The Information

by Martin Amis

  Making his last move he sideswiped his way east, across Fifth and Madison, on to the avenue of sun and gold. To the north the prospect was seized in the city's grid, locked and channelled by the buildings on either side and their stiff-chested measure. The vista looked infinite, and entirely unknown, like the open sea to the first traversers of the Atlantic (when gods and terrors were still young and strong), ever ready tobecome the end of the world, where water became waterrall, oceanfall. Richard realized that he would have to stop saying he had never been to America. To that distinction-his main accomplishment and claim to fame-he could no longer pretend. He had been to America. He had been to America.

  PART FOUR

  Gwyn awoke. He had slept, as always, now, in what Demi called not the spare room or the guest room but the visitors' room, which faced the master suite on the first floor-where Demi slept. With a brisk clearance of the throat he turned over onto his back, and then over onto his side. The nearer pillow of the other twin bed was evenly scratched with strands of straight black hair: hair belonging to Pamela, his research assistant. A section of her sharp-shouldered back was visible, and even through the curtained blur of early morning he could see the fine indentations her hair had made on her impressionable flesh. For half a minute or so he tried to think of a good way of describing this sight. Other men, other writers, might have started off with-who knows?-map contours or shallow estuaries; but Gwyn had decided some time ago that there weren't going to be any descriptions of women's bodies, or anyone else's, in what he wrote, because some bodies were "better" than others (and Pamela's body, as it happened, was better than most), and although Gwyn felt the way everyone did about bodies (always complaining to Demi about her body and telling her to get it fixed), he knew that comparisons were odious (and nearly always unflattering)-so why waste valuable time? Gwyn sat up and drank a tumbler of bottled water. The water was called Elixir and its ads promised you eternal youth.

  Probably there is no word in contemporary usage delicate enough, nice enough, to describe Gwyn's feeling-tone as he crossed the few feet of carpeted floor and slipped into Pamela's bed. "Condescension," in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sense, would perhaps come closest. When the Rev. Mr. Collins dines with Lady Catherine de Bourgh and, the next day, his voice weak with gratitude, praises her extraordinary"condescension"-that comes close. The willing, the indulgent dilution of one's own superlative being, for the delight and enrichment of simpler lives. Considering how wonderful he was, it seemed wonderful of him to behave so wonderfully when he could justifiably behave so badly, if he felt like it. Lady Catherine was a snob and a toady. Mr. Collins was a snob and a toady. And Gwyn Barry, like Jane Austen, was a writer.

  "Good morning," he said indulgently.

  "Mm," said Pamela. Or was it "Hmm"?

  Women do adore to be cuddled and babied in the morning. It really was universal. There weren't any that didn't like it. All the more reason not to say so, in writing: an offensive commonplace is what you'd end up with. Gwyn had a great deal to attempt and achieve that day (What is this life of the mind? what asketh men to have?), so he came as quickly as he could.

  Where was his simple dressing gown? There.

  He got out of bed and crossed the room and opened the door and crossed the landing and, most symmetrically, opened the door and crossed the room and got into bed. Demi was awake. He reached for her hand and gave it a benevolent squeeze.

  "Time to get the tea, love," he told her.

  It was all laid out on a tray, of course-laid out by Sherilee or Paquita. All Demi had to do was go and get it. Yes, and his mail.

  "Come on, love. Tick tock goes the clock."

  Demi moved very lazily sometimes. Gwyn's green eyes leniently twinkled.

  "Pam's having a little lie-in. A little snooze," he whispered, remembering-as he quite often remembered-that Demi disliked running into Pam first thing in the morning. Or any time at all. But especially first thing. He occasionally found it depressing, the spiritlessness with which Demi rolled from the bed. Now he could establish himself in her vacated warmth, unfastidiously, loving all that lived.

  "As I think I've gone to the trouble of pointing out before, you are at liberty, you know, to adjust the present arrangement any time you like. As I think I've gone to the trouble of pointing out before. Listen to this: 'The attractive simplicity of Mr. Barry's fable may sometimes tend towards the simplistic.' This, anyway, is the belief of Mr. Aaron E. Wurlitzer of the Milwaukee Herald. Don't they know how hard it is to make the complicated look simple? At your say-so, Demi, the present arrangement could also be submitted for review. Or modification. I am a man, in his manlynoon. I am a man. Take me for all in all. As a man, I have certain needs. To satisfy these needs, Demi, I have to stray less far and less perilously than most men would. I see by your pinched expression and throbbing port-wine stain that you would wish me to stray farther than across the landing to the visitors' room. But would you, Demi? Would you really? Ah. This is good. This is excellent. Marion Treadwell, of the Midland Examiner: 'It would seem that Barry has somehow tapped a deep collective yearning. This explains the book's success. Nothing on the page explains it.' " Gwyn paused stoically. "Why are women fractionally less keen on my work than men? You might ponder that, Demi. I would be grateful for your 'feminine intuition.' "

  Demi watched her husband, who was now contemplating his halved grapefruit, and with suspicion: not with rapt and childlike curiosity, the way he used to, as if he'd never seen one before. He had stopped doing that to grapefruits after a certain grapefruit, responding to Gwyn's rapt and childlike prod with the tined spoon, had squirted him in the eye. Then he'd had her running around for half an hour with moistened washclothes and bottles of Optrex.

  "Again. Let's see if you've got it right at last. I have a duty to follow my impulses. To catch after my impulses, wherever they may lead. Because what am I really doing?"

  "Research."

  "Research. When I'm playing snooker with Richard, or tennis, or chess, when I'm-"

  "I wish you wouldn't."

  "Wouldn't what?"

  "Play games with Richard. You always lose and it puts you in a vile mood."

  Gwyn paused stoically. "When I'm out playing snooker, I'm doing research. When I'm asleep, I'm doing research. When I go out hunting or gambling with Sebby, I'm doing research. When I'm having sex next door with Pamela, I'm doing research."

  "She's your research assistant."

  "Demi, that's rather good. We research in the missionary position. We research in the doggy style. We research with her on top: the cowgirl."

  "But there isn't any sex in your novels."

  "You may or may not have noticed," said Gwyn, letting his head drop (so might Richard let his head drop when, for the thirtieth time in fifteen minutes, Marco mistook a d for a b, or a q for a g) but also realizing, in that instant, that he could never leave Demeter, because only with herdid he wield this thrilling and frightening eloquence, this drolly rolling periodicity, "that there isn't any snooker in my novels either. It doesn't work like that. It works like this. The prose is given tautness and burnish precisely by what it deliberately excludes. Picasso's abstracts gain their force from the . . . from the representational mastery he holds in check. Something held back. Or held in harness. Just as the coachman, with the reins in one hand and the-"

  "Or the carpenter."

  "What about the carpenter?"

  "There aren't any children in your novels either. Half the men have had vasectomies. Shouldn't that mean that we ought to have children? So you can deliberately exclude them?"

  "Don't try to be clever, love. It doesn't suit you. Well. I see we have returned to base. And I say unto you: Go on the pill, Demi. Get a coil fixed, Demi. Get a cap. This is 'against your religion,' you will say. Unlike taking cocaine and fucking black pushers. Or is all that for your religion? God moves in mysterious ways. Thou shalt take cocaine. To get more cocaine, thou shalt…"

  Demi got out of bed and w
ent toward the bathroom, saying, "There was only one black pusher."

  "Congratulations. Were there pushers of other creeds and hues? White, say, and Church of England?" He raised his voice, to make himself heard; but his tone did not change. "Richard rang. He's preparing his major piece about yours truly. Something tells me it's going to be very hostile. I wouldn't be surprised if he puts all that in."

  She came back to the doorway. Her arms were folded. "All what in?"

  "About you fucking black pushers."

  "… He can't. What can I do about it?"

  "I don't know. Perhaps you'd better go round and fuck him."

  At ten-thirty or thereabouts Gwyn stepped into his study: the three tall windows, the inlaid bookcases, the heavy wealth. His great work station-mahogany dining tables, French desks-formed a broad arc in the center of the room, slabbed with the thick shapes of processor, printer, copier. Here the two cultures, Gwyn believed, were attractively reconciled: the bright flame of human inquiry, plus lots of gadgets. Give Gwyn a palatinate smoking jacket, as opposed to a pair of tailored jeans and a lumberjack shirt, and he could be Captain Nemo, taking his seat at the futuristic bridge of the sumptuous Nautilus.

  His morning coffee was there, laid out by Paquita. His morning newsprint was there, laid out by Pamela: all the non-tabloid dailies, threeweeklies, one fortnightly, two monthlies, and a quarterly. On the French desk lay an Italian notebook, open on the front page, where Gwyn had written, in longhand, The Road from Amelior? The Road to Amelior? Beyond Amelior? The house was utterly silent: a silence of tiptoe, and finger to the lips. Like the house of his grandfather, who worked all night and slept all day.

  Gwyn relied on two different agencies for his press clippings. His publishers used an agency, and they sent him stuff. And he'd made do with that, for a while. But he kept coming across extra references to himself, over and above what they sent him. And he didn't like that. So now he employed a rival outfit, giving them the broadest possible brief; and still he would encounter stray mentions of his own name, unduplicated in the agency envelopes. Now he sat himself down.

  In the early days he had confined himself to reviews of his contemporaries, in which the example of Gwyn Barry might reasonably be invoked. Then he branched out, reading reviews of the novels of younger, and indeed older, novelists. Before he knew it, he was reading all fiction reviews. Reviews of Panamanian allegories, Japanese thrillers; reviews of reissues of Don Quixote, Humphrey Clinker. It was the same with literary criticism. Reading all reviews of books about modern writing quickly developed into the habit of reading all reviews about any writing whatever (poetry, drama and travel had long since climbed on board). Pliny, Nostradamus, Elizabeth David, Izaak Walton, Bede. The besetting interest in contemporary fiction expanded not only upward but also sideways. He started reading reviews about contemporary art, and then non-contemporary art; contemporary sociology, architecture, economics, jurisprudence, and then non-contemporary ditto. And then again: it seemed natural enough that reports on contemporary agriculture would eventually contain some lighthearted reference to the pages in Amelior that dealt with, say, crop rotation. And this happened, it came to pass; and from that day forth Gwyn found himself helplessly committed to agriculture, as something to follow, plus hydroponics and so on, all in the same sheep-dip and turnip-swagging prose. Now, new interests struck him suddenly, and at tangents. One morning he was reading a piece (idly, almost disinterestedly, with no secure hope of seeing fresh news about Gwyn Barry) on the property page by a guest writer who had experienced supposedly comical difficulties in selling his small flat; the flat was small and the writer, evidently, was big, which made the small flat seem even smaller. "Better to be a titch like Gwyn Barry," he wrote, "rather than a-" And here he cited a playwright of celebrated obesity. After that, Gwyn was reading everything he could find about propertyand, a little later, everything he could find about size: cars, holiday accommodation, clothes, prison cells. Pretty soon-and you could see this coming-he was reading everything about everything. Not in itself a bad idea, if information was what you sought. But we see accidents, everywhere, on the information highway. We see hazard lights and freezing fog. We see jackknife and whiplash.

  There was a time, about fifteen years ago, when Richard Tull was so worried by alcohol, so worried that he might be an alcoholic, that he became almost as interested in alcoholism as he was interested in alcohol, which was plenty interested. And, when he read, his eyes would mutiny. He was of course transfixed by any incidence of the word alcohol, and all its cognates and synonyms and homonyms; and innocent words, innocently used, came to rivet him: words like stout and punch and sack and hock and mild and bitter; "high spirits," "small beer," "in the drink." He knew he had gone about as far as he could go with this when one day he veered in on the word it. He was thinking, he realized, of gin-and-it, or gin-and-Italian vermouth. So even it, not to mention Italy, was all fucked up for him. Alcohol, naturally, retained its suzerainty. And any word that looked anything like it. Anabolic. Laconic. Interpol. Uncool. School. Any word that had an / and a c in it, or a c and an h, or an o, or an a. Richard was less interested in alcohol now, largely because he was an alcoholic . .. Analogously, Gwyn Barry's scannings and skimmings (and what was his mood when he read? Puzzlement, mainly: a desert of patient disgust, with infrequent oases) were Gwyn Barry-seeking. All that kept him from lecteurial chaos were those two capital letters, G and B, the twin sentinels of his sanity. How many times had his eyes bumped into George Berkeley and George Balanchine, into George Bush and George Brown, into Guy Burgess and Geoff Boycott, Gerald Brenan and Grigori Baklanov, George Brummell and Georges Braque, Geoffrey Biddulph and Gertude Bell, into Giovanni Barbirolli and Giovanni Boccaccio and Gianlorenzo Bernini and Giambattista Bodoni. Into Granville Barker and Gaudier-Brzeska. Into Guinea-Bissau. Gladstone Bag. Gutenberg Bible. Grolsch Beer. Great Bear. Great Britain.

  Soon he would have to go out into it: into Great Britain, and its capital, London, which had suddenly-or was it gradually? … Which had suddenly turned, and shaped itself against his peace. It was now two-forty-five. Lunch had already been brought to him; he didn't even know who had borne the tray, such was the tact, discretion, and awe with which she had slipped in and out of the room-Demi? Pam? Paqui? Sheri? As if he was a whispering visionary, a couturier of the cosmos, on the brink of discovering … the universal. Actually he had got throughall the Saturday supplements, and the weeklies, and the fortnightly; but the PMLA and (Christ) The Little Magazine remained unprobed. Today he found three mentions: one in a piece about parking meters; one in a piece about the limitations of multicultural street theater; and one in a piece about the Profundity Requital (this made it all seem worthwhile, and even rational), in which he learned that he had bounced back into consideration, though he still lagged behind the Bosnian poetess who also ran a thousand-bed children's hospital in Gorazde-among others. On top of this he had also managed to cross the room occasionally and write something like Onwards from Amelior? in his notebook. Now he stood with his fists leaning on the long table (once more Nemo over his charts); he was staring at a loose pile of mail, non-urgent, second-echelon, which he would soon spare an hour on with Pam and a few yeses and nos and thank-yous and maybes. You don't know me but. I have recently been appointed as the. I am a student in my. This is the first time I have ever written to a. Despite recent triple heart-bypass surgery I felt I. You're probably fed up with. Here is a photograph of me in my. We at. I don't usually. What's it like being . . .

  Gwyn advanced to the central window and looked down at the street and its ballroom of cherry blossom-the dance partners in their ball gowns, swelling and jostling and bristling, all the way to the bottom of the hill. How could the street not like him? The universe, the world, the hemisphere liked him. But the street didn't like him, and the city didn't like him. He would have to be going out into it for important and expensive meetings (things with Richard were not yet over): audiences at the feet of the great Buttruguena, t
he great Abdumomunov, the great O'Fla-herty. Before, the city had never paid him any mind, except in theater crush bars or high-visibility restaurants and, yes, every now and then out there when people stopped and stared in that fixed, gratified way, or frowned forgetfully as if trying to place him among their acquaintances . .. But now the city behaved as if it wanted to break his face. The city wanted to break his face.

  Cognitive dissonance was what he was dealing with. Nothing rhymed.

  Whereas applause and praise were gathering, circumambiently, in response to the new thing he had brought into the world, his novel, his gift, the world itself-the streets, which stretched away, in folds and folds-had begun to hate his being. Not qua novelist, he assumed. But personally. It wasn't that the streets were giving him a bad review. The streets didn't read. Newsprint often told him that he was the spokesman for the next generation, and even Gwyn could imagine the next generationminding that-looking around, and seeing how very few he spoke for, and how quietly. But, again, the next generation didn't know he spoke for them, or that newsprint thought he did. This was personal. The compact Celt in his expensive yet essentially democratic chinos and leather jacket, under his silvery blacktop of hair (lightly cropped, at present, against baldness): this creation was no longer invisible and monochrome in its A-to-B, pavement-using, pause-for-thought and taxi-hailing functions, but floridly motley. Was it fame? He had become part of the landscape. And the landscape didn't want him there. Gwyn stood by the window, looking out, wondering what he'd done.