like, it was there one instant, gone the next. What it came down to was –
No no no no no. It won’t do. That’s not the whole story. That is not, Lucifer, the whole story. Very well. I hold up my hand. Economy with the truth. The truth is I had to take it seriously. Had to, d’you see? In no more or no less the way than the Old Boy has to take genuine human penitence seriously. It’s a condition of His Nature. One doesn’t have a choice about some things – even He’d admit that. Of course what one wants to do is laugh the whole thing off. ‘Me back in Heaven,’ one wants to muse aloud with trowelled-on facetiousness, ‘yes, I see. Capital idea. Can I roll you another Camberwell Carrot?’
How long before I’m reinstated with full angelic clout? I asked Gabriel.
Wholly at His discretion.
So you’re saying that even if I make it through the human life without running amok and get back in Upstairs, it’ll be as a human soul until His Lordship feels like returning me to my former st
atus and station?
Angelic status, yes. No guarantee of rank.
And what happens, my dearest Gabrielala, should I fail to get through the scribe’s life without mortal sin?
He shrugged. (I was at a loss for how to describe what he did in corporeal terms until yesterday, when the joke fat man in the Leather Lane chippy said ‘Sawt’n’vinnigga, chief?’ and I found Gunn’s shoulders going up – then down. How on earth should I know?) Charming. So you get back in, but there’s no guarantee that you’re not going to be polishing some bubble-head’s bugle down on the forty-second level for fifty billion years.
I took the one month ‘trial’ and sent Gabbers back Upstairs with a new set of terms and conditions. Not with any hope that they’d be accommodated, obviously – but to let them know that I’m taking the proposition – ahem – seriously.
Now. I’ve got some moves – but even if I didn’t, there’s no reason to pass up a month’s vacation in the Land of Matter and Perception.
You know what Eden was? I’ll tell you. Edenic. Susurrating trees reached out fingers of frothy foliage to catch the languid landings of turquoise birds. Opalescent streams exhaled the sweet scent of sewage-free water. Red and silver fish jewelled obsidian meres. Succulent grass appeared and let green really show itself. (That grass and that green, they were made for each other.) Gentle rains fell from time to time and the earth lifted its face up to receive them. Colours debuted daily in the sky: aquamarine, mauve, pewter, violet, tangerine, scarlet, indigo, puce. Colours were textures in Eden. You wanted to roll around naked in ’em. The material world, it was apparent from the get-go, was my kind of place.
Yes, Eden was beautiful – and if I had to squeeze through corporeal keyholes to crash it – so be it. (Hasn’t it bothered you, this part of the story, my being there, I mean? What was I doing there? ‘Presume not the ways of God to scan,’ you’ve been told in umpteen variations, ‘the proper study of Mankind is Man.’ Maybe so, but what, excuse me, was the Devil doing in Eden?) I took the forms of animals. I found I could. (That’s generally my reason for doing something, by the way, because I find I can.) I hung around the gates for quite a while; I made several slow passes at the material boundaries until I sensed – my hunches are infallible – that flesh and blood would open to me, that angelic spirit could cleave and inhabit the body, drawing form around itself in a meaty cloak. It’s claustrophobic, at first, taking on a form. Your spirit instinct screams against it. Incarnation requires a strong will and a cool head – well, a cool mind, until an actual head is available. Imagine you suddenly realised you could breathe underwater. Imagine you could take water into your lungs, ditch the hydrogen and hang on to the oxygen. Taking that first breath wouldn’t be easy, would it? Your reflex would be to kick for the surface and wolf down air as nature intended. Well, it’s the same with corporeal habitation. Only the single-minded overcome that reflex panic and yield to the body’s fit. And as if you needed reminding: I am one of the single-minded. So I took the forms of animals. Birds were the obvious first choice, what with their bird’s-eye view of things. And flying’s hardly to be sniffed at, when you consider it. (One of your most irresistible traits, by the way, is the speed with which you exhaust novelty. I was on a red-eye from JFK to Heathrow the other day, working on a rapper who’s this close to stabbing his model girlfriend to death, when I noticed how utterly indifferent the passengers were to what they were doing, namely, flying through the air. A glance out of the window would have revealed furrowed fields of cloud stained smokeblue and violet as night and morning changed shifts – but how were they passing the time in First, Business and Coach? Crosswords. In-flight movies. Computer games. Email. Creation sprawls like a dewed and willing maiden outside your window awaiting only the lechery of your senses – and what do you do? Complain about the dwarf cutlery. Plug your ears. Blind your eyes. Discuss Julia Roberts’s hair. Ah, me. Sometimes I think my work is done.) Yes, I thoroughly enjoyed flying. And flying at night? Oy. Like butter. Ask the owls. I bathed in the darkness and basked in the light. You’re poor on basking, you lot. With the exception of white girls from the northern hemisphere’s urban pits, who, supine on southern beaches quite naturally allow the sun to strip from them the last tissues of sentience, humans have everything to learn from lizards. The only animal from which humans have nothing to learn, in fact, is the sheep. Humans have already learned everything the sheep’s got to teach.
