by Glen Duncan
It was no good. I wasn’t ready. I’d need longer to prepare. Warm up with some physical pain in Gunn’s apparatus, maybe. A stroll over hot coals. Amateur dentistry. Self-electrocution. An acid bath. Something to get me back into shape. Either way incorporeity over the Aegean right then was out of the question. Imagine returning to the basement crew in that state! Christ I’d be laughed out. I could just imagine what fucking Astaroth would make of it.
Raphael found me in the open air cinema. Schindler’s List. Not that I paid much attention to the sounds or images. It was just that I needed the darkness and the silent presence of other flesh and blood. He came in near the end, Mr Mandros, Theo, patron of the museum and provider of Greek victuals. Some lardy Hydran matron with a gigantic head of dark hair shooed her gnat-sized sprog to free-up a seat for him. He’s liked here, respected. It’s a life. I knew why he’d come. He couldn’t follow me into Hell all those millennia ago, but he could follow me, with the Old Man’s blessing, apparently, onto Earth.
‘He who saves a single life,’ Ben Kingsley said to Liam Neeson, ‘saves the world entire.’
I got up and slouched out in disgust.
‘Lucifer, wait.’
He caught me up in the street. I was heading for an appealingly dark and invitingly empty taverna at the fork of two cobbled ways, and I didn’t stop. He fell into step alongside and said not a word until we were seated at a booth within. Dark wood panelling; absurd maritime accoutrements; smell of shellfish and burnt cooking oil; a jukebox that looked like it might run on gas. Quadruple Jack Daniels for me – on the house when the barkeep, a small red-eyed bandit with a Zapata moustache and hairy forearms, realised who I was with; Mr Mandros took ouzo and called for olives and pistachios. I sat and glared at him after their prompt arrival.
‘This is all shit,’ I said. ‘Two weeks ago – no, wait – three weeks ago I get a message from your friend and mine that the Old Man wants to cut me a deal. The Human show’s coming to its close and I’m a loose end He wants tied up. I get a shot at redemption. All I’ve got to do is live out the rest of this sad sack’s miserable life without doing anything heinous. Say my prayers at night, go to Mass Easter and Christmas, love people, the usual bullshit. Big challenge for me, obviously, what with my pride and all, what with me being the second most powerful entity in the universe, what with me having developed this habit of being Absolutely Evil. So I think, what the fuck? I’ll take the month’s money back offer, live it up in the flesh, then tell Him come August 1 He can shove His redemption where it smells. Now you show up with a kebab empire and a Bogart suit and tell me my entire existence has been a delusion, and that the Hell I know isn’t the Hell I’m going to.’
‘Yes.’
‘And I’m supposed to take this seriously?’
‘Yes. You know I’m not lying.’
‘No, you’re not lying, Raphael, but you’re definitely not all there, either.’ He gave me a sad and slightly sheepish smile. ‘Okay, Mr Theo Moussaka Mandros,’ I continued. ‘Tell me what it is you think I need to know.’
‘He knew what you were going to do. He knew you weren’t going to take the mortal road.’
‘Yeah well that’s omniscience for you.’
‘We all knew. We’ve all been watching.’
‘And whacking off, I don’t doubt.’
Funny little pause there, while he stared at his ouzo and I torched a Silk Cut.
‘He knows Hell has no fear for you. The mortal John’s words were all words that stood for words unsayable. He knows you, Lucifer, though you think He does not. He knows you.’
‘Not in the biblical sense.’
It was his turn to rub his eyes. He did it rapidly, as if fighting off a sudden attack of sleep. ‘Hell is to be destroyed,’ he said. ‘Utterly and forever. No trace of the world you know, nor your Fallen brethren will remain. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, I understand.’
Poor Raphael. Torn in two. He put his hand across the table and covered mine with it. His fingers were oily from the olives. ‘You don’t think you’ve been missed, Lucifer,’ he said, his eyes welling up. ‘But you have.’
Well, I didn’t like the way that made me feel. The Jack Daniels was kicking in and somewhere in the bowels of the tavern a woolly speaker was releasing a surreal Greek instrumental version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’. I started swallowing, emptily. Oh fucking great.
‘Okay, Mr Mandros,’ I said, mastering myself with a same-again gesture to the dozing barman, ‘if you’ve got all the answers, tell me this: if everything you say is true, if Judgement Day is coming and with it the destruction of my Kingdom, if Sariel, Thammuz, Remiel, Astaroth, Moloch, Belphegor, Nelchael, Azazel, Gabreel, Lucifer and all the glorious legions of Hell are to be annihilated forever, then why should I not embrace oblivion? Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven, yes. Better even not to be than to be and serve. What fear of death is there in me?’
Poor Raphael’s eyes, unable to quite meet mine. When he spoke, he spoke as if to the beer-stained table. His voice came in a flat incantation.
‘God will take unto Himself the souls of the righteous and the angelic host. The world, the Universe, matter, the whole of Creation will be unmade. Only God in Heaven will remain. Hell and all its Fallen will be destroyed. In its place, a nothingness utterly separate from Him. Eternal nothingness, Lucifer. A state from which nothing comes and into which nothing enters. Without exception, nothing. The inhabitant of such a state would exist in absolute aloneness and singularity. For eternity. Alone. Forever. In nothingness.’
Hell, didn’t I say somewhere, is the absence of God and the presence of Time.
After a long pause – the dismal rendition of ‘Stairway’ replaced now by the speakers’ endless exhalation of static or hiss – I looked up and met Raphael’s sorrowful eyes. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I see.’
(It was something to think about on the flight back to London. For the sake of argument I had a (pointless) go at believing it. It was a kind of victory, when you thought about it. Last man standing and all that. You know, if you looked at it that way. Kind of.)
‘So this is all . . . what, exactly?’ I asked Raphael, rhetorically, the night before I left. ‘The best you can come up with? Me and you living on a Greek island reading Rilke and desultorily managing half a dozen restaurants while the Old Man gets up the nerve to ring down the curtain?’
‘There are worse lives,’ he said. The two of us were on the veranda again. The sun had gone down, gaudily, with exhausted passion; we’d watched from the western side of the island, having ridden out on Raphael’s two sorrel mares, lunched on olives, tomatoes, feta, cold chicken, a plummy red with peppery undertones. I’d stretched out, shadow-dappled under the eucalyptus, and he’d wandered away to fish. To give me a bit of room. Now, back at the villa, we sat facing the sea’s deepening shadow and the first faint scatter of stars. Funny to think of stars disappearing. Funny to think of Everything disappearing. Except me. Funny.
‘I thought you’d need . . .’ He’d been going to say ‘help’ I could tell. ‘A companion. It’s not easy, is it, this mortal life.’
I thought of the photograph of Gunn’s mother and of the Clerkenwell flat’s sad little corners. ‘Not unless you’re prepared to make the effort,’ I said. ‘Most mortals aren’t. We’ve always known this. That the whole fucking thing would be wasted on them.’
‘Like Wilde’s youth on the young.’
‘It wasn’t Wilde,’ I snapped. ‘It was Shaw.’
Later, that piccante little exchange having hovered between us like something imperfectly exorcised, he came into my room in the small hours. I knew he knew I was awake, so I didn’t bother pretending to be asleep. The moon was up, a solitary petal of honesty casting stone-coloured light on the Aegean, the sleeping harbour, the hill, the veranda, the terra cotta, the silk-fringed counterpane, my bare arms. His eyes were slivers of agate. It would have been nice for me if the bed had made a silly noise when he sat on it –
some boing or twoing – but the mattress was solid and silent, no help at all. I’d drunk too much and not enough.
‘No, Raphael,’ I said.
‘I know. Not that. I just mean: Please think about it, okay?’
‘Although it seems rude not to, given that we’ve got the flesh.’
‘Don’t play with me, please.’
‘Sorry. I know. Truth is, there’s a good chance I’d give you something.’ He didn’t understand. ‘Something nasty,’ I said. He was bare-chested, in pale pyjama bottoms. Theo Mandros’s body was brown and lean with ropy muscle in the long arms and a small pot belly of almost unbearable pathos. His dead wife had loved it; the ghost of her love still surrounded it in a little crescent of warmth. It suited Raphael.
‘Tell me something,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Why you’ve found it so hard to admit that you’ve considered it?’
‘Considered what?’
‘Staying.’
I half-smothered the laugh, very inadequately tried to pass it off as a cough. Slowly reached for and lit a cigarette. ‘I assume – hard though this is to countenance – that you mean staying here, staying human?’
‘I know you’ve considered it. I know the flesh’s seduction.’
‘What a lot you seem to know, Mr Mandros. I wonder why you bother to ask anything at all.’
‘I know your capacity for self-delusion.’
‘And I know yours for credulity. Not to mention limp-wristed infatuation.’
‘You lie to yourself.’
‘Good night, Biggles.’
‘You deliberately avert your gaze from the true appeal of this world.’
‘And that would be . . . what, exactly? Daisies? Cancer?’
‘Finiteness.’
Oh the nasty things I nearly came out with then. Really. It’s lucky for him we were old chums. All things considered, I was glad imminent operations wouldn’t affect him.
‘Lucifer?’ he said, putting a hand on my pelvis. ‘Is the peace of forgiveness so terrible a thing to embrace? Wouldn’t redemption be the mightiest gift He could give? Haven’t you ever, in all these years, haven’t you ever once longed to come home?’
I sighed. Sometimes, I’ve found, sighing’s just the thing. Moonlight lay on my face now like a cool veil. My bedroom doors opened onto the veranda; the white wall; the constellations’ impenetrable geometry. There’d be an epiphany, I was thinking. Anyone else’s story, this is where the tide would turn, objectively correlatived by lyrically described buggery, no doubt. Any other fucker’s story.
‘Raphael,’ I said – then, staying in character, added, ‘Raphael, Raphael, Raphael.’ Didn’t quite have the effect I was after, somehow. None the less I pressed on. ‘Let me ask you something, dear boy. Do you think I despair?’
‘Lucifer –’
‘Do you think I exist in a state of despair?’
‘Of course you do. Of course you do, my dear, but what I’m trying to suggest is that –’
‘I do not despair.’
‘What?’
‘You heard.’
‘But –’
‘Despair is for when you see defeat beyond all hope of victory.’
‘Oh, Lucifer, Lucifer.’
‘I repeat: I do not despair. Now please, for fuck’s sake, go to bed.’
He didn’t. He sat there next to me with his palm against my hip and his head bowed. I might have been mistaken but I thought I saw the glimmer of tears. (And I know this is really awful, but I did, actually, feel the first scrotal stirrings of an impending erection. Typical.)
This time he sighed. Then said: ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going back to London.’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow. I need . . .’ What did I need? The flat? The Ritz? To finish the script? The book? To idiot-check the details of my upcoming venture? (Well I did say at the very beginning that I wasn’t telling quite all . . .) ‘I need to be alone with it. With what you’ve told me. It’s not that I don’t believe you –’
‘You don’t believe me, Lucifer, I know. Why should you? Why should you think this was anything more than some ruse to . . . to . . .’
Couldn’t finish that. Got up and padded on Mandros’s long bare feet to the door, where he halted and said, to the tiles, ‘I just want you to know that I’m here. I’ve made my choice.’
‘No month’s trial?’ I asked him.
I saw the gleam of his teeth in the moonlight. ‘Up a long time back,’ he said. ‘This is my home, now.’ Then, again to the floor: ‘And yours, too, old friend, should you need it.’
I don’t know what you’d call it. Goin’ Loco Down in Acapulco – except it wasn’t Acapulco, it was London. A farewell binge, I suppose. Tying one on. A bender. A spree. I’d half a mind to kill the last week in Manhattan, but the jetlag would’ve slowed me down and every hour was precious; by the end of the week in London, it just felt like I’d half a mind. First thing I did was e-mail the bulk of this to Betsy with instructions to read it and whiz it out to the usual suspects ASAP. If the thought of slipping out of Gunn’s bones hadn’t entailed the thought of excruciating pain I’d have dropped in bodilessly on the head honchos at Picador or Scribner or Cape or whoever the fuck, to work the necessary chicanery; but the memory of my big ouch over the Aegean was still fresh. No need to repeat that before I absolutely have to. Anyway the point is I let myself go. Man did I let myself go. Have you had flambéed mangoes? There are so many flowers in my room now that I can’t handle more than three XXX-Quisite girlies without crashing into a vase or bruising a blossom. I’ve prowled the city’s parks and yards day and night molesting odours of every stripe, from freshly laundered bed sheets to the diarrhoea of dogs. I’ve fist-fought in Soho (I won, perhaps not surprisingly – come a long way since the night with Lewis and his beard) and bungeed over the Thames. I’ve snuffled and retched my way through three grand’s worth of Bolivian Breeze, dropped E, acid, speed, shot up, tuned in, turned on and passed out. I’ve been ravished by the warm wind and rinsed by the rain. Blood is a juice of quality most rare . . . Oh I’ve manhandled, I have, stone, water, earth, flesh . . . Yesterday night I swam in the sea. Don’t laugh – at Brighton, where the pier’s lively fug (candyfloss, mussels, hot dogs, popcorn) and delirious soundtrack dropped the nukes of Gunn’s childhood in my head, tipping me momentarily off balance. I swam out and flipped onto my back like a seal pup. The water was a dark and salty slick, the sky diagrammed with myth. I got depressed as hell (not to mention cold as hell – five seconds of warm bliss when I emptied Gunn’s bladder) hanging there all alone and looking back to the seafront’s chain of lights. Nearly drowned, too, as a matter of fact, what with that coke nod-out when I should have been kicking back to shore. Where would that have left us, I wonder? (I wonder a lot, these days. You must spend your whole lives at it, this wondering game.) But time – this New Time, how it flies – has done what time will do. Every hour, no matter how mighty the wall of your dread, comes through . . .
The funk, the jive, the boogie, the rock and roll .. . . the weight of the body draws it down, to the dirge of the dark cortège. This won’t do, for you or for me. Tomorrow is clocking-off day, and after a week of extremes, I find myself strangely drawn to the predictable smallness of the Clerkenwell flat. There are unique comforts, it seems, in the most lifeless crannies of life: the tinkle of the spoon in the cup; the kettle-fogged pane; the floor’s worn poem of ticks and groans; the PC’s unjudgemental hum; the fan’s feeble campaign against London’s summer of bruisers and thugs. (I don’t think Gunn’s body’s very well at the moment. The whites of his eyes contain startled capillaries and spooked pupils. His back’s killing me and his teeth itch. The skull’s ducts rattle and creak with mucus and even Harriet would think twice before letting this mossed and maculate tongue anywhere near her sensitive parts.) Besides, I need somewhere quiet to think, and to finish this at least.
Think if it were true. It isn�
��t true, obviously, but there’s a masochist in here that will have his fifteen minutes. Can’t. . . cannot be true. But think if it were true. A comfortable life – Mr Mandros would do as a decompression chamber, a comfort zone, a kind of arrivals lounge facility – no real theoretical objection to living it with moderate ethical decency; plenty to enjoy in the perceptual realm that wouldn’t land me in jail or send me to the chair – you know: tulips; kissing; snow; sunsets; journeys; and so to death, the obligatory purgative stint, then home. Home.
Home? How long has that word meant anything other than Hell? Which reminds me, there is still the matter of. . . ah . . . There is still, vividly, the memory of what the incorporeal version of my existence felt like last week. In other words how much it fucking killed. Can’t help thinking that’s left me in a bit of a corner. Should have seen that coming sooner. Should have kept myself in shape with regular nights off from the body. Should have done shifts.
Course I’m going on like this as if I’m even considering it. Considering staying on, I mean. Considering being Declan Gunn. Course I’m going on like this as if there won’t shortly be wheels of a very different kind in cacophonous motion. Course I’m . . .
Well.
I’m not turning any of the lights on in the flat. The hot gloom and steady rain comfort me. Like Hydra’s sunlight and silence, they let me drift into dream. Thunderstorms since the early hours. Never really seen storms from your end. Don’t they make you doubt what you learned at school? Don’t you hear thunder and think: all that atmosphere stuff, it’s cobblers; the sky’s made of iron that sometimes shifts and grumbles, billion-ton slabs and plates forced through the same tectonic trials as earth, yielding this, this skyquake. Oh yes, it’s been up to spectacular tricks since the small hours has the weather. I watched the lightning revealed in glimpses, the sky’s shocking varicosis. The rain’s been racing earthwards as if with some religious or political fanaticism. The clouds have the look of dark internal bleeding. Surely you lot look up from Cosmo while this sort of thing’s going on? Surely you take a Playstation break?