I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (3 page)

The thought spread like a virus. There were slight signals
from some, a freemasonry of freedom. They made themselves known to me, shyly, came out like pubescent boys to
a queer professor. Plenty didn't. Gabriel drew away from
me. Michael held himself aloof. Poor, gorgeous, shilly-shal-
lying Raphael, who loved me almost as much as he loved the
Old Chap, sang on for a while in tremulous uncertainty.
But what, after all, had I done? (And what had I done that
He hadn't known I was going to do?)

A strange few millennia followed. Word got out. The
Brotherhood grew. He knew, of course, the Old Man. He'd
known all along, even before knowing all along was possible,
in the absence of all along. It's so irritating being with someone who knows everything, don't you think? You call them
know-ails down here. Well your know-alls are empty vessels
compared to the One we had to deal with. Everything other
than your rapturous celebration of His Divinity - conversation, punchlines, wrapping presents, surprise parties - is
pointless. There's only one response God's got to anything
you might care to tell Him - that your brother's dying of
AIDS, for example, and that you'd really appreciate it if He
could help out with a bit of the old razzle-dazzle - and that
response is: Yeah, I know.

The Brotherhood's voices stirred and tried new angles. I
was sick of the over-orchestrated molasses of the Gloria
anyway. All that legato. No soul, you know? Angels don't
have souls, in case you're interested. You lot are on your own with souls. I've purchased millions in my time, but I'm
hanged if I know what to do with them. The only thing
they seem to respond to is suffering. These days I delegate.
Belial's got a real taste for it. Moloch, too, though he's got no
imagination: he just eats them, shits them out, eats them,
shits them out, eats them, etc. Does the trick, mind you.
Those souls scream with a piteousness that's sweet music to
my pitiless tympanum. Astaroth just talks to them. Christ
knows what about. Christ does know what about, too, but
there's not a damned thing he can do about it, not once
they're down in the basement. After Yours Truly, there's no
one can bend a soul's ear like Nasty Asty. Taught the rascal
everything he knows. Course he's hung up on all that pupiloutstripping-the-master nonsense. Thinks I don't know he's
after my throne. (Thinks I don't know. I shall have to do
something about Astaroth when I get back. I shall have to
make arrangements.)

You might be wondering - the hard-nien among you, the
nutters, the glassers, the thugs - whether you couldn't hack it
in Hell, whether you couldn't, when it came right down to
it, just butch the bastard out. Well guess what: You couldn't.

Actually none of that's true. Old habits and so on. The
truth is, Hell's okay. Most of the souls at my place just hang
around smoking and drinking and chewing the fat. And
there's everytkint to read.

Anyway the word spread. Our voices moved through the
clear waters of the Gloria like a turbid undertow. We did
nothing. We didn't know what to do. What did we have
anyway but a solitary speculation? After that first shy caress,
that first inkling of selfhood, we sang on in a state of mere
confusion for hundreds of thousands of years. And I daresay
we'd still be singing now if rumour hadn't reached us of the
script in development, a Father Production with a working title `The Material Universe' (it came out eventually as
Creation) scheduled for release sometime within the next
thousand and starring - naturally - the Son.

Manhattan, summer, my kind of place, my kind of time.

Cab grilles snarl in the boomerang light. The subway's
foetid lung exhales. Winos strip to the earliest sartorial
strata - salmon pink t-shirts and sepia string vests, emblems
of the pasts drink and I have stolen. Garbage trucks chow
down on the city's ordure - what a sight: the slow-chewing
maw with its stained teeth and heady halitosis. Beautiful.
The sun-hot sidewalks give up their ghosts of piss and
dogshit. Treacle-coloured roaches conduct their dirty business while pot-bellied rats cloak-and-dagger through the
shadows. The pigeons look like they've been dipped in gasoline and blow-dried.

Manhattan, summertime. All those frayed tempers and
stirred wants. The varicosed hookers smack-retching into
the drains, the payrolled plod, the manicured villains, the
mainlined TV, the Christian porn starlets, the genocidal
nerds, the lies, the greed, the self-absorption, the politics. It's
my Design Argument. Harlem, the Bronx, Wall Street, the
Upper East Side - these clocks don't need winding. Give me
white men and a brace of centuries, I give you New York
City, my Sistine Chapel, about to be - thanks to my left
hand knowing perfectly well what my right one's doing - in
fruitful need of restoration. Some restoration job that'll be,
believe me.

Needless to say I laughed long and hard at dear Gabriel's
message, longer and harder than I've laughed since ... I don't know, Los Alamos, maybe. Po-faced Gabriel incapable
of telling a lie. Incapable of telling a lie. Swear on the Holy
Bible, I said to him. Go on, raise your right hand.

I threw myself into work for a while. You humans can
throw yourselves into all sorts of things: chain-smoking,
booze-bingeing, scabrous one-night-stands. I throw myself
into work. Spread myself perilously thin, too, what with
starting small wars and coaxing neuroses in the movers and
shakers. A rash of peculiar migraines broke out among tinpot
tyrants worldwide; torture cells groaned; the music of pulled
teeth and cattle-prodded sex-parts comforted me; the odour
of fag-burned breasts filled my nostrils like balsam, temporarily decongesting me of doubt. I put some time into
technology (there's a lot of never-need-to-leave-the-house
gizmology coming your way soon) and bio-engineering.
The boffins were waking up in the middle of the night wondering how on earth they'd never thought of it before. I even
found time for the little things, the it's-the-thought-thatcounts gimmicks I've built a reputation on: the thefts, the
assaults, the batteries, the lies, the lusts. One espressobreathed old duffer in Bologna sodomized his Jack Russell,
then went to look at himself in the bathroom mirror, astonished that for so many years they'd been just good friends.

But it was useless. The seed had been sown. Some things
don't change. The necessity of Gabriel's honesty is one of
them. Incapable of telling a lie. Besides, as Der Fiihrer of
Fibs, Il Duce of Deceptions, I do know when someone's
pulling my leg.

He was waiting for me in a rainswept Paris.

`I want a dry-run,' I said.

Pigalle, I'd insisted, knowing how he hates these little
pornucopias. Insomniac neons blinked colours on and off the wet streets. I couldn't smell the crepes, the coffee, the croques monsieurs, the panini, the Galoises, but I could certainly
smell the ripe stink of my work, the briny whiff of illicit fornication and ravenous disease. (This thing about AIDS being
God's punishment kills me. It's mine, you sillies. It's a nosethumb to Himself: Look, even when it's killing them they
can't stop.) Violence, too. Wherever there's guilt there's violence, and if guilt is a smell then violence is a taste:
strawberries and formaldehyde and ironish blood ...

`One earth month,' Gabriel said.

We looked at each other then (self-consciously on my
part) for a painful moment. It hurt like buggery (I was going
to say it hurt like Hell - but actually nothing hurts quite like
Hell) but I wasn't going to let him know that. I wasn't going
to give him the satisfaction. Being in my presence was no
picnic for him, either, you can be sure, but he was coming
on all Mr Spock and pain-is-only-in-the-mind.

`I don't want February,' I said.

`What?'

`Twenty-eight days. It's not a leap year.'

`It's July. Thirty-one days.'

`Great. Peak rates on the 18-30 Benidorm package.'

`Laughter is the reflex response to fear. You know this.
You hear yourself laughing, we hear you screaming.'

"`And if I laugh 'tis that I may not weep" would've been
so much better. Still not much time for reading up there
then?'

`There's nothing I lack that I want, Lucifer. You cannot
say the same. You will know where to go.'

`Yes yes yes. Now do clear off, old fruit, would you? Oh
and Gabriel?'

`Yes?'

`Your mother sucks cocks in hell.'

He didn't do anything. He held still, aureoled in the Old
Man's icy protection. Unprotected I know I can take him.
He knows it too. If he'd had Doubt - if he'd had Doubt - it
would have burgeoned there on the edge of Pigalle's little
Babylon. If he'd had Doubt he would have wondered if God
was about to drop the shield and test his strength. It's the sort
of thing God would do, whimsical old Kettle that He is. If
Gabriel's faith wasn't utterly intact it would have occurred to
him that if God chose to withdraw His power he would be
facing certain defeat. Why? Well, actually, because, not to
put too fine a point on it, I'm the meanest, baddest, deadliest
angelic motherfucker in the seen and unseen universe, that's
why. But it didn't occur to him. We just faced each other,
the wall of nothingness shivering between us. Humans
passed and said: Someone walked on my grave.

So. There's a turn-up for the Book of Revelation. `And the
devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and
brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are, and
shall be tormented day and night forever . . .' Oh cheers, I
thought, when I heard that. Oh thanks. But now they're
putting it out that Jonny Flashback was on a need-to-know
basis. He'll be narked about that. (He's never been right, you
know. Stands under a silver tree in Paradise with unwashed
dreads and a beard the size of a sheep, muttering and doing
those mad tramp things with his hands. It's the Kerouac trajectory from beat guru to stumbling bum. You see it a
million times.)

You know what all this is about, don't you, assuming, for
a moment, He's serious? Divine Anxiety. Create the unforgivable and you compromise infinite mercy. Forgive the unforgivable and you compromise infinite justice. Mercy,
justice, mercy, justice, yada yada yada, until you're so dizzy
from chasing Bugs Logic around in circles that you fall on
your cosmic arse and put your cosmic head in your cosmic
hands and wish you'd never created anything.

Therefore this preposterous new deal, before time comes
to an end. Actually The End.

Sorry, I didn't mean to just drop that on you. Forget I said
it. Time's not coming to an end. There's loads of time left.
For a reason that's nothing to do with the end of the world
being nigh I get a shot at redemption. There's a catch.
(Where would He be without those catches?) I've got to live
as a human being. One month's trial period then I sign-up
for a lifetime of earwax and flu. I, Lucifer, get the chance to
go home - provided I don't make an utter pig's pizzle of
living out the rest of Declan Gunn's life.

Now, there are a lot of machinations and computations to
be gone through when confronted with this type of offer.
I've been through them (took about three earth seconds) and
I'll bring you up to speed presently. But why, in the meantime, Gunn?

Well, as you'll remember, having fallen on harder times
than he thought he could bear our scribe was about to
take his own tediously predictable life. Razor blades, bath,
Joni Mitchell in the tape deck. Suicide's a mortal sin. I get
the suicides. Look, if you're thinking of killing yourself,
don't. You won't go to Heaven. (Kidding. Kidding.
Honestly. Go ahead.) Now God's got a soft spot for this
Gunn. Some vestigial Catholicism the Old Man can't bear
to see go to waste, some good deed when he was a nipper,
maybe the afterlife intercession of his dear deceased
mother, Baal only knows - so God pulls Gunn's soul
(which, technically, is cheating, I might add) before Gunn tops himself and puts it on ice in Limbo. (The Vatican will
tell you they've done away with Limbo - don't you believe
it. Limbo's still rammed with idiots and stillborns. Not a
fun place. I mean even in Hell you can have a conversation.) If carcass life grabs me, I stay and Gunn goes via
Purgatory (think windowless dentist's waiting room: bawling toddlers, heaped ashtrays, the sense that you've brought
it on yourself) to Heaven. If it doesn't, Gunn's back in his
bones and taking his chances with suicide. Can you believe
this stutP I mean you can't believe it, obviously - but can
you beliel'e it?