THE INFORMATION

pride.

I quite agree. What an asshole.

Gal's right. Nothing ever happens to novelists. Except-this.

They are born. They get sick, they get well, they hang around the inkwell. They leave home, with their stuff in a hired van. They learn to drive, unlike poets (poets don't drive. Never trust a poet who can drive. Never trust a poet at the wheel. If he can drive, distrust the poems). They get married in registry offices. They have children in hospitals-the ordinary miracle. Their parents die-the ordinary disaster. They get divorced or they don't. Their children leave home, learn to drive, get married, have children. They grow old. So nothing ever happens to them, except the universal.

With so many literary biographies down him, Richard knew this perfectly well. Confirmation came seasonally, every April and September, when he sneered his way through the color supplements and met the novelists' tremulous stares-sitting on their sofas or their garden benches. And doing fuck-all.

Although they don't or can't drive, poets get around more. William Davenant certainly took his chances: 'He got a terrible clap of a black handsome wench that lay in Axe-yard . . . which cost him his nose.' And Johnson's Life of Savage-bastardy, adultery, the fatal tavern brawl, the sentence of execution-describes a savage life: it reads like a revenger's tragedy that really happened. In mitigation, it should be said that an asshole is not the same thing as an arsehole. An Atlantic divides them. Weare all assholes some of the time, but an arsehole is an arsehole all of the time. What was Richard? He was a revenger, in what was probably intended to be a comedy.

When Gwyn said, of the Profundity Requital, that the money was 'ridiculous,' Richard took him to mean that the money was derisory. But it wasn't derisory. It was ridiculous. And you got it every year.

Richard, unsurprisingly, was to be found at his desk, on which, along with pp. 1-432 of Untitledand many sloping stacks of assorted trex, three items were prominently displayed: a minutes-style letter from Gal Aplanalp; a bourgeois tabloid, staked open on the Rory Plantagenet page; and a third scrawled note from 'Darko'-Belladonna's backer or abettor. Richard was making a connection.

He reread:

To recap: the itinerary is New York, Washington, Miami, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Boston, New York.

Denver. Why Denver? He reread:

. . . awarded annually, in perpetuity. The three judges are Lucy Cabretti, the Washington-based feminist critic, poet and novelist, Elsa Oughton, who lives and works in Boston, and Stanwyck Mills, author and Sue and Ron L. Summerdale Professor of Law at the University of Denver.

Richard sat back, nodding. He reread:

Whats the secret. Come on. Or is it all just the hipe. Belladonna is good at secrets. She can get any thing out of anyone, that one. Thats' why Gwyn Loves Belladonna. Its not too late for that 'jar.'

What interested Richard here, naturally, was the bit about Gwyn loving Belladonna. Even in Darko's world-with its sense of futile toil-love might mean something. It might mean vulnerability. Gwyn Loves Belladonna would look pretty interesting even if you saw it carved on the trunk of a lumpen evergreen in Dogshit Park or smeared in spray paint on the gray flank of the flyover. But given who Gwyn was and whoever the hell Belladonna might be: this was a matter of broad-of tabloid- interest. Gwyn Loves Belladonna would look even better as a headline, positioned directly beneath the compromised and epicene features of Rory Plantagenet. Undermining or destroying Gwyn's marriage seemed broadly attractive but also clumsily wide of the mark, just as a physicalattack on his person would surely never rise above the gruesomely approximate. Richard didn't want to single out Gwyn's life, which came a poor second to what he really hated. Still, if he had to make do with Gwyn's marriage, he would make do with Gwyn's marriage. If he had to make do with Gwyn's life, he would make do with Gwyn's life.

'Hello. Is Darko there please? Sure. Yes, this is uh, Richard Tull.' Richard was Richard's name and there was nothing you could do to it: Rich and Richie were out for obvious reasons, and he had never liked Rick, and bad things had happened to Dick. 'No, I'll wait … Darko? Hi. This is Richard Tull.'

There was a silence. Then the voice said, 'Who?'

'Richard Tull. The writer.'

'… What's the name again?'

'Christ. You're Darko, right? You wrote to me. Three times. Richard Tall.'

'Got it. Got it. Sorry uh, Richard. I'm half asleep.'

'I know the feeling.'

'Still in a daze. I got to get myself sorted out,' said the voice, as if suddenly and worriedly considering something more long-term.

'Happens to the best of us.'

'… Anyway: what you want?'

'What do / want? I want to hang up. But let's go another half-mile. I want to have a word with this girl you mentioned. Belladonna.'

'She can't come to the phone.'

'No, not now.'

'Belladonna, she does what she fucking well likes. Yep. She pleases herself, I reckon.'

'Why don't the three of us get together some time?'

'… Nothing simpler.'

When that was over he rang Anstice and did his hour with her. When that was over, he went to the boys' room and fished Marco out from under his GI Joes and clothed him. Sitting on the twin bed, he looked out of the window and saw the lightest swirl of thinning cloud, way out there, like a wiped table in the last few seconds before it dries …

The day was heating up and so in the end he took Marco out into it, into Dogshit and into park culture, which is something to see. Queueing at the snack stall with all the other weight problems and skin conditions, among the multiple single mothers in crayon-color beachwear, the splat and splotch of English skin, beneath treated hair, and all the sticky children each needing its tin of drink, Richard watched the joggers pounding the outer track in scissoring shellsuits of magenta, turquoise,of lime or sherwood green. Marco stood there with his upper teeth warily bared to the press of sense data.

With their papercupfuls of Slushpuppy, they walked past the flat-roofed park toilets where a boy younger than Marco had recently been raped while his mother tapped her foot on this same patch of asphalt. One man and his dog went by the other way, man as thin as a fuse, dog as cocked and spherical as a rocket. The sloping green was mud, churned and studded, beige and dun, half soil, half shit. On the bench, Marco faced the prospect with the candid bewilderment of his gaze, turning and lifting his head, every few seconds, to his father's stunned profile. The boy might have looked at the hospital smokestacks, and then at the loners, the ranters, the post-pub staggerers, all those born to be the haunters of parks, and then looked again at his father, with the six or seven immediate difficulties pulling on the skin around his eyes, each with its own nervous tic, and wondered what the difference was.

For Richard was thinking, if thinking is quite the word we want (and we now do the usual business of extracting those thoughts from the furious and unceasing babble that surrounds and drowns them): you cannot demonstrate, prove, establish-you cannot know if a book is good. A sentence, a line, a phrase: nobody knows. The literary philosophers of Cambridge spent a century saying otherwise, and said nothing. Is 'When all at once I saw a crowd' worse than 'Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears'? (Yes. But it was the better line that contained the identifiable flaw: that do, brought in to make up the