‘What’s worse,’ says Todd, ‘is that when they repeated the study at Princeton, they got a figure of eighty per cent total obedience from volunteers.’
‘Eight out of ten,’ the English poet, says, huskily – then, with a guilty eye-flash at Trent’s fags – ‘Could I have one of those?’
‘Yeah but what’s really cool?’ Todd continues, with that American turn-a-statement-into-a-question intonation, ‘Is that one guy in the experiment refused – point blank refused – to administer even the first shock. Just wouldn’t do it.’
Bastard, the English poet is thinking. Lucky bastard . . .
‘Sure,’ Todd says. ‘And do you know who that one guy was?’ Everyone except me looks blank.
‘Who?’ Lysette Youngblood asks.
‘Ron Ridenhour,’ Harriet says, to my surprise. Hadn’t realised she was historically clued-up. Presumably she optioned the rights to his story.
‘Who the fuck is Ron Ridenhour?’ Trent demands, with a stellar smile.
Todd and I smile at each other through the gloom, as if Ron Ridenhour might be our son. ‘He’s the guy who later blew the lid on the My Lai massacre in Nam,’ Todd says. ‘Without him there’s a good chance the whole thing would’ve been covered up for ever.’
‘Still,’ Trent says – and I know that through the opium he’s thinking about getting My Lai into the script, some flash-forward, some satanic prophecy – ‘eighty per cent’s pretty fucking depressing, right? I mean that’s only two out of ten good guys, right?’
‘There’s ten of us here,’ Jack points out. ‘Who’s who? Who here knows they’d be in the ethical twenty per cent? Let’s take a secret ballot!’
Oh yes, the English poet is thinking, yes let’s. What a brilliant fucking idea . . .
I never believed I’d get anywhere near eighty per cent. Nothing like. Of course it tripped off the tongue in Hell, of course it sounded fantastic – ‘Eight out of every ten. Do you hear me? I accept no less. We must work in the garden, my dears, we must work hard in the garden . . .’ but the truth is I’d’ve settled for fifty per cent. Hell I’d’ve been happy enough with twenty. That, actually, was my real number, twenty per cent. Two out of every ten. Would’ve been enough to get the Old Man’s goat. He must be positively cheesed off with today’s numbers. Serves him right. It’s His own fault. Oh yes. Those Commandments. How about those Commandments, though, eh? Thou shalt honour thy father and mother. Er . . . eeyah. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife. Excuse me – have you seen my neighbour’s wife? Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself . . . I remember thinking even at the time, He’s not serious. He can’t, surely, be serious. Thou shalt not kill. (If only you’d kept that one! The Crucifixion – the entire New Covenant would have been impossible! All my work would’ve been done for me.) Thou shalt not bear false witness. Oh stop, I thought, you’re killing me. Thing was: nobody was actually going to Heaven.
I remember St Peter getting his new uniform and ticketpunch. Time passed. He wished he’d brought a magazine. The turnstile booth grew . . . oppressively familiar. Whereas we were taking on extra staff downstairs. Every day a gala day. I was down to a three-and-a-half-hour week. Spent the rest of my time lying in a hot hammock and dabbing away tears of mirth.
I sent Him a telegram. Far be it from me to tell You Your Own business and all that, but . . . Stony silence. Still no sense of humour. On the other hand, it wasn’t long after that regrettably indulgent quip that I noticed the goalposts were on the move. Without so much as a nod or a wink. It was the coveters first, peeling off to Purgatory when they should have been hurtling straight down to us. Then every other onetheft-only thief. The odd regretful adulterer. Whole generations with a beef against Mum and Dad. Hang on a minute, I thought. This is a bit . . . I mean you can’t just suddenly . . . Oh but He could. And did. Dear Lucifer, He should have replied, thanks so much for your helpful suggestions . . . I could have respected that. But no, not a word. And it’s me who’s the petulant one.
Similar chestnuts come up, now and again, après déjeuner in Hell. You know the setting: belts loosened, brains on the cusp of drunkenness, hash-smoke genie presiding, the air wreathed in the scent of port and brandy, an expansiveness of body, a provocatively meandering mind or two . . . ‘What is the greatest evil?’ someone will say. Thammuz, usually, who’s of an infuriatingly reflective bent, or Asbeel, who just loves to argue. They’re so hung up on torture, you know? On creating individual instances of despair. I tell them – eventually, after they’ve prattled for hours of thumbscrews, hot boots and racks – I tell them that what we need is Systems. Without Systems, without Seeing the Big Picture, without setting up a machine that runs itself, our work is mere vandalism.
Take torture, for example. What do you want from torture? You want the suffering of the victim, obviously, the bouquet of fear, the parfum of pain; you want the gradual revelation of the body’s thraldom to physics, the careful journey back to the flesh’s sovereignty over the spirit. You want his appalled grasp of the inescapable ratio: your motivation is pleasure; your pleasure increases proportional to his suffering; your capacity for pleasure exceeds his capacity for suffering; no amount of his suffering, therefore, is ever going to be sufficient. (What kills me about torture is how long it takes the victim to understand the impossibility of transaction. There’s nothing the torturer wants from him except his suffering. Yet on and on the victim blabs and whimpers, naming names, offering up secrets, promises, bribes. Language compels him – if he has it at his disposal, if his tongue hasn’t already been snipped or broiled – to persist in the belief that it can help him. The victim’s voluntary retreat into silence, barring screams and moans, is always a sign that he’s made the shift, fully realised his situation, got it.) You want, too, his degradation in his own eyes; you want him to observe the dismantling of his own personhood, his astonished shift from subject to object. It’s why the classier torturers force their victims into a relationship with the instruments of torture before those instruments have been torturously employed: the whip is drawn caressingly over the shoulder or loins; the rods and prods, the ferruled canes, the probes, the nightsticks, the crops – must be kissed, fondled, or otherwise venerated by the torturee, as if they themselves are sentient subjects while he is a mere object of their intention. You want him to see that in the universe you now control, in your universe, all prior hierarchies are void.
Sooner or later (you humans can’t help it, it’s the way you’re made) this leads to despair. The victim’s despair. The torturee’s preference, after a certain point has been perspiringly passed, for death over life. The impossible ideal for the torturer, of course, is that the victim remains alive in this state of craving-but-not-being-given death forever. We don’t call it an impossible ideal in Hell. We call it routine.
Yes yes yes, despair is good, and torture a sure-fire way of bringing it out – but I have to keep reminding them – the boozers are nodding off by this point, the dullards daydreaming or picking their teeth – that flavoursome though these prison cell episodes may be, the real prize is in achieving a state where despair can flourish with barely any interference from us, when they do it to and for themselves, when that’s the way the world is.