Read I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story Online

Authors: Glen Duncan

Tags: #Psychological, #Demoniac possession, #Psychological fiction, #London (England), #Screenwriters, #General, #Literary, #Devil, #Christian, #Fiction, #Religious

I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (7 page)

I - yea, even I, Lucifer - can't quite explain this frond of
selfhood that waved from time to time in the mistrals of
Eve's heart. It wasn't that she didn't love God; she did, for
vast tracts of time as much as Adam did, constitutionally,
reflexively, with all but no sense of being different from
Him, penetrated (excuse nee) and enfolded by Him almost to
the point of dissolution. And yet. And yet, you see ...?
There was something in Eve I can only describe as the first
cramped inkling of ... well, of freedom.

Now how can I put this, economically? She was beautiful.
(Adam was no back end of a bus either - the sloe eyes and
sculpted cheekbones, the tight buns and chiselled pecs, the
abdominals like a cluster of golden eggs - but without Eve's
sliver of personality it was all just a pretty picture.) Perhaps
you've got some post- I)arwinian model in mind, lowbrowed and beefy, with an Amazonian vadge and
knuckle-hair; maybe you've got some Neanderthalette with
an overbite and Brillo bumfuzz. Forget it. All that came
later, after expulsion, in the sweat of thy brow with multiplied pains, etc. The Edenic Eve was ... Well, think Platonic
Form. The Beautiful Woman. Another bone I've picked
with Buonarotti, incidentally. Oh yes, we got Mike downstairs. In fact maybe now's as good a time as any to tell you:
if you're gay, you go to Hell. Doesn't matter what else you spend your time doing - painting the Sistine Chapel, for
instance - knob jockey? Down you go. (Lezzers are borderline; room for manoeuvres if they've done social work.) The
entire masterpiece fuelled by the stiffened brush softened in
the wrong pot. Another superb irony lost on His Lordship.
Not a titter. Just consigned Michelangelo to my torturous
care. Awful shame, really. (Had you going, didn't I? Don't,
for heaven's sake, take everything so seriously all the time.
Heaven's bulging with queer souls. Honestly.)

But the bone I've had to pick with Mick (it ... ah ...
hurts when I pick a bone with you, by the way) was over the
Eve in his Original Sin. Personal tastes notwithstanding you'd
think he'd have made a bit of an effort with the First Woman
Ever Created. She makes Schwarzenegger look gym-shy.
The actual Eve made today's creatures (your Troys, your
Monroes) crones by comparison. She was inevitable, tight as
a Conrad novel, from the fortune of rippling hair to the
calyx and corolla of the alert and sulky cunt, from the delta
of the midriff to the sacrum's golden slopes ... I get carried
away. The important thing about her wasn't her body, it was
her au'akeness. (I'm sure when I started this passage I had
some notion of the flesh functioning as metaphor for the
soul's irresistibility. Bit of a stretch. My apologies. Gunn's
penchant for oily lechery and oilier lyricism infecting me in
equal measures. That fraud. How did women stand him?)

It wasn't love at first sight. They ran into each other one
morning in a sunny clearing in the forest. A few moments of
stunned silence. `Glockenspiel,' Adam pronounced, thinking
(but with terrible doubt) he'd found another animal in search
of a name. When Eve approached him, proffering a handful
of elderberries, he threw a stick at her and ran away.

They didn't see each other again for quite some time. It
was no skin off Eve's nose - but Adam couldn't get her out of his head. It wasn't desire (micturition aside, the Edenic
Johnson was as useful as a burst balloon); it was anxiety. No
other animal had ever (a) offered him elderberries (or anything else), or (b) looked so ... so related to him. Not even
the orangs, of whom he was especially fond. The memory of
her tormented him in the weeks and months that followed -
the dark eyes and long eyelashes, the swollen, berry-stained
mouth, the in ornprelimsihle arrangement between her legs;
most of all the shocking fearlessness, the composure of the
fruit-offering, as if he - he, Adam - was a beast to he propitiated or gulled. (Yes, girls, I know: good definition ol'a man.)
He walked in the garden and called on God for reassurance,
but God chose inscrutability. (He did that, from time to
time, Adam had noticed. Until now he hadn't questioned it.)
His unease grew. He became obsessed with the idea that
she'd already named the animals and that his own hardthought-out monikers were redundant. Obsessed, too, with
the notion that all those times God had withdrawn into
silence He had in fact been with . . . with her, and this
whole concept of his, Adani's sovereignty was nothing but
a ... but surely that wasn't possible', Surely he, Adam, was
God's first ...

He saw her twice more. Once from a distance - he stood
at the top of a valley looking down to the river hundreds of
feet below, where, having discovered that wood floated, Eve
sat straight-backed astride three or four vined-together
saplings she'd uprooted, drifting gently on the current - and
once at unsettling proximity, when, having slept late before
emerging from a cataract-curtained cave he saw her fresh
from a dip, supine on a large flat stone, eyes closed, sunlight
resting on pubes and eyelashes like tiny spirits. He considered
throwing a rock at her, but bottled out and slunk away.

The anxiety - who the /iick? - worsened. He went off his food (she'd spoiled elderberries for him for good) and developed a rash on his ankle. It was a frustrating time for me. I
couldn't believe he couldn't hear nay suggestion that he sneak
up on her while she was asleep and bash her head in. I still
think what a coup that would have been: Murder in Eden -
but it was no good. An appalling waste of paranoia, that
period of Adam's angst. I've got subsequent genocide started
with less. I tried Eve, too, needless to say. Same deal. Adam
lost weight and invented nailbiting. Finally, God took a hand.
(Why `finally'? What had He been waiting for?) One night
He caused Adam to fall into a deep sleep. During this sleep
He did three things. First, He brought Eve in a trance to
where Adam lay and caused her to fall into a deep sleep by the
man's side. Second, He erased from both their minds all
memory of each other. Third, He gave Adam a dream (the
first dream, ever, and one which Adam would later remember
as a real event) in which he asked God for an help meet and
in which God delivered by forming Eve out of Adam's rib.

You know what I did? I spent the entire night hovering
over Eve whispering: `Rubbish. Don't believe it. It's a story.
You're being brainwashed. It's lies, lies, lies.' I concentrated all
my energy, every ounce of angelic clout, on that fine filament of her, that faint strand I'd sensed before; I addressed
myself only to that.

In the morning - the world's first conjugal lie-in - it
seemed I might as well have addressed myself to the fish in
the lake. She woke with her head on his chest and his arms
wrapped around her. They looked into each other's eyes and
smiled. 'Man,' she said to him. 'Woman,' he said to her. 'My
children,' God said to them both. 'Oh, please,' I said (well,
hissed, actually, having opted that morning for the body of a
python) before slithering away in search of somewhere private where I could hurl my ophidian guts.

It seemed, I said.

Language duly arrived. Proper language, not Adam's
moo-cow and bow-wow rubbish. Verbs, prepositions, adjectives. Grammar. Abstraction. God dropped in on them from
time to time, usually with some critter Adam had missed.
Tiny, fluttering, multicoloured thing. `Butterfly,' Eve said,
while Adam stood pleasantly stumped.

`Yes,' Adam said. 'Butterfly. That's what I was going to
say.

But Eve's unease lingered. The post-brainwashing residue
of self-sufficiency from the days before Adam's dream. If nie
and humankind had a future together I knew it lay in these
vestiges of Eve's independence. Literalist yes-plan Adam fed
the parrots and sang songs with nerve jangling tunelessness
to God. If Fall II: The Next Get,eration was ever going to
make it out of development and into production, if humans
were ever going to be anything more than monkeys on the
Divine Grinder's organ (excuse nie again) then it was going
to be down to the lady and the tramp.

And therein, my dears, lies the answer to that nagging
question: What was I doing in Eden in the first place? God's
got the big martyr death scene written in for Jimmeny. The
infinitely self-sacrificing part of His nature demands it, just as
the infinitely generative part of His nature demanded the
creation of Everything out of Nothing, and just as the infinitely unjust part of His nature demanded the creation of an
infinite Hell for finite transgressions. The boy's motivation for
self-sacrifice is the redemption of His Father's world. The
infinitely filial part of His nature demands it. But for redemption there must be freely chosen transgression. Therefore -
ta-da! - transgression must feel, at least temporarily, good.

Now ask yourself: Was there anyone better qualified for
the job?

He was kidding Himself with Adam and He knew it.
Certainly He'd created him free - but in the letter of the law,
not its spirit. The infinitely insecure part of His nature had
baulked at it, when it came down to it. The infinitely
deluded part of His nature had allowed the creation of a role
the designated actor would never have the spine to play. The
infinitely paradoxical part of His nature had demanded
Man's free choice of sin over obedience whilst creating a
man who'd never be man enough to sin. Enter Eve.

And boy did I.

Violet, Gunn's Penelope-replacement, lives in a studio flat in
West Hampstead.

`You do, actually, expect me not to be annoyed, do you?'
she said, having let me in, turned, and stormed up the stairs
to her living room. Neglectful of me, I know, not to have
offered an explanation for my tardiness, but I was still in a
state from the garden.

`I don't imagine you stayed in waiting for me,' I said, following.

`No I bloody did not. No, Declan, I bloody, thank God,
did not.'

`Well then,' I said. `No harm done, eh?'

She stood with her arms folded and her weight on one
sharp leg, lips parted, eyebrows raised. `Oh, I see,' she said.
`You've completely lost your mind. Right. I thought it was just
partial. I mean - are you ...? I mean what are you?'

Violet thinks of herself as an actress and is almost wholly
unacquainted with talent and has a great froth of dark red
hair she pretends to be perpetually irritated by and at war
with (the legion clips and scrunchies, the barrettes, the ties, the pins, the sticks, the bands) but which she secretly thinks
of as her pre-Raphaelite crowning glory and under the glow
of which she poses, endlessly, in front of the full-length
mirror on the back of the bathroom door after narcissistic,
unguent-heavy baths on her many unemployed afternoons.
She can't make her mind up whether she's at her sexiest as
chin-upholding Boadicea or dimpled and cleavaged Nell
Gwyn - but either way she's baffled and chagrined that not
one BBC period drama casting director has so far had the
good sense to be instantly at the mercy of her hair's splendour.

She waited, still with her weight on one leg.

`I thought perhaps Italian,' I said, after a sudden twinge in
my salivary glands. (Me the bemused amnesiac, Gunn's preferences my forgotten family and friends, introducing
themselves, willy-nilly.) `What do you think?'

She did something with her face then, a simultaneous
smile-snort that lasted a third of a second. Then she put her
head on one side like a perplexed kitten. `Let me just check
something with you,' she said. `Are you actually aware that
you're six hours late?'

`Yes,' I said. `I'm dreadfully sorry.

`Well perhaps, since you're six hours late, and are dreadfully sorry, you wouldn't mind fucking off?' she said.

For a moment I held my tongue - which was difficult,
given that I'd only seconds ago discovered the fascinating
imprecisions entailed in letting it loose. (So quaint, too, that
humble servitude paid by the organs of speech to the organ
of cognition, all those cerebral constrictions eased by labials
and glides, palatals and stops, the concerted efforts of wet
little bits and pieces.) Then I very slowly and with excessive
expansiveness installed myself in her one battered red leather
armchair. `Chimera Films have commissioned me to adapt my novel, Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest, for the screen,' I
said, quietly. (To be fair to Gunn, he's thought of this himself, some bogus incentive to keep her boudoir friendly.
What he's never come up with, what's stopped him going
through with the yarn, is the explanation necessary for the
day of reckoning when Violet - money-shot, fisted, assbanged, lezzed-up, whatever carnal prices he would have
tagged on to the starring role - discovered that there u'as no
starring role, no supporting role, no bit part, no walk-on, no
fucking movie.)

Violet stared. Then switched her weight from her left leg
to her right. Then said, `What?'

`Martin Mailer at Chimera Films has optioned Bodies for
the screen and has asked me to write the screenplay.' I fished
out a Silk Cut and ignited it with a languidly struck Swan
Vesta. The scent of sulphur reminded me of ... ahhh.

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