Arms Race (14 page)

Anorexia, he said.

Excuse me?

It's good, he said, but she's too plump. She looks normal. Starve her for a month
and shoot it again—then it'll get interesting. Hell, starve the boa constrictor for
a month as well. Then you'll sell some drinks.

Without waiting to be asked, he slid into the booth beside me, drank my whisky and
bombarded me with questions about the advertising world. It was seriously dark in
that bar but he kept his sunglasses on. He jumped chaotically from one topic to
another and I remember thinking: he talks like a kid on a sugar high browses the
net. I could barely keep up. Before I knew what I was doing, I'd taken him back to
the office to meet Mary McGowan, our CEO. He took off his shades to reveal these
strange pale-green eyes, crackling with bandwidth. He looked straight at Mary and
smiled. She hired him on the spot.

For a while there, before we took over the world, life was much the same at the agency.
I was solid, Slick was a whizz kid, but who cared? Advertising's full of these punks.
They come on strong and burn out fast. Sure, his campaign for Audi showed talent.
Leaving bullet-riddled A5 sedans outside foreign embassies sold a lot of cars. But
Slick was from a family of see-you-in-hell Catholics from the western suburbs. All
he'd had for stimulus was the Bible and the internet. I gave him a year, tops.

Then that BP rig blew a million litres of crude over the Gulf of Mexico's face. Birds
and fish died in their millions, and whole towns and industries went belly-up. It
was a public-relations disaster. When we came in one morning to find BP's Director
of Global Marketing in the foyer, a ripple of excitement went round the office. This
was going to be lucrative.

The BP guy was Jim Bacon. Most marketing directors are so cheerful you want to stab
them. Jim looked old and tired. BP's stock had crashed, they were up for a trillion
in federal damages and they'd had to stop advertising their green credentials in
National Geographic
. Worst of all, there was still a stinking black oil slick out
there killing their business. They were desperate to clean up their image.

Jim told us he wanted a southern-hemisphere campaign to win support for their clean-up
efforts. He'd liked our work for Audi. When he found out that was Slick's idea, he
asked the kid to come in.

He's just a junior, I said.

Jim waved his hand. Bring him in.

Slick wandered into the boardroom and listened to what Jim had to say. Then he pushed
his ridiculous lank fringe out of his face, looked Jim in the eye and started asking
questions.

Who's doing your campaign in the States?

How's that working out so far?

What's your total budget?

What's your best-case scenario?

He listened to Jim's answers then said, like it was the most natural thing in the
world: You need to fire all your other agencies, and give the whole campaign to us.
You give it to us and we'll make that oil slick go away. It'll be the most ambitious
campaign in the history of advertising. Ever.

For the next hour Slick outlined his plan. I don't know if he was making it up or
channelling it from on high, but the rest of the world disappeared, and there was
just Slick's voice and a weird electricity in the air.

The problem, he said, is that no one has ever gone all the way. People complain there's
too much advertising. The problem is there isn't enough. Given what's possible, every
campaign to date has been piecemeal and half-arsed. You might sell a few more toasters,
but you quit before you've ever really started.

The secret is to expand your view of what's possible. We don't just do web or viral
or TV or film or print or politics or bribes or school sponsorship, or whatever.
We do all of them and more; we do things that haven't even been invented yet. No
one will escape this campaign. It'll be an oil slick of information. With my ideas
and the size of your budget we can make history. We can
unmake
history. Give the
job to us and no one will ever remember there was an oil slick. No one. Not even
you.

It was a hell of a pitch. We sat in silence. No one's iPhone rang. Jim Bacon's stunned
expression thawed into
a grin, and he nodded. He went into the hallway and made some
calls. It was on.

After that, the madness. Our boardroom became a war room. We ate, slept and drank
the oil slick. It started with a viral smear campaign
against
BP. The allegations
were ingenious: napalm attacks on protest vessels, Blackwater contractors torturing
seagulls and posting the photos to Facebook, political conspiracies we'd made up
that later turned out to be true. We recruited, at one point, thirty-two per cent
of all American college students to talk incoherently about the oil slick at parties.
Slick even commissioned season six of
The Wire
, set in the Gulf of Mexico but without
once mentioning the spill.

My strongest memory from this period is of the nightly strategy meetings. Come two
a.m. you'd find a dozen of us at the boardroom table in our singlets, drinking Scotch
and throwing round ideas. Slick watched over us with a beatific smile and a knowing
twitch of the mouth.

Which option should we choose? we'd ask, and his answer was always the same.

All of them.

Two months in, something began to shift. Public opinion dipped, then rose a little,
then plummeted. I started to worry. Petrol stations were bottled, yet share prices
rose,
and then a truckload of rotting sea turtles was dumped in the lobby of BP's
New York headquarters. No one else at the agency seemed to care.

It's a
delicacy
, I overheard someone say on the phone. In Helsinki that shit is two
hundred bucks a gobbet.

The rest of the team worshipped Slick, and the more incoherent public opinion looked,
the happier Slick became. It made no sense. My questions became more and more shrill,
and before I knew it Slick had put me in charge of a smear campaign against our own
company. He was shutting me out. For months I picketed our front gate, chanting
dumb slogans and linking arms with luddites, wondering what was happening inside.

Slick had changed too. He hadn't shaved in months and never seemed to sleep. At night,
when security let me in after the day's protesting, I would pause in the doorway
to watch him work. He sat at his bank of screens, humming with manic energy like
he was in spiritual communion with the data. The numbers streamed past, reflected
in his two-dollar shades.

One night he looked up and saw me.

Hey, he said gently. What's on your mind?

I swallowed, feeling ashamed, and angry that we'd let this child lead us so far astray.

It's all—this, I said, gesturing to the monitors and graphs. I don't understand what
we're doing anymore. We've lost sight of the facts. Worse, we've lost sight of the
brand values
.

Slick took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. He was skinnier than ever but
his gaze was full of knowing kindness. I know you don't trust what we're doing, he
said. That's okay. There are no brand values anymore, or facts. We're way past that.
We're doing something revolutionary. These days we're so over-saturated that no single
fact can mean a thing. So, what are we working with instead? Over-saturation itself.
Creating it, shaping it—one giant ecosystem of chaotic over-stimulus. It's the new
medium of communication. It's the only thing people can possibly understand.

He paused just long enough for me to blink in agreement.

Try not to think of it as an advertising campaign, he said. Think of it as an information
mandala. Or a kind of magic-eye picture. Up close it looks like chaos, but as you
draw back and the months pass and people try to make sense of it, they'll find a
pattern. Their brains are hardwired to find meaning and, trust me, there is meaning
in all of it. We'll buy the satellite imagery of the oil slick from space, maybe
start a war in Mongolia, and launch a new Cormac McCarthy trilogy. Then it'll all
come together. You watch.

I thanked him. Our eyes met and I tried to smile, but as I said good night my voice
cracked. I was turning against him, and he knew it.

The campaign went into overdrive. We churned out daytime soap operas, claimed responsibility
for Hurricane
Katrina and launched a new frozen yoghurt derived entirely from petrochemicals.
I wanted to call it Oils Lick, but Slick said I was still thinking too literally.
We routed half the world's internet traffic through Mexico and had mentions of disaster
replaced by discussion about running shoes. We saturated people with so much gibberish
they stopped noticing it was gibberish at all.

At the height of the craziness I answered a call from Jim Bacon. Get your boss, he
croaked.

Mary took the phone. Beneath her make-up she blanched. Okay, she said. I'll call
you back. She turned to the team.

Pack your bags, she said. You're not going to believe what's gone down.

That night six of us boarded a plane for the US. As the sky grew light over the Gulf
of Mexico, we were watching from the deck of BP's research ship. Jim Bacon and his
team of marketing execs stood grim-faced.

I'm not sure how to tell you this, Jim said, but—we've lost the oil slick.

What do you mean? one of our people asked.

Jim flung a hand out towards the horizon. See for yourself.

The sun slid into view. In front of us, the blackened remains of the oilrig stood
silhouetted like a giant mechanical wading bird. Beyond was smooth ocean and the
cries of seabirds, and a faint wind whistling in our ears.

How can you
lose
an oil slick? I said.

You tell me, Jim replied. We did as you asked and stopped the clean-up for a week,
and when we got back out here we couldn't find it.

The deck erupted in shouting. Had the slick moved? Had it sunk? Somehow dispersed?
Someone suggested we check the satellite data, but I pointed out that we'd already
bought and changed it. Jim thought maybe BP's ship-towed chemical booms had finally
worked, but we soon realised we'd made them up as well.

The buzz faded and died, and one by one we turned to look at Slick. He was leaned
against the railing with his sunglasses on, watching us with a smirk.

All right, you, Mary said. Any thoughts?

We're done, Slick said.

All twelve of us on the deck stared at him.

It's over. We've won.

What do you mean? Jim said.

We did it. We made the oil slick go away. It's a work of freakin' art.

But where's the slick gone? I asked.

Slick shook his head, disappointed. They'll spend the next few weeks searching for
the oil but they'll never find it—and eventually they'll forget about it altogether.
We all will, and you know why? Because it never existed in the first place.

Slick looked at me.

There never was an oil slick, he said. That's what's at the heart of the mandala.

Let me get this straight, Jim said, a tentative awe in his voice. Your advertising
campaign was so successful you've physically made the oil slick go away? It's just—gone?

Slick simply grinned. We stood there trying to let the idea sink in. Mary McGowan
was leaned against the railing, crying. I went over and gave her a consoling hug
but she shook me off. I saw she was crying with joy.

It's a fucking miracle, someone said.

But it doesn't make sense, I said.

The others scowled at me.

He's right, Slick said. We're way beyond making sense. He looked out towards the
radiant dawn. We've finally broken through.

These long summer evenings when the mosquitoes whine, and sleep is a brand name I
can't quite recall, I go walking. I unlock the back door and shuffle down to the
beach. As I walk I replay that day in my mind. Does it weigh on my conscience? Does
it grind me down?

It does. I betrayed him.

While the staffers danced, and a drunken Jim Bacon backflipped awkwardly off the
side of the ship, I sat in a toilet cubicle staring at my phone. People needed to
know the truth. I called the executive producer of
The View
,
and for more than a
few pieces of silver I spilled my guts.

Even as I rejoined the party, I knew I'd made a mistake. Jesus would never have been
famous if he hadn't been crucified, and Slick—reclining in a deck chair, watching
me with his infuriating smile—well, he knew it. It was the last time I saw him.

The party spread to the wrecked platform of the Deepwater Horizon. A few hours later,
when my outraged voice began to blare from TVs around the world, Slick was nowhere
to be found. A wildfire of bogus revelations blazed across the mediasphere. The agency
was courted and maligned by everyone, from the climate sceptics to the Pope. British
American Tobacco offered Mary a fortune to tackle cancer. Confusion was swift and
total, and the truth—that thin thread, so easily lost—was but one hair in Slick's
long and tangled beard. The man had disappeared.

Some evenings, if it's still early, I pass others strolling on the beach. To most
I'm just a harmless old eccentric, Gucci slippers in hand. A few recognise me and
there's hatred in their eyes. They think I did more than betray Slick.

Murderer
, they hiss.

I shrug, and roll my cuffs, and amble on down the tide line. What really happened
is nothing so banal.

Slick was the Messiah.

There. I've said it. The millennial doomsayers were right: He was coming. They were
just looking in all the wrong places. The Messiah was a Bible-and-internet kid
from
Western Sydney, come again to walk this earth in jeans that were a little too tight.
He ushered in a new spiritual age, and then returned to the network, from whence
He came.