This Other Eden (4 page)

All in
all, the Beverly Hills security guys had reason to be nervy. Being a mad gunman
was one of the best paid jobs a talentless nobody would ever get and fame is
universally recognised as the spur. Certainly, in order to get the fame, you
had to be caught and imprisoned, but then the objects of your murderous
careerism were also forced into prison, living as they did behind wire and guns
and leather-clad security men. Yes, their prisons were more comfortable, but
they were prisons none the less.

The
market force.

Nathan could see that the
private cops thought he was a crazie.

‘I’m
not a crazie,’ he said, ‘I’m a British writer named Nathan Hoddy.’

The
cops’ demeanour stiffened noticeably. They fingered their armaments
conspicuously. If crazies were a little crazy, writers were dangerous lunatics;
embittered socially dysfunctional grudge-carriers who had spent so long in
development that they had come to believe that they and their scripts were the
only real things in the world and that everything else was irrelevant fantasy.
The private cops had lost count of the number of writers who had come their
way, armed to the teeth, having decided that the only way to get their projects
through development was to shoot any reader, editor or producer who stood
between them and a green light.

‘A
writer, huh?’ the first guard sneered. ‘Ain’t no casual labour hired here, son.
I believe they’re hiring pump attendants at the gas station ‘bout a mile back.’

The
guards sniggered at the joke. It is a curious facet of the Hollywood obsession
with success and pecking orders that literally everybody in the town, from
studio head to studio cleaner, harbours the same snobberies and prejudices.

‘I hear
Hank Wank’s new picture didn’t open,’ one tramp will remark to another.
‘Overspent and overblown, the studio lost its shirt.’

‘What a
schmuck,’ the other tramp will reply. ‘Always had that guy picked for a loser.’

Nathan
hastened to establish his legitimacy.

‘Yes,
all right, I’m a bloody writer, but I am a writer who has an appointment with
Plastic Tolstoy.’

Nathan
could not help but be pleased as the guards’ manner changed yet again. A crazie
was just a crazie and a writer was of course something which you scraped off
your shoes, but Plastic Tolstoy was a man of stratospheric importance. If, as
is said, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, Plastic Tolstoy could have teased
an erection out of a concrete monk. The man was an industry legend. Not only
did he own a large percentage of the global media, but his company held the
Claustrosphere account and had done since almost the very beginning.
Claustrosphere was the world’s biggest industry, and it was Plastic Tolstoy who
had made it so. Through ruthless, attrition marketing, he had made hermetically
sealed BioSphere environments the biggest single consumer durable of all time.
Bigger than cars, bigger than hamburgers, bigger even than wars. Because every
time Plastic Tolstoy made a sale, he sold a whole world — only a little one —
but a world none the less. A world that some lucky group or individual could
forever call their own.

Plastic
Tolstoy marketed the future, which, of course made him the enemy of the
present. He was PR man for history’s most irresponsible idea. The idea that it
was possible to survive the end of the world.

Chapter
Four

The life of a salesman

Communication
breakdown.

The stricken tanker story
was on the news. Nathan had heard it on his car radio as he drove up towards
Beverly Hills. Plastic Tolstoy saw it fifteen times all at once, standing
before the vast fibre-optically fed information wall that he had had built in
his kitchen.

First
the news, then the adverts. Plastic sipped his coffee and watched.

The
first ad was for snack-food: ‘You know that feeling when you’re hungry as a
horse but you’re also fat as a pig? Donut Heaven understands, which is why
we’re now offering free, on the spot liposuction to any customer who eats
twenty Donuts or more, plus extra frostings! So if you’re feeling hungry
and
fat, why not get down to Donut Heaven… You fill your face, we’ll suck
your butt.’

Plastic
Tolstoy was watching one of the channels on his own Plastic Tolstoy
Communications System. Despite this, his grim, angry expression suggested that
the thing which he had hoped to see had not materialised. Long before the Donut
advert was over, Plastic Tolstoy had patched a multi-call through to his media
co-ordinators and programme controllers.

‘What, in
the name of my mother is happening, excuse me!’ he barked. ‘An oil tanker has
sunk and what do I see first up on the break? On one of my own damn networks,
no less! Donut ads and liposuction! After an
oil tanker has sunk!
You’re
supposed to be ready for this kind of thing!’

What
Tolstoy was upset about was the failure of a classic piece of cross-promotion.
Tolstoy marketed Claustrosphere and he had a policy that, whenever there was an
environmental disaster, the news would instantly trigger a buying programme
within his own media mainframe. The theory behind this shameless abuse of
influence was this: whenever planet death lurched a small step closer, the vast
Tolstoy worldwide audience would be instantly hit with Claustrosphere adverts
playing in heavy rotation. That was the theory; it appeared not to have worked.

‘We’re
up next break, Plastic,’ an anguished employee spluttered over the line. ‘The
Donut people had the space booked and threatened to sue if we shifted them.
They think the end of the world will make people reach for comfort food.’

Plastic
Tolstoy looked back at the screens. Sure enough, the current Claustrosphere
campaign was now showing. A gorgeous sun rising over a geodesic dome and the
simple slogan: ‘Claustrosphere. Who are you to deny your kids a future?’

‘You
see, Chief! You see,’ the anguished employee pleaded. ‘Right there, second
slot. Personally, I think that’s a better placing. More impact.’

‘Listen,
man with no brain, shortly to become man with no job,’ Plastic shouted, ‘when
there’s a disaster we take first slot, OK! Not second, not third, ever. First.
Donuts, for chrissakes! I’m selling people the future here!’

Tommorow’s
man.

It wasn’t a new idea, the
Rat Run mentality with which the human race ushered in the third millennium and
which Plastic Tolstoy marketed with such enthusiasm. It was not the first time
people had taken a good square look at Armageddon and decided that they would
prefer it to happen to somebody else. Ever since Noah built the Ark, the
seductive notion that it is possible to opt out, to stand on the sidelines
whilst global cataclysm passes you by, has exercised a strong pull. Prior to
the First Great Green Scare of the 1980s, it had been nuclear war which seemed
most likely to carry off the human race. Then, people had built fallout
shelters, as they now built Claustrospheres. Although admittedly, not on quite
the same scale.

It was
Jurgen Thor, the man whom many people considered to be the last sane person on
Earth, who had coined the phrase the ‘Rat Run’ to describe that hypothetical
time when people would take refuge in their Claustrospheres. He had appeared on
numerous TV chat-shows, condemning the very idea of Armageddon survival.
Sitting on couches wedged between pop singers and popular authors flogging
their books, he would thunder that Claustrosphere was a terrifyingly dangerous
illusion, a kind of global death-wish madness. He, in his capacity as head of
Natura, the World Environmental Party, had taken a civil action against
Claustrosphere all the way to the US Supreme Court, attempting to question the
very legality of marketing a product which, he claimed, encouraged planet
death. It was then that Plastic Tolstoy and Jurgen Thor had first crossed
swords. Jurgen Thor had called Plastic Tolstoy a salesman of doom. Plastic
Tolstoy had told Jurgen Thor to lighten up.

‘Hey,
survival is a commodity,’ Tolstoy had said. ‘People should be allowed to buy it
just like anything else.’

Claustrosphere
won the case.

Plastic’s
mother.

Plastic Tolstoy was named
Plastic by his mother, who thought that plastic was the most beautiful material
on Earth.

‘Wood
will always be wood and stone will always be stone,’ she would say. ‘But
plastic can be anything, anytime, anywhere.’

‘It’s
cheap and it’s common,’ grumbled her husband.

‘So am
I,’ Mrs Tolstoy would reply. ‘So is rock’n’roll.’ Then she would peer down at
her son, asleep in his cot, and say again, as she always did, ‘Plastic can be
anything, anytime, anywhere, my darling. And so can you.’

Mrs
Tolstoy was Professor of Popular Culture at the University of Disney World in
Florida. It was there that she had developed the thesis for her best-selling
book
The King is Not Dead,
which demonstrated conclusively that Elvis
did not die. He could not have died, Mrs Tolstoy asserted, because he had in
fact never existed. The meticulous detail with which she documented and then
disproved every single sighting of the King between the years 1935 and 1977
(the period of his supposed ‘life’) obsessed the nation for nearly a whole morning.

Mrs
Tolstoy used the revenue from her book to set up a school of modern art,
dedicated to the principle that the Barbie Doll was greater sculpture than the
Venus de Milo, and that a reproduction of a great painting was of more value
than the original. As she explained, with an original all you got was a
painting, whereas a reproduction could also be a tablecloth, an apron, indeed,
anything one cared to print it on.

Don’t judge a book by
its contents.

Plastic was his mother’s
son, but his eye was better than hers. Whilst she worshipped populism via its
products, he saw that the real beauty lay in that which surrounds the products,
the marketing. It was a lesson he learnt early on, as he often explained to the
numerous documentary film-makers who were endlessly doing documentary films
about his life.

‘I was
at this kid’s party, you know? With the clown and cakes and the abuse therapist
and stuff. Anyway, we all got a present of a toy gun. Brand new, still in the
box, right? Well, let me tell you, those boxes were big! And the picture on
them? Wow! A marine blasting away with an M16! We were in heaven. So we open
the boxes, right? And of course there’s this tiny, shitty little toy inside and
all the other kids think they’ve been ripped off. But not me, I didn’t think
so. All I could think of was how beautiful that box was! It looked so big and
exciting, it had fooled us all. I lost the toy that same day, but I kept the
box a long time.’

Plastic
had realised the great truth. A truth he would later embody in his First Law of
Attrition Marketing. That law said that almost everything anybody ever buys is
crap: instant noodles, four-wheel drive-trucks with huge wheels, vaginal
deodorants. Anyone can produce any amount of crap, Tolstoy would later explain,
in his famous educational video entitled
Selling: My Soul,
the clever
part is to get someone to buy it.

‘Listen,’
the video explained, ‘the world is one big marketplace full of people buying
and selling useless, shitty stuff that nobody ever dreamt they wanted. So why
do they buy it? Because, while the product may be ugly, the marketing is
beautiful. You don’t believe me? Turn it round, consider trying to sell a truly
great product but with useless, shitty marketing. You couldn’t do it, right?
The message is the only thing that counts.’

At the
age of twelve Plastic Tolstoy made his first million. He had been pondering the
delight with which his friends searched for the little snap-together toys
hidden in their cereal boxes.

‘Toys
in cereals, that’s great,’ the boy Plastic thought, ‘but timid.’

So he
wrote to the manufacturers, suggesting that they reverse the ratio and market
boxes full of snap-together plastic toys with a free cornflake hidden amongst
them. Kids went crazy for it.

Plastic
always considered himself fortunate to have been young and impressionable when
the great Cola wars of the 1990s erupted on screens and in shopping malls. He
watched with childlike wonder as two nearly identical drinks made of carbonised
water and flavoured with vegetable extracts indulged in a worldwide orgy of
aggressive saturation marketing which became
in itself
a multi-billion
dollar industry. The name was sold, the image was sold, the history was sold.
Eventually, people actually began to forget about the drink because
the
marketing had become the product.
Young Plastic watched in starstruck awe
as Pepsi and Coke actually marketed their own marketing. It was beautiful.