I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (2 page)

So this is going to be a difficulty - my existence has always
been latticed and curlicued with difficulties (bent wrist to perspiring forehead) - this translation of angelic experience into
human language. Angelic experience is a phenomenal renaissance, English a tart's clutch-bag. How cram the former
into the latter? Take darkness, for example. You've no idea
what stepping into darkness is like for me. I could say it was
sliding into a mink coat still redolent with both the spirits of
its slaughtered donors and the atomized whiff of top-dollar
cunt. I could say it was an immersion in unholy chrism. I
could say it was the first drink after five pinched years on the
wagon. I could say it was a homecoming. And so on. It
wouldn't suffice. I'm confined to the blank and defeated
insistence that one thing is another. (And how, pray, does
that bring us any closer to the thing itself?) All the metaphors
in this world wouldn't scratch the surface of what stepping
into darkness is like for me. And that's just darkness. Don't
get me started on light. Really, don't get me started on light.

It's yielding sympathy for poets, this new deal, which is
fitting reciprocity, since poets have always had such sympathy
for me. (Not that I can claim any credit for `Sympathy For The Devil', by the way. You'd think, wouldn't you? But no,
that was Mick and Keith all on their own.) Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves
condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the
human world. Lots of them go mad. It doesn't surprise me.
Time held me green and dying/ T hough I sang in my chains like
the sea. You get close now and then - but whose inspiration
do you think that was? St Bernadette's?

In the early days of the Novel, it mattered to have a structural device through which fictional content could make its
way into the non-fictional world. Made-up narrative nominally disguised as letters, journals, legal testimonies, logs,
diaries. (Not that this is a novel, obviously - but I know my
readership will spill well beyond the anoraks of Biography
and the vultures of True Crime.) These days no one bothers,
but despite the liberties modernity allows (it'd be fine with
you if there was no explanation of how His Satanic Majesty
might come to be penning, or rather keying in, a discourse
on matters angelic) it so happens that I needn't avail myself
of any of them. It so happens, in fact, that I am currently
alive, well, and in possession of the recently vacated body of
one I)eclan Gunn, a dismally unsuccessful writer fallen of
late (oh how that scribe fell) on such hard times that his last
significant actions before exiting the mortal stage were the
purchase of a packet of razor blades and the running of - followed by the immersion of his body into - a deep bath.

Which brings the buzz of further questions. I know. But let
me do it my way, yes?

Not long ago, Gabriel (once a carrier pigeon always a carrier
pigeon) sought and found me in the Church of The Blessed
Sacrament, 218 East Thirteenth Street, New York City. I was taking my ease after a standard job well done: Father
Sanchez, alone, with nine-year-old Emilio. You fill in the
blanks.

It's no challenge for me any more, this adult-meets-child
routine.

Hey, Padre, how's about you and -

I thought you'd never ask.

I exaggerate. But you can barely call it temptation.
Umnphing Father Sanchez of the gripping hands and beaded
brow needed barely a nudge into the mud, and a drearily
unimaginative job of wallowing he made once he got there.
I snuffled up the scent of ankle-grabbing Emilio (it's laid
some useful foundations in him, this episode - that's the
beauty of my work: it's like pyramid selling) then retired to
the nave for the non-material equivalent of a post-coital cigarette. Nothing happens when I enter a church, by the way.
The flowers don't wilt, the statues don't weep, the aisles
don't shudder and crack. I'm not overly keen on the tabernacle's frigid nimbus, and you won't find me anywhere near
post-consecration pain et vin, but these antipathies excepted,
I'm probably just as at ease in God's House as most humans.

Father Sanchez, roseate and piping hot with shame,
walked wide-eyed and sore-bummed Emilio, musky with
fear and tart with revulsion, to the vestibule, from where the
two of them disappeared. Sunlight blazed in the stained glass.
A cleaning lady's mop and bucket clanked somewhere. A
patrol car's siren whooped, twice, as if experimentally, then
fell silent. There's no telling how long I might have stayed
there, bodilessly recumbent, if the ether hadn't suddenly
quivered in announcement of another angelic presence.

`It's been a long time, Lucifer.'

Gabriel. They don't send Raphael for fear of his defection. They don't send Michael for fear of his surrender to wrath, which, at Number Three in the Seven I)eadlies
Chart, would be a victory for Yours Truly. (As it was, incidentally, when Jimmeny Christmas lost His rag with the
loan sharks in the temple, a fact theologians invariably overlook.)

`Gabriel. Errand-boy. Pimp. Procurer. You rather stink of
Himself, old sport, if you don't mind my saying.' Actually,
Gabriel smells, metaphorically, of oregano and stone and arctic
light, and his voice goes through me like a gleaming
broadsword. Conversation struggles under such conditions.

`You're in pain, Lucifer.'

'And the Nurofen's holding it marvellously. Mary still
saving that cherry for me''

`I know your pain is great.'

'And it's getting greater by the second. What is it that you
want, dear,'

'To give you a message.'

`Quelle surprise! The answer's no. Or get fucked. Think
brevity, that's the main thing.'

I wasn't kidding about the pain. Imagine death by cancer
(of everything) compressed into minutes - a fractally
expanding agony seeking out your every crevice. I felt a
nosebleed coming on. Extravagant vomiting. I had trouble
keeping my shaking in check.

`Gabriel, old thing, you've heard of those chronic peanut
allergies, haven't you

He withdrew a little and turned himself down.
Reflexively, I'd expanded my presence to the very edge of
the material world; already there was a crack in the apse. If
you'd been there you might have thought a cloud had passed
over the sun, or that Manhattan was brewing one of its
blood-and-thunder storms.

'You must listen to what I have to say.'

`Must I?,

'It's His Will.'

`Oh well if it's His will -'

`He wants you to come home.'

Once upon a ...

Time, you'll be pleased to know - and since one must
start somewhere - was created in creation.

The question What was there before creation? is meaningless.
Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation
there was no before creation. What there was was the Old
Chap peering in a state of perpetual nowness up His own
almighty sphincter trying to find out who the devil He was.
His big problem was that there was no way to distinguish
Himself from the Void. If you're Everything you might as
well be Nothing. So He created us, and with a whiz and a
bang (quite a small one, actually) Old Time was born.

Time is time is time, you'll say (actually no: time is money,
you'd say, you darlings) but what do you know? Old Time
was different. Roomier. Slower. Texturally richer. (Think
Anne Bancroft's mouth.) Old Time measured the motion of
spirits, a far more refined dimension than New Time, which
measures the motion of bodies, and which made its first
appearance when you prattling gargoyles arrived and started
mincing everything up into centuries and nanoseconds,
making everyone feel exhausted the whole time. Therefore
Old Time and New Time, ours and yours. We were
around - Seraphim, Cherubim, Dominations, Thrones,
Powers, Principalities, Virtues, Archangels and Angels - for
a terribly long stretch before Himself started getting His hands
dirty with a material universe. Back then in Old Time things were blissfully discarnate. Those were the days of grace. But
I've said it before and I'll say it again: kneecaps only exist to
get hit with claw-hammers; grace only exists to be fallen
from.

So what happened? That's what you want to know. (It's
what you always want to know, bless you. Along with What
should we do? And What would happen if? Hardly ever
accompanied, I'm happy to note, by: Ah, but where will it all
end?) We've got AntiTime and GodVoid. We've got
GodVoid distinguishing Itself into God and Void in an act
of spontaneous creation - the creation of angels, whose
purpose is revealed to them instantaneously in their bright
(nian that was bright) genesis, namely, to respond to God
rather than Void, and to respond (to put it mildly) positively.
There's no human word for the undiluted adulation we
were expected to dish out, ad nauseant, ad infinitunm. The
Old Man was insecure from day one. Disencumbering the
Divine Wazoo of the Divine Head, He filled it instead with
301,655,722 extramundane brown-posers for-He's-a jollygood-fellowing Him in deafening celestial harmony. (That's
how many we are, by the way. We don't age, we don't get
sick, we don't die, we don't have kids. Well, we don't have
little angels. There are the Nephilim - those freaks - but
more of them later.) He created us and assumed - though
naturally He knew the assumption was false - that the only
possible response to His perfection was obedience and
praise, even from ultra-luminous superbeings like us. He
did know, however, that all the angelic carolling in the antimaterial universe counted for nothing if it was automatic. If
everything He was getting was congenitally guaranteed He
might as well have installed a jukebox. (I invented jukeboxes, by the way. So that people could suck up rock and
roll at the same time as getting drunk and rubbing their groins together.) Therefore He created us - God help
Him - free.

And that, you will not be surprised to hear, was the root
of all the trouble.

Give the Old Boy His due. He was almost right. (Well, actually, He was completely right in knowing that He was wrong
in thinking it was all going to turn out okay - but there's no
telling this story without contradictions.) He was almost
right. It turned out, once we were around to experience
Him, that God was really incredibly nice. It's quite something, you know, to feel yourself bathed in Divine Love all
the time. It's hard not to feel grateful - and we did. We all
really did feel nothing but refulgent gratitude, and spared not
our throats in telling Him so. It was obvious - He discovered
what He'd known all along - that He loved an audience.
The creation of the angels and the first crank of Old Time
had shown him Who and What He was: God, Creator,
alpha and omega. He was Everything, in fact, apart from that
which He had created. You could feel His relief I'm God.
Phew. Cool. Fucking knew it.

Perennial and all-encompassing love notwithstanding, we
were aware of our condition, a queasy cocktail of subordination and imperishability. Ask me now why He made us
eternal and the answer is (after all time, Old and New): I
haven't a clue. Why I'm still running around mucking things
up ... I'm a proud bird - it's been made much of, my
pride - but I'm not stupid. If God wanted to destroy me He
could. It's the CIA and Saddam. Yet I've known from the
Beginning (we all knew) that once created, the angels would
exist forever. `An angel is for life,' Azazel says, `not just for
fucking Christmas.' But I digress. I'm schizophrenic with
digression. Awful for you I'm sure - but what do you expect? My name is Legion, for we are many. And what's
more, I have of late ...

Never mind that for the time being.

He turned a side of Himself to us and from it poured an
ocean of love in which we sported and splashed like orgasmic kippers, singing our response in flawless a cappella (those
were the halcyon days before Gabriel took up the horn) as
reflexively - as unreflectively - as if we had been no more
than a heavenly jukebox. Since He was infinitely loveable it
never occurred to us that we had any choice but to love
Him. To know Him was to love Him. And so it went for
what would have been millions of millions of your years.
Then -

Ah yes. Then.

One day, one non-material day, nowhere, a thought came
unbidden into my spirit mind. One moment it wasn't there,
the next it was, and the next again it was gone. It flitted in
then out again like a bright bird or a flurry of jazz notes. For
the briefest, most titillating moment my voice faltered and
the first hairline crack in the Gloria appeared. You should
have seen the looks. Heads turned, eyes flashed, feathers ruffled. The thought was: What would it be like without Him?

The Heavenly Host recovered in a twinkling. I'm not
sure Michael even noticed, the dolt. The Gloria renewed, saccharine sweet, porcelain smooth, and we delivered ourselves
to him in splashed bouquets - but it was there: freedom to
imagine existing without God. That thought had made a
difference and that thought, that liberating, revolutionary,
epoch-making thought, was mine. Say what you like about
me. Tempter I may be, tormentor, liar, accuser, blasphemer
and all-round bad egg, but no one else gets the credit for the
discovery of angelic freedom. That, my fleshly friends, was Lucifer. (Ironic of course that after the Fall they stopped
referring to me as Lucifer, the Bearer of Light and started
referring to me as Satan, the Adversary. Ironic that they
stripped me of my angelic name at the very moment I began
to be worthy of it.)