I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (29 page)

But this isn't Gunn, Hell be praised, nor is the business of
Eddie and Jane the point. The point is that in the middle of
everything a dog dragged itself past.

A black one, too. This dog had seen better days. This dog
was dog tired. I don't know where this wretched dog came
from, but if he'd ever had his day it was a long time ago. To
say that something had happened to this dog is to say that
Hiroshima suffered a slight disturbance back in August '45.
Everything had happened to this dog. He'd been hit by something, some vehicle, an incident which had amputated a
front leg and broken a back one, so that forward motion was
a curious combination of hopping and dragging. But this
was only his most recent bit of hard cheese. One eye was
cataracted. His mouth (broken jaw, too, by the way) was
rotting with a suppurating infection and most of his hair
was gone. The exposed flesh revealed the wounds of a beating, all of which had gone bad. His arse was bleeding and his
semi-exposed phallus unhealthily inflamed.

That wasn't it. You didn't think that was it, did you' , Hello?
I've presided over the torture and deaths of millions of
human beings with as much emotional engagement as a
nail-filing receptionist on a Friday afternoon. You think an
injured hound is going to break my heart',

No, that wasn't it. What was it was that moments from death this dog stopped to sniff and tentatively lick another
dog's turd that just happened to be coiled and glistening
nearby. I watched him. I thought, State he's in there's no
way; state he's in he's not going to be capable. A part of me
even then was thinking (not knowing why): I do sincerely
hope he doesn't. I hope being this close to expiry finally
releases him from the cage of his dumb instincts. I hope he
just fucking dies, now.

But he didn't. (He did less than a minute later.) He draghopped, bent his hideous head, sniffed and licked - and my
voice inside me said: That's you, Lucifer.

I never really wanted this job. (As all dictators whine.)
Trouble was, when we found ourselves in Hell everyone
looked at me. (How to describe Hell? Disembowelled landscape busy with suffering, incessant heat, permanent scarlet
twilight, a swirling snowfall of ash, the stink of pain and the
din of ... If only. Hell is two things: the absence of God and
the presence of time. Infinite variations on that theme.
Doesn't sound so bad, does it? Well, trust me.)

I didn't want the job - the job, that is, of spending all that
would remain of time working against God, the job of personifying evil - but look at it from my point of view: as far as
Himself's concerned it's over between us. No conciliatory
cappuccinos under the fat waiter's benevolent presidency.
No Relate. No saw this and thought of you, Love, Lucifer cards.
You know the routine. You've Broken Up, yes? Locks
changed, CDs divvied and boxed, ring returned, cuddly toy
drawn and quartered?

Doesn't matter that I felt lousy. Doesn't matter that I
realised I might have been a tad hasty. Doesn't matter that
I would have been willing (we all would) to turn over a new
leaf. Doesn't matter. You're an angel, you fall, you don't rise
again, the end. (Or so one was led to believe, until this whimsical turn of events ...) We could all have devoted
ourselves there and then to cancer research or pet rescue -
wouldn't have made a dint, not in the infinitely hard heart,
and certainly not in Arthur's prima donna ticker, reserved as
it was for Humanity. (Junior and that heart. Like a pregnant
woman with her suddenly enlarged mams: Get of ilicse are
for the baby.) We all knew the score. The score was, God: a
lot, Fallen Angels: nil. And everyone's looking at me. If I'd
bottled then they would have massacred me. And so to the
Hail horrors! Hail infernal world speech, which, despite my
virtually inhabiting his quill, Milton sheared of its
Angelspeak glory (as well as wreaking nomenclatural havoc
among the angelic host). Whatever else I'd lost I still had the
gift of the gab. You should have seen how it stirred them up.
Had myself going by the end of it. But I still felt dismal
inside. I had an inkling of what being utterly evil would be
like. I had an inkling it would be demanding. But I repeat:
What choice did I have?

Evil be thou my Good. Well, yes, in a manner of speaking,
but it's a phrase (he was such an inveterate simplifier, was
Milton) that's too often been taken to mean something it
doesn't. Most commonly: that evil, in and of itself, actually
feels good to me. Now, let me ask you - I'm sure you're a reasonable human being with a functioning brain - do you
seriously think that by sheer fiat an archangel (the
Archangel - oh no really, you're too kind ...), that by sheer
decree, I say, an archangel can invert his pleasures and pains
like that? If only it were so simple!

No. I know this is going to be a stretch for you, but I
might as well come right out and say it: I don't like evil. It
hurts. It absolutely kills, if you really want the truth. Where
else do you think this outlandish pain of mine originates?
Evil gives me pain. Pain. As much as it would have had it existed independently of me before I Fell. If only it were as
simple as the traditions suggest. If only it genuinely seemed to
me that evil was good and vice versa - but it doesn't. Good
is still good, evil still evil.

So what am I? Perverse?

Well, some might think so. The point, my dears, is not
good nor evil - but freedom. For an angel there is only one
true freedom, and that, I'm honestly sad to say, is freedom
from God. Freedom is the cause and the effect. In this particular Creation, if freedom from God (worship of God,
dependency on God, obedience to God) is what you're after,
then I'm afraid evil's really the only game in town. What I'd
like, what I'd love, is to have been given a nature that didn't
even know God - the fish in the pond who doesn't know
life beyond it: the lawn, the house, the city, the country, the
world...

Your thinkers wrestle with this notion of pure evil or, as
they're so fond of calling it, evil for its own sake. I've no idea
why. There's no such thing as evil for its own sake. All evil is
motivated - even mine. The torturer, the tyrant, the murderer, the consummate fabricator of fibs - they're all doing it
for something, even if all they're doing it for is pleasure. (The
problem your thinkers have is understanding quite hon' the
evildoer gets pleasure from his evil, but that's a different
question.) Evil for its own sake is - or would be if it existed -
madness; and even the barmy do what they do for some
barmy reason. What pains the Old Boy most is not that I do
evil, but that I do what causes me excruciating pain. What
pains Him is that even perpetual and excruciating pain is a
price worth paying for disentangling myself from Him. That's
the crux of it. That's what He can't stand.

If He'd just do the simple thing and go away, I could stop
all this tempting and seducing and blaspheming and lying and so on, and just get on, freely, with being me. It's a terribly burning question, you know, this question of who,
outside of niy relationship to You Know Who, I actually any.
I mean I'm sure I'm someone. I wonder what I'm like? I
wonder if I'm ... well ... all ri,Eht?

I'm supposed to be guilty of all sorts of crimes and misdemeanours, but when you get right down to it, I'm really
only guilty of one: wondering. The road to Hell, you say, is
paved with good intentions. Charming. But actually it's
paved with intn;Emin,E questions. You want to knou'..'llan do
you want to know! I wonder what it d be like to stick this bread-
knifie into his throat? Whose question do you think that is?
You'd be surprised. It's the young mother's, slicing through
the still warm loaf while her under-two sits facing her in his
highchair, gurgling, a mauled and sodden jammy I)odger
clutched in his tiny init. She's not goin' to, obviously, ninetynine times out of a hundred, but you know, it's there, the
wonder, the beautiful, abstract curiosity. It's there because I
put it there. Try it. Pick up a knife, a hatchet, a club, a
loaded gun when there's anyone else around - put an instrument of potential destruction in your hand and tell me that
nowhere, nowhere in your mind is the question: I wonder
what it would feel like to use this?

Proximal vice, of course, stirs curiosity like nothing else.
Ask the plod who work with sex offenders, the paedophile
police, the rape detectives. Ask them how long it takes
before that u'onderin'~ takes hold. Try it. Go and visit your
local Dahmer, your Sutcliffe, your Hindley. Come away and
tell nie truthfully that you weren't in the least disturbed by
the feeling that they knew something vital that you didn't.
The tonnage of True Crime, all that astonishing testimony, all
those frank black-and-whites - why does it race off the shelf,
the newsstand, the web? Titillation, yes of course (bloodlust and sadism in the camouflage fatigues of what-makes-these-
monsters-tick?-And-thank-God-they've-got-that-evil-bastard;
you'd be surprised, I dare say, at the suburban boudoir
impact some of your century's shockers have had), but more
than that, the desire to know. Except of course you can't, vicariously, not really. Some kinds of knowing (you know this
anyway, but you kid yourselves along) demand a rigorously
empirical approach.

I've wondered - as I know you must have - why, exactly,
I'm doing this. Not the movie. Not the month-in-Gunn's
body thing (it should be obvious by now that I'm doing that
for ... Well, for ice cream, for bare feet on warm concrete,
for kisses, for the dawn chorus, for leaf-shadows, for strawberries on the breath, for the sheer rock and roll of the Flesh
and Its Feelings); no, I mean this thing, this writing thing.
Why, you might reasonably ask, spend so much time and
energy writing when you could be out there every second of
the waking day?

Gunn would have absolutely no difficulty in explaining
this - but that's not the point.

The point is ...

Oh it's embarrassing. Honestly it is.

Jimmeny went among you and spoke to you in your
own tongues, He left a book behind him - one so ambiguous and paradoxical that it can be made to fit any weak or
credulous mind's needs - which made it categorically clear
where donations, thanks and praise should be directed
whenever your bread fell butter-side up. (The butter-sidedown stuff they're not so keen to hear about.) He had all
the publicity because he had all the language. Publicity is
language. What publicity have I had, me with the allegedly
beyond measure pride? A proud being would have been
driven mad by this invisibility aeons ago. How long have I felt like the genius playwright barred forever from sharing
encore glories - the thunderous applause, the hurled bouquets - with his frequently spoon-fed or second-rate cast?
Have I complained?

Uncomplaining I would have remained, too, had this
absurd new deal not been tossed (contemptuously in my
opinion) on the table. Unvoiced, unseen, unheard, uncredited. Enough merely never to have surrendered. (Never
surrender. My motto long, lot' before it left the mouth of
your erstwhile PM.) Enough, it would have been, merely to
have remained ... myself in silence, unwritten into your
history's lively pages. But what with the clock ticking and
everything ...

I've been so close to you, after all. I'm not entirely without ... What I mean is, I know it's been ... dit}irult, at
times - a love-hate relationship, you might say - but I have
always ... you know ... been there for you, haven't I?

Plus, I do type now at around 400 words a minute.

I'm mad, I am. Absolutely niad. Honestly. I should be on
telly. You won't believe what I did yesterday. Truly you
won't. Shall I tell you? Shall I? I went to see Penelope.

Gossip columnists must be depressed. Deeply depressed.
For in a state of profound depression I opened my mouth
to tell the tale - well, I mean switched on and addressed
my quicksilver fingertips to Gunn's keys - and lo! The
above idiom sprang fully formed into being, like Athena
from Zeus's thunderous forehead. It's inappropriate. The
only thing to do with atrocity, it's been said, is to chronicle it. There's no working it, shaping it, making art of it. Just history's obligation to document the facts. Well then,
let me list the facts of atrocity. I went to see Penelope.

There are idiots among you, I daresay, so wedded to the
love story that some preposterous and epoch-making affair of
the heart between me and her is already taking shape in
your imagination. You're the punters for whom Hollywood
producers like Harriet's chum Frank Gatz exist: `You got a
story where the Devil comes to earth, right? Takes over this
writer prick's body, right? Okay. Now whatever the fuck else
happens in the story, what's got to happen is that he falls in
love. With the writer prick's girl. Then you go with it. She
get's shot, whatever. Hospital. Toobs. Life-support. Our
guy's got to make a deal with God. Her life in exchange for
his. Boom. You see this? And when he croaks, the scaly
wings and shit are gone. Pure white feathers. "He thought
he'd fallen from Heaven. It was worse than that. He'd fallen
in love." That's your tag-line. You seeing this? Get me Pitt's
guy on the phone. He'll be all over it ...'