THE INFORMATION

winter, squinted into his face. When he threw the ball up to serve, an image scored itself onto the dark shutter of his eyelids; the ball burned in the bright orbit of his rackethead, like Saturn.

He had been a slave in his own life. Now he was a ghost in his own life.

How civilized, how spacious, how decent everything must have been, when his nose wasn't nuts, when his eye wasn't black. Everyone stared at him. No one sniffed at him, but everyone stared at him.

The only place he felt any good was in the Adam and Eve. No one stared at his black eye. No one noticed his black eye. This was because everyone else had a black eye. Even the men.

Gal Aplanalp didn't call.

At the Tantalus Press he continued to look kindly on the work of Keith Horridge. With poets, he realized, he was generally lenient. When in the year before he married her Gina started sleeping with writers, Richard found his jealousy reasonably easy to manage when she slept with poets- easier, much easier, than when she slept with novelists and (especially) dramatists. He liked poets because they had no power and no money. He wrote to Horridge, giving him advice on the stanza:

Spume retractile, the detritus of time. Stasis is epitaph- the syzygy of sand.

And Horridge reworked the stanza to make it more obscure. Maybe he should fuck up Keith Horridge. Maybe Keith Horridge was more his speed. But Richard wrote back, telling Horridge to justify the obscurity-telling Horridge that obscurity must be earned.

Horridge was twenty-nine. This sounded like a good age for a poet to be.

At The Little Magazine he secured favorable reviews for the paperback of

Saddle Leather, a collection of short stories by the Boston-based poet

and novelist Elsa Oughton, and for the out-of-print Jurisprudential by Stanwyck Mills, Sue and Ron L. Summerdale Professor of Law at the University of Denver.

Del and Pel and the others would be so lulled by his mastery, by his Knowledge know-how, that the clock would tick along its ratchet and hum warningly, and Richard would guess, furiously, and smack the wrong button, and the quest, the trail of gold, would evaporate and a new one would form. Because of course the quest for knowledge never really ended. Like the universe, it was a saga of augmentative abasement. Who was said to be the last man to have read everything? Coleridge. Hazlitt. Gibbon. Coleridge: it was Coleridge. Two hundred years on, nobody had read a millionth of everything, and the fraction was getting smaller every day. And every new book held less and less of the whole.

'Let's go,' said Gwyn. 'We're on.'

Richard was staring at the screen-at the resumed quest. What is coprolite? Rock. Oil deposit. Fossil dung. Turning to leave, he thoughtlessly smacked A (thoughtlessly, because the opening question of any quest allowed two attempts, as was meet, as was only right). Then with impatience he smacked B. Also wrong. 'Shit,' he said.

'Fossil dung!' said Pel, with humorous authority, as the quest dissolved.

'Yeah, of course. Kopros: shit. You know, like coprophile.'

'Most untypical,' said Gwyn.

Richard looked at him.

'I thought you knew everything about shit.'

The guys laughed, uncertainly. TV meant that everything Gwyn said was revised upwards in terms of sparkle and pertinence; but shit, the reality, the stuff itself-this was not happy ground.

'Homer nods,' said Bal. 'Cedric nods. 'Anosmia' nods.'

Anosmia: loss of sense of smell. Although Richard had a great memory, he didn't remember that 'anosmia' had once featured on the Knowledge. And he didn't know that they called him Anosmia not because he suffered from it but because he was capable of defining it. He dropped his head and ducked away from the crowd, following Gwyn on to Court One.

'Won't be able to concentrate today.' Gwyn was shaking his wrists and bobbing around like a million-quid footballer arising ominously from the dugout. 'I'll keep thinking about that maniac in my bedroom.'

'What did she actually … How do you-'

'Oh our visitor left a calling card all right,' said Gwyn with disgust.

'Christ, you don't mean she-'

'Enough. Please.'

If, at seven in the morning, you had told Richard he was going to play tennis that same afternoon, he would have laughed in your face. No: notOver the chessboard, the following Sunday, Richard asked Gwyn what had happened with Belladonna.

'Nothing,' he said. 'What did you expect? I wanted to talk about oral sex but she just wanted to talk about Amelior. That book is her bible. A lot of kids seem to have taken it up. It's the message of hope, I suppose.'

'J'adoube,' said Richard, sniffing his fingertips.

'You know it's on the syllabus. Not just in America, where you'd kind of expect it. But here in stuffy old England!'

'Mate in three,' said Richard. 'No. Mate in two.'

Gal Aplanalp didn't call.

Once a day that slobbering fuckpig of an Englishman hurled and bounced himself down Calchalk Street at sixty miles an hour in his German car. Like a low-flying aircraft-like a drug rush …

Richard couldn't believe this fucking guy. This fucking guy: what was his hurry? Who did he think could want him anywhere a second sooner than he was going to get there already?

Somehow it always happened that Richard was out on the street when the German car ripped past-frozen with loathing, his imprecations tousled and tossed aside by the barreling backdraft. The drooling brute in his capsule of humorlessness. White shirt, with loosened tie, and the navy suit-top on the hook behind him.

What is it with this fucking guy? he always said out loud-driving down my street at sixty miles an hour, coming to kill my kids.

He rang Demi. 'Oh I'm okay,' she said. 'How are you?'

'Tolerably well,' he said, for this was sometimes Richard's style. His black eye had stopped being a black eye. The lid was violet, the orbit a lively-even a cheerful-yellow. 'Demi, you know I'm writing this big thing on Gwyn. This means we'll have to hang out together. Lunch, for instance. A brief sea cruise, perhaps.'

'On me. What are you … What's your-'

'My angle? The usual, I should think. What made the princess fall for the grim little Taff.'

'And what's the answer?'

'I don't know.'

'So you want…?'

'Deep background.'

Then she gave him a date in mid-January and said, 'I'm going home that weekend. You could come down on the Friday or the Saturday. Spend the night. It'll be very informal. Just family.'

He sat in the pub for three hours staring at the haywain of Anstke's dipped head while she explored what she considered to be her only alternative to suicide: moving into 49E Calchalk Street.

Early in December Richard had lunch with the Features Editor of the Sunday broadsheet which would be publishing his long profile of Gwyn Barry. 'What we want to know,' said the Features