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

I don’t know what you’d call it. Goin’ Loco Down in Acapulco – except it wasn’t Acapulco, it was London. A farewell binge, I suppose. Tying one on. A bender. A spree. I’d half a mind to kill the last week in Manhattan, but the jetlag would’ve slowed me down and every hour was precious; by the end of the week in London, it just felt like I’d half a mind. First thing I did was e-mail the bulk of this to Betsy with instructions to read it and whiz it out to the usual suspects ASAP. If the thought of slipping out of Gunn’s bones hadn’t entailed the thought of excruciating pain I’d have dropped in bodilessly on the head honchos at Picador or Scribner or Cape or whoever the fuck, to work the necessary chicanery; but the memory of my big ouch over the Aegean was still fresh. No need to repeat that before I absolutely have to. Anyway the point is I let myself go. Man did I let myself go. Have you had flambéed mangoes? There are so many flowers in my room now that I can’t handle more than three XXX-Quisite girlies without crashing into a vase or bruising a blossom. I’ve prowled the city’s parks and yards day and night molesting odours of every stripe, from freshly laundered bed sheets to the diarrhoea of dogs. I’ve fist-fought in Soho (I won, perhaps not surprisingly – come a long way since the night with Lewis and his beard) and bungeed over the Thames. I’ve snuffled and retched my way through three grand’s worth of Bolivian Breeze, dropped E, acid, speed, shot up, tuned in, turned on and passed out. I’ve been ravished by the warm wind and rinsed by the rain. Blood is a juice of quality most rare . . . Oh I’ve manhandled, I have, stone, water, earth, flesh . . . Yesterday night I swam in the sea. Don’t laugh – at Brighton, where the pier’s lively fug (candyfloss, mussels, hot dogs, popcorn) and delirious soundtrack dropped the nukes of Gunn’s childhood in my head, tipping me momentarily off balance. I swam out and flipped onto my back like a seal pup. The water was a dark and salty slick, the sky diagrammed with myth. I got depressed as hell (not to mention cold as hell – five seconds of warm bliss when I emptied Gunn’s bladder) hanging there all alone and looking back to the seafront’s chain of lights. Nearly drowned, too, as a matter of fact, what with that coke nod-out when I should have been kicking back to shore. Where would that have left us, I wonder? (I wonder a lot, these days. You must spend your whole lives at it, this wondering game.) But time – this New Time, how it flies – has done what time will do. Every hour, no matter how mighty the wall of your dread, comes through . . .

The funk, the jive, the boogie, the rock and roll .. . . the weight of the body draws it down, to the dirge of the dark cortège. This won’t do, for you or for me. Tomorrow is clocking-off day, and after a week of extremes, I find myself strangely drawn to the predictable smallness of the Clerkenwell flat. There are unique comforts, it seems, in the most lifeless crannies of life: the tinkle of the spoon in the cup; the kettle-fogged pane; the floor’s worn poem of ticks and groans; the PC’s unjudgemental hum; the fan’s feeble campaign against London’s summer of bruisers and thugs. (I don’t think Gunn’s body’s very well at the moment. The whites of his eyes contain startled capillaries and spooked pupils. His back’s killing me and his teeth itch. The skull’s ducts rattle and creak with mucus and even Harriet would think twice before letting this mossed and maculate tongue anywhere near her sensitive parts.) Besides, I need somewhere quiet to think, and to finish this at least.

Think if it were true. It isn’t true, obviously, but there’s a masochist in here that will have his fifteen minutes. Can’t. . . cannot be true. But think if it were true. A comfortable life – Mr Mandros would do as a decompression chamber, a comfort zone, a kind of arrivals lounge facility – no real theoretical objection to living it with moderate ethical decency; plenty to enjoy in the perceptual realm that wouldn’t land me in jail or send me to the chair – you know: tulips; kissing; snow; sunsets; journeys; and so to death, the obligatory purgative stint, then home. Home.

Home? How long has that word meant anything other than Hell? Which reminds me, there is still the matter of. . . ah . . . There is still, vividly, the memory of what the incorporeal version of my existence felt like last week. In other words how much it fucking killed. Can’t help thinking that’s left me in a bit of a corner. Should have seen that coming sooner. Should have kept myself in shape with regular nights off from the body. Should have done shifts.

Course I’m going on like this as if I’m even considering it. Considering staying on, I mean. Considering being Declan Gunn. Course I’m going on like this as if there won’t shortly be wheels of a very different kind in cacophonous motion. Course I’m . . .

Well.

I’m not turning any of the lights on in the flat. The hot gloom and steady rain comfort me. Like Hydra’s sunlight and silence, they let me drift into dream. Thunderstorms since the early hours. Never really seen storms from your end. Don’t they make you doubt what you learned at school? Don’t you hear thunder and think: all that atmosphere stuff, it’s cobblers; the sky’s made of iron that sometimes shifts and grumbles, billion-ton slabs and plates forced through the same tectonic trials as earth, yielding this, this skyquake. Oh yes, it’s been up to spectacular tricks since the small hours has the weather. I watched the lightning revealed in glimpses, the sky’s shocking varicosis. The rain’s been racing earthwards as if with some religious or political fanaticism. The clouds have the look of dark internal bleeding. Surely you lot look up from Cosmo while this sort of thing’s going on? Surely you take a Playstation break?

I forget myself. Of course you don’t. Of course you don’t. I’ve put a lifetime’s work into making sure you don’t. How could I possibly forget?

In the summertime, when the weather is . . . How these minutes fly! Six minutes past six, the fifth second morphing digitally into the sixth just as my eyes focused. Little red numbers in the darkness. Is somebody pulling my leg here? Betsy’s going to have to cut this. I don’t have the time to