I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (15 page)

I've looked back since and known that I must have been
in a funny mood. It was a bad pain day, yes - sometimes I
can barely manage the raised eyebrow and devilish grin - but
something else, too ... A shade of melancholy, perhaps? A
sense that my best days were behind me? That the challenging work had already been done? (Foolish, in hindsight,
given my achievements of the last 400 years, but I'm prone
to moments of doubt just like everyone else. And I'm not
talking little or ua'ec. ir~Q doubt. I'm talking crippling, existential, what-on-earth-is-the-point-of-it-all doubt. There have
been days when I've just had to lie in a darkened room.)
Anyway the point is that for whatever reason I wasn't quite
myself when I visited Morrales in the ritual room of one of
his occult amigos, who, at Morrales's insistence, had gone to
the bogus and completely unnecessary trouble of 'summoning' rne. Do please note those inverted commas, to signify
facetiousness. You don't, darling, 'summon' Lucifer. He's
not a fucking butler. Lucifer visits you. That's all. If I feel it's
going to be in my interest to have direct dealings with you
(and you really better hope I don't) then I'll come whether
you attempt to `summon' me or not. If I don't, no amount
of spooky chanting, bare burns, sinister beards, fellated goats
or murdered chickens is going to make the slightest difference, except to your carpet. Don't get me wrong: you'll
have a blast. It just doesn't work.

Damn these digressions. How did Gunn - how does one,
ever finish anything? Morrales's churn, one Carlos Antonio
Rodriguez, was one of those chickenshit dabblers manifestly in it for the carnal extravagances. He'd argued long and hard
with Fernando that the conjuring of His Satanic Majesty was
both difficult and highly dangerous, but had finally - seeing
that if he didn't comply there was a good chance that
Fernando would stick his sword through his, Carlos s, head -
capitulated and begun. He wasn't ready for me when I
appeared. (I'd consulted the manifestations wardrobe: yes,
something ... traditional, I think - although I'll tell you for
nothing, love, those cloven hooves are strictly bedroom.) I
could tell he had a good couple of hours' worth of incantatory twaddle lined-up, and the truth is I couldn't sit through
the Latin. Gave him quite a turn. So much of a turn, in fact,
that he bemerded his hose and ran screaming from the room,
leaving me alone with Fernando.

Don Fernando Morrales. Oy. Always when you least
expect ... sorry. Talking to myself when I should be talking
to you. (You. I know who you are, you know. I know where
you live. How does that make you feel? Secure?) Fernando,
when all's said and done, had some fucking cojones on him.
He was scared. He was ... ah ... perspiring - but he held it
together long enough to get through the negotiations. No
surprises there: I'd get his soul, he'd get a wagonload of
money, fatal accidents to an arm-long list of real and imagined enemies, and a lot - really an auful lot - of unhygienic
nookie. So I dictated the wording of the contract and told
him to open a vein for the bloody signature. (It's not the
piece of paper, obviously, which in any case I can't carry
back with me into the ether; it's the act of signing. Blood
seals it. That's the way it's always been. Ask Jimmeny. You
can destroy the contract, materially - everyone does - but it
won't make a difference come time for collection. I can
promise you that.) Anyway Fernando had just rolled up his
sleeve and was inspecting his forearm for a safe spot to make the cut, when - God knows what put it into his head to do
such a thing - he asked me straight out if it was true that I'd
been present at the Crucifixion. When I told him yes, of
course, he asked me, rather absurdly I thought, if I could
draw a likeness of what I'd seen.

I should, strictly speaking, have searched Morrales's soul a
little more thoroughly. That was carelessness on my part, I
admit. I was feeling peculiar. The pain was banging away like
an autistic kettle-drummer and my heart ... my heart ...
Oh all right not my heart, but it was one of those weird days
when I could barely concentrate on what I was doing, when
the blood-spattered and corpse-littered wake of my busy life
tugged at me like a conundrum. How art thou fallen from
Heaven, O Lucifer, Son of the morninc! Sometimes I let that run
through my head and it's the sound of a triumphal trumpet.
Other times it just makes nle terribly sad. Fernando - God
knows why - had quoted it in an undertone, a whisper
mortal ears wouldn't have heard. (Isaiah wasn't even talking
about me when he said it. He was prophesying the fate of
Merodach-baladan, who was not, as you might be thinking,
one of the Harlem Globetrotters, but the King of Babylon.
It's just that sometimes human utterances accidentally align
with the truths of Heaven and Hell. When that happens, the
phrases stick in history like burrs.)

I did it telekinetically, the quill inked with Morrales's
blood. Never knew I had any artistic talent until that drawing emerged on the back of the unsigned contract. Never
knew I was ... you know ... creative. Got lost in it, the challenge to keep the line honest, the strange state of suspension
between absolute concentration and absolute blankness (it's a
Zen thing, apparently), the momentary dissolution of the
boundary between subject and object, the fleeting transcendence of self. You know there are drawings that seem to say so much in so few lines? This was one of them. On top of all
my other knacks and talents, I was supernaturally good at
droring.

Too good for my own good, as it turned out. When I
turned my attention back to Morrales I saw he was weeping
piteously and tearing out hanks of his hair. He kissed the
image (I'd been a bit flattering with junior's hairdo and
beard, if you want the truth, but then so has practically every
other painter in the history of art), wailing now as his tears
mingled with the blood: Vade Satana: Scriptum est enim:
Dominum Deum mutt adorabis, et illi soli seruies ... Dade
Satana ... Vade Satana! Which, for the Classically challenged
among you (that's pretty much all of you, these days) translates as: Begone Satan: for it is written: The Lord thy God shalt
thou adore, and Him only shalt thou serve.

You humans and your confounded epiphanies, eh?
Honestly. You're so mauve. Couldn't get a word out of him
after that. Certainly no signature. Worse than a complete
waste of time - a conversion. Hoist, as they say, by my own
petard. Course I couldn't help it once I saw that I could
really ... capture something in the drawing. Had to let myself
go. Had to show off.

I went small-mouthed back to my brothers in Hell. Told
them I wasn't well. Had a lie-down. (Astaroth smirked a bit,
I now recall.) Bloody Morrales gave the picture up to the
Cardinal Penitentiary and - as I live and breathe - joined the
Franciscans. Idiot. Couple of millennia in Purgatory then the
Old Man let him in. Meanwhile the drawing, my drawing, is
locked in one of the Very Rarely Unlocked rooms of the
Vatican, its existence, until now, known only to a privileged
few. It can have ... effects on those who do get to see it,
mind you. Sent one corrupt cardinal (tautological phrase if
ever there was one) back in the Eighteenth completely mad.

So mad, in tact, that he hanged himself in a brothel shortly
after his young lady had left hint to dress, dropping his sinheavy soul into illy lap like a lump of rotten fruit -
compensation for Morrales, I might add, long overdue.

Now ... Gunn. Gunn and suicide. You're thinking: For
heaven's sake Wily?

It takes patience to drive people to suicide. Patience and a
particular voice of reason. It's not goin,~ toget any better. It ~ only
going to,get worse. You need this pain to stop. Its perfectly all r((thit
to avant this pain to stop. All you need to do is lie down and close
your eyes . . . It took me a while to hit on just the right tone,
part disinterested physician, part forgiving priest - their twin
implications: You need it; It's okay.

But Gunn. What brought it on? What - apart from his
dead mother, Violet, A Grace of Storius, and Wordsworthian
melancholy over the loss of childhood's celestial light - happened?

There's a long story and a short one. If you don't believe
in God or free will there's really only one long story, an antimorality tale in which no one's to blame for anything.
(Another place my reasonable voice came in handy, that,
getting the universe reduced to matter and determinism)
The short story, on the other hand, the tabloid leader, is
Penelope. Not that Penelope - though the name of Gunn's
ex is apposite, since he thought of her as, among other idealizations, a paragon of female fidelity. (And enjoyed with
peculiar and shameful relish at my suggestion a porn video in
a Manchester hotel - up there for book signing; `... sensitive and insightful ...' the Manchester Evening Venus - called
Penelope's Passions, which tale follows its classical progenitor in all but one significant detail: Penelope works her carnal
way through the entire host of suitors and most of her
household staff as well, ending the flick in a state of such
cross-eyed satiation that one wonders whether she'd be capable of recognizing Odysseus should he scupper plans for
Penelope's Passions II by actually making it home ...) Oh but
these digressions! The trouble with knowing people, you see,
is that everytltinY's relevant. Nothing is a digression. Even
Gunn knew it. Dear old cabbage-face Auden, for example,
a copy of whose Collected Poems when pulled from Gunn's
shelf opens itself like a robotic hussy at `The Novelist',
wherein we find Wystan's observation that the budding
Dickens orJoyce must

Lest ye become as gods yourselves, didn't I tell Eve, the first
prospective novelist? Was that a lie? Must know All and tell
Some. Which is lying by omission. No artist knows everything (yea, even this artist - piss-artist, sack-artist, con-artist,
body-artist) but since every artist knows more than he can
tell, all art is lying by omission. And if God is the only
artist who knows Everything, how enormous that sin of
omission is! Who, I ask you, humbly, is more worthy of the
Father of Lies tag? You write this incredible book - but
there's a catch: only you can read it - and what is Creation
but a book only God can read? What remains untold is
occult, and what remains occult is feared, and what remains feared is not infrequently worshipped. Quad Brat demon-
strandum.

But to return to young Gunn. Who, in recent months,
has found himself staring into the pocked bathroom mirror
and pronouncing the words `young gun' aloud, exploring
the shocking inapplicability of the metaphor with haggard
and bilious irony, much in the way one might explore with
one's tongue, perversely, the still-painful cavity of a recently
extracted tooth. It's one of his habits of despair. He's got a
quiver of them, and looses them by the hour until come
evening he stands before his reflection Saint Sebastianized
once more and lullabyed closer to his heinous sleep by my
voice of gentle reason: She used to call you Yrii Gunn. She let
it fall from her lips like a sweetly spoken spell min'ling tenderness
and tease. Along with An and Deckalino and Gunneroo and
Baby and Boy and Honey and - the crucifier - Love. Speaking
aloud the names no one else will ever call him to his own
unpitying reflection is one of his habits of despair. As is alcoholism. As is pornography. As is Violet. As is the replayed
tape of silence between him and his dear departed mother.
As is the daily refined map of his own fraudulence -
sensitive and intelligent ...' as the Manchester Evenin i
Neivs had it - which phrase he repeats, gutturally, just before
crashing drunk to his knees in a Shaftsbury Avenue gutter, or
projectile vomiting into the unjudgemental mouth of his
Clerkenwell bog.