THE INFORMATION

was London; that was Nottingham. 'Are you going to stop?' she said. But she didn't mean stop. She meant stay. Oh, stay! Richard went back to Dominique-Louise. He left the cuddly animals, the morning tea and toast, the birds fussing trustingly on the windowsill, round-eyed Gina with her baby-doll nightdress and her puffy slippers and her clutched hanky (there were two or three tears this time, silent, welling), and fought his way back to Dominique-Louise. Dominique- Louise's bedroom, by the way, was painted black and had no windows. Its darkness, at night, was classical, mythological. She would be lying in it cradling the twenty-pound ashtray she sometimes threw at him (she had found out about the changed dedication), smoking and waiting and not getting the curse.

He thought Gina would return to Nottingham. But it didn't seem to occur to her. Richard assimilated this, and found it to be good: he could just show up and sleep with her whenever he liked. He could continue to do this, he projected, even after she had secured some sympathetic simp with a regular job. Because she loved him. Girls, in those days, couldn't do anything to you (they couldn't call the lawyers, the tabloids, the cops) except kill themselves or get pregnant. All they had was life: they could augment it, they could bear it away. They could subtract from it or they could add to it; and that was all. Richard had two additional certainties. Gina would never kill herself. And Dominique-Louise would never get pregnant. What Gina did was this. She took up contemporary literature, systematically. It was her idea of night school. Gina started sleeping with writers.

The next afternoon Richard was back on the beach. He had just done the interview with Pete Sahl of the Miami Herald. And it hadn't worked out. Nothing disastrous; nothing apposite either; nothing embarrassing or even interesting. It just hadn't worked out.

Personally they had hit it off well enough. Richard had liked and fancied the Miami Herald's Pete Sahl-for she was a woman. Shockingly well preserved, Pete came right out and told you she was fifty-three, withgrown-up children. Pete's dad had wanted boys. So he went ahead and gave boys' names to all his five daughters. Pete had stuck with Pete, and never tried to pretty things up with Petranella or Petula or Petunia. Just Pete: Pete Sahl.

It wasn't that she talked about Gwyn the whole time or anything. Encouragingly, in a way, Pete seemed unclear about who he was either. The interview consisted entirely of her recommendations: recommendations of other novels, of books of poetry, of films, of plays, of shows. 'I'll write it down for you,' Pete kept saying. But she couldn't quite remember what anything was called. She was just spaced out, like everyone else in Miami. By the time the half hour was up, Pete was recommending restaurants.

'Okay. Gino's,' she said. 'It's a twenty-minute cab ride. If you can't get a table, tell them Pete Sahl. Gino's. I'll write it down for you. Go for the veal. Tell them Pete Sahl.'

'That's what I'll do, when I get in through the door. I'll tell them Pete Sahl.'

'I'll write it down for you. The veal alia picante. They do it with a lemon sauce. Go for it. Nice talking to you. Remember: tell them Pete Sahl.'

'Write it down for me.'

The Earl of Rieveaulx had wanted boys. And he was an old brute too. But he had called his daughters Urania, Callisto, Demeter, Amaryllis, and Persephone. He hadn't called them Lady Jeff, Lady Mike, Lady Pete, Lady Brad, and Lady Butch.

Richard twisted in his lounger as he heard the whir of the caddycart. The little witch was steering her way toward him on her electric motor, with jinking money pouch. A light aircraft was flying laterally across the strand. It seemed to be trailing a long rope ladder-reminding him of the black dancers: the cookie-cutout men. He tried to focus against the hot pulse of the sky. The rope ladder was saying something: it was made of words. It said simply, in small caps, GWYN BARRY AMELIOR REGAINED. The plane fired a bolt of light at him and then deliquesced in the sun. Richard picked up his book. They themselves were flying out in an hour. He had seen this plane before, trailing a different banner, selling some other piece of shit. What was it? Bloodbath, by someone called Chuck Pfister. So that was okay.

But for a moment there the sky seemed to like Gwyn Barry-the sun slapping palms with the plane's wing. For a moment there the solar system seemed to like Gwyn Barry.

Chicago was the only city that really frightened him.

It frightened him because it was there, in Chicago, that he would-or would not- be the subject of the Dub Traynor Interview. Radio: hour-long, one-on-one. This was now in doubt. But it frightened him for other reasons too. The severity of its naked steel frightened him. Chicago, he knew, was the cradle, or the ancient assembly point, of the American political machine. What goes around comes around. I'm okay: you're okay. We don't take nobody nobody sent. Chicago, he knew, was the eighth biggest city on earth. Cities are machines. No other city he had ever been to said to you, as Chicago said to you, This is a machine. I am a machine.

There was a traffic jam all the way in from the airport, and dark rain. The mist was as thick as clouds and the clouds were as thick as smoke and the smoke was as thick as chalk. Chilling Chicago awaited them in its vapors and gray medium, deeply massed and square-shouldered on the vague horizon. They heaved on, five yards per heave, along Kennedy Expressway. The five lanes coming into the city were all blocked and the five lanes going out of the city were all blocked; between these two great metal Mississippis of steam and suffering, of spiritual durance, there lay a railtrack on which brightly lit and entirely empty trains sped past in both directions. No one ever used the trains. They had to be in the cars. Americans were martyrs to the motors; autos were their autos-da-fe. Never mind what cars have in store for us globally, biospherically; cars- our cars-hate us and humiliate us, at every turn, they humiliate us. Types of car drivers (timid, pushy) are also types of sufferers: the silent, the permanently enraged, the apparently equable, those who persuade themselves that they are running the show (known as 'motorists'), the snarl-prone, the oath-casting, the sullen, the erased … They drove on. Their driver-a woman, affiliated with Gwyn's publishers-who was seated beside the plump-necked publicity boy, pointed out where the first, third, and fifth tallest buildings on earth might be seen, on a clear day. They drove on: the shell of Shell, yellow on red like a hand raised against the sun. LEE'S LUMBER and WAYNE'S WINDOWS. Zero Willpower Meets Zero Fat, a billboard slogan in praise of a product that at least tasted fattening, struck a brief chord in Richard, who wasn't particularly fat, yet. A sodden flag. And then at last they were in the city or under thecity, with its halls and chutes and stanchions of steel, and you were a lab-rat in the rat-trap of steel Chicago. Richard suddenly felt that American cities were the half-mouths of lower jawbones and held a monstrous acreage of wedged dentition; with those big teeth they have, no wonder their gums whine with permanent maintenance and repair, all the deep scaling and root-canal work, the cappings, bridgings, excruciating extractions. Now they were engulfed by the sounds of this desperate periodonture, and for a moment Richard's teeth felt like claws, seized in his gums.

They dropped him off first. For the second city running Richard was to be lodged in a separate and of course much worse hotel, and he didn't mind . . . He took the long walk down the long passage, following the lively stride of the big black porter. With an easy swing of his right arm the porter was carrying Richard's unliftably heavy suitcase; but authorial pride dictated that the fabler himself should tote his own mail sack which, he knew, had warped his spine forever before they even left Washington. They turned a corner: before them lay a fresh infinity of corridor. To the porter this journey was utterly and indeed miserably familiar. The corridor could hold no surprises for him. Not to mention or admit the much older guy, the quivering white stiff coming past the other way, struggling and rattling with some super-awkward and overrated and probably obsolete contraption like a triple tureen on wheels. Forty years ago this old guy might have been happy to return Richard's gasped good evening. But he had no use on God's earth for it now.

In the Spinnaker Room he dined alone-the Spinnaker Room with its stags' heads and bearskins, the walls studded, for some reason, with locally kilned plates and the ceiling hung with locally loomed bolts of cloth in carpet-booklet colors and textures, reminding him, oppressively, of the jacket of Untitled. He felt as if he was wedged between the covers of his own novel. As Richard was simultaneously finishing his porkchop and The House of Fame: A Life of Thomas Tyrwhitt, a telephone was brought to his table, not a cordless or cellular device but an ancient white dialer on a long, squirming lead.

'Yeah well it's all fixed,' said Gwyn. Behind his voice you could hear drowsy self-approbation-also the murmur and tinkle of festivity: discreet, corporate.