THE INFORMATION

'And 'tight' or 'cheap' used to be this.' She stroked her chin.

'Meaning?'

'Jewish. With a beard.'

'Christ. I can see that needed some work.'

'And a person of same-sex orientation,' said Leslie, 'used to be-'

'Queer,' said Frances.

'Excuse me?'

'Queer. They're called queers now.'

'Right. Queer,' Leslie went on, 'used to be this.' He gave a languid flap of the wrist. 'Can you believe?'

'And now what is it?'

'Queer?' said Leslie, turning to Frances. 'What's queer now?'

'Queer? I think it's just sign language for queer.'

'We've come a long way,' said Richard.

'Too right,' said Frances.

'Too right,' said Leslie.

He took her hand. Or she took his. Or their hands joined. In a way nothing was expressed by this, no claim of love or friendship or even solidarity. But it still looked like sign language. Meaning the future, the next thing, meaning evolution, and Amelior…

Frances said good-bye and very soon Richard was being guided toward the stairs by Leslie, who was saying, 'As hard as we're working here you can see we still have a way to go. Copies have been submitted for review. At the present time distribution is light going on minimal but if the reviews are perceived as positive then things may build from there. Can I ask you something? Are you just touring the States anyway'?'

Now Richard paused on the stairs. He saw no way out. 'I'm writing a piece about Gwyn Barry.'

'Isn't it amazing the attention he's getting?'

'Yes. Consternating. How do you account for it??

'I guess it's a book whose time has come. The Profundity Requital- that's the key for him. He's on fire. And if the Requital goes his way: abracadabra. Supernova.'

Don't worry about it, he wanted to answer: the Requital will not go Gwyn's way. Richard was resolved. He owed it to Profundity. He owed it to the universe.

They moved on.

'I'm sorry we can't get out there more for Untitled,' said Leslie. 'But yet. If you so choose to do so …'

At the front door he veered off to the left, into a storeroom or junk room. There were sounds of mauling and tugging and dragging and his sudden and surprising 'Shit!' and then more dragging, until he finally flung a lumpy brown mail sack out into the passage at Richard's feet and came stumbling in on after it.

'You're doing readings, signings,' said Leslie. He looked vivid- warmed up. 'I don't know. You could care less, right? I don't know. There's eighteen copies in there. You feeling strong?'

What could he do? Untitled was his youngest, and probably his last born. The sack looked ragged, frayed, at the end of its tether. But Richard swung it up onto his shoulder. And he had to make it clear to Evry that he could lift it: that he was man enough.

'Boston. That your first stop?'

'Last stop.'

'Oh. By the way. Great book.'

It wasn't until now that Richard teetered, all his weight gathering on his back foot. 'Thank you,' he said in a youthful voice. 'That's very kind of you. I did feel I was on to something. You don't think … I was worried about the penultimate bridging passages. You know: where the figment narrator pretends to attempt that series of decoy refocusings.'

Leslie nodded understandingly.

'Because the travesty is a counterfeit.'

'Yup.'

'Not that he's really a narrator.'

'Mm-hm.'

'Reliable or otherwise. But he had to be a surrogate if the sham refocusings were going to seem to work.'

'Absolutely. Hey are you sure you can handle that?'

Out on Ninth and B, between Bold Agenda and the Life Cafe, a little

bookshop (The Lazy Susan) lurked, in a half-basement, behind thick light- bending glass. Unlike most American bookshops-unlike the bookshops he had already meandered between on Fifth and on Madison(monitoring his own absence and turning Amelior Regained to the wall or inhuming it beneath stacks of contending trex), and unlike the bookshops he would come to know, the Muzaked and mallish, the underlit and wood-paneled and pseudo-Bodleiaic, the disco- Montparnassian- this was Richard's kind of bookshop. It looked like a garage sale thrown by the dependents of some bibliomaniacal niggard. As he ventured further, into the pleasant barnyard smell (the smell of the twins' hair), he was struck by a contrary association-the Christian Science Reading Rooms of the English high street, and their structural futility: because a Reading Room meant freedom and possibility, and (as he was often reminded on his doorstep) Christian Science, which was all there was to read in there, was a nonstarter and meant absolutely nothing. He bumped about with his mail sack, finding categories, alphabetization. Maybe this was a broader church; it offered revelation by a variety of means-crystals, heavenly configurations, numerology and, here and there, yes, poetry, fiction, criticism, philosophy. Then he saw it, on a bench, the slow staggered stacks and the sign saying bold agenda. The mail sack thudded into his spine as he quickly approached and quickly halted. Hush Now by Shanana Ormolu Davis, Cowboy Boots by John Two Moons, and, among other works by other visionaries of the Bold Agenda imprint, a brace of copies of Unfilled by Richard Tull.

He tarried in the Lazy Susan Bookstore for over an hour. No one bought Untitled; no one flipped through it or weighed it in their hand; no one strayed that close to the bench enshrined to Bold Agenda-all of whose publications, it turned out, bore the same strange nimbus of fur and fuzz, as daunting to the eye as to the touch. It was certainly a pity about the look of it, the look and feel of Untitled. No dust jacket, for instance; and that horsehair texture. Wrenching his first copy out of its Jiffy Bag, back in Calchalk Street, Richard had caught a hangnail deep in its bristling weft. And his fingertip was little more than a blob of plasma when he eventually shook it free … Richard tarried for over an hour. And no one touched Untitled. But he paid this no mind. What was an hour? Literary time wasn't cosmic time or geological time or evolutionary time. Still, it wasn't quotidian time. It went slower than the clock on the wall.

Which Gwyn Barry would do well to learn, thought Richard, when he got back to the hotel. Shackled and hostaged to the secular, to the temporal, an eager hireling of his own novel, Gwyn was still Stockpiling interviews in his suite on the fourteenth floor. Richard watched and listened to three or four of them (simplicity, unsophistication, carpentry), quietly mesmerized by boredom and disgust. True, Amelior Regainedwasn't published until early next month, and Unfitted had been out, or available, for at least a fortnight, but Richard still reckoned he was holding his own. Why? And why did he want a great deal of alcohol so much (why did he want to upend the drinks table into his mouth?), and why did he throb for Gina's touch? Waking beside her, on some recent mornings, he had felt as questingly nubile as the opening bars of Peter and the Wolf. .. They were flying out in the late afternoon. Somehow Richard found time to cab downtown to Avenue B, to reenter the Lazy Susan and establish that neither copy of Untitled had left the