by Martin Amis
It looked like another garage sale-thrown, this time, by a troglodytic kindred of petty thieves and welfare hustlers. The old car seat to sit on, the old cardboard box to put your paper cup on, the grunge-drenched carpet, the leprous wallpaper … it could only mean one thing: a radio station. Or, much more specifically, RPT4456 4534, and "The Dub Traynor Show." Richard was undisquieted. The BBC, where he sometimes went, for something like #163;11.37, and talked about book reviewing or biographies or anything at all to do with little magazines, was just as rough, in its way. Cruelly lowering surroundings: this was the thing about radio. Radio knew it would always be heard and not seen and could let itself go; it was okay-people understood; radio would never have to cringe in apology and pain, under the general gaze. So Richard accepted the atmosphere, but not without internal comment. If the imperfect-the half-made, the failed, the let-gone-is what you sympathize with, then you will find much with which to sympathize. He was given a cup of unbelievable coffee. Dub would be with him soon. Dub, who, according to Gwyn's publicity boy, was a very serious guy and a great reader: he loved modern prose. The night before Richard had extracted a copy of Untitled from his mail sack and, feeling briefly stratospheric, cabbed it round to Dub's West Side address. Probably Dub wouldn't have had time to read it all, but Richard was looking forward to what he got so little of: a response. Furthermore, his mail sack felt appreciably lighter. Experimentally hoisting it onto his shoulder that morning, Richard thought that his retch of pain was, in retrospect, detectably quieter: appreciably more subdued.
The girl who had provided him with his coffee came through and told Richard that there was, of all things, a problem: the local baseball team, that very hour, was announcing its intention of changing sponsors.
Richard looked at her expectantly.
"It's a big story here. Dub will be having to deal with it. Just bear with us."
In came Dub, with his chinos and his bearded preoccupation and his strictly localized charisma. He nodded and shook hands and then led Richard into the gloom of his booth, which consisted of an Okie kitchen table under the usual mess of radiobiotics. Dub had the copy of Untitled in front of him, under a heap of press releases and folders and legal pads. He kept touching his eyes, with thumb and forefinger, and then blinking glutinously.
Settling himself, Dub flicked a switch, and murmured, "We're having to take all this …?
"What Max has done here," a voice was saying, dully, dutifully, "for the ball club, from a business standpoint, has been from our . .. standpoint .. . has been real good business-for the ball club."
"Sorry," said Dub, "but it's a big deal here. Have you been to Wrigley Field?"
"No. Should I? What is it?"
"It's the ball park. It's sixty years older than any other ballpark in America. The slopes, the hardboard. It's sad there, as it should be. Even the best teams lose fifty games a year. That sadness gives the game its poetry. Like no other. Look at the writers it attracts. Lardner, Malamud …"
He flicked the switch again. Another voice was saying, "We like to think that Coherent is tops in our product category. And that that success will be reflected back on to the ball club." Then the original voice was saying, "And so what's good for Coherent will hopefully, for the ball club, also be … be good."
With a nod to Richard, Dub said briskly, "That was Coherent VP Terry Eliot and Fizz Jenkerson talking at Wrigley Field. We'll have more on the sponsorship switch, after some messages, and I'll be talking with the British cult writer Richard Tull. I was going to be talking with another British writer, Gwyn Barry, but we've been switching too, and now it's Richard Tull. Say," he said, "do you like great musicals? All-"
"No," said Richard.
Dub looked up from his mike.
"I don't like any musicals."
"… Well, if you did, all this week there's a sweet brunch-and-matinee deal at the Ashbery. For just twenty-five dollars you get the hit show and an all-you-can-eat grande bouffe right across the street at the Carvery, extras and service charge not included. Now doesn't that sound good?"
"But I don't like musicals."
"It's not-it's a message."
"What?"
Once more Dub fell to touching his eyelids as a voice was saying, "The problem was not any problem with Ultrason, who've been real good for the ball club. The problem … well it's not a problem, because it's good, is Coherent, is the Coherent deal, which is more … which is better. For the ball club."
"Don't you wish sometimes," said Dub, "that writing were just like sports? That you could just go out there and see who'd win? See who's better. Measurably. With all the stats."
Richard thought about it. "Yeah," he said.
"And I hear," said Dub to his mike, "that the ball club's transfer play is already being reenergized in the trading pits of La Salle Street. Do you have a little doggy?"
"No," said Richard.
Dub looked up, apparently appalled by this admission. He raised a palm, saying, "Well if you did I'd really recommend the Fenceless Fence from Perter Pets at forty-nine-ninety-five. This way you put pooch on a non-tangle leash with a range limit set by you. He'll like it. And so will the neighbors."
"My two boys keep pleading with me to get one-a dog," said Richard. "But we live in a flat and you know how the . .."
"I don't believe this guy." Dub coughed, and continued, "You know what Berryman said when they told him Frost was dead? He said, 'It's scary. Who's number one?' "
"The answer being Lowell. I suppose."
"Right… Right. There was a witness to Berryman's suicide. Washington Avenue Bridge. Into the Mississippi. The rocks along the bank. The witness said, 'He jumped up on the railing, sat down and quickly leaned forward. He never looked back at all.' The witness's name was Art Hitman. University carpenter. Art Hitman. Don't you love it?"
"I do. I do. Berryman said he always felt 'comfortable' about being number two to Lowell. Oh sure."
"Wait." Dub was nursing his eyes again, even more intently, as if Richard wasn't there. He started to do parallax exercises with his thumbs, focusing and refocusing and jerking his head back affrontedly. Meanwhile they went live to the media conference at Wrigley Field, and stayed there.
At three minutes to twelve Dub freed up his copy of Untitled. It sprang open on page five. Dub's hand groped for his eyelids as he said, "It's the weirdest shit. I was just getting into your book last night and I- I thought you know like something had gotten in under my contacts. Then I … That was Fizz and Terry Eliot, wrapping it up at Wrigley Field. We're almost fresh out of time here, and we were going to be talking to Gwyn Barry about his vision of a new direction for our troubled species, but here we have another British writer, Richard Tull, whose new novel has just appeared. Richard Tull. We know from the Amelior novels of your friend and colleague where he would have us go. How about you? What's your novel trying to say?"
Richard thought for a moment. The contemporary idea seemed to be that the first thing you did, as a communicator, was come up with some kind of slogan, and either you put it on a coffee mug or a T-shirt or abumper sticker-or else you wrote a novel about it. Even Dub clearly thought you did it this way round. And now that writers spent as much time telling everyone what they were doing as they spent actually doing it, then they would start doing it that way round too, eventually. Richard thought on. Dub tapped his watch.
"It's not trying to say anything. It's saying it."
"But what is it saying?"
"It's saying itself. For a hundred and fifty thousand words. I couldn't put it any other way."
"Richard Tull? Thank you very much."
Before he left he offered to sign Dub's copy of Unfitted. Bent over in his chair, with his hands semaphoring in front of his face, Dub abstractedly declined. In fact he insisted on returning the book to its author. Making quite a thing of it; pressing it on him, so to speak. Richard tried to give it to the girl who had brought him coffee.
"Thank you, sir," she said. "But I belie
ve not."
There was a traffic jam all the way to the airport, and dark rain. The five lanes going out of the city were all blocked and the five lanes coming into the city were all blocked. On the central divide the empty trains, rigidly balanced, cruised by. You could sense the shape and mass of blackened smokestacks. You could see lights, and the reflections of lights, car lights, murkily glistening-the filthy jewelry of Kennedy Expressway. They heaved on, flanked and tailed by mustang, bronco, pinto, colt, by bluebird and thunderbird and ladybird and lark, by panda and cobra, by jaguar, by cougar: the filthy menagerie of Kennedy Expressway.
Alone for many hours in the backs of planes, drinking, reading, looking out the window, with his being in a process of steady diminution, he had a chance to get things straight about the sky. He saw clouds all day, from above and from below.
From above. Imagine clouds as you would be seeing them for the first time: on your way in. Clouds would be telling you about the earth. About its cliffs, its mountains and plateaus, its pastures and snowfields. Clouds would be telling you about its sandbars and sandflats, and insistently telling you (seven-tenths of the time) about its oceans and their postures of turbulence and calm. From above, even though the beauty of the clouds had lost some of their innocence, their pristine aura of eternal unregardedness, because nearly everyone from below had seen them now, the sky was telling outsiders about the earth.
From below, the sky was telling you about the outside-about the universe. Richard was back on the ground, in Colorado, on the tarmac, and then with his mail sack in the flatland of the car park … The sky was getting bigger as he moved west; the sky would have much to say. Most commonly the sky imitated vacuum: vacuum laced with impermanent matter. Next most commonly, interstellar gas, tufts of dust and nebulae. Next, the characteristic shapes of galaxies-disc, corkscrew, spiral, cigar, sombrero. It could do other imitations. It had a supernova imitation and a quasar imitation. Richard was destined soon to discover, with horror, that it could do black holes. It was working on its pulsar imitation. The sky was there to provide the artistic comment on the day, the weather, the light it was screening for you, but it was also there to tell you about the universe, the gentlest pointers and reminders for the most part, with no hard lessons about where you stood in it and where this left you.
"I'm dying here," said the publicity boy, all that night in Denver. "I'm dying here."
In Denver, which was also a Profundity stop, they were coming in at the end of a national booksellers' convention, or works outing, and gimmick parties were the thing: parties in gymnasiums, parties in precinct
stations, parties in mineshafts. The party they threw for Gwyn Barry and Amelior Regained was in a circus, small scale and itinerant but under a medium-big top and so on, with sawdust, animals, jugglers, tumblers. Itwas meant to be good because the performers were all Hispanics and Gypsies and Amerindians-just finishing a tour of male-pride Sweat Lodges and Reservation casinos. In fact the circus was a squalid disgrace and everyone was completely grossed out by it. With his plastic glass on its paper napkin, the publicity boy pounded the sawdust saying, "I'm dying here." He also threatened to call the fire department, the sanitation people and the company lawyer. But what he kept saying was: "I'm dying here." He was like, "I'm dying here." Considering how ill and old he felt, Richard had the time of his life.
The animals were all wrecks, and the troupers all looked stupid and cruel, and none of them seemed to be any good at anything. It was cold out and hot in, and there was a nightsweat crossfire from the laboring generators and the Alaskan drafts through the ragged canvas and the slow-moving gusts of beast-warmed gas . . . Gwyn's countenance, on arrival (Richard noted), was obviously geared up for a whole evening of childlike wonder; but he soon forgot about that and fell in with all the flat smiles and crinkled lips and the earnest concern with animals' rights and animals' germs.
"Who's funding these clowns?" asked the publicity boy, rhetorically.
But there were no clowns.
Cringing off-white dogs were being urged with many menaces to attempt bedraggled diagonal leaps through hand-held hoops as Richard identified Professor Stanwyck Mills, standing near the spread of crates and trunks where the performers stored their juggling batons, their sequined capes, their bolts of damp finery. He was talking and being talked to by Gwyn Barry; Gwyn had his head cocked at a sympathetic angle, and was frowning and nodding as if assenting (on TV) to a proposition both beautiful and true. And there in the ring, after his stunts with the dogs, the matador, arms raised, had gone into his tense-buttocked appeal for recognition and praise.
There followed a collective high-pitched groan-almost a hoot-as a putrescent little elephant waddled out into the glare. Was this an elderly dwarf elephant, or just an afflicted infant elephant, already rotting at the age of one? Its well-intentioned wanderings and blunderings were somehow meant to be combined with the fierce determination of a piebald pony, running in its tight circle with a kind of traumatized invariance, apparently prepared to keep doing that forever while the
elephant plodded helplessly about, so anxious to please, black rheum
thrown off from its eyes like sweat, its damp-damaged hide lightly coated with the kind of hair that sprouts out near a healing wound, gingery and brittle, like the weft of baklava. Dressed in overalls, theelephant could have passed for a London builder: cheerful, not very dishonest, complete with beer-paunch and bony coccyx-prominent on its fleshless, winded rump.
Richard saw his chance. "Professor Mills?" he said, and introduced himself at length. "I wonder if you were ever sent a copy of our review of the reprint of Jurisprudential? I brought a copy along. Hoped you might be here. An interesting review, as well as a favorable one."
"Why thank you," he said. "I'll look forward to that."
The reviews, thought Richard, had definitely been a good idea. Americans couldn't know-couldn't possibly imagine-just how little The Little Magazine really was.
"I'm particularly interested in your ideas on penal reform," Richard went on. "I like what I might call your humanely utilitarian slant. In a field so full of humbug. As you say, the question is: 'Does it work?' "
They talked on, or Richard did. Mills had an air of troubled and shaky preoccupation. Glancing at the animals, the runts and curs and strays bobbing round the ring, Richard was struck by Mills's inches: for an Irish-American he seemed fabulously tall. So maybe this tremulous fatigue was what the tall ended up with, after a lifetime of lugging that sack of height. Round his neck he wore a light surgical brace like an aerodynamic yoke.
"It's amazing how hidebound we are in England. Still the old ideas. Deterrence. Sequestration. There's a lot of talk but no will to bring about change. Even our most liberal public figures say one thing and …" Richard appeared to hesitate, as if considering the etiquette or equity of simply seizing on the nearest example. "Well. Take Gwyn Barry. Thoroughly liberal in all his pronouncements. But deep down …"
"You surprise me. In his writing he seems-irreproachably liberal on such matters."
"Gwyn? Oh, you've no idea the kind of things he'll say in private. He actually favors a return to more public forms of punishment."
As Mills leaned backward on his plinth Richard went through the formality of telling himself not to get carried away.
"With paying spectators. Retributive and exemplary. But with a vengeance. So to speak. Stocks and pillories. Ceremonial scourgings. Ducking-stools. Tarring and feathering. Impalements and flayings. You see, he thinks the mob has had a poor deal in recent years. Public ston-ings, even lynchings-"
He was interrupted, not by the professor, but by the publishing and bookselling community and its fresh consensus of exhausted forbearance: a pair of midget camels or lumpy llamas were now trotting anx-iously about, to so little purpose that the ringmaster was now giving them the taste of his lash. A modest instrument-a black cord on a black stick. Nothing like the deafening bullwhips that Richard had in mind. He said,
"Yo
u're an Irishman, Professor. You must have followed that case- the bomb in the shopping center. Here's what Gwyn said. He said: round up all known IRA members and shackle them to the gates of the Tower of London. With a big sign, with pictures, saying what they did and inviting the public to go ahead and vent their anger. And then, after a couple of months of that, when their arms and their legs and their 'cocks' have been ripped off (do excuse me), string them up for the ravens. Oh yes. That's friend Barry for you."
Richard might have said more; but now a steel-hooped tunnel was being hastily and noisily pounded together, leading through the crowd toward a square cage in the ring. There was talk of a tiger . . . The two men found themselves pushed together in the press, Richard taking care to shield the professor, who seemed fearful for the upholstery supporting his neck. They stood side by side, enjoying what Richard felt to be a just and wordless solidarity. Earlier that winter (the case was still sub judice), Mills had Christmased with his wife at their holiday home on Lake Tahoe; forcing entry on Christmas Eve, a crew of nomad joy-raiders had then subjected the Millses to a two-hundred-hour ordeal of abuse, battery, bondage and arson. The professor was of course aware that a personal experience, however dire, should carry only statistical weight in the settlement of one's intellectual positions. But he was doing a lot of rethinking, which he was going to have to do a lot of anyway, because the many scores of texts he had studied and annotated in preparation for his next book (a lifetime effort provisionally entitled The Lenient Hand) had been mockingly torched by the intruders, along with the rest of his work station and, it seemed, everything else he had ever cared about. His wife, Marietta, still in deep therapy, hadn't uttered a word since New Year's Day.
The tiger was coming. Richard dumped Stanwyck and managed to dispatch another tray of drinks before sidling his way ringside. Along its tube of bars the tiger moved silently in the hush, with almost inorganic smoothness, like the contents of a hypodermic responding to the pressure of the surgeon's thumb. Richard looked up suddenly: Gwyn was
