by Glen Duncan
‘Yes.’
‘What’s my part?’
‘Gabriel’s part is –’
‘What’s my part?’
‘Michael will be –’
‘What is my part, Raphael?’ Or words to that effect.
‘We’re to be messengers,’ Uriel said.
‘Messengers?’
‘To the New Ones.’
‘What New Ones?’
‘The Secondborn. The Mortals.’
Matter. Matter, apparently, was the high concept. It dizzied us to think of it. We couldn’t think of it. And what was all this gobbledygook about mortals?
Indulge my litotes: I didn’t like it.
Meanwhile Junior gave me that look every time our eyes met. It wasn’t the enmity that got to me. It was the condescension. A thousand times it was on the tip of my tongue (unforked in those days) to ask Him, What the fuck? Something always stopped me. His applehood in the eye of the Father. And now that we’re on the subject, let me settle this ‘God’s favourite’ thing once and for all. It was never me. The truth is . . . ah, the truth . . . the truth is God never really . . . He never really listened to me. For years, for years almost immediately after my birth I tried to . . . to put something special into the Gloria, something unique, a communiqué from me to Him, a signal that I was . . . that I wanted to . . . that I understood the way He . . . That . . .
Anyway the point is, fucking Michael (do please pardon my French) was always His favourite. Michael.
Some presences have their own gravity, their own radiation. So it was with Creation. No hard evidence, but slowly, one by one, each of us came to understand that it was there, somewhere, elsewhere. Elsewhere! Our minds fairly boggled. Was it possible to conceive of an elsewhere in a nowhere? (A ticklish question. In the angelic realm there’s no concept of place. It’s meaningless, actually, to talk about the angelic ‘realm’ at all.) Therefore we weren’t anywhere; we were nowhere. And yet, as Old Time passed . . .
‘I think it’s started,’ I said to Azazel.
‘What has?’
‘Creation.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s different from this. It’s to do with the Son. The Son and the Mortals.’
‘What are these Mortals?’
‘They’re not like us.’
‘Not like us?’
‘No.’
Quite a while passed between us in silence. Then Azazel looked at me. ‘That doesn’t sound too good, does it?’ he said.
‘We’re supposed to take His Will to them,’ Uriel insisted.
‘Why?’
‘They’re His children.’
‘We’re His children.’
‘They’re different. They’ve got something.’
‘What?’
‘Him inside them.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘It’s true. They’ve got a bit of Him inside them.’
‘So you’re saying they’re better than us?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Look – is it just me? Or does everyone else think this is a bit . . . much?’
It was a dismal time for us, that period when His Lordship turned away from us and absorbed Himself in making the Universe. The central heating went off. The stalwarts kept the Gloria going, but my heart (and I wasn’t by any means alone) just wasn’t in it. The Holy Spirit went among us checking morale, but a good third (the bad third) could barely summon a salute. Meanwhile Arthur was really beginning to get – as you so evocatively have it – on my tits. He developed a new gimmick. At first I found it merely bizarre. Then I found it strangely crude. Finally I found it downright insulting. (Merde alors, the labour of all this, this hunt for things you can work with. Keep in mind all of this pre-dates Matter or Form. Keep in mind all of this is being patched together out of hopelessly inadequate metaphors.) The new gimmick was this: He’d choose a moment when I was absorbed in reflection or deep in conversation. I couldn’t ignore Him. (Prostration in His presence was customary. Never explicitly requested – that would be vulgar – but fail to comply and see the rashes and nosebleeds that followed. It had become a chore for me.) Like a girl using her own innocence as a tool of seduction He’d reach up and part His robes, revealing a terrible chest cavity around a pulpy and thorn-crowned heart. Blood-droplets jewelled this ghastly organ, complemented, I saw, by playing-card diamond wounds in the hands and feet, and a nasty-looking gash just above the kidneys. I had no idea why I was being called to this obscene spectacle, nor what was expected of me – although I must say I had a bad feeling about it. I had, even then, a woeful intimation that it meant something . . .
In a way, God brought it all on Himself. (Of course He brought it all on Himself Luce, you moron.) If he hadn’t presented me with His actual absence things might have turned out differently; but there I was – there we were, the thinkers and speculators of the angelic host, managing quite well without Him. It felt. . . how can I put this? It felt like a holiday. Up until then I’d spent all that time (and this is still Old Time, remember), all my time, in fact, sailing around Heaven telling Him what a wonderful guy He was for allowing me the privilege of sailing around Heaven telling Him what a wonderful guy He was. I didn’t know why, but it suddenly seemed . . . well. . . pointless.
When I had this thought (there were whole flocks of these bright birds, now, whole experiments in jazz) even the Holy Spirit left me alone, and I existed for the first time in a state of brilliant, adamantine singularity. It was queasy and arousing. It was rugged and naive. It was daring and giddy. It was glorious and – since I assumed it was the way He felt the whole time – profane. Truth is, it was a huge rush. The crystallization of selfhood, the moment of realising that I was, indubitably, myself, separate from anyone or anything, rich with time and potent with the desire to spend it away from home, to squander it, to lavish it on my own deeds and desires, to set myself aside from God (aside theologians please note, not above), to wake up in the morning and think: Holy shit, it’s me! What shall I do today? A rush. The rush. Of all time. In my long, scabrous, violent and filthy history of moments I’d have to say that moment capped the lot. You can’t imagine it. That’s not a criticism. I just know you can’t imagine it because I’ve made sure that separateness from God is something you take for granted.
My murmur went through the host like the clap. It wasn’t until my spirit leaped onto its legs and went capering among them whispering of all that time they’d wasted that many of them realised themselves truly free.
You can’t blame me. I mean that literally. You’re incapable of blaming me. You’re human. Being human is choosing freedom over imprisonment, autonomy over dependency, liberty over servitude. You can’t blame me because you know (come on, man, you’ve always known) that the idea of spending eternity with nothing to do except praise God is utterly unappealing. You’d be catatonic after an hour. Heaven’s a swiz because to get in you have to leave yourself outside. You can’t blame me because – now do please be honest with yourself for once – you’d have left, too.
Not that I was prepared for His anger, when it came. In fact let me give you a tip: Don’t ever, ever think you’re prepared for God’s anger. It happened so quickly. In Old Time we’d say it took no time at all. Really no time at all. Suddenly, He turned His presence upon us. Us. We hadn’t even noticed up until that moment that we’d started hanging around in a group. I knew the game was up. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. He sent Michael.
‘It’s too late to change my mind, I suppose,’ I said.
‘It’s too late to change your mind,’ Michael said. ‘Your pride has set your course, Lucifer.’ We could see them, then, the white-hot ranks massed behind him. Outnumbered us two to one. Easy two to one. I could feel the Old Man’s barely contained rage like a swollen sky. Be strong, Luce, I told myself. Be strong, be strong, be strong. You know what it’s like: a nauseous glory in your guts because now you know you’ve Done It, now you know you’re going to Get It. The happy clarity o
f defiance. You’re fey with it, addled, tumbleweed light, ridiculously devil-may-care. Terror and elation. We’re doing it, I thought, we’re actually doing it!
I turned and looked back from the threshold, chin up, the high-diver’s moment of pure being before the backwards pitch and scribbled notation through space. Some moment, that, the ether’s quiver and torque, the brilliant ranks, time holding its giant breath. I hadn’t rehearsed anything, but I did think, you know, a few fitting words.
‘Well,’ I began.
Then all Heaven broke loose, and before we knew it we were fighting for our lives.
Say what you like about me, but don’t say I can’t wing it, will you? I mean, would you have thought of that? The Devil makes work for idle hands – even if they’re his own. I’m not overly ashamed to admit that until I met Harriet in the bar I had no higher agenda than the exhaustive expenditure of Gunn’s mortal resources on excess: I’ve got a shocking weakness for scrambled egg with smoked salmon, fresh dill and coarse ground black pepper, it turns out; I’m up to eighty Silk Cut a day, but I’m pretty sure I’ve hit a plateau with smoking; the bar staff . . . know me, shall we say, and have even officially added the Lucifer Rising – vodka, tequila, orange juice, tomato juice, Tabasco, Tio Pepe, Grand Marnier, cinnamon and a pepperoncino chilli – to the joint’s unadventurous cocktail menu. I’ve ridden the tiger ragged. That tiger, it’s rolled over on its blazing back and put up its paws and just asked me to stop. Cocaine (two lines of which form the tenth unofficial ingredient in a Lucifer Rising) has found its feisty way up both ports of my hungry hooter, and I’ve slogged (and whacked, and ploughed, and rootled, and slurped, and chomped) my way through a good half of the talent at XXX-Quisite Escorts – ’girls with personality and verve for the gentleman who demands excellence’. Do I demand excellence? Let me tell you, that excellence they’ve got on offer at XXX-Quisite, it’s excellent. I’m feeling . . . Well, I’m feeling good, you know? Violet-length bubble baths, oven-roasted quail, coke-dusted nipples and the odd vanilla-flavoured vulv, altered states, clairvoyant cachet (I’ve got a whole posse of admirers here now) and the strangely reliable lust inspired by Harriet’s past-it poop-chute – it’s not much compared to my Rwandan rumbles or Balkan brouha-has, you know, but it’s something, it’s stuff. What else does one do with one’s finite body, with one’s life on earth? I’ve been dreaming of a vacation like this for billennia. And now? – Oh glorious and bountiful serendipity! – Harriet, Nexus Films, and Trent Bintock.
Trent’s short film Including Everything won at Sundance this season. And Cannes. It won at Los Angeles, too. And Berlin. And everywhere else that mattered and everywhere else that didn’t. Trent, a twenty-five-year-old New Yorker of such gilt and chiselled good looks as to amount to a self-parody, is currently under contract to the remarkable Harriet Marsh of Nexus Films. He looks like a cross between an aerobic Apache and a Californian surf god. His fingernails and teeth appal with a whiteness that would shame the snows of Aspen. Trent, whose youthful brush with even modest celebrity has lifted him to heights of vanity that would make Gunn look shy, is what you might call ’poised’ for conquest. Harriet is going to launch him. Launching young men is one of Harriet’s pastimes; she considers herself a kind of watermark they’ll carry out into the world, visible in future only when the young man is held up against a strong light . . . The only thing missing from this picture is the picture. The feature that’s going to put Trent on Hollywood’s A-list and a planet-sized wedge into Nexus’s coffers. The feature, the picture, the movie, the film. The story. The one I pitched post-coitally to Harriet over three bottles of Bolly and eight lines of the Very Reverend Charles Cocaine.
Oh I know it’s frivolous. So deshed frivolous. But once Harriet took me seriously I couldn’t but run with it. She picked up the blower there and then. LA. Tokyo. Paris. Mumbai. Twenty-five words or less? Less. ’“Lucifer”,’ she said. ‘Creation. Fall. Eden – Julia – battle on Earth with Christ. Effects up the arse. Controversy.’ She capped the pitch with pure anti-logic. ‘The most expensive film ever made.’ They loved it. You can’t blame me, can you? Obviously set the record straight before the end of time, obviously unveil the Real Me – but think of the merchandising. That and we leak a story that now-reclusive scriptwriter Gunn was Actually Possessed by Lucifer to write the script. Bump off a couple of sour grapes critics to give the thing some momentum. Maybe decapitate Julia half-way through shooting and roll in Penelope Cruz. ’. . . members of the crew are beginning to believe the rumour that writer Declan Gunn made some Faustian pact. . .’ Lucifer’s going to be the pop culture icon for the final days of pop culture. And the final days of everything else, now that you mention it. Move over Madonna. The Caths, the Fundamentalists, the Baptists, Jumpin’ Jeehosophet’s Witnesses – Christ, anyone who’s anyone on the overlarge map of Christianity is going to be picketing movie theatres worldwide. And the kids? The kids are going to love it.
Honestly, I looked in the mirror this morning and thought: You know what you are, don’t you? You’re cocky. Your trouble, Lucifer, your irresistible and invidious trouble, is that you’ve always got to go the extra yard. Not content to accept Declan’s soul self-delivered by the mortal sin of suicide, you want to put him back into play with a new set of conditions that are going to freshen his appetite for life and lead him away from the Old Man all over again. ‘I had this soul already,’ you want to say to Him, between sips of Remy and insouciantly expelled smoke-rings, ‘I already had it, but I put it back. I’d like you to observe, Old Fruit, as, with his new lease of life, snatched from the very doorstep of certain Hell, your boy spends what remains of his liberty walking straight back into my arms . . .’ Confidence? This is meta-confidence, Toots.
So there you have it. Coming to a theatre near you. What kills me is this quaint business of me coming back here to Gunn’s hovel to write. Don’t laugh. Can’t squeeze a word out at the hotel. I’m not complaining, really: the poverty of Gunn’s former life provides a titillating counterpoint to the extravagant one I’m living on his behalf at the Ritz. A counterpoint in small doses, let me stress, in very, very small doses.
Life among the hotel’s loaded suits me. I’m a Name: the clairvoyant who pretends to be the Devil. Celebrity, you see, on a scale Declan could (and regularly did) only dream about. They’re used to celebs there, obviously. Staff are prohibited on pain of dismissal from making a fuss. I mean they’re polite, of course – they are supposed to recognize you – but none of that ‘Oh, Mr Cruise I just loved you in the one with the retard’ nonsense. Word of the Film Deal is out. There’s a whispery buzz about us, me, Trent and Harriet, when we park at the bar. The Lucifer Rising is the best-selling cocktail in the house. I wake up these mornings with a grin on my gob and pep in my prick. The sun comes in the window and embraces me. Those champagne breakfasts Harriet insists on practically guarantee a Feelin’ Groovy sort of day. Gunn’s bones seem finally to be coming into some kind of right alignment. I sing in the shower (Giddupah giddorn up – like a sex-machine – giddorn up) and take the stairs three at a time. This is how one should live. This, let me repeat, is how one should live.
(You know, it’s true. Work had really been getting me down latterly. Of late. The predictability. The routine. The absence of even the ghost of a challenge. With nice symmetry, my newly acquired corporeal threads provide material for the analogy: I’d felt heavy, sluggish, fevered now and then, stiff of joint, leaden of head, sour of guts, immaterially peaky and generally under the angelic weather. This getaway’s just what I needed. A change, as they say, is as good as a rest.)
The clairvoyance gimmick’s magnetic. Jack Eddington wants to give me my own show. Lysette Youngblood wants me on the road with Madonna. Gerry Zooney wants me to go head-to-head with Uri Geller. Todd Arbuthnot wants to hook me up with his contacts in Washington. Who are these people? They’re members of my Ritz coterie.
‘Do you have any idea, Declan, of the sort of money you could make with this?’ Todd Arbu
thnot said to me last night, after I’d told him a thing or two about Dodi and Di that made his toenails curl.
‘Yes, Todd, I do have an idea,’ I said. ‘And do, dear boy, please, call me Lucifer.’
They don’t get it, the Devil thing. They write it off as permissible guru eccentricity. Needless to say, none of them has heard of Declan Gunn. None of them has read Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest. None of them has read Boneshadows. Not that the obscurity credentials didn’t come in handy with Trent, who’s a writing snob, when he’s not out of his box on drugs.
‘Okay,’ he said, coming up bleary-eyed from a toot in my suite, where, by mutual agreement, our ’development meetings’ take place. Harriet was out. Dining with microelectronics and pharmaceuticals. Outside the window lit London beckoned. I get terribly excited once it’s gone dark. I get terribly excited while it’s still light, too; but that darkness, those winking city lights . . . I’ve started going out, you see. Going out, in London, at night, with money, drugs, famous people, and extremely expensive prostitutes. (Whereas Gunn used to go out, at night, alone, with hardly any money, no drugs, no celebs, fail to pull, get denied sex even after the capitulation and retreat to Vi’s, then come home, have a hungover handjob, a sob, a vomit, a cigarette, and much mulling over just how close he was to having altogether given up hope before falling into a troubled and unregenerative sleep.)
‘Okay,’ Trent said, stretching his bottom jaw and widening then contracting his sapphire eyes. ‘We start with just a full black screen and a voiceover. No stars, right? I mean, there wouldn’t, would there, be actual stars?’
I rounded off my scheduling call to Elise at XXX-Quisite, and put the phone down. Your verbal engagement on the telephone – or in conversation with someone else, for that matter – presents no obstacle to Trent. ‘There weren’t stars,’ I said. ‘There wasn’t anything.’
He looked at me for a moment very much in the manner of a person about to pass into an inaccessible dimension of consciousness. Then he shook himself. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Right, right, right. You were there. I forget.’