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/Though 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 Declan 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 Deadlies 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 (man 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 nauseam, ad infinitum. 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-nosers for-He’s-a-jolly-good-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.