I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story

beard matted, eyes stied and reddened, cheeks hollow, fingernails torn, lips cracked and blistered. Yes, fasting for forty days and nights manifestly had not been a blast. When I found him he was sitting hunched in the mouth of a cave, knees up to his chin, bony fingers laced around his lengthy shins. Very black was the cool mouth of the cave and very white the scorched land around it.

‘Hungry, lovey?’ I said. It’s been a weakness of mine – yes, definitely a weakness – that ever since the days of the parted robes and the punctured heart I’ve found it all but impossible to control my irritation in his presence. Soon as I see him something in me just clicks and it’s all barbed jibes and leaden sarcasm. So annoying. I’m sure that if I could just have got beyond it and let the charm flow . . .

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘It’s you.’

‘You know those crash-diets are a trap, don’t you?’

‘You’re wasting your time, Satan.’

‘Not if it gives me pleasure to be here. Lucifer, by the way.’

‘Go away.’

‘Look, you know the drill. Would I be here if your Dad didn’t want me to be?’

He sighed. I had him there. He’d come out here to be tested.

‘Get on with it then, will you?’ he said.

So on with it I got. Now obviously the versions you’ve inherited are way off. Matthew’s got me trying to get him to turn stones into bread (prompting all the not by bread alone blarney), to throw himself off a mountain and precipitate an angelic rescue (provoking all the don’t test the Lord thy God baloney), and to bow down and worship me in return for all the kingdoms of the earth (eliciting the now world-famous get thee behind me claptrap.) Luke agrees, but cocks up the order and substitutes a building (in the desert) for the mountain.

Now I ask you: do you really think that’s the best I could come up with? I mean I’ll just remind everyone in case everyone’s forgotten: I’m . . . the Devil. And even if I wasn’t, I’d have to have been a complete dunderhead to think he’d go for any of that nonsense. You’re not even capable of eating bread after forty days’ and nights’ starvation. Having angels come to his rescue – what would that prove? It would, I suppose, have given him an opportunity to show me just how important he was, an opportunity for the gratification of ego or pride, but pride wasn’t his weakness. You’re going to tempt someone, you find their weakness. All the kingdoms of the earth? Might as well have offered him the complete Pokemon collection. The Evangelists tell you what they would have been tempted by. Jimbo wasn’t interested in that sort of thing. It doesn’t bother me that the Gospels are skewed, but it bothers me that I come out looking so narrow, so myopic.

Apart from sanctimoniousness and impenetrable parabling Arthur really only had one weak spot. Doubt. Very occasional, and invariably mastered by faith – but it was there. (I got to him in Gethsemane, right before the fun and games started, and almost had him at the very last on the cross, when, after I’d niggled him with that ‘told you you can’t trust Him’ remark he panicked and went all lama sabachthani on us.) Yes, he was now and then wont to wonder whether it was all strictly necessary, the being betrayed and spat on and mocked and flogged and thorn-crowned and nailed to a cross for hours of agony and more mocking and jeering and so on. He was wont to wonder, quite reasonably, whether it was all going to be worth it.

So I took him to a place where the dunes dropped to a bed of rock blazing pink in the sun.

‘You’re doing this to save the world, right?’ I asked him. He just stared down, saying nothing. ‘Okay,’ I continued. ‘This is what the world will look like after you’ve done your thing. I’ll just give you the headlines, but stop me any time if there’s something you want a closer look at.’

An unpalatable but not dishonest (honestly) preview of the next 2,000 years screened as if by magic on the stony plateau beneath us, complete with names, dates, places, soundeffects and statistics. There was some fantastic stuff in there – well, you know that, now – holocausts, tyrannies, massacres, technology, biotechnology, wars, ideologies, atheism, starvation, money, disease, Elton John . . . He didn’t like the look of it, you could tell. Nor did he think I was making it up. He didn’t think I was making it up because he knew I wasn’t making it up. He stood next to me and swayed. Maybe it was the hunger, the heat, the hallucinations, the headaches. Maybe it was the effect of the subliminals I’d sneaked in – Xrated flashes of him with a thonged and baby-oiled Mary Mags (or Dirty Mags, as I used to call her, much to Jimmeny’s chagrin) making the beast with two backs (bit cheeky of me, I know, but you’ve gorr’ave a larf at work narn’again, intcha?); maybe it was just that he was feeling dreadfully lonely after more than a month with only scorpions and bugs to talk to – who knows? What I do know is that he wavered. Rocked. Wobbled. Turned to me, lifted an unsteady hand as if to grab my non- existent lapel. At which point, typically – typically – the Old Man dropped a black cloud over the sun and a thunderbolt straight into the middle of my screen, scaring the hoop out of me and bringing Charlie Brown rudely to his senses.

‘I’m going through with it,’ he said. ‘Now fuck off, will you?’

Like I said: not a fair fight.

The hotel is filled with echoes, the ghostly resonance of torturous trysts and bad business. Deals, betrayals, cramped passions and sudden deaths – each room holds its after-image composite of the beings who’ve passed through. The hotel is a great London valve, through which the lifeblood of the city’s wealth – the planet’s wealth – has passed, now with dalliance, now in haste. Beauty and boredom form its unjudgemental mood. I’m at home there. I’m so . . . at home there.

Scale fucks with my head. Angelic scale with human head, human scale with angelic head – oy. You go dizzy. What does one do – having been immaterially present at the Divine ejaculation that brought matter into being – what does one do with . . . a daisy? How is consciousness – especially the troubled hybrid I’m walking around with at the moment – to reconcile these extremities? Having observed newborn galaxies tossed prodigally, milkily, into the void, having straddled event horizons and strolled bodilessly ’twixt time’s wrinkles and matter’s loops – how, exactly, am I to accommodate the crenulations of Harriet’s toenails? Am I to apprehend seconds and caraway seeds that have called aeons trifles and held gas-giants baubles fit for a Heavenly whore?

Apparently, yes. And don’t mistake me. If I sound confused it’s only the happy confusion of the roll-over jackpot winner, now that all his choices are choices between pleasures. I smile a lot, faced with these charming frictions. Memories of the measureless deflagrations of home mix now with the intimate passing of a pigeon’s shadow, or the precise dimensions of a full stop. Drugs or no, this gentle dissonance of cognition sends me through my time here in feisty bliss . . .

I’ve got fourteen scenes to write, I know, but how, may I ask, do you handle dreams?

To start with: sleep. How did I ever do without it? Actually not sleep itself, but falling asleep. How did I ever survive without this business of falling asleep? There are – Day Twelve (Heavens how time flies when you’re having fun) – all sorts of things I’m wondering how I ever got along without. Israeli vine tomatoes. Campo Viejo Rioja. Heroin. Burping. Bollinger. Cigarettes. The sting of aftershave. Cocaine. Orgasm. Lucifer Risings. The aroma of coffee. (Coffee justifies the existence of the word ‘aroma’.) There are, naturally, plenty of things I don’t know how you put up with – disc jockeys, hangnails, trapped wind, All Bran – but then I knew it was going to be a mixed bag.

Anyway sleep. Granted, the first time it took me I was caught off-guard: one minute it was evening and I was lying on Gunn’s bunk with crossed ankles and a warm feeling in my feet and shoulders – the next brilliant sunshine with yours truly truck-horned awake with pants-shitting suddenness and a miniature identity crisis bringing on the first-morning-in-a-foreign-hotel-reconstruct-your-own-history routine. I was so startled (another first) I shot out of Gunn’s bones and back, bodilessly, into the ether. That turned out (wearing, this business of things turning out) not to be a good idea. Pain – the pain – returned, instantly, bright and clamorous. (When I quit Gunn’s carcass at the end of the month, you know, that pain’s going to