Damn these digressions. How did Gunn – how does one, ever finish anything? Morrales’s chum, one Carlos Antonio Rodriguez, was one of those chickenshit dabblers manifestly in it for the carnal extravagances. He’d argued long and hard with Fernando that the conjuring of His Satanic Majesty was both difficult and highly dangerous, but had finally – seeing that if he didn’t comply there was a good chance that Fernando would stick his sword through his, Carlos’s, head – capitulated and begun. He wasn’t ready for me when I appeared. (I’d consulted the manifestations wardrobe: yes, something . . . traditional, I think – although I’ll tell you for nothing, love, those cloven hooves are strictly bedroom.) I could tell he had a good couple of hours’ worth of incantatory twaddle lined-up, and the truth is I couldn’t sit through the Latin. Gave him quite a turn. So much of a turn, in fact, that he bemerded his hose and ran screaming from the room, leaving me alone with Fernando.
Don Fernando Morrales. Oy. Always when you least expect. . . sorry. Talking to myself when I should be talking to you. (You. I know who you are, you know. I know where you live. How does that make you feel? Secure?) Fernando, when all’s said and done, had some fucking cojones on him. He was scared. He was . . . ah . . . perspiring – but he held it together long enough to get through the negotiations. No surprises there: I’d get his soul, he’d get a wagonload of money, fatal accidents to an arm-long list of real and imagined enemies, and a lot – really an awful lot – of unhygienic nookie. So I dictated the wording of the contract and told him to open a vein for the bloody signature. (It’s not the piece of paper, obviously, which in any case I can’t carry back with me into the ether; it’s the act of signing. Blood seals it. That’s the way it’s always been. Ask Jimmeny. You can destroy the contract, materially – everyone does – but it won’t make a difference come time for collection. I can promise you that.) Anyway Fernando had just rolled up his sleeve and was inspecting his forearm for a safe spot to make the cut, when – God knows what put it into his head to do such a thing – he asked me straight out if it was true that I’d been present at the Crucifixion. When I told him yes, of course, he asked me, rather absurdly I thought, if I could draw a likeness of what I’d seen.
I should, strictly speaking, have searched Morrales’s soul a little more thoroughly. That was carelessness on my part, I admit. I was feeling peculiar. The pain was banging away like an autistic kettle-drummer and my heart . . . my heart . . . Oh all right not my heart, but it was one of those weird days when I could barely concentrate on what I was doing, when the blood-spattered and corpse-littered wake of my busy life tugged at me like a conundrum. How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, Son of the morning! Sometimes I let that run through my head and it’s the sound of a triumphal trumpet. Other times it just makes me terribly sad. Fernando – God knows why – had quoted it in an undertone, a whisper mortal ears wouldn’t have heard. (Isaiah wasn’t even talking about me when he said it. He was prophesying the fate of Merodach-baladan, who was not, as you might be thinking, one of the Harlem Globetrotters, but the King of Babylon. It’s just that sometimes human utterances accidentally align with the truths of Heaven and Hell. When that happens, the phrases stick in history like burrs.)
I did it telekinetically, the quill inked with Morrales’s blood. Never knew I had any artistic talent until that drawing emerged on the back of the unsigned contract. Never knew I was. . . you know . . . creative. Got lost in it, the challenge to keep the line honest, the strange state of suspension between absolute concentration and absolute blankness (it’s a Zen thing, apparently), the momentary dissolution of the boundary between subject and object, the fleeting transcendence of self. You know there are drawings that seem to say so much in so few lines? This was one of them. On top of all my other knacks and talents, I was supernaturally good at droring.
Too good for my own good, as it turned out. When I turned my attention back to Morrales I saw he was weeping piteously and tearing out hanks of his hair. He kissed the image (I’d been a bit flattering with Junior’s hairdo and beard, if you want the truth, but then so has practically every other painter in the history of art), wailing now as his tears mingled with the blood: Vade Satana: Scriptum est enim: Dominum Deum tuum adorabis, et illi soli seruies . . . Vade Satana . . . Vade Satana! Which, for the Classically challenged among you (that’s pretty much all of you, these days) translates as: Begone Satan: for it is written: The Lord thy God shalt thou adore, and Him only shalt thou serve.
You humans and your confounded epiphanies, eh? Honestly. You’re so mauve. Couldn’t get a word out of him after that. Certainly no signature. Worse than a complete waste of time – a conversion. Hoist, as they say, by my own petard. Course I couldn’t help it once I saw that I could really . . . capture something in the drawing. Had to let myself go. Had to show off.
I went small-mouthed back to my brothers in Hell. Told them I wasn’t well. Had a lie-down. (Astaroth smirked a bit, I now recall.) Bloody Morrales gave the picture up to the Cardinal Penitentiary and – as I live and breathe – joined the Franciscans. Idiot. Couple of millennia in Purgatory then the Old Man let him in. Meanwhile the drawing, my drawing, is locked in one of the Very Rarely Unlocked rooms of the Vatican, its existence, until now, known only to a privileged few. It can have . . . effects on those who do get to see it, mind you. Sent one corrupt cardinal (tautological phrase if ever there was one) back in the Eighteenth completely mad. So mad, in fact, that he hanged himself in a brothel shortly after his young lady had left him to dress, dropping his sinheavy soul into my lap like a lump of rotten fruit – compensation for Morrales, I might add, long overdue.
Now . . . Gunn. Gunn and suicide. You’re thinking: For heaven’s sake why?
It takes patience to drive people to suicide. Patience and a particular voice of reason. It’s not going to get any better. It’s only going to get worse. You need this pain to stop. It’s perfectly all right to want this pain to stop. All you need to do is lie down and close your eyes . . . It took me a while to hit on just the right tone, part disinterested physician, part forgiving priest – their twin implications: You need it; It’s okay.
But Gunn. What brought it on? What – apart from his dead mother, Violet, A Grace of Storms, and Wordsworthian melancholy over the loss of childhood’s celestial light – happened?