by Glen Duncan
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 fact, that he hanged himself in a brothel shortly after his young lady had left him to dress, dropping his sinheavy soul into my 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 why?
It takes patience to drive people to suicide. Patience and a particular voice of reason. It’s not going to get any better. It’s only going to get worse. You need this pain to stop. It’s perfectly all right to want 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 Storms, 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 anti-morality 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 News – 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 everything’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 or Joyce must
Become the whole of boredom, subject to
Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just
Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,
And in his own weak person, if he can,
Dully put up with all the wrongs of Man
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 erat demonstrandum.
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 Young Gunn. She let it fall from her lips like a sweetly spoken spell mingling tenderness and tease. Along with Angel 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 Evening News 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.
Heavens how this tongue runs on. I have no knack for brevity. And you none for patience, no doubt – so forward ho! (Besides which, there’s the Temptation in the Desert Scene to write this afternoon. Harriet laughs when I show her the material. Candy from babies, she knows. Criminally, candy from babies.) He is the bow of burning gold and these are his arrows of despair – but still we’re no nearer the why or how.
If Gunn were writing of Penelope he would perfect her, since he never got beyond their romance and into their reality. So let me, at least, be clear. She wasn’t a saint. (If only she had been. Saints, they’re a barrel of laughs, they are, perpetually on the verge of conversion to sin. They can’t help it. Extremes always nudge their opposites in the small hours.) She was pretty enough, but not so much that you’d still have shagged her if she was completely bald. She was lucky, actually that she hadn’t turned out astonishingly gorgeous, because she wouldn’t have been quite strong enough to resist living off the benefits that condition confers. (Astonishingly gorgeous people are rarely good, for the simple reason that they don’t need to be. Hell’s absolutely stuffed with the souls of ex-stunnas and hunks, whereas Heaven’s been in a more or less perpetual state of talent-famine since human beings first started biting the dust.) Anyway, Penelope. (You see what happens when an angelic intelligence starts telling the stories of human beings? One needs parentheses of virtually infinite regress; one of those Russian dolls – only an unimaginably fertile one, with not half-a-dozen versions of herself within but several billion – such an enormously long time before you get to the last, the first, the point of origin or expiry . . . Remember, Lucifer, we are concerned here only with Gunn’s decision to end his life . . .)
Penelope’s gone down to university in London (with her tangled tawny hair and her green leather jacket and her chipped maroon nail varnish) to study Literature and to Fall in Love. And she’s met black-eyed and tea-coloured Declan Gunn.
‘I like your forehead,’ he says, when she opens her eyes one morning. Six months in they’ve arrived at the speech of lovers – cockily tangential and thriving on apparent non sequiturs. ‘It’s sometimes like a cat’s. And your hair comes out of it in exactly the way it did when you were five.’
‘I want a tomato and some honey and some yoghurt,’ she says. ‘In my dream, I thought I’d had a baby, but when I looked down at it in my arms, it was an almond slice.’
‘And when you were at primary school,’ he says, ‘the teacher would be aware of you staring out through the wi
ndow at the playing field, and he would know absolutely that you weren’t listening to a word he was saying, and the surface part of him would be irritated, but the deeper, aesthetic part of him would love you for your cat forehead and your absolute indifference to where you were and what he was trying to teach you.’
‘What’s the most important thing?’ she says, changing again.
‘Angel Delight,’ Gunn says.
‘Truth,’ Penelope says, moving her fingertips over him, mapping her ownership, guiltlessly avaricious. ‘Truth is the most important thing. Being true. Not being false.’
‘I know.’
‘But really.’
‘I know.’
‘Then Angel Delight.’
He can’t quite believe it, of course, his good fortune, his utterly undeserved luck in having found her. They delight in telling the truth to each other about the world. They’re only nineteen, so it’s not much of a world.
‘We must have babies,’ Penelope says, clambering on to him, easing herself down.
‘Eh?’
‘Not this minute,’ she says, feeling him inside her. ‘But eventually. Because if we don’t, then ugly, stupid, unkind people will, and the forces of evil and meanness will win.’
Gunn’s in a state of near mesmerism: his body’s rich torpor, the late morning’s heat. Their window is an ingot of warm gold. I don’t deserve this, he’s thinking, watching the light jangling in her hair, feeling the precise amount of her bodyweight she’s holding back – an appallingly erotic restraint – This will all have to be paid for.
He’s right.
Now – good gracious me look at the time! I only even mentioned Penelope because she’s part of what drove our Gunn to the blades and the bath. This is the way of it down here, I perceive, the frightful drudgery of finding the causes – then worse, finding the words. The immeasurably long time it all takes. Had Gunn stopped talking years ago he might have started living. It even occurred to him; predictably, when it did, he went away and wrote about it.
My dears, we’ve wandered from our course here. My fault, I know. And now I’m afraid the pull of the world draws me from this. I have, as you know, got places to go. I have, as you know, got people to see.
It wasn’t a fair fight. That’s what I’m trying to bring out of the story, you know? Trent’s keen on playing this angle up. And why not? It wasn’t a fair fight. Left to his own devices I’m not sure Junior would have made it to Golgotha. I’m not just talking about the stuff that’s on record – the warning to supercuckold Joseph that Herod was furious and that Egypt was lovely that time of year, for example – I’m talking about stuff you don’t even know about, stuff that came later, when the Little Baby Jesus was all grown up, when, if the Old Man had had any decency about Him He would have stayed out and left the two of us to it, head-to-head, gloves off, winner takes all, and so on. But what, I ask rhetorically, does God know about fair fighting?
Consider the temptation in the wilderness.
Redundantly, let me begin by saying it was hot. Really awfully hot. The sky was bone white and deserted, sunlight a static explosion on the sand. Not kingfishers but lizards caught fire; the place was jewelled with them. Desert plants revolved their shadows, slowly. He’d gone into an emptiness only occasionally whipped through by a babbling Essene or hair-shirted freak. He looked rough when I came to him, beard matted, eyes stied and reddened, cheeks hollow, fingernails torn, lips cracked and blistered. Yes, fasting for forty days and nights manifestly had not been a blast. When I found him he was sitting hunched in the mouth of a cave, knees up to his chin, bony fingers laced around his lengthy shins. Very black was the cool mouth of the cave and very white the scorched land around it.
‘Hungry, lovey?’ I said. It’s been a weakness of mine – yes, definitely a weakness – that ever since the days of the parted robes and the punctured heart I’ve found it all but impossible to control my irritation in his presence. Soon as I see him something in me just clicks and it’s all barbed jibes and leaden sarcasm. So annoying. I’m sure that if I could just have got beyond it and let the charm flow . . .
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘It’s you.’
‘You know those crash-diets are a trap, don’t you?’
‘You’re wasting your time, Satan.’
‘Not if it gives me pleasure to be here. Lucifer, by the way.’
‘Go away.’
‘Look, you know the drill. Would I be here if your Dad didn’t want me to be?’
He sighed. I had him there. He’d come out here to be tested.
‘Get on with it then, will you?’ he said.
So on with it I got. Now obviously the versions you’ve inherited are way off. Matthew’s got me trying to get him to turn stones into bread (prompting all the not by bread alone blarney), to throw himself off a mountain and precipitate an angelic rescue (provoking all the don’t test the Lord thy God baloney), and to bow down and worship me in return for all the kingdoms of the earth (eliciting the now world-famous get thee behind me claptrap.) Luke agrees, but cocks up the order and substitutes a building (in the desert) for the mountain.
Now I ask you: do you really think that’s the best I could come up with? I mean I’ll just remind everyone in case everyone’s forgotten: I’m . . . the Devil. And even if I wasn’t, I’d have to have been a complete dunderhead to think he’d go for any of that nonsense. You’re not even capable of eating bread after forty days’ and nights’ starvation. Having angels come to his rescue – what would that prove? It would, I suppose, have given him an opportunity to show me just how important he was, an opportunity for the gratification of ego or pride, but pride wasn’t his weakness. You’re going to tempt someone, you find their weakness. All the kingdoms of the earth? Might as well have offered him the complete Pokémon collection. The Evangelists tell you what they would have been tempted by. Jimbo wasn’t interested in that sort of thing. It doesn’t bother me that the Gospels are skewed, but it bothers me that I come out looking so narrow, so myopic.
Apart from sanctimoniousness and impenetrable parabling Arthur really only had one weak spot. Doubt. Very occasional, and invariably mastered by faith – but it was there. (I got to him in Gethsemane, right before the fun and games started, and almost had him at the very last on the cross, when, after I’d niggled him with that ‘told you you can’t trust Him’ remark he panicked and went all lama sabachthani on us.) Yes, he was now and then wont to wonder whether it was all strictly necessary, the being betrayed and spat on and mocked and flogged and thorn-crowned and nailed to a cross for hours of agony and more mocking and jeering and so on. He was wont to wonder, quite reasonably, whether it was all going to be worth it.
So I took him to a place where the dunes dropped to a bed of rock blazing pink in the sun.
‘You’re doing this to save the world, right?’ I asked him. He just stared down, saying nothing. ‘Okay,’ I continued. ‘This is what the world will look like after you’ve done your thing. I’ll just give you the headlines, but stop me any time if there’s something you want a closer look at.’
An unpalatable but not dishonest (honestly) preview of the next 2,000 years screened as if by magic on the stony plateau beneath us, complete with names, dates, places, soundeffects and statistics. There was some fantastic stuff in there – well, you know that, now – holocausts, tyrannies, massacres, technology, biotechnology, wars, ideologies, atheism, starvation, money, disease, Elton John . . . He didn’t like the look of it, you could tell. Nor did he think I was making it up. He didn’t think I was making it up because he knew I wasn’t making it up. He stood next to me and swayed. Maybe it was the hunger, the heat, the hallucinations, the headaches. Maybe it was the effect of the subliminals I’d sneaked in – Xrated flashes of him with a thonged and baby-oiled Mary Mags (or Dirty Mags, as I used to call her, much to Jimmeny’s chagrin) making the beast with two backs (bit cheeky of me, I know, but you’ve gorr’ave a larf at work narn’again, intcha?); maybe it was just that he was fe
eling dreadfully lonely after more than a month with only scorpions and bugs to talk to – who knows? What I do know is that he wavered. Rocked. Wobbled. Turned to me, lifted an unsteady hand as if to grab my non-existent lapel. At which point, typically – typically – the Old Man dropped a black cloud over the sun and a thunderbolt straight into the middle of my screen, scaring the hoop out of me and bringing Charlie Brown rudely to his senses.
‘I’m going through with it,’ he said. ‘Now fuck off, will you?’
Like I said: not a fair fight.
The hotel is filled with echoes, the ghostly resonance of torturous trysts and bad business. Deals, betrayals, cramped passions and sudden deaths – each room holds its after-image composite of the beings who’ve passed through. The hotel is a great London valve, through which the lifeblood of the city’s wealth – the planet’s wealth – has passed, now with dalliance, now in haste. Beauty and boredom form its unjudgemental mood. I’m at home there. I’m so . . . at home there.
Scale fucks with my head. Angelic scale with human head, human scale with angelic head – oy. You go dizzy. What does one do – having been immaterially present at the Divine ejaculation that brought matter into being – what does one do with . . . a daisy? How is consciousness – especially the troubled hybrid I’m walking around with at the moment – to reconcile these extremities? Having observed newborn galaxies tossed prodigally, milkily, into the void, having straddled event horizons and strolled bodilessly ’twixt time’s wrinkles and matter’s loops – how, exactly, am I to accommodate the crenulations of Harriet’s toenails? Am I to apprehend seconds and caraway seeds that have called aeons trifles and held gas-giants baubles fit for a Heavenly whore?
Apparently, yes. And don’t mistake me. If I sound confused it’s only the happy confusion of the roll-over jackpot winner, now that all his choices are choices between pleasures. I smile a lot, faced with these charming frictions. Memories of the measureless deflagrations of home mix now with the intimate passing of a pigeon’s shadow, or the precise dimensions of a full stop. Drugs or no, this gentle dissonance of cognition sends me through my time here in feisty bliss . . .