They’re not here for this, the Lucifer shtick; they’re here for the clairvoyance, though they feign interest and chuckle in all the right places. I’m just about to pluck something from the privacy of the English poet sitting cross-legged in the room’s darkest corner, when Gunn’s partying bowels and quivering hoop send me an urgent neural telegram: Get to a john now, or forget socializing for the rest of the month. Original Apostate and Ruler of Hell you may be, Bub, but dump this load in your pants in public, and you’re going straight off the A-list into celeb Coventry.
All that rich food, I’m thinking – much in the way you lot do, consigning all the fags, drink and drugs (not to mention quite a quantity of hygienically suspect XXX-Quisite rimming) to the irrelevance category. Must be all that dreadfully rich food.
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I say. ‘Would you excuse me for a moment? I’m afraid there’s something . . . yes. I’ll be back momentarily.’
‘Oh God,’ I hear Lysette say, as I exit, clutching my solar plexus, ‘are we really being expected to talk amongst ourselves?’
It’s touch and go, even then. Half-a-dozen broom closets and walk-in wardrobes later, at a point where my anus is engaged in some kind of voodoo salsa or go-go shimmy all of its own, I finally find a door that opens into the forgiving whites of a bathroom, where, after a much-haste-no-speed conflict with the suddenly arcane fastenings of my trousers, I launch myself at the crapper.
There’s a good deal of ooohing and aaahing from me, not surprisingly, a good many cartoon faces. I discover cold sweats, tears, shivers, clenchings, and a vocal palette that might belong to a senile animal impersonator. Oh you’d be tickled pink if you saw me there on the can, puffing and blowing at both ends, the false finales, the triple-endings, the beatific relief cruelly betrayed by the bowels’ wicked whimsy . . . Oh yes, I do look a sight, slumped like a depressed and molested orang – but that’s not what I mind. I’ve signed on for that, I know. Do unto your body as you would have your body do unto you. Fair enough. No, what bothers me is the feeling of . . . I don’t know . . . There’s something, some nagging suspicion that I’m being watched, as, decently dressed once more I lean at the sink on the heels of my hands, peering with mischievous penitence at my mortal reflection in the Guitar God’s mirror. Maybe he’s got closed circuit cameras in the joint, I’m thinking, but even thinking it I know I’m having myself on. That’s not the kind of Being Watched I’m talking about.
‘You have of late – wherefore you know not . . .’
As I spin on my Guccis I’m almost sure I catch, peripherally, a quick shudder in the mirror’s glass, a warp, a wobble, some bulge or bruise from a passing incorporeal presence.
The bathroom’s empty, but for me and the olfactory fallout from my thermonuclear bum-blast. Call me overly imaginative, but I’m sure I hear the rustle of . . .
‘That’s very funny,’ I say, aloud, returning to the mirror, the taps, the Camay. ‘That is really, really hil-fucking-hairyarse . . .’
The English poet (whose publishing house the Axe Wizard has just bought so that he, the Axe Wizard, can publish his, the Axe Wizard’s, poetry – and may God have mercy on your souls) is troubled. He’s troubled by the suspicion that he would do terrible things in certain hypothetical carte blanche situations.
‘But if it’s a choice between torturing some poor bastard because you’re following orders,’ Trent Bintock is saying as I return, ‘I mean what if you’re going to be tortured if you don’t do it?’ He gnashes his way through all this with relish and a brilliant smile. He’s thinking it would make a better dramatic dilemma if it wasn’t simply that you –
‘No no,’ the poet says. ‘This is a situation where you’re in control, totally. You are the camp commandant, you see.’
‘But I wouldn’t be the camp commandant,’ Lysette says. She’s not kidding and she’s not lying, either. She’d be too busy managing the government’s publicity. She’d be too busy securing political endorsements from attractive female tennis stars.
‘But how can you say you’d never get to be camp commandant?’ the generously smiling Trent wants to know, as the pipe comes his way. ‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because I’d join whatever group was against the group that even had such things as camp commandants,’ Jack interrupts, without a shred of honesty. ‘Because I’d get out of the fucking country.’
I wouldn’t, the internally honest English poet thinks, tossing back another vodka on the rocks, miserably.
‘You’re given authority, you see,’ Todd Arbuthnot of the Washington connections says. ‘If you’re given the right framework . . . Authority from a higher power and a closed community within which to exercise it . . .’
‘It’s Milgram’s electric shock test,’ Jack says.
Trent Bintock, having just inhaled, massively, beams and tears noisily into a new pack of Marlboro Lights. ‘Who’s Milgram?’ he says, in a helium-swallower’s squeak.
‘Back in the early sixties,’ Todd picks up. ‘In New Haven. Stanley Milgram ran an experiment designed to test human willingness to obey orders, even when those orders caused suffering to others.’
I don’t know who this Milgram cunt is, the English poet is thinking, but I know how I’d come out of his fucking experiment . . .
I’m sitting quietly in the shadows through this, nursing not just my ravaged bowels and traumatized hoop, but my outraged sense of sportsmanship . . .
‘So,’ Todd Arbuthnot continues, ‘the volunteers for the experiment are told by the “scientist”, the guy in the white coat, that they’re taking part in an experiment about learning. They’re told that the “learner” next door is hooked up to electrodes, and that every time he gives a wrong answer to a question, the volunteer is to give him an electric shock by throwing a switch. Obviously, there’s no actual electric shock – but this learner acts as if there is, every time the volunteer throws the switch.’
‘What a disgusting experiment,’ the poet says, on the edge of hysteria. ‘What a predictable experiment.’
‘So anyway,’ Todd says (I rather like Todd’s voice; it’s dry, and calm, and oaky with ancient New England wealth), ‘Naturally, some of the volunteers started to, you know, baulk, when they heard the learner next door protesting, kicking on the wall, demanding to be released, screaming . . . But the man in the white coat told them to continue, and most of them did. Thing is, you know, to give the shocks they had to pull the switch through a number of positions from 15 to 450 volts. These switch positions were marked like “slight shock”, “moderate shock”, “strong shock” and so on, all the way up to things like “intense shock”, “extreme intensity shock”, “danger: severe shock”, and, finally, at 450 volts, the switch position was marked “XXX 450 volts”. More than half the volunteers carried on all the way through the shock register.’
‘Fuck,’ Trent says, heartily enjoying all this, seeing, in fact, the whole thing unfolding dramatically, seeing the camera angles, the pull-backs, the close-ups. ‘That’s fucking scary, man.’