MARTIN AMIS - THE INFORMATION

Essentially Richard was a marooned modernist. If prompted, Gwyn Barry would probably agree with Herman Melville: that the art lay in pleasing the readers. Modernism was a brief divagation into difficulty; but Richard was still out there, in difficulty. He didn't want to please the readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged. Aforethought was first person, Dreams Don't Mean Anything strictly localized third; both nameless, the I and the he were author surrogates and the novels comprised their more or less uninterrupted and indistinguishable monologues interieurs. Untitled, with its octuple time scheme and its rotating crew of sixteen unreliable narrators, sounded like a departure, but it wasn't. As before, all you had was a voice. This was the basket that contained all the eggs. And the voice was urban, erotic and erudite … Although his prose was talented, he wasn't trying to write talent novels. He was trying to write genius novels, like Joyce. Joyce was the best yet at genius novels, and even he was a drag about half the time. Richard, arguably, was a drag all the time. If you had to settle on a one-word description of his stuff then you would almost certainly make do with unreadable. Unfitted, for now, remained unread, but no one had ever willingly finished its predecessors. Richard was too proud and too lazy and--in a way-too clever and too nuts to write talent novels. For instance, the thought of getting a character out of the house and across town to somewhere else made him go vague with exhaustion …

He reached a corner. Wroxhall Parade? Across the road was a wired children's playground populated not by children (note the silence) but by menacingly sober old drunks, behind seesaw, behind jungle-gym, between swings and roundabouts. Would New York be like this? On his way here Richard had noticed all the speed bumps. Sleeping policemen were the only kind of policemen you would find in such a land, a land of stay-away and no-go. Richard walked past yet another scorched mattress. Revelation would come, hereabouts, in the form of the mattress-fire . . . Richard continued to write about this world but he hadn't

actually walked around in it for six or seven years. All he did, nowadays, with this world, was drive through it, in the vermilion Maestro.

As he made towards the given address, and identified it, he paused and turned and gave his surroundings one last dutiful sweep of the eyes. The pale wire, the brutalist hairdos of the lopped trees. Poverty said the same thing, century after century, but in different kinds of sentences. The sentences spoken by what confronted him here would be short sentences, rich in nothing but solecism and profanity. Now how did this tie in with the mangled syllogism, arrived at ten hours earlier over a cup of tea and a stupefied cigarette, following the usual failure with Gina. Going something like:

A. Gwyn's trex was loved by the world; his trex was universal.

B. The world loved trex; the world was trex.

C. Better use the world, in that case; better have Gwyn picked on by

something his own size . ..

No need for Richard to knock himself out, humping the Los Angeles Times all over town. Or seeking the hospitality of the pages of The Little Magazine for that gory "middle" he was forever rehearsing in his mind. Literature couldn't do it. The world could fucking do it… As Richard climbed the steps, the supposedly superseded notion of paying money to get Gwyn beaten up returned to him with all the freshness of discovery.

As promised, the front door was unlatched ("I guarantee it," Darko had said). Steadying himself in the hall Richard heard the sound of a sander or a plane-saw: a plane-saw whining for its plane-saw mummy. It was the noise of dental pain: it was the noise of pain. The weak link is you, Steve Cousins had said, in the Canal Creperie. If we do this, he had said, the weak link is you. If someone leaned on you-you'd break. People don't know pain and fear, he had said, I know pain and fear. Pain and fear are my friends. I'm watertight. The weak link is you . . . Richard had always thought that he knew pain and fear; but he didn't-not yet. Pain and fear were waiting for him, as they waited for everyone. A whole hospice of pain and fear, patiently waiting.

He knocked on the first inner door he came to. Darko opened it. A Transylvanian confrontation, just for a second: Darko's eyes were redder than his red hair, redder than the Maestro. He looked Richard up and down, and said, as if identifying him by name, "Charisma bypass." Very soon they were standing in a room roughly the size of a tennis court and filled with furniture that might have come from anywhere or even everywhere: from the SCRs of provincial sociology departments, from business hotels, from schoolrooms, from barracks.

Turning, Richard said boldly, "Where are you from, Darko? Originally."

"From the place I still call Yugoslavia.?

Darko was standing in the middle of the room's kitchen district and staring down at some kind of foodstuff splayed on a plate. Now he looked up, and smiled. Long upper lip with a feathery mustache on it; long upper gum, also gingery in hue.

"Are you Serb or Croat? Out of interest."

"I don't accept that distinction."

"Yes. Well. There isn't any ethnic distinction, is there. Just religion. Nothing visible." On the mantelpiece Richard thought he saw a devotional knickknack or icon, lit from within by a bulb the shape of a closed tulip; it was the Virgin Mary (he sensed), but travestied, with joke breasts outthrust like the figure of a redoubtable maiden on a ship's prow. "Isn't there some big deal about the sequence of making the sign of the cross? In the war, in the world war, Croat soldiers rounded up children and got them to make the sign of the cross. To see which way they did it. To see if they lived or died."

This was obviously news to Darko: fresh information. Richard tried to relax himself with the following thought: that nowadays, in a sense, you could know more about a stranger than the stranger knew about himself. Recently he had involved himself in an argument on his doorstep with a proselytizing Mormon (soon to be sent on his way with a taunt) who had never heard of Moroni: Moroni, the nineteenth-century American angel, the Messiah of the wild-goose chase in whose name the bearded ranter trudged from house to house. Big clue, that: Moroni. Moron with an i on the end of it. Moronic without the c.

Darko said, "I believe that everyone is a human being."

"I buy that too. Belladonna, I take it, is a human being. I mean I assume she exists. Where is she?"

"Getting dressed. Getting undressed. What's the diff? Now what do I do with this cholesterol bomb?"

He gestured at the dish and what it contained. The dish glowed back up at him like the palette of a busy artist: some modern primitive who worked in pastels.

"Bung it in the fucking MW," Darko decided.

MW equaled microwave. That was good. The word had fewer syllables than its abbreviation. Especially good, especially self-defeating, because the microwave was a device intended to cheat time. Anyway Darko had already heated it, and was already eating it-his mango pizza or pomegranate rissole-with both hands… On a video he'd hired and admired, Richard remembered the motorist hero referring to his FWD, or four-wheel drive. One might add that there are certain frolicsome cosmologists who refer to "the WYSIWYG universe," or "What You See Is What You Get." To be fair, this isn't an abbreviation but an acronym. They don't actually stand there and say Double-U-Why-Ess-Eye-Double-U-Why-Gee. They stand there and say Wysiwig. Those assholes. Whom we ask to do the job of wondering how we're here. The wysiwyg universe is the one in which dark matter, the overarching shadow comprising perhaps 97 percent of universal mass, remains unexotic, the usual proton-neutron-electron arrangement, just planets, possibly, bigger than Jupiter but not big enough to shine, "massive compact halo objects," known (what is it with these guys?) as MACHOS. What is it with these guys? The "free lunch" universe. The "designer" universe. The "charisma bypass" universe? Sending their minds back eighteen billion years, they reach for catchphrases that were getting old eighteen months ago.