Actually none of that’s true. Old habits and so on. The truth is, Hell’s okay. Most of the souls at my place just hang around smoking and drinking and chewing the fat. And there’s everything to read.
Anyway the word spread. Our voices moved through the clear waters of the Gloria like a turbid undertow. We did nothing. We didn’t know what to do. What did we have anyway but a solitary speculation? After that first shy caress, that first inkling of selfhood, we sang on in a state of mere confusion for hundreds of thousands of years. And I daresay we’d still be singing now if rumour hadn’t reached us of the script in development, a Father Production with a working title ‘The Material Universe’ (it came out eventually as Creation) scheduled for release sometime within the next thousand and starring – naturally – the Son.
Manhattan, summer, my kind of place, my kind of time.
Cab grilles snarl in the boomerang light. The subway’s foetid lung exhales. Winos strip to the earliest sartorial strata – salmon pink t-shirts and sepia string vests, emblems of the pasts drink and I have stolen. Garbage trucks chow down on the city’s ordure – what a sight: the slow-chewing maw with its stained teeth and heady halitosis. Beautiful. The sun-hot sidewalks give up their ghosts of piss and dogshit. Treacle-coloured roaches conduct their dirty business while pot-bellied rats cloak-and-dagger through the shadows. The pigeons look like they’ve been dipped in gasoline and blow-dried.
Manhattan, summertime. All those frayed tempers and stirred wants. The varicosed hookers smack-retching into the drains, the payrolled plod, the manicured villains, the mainlined TV, the Christian porn starlets, the genocidal nerds, the lies, the greed, the self-absorption, the politics. It’s my Design Argument. Harlem, the Bronx, Wall Street, the Upper East Side – these clocks don’t need winding. Give me white men and a brace of centuries, I give you New York City, my Sistine Chapel, about to be – thanks to my left hand knowing perfectly well what my right one’s doing – in fruitful need of restoration. Some restoration job that’ll be, believe me.
Needless to say I laughed long and hard at dear Gabriel’s message, longer and harder than I’ve laughed since. . . I don’t know, Los Alamos, maybe. Po-faced Gabriel incapable of telling a lie. Incapable of telling a lie. Swear on the Holy Bible, I said to him. Go on, raise your right hand.
I threw myself into work for a while. You humans can throw yourselves into all sorts of things: chain-smoking, booze-bingeing, scabrous one-night-stands. I throw myself into work. Spread myself perilously thin, too, what with starting small wars and coaxing neuroses in the movers and shakers. A rash of peculiar migraines broke out among tinpot tyrants worldwide; torture cells groaned; the music of pulled teeth and cattle-prodded sex-parts comforted me; the odour of fag-burned breasts filled my nostrils like balsam, temporarily decongesting me of doubt. I put some time into technology (there’s a lot of never-need-to-leave-the-house gizmology coming your way soon) and bio-engineering. The boffins were waking up in the middle of the night wondering how on earth they’d never thought of it before. I even found time for the little things, the it’s-the-thought-that-counts gimmicks I’ve built a reputation on: the thefts, the assaults, the batteries, the lies, the lusts. One espresso-breathed old duffer in Bologna sodomized his Jack Russell, then went to look at himself in the bathroom mirror, astonished that for so many years they’d been just good friends.
But it was useless. The seed had been sown. Some things don’t change. The necessity of Gabriel’s honesty is one of them. Incapable of telling a lie. Besides, as Der Führer of Fibs, Il Duce of Deceptions, I do know when someone’s pulling my leg.
He was waiting for me in a rainswept Paris.
‘I want a dry-run,’ I said.
Pigalle, I’d insisted, knowing how he hates these little pornucopias. Insomniac neons blinked colours on and off the wet streets. I couldn’t smell the crêpes, the coffee, the croques monsieurs, the panini, the Galoises, but I could certainly smell the ripe stink of my work, the briny whiff of illicit fornication and ravenous disease. (This thing about AIDS being God’s punishment kills me. It’s mine, you sillies. It’s a nosethumb to Himself: Look, even when it’s killing them they can’t stop.) Violence, too. Wherever there’s guilt there’s violence, and if guilt is a smell then violence is a taste: strawberries and formaldehyde and ironish blood . . .
‘One earth month,’ Gabriel said.
We looked at each other then (self-consciously on my part) for a painful moment. It hurt like buggery (I was going to say it hurt like Hell – but actually nothing hurts quite like Hell) but I wasn’t going to let him know that. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. Being in my presence was no picnic for him, either, you can be sure, but he was coming on all Mr Spock and pain-is-only-in-the-mind.
‘I don’t want February,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Twenty-eight days. It’s not a leap year.’
‘It’s July. Thirty-one days.’
‘Great. Peak rates on the 18–30 Benidorm package.’
‘Laughter is the reflex response to fear. You know this. You hear yourself laughing, we hear you screaming.’
‘“And if I laugh ’tis that I may not weep” would’ve been so much better. Still not much time for reading up there then?’
‘There’s nothing I lack that I want, Lucifer. You cannot say the same. You will know where to go.’
‘Yes yes yes. Now do clear off, old fruit, would you? Oh and Gabriel?’
‘Yes?’
‘Your mother sucks cocks in hell.’
He didn’t do anything. He held still, aureoled in the Old Man’s icy protection. Unprotected I know I can take him. He knows it too. If he’d had Doubt – if he’d had Doubt – it would have burgeoned there on the edge of Pigalle’s little Babylon. If he’d had Doubt he would have wondered if God was about to drop the shield and test his strength. It’s the sort of thing God would do, whimsical old Kettle that He is. If Gabriel’s faith wasn’t utterly intact it would have occurred to him that if God chose to withdraw His power he would be facing certain defeat. Why? Well, actually, because, not to put too fine a point on it, I’m the meanest, baddest, deadliest angelic motherfucker in the seen and unseen universe, that’s why. But it didn’t occur to him. We just faced each other, the wall of nothingness shivering between us. Humans passed and said: Someone walked on my grave.
So. There’s a turn-up for the Book of Revelation. ‘And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night forever . . .’ Oh cheers, I thought, when I heard that. Oh thanks. But now they’re putting it out that Jonny Flashback was on a need-to-know basis. He’ll be narked about that. (He’s never been right, you know. Stands under a silver tree in Paradise with unwashed dreads and a beard the size of a sheep, muttering and doing those mad tramp things with his hands. It’s the Kerouac trajectory from beat guru to stumbling bum. You see it a million times.)
You know what all this is about, don’t you, assuming, for a moment, He’s serious? Divine Anxiety. Create the unforgivable and you compromise infinite mercy. Forgive the unforgivable and you compromise infinite justice. Mercy, justice, mercy, justice, yada yada yada, until you’re so dizzy from chasing Bugs Logic around in circles that you fall on your cosmic arse and put your cosmic head in your cosmic hands and wish you’d never created anything.