THE INFORMATION

imitations of mountain rivulets, of dew simpering downwards through the trees. Now the parrot had left its jungle and stood on a hook in a pub shouting 'Bullshit!' Now the singing thrushes and sparrows outside the window sounded like machines. Cold out there. Now that he was forty, he feared the cold. Now he was forty, something animal in him feared the winter.

righteousness. Today, it wouldn't have surprised Steve to learn that Gwyn-or, as it turned out, Richard-now faced major cranial surgery and would be eating through a straw for the next nine months. You give one smack: then you begin to think that you have been chiefed out. The blow that came before was there to justify the blow that will come after. The blow that comes after is there to justify the blow that came before. What held him back, Clasford, wasn't his strict instructions-but the city. Be quick: the lights, the footsteps. Suddenly Steve thought about the nun he had seen, out Wimbledon way. Nuns wore witchy booties and no cosmetic except the no-sex cosmetic.

Now Steve Cousins walked past security camera, past doorman, past security camera and security-camera monitor; he entered the lift and went up, high up, with the building's girders and cement blocks thrumming past him; then out past the security camera and down the tubular passageway. Excluding the two penthouses and the six maisonettes and the fourteen studios (and there were other hierarchical distinctions to do with elevation and vantage), Steve's flat was just like all the other flats in the complex. A squad of architects had been told to dream the dreams of the contemporary businessman, and to give that dream the weight of concrete and steel: economy of line, public space/private space, dynamism melding into hard-won repose. Then let the individual imprint his personality upon it-if he had one. But we all have one. Don't we? Scozzy's double reception room, the main living area where the expression of his personality was supposed to occur, had four corners: a fitness corner (weights, flexers, StairMaster), a computer corner (the usual information processors), a reading corner (cushions, a low glass table stacked with various nihilistic classics), and a video corner (a depthless window-sized TV, the numb sleek blackness of the VCRs, the heap of remotes, plus a Canaveral of decoders and unscramblers). Was there a truth to this room? In a sense it was all for show, like a stage set- despite the fact that nobody ever came here. Steve removed his clothes. At home, he went naked. At home, he sniffed his food before putting it in his mouth (his mouth: he knew that his jawbones, typically, projected at the dental arcades). At home, he stood and swayed with the wind, monotonously, unbearably, for hour after hour. At home, he often thought of renouncing all speech. Did he use to do these things when he was a wild boy? Or did he just do them now: now that he had read about wild boys? All he seemed to remember, from his wild-boy period, was lying under some fucking hedge. In the fucking rain.

Naked, he proceeded to the video corner. Then came a series of activations. He sank into the cold leather of the great swivel chair. On screenMarco knew grownups. Very often he hung out with them all day and all night long … Now Marco conceived the idea of giving his father pleasure, or comfort. A kiss, perhaps, on the temple? A few restorative pats on the shoulder? As he got to his feet he decided instead to regale Richard with a joke.

Sensing his approach, Richard looked up from The Proverbial Husbandman: A Life of Thomas Tusser. The child's uplifted face, one eye wide, the lips compressed, brewing amusement.

'Knock knock.'

'Who's there?'

'I dunnop.'

'I dunnop who?'

'Ooh you smelly phing!'

'… I don't happen to find that very funny, Marco.'

'I phought it weren't him. He came on like he expected it. That was the phing.'

'No, mate. You don't say it like that. Not with thing. You say ting.'

'Yeah. That was the ting.'

'What you give him?'

'Give him a smack. First I had to catch him.'

'He scurried around, did he. Jesus. You say anything? Make it look…'

'Yeah. I said, 'You called me chief.' '

'Yeah?'

'Yeah. You know. 'You fucking chiefed me out.' '

'Anything else?'

'Yeah. After I give him the smack I said, 'Don't chief me out.' '

''Don't chief me out.''

'Yeah. 'Never chief me out.' You know. 'You don't never fucking chief me out.' '

Steve was trying to imagine Richard chiefing Clasford out. 'Clasford. When was the last time somebody chiefed you out?'

'I don't know. When I was about phree.'

'Yeah well take care, chief.'

He pocketed the mobile and parked the Cosworth. It all proved that the town was safer than the country. The trees were more dangerous than the streets. The city was like world opinion-it held you back. The fields held no one back. Why do you think people get stabbed fifty-seven times? Why do you think people die from thirty-nine blows to the head? Given the leisure (the privacy, the seclusion), you don't stop. It's the … reversecard at the bottom of the deck; and then slid in the second and third, saying, 'One jack goes in the first floor. And one on the next floor.' He paused, thinking. 'And the fourth jack goes on the roof to look out for police.' Reasonably skillfully he placed the four jacks, held tightly, as one card, on the top of the pack. Marco watched with drugged interest. 'Then the police came! Me-mao me-mao me-mao me-mao! So the jack on the roof called to the other jacks: 'Police are here!' And they all came running up. One jack, two jacks, three jacks, four jacks.'

Marius's shoulders subsided; tension absented itself from him. 'Brilliant,' said Gina. Marius gave a modest smile and lifted his eyes toward Marco-and Marco's imploring stare.

Marco said: 'Then what?'

Richard shifted his weight. He too was thinking about a story: 'The Aleph,' by Jorge Luis Borges. About a magical device, the aleph, that knew everything: like the Knowledge. About a terrible poet, who wins a big prize, a big requital, for his terrible poem. 'Astonishingly,' the narrator writes, 'my own book, The Cards of the Cardsharp, received not a single vote.' Richard listened to the tuneless blues that was playing in his head. None of this ever left him and everything always reminded him of it.

'Then what?' said Marius.

'Then what?' said Marco.

'… Nothing!'

'Did the police get them? What did they steal? Where did they go?'

'Marco.'

Yes. Because Marco was always like this. Marco. So unlike Marius, who was so firmly placed in the world, who constantly sought and identified distinctions (that was a hem, that was a fringe; that was an eave, that was a ledge; that was a scratch, that was a scrape), who had already joined in the great human venture of classification. Richard, too, knew all about classification. That afternoon, hoping to begin a single-paragraph review of a seven hundred-page biography, L. H. Myers: The Forgotten, he had spent an hour with his ragged thesaurus, in search of a fancy word for big. Halfway through this search, Gal Aplanalp telephoned. 'You're not going to believe this,' she began . . . Whereas Marco would believe anything. He longed to believe everything. He never wanted any story to end. It had been tentatively suggested, by a young neurologist, that this was why Marco