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

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, apres dejeuner 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.

Uffenstadt, Neiderbergen, Germany, 1567. Marta Holtz stands naked and shivering in the village church. She’s beginning to have an idea of why Bertolt has accused her. The Inquisitors – three Franciscans led by Abbot Thomas of Regensberg – are seated in a rough semi-circle of mahogany high chairs between the altar rail and the first pew. A brazier burns with occasional pops and snaps, tinting the rough carvings with petals of orange light. Jimbo’s crucifixion to the left of the altar releases a pterodactyl of shadow, and there’s a compact and vivid eruption of daffodils from the vase at the Virgin’s feet. The smell (I imagine) is of incense and chilled stone. The first pew used to be the fourth; the brothers have had three pews removed to make room. Marta, who isn’t stupid (that’s one of the reasons she’s here), has more than an inkling of what they might need room for. This more than an inkling began life in her feet and knees, but soon scurried up into her loins and belly, thence ribs, breasts, throat and face. Now this more than an inkling is all over her like a host of hairy spiders. She’s beginning to have the idea that Bertolt accused her because that is his job. Bertolt came to Uffenstadt three months ago. She’s barely had any dealings with him. Once, he helped her catch a piglet that had got loose. Another time she gave him a taste of the damson cake she had baked for her sister’s birthday. On neither of these occasions did she have the slightest sense that he had any feelings about her beyond the one shared by most of the men in the village: that she was a desirable woman and that Gunter Holtz was a lucky sonofabitch. (At this moment – this moment of Marta’s realisation that Bertolt works for the Franciscans, and that with the first three pews removed there will be plenty of room for the good Fathers’ manoeuvres – Gunter is being informed by the Regensberg accountant that should Marta be found guilty of witchcraft her execution will be followed by Church confiscation of any property belonging – even jointly or by virtue of marriage – to her, not to mention an itemized bill – implements, fuel, labour – for the cost of the interrogation. At this moment Gunter is looking at the accountant’s broad and porous face and wondering how its cheek came by those three silver scars like fishbones. He’s thinking, too, of Marta’s pale and downy midriff, of her sloe eyes and oddly deep voice, of her habit of making him laugh at his own struggle to be a manly man, of the small mole at the back of her left knee, of her wheaty breath when she comes, of the pear-sized baby in her thickened womb. He’s thinking that he’ll kill this accountant, no matter what. The accountant and Bertolt. With the heavy scythe. Bertolt first. He’s thinking these and many other things, none of which is of any use to Marta, who having been clumsily shaved by Brother Clement, is now being hand-examined by the trio, who bring to bear a predictably excessive investigative zeal when it comes to her vagina, breasts and anus.) Marta – who, somewhere