MARTIN AMIS - THE INFORMATION

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 felt light. 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.