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

Epimetheus was drunker than Bolton, and the actor did indeed have to prop the adman up, as, wavering in and out of blackout, they proceeded to Blore Court by way of Piccadilly Circus.

Sony PlayStations and Nicorette patches; Halifax mortgages and Nokia mobile phones; Coca-Cola and depilatory cream; the giant girlies of a mythic present — apple-cheeked Hesperides, star-fucking Pleiades, Hyades suffering with water retention — rode juggernauts and scaled the sides of buildings in their armour of lights. Cars transformed into robots and duelled down Lower Regent Street, while Eros fired arrows that were tipped with soft-centred milk chocolates.

Epimetheus reeled through the throng, each face a semitransparent pop-up ident swelling in his monitors: clay faces, not yet set, gashes for mouths, indentations for eyes, slick with the water they swigged from plastic bottles, each labelled with a rusty tap-tap-tap graphic. Overhead, the electronic signboards bellied out, their surface tension a deliquescent blare. Clay and water, flesh and.

Blood and bile flowed through the veins of the liverish city; coiled conduits that merged, then branched out into the biliary tree of Soho. In Blore Court the two drunks tumbled through the visceral peritoneum, before being sucked into the porta hepatis. They staggered on the stairs, slammed against the door of Mr Vogel’s long-dormant import business, recovered themselves, fell up the next flight, collapsed through the filthy plywood door — its baize long since gone — and, partially recovering themselves, entered the bar-room with all the nonchalance of five-year-olds stealing biscuits.

Hilary was on his stool by the cash register, an illegal cigarette between washing-up-glove fingers, a vodka and tonic in front of him. Behind the bar, Stevie was slotting a new bottle of Bacardi into an optic, while on the other side the Cunt and the Poof raised their animalistic faces from small pools of alcohol.

The smoking ban had been in force for only a few months, yet witnessing someone smoking in a bar was like seeing an old film. Epimetheus’s lazy eyes rolled down the blue-grey grooves of smoke to where these merged with the inflamed veins networking Hilary’s swollen nose. He looked away, and discovered the Martian deep in conversation with Isobel Beddoes, who, since she had been released from jail in Switzerland, had assumed the position formerly occupied by Her Ladyship. Margery De Freitas, dead drunk for years; now simply dead.

Isobel — known in the Plantation as ‘Come-to-Beddoes’ — was tolerated by Hilary because she had an inheritance to squander. Her miserable devotion to him was another bad joke. Sometimes he made her fuck Jones, the resident cocaine dealer, in return for a gramme for them to split — he and Jones, that is.

There were two or three other members in the club — a Scots sculptor who specialized in Holocaust memorials, a fashion writer for a mid-market tabloid, Cal Devenish, the ailing television personality and one-time literary enfant terrible — but even to Epimetheus’s untutored eye they were an irrelevance. He saw only the old ads for cable-knit cardigans tacked to the bamboo-patterned wallpaper; the gibbous letters of an ancient flyer that bellowed BLACK SABBATH AT THE MARQUEE CLUB; and a tin hoarding showing two cloth-capped kids, their nostrils flared to suck in a meaty ribbon, which had had its slogan customized to read ‘Ah! Cunto’.

‘ ’Allo,’ Hilary said after an age, ‘it’s the fucking Prop — and oo’s this ugly cunt ’e’s got viv ’im, eh?’

Billy tittered and took a slug of his vodka-spiked lager. Bolton swept off his mohair fedora and addressed the company magnilo-quently. ‘Ladies, gentlemen, my residuals are far from negligible, courtesy of this fine and principled advertising executive. I’m in a position to offer you and your leader’ — he half bowed to Hilary — ‘many libations.’

Paper cuts an already raw mucous membrane. Insufflation: the shrapnel blast of cocaine granules. Jostled by flying blood boulders, the tiny colourless creatures embark on the next leg of their fantastic voyage.

Abruptly, in the still, sweaty eye of his drunken storm — and after a score of nights the same — Epimetheus remembered that last night was especially not right. In the small hours, while Pandora whimpered beside him, crazy little grunts falling from her parted lips, he was gripped by an ague so intense that the chains of his dangling bed clinked. He knew it then — he knows it now still more — his body had new visitors, and, unlike so many of the others, these would stay.

The eggy reek of a forehead drenched with feverish sweat, the watery flux of the bowels; if only, Epimetheus thought, this was some earlier era when such supernatural rumblings could be propitiated, when there was a gross, yet effective, match between anatomy and belief. Instead, he would have to make an appointment to see Doc Ben — this, too, impinged, a rock in the maelstrom of alcohol — so that those callused fingers could prod the buttons, make the calls, arrange the further appointments at which Epimetheus’s organs would be peered into by X- and gamma-rays.

‘Oi! You! Ugly cunt — bonehead.’ It was Hilary.

‘Me?’ Epimetheus beheld the ancestral nose.

‘Yeah, you. What’re you ’aving?’

He was having a nervous breakdown — drowning in the splenetic fluids of the Plantation, a hepatocyte in a lobule in a lobe in a liverish city. London, a metropolis that had itself been breaking down cultural toxins and processing rich nutrients for two millennia, yet could only do so by manufacturing hectolitres of bile.

Never before had Epimetheus been so transported by all the rough and scumble of lived life: the blurring of feeling and texture that lay below the slickery of his visuals — an icy surface that human desire skated over, describing figure eights, pound and dollar signs.

‘I said, what’re you FUCKING ’AVING!’

A frozen moment, indeed. Nowadays, Hilary was prone to lashing out, and Stevie was a girl who walked into doors. The Cunt said, ‘Shall I give ’im the old ’eave-’o ’ilary?’ But the Martian, who was fetching his and Come-to-Beddoes’s drinks, took the matter in hand, picking Epimetheus up and lifting him on top of the bar.

For the art director was nothing but a perspex torso, such as are used in pharmaceutical advertisements. His transparent outer layer would allow a camera lens to discover green gall bladder, pink pancreas, blue guts, brown stomach and red liver; all the better to convince the superstitious peasantry — for whom medicine remains a cadet branch of magic — that they should leave their innards to the professionals.

The Martian slipped on a crisp white coat and brandished a pointer; Stevie hurried around arranging the chairs and bar stools for the presentation. The neon tube on the ceiling spluttered, then flared solar, annealing every scumbled thing until it was white-tile-hard and bright. The audience put on the same expressions of serious concern. The Martian picked up a jug of water from the bar and poured some into Epimetheus’s reopened fontanelle; it trickled down, a silver stream that the Martian followed with his pointer, while saying, ‘Pegasys is an injectable form of pegylated interferon alpha. ’The water coursing through his veins and converging on his liver felt icily dangerous — not that Epimetheus, object lesson that he had become, could do a damn thing about it.

‘Success,’ the Martian snapped, ‘you can depend on all the way. Patients in clinical studies, overall, had a better than 50 per cent chance of achieving sustained viral response. Pegasys helps the body’s immune system fight the hepatitis C virus; Pegasys is the most prescribed medication of its kind.’ The small audience was rapt, their eyes following the Martian’s pointer as it tapped first one lurid organ, then the next. Epimetheus’s liver was brimming with bubbling water — his own clever visualization, intended to express the mortal combat of the winged horse and the viral Furies.