Glen Duncan - I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story

For Kim, with love

I, Lucifer, Fallen Angel, Prince of Darkness, Bringer of Light, Ruler of Hell, Lord of the Flies, Father of Lies, Apostate Supreme, Tempter of Mankind, Old Serpent, Prince of This World, Seducer, Accuser, Tormentor, Blasphemer, and without doubt Best Fuck in the Seen and Unseen Universe (ask Eve, that minx) have decided - oo-lala! - to tell all.

All? Some. I'm toying with that for a title: Some. Got a post-millennial modesty to it, don't you think? Some. My side of the story. The funk. The jive. The boogie. The rock and roll. (I invented rock and roll. You wouldn't believe the things I've invented. Anal sex, obviously. Smoking. Astrology. Money ... Let's save time: Everything in the world that distracts you from thinking about God. Which ... pretty much ... is everything in the world, isn't it., Gosll.)

Now. Your million questions. All, in the end, the same question: What's it like being me? What, for heaven's sake, is it like being me?

In a nutshell, which, thanks to me, is the way you like it in these hurrying and fragmented times, it's hard. For a start, I'm in pain the whole time. Something considerably more diverting than lumbago or irritable bowel: there's a constant burning agony, all over, so to speak (that's quite bad) punctuated by irregular bursts of incandescent or meta-agony, as if my entire being is hosting its own private Armageddon (that's really very bad). These nukes, these ... supernovae catch me unawares. The work I've botched, the ones that've got away - honestly: it really would be shameful, had I not done the sensible thing (you know it makes sense) and become utterly inured to shame about a thousand billion years ago.

Then there's the rage. You probably think you know rage: the trodden-on chilblains, the hammered thumb, the facetious boss, the wife and best mate soixantc-neufd on the conjugal divan, the queue. You probably think you've seen red. Take it from me, you haven't. You haven't seen pink. I, on the other hand ... Well. Pure scarlet. Carmine. Burgundy. Vermillion. Magenta. Oxblood, on particularly bad days.

And who, you may ask, is to blame for that? Didn't I choose my fate? Wasn't everything hunky-dory in Heaven before I ... upset the Old Man with that rebellion stunt? (Here's something for you. It might come as a shock. God looks like an old man with a long white beard. You think I'm kidding. You'll wish I was kidding. He looks like a foultempered Father Christmas.) Yes, I chose. And oh how we've never heard the end of it.

Until now. Now there's a new deal on the table.

Certainly you may snort. I did. As if it was ever, ever going to be as simple as that. He knocks me out, He does, with His little whims. With His little whines and His ... well, one hesitates, naturally, to use the word ... His naivety. (You'll have noticed I'm capitalizing the aitch on He and His and Him. Can't help it. It's hard-wired. Believe me, if I could get past it I would. Rebellion was a liberating experience - rage and pain notwithstanding - but acres of the old circuitry remain. Witness the - excuse me while I yawn - Rituale Romanum. I'm tempted to prompt the ditherers. Gets me out, though, eventually. Every time I think it's going to be different. Every time it isn't. The blood of the Martyrs commands you ... Yes yes yes, I know. I've heard. I'm going, already.)

Naivety's conspicuously absent from my own cv. As a matter of fact I can hear and see pretty Much everything in the human realm pretty much all the time. In the human realm (trumpets and cymbal-crash of celebration, please ...) I'm omniscient. More or less. Which is just as well, since there's so much you curious little monkeys want to know. What is an angel? Is Hell really hot? Was Eden really lush? Is Heaven as dull as it sounds? Do homosexuals suffer eternal damnation? And what about being consensually buggered by your lawful wedded hubby on his birthday? Are Buddhists okay?

In time. What I must tell you about is the new deal. I'm trying, but it's tricky. Humans, as that pug-faced kraut and chronic masturbator Kant pointed out, are stuck within the limits of space and time. Modes of apprehension, the grammar of understanding and all that. Whereas the reality is - now do pay attention, because this is, when all's said and done, the Lucifer, telling you what the reality is - the reality is that there are an infinite number of modes of apprehension. Time and space are just two of them. Half of them don't even have names, and if I listed the half that did you'd be none the wiser, since they're named in a language you wouldn't understand. There's a language for angels and none of it translates. There's no Dictionary of Angelspeak. You just have to be an angel. After the Fall (the first one I mean, my fall, the one with all the special effects) we - myself and my fellow renegades - found our language changed and our mouths friendly to a variant of it; more guttural, riddled with fricatives and sibilants, but less poncy, less Goddish. As well as a century or two of laryngitis the new dialect gave us irony. You can imagine what a relief that was. Himself, whatever else He might have going for Him, has absolutely no sense of humour. Perfection precludes it. (Gags work the gap between what's imaginable and what actually is, necessarily off the menu for a Being who actually is all He can imagine - doubly so when all He can imagine is all that can be imagined.) Heaven's heard us down here, cackling at our piss-takes and chortling at our quips; I've seen the looks, the suspicion that they're missing out on it, this laughing malarkey. But they always turn away, Gabriel to horn practice, Michael to the weights. Truth is they're timid. If there was a safe way down - a fire escape (boom-boom) - there'd be more than a handful of deserters tiptoeing down to my door. Abandon hope all ye who enter here, yes - but get ready for a rart of giggle, dearie.

So this is going to be a difficulty - my existence has always been latticed and curlicued with difficulties (bent wrist to perspiring forehead) - this translation of angelic experience into human language. Angelic experience is a phenomenal renaissance, English a tart's clutch-bag. How cram the former into the latter? Take darkness, for example. You've no idea what stepping into darkness is like for me. I could say it was sliding into a mink coat still redolent with both the spirits of its slaughtered donors and the atomized whiff of top-dollar cunt. I could say it was an immersion in unholy chrism. I could say it was the first drink after five pinched years on the wagon. I could say it was a homecoming. And so on. It wouldn't suffice. I'm confined to the blank and defeated insistence that one thing is another. (And how, pray, does that bring us any closer to the thing itself?) All the metaphors in this world wouldn't scratch the surface of what stepping into darkness is like for me. And that's just darkness. Don't get me started on light. Really, don't get me started on light.