#Zero

by Neil McCormick

  ‘Your new album, out Friday, is called Year Zero,’ announced my persecutor. ‘Love the subtle pun on your name there. Did it take you long to think that up?’

  ‘I have teams of people working round the clock,’ I said. Actually, that’s true.

  ‘I’ll bet you do. Your first solo album was Zero Hour, that was another good one. And I hear your old band The Sums are recording an album without you. It’s going to be called Minus Zero.’

  ‘The Sums did release a record without me,’ I said, struggling on. ‘You probably didn’t notice because it sold zero copies.’

  ‘Ouch,’ he said. As well he might. But it got worse. He started telling me about his fixation with Penelope. ‘I used to have a pin-up of your fiancée on my wall when I was, well, just a bit younger than you are now, I guess. You know the poster, I’m sure, Suicide Blonde, very sexy pose, it was in every red-blooded boy’s bedroom back in the day. Did you ever look up at that poster and think “That’s the woman I am going to marry”? I know I did.’

  I got that all the time, the implication being that I was acting out some adolescent infatuation, and our great romance could be reduced to an act of celebrity stalking. People had a sense of ownership over Penelope. She had been a sex goddess since biblical times, or at least pre-Google, then some Irish runt who was filling nappies when she had her first hit comes along and snatches her away. Well, fuck ’em all. True love never was predictable, otherwise what would we write songs about?

  ‘Some of us get the women of our dreams and some just go on dreaming,’ I said. ‘Have you still got that poster, or did your mother make you take it down?’

  It was just banter, five minutes of trivia to promote my new album, but daggers had been drawn. I wanted to reach down that phone line and stab him in the throat. But he was too quick for me.

  ‘No, I’ve got a poster of Penelope and Troy Anthony now,’ he said.

  I managed to squeeze out a hollow laugh but it was too early in the day for this. I didn’t have my force field up yet. Fucking interviewers. They worm their way inside your head, burrow under your skin, probing away for sensitive tissue, armed with erroneous facts and figures, clippings full of every stupid remark you ever made, ready to throw it back in your face. Never trust a journalist. Beasley told me that. ‘They’ll sing your praises, laugh at your jokes, hang on every word like you are the most fascinating being to walk the earth since Jesus pissed off to heaven, but all they are interested in is a headline.’

  This was a whole rap he laid on me when we started out together. ‘The media is a whore,’ was another one of his maxims. ‘You can fuck them any which way you want but they will always make you pay.’

  He was full of this shit; his Bad Wisdom he called it when he was feeling particularly pleased with himself, which was most of the time. I don’t know why I ever listened to him. Because he was usually right, I suppose. Or maybe because he was telling me what I wanted to hear. About how we were on a quest, a mission to the stars, strapped to a guided missile blazing its way to the centre of the entertainment universe. And when it detonated, stand back, cause this was gonna be the supermassive supernova of superstardom, not just a global brand but a celestial event, Elvis, Madonna, Mickey Fucking Mouse and Jesus H Himself, all collapsed into one, The ONE, preceded by a dollar sign and followed by an endless procession of Zeros, me to the power of infinity. But, as he never ceased to remind me, you can’t get something from nothing. Beasley did what no teacher in school ever managed to: tap my inner workaholic. Life with Beasley was fucking relentless.

  Speaking of the devil, the smell of cordite came wafting to my nostrils, the stench of one of his godawful cigars. Beelzebub was in the house. The bedroom door swung open, briefly revealing a clatter and hum of activity (what were all those people doing in my suite?) as my manager made his usual impressive entrance, a big, bald, sweaty human cannonball in slo-mo flight, artfully tailored, stressed cotton suit billowing around him. By any objective criteria, Beasley was a very fat man, but he never struck me as soft. He was tightly compressed, as if he started out larger than life and got packed down, squashed into a body not quite big enough to contain him. The beads of sweat pricking his forehead looked like an early warning system indicating he might spontaneously combust at any moment. Clutching newspapers in both puffed-up fists, jaw clenched tight around his cigar, he glanced imperiously around the room before settling his gaze on me to triumphantly announce: ‘We are UBIQUITOUS!’

  He tossed the newspapers on the bed. Kilo and the girls dutifully applauded in acknowledgement that my arrival was front page on every first edition. Even the New York Times had me stepping out of the helicopter, this descent into blatant populism excused by an ironic headline: ‘MAKE MONEY, NOT WAR: Brand Zero Appropriates Military Might for Marketing Assault on America’s Youth’. ‘Oooh, look, you’ve pushed the orphans off the front page,’ noted Kilo, perfectly aware this was exactly what Beasley wanted to hear. The plight of the so-called Orphans of MedellÍn, street children devastated by a combination of economic breakdown, political impotence and natural disaster, had become the hobby horse of the hour, with heart-rending pictures of photogenic victims going viral, and had dominated the news for several days running. But not any more.

  ‘They don’t buy music anyway,’ smiled Beasley, who delighted in affronting delicate sensibilities. Blowing smoke rings, he made a speedy inspection of my appearance. ‘Ready to face your public?’

  I was ready to get back into bed but Beasley always made me feel I had to rise to a challenge, and that it would be craven to admit weakness or doubt. And to be fair to Beasley (though fuck knows why, I have no reason to be fair to him, of all people) it is hard to complain of overwork to a boss who works harder than you (was he my boss? Wasn’t he supposed to be in my employ?). He was usually the last man standing at night and up at the crack of dawn. Fuck knows why, since he had so many minions to do his bidding, many of whom had stealthily assembled in my suite while I was being made human.

  Reflecting my status as the biggest swinging dick in town, the luxuriously appointed living area of the penthouse suite stretched the length of one side of the hotel. Which was just as well, since Beasley’s battalion of road managers, tour managers, product managers, assistant managers, assistants to assistant managers, assistants of every hue and gender, agents, publicity reps, record company reps and all the other small-credit people deemed necessary to bring my message to the world were colonising every polished surface with their smartphones, tablets, laptops and printers, comparing presentations across leather-topped tables, sticking Post-it notes to a cylindrical glass tank housing a family of exotic jellyfish and making Facetime calls from opposite ends of elongated sofas. My entrance created the usual micro-vacuum as every conversation paused, every eye turned, just for an instant. Then they all started chattering again, slightly louder than before.

  I didn’t need two guesses whose bright idea it was to turn my suite into the war room. ‘If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad …’ Beasley growled, giving me a warning nod as I turned to acknowledge the digicam that had me trained in its sights, webcasting my every move to my most adoring, obsessive, or just plain bored-out-of-their-skulls-with-nothing-better-to-do fans on zero24seven.com.

  ‘Good morning, Vietnam!’ I bellowed, pulling a funny face. It was pathetic, really. I couldn’t fucking help myself. My inanity was greeted with gratuitous applause from the busy bees, who have perfected the kind of in-built laugh track that would make them an asset to any sitcom.

  I’ve got to be honest, zero24seven was my bright idea, not Beasley’s, and one I had come to regret. Like every other homestar with a cheap mic and an IP address, back in prehistory my bedroom was my stage and the net my only spotlight. At first I wasn’t sure if the dark theatre of web dreams was empty or teeming with other lost souls until my hit counter started going haywire. I only formed The Zero Sums so I could fuck some of the honeyz in my inbox, if I’m completely honest, which, of cours
e, I am. Maybe I should have just stayed in my room and ordered pizza, a legend in my own upload time. It was never as pure in the real world, never as easy to control, people kept straying from the script, it got complicated and messy and it all ended in tears. Not mine, obviously. So when Beasley came calling, I told him about my fantasy of webcasting twenty-four hours a day in real time, so that I could find that synthesis between my first and second life, real and virtual, invite people into my space without having to go out into theirs. At least that was the idea. Clearly, I hadn’t thought it through.

  Everyone’s at it now, so it’s easy to forget that it was briefly hailed as a zeitgeist-riding nu-media sensation. I was top of the pods before I even released a single. But the 24–7 concept quickly became a royal pain. When I was younger the idea that God was watching my every move filled me with dread. Would I go to hell if I dropped dead in the middle of a five-knuckle shuffle? But when God Almighty was replaced with an all-seeing digicam and you can’t rip a fart for fear of complete strangers wrinkling their noses, or worse still your dad (although in my case that didn’t really apply cause my old man was so technophobic he needed the assistance of a child to plug in his electric blanket) then self-consciousness takes on a whole new dimension. The only way I could avoid behaving like a bad actor in the tragicomedy of my own life was to secretly get ripped off my tits behind the scenes (i.e. in any bathroom where I was not contractually bound to let Beasley install a camera). Thank fuck the impossible logistics of getting everyone we encountered to sign release forms put an end to the ideal of the over-examined life. We should be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act because these days zero24seven was full of videos and repeats. I had live content down to a bare minimum, no more than a few hours max of the most public footage, though much of my courtship with Penelope was carried out online because she was never happier than when she was on camera. At least before the blowjob at the BRITs incident, which put her off a bit. Obviously, I hadn’t answered my own emails in years. I didn’t even write my own tweets.

  That was Spooks McGrath’s job, among others, a bespectacled, frazzle-haired techie hovering at Digicam Dude’s elbow, ready to catch my every wink and stutter and feed it into the voracious maw of the beast. To his credit, in my view at least, he was the only one here who looked as bad as I felt. He had probably been up all night, editing footage and talking to the Chinese branch of the Zeromaniacs fan club while most of Beasley’s clean-cut college grads were getting a good night’s sleep under chamomile eyeshades.

  ‘Looking forward to the big day?’ said Spooks, which was just some inanity designed to get me going, I know, but you expect a better chat-up line from a webmaster and ghostblogger with an alleged IQ the size of a supercomputer.

  ‘Every day is a big day,’ I sighed through a fake grin, and looked into the unblinking lens, trying to imagine invisible hordes on the other side. I had to give them something better. ‘Here we are in New York, New York, so good they named it twice: once for the night before, and once for the morning after!’ That joke wasn’t improving with age. ‘First we take Manhattan, tomorrow … ze world!’

  I screamed the last bit, obviously, jumping onto one of the leather coffee tables like a demented dictator and spilling someone’s latte. The minions applauded reliably, except for the latte drinker, who was trying to stop a pool of coffee swamping her spreadsheets while smiling apologetically, like it was her fault. Which it was. Now I was standing there like a virgin at an orgy, every face in the room turned towards me and a webcam broadcasting my antics to over 45 million subscribers. How do these things happen? ‘My people, my people,’ I brayed, waving victory fingers and wagging devil horns. Sometimes, my mouth and body function without engaging my brain at all. ‘We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight with their bitches on Coney Island beaches.’ All those eyes on me, puzzled but expectant. That’s when you either impale yourself or fall into the moment. When the room grows so still you can focus on particles of dust floating in the air. ‘Hi-fi, wi-fi, fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of everybody in the room,’ I spat, falling into a rap I had been working up for the live version of ‘Never Young’, which made no sense at all in this context but these words, this rhythm was all I had to hold onto, a lifeline tossed out from my subconscious.

  Everything accelerating, everybody tired of waiting

  For the end of the beginning’s the beginning of the end

  Approaching singularity, mathematical clarity

  Can’t see what’s up ahead, can’t see what’s round the bend

  Radiation sickness, call Jehovah’s witness

  Hope they spell my name right in the Big Black Book

  Pick a number, any number, odds or evens, dumb or dumber

  Wake me from my slumber, cut me from the hook

  Rich man, poor man, load up your camel

  You bring the silver spoon, I’ll bring the needle

  But you’ll never get to heaven in a fuel-injection car

  You’ve got to come … to where you are!

  Beasley came to my rescue, raising one arm as if to wind up applause while moving deftly in front of the table so I could put my hand on his shoulder and stand there grinning like this was perfectly normal behaviour for a rock-and-roll superstar, which, after all, it was.

  ‘Listen up, people,’ said Beasley. ‘Zero’s right …’ (I am?) ‘… this weekend in New York is crucial …’ (It is?) ‘… it is what we have been working towards all year …’ (Did I say that?) ‘… tour kicks off Monday, album drops in all formats Friday and with our partners at Mount Olympus we’ve got what is shaping up to be the blockbuster movie of the summer. The single is number one, for which you should all give yourself a round of applause …’ (They do, of course.) ‘…This year, together, we have the chance to make Zero not just the biggest artist in the world right now but one of the biggest stars in entertainment history …’ (More applause, they are really getting into it now.) ‘… and we’re counting on each and every one of you …’ (This is just such crap. Where were these kiss-asses when I was holed up in my bedroom studio, carving out the hits?) ‘… to put all your resources behind the final push…’ (I’d been working on this my whole life, we’d been on the Year Zero campaign trail for weeks already and we all knew there was no such thing as a final push, just another push, and then another, and then another.) ‘… there is still everything to play for, the world’s media is here, they’re watching, so let’s do our jobs and make this a weekend New York will never forget.’

  The applause was ridiculous, which was par for the course. They were an easy crowd. Probably thinking about their bonuses. But I accepted it on Beasley’s behalf, seizing the opportunity to step down from the table. Beasley and Kilo formed a phalanx around me, with Tiny Tony Mahoney, my diminutive head of security (small but lethal, apparently) leading the way towards the door, one of his oversized grunts taking up the rear, while various apparatchiks fell in behind, and the webcrew revolved around, shooting it all. The same thing happened every time I moved from one spot to another: instant entourage. If I got taken short in a public place, there would be a line of my own employees forming behind me at the urinal before I could get my dick out.

  Nodding and smiling, kissing a cheek here, patting an elbow there, I worked the room, even though these were my people, for fuck’s sake, I didn’t have to impress them, they were here for me, me, me, me. Everything is fucking me. We picked up more security at the door, into the lift (ejecting a hapless hotel guest, whose indignation was bought off with a quick autograph for his daughter), through the lobby (security fending off a sudden rush of lurking Zeromaniacs), slipping on some evil logo shades courtesy of Linzi before stepping onto the street where a swarm of stalkerazzi called my name, flashbulbs popping, camera motors whirring, click click clickety click. How many fucking photographs do they actually need? What do they do with all these identical frames of me stunting on sidewalks? How can they even tell one shot from another? Then a voice
sliced through my dreaminess: ‘Hey, Zero, what do you think of the pics of Penelope and Troy?’ Flash. I knew in my sinking heart that was the one they’d use, the rabbit in the headlights shot, as the limo door swung open and I escaped into the soft leather and walnut cocoon, flopping out on the couch, invisible behind the presidential tints.

  3

  Beasley and Kilo slid in before I pulled the door shut, cutting off the webcrew. Security would ride up front, the rest of my entourage could take the minivan convoy, I needed a moment.

  ‘What fucking pictures of Penelope and that squarejaw cunt are they talking about?’ I snapped.

  Kilo glanced nervously at Beasley. ‘Just the usual gutter provocation,’ Beasley shrugged. ‘You should know better.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know anything, that’s the whole fucking problem,’ I snapped back, hating the sound of my whining brat voice while Beasley played Big Daddy. I turned my attention to Kilo instead. At least him I could bully. ‘Did you get hold of Penelope?’

  He started making excuses about time zones, jungle locations, the unreliability of satphones, blah de fucking blah, but I wasn’t buying any of it. If illegal loggers and coke barons could run profitable businesses in the rainforest, nobody was going to convince me a Hollywood studio couldn’t get a line out for one of their most prized assets. I’ve seen National Geographic. Mobile phones come just after ploughs and chickens on the must-have accessory list of the modern peasant farmer. Even the Discovery channel has given up pixilating iPhones out of shots of the Bushmen of the Kalahari. I bet there’s an Internet cafe in every shanty town in the third world. Meanwhile, it had been a week since I had heard from Penelope, a fucking cinematic icon, and even that was a broken-up, digitally stuttering, incomprehensible cackle, the underlying theme of which had been the nobility of suffering for your art. She claimed to be living on location in a tent but Penelope’s idea of camping bore little relation to the waterproof sheets we used to crawl inside for respite from pissing rain on so-called seaside holidays in the west of Ireland. Our tents didn’t have built-in toilet facilities with hot running water. If you wanted a piss you braved the elements or went in your sleeping bag for extra warmth. I got Kilo to look up Penelope’s location one night on Earthmap. It was a fucking Bedouin city. Her so-called tent was built like a wedding marquee. She had a fucking walk-in wardrobe, for fuck’s sake.