The Information

PART THREE

Of the pressures facing the successful novelist in the mid-1990s Richard Tull could not easily speak. He was too busy with the pressures facing the unsuccessful novelist in the mid-1990s-or the resurgent novelist, let's say (for now): the unproved novelist. Richard sat in Coach. His seat was non-aisle, non-window, and above all non-smoking. It was also non-wide and non-comfortable. Hundreds of yards and hundreds of passengers away, Gwyn Barry, practically horizontal on his crimson barge, shod in prestige stockings and celebrity slippers, assenting with a smile to the coaxing refills of Alpine creekwater and sanguinary burgundy with which his various young hostesses strove to enhance his caviar tartlet, his smoked-salmon pinwheel and asparagus barquette, his prime fillet tournedos served on a timbale of tomato and a tapenade of Castilian olives-Gwyn was in First. Richard was in Coach, drinking small beer, eating peanuts; and Coach was the world. Coach World-World Traveler. To his immediate left sat someone very young. To his immediate right sat someone very old. And there was Richard, in the middle. The child leaned and pushed and sometimes squirmed up against him in a careless way, carelessly confident that its touch would be welcome. Whereas the old guy on his right, coated in his crepe of age, remained properly withdrawn. Richard found himself inclining to his left, courting the child's thoughtless touch. After all, he was at the time of life when- sitting in a garden or a park-he was more pleased than vexed if a bee

buzzed him, flattered that anything, however briefly and stupidly, could

still mistake him for a flower.

Was this, then, a renovated Richard we were looking at? You might have thought so. If you had marked him in recent weeks, his black eyeerased (even that whispered query of nicotine, high on the cheekbone), his nose as sane as any other nose (his nose now basked on the shores of reason), his air of pitying detachment in the offices of the Tantalus Press ("It will be a relief to return to your metrical meditations," he had written to Keith Horridge, "after the brouhaha of publication in the States"), his quite frequent renderings of Respect as he showered and shaved (having made love successfully, or at least undeniably, to Gina the night before-"What you want: baby I got"), his slurred promise to Gwyn, which helped foreclose an otherwise pleasant dinner at Holland Park, that he was going to run him out of town: seeing and hearing all this, you might have thought that, yes, here was a writer on a roll. He had put in a lot of time with Anstice, patiently steering her away from her latest plan (that of committing suicide at Calchalk Street) and encouraging her to take that brief but restorative holiday in the Isle of Mull (the Isle of Mull, in mid-March, he reckoned, would get Leibniz himself drooling over his pill jar). He had called off Steve Cousins, an exquisitely delicate operation, in which he had eaten a lot of shit, and during which he had felt great and immediate harm skittishly considering his person; calmer himself, he had glimpsed the white-capped tor-menta in the digital grid of the young man's face; and walking home that night, from the Canal Creperie, he had sensed a kind of thunder at the back of his neck, which never broke. He had not called Belladonna. He had lunched uneventfully with Lady Demeter (and was even pretty sorry to hear about her father's pretty serious heart attack, which had hobbled him that same Sunday night-and apparently within twenty minutes of Richard's departure). But did he hate Gwyn any less? That would have been the key to it. Did he hate Gwyn any less?

In any event Richard was persisting in the belief that a rewarding experience lay ahead of him, despite his immediate discomforts, despite his adhesive doubts about Bold Agenda, Inc., and despite the pillow of crimson tissue paper that he clutched to his face. Soon after take off, while the plane was still climbing, about a period's worth of blood had burst from his right nostril. Now, as he settled down with his beer and his biography, and looked forward to the lunch that was edging ever nearer, about a period's worth of blood burst from his left nostril. Richard's nose, it seemed, was once again a reliable instrument; it just happened to contain a gallon of restless gore. He bent and squeezed

himself toward the aisle, past the child, its single parent, and another,

older child, and joined the queue for that most despised section of the aircraft, Toilet World-deep in the machine's rump. After his first visit there he had rested on the haunch of the emergency-exit door andlooked down at the rink of London and tried to connect it with his own journey from home to airport in the silver courtesy car so affably skippered by Gwyn: that staggered sideways drift through the pale and permanent Sunday of west West London with its patches of green beneath patches of gray, past files of houses tortured by the road you drove; then the ground thinned and flattened in preparation for the netherlands of sky launch (freight, catering), while above a quivering crucifix was spearing down toward you, with its arms out to get you, and screaming at you with its machine scream. "America will kill me," he had said to Gina, on the doorstep, smiling but hot-eyed, and the fine-grained hair of his sons' heads feeling hot beneath his hands-"It's just going to kill me."

Half an hour later Richard emerged, leaving behind a toilet resembling the kitchen of a serial murderer in slapdash but hyperactive career phase; bent over the basin, he had started like a guilty thing when the PA system identified him by name and demanded that he make himself known to the cabin staff. A few last bubbly snorts into the paper towels, and then he squelched his way out of there. In the aisle he saw that a stewardess was coming toward him, looking to left and right and dutifully saying,

"A Mr. Tull? A Mr. lull. A Mr. Tull at all?"

He watched her. He knew her. He had already singled her out for attention. And we are inclined to speculate whether anyone would really want this-Richard's attention. She was the stewardess who, before takeoff, had been obliged to demonstrate the safety procedure, standing a few feet from Richard's knees. Normally of course the task would have been assigned to a surrogate: to the electronic stewardess on the video screen. But the image had fluttered and stalled; and so, in some bewilderment, they'd all had to settle for the real thing. The stewardess, and her sign language-the hard old dame of the middle air, nearing retirement, her systems warped by the magnetosphere, and by disuse (he understood disuse), like a madam summoned out of deep retirement for the last thing she wanted, going through the motions with the hand stroke, the knee bend-the cursey curtseys of the stewardess.

"A Mr. Tull? A Mr. Tull at all."

This too was the language of the air, this was airspeak; no one on terra firma would ever talk like that. But to Richard's ears, still papery with blood loss, it seemed well said. A Mr. Tull. A Mr. Tull at all.

He owned up.

The stewardess escorted him down the length of Economy, and then another stewardess escorted him through Business World; he ducked under a curtain, and then another stewardess led him into First. As hemade this journey, this journey within a journey, getting nearer to America, Richard looked to see what everyone was reading, and found that his progress through the plane described a diagonal of shocking decline. In Coach the laptop literature was pluralistic, liberal, and humane: Daniel Deronda, trigonometry, Lebanon, World War I, Homer, Diderot, Anna Karenina. As for Business World, it wasn't that the businessmen and businesswomen were immersing themselves in incorrigibly minor or incautiously canonized figures like Thornton Wilder or Dostoevsky, or with lightweight literary middlemen like A. L. Rowse or Lord David Cecil, or yet with teacup-storm philosophers, exploded revisionist historians, stubbornly Steady State cosmologists or pallid poets over whom the finger of sentimentality continued to waver. They were reading trex: outright junk. Fat financial thrillers, chunky chillers and tublike tinglers: escape from the pressures facing the contemporary entrepreneur. And then he pitched up in the intellectual slum of First Class, among all its drugged tycoons, and the few books lying unregarded on softly swelling stomachs were jacketed with hunting scenes or ripe young couples in mid swirl or swoon. They all lay there flattened out in the digestive torpor of midafternoon, and nobody was reading anything-except for a lone seeker who gazed, with a frown of mature skepticism, at a perfume catalogue. Jesus, what happened on the Concorde? Scouring the troposphere at the limit of life, and given a glimpse of the other side-a glimpse of what the rest of the universe almost exclusively consisted of (unpunctuated vacuum)-the Mach 2 morons would be sitting there, and staring into space. The space within. Not the space without. In the very nib of the airplane sat Gwyn Barry, who was reading his schedule.

"Hi," said Richard.

Gwyn pulled a lever which caused him to surge up from the supine to the sedentary. He pointed to a little bulkhead table. Richard sat on it, next to the vase of tulips. There were posies everywhere, here in First.

"How are you doing?" said Gwyn. And his eyes returned to his schedule: six or seven sheets, with many a box and bullet-punch, and highlit and color-coded-TV, radio, press. "Wow, they've really got me grid-locked in LA," he went on. "It's all the interest leaking down from San Francisco. Look at that. How can I do the Chronicle and then Pete Ellery back to back?" He turned to Richard as if he expected an answer. Then he said, "What have your people got lined up for you?"

"I told you. My editor moved on, They've given me some other

Chuck or Chip." And it was true. Roy Biv, Richard's editor-so full of enthusiasm and ideas-had moved on from Bold Agenda, and every time Richard called he got shuffled around from Chip to Chuck, from Chuckto Chip. "Is Chuck there?" You mean Chip. "Then give me Chip." You ?want Chuck. And they were never there. Richard couldn't decide whether Chuck and Chip were the same person (like Darko and Ranko), who was permanently absent, or whether both Chip and Chuck were the inventions of a third person called something like Chup or Chick. The only editor he ever got through to, these days, was an inoffensive-sounding guy who went by the name of Leslie Evry.

Gwyn said, "So what have they got lined up?"

"I said. I won't know till I get there."

"But this is America, man! You got to get out there. You got to go for it."

Richard waited.

"You got to come on strong. Talk big and kick ass."

"Let's get this straight. Are you trying to be funny, or is it your intention to pretend to be American while we're there?"

Gwyn sank back, and gave his schedule a careless brandish. "You know, you're lucky. This is just show business. While I'm scurrying around out there, you'll have time to absorb everything. Time to think. To ponder. Time to dream. Are you all right, mate? You look a bit pale. But it could be the light."

And the light was coming in sideways, and everything looked combustible or already white-hot, close to burnout or heat-death.

"I had a nosebleed. I haven't seen so much blood since the twins were born. I used up two whole cans' worth of tissues and towels."

"Beautiful flying weather."

"It's always sunny, you know. Above the clouds."

"I got you up here, and it took some doing, so you could see what it's like. For your piece."

Then, for Richard's further benefit, Gwyn cast his gaze round the cabin with an expression that judiciously combined embarrassment and mischief. "Who would have thought it? A boy from the valleys. Flying to America first class."

"Do you mind if I use that line?"

"It's nice, though, isn't it? Dead comfy."

"The sickbags," Richard said dully, "look no better or bigger than the ones in Coach. And they still have turbulence here. And it still takes seven hours. I'll see you on the ground."

He made his way back, past Magenta Rhapsody and Of Kingly Blood, past Cartel and Avarice and The Usurers, and into the multitudinousness of Hard Times, La Peste, Amerika, Despair, The Moonstone, Labyrinths … Two people-a man in Business and some dope in Coach-were reading Amelior: the paperback.

But as Richard shackled himself back into his seat (which itself bore the heavy indentation of The Wouldbegood: A Life of Edith Nesbit), he had other information to process. Gwyn, Gwyn's schedule, Amelior, the unfortunate defection of Roy Biv from Bold Agenda: these swayed like loose harpoons from the nucleus of his soul. But he had other information to process, the kind that only comes when life is turning, the kind you have to be there to get, because no one will ever tell you about it. And if they did-you'd never listen.

On his way back through the plane Richard had seen women crying- three women, four women. And he realized that there always were these women on planes, crying, with makeup in meltdown, folded over in the window seat or candidly hideous in the aisle, clutching Kleenex. Before, if he assumed anything, he assumed they were crying about boyfriends or husbands (partings or sunderings), or crying (who cared?) from toothache or curse pains or fear of flying. But now he was forty, and he knew.

Women on planes are crying because someone they love or loved is dead or dying. Every plane has them. The talent on the short hops, the broads on the wide-bodies, with their clutched hankies. Death can do this; death has the power to do this. Death, which sends women hurrying to the end of the street, to bus stops, which makes them run under the clocks of railway stations, which lifts them five miles high and fires them weeping through the air at the speed of death, all over the world.

While it would always be true and fair to say that Richard felt like a cigarette, it would now be doubly true and fair to say it. He felt like a cigarette. And he felt like a cigarette. His mouth was plugged with a gum called Nicoteen. And he wore circular nicotine patches, from the same product stable, on his left forearm and right bicep. Richard's blood brownly brewed, like something left overnight in the teapot. He was a cigarette; and he felt like one. And he still felt like a cigarette . .. What he was doing was practicing non-smoking. He knew how Americans treated smokers, people of smoke, people of fire and ash, with their handfuls of dust. He knew he would be asked to do an awful lot of it: non-smoking. So he felt like a cigarette, and he felt like a drink-he felt like a lot of drinks. But he didn't drink and he didn't smoke. All he had was the plastic bottle of mineral water that Gina had made him bring.

He spent his first two hours in New York wearing an expression of riveted horror. This expression of riveted horror was not a response to American violence or vulgarity, to the disposition of American wealth, the quality of American politicians, the condition of American schooling or the standard of American book reviewing (hopelessly variable but often chasteningly high, he would later conclude). No. This expression of riveted horror Richard came to know well. He looked horrified and riveted, and he knew he looked horrified and riveted, because he was staring into the riveted horror of his own face.

In the bathroom, at the hotel. It was a shaving mirror, on a retractable arm, supplementing the broad background of the regular mirror (itself implacable enough). The shaving mirror had a light above it; it also had a light inside it. He thought there must be a lot of people who imagined they looked okay, who fancied they could pass for normal, until they met a shaving mirror in an American hotel. Then the jig was up. Presumably, with the human face, the worst possible representation will always be the truest. This was the best mirror, and it was the worst mirror. All other mirrors were in public relations. After an audience with such a mirror, only two places to go (and maybe the hotel took its cut): the cosmetic surgery, or the church. Richard tried to tell himself that he had looked terrible in London too. And memorably terrible. A week before departure he found that his passport, disused for some while, had quietly gone out of print, or been remaindered. So he breezed along to Woolworth's in Portobello Road and slipped into the booth, expeditiously, without even pausing to arrange his hair. Three minutes later he was shredding the strip of photographs with his fingernails-photographs in which he looked, at once, incredibly old, incredibly mad and incredibly ill. He returned to the beauty parlor of Calchalk Street, and then tried again; and he spent another six quid before he came up with anything he could seriously present at Petty France . . . The mirror had the power to hold him in position, like a vise. His face, it was nothing. It was scorched earth.

Next door on the bed there lay a bundle of early reviews and a copy of the schedule and some bright new hardbacks and even a spray of flowers, all sent by the publisher. By Gwyn's publisher, that is to say: to help him with his piece-his piece about Gwyn. There was nothing from BoldAgenda, no message, no word and no meaningful reply to the calls he kept making from the bathroom telephone, with his nose an inch from the glass. Richard's requests to speak to Leslie Eviy got bounced round the office until they seemed to evaporate or else were pounded into submission and silence by a background cacophony of impulsive home improvement, complete with pummeled nailheads and creaking bucket handles and one-liners tossed back and forth by guys with names like Tug and Tiff and Heft. In twenty minutes he was due upstairs: to listen in on Gwyn being interviewed. Then, when that was over, he was going to arrange to interview the interviewer about what Gwyn was like to interview. Richard left the bathroom and went and sat on the bed and calmly smoked his way through a panic attack. He wanted his boys with him, Marius on this side, Marco on that side. Marius here, Marco there. The mirror was telling him that his body was close to death but his mind felt six months old.

Gwyn's suite seemed as crowded as Coach: waiters, the hotel assistant manager, two interviewers, one incoming, one outgoing, two photographers ditto, two lady high-ups from Gwyn's publishers or its parent corporation and one publicity boy. The room was additionally infested with bouquets and bowls of fruit, presumably real but impressively fake-looking, and, at some unguessable level of authenticity, the excitement of increase, of reputable profit, the kind you get when commerce meets art and finds it good. Richard sat down near the publicity boy, who, he saw, was not only on the telephone but was physically attached to it: he had a thick wire circling his chin like a pilot's mouth-mike, freeing both his hands to cope with his laptop E-mail and all the other light-speed technologies they had wired him into. He was plumply handsome, the publicity boy, his backswept hair as darkly super-lustrous as an oil stain on a blacktop.

"I really do feel," Gwyn was saying, angling his head to accommodate the photographer who crouched at his feet, "that the novelist has to find a new simplicity."

"How, Gwyn, how?"

"By evolving into simplicity. By deciding on the new direction and heading for it."

"To where, Gwyn, where?"

"How about if we loop the Post guy," called the publicity boy, "and he can just watch you do the radio spot?"

"To fresh fields. Okay: the guy from EF can listen to me do the TV spot-from the audio booth. And pastures new."

"So have the signing after the reading but before the meeting.?

"Have the meeting during the signing. And I can get photographed while I'm getting photographed. Phyllis Widener. Richard Tull."

Richard knew from his Amelior Regained publicity pack that Phyllis Widener had a bold-print twice-weekly column in one of the New York tabloids: personalities, arts, local politics. Wry seniority was her thing; she was meant to be twinkly and unfoolable. That's what you got when you were old: experience. And maturity too. In person, Phyllis seemed to be the kind of American woman who had taken a couple of American ideas (niceness, warmth) and then turned up some dreadful dial, as if these qualities, like the yield of a hydrogen bomb, had no upper limit- the range had no top to it-and just went on getting bigger and better as you lashed them toward infinity. Only her colleagues and superiors knew that the pieces she wrote, over many hours and many cups of strong coffee in her small and memento-strewn apartment on Thirteenth Street, often and increasingly turned out to be unusably vicious . . . Richard found a bit of hotel notepaper and a hotel biro and dragged up a chair. He was immediately rewarded with a good bit for his piece: Gwyn pausing mid-word, actually mid-syllable (halfway through "unsophisticated"), like a machine himself, when Phyllis's tape clicked off at the end of its spool; he sat there with his mouth open, on pause, while she replaced it. Meanwhile too it became clear that the energies of the publicity boy were directed not to the further accrual of publicity opportunities but to their radical attenuation.

"Unsophisticated approach, then that's their opinion. I prefer to liken it to carpentry."

"Are you a carpenter, Gwyn?"

"With wood, a poor one, Phyllis. With words, well, I have my molds and templates, my spirit level, my trusty saw."

"I think it's so beautiful the way you say that."

"You know. Pottering away."

The interview ended, and the room thinned out, and Gwyn, who looked fresh enough to Richard, went to freshen up next door. So he was left alone with Phyllis; he sat there, rinsed in her entirely embarrassing gaze, and duly began to interview Phyllis about her interview with Gwyn. After a minute and a half he had no more questions.

Preceded by the publicity boy, Gwyn passed through the room. He was expected downstairs in the restaurant, to be interviewed.

"I have been busy," he said to Richard, "on your behalf. How's your

schedule? There's a press interview in Miami and a big radio slot in Chicago. And a reading-signing in Boston. I was wondering if you could work them in.?

"Why's this?"

"I'm double-dated all over the place. I offered them you. It's all fixed."

Gwyn's was a non-smoking suite, on a non-smoking floor. Over half the hotel was non-smoking. Whereas Richard had dedicated his life to the cause of non-non-smoking. He had laid it down, his life. They sat in silence until Phyllis said,

"You two are old friends."

He gave an economical nod.

"You know, he admires your work deeply. I heard him. Telling everyone on the phone what a truly marvelous writer you were. He loves you very dearly."

"No he doesn't. He might want you to think he does."

Surprisingly she said, "You think he's trying to hurt you?"

"He doesn't need to. The world will do it."

You live alone, right? This was what the greeters and credit-card ratcheters of American hospitals said to the pungent phantoms of the reception desk-to those rendered unpresentable by neglect, to those singled out and quarantined by neglect. Phyllis looked okay. Richard didn't understand that much about other people. But he understood neglect.

"You live alone, right?"

She made her blue eyes rounder and her closed lips wider; she gave him rich assent.

"Never any husband or anything?"

It made him despair twice over. Because he had believed, until then, that he wasn't ready for despair. Suddenly Richard thought of Anstice- but saw himself living with Phyllis: rigid among the chintz and dimity of her bedroom, in new pajamas (the pajamas, perhaps, were a key part of this fresh beginning), with Phyllis leaning over him and applying a moistened washcloth to his brow …

"I'm sorry," he said, and sat up straighter.

"That's okay," she said. "Now can I ask about Gwyn?"

The piece she intended to write was going to be borderline hostile anyway-before Richard even got started. As it turned out, Phyllis's editor would get no further than the end of the second sentence before deciding, with a practiced shrug, that the Barry profile had better be quietly spiked. In fairness, Richard never thought that Phyllis's piece would be influential enough to be worth contaminating. He was just getting in shape for later on.

Broadly satisfied, he left Phyllis in the lift and returned to his room. Over a club sandwich he roughed out a 550-word review of Time's Song: Winthrop Praed, 1802-1839 and then curled up with AntiLatitudinarian: The Heretical Career of 'Francis Atterbury. At one in the morning, by which point his day was twenty-five hours old, he went out into New York. A brief turn, in his mack, along Central Park South.

He knew American fiction, and he knew that fiction, considered in aggregate, would not lie. For him, coming to America was like dying and going to hell or heaven and finding it all as advertised. Take hell: black fire and darkness visible, the palpable obscure-and ice, to starve your soft ethereal warmth: the anti-universe of the damned. New York was out there and he didn't have any time to think about it. But he knew, the instant he arrived on its streets, that New York was the most violent thing that men had ever done to a stretch of land, more violent, in its way, than what was visited on Hiroshima, at ground zero, on day one. He looked up. He looked up and saw no difference: the usual metropolitan sky with its six or seven stars weakly guttering. Raw land can do nothing about them but cities hate stars and don't want their denizens to be reminded of how it really goes with ourselves and the universe.

"So!" said Leslie Evry, settling back in the swivel chair with his hands interjoined behind his head. "What brings you to our fair land?"

Richard had to hear this again. This was great. The whole adventure had lasted five seconds. And here he was: wiped out.

"I beg your pardon?"

"What brings you," repeated Leslie Evry, with brio, "to our fair land?"

Richard had been asked this question several times already-by liftmen, by barmen. Now he was hearing it from Bold Agenda. He was hearing it from his own future. Of course, Richard liked to think of himself as a virtuoso of rejection; his history of humiliation was long-was long and proud. The humiliated are always looking for consideration and getting the unconsidered, the offhand and ready-made. So Richard sat there, devastated, wiped out, by a reflexive banality from Leslie Evry.

"What brings me to your fair land? I somehow ran away with the idea that I had a novel coming out in your fair land."

"You certainly do. Seen this?"

He was handed a slender flyleaf or bookmark. On it were listed ten or twelve tides. There he was, near the bottom. Richard Tull. Untitled. $24.95. 441pp. Richard Tull recognized Richard Tull. The other names were not familiar, were in themselves unfamiliar; even the compilers of American telephone directories, he sensed, might have been impressed by their unfamiliarity. The only thing they reminded him of was the castlist of Amelior and Amelior Regained: Gwyn's identikit hominids-Jung-Xiao, Yukio, Conchita, Arnaujumajuk.

"Have you heard anything about any reviews or anything of that kind?"

"For sure," said Leslie. Smartly he flipped open a folder on his desk. "John Two Moons had some coverage in the Cape Codder. He keeps a fishing boat up there or something. And Shanana Ormolu Davis had a nice mention in the Shiny Sheet. In Miami. She's working with the hearing-impaired down there. At the Abbe L'Epee Institute?"

Two stamp-sized clippings were passed toward him. Richard looked and nodded.

"You know how John Two Moons got his name? It's kind of a nice story. Apparently-"

"Excuse me. What about Untitled?"

"Excuse me?"

"Untitled. Twenty-four-ninety-five. Four hundred and forty-one pages."

Then Leslie Evry did a terrible thing. He said "Excuse me?" again- and then lavishly blushed. "Not thus far. Insofar as we know."

"Is there a. prospect of any reviews?"

"A 'prospect'?"

"Is there anyone in the publicity department I should be talking to?"

"May I ask what this would be in regard to?"

In the past, Richard had often been known to be "difficult." Difficult was a word that applied to his person as well as his prose. Unfortunately, though, he soon failed to command much of an arena to be difficult in. There was surely no more elbow room for difficulty (difficulty was exhausted), he decided, after his yodeling stalk-out from the debating hall of the Whetstone Public Library Literary Association ("Whither the Novel?"). He stalked out because he was the only panel member who, in the cafeteria before the talk, had not been offered a biscuit with his tea. As he rode alone on the bus and, later, on the tube train, with his armpits ablaze, Richard recalled that he had been offered a biscuit. But not a chocolate one. Just a ginger-nut. And that same year he had to be expensively dissuaded from suing a reviewer of Dreams Don't Mean Anything for that dismissive filler in The Oldie . . . Richard considered being difficult now, and stalking out of Bold

Agenda. Then what? A few plangent inhalations, on Avenue B? Like all writers, Richard wanted to live in some hut on some crag somewhere, every couple of years folding a page into a bottle and dropping it limply into the spume. Like all writers, Richard wanted, and expected,the reverence due, say, to the Warrior Christ an hour before Armageddon. He said,

"Frankly, you surprise me. Roy Biv was full of ideas. As it happens I-"

"Ah, Roy! Roy Biv!"

"As it happens I've already fixed a few things. A reading and signing in Boston. I'm doing the Dub Traynor interview in Chicago."

"Dub Traynor? For the book?"

"For the book."

"Well that's great. Hey. May I introduce my co-director. Frances Ort. Frances? Come and say hi to Richard Tull."

Bold Agenda, as an operation, was still only half constructed. Frances Ort had not so much entered Leslie's office as wandered on to his floor-space. Behind her, big clean guys in overalls plodded about carrying sections of white wallboard. On arrival Richard had himself plodded about among them for a while, before finding Leslie. You could see how it was all going to look one day-cord carpets, white cubbyholes.

"It's certainly a pleasure to meet you, sir. I'm really looking forward to reading your novel."

"I was just telling Richard," said Leslie, "how John Two Moons got his name."

"I love this story."

In appearance Frances Ort suggested a rainbow coalition of the chromosomes. She could probably go anywhere in the five boroughs- Harlem, Little Astoria, Chinatown-and provoke no comment other than the usual incitements to immediate and rigorous sexual congress. In this she resembled her colleague. Ethnically, Evry and Ort were either everything and nothing or neither one thing nor the other. They were just Americans.

"Well. You know how Native Americans get their names."

"I think so. It's the first thing the dad sees."

"Right. Now. The night John Two Moons was born there was this beautiful full moon, and his father-"

"Was drunk," suggested Richard.

"Excuse me?"

"Was drunk. And saw two moons. Well they are meant to be incredible drunks, aren't they? Native Americans? I mean we're bad enough,

but they're…"

"… And-and his father walked out, by the lake, and saw the full moon reflected in the water."

"That's it?" said Richard. He was thinking about smoking, in directdefiance of the sign on the wall, which told him not to: not to think about it.

"Frances here has been working in Miami with Shanana Ormolu Davis," said Leslie, standing, and taking up position at her side, "updating-"

"How did she get her name? I beg your pardon. Go on."

"Updating sign language for the hearing-impaired. It's really interesting."

"African, or Afro-American," said Frances, "used to be this." She flattened her nose with her palm. "And Chinese used to be this." She tweaked her left eye slantwise with a childish fingertip. "And 'tight' or 'cheap' used to be this." She stroked her chin.

"Meaning?"

"Jewish. With a beard."

"Christ. I can see that needed some work."

"And a person of same-sex orientation," said Leslie, "used to be-"

"Queer," said Frances.

"Excuse me?"

"Queer. They're called queers now."

"Right. Queer," Leslie went on, "used to be this." He gave a languid flap of the wrist. "Can you believe?"

"And now what is it?"

"Queer?" said Leslie, turning to Frances. "What's queer now?"

"Queer? I think it's just sign language for queer."

"We've come a long way," said Richard.

"Too right," said Frances.

"Too right," said Leslie.

He took her hand. Or she took his. Or their hands joined. In a way nothing was expressed by this, no claim of love or friendship or even solidarity. But it still looked like sign language. Meaning the future, the next thing, meaning evolution, and Amelior…

Frances said good-bye and very soon Richard was being guided toward the stairs by Leslie, who was saying, "As hard as we're working here you can see we still have a way to go. Copies have been submitted for review. At the present time distribution is light going on minimal but if the reviews are perceived as positive then things may build from there. Can I ask you something? Are you just touring the States anyway'?"

Now Richard paused on the stairs. He saw no way out. "I'm writing a piece about Gwyn Barry."

"Isn't it amazing the attention he's getting?"

"Yes. Consternating. How do you account for it??

"I guess it's a book whose time has come. The Profundity Requital- that's the key for him. He's on fire. And if the Requital goes his way: abracadabra. Supernova."

Don't worry about it, he wanted to answer: the Requital will not go Gwyn's way. Richard was resolved. He owed it to Profundity. He owed it to the universe.

They moved on.

"I'm sorry we can't get out there more for Untitled," said Leslie. "But yet. If you so choose to do so …"

At the front door he veered off to the left, into a storeroom or junk room. There were sounds of mauling and tugging and dragging and his sudden and surprising "Shit!" and then more dragging, until he finally flung a lumpy brown mail sack out into the passage at Richard's feet and came stumbling in on after it.

"You're doing readings, signings," said Leslie. He looked vivid- warmed up. "I don't know. You could care less, right? I don't know. There's eighteen copies in there. You feeling strong?"

What could he do? Untitled was his youngest, and probably his last born. The sack looked ragged, frayed, at the end of its tether. But Richard swung it up onto his shoulder. And he had to make it clear to Evry that he could lift it: that he was man enough.

"Boston. That your first stop?"

"Last stop."

"Oh. By the way. Great book."

It wasn't until now that Richard teetered, all his weight gathering on his back foot. "Thank you," he said in a youthful voice. "That's very kind of you. I did feel I was on to something. You don't think … I was worried about the penultimate bridging passages. You know: where the figment narrator pretends to attempt that series of decoy refocusings."

Leslie nodded understandingly.

"Because the travesty is a counterfeit."

"Yup."

"Not that he's really a narrator."

"Mm-hm."

"Reliable or otherwise. But he had to be a surrogate if the sham refocusings were going to seem to work."

"Absolutely. Hey are you sure you can handle that?"

Out on Ninth and B, between Bold Agenda and the Life Cafe, a little

bookshop (The Lazy Susan) lurked, in a half-basement, behind thick light-bending glass. Unlike most American bookshops-unlike the bookshops he had already meandered between on Fifth and on Madison(monitoring his own absence and turning Amelior Regained to the wall or inhuming it beneath stacks of contending trex), and unlike the bookshops he would come to know, the Muzaked and mallish, the underlit and wood-paneled and pseudo-Bodleiaic, the disco-Montparnassian- this was Richard's kind of bookshop. It looked like a garage sale thrown by the dependents of some bibliomaniacal niggard. As he ventured further, into the pleasant barnyard smell (the smell of the twins' hair), he was struck by a contrary association-the Christian Science Reading Rooms of the English high street, and their structural futility: because a Reading Room meant freedom and possibility, and (as he was often reminded on his doorstep) Christian Science, which was all there was to read in there, was a nonstarter and meant absolutely nothing. He bumped about with his mail sack, finding categories, alphabetization. Maybe this was a broader church; it offered revelation by a variety of means-crystals, heavenly configurations, numerology and, here and there, yes, poetry, fiction, criticism, philosophy. Then he saw it, on a bench, the slow staggered stacks and the sign saying bold agenda. The mail sack thudded into his spine as he quickly approached and quickly halted. Hush Now by Shanana Ormolu Davis, Cowboy Boots by John Two Moons, and, among other works by other visionaries of the Bold Agenda imprint, a brace of copies of Unfilled by Richard Tull.

He tarried in the Lazy Susan Bookstore for over an hour. No one bought Untitled; no one flipped through it or weighed it in their hand; no one strayed that close to the bench enshrined to Bold Agenda-all of whose publications, it turned out, bore the same strange nimbus of fur and fuzz, as daunting to the eye as to the touch. It was certainly a pity about the look of it, the look and feel of Untitled. No dust jacket, for instance; and that horsehair texture. Wrenching his first copy out of its Jiffy Bag, back in Calchalk Street, Richard had caught a hangnail deep in its bristling weft. And his fingertip was little more than a blob of plasma when he eventually shook it free … Richard tarried for over an hour. And no one touched Untitled. But he paid this no mind. What was an hour? Literary time wasn't cosmic time or geological time or evolutionary time. Still, it wasn't quotidian time. It went slower than the clock on the wall.

Which Gwyn Barry would do well to learn, thought Richard, when he got back to the hotel. Shackled and hostaged to the secular, to the temporal, an eager hireling of his own novel, Gwyn was still Stockpiling interviews in his suite on the fourteenth floor. Richard watched and listened to three or four of them (simplicity, unsophistication, carpentry), quietly mesmerized by boredom and disgust. True, Amelior Regainedwasn't published until early next month, and Unfitted had been out, or available, for at least a fortnight, but Richard still reckoned he was holding his own. Why? And why did he want a great deal of alcohol so much (why did he want to upend the drinks table into his mouth?), and why did he throb for Gina's touch? Waking beside her, on some recent mornings, he had felt as questingly nubile as the opening bars of Peter and the Wolf. .. They were flying out in the late afternoon. Somehow Richard found time to cab downtown to Avenue B, to reenter the Lazy Susan and establish that neither copy of Untitled had left the bookstore. On the other hand, perhaps one had been sold and his modest pile had been fondly replenished from the stockroom. Perhaps one copy had been sold. Perhaps, somewhere, a reader was frowning and smiling and scratching his hair. Perhaps one copy had been sold. Perhaps two.

We have reiterated that neither Demeter Barry nor Gina Tull enjoyed any connection with literature except by marriage. Just as Richard had no connection with Nottingham except by marriage. Just as Gwyn, at the outset, had no connection with the nobility, or with central heating, except by marriage.

This wasn't true. Demi had her literary salon for a while, after all, and had briefly served on a committee or two which championed the cause of oppressed, silenced, imprisoned and murdered writers, and the cause of the Ghost Writer himself, he who is here and yet not here, he who is among the living and yet not among them. As for Gina, she and literature went way back.

The first time Richard set eyes on her he wondered why she wasn't doing her nails in the master bedroom of a thirty-berth yacht in the Persian Gulf, or bawling out her greeters as she stepped from the scrapertop helipad, late for her little lunch with B.J. or Leon or Whitney. More than this (because her face was artistic, unhackneyed, it was original), he could see her on the parapet of the Spanish castle, long emplaced as mistress-muse of the smocked and popeyed iconeer … All these impressions were strongly and strangely reinforced the first time he went to bed with her, which in fact took some doing. But there she sat, unregarded, behind a desk, selling postcards and catalogs in a black-timbered Nottingham museum, and behind her, through the glass, a patch of walled garden with the sun squinting at it after the rain, and a lone crow on the grass flexing

its shoulders and straightening its sooty zootsuit. The world had not

found out about her. How come? Because Richard knew it couldn't just be him. This was genetic celebrity, which had an audience and an essential value. In other times and climes her family would have kept her in alocked room and held an auction on her sixteenth birthday. Leaning forward at her desk, counting money and sighing without weariness, she was ten years further on into womanhood-and the word, the phone calls and faxes, still had time to go out to the planet's playboys, all of them, from the pub spiv with his white-lipped salacities, up past the jodhpured joke in his jeep and right the way through to the kind of OPEC keltocrat who blew half his GNP on his own Johnson. Richard felt the ignoble excitement of a Sotheby's smoothieboy buying a Titian from a tinker. He was thirty, and Oxonian, and still handsome. He lived in London: the capital itself. He had a notorious girlfriend-the powerful Dominique-Louise. He was a freshly published novelist. But his knees were the knees seen through that bendy leaded window, seen by that brute of a crow, which was watching him and harshly purring.

He bought his seventh postcard and second catalog and said, "Do you like Lawrence?" And she looked up at him with eyes so great and clean that they were obliged to include some vapidity, some provincial vapidity, because there was room in there for everything. Gina was no English rose, dead the next day. This was subsoil: Celt-Iberian, Northern-swarthy, gypsyish. Her eyes were set in dark loops of shadow, like badger, burglar, brawler, dramatically bruised by some internal suffusion (embarrassment always deepened these shadows); her nose was a Caligu-lan quarter-circle; her mouth was lean- wide, but not full.

"Do you like Lawrence?"

"Eh?"

"D. H. Lawrence. Do you like him?"

How do you mean, like? her eyes said, then. But her mouth said, "You had me there. My boyfriend's called Lawrence. Anyroad, I can tell you like him."

Richard laughed sparingly, grandly. (And she really did say anyroad. Just that once. And never again.) With his ears all gummed and humming, Richard explained. This was indeed his fifth visit to the museum in two days. But his interest was professional, was shrewd, was remunerative. Around them a temporary exhibition in honor of D. H. Lawrence had been mounted (his shaving brush, his fob-watch, his manuscripts, his surprisingly well-controlled paintings), here in the author's hometown. Richard was writing a piece about it-very much the kind of piece he wrote in those days: regional, marginal, with a flat fee for expenses. Richard in a room at the bunky boardinghouse; a half-bottle of whisky and the Selected Letters, the poems, Lady Chatterley, D. H. Lawrence, Novelist, A Selection from Phoenix, Women in Love. That kind of thing made him happy then.

"It's for the TLS. The Times Literary Supplement." That was good. All those prissy syllables were good. Richard knew that words were all he had. Not the words that would appear in the Times Literary Supplement. Nor the words that would appear on the pages of Dreams Don't Mean Anything, due out in the autumn. Just the words he would use on Gina Young. In speech, and of course in letters, in notes. Because Richard knew about women and letters, women and notes. He knew about women and words.

She said, "Where are you stopping?"

Ah: a local ambiguity. Stopping meant staying. And Richard wasn't stopping anywhere. He was going all the way. He said, " 'The Savoy,' 3 Stalton Avenue. Can I ask you if you'll do something?"

"Eh?"

"Come live with me and be my love."

"Bloody hell."

"And we will all the pleasures prove . .. Wait. I'm sorry. But what does one say? I've never seen anyone like you before. Your eyes."

She was looking around. Who for? A policeman. Or a critic, to come and help with the cliches. But we like cliches, don't we, in matters of the heart? Lovers are a mob. No detail, thank you, nothing too interesting in itself, if you don't mind, where love is concerned. That all comes later. Our tiring and fantastical requests and provisos, our much-humored peculiarities, our exasperating attention to detail.

"Get away," she said.

"Okay then. Lunch."

"I've a boyfriend."

"Yes. Lawrence. I bet. Long time? How long?"

"Nine years."

"Of course. And you like Lawrence. And Lawrence wouldn't like it."

"No he wouldn't. What would I tell him?"

"Nothing. No, not nothing. Tell him good-bye. Good-bye, goodbye."

He turned. A lady-her tolerant swallow, her habitual beam-had formed a one-lady queue behind him. Richard glanced at the postcard in his hand: Mexico. He paid for it. How sore his throat was. And her face, pointing up at him from where she crouched at the brown table, how swollen, how infused. We must remember the particular ghost (though Gina hadn't read him, and never would) who presided over the innocent triteness of their exchange. Not Henry James. Not E. M. Forster-oh dear me no. Look at Sir Clifford Chatterley, in his wheelchair: he wasn't man enough to call a cunt a cunt! But now behold the hot Lawrence witha hundredweight of hot horseflesh clenched between his thighs, with the fat and frightening Frieda on the next saddle along, thundering through the spark-shower and crimson brushstrokes of Popacatapetl …

Gina had slept with Lawrence, he assumed. She hadn't slept with any writers. Before very long, she would sleep with many.

"Can I meet you after work?"

"No."

This is the past. And so it's true.

In Washington there was a party for Gwyn at the British Embassy, co-thrown, it seemed, by Britain and the publicity boy.

Under a ton of chandelier Richard stood with ovals of light streaming at an angle across his face. This made him look like a creature on some riverine mission or vigil: it imparted an amphibian-no, a reptilian- quality to his unvarying stare. And it was with reptilian patience, a croc-like consideration of the percentages, the rot-rates and backlash factors, that Richard watched and waited, and waited and watched. Gwyn was doing his thing on Lucy Cabretti: Lucy Cabretti, who in Richard's hearing had been referred to by the publicity boy (the publicity boy was big on game plans) as Profundity One. For the first hour or so they'd stationed Gwyn at the door, working the arrivals: a succession of sodden wayfarers (they seemed to form a subscription audience of the local sociocultural), with their snow-capped umbrellas and slithering galoshes. Effusive enough when introduced to Lucy in the hall, Gwyn was now concertedly loving her up-on a sofa beneath the mullioned window, against a galaxy of lamplit snow. She was laughing with her small head thrown back, a hand placed on Gwyn's arm to ward off further hilarity. Under the trembling chandelier Richard maintained his reptilian vigil. He wondered what Gwyn had going for him, these days, in terms of sexual charm. Gwyn never used to have any; but since then he'd thrown some money at his appearance (need Richard adduce the tinted contacts?), and of course he had the entree now. Success revamps you. It must keep you young. Because failure sure makes you old.

For largely accidental reasons (an international conference, plus culture week at the White House, according to the publicity boy), several American writers were present, none of Richard's outright heroes but a fair selection of middleweights, hallowed background figures, on cautious exhibit. Had they been here, their British counterparts would have been sitting in a clump, cheerfully monolithic and practically indistinguishable. Yet the carved idols of American letters kept their distance, the nuclei of their own inner circles. And Richard had circled these circles, earlier on, appreciatively sensing the repulsive force that kept them apart. Why did they hate each other? It was obvious. To exaggerate: here was a two-foot Alabaman with his face in a bucket of hooch: there was a towering Virginian belle with her mint julep and her honeysucklevowels; here was a gnashing Jew from Dneopropetrovsk: there was the writhing moustache of the wandering Lebanese; here the granddaughter of an African slave, here a Boston brahmin, here a Swedish hippie from Duluth. America is like the world. And look at it, the world. People don't get on. And writers should hate each other, Richard naturally believed. If they mean business. They are competing for something there is only one of: the universal. They should want to go to the mat.

"Excuse me, are you Lucy Cabretti? Richard Tull. Literary Editor of The Little Magazine, in London. I wonder if you saw the review we ran of Double Dating."

"No! I didn't see that."

"I was told you'd be here so I brought along a copy of it. Look at it later. An interesting review, as well as a favorable one. / thought too that you found the most tenable position. You make the legal situation very clear, without losing sight of the fact that we're talking about real men and women."

She thanked him. Richard had skimmed Double Dating: Yes and No, Lucy's how-to book about not getting raped by all your friends. He had agreed with her arguments, while simultaneously wondering why anyone would need to hear them. Who could explain the fact that "My Way" was the anthem of modern America? Americans didn't want to do it their way. They wanted to do it your way.

"I'm actually traveling with Gwyn while he's touring here. I'm writing it up. We're very old pals. Yes, we shared rooms at Oxford. Scholarship boys. I came up from London, and there he was, fresh in from the Welsh valleys."

"How romantic."

"Romantic? Yes. Well."

"I'm sorry. I'm a disgusting Anglophile."

"He was from Wales, not England," said Richard, who thought it extraordinary that Anglophilia was still staggering around the place. "Imagine it as something like Puerto Rico."

"Even more romantic."

"Romantic? Well, Gwyn was certainly a ferocious … A 'ladies' man' is I suppose a polite way of putting it."

"Really?"

"A very polite way of putting it," he said, realizing that he was about

to get carried away. "Let's go and sit over there. Let's get a drink. You'll

need it."

Richard had not, so far, found much to do in Washington, which was only the center of the world. All afternoon he reclined on his hotel bedin a trance of cunning. While Gwyn had done four photo sessions and six interviews in a variety of mediums, while also finding time to visit the Phillips Collection, the Senate, the Library of Congress, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Richard had succeeded only in washing his hair. Oh yes. And in throwing in a call to the Lazy Susan (this was arduous), where he was eventually told that they had two copies of Untitled in stock. Washing his hair was no formality either. Again he found himself riveted to the bathroom mirror, immersed in the question of how the same human being could look so bald and so shaggy. In the end, after a visit to the pharmacy, he smothered himself in mousses and conditioners. It hadn't worked out, and, for the time being at least, Richard's hair was basically in deep shit… He made his own way to the party. Because of the weather, or the zone system, his cab kept picking up new passengers, all orphans of the loosening Milky Way, all starred and kissed by the six-faceted snowflakes. Richard sat zestlessly in the back while the driver idled them all over town, along the unbarricadable boulevards, through the bare snowfields of American history; the cab glass creaked to the sharp switches of the winds, but the many-eyed Capitol seemed to loom no bigger however close you got to it; they did Georgetown, the Hill, Du Pont Circle, following the city's large design which was accessible only to a higher being. He climbed out at last, in the embassy district. And Gwyn was there to greet him at the door.

"There's probably a medical term for it now," Richard was saying. "Satyromania or some such."

"Well he has a certain style," Lucy said tolerantly. "And all those pretty students . .."

"Oh no. It wasn't with the students. All those little paragons from Somerville and St. Hilda's. With as many O-levels as freckles on their noses. No no. He'd never get the turnover he needed. It wasn't the students. No." Richard paused and said, "It was the college servants that friend Barry looked to for his sport."

Lucy frowned: a small frown under her dark ringlets. As a parting gesture, Richard conjured up a genuine memory from his first year at Oxford: himself, crashing in at two in the morning, after some debauch in some bedsit at the secretarial school, to find Gwyn, in his earphone sideburns, still bent over his books, inching down that long road toward his bad Second. Every other weekend Gilda would bus herself in from Swansea. She used to cower in the little bedroom. On Sunday mornings, after breakfast in Hall, Gwyn would bring a bun back for her hidden in his pocket. She liked marmalade. Anyway, marmalade was what she got.

"He was notorious for the way he went after the scullery maids. Inthose days, the college servants, or 'gyps' as we used to call them-unbelievable, isn't it?-were almost slave labor. They were sacked en masse at the beginning of the long vacation and hired in the autumn, after a summer of breadlines and doss houses. So if a young gentleman wanted to take advantage …" Richard moved his head upward and sideways, in pained recollection. "There was one particularly unfortunate incident involving a kitchen maid of barely sixteen. A touching-looking girl. Dark ringlets. Just a child, really. Some said she was a Gypsy girl-a foundling." Richard tried to pull himself together. His eyes were stinging at his own fiction. "Gwyn … Gwyn and one of his fellow bloods contracted a wager. I'll spare you the details. Gwyn won, but his friend- Trelawney his name was-refused to pay up. A matter of a few guineas."

"Guineas?" said Lucy Cabretti.

"A unit of currency. Favored by gamblers." He lurched on, raising his voice. "And so Gwyn forced Trelawney's hand. He nailed up her-he nailed up a section of her underwear onto the notice board of the Junior Common Room. With full details of the hazard."

"Then what? Trelawney pays up, right? Pays Gwyn the gwyn-the guineas. How much is a guinea?"

"Twenty-one shillings." He thought it had probably been a mistake about the guineas.

Lucy folded her arms and sighed. She said, "You know, your story is really hard to believe."

"Oh? Why's that?"

"He seems so nice and normal. And his books. That Amelior stuff. He writes like such a whuss."

"A what?"

"You know. A real pooch. As if all he wanted to do was not offend anybody. I mean it's pleasant enough, that stuff, but it's just dead."

Richard was happy and proud. But he could see that he didn't need to waste any more time on Lucy Cabretti. He stood up, saying, "It's been nice talking to you. And I hope you like that review."

"Thanks. You too. Wait. What happened to the girl?"

"What girl?"

"The serving girl. The foundling."

He paused. He actually had one foot in the air-about to begin its ponderous journey to the door. Pregnancy? Prison? Thrown out into the wind and the rain, naked, without a groat to her name? But she thought Gwyn's stuff was shit anyway, so all he said was, "Who knows? Once they've been used and cast aside-who knows what happens to these poor girls??

When he got back to the hotel Richard rang home and spoke to Lizzete, Marius and Marco, Gina being elsewhere … Then he sat down at the desk and coerced himself into facing up to something: biography. As he had long suspected, the ring road of his reviewing schedule was all freezing fog and black ice, all sideswipe and whiplash: he faced a catastrophe of deadlines. Richard was actually reviewing more books than ever before. It remained true that he was partly resuscitated as a novelist; but novels still showed no sign of earning him any money. This had taken a while-and many reminders from Gina-to sink in. He turned in his chair. Biographies were scattered . . . No. Biographies were stolidly installed around the room, each of them as heavy as a cinder block. Richard felt dizzy and that was strange, because he'd been very good at the party and had carefully counted his drinks: he'd had seventeen. There were several more biographies in his suitcase: his suitcase, which he would never unpack; his suitcase, gravid with heavy lives.

It was ten o'clock. Lucy Cabretti was home by now. And she, too, was reading. Richard was on page five of The Mercutio of Lincoln's Inn Fields: A Life of Thomas Betterton. Lucy was on page 168 of Come Be My Love. Within minutes she would finish Come Be My Love and would begin Magenta Rhapsody. Lucy read chain-store romances at a rate of three or four a day. This had no effect on the stern probity with which she fought for the Equal Rights Amendment; it did not color her speeches and lectures on economic equity; in no wise had it vitiated her non-anecdotal and dryly legalistic best-seller on sexual mores. But she read chain-store romances at the rate of three or four a day. Lucy was in bed, alone. Her handsome and sagacious boyfriend was in Philadelphia, visiting his sister. As she read on (with his cane, his snorting mastiff, Sir William was stalking Maria through the hayricks), her eyes swelled fearfully, and her hand sought her glowing throat. Maria was a serving girl, small, pretty, with dark ringlets.

Midnight. Richard was on page seventy-three. He was also drinking from the mini-bar, which sounds comparatively prudent of him. Given a free hand, he might have been drinking from something bigger. Richard was drinking beer from the mini-bar only because there was nothing else left in the mini-bar, except for mixers and snacks. Slowly Richard's head jerked back. He stared at his drink with indignation. The softly humming liquid seemed disturbingly bland to his tongue. The suspicion formed that it contained no alcohol. Under the light he peered closely at

the bottle until he found some small print warning that its contents

might rack up pregnant women. And so he drank on, calmly nodding, mightily reassured.

The next day they were flying south.

Clearly there was a spiritual bond-a covenant, a solemn sympathy- between airports and junk novels. Or so it seemed to him.

Junk novels were sold in airports. People in airports bought and read junk novels. Junk novels were about people in airports, inasmuch as junk novels needed airports to shift their characters round the planet, and airports served, in junk novels, as the backdrop to their partings, chance encounters, reunions and trysts.

Some junk novels were all about airports. Some junk novels were even called things like Airport. Why, then, you might ask, was there no airport called Junk Novel? Movies based on junk novels were, of course, heavily reliant on the setting of the airport. So why wasn't one always seeing, at airports, junk novels being made into movies? Perhaps there really was a whole other airport, called, perhaps, Junk Novel Airport, or with a fancier name like Manderley International Junk Novel Airport, where they did them all. This wouldn't be a real airport but a mock-up on a soundstage somewhere, with everything two-dimensional and made of plastic and tinfoil and other junk.

Even when they found themselves in airports, characters in junk novels didn't read junk novels. Unlike everyone else in airports. They read wills and pre-nups. If they were intellectuals, connoisseurs, great minds, they were sometimes allowed to read non-junk novels. Whereas real-life people who read non-junk novels, even people who wrote non-junk novels, read junk novels if, and only if, they were in airports.

Junk novels have been around for at least as long as non-junk novels, and airports haven't been around for very long at all. But they both really took off at the same time. Readers of junk novels and people in airports wanted the same thing: escape, and quick transfer from one junk novel to another junk novel and from one airport to another airport.

Richard, as he made his way through all these airports, toting his mail sack of Untitledsand his burden of biographies, wouldn't have minded trying the odd junk novel, but he was too busy reading all this crap about third-class poets and seventh-rate novelists and eleventh-eleven dramatists-biographies of essayists, polemicists, editors, publishers. Would the day dawn when he reviewed a book about a book reviewer? Or a paper-clip salesman or a typewriter repairer. You didn't have to do much in the literary field, he thought, to merit a biography. So long as you knew how to read and write … Quite a few of the amblers and hurriers and sprawlers in these airports were sporting copies of Amelior Regained. This puzzled him. In Richard's view, certainly, Amelior Regained was junk. But it wasn't a junk novel. It was a trex novel. But it wasn't a junk novel. The heroes and heroines of junk novels, even when they were car-dinals or novitiates, remained ravenously secular. And look at Gwyn's little troupe of trundling dreamers, none of whom had any money or sex or facelifts or cool cars, and never went anywhere near airports.

Whatever junk novels were, however they worked, they were close to therapy, and airports were close to therapy. They both belonged to the culture of the waiting room. Piped music, the language of calming suasion. Come this way-yes, the flight attendant will see you now. Airports, junk novels: they were taking your mind off mortal fear.

Now, wearing woolen jacket, and bow tie, and two nicotine patches, and chewing (or sucking) nicotine gum, and smoking a cigarette, and feeling like something in a ten-gallon bag behind a nuclear power plant, humbly awaiting its next dreadful atomic declension, Richard lounged on a lounger: before him idled the uninviting Atlantic, in bayside calm; on either side the raked and watered sands of South Beach, Miami, stretched far away… Gwyn and the publicity boy were staying in a five-star citadel farther up the shore, whereas Richard was more informally lodged down here on South. And that was okay. Richard's snobbery was sincere snobbery; he didn't just pretend to be a snob because he thought it looked upper class. All right, he hadn't made it as a contemporary guy. He was a modern. But he wasn't a postmodern. So he really didn't want to be wallowing and languishing, with Gwyn, in that twenty-first-century nautilus, that regency spaceship offish tanks and startling energy bills, where every room had three televisions and five telephones (American luxury having much to do with the irreducible proximity of televisions and telephones), and in which money flew off you every minute whatever you did. Solacing himself, too (as always), with the fixtures of neglect, he liked his flaking medium-rise on South Beach, with its shot early-morning smell of damp plaster and India. Kafka's beetle didn't just pretend to like lying around on unswept floors beneath items of disused and disregarded furniture. To paraphrase a critic who also knew about beetles and what they liked, Kafka's beetle took a beetle pleasure, a beetle solace, in all the darkness and the dust and the discards.

Behind him, between the beach and the main drag, where resort commerce convulsed itself against an innocuous proscenium of art deco, lay a halfheartedly vegetated area, bounded by low brick walls, in which Gwyn Barry, and others, were making a rock video. Gwyn's role was more or less a passive one, it had to be allowed. He wasn't dancing in it or singing in it. He was just sitting in it-at the request of the featured band's lead singer, an Amelior enthusiast. All Gwyn had to do was place himself at a table that had a globe and a book on it; behind him they had positioned a flapping tapestry where bent sheep grazed, wisely watched over by white-haired pards holding crooks and lyres, aeolian harps. A squad of young black dancers were then to move past him, dipping and straightening, like cookie cutouts. Richard had stayed to monitor an edi-fying conversation, duly recorded in his notebook, between Gwyn and the sleek publicity boy. Something like:

"Trust me. This'll help Regained. It'll groundbreak it." "Maybe," said Gwyn. "But it might hurt the Profundity thing." "We have their guarantee that it won't screen until after the Profundity thing."

". .. How much will it help Regained?" "Major. Come on. Just think who it'll reach."

After that Richard had fled, down toward the sand and the sea, the eye-hurting metal of the sky. It was not the spectacle of vulgarity or venality that hastened his departure. The reason lay inward, as everything, now, lay increasingly and irreversibly inward. Richard fled the black dancers and their grip and torque of life, their raised temperature of youth and health. These little black stars, teenagers, every inch of their bodies primed and juiced, were nonetheless the opposite of artists in that they did what other people told them to, and unreservedly accepted the time and place they were living in. They were still enslaved. Richard could claim as his forebears only free men and women, but he was a slave and a ghost in his own life; the only bit of him that acted freely was the bit that planned and typed his fiction. Then, too, the dancers were at the top of the chattels business, cosseted calves, priceless specimens, skittish and exquisite. Whereas Richard … Still, it wasn't his thoughts that had driven him over the wall and onto the beach, where the sky glistened and pulsed more heavily than the sea, his head down, one forearm bent beneath the two big books he carried, the other raised to soothe or steady his flinching face. It was the burn of their brownness, and the colder clarity of their eyes and teeth, the pulp salmon of their tongues-which made him feel that from now on all life and love would be harbored elsewhere. It seemed as if the atrocious doses of powerful medications that he soon must surely take were already in dour operation, bringing down a thick and wobbling penumbra of turbulent air, the kind which, in larger quantities, makes big jets quake, secluding him, roping him off from life and love. Before him on the beach Americans exercised, and played games. American health got everyone where it hurt, in the pocket, and had things so arranged that each disaster for the body was a multiple disaster for you and everyone around you in your life. Loved ones, and so on. But those with the money were Clearly getting a lot out of it, the health deal here, and Miami, with all the robot methuselahs of Miami Beach, was the holy city of its miracles. On the faces of those who leapt and limped and hollered and panted in front of him Richard was seeing something that he hadheard about only in discussions of American foreign policy (and then not recently): American resolve. Visible on the face of the fattest jogger. American resolve, which is like no other resolve, not the steeliest, quite, but always saying that their right to it need never be examined. Seriously considering the removal of his bow tie, Richard lit another cigarette.

He was heating up, and not just in his person. Also, apparently, as a commodity. Even the publicity boy, surveying Richard's situation, might have said without irony that all his prospectives were zeroing in. Once or perhaps twice every day Richard had called the Lazy Susan, deploying one or other of his strikingly talentless American accents (he was no better than the twins, who, when imitating Americans, pronounced yes as a trisyllable and put three ns in banana); and it seemed that Untitled was suddenly and unaccountably taking fire. Instead of having two copies in stock, the Lazy Susan now had one copy in stock. With his enhanced royalty deal, that meant he was a clear $2.50 to the good. More than this, much more than this, he now had something resembling a publicity schedule. He would be interviewed, the following afternoon, by Pete Sahl of the Miami Herald; in Chicago he would be the subject of the hour-long Dub Traynor interview; and in Boston he would give a reading-signing at the Founder Theater. All fixed or facilitated by Gwyn. The publicity boy had sent over a sheet of paper with all the details typed out on it.

"Hi."

Richard looked up. A young woman was standing over him. She wore cutoffs, tattoos, a plastic money pouch like a belt with a beer-gut.

"That'll be three bucks."

"What'll be three bucks?"

"The lounger you're lying on."

"I haven't got any money on me."

"Sorry, sir."

It was a nice idea, Americans calling everyone sir, addressing everyone-waiters, cabbies, toilet attendants, serial murders-as sir. The consequence was, though, that they made sir sound like Mac or bub or scumbag.

"Okay. I might just have it."

Bearing his two crumpled bills and a handful of his brown and silver change, she climbed back into her caddycart and whirred softly off on it, looking for other people who were lying on loungers. "Great job you got," said Richard quietly. Said Richard to himself. He lay back on his padded rack, and yawned, and briefly nursed his bubonic jet lag. Anyway, that was what he hoped it was: merely jet lag, rather than a no-surprises, by-the-book expiration from advanced old age.

His one concession to his surroundings was a Day-Glo yellow flexi-grip highlighting pen (found beneath the bedside table in his hotel room), with which he was marking passages of especial interest in The Character of Sir Thomas Overbury (1581-1613). But really he was reading two books at once, with one drooping and one auspicious eye. The book on his lap was a literary biography. The book in his head was his own, Unfitted, from whose pages he would read in Boston, Massachusetts. Which bits? The description of the escort-agency advertisement done as a chapter-long parody of The Romance of the Rose? That miraculously sustained tour de force in which five unreliable narrators converse on crossed mobile-phone lines while stuck in the same revolving door? Gwyn had given him confirmation of the engagement that lunchtime, backstage at the Miami Book Festival, as the seconds ticked away before "An Hour with Gwyn Barry." Touched by his friend's words, Richard hung around for the event, hoping it would simply be a severe disappointment as opposed to an unqualified flop. Annoyingly, about a thousand people showed up for it. Why? In Miami, for pity's sake, where there was so much else on offer. Why not the mall, the pool, the casino, the crack house? Didn't they have anything better to do? The only good bit came as Gwyn was leaving the auditorium, lingeringly, accepting congratulations and handshakes, and giving previews of his book-signing skills-soon to be deployed in greater earnest at the Gwyn Barry stand out on the mezzanine. Abruptly and with such marked address that the publicity boy interposed himself between them, a burly woman in jeans and tank top stepped up to Gwyn and said, "Nothing personal, but I think your books are shit." With corporate calm and erectness the publicity boy steered Gwyn past this bejeaned embarrassment, this tank-topped glitch. And she called out after them, "Not everyone thinks you're wonderful!" Gwyn hesitated; he hesitated, half turning, half smiling, as if grateful for this salutary reminder-that America still contained one or two holdouts. The woman turned, and communicated with her companion, in sign language. She didn't pinch her nose with her fingers or anything, but it was clear that she was telling her deaf friend that Gwyn's books were shit. With pride and solidarity, Richard had already intuited who this must be: Shanana Ormolu Davis, of Bold Agenda. He watched Shanana shoulder her way out of there, content to admire her from afar.

The haze above South Beach was evaporating under its share of the sun's heat. Under that fraction of energy which our terrestrial star-a star on the main sequence but heavier than ninety percent of its peers, and just entering early middle age-radiated with such moronic munificence, not only earthward: in every other direction too. Every second,640,000 tons of mass were lost in the solar reactor and were multiplied, in (inefficient) obedience to the Einsteinian equation, by the speed of light squared: 186,282 X 186,282. Richard took off his jacket-a taxing task. He had never given a reading before. But he had spoken in public often enough. If you defined public freely enough. Dollis Hill tube, then 198B. Follow the walkway. You will be met near the ticket machines. What Price Modern Poetry? All welc. The invitations came in every other year. He always accepted. He could see himself, one day, being stretchered out of his deathbed to go and discuss the death of the novel. Would the novel have any last words? With a harsh groan he leaned forward and started unlacing his shoes.

Over the ocean was where Gina was. Now, when he thought about his wife, he was sorry to find that he always pictured her in flagrante delicto, in blazing crime, and he had to stand there with a towel over his wrist, like a waiter, while she hauled herself out from under . . . He didn't know. But he had strong suspicions. In a few minutes Richard would go back to the bar at the hotel and write postcards-to Marius and Marco, to Anstice, to Keith Horridge. And he would write a letter to Gina. Containing no news. A letter of love. That song he'd sung, those mornings, in the face of February:

What you want: Baby I got. What you need: D'you know I got it…

And then the second verse, rendered at the very limit of female rapture and practicality:

I ain't gonna do you no wrong While you're gone. I ain't gonna do you no wrong Because I don't wanna .. .

He refastened his clothes and gathered his things and went back up the beach.

"Nothing. No, not nothing. Tell Lawrence good-bye. Tell him goodbye, good-bye."

Gina told Richard good-bye, that time. Good-bye, good-bye. And he kept coming back. He didn't get the lunch or the early-evening drink.

He certainly didn't get the glazed and heavy-blooded hour in his room at the Savoy. But when he rode the train back to London he had her home address in his waistcoat pocket; and after that, sexually, the when was in doubt but not the what. The why? Because in skilled and determined hands the pen and paper are near equivalents of the ravisher's doctored drink, the rapist's spit-steeped balaclava. Like the fists of the martial artist, written words, hereabouts, can be classed as weapons of deadly force, usable only in the ring or on the mat-for display. If men knew about women and letters, women and notes. If they believed it. Thus the veteran husband, before setting off for work, scribbles something like GASMAN SAYS HELL CALL LATER or WERE OUT OF BUTTER AGAIN, and that evening returns to find his wife in a bikini and high heels and with a chilled cocktail glass in either hand; after dinner (his favorite dish), she softens the lights still further and engages the tape of swoony music and puts another log on the fire and settles him there in the marmalade light on the rug with the cushions and the creme de menthe. And retires from the room. So he can have a hand job. Wait. That comes later. Where was he?

Here. Richard Tull, leaning over a bottle of Valpolicella at the kitchen table of his flat in Shepherd's Bush, late at night, with the telephone's cries smothered under a pillow (Dominique-Louise), writing to Gina Young. The letters were confetti, like apple blossom in the accelerator of the April streets. By every post they came. He was sending her formulas and borrowings-truisms, the disposables of love. Her replies were like thank-you notes to an excitable and ultimately goonish godfather. He barely glanced at them. Every other weekend, persistently, long after D. H. Lawrence had been supplanted by local pottery and crafts, by antique typewriters, by imperial loot, he journeyed up there, his facial flesh juddering to the jolts of strip light and rail track, his cheeks urban pale but for the dabs of color where Dominique-Louise had scratched or elbowed him; slowly he would raise his chin in stern romantic pride. Half hours in the High Street coffee bars, strolls through the municipal gardens in rain too light to fall. Feed the ducks. Her hand, when at last he took it, was elegantly nervous and long-fingered. He said so. He said more. Back in London he made an important correction to the final proof of Dreams Don't Mean Anything, on the dedication page, where he put a line through Dominique-Louise and went for something simpler. In the sodden pastoral of Victoria Gardens he leaned against her under the dripping birch. She sadly kissed him. Her lips were lean and there were raindrops on her hair. He knew it was in the bag when, one Saturday night, round the rear of the Station Hotel, he was lugubriously beaten upby Lawrence, the outgoing boyfriend, who was accompanied by an older brother and a cousin-who were not needed. Richard wasn't much good at fighting. He was good at writing. Book reviews. Love letters. Richard, in his bow tie, went down and stayed down. His body more bent than curled, one open hand slackly resting on his knee. Even when Lawrence's boot started coming in, and Richard resignedly sat there on the concrete, against the wall, giving a quiet yelp or a loud hiccup every time the leather met his ribs, he didn't feel picked on or hard done by. He took it for granted that Lawrence would do what Lawrence would do, with his body. So Lawrence nutted and loafed, then kneed, then kicked (the head-butt was his first move: pain began at this instant with their brows crushed together, their noses interwedged, their lips a kiss away). He swore: "Cunt!" He also wept. Richard had taken Gina back to his room at the Savoy that afternoon for the first time. Inconclusively. But he went down very quickly, in his bow tie and his paisley waistcoat, and just sat there on the wet stone. He knew Lawrence couldn't be that bad. Lawrence must be okay, or must have become okay, after nine years with Gina.

Two and a half months after Gina moved down to London (she was surprisingly well organized and unterrified, and without his seeming to do much about it she soon had a tube-map and a duplicate of his door key and a diary/address book and a job and-no, she insisted-a studio flat nice and near to his place with white curtains and a white sofa that at midnight she transformed into an aromatic bed infested with embroidered pillows and cuddly animals where he too was cuddled and canoodled and regularly rendered speechless by her ultrametropolitan diligence and ingenuity on top of all the primitive ardor), Richard left her and went back to Dominique-Louise, to his bulimic vamp, who screamed at him all night long and never got the curse. He had a whole sequence of girlfriends, at that time, who never got the curse. He didn't have anything against the curse, so far as he knew. It was just that none of his girlfriends ever seemed to get it. He drew no conclusions; but it remained the case that several years had gone by without him glimpsing a tampon or a drop of blood that wasn't his own. Until Gina, whom he left anyway. She didn't cry.

Richard hoped and even expected that she would go back-to Nottingham, and to Lawrence. The day he left her he noticed, as he undressed that night, under Dominique-Louise's unadmiring gaze, that all vestiges of Lawrence's beating had at last been absorbed by his body: the tenacious bruises on his hip bone, the scrape on his forearm, the eventful spectrum of yellows and purples that had looped his right eye,to which, that night in Nottingham, Gina had herself held the lump of raw meat. This coincidence seemed to Richard to demarcate the affair as an episode of reckless nostalgic: class, blood, the provinces, D. H. Lawrence, uncomplicated love. Five nights later he went back to Gina, or at least he went back to her flat. The same right eye had been adventitiously reblackened by Dominique-Louise. Once again Gina flew to the fridge. The meat she returned with came out of polyethylthene packet. This was London; that was Nottingham. "Are you going to stop?" she said. But she didn't mean stop. She meant stay. Oh, stay! Richard went back to Dominique-Louise. He left the cuddly animals, the morning tea and toast, the birds fussing trustingly on the windowsill, round-eyed Gina with her baby-doll nightdress and her puffy slippers and her clutched hanky (there were two or three tears this time, silent, welling), and fought his way back to Dominique-Louise. Dominique-Louise's bedroom, by the way, was painted black and had no windows. Its darkness, at night, was classical, mythological. She would be lying in it cradling the twenty-pound ashtray she sometimes threw at him (she had found out about the changed dedication), smoking and waiting and not getting the curse.

He thought Gina would return to Nottingham. But it didn't seem to occur to her. Richard assimilated this, and found it to be good: he could just show up and sleep with her whenever he liked. He could continue to do this, he projected, even after she had secured some sympathetic simp with a regular job. Because she loved him. Girls, in those days, couldn't do anything to you (they couldn't call the lawyers, the tabloids, the cops) except kill themselves or get pregnant. All they had was life: they could augment it, they could bear it away. They could subtract from it or they could add to it; and that was all. Richard had two additional certainties. Gina would never kill herself. And Dominique-Louise would never get pregnant. What Gina did was this. She took up contemporary literature, systematically. It was her idea of night school. Gina started sleeping with writers.

The next afternoon Richard was back on the beach. He had just done the interview with Pete Sahl of the Miami Herald. And it hadn't worked out. Nothing disastrous; nothing apposite either; nothing embarrassing or even interesting. It just hadn't worked out.

Personally they had hit it off well enough. Richard had liked and fancied the Miami Herald's Pete Sahl-for she was a woman. Shockingly well preserved, Pete came right out and told you she was fifty-three, withgrown-up children. Pete's dad had wanted boys. So he went ahead and gave boys' names to all his five daughters. Pete had stuck with Pete, and never tried to pretty things up with Petranella or Petula or Petunia. Just Pete: Pete Sahl.

It wasn't that she talked about Gwyn the whole time or anything. Encouragingly, in a way, Pete seemed unclear about who he was either. The interview consisted entirely of her recommendations: recommendations of other novels, of books of poetry, of films, of plays, of shows. "I'll write it down for you," Pete kept saying. But she couldn't quite remember what anything was called. She was just spaced out, like everyone else in Miami. By the time the half hour was up, Pete was recommending restaurants.

"Okay. Gino's," she said. "It's a twenty-minute cab ride. If you can't get a table, tell them Pete Sahl. Gino's. I'll write it down for you. Go for the veal. Tell them Pete Sahl."

"That's what I'll do, when I get in through the door. I'll tell them Pete Sahl."

"I'll write it down for you. The veal alia picante. They do it with a lemon sauce. Go for it. Nice talking to you. Remember: tell them Pete Sahl."

"Write it down for me."

The Earl of Rieveaulx had wanted boys. And he was an old brute too. But he had called his daughters Urania, Callisto, Demeter, Amaryllis, and Persephone. He hadn't called them Lady Jeff, Lady Mike, Lady Pete, Lady Brad, and Lady Butch.

Richard twisted in his lounger as he heard the whir of the caddycart. The little witch was steering her way toward him on her electric motor, with jinking money pouch. A light aircraft was flying laterally across the strand. It seemed to be trailing a long rope ladder-reminding him of the black dancers: the cookie-cutout men. He tried to focus against the hot pulse of the sky. The rope ladder was saying something: it was made of words. It said simply, in small caps, GWYN BARRY AMELIOR REGAINED. The plane fired a bolt of light at him and then deliquesced in the sun. Richard picked up his book. They themselves were flying out in an hour. He had seen this plane before, trailing a different banner, selling some other piece of shit. What was it? Bloodbath, by someone called Chuck Pfister. So that was okay.

But for a moment there the sky seemed to like Gwyn Barry-the sun slapping palms with the plane's wing. For a moment there the solar system seemed to like Gwyn Barry.

Chicago was the only city that really frightened him.

It frightened him because it was there, in Chicago, that he would-or would not-be the subject of the Dub Traynor Interview. Radio: hour-long, one-on-one. This was now in doubt. But it frightened him for other reasons too. The severity of its naked steel frightened him. Chicago, he knew, was the cradle, or the ancient assembly point, of the American political machine. What goes around comes around. I'm okay: you're okay. We don't take nobody nobody sent. Chicago, he knew, was the eighth biggest city on earth. Cities are machines. No other city he had ever been to said to you, as Chicago said to you, This is a machine. I am a machine.

There was a traffic jam all the way in from the airport, and dark rain. The mist was as thick as clouds and the clouds were as thick as smoke and the smoke was as thick as chalk. Chilling Chicago awaited them in its vapors and gray medium, deeply massed and square-shouldered on the vague horizon. They heaved on, five yards per heave, along Kennedy Expressway. The five lanes coming into the city were all blocked and the five lanes going out of the city were all blocked; between these two great metal Mississippis of steam and suffering, of spiritual durance, there lay a railtrack on which brightly lit and entirely empty trains sped past in both directions. No one ever used the trains. They had to be in the cars. Americans were martyrs to the motors; autos were their autos-da-fe. Never mind what cars have in store for us globally, biospherically; cars- our cars-hate us and humiliate us, at every turn, they humiliate us. Types of car drivers (timid, pushy) are also types of sufferers: the silent, the permanently enraged, the apparently equable, those who persuade themselves that they are running the show (known as "motorists"), the snarl-prone, the oath-casting, the sullen, the erased … They drove on. Their driver-a woman, affiliated with Gwyn's publishers-who was seated beside the plump-necked publicity boy, pointed out where the first, third, and fifth tallest buildings on earth might be seen, on a clear day. They drove on: the shell of Shell, yellow on red like a hand raised against the sun. LEE'S LUMBER and WAYNE'S WINDOWS. Zero Willpower Meets Zero Fat, a billboard slogan in praise of a product that at least tasted fattening, struck a brief chord in Richard, who wasn't particularly fat, yet. A sodden flag. And then at last they were in the city or under thecity, with its halls and chutes and stanchions of steel, and you were a lab-rat in the rat-trap of steel Chicago. Richard suddenly felt that American cities were the half-mouths of lower jawbones and held a monstrous acreage of wedged dentition; with those big teeth they have, no wonder their gums whine with permanent maintenance and repair, all the deep scaling and root-canal work, the cappings, bridgings, excruciating extractions. Now they were engulfed by the sounds of this desperate periodonture, and for a moment Richard's teeth felt like claws, seized in his gums.

They dropped him off first. For the second city running Richard was to be lodged in a separate and of course much worse hotel, and he didn't mind . . . He took the long walk down the long passage, following the lively stride of the big black porter. With an easy swing of his right arm the porter was carrying Richard's unliftably heavy suitcase; but authorial pride dictated that the fabler himself should tote his own mail sack which, he knew, had warped his spine forever before they even left Washington. They turned a corner: before them lay a fresh infinity of corridor. To the porter this journey was utterly and indeed miserably familiar. The corridor could hold no surprises for him. Not to mention or admit the much older guy, the quivering white stiff coming past the other way, struggling and rattling with some super-awkward and overrated and probably obsolete contraption like a triple tureen on wheels. Forty years ago this old guy might have been happy to return Richard's gasped good evening. But he had no use on God's earth for it now.

In the Spinnaker Room he dined alone-the Spinnaker Room with its stags' heads and bearskins, the walls studded, for some reason, with locally kilned plates and the ceiling hung with locally loomed bolts of cloth in carpet-booklet colors and textures, reminding him, oppressively, of the jacket of Untitled. He felt as if he was wedged between the covers of his own novel. As Richard was simultaneously finishing his porkchop and The House of Fame: A Life of Thomas Tyrwhitt, a telephone was brought to his table, not a cordless or cellular device but an ancient white dialer on a long, squirming lead.

"Yeah well it's all fixed," said Gwyn. Behind his voice you could hear drowsy self-approbation-also the murmur and tinkle of festivity: discreet, corporate.

"How did you do it?"

"I told him I'd got a TV crew flying in from Detroit, which turns out to be true. And offered him you."

"Was he … How did he take it??

"Okay in the end. I told him I'd do him when I tour with the paperback."

At about 11:00 P.M. the hotel bars of big American cities fill up with men who don't necessarily spend much time in big cities: conventioneers, business trippers. You are therefore at liberty to observe what the big city does to them. Not that much, really. The big city turns up their volume dial; it floods faces with heat; it makes them young and bad and lewd (how the waitresses roll their eyes). The metropolis makes them overdrink, of course; the Smoke makes them smoke, too, some of them: they light up with a flourish and tell everyone how long ago they quit… Richard sat smoking and drinking in the corner: the corner he had painted himself into, with his smoking and drinking. Smoking and drinking were what he liked to do. He was approaching the point where smoking and drinking were all he liked to do. Beyond that point lay the place where smoking and drinking would be all he could do, anyway, stupefied, entirely immobilized, by smoking and drinking. Nevertheless, he felt good (he was smoking and drinking), and if he stayed up late enough he could call Gina and tell her that things weren't going at all badly, what with the Lazy Susan sale, and now the Dub Traynor Interview and this further dissemination of Untitled.

With so many biographies down him Richard knew what America was capable of doing to British writers. Timid rubes who crossed the Atlantic, timidly blinking, were immediately swept up in the indigenous panic of make-or-break. They twirled right out of control, like Dylan Thomas and Malcolm Lowry, done in by dread and drink. This appeared to be Richard's strategy. Or else (this was Gwyn's) they rigged themselves up with temporary personalities, new smiles, new laughs, so it felt okay to walk the streets all night waiting for the reviews in the papers, like Broadway impresarios. Then the fever of transformation ends, and they go back where they came from and become reasonable again. And so what? But the question is: who are they leaving behind? If America can do that to frowning bookworms from middle England, what was America doing to Americans-who, on the whole, hadn't spent three years at twelfth-century universities with Paradise Lost on their laps, and who had no Home Counties to come from or go home to. They never had a lifetime elsewhere to protect them from it, from America and the fever of possible change. Lie awake in the big city and you can hear it like the beady scrape of cricket wings in the Miami night-the nasal insect drill of need and neurosis.

Insects are what neurosis would sound like, if neurosis could make a noise with its nose.

It looked like another garage sale-thrown, this time, by a troglodytic kindred of petty thieves and welfare hustlers. The old car seat to sit on, the old cardboard box to put your paper cup on, the grunge-drenched carpet, the leprous wallpaper … it could only mean one thing: a radio station. Or, much more specifically, RPT4456 4534, and "The Dub Traynor Show." Richard was undisquieted. The BBC, where he sometimes went, for something like #163;11.37, and talked about book reviewing or biographies or anything at all to do with little magazines, was just as rough, in its way. Cruelly lowering surroundings: this was the thing about radio. Radio knew it would always be heard and not seen and could let itself go; it was okay-people understood; radio would never have to cringe in apology and pain, under the general gaze. So Richard accepted the atmosphere, but not without internal comment. If the imperfect-the half-made, the failed, the let-gone-is what you sympathize with, then you will find much with which to sympathize. He was given a cup of unbelievable coffee. Dub would be with him soon. Dub, who, according to Gwyn's publicity boy, was a very serious guy and a great reader: he loved modern prose. The night before Richard had extracted a copy of Untitled from his mail sack and, feeling briefly stratospheric, cabbed it round to Dub's West Side address. Probably Dub wouldn't have had time to read it all, but Richard was looking forward to what he got so little of: a response. Furthermore, his mail sack felt appreciably lighter. Experimentally hoisting it onto his shoulder that morning, Richard thought that his retch of pain was, in retrospect, detectably quieter: appreciably more subdued.

The girl who had provided him with his coffee came through and told Richard that there was, of all things, a problem: the local baseball team, that very hour, was announcing its intention of changing sponsors.

Richard looked at her expectantly.

"It's a big story here. Dub will be having to deal with it. Just bear with us."

In came Dub, with his chinos and his bearded preoccupation and his strictly localized charisma. He nodded and shook hands and then led Richard into the gloom of his booth, which consisted of an Okie kitchen table under the usual mess of radiobiotics. Dub had the copy of Untitled in front of him, under a heap of press releases and folders and legal pads. He kept touching his eyes, with thumb and forefinger, and then blinking glutinously.

Settling himself, Dub flicked a switch, and murmured, "We're having to take all this …?

"What Max has done here," a voice was saying, dully, dutifully, "for the ball club, from a business standpoint, has been from our . .. standpoint .. . has been real good business-for the ball club."

"Sorry," said Dub, "but it's a big deal here. Have you been to Wrigley Field?"

"No. Should I? What is it?"

"It's the ball park. It's sixty years older than any other ballpark in America. The slopes, the hardboard. It's sad there, as it should be. Even the best teams lose fifty games a year. That sadness gives the game its poetry. Like no other. Look at the writers it attracts. Lardner, Malamud …"

He flicked the switch again. Another voice was saying, "We like to think that Coherent is tops in our product category. And that that success will be reflected back on to the ball club." Then the original voice was saying, "And so what's good for Coherent will hopefully, for the ball club, also be … be good."

With a nod to Richard, Dub said briskly, "That was Coherent VP Terry Eliot and Fizz Jenkerson talking at Wrigley Field. We'll have more on the sponsorship switch, after some messages, and I'll be talking with the British cult writer Richard Tull. I was going to be talking with another British writer, Gwyn Barry, but we've been switching too, and now it's Richard Tull. Say," he said, "do you like great musicals? All-"

"No," said Richard.

Dub looked up from his mike.

"I don't like any musicals."

"… Well, if you did, all this week there's a sweet brunch-and-matinee deal at the Ashbery. For just twenty-five dollars you get the hit show and an all-you-can-eat grande bouffe right across the street at the Carvery, extras and service charge not included. Now doesn't that sound good?"

"But I don't like musicals."

"It's not-it's a message."

"What?"

Once more Dub fell to touching his eyelids as a voice was saying, "The problem was not any problem with Ultrason, who've been real good for the ball club. The problem … well it's not a problem, because it's good, is Coherent, is the Coherent deal, which is more … which is better. For the ball club."

"Don't you wish sometimes," said Dub, "that writing were just like sports? That you could just go out there and see who'd win? See who's better. Measurably. With all the stats."

Richard thought about it. "Yeah," he said.

"And I hear," said Dub to his mike, "that the ball club's transfer play is already being reenergized in the trading pits of La Salle Street. Do you have a little doggy?"

"No," said Richard.

Dub looked up, apparently appalled by this admission. He raised a palm, saying, "Well if you did I'd really recommend the Fenceless Fence from Perter Pets at forty-nine-ninety-five. This way you put pooch on a non-tangle leash with a range limit set by you. He'll like it. And so will the neighbors."

"My two boys keep pleading with me to get one-a dog," said Richard. "But we live in a flat and you know how the . .."

"I don't believe this guy." Dub coughed, and continued, "You know what Berryman said when they told him Frost was dead? He said, 'It's scary. Who's number one?' "

"The answer being Lowell. I suppose."

"Right… Right. There was a witness to Berryman's suicide. Washington Avenue Bridge. Into the Mississippi. The rocks along the bank. The witness said, 'He jumped up on the railing, sat down and quickly leaned forward. He never looked back at all.' The witness's name was Art Hitman. University carpenter. Art Hitman. Don't you love it?"

"I do. I do. Berryman said he always felt 'comfortable' about being number two to Lowell. Oh sure."

"Wait." Dub was nursing his eyes again, even more intently, as if Richard wasn't there. He started to do parallax exercises with his thumbs, focusing and refocusing and jerking his head back affrontedly. Meanwhile they went live to the media conference at Wrigley Field, and stayed there.

At three minutes to twelve Dub freed up his copy of Untitled. It sprang open on page five. Dub's hand groped for his eyelids as he said, "It's the weirdest shit. I was just getting into your book last night and I- I thought you know like something had gotten in under my contacts. Then I … That was Fizz and Terry Eliot, wrapping it up at Wrigley Field. We're almost fresh out of time here, and we were going to be talking to Gwyn Barry about his vision of a new direction for our troubled species, but here we have another British writer, Richard Tull, whose new novel has just appeared. Richard Tull. We know from the Amelior novels of your friend and colleague where he would have us go. How about you? What's your novel trying to say?"

Richard thought for a moment. The contemporary idea seemed to be that the first thing you did, as a communicator, was come up with some kind of slogan, and either you put it on a coffee mug or a T-shirt or abumper sticker-or else you wrote a novel about it. Even Dub clearly thought you did it this way round. And now that writers spent as much time telling everyone what they were doing as they spent actually doing it, then they would start doing it that way round too, eventually. Richard thought on. Dub tapped his watch.

"It's not trying to say anything. It's saying it."

"But what is it saying?"

"It's saying itself. For a hundred and fifty thousand words. I couldn't put it any other way."

"Richard Tull? Thank you very much."

Before he left he offered to sign Dub's copy of Unfitted. Bent over in his chair, with his hands semaphoring in front of his face, Dub abstractedly declined. In fact he insisted on returning the book to its author. Making quite a thing of it; pressing it on him, so to speak. Richard tried to give it to the girl who had brought him coffee.

"Thank you, sir," she said. "But I believe not."

There was a traffic jam all the way to the airport, and dark rain. The five lanes going out of the city were all blocked and the five lanes coming into the city were all blocked. On the central divide the empty trains, rigidly balanced, cruised by. You could sense the shape and mass of blackened smokestacks. You could see lights, and the reflections of lights, car lights, murkily glistening-the filthy jewelry of Kennedy Expressway. They heaved on, flanked and tailed by mustang, bronco, pinto, colt, by bluebird and thunderbird and ladybird and lark, by panda and cobra, by jaguar, by cougar: the filthy menagerie of Kennedy Expressway.

Alone for many hours in the backs of planes, drinking, reading, looking out the window, with his being in a process of steady diminution, he had a chance to get things straight about the sky. He saw clouds all day, from above and from below.

From above. Imagine clouds as you would be seeing them for the first time: on your way in. Clouds would be telling you about the earth. About its cliffs, its mountains and plateaus, its pastures and snowfields. Clouds would be telling you about its sandbars and sandflats, and insistently telling you (seven-tenths of the time) about its oceans and their postures of turbulence and calm. From above, even though the beauty of the clouds had lost some of their innocence, their pristine aura of eternal unregardedness, because nearly everyone from below had seen them now, the sky was telling outsiders about the earth.

From below, the sky was telling you about the outside-about the universe. Richard was back on the ground, in Colorado, on the tarmac, and then with his mail sack in the flatland of the car park … The sky was getting bigger as he moved west; the sky would have much to say. Most commonly the sky imitated vacuum: vacuum laced with impermanent matter. Next most commonly, interstellar gas, tufts of dust and nebulae. Next, the characteristic shapes of galaxies-disc, corkscrew, spiral, cigar, sombrero. It could do other imitations. It had a supernova imitation and a quasar imitation. Richard was destined soon to discover, with horror, that it could do black holes. It was working on its pulsar imitation. The sky was there to provide the artistic comment on the day, the weather, the light it was screening for you, but it was also there to tell you about the universe, the gentlest pointers and reminders for the most part, with no hard lessons about where you stood in it and where this left you.

"I'm dying here," said the publicity boy, all that night in Denver. "I'm dying here."

In Denver, which was also a Profundity stop, they were coming in at the end of a national booksellers' convention, or works outing, and gimmick parties were the thing: parties in gymnasiums, parties in precinct

stations, parties in mineshafts. The party they threw for Gwyn Barry and Amelior Regained was in a circus, small scale and itinerant but under a medium-big top and so on, with sawdust, animals, jugglers, tumblers. Itwas meant to be good because the performers were all Hispanics and Gypsies and Amerindians-just finishing a tour of male-pride Sweat Lodges and Reservation casinos. In fact the circus was a squalid disgrace and everyone was completely grossed out by it. With his plastic glass on its paper napkin, the publicity boy pounded the sawdust saying, "I'm dying here." He also threatened to call the fire department, the sanitation people and the company lawyer. But what he kept saying was: "I'm dying here." He was like, "I'm dying here." Considering how ill and old he felt, Richard had the time of his life.

The animals were all wrecks, and the troupers all looked stupid and cruel, and none of them seemed to be any good at anything. It was cold out and hot in, and there was a nightsweat crossfire from the laboring generators and the Alaskan drafts through the ragged canvas and the slow-moving gusts of beast-warmed gas . . . Gwyn's countenance, on arrival (Richard noted), was obviously geared up for a whole evening of childlike wonder; but he soon forgot about that and fell in with all the flat smiles and crinkled lips and the earnest concern with animals' rights and animals' germs.

"Who's funding these clowns?" asked the publicity boy, rhetorically.

But there were no clowns.

Cringing off-white dogs were being urged with many menaces to attempt bedraggled diagonal leaps through hand-held hoops as Richard identified Professor Stanwyck Mills, standing near the spread of crates and trunks where the performers stored their juggling batons, their sequined capes, their bolts of damp finery. He was talking and being talked to by Gwyn Barry; Gwyn had his head cocked at a sympathetic angle, and was frowning and nodding as if assenting (on TV) to a proposition both beautiful and true. And there in the ring, after his stunts with the dogs, the matador, arms raised, had gone into his tense-buttocked appeal for recognition and praise.

There followed a collective high-pitched groan-almost a hoot-as a putrescent little elephant waddled out into the glare. Was this an elderly dwarf elephant, or just an afflicted infant elephant, already rotting at the age of one? Its well-intentioned wanderings and blunderings were somehow meant to be combined with the fierce determination of a piebald pony, running in its tight circle with a kind of traumatized invariance, apparently prepared to keep doing that forever while the

elephant plodded helplessly about, so anxious to please, black rheum

thrown off from its eyes like sweat, its damp-damaged hide lightly coated with the kind of hair that sprouts out near a healing wound, gingery and brittle, like the weft of baklava. Dressed in overalls, theelephant could have passed for a London builder: cheerful, not very dishonest, complete with beer-paunch and bony coccyx-prominent on its fleshless, winded rump.

Richard saw his chance. "Professor Mills?" he said, and introduced himself at length. "I wonder if you were ever sent a copy of our review of the reprint of Jurisprudential? I brought a copy along. Hoped you might be here. An interesting review, as well as a favorable one."

"Why thank you," he said. "I'll look forward to that."

The reviews, thought Richard, had definitely been a good idea. Americans couldn't know-couldn't possibly imagine-just how little The Little Magazine really was.

"I'm particularly interested in your ideas on penal reform," Richard went on. "I like what I might call your humanely utilitarian slant. In a field so full of humbug. As you say, the question is: 'Does it work?' "

They talked on, or Richard did. Mills had an air of troubled and shaky preoccupation. Glancing at the animals, the runts and curs and strays bobbing round the ring, Richard was struck by Mills's inches: for an Irish-American he seemed fabulously tall. So maybe this tremulous fatigue was what the tall ended up with, after a lifetime of lugging that sack of height. Round his neck he wore a light surgical brace like an aerodynamic yoke.

"It's amazing how hidebound we are in England. Still the old ideas. Deterrence. Sequestration. There's a lot of talk but no will to bring about change. Even our most liberal public figures say one thing and …" Richard appeared to hesitate, as if considering the etiquette or equity of simply seizing on the nearest example. "Well. Take Gwyn Barry. Thoroughly liberal in all his pronouncements. But deep down …"

"You surprise me. In his writing he seems-irreproachably liberal on such matters."

"Gwyn? Oh, you've no idea the kind of things he'll say in private. He actually favors a return to more public forms of punishment."

As Mills leaned backward on his plinth Richard went through the formality of telling himself not to get carried away.

"With paying spectators. Retributive and exemplary. But with a vengeance. So to speak. Stocks and pillories. Ceremonial scourgings. Ducking-stools. Tarring and feathering. Impalements and flayings. You see, he thinks the mob has had a poor deal in recent years. Public ston-ings, even lynchings-"

He was interrupted, not by the professor, but by the publishing and bookselling community and its fresh consensus of exhausted forbearance: a pair of midget camels or lumpy llamas were now trotting anx-iously about, to so little purpose that the ringmaster was now giving them the taste of his lash. A modest instrument-a black cord on a black stick. Nothing like the deafening bullwhips that Richard had in mind. He said,

"You're an Irishman, Professor. You must have followed that case- the bomb in the shopping center. Here's what Gwyn said. He said: round up all known IRA members and shackle them to the gates of the Tower of London. With a big sign, with pictures, saying what they did and inviting the public to go ahead and vent their anger. And then, after a couple of months of that, when their arms and their legs and their 'cocks' have been ripped off (do excuse me), string them up for the ravens. Oh yes. That's friend Barry for you."

Richard might have said more; but now a steel-hooped tunnel was being hastily and noisily pounded together, leading through the crowd toward a square cage in the ring. There was talk of a tiger . . . The two men found themselves pushed together in the press, Richard taking care to shield the professor, who seemed fearful for the upholstery supporting his neck. They stood side by side, enjoying what Richard felt to be a just and wordless solidarity. Earlier that winter (the case was still sub judice), Mills had Christmased with his wife at their holiday home on Lake Tahoe; forcing entry on Christmas Eve, a crew of nomad joy-raiders had then subjected the Millses to a two-hundred-hour ordeal of abuse, battery, bondage and arson. The professor was of course aware that a personal experience, however dire, should carry only statistical weight in the settlement of one's intellectual positions. But he was doing a lot of rethinking, which he was going to have to do a lot of anyway, because the many scores of texts he had studied and annotated in preparation for his next book (a lifetime effort provisionally entitled The Lenient Hand) had been mockingly torched by the intruders, along with the rest of his work station and, it seemed, everything else he had ever cared about. His wife, Marietta, still in deep therapy, hadn't uttered a word since New Year's Day.

The tiger was coming. Richard dumped Stanwyck and managed to dispatch another tray of drinks before sidling his way ringside. Along its tube of bars the tiger moved silently in the hush, with almost inorganic smoothness, like the contents of a hypodermic responding to the pressure of the surgeon's thumb. Richard looked up suddenly: Gwyn was

nearby, part of the inner circle, but he kept on slackly turning to the man

who leaned over his shoulder, a suited sophomore intent on finishing his joke or his pitch or his ramble. It was then that Richard knew, for at least the thousandth time, that Gwyn was not an artist. If it was a woman he'dbeen talking to-then okay. But to be only half engaged, attending to some bloke, when you could be looking at a tiger … Equally but not quite equivalently remiss, Richard now tried to assimilate the animal as an artist ought to, and he greeted it first with fear, which was surely right; even Steve Cousins you greeted this way, with the thought of what the wilder thing could do to you if you two were really alone. Of course the tiger in question was no glittering savage of the rain forest or the tundra: it seemed detoxed or pre-tamed, displaced from its very phylum, and burdened with its camouflage gear-its worn sun-and-dust yellow, ridged with shadow. Even the essential severity of its stare felt disorganized. Richard feared for its teeth but they were intact, the feline's dirk-like canines revealed in its fixed yawns of hatred, hatred of the handler and the handler's stool. Hatred of the drug that dried its mouth, imparting desperate struggle, desperate servitude, to the tiger's yawns.

Soon it was gone and all the other animals gathered to take their curtain call-for the publicity boy was breaking everything up. One of the dogs started gagging and retching, either from delayed stage fright or from unimaginable wolfings before the show, and another dog inclined its trembling snout to sniff and lick the flesh-pink stew, and the publishers and booksellers of America all groaned, then gagged and so it went on, in relays of disgust.

At Denver's Stapleton International Airport, at five o'clock in the morning, nobody wanted to work. So they had a robot doing it. A computer, with a robot voice: female. Richard thought that the robot, considering it was a robot and every inch a slave, didn't take any shit, always telling him to move on, to unload quickly and move on, to deposit bags quickly and move on. He let his suitcase and his mail sack splash down onto the carousel, where he inadvertently but briefly joined them, and then while Gwyn went on ahead he picked himself up and retraced his steps to the door and the cold blue yonder, planning on a quiet cigarette. The cigarette was a cigarette-but not a quiet one. He coughed his heart out behind a baggage trolley and ralphed his ring out behind a soft-drinks machine and finally cried his eyes out leaning backwards against the glass and smoking another, quieter cigarette. These tears incorporated an element of relief, and of grateful mortality, under the big western sky, which happened to be practicing its quasar imitation: a

multitude of clouds had been foregathered, bright and compact and in

cluster-galaxy posture, surrounding and obscuring something strange and grand-the sun. The sun, as he watched, went from early-morning tumescence to full-face pallor, from red giant to white dwarf. When the

sun was white you had no trouble at all believing in black holes, in singularities. Because this ordinary star already looked half blistered out of space-time.

Mandated to hang around and deal with all the fallout from the circus thing, the publicity boy was catching a later flight. Therefore Richard would be traveling first class, up there with Gwyn. With Gwyn, who had to make some early interviews at the next city along.

"We're all a little discombooberated here," said the stewardess.

Richard told her that he was all right.

"Ah," said Gwyn, "an English breakfast."

"Coffee for you, sir? Coffee for you?"

"Have you got any brandy?"

"Any?"

"Brandy?"

Finding out how many kinds of skin and hair the world had, Richard looked out of his porthole all the way to the Pacific, while Gwyn capably slept. All the way, over the waffle fields and hanks of french toast sprinkled with confectioner's sugar, over salt lake, pious plain, desert, more desert, mountain, valley, and then the coniferous ridges of the continent's edge, all the way from tundra to taiga.

He thought the circus crowds in the Kafka story were probably right, to turn away from the hunger artist, from Der Hungerkunstler, who just lay there half buried by the straw in his cage, fasting, plangently not eating; the crowds were probably right to favor the panther which replaced him. Because the panther had no sense of servitude or even captivity, and carried freedom around inside its own body (somewhere in the jaws it seemed to lurk). In the photographs Kafka always looked so amazing, so amazed, perpetually spooked, as if he kept seeing his own ghost in the mirror.

When they landed they were given an additional hour, enplaned, on the ground. A technical matter, or a slave revolt; not even Gwyn could find out which-Gwyn, whose interviews were being stacked above him in the sky like tiers of jets . . . Richard had come to know the landscapes of airports-which were landscapes of the incomplete. Not the interiors, with their popcorn smell and cheerful yellow popcorn light, which were landscapes of incessant addition. The tacked-on Bs and Cs and Ds, the proliferating lego of elbow and kneejoint; and for every sundered couple there wag another kissing thirstily at six in the morning, and for every weeping granny there were familial burgeonings elsewhere-feasts of cousins. Planes moved at the same speed but the human travelers had different rhythms, hurrying, ambling, sprinting, sprawling. Outside,though, the landscape insisted on incompletion. The empty crew buses and stationary forklifts, the prefabricated portakabins. And then headless trucks and cabless wheel sets, staircases pointing upwards but leading nowhere, the joints of amputated corridors, stranded on the tarmac, both ends leading nowhere, insisting on the incomplete.

"We're just going to be thinking out loud here."

"Bear with us. Okay? Okay. Amelior …"

"Now. For us to care about this community, what we need is for it to be … threatened from outside."

"So we care."

"So we care."

"The community is threatened, if we're going to go with the eco thing, by … I don't know. Okay. Shoot me. Killer rats. Mutant rats."

"Please. Keep it human. The community is threatened …"

"By Nazi bikers. The Klan. I don't know."

"Way-wait. Solomon-Solomon's up on the hill, tilling it or whatever. With Padma and Jung-Xiao. Baruwaluwu shouts out! And Solomon sees …"

"The dust trail."

"The dust trail?"

"Of the Nazi bikers."

"Way-wait. A construction company plans to …"

"Build a highway through …"

"Wants to turn the community into a …"

"A chemical warfare facility."

"A casino."

"A bioengineering plant. Which gives us the eco thing. Do we want the eco thing?"

"Where they make mutant cattle."

"Mutant cattle?"

"Mutant . . . pigs. You know, like a block long with no head. Or mutant rats."

"For the military. And Solomon …"

"Figures out…"

"How to fuck them up. Way-wait."

Not even in his sweatiest dengues and beri-beris of facetious loathing had Richard ever seriously considered that he would one day be asked to face the prospect of a Gwyn Barry movie sale. But there they sat, Richard and Gwyn, on a sofa in a luxurious prefab within the Millennium precinct of Endo Studios, Culver City, in Greater Los Angeles. SoL.A. had brought fresh horror, and in the form of a double bill. Amelior Regained had been optioned. But Amelior was a firm sale.

"Yeah," Gwyn had said the previous evening in the hotel. "Millennium are doing it. Hey," he added to the publicity boy, newly arrived, and emerging plumply from the shower, "I don't want this to break until the Profundity thing is all straightened out."

The publicity boy looked at him.

"People will think I don't need it," said Gwyn in a wronged voice. "You know. Rich wife related to the Queen. Back-to-back best-sellers. Movie deals."

"Rock videos."

"Rock videos. They're bound to ask me about movie deals here. I've already been asked about nine times."

"Just say there's been movie interest."

"Okay. Yeah, that's good. Movie interest is good."

Richard still couldn't figure it. No matter how degraded or talentless, every work of art belonged to a genre. And the Amelior books belonged to the literary Utopias. There had been plenty of movies about failed Utopias and anti-utopias, but there had never been a movie about a nice Utopia, where everyone was happy all the time. Whole movies about nudist colonies, early Kulturfilmen, the iron jawlines of socialist realism: Utopia, in the cinema, belonged to propaganda and pornography. Besides, the big thing about Amelior, as a joint, was that it was cleansed of all incident-cleansed, too, of sex, violence, conflict and drama.

Such thoughts had evidently occurred to the three-person development team gathered there in the wheeled bungalow to toss ideas around in Gwyn's presence. The two guys wore complicated sports gear- reversible wetsuits. The woman wore a plaid skirt and a white blouse; and she smoked.

"Wouldn't it be better," said Gwyn, who, in this pre-Profundity period, had yet to commit to writing the screenplay, "if you made the conflict internal?" Gwyn opened his hands and fell silent again.

"Let's run with it. Like Gupta's one of them."

"A Nazi biker."

"No. A bioengineer."

"Gupta? Way-wait. Solomon …"

"Why always Solomon?"

"Okay. Abdelrazak…"

"Can you imagine the shit we'll have to sit through if it's Abdel-razak?"

"Okay. Jung-Xiao … tricks Gupta-?

"Not Gupta. How about Yukio?"

"Tricks Yukio? Are you kidding?"

"Okay. Piotr . . ."

"Yeah. Piotr."

"Jung-Xiao tricks Abdelrazak into revealing that Piotr … is one of them."

"A bioengineer."

"Or a Fed."

"Way-wait. Gupta hates Solomon, right?"

"Right. And so does Abdelrazak. And Yukio hates Jung-Xiao. And Eagle Woman hates Conchita. And Padma hates Masha."

"And Baruwaluwu hates Arnaujumajuk."

". . . Why in Christ's name would Baruwaluwu hate Arnaujumajuk?"

"Because they're always going after the same funding."

"Way-wait . . . Conchita is spreading a mutant disease through Amelior."

"… Which she got from the bioengineer: Piotr."

".. . Who's also having a thing with Jung-Xiao."

"… Who's putting out for Yukio."

". . . Who's feeding it to Abdelrazak."

".. . Who's deep in the jeep with Eagle Woman . . ."

Asked to comment, after an unusually long silence, Gwyn said,

"There's no love and no hate in Amelior."

"That's true, Gwyn. We wondered about that. And everyone has these diseases anyway."

"The hardback is in its eleventh printing," said Gwyn, who went on to list the hemispherical achievements of Amelior. "All this without love and hate. Perhaps you should think about that."

"There has to be love and hate, Gwyn. Even if it means hazing the ethnic distinctions-and making them all Americans."

"And losing the diseases. There has to be love and hate. So we care."

"So we care."

"So we care."

"While we're on the subject of caring," said Richard, who was about to take his leave (Gwyn would be lunching with the team), "can I ask a question? There's a big dump bin in reception, where we came in. It's got a little stenciled sign on it which says 'Caring Barrel.' What's a Caring

Barrel? It looks like a big trash can."

"Ah yes. That's the Caring Barrel. The Caring Barrel was placed there after the earthquake for-" "After the riots.?

"After the riots. The Caring Barrel is for concerned employees to … deposit food or warm clothes for …"

"Those who might be in need."

"Thanks," said Richard. On his way to the door he passed the third executive, who was frowning and massaging his eyebrows and saying,

"Is that what it is? I thought it was just a big trash can."

While the lady in reception called him a cab Richard had a good look at the Caring Barrel. It did indeed contain an old scarf and a pair of socks and a couple of packets of cookies and cereal, half hidden by all the regular trash tossed in there by employees who didn't know it was a Caring Barrel. Richard cared. Caring was what Richard was all about. If caring was wrong, then-yes-Richard was wrong. But he didn't know he cared so much. In later years, he supposed, he might have to spend a lot of time peering into Caring Barrels and caring about what they contained.

Back at the hotel he threw in a call to the Lazy Susan. Sure enough, sales were holding firm at one copy.

During the tour Richard had been solicitous of his own health, careful, for instance, to stop drinking every night when he was still a good milliliter clear of liver collapse; he quite often remembered to take his Vitamin C, until it ran out; and of course his smoking had been much reduced, or much rearranged. The confinement and immobility and canned air of modern travel, and the effects of at least three huge and ill-chosen meals a day, he offset with his frequent sprints to the bathroom and with his roilingly aerobic insomnias. But in Los Angeles he definitely started to let himself go. The thing seemed to be that he was making a superhuman effort to avoid thinking about the future, and it was taking a lot out of him.

Everyone said that Gwyn was meant to be taking it easy-secluding himself from the pressures ranged against the successful novelist. But he looked and behaved like a walking power surge, and continued to indulge and even embolden the publicity boy. When he wasn't being interviewed elsewhere, Gwyn Barry, wearing white tennis shorts and black espadrilles, was being interviewed out by the pool. Sometimes Gwyn would be accompanied by the publicity boy; sometimes (there were at least two occasions Richard knew about), the publicity boy's place was taken by Audra Christenberry, the young screen actress, and her publicity boy, or agent, or agent's agent: this young man was in any case Audra's reality-handler, just as Gwyn's reality was handled by his publicity boy. Audra, who claimed to be a great admirer of Gwyn's material, was up for the role of Conchita in Amelior. Richard had to say thatAudra didn't look the part. She was no longer the fresh-faced tomboy from Montana. After six months in Hollywood, Audra was now a corny phantasm of man-pleasing artifice-whereas Conchita, in the book, was just another fresh-faced tomboy in straw hat and coarse dungarees with green fingers and a chest condition.

But this was Hollywood, and Audra was heady effluvia from the dream factory. And Richard stood alone, he felt, in the real world. Stood before the mirror, in fact, where he auditioned or screen-tested himself in his swimming trunks, and decided no. There wasn't a publicity boy good enough to handle the reality that faced him. It was decidedly inopportune that his reading-and-signing engagement was scheduled for the end of the tour, in Boston. Had he read and signed in Washington, in Chicago, Richard thought, his mail sack might by now have been lightened, or even emptied. And then there were the biographies, which habit forbade him to discard. And anyway his suitcase, with its appalling tonnage, seemed to provide a chiropractic counterbalance to the sadistic burden of his mail sack.

The mirror said it was reality. He felt convinced that he had lost at least three inches in height since leaving London. He stood there, in the wizened trunks; his polyplike pallor was relieved only by the loud rash or broad abrasion that swathed his right shoulder. There was also a kind of bedsore in the corner of his clavicle. The right arm itself felt okay if it wasn't being asked to do anything but when he sobbed himself awake at night it felt numb and blood-logged and inflexibly swollen. When he could distinguish his hand, in the dawn, he expected it to look like a boxing glove. His one pair of shoes bore testimony to what gravity was doing to him: there they wallowed on the carpet, like cowpats indented by unfortunate footprints.

So he never went out. Except when the maid came, he never went out. He developed a liking for The Simpsons, a cartoon sitcom about an average American family, awkward-bodied, totem-faced; they bickered a lot. He was also intrigued, as they say, by all the pornography. The television in his room went about its transmissions nonjudgmentally, but to Richard the set itself often seemed scandalized and even persecuted by these gladiatorial displays-this modern marriage of window-shopping and blood sport. Or this post-modern marriage: pornography tried to occupy the basements of other genres (sex Westerns, sex space

operas, sex murder mysteries), but it looked to be increasingly preoccupied by pornography: by "adult," as the industry called itself. Pseudo-documentaries about adult; rivalries between adult stars; the ups and downs of an adult director. There was also many a talentless parody ofother small-screen entertainments. There was even a loose parody of The Simpsons-called The Limpsons. All this footage had been bowdlerized, on the set, for hotel use, with a strategic lampshade here, a fruit bowl there. You saw faces, not bodies. The men perspired and bared their teeth, as if under torture. The women snarled and whinnied, as if giving birth. So: The Simpsons, The Limpsons, and room service.

Usually, around midmorning, propping up the mini-bar in a pair of black socks, Richard thought about calling home. It was his boys he wanted to talk to, for selfish reasons. Marco. Or Marius would be better. Marius had a telephone manner, he listened and paused (you could hear his warm young breath), whereas Marco just grabbed the receiver and babbled about whatever had happened to him in the last ten seconds. So Marco'd be no fucking good. And it all cost too much. When they checked out of these hotels, all these monuments of inflation and entropy, Gwyn strolled straight to the cab or the courtesy car while Richard queued at the desk and then weepily tallied his traveler's checks against his Extras: telephone calls, service charge, beverages, bed rental. Richard went over to the desk and resumed another long letter to Gina. As he wrote, three related anxieties competed for his attention. Letters were made of paper and had no bulk, no mass, to deflect or impede her; something on the doormat would be hopelessly outweighed by someone on the doorstep, ringing the doorbell: who? He felt, also, that his marriage and even the existence of the twins represented not a cleaner parallel to his mortal career but were simply more of the same-the product of literary envy, and literary neglect. Finally he imagined that all his letters to his wife would just be opened and skimmed and then filed or thrown away, and would remain unread like everything else he wrote. Or not even. Just trampled into the downstairs doormat along with all the other junk.

When Richard went back to Dominique-Louise that time, and Gina, instead of going back to Nottingham and to Lawrence, stayed in London and took up contemporary literature, she started-of course-with the poets.

With the poets: the pastoral, the lyrical, the satirical. Richard had always found stimulation and unaffected good cheer in the company of poets because they were the only living writers who were lowlier than he was. And who would stay lowlier, he then thought. Richard had shown Gina off in the forsaken pubs where the poets gathered. She was not daunted by them: they weren't from London either. They understood her and where she was coming from. As soon as Richard left Gina andstarted regroping his way around the blackened bedroom of Dominique-Louise, the poets, their scavenging instincts of necessity highly evolved, moved in, with their metrical love letters, their crying jags, their bottles of Sangre de Ton. For a time, when Richard went round to her flatlet, which he was allowed to keep on doing, the hallway was like the common room of the Poetry Society on an average weekday evening. At the door he would edge past some Proinnsias or Clearghill; in the stairwell some Angaoas or laiain would be bent over his bicycle clips or patting the pockets of his donkey jacket. There were symbolists and dadaists and acmeists. But Gina was a realist. Did she actually sleep with them, or did they all just talk about the heart, as poets will? Maybe she just heard them out about the heart. Promiscuity among the poets simply wasn't practical; it placed you in a disadvantageous retelling of The Beauty and the Beast-wandering the municipal gardens, going down on down-and-outs, giving blow jobs to bullfrogs, and hoping for a prince. Princeliness, here, was a long shot. Did she further sense that contemporary circumstances were demoting or declassing the poets, reducing their size, reducing their reach? And none of them drove cars. Soon, anyway, Gina was having parallel flirtations with a literary editor and a literary agent. Then she moved on to the novelists. Even now, nearly ten years later, poems still appeared in magazines and slim volumes, with titles like "Stop and Stay" or "Trent River" or even "For Miss Young," eight-liners paralyzed with romantic nostalgia, or longer and looser and murkier efforts full of sexual playback or thought-experiment. You could never be sure (and Gina wouldn't tell him). Poets got women. They didn't get anything else, and women sensed this; so they got women.

Gina's novelist period was unquestionably the toughest time for Richard. He assumed that she must be sleeping with at least one or two of them, or must be seeming to be about to. Why else were they going round there? She wasn't an aristocrat or a psychopath. She was touching (she was a flower from out of town); proletarian-exotic, and still largely speechless, she was perfect for the poets. But that wouldn't hold the novelists. Those marathon men, those grinders of the desk hours, those human sandglasses: they would want diversion at the end of the day. Later, when Gina and Richard were married, two or three novels appeared in which Gina could be firmly identified (largely by her association with an uppity book reviewer who had a sharp tongue and a line in

paisley waistcoats); and certain descriptions of her sexual gifts rang tin-

kly, tinselly little bells of nausea, deep in Richard's middle ear … Where did it come from, then, the talent? He was her second lover; and he couldn't imagine Lawrence as an erotic exquisite, not Lawrence, with histears and his smearing fists. It seemed that Gina was a sexual discovery: she stood revealed. Like the Wesleyan district nurse who has her first drink at the age of forty and wakes up five days-or five years-later in a puddle of hair tonic and skin-bracer. Now, happening to walk down her street, he would exchange wary leers with magical realists, with urban brutalists. Now, standing on her doorstep at dawn, all mauled and bloodshot after a night with Dominique-Louise, he would encounter a brilliant anatomist of contemporary culture or a meticulous dissecter of post-modern mores or (more simply) a strangely compelling new voice. He was a strangely compelling new voice himself, at that juncture, with one book out and another imminent. It seemed that Gina's novelists were becoming richer (and older); he thought she must keep a master best-seller list in the drawer of her dressing table, and intended to work her way up. Although Gina wasn't literary (Gina was literal), she stuck to the literary novel, and did not experiment with the genres-or with the kind of novelist who was famous, but famous for doing something else. Richard wouldn't have minded so much, probably, if she was wintering in Bali with some golfer who wrote novels about computer fraud. Or about golfers. But Gina had chosen to operate within what was approximately-and temporarily-his peer group.

There is a beautiful literary law, slightly scuffed and foxed, yet still beautiful, which decrees that the easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.) So there was a sense of sighing inevitably when, via an arts editor and a theater critic, Gina made her switch to the dramatists. Here too Richard bade farewell to his reveries of arm's-length coquetry and provincial restraint. She moved: and her new flat, in a modern block off Marble Arch, was soon established in his mind as the locus of the most humorless carnality. Visiting her now (nodding to the porter, waiting for the lift), Richard was obliged to review, one after the other, the fiery mediocrities of the London stage. No famished bard, no myopic storyteller. Instead, an elaborately quenched Marxist in black leather trousers. Richard had hated all the poets and novelists too, but the playwrights, the playwrights . . . With Nabokov, and others, Richard regarded the drama as a primitive and long-exhausted form. The drama boasted Shakespeare (which was an excellent cosmic joke), and Chekhov, and a couple of sepulchral Scandinavians. Then where were you? Deep in the

second division. As for the dramatists of today: town criers, toting leper

bells, they gauged the sickness of society by the number of unsold seats at their subsidized Globes. They were soul doctors demanding applause for the pitilessness of their prognoses. And also, presumably, and era-daily, they made a lot of money and splashed their way through all the actresses. Richard could stand it no longer, and he made his move.

Afterwards, he often used to wonder how far Gina would have gone. And he had no trouble visualizing her poolside with the five-million-a-pop screenplay writer, walking the chateau grounds with the belly-worshipping Francophile-or holed up in the safe-house of the Ghost Writer (he who is with us, and not with us), or piously following the electric wheelchair of the afflicted astrophysicist. Really he should have married her the day she came down from Nottingham. What held him back-the feeling that she was insufficiently literary, and would never give him enough to write about? There'd been an evening, early on, at Gwyn's. Gwyn and Gilda. Richard and Gina. Pasta, and a family-sized bottle of red wine. Gwyn was still a failed book reviewer then, back in those golden days. The humble meal, the whispering girls with their wavering vowels. Richard, in his soiled cravat, somehow thought he deserved better. He left Gina's cuddly animals for the stygian boudoir of Dominique-Louise. But he kept coming back. Her thing with all the writers-it looked like a stratagem but maybe it was just despair. It seemed to say, Look what you've made me do. Why not? Why not? it seemed to say. It also gave him a chance to leapfrog over the entire opposition. Which he took.

So one morning he lingered at the hospital long enough to see the IV tube attached to Dominique-Louise's wasted bicep and jogged straight over to Gina's and stood there with his arms folded while one of Britain's more outspoken young scenarists put his electric toothbrush in his metal briefcase and went out of the door forever, with Richard saying, "Let's get married," and Gina assenting with a sneeze of tears.

That sneeze of tears: he thought it belonged to the female repertoire. Yet he had done it too, when his book was accepted by Bold Agenda . .. This had nothing to do with the dramatists, but Richard still wondered about female theatricality. Women did all this feeling, and seemed to need guidance from the theater. Still, men were theatrical too, insomuch as they needed to be, feeling less. As with the styles of trousers they wore, women liked variety. And men attended only one school of acting (the method), that of the cool. That's men. That's men for you: hams of cool.

"Is Audra Christenberry going to be Conchita?"

"She's a very talented actress. Such radiance. And vivacity." Gwyn nodded to himself, considering this. "Yeah, I think she'd be good." "She'll have to have her tits back out," said Richard, who wasn't cool,who had failed at cool. He was decreasingly a cool guy, and was abandoning cool. But was there anywhere else to go?

"Back out?"

"Yeah, back out. You know. Off again."

"Off again? I don't get you."

"In the book Conchita is flat-chested, right? She has a rather masculine chest."

"Not masculine. Just not pronounced."

"Flat."

"On the small side, I suppose."

"So what are you going to do about them?"

"About what?"

"About those two windsocks of silicone she's got now?"

"It's a different medium. Christ, the way you talk. How do you know they're false?"

"We've seen her in films before. We saw her in that film where I got my black eye. She didn't have any tits then. She had two backs. Perfect for Amelior."

"Maybe she's a late developer."

"Oh sure. When she turns a corner, she goes one way and they go the other. She goes indoors for a club sandwich, and they're still poolside, soaking up the rays."

"Jesus."

"She's like the girl in The Limpsons."

"What's that?"

"Pornography."

"I would never watch that stuff."

"Because?"

". . . Well, for one thing it objectifies women. It turns them into objects."

"It'd be a handy way for you to check on changing sexual styles. Whither fellatio, and so on. Actually you can never see anything because there's always some wine bottle or flower bowl in the way. It turns women into objects. Such as silicone."

"What's the matter with you?"

"I'm dying here."

"You're drunk. What's the matter with your voice? You sound like a farmer with adenoids. You better get your voice fixed by Boston. No one's going to understand a word you say."

Thus, occasionally, in the afternoons, Richard was venturing out, hopelessly dazzled, to the dazzled courtyard, in his antique T-shirt andlong khaki shorts. Usually he sat at a diffident distance from Gwyn and whoever Gwyn was with-and watched the bathers. By no means all of the women were as high-gloss and high-tech as Audra Christenberry. Many were as matte and as mottled as he, though no doubt at least twice his age. They did their laps, with that bent-arm crawl favored by women, especially American women, and with that expression, not pinched, but set-that expression of American resolve. This particular Hamlet, and physical ruin, felt no urge to mock American resolve. Unprecedentedly overweight, Richard was still pretty slim compared to the Texan couple with whom he had rode down to the mezzanine: a couple so fat that they had you rereading the installers' guarantee that the elevator could carry eighteen people. The men out here on the deck-these wonderful providers-swam and ate and telephoned; confidently occupying the sun beds, they sprawled on their sides with one leg crooked and one hand flat on the tensed belly, and talking provider talk with fellow providers, fellow prime-of-lifers. Richard felt, in Los Angeles, that he wasn't hard currency; he was a zloty, a despicable kopek. Nearby, Gwyn would be sampling a plain omelette, an iced tea, and answering questions. Writing is like carpentry. It's speculative, but there has been movie interest. I use a simple word processor, more like a typewriter with added functions. From breakfast until lunch, and a bit more in the late afternoons … Five feet away, the stress-equations of Audra Christenberry's swimsuit. Or else the hundred-percent expressionlessness of the publicity boy.

With his Iberian blood, Gwyn grew dark and sparkling in the sun. Richard's brief visits to the pool, in his nontransferable English flesh, gave him first-degree burns on his arms, thighs, neck, nose and forehead. When clothed he looked like a bit player in a cheap video, or in pornography, the repulsive patsy of slapdash makeup and deathwatch lighting. Naked, he felt he had the distinctive markings of a London pigeon. Even the skinny pigeon redness of his legs contributed to his homesickness. Other things were going wrong with him here in the Pacific city. He couldn't get his mouth wet, no matter what he drank. His tongue was curling up at the edges. Beads of information were traveling along his gum lines, information about the immediate future. In two locations (upper left, lower right) the pain fairies were already breaking little fairy eggs of fairy pain, at every second's throb. Then it would go away again. At night he reviewed biographies in his room, and marked up Untitled

for the reading in Boston, which was the end of the line.

Other things were going wrong with him here in the Pacific city, the city that went on being a city as far as the eye could see in every direction, forever and ever. A couple of times he accumulated the energy to bedriven out into it, when Gwyn did radio or TV, and he attended Gwyn's reading, in a mall somewhere. The city was like a city doing remarkably well so soon after that unfortunate all-out nuclear attack, after that Everest of a meteorite, that mile-high tidal wave; there were blips and glitches, square miles of them, but sun and enterprise and multicultural synergy were always getting the place back on stream. As Gwyn had truckingly told his audience, during the warmup at the reading, Los Angeles was Amelior .. . With differences. Nikita Khrushchev, flying in over the West's last stop and seeing all the swimming pools innocently open to the sky, knew at once that Communism had failed. And Richard's body knew that whatever it was Richard stood for-the not-so-worldly, the contorted, the difficult-had failed. Los Angeles sought transcendence everywhere you looked, through astrology or crystal or body-worship or templegoing, but these were stabs at worldly divination, tips and forecasts about how to do better in the here and now. What mattered was to prepare for the future. And Richard was not prepared for the future. Bodily knowledge of this seemed to pass in through his sinuses; knowledge of this presented itself not in the mind but in the ears and nose and throat.

Women, he thought, understood about time. (Gina understood about time.) Women could send their imaginations out over the future and situate themselves at certain points within it. Time is a dimension, not a force. But women felt it as a force, because they could feel its violence, every hour. They knew they would be half dead at forty-five. This information did not fall in the path of men. Men, at forty-five, were in "the prime of life." The prime? Prima (bora): first (hour)? They get the Change. We get the Prime. And this is the reason why our bodies weep and seep in the night, because we're half dead too, and don't know how or why.

"Wow," said the publicity boy. "Too bad about your face. Does it hurt a lot?"

Richard said, "Not as much as you'd think."

"Pardon me?"

"Not as much as you'd think."

"Pardon me?"

He shook his head no. That hurt a lot. Just before dawn Richard had got out of bed and moved toward the bathroom mirror with unusually intense disquiet. Sure enough, his face was the shape of a television. He looked like one of the Simpsons. He looked like Bart Simpson. In profile Richard resembled the joke figure in a newspaper cartoon about a den-tist's waiting room. Full face, though, he looked like Bart Simpson. Because he had two joke toothaches: lower right, upper left.

At the airport he sat with Gwyn while the publicity boy banged his head against the wall of a nearby phone booth, rearranging interviews. Their flight to Boston was delayed, and there were further complications. Following the mid-afternoon reading they were to make a short hop to Provincetown, over the bay, in Cape Cod, there to attend a party at the holiday home of the toiletry tycoon or burger king who owned Gwyn's publishers. The publicity boy returned, saying,

"The Globe guy and the Herald lady will meet us at Logan and we can do a double interview in the cab."

"Did you get Elsa Oughton?"

"I keep getting this jig who just bawls me out and won't take a message."

The publicity boy sat down heavily.

Gwyn was staring at him. "Try again. What is this? She's Profundity Three for Christ's sake."

On the afternoon of Gwyn's Los Angeles reading the publicity boy had pointed to the lone cloud in the sky-pink-fringed, chef's-hat-shaped, utterly lost-and predicted, drolly, and wrongly, that no one would show up, this being Los Angeles. In Los Angeles the sky had only one imitation it could do: that of the interstellar void. As for telling Los Angeles about the kind of day it was having, the sky, like Gwyn Barry when they asked him about the Millennium deal on Amelior, had no comment. The sky above Los Angeles was a no-comment sky.

The simultaneous or parallel reading was to be given in a converted theater in Boston's commercial midtown. Richard took it as auspicious when he saw the crowd outside, and the crowd in the entrance hall, and the crowd lining the passage, and the crowd in the bar where the simultaneous or parallel signing session would later take place. Gwyn's table was ready, hardly visible beneath the earthworks and palisades of his fiction: the stacks of Amelior Regained, the stacks of Amelior, and (Jesus) the stacks of Summertown in a bright new paperback original. Richard approached his own table, which was of course entirely bare, and started unloading his mail sack. Lifting out the first copy of Untitled, and catching the usual hangnail in the rough loom of its jacket, Richard watched Gwyn and tried to imitate his expression, benign, bemused, unsurpris-able. He was also endeavoring to take heart from the rampant and (by definition) laughably undiscriminating enthusiasm on display. In England, if your favorite living author who also happened to be your long-lost twin brother was giving a reading in the next house along, it would never occur to you even to stick your head round the door. But Americans clearly went out and did things.

For the next fifteen minutes the two writers were to occupy a sectioned area of the bar, where a group of journalists and academics had been gathered for them to hobnob with. Elsa Oughton stood among them. Richard was startled by her appearance. She was no longer the angular, Gina-like dryad of her jacket photograph: he wouldn't have identified her if she hadn't had both Gwyn's shoes sticking out of the back of her skirt. On the happenstance/coincidence/enemy-action principle, Richard had decided against any further defamation of his friend. But after Gwyn was done with her (in parting he gave Elsa the full PR handshake, two palms enfolding hers as if in joint prayer), she came over to where he was standing with his swollen face and his plastic beaker of white wine and Richard thought what the hey and said,

"Elsa Oughton? Richard lull. I wonder if you saw our review of Saddle Leather in The Little Magazine. A favorable and also a very interesting piece. I'll make sure you get sent a copy."

"Thanks. Good. How was your tour?"

What Richard was looking at here was a narrative of fat. The whole story: how she'd got that way, how she'd tried to get back. How muchshe hated it. He wondered whether it was in him to dream up something about Gwyn hating fat people-a taunt directed at a small child with gland problems, perhaps. But he didn't see how the subject of fat people could be smoothly raised. For a moment he felt pride in the shaming bloat of his own face. The only other stuff he knew about Elsa was that she wrote twangingly sensitive short stories about hikes and sleepouts and mingling with animals. And that she had recently married Viswanathan Singh, the Harvard economist.

He sucked in his chest and stuck out his gut and said, "Rather shocking, actually."

"How so?"

"Well. I've known Gwyn for twenty years." Richard didn't even bother to tell himself not to get carried away. "I know his foibles. Or I thought I did. Outrageous looks-snob. Loves his creature comforts. Hates animals. So what? Who cares? But I had no idea he was such an unreconstructed racist. Really. I'm flabbergasted."

"Racist?"

"Of course he did grow up in Wales, which is racially very homogeneous. And in London he and his wife-that's Lady Demeter to you- move in very select circles. But over here, in the great 'melting pot'…"

"What kind of thing?"

"For two weeks now I've had to endure a constant stream of snide remarks about geeks and slopes and wops and wogs and boogies and pakkis. Send them back to the hellholes they came from. You know the kind of thing." What next? Gwyn punching eye-slits in his hotel pillow slips? Gwyn with his blazing cross, thundering over … No. No horses. Richard made a serious effort and managed to mutter in his clogged new voice, "I tried reading him Dickens on the American South. No earthly use, of course. Oh no. Not with friend Barry."

"But his wofk's so bland. So bland."

"Yes, well this is often the way, isn't it."

"I can't stay for the reading. I… can't stay."

Elsa Oughton couldn't stay for the reading because a curtain-hanger was expected at the house, and Viswanathan refused to deal with tradespeople. The Singhs had moved, not so long ago, and something like this happened almost every day. Viswanathan would call and tell her to come home because there was a man outside trying to deliver a parcel. Late the night before he had caught her crouched over the icebox in the dark and announced his intention of moving into a separate bedroom. And a separate bathroom. That morning: another fight. She had crossed the room in front of his desk. In future she was to cross the room behind hisdesk. Even as things stood it seemed that she was only allowed to look his way every other Tuesday.

"At the airport just now," said Richard, "our porter was an elderly Asian gentleman and he accidentally dropped Gwyn's shooting-stick. And Gwyn called him a fucking monkey! I'm sorry. But can you believe that? I mean / don't care whether people are green or blue or polka-dotted …"

Oh sure, she thought. Come back to my place and try handling my fucking monkey. "Nice talking to you. I'll look again at his work."

"Do that."

It was time. The lady organizer took his arm and with an indecipherable smile drew him away, ahead of Gwyn. As he was led down passages, and up stairways like fireman's drops with steps curled round the pole, Richard began to suspect that a disaster awaited him: not a literary humiliation but a disaster, with body counts. First a young woman on a stretcher came flowing past, borne by two health-industry freelancers in orange salopettes. There followed a policeman, another medic, and a genuine fireman, with an axe, and then a young couple seemingly brought together and sustained by deep shared sorrow. He turned a corner. The walls were lined on either side by leaning figures in attitudes of distress and exhaustion and qualified recovery. This was the entrance to Theater A, where Gwyn would be reading. Richard glanced inside and saw human congestion on a scale no longer imaginable in the civilized world. Perhaps in Japanese commuter trains, in crushed crowds in news footage, watched over by the sneer of calamity . . . He thought of deportations, slave-packing, the cages of Calcutta. The room gave off the thick insect buzz of coagulated youth-a hive of hormones. Richard's escort paused to reassure the two firemen who doubtfully flanked the doorway, and then turned to him and said, with ominous tenderness,

"I'm sure you're a beautiful writer too."

They walked on, to Theater B. Theater A sat 750 people, Theater B 725. Richard had agreed altogether readily, with much astute nodding of the head, in an airport somewhere, in a flickering coffeenook, on a cab chute of a hotel forecourt, that Gwyn belonged in Theater A. With a last nasal drool into his handkerchief, Richard stepped into the space and silence of Theater B.

Later, he would tell himself that the reading was the clear high-point of the afternoon. His audience might not have been large. But it was varied. One was female, one was black, one was Native American, and one was fat. And that was that. But wait. The fat man was fabulouslyfat-how his folds seemed to slur and slobber over two seats, over three! And the black man was as black as the bedroom of Dominique-Louise: as black as Adam. And the Amerindian wore cowboy boots, and had one leg up over the aisle armrest with the spur lolling in pluralistic suspension. And the woman, beneath the quilted lodge-skins of her smock, was all woman, Richard was sure. Fat man, black man, cowboy and Indian, womankind . .. He took the lectern to a Krakatoa of applause: from next door. It sounded like an espresso machine going off an inch away from his clogged right ear. Instead of fainting, he started reading, from the early pages of chapter eleven: the description of the coven of tramps, rendered as a burlesque of The Idylls of the King. Immediately he lost a quarter of his audience when, with a primitive ululation, the Native American got to his feet and started walking backwards up the steps. Richard raised his head. Their eyes met. The Native American was severe and vain and stupidly lissome in his cowboy boots. Cowboy boots? The boots of your slaughterer? With a rush of hurt and hate Richard knew that this was his comrade from Bold Agenda: John Two Moons. Three listeners remained. As he got going again Richard found he was becoming increasingly and then entirely absorbed by the question of their tenuous equanimity, their whims and mood swings. What he was reading was no use at all: he needed paragraphs that praised fat people, black people, smocked women. Causing intolerable suspense, the fat man was now making successively enfeebled attempts to get out of his seat. He flailed, and failed, and eventually subsided into a troubled sleep. The African American, too, was providing conflict and drama: ever more energized by his private agenda, he began to mouth, mumble, intone and holler, louder than the man at the mike. Only the woman-thickly made-up, unblinking, flatly smiling, his age-maintained an undivided composure: the dream audience of one.

And the reading was the clear high point of the afternoon. After that it was all downhill.

During one of the many intermissions, caused by the stridor from Theater A, Richard fell to the perusal of his handkerchief. A handkerchief the likes of which no American had set eyes on since the invention of paper tissues. (The publicity boy, Richard knew, just couldn't believe this handkerchief.) Some bits bunched, infinitely parched and crackling to the touch; others as glutinous as the white of a half-boiled egg: the whole seeking a strange shape-definitive asymmetry. He moistened his nose with it. Yeah, a real old snot-rag. Such as the schoolboy he once was might have found in his blazer pocket, after a term of flu. The shape and color of London skies.

Boston was burning behind them in its brick-red dusk as they walked out of the gate and headed for the plane-the light aircraft. Richard turned. The rust and dust of the Logan evening contained something lurid, something brothelly and lewd. And you could hear the primal moan over and above the ordinary wind.

Gwyn said, "Reassure me."

"It's a hop," said the publicity boy. "Like a half hour. We'll beat the storm. They guarantee we'll beat it."

"We're not going up in that. Jesus. It's the Wright brothers."

"Orville and Wilbur," said Richard ramblingly. "The Kitty Hawk."

"I've done it like a thousand times. It's a breeze."

"It's not a breeze. It's a hurricane."

"Don't worry about it."

Richard unyoked his mail sack from his shoulder and lowered it to the ground. His mail sack was fractionally heavier than it had been before the Boston signing session. As if to prove and memorialize this fact, as if to give it chapter and verse, his mailsack was now going to be weighed. Weight, hereabouts, was much in the air. All the passengers, at check-in, were asked what their weight was, Gwyn disclosing a game 140, Richard an overparticular and outdated 167, the publicity boy eventually coming up with a regrettable 215. Tensing her legs, a young woman in a blue pants suit now hoisted Richard's mail sack on to the broad bucket of the platform scale. If his suitcase had raised eyebrows, his mail sack was the theme of candid debate. To get them through this debate, Richard had to smile. And if it hurts when you smile, you realize how often you smile when you don't want to-how often your smiles are smiles of pain. He knew from mirrors how his smiles made him look. They made him look as if he was recovering from a stroke. So these smiles, performed on behalf of his mail sack, in front of Gwyn, in front of the publicity boy, these smiles took from him everything he had. These smiles removed the change from his pockets. These smiles just cleaned him out … A couple of hundred feet away the light aircraft crouched self-consciously in its bay, spindly-legged but plump-girdled, and eloquent of aerodynamic ingenuousness. Looking at it, Richard thought not of the goggled smiles of Orville and Wilbur but of the spastic wrigglings of moustachioed hobbyists-riding off cliffs on buttressed bicycles and flapping their pantomime wings. His mail sack was skeptically returned to him, as hand baggage. He shouldered it once more, and turned to Gwyn. "Christ. Will you look at that." "Where?" he said, and looked to the south.

Night was ready to arrive, to roll over, but the day was not accepting this. Light was being displaced by dark, because the earth turned; but light was not accepting this. Light and day hadn't gone to bed. They were up after dark. In the core of the advancing darkness, light-talent, passion-feverishly struggled and would then rear up madly bright: hysterical day.

He wasn't worried because he was already dead. It was over. He went off with his mail sack and sat down on it, behind a staircase pointing upward but leading nowhere, and stuck a cigarette into the unfamiliar tautness of his lips, and let his death go slowly by.

It was the signing that had killed him. Keats was killed by a review. Richard was killed by a signing. Of the reading you could at least say that there weren't many people there to see it. But his audience for the signing was biblically vast. Submitting to demand, Gwyn had given a shortened reading-in three sittings. And everyone stuck around.

So while his friend and rival exhausted four whole ballpoints, signing Amelior Regained, Amelior, Summertown, signing programs, flyers, press photographs, signing autograph books, plaster casts, girls' forearms, girls' inner thighs, Richard sat at the other table for two hours doing nothing … In the past, and in various capacities, none of them exalted, he had hung around at fairs and festivals and studied, with casual enmity, the signing queues of writers. Each queue, like each book and each writer, had a genre it belonged to. The countercultural, the contentedly pedagogic, the straggly, the ramrod orderly, the playful, the earnest, as well as all the other emphases of class, age, sex and race. And Gwyn's queue, it had to be admitted, looked like the universal. Here they came, stepping up the gangway to the ark of the future.

While queueing (and where did this queue end? Where did it end?), the queuers had Richard to look at and wonder about-they had Richard to delectate. They didn't know it, but they were actors at his funeral, they were mourners, weepers, moving slowly past the corpse of his calling, the tinpot jackboot, numb and luminous in his death wax.

The ghost went on sitting there, at the table heaped with unsigned Untitleds. About forty minutes in, an old man wearing pressed jeans approached, his face archangelic with integrity: the ghost of Tom Paine. He produced a copy of Richard's novel from under his arm and smacked it down on the tabletop. Untitled snapped open on pages eight and nine, both of which were unmistakably stained and warped by dried blood; in the interface lay the distinctive bookmark of the Lazy Susan; the top corner of page nine had been forcefully turned down and bore the perfectcontours of a gory thumbprint. He didn't want it signed. He didn't want it… His only other visitor was a woman: the woman who had attended his reading. At the time, she had seemed to him to be the only person present who had paid the slightest attention to his words. With kittenish timidity she approached his table. Richard bade her welcome, and meant it, and went on meaning it as she extracted from her shoulder pouch a copy of a novel written not by Richard Tull but by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Idiot. Standing beside him, leaning over him, her face awfully warm and near, she began to leaf through its pages, explaining. This book too was stained, not by gouts of blood but by the vying colors of two highlighting pens, one blue, one pink. And not just two pages but the whole six hundred. Every time the letter h and e appeared together, as in the, then, there, as in forehead, Pashlishtchev, sheepskin, they were shaded in blue. Every time the letters s, h, and e appeared together, as in she, sheer, ashen, sheepskin, etc., they were shaded in pink. And since every she contained a he, the predominance was unarguably and unsurprisingly masculine. Which was exactly her point. "You see?" she said with her hot breath, breath redolent of metallic medications, of batteries and printing-plates. "You see?" . .. The organizers knew all about this woman-this unfortunate recurrence, this indefatigable drag-and kept coming over to try and coax her away. Richard wouldn't hear of it. Never had he found another's company so gorgeous. Never had he lived so deliriously. Never would he stray from her side. Together, in their dwindling years, with no kids of course but with new twin sets of highlighting pens, they would tackle the great texts, one by one. If he should falter, she would take up the blue. Should she grow weary, he would wield the pink. But life is short and art is long: would they ever exhaust the great Russians? Side by side, him with his pint jug and his painkillers, her with her zinc and her manganese.

Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories. The Greatcoat. Father and Son. A Hero of Our Time.

The Death of Ivan Ilych. The Gentleman from San Francisco. The Master and Margarita.

The Devil. The Double.

We.

Richard raised a palm to the spongey cladding of his face. He thought he could probably work it out, now-where his stuff stood, and where Gwyn's stuff stood, in relation to the universe. The publicity boy was calling. Up above, the sky was showing that it could do black holes. This imitation (the event horizon only roughly circular, with the standard drug-squeezed pupil at the eye's center-the kind of puckered blob you would find in one of the twins' astronomy booklets) needed more work.

They rolled forward, soon to go. The seven passengers sat with their necks bent almost sideways, in postures of tortured compression. It wasn't just the low ceiling: it was also the embarrassing proximity of the tarmac, only a few feet beneath the soles of their shoes. Richard assumed that the engine was so loud that it was off the human scale altogether, and all you felt was vibration, in your every atom. More or less engulfed by his mail sack, he sat jammed into the rearmost row, next to Gwyn. They were both assessing the pilot-a figure of unusually enhanced interest: tall, fleshy, ginger-blond, a big man with a light step, he deployed a feminine delicacy in the arrangement of his peaked cap, his flightbox, his earphones. Turning sideways in his seat, comfortingly perfunctory, he had run through the safety instructions in a voice perhaps incapable of modulation anyway, and then attended to his controls-the sort of dashboard appropriate to a prewar spaceship or a glue-and-balsa nuclear sub, dials, graphs, metal switches coated in worn paint. Richard realized that the dash contained no plastic. Was that good, he wondered, and tried to lose himself in silent tribute to durable and horny-handed craftsmanship and skills, now, alas, long vanished. The pilot wore a white shirt and lumpy cream trousers the texture of flock wallpaper. It was easy, somehow, to lose yourself in the expanse of his cream rump: firmly framed in the lower aperture of his seat, it filled its space solidly and proudly, soft-cornered, like a TV-like the shape of Richard's face.

So the little plane queued for take off. The little plane was a little plane, among all these big ones, and hoped it wasn't in the way. But it was. The passenger jets, dog-nosed (their noses black and damp in the dew or sweat of the coming storm), waited in line behind them like rigid pointers cocked for the hunt. Richard looked out through the propeller blades, which were moving invisibly fast, seeming to smudge the air or bruise it. Ahead of them, round the turn, were the tensed haunches of the important shuttles-to New York, to Washington-waiting to take Americans where they needed to go: around America. Over and above the compound anguish of the checked planes, all screaming at each other to get out of the way, you could hear the sky and the epic groan of the middle air. Darkness, night, was wheeling in from the north. But from the defiant south came a negligent and unanswerable demonstration of light, the electromagnetic: god's whips, knouts and sjamboks of solder and copper.

No one spoke. Gwyn suddenly leaned forward and engaged the publicity boy. His inquiries were muffled by the headrest, and when the publicity boy replied he seemed to be talking or shouting to himself,like a bum or a wacko, like American fever. Come on, you seen what's behind us . . . They do this like nine times a day … No way is it a hurricane. It's a storm . . . You mean like a hurricane with a name?

"Hurricanes used to be all girls," said Richard. He had spoken, really, to make the publicity boy seem saner. It made him seem saner too, though, and he continued ramblingly, "Now they alternate them. Girl, boy. Boy, girl. I think that's better, I don't know. Hurricane Demi. Hurricane Gwyn. Hurricane Gina. Hurricane Marius. Hurricane Anstice. Hurricane Scozzy."

"Hurricane who?"

"Nothing."

"Listen to this one," said Gwyn. "He's already flipped. Jesus. All this for a party."

The pilot put his face into profile and monotonously informed them that it would be a whole lot cooler in here when they were off the ground. This was good news. Because the passengers were finding out what happened to the air on planes and what would happen to the air on jets unless they doctored and gimmicked it. How soon it was exhausted, and went blood-heat and pungent. How soon you were all breathing each other's yawn. On the jets you could wait at the can door for half an hour and step right in after some exploding nonagenarian had dragged himself out of there: that's how good these guys were. But on the little plane the air was already critically delicate. You wouldn't even want to worry it with speech . . . Now all the passengers were silent, giving themselves up to that strange modern activity, fancy-priced suffering, in which America leads the world; but when the plane rounded the last corner and found nothing ahead of it except sea and sky, and made its rat-ding gallop for the bruised yonder, and was up, away, exchanging one medium for a new and better one, and was immediately sent skidding sideways, windmilling its arms, then all eight of them moaned in harmony, answering the moan above their heads.

They steadied, and climbed. Over car park, over graveyard, over the harbor, over the bay. Soon the patchy whitecaps were no more than flecks of dandruff on the broad shoulder of the sea. Richard looked casually out of his porthole, to the south. And he couldn't believe it. The storm was there, like a gothic cathedral, with all its glaring gargoyles … Diurnal time was a figure for the human span: waking, innocent morning, full midday and the pomp of the afternoon, then loss of color, then weariness, then mortal weariness and the certainty of sleep, then nightmare, then dreamlessness. Outside, day was gone but it wouldn't go to bed. The day was dead and gone but wouldn't believe it and wouldn'taccept it, the day and its sick comeback, trying to return and saying, I'm still day. Don't you see me? Don't you like me more? I'm still day, and not letting go, jerkily reanimated, hot-wired, and pulsing under the jump-leads. And the rain: the rain was wanting to lubricate this desperate tension between day and night, wanting to soothe and cleanse. But the rain was panicking and completely overdoing it and sounding like psychopathic applause.

"That red switch," said Gwyn. "What's he doing with that red switch?"

Next to the digital clock on the dashboard, which recorded their flighttime (nine minutes elapsed), there was a red switch and a flashing and beeping red light which did seem to be exercising the pilot in an unencouraging way. He kept twiddling it, as if hoping that the light would go off, or change color, or stop beeping. But his movements were perhaps more curious than agitated. The stiff cream carapace of his backside was still stalwartly ensconced in its chair.

"We're losing height. I think we're losing height."

"He'd tell us if something was up. Wouldn't he? Or wouldn't he?"

Without turning round the pilot said, "We're having a weight problem. Hopefully it won't be a … a problem. It'll keep us under this weather here." And now he did swivel round, eyeing each passenger in turn with reasonable suspicion, as if searching for a superfat stowaway.

"I'm not going to worry," said Gwyn, "until he starts to worry."

The pilot didn't seem worried. He had even started to whistle.

"That sounds wise," said Richard, and turned to his porthole. And the sea looked as close as the tarmac had looked ten minutes ago, and the plane suddenly seemed to be traveling not through the air but through the churned water. The dip, the climb, the crest, the fall. The wave, the wait, the wave, the wait, the wave, the wait, the wave.

"Oh man," said Gwyn.

"He's stopped fucking with that red switch."

"Has he? Good."

Above their heads the cabin lights dimmed and flickered and dimmed again.

It was when the patch of shit appeared on the pilot's cream rump that Richard knew for certain that all was not well. This patch of shit started life as an islet, a Martha's Vineyard that soon became a Cuba, then a Madagascar, then a dreadful Australia of brown. But that was five minutes ago, and no one gave a shit about it now. Not a single passenger, true, had interpreted the state of the pilot's pants as a favorable sign, but that was five minutes ago, that was history, and no one gave a shit about it now, not even the pilot, who was hollering into the microphone, hollering into a world of neighing metal and squawking rivets, hollering into the very language of the storm-its fricatives, its atrocious plosives. The gods had put aside their bullwhips and their elemental rodeo and were now at play with their bowling balls clattering down the gutters of space-time. Within were the mortals, starfished from white knuckle to white toe-joint, stretched like Christs, like Joans in her fire. Richard looked and now felt love for the publicity boy, his sleek, shaking, tear-washed face.

This would end. He reached for Gwyn's hand and said, loudly, in his ear, "Death is good."

"What?"

"Death is good." Here in America he had noticed how much less he cared, every time, whether the plane he was in stayed up. There was so much less, every time, to come down to. "Death is good."

"Oh yeah?"

Richard felt he had won. Because of his boys-because of Marius and Marco. Gwyn had a wife. And Richard had a wife. But who was your wife? She was just the one you ended up with who had your kids. And you were just the one she had them ?with. Childhood was the universal. Everyone had been there. He said,

"I'll survive."

"We'll survive. We'll survive."

No, not you, he thought. But he said, "The world liked what you wrote."

"Who fucking cares? No. Thanks. I'm sorry your … Gina loves you. She just…"

"What? She just what?"

Now came a thousand camera flashes through every porthole. Theparting shots of the paparazzi of the storm. With rolling deliberation the sky gathered them into its slingshot, wound and stretched them back ("Death is good," he said again) and fired them out into silent night.

You could sense the presence of the peninsula, and see the lights of the airport. Some lights were fixed. Others moved.

"Avoidance apron," sobbed the pilot into his mike. "Avoidance apron

n

The passengers unwrapped their voices and sank back, harshly purring. Richard offered his handkerchief to the publicity boy, who accepted it.

"Avoidance apron. Avoidance apron!"

"What's he mean?" said Gwyn, jerking around in his seat. "What's the avoidance apron? Where you crash-land? Is the landing gear down? Is it gone?"

It didn't seem to matter and no one else seemed to care. They were getting nearer to their own thing, the ground, the earth. Not scored and seared by another thing, the fire, not covered and swallowed by another thing, the water, not plucked apart by another thing, the air.

Provincetown Airport was a baby airport, meant for baby planes, and it was shy about the fuss. With his case and his mail sack Richard had plonked himself down on a patch of grass-over on the civilian side of the airport's main bungalow. He patiently chain-smoked, and from a plastic bottle with a plastic tube patiently drank the brandy given to him by a sympathetic medic. On the airfield a scene of human and mechanical confusion was approaching its completion and dispersal point. There was a handsome fire engine, and two blue-cross station wagons on the lookout for custom (into one of which an elderly passenger had been levered, clutching his pacemaker) and a couple of cops creaking about … The pilot had left the plane last, attended by ground staff. He was wearing a shiny black mid-length skirt or pinafore. Two other passengers, slumped on chairs in the airport building, attempted to give him a cheer; but he shuffled on through, with marked modesty. Gwyn was in there now, with the publicity boy and a gesticulating young journalist from The Cape Codder.

He closed his eyes for a while. Someone took the cigarette from

between his fingers and drew on it with audible hunger. He looked

up: it occurred to him that they were both in a state that had a medical designation, because Gwyn resembled no one he had ever seen before. And maybe he didn't look that hot or that cool, sitting with hisshoulders shaking on the frosted grass, and steam coming up all around him-animal vapors. But he laughed his tight laugh and said, not ramblingly anymore,

"I worked it out. You know the pilot? We thought he was shouting avoidance apron. But he wasn't. I heard one of the ladies here. He wanted a-voidance apron. She called it a shit-wrap." Richard laughed stealthily, under the cover of his shaking shoulders. He did think it was kind of great. You wouldn't want to radio ahead for a shit-wrap. That would offend the passengers. So you radioed ahead for a "voidance apron." And the passengers can remain unoffended as they prepare to crash-land or mass-eject onto the airport latrine. "A voidance apron," he said. "It's kind of great, I think. You were saying? About Gina?"

Gwyn stood over him.

"She loves me?"

"Despite everything. Which is saying something. Oh, you know. Despite you being a failed book reviewer who comes on like Dr. Johnson. I can see why you think death is good. Because then you and I are the same. But I'm alive. And I'm going to go on doing what every man would do if he thought he could get away with it. Everything's changed." Gwyn knelt, his hands folded on his thigh, as if for a knighthood. "Let me tell you the interesting thing about the star system. It works. You want to know what silicone feels like? It feels good. It feels better. Because of what it says. Whither fellatio? you ask. Well that's changed too. I'll tell you whither. I can sum it up for you in one word. It's noisier." He straightened up again. With a sudden apprehension of disgust he flicked the cigarette away and said, "You know what bloody near killed us up there? Killed you, killed me?"

Now he stepped forward and gave the mail sack a careless kick-and Richard was holding it close, like a boxing coach with a punchbag, feeling the force of the contender's right.

"Your lousy book."

The publicity boy came out of the building with his mobile phone and told them that they had three choices. They could go straight to the hotel and rest up. Or they could go to P-town General or wherever for checkups and the usual post-trauma bullshit. Or they could go to the party.

They went to the party.

At dawn the next morning the two writers checked out of the Founding Fathers and, traveling by limousine, made the six-hour journey to New York in unpunctuated silence. When the chauffeur was pulling off FDR Drive, Gwyn said,"While you're here . .."

From his briefcase he took out the copy of Untitled that Richard had given him, back in London, a month ago. They both looked at it. Just as Amelior, in Richard's judgment, could be thought remarkable only if Gwyn had written it with his foot, so Untitled, as an object, could be thought passable only if its maker had fashioned it with his nose.

"You might as well sign it for me."

"I've already signed it."

"Ah. So you have," said Gwyn. "So you have.?

Whereas Boston had been trussed in its green-studded rustbelts, Manhattan, as they neared it from the north, looked like a coda to the urban-erotic, the garter and stocking-top patterning of its loops and bridges now doing service as spinal supports and braces, hernia frames. Above it all, the poised hypodermic of the Empire State.

There wasn't much time. Richard parked his suitcase with the porter at Gwyn's hotel, and, accompanied by his mail sack, his fat face, his handkerchief, and his hangover, walked the sixty-odd blocks to Avenue B and Bold Agenda. He arrived unannounced at the desk of Leslie Evry, who climbed cautiously to his feet. Silence fell over the entire workspace as Richard said, in his loudest and reediest voice,

"In what sense, if any, are you publishing Unfitted?"

Leslie looked at him in the way that so many Americans had looked at him: as if they wanted to call Security. Americans, it transpired, were disappointed in Richard. Not because he wasn't a duke or a beefeater but because of the clear imperfections, the reparable tarnishings of body and mind, that he chose to live with. Frances Ort was there, hesitant in his peripheral vision, but undaunted.

"In what sense, if any, are you publishing Untitled?"

"Excuse me?"

"Well let's go through this one step at a time. Are you distributing it?"

"Not directly."

"Have you sent out copies for review?"

"We have sent a number of copies out to certain . .. outlets."

"What number? I know. One! Zero! How many did you print?"

"There's a run on reserve. They're not bound, not as yet."

"How many did you print'?"

Regretfully Leslie indicated the mail sack that Richard still wore on his shoulder. "That's it."

"Who made the decision to publish my novel-to print the typescript and bind it between hard covers? Where's Chip? Where's Chuck? Where's Roy Biv?"

"Ah, Roy," said Evry, shaking his head. "Roy Biv! Tell me. Did he ever

sign himself Roy G. Biv? . . . He changed his name to that. If you were American, you'd understand. It's a mnemonic. The rainbow. Red,orange, yellow, green. Blue, indigo, violet. He wanted to please everyone. That's Roy. Poor Roy."

"Someone published it. On what criteria? Please tell me the truth. This is a literary life. Of a kind. Tell me the truth. On what criteria?"

He felt Frances Ort's young hand on his arm. He turned. The friendly spaces of Bold Agenda were still taking shape for future use, whatever was necessary, kindergarten, rape hotline, health-crisis center. Its cubbyholes and cord carpets-its pro-bono feel, like a clinic. And he could of course see himself there, sitting quietly on a low sofa, awaiting counsel for all his pains and his ills.

"Basically," said Leslie Evry, "basically to balance the list. We felt the mix was wrong and may look badly. We felt it might imperil our funding."

"Because," said Richard, "everyone else was called Doo Wah Diddy Diddy or Two Dogs Fucking. And you needed …" On the wall, he noticed, was a framed poster of the Bold Agenda flyleaf or bookmark. With recognition, with love, Richard saw that one of his fellow authors was called Unsold-Unsold Inukuluk. "Christ," he said. "A token honky-not even Gwyn bothered with that. Why me? Why not someone from Boston?"

"It's our policy to represent the most authentic possible-"

"Did anyone read it? Did anyone? Did Roy?"

"Roy? Roy never read anything, /read it."

"You read it all?"

"Not exactly. I had a-I'd just gotten into it when I had a …"

"Leslie was hospitalized with suspected meningitis," said Frances Ort.

"Okay. Okay. Well, I'm going to leave this here, if I may. I'll just take-no. Here." Richard looked from face to face. And he remembered. He said, "Richard Of York Gains Battles In Vain. That's it. That's it. That's the difference between the cultures. Between the new and the old. Between you and me. Richard Of York meets Roy G. Biv. It's no contest. It's no contest."

"We're sorry," said Frances Ort.

"I'll find my own way out. So long."

So long, and no longer. He stood on the sidewalk, outside the Lazy Susan. Whose windows .. . Even the windows of the Lazy Susan were

telling him, with American emphasis, that if you do the arts, if you try

the delirious profession, then don't be a flake, and offer people something-tell them something they might reasonably want to hear. He feltlight. He felt light because there was nothing to carry, nothing to grip and tote, nothing to heave and buckle under.

The first bar he hit was selling vodka and milk to old black men for $1.25.

By the time he reached Central Park South he had driven this up to ten bucks a pop, and came out of the Plaza, where they wouldn't serve him, in some disarray. As he staggered about, among shoeshine and fountain spray, a phalanx of civilians streamed past him in distinct amateur-military style, and on their faces-well, he took his last look at it: American resolve. Their mission was simple. They intended to embarrass the horse-and-carriage trade of Central Park South. Across the road they surged, raising their daubed placards, all of which had something pithy or rhyming to say about the incompatibility of beast and city: how the two didn't mix. The horsemen, slaves of tourists, dressed in low-caste colors (and there was a horsewoman too, not that old but her face grimily lined, wearing what looked like an entire tepee over a body as thin as a ridgepole): the horsepeople watched their advancing adversaries with a loathing that lay at the limit of human fatigue. Swept along, Richard now disengaged himself and pushed his way toward the railings. A horse halted his progress-a horse and its sightless stare. The animal, the blinkered clipclop, cause of all the fuss, raised its head in pompous indifference, and then dropped it again, wholly preoccupied, it seemed, by the task of wiping shit from its shoe (not dog shit but horse shit-in a class of its own, really, as shit went), and doing this not as humans do it, heel-first and backwards, but as horses do it, toe-first and forwards. So the charioteers in the ethnic heft of their patchwork and motley, in their gypsy jackets, averted their gypsy chancer's eyes, and the horse scraped its shoe, not minding. Agony, of which there was much in the air, found expression only through the cars: the delivery vans, the Plaza limousines, the yellow cabs. Deliberately obstructed for now, until the police showed up and cleared the scene, the beasts of burden, made of metal and serving the concrete city, twisted and shuddered, blaring blue murder with smoke coming out of their ears. Beyond, exhaustively deconsecrated, lay the enchanted glade of Central Park.

Making his last move he sideswiped his way east, across Fifth and Madison, on to the avenue of sun and gold. To the north the prospect was seized in the city's grid, locked and channelled by the buildings on either side and their stiff-chested measure. The vista looked infinite, and entirely unknown, like the open sea to the first traversers of the Atlantic (when gods and terrors were still young and strong), ever ready tobecome the end of the world, where water became waterrall, oceanfall. Richard realized that he would have to stop saying he had never been to America. To that distinction-his main accomplishment and claim to fame-he could no longer pretend. He had been to America. He had been to America.

PART FOUR

Gwyn awoke. He had slept, as always, now, in what Demi called not the spare room or the guest room but the visitors' room, which faced the master suite on the first floor-where Demi slept. With a brisk clearance of the throat he turned over onto his back, and then over onto his side. The nearer pillow of the other twin bed was evenly scratched with strands of straight black hair: hair belonging to Pamela, his research assistant. A section of her sharp-shouldered back was visible, and even through the curtained blur of early morning he could see the fine indentations her hair had made on her impressionable flesh. For half a minute or so he tried to think of a good way of describing this sight. Other men, other writers, might have started off with-who knows?-map contours or shallow estuaries; but Gwyn had decided some time ago that there weren't going to be any descriptions of women's bodies, or anyone else's, in what he wrote, because some bodies were "better" than others (and Pamela's body, as it happened, was better than most), and although Gwyn felt the way everyone did about bodies (always complaining to Demi about her body and telling her to get it fixed), he knew that comparisons were odious (and nearly always unflattering)-so why waste valuable time? Gwyn sat up and drank a tumbler of bottled water. The water was called Elixir and its ads promised you eternal youth.

Probably there is no word in contemporary usage delicate enough, nice enough, to describe Gwyn's feeling-tone as he crossed the few feet of carpeted floor and slipped into Pamela's bed. "Condescension," in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sense, would perhaps come closest. When the Rev. Mr. Collins dines with Lady Catherine de Bourgh and, the next day, his voice weak with gratitude, praises her extraordinary"condescension"-that comes close. The willing, the indulgent dilution of one's own superlative being, for the delight and enrichment of simpler lives. Considering how wonderful he was, it seemed wonderful of him to behave so wonderfully when he could justifiably behave so badly, if he felt like it. Lady Catherine was a snob and a toady. Mr. Collins was a snob and a toady. And Gwyn Barry, like Jane Austen, was a writer.

"Good morning," he said indulgently.

"Mm," said Pamela. Or was it "Hmm"?

Women do adore to be cuddled and babied in the morning. It really was universal. There weren't any that didn't like it. All the more reason not to say so, in writing: an offensive commonplace is what you'd end up with. Gwyn had a great deal to attempt and achieve that day (What is this life of the mind? what asketh men to have?), so he came as quickly as he could.

Where was his simple dressing gown? There.

He got out of bed and crossed the room and opened the door and crossed the landing and, most symmetrically, opened the door and crossed the room and got into bed. Demi was awake. He reached for her hand and gave it a benevolent squeeze.

"Time to get the tea, love," he told her.

It was all laid out on a tray, of course-laid out by Sherilee or Paquita. All Demi had to do was go and get it. Yes, and his mail.

"Come on, love. Tick tock goes the clock."

Demi moved very lazily sometimes. Gwyn's green eyes leniently twinkled.

"Pam's having a little lie-in. A little snooze," he whispered, remembering-as he quite often remembered-that Demi disliked running into Pam first thing in the morning. Or any time at all. But especially first thing. He occasionally found it depressing, the spiritlessness with which Demi rolled from the bed. Now he could establish himself in her vacated warmth, unfastidiously, loving all that lived.

"As I think I've gone to the trouble of pointing out before, you are at liberty, you know, to adjust the present arrangement any time you like. As I think I've gone to the trouble of pointing out before. Listen to this: 'The attractive simplicity of Mr. Barry's fable may sometimes tend towards the simplistic.' This, anyway, is the belief of Mr. Aaron E. Wurlitzer of the Milwaukee Herald. Don't they know how hard it is to make the complicated look simple? At your say-so, Demi, the present arrangement could also be submitted for review. Or modification. I am a man, in his manlynoon. I am a man. Take me for all in all. As a man, I have certain needs. To satisfy these needs, Demi, I have to stray less far and less perilously than most men would. I see by your pinched expression and throbbing port-wine stain that you would wish me to stray farther than across the landing to the visitors' room. But would you, Demi? Would you really? Ah. This is good. This is excellent. Marion Treadwell, of the Midland Examiner: 'It would seem that Barry has somehow tapped a deep collective yearning. This explains the book's success. Nothing on the page explains it.' " Gwyn paused stoically. "Why are women fractionally less keen on my work than men? You might ponder that, Demi. I would be grateful for your 'feminine intuition.' "

Demi watched her husband, who was now contemplating his halved grapefruit, and with suspicion: not with rapt and childlike curiosity, the way he used to, as if he'd never seen one before. He had stopped doing that to grapefruits after a certain grapefruit, responding to Gwyn's rapt and childlike prod with the tined spoon, had squirted him in the eye. Then he'd had her running around for half an hour with moistened washclothes and bottles of Optrex.

"Again. Let's see if you've got it right at last. I have a duty to follow my impulses. To catch after my impulses, wherever they may lead. Because what am I really doing?"

"Research."

"Research. When I'm playing snooker with Richard, or tennis, or chess, when I'm-"

"I wish you wouldn't."

"Wouldn't what?"

"Play games with Richard. You always lose and it puts you in a vile mood."

Gwyn paused stoically. "When I'm out playing snooker, I'm doing research. When I'm asleep, I'm doing research. When I go out hunting or gambling with Sebby, I'm doing research. When I'm having sex next door with Pamela, I'm doing research."

"She's your research assistant."

"Demi, that's rather good. We research in the missionary position. We research in the doggy style. We research with her on top: the cowgirl."

"But there isn't any sex in your novels."

"You may or may not have noticed," said Gwyn, letting his head drop (so might Richard let his head drop when, for the thirtieth time in fifteen minutes, Marco mistook a d for a b, or a q for a g) but also realizing, in that instant, that he could never leave Demeter, because only with herdid he wield this thrilling and frightening eloquence, this drolly rolling periodicity, "that there isn't any snooker in my novels either. It doesn't work like that. It works like this. The prose is given tautness and burnish precisely by what it deliberately excludes. Picasso's abstracts gain their force from the . . . from the representational mastery he holds in check. Something held back. Or held in harness. Just as the coachman, with the reins in one hand and the-"

"Or the carpenter."

"What about the carpenter?"

"There aren't any children in your novels either. Half the men have had vasectomies. Shouldn't that mean that we ought to have children? So you can deliberately exclude them?"

"Don't try to be clever, love. It doesn't suit you. Well. I see we have returned to base. And I say unto you: Go on the pill, Demi. Get a coil fixed, Demi. Get a cap. This is 'against your religion,' you will say. Unlike taking cocaine and fucking black pushers. Or is all that for your religion? God moves in mysterious ways. Thou shalt take cocaine. To get more cocaine, thou shalt…"

Demi got out of bed and went toward the bathroom, saying, "There was only one black pusher."

"Congratulations. Were there pushers of other creeds and hues? White, say, and Church of England?" He raised his voice, to make himself heard; but his tone did not change. "Richard rang. He's preparing his major piece about yours truly. Something tells me it's going to be very hostile. I wouldn't be surprised if he puts all that in."

She came back to the doorway. Her arms were folded. "All what in?"

"About you fucking black pushers."

"… He can't. What can I do about it?"

"I don't know. Perhaps you'd better go round and fuck him."

At ten-thirty or thereabouts Gwyn stepped into his study: the three tall windows, the inlaid bookcases, the heavy wealth. His great work station-mahogany dining tables, French desks-formed a broad arc in the center of the room, slabbed with the thick shapes of processor, printer, copier. Here the two cultures, Gwyn believed, were attractively reconciled: the bright flame of human inquiry, plus lots of gadgets. Give Gwyn a palatinate smoking jacket, as opposed to a pair of tailored jeans and a lumberjack shirt, and he could be Captain Nemo, taking his seat at the futuristic bridge of the sumptuous Nautilus.

His morning coffee was there, laid out by Paquita. His morning newsprint was there, laid out by Pamela: all the non-tabloid dailies, threeweeklies, one fortnightly, two monthlies, and a quarterly. On the French desk lay an Italian notebook, open on the front page, where Gwyn had written, in longhand, The Road from Amelior? The Road to Amelior? Beyond Amelior? The house was utterly silent: a silence of tiptoe, and finger to the lips. Like the house of his grandfather, who worked all night and slept all day.

Gwyn relied on two different agencies for his press clippings. His publishers used an agency, and they sent him stuff. And he'd made do with that, for a while. But he kept coming across extra references to himself, over and above what they sent him. And he didn't like that. So now he employed a rival outfit, giving them the broadest possible brief; and still he would encounter stray mentions of his own name, unduplicated in the agency envelopes. Now he sat himself down.

In the early days he had confined himself to reviews of his contemporaries, in which the example of Gwyn Barry might reasonably be invoked. Then he branched out, reading reviews of the novels of younger, and indeed older, novelists. Before he knew it, he was reading all fiction reviews. Reviews of Panamanian allegories, Japanese thrillers; reviews of reissues of Don Quixote, Humphrey Clinker. It was the same with literary criticism. Reading all reviews of books about modern writing quickly developed into the habit of reading all reviews about any writing whatever (poetry, drama and travel had long since climbed on board). Pliny, Nostradamus, Elizabeth David, Izaak Walton, Bede. The besetting interest in contemporary fiction expanded not only upward but also sideways. He started reading reviews about contemporary art, and then non-contemporary art; contemporary sociology, architecture, economics, jurisprudence, and then non-contemporary ditto. And then again: it seemed natural enough that reports on contemporary agriculture would eventually contain some lighthearted reference to the pages in Amelior that dealt with, say, crop rotation. And this happened, it came to pass; and from that day forth Gwyn found himself helplessly committed to agriculture, as something to follow, plus hydroponics and so on, all in the same sheep-dip and turnip-swagging prose. Now, new interests struck him suddenly, and at tangents. One morning he was reading a piece (idly, almost disinterestedly, with no secure hope of seeing fresh news about Gwyn Barry) on the property page by a guest writer who had experienced supposedly comical difficulties in selling his small flat; the flat was small and the writer, evidently, was big, which made the small flat seem even smaller. "Better to be a titch like Gwyn Barry," he wrote, "rather than a-" And here he cited a playwright of celebrated obesity. After that, Gwyn was reading everything he could find about propertyand, a little later, everything he could find about size: cars, holiday accommodation, clothes, prison cells. Pretty soon-and you could see this coming-he was reading everything about everything. Not in itself a bad idea, if information was what you sought. But we see accidents, everywhere, on the information highway. We see hazard lights and freezing fog. We see jackknife and whiplash.

There was a time, about fifteen years ago, when Richard Tull was so worried by alcohol, so worried that he might be an alcoholic, that he became almost as interested in alcoholism as he was interested in alcohol, which was plenty interested. And, when he read, his eyes would mutiny. He was of course transfixed by any incidence of the word alcohol, and all its cognates and synonyms and homonyms; and innocent words, innocently used, came to rivet him: words like stout and punch and sack and hock and mild and bitter; "high spirits," "small beer," "in the drink." He knew he had gone about as far as he could go with this when one day he veered in on the word it. He was thinking, he realized, of gin-and-it, or gin-and-Italian vermouth. So even it, not to mention Italy, was all fucked up for him. Alcohol, naturally, retained its suzerainty. And any word that looked anything like it. Anabolic. Laconic. Interpol. Uncool. School. Any word that had an / and a c in it, or a c and an h, or an o, or an a. Richard was less interested in alcohol now, largely because he was an alcoholic . .. Analogously, Gwyn Barry's scannings and skimmings (and what was his mood when he read? Puzzlement, mainly: a desert of patient disgust, with infrequent oases) were Gwyn Barry-seeking. All that kept him from lecteurial chaos were those two capital letters, G and B, the twin sentinels of his sanity. How many times had his eyes bumped into George Berkeley and George Balanchine, into George Bush and George Brown, into Guy Burgess and Geoff Boycott, Gerald Brenan and Grigori Baklanov, George Brummell and Georges Braque, Geoffrey Biddulph and Gertude Bell, into Giovanni Barbirolli and Giovanni Boccaccio and Gianlorenzo Bernini and Giambattista Bodoni. Into Granville Barker and Gaudier-Brzeska. Into Guinea-Bissau. Gladstone Bag. Gutenberg Bible. Grolsch Beer. Great Bear. Great Britain.

Soon he would have to go out into it: into Great Britain, and its capital, London, which had suddenly-or was it gradually? … Which had suddenly turned, and shaped itself against his peace. It was now two-forty-five. Lunch had already been brought to him; he didn't even know who had borne the tray, such was the tact, discretion, and awe with which she had slipped in and out of the room-Demi? Pam? Paqui? Sheri? As if he was a whispering visionary, a couturier of the cosmos, on the brink of discovering … the universal. Actually he had got throughall the Saturday supplements, and the weeklies, and the fortnightly; but the PMLA and (Christ) The Little Magazine remained unprobed. Today he found three mentions: one in a piece about parking meters; one in a piece about the limitations of multicultural street theater; and one in a piece about the Profundity Requital (this made it all seem worthwhile, and even rational), in which he learned that he had bounced back into consideration, though he still lagged behind the Bosnian poetess who also ran a thousand-bed children's hospital in Gorazde-among others. On top of this he had also managed to cross the room occasionally and write something like Onwards from Amelior? in his notebook. Now he stood with his fists leaning on the long table (once more Nemo over his charts); he was staring at a loose pile of mail, non-urgent, second-echelon, which he would soon spare an hour on with Pam and a few yeses and nos and thank-yous and maybes. You don't know me but. I have recently been appointed as the. I am a student in my. This is the first time I have ever written to a. Despite recent triple heart-bypass surgery I felt I. You're probably fed up with. Here is a photograph of me in my. We at. I don't usually. What's it like being . . .

Gwyn advanced to the central window and looked down at the street and its ballroom of cherry blossom-the dance partners in their ball gowns, swelling and jostling and bristling, all the way to the bottom of the hill. How could the street not like him? The universe, the world, the hemisphere liked him. But the street didn't like him, and the city didn't like him. He would have to be going out into it for important and expensive meetings (things with Richard were not yet over): audiences at the feet of the great Buttruguena, the great Abdumomunov, the great O'Fla-herty. Before, the city had never paid him any mind, except in theater crush bars or high-visibility restaurants and, yes, every now and then out there when people stopped and stared in that fixed, gratified way, or frowned forgetfully as if trying to place him among their acquaintances . .. But now the city behaved as if it wanted to break his face. The city wanted to break his face.

Cognitive dissonance was what he was dealing with. Nothing rhymed.

Whereas applause and praise were gathering, circumambiently, in response to the new thing he had brought into the world, his novel, his gift, the world itself-the streets, which stretched away, in folds and folds-had begun to hate his being. Not qua novelist, he assumed. But personally. It wasn't that the streets were giving him a bad review. The streets didn't read. Newsprint often told him that he was the spokesman for the next generation, and even Gwyn could imagine the next generationminding that-looking around, and seeing how very few he spoke for, and how quietly. But, again, the next generation didn't know he spoke for them, or that newsprint thought he did. This was personal. The compact Celt in his expensive yet essentially democratic chinos and leather jacket, under his silvery blacktop of hair (lightly cropped, at present, against baldness): this creation was no longer invisible and monochrome in its A-to-B, pavement-using, pause-for-thought and taxi-hailing functions, but floridly motley. Was it fame? He had become part of the landscape. And the landscape didn't want him there. Gwyn stood by the window, looking out, wondering what he'd done.

It started happening almost the instant he got back from America. Did America do it? Was it the Californian tan, the money-color, the aurora of American fever?

Maybe it wasn't anything. Maybe it was nothing.

Take the day before yesterday. The talented fabulist-his prose as clear as a mountain creek-is walking along Kensington Park Road, through the spring rain, after a visit to the local bookshop, when out of the flow of the street an oncoming figure distinguishes itself, by retardation, by arrest, and stands there, awaiting his approach. And as the modern myth-maker nears, this figure starts to retreat in front of him, as if, by following, Gwyn was being followed-preceded, but followed. There is no alternative: the standard-bearer of the near future must raise his eyes and confront those of his follower. A sodden youth in a track suit. Who says simply, keeping step, "Don't look at my face. Don't look at my face. Look at my hands. Look at the paint on these hands. Look at the blood on these fucking hands."

Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it wasn't anything.

Take yesterday. That rarest of literary phenomena-a cult writer with a mass audience-is walking home up Holland Park Avenue with his plastic bagful of coffee. He looks down for a second and walks into a slab of black. Loose change scatters all around them. The resonant allegorist takes three steps backwards, looks down, looks up again. The dark face in dark glasses is simply saying, "You dumb cunt. Pick it up. Pick it up, you dumb cunt." And there is the one-man paradigm-shift, down on his haunches, prizing pennies from the sticky street. He offers up the gathered change and it is dashed from his hand and he's down there again, and again. "Come on, man. It was an accident." And the mouth, as vivid as fruit pulp, just said, "Yeah? I ain't your brother. You ain't my brother. Yeah?" Until he let him go.

Maybe nothing. He stood by the window, looking out, wondering what he'd done.

Gwyn had a new hobby, now, in his head. He was writing, or paraphrasing, his own biography-in his head. Not his autobiography: by no means. His biography, written by someone else. It was the official biography. Gwyn liked his new hobby so much that even he could tell that it might have deleterious-possibly disastrous-effects on his mental health. Solitary gratification didn't come much more solitary than this: even his own body was excluded from it. Here, biography was pornography. But he had managed to reach the (counterintuitive) conclusion that his new hobby somehow kept him sane. Anyway, he was hooked. He couldn't put it down.

Of course, the biography was insufficiently finished. It had no tide, for instance. Yes, it needed work. Now he left his study and went across the passage to the visitors' room, to change.

Although Barry was no. A keen. While no jock or gym rat, Barry responded to the heightened life of fierce competition. He loved games and sports. (But he hated games and sports. Because he always lost.) With his old sparring. With his old friend Richard Tull he enjoyed a healthy rivalry-on the tennis court, over the snooker table, and across the chessboard. (And he always lost. He never won.) As a novelist Tull was no. Unfavored by the muses, Tull was nevertheless. In hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness, if not in imaginative fiction, Tull was Barry's . . .

Superior? T-shirt, shorts, jockey pants, socks: all laid out for him. As usual, hereabouts, Gwyn moved on to a better chapter.

He had a reputation as a. He made no secret of his love of. To him, the fairer. In every sense he was enamored of womankind. Demeter, who would continue to love him dearly, eventually resigned herself to the fact that. Some men, she came to realize, carry with them such intensity of. In him, the lifeblood. Now that Lady Demeter, in the words of W. B. Yeats, is old and gray and full of sleep, it is with a rueful smile that she …

Wearing his new black track suit he came down into the hall and browsed about the sideboard, reviewing the invitations and looking for his car keys. He was meeting Richard at the Warlock. Things had changed: they just said hello, and played, and said good-bye. The Warlock was good because he could drive straight into the car park, eschewing all real contact with the city and the streets that suddenly hated his life.

Gwyn was looking forward to reading the Richard Tull profile: five thousand words. At least it was going to be all about Gwyn. And while he was reading it he wouldn't be reading about soil erosion or Norman architecture or curtain rails or Keir Hardie or deck chairs or treetops, or any of the other stuff he read about, just in case.

p. 1 GWYN BARRY R. Tull

Gilda Paul sits in Room 213 on the East Wing of the Gwynneth Littlejohn Care Center-or "the mental home," as they call it, down Swansea way. As in a naive poem of sorrow and rejection, the gulls of the Gower Peninsula, their famished cries weakly audible, drift and turn above the bay. Gilda is thirty-nine. Her psychological being unraveled four years ago, on an anonymous London railway platform, the day Gwyn Barry dispatched her to the past, and went his own way: to the future. He writes to Gilda-to the past- every now and then. But he hasn't been back.

Richard was sitting at his desk. His life was desks. Life had changed. But life was still desks. Always desks, there in front of him. First, school, and twenty years of that. And then jobs, and twenty years of that. And always, in the early mornings and the late evenings, more desks. Homework: forty years of that.

The horrendous surface was now strewn with sheets of foolscap, themselves strewn with his doodled dry-runs. His eye dodged over them. A useful idiot of cultural forces he only dimly. Love of fame, which Milton called the last infirmity of noble. The actress Audra Christenberry, glimpsed at the poolside, presents a redoubtable tribute to the surgeon's. Perhaps Lady Demeter puts it best: "Gwyn," she says, "can't write for." Equipped with a voluptuous wife, a huge readership, a big house, and no talent, the author of. In the annals of philandery, hucksterism, and opulent hypocrisy. . .

"Daddy?"

"Yes?"

"Daddy? I don't want to be called Marco anymore. I want to change my name."

"What to, Marco?"

"Nothing."

"What, you don't want a name? Or you want to be called 'Nothing'?"

The child raised his blunt but shapely eyebrows and nodded once.

Richard waited until Marco was on his way to the door, and then said, " 'Nothing'?"

The child paused disaffectedly-nihilistically-and said, "… Yeah?"

"Bath time."

He got to his feet and began doing the boys . . . When you've been away, and you come home again, your life re-enfolds you. And not lov-ingly. He had come home. Manually and very doubtfully assisted onto the aircraft at Kennedy, Richard had been at first wheelchaired and then eventually stretchered off it again at Heathrow. He was still amazed and impressed by this. The wheelchair, it transpired (after a confused and even quite humorous interlude on the tarmac), had been inadequate to his needs. So he came home again and his life re-enfolded him. And not lovingly. For a few days after his return, when he looked back on his torments in America, he saw himself up there among the big-league sufferers, with Job, with Griselda, with Milton's Adam, with Milton's Eve. But by now he had demoted himself to one of the squawking hopefuls on some Japanese endurance show, grinningly abasing his being in the quest for immediate gain. He also wondered if Untitled, so clearly and entirely hopeless as a novel, might have its uses as something else. A military application, perhaps. The army might like to have Untitled up its sleeve. Marie Curie's notebooks, even today, a century on, were still carcinogenic. He could imagine a copy of his novel preserved in a lab behind foot-thick glass, and occasionally leafed through by jolting robots. With that book Richard had so far earned himself, worldwide, a readership of one: Steve Cousins. He had sent him a proof in February, and the response came back almost by return post. "You're good, man," Cousins wrote (typed, touched: justified margins), and went on to make intelligent, or anyway intelligible, comparisons between the new novel and its predecessors. Between Untitled and Dreams Don't Mean Anything and Aforethought. You're good, man: the words often breathed in his ear when he sat around wondering why he wasn't good. And he knew why, now. He wasn't good because he wasn't innocent enough. Writers are innocent. Not guiltless-just innocent. Tolstoy was certainly innocent. Even Proust was innocent. Even Joyce was innocent. And another thing: he didn't love his readers, as you need to do. Although he had nothing against them personally, he didn't love them; and you must love them. So, to conclude. Richard was innocent (look where he was heading), but in the wrong way. He did love his readers (how he yearned for them), but in the wrong way. Look what he would put them through … He should have held a knife to Gwyn's throat and made him read aloud from Untitled until he reached page eleven. Some fantastic brain tumor would have done the rest. Gwyn wasn't good either; but Gwyn was a special case.

"Hands," said Richard. And then after a while, "Bums." Then after a while, "Necks." And so on.

Richard in America, old Richard, in the new world. It was like pulling over on the six-lane highway, that time, and clambering out of the … no, not the Maestro but its predecessor, the thirdhand off-white Prelude:clambering out to change a tire, to secure a slewing roofrack, to open the hood and assess (or contemplate) its soiled and steaming innards. Out there, in the breakdown lane (Gina rigid in the passenger seat, the tiny twins in the pantaloons of their carseats), it struck Richard that he was the only organic figure in that landscape of remorseless purpose, which sounded-Christ-like a million Band-aids being ripped off a million sections of fuzzy flesh (with accompanying whines of pain and surprise). And he thought: I'm a joke. And an old one. This place belongs not to the bare and dithering human creature but to the intent hundredweights, to the leaning machines and the howl of their anathemas.

"Teeth," said Richard. And then after a while, "Socks." Then after a while, "Slippers." And so on.

When the boys were done he squelched into the kitchen and unplugged his bottle of Norwegian Cabernet, to go with whatever bit of whatever animal he would eventually flip onto the grill. Gina would be in and out, wearing a dressing gown, a hair cap even, a mask of cream. It was all right. She was working four days a week now; they would have more money; she was resolved on a full family vacation this summer, and was already staring critically at burnished brochures. It was all right. Gina was no longer a writer's wife because he was no longer a writer. He didn't think she was going to leave him: yet. Together they had joined the great community of the exhausted.

"The boys' lips," he said. "Children's lips. They always look just a little bit sore. Like the lips of trumpeters. Halfway through the second set. They toughen up later, I suppose."

It was all right-and do you know how he could tell? Sometimes, later on, when he had finished his chump chop and she had finished her bowl of porridge or village-idiot cereal, he would go on reading Man of his Words: The Life and Times of Ingram Bywater and she would go on reading Budgeting for Belgium, as the tap dripped and the strip-light fizzed like a fat fly-and they would yawn together. Nothing too sensual or explicit, three or four each, a transient contagion of yawns. From his private culture, from his stock of inherited information (Unless The Kettle Boiling Be), Richard knew that you couldn't catch a yawn from someone you didn't like. He caught hers. She caught his. At present, this was the extent of their physical life. A shudder in the jawline answered by a widening of the nostrils; a slow gasp answered by a moan of mild surprise. Nothing too candid or throat-baring. But a definite exchange of yawns. A little epiphany of yawns.

Gina went to bed, and Richard headed for his study, availing himself of this facility, because he knew she had other plans for the room.

GWYN BARRY: R. Tull. He reread the first paragraph, his eyes itching with melancholy and pride. There'd been a bad moment that morning, when Richard had called the madhouse to fact-check the status of Gilda Paul-and been told that she was no longer a patient. But it was cool (whew): she had merely been upgraded to some kind of trusty. Gilda was still sectioned. And still considered nuts. The only other good news to come Richard's way since his return from America was that Anstice, his devoted secretary at The Little Magazine, had not taken a welcome break, alone, in the Isle of Mull, as everyone thought, but, instead, had gone home and killed herself.

Oh, this profile would tax his journalistic skills to their very limit! Let's be honest: he would be ducking and weaving all the way to the deadline. Now Richard lit a cigarette and fed a fresh piece of paper into the barrel. With a sense of afflatus, of pregnant illumination, he wristily typed-

pl. GWYN BARRY R.Tull

The airway is open-the breathing unimpaired. The patient can now squeeze the examiner's hand and resist passive motion of the extremities. Retrograde amnesia at first suggested major closed-head injury, but the patient can now maintain a consistent level of consciousness. His voice is weak, yet clear. Gone are the drips and feeding-tubes of the Emergency Room. Signs of trauma are painfully apparent-but Gwyn Barry is out of Intensive Care.

Here's what struck Steve Cousins about pornography: at last he had found something that was as interested in sex as he was.

He had found something that was all about sex. And nothing else. The bits in between were just breathers: breathers for the breathers. Pornography sometimes tried to be about other things, or to happen in other settings. But all it could ever tell you about these other things, these other settings, was that they were all about sex too. And nothing else. Freud thought that everything was about sex. That was his theory. Pornography, though, was demonstrably all about sex. Sex as a spectacle, of course. And nothing else.

Steve Cousins didn't read pornography (words were no use here), but he read everything he could find that was about pornography-that was all about the thing that was all about sex. His ludicrously eclectic library (Freud, comic books, Nietzsche, the complete works of Richard Tull) contained several yards of books that were all about pornography. Patriarchy and the Limits of. Just Push My. Commission on Obscenity and. The Traffic in. Visual Anthropology and the. I Was a. Many times he had read that many of the actors and almost all of the actresses on the pornographic screen had been abused as children. That meant that he and they formed . .. not a happy family. But a big one.

He watched them aging, the terrible stars in their terrible galaxies. The anti-stars, in their anti-galaxy. Without exception the men seemed imperishable (stupid, tireless, ever-thrusting, ever-wincing), but the women, with their limited screen-lives … Tenderly, in every sense, he monitored their facelifts and breast-implants, their tattoos, pubic hairdos, the bodies in question increasingly encrusted with cellulite and jewelry, chokers, anklets, bracelets, nipple-rings, navel-studs, tongue-clasps-heavy brooches, carbuncles, pierced into the tongue. See them in something ten years old and they looked ten years old themselves, bucktoothed with inbreeding. And wall-eyed with incest. Then they passed through a kind of lab or clinic, which reinvented them for male desire. Where did they come from? Where did they go? Some made it into mid-career, with frequent recalls to the drawing board-permanent outpatients. Others fell apart right there, in the ponderous beam of your ponderous gaze (Scozzy's gaze, with its slow-pulse blink rate, in the darkness he owned, which held the brightness of the TV screen likesomething precious in its hand-like the charm or amulet on the tarnished tongue). Identifying, with difficulty, a familiar veteran in her third or fourth incarnation-looser, frecklier, and above all suddenly and seriously older-Steve would say things like "For it now, darling" or "Downhill now, darling," or sometimes, just as typically but in a lower and slower voice, "Oh my dear .. . what have they done to you?" Toward career end, it looked to be a rite of passage: the mature Adult actress, subjected to abuse. You know. After her hours, belly-up on the bar, three speckle-faced hardhats bearing down on her. You know. As if in reenactment or commemoration of what brought her there.

So they were all children. They were all children together, in this- this big family. All children, until they weren't. Pornography was the story of his life.

He was out, now, down Wimbledon way. Not in the Cosworth, with its low racing skirt, but in the hulk of the orange van. With an occasional flinch he registered the scattered presence of 13 's tabloids and Ting tins. Proof of his vigils, his time-killings. There was also less palpable evidence (a hairpin, a tissue) that with one or two flinches of its own the aged van had served as a setting for the act of love-as bedroom, as bower. Scozzy had some trouble imagining this, 13 and Lizzete being too young to have their equivalents in Adult. He supposed, anyway, that it didn't last that long. 13 wouldn't want to hang about. Giving Lizzete one was illegal all right, but there was no money in it.

Apparently the wind had to blow that bit harder every year. Whatever it was the wind thought it was doing, blowing the dust off, getting the smells out-this was becoming a bigger job, every year. Each spring. Nice to think that it did have a function. Other than driving you out of your mind. Scozzy knew wind (country wind, mate): in some hut somewhere, in some field, as a wild boy he had waited out the wind, moaning to it, swaying to it, with unbearable monotony, for hour after hour. Even light, as it traveled, grew tired. But wind never tired. It had blown him clean. He was as light as air. He had told 13 and 13 had said . .. Oh yeah. He remembered. Early retirement is it.

Again, he was watching Terryterry's women, the two little girls with their stunts on the slide and the swing, the mum in the kitchen tapping on the glass above the sink, like any mum anywhere, which was probably how she saw herself, no babymamma, no hired box or Quacko test tube. He realized he had become addicted to this spectacle (the girls were called something like Diandra and Desiree); anyway he came here for no earthly professional reason, on nice days. One thing about being insidethe van: you weren't outside the van, and looking at it. That unforgivable orange, an orange you could never associate with any living fruit, an orange that belonged to plastic, kitchen dustbins, and the beaks of certain black London birds. He found the suburbs exotic and innocuous, not wild, like the country, not wild, like the city. What was this, going on around him? The leaves, the broken sunlight, the child-molester calm and fixity of the male passersby, the single craven car inching down the street on its brothel-creepers, the windswept cries of the girls in their stripes and dots.

In for their tea now. He thought: only time it gets lively round here is when the tennis. Scozz could see but not hear the girls being summoned, the mum's voice failing at the windbreak of the garden wall. The three of them now at the kitchen table. He used his binoculars: yack yack yack. Diandra was holding up a comic. Mum giving Desiree the wagging finger . . . He knew exactly how quickly and radically he could transform this scene. Scozzy had a chaos organized in his mind, and ready to go. You're coming into their place but really you're taking them to your place: which is the world of fear. Which you know like the back of your hand. And they've never been there before, even though it's home. This wouldn't be business. Business was over. It wouldn't be business. It would be the other thing. Still, Scozzy had no intention; the option was duly waived. And they were that close to what he wanted to hurt. Wrong size? Wrong color? He didn't know. But something was wrong with them.

He reached for the keys, staring out through the glass, itself alive with the riotous reflections of maddened foliage. Here came that nun again. Jesus, he thought: look at the state of her boat-the ridged mouth, the mineral eyes. Nuns, in his personal Utopia, wouldn't be allowed out unless they daubed themselves an inch thick. Then at least you could tell they were meant to be women. And not runty results in cross-dress mourning gear. "Don't look at me that way," he whispered. "You think I don't have time for you? Look at me that way, and I'll have time for you. I know nuns. Brides of Christ." Steve Cousins: Barnardo boy. "God wants me for a sunbeam too."

The orange van came noisily and dirtily to life. Scozzy pulled out (piece of shit) and, after a couple of lefts, joined the chain-gang of the traffic, back London way.

"D mate," he said into the phone. "Tomorrow, mate." He listened) seeming to stare over his own cheek, top teeth bared, eyes dimmed. "Gimme … Gimme Styx.?

If you wanted someone picked up off the street, say, if you wanted them quelled with a stare, a hand on the shoulder, you'd opt for a couple of schwartzers every time. D and Styx. Big Dread and Wisely. Thelo-nius. Netharius. It wasn't just their blackness, their density and mass. It was their otherness and the severity with which they imposed it. You stepped into a new etiquette, into unreadable conventions.

A minute later he got D again and said he'd changed his mind. He didn't want a bro on next. It might create a false impression. So put Styx on hold and give him . .. Gimlet. "Yeah," said Scozzy. "Gimme Gimlet."

And then he called Agnes Trounce.

Gwyn was in the octagonal library, reading-or vetting-a piece about Etruscan pottery in The Little Magazine. Demi came in and served him his drink (a dry sherry) in its crystal capita. And she lingered, arms folded, with her long glass of Perrier. He had stopped being nice to Demi. On account of information conveyed to him by Richard, he hadn't looked at her for two days. And for two mornings he had taken his breakfast in the visitors' room, with Pamela.

"How was your lesson?"

"Good," said Gwyn. "Positive."

"Maybe I'll go to him. He could teach me a few tricks or two."

"… What?" It was quite an effort, asking a question without looking up.

"Just a thought."

"Teach you what?"

"Some tricks."

"You said 'a few tricks or two.' It's 'a few tricks.' Or 'a trick or two.' Not 'a few tricks or two.' "

Demi shrugged and said, "Um-'Pamela' told me about your incident. How very unpleasant. Are you sure you're all right?"

His face formed the expression that meant: work. Research. Demi apologized and left the room. Gwyn started reading-or vetting-a piece from the recruitment methods of Albrecht Wallenstein (1583-1634). This piece fell into the (by now capacious) category where it was the very distance of the subject from his own concerns that claimed his interest. Things were either pleasant or unpleasant, after all, and, if pleasant, they might be compared to the world of Amelior, and, if unpleasant, they might be contrasted with it.

Three hours earlier: Gwyn, hunkered down courtside with the great Buttruguena, in the vast fridge of the Oerlich.

The great man looked even older than he looked on TV-when they picked him out in the royal box or the celebrity enclosure, or when he stepped forward, as he did every year, to congratulate the champion at Roland Garros. Older, and less benign. In fact he looked almost as savage and stupid as some carnivorous ray or eel of the deep-after a more or less satisfactory kill (no poisons-yet; no impenetrable carapaces). Gwyn didn't feel any of this. He was a busy man with an immediate purpose. And if, in the mind of Richard Tull, there was always a kind of blues playing, with Gwyn the signature tune was much more upbeat; it was usually easy listening. The two men were introduced by affable Gavin in the bar, and had then walked slowly and silently down a long bunker of a passage whose walls were studded with framed photographs of famous tennis players and of famous people playing tennis, newscasters, soap stars, mountaineers, royals (Gwyn spent much of his time at the Oerlich wondering when Gavin was going to get out his camera. But maybe there wasn't any room). When he walked, the sole of the great Buttruguena's right gym shoe was almost fully exposed to the air. His right foot seemed to be upside down.

"We'll hit," he said. And they began.

In terms of trajectory and weight, there was no difference between the forehand and the backhand of the great man, the forehand hit flat, the backhand with a slice that made the ball hum as it crossed the net. Without apology or embarrassment Gwyn skipped and twirled around the baseline, his game a disastrous miscellany. Steadily the great man reduced the power and the depth of his drives. After ten minutes he pointed to the bench and limped toward it shaking his head.

"I don't understand," he said, staring at the net post. "You have no talent."

"I know there's a long way to go."

Using his forehead only, the great Buttruguena shrugged: traduced, trifled with. "It's quite hopeless."

"I know there's a lot to do."

"What you want? Spend a fortune to be one percent better?"

Buttruguena sat there, fierce, old, handsome, sour. He had won the French on clay and the Australian on grass. He had been a star in the days before the star system. Now he taught nineteen-year-olds who had their own airplanes.

"The thing is, there's only this one player I want to beat. I thoughtyou might be able to-you know, give me a few tips."

Buttruguena showed interest.

"He's not a whole league better. He beats me 6-3, 6-4. His backhand is pretty weak but it's-"

Buttruguena erased all this with his hand. "Okay. We can do it in five minutes right here and then we walk off the court. Okay?"

"Perfect."

"Are you richer than him? Who buys the balls?"

Afterwards, with his hair still wet from the shower, Gwyn had a Danish and a cup of espresso, more out of a sense of duty (duty to the expensive amenities) than hunger or delectation. Next he went and pretended to look around the pro shop: here you got a good view of the girls who policed Reception, shell-suited blondes from Sweden and South Africa, their tans growing lusterless under the striplight of public relations. He moved past them with his smile, his jerked nods, his colossal sports bag.

Outside he turned right, under the tube track where members such as himself were allowed to park. There was the builders' yard, there was the dead pub (peer through the glass: it looked as though it had been wiped out by some criminal knees-up, thirty years ago). He walked on. He hesitated, and walked on. A big black guy in a big black leather coat was leaning on the driver's door of Gwyn's Saab. Now what? Gwyn approached briskly, producing his keys: a busy man with an immediate purpose.

"Excuse me. My car."

They smiled at each other. The black guy didn't move. He announced: "Tennis."

"That's right," said Gwyn. "Just had a lesson."

"No you ain't."

"Excuse me?"

He unfurled his leather coat. There was a pouch sewn into the lining which contained a baseball bat. He lifted it out between finger and thumb and lowered it to the ground.

Gwyn felt the impulse to run, but the impulse was youthless; it wouldn't get him anywhere.

"You want a baseball lesson?"

"No thanks," he whispered.

The black guy stepped aside saying, "Nah. You don't want any of this. You don't want any of this …"

He had to step forward. He could feel the back of his own head, the hair cringing, or trying to grow-to pad and cover the helpless egg of his skull. As he beeped the lock-release and opened the door he could hearthe swathes cut by the bat through the surprisingly heavy resistance of the air.

The time had come for him to share the good news with Gina.

"Bad news," he said. "You know Anstice? Brace yourself. She's dead. Sleeping pills. She just went home and did it."

Of course, it wasn't all good news, and Richard had been wretched at first. Say she'd fingered him in some suicide note and Gina found out about it. Say the police came round-with the diary he knew she kept. But he seemed to have got away with it okay. And that was that. It was done. And nothing would ever persuade him that Anstice was having a worse time dead. On the other hand, he was free to wonder why so many writers' women killed themselves, or went insane. And he concluded: because writers are nightmares. Writers are nightmares from which you cannot awake. Most alive when alone, they make living hard to do for those around them. He knew this now-now that he wasn't a writer. Now that he was just a nightmare.

"Good news," corrected Gina. "Good."

"Gina!"

"So at least that's all over."

"What?"

"You know."

"You know. How?"

"She told me."

"Who?"

"Who do you think? It happened while I was at my mother's, right? When I came back there was a nine-page letter waiting for me. With all the details."

"Nothing happened. I was impotent, I swear."

"Well I can believe that… But it isn't what she said."

Gina made it clear that Anstice, in her letter, and on the telephone, and in person, one Friday, over coffee here in Calchalk Street, had consistently portrayed Richard as a Lionheart, a Tamburlaine, a veritable Xerxes in the sack.

"Oh sure. So likely. It was a one-night fiasco." Yeah: just one of those crazy things. "One night. Instantly regretted."

"Still. You tried."

"I tried … What did you do? You know. In the way of counter-measures."

"Ask me no questions," said Gina, "and I'll tell you no lies.?

"It's the Town Crier, isn't it? Dermott. Or did you revive one of your poets? Is it Angaoas? Is it Clearghill?"

"Ask me no questions," said Gina, "and I'll tell you no lies. We're quits. How could you? I mean. What a dog. And what a drag, too. Bloody hell. She used to call me twice a day until I told her to bugger off. Now go and do the boys."

Doing the boys-something he did plenty of-was nothing like as bad, moment for moment, as it used to be even a year ago. Their status was no longer that of royal exiles, of imperial prisoners under house arrest. Now they were treated like extravagantly distinguished, headstrong, and senile VIPs in, say, a Stalin-era sanatorium or retirement home (from their window they could glimpse a scrapyard full of twisted excavators and, beyond, an envenomed canal the color of a green traffic light). Their beds were made, their towels warmed; the badges and medals of high office were laid out before them and cleared away after them; their many mishaps, breakages, and self-soilings were tactfully and skillfully smoothed over. At the sanatorium, these days, the inmates might detect in their more lucid intervals the symptoms of a new laxity: the result of forced economies, or ideological revision, or merely the male meanness of the male nurse. For example it was no longer thought necessary to carry them down to breakfast or even lead them there by the hand; the simple provender would be ready on the table but they were now expected to feed themselves (though of course they could continue to be as messy as they liked). Privilege loss was something the inmates were forgetfully growing accustomed to. Occasionally it seemed that they remembered how it used to be, and they struggled weakly, fitfully-and they wept for shame … But the male nurse sits at the kitchen table, hearing their cries. His singlet, his newspaper, his coffee mug, his idle toothpick…

One thing about being a househusband: it gave you plenty of time to search your wife's bedroom. You could go up there with a cup of tea and make an afternoon of it. Richard had the leisure. The children were at school all day. Soon it would be half term, and the children would be at home all day. He kept thinking there were other things he ought to be doing. Reading a biography, talking to Anstice, writing modern prose. But Richard had the leisure.

He found: a shoebox containing all the letters he had ever written her, chronologically arranged, all of them opened, all of them read. They bore traces of her body scent, he believed.

He found: a polaroid of Gina and Lawrence, sitting on a wooden bench in some seaside pub. His arm round her shoulders, the pale mid-morning sunlight, the dusty wash of pubs.

He found: in a gray plastic zip-up folder, letters written to her by other writers, and poems written to her by the poets: none of them recent.

He found: under the floorboards, in her closet, four soot-coated brown envelopes each containing twenty fifty-pound notes. He thought he might have to borrow some of this and give it to Steve Cousins, depending on when he got paid for the Profile.

With the savaging of Gwyn's physical being now well entrained, Richard's mind could soar free and contemplate something higher: the savaging of Gwyn's literary reputation.

The way he figured it, in his soaring insomnias (with Gina breathing steadily and neglectedly at his side), there were only three ways that writers could get into serious trouble-on the page. Obscenity was one, and blasphemy was another; and both afforded little hope. There wasn't any love or sex or swearing in Amelior. As for blasphemy, Gwyn's stuff was incapable of giving offense even to the people who were all wired up and hair-triggered to receive it-the people who lived to take offense. But there was, he believed, a different way. The whole thing came to him like this.

Richard stood over his desk at the Tantalus Press. He was smoking. He exhaled fatalistically. A week ago he had resigned as Books and Arts Editor of The Little Magazine. Now he did an extra day and an extra morning a week for Balfour Cohen, and also took work home. Furthermore, he was turning down book reviews. Assistant Literary Editors all over town were left staring into their telephones-as Richard turned down book reviews. Would he like to write three hundred words on a three-volume life of Isaac Bickerstaffe? No. The definitive critical biography, perhaps, of Ralph Cudworth, of Richard Fitzralph, of William Courthope? No. In terms of time and motion, in terms of money, it would work out in his favor. Correcting the trex of the talentless, for private publication: this was better paid, was more highly prized by the world, than the disinterested perusal of on the whole passionately conscientious studies of minor poets, novelists, and playwrights. Books about duds, and written by duds: but not trivial. With book reviewing, Richard strolled the temperate climes of mediocrity. At the Tantalus Press he entered the Wirral of florid psychosis. Given a two-word account of how things had gone in America, Balfour had taken him off fiction and put him on nonfiction-more specifically, the Study of Man. From which Richard learned that there were crazed old wrecks crouched in attics all over England, revolutionizing twentieth-century thought.

They saw off Marx. They turned Darwin on his head. They yanked the carpet out from under Sigmund Freud.

"Jesus," said Richard, at his desk. He said it all day long. That morning Richard had agreed to let his name appear on the letterhead and in the literature of the Tantalus Press . .. He exhaled fatalistically. His teeth were grinding their way to the end of yet another five-hundred-page fool's errand by yet another pompous (and vicious) old dunce (and arse-hole) who, in this case, and without much apparent effort, had found the missing link between genetics and General Relativity. Richard wrote ENDS under the author's final exclamation mark and tossed the typescript into his Out tray.

Balfour Cohen stirred tolerantly in the background and said, "Ah. Here's your poet."

"Horridge?"

"Horridge."

"Ah."

The distinctive manila envelope favored by Keith Horridge; the distinctive paperclip; the distinctive bite of his manual typewriter. Richard was trying to persuade himself that it might be reasonably satisfying: to find a poet. To seek out the pleasures, if any, of the literary middleman. Horridge's envelope contained a note and three poems. The first, "Ever," began:

In the Gnostic cosmogonies The demiurgi knead and mold A red Adam who cannot stand Alone.

Now wait a minute. It was overcompressed, maybe, but wasn't that kind of good? Like Yeats at his grandest and raciest?

To be immortal

Is commonplace, except for man. All creatures are immortal, being Ignorant of death.

Wasn't that something that the heart assented to-already knew? At this point "Ever" became obscure, or more obscure; but it seemed to end strongly. Richard lit a cigarette. He could see himself, twenty-odd years from now, on the TV screen (unimaginably old and, of course, rollickingly hideous), saying, in a senescent singsong, Yes, well it was clear to me at once-one always knows, do you see-that Keith Horridge was something rather . . . The second poem, "Disappointment," was Horridge at his most compressed ("Glue, gluten, gum / Just half-made always, / Soup-sup and ooze-thaw . . ."): what you would do was steer him away from the opacity of the sprung rhythm, toward the-

"I've got a feeling," he said, "that Horridge just might be the real thing."

Balfour's swivel chair gave its squeak. "Really? The question is whether he's got enough for a first collection."

"Enough poems or enough money?"

"Enough poems," said Balfour. "And enough money."

"You know, I think he's too good for us. I think he could walk into any list. Why don't we just publish him? Five hundred copies. It's only poetry. He'd only expect about seventy-five quid."

Richard was reading Horridge's covering letter (and reminding himself to keep it somewhere safe). "How was America? Welcome back." Enclosed, wrote Horridge, were three "newborns": "Ever," "Disappointment," and "Woman." " 'Woman,' " Horridge went on, "is a departure for me, and possibly a breakthrough. Here for the first time I cast off all influences and speak in my own voice."

And here it was-"Woman":

Yesterday my woman, this girl I care about more

Than anyone else on the face of this earth, said

That

She

No

Longer

Wants

To

See

Me

Again.

There was more. The lines got longer again, as Horridge licked his wounds, and then got shorter, as Horridge girded himself to "Try/To/Win/Her/Back/Once/More." Richard looked around for his wastepaper basket. But of course you didn't do that here. You didn't reject stuff-you didn't stomp it into the trash. What you did was publish it. You held it in front of you and with your red pen you wrote, center title and set as verse.

"It's something to think about," said Balfour.

"No it's not. Forget Horridge. Let's just take all his money and never talk about him again."

If literature was the universal, then all you'd ever get in here was space trash. A slowly twirling door panel from some old Telstar. A scorched waste-chute from some old Sputnik. "Woman" was what Horridge sounded like when he cast off all influences and spoke in his own voice. And "Disappointment" was what he sounded like when he was fucking around with his thesaurus. And "Ever" … The authors published by the Tantalus Press were in the habit of giving themselves credit for things, but most people weren't, and Richard wasn't. Otherwise he might have been gratified by the way his memory now went to work-the way its tumblers swiftly recombinated. In the Gnostic cosmogonies the demi-urgi knead and mold a red Adam who cannot stand alone. To be immortal is commonplace, except for man. Jorge Luis Borges-and from something impregnably famous like "The Library of Babel" or "The Circular Ruins." He looked at Horridge's shining margins and saw all the thumb prints and palm sweat. And it came to him.

It came to him. Obscenity, blasphemy: Gwyn Barry's novels had survived any such booby trap. But there was a third hazard, one that could sneak up on you, at whatever time. Richard reached for his desktop dictionary and read: "L. plagarius a kidnapper; a seducer; also, a literary thief." Plagiary: it was an ugly word.

"Balfour. There's something I want you to help me with."

Having heard him out, Balfour said, "You're not planning to do anything rash, I hope."

"How long will it take? And how much will it cost?"

He waited at the school gates for his sons in the rain.

Thence to the video shop, whose windows were as thick with steam as the windows of Mick's Fish Bar across the street. The damp dogs had to wait outside in the wet but the damp dogs were what the video shop smelled of. At this hour the place was full of other adults and other children. Richard thought that the adults looked like child-murderers, and so did the children, with their hairdos and earrings and their shallow, violent eyes. Marius and Marco were crouched under HORROR, in pious supplication, but they would eventually have to settle for CHILDRENS with no apostrophe. Then he took them across the road (don't tell Mummy) to Mick's Fish Bar for their fries.

When he got home he installed the boys in front of Tom and Jerry. Two or three years ago they used to watch Tom and Jerry with fullattention but with no amusement, as if it was a simplified and stylized but essentially truthful representation of how an average cat got on with an average mouse. Nowadays, though, they found it funny. And Richard found it funny. He found everything funny. Listening to their laughter, he sat at his desk, a room away. He wasn't writing. He was typing-typing Amelior. And not word for word. But making little changes (sometimes for the worse if he could contrive it, sometimes unavoidably for the better) as he went along.

"Now, son," said the great O'Flaherty, "how old would you be?"

"I'll be forty-one next month," said Gwyn, as if expecting this news to cause considerable surprise.

"Now you won't be giving up your day job, I hope. I fear you'll starve!" O'Flaherty shrugged-so lightly, so gently. "You see, it's your cueing. And your eye, son. Your eye."

For the second time O'Flaherty talked, at some length, about snooker being a game of visual imagination. Earlier, Gwyn had perked up, thinking he ought to be pretty good at that. But the experiments O'Flaherty had had him conduct (with an additional white ball placed against the object ball at various set angles and then removed) seemed to make the game no easier.

Gwyn interrupted him, saying, "The thing is, there's only this one player I want to beat. And he's no good either."

Soft-faced, still, at sixty, but with a protuberant ironic prow to his upper lip, the great O'Flaherty patiently inclined his head. "Now if I was to take your cueing apart," he said, "you'd lose for a long time before you won."

"Yeah and I can't have that."

"But think. In a while you'd be knocking in breaks of thirty. Thirty-five!"

"No I want to beat this guy now. What I'm here for are some tips. About how to win."

O'Flaherty inclined his head, not sadly, but with professional docility. To him, the game stood for temperance and fair dealing; it stood for civilization. He had twice been runner-up in the World Championship in the days when you got ten bob for winning it. And he'd got five bob for losing it. In contrast, though, to the great Buttruguena, who spent every waking moment wondering why he wasn't a resident of Monte Carlo, the great O'Flaherty did not mourn the Marbellan holiday home-did not mourn the personalized number plate.

"If it was down to me I'd advise you not to bother. But I am in your employ…"

"That's true," said Gwyn with emphasis.

He straightened up. "Now you both have your own sticks?"

"Yes. But mine's much more expensive.?

"The purchase of a chamois cloth is usually worth a couple of blacks, initially. Then you could go further. The cue extensions, the half-butt, and so on. The little rest-extension gadget."

"So you're saying that just getting more equipment helps?"

O'Flaherty inclined his head. "Initially. For a little while."

Gwyn offered a suggestion.

With a twist of the wrists the great O'Flaherty sundered the two sections of his cue. "That probably ought to do it."

It was not a snooker hall, nor a cave of pool, that Gwyn had now to take his leave of; and Gwyn was glad about that. Snooker halls, with their darkness, their pyramids of light over the green-decked slabs of lead-snooker halls were places where violence might traditionally lurk. But no. The lesson had taken place in one of the public rooms of the Gordon Hotel on Park Lane. It was here that O'Flaherty gave his trick-shot displays for the instruction and delight of corporate gatherings (it was Sebby, in fact, who had put Gwyn in touch with the Irish magician). Now he took out his wallet and asked what the damage was, but it had all been taken care of at the other end, and O'Flaherty didn't even want Gwyn's tip.

The Boy from the Valleys: A Life of Gwyn Barry was no good because Barry chimed with Valley and he wanted to stop reminding people he came from Wales. Allegorist was quite nice and more modest than Visionary. Gwyn Barry: Troubled Utopian was far from ideal, and too gloomy, though he liked the notion that being Utopian wasn't as easy as it looked. A Better Way: Gwyn Barry and the Quest for . . . Really he would prefer plain old Gwyn Barry or even, simply, Barry. American writers had those good surnames-gruff, rasping, unassimilated. You didn't seem to get that here. Pym. Powell. Greene.

Gwyn with his cue case strolled up from the depths of the Gordon Hotel, through hallways, arcades-like a tube station that served an unknown plutopolis. At one point he paused and looked to his left over the gallery rail and saw a ballroom with a boxing-ring at its center with laid dining tables clustered around it. A placard on an easel told of the Amateur Finals: spectators were to wear black tie. Gwyn began noticing shell-suited youths here and there on the staircases and in the ground-floor reception zones. Dressed in shiny shorts they would perform, tonight, in a termitary of dinner jackets. He moved past them, tidily, meekly. The faces of these teenage fighters forbade inspection; these faces were warrior-caste, with everything unnecessary shorn away-just two dimensions of defiance and dawning brain damage. They had their names on their backs: Clint, Keith, Natwar, Godspower. Godspowermust have been teased about his name: but not recently. One of them swiveled in his direction and Gwyn almost fell over sideways-onto the lap of another boxer, who was just sitting there stupidly on a sofa, waiting for tonight, "Sorry," said Gwyn, into the depthless young face. He felt ashamed, not of his fear but of the dislike he seemed ready to inspire, almost universally. .. How would he break this to his biographer? Gwyn crept outside, through the swing doors, between the pillars. It was his intention to look in on the publicity department of his publishers' offices in Holborn. There was the ten-laned street, and Speakers' Corner, and the Park. Miles and miles of enemy lines.

As it happened he had a great time in Publicity. It was as if, on his way up in the lift, he had dropped a tab of C: that drug called Condescension. People in publicity are committed to making you feel good about yourself, even or especially when you have no reason to feel good about yourself, and they are good at that, and Gwyn felt good about himself already, so it all worked out. He thought they thought he was wonderful because he was wonderful but also because he made their jobs seem wonderful. Forget the cookbooks and the diet plans, the decrepit poets, the Hebridean novelists. He did it all for them: a serious writer who could comb publicity out of his hair. Only once did he lose his temper, and that was enjoyable too, in its way (he increasingly found). The new girl, Marietta, started talking about the Profundity Requital-completely failing to realize that Gwyn didn't want to talk about the Profundity Requital. Such talk tempted fate. And made him nervous. Anyway, they got her out of the toilet in the end, with her red nose, and Gwyn produced his wallet with a humorous flourish and sent her out for champagne.

Ninety minutes later he rode the elevator earthward, leaving the team working late. He said hi to the young black porter, thereby making his day. That was what Gwyn was doing all the hours there were: making people's days. Whew, that C was really good shit! In the early darkness Holborn was still yellowly illumined by its shop windows, and abandoned. That was the modern city: worked in, but not lived in. He was letting the door close behind him and buttoning his coat and had just started forward into the wind … It hit him like a solid tumbleweed of sweat and freckles and bare busy flesh: there was an instant of extreme facial proximity-yeast and loose saliva and ginger eyebrows-and then the two men were staggering quickly in each other's arms and Gwyn fell carefully, lumberingly, lowering himself on to the speckled sheen of the flagstones at no greater rate, really, than Richard had hit the car-parkdeck ten years ago in Nottingham, there to receive Lawrence's talentless and essentially unenthusiastic right boot.

A young man stood over him, stripped to the waist-and giving off steam. Sticky, coppery, he appeared to be mantled in a galaxy of hormones and youth. And evening steam.

"Sorry." This was Gwyn, offering it from the floor.

Steadying himself, the young man said, "They sending me this now? Let me tell you something. I got a little …" But he was moved! He was desperately moved. And his voice cracked and deepened, saying, almost with tears of pride, "My mum's got a little son. He's only twelve years old. And he'd fucking murder you."

Then the evening sky was empty and the street was as it had been before. Momentum reengaged the young man and he was gone, down the street and swiftly slantwise across it toward the stalled traffic of Kingsway. Gwyn was sitting there. Now he got up. He ran a damage check, first from the inside outward, then with his palms and his fingertips. For the moment he felt unnaturally healthy, and unnaturally safe, because that was that for today, and he need expect no further encounter.

No encounter, for instance, with the young man's younger brother, or half-brother, or kid bastard. The twelve-year-old capable of murder. Whose acquaintance one was naturally impatient to make.

Clearing out his desk at The Little Magazine, Richard found-to his alarm, but not to his surprise-a keepsake from Anstice. Upstairs his farewell party was already under way: a concentration of raised voices and blundering footsteps. He was working on his speech. They were going to present him with a bound set of The Little Magazine, sixty volumes, going back to 1935. Richard had asked Gina along to the party, and Gwyn, and Demi.

Anstice's memento was a book, with an inscription. Love's Counterfeit, by someone called Eleanor Tregear. She used to read many such books, at least one a day, all the Dorothys and Susans, bought and sold by the boxful. Noncoincidentally, no doubt, Love's Counterfeit was the sample novel he had once borrowed from her (and read about half of), curious, as always, about any prose work that found a publisher. Richard remembered now. It was about a country girl who comes to London and falls in love with a great artist, an opera singer or somebody. No, a conductor. No: a composer. Anstice's inscription said:

You were no counterfeit. That night we shared bore love's very imprimatur. Ah, but you were wed, with your two bonny boys!Now I venture into another night, alone, without your hugeness inside me. No regrets, my love. Adieu.

Richard put his speech aside and looked at his watch and lit a cigarette. Upstairs the rumor of carousal was now diversified by sounds of breakage. Self-injury, dissolution, in the name of love: so innocent, so period. And literary, as opposed to televisual. TV trained women not to be victims. I mean (he thought), with Gilda you could kind of understand it: years of contiguity, in tiny beds, in tiny rooms. But Anstice. Anstice, who topped herself for a no-show… It took him ten minutes to speed-read the second half of Love's Counterfeit. Beautiful provincial (Meg) comes to London, to work as secretary to fiery composer (Karl). He smolders, and attempts to seduce. She smolders, and resists. For Karl is an emotional tyrant, devoted to his art; he also has a wife, a volcanic diva based in Salzburg. No kids. Smitten, desolate, Meg does a deal: one night of love. She would give Karl her body and then go back to Cumbria-to the hills, the valleys, the healing sheep-dips … Their big night got a chapter to itself and was rendered entirely in terms of metaphor- musical metaphor. Richard lit a cigarette. He was prepared for a muted performance. Say a scherzo for second piccolo. But this was a power symphony, with full jingoist hysterics from brass and strings and with buffalo stampedes from the kettledrums. On the last page Meg is standing in a puddle in Cumbria when Karl's cream sedan appears at the end of the lane. Happy ever after. The volcanic diva has killed herself-about something else.

There was a knock at the door and R. C. Squires entered the room. For the second time in half an hour Richard felt alarm unqualified by surprise: one or two other distinguished ex-occupants of Richard's chair had already arrived. R. C. Squires entered his old office with a misleading swagger. He doffed his hunting hat with the tweed earflaps and brandished his stained umbrella and shouted,

"Any advance on seventy thousand pounds?"

People who made big entrances, Richard had decided (now that he sometimes thought of making them himself)-people who made big entrances did so as a diversionary measure: to distract you from how terrible they looked, how old, how ill. R. C. Squires: his shattered visage, the color of Parma ham, his hair as soft as winebar sawdust. For fifteen years, unbelievably, he had written judicious and elegant "middles," on Courtly Love, on Shakespeare's women, on Rosicrucianism and Panti-socracy, on Donne, on Keats, on Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It was possible, presumably, to think of looking to R. C. Squires for mentorship.

He showed Richard the future and the past: his own available future, and the marginal literary past. Something could presumably be learned, at the Hush-Puppied feet of R. C. Squires.

"Seventy thousand pounds! Or do I hear eighty?"

It turned out that he was referring to the debts bequeathed by Horace Manderville (another distinguished predecessor), whose liver had finally exploded that spring. Richard had seen the filler-sized obituaries.

"How did he get people to lend him all that money?"

"Banks! He had rich wives."

R. C. Squires turned to the bookshelves. You could tell that he was translating their merchandise into gin-and-tonics. His eyes were gin-and-tonics, pleading for more gin-and-tonics. Earlier in the year Richard had come across R. C. Squires leaning on a broken jukebox in some barnsized pub loud with canned rock. Contemplating Richard with the stalest disgust, R. C. Squires inflated himself with several lungfuls of air, and began. The attempted denunciation sounded almost pre-verbal. Just a few glottal stops here and there.

"Why don't you go on up? You can hear them up there. I'll be along in a minute."

"Sorry about-Anstice. Anstice! Poor girl. Later we'll talk. I want a word with you."

"What about?"

"About your destiny."

Left alone, Richard reread his farewell speech, which seemed much too long. It wasn't often he had an audience-one that couldn't get away. For the last time he left his chair, the chair that had cupped the buttocks of Horace Manderville, of John Beresford-Knox, of R. C. Squires . . .

As he passed the outer office he saw a figure leaning over the book table (her hat, her scarf like a rope of hair, her angle of dutiful inquiry)- and death brushed past him. Death with its nostril hairs, its nicked and narrowed lips concealing a skeleton staff of teeth. But it wasn't Anstice. Anstice was dead.

"Demi. How sweet of you to come. No Gwyn, I see."

"No Gina?"

"It's Friday. Gina likes to have Fridays to herself."

He helped her off with her coat and when she turned to face him he thought for a moment that both her eyes had been blackened or bruised. But now her eyes widened, contradicting him, and she said abruptly,

"Gwyn seems to think you're going to say something about me in your piece. Something mean. Are you??

"No. I don't think so. I'm just going to say what you said about his stuff. That he can't write for toffee."

"Well that's a relief. He shouldn't mind that."

And Richard wondered for the first time how Demi could tell that Gwyn couldn't write for toffee. But all he said was, "Let's go on up. I've got a speech to make. Wish me luck."

They went up the stairs to where all the noise was coming from. Except there wasn't any noise, not anymore. Side by side they moved down the corridor to the conference room. He reached for the handle and pushed. The door gave an inch or two. He leaned on it but it gave no further. All he could hear was a single anguished sigh. All he could see was a single sandy suede shoe, which quivered for an instant, then twitched, then stretched and straightened in death or repose: the olden Hush-Puppy of R. C. Squires.

Meanwhile, Richard had "finished" Amelior-in the novelist's sense. He hadn't finished reading it. He had finished writing it. Had he become Gwyn Barry? Was this the information?

Having written it, Richard was now obliged to christen it. What he really wanted to call it was Dogshit Park. Another possibility was Idylland-his rather slapdash substitute for that sylvan Utopia, that newer, better world. In the end he settled on a nice plump phrase from Andrew Marvell's "The Garden." Stumbling on Melons.

Having named the book, he now had to name the writer. It might be cute, he thought, to anagrammatize "Andrew Marvell." And make it a woman. With his crossword skills, it shouldn't… Ella something looked promising. Ella Rumwarden, Ravella Drew, M.D. No. Velma . .. Jesus. Drew la Malvern. Wanda Merverl. Leandra Wrelmv. This is pathetic. Marvella Drewn …

Having tried and failed to anagrammatize "Andrew Marvell," he now tried to anagrammatize "The Garden." And make it a man. There was no sex in Amelior, and there was no gender either. Gwyn didn't write like a man. Gwyn didn't write like a woman. It wasn't personal: he wrote like something in between. "The Garden" . . . Gren Death? Grant Heed? Garth Dene?

Stumbling on Melons. By Thad Green. Yes.

The business of writing Amelior had of course involved reading it, again, and with rare attention. It was, in Richard's view, without merit. A straightforward armpit-igniter. You could come home, after a full day at the Tantalus Press, and Amelior could still gnarl your toes. But at last he thought he knew what Gwyn had done and how he had done it.

Plagiarism was good. Plagiarism was just punishment. Richard Tull was going to make it look as though Gwyn Barry had stolen Amelior. And Gwyn had stolen it. Not from Thad Green. From Richard Tull. And Richard, as he typed, had been stealing it back.

There were witnesses. It all originated, as so much literature originated, from an incident featuring conversation and alcohol. It all originated from a symposium, which means "drinking party": sym (with, together), plus potes (drinker). It all went back to a pub. Present also were Gina and Gilda. Richard was summarizing his latest project, a big bold book he never wrote called The History of Increasing Humiliation. In that same evening they spent almost half the advance.

"Literature," Richard said (and it would be nice to write something like "wiping the foam from his lips with his sleeve as the company fell silent." But he was drinking cheap red wine and eating pork scratchings and Gina and Gilda were talking about something else)-literature, Richard said, describes a descent. First, gods. Then demigods. Then epic became tragedy: failed kings, failed heroes. Then the gentry. Then the middle class and its mercantile dreams. Then it was about you-Gina, Gilda: social realism. Then it was about them: lowlife. Villains. The ironic age. And he was saying, Richard was saying: Now what? Literature, for a while, can be about us (nodding resignedly at Gwyn): about writers. But that won't last long. How do we burst clear of all this? And he asked them: Whither the novel?

This was already more than enough, surely. Oh, it was pitifully plain what Gwyn had done. He had gone back to his bedsit and gathered his Brit.-Con. textbooks and his gardening manuals and sat down and written Amelior. But it went further. That wasn't really the key…

Supposing, Richard went on, flown with cheap red wine and an audience of three-supposing that the progress of literature (downward) was forced in that direction by the progress of cosmology (upward-up, up). For human beings, the history of cosmology is the history of increasing humiliation. Always hysterically but less and less fiercely resisted, as one illusion after another fell away. You can say this for increasing humiliation: at least it was gradual.

Homer thought the starry heavens were made of bronze-a shield or dome, supported by pillars. Homer was over long before the first suggestion that the world was anything but flat.

Virgil knew the earth was round. But he thought it was the center of the universe, and that the sun and the stars revolved around it. And he thought it was fixed.

Dante did too. Virgil was his guide, in purgatory, in hell: becausenothing had changed. Dante knew about eclipses and epicycles and retrogradation. But he had no idea where he was and how fast he was moving.

Shakespeare thought that the sun was the center of the universe.

Wordsworth did too, and thought it was made of coal.

Eliot knew that the sun was not at the center of the universe; that it was not at the center of the galaxy; and that the galaxy was not at the center of the universe.

From geocentric to heliocentric to galactocentric to plain eccentric. And getting bigger all the time: not at its steady rate of expansion but with sickening leaps of the human mind.

And prepare yourself for another blow, another facer: the multiplicity-the infinity, perhaps-of other universes.

So that's what you'd have to do. That's what you'd have to do, to make it all new again. You'd have to make the universe feel smaller.

Which is what Gwyn had done, Richard realized, as he typed out Amelior. Quietly, uninsistently, reassuringly. It provided the novel's only memorable phrase: "the naked-eye universe/' That's what Amelior was the center of: the naked-eye universe.

Of course, in Gwyn's novels, there wasn't much talk of astronomy. There was talk of astrology. And what was astrology? Astrology was the consecration of the homocentric universe. Astrology went further than saying that the stars were all about us. Astrology said that the stars were all about me.

Richard wanted to know how Gwyn was feeling these days. He called him and said, "How's your elbow?"

"Still bad," said Gwyn.

"So no tennis. And no snooker, I suppose. But why no chess? I know. It's that nagging brain injury of yours. That niggle in the brain. Better rest it. Rub some Deep Heat into your hair when you go to bed."

"Hang on a minute."

Gwyn was sitting on the armchair near the window in his study. He was between interviews. He had fixed it with Publicity that they all came to him now. All he needed was a tennis court in the basement, and a couple of restaurants, and he'd never have to go out. Pamela knocked and entered. She named a monthly magazine and said that its people were here.

"Photographer?" he asked.

"Photographer.?

"They're early. Have them wait . . . Interviews," he explained. "Where were we?"

Richard said, "We were talking about your brain."

"Look, I'd better tell you that I've been deceiving you these past couple of years."

"In what way?"

"I'm actually much better than you at games. Much better than you at tennis and snooker. Even chess. This sometimes happens, you know, after a great worldly success. There's a power rush. It overflows. Particularly into the, into the sexual and competitive spheres."

"But you always lose."

"That's right. I didn't want to win. I thought, you know, what with everything else, it might be more than you could handle. Losing at all games too."

"Oh dear. It's happened. I always knew you had a rogue maggot loose in your brain. Twanging its way from chamber to chamber. Well. It's happened."

"What's happened?"

"The maggot's had kids. Demi said you weren't yourself anymore. Not yourself. Whatever that might have been."

"Listen. Clear a day for it. We'll have a triathlon. Bring a change of clothes. We'll play tennis. Then go and play snooker. Then I'll give you dinner here and we'll finish up with a couple of games of chess."

"I can't wait. No excuses now. No checking into Intensive Care."

"Listen. What was it exactly Demi said to you? About my work?"

"I've got it written down. On my typewriter. Gwyn can't write for toffee comma you know full stop."

"You're sure she was talking about me."

"I ran it by her the next morning. She said, 'Well he can't, can he?' And I said-"

"Clear a day."

Gwyn stood up and walked toward the window and stared out. The world loved him, but the world loved him not. Poor Gwyn, and all this cognitive dis.

Outside, now, he didn't know where or how to look. The world said it loved him. So why was it stinging him in the corners of his eyes? He was the unrequited. The pink lips of the cherry blossoms were kissing him and mouthing his name, and whispering, and showing him the papillae of their tongues. Mother Earth was blowing hot and cold, as hot as Venus with its trapped gas and ceaseless lightning, as cold as Pluto and its frozen rock.

In truth, Gwyn's interests didn't extend very far above ground level. Up to the troposphere, because weather came from it, and even as far as the stratosphere, sometimes, if he happened to be flying in it. He knew the earth went round the sun-he knew this twice a year, when he adjusted his watch because of it. The cosmology of Amelior owed nothing to Richard Tull. What Gwyn had been trying to provide, as usual, in that book and its successor, was the reassurance of honest practicality. He sought to represent the universe only to the extent that a sensible person (himself, for instance) had any use for it. There was a sun, made of whatever it was made of, which went in and went out, which rose and set, which helped grow things and gave you a tan if you lay in it. There was a moon with a man in it. There was a backdrop of stars, if you looked at it, which could guide you at sea, if you needed it. And beyond all that-don't worry about it.

He lingered by the window while the new photographer deployed his lights, his tripods, his white umbrellas. The new interviewer was a girl (unattractive). With nonspecific hostility Gwyn noticed that Pamela had at some point deposited a fresh stack of weeklies onto the round table by his armchair. Next to last week's weeklies. And he hadn't even . . . An avid reader, Barry always. He felt it was his duty to keep up with as many. Here as elsewhere, Barry was committed to the spirit of serendipity: everything was grist to his-

"Do you mind if I use a tape? .. . Could you say something? What you had for breakfast?"

"Let me think. I had half a grapefruit. And some tea."

"You once said, 'Nobody seems to like my books. Except the public.' Would you still say that?"

Beyond the window the cherry blossoms rolled. London went on from there, spreading out in all directions.

"How, then, do you account for your universal appeal?"

London went on from there, spreading out in all directions. The world was like a lover that loved you only sometimes. Sometimes, when you touched her, she went mmmm and enveloped you with all her warmth.

"Is Amelior a kind of promised land? Does it play on that myth and on that appeal?"

Sometimes when you touched her she went mmmm and enveloped you with all her warmth. But sometimes she was hair-trigger, was fingertip, in her hate. And she twisted to your touch.

"Are the two books formal Utopias?"

She twisted to your touch. And this you could live with, could even understand. Only: all her brothers were out there.

"Could they be described as pastorals?"

All her brothers were out there. All her brothers were out there, waiting to break your face.

"Do you see the reinvention of society as one of the novelist's responsibilities?"

One last interview after this interview. He hoped the last interview would be easier than this interview. He wanted an interview with more questions like Did he set himself a time to write every day? or Did he use a word processor? or (come to think of it) How much money did he earn? or Who was he fucking? These days he was being taken far more seriously. Because it worked the other way round now: the literature-and-society people came in through the back door, to investigate an incidence of mass appeal. Gwyn liked being taken seriously and wanted-and expected-much much more of it. He felt strongly attracted to the idea that his work was deceptively simple. But he wished they'd make their questions easier. Now, as he traipsed through his answers, Gwyn checked the schedule to see who was coming next. Someone from the in-flight magazine of a charter firm based in Liverpool. Good.

After that, the great Abdumomunov was expected: to teach him chess. Gwyn used to go to the great Abdumomunov (up on some crag in Kensal Green) but now the great Abdumomunov came to him. He supposed that the old grandmaster must relish these visits. And he was wrong. These visits pained the great Abdumomunov; they pained him in the chess sense, which was more or less the only sense he had. He was used to teaching pampered but owlish ten-year-olds in whom you encountered a riotously burgeoning vocabulary of the thirty-two pieces and the sixty-four squares. Gwyn was hospitable enough, and paid the carfare, and his house was pornographically luxurious; but he never learned anything. It was like teaching poetics to someone who could only say bus, hot and floor. Currently they were working on stonewall openings where a pawn-infested center gave drawing chances to Black.

It seemed to the great Abdumomunov that Gwyn wanted to learn how to cheat at chess. Cheating at chess, or wanting to cheat at chess, had a long and illustrious history. Seat your opponent with the sun in his eyes was a maxim that went back to the indolent nawabs and the reclining caliphs of sixth-century Asia. Of course, you couldn't cheat at chess: with cheating, all you could do, at the chessboard, was think you were being cheated. Like many old grandmasters the great Abdumomunov could still teach the game but he couldn't bear playing it. Forced stalematesgave him some pleasure. Agreed draws left him more or less undisqui-eted. He couldn't bear losing. He couldn't bear winning.

Gal Aplanalp said, "Wait. You're not asking me to fire him."

Gwyn was out of the house. This was his weekly meeting with his agent, something he didn't want to skip, so near to publication day. He said,

"He's fired himself. He has cast his staff into the cold waters. His wife goes out to work. He stays home and minds the kids."

"I'm going to go to hell for placing him with Bold Agenda. Who knew they were that Mickey Mouse? He didn't even call me and bawl me out. Why?"

"Shame," said Gwyn.

".. . It is sad. Kind of."

"Kind of. Anyway. Now: foreign rights. I see from my statement that I'm paying one and sometimes two extra chunks of five percent to various intermediaries. These intermediaries are probably very good at sending and receiving faxes. But what other services do they do me? And why is it twenty percent in Japan?"

Gal told Gwyn that this was how it had always been. Gwyn told Gal to find a new and better way. Then he said,

"What time is it?"

"Uh-oh."

He got out of bed and began the business of locating the socks and Y-fronts he had hurled here and there forty minutes earlier-in an imitation of heedlessness which he now found overdone. Then, too, Gal's bedroom was disappointingly unkempt. From somewhere in his digestive tract came a cluck of quiet confirmation: the impeccable career-woman led you from her impeccable office, and you followed her stocking seams and their impeccable perpendiculars, upstairs-into an arena of neurotic disarray .. . Actually, Gwyn felt wonderful. Nothing had happened to him on his way to St. James's. And he had a hunch that nothing would happen to him on his way back to Holland Park. It was like being back on C after a month of the sweats. Wishing to express his confidence, wishing to give that confidence expression, Gwyn turned and said,

"Don't fire Richard. He lends a kind of respectability to your client list. Otherwise it's pretty cheesy stuff, isn't it. Novels by weather forecasters. And darts players and royal chauffeurs … You ought to go on a diet, love."

Gal waited. She then said, "You think I'm not on a diet already??

"Seriously though, love. I don't see myself with a fat agent. It wouldn't do. I'd have to go elsewhere: to Mercedes Soroya at IPT. Can you believe those eyes? And those ankles!"

Patiently Gwyn went on standing there with his Y-fronts hanging from his hand. Gal, who was half out of bed, now rolled back into it, saying,

"It's not fair. You're a world-famous novelist. And you have the body of a young boy."

"Thanks, love."

For a moment he stopped thinking about Mercedes Soroya and started thinking about Audra Christenberry, who would shortly be in town. Then he thought about Demeter: indulgently.

"About next week. Demi's dad has taken a turn for the worse. Yeah. She wants us to go up there for a few days. So I can't make it next week."

"Boo-hoo," said Gal.

"Now what was that look all about?"

"Nothing. You know I always smile when I watch you getting dressed."

He stood upright, in his socks, his Y-fronts, beneath the inlets-the lagoon-of his male-pattern baldness, and said,

"Thanks, love."

This time it was like walking into a lamppost. He always dipped his eyes, discreetly, as he came out of Gal's and took a sapless little hop off the last step to generate a turn of speed . . . "You're ready, mate." The black guy cast out of black iron flattened him up against the railings and leant forward holding the pads of his thumbs-so warm, so firm, so aromatic even, like a doctor's touch-over Gwyn's closed lids, saying, "What can I tell you. We've all heard it all on the TV. I'm your worst nightmare. I'm going to put your lights out. We've all heard it all. On the TV. You're ready, mate. Look at the way you drop your head. You're ready.?

Now came half term, and Richard's week of Sole Charge.

It was a time of great revelations. It was a time of ceaseless discovery. Who would have thought it? In a scant five days, while he went about his simple tasks in the company of those two young souls, more genuine illumination came his way than in as many years of cloistered endeavor, bent over his books and all their fust and dust. ..

By midmorning on Tuesday Richard knew why women never did anything and were no good at anything and never amounted to anything and never contributed anything to anything. To anything permanent, that is to say. It wasn't having children that did it, necessarily. It was hanging out with children that did it. Whatever you thought of this arrangement, it had something to be said in its favor: it demanded no further inquiry. And it wouldn't be getting any-not from him. Why waste valuable time when you could be untangling a shoelace or picking up crumbs or tripping over a squeaky toy or slapping some slice of trex onto a frying pan or going down on your hands and knees to search for a weapon component under the sofa or the bunk bed or the oven? Gina came home at six. Richard went into his study and began his review of a new Life of Warwick Deeping. After forty minutes he had something like-

This is a long book. This book has pictures. I like pictures. Pictures are good. There is a picture of a man. There is a picture of a house. There is a picture of a lady. You have to read pages but you don't have to read pictures. I like pictures because pictures are good.

On Wednesday morning, first thing, he escorted the twins to the video store and the three of them returned with a sack of cartoons. Mar-ius boycotted these, and pleaded for stronger fare. By Thursday the boys were watching anything they liked so long as the movie wasn't actually called Snuff. By Friday they would both have thick and fluent American accents, spurning strawberry jam at breakfast, for example, and inflexibly insisting on peanud budder. With the children parked in front of some ghoul or Nazi Richard made progress with his review, managing to add that the book contained a picture of a dog and that he liked pictures of dogs because pictures of dogs were good. He seriously considered typing this out and biking it in. Because he knew that even his book-reviewingdays were numbered. A slow contamination would be seeping out from the Tantalus Press. The appearance of his name on its letterhead, and in its ads (the Tantalus howled to the talentless: the talentless howled back), this would be seeping out. . . And Richard accepted it. Here there was no cognitive dissonance. He felt fully contaminated. He thought of clear liquids, of saline solutions. He wanted people in white to gather round him and wash his blood . .. On Thursday afternoon he came out of his study, drawn by a squall of salvos and screams. Eating jellybabies, the boys were engrossed in a billion-dollar bloodbath called Decimator.

"I could practically go to jail for this. Jesus. Don't tell Mummy. Why can't you watch something nice?"

"Like?" said Marius.

"I don't know. Bambi."

"Bambi's quap."

"How can you say that?"

"There's one good bit in Bambi."

"What bit's that?"

"When Bambi's mother gets killed."

"Let's go to Dogshit. Marco? Marco's asleep."

"No he's not. He's pretending. He's scared of violence but he won't admit it."

"Come on. Let's hide the videos."

"Marco! Dogshit!"

Dogshit-that verdant world, that ghost of Eden, so late our happy seat.. . From a distance the grass had a layer of silver or pewter in it: the promise or the memory of dew. Up close, its green was as municipal as paint. And then there were the formal flowers, the pudding blooms, the gladioli in their thin old-lady overcoats; the flower bed was Dogshit's flower hat. People, park wanderers, provided other colors, from other countries: spice and betel.

Suddenly he knew what London children looked like. London children, those of London raising-they looked like crisps. They looked like Wotsits. Which wasn't to say that they all looked the same. There were genres, even here. This one looked like cheese-and-onion. This one looked like beef-and-mustard. This one looked like salt-and-vinegar.

Three black women moved through them, across the playground. The two grown girls with their African height and verticality, and behind them the old lady, in a white smock and a dark sash, round, rolling, like a pool ball waddling to the end of its spin.

It seemed to him that all the time he used to spend writing he now spent dying. His mind was freer now. Alas. He no longer did his "mid-dies" for The Little Magazine-where he got his hands on the first-echelon talents, great men, great and childless women. He no longer solaced the childless Anstice by telephone for hour after hour. He no longer wrote. Boredom and sordor used to be asked to be seen as interesting and beautiful, and you could do it, with your energy. Transformation would occur. It seemed to him that all the time he used to spend writing he now spent dying. This was the truth. And it shocked him. It shocked him to see it, naked. Literature wasn't about living. Literature was about not dying.

Suddenly he knew that writing was about denial.

Suddenly he knew that denial was great. Denial was so great. Denial was the best thing. Denial was even better than smoking.

He came to think of denial as a fashionable resort, a playground for the rich, in a prose borrowed from Gina's brochures.

On Friday, she was home. So they had to be out. Colossally girding himself, Richard promised the children a trip to the zoo. On the bus he took his head out of his hands and said,

"Where shall we go first? The reptile house?"

Marius shrugged. He was working on this shrug, palms loosely out-thrust from tight elbows. Five years ago he was practicing his reflexes. Now he was practicing his gestures-his shrugs.

Richard said, "The aquarium?"

"The gift shop," said Marius.

"You're very quiet, Marco. What are you sitting there thinking about?"

And Marco came alive and said, "My secred idendidy!"

In the zoo there were many kinds of animals for the people to look at. But there were only two kinds of people for the animals to look at. Children. And divorcees.

He was not a divorcee, he knew. At night, in the arid fever and miserable magic of the dark, he would whimper up to his wife, and hold on. He wasn't seeking warmth. He was trying to stop her going away. Which she wouldn't do, so long as he held on. More than this: in the depleted menagerie of their bed he could sense certain rumors of beasthood, not the beast of old, which was a young beast, but a new beast, which was an old beast. Something patched together, something inexpensively revamped. In the mornings, too, especially at weekends: watching her as she showered and dressed, and then looking up through the skylight at the clouds, their paunches, their ashen love-handles … I will arise and go now, with a suitcase, to the callbox. He thought of the fame-ruined lines from "The Second Coming," about the rough beast, its hour comeround at last, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. What would it look like, this beast of his? Yeah. Rough. Now he was impotent again but without his excuses. And what is a man, without his excuses? There was nothing for Gina to stick around with. There was nothing for Gina to leave. Richard no longer cried in the night. He thrashed, and gnashed-but he no longer wept. Because he did all that in the day. The day, and the dusk. He wasn't crying in front of anyone yet, as women do. Crying in front of people was part of their catharsis. He was determined never to cry in front of the boys, as he had that one time, in front of Marco, long ago.

At the zoo he felt the end of all childish promises.

I will stay with you for ninety-nine billion nine million nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand million billion-

I will love you forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and-

She wouldn't leave him. She would never leave him. What she would do was ask him to go.

And I will go, with a suitcase, to the callbox.

The children will have to come to love us separately.

Saturday morning Richard rose late. Around noon Gina said,

"Why don't you go out for a newspaper? Look in at the pub. Do the crossword."

"I might well."

"Pop in and get the Hoover on your way back. This afternoon if they're very good you can take them to choose a video. Something nice, mind. Disney. The Jungle Book or Beauty and the Beast. None of that Tom and Jerry."

Who are the girls in the backs of police cars? He stepped through the pigeons and their truckdriver tans.

London pubs always lag ten years behind the stretch of city they serve. If, ten years ago, Calchalk Street had made that upward lurch it was gearing itself for, then the Adam and Eve, starting today, would call itself the Tick and Maggot and would offer you quiche and cheesecake in a pavilion of striped parasols. But Calchalk Street had stayed where it was, and the Adam and Eve had stayed where it was-ten years behind. The same donkey-jacketed Irishmen drank the same black beer. The same black dog was still dying in the cardboard box beneath the pie-warmer. Richard found his usual seat. A pale girl moved past him, powdered and tinted like a bride of Dracula. As he started flinching and mumbling over his crossword Richard thought, quite unconstructively:always give the devil the best tits. Such thoughts, thoughts of unknown provenance, came often to him now.

"Charisma bypass," said a voice in his ear.

He looked up, wondering if this, or something like it, was the answer to 3 down, and said, ".. . My dear Darko. Or is it Ranko?"

"Darko," said Darko.

Or was it Ranko? One or other of them, at any rate, had lost all his hair, or given it away. What remained was gathered in little fungal patches here and there, above a face essentially and now irreducibly his own-the purple orbits, the purple lips. And Richard, who had had some bad haircuts in his time, found himself thinking: Samson and Delilah. Oh, what a haircut was that! Ah, what syrup work was there … The Adam and Eve was ten years behind. Darko, somehow, was ten years ahead. No, twenty. He asked him,

"How's the writing?"

"That's Ranko. I don't do that shit."

"How is Ranko? And how's Belladonna?"

"They're both fucked."

"Now this is kind of great, you know, because you're the very man I need to talk to. Let me ask you something."

In his Profile, Richard was arriving, with a show of regret, at the first of his paragraphs about Gwyn's sexual delinquencies; and he was doing all he could with Audra Christenberry. But there was another paragraph he wanted to write. Quite recently I. Doubtful privilege to introduce. Barely sixteen, this young student was keen to. Of their two-hour encounter, she. The child, whom I shall call Theresa, had this to …

"Did anything happen between Gwyn and Belladonna? I need to know because I'm doing a long piece about him. For the papers."

"Oh yeah."

Richard thought it might look good if he wrote this down. He produced his checkbook-all scrolled and furled.

"I get it," said Darko. "Checkbook journalism."

"… Do you want a drink? At last. We can have that 'jar.' "

"I'm out of here. And you're a piece of shit. She did his favorite, right? She's way out there. She wanted them to die together."

"What? In the poetic sense?"

"What? She ain't mega-well. She's positive, man."

It took a moment. But Richard's body was quicker than his mind. His body was walking past a dry cleaners' on a warm day: it breathed its false breath on him, and a hot damp gathered in every crevice of his clothes.

"Jesus. What about you? Are you all right??

"Ranko-he's got it. But I'm clean."

"Stay well, Darko. Stay well."

Left alone, he sat for half an hour with the crossword on his lap. He still had his pen out but he wasn't called upon to use it. The only clue he was sure about was 13 across (eight letters). There was only one possible answer: shithead. And that couldn't be right.

He thought: the lion will lie down with the lamb. The lion can and must lie down with the lamb. But he doesn't have to fuck it. Unless they both say it's cool.

Come to Denial.

Denial. For that "holiday of a lifetime." Or just to "get away from it all" and take a well earned "break."

Your room, ideally designed for comfort, offers a panoramic view of the ocean setting. In the restaurant you may sample typical local cuisine or delicacies from our international menu. Before your meal, why not enjoy a "cocktail" in the "Crow's Nest" bar?

In Denial, amenities abound. There is a wide variety of activities and the finest entertainment. Hunt for "bargains" in the bustling market town. Or simply recline by the pool and "relax."

Whilst we reserve the right to increase our prices at any time, once you pay your deposit the price of your holiday as shown on your invoice will not be increased unless you amend your booking. No refunds will be made for cancellations, exchange rate movements, or cost adjustments that would otherwise decrease the holiday price.

So book now for the sun and fun of Denial. Denial: the true "never never" land of all your dreams .. .

But the information comes at night. The communications technology it picks is not the phone or the fax or the E-mail. It is the telex-so its teeth can chatter in your head. The information makes sleep interdisciplinary, syllabus disciplines, and then disciplines unknown or not yet devised: eschatoscopy, synchrodesics, thermodonture.

The information is advertising a symposium of pain. Pains of all faiths and all denominations. These are your little ones, these are your pretty ones. Become accustomed to their voices. They will grow louder, and more persistent, and more persuasive, until they're all there is.

It is ordinary and everyday. On the beach the waves do it ceaselessly, gathering mass and body, climbing until they break and are then resum-moned into the generality with a sound like breath sucked in between the teeth.

Weakness will get you where you are weakest. Weakness will be strong and bold, and make for your weak spot. If in the head, then in the head. If in the heart, then in the heart. If in the loins, then in the loins. If in the eyes, then in the eyes. If in the mouth, then in the mouth.

The information is nothing. Nothing: the answer is so many of our questions. What will happen to me when I die? What is death anyway? Is there anything I can do about that? Of what does the universe primarily consist? What is the measure of our influence within it? What is our span, in cosmic time? What will our world eventually become? What mark will we leave-to remember us by?

"Door," said Richard. "The door. I-"

"What is it?"

"Just sad dreams. It isn't anything."

"Hush now," said Gina. "Hush . .."

It was seven o'clock and Gwyn Barry was driving westward into a low sun: into the bloodbath of sunset. The one-way street fled through the tunnel of his rearview mirror; and above his head a ragged and sclerotic cloud dangled from the sky, an outcast from a superior system: it looked like an unforgivable deepsea fish whose bad radar had taken it where it should not go-a disgrace to the bright-ringleted shallows. Thus the ambience was briefly painterly and Parisian: clarity on which a shadow is soon to fall. Had he been younger (say seventeen), or a different kind of person, he might have marked it, its queasy numinousness. But he was Gwyn Barry, and he was coming back from his hour with the pro at the Warlock, and he was having drinks and dinner with Mercedes Soroya, who had a proposal for him, and the Profundity thing would be announced that night at 2200 hours-and he was driving, in a city, which takes part of the mind and plugs it in somewhere else, into the city and the city's sticky streets.

Up ahead an orange van stood athwart the narrow entrance to Sutherland Avenue. Gwyn's car slowed and, at a respectful distance, rolled to a halt. He could see through the dusk-lit slot of the van's side windows: empty, like something brain-dead. He looked around, expecting to see the nearby berk who would shortly climb into it and drive it away or at least open its bonnet and stand there staring at it with his hands on his hips. There was hardly enough time for impatience to gather (he wasn't Richard after all, who would have been impatient already, whatever was happening), hardly enough time to give his horn a coaxing toot . . . When Gwyn felt the car jolt he was less surprised by the impact, whichwas not severe, than by the affront to his spatial awareness: a second ago the rearview mirror had been clear, the street bare, the evening light still and heavy. He turned. An old wood-ribbed Morris Minor occupied the breadth of his tinted back window. At its wheel, an old lady in a rimless fruitbowl hat and a white shawl, and also wearing the pleading look that old ladies wear. Sumptuously reassured, Gwyn felt love for the old lady, for the white shawl, for the wooden ribs of the innocuous Morris. Yes- wait-she was climbing out. Gwyn undipped his seatbelt. He would be wonderful about it. He didn't know the old lady's name. The old lady was called Agnes Trounce.

He stepped into the rosy light, under the gut-colored cloud. He veered round affrontedly as the orange van gave a neigh out of nowhere and reeled off at speed down the open avenue. He turned again: the old lady, her figure bent, was walking away too fast between the parked cars, and the second door of the ribbed Morris was opening. They came out low, and then they straightened. One had hair of pale ginger and invisible eyebrows. The other was thin, with black hat pulled down and black scarf pulled up and black glasses looping the central strip of his face. Gwyn was entirely ready. He was without reflexes, without gestures. All he felt was apology and panic and relief.

"What you call my mum?"

"What?"

"Nobody," said Steve Cousins, coming forward and reaching under his coat for the car tool, "and I mean nobody, calls my mother a cunt."

The sun was looking down on this, but not quite sincerely. The sun is very old, but the sun has always lied about its age. The sun is older than it looks: eight minutes older. The sun, to us, is always as it was eight minutes ago, when its light began the journey across the eight light-minutes. As Steve Cousins and Paul Limb (backup) moved in on Gwyn Barry, the sun was really eight minutes older than it looked, eight minutes redder, eight minutes deeper in the sky. This opened up a gap in time.

Eight minutes ago Crash was behind the wheel of the blue Metro (under its roof rack of ads and L-signs), half a mile to the east, showing Demeter Barry how you negotiated speed bumps at fifty miles per hour.

Six minutes ago Crash was 400 yards to the northeast, showing Demi how you reversed over a mini-roundabout.

Four minutes ago Crash was 450 yards to the north-northeast, showing Demi how you did a hand-brake turn on a zebra crossing.

Two minutes ago Crash was 200 yards due north, showing Demi how you jumped a red light with your eyes shut.

No minutes ago, intending to show Demi how you careened in the wrong direction up a one-way street, Crash performed an emergency stop, smacked his palm on the horn, and slid with massive ease through the opening door (his belt lay in a coiled pool on the floor mat, despised, disdained, dull with disuse). By the time Demi climbed out and fixed her fragile vision on the scene, she saw the Morris Minor reversing at speed down the one-way street (she was momentarily impressed), and Crash standing by her husband's car with her husband.

The sun liked him. The universe still liked him. Either that, or the universe was through with Richard Tull.

Shortly after noon the next day Richard was to be found in the snug bar of the Warlock Sports Club. He was drinking brandy and smoking cigarettes and staring at his shoe. A broadsheet newspaper, uncomfortably perched on the round table nearby, carried a front-page photograph of Gwyn and his wife, and described him, in its caption, as the Inaugural Laureate of the Cairns-Du Plessis Profundity Requital. Richard went on drinking and smoking and staring, with some show of serenity, at his shoe. The snug bar was often called the squash bar, and it was certainly very cramped and airless, but it never contained any Squash Members, or Tennis Members, or any exponents of snooker, darts, or bowls. It contained Social Members. Who were all sociopaths. So around Richard were arrayed a few tattoo-bespattered warthogs and authentic thirty-year-old methuselahs fingering their earrings as they applied themselves to their tabloids, and the odd clutch of regulars whispering into the foam of their pints, shrugging, and warily rolling their necks, and marked by that air of watchful cruelty which traditionally attends the criminal twilight. The barmaid, She, moved from table to table noisily collecting empties. Richard was still recovering from another bad moment, on the Knowledge. Having taken the trouble to stagger over to put a quid in it, he was almost at once confronted with:

Who wrote the novel Dedmator, on which the film was based?

A. Chuck Pfister

B. Gwyn Barry

C. Dermott Blake

Dermott Blake was the fiery playwright whom Gina used to go to bed with-and continued to go to bed with (in Richard's view), every Friday. Paralyzed, and soon in time trouble, Richard distractedly and ridiculously punched the C. Whereas Dedmator, of course, was the handiwork of Chuck Pfister … He staggered back to his newspaper and reread Stanwyck Mills's Profundity address: "Initially we felt that the optimism of the Amelior novels was altogether too frictionless. We had to ask ourselves whether that optimism was the result of struggle-whether it was earned. We decided it was. And we chose to honor that struggle." Richard drank brandy and stared at his shoe.

Something happened to the snug when Steve Cousins walked into it. An outsider might have identified him as a force for good, for order- the relay of minute straightenings and self-corrections that his presence entrained. Here, the graffitied young reined in the sprawl and slobber of their sports pages, their TV pullouts; there, the cardiganed elderly sniffed briskly and lifted their chins: everyone seemed to grow an inch or two in their chairs.

"Ah. Mr. Cousins," said a swampy old voice.

Richard looked up. His eyes and Scozzy's eyes dully encountered each other. Richard said, "You're late."

"Mr. Cousins, sir. The very man."

Now Richard looked sideways. At a nearby table sat two speckle-faced and ash-haired gents whom he had come across pretty often. They weren't like the other older guys, the arthritic artists of the bowling green who, as they aged still further, appeared to be fading into sweet-jar colors of caramel and nougat, into drip-dry and ready-to-wear. No, they retained a halo of dwindled charisma, of robberies and readies-these old thrusters, with the complexions of crumpled tenners. Laconic and discreet inquiry would have revealed that they were long-retired target burglars whose deeds had made a few headlines in past decades: the round-eyed actress relieved of her jewelry box while she slept in the West End hotel; the emptied stockroom of the Mayfair furrier; the rueful viscount pointing to the yawing drainpipe, the scrabbled-at first-floor window frame …

"Mr. Cousins, we desire your assistance. The very man we need. A man of parts."

"Ben," said Scozzy, with formality. And then: "Den."

"Vermin," said Den.

Slowly twisting in his seat, Richard absorbed the fact that Ben and Den were poring over something that both gripped and galled them. It was a newspaper, folded a good sixteen times, almost to the density of a pack of cards. They were doing the crossword.

"We're almost there," said Ben. "It's the top right-hand corner. Just can't get it."

"Vermin," said Den. "Four letters."

This wasn't the kind of crossword that Richard used to complete. This wasn't a grid of winsome quibbles, of little winks at Restoration drama, at Greek mythology, at Cartesian philosophy, where the poet, Noyes, can never make up his mind.

"Vermin," said Ben. "Blank, blank, C. Blank."

This was a crossword of bald synonyms, where neat equaled tidy and tidy equaled neat, where big meant large and not small meant big.

Scozzy faced the old men, in his tan leather mack. Once again his glance moved past Richard's eyes. After a long interval of subjective time he said, "Mice."

Den said, "That's what Ben said. But then you got… 7 across."

Ben said, "Messenger. Six. Say it is mice. Then you got… M, blank, G, blank, T, blank."

"Maggot," said Den.

"Midget," said Ben.

Even the fucking tabloids had run the Gwyn Barry story: the guru from Gower, married to Lady Demeter, and his mini-Nobel: the romping zeros of the annuity, granted for life, forever and ever and ever …

"Messenger," said Scozzy.

"Jesus," said Richard. He climbed to his feet. And he did mean climbed. It took him up the rungs of all his years. "Legate," he said.

Den said, "Legit?"

"Legate" he repeated. "L-e-g-a-t-e. Christ, well what can you expect around here, where all Aristotle is is slang for arse. Legate. It's not maggot. It's not midget. And it's not mice. It's legate. Messenger. Jesus." Scozzy had turned to him and Richard stood there, resolutely swaying, and saying, "You think you're a frightener. Yeah, you're really terrifying. All you've got to do is fuck someone up. And you even fuck that up. You think you're a frightener and you don't even frighten me. And what do I do? I review books."

The room was attentive to him and his voice. His voice was right out there on its own. The voice of half a ton of opera singer, abysmally deep-the voice of Baron Ochs.

"You think you're some kind of wild boy. Some kind of wolf child. Instead," said Richard, "instead of a fucking dog who, for a while, stopped being a tramp in the city and started being a tramp in the country. Yeah, The Wild Boy ofAveyron. I've read it, mate. I reviewed it! They thought he was going to tell them everything they didn't know. Nature and nurture. Civilization. Nobody calls your mum a cunt? Everybody calls your mum a cunt, I call your mum a cunt."

"Leave it, he's pissed," said Ben. Or Den. Because there was no way, no day, that Scozzy was going to speak. Not now or here.

"But he couldn't talk. The poor boy couldn't talk. Wild boys never can. And what have you got to say? What have you got to tell us. Give me my money back. Give me my money back."

"Oi," said Den. Or Ben.

Richard turned to them with a leaning flourish. As he moved pastScozzy's face he said, "And it's not mice. It's lice. You got that, you dumb shit? It's lice."

Gwyn was in the financial district, in the City, in a skyscraper, in a bucket chair, thinking about certain changes it might be good to make to his being-interviewed style now that the Profundity thing had gone his way. When they asked him difficult questions, perhaps expecting him to be Profound, he would in future say something like, "I just write what comes to me" or "It is for others to draw conclusions" or "I'm a writer, not a literary critic."

His friend Sebby would be there in a minute. Then, after their chat, they would go through to lunch. Once every couple of months he came in to lunch here anyway. Sometimes he would make a little speech. Gwyn often said that Sebby knew some very interesting people. He got up and walked to the window: this was one of Sebby's many chambers of the upper air. It was like Gal's old office in Cheapside, only higher and better. You could look down past the birds over many miles of the sweated city and see what new shapes people like Sebby were molding it into.

At last Sebby entered. Rubbing his hands together, he offered apologies and then congratulations.

"Thanks," said Gwyn. "Listen."

He said he wanted to present Sebby with a hypothetical situation. Sebby was used to being presented with hypothetical situations. Beginning every sentence with the word supposing, Gwyn gave Sebby a digest of recent events and an account of the incident the previous evening.

"Supposing all this happened," he said. "I mean, I know when you get well-known-things like this are going to happen. But I've talked to a couple of people who are on TV more than I am, and they say these things happen to them about once a year. Not once a day. So. Suppose it isn't random. Suppose all this. What would I do?"

And Sebby said, "You'd come to me."

At once Gwyn felt a part of his mind freeing up: "I'm a writer, not a literary critic" sounded too dry and lordly. One should be humble, but also secretive: twinkly. Why do I write? Why does the spider spin its web? Why does the bee store its honey? That sounded a bit-

Sebby wanted something from him.

"Oh, right," said Gwyn. He searched his wallet for the piece of paper with the registration number of the Morris Minor written on it. No: itwas in his diaiy. Another jacket. "It's in another jacket," he said. "You might start with the driving instructor. He denied it to me, but Demi says he knows one of the men in the car. They call him Crash but his real name's Gary."

Sebby wanted something else from him. But there was a problem here because Gwyn would be a Labour man until the day he died.

"Let me think about it. On this other matter, what exactly are you going to do?"

"You don't want to know."

And they went through to lunch.

On the whole, Richard was delighted with Stumbling on Melons-the feel of it, the heft of it. He compared it to Love's Counterfeit and it looked just as antique and marginal and forgotten-though much newer, of course. He booted it round his study for a few hours, and wet it, and used it as an ashtray, and scrabbled at it with his chewed nails. The main difference between Stumbling on Melons and Love's Counterfeit was that Love's Counterfeit looked read. So he put in a lot of time, not exactly reading it (he did read it, twice, savoring his own interpolations), but skimming it. With unwashed hands. With city fingers. Balfour had been quiet and tactful, and hadn't asked any more questions. He seemed to know. He certainly knew about the Profundity Requital, and offered his commiserations. He more or less came out and said that he wouldn't be expecting too much from Richard over the next few weeks. In effect he was giving him a Profundity Sabbatical from the Tantalus Press.

Richard called Rory Plantagenet and arranged to meet him that Friday.

"No," he said. "It's too sensitive to discuss on the phone. I want to do some checking first. It could be a hoax. Or it could be a big, big story."

Annoyingly, there were now three Barry Profiles under construction on Richard's desk. Three Profiles: the original, the original alternative, and the alternative alternative. The original was, in Richard's estimation, a work of the flintiest integrity, a noble example of that ancient literary genre called "flyting." Flyting stood at the polar opposite of panegyric, which is to say that it consisted of personal abuse. Freakishly well written, and fantastically hostile, the original could take its shameless place alongside certain passages of Swift, of Jonson, of William Dunbar. But nearly all of it would have to go. The original alternative and the alternative alternative, by comparison, were just workmanlike character assassinations of the kind you might see pretty often, he imagined, in the newspapers of certain totalitarian states, when a pressured editor was

softening up some internal enemy for obliteration. Still, Richard believed that the alternative alternative needn't be as namby-pamby as the original alternative, which would have appeared when Gwyn (his condition, like Richard's prose, serious but stable) was deep in Intensive Care. And of course all that would have to go too.

Okay, he thought. Plagiarism was better. With plagiarism, decorum would be observed. Those who live by the pen must die by the- etcetera. Richard still felt that violence was a better and simpler way (give him the sword every time) but violence was an alien from another genre. Look how it inhibited his prose .. . Perhaps that was what violence, all violence, really was: a category mistake. Violence was both fabulous and banal. Anyway, it would have to go. It was gone. He knew that Gwyn had finally put one and one together and was now taking the appropriate precautions. And Cousins was gone. Steve Cousins had what it took to get through Untitled without his head falling off, but that was the extent of his merits. Cousins: his reader. Richard's readership.

The alternative alternative. Richard would of course begin with the scandal he was about to create, saying at once, with a disingenuousness as pure and rarefied as celestial music, that he had "no wish to add to" the tumult surrounding "this unfortunate affair." He would then go on to talk generally about plagiarism and the self, how its roots lay in masochism and despair, in dreams of self-injury and self-defeat; and how, uniquely, it seemed to linger as a smear, infecting both the raptor and the raped. Next, if he could summon the gall for it, he would demand the reader's sympathy for Thad Green, that tender and neglected seeker who lived and died without knowing that his work, his vision, albeit in the form of a mercenary travesty, would eventually bring (false and transient) consolation to an entire hemisphere .. .

Plagiary meant kidnapper, seducer-which meant he could get the girls back in. Gilda, Audra Christenberry, maybe Belladonna. It was a shame that Audra wasn't married and that Belladonna was presumably over sixteen. Richard needed to keep telling himself that there was another test the Profile had to pass (one that the original, he now saw, would certainly have failed): it had to be publishable. No kill-fee, thank you: he was already a kill-fee down on the deal . . . Demi could stay, and the shape of the piece seemed to demand that she be treated gently. Richard had never been completely happy with the extended digression about her sleeping with black guys for free cocaine, but he was definitely going to keep, and enlarge, the passage where she said that Gwyn's stuff-or Thad's stuff-was shit.

With his thumb and forefinger Richard massaged his right elbow, inthe joint there: pestle and mortar. Belladonna: what did one believe? A thin sweat of confusion formed a join-the-dots puzzle on his unreliable upper lip. His plan, he knew, had certain flaws.

"Rank beggar, ostir dregar," he incanted, "foule fleggar in the flet. Baird rehator, theif of natour, fals tratour, feyindis gett.. ."

Thief of nature. One of the birds lodging in the nicotined greenery outside his window seemed to have learned how to imitate a car alarm: a looping lasso of sound. Various car alarms belonged to various types, various genres: the nagging, the hysterical, the scandalized. There was even a postmodern car alarm, which trilled out a fruity compendium of all other car alarms. This was the car alarm that all the birds of London would eventually know how to do.

He had liked Steve Cousins because he was the hero of a novel from the future. In literature as in life everything would go on getting less and less innocent. The rapists of the eighteenth century were the romantic leads of the nineteenth; the anarchic Lucifers of the nineteenth were the existential Lancelots of the twentieth. And so it went on, until . . . Darko: famished poet. Belladonna: damaged waif. Cousins: free spirit and scourge of hubris. Richard Tull: the good guy, down on his luck, and misunderstood.

Demi was leaning on the sideboard with her arms straightened, her arms locked-near where the telephone was. She had her rounded back to the room but Gwyn could see her in the mirror as he approached: her head unemotionally bowed (over a desk diary), the skewed collar of her shirt, the inevitable glimpse of tinged brassiere. And she could see him, now: in yet another new track suit, black, hugging, frogmanlike.

"No lesson," she announced.

"What? Oh. No driving lesson."

"Crash has had an accident."

"A road accident by any chance?"

"He fell down. He had a fall. The reason he has accidents sometimes is he's always trying to do something really difficult in cars. Really challenging. I think it must be quite serious. They offered me Jeff. But I want Crash."

Gwyn surveyed her with marked indulgence. In fact he was yearning

to go into the kitchen and hobnob with his favorite bodyguard: Phil. But

he lingered, wonderfully, with his wife. Wonderfully, he was being wonderful to Demi. Watch. He even took her in his arms. Why? Because things were rather different now. But what had she done to deserve it?.

The night before, over dinner, here at home, Gwyn, at considerable cost to his own sensitivity, finally goaded Demi into saying, "You hate me. Why?"

"What is a man .. . How is a man meant to feel? When his wife, when his own wife . . . sneers at his very essence. At his lifeblood. At the thing that gives his life meaning. When she sneers at his soul."

"I honestly have no idea what you're talking about."

A moment ago, Gwyn had felt close to tears-close to bottomless self-pity. And it was a reasonably pleasurable state, he found: loose, sensual, oozily calorific. Now he leaned back, raised his chin, slowly closed his eyes, and said,

"You told Richard I couldn't write for toffee."

"Well you can't."

"Okay. That's it."

"Well you can't!"

"Okay. That's it."

"Well you can't."

"I suppose the next stage-is separation."

"But you can't. It just seemed so obvious."

"This now passes into the hands of my lawyers."

"If it was wrong to say it in public then I'm sorry."

"It'll take me a day or two to move out. I trust you will do me the common courtesy-"

"Wait. I honestly don't understand why you're so cross. Let me think." And again the commentary, the punctuation, provided by Demi's forehead: bracketings, underlinings. "We were talking about how much you got paid. Not just novels but magazine pieces. You know, so much a word. And Richard said it was a lot. And I said you couldn't write for toffee. Was that so wrong?"

"… Come and give me a kiss. Mwa. Mmm. You mean peanuts, love. Not toffee. Mwa. Peanuts."

Within seconds he was huskily promising that one day soon he would fill her with their sons. And he spent the night in the master bedroom, and might even have made love to her, tenderly, tearfully, absolvingly, if he hadn't been feeling so fucked out-and worried about getting her pregnant. Demi also told him something else about that weekend at Byland Court with Richard: something he was awfully pleased to hear. Like all writers, Barry was often at the mercy of his. Seeing that light in her husband's eyes, she would know that the. Hypersensitive, but quick to forgive, he could never . . .

Now Gwyn said, "Crash can't drive for toffee. Eh, love??

"Well his rates are quite high."

"Ah. Here he comes."

A minute later Richard was standing in the hall, in his shorts, in his mack, cruelly encumbered, with his racket, his cue case; he was carrying his street clothes in a cheap new sports bag which was clearly made out of plastic (if that). Demi kissed him. He looked lost.

"A lamb to the slaughter," said Gwyn.

"We're not going to do this, are we?"

Richard took his place in the back of Gwyn's Saab.

Up front, riding shotgun, was the bodyguard, Phil. It might have been pleasant, Richard supposed, to claim and savor responsibility for all this anxiety, expense, inconvenience, and preposterous exoticism. But the author of Amelior and Amelior Regained, dependably and adaptably insufferable, as ever, had too clearly thrown himself into bodyguard culture: here, in Phil, Gwyn had found another reality-softener-a publicity boy who pumped iron. It emerged that he even went to the gym and worked out with Phil's co-bodyguards: Simon, Jake. Gruffly, malely, Gwyn swore as he drove. He even wound his window down to holler at some affront to his territoriality. Another category mistake. Silence, please! We may think we are swearing at others, at traffic. But who is the traffic? The soliloquy is the appropriate form for such language, because what we are doing is swearing at ourselves. Richard didn't miss driving; he didn't miss being plugged into the city. But he missed swearing. He missed being yet another chump in yet another reeking ton of metal in yet another bronchitic defile, swearing at himself.

As they queued for Marble Arch, Gwyn jerked his head back and told Richard that Phil had been thrown out of the SAS for being too vicious. Phil grunted leniently. Phil? Lamp-tanned, rubbery, big-lipped, with capped teeth and clear eyes-their age. Phil's full name was Phil Smoker. Richard thought it might save a lot of trouble to be called Richard Smoker, particularly when you were in America. Or Richard Smoking. Phil smoked-so Richard smoked. Gwyn was now filling Phil in about their years of rivalry-on the tennis court, the snooker table, the chessboard.

"And today's the day I clean his clock."

"He's never beaten me at anything," said Richard.

"Sport," said Gwyn, "provides release. There aren't many areas of transcendence left to us now. Sports. Sex. Art.?

"You're forgetting the miseries of others," said Richard. "The languid contemplation of the miseries of others. Don't forget that."

Their destination was not the Warlock but the Oerlich. "I'm paying for all this," said Gwyn. "And I'll have to pay your guest fee. You can get the balls at least." Phil, who had done a lot of staring on their way in from the car park, now did some more staring before settling down with the newspaper. Staring, Richard decided, was what bodyguards were really good at. He bought the balls: they were Swedish, and internally pressurized, and cost a bewildering amount of money. On the way down the cold green tube to their court Gwyn came to a halt and said, "Look. I've arrived." There on the wall was a framed photograph of Gwyn in his whites (together with his semiliterate signature). Nearby there were framed photographs of a dress designer, a golfer, a boxer, and the great Buttruguena.

"How long have you been a member here? What's it cost?"

"Thousands. Quite a while. This is where I play all my real tennis."

After the first changeover Richard said, "What happened to the fourth ball?" They searched for it, and failed to find it. This was an indoor court, and there was of course nowhere for the ball to go. But there were plenty of places for the ball to hide. And tennis balls long to be lost. It's their life; they long to be lost. .. After the second changeover Richard said, "Where'd the third ball go?" They searched for it, and didn't find it. Gwyn, in the keel of whose leather sports bag the two balls now nestled, asked Richard if he wanted to go and buy some more. But Richard shrugged, and played on.

He didn't understand how it was happening. Was it possible to hate too much? At all times he hated Gwyn on the tennis court, even when he was winning easily: even when he sent him from corner to corner like a lab rat (and then put him on his backside with a simple wrong-foot); even when, after a long alternation of lobs and dropshots, he had him gaping over the net, and, with big windup and loud puppy-yelp of racket on ball, drove a topspin forehand straight into his mouth. Hatred was part of his game but something had gone wrong with it-wrong with his hatred, wresting it beyond all focus and all utility. There were reasons for this.

Usually pretty matter-of-fact on court, Gwyn seemed to have converted himself, for the occasion, into a one-man band of affectations and tics-all of them hopelessly and inexpiably repulsive. Every time he won a point he clenched his fist and hissed "Yes" or, even more unbearably, gulped "Yup." Yes, the yup was very much worse than the yes. When they changed ends he could be heard to deploy a deep-breathingexercise: he sounded (Richard thought) like a pre-fire caveman warding off hypothermia. If Gwyn's first serve hit the net and plopped to the ground or rolled unobjectionably into the tramlines, he would reshape, as if to continue, then hesitate, then stand there for a couple of beats with his hands on his hips before trudging forward to retrieve it-while Richard said, for example, "What is this? The Princess and the Pea?" And Gwyn never knew the score. He kept asking what the score was: that tedious shibboleth-fit for hackers and literalists-called the score. "What's the score?" he would say. Or, "Where are we?" Or, "What's that now?" Or, more simply, "Score?" Finally and self-fulfillingly Gwyn was doing something else he had never done. He was winning.

After half an hour Gwyn had set point. Then, toddling forward on a typical piece of junk, he got an inch of racket handle onto Richard's skittish pass. The ball hit the tape, and climbed over it, and died.

"How's your thumb?" said Richard as they sat down. "Thumb all right?"

"It was an angled drop volley. And I was aiming for the tape."

"Don't worry about that thumb. Over the coming weeks that thumb will start to heal. Jesus, how could we lose two balls'?"

Gwyn didn't answer. He had placed a towel over his head-as they do at the Australian Open when the courtside temperature reaches 140 degrees. Richard lit his customary cigarette. Gwyn peered out of his tepee and told him that the Oerlich was no-smoking. Then he added,

"You can't play for peanuts."

"How do you mean?"

"Or for toffee." Gwyn explained. "By the way, did you ever wonder how you got that black eye, at Byland? Or are black eyes just a matter of routine?"

"I did wonder. But given my condition …" And given the locale: an adventure playground for those in need of a black eye. If you were tumbling around it in the dark, on your hands and knees.

"You tried to get into bed with Demi at three in the morning. It was a right hook, I think she said."

"This is disappointing news."

"She doesn't hold it against you. And I think it turned out rather well."

Halfway through the second set the wall telephone rang. Gwyn answered it: Gavin, as arranged, calling to confirm the date of a pro-celebrity doubles tournament. For charity. And for Sebby.

"That was the manager," Gwyn said. "He said you've got to stopscreaming and swearing or they're going to sling you out on your ear. And I must say I think he's got a point."

Ten minutes later Gwyn said, "Score?"

"Forty-love,"said Richard, coming to the net so that he wouldn't have to shout. "To you. Forty-love, and five-one. First set: six-two. To you. That means triple match-point. To you. That means that if you win this point or the next point or the point after, you will win the set and the match. Which you've never done before. Okay? That's the score."

"Gosh. Only asking," said Gwyn, who made that point too.

Richard took it like a man. "Well played," he said as they shook hands over the net post. "You're rucking useless and if I don't win love and love next time I'm giving up the game. Who'd you pay to teach you all that crap anyway?"

"Ask me no questions," he said, "and I'll tell you no lies."

The second set, like the first, had concluded with a dead net cord. Yellow ball hit the white tape: Richard had already forgotten who sent it there. Which didn't matter. The ball teetered on the high-wire of the net and even spun laterally across it for several suspended centimeters before it fell. In tennis, with the dead net cord, you want the ball to come down on the other side. Not your side. You are always wishing it away. But the ball fell toward him, and died. The ball never liked him. The world of the seamed and fuzzy ball never liked him anyway.

They drove back to Holland Park. Richard's tennis wear fumed softly of detergent and family wash, in opposition to the humid tang of Gwyn's cologne-and Phil's Man-Tan and Right Guard. Demi was out. "She's at Byland," said Gwyn. "Dad's dying." After a brief bonding ritual with his charge, Phil disappeared. Richard was shown into a basement toilet which had a shower in it somewhere, as well as various padded boilers and bouncing clothes-dryers. Then for a while, in his wet hair, he inspected the carpentry corner beneath the staircase. Nothing seemed to be under construction, but there was an antique bookrest whose varnish had been mostly scraped off with sandpaper: Gwyn, evidently, was trying to make it look like his own work. Richard went on up.

"Got your cue? Let's go."

"Won't we be needing Phil?"

In recent months Gwyn's wardrobe had been tending toward the softer and more capacious feminine fabrics, smocklike colored shirts, faux-naif knitwear, windblown scarves: the Will Ladislaw of Wll. Nowhe confronted Richard in a charcoal three-piece suit of tubular severity, plus rigid bow tie. He was adjusting his cufflinks and saying,

"This won't take a second. I want to show you something before we

go."

On the way to the top floor they passed Pamela, who withdrew with valedictory silence into the shadows of a distant doorway.

"You've been up here, haven't you?"

Richard had been up there, conducted by Demi, on a recent Profile-related tour. They were approaching the garden-site attic, which Demi had called the "childhood room." Painfully obviously, it was intended as a nursery: narrative wallpaper, Victorian toys (a rockinghorse with madamic eyelashes), Georgian cuddly animals, a Jacobean crib. Gwyn opened the door and stood aside.

The childhood room was no longer the childhood room. It was the snooker room. Cue trees, scoring rails, and a curved bar in the corner with four steel-and-leather stools for you to roost on.

"Amazing business. That thing weighs a third of a ton. They had to reinforce the floor.They came through the skylight-we had cranes outside. But the real challenge," Gwyn concluded, "was getting Demi to get rid of all her shit."

Richard lost 0-3.

They had a candlelit supper of smoked salmon, quail's eggs, and potted shrimp, prepared, or unwrapped, by Pamela and served to them in the dining room. Incapable of being struck by much, at this stage, Richard was nonetheless struck by her manner. You could not but be struck by it. Richard she served with cordiality; Gwyn, with melodramatic unceremoniousness.

"What's wrong with her? I mean apart from being your girlfriend. Is anything else the matter?"

"Not really. It's just that I'm getting on wonderfully well with Demi these days. And Audra Christenberry's in town." A door slammed somewhere. Gwyn flicked his napkin onto the table. "I suppose I'd better go and sort it out."

This took fifty-five minutes. Richard passed the time smoking and drinking. He had his hands full with that: with drinking and with smoking. When Gwyn reappeared in the doorway and made a gesture with his head, Richard said ordinarily,

"What about this??

He opened his hands over the dining table. He meant the soiled plates, the leftovers, the inevitable decomposition .. .

"Pamela'll get it."

But before she did that she brought them coffee and brandy-in the octagonal library, as they settled over the board-and lingered to plump Gwyn's cushions and assist him in the ignition of his cigar. All this she did with an air both secretive and devout. Richard kept his eyes on the pieces he was assembling. These pieces, with their divine heaviness. Even the pawns responded greedily to gravity; and you could feel their affinity with the center of the earth.

The door closed. They were alone. Gwyn said:

"Adolescence is the best. I'm glad I left it this late. It's the tops. Can you remember-all that sexual loneliness? Lying in a single bed, thinking: there must be a million women out there, feeling like me. Sexually lonely. Nothing really changes. Even Tolstoy thought that. Time happens to your body. But not to your head. You're still looking out of a window watching them all go by. I'm still fifteen. But there are differences. They aren't out there anymore. They're in here. Or they're on the preselect of my mobile phone. Audra Christenberry. Gal Aplanalp. Hey, I've switched. I'm with Mercedes Soroya. You were right. Gal's list is so tacky. Novels by couturiers. Novels by synchronized swimmers. And Mercedes. Man. You could just drown in those eyes. Guess what. Gal had a crush on you, way back. When we were kids. You know, I really lucked out, marrying a Catholic. They can't get away. Ah. E4. Wait.. J'adoube."

"Resign," sighed Richard, for the second time in half an hour.

He went on staring at the board. It wasn't anything Gwyn had done, particularly. The chess just followed from everything else.

This was his last shot. "You remember that weird little sister I brought round to see you-Belladonna?" He waited, with his head down. "What happened?"

"That would be telling now, wouldn't it." "Naturally." He waited. "You didn't fuck her, did you?" "Are you out of your mind? Or do you just think / am? A little spook like that. And someone of my visibility. All she's got to do is drop ten pee into a phone box. And tell Reuter's I raped her or got her pregnant. I need that. Not to mention the risk of disease."

On the whole Richard felt quite impressed by himself. His disappointment was mild.

"Come on" said Gwyn.

"Yeah. Well."

"No. I just let her give me a blow job."

Gwyn's face was open, was declarative: the face of a man keen to transmit information clearly. He said, "After she'd taken her clothes off and done a little dance. She asked me what my favorite was. And I told her. It was pretty amazing actually. You know when they're actually down there-one thing it does is shut them up. For the time being. But not her. She took it out every ten seconds to say something. Me on TV Her on TV. Holding it there, like a mike. It was kind of brilliant because it meant it lasted about two hours. Very skilled she was. Very noisy all round. I bet you think you're going to put all this in your piece. But you won't. You won't."

"Not Belladonna. I'm not sure but I think … Deadly nightshade. I think she's got it."

"It?" Gwyn considered. "I'm not surprised. Going round doing everyone's favorite all day."

… The way the white pieces were configured, like a hairline, and the squares drifting in his milky gaze: the board resembled the image of a face, on TV; the smeared cubes of some wrongdoer, some child-murderer, pixelated-the face of Steve Cousins. As in the first game the position was far from conclusive. But the chess just followed from everything else.

"It's late."

They stood up. Suddenly and startlingly Gwyn turned and seized Richard by the shoulders. What was this? More adolescence? With an expression of primitive alarm, Gwyn said,

"You didn't fuck her, did you?"

"Who? No."

And they sagged together, over the chessboard.

Richard said, "I'm touched . . . It's strange. Whatever happens, we balance each other out. We're like Henchard and Farfrae. You're part of me and I'm part of you."

"You know something? I understand exactly what you're saying. And I couldn't disagree more."

With a gesture at the chessmen Richard said, "It's a blip." And he meant the whole day. "I'll be back. I'll get you next time."

"I think not. I think there just won't be a next time. I think we've got to

the end of one another, This'll do me, It's a wrap."

He walked home. In Calchalk Street, as he approached, he looked toward the rooftop. Two of the half-dozen stars that still shine on Lon-don (sufficiently fat or proximate) were burning; but no lights were burning at 49E. He went up the stairs, past the bikes. In the kitchen he drank a glass of water, a glass of milk, and a glass of sweet vermouth. With his head sticking out of his study window he smoked a final cigarette. Then he sat there, listening: no noises you could go ahead and locate. But the place was subtly unsilent.

He went out into the passage . .. Nothing. Just the boys. He could hear them writhing and whispering away in there. And this was very bad: Marco was supposed to be ill. Richard entered, and told them what time it was. They countered with a demand for a story-the new kind of story he had, he thought, unwisely introduced them to. Twins stories: stories in which the twins personally appeared-and invariably distinguished themselves for their ingenuity and valor. He felt uneasy as he told these tales (Marius suddenly realized. It was Marco who), while the boys lay on their backs, clutching their boyhoods, with drugged eyes. No story, he said. But he told them one anyway. In which they bravely rescued their daddy-rescued him, then tended to his wounds.

He leaned back against the cold outer wall and the window frame. And he thought: the Man in the Moon looks younger every year. It used to be a joke face he wore: a clown face. No longer. He looks pretty mainstream now, like a contemporary: I know people as fat-cheeked, people as pale, people as bald. He looks like me. His face used to smile. Now it pleads. He's sorry-about how he looks. When I'm old, that face will pout. And the Man in the Moon will look like a baby-like the god of babies.

Why cars? Why stars? Why pounds and pence? Why fog, why clouds? Why cold and gold, why dust and rust? Why tramps and vamps and dukes and nukes, why fucks and fights? Why planes? Why trains? Why jobs? Why nickel and dime? Why time? Why mire? Why fire?

I will arise … I will arise and go now, to the callbox, with a suitcase. A phonecall will I make there. Who to? Balfour? R. C. Squires? Keith Horridge? Gwyn, his oldest-his only-friend: Gwyn had never been a candidate. Ever. Richard realized that it had always been Anstice at the end of the line (waiting, in her urban bird's nest with its dust and trinkets, and ever eggless), but Anstice was already dead.

He turned away from the window. The twins were asleep. More than asleep. They looked like figures on a battlefield, arrested, abandoned. They too looked already dead … Richard didn't want to be telling them these stories; these stories about themselves. They were bad for the boys. They reminded him of pornography.

But pornography was surveillance on the act of love.

If he had climbed into his weepship and reared up over Calchalk Street, over Westway and its speed checks and electric eyes, and come on down over Windsor Court, and moved past night porter and night camera and tracked the cable to the apartment-to the Club World-of Steve Cousins …

"I have no words for him," said Steve. "As for him, I have no words."

He sat naked in his black leather chair, finding out what he wanted to hurt. He was conducing surveillance on pornography, which was itself surveillance on the act of love. He was watching others watching others. And it was all up in the air: because if what you were seeing didn't remind you of something, then you really shouldn't be watching it. You really shouldn't be watching.

Pornography, which could wear down the brake linings, releasing you forward . . .

This was so important to him: that he chose to do what he did. Others thought they had chosen-chosen, for instance, a life of crime-just by the hangdog repetition of a hangdog cliche. "You're on your own in this world." "Nobody's going to look out for you in this life"-in this life of crime. But they didn't choose it. It chose them.

What you never wanted to do was fit the profile. You never wanted to be put together like that. No, he wasn't abused by his father. Yes, he had tortured animals as a child. No, he was not in the habit of recording his illicit actions on camera or camcorder. Lifelong hypochondriac: yes. Latent homosexual: no. Stay clear of the profile and work from left field. Left field: the obstetrics nurse who takes to smothering newborns; the millionaire who sends his daughter's ear to the house of the known kidnapper.

Although he believed it contained the information he sought, Steve hadn't found it in pornography. Pornography of the visible spectrum: the red, orange, yellow, the green, the blue, indigo, violet. Boy-and-girl or girl-and-girl and boy-and-boy: this hadn't told him what he wanted to hurt. But tonight he found it. He was ready.

And it came from nowhere-from left field. He wasn't one of those people who watched things and then went out and did them.

Steve sat there naked on the black armchair. Unfolding before his eyes was something completely average. American, hard-core but heavily and vandalously edited. Called?… Called Test Tube Babes. According to the story, the women in it were one minute old. Made by the men, scientists: to their own specifications. They mixed the DNA in a test tube. Then under the microwave or whatever. And then they were born. Withbig hair and big jewelry, tattooed and tit-jobbed, ankle-chained and nipple-ringed-and one minute old. The inter-sex sections were meant to be funny. Reminding whoever was watching that the people in pornography had no sense of humor. It was a necessary condition. Absolutely everyone in pornography was absolutely humorless. Steve never quite got this.

Test Tube Babes. He was about four fucks in when it happened. Scientists and scientist's creation: they're on the lab floor, just finishing up. And a kitten wanders in. They're on the floor, covered in sweat, and a kitten wanders in. Actor smiled, and actress smiled back: the kind of smiles that expressed full confidence of mutual forgiveness. And the kitten (ginger. Do they call it tortoiseshell?) just tiptoes in between them, curiously, with one back paw raised in exquisite tentativeness-having no idea, being an animal, of the prevailing reality. The ergonomic reality. And Steve knew what he wanted to hurt.

It made him do something he couldn't remember having done before-maybe he'd done it long ago, when he was one minute old. He tried to cry. Kittens taken from the newborn litter and kept all alone are immune to the pain of fire and will stand there with their whiskers crackling as the flames come ever nearer. He didn't have the lungs, he didn't have the ducts; the cobbled muscles of his naked belly-each of them hardened and bulged. But it didn't work out.

What he wanted to hurt had something to do with himself. Not himself now. But himself. Himself then.

He raised a hand to his eyes. "They're doing me all over the gaff," he said, just to delay it a moment or two. "They're doing me all over the gaff," he said, just to buy a little time.

It was spring: the season of comedy.

In comedy, in the end, all is forgiven. All obstacles are surmounted, all misunderstandings resolved. Everyone is gathered into the festive conclusion. Warped schemers, incorrigible pedants: they are banished. And everyone attends the nuptials of hope.

But we haven't had much luck with our seasons. Not yet, anyway. We did satire in summer, and comedy in autumn, and romance in winter.

And this was spring. The season of comedy.

But comedy has two opposites; and tragedy, fortunately, is only one of them. Never fear. You are in safe hands. Decorum will be strictly observed.

Marco Tull hurried down the Portobello Road, hand in hand with Lizzete. Unless he was being directly entertained, Marco, on the street, always wore a leer of settled skepticism. You could see his two-sized upper teeth, anxiously yet resignedly bared. He didn't seem frightened so much as overloaded: too many lines of inquiry, too many sense impressions, too many narratives to pursue and complete. Today was Friday: the end of a week of mild illness. Lizzete's pace was brisk. To keep up, Marco didn't jog or trot but walked and ran, walked and ran.

They approached PriceSlash. This was the first shop Lizzete aimed to visit. Gina had called her up the night before. Friday was her day off and she wanted a little peace: a working mum. She offered Lizzete the usual truancy bonus as well as the flat rate for three hours with Marco. But Lizzete was planning to play hooky anyhow, and get some shopping done.The truancy bonus she had fair-mindedly waived. She looked down at him. He looked up at her. She said, "All right? You've got a Megabar coming your way." 13 was watching them from the confines of the orange van, which was currently impeding access to Lancaster Road. He looked completely sick. Not like he looked after a night at the Paradox or on the M25. Being black, he couldn't look green, or gray, or white as a ghost. He just looked completely sick.

"PriceSlash is it."

Steve Cousins said, "There's this mouse driving through the jungle in his Porsche. Hears this cry of Help! and pulls up by this pit. Gets out of the Porsche, looks down-there's this fucking great gorilla. Trapped in this pit. 'I'm trapped, mate. Can you help me out?'

"So the mouse grabs a-grabs this vine. He slings one end down the pit and ties the other to the tow-hook on his Porsche. 'Hold on tight.' He jumps in the Porsche and starts revving. And sure enough. Bit by bit … Hello? I said hello? Are you with me?"

"With the Porsche or whatever," said 13. He looked completely sick.

" 'Thanks a million, mate,' says the gorilla. 'I'll do the same for you one day. Shake.'… Five years later the gorilla is walking through the- through the prairie. And he hears this little cry. Help! Help! There's this pit. He looks down. It's the mouse! 'Where's the Porsche? Don't worry. We'll soon have you out of there.' And the mouse goes, 'How, mate? There's no vines round here.' And the gorilla says, 'It's okay. I'll use me cock.' So he slings his cock down the pit and the mouse scampers up it. And he's free."

Steve waited. He said, "Don't you want to hear the moral?"

"Uh?"

"And the moral of the story is: If you've got a big cock, you don't need a Porsche. Park in Basing Street. In the garage that went bust. Do it."

Marco's father was fifty yards away, in Kensington Park Road. He shook his glass like a maraca at the waiter and said, to Rory Plantagenet,

"Stumbling on Melons, by Thad Green. It came in a plain brown envelope. London postmark. No covering letter. Copyright 1954. I didn't even look at it for a couple of days. And when I did I just thought wow."

"I can't understand," said Rory, "why they put us downstairs."

"Plot, characters, location. He's changed some of the names of course. There are whole pages that are word for word."

"It's too dark down here. And there's a kind of pissoir smell. Can you smell it? Sorry. Go on. Waiter!"

Rory Plantagenet wasn't his pen name. It was his real name. And it suited him. He looked cornily patrician. And altogether vestigial. A generation ago he would have been living in Cap d'Antibes with a mature ladyfriend called something like Christabel Cambridgeshire. He and Richard were schoolfriends, or schoolfellows. For several years they had simultaneously attended the worst and most paranoid public school in the British Isles.

"The thing with plagiarism is," said Richard, "-it always comes out. It's just a matter of time. And that's why I came to you. You know what a novel is. And how much a novel can matter."

This was news to Rory Plantagenet. Agreeable news, on the whole. He was Richard's age. After nights out during which he had attended three or more parties, Rory often found himself wondering about his place in the larger scheme of things.

Richard said, "I want to control all this. Damage limitation. The one / feel sorry for," he added, briefly pondering the wisdom of that third gin-and-tonic, "is Lady Demi. Considering everything else she has to put up with."

"Women?"

"Don't ask me. Ask Audra Christenberry. Ask Mercedes Soroya. You know he even has a … But that's another story. Look. The last thing I want to do is make this any worse for Gwyn than it has to be. He's my oldest friend for Christ's sake. I fucking love the guy."

Marco's godfather, and the object of Richard's love, was also but a block distant. Gwyn was walking west up Ladbroke Grove. He had not informed Phil of this excursion. Actually, it wouldn't have been Phil anyway, so early in the afternoon. It would have been Simon. Boldly he walked on, past the tube station, past Mick's Fish Bar, past Westway. If anything was going to happen, it would surely happen under Westway. That black cavity, where the very walls and pillars were drenched in eel juice and snake's hiss, and tattooed with graffiti. If something was going to happen, it would surely happen under Westway. But nothing was going to happen. Gwyn was clear.

The night before, Phil had told him, in the kitchen (Simon and Jake were also present, tacit, collusive, sloped over their Gold Blends), that all this "nonsense," all this recent "rubbish," all this "silly-buggers," would presently be "sorted." Presently: like tomorrow. "Who is he?" said Gwyn. "What are you going to do about him?" From Phil, a quick shake of the head and a downward glance; but Jake, without raising his crushed, Rugby League face from his coffee mug, simply said, "\bu don't want to know." And Gywn didn't want to know. Gwyn was clear. The universe loved him again. He was clear. He walked on.

When he reached the turning into Calchalk Street he paused and then entered the Adam and Eve. His expression was timid, tolerant, with anthropologist's protuberance of eye. And his voice sounded more Welsh than usual when he ordered his drink . .. Barry would often strollthe streets and sit in simple. Sit in rude. Sit in simple. Sit in unpretentious pubs enjoying a "jar" with the common. With ordinary. With the. Just like anybody else . . .

Gwyn confirmed the presence of his wallet with the inside of his wrist and then glanced masterfully at his watch.

In PriceSlash children on tautened reins pressed ahead of their guardians: little rickshaw runners, leading the way to the millennium.

To save money, or because the shops had all sold out, many parents had improvised with washing-line cord and roof-rack grapplewire. These children had enemies and these enemies were everywhere and everyone. Marco was not on reins. Lizzete usually kept a hand lightly resting on his hair. And Marco liked to grip you: by the waistband, by the jacket pocket.

Lizzete was singing a song as they moved up and down the strip-lit canyons of PriceSlash. At present they were in the domestic-hygiene section with its plastic and polythene and all the colors associated with the spick and span.

13 was across the street, in Ultraverse. Ultraverse sold second-hand comics: X-Man and She-Hulk, Count Zero and RoboBabe. Donnama-trix meets Dr. Strange.

"I'm dead," he whispered, and steadied himself against a comic rack. Aquavixen v. Animalman. "I'm dead."

He reckoned he was dead ten times over. Crash would kill him for this but not today and not tomorrow. Crash wouldn't kill him today because Crash was in bed eating hospital food. Even as things stood, Crash wouldn't speak to 13 or even glance his way. All 13 knew was that three men had done his brother, wanting information. It was Grievous Bodily Harm, no argument, as opposed to Actual. In his bed at St. Mary's, Crash seemed to be contemplating the letter G. Grief was what he seemed to be full of. His eyes didn't blink. They stared inward with childish and narcotic melancholy-staring at the grief of his wounds.

On top of everything else 13 had parked Giro in Crash's flat in Keith Grove. Pining, and scratching the doors.

Grendel and Cerebus, Venom and Magma. 13 looked through the dark glass of Ultraverse, across the market street: PriceSlash. As instructed, he had left the orange van in the yard of the dead garage in Basing Street.

"Who is this Tad Green?" said Rory Plantagenet.

"Thad Green. Thaddeus, presumably: American. I can't find any record of him anywhere. The publisher's long defunct. Which all figures. Oh I think we can trust friend Barry to have thought this through pretty thoroughly. He's not going to claim he wrote Hamlet.''''

"It seems so out of character. From what I know."

"Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief. Taffy came to my house-"

"This isn't some kind of hoax, is it? I've got a sixth sense about these things. When I'm being used."

"I swear on my wife and kids. Come on. Don't you see how hard this is-for me? We shared rooms at Oxford. I love that fucking guy."

"Well the more I think about it, the more I think that Smatt will want to whale on this," said Rory-Smatt being the office nickname for his editor (a Cumberland cruiserweight called Sir Matthew Druitt). "It's perfect for him."

"Why, particularly?"

"Because Gwyn's Labour. And Welsh. Let's get on to the women."

When the bill had been called for Richard left the table and made for the pay phone. Rory wanted to inspect Stumbling on Melons and take it away for the weekend; he would read it, alongside Amelior, and, if everything panned out, he would splash on Monday-the same morning, the same bright dawn that would see the publication of Amelior Regained. Richard had his head bowed over a palmful of change. It was his intention to warn Gina that he would be stopping by. That afternoon he was due-was overdue-at the Tantalus Press.

He dialed his own number.

At 49 Calchalk Street, Flat E, Gina was sitting naked in the bath, her hair all gray and greased with some glutinous unguent or elixir. She stopped her ears with her forefingertips, and lay back. Only her breasts and her caligulan nose were visible in the steam.

Next door, the telephone started ringing. It rang and rang and rang. It stopped ringing.

Gina's head and torso surged up from the water.

Space-time was not on Richard's side. The universe was definitely through with him.

Gwyn came out of the Adam and Eve and walked down Calchalk Street. Although his work conjured up an idealized vision of humankind, hehimself remained. Robustly individual, he went about things in his own. No one could accuse. He always . . .

On the steps of Number 49 he rang the bell marked Tull. He waited. He looked at his watch, and at his fingernails.

"Hello?"

"It's me."

There was a silence. The buzz sounded and he went on up.

Gina was waiting by the door at the top of the stairs in her pink towel dressing gown. She said,

"Are you going to stop?"

Lizzete released Marco's hand as she stood on the street checking her change.

"Hey."

It was 13. Marco was pleased. He liked 13. And he sensed the cool of black. Lizzete was black, but she was a girl. 13 was black, but he was a boy.

"Where've you been, man?" said Lizzete.

"Angela wants you." He pointed with a bent finger, meaning: round the corner. "In the Black Cross."

Marco backed off as Lizzete flusteredly shifted her weight: Angela was her oldest sister. She transferred the shopping bag from her right hand and reached out for Marco.

"You can't take a kid in a pub. We'll wait here."

Lizzete looked hard at 13.

13 said, "Give us him."

"Now here, Gina, we encounter an ambiguity. You being from Nottingham. Am I going to stop. I love it when you say that. Am I going to stay? Or am I going to desist?"

"Well which?"

"Both. I'll stay this time, if I may. And then I'll desist. So I'll stop- and then I'll stop."

"You say that but you keep coming back. Please-desist, and don't stay. Go."

Gwyn sighed. He said, "Fine. So you don't mind me telling Richard. I wonder how I'll break it to him. Will it make it easier or harder for him, do you think, that you did it for the money??

"I didn't do it for money. I did it for revenge."

"Oh yes. Poor Anstice. I met her once. Unbelievable."

"I'm surprised he hasn't guessed already. I always told him I'd do the worst thing."

"Ah but he thinks you don't like me."

"I don't."

He turned his head away. And he actually said it. He said: "Women!" He sighed again. Then he reached for his wallet and produced four notes of high denomination. "Nevertheless money was involved. I like to think of myself as Richard's patron. Keeping his family struggling along while he completed his last and, some say, his greatest novel. What was it called?"

"Enough. Stop. Desist."

"Why do you stop? Meaning stay. I must say, these days I find his presence . . . entirely soiling. But of course you have this wonderful love life, don't you. This raging sea of hysterical sex. Why don't you just chuck him out? He'd go."

And he would go. With a suitcase, to the callbox.. . He would go quietly. One thing about Richard. She sensed all the violence, all the verbal violence, he contained. But he had never turned it on her. And she knew he never would.

"One last time," said Gwyn. "And just beauty and the beast."

It was naturally the phenomena of his own eye-level that claimed the lion's share of Marco's attention. For example, the cavernous murk beneath the stalls where an apple or a turnip might have rolled: between the gutter and the shadow-edge. The inner glisten of things under there, where he could easily go, bending in under there, where the small was better than the tall.

He looked up. He turned a full circle. 13 was gone. Immediately Marco's ears started humming at him. He wheeled and his vision wheeled, wheeled for a face to form out of the swings and roundabouts, the costumed impostors, the taffetaed dissemblers-the kings and the queens and the jacks.

A bus stood at the crossroads. Behind it, Marco's father, accompanied by his friend, walked past, continuing down Westbourne Park Road to Ladbroke Grove.

"There was this novelist," Richard was saying, "who taught a creative-writing course at Brixton Prison. He went away for six months and when he came back all the lags had written a novel each. Or transcribed a novel each. But there were only about five novels in the prison library for themto plagiarize. Three of them had done The Cruel Sea."

Rory frowned. They walked on.

"Jesus. I'd better pick up the vacuum cleaner. Do you mind? It's been there for weeks and I get hell at home."

Three days of weather were stacked in the sky. Here was today. And there was tomorrow. And over there, the day after.

"Beauty and the beast," said Gina. "And that's it. For ever."

"Amazing that women find that less intimate. Particularly when they're swallowers, like you. It always seems more intimate to me."

"Except it's got nothing to do with babies. Why don't you and Demi have a baby? It would suit you. It would shut her up."

"But it wouldn't shut the baby up."

"But it might shut you up. You need a change."

"Well I might get one whether I want it or not. Demi's changed since her dad popped off. She's chucking Pamela out. She's talking of chucking me out. She's really changed. She's dead flash. Take your dressing gown off at least."

"Quick now. I don't want you running into Lizzete on the stairs."

Gwyn stood up and took his jacket off and said, not altogether truthfully, that he would be as quick as he possibly could.

A figure stepped out between the market stalls-instantly dismissed by Marco as playing no part in Marco's world. But then Marco's world was already falling away, falling, falling through the curved heavens. That was what he could hear in his ears: the friction of the falling world.

Persisting in their address, the face and the figure came nearer.

"Marco. It's Steve, remember? I know your dad."

The face held out its hand toward him. Marco declined it. But he went on standing there, abjectly, with his neck bent. A modern child, he knew the kinds of things the world could contain: local-personal-disasters. It was like a shadow falling, but a shadow made of uneasy light. Storm light, and summer thunder.

"Marius is waiting round the corner. I want to tell you a story. Come on, I got some kittens in the back of the van."

A hand was offered again, and declined again. They started off. To keep up with his minder, and his minder's brisk stride, Marco didn't jog or trot but walked and ran, walked and ran.

"Need any help with that?"

"It's easier if one person carries it. Funnily enough."

They had drunk more wine than they were young enough to drink; and then there was the large brandy that Richard had successfully consumed while Rory settled the bill. After the thousand-yard hike through the human and mechanical effluvia of Ladbroke Grove, Richard, at least, felt intoxicated to a sordid degree. He paced up the three double flights of stairs, giving stertorous voice to his opinion that there was probably a sequel to Stumbling on Melons and Gwyn had got that off the back of Thad's lorry too .. . He fell sideways, and righted himself. The bikes on the walls, on the ceiling, seemed to strike up an assonance with the oil and metal at the back of his throat. Richard opened the clapboard door: more stairs.

"Everest," said Rory.

Richard pressed on, bouncing from wall to wall with the Hoover tube tightening its grip round his neck; and he was already thinking that suicide had much to be said for it, because life was too much fucking fetching and carrying and too much scrabbling for keys in pockets and too much going from this place to that place and then to some other fucking place …

"It'll come out," he said. "It always comes out."

And the shoe will squeak, and the door will creak.

Gwyn heard him. His body stiffened; but his body was stiffening anyway. And do you know what he did? He pressed his hands over Gina's bath-brightened ears. He pressed them good and tight.

What happens when galaxies collide? Most frequently, nothing. Stars are sparser than the conglomerations they form. Galaxy moves through galaxy. Anti-galaxy moves through anti-galaxy. There is plenty of room.

Richard is back on the street. And this story, his story, endeth here. On the street, with its opposed houses, its ranked cars-and the anti-comedy of the apple blossom loosening in the wind.

He turned. He knew that nothing in his past or his future could ever be as inimitably contemptible as the smile he had managed to rig up for Rory Plantagenet: to rig up, among the moonspots and boneshadows of his youthless face. The memory of this smile would be with him until he died; thirty years from now he would be standing there with his hands over his ears, raising his voice in a mortified yodel, trying to batten down the memory of this smile.

How much had Rory seen? He didn't know. How much had Richard seen? He didn't know. The gulping flurry of pink toweling. They had seen enough. Oh, basta . . .

"Well, as you've probably guessed," he said, "we've been leading you down the garden path."

"I don't follow you."

"Yes. Pulling the wool over your eyes." Richard shrugged and opened his hands. A negative hilarity was possessing him. The English language offered him no help-offered him nothing. "It was just a little stunt we hatched. The three of us, you see. To see how far it would go. We wasted your time. There's no story here. I'm sorry. Please forget it, Rory. Forget it. Please, Rory."

Now Gwyn chose to make his exit from 49 Calchalk Street, drooping loosely down the steps with his hands in his pockets: the feminine colors of his clothes. To Richard's eyes he looked cynically and even satanically handsome. Unforgettable, again, was the complicit rictus that Richard now laid at his feet.

"Going my way?" said Gwyn.

And Rory fell into step beside him. And Richard was alone.

As he looked down the vista into which they would soon disappear, toward Ladbroke Grove and its circus horses of traffic, Richard saw his son Marco-Marco a long way away, and on the far side of the street, butwith Marco's unmistakably brittle and defeatist stride. There was something terribly wrong with Marco: there was nobody at his side. And yet the child's solitude, his isolation, unlike his father's, was due to an unforgivable error not his own. There was always somebody at Marco's side. In all his seven years there had always been somebody at his side.

A drama, thought Richard. And a diversion: at least this will get me up the goddamned stairs. He realized that he still had the vacuum cleaner: in his arms, across his body, round his neck. Richard was still Laocoon, engulfed in coils and loops. That too he would have to tote, all the way up to 49E. That too.

Father and son started hurrying toward each other. Marco wasn't crying, but Richard had never seen him looking so unhappy: the unhappi-ness that was always made for Marco; the unhappiness that was all his own. Richard knelt, like a knight, and held him.

"Who was with you?"

Marco told him: Lizzete.

"And you were lost?"

There was a man.

"Then what happened?"

He took me to a car: for kittens.

"Then what?"

Three men came. And took him away.

"Took him where? Were they police?"

Marco shrugged.

"Did he go willingly or unwillingly?"

Marco shrugged-with out-turned palms.

"What did they say? Did anyone say anything?"

Yes. The man said, "I'm a child."

"The man said you're a child?" And Richard went back four or five years, to the natural confusions of early speech. "How are you?" he would ask him; and Marco would say, logically enough, "You're fine." And Marco would reach out to him with his arms and say, "Carry you." And Richard would pick him up and carry him . . .

No. He said I'm a child.

"But he wasn't a child."

No. He was a man.

Richard stood up. A definitive misery, having to do with unintended consequences, moved past him, tousling his hair like the backdraft of a speeding car. He turned; and now Lizzete, too, was running down Calchalk Street toward them, running stockily with her waist held low. Jesus: and here came the swine in his German car, ripping down my roadat sixty miles an hour to kill my kids. What is this guy's hurry'? Who could want him anywhere sooner than he would get there already? The cone of air with the pig in its nose-it ripped past. A snapshot of profile: the thick skin (two-layered, like the vest beneath his shirt), the pale eyebrows, the plump slobber of the underlip. Richard stood wavering, his hair roughly tousled by the backdraft of the German car.

In its wake, also, crept the tublike orange van, with its limp cream curtains, and 13 slumped flaccid at its wheel. "Yes" he managed to say (it was pure sibilant: Sssss) when he saw the three of them standing there. Relief and even rapture were shoving their way through a sepsis of distress. It had hit him as he stared through the gap in the back gate of the dead garage: Them was the same fucking blokes that did Crash. Telling little Marco to run along or piss off. And Adolf saying, What's this then? What's this then, lads? Adolf knew what it was: it was a lesson. Compared to you lot-compared to you, I'm a child. I'm a child … 13 was free. He crept past in the orange van. He didn't want them to see him. He never wanted their fire of eyes.

Marco wasn't crying. But Lizzete was. And so was Richard. In the peripheries of his mind he was already rewriting his Profile (It's not often. Clash the, roll out the, raise high the. Hats off to) and working on a way of forgiving Gina. A form of words. Because if he forgave her, she could never leave him now. Who was he? Who had he been throughout? Who would he always be? He was Abel Janszoon Tasman (1603-59): the Dutch explorer who discovered Tasmania without noticing Australia . . .

All the rumors of wind, which had until then been anarchic, like all the backdrafts of London come together, like all the car alarms of London (the Blitz which each of us suffers alone)-all the rumors of wind now gathered themselves, in riptide. More a breath sucked in than a breath expelled, up the street it hastened, shaking the trees until their teeth rattled and their pretty hair fell out. Soon the apple blossoms were everywhere, as an element.

And that was the blossoms gone for another year. But for a little while longer they flew in festive and hysterical profusion, as if all the trees were suddenly getting married.

The Man in the Moon is getting younger every year. Your watch knows

exactly what time is doing to you: tsk, tsk, it says, every second of every day. Every morning we leave more in the bed, more of ourselves, as our bodies make their own preparations for reunion with the cosmos.

Beware the aged critic with his hair of winebar sawdust. Beware the nun and the witchy buckles of her shoes. Beware the man at the callbox, with the suitcase: this man is you. The planesaw whines, whining for its planesaw mummy. And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night.