THE INFORMATION

on the money: contrivance, slow revenge, seduction-the undermining of innocence and Eden.

My sentence is for open war . . . That sentence was awfully good. When writers hate, it all comes down to something very simple. His word against mine.

This whole thing is a crisis. The whole mess is a crisis of the middle years.

Every father knows the loathed park and playground in the unmoving air of Sunday morning (every mother knows it Friday evening, Tuesday afternoon-every other time), the slides and seesaws and climbing-frames like a pictogram of inanity. The fathers on the edges of benches, or strolling, or bending and peering: this is their watch. They exchange slow nods of resignation and hear the wall of childish sound from which no sense is detachable: its twangs and pops and whipcracks.

I was there in the fog. The fog was sorry about it-the fog was wretched about the whole thing. Like the fathers the fog had nowhere else to go. Ancient and stupid, but equipped with new chemical elements and contributions, the fog loomed and idled, hoping it wasn't in the way.

Here I found a reversal of the more familiar protocol: no adult was allowed into the playground unless accompanied by a child. The playground was therefore maniac-free, murderer-free. You were not a murderer. Your child was the living guarantee that you were not a murderer.

A little boy approached me-not one of my own. And he made a sign. Keeping a humorous distance, he made a sign: the two forefingers in the shape of a T. Deaf-and-dumb kid, I thought, and felt my face widen with the unsurprised tolerance I automatically wanted it to have. My look was so tolerant it didn't even look tolerant: just open. T. Wasn't that deaf-and-dumb for the'? Wait. He was doing another one now, and another. Wasn't the circle, the O, deaf-and-dumb for nothing? I found that my head was intensely inclined toward him, that I was suddenly braced for revelation, frowning, essaying, as if the boy could tell me something I really might need to know.

Because I know so little. Because I need information from any source.

'Tom,' he said. 'It's my name.'

And I made the Sips-the M, the A-with my strange and' twisted fingers, thinking: how can I ever play the omniscient, the all-knowing, when I don't know anything? When I can't read childish capitals in the apologetic fog.

I wrote those words five years ago, when I was Richard's age. Even then I knew that Richard didn't look as bad as he thought he looked. Not yet. If he did, then someone, surely, a woman or a child-Gina, Demi, Anstice, Lizzete, Marius, Marco-would take his hand and lead him to somewhere nice and soft and white, kindly whispering to his gasps for breath. Intimations of monstrousness are common, are perhaps universal, in early middle age. But when Richard looked in the mirror he was looking for something that was no longer there.

It might help if we knew where we lived. Each of us, after all, has the same address. Every child has memorized it. It goes something like.

This or That Number, This or That Street, This or That Conurbation, This or That County, This or That Country, This or That Continent, This or That Hemisphere, The Earth, The Superior Planets, The Solar System, Nr. Alpha Centauri, The Orion Spur, The Milky Way, The Local Group, The Local Cluster, The Local Supercluster, The Universe,

This Universe. The One Containing: The Local Supercluster, The Local Cluster, And So On. All the Way Back To: This or That Street, And This or That Number.

It might help if we knew where we were going, and how fast.

The Earth revolves at half a kilometer per second. The Earth orbits the Sun at thirty kilometers per second. The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way at 300 kilometers per second.

The Milky Way is traveling in the general direction of Virgo at 300 kilometers per second.

Astronomically, everything is always getting further away from everything else.

It might help if we knew what we were made of, how we keep going and what we will return to.

Everything before your eyes-the paper and the ink, these words, and your eyes themselves-was made in stars: in stars that explode when they die.

More proximately we are warmed and hatched and raised by a steady-state H- bomb, our yellow dwarf: a second-generation star on the main sequence.

When we die, our bodies will eventually go back where they came from: to a dying star, our own, five billion years from now, some time around the year 5,000,001,995.

It might help if we knew all this. It might help if we felt all this.

Absolutely unquestionably, the universe is high style.

And what are we?Flat-earthers. Richard's opening move, in his plan to ruin Gwyn's life, was not calculated to be in itself decisive, or even dramatic. On the other hand it did demand from Richard a great deal of trouble and expense-and internal wear. All these phone calls and stunned crosstown journeys and talentless grapplings with brown paper and string. Whether Richard had any talent for fictional prose remained arguable, perhaps; but he was definitely no good at all with brown paper and string. Nonetheless, he was decided. He even raised his chin for a moment in simple heroism. His nostrils widened. Richard Tull had resolved to send Gwyn Barry a copy of the Sunday New York Times. With a note. And that was all.

He was quite clear about it in his own mind …

'Daddy? Are you bold?'

'I sometimes like to think so, yes, Marco.'

'Will you always be bold?'

'Despite the ills that await life's balm, Marco, though made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, to strive, to seek-'

'Have you always been bold? How did you get bold?'

Richard closed his eyes. He dropped his pen on to the desktop and said, 'You mean bald. Go elsewhere, Marco.'

The child remained. He went on gazing at his father's hair. 'Have you got male-pattern boldness?'

'I suppose so. I suppose that's the kind I've got.'

'When did you start to be bold?'

'Go elsewhere, Marco. Go and play in the traffic. I'm trying to work.'

He was quite clear about it in his own mind . . . Richard sat at his desk; he had just put Unfitted away for the morning, after completing an hysterically fluent passage of tautly leashed prose, and was now assembling his notes (which were widely dispersed) for a review of The Soul's Dark Cottage: A Life of Edmund Waller. Even Richard's book-reviewing career, unusually, described a tidy downward curve, like the bedside graph of an open-and-shut moribund. He had started off with fiction

and poetry; then fiction; then American fiction (his specialty and passion). Things began going wrong when they steered him on to South American fiction: an interminable succession, it seemed, of flowery thousand-pagers about sheep-dips or coconut shies. Then biographies.

Then more biographies. Like most young reviewers, Richard had come in hard. But instead of getting softer, more catholic, more forgiving (heading toward elderly impartiality and, beyond that, journey's end: a gurgling stupor of satisfaction with everything written), Richard had just got harder. There were personal reasons for this, of course, which everyone eventually sensed. As a reviewer he wrote forcefully-he had an individual voice and an individual memory. But he subscribed to the view of the Critic as Bouncer. Only geniuses were allowed in Richard's speakeasy. And the real trouble with all those novels he was sent was that they were published. And his weren't. . . Richard leaned back: he was achieving the difficult feat of