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

Naming the animals was pretty much the high point of Adam’s career. Took a while, as you can imagine, but he stuck at it, plodder that he was. Not that he couldn’t pull some corkers out of the air when the mood took him. Platypus, for example. Iguana. Gerbil. Vole. Ostrich.

He didn’t know I was there. Whatever gifts the Maker had given him, ESP wasn’t one of them. Either that or God put a wall between us. In any case Adam couldn’t hear me when I tried to reach him with my mind, and when I tried going through the various animal larynxes I got the predictable range of grunts, squeaks, barks and twitters. I got terribly bored. Even a cursory headcount (we were bogged down at the tail-end of Chondrichthyes) revealed it was going to take a while. The only interesting development was the emergence of a strange and humbly beautiful new sapling in the centre of the garden, a modest specimen – certainly without the maidenly grace of the silver birch or the melodrama of the weeping willow – but with the air of becoming a sure-fire bearer of succulent fruit come spring . . .

Blake’s Elohim Creating Adam has one thing going for it. God looks – thanks to the Feldmanesque eyeballs and Braille-reader’s averted gaze – like He knows it’s all going to end in tears. Which of course He does. Did. Blakey managed to get something of it into his image; something, too, of his other preoccupation with opposites: ‘without contraries is no progression . . .’ Stubbornly flexible phrase, that. (Comes in handy at my rare moments of existential doubt.) Applied to the image of Elohim myopically touch-typing Adam into existence the contraries that spring to mind are God’s, His nasty habit of banging free will and determinism together in His head. Don’t eat that fruit you’re going to eat, okay? Don’t eat that fruit you’ve already eaten! What was Eden if not an exercise in Divine ambivalence? Another point in my favour, history agrees: at least I’m consistent . . .

When I see gurgling retarded children (that’s God’s doing, by the way, not mine) happily styling their hair with their own stinking mards, I think of Adam in those pre-marital days. I know he’s your great-to-the-nth-degree-granddad and all – but I’m afraid he was rather an imbecile. He strolled around Eden wearing a beatific grin, content with an Everything so undeserved it amounted to Nothing, so filled with unreflective bliss that he might as well have been completely empty. He picked flowers. He paddled. He listened to birdsong. He rolled naked in the lush grass like a bare baby on a sheepskin rug. He slept nights with his limbs thrown wide and his head unrummaged by dreams. When the sun shone, he rejoiced. When the rain fell, he rejoiced. When neither sun shone nor rain fell, he rejoiced. He was a one-speed kind of guy, Adam, until Eve came along.

Now this is going to be hard for you, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to forget the story of Adam getting lonely and asking God for an help meet and God putting him to sleep and forming Eve out of one of his ribs. You’re going to have to forget it for one simple reason (cheer up girls!): it’s flan. The truth is that God had already created Eve – for all I know before He created Adam – and she’d been living quite self-sufficiently in another part of the garden as unknown to her future spouse as he was to her. You’ve got Eden in your heads as some in-need-of-a-trim public garden in Cheltenham. But Eden, not to put too fine a point on it, was fucking huge. Keeping one man and one woman apart wasn’t difficult, and that – ‘presume not the mind of’ etc – was the Old Man’s initial desire.

The first thing to say about Eve is that she was a big improvement on the Adam design, or that Adam was an extremely misguided variation on the Eve design. (Consider testicles. Two concentrated nuclei of absolute vulnerability. Where? Dangling between the legs. I rest my case.) But I’m not just talking about the boobs and the bum, inspired though those innovations were, I’m sure we’re all agreed. She had something Adam didn’t. Curiosity. First step to growth – and if it wasn’t for Eve’s Adam would still be sitting by the side of the pool picking his nose and scratching his scalp, bamboozled by his own reflection. Off in her part of Eden, Eve hadn’t bothered naming the animals. On the other hand she’d discovered how to milk some of them and how best to eat the eggs of others. She’d decided she wasn’t overly keen on torrential rain and had built a shelter from bamboo and banana leaves, into which she’d retire when the heavens opened, having set out coconut shells to catch the rainwater with a view to saving herself the schlep down to the spring every time she wanted a drink. The only thing you won’t be surprised to hear about her is that she’d already domesticated a cat and called it Misty.

There was a strange psychic timbre to Eve, sometimes, as if she sensed herself not entirely pleasing to her Maker. There were moments when, in some narrow tunnel of her being, she felt God’s presence as if she were looking at the back of His head, as if His attention was engaged emphatically and judgementally elsewhere. It made her feel curiously separate.

I – yea, even I, Lucifer – can’t quite explain this frond of selfhood that waved from time to time in the mistrals of Eve’s heart. It wasn’t that she didn’t love God; she did, for vast tracts of time as much as Adam did, constitutionally, reflexively, with all but no sense of being different from Him, penetrated (excuse me) and enfolded by Him almost to the point of dissolution. And yet. And yet, you see . . .? There was something in Eve I can only describe as the first cramped inkling of . . . well, of freedom.

Now how can I put this, economically? She was beautiful. (Adam was no back end of a bus either – the sloe eyes and sculpted cheekbones, the tight buns and chiselled pecs, the abdominals like a cluster of golden eggs – but without Eve’s sliver of personality it was all just a pretty picture.) Perhaps you’ve got some post-Darwinian model in mind, lowbrowed and beefy, with an Amazonian vadge and knuckle-hair; maybe you’ve got some Neanderthalette with an overbite and Brillo bumfuzz. Forget it. All that came later, after expulsion, in the sweat of thy brow with multiplied pains, etc. The Edenic Eve was . . . Well, think Platonic Form. The Beautiful Woman. Another bone I’ve picked with Buonarotti, incidentally. Oh yes, we got Mike downstairs. In fact maybe now’s as good a time as any to tell you: if you’re gay, you go to Hell. Doesn’t matter what else you spend your time doing – painting the Sistine Chapel, for instance – knob-jockey? Down you go. (Lezzers are borderline; room for manoeuvres if they’ve done social work.) The entire masterpiece fuelled by the stiffened brush softened in the wrong pot. Another superb irony lost on His Lordship. Not a titter. Just consigned Michelangelo to my torturous care. Awful shame, really. (Had you going, didn’t I? Don’t, for heaven’s sake, take everything so seriously all the time. Heaven’s bulging with queer souls. Honestly.)

But the bone I’ve had to pick with Mick (it . . . ah . . . hurts when I pick a bone with you, by the way) was over the Eve in his Original Sin. Personal tastes notwithstanding you’d think he’d have made a bit of an effort with the First Woman Ever Created. She makes Schwarzenegger look gym-shy. The actual Eve made today’s creatures (your Troys, your Monroes) crones by comparison. She was inevitable, tight as a Conrad novel, from the fortune of rippling hair to the calyx and corolla of the alert and sulky cunt, from the delta of the midriff to the sacrum’s golden slopes . . . I get carried away. The important thing about her wasn’t her body, it was her awakeness. (I’m sure when I started this passage I had some notion of the flesh functioning as metaphor for the soul’s irresistibility. Bit of a stretch. My apologies. Gunn’s penchant for oily lechery and oilier lyricism infecting me in equal measures. That fraud. How did women stand him?)

It wasn’t love at first sight. They ran into each other one morning in a sunny clearing in the forest. A few moments of stunned silence. ‘Glockenspiel,’ Adam pronounced, thinking (but with terrible doubt) he’d found another animal in search of a name. When Eve approached him, proffering a handful of elderberries, he threw a stick at her and ran away.

They didn’t see each other again for quite some time. It was no skin off Eve’s nose – but Adam couldn’t get her out of his head. It wasn’t desire (micturition aside, the Edenic johnson was as useful as a burst balloon); it was anxiety. No other animal had ever (a) offered him elderberries (or anything else), or (b) looked so . . . so related to him. Not even the orangs, of whom he was especially fond. The memory of her tormented him in the weeks and months that followed – the dark eyes and long eyelashes, the swollen, berry-stained mouth, the incomprehensible arrangement between her legs; most of all the shocking fearlessness, the composure of the fruit-offering, as if he – he, Adam – was a beast to be propitiated or gulled. (Yes, girls, I know: good definition of a man.) He walked in the garden and called on God for reassurance, but God chose inscrutability. (He did that, from time to time, Adam had noticed. Until now he hadn’t questioned it.) His unease grew. He became obsessed with the idea that she’d already named the animals and that his own hard-thought-out monikers were redundant. Obsessed, too, with the notion that all those times God had withdrawn into silence He had in fact been with . . . with her, and this whole concept of his, Adam’s sovereignty was nothing but a . . . but surely that wasn’t possible? Surely he, Adam, was God’s first . . .

He saw her twice more. Once from a distance – he stood at the top of a valley looking down to the river hundreds of feet below, where, having discovered that wood floated, Eve sat straight-backed astride three or four vined-together saplings she’d uprooted, drifting gently on the current – and once at unsettling proximity, when, having slept late before emerging from a cataract-curtained cave he saw her fresh from a dip, supine on a large flat stone, eyes closed, sunlight resting on pubes and eyelashes like tiny spirits. He considered throwing a rock at her, but bottled out and slunk away.

The anxiety – who the fuck? – worsened. He went off his food (she’d spoiled elderberries for him for good) and developed a rash on his ankle. It was a frustrating time for me. I couldn’t believe he couldn’t hear my suggestion that he sneak up on her while she was asleep and bash her head in. I still think what a coup that would have been: Murder in Eden – but it was no good. An appalling waste of paranoia, that period of Adam’s angst. I’ve got subsequent genocide started with less. I tried Eve, too, needless to say. Same deal. Adam lost weight and invented nailbiting. Finally, God took a hand. (Why ‘finally’? What had He been waiting for?) One night He caused Adam to fall into a deep sleep. During this sleep He did three things. First, He brought Eve in a trance to where Adam lay and caused her to fall into a deep sleep by the man’s side. Second, He erased from both their minds all memory of each other. Third, He gave Adam a dream (the first dream, ever, and one which Adam would later remember as a real event) in which he asked God for an help meet and in which God delivered by forming Eve out of Adam’s rib.

You know what I did? I spent the entire night hovering over Eve whispering: ‘Rubbish. Don’t believe it. It’s a story. You’re being brainwashed. It’s lies, lies, lies.’ I concentrated all my energy, every ounce of angelic clout, on that fine filament of her, that faint strand I’d sensed before; I addressed myself only to that.

In the morning – the world’s first conjugal lie-in – it seemed I might as well have addressed myself to the fish in the lake. She woke with her head on his chest and his arms wrapped around her. They looked into each other’s eyes and smiled. ‘Man,’ she said to him. ‘Woman,’ he said to her. ‘My children,’ God said to them both. ‘Oh, please,’ I said (well, hissed, actually, having opted that morning for the body of a python) before slithering away in search of somewhere private where I could hurl my ophidian guts.

It seemed, I said.

Language duly arrived. Proper language, not Adam’s moo-cow and bow-wow rubbish. Verbs, prepositions, adjectives. Grammar. Abstraction. God dropped in on them from time to time, usually with some critter Adam had missed. Tiny, fluttering, multicoloured thing. ‘Butterfly,’ Eve said, while Adam stood pleasantly stumped.

‘Yes,’ Adam said. ‘Butterfly. That’s what I was going to say.’

But Eve’s unease lingered. The post-brainwashing residue of self-sufficiency from the days before Adam’s dream. If me and humankind had a future together I knew it lay in these vestiges of Eve’s independence. Literalist yes-man Adam fed the parrots and sang songs with nerve-jangling tunelessness to God. If Fall II: The Next Generation was ever going to make it out of development and into production, if humans were ever going to be anything more than monkeys on the Divine Grinder’s organ (excuse me again) then it was going to be down to the lady and the tramp.

And therein, my dears, lies the answer to that nagging question: What was I doing in Eden in the first place? God’s got the big martyr death scene written in for Jimmeny. The infinitely self-sacrificing part of His nature demands it, just as the infinitely generative part of His nature demanded the creation of Everything out of Nothing, and just as the infinitely unjust part of His nature demanded the creation of an infinite Hell for finite transgressions. The boy’s motivation for self-sacrifice is the redemption of His Father’s world. The infinitely filial part of His nature demands it. But for redemption there must be freely chosen transgression. Therefore – ta-da! – transgression must feel, at least temporarily, good.

Now ask yourself: Was there anyone better qualified for the job?

He was kidding Himself with Adam and He knew it. Certainly He’d created him free – but in the letter of the law, not its spirit. The infinitely insecure part of His nature had baulked at it, when it came down to it. The infinitely deluded part of His nature had allowed the creation of a role the designated actor would never have the spine to play. The infinitely paradoxical part of His nature had demanded Man’s free choice of sin over obedience whilst creating a man who’d never be man enough to sin. Enter Eve.

And boy did I.