The Devil in Detail, page 12
In order to facilitate that task I decided to walk to Asda, partly because I had run out of bread, eggs and various other vital food supplies, and partly because I thought it might be wise to stock up on cheap wine, just in case the Devil was going to make further demands on my hospitality. I wanted to save the last bottle of Pinot Noir from Boulogne for a possible celebration, if **** ran true to form and decided to come back again, at least for a while.
As it happens, she eventually did—ten more times in the course of a further decade, in fact—before she finally vanished forever into the toils of divorce, but that would be another story, and one that will remain forever untold, because it is essentially devoid of interest, significance and incapable of any possible influence on the dark or light mind of anyone.
Asda was a mile and a half away from home, mostly along the aptly-named Wilderness Road, so it took approximately half an hour to walk there and slightly longer to walk back carrying a rucksack full of supplies. I knew every step of the way by heart so I could do it on automatic pilot, and I always found it a useful opportunity for cogitation and for doing the kind of work that writers have to do when they are not actually tapping keys—the sort of work that no writer’s spouse will ever believe that he or she is doing, that it needs doing, or even that it can be done, which is why the divorce rate among writers is so much higher than average.
But I digress. On that Wednesday, I devoted the half hour spent walking to Asda and the half hour return journey to thinking about what I was going to tell the Devil, if he condescended to return that night, in order to fulfill my part of the pact. I knew that the only benefit I was likely to get out of it, if any benefit were possible at all, was personal—that the only person on whose dark mind I had any real chance of having even the slightest influence was my own—but I didn’t want to go into the situation in that frame of mind. I wanted to think like a writer, of constructing arguments that might have some kind of rhetorical or persuasive force, provided that they were cast in an appropriate form.
What I mean by an appropriate form is, essentially, an elliptical form. The truth requires its own rhetoric, far more than lies, because the truth, unlike lies, doesn’t have its own persuasiveness already built in. Lies are intended to persuade and deceive, and are designed from scratch with that purpose. The truth isn’t designed to persuade—because the truth simply is, and is therefore designed by the Cosmic Mind, simply to be. It has to be discovered, and when it is, it often turns out to be difficult, frequently absurd and usually not very persuasive at all, on the surface.
The best way, and perhaps the only way, to make the truth palatable, let alone persuasive, is to formulate it as fiction, as fable, parable, comedy, satire or tragedy. Not all writers want to tell the truth, of course, and those who only want to tell people what they want to hear—which is, let’s face it, the only way to appeal to a lot of readers—are usually liars, but even they usually have sufficient conscience to want to slip a little truth in there surreptitiously, because they are, after all, writers, and would have chosen to do something else if they did not have that raison d’être.
So, while trying to work out what answer to give the Devil if and when our conversation resumed and our pact was completed, I was already thinking of various ways that it might be cast in fictional form, and made into a story—not the one you are reading at present, obviously, as I knew full well that no one in 1997 would ever condescend to publish this one. I knew that I would have to wait for a new era of small press publication to become economically viable, or for self-publication to become much easier, if it were ever to be worth the effort of telling it like it actually was rather than simply reproducing the bare bones of the tale of the haunted bookshop as a kind of quirky joke.
“The most important thing of all,” I said to the imaginary Devil by way of rehearsal of what I might say to the one who, although non-existent, was nevertheless real and material, “is to undermine the supposed certainties of the dark mind. The most vital thing is to adopt a strategy of opposition to the obvious. Whatever seems to be unassailable needs to be challenged. Only by first weakening the existing supportive structures of the dark mind can it be prepared for evolution and metamorphosis. Cynicism is vital; without the spread of cynicism, as widely and as deeply as possible, no progress is even conceivable. Wherever there is certainty, we must sow doubt, and wherever there is optimism, we must sow fear. Otherwise, we’ll simply be stuck in the conservative mind—which, believe me, does not have the redemptive potential of the dust of Glofeydd Diafol.
“We must pay attention not merely to the content of the stories that we tell and try spread but also to the form and narrative strategy. The deadliest of all diseases of fiction is the standard story-arc that concludes a story by reversing or compensating for some distortion introduced in the course of the plot by means of an apparent return to normality—what the technical jargon calls a ‘happy ending.’ The first duty of a serious writer, and hence of a serious Devil, is to undermine the mythology of the ‘happy ending,’ to defeat and defy the feelgood factor that slyly suggests to readers that they ought to feel joyful if things are returned to ‘normal,’ and to assert instead that only a transformation and transcendence of normality can really qualify as a satisfactory or interesting conclusion.
“The endings of stories, and hence the stories themselves, ought to suggest insistently and repetitively, and should assert as cleverly as humanly possible, that consciousness should never be so light-minded as to be satisfied with normality, that it should always be striving for something different, because there is no other way of exploring the possibility of something better. There is nothing wrong with levity, which is inherently opposed to gravity, but light minds should be buoyant, not insubstantial, and they should never be content.
“That ought to become the basic strategy of future temptation, the first objective of future mischief. It is, by definition, the Devil’s work, and the writer’s duty, and it is the manner in which you and I ought to work in collaboration, in future.”
I stopped there, not because I couldn’t go on—believe me I can go on and on and on—but because it pays to keep things simple, and take things one step at a time. Enlightenment is an intrinsically slow process, and more haste sometimes leads to less speed, or even to overheating and breakdown.
In any case, I had reached home again, and my headache had come back in no uncertain manner. I was in dire need of three paracetamol and a lie down before dinner.
CHAPTER XI
I didn’t actually get as far as the bed before the telephone rang. I was strongly tempted to let it ring until the answerphone condescended to take it, but the ringtone seemed particularly grating, so I picked it up.
“Hello,” I said.
“Mr. Stableford?”
“Yes,” I said, warily. The age of nuisance callers had already begun, even though it hadn’t reached the plague proportions it has attained today.
“It’s Penny, from the SPR. We met on Monday, for the vigil at Martin’s bookshop, and we both volunteered for the experiment at the university next week.”
“Indeed,” I said, surprised. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you, but I wanted to ask you whether you were feeling okay. I think you were right, you see, about there being something in the bookshop that might make us ill. I seemed to be all right once I got back into the fresh air, but….”
For a moment, I actually thought she was going to say that she had met the Devil—but that, of course, was absurd. If she had, there was absolutely no way that she would say so, especially to me.
“Well,” she continued, after a slight pause, her Welsh accent coming out more strongly as embarrassment took hold, “the long and the short of it is that I’m not feeing too clever today, and I’ve seen Martin, who looks distinctly the worse for wear. I phoned Lionel, but he’s his usual self—nothing gets him down—but I thought…just to complete the picture…I ought to see how you are.”
“Actually,” I confessed, “I’ve got a terrible headache. It’s partly my own fault—I had a drink last night, trying to dispel a vague feeling of being under the weather, and I think that made things worse. I don’t think it’s anything serious, though. It could be a virus, or it could be fungal spores or something else I breathed in while we were in the shop, but I’m sure it will pass.”
Unlike the Devil, I lie all the time.
“Right,” she said. “I thought, being a biologist, that you might have some idea of what it is…given that, as there are three of us feeling under the weather, it’s probably not psychosomatic.”
“I can’t offer any specific hypothesis, I’m afraid,” I told her, “but as I say, I don’t think the symptoms are serious, and it will probably pass…as least so far as you and I are concerned, and probably Martin too.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll see how I feel tomorrow. Claire Louchon dropped round, but she doesn’t seem worried either.”
It took me a few seconds to realize that Claire Louchon must be Axel Castle’s collaborator. “Oh, no,” I said, “I’m sure it will have cleared up be next week. I’m coming to Pontypridd on Tuesday, but I assume I won’t see you there, as they can only do one volunteer at a time.”
“That’s right,” she said. “You’re before me, then—my first session is set for Thursday. It sounds interesting, although I must confess that I can’t actually believe that it’s really going to put us in telepathic contact with the Cosmic Mind.”
“I don’t think telepathy is what they’re aiming at,” I observed. “It’s more a matter of trying to stimulate neural connections inducing an alternative state of consciousness—something akin to nirvana. The reference to the Cosmic Mind is just a metaphor, so far as I can judge from what Axel told me.”
“Right,” she said. “Claire was a bit vague. She didn’t want to put ideas into my head, she said, in case it prejudiced my expectations. She muttered something about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, but I think she just meant the act of observation influencing the properties of the observed—the curse of psychological and sociological research, as they used to say at the LSE.”
“I used to say the same when I was teaching at Reading,” I told her. “Personally, I think that referencing the Cosmic Mind is a blunder on Axel’s part. He should have made up some opaque jargon that would just sound like gobbledygook to the guinea-pigs. Not that suggestive prejudice of that sort will affect me, of course.”
“Of course not,” she said, sounding less than entirely convinced. “Well, even if I don’t see you, good luck with it.”
“Thanks,” I said. It seemed only polite.
“Bye,” she said, and rang off.
I was intrigued by the call—not so much by anything she’d said as because she’d made it. It would have been easy enough for her to get my number from Lionel if she’d spoken to him, so she hadn’t gone to any real trouble, but she must actually be more worried about her condition than she had let on, and if, as she suggested, Martin had had something of a relapse, perhaps while trying to tidy up after me in the upstairs room, then the bookshop might indeed by measurably toxic, albeit not literally haunted.
I was almost tempted to ring Martin myself, to find out more about what he’d been doing in the shop and exactly what the effects were. I knew, though, that if he had seen any kind of hallucination, the chances of his spelling out the details to me were very thin…although he might spell them out to Lionel if he went back to the idea of a precautionary exorcism.
I decided, on reflection, that it could probably wait until next week, when Lionel, who would doubtless keep up to date with the situation, could fill me in one the remainder of the story.
I did have a nap thereafter, and I ate dinner late again, as I had on the previous night. I felt considerably better afterwards, so the nap had obviously helped. Once again, thanks to the summer schedule, there was nothing on TV that I wanted to watch, so, when I’d washed up, I went back into the front room intending to pick up my neglected book.
Once again, I had hardly begun to reach for it when I became aware of the Devil sitting in the same armchair, in the same relaxed attitude, wearing the same red cravat.
“I wasn’t sure that I’d see you again,” I said.
“I wasn’t sure that I’d see you,” he countered, “but here we are.”
“It’s very kind of you,” I said, “considering all the things you must have to do, to pay so much heed to a soul as mediocre as mine.”
“You don’t mean that,” he observed, accurately, in a neutral tone.
“Sorry,” I said, insincerely. “I’ve been thinking hard all day, though, about the way to conclude our pact, and I think I’ve worked out an argument that might satisfy its terms.”
“I know,” he said, “I’ve been listening in on your thoughts from the shadows of your mind. To be perfectly honest, though, I know all of that pseudointellectual bullshit already, and I’d really rather you didn’t bother with any of it. I know that you’re a writer, but without meaning to be insulting, even humble creators of that petty sort do have a tendency to be a little too self-involved and intellectually self-indulgent, which I find rather trying, vanity- and vexation-wise. That isn’t what I wanted to ask you about at all, as you’d have discovered if you hadn’t started throwing up all over the place. Could you possibly open one of the bottles you bought at Asda, by the way? I won’t be so impolite as to ask you to open the Pinot Noir that you want to save, even though you won’t be needing it for a couple of months.”
“Are you saying now that you can foretell the future?” I asked.
“No, but I’m a good judge of probabilities. I also know that you bought the wine in case I came back, even though you know perfectly well that it’s not my favorite tipple, so you can’t have any rational objection to opening it.”
“You won’t mind if I don’t join you, though. I need a sober evening.”
“I won’t mind at all,” he assured me, perhaps with the ghost of a smile.
I opened a bottle, but only brought one glass, just to make sure that I avoided temptation—at least to the extent that such avoidance might be possible while negotiating with the Devil.
I filled the glass for him, and then abandoned the bottle to his own devices. It was Australian Shiraz, perfectly drinkable but a little more full-bodied than the wines I usually preferred.
“Well,” I said to him, “if you aren’t interested in my theories regarding the progressive education of the unconscious, what were you about to ask me when malaise intervened?”
“I was about to ask you what you think I ought to have done about Lucile?”
The extent to which one can be caught by surprise by a figment of one’s own imagination is really quite surprising.
“Lucile?” I echoed, taken aback.
“The young woman in the story that I told you about,” he reminded me. “The one who became infatuated with me, effectively betting her heart on me.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s not a problem I’ve ever had to deal with.”
“It is now,” he said. “Hypothetically, at least. What should I have done? I did tell her the truth, remember. I didn’t make any false promises. Should I have rejected her when I left the house, do you think, on the grounds that breaking her heart then would be somehow kinder than breaking it later?”
“You could have refrained from breaking it at all,” I pointed out.
“Not forever,” he pointed out, “or even for her lifetime. I could only refrain in the short term, in fact, by maintaining a pretence that was becoming increasingly burdensome as well as transparent, and which would soon have been obvious not merely to her but to everyone else, given my essential honesty. Do you really think that there was any way that she could have been preserved for very long from catastrophic disappointment?”
“Perhaps not,” I admitted, warily.
“I’m not saying that it wasn’t my fault, of course,” the Devil, “although you might well have attempted denial, if you ever had been in my position. Unfortunately, as the personification of temptation, I can hardly deny responsibility for the fact that she was tempted, into a situation that had no exit.”
“It’s a puzzle,” I admitted. “I’m afraid that I don’t have an answer. Personally, on the rare occasions that I write love stories, they tend to end tragically or perversely, but you already know all about my manifesto for the abolition of happy endings. It’s not what I once hoped for in real life, of course, but that’s merely a reflection of the extent to which the odds are stacked in the configuration of reality. I’m older and wiser now.”
He didn’t seem to want to discuss Schopenhauerian philosophy, even though the extent of my acquired wisdom was supposedly the whole point of our conversation, and the substance of our pact. I was disappointed, although admittedly not disastrously so.
“What about Jesus?” he asked.
“What about Jesus?” I riposted, again taken by surprise.
“Do you think that I gave him the right advice in suggesting that he ought to settle for the world, and life, and everyday compensations, instead of pursuing his supposedly divine mission?”
I was very tempted to reply that, given my estimation of the manner in which the odds are stacked against the likelihood that the compensations of everyday life would have delivered anything resembling happiness, it probably wouldn’t have mattered much, but that would have been unfair, as even a bad marriage can only lead to metaphorical crucifixion—believe me, I know—and literal crucifixion is definitely several orders of magnitude worse. So I answered the question seriously, once I’d given it a few moments’ thought.
