Will Self - Liver - A Fictional Organ With a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes

‘Are you OK?’ Epimetheus whispers, but Zeus booms, ‘You look like shit! What’s wrong with you?’ Other late lunchers peer up from their tripe and their oysters.

While his partner was away it’s been a difficult five minutes for Epimetheus. At first, he tried to divert Zeus with talk of other accounts the agency handles: Devo, the giant Korean electronics corporation; Prosser and Beadle, tea merchants by Appointment; Lickstep Sportswear — but the tycoon wasn’t impressed. Nor was he impressed by Epimetheus’s talk of ‘meaningful effectiveness data’ and ‘household penetration’. Epimetheus may art-direct, but his real passion is the quantitative and qualitative evaluation of advertising: looking back to the immediate past and judging how true has been the flight of cupidity’s dart.

Zeus is so ineffably bored that he examines his nails. For the first time he takes in his companion’s shady cheeks and the raw circles under Epimetheus’s eyes. This, he troubles to conclude, is not merely the creative dishevellment of adland; this scumbag looks like he was up all night snorting coke with some whore . Epimetheus is on the verge of making a complete fool of himself, blethering on about ‘interacting via text, phone or red button’, when Prometheus is back, and gulping down water.

‘It’s nothing, really,’ he gulps up. ‘I’m fine.’

It’s always like this in the first few minutes after the vulture has been feeding on him. There’s a near-catastrophic collapse of Prometheus’s system. His blood pressure plummets; the remaining portion of his liver, his gall bladder and his pancreas all swell with bile, threatening to rupture. Then comes a spasm, as of an anaconda choking down its own tail. Then the adman’s internal organs right themselves and he begins to spiel, talking better than ever, quip after riff after sly dig, all accompanied by charming jerks of his handsome head.

Ah, Prometheus, he has the great salesman’s knack of being able to convince whomever he transfixes in his charm-beam that he really does want to be their friend; and, moreover, that his amity is something keenly to be desired, a passport to carefree sunny uplands — a larger commercial featuring baking-hot pool surrounds, convertibles sweeping along a generic corniche, tipsy dawn serenades beneath the balconies of rapacious Rapunzels. and more — much more.

‘OK,’ Zeus silences Prometheus. ‘You can do the fucking water, and you jokers can come on the roster.’

Both admen begin to thank him, but Zeus chops them down: ‘Yeah, yeah, don’t get overexcited, there’s a poxy spend on this one, and you’re gonna have to deal with my people, who’ll cut the deal with the media house. There’s no percentage in it for you shysters. And, while we’re at it, I don’t want one penny wasted — and I want results!’

Then he’s up and toddling among the tables — there is no other word for the muleless rider — towards the glassed partition separating the restaurant from the bar-cum-bakery, where bankers with unsustainable levels of personal debt dab at olive oil with cubes of bread. Zeus pays the bill en route, standing by the maître d’s plywood podium punching digits into the card-reader.

Next he’s gone, and it isn’t until then that Prometheus realizes the tycoon hasn’t so much as nodded to his own daughter.

In recent weeks Prometheus has found himself contemplating this fine madness: that he was born out of Athene’s head, in a wobbling caul, from which his features — like the bonnet of an implausibly high-performing mid-range saloon car — stretch towards the future. But this is absurd. He was fully formed when they met; thirty-five, well educated — no mere Hoxton haircut with a grab-bag of thefts masquerading as creativity. And yet. her energy, the kissing slap of her buttocks against his thighs, the report of her thought in his mind. She was yet quicker than him, she had twists of phrase that left him spinning, unable to retort — how could this be?

In private members’ clubs and minimalist bars, in restaurants with anorexic decor, and at plumply uncomfortable country house hotels in the Cotswolds where horse brasses neigh from the walls, Prometheus applies the bellows to his soul-forge. There’s no tight-mindedness in him at all, no ability to guard his ideas, he gives of all and to all freely.

‘What we advertise’, he says, ‘is nothing much — things, and the things people do. But what we do , matey, that’s the real McCoy, the full-fucking-monty. See, when a punter sees what we do , likes what we do , he begins to desire our ads more than the things — and the things people do — that they’re selling. At that exact moment the whole fucking gig catches fire, because now the punter wants ads — covets them; wants to be in that mytho-bloody-logical realm where a guy can strap on a pair of homemade wings and fly, or a chick can comb snakes outta her hair — real ones! — with the right kind of conditioner.’

Prometheus’s voice, that’s his weapon. What he says? Well, on the page it looks like any other copy for the same old pitch: nothing for money. But his voice — it dips and soars and writhes its way into his listeners. His notes are deep or high, his tone rough or smooth, his accent posh with a street edge, or street with a layer of posh tar.

‘One per cent of GDP! One poxy per cent! We can do way better than that ; after all, we’re growing all the time, mutating — business to business, virals, naming rights ferchrissakes. One day soon. ’ He pauses all eyes on him; his aptitude is such that once you’re fixed on Prometheus you cannot look away. You covet him. ‘. one of us — and I’m not necessarily saying it’s gonna be me — is gonna figure out a way of selling advertising directly to the consumer — ’ His ceaseless movement, his jiggling and darting, suggests not nervousness but unbridled potency. ‘Social networking is only the beginning — some time soon, every man, woman and child is gonna become their own agency. Then it’ll be 2 per cent, 5 per cent — way more than defence spending; the billings, my friends, will be astro-fucking-nomical!’

The whiplash of his upper body reels them in, while Prometheus’s piercing, square eyes give those that look upon him the paradoxical feeling that it’s he who is searching for the best angle from which to view them.

But that was now — and this, also, is now. Athene’s heart-shaped face is annotated by her black curls; her torso is armoured in gold lamé. Even from forty feet away, glimpsed among cotton trunks and woollen boughs, Prometheus experiences a voyeuristic thrill. Oh! To be her friend, to be privy to those girly secrets and party to that caressing mockery.

Athene stands and whips the cloth from her table so swiftly that plates, glasses and cutlery all remain in place. She slings the cloth around her shoulders and shimmies up the aisle. Other women arise in her train, whip off their tablecloths and don them. Their abandoned lunch companions drum on the tables and howl a Bacchanalian jingle: ‘Oooh-ooh, you can’t stop the children of the revolution!’

Athene slips the linen off her shoulder and arm — they’re naked; her high-kicking legs are bare as well. All the sashaying women are naked beneath their robes, robes they hold up in front of themselves to make targets for the cannonade of food the sous-chefs are firing from tiny tungsten mortars. Tripe splodges, langoustines clatter, kedgeree disintegrates into rice shot and fishy shards.

The maître d’ pushes forward a washing machine, and, as Athene sheds her soiled raiment, the other dancers strike arty poses to preserve her modesty. She stuffs the tablecloth into the machine, it hums, shudders and spits it out — all within seconds. It’s cleaner than a void.