The Information

by Martin Amis

  It so happens that I know quite a lot about dating-down at that end of the scale. As a man who stands five-feet-six-inches tall (or five-feet-six-and-one-half-inches, according to a passport I once had), I know about dating and size. In my early teens I was at least a foot shorter. My mother kept telling me I would "shoot up." I was still asking her, at the age of twenty: "What's all this about me shooting up?" (It never happened; but I grew; and I have no complaints, anymore, about five-feet-six.) Thirty years ago my very slightly older but very much taller brother would sometimes arrange foursomes for my benefit: my brother's girlfriend would be asked to bring a girlfriend along-or a sister. And I would wait, in a doorway, while he made a rendezvous and then report back, saying, "Come on. She's tiny"-or else (shaking his head), "Sorry, Mart." In which case I would perhaps follow him at a distance and watch him rejoin the two sixty-inch giantesses at the entrance to the milk bar or under the lit portals of the Essoldo or the Odeon, and then numbly make my way home in the probable rain.

  But this rain, probably, almost certainly, was just ordinary rain, and not the Old Testament deluge that had engulfed and ruined the yellow dwarf. She stood in the doorway, with all the other flashflood amphibians. The makeup, the get-up-the tide-marks round her ankles, like socks; and her face in full defiance under the flattened hedge of the big hair. And I had to think: this is awful. But you tried to make too little go too far. You tried to make so very little go so very far.

  . . . The information is telling me to stop saying hi and to start

  saying bye,

  PART THREE

  Of the pressures facing the successful novelist in the mid-1990s Richard Tull could not easily speak. He was too busy with the pressures facing the unsuccessful novelist in the mid-1990s-or the resurgent novelist, let's say (for now): the unproved novelist. Richard sat in Coach. His seat was non-aisle, non-window, and above all non-smoking. It was also non-wide and non-comfortable. Hundreds of yards and hundreds of passengers away, Gwyn Barry, practically horizontal on his crimson barge, shod in prestige stockings and celebrity slippers, assenting with a smile to the coaxing refills of Alpine creekwater and sanguinary burgundy with which his various young hostesses strove to enhance his caviar tartlet, his smoked-salmon pinwheel and asparagus barquette, his prime fillet tournedos served on a timbale of tomato and a tapenade of Castilian olives-Gwyn was in First. Richard was in Coach, drinking small beer, eating peanuts; and Coach was the world. Coach World-World Traveler. To his immediate left sat someone very young. To his immediate right sat someone very old. And there was Richard, in the middle. The child leaned and pushed and sometimes squirmed up against him in a careless way, carelessly confident that its touch would be welcome. Whereas the old guy on his right, coated in his crepe of age, remained properly withdrawn. Richard found himself inclining to his left, courting the child's thoughtless touch. After all, he was at the time of life when- sitting in a garden or a park-he was more pleased than vexed if a bee

  buzzed him, flattered that anything, however briefly and stupidly, could

  still mistake him for a flower.

  Was this, then, a renovated Richard we were looking at? You might have thought so. If you had marked him in recent weeks, his black eyeerased (even that whispered query of nicotine, high on the cheekbone), his nose as sane as any other nose (his nose now basked on the shores of reason), his air of pitying detachment in the offices of the Tantalus Press ("It will be a relief to return to your metrical meditations," he had written to Keith Horridge, "after the brouhaha of publication in the States"), his quite frequent renderings of Respect as he showered and shaved (having made love successfully, or at least undeniably, to Gina the night before-"What you want: baby I got"), his slurred promise to Gwyn, which helped foreclose an otherwise pleasant dinner at Holland Park, that he was going to run him out of town: seeing and hearing all this, you might have thought that, yes, here was a writer on a roll. He had put in a lot of time with Anstice, patiently steering her away from her latest plan (that of committing suicide at Calchalk Street) and encouraging her to take that brief but restorative holiday in the Isle of Mull (the Isle of Mull, in mid-March, he reckoned, would get Leibniz himself drooling over his pill jar). He had called off Steve Cousins, an exquisitely delicate operation, in which he had eaten a lot of shit, and during which he had felt great and immediate harm skittishly considering his person; calmer himself, he had glimpsed the white-capped tor-menta in the digital grid of the young man's face; and walking home that night, from the Canal Creperie, he had sensed a kind of thunder at the back of his neck, which never broke. He had not called Belladonna. He had lunched uneventfully with Lady Demeter (and was even pretty sorry to hear about her father's pretty serious heart attack, which had hobbled him that same Sunday night-and apparently within twenty minutes of Richard's departure). But did he hate Gwyn any less? That would have been the key to it. Did he hate Gwyn any less?

  In any event Richard was persisting in the belief that a rewarding experience lay ahead of him, despite his immediate discomforts, despite his adhesive doubts about Bold Agenda, Inc., and despite the pillow of crimson tissue paper that he clutched to his face. Soon after take off, while the plane was still climbing, about a period's worth of blood had burst from his right nostril. Now, as he settled down with his beer and his biography, and looked forward to the lunch that was edging ever nearer, about a period's worth of blood burst from his left nostril. Richard's nose, it seemed, was once again a reliable instrument; it just happened to contain a gallon of restless gore. He bent and squeezed

  himself toward the aisle, past the child, its single parent, and another,

  older child, and joined the queue for that most despised section of the aircraft, Toilet World-deep in the machine's rump. After his first visit there he had rested on the haunch of the emergency-exit door andlooked down at the rink of London and tried to connect it with his own journey from home to airport in the silver courtesy car so affably skippered by Gwyn: that staggered sideways drift through the pale and permanent Sunday of west West London with its patches of green beneath patches of gray, past files of houses tortured by the road you drove; then the ground thinned and flattened in preparation for the netherlands of sky launch (freight, catering), while above a quivering crucifix was spearing down toward you, with its arms out to get you, and screaming at you with its machine scream. "America will kill me," he had said to Gina, on the doorstep, smiling but hot-eyed, and the fine-grained hair of his sons' heads feeling hot beneath his hands-"It's just going to kill me."

  Half an hour later Richard emerged, leaving behind a toilet resembling the kitchen of a serial murderer in slapdash but hyperactive career phase; bent over the basin, he had started like a guilty thing when the PA system identified him by name and demanded that he make himself known to the cabin staff. A few last bubbly snorts into the paper towels, and then he squelched his way out of there. In the aisle he saw that a stewardess was coming toward him, looking to left and right and dutifully saying,

  "A Mr. Tull? A Mr. lull. A Mr. Tull at all?"

  He watched her. He knew her. He had already singled her out for attention. And we are inclined to speculate whether anyone would really want this-Richard's attention. She was the stewardess who, before takeoff, had been obliged to demonstrate the safety procedure, standing a few feet from Richard's knees. Normally of course the task would have been assigned to a surrogate: to the electronic stewardess on the video screen. But the image had fluttered and stalled; and so, in some bewilderment, they'd all had to settle for the real thing. The stewardess, and her sign language-the hard old dame of the middle air, nearing retirement, her systems warped by the magnetosphere, and by disuse (he understood disuse), like a madam summoned out of deep retirement for the last thing she wanted, going through the motions with the hand stroke, the knee bend-the cursey curtseys of the stewardess.

  "A Mr. Tull? A Mr. Tull at all."

  This too was the language of the air, this was airspeak; no one on terra f
irma would ever talk like that. But to Richard's ears, still papery with blood loss, it seemed well said. A Mr. Tull. A Mr. Tull at all.

  He owned up.

  The stewardess escorted him down the length of Economy, and then another stewardess escorted him through Business World; he ducked under a curtain, and then another stewardess led him into First. As hemade this journey, this journey within a journey, getting nearer to America, Richard looked to see what everyone was reading, and found that his progress through the plane described a diagonal of shocking decline. In Coach the laptop literature was pluralistic, liberal, and humane: Daniel Deronda, trigonometry, Lebanon, World War I, Homer, Diderot, Anna Karenina. As for Business World, it wasn't that the businessmen and businesswomen were immersing themselves in incorrigibly minor or incautiously canonized figures like Thornton Wilder or Dostoevsky, or with lightweight literary middlemen like A. L. Rowse or Lord David Cecil, or yet with teacup-storm philosophers, exploded revisionist historians, stubbornly Steady State cosmologists or pallid poets over whom the finger of sentimentality continued to waver. They were reading trex: outright junk. Fat financial thrillers, chunky chillers and tublike tinglers: escape from the pressures facing the contemporary entrepreneur. And then he pitched up in the intellectual slum of First Class, among all its drugged tycoons, and the few books lying unregarded on softly swelling stomachs were jacketed with hunting scenes or ripe young couples in mid swirl or swoon. They all lay there flattened out in the digestive torpor of midafternoon, and nobody was reading anything-except for a lone seeker who gazed, with a frown of mature skepticism, at a perfume catalogue. Jesus, what happened on the Concorde? Scouring the troposphere at the limit of life, and given a glimpse of the other side-a glimpse of what the rest of the universe almost exclusively consisted of (unpunctuated vacuum)-the Mach 2 morons would be sitting there, and staring into space. The space within. Not the space without. In the very nib of the airplane sat Gwyn Barry, who was reading his schedule.

  "Hi," said Richard.

  Gwyn pulled a lever which caused him to surge up from the supine to the sedentary. He pointed to a little bulkhead table. Richard sat on it, next to the vase of tulips. There were posies everywhere, here in First.

  "How are you doing?" said Gwyn. And his eyes returned to his schedule: six or seven sheets, with many a box and bullet-punch, and highlit and color-coded-TV, radio, press. "Wow, they've really got me grid-locked in LA," he went on. "It's all the interest leaking down from San Francisco. Look at that. How can I do the Chronicle and then Pete Ellery back to back?" He turned to Richard as if he expected an answer. Then he said, "What have your people got lined up for you?"

  "I told you. My editor moved on, They've given me some other

  Chuck or Chip." And it was true. Roy Biv, Richard's editor-so full of enthusiasm and ideas-had moved on from Bold Agenda, and every time Richard called he got shuffled around from Chip to Chuck, from Chuckto Chip. "Is Chuck there?" You mean Chip. "Then give me Chip." You ?want Chuck. And they were never there. Richard couldn't decide whether Chuck and Chip were the same person (like Darko and Ranko), who was permanently absent, or whether both Chip and Chuck were the inventions of a third person called something like Chup or Chick. The only editor he ever got through to, these days, was an inoffensive-sounding guy who went by the name of Leslie Evry.

  Gwyn said, "So what have they got lined up?"

  "I said. I won't know till I get there."

  "But this is America, man! You got to get out there. You got to go for it."

  Richard waited.

  "You got to come on strong. Talk big and kick ass."

  "Let's get this straight. Are you trying to be funny, or is it your intention to pretend to be American while we're there?"

  Gwyn sank back, and gave his schedule a careless brandish. "You know, you're lucky. This is just show business. While I'm scurrying around out there, you'll have time to absorb everything. Time to think. To ponder. Time to dream. Are you all right, mate? You look a bit pale. But it could be the light."

  And the light was coming in sideways, and everything looked combustible or already white-hot, close to burnout or heat-death.

  "I had a nosebleed. I haven't seen so much blood since the twins were born. I used up two whole cans' worth of tissues and towels."

  "Beautiful flying weather."

  "It's always sunny, you know. Above the clouds."

  "I got you up here, and it took some doing, so you could see what it's like. For your piece."

  Then, for Richard's further benefit, Gwyn cast his gaze round the cabin with an expression that judiciously combined embarrassment and mischief. "Who would have thought it? A boy from the valleys. Flying to America first class."

  "Do you mind if I use that line?"

  "It's nice, though, isn't it? Dead comfy."

  "The sickbags," Richard said dully, "look no better or bigger than the ones in Coach. And they still have turbulence here. And it still takes seven hours. I'll see you on the ground."

  He made his way back, past Magenta Rhapsody and Of Kingly Blood, past Cartel and Avarice and The Usurers, and into the multitudinousness of Hard Times, La Peste, Amerika, Despair, The Moonstone, Labyrinths … Two people-a man in Business and some dope in Coach-were reading Amelior: the paperback.

  But as Richard shackled himself back into his seat (which itself bore the heavy indentation of The Wouldbegood: A Life of Edith Nesbit), he had other information to process. Gwyn, Gwyn's schedule, Amelior, the unfortunate defection of Roy Biv from Bold Agenda: these swayed like loose harpoons from the nucleus of his soul. But he had other information to process, the kind that only comes when life is turning, the kind you have to be there to get, because no one will ever tell you about it. And if they did-you'd never listen.

  On his way back through the plane Richard had seen women crying- three women, four women. And he realized that there always were these women on planes, crying, with makeup in meltdown, folded over in the window seat or candidly hideous in the aisle, clutching Kleenex. Before, if he assumed anything, he assumed they were crying about boyfriends or husbands (partings or sunderings), or crying (who cared?) from toothache or curse pains or fear of flying. But now he was forty, and he knew.

  Women on planes are crying because someone they love or loved is dead or dying. Every plane has them. The talent on the short hops, the broads on the wide-bodies, with their clutched hankies. Death can do this; death has the power to do this. Death, which sends women hurrying to the end of the street, to bus stops, which makes them run under the clocks of railway stations, which lifts them five miles high and fires them weeping through the air at the speed of death, all over the world.

  While it would always be true and fair to say that Richard felt like a cigarette, it would now be doubly true and fair to say it. He felt like a cigarette. And he felt like a cigarette. His mouth was plugged with a gum called Nicoteen. And he wore circular nicotine patches, from the same product stable, on his left forearm and right bicep. Richard's blood brownly brewed, like something left overnight in the teapot. He was a cigarette; and he felt like one. And he still felt like a cigarette . .. What he was doing was practicing non-smoking. He knew how Americans treated smokers, people of smoke, people of fire and ash, with their handfuls of dust. He knew he would be asked to do an awful lot of it: non-smoking. So he felt like a cigarette, and he felt like a drink-he felt like a lot of drinks. But he didn't drink and he didn't smoke. All he had was the plastic bottle of mineral water that Gina had made him bring.

  He spent his first two hours in New York wearing an expression of riveted horror. This expression of riveted horror was not a response to American violence or vulgarity, to the disposition of American wealth, the quality of American politicians, the condition of American schooling or the standard of American book reviewing (hopelessly variable but often chasteningly high, he would later conclude). No. This expression of riveted horror Richard came to know well. He looked horrified and riveted, and he knew he looked horrifi
ed and riveted, because he was staring into the riveted horror of his own face.

  In the bathroom, at the hotel. It was a shaving mirror, on a retractable arm, supplementing the broad background of the regular mirror (itself implacable enough). The shaving mirror had a light above it; it also had a light inside it. He thought there must be a lot of people who imagined they looked okay, who fancied they could pass for normal, until they met a shaving mirror in an American hotel. Then the jig was up. Presumably, with the human face, the worst possible representation will always be the truest. This was the best mirror, and it was the worst mirror. All other mirrors were in public relations. After an audience with such a mirror, only two places to go (and maybe the hotel took its cut): the cosmetic surgery, or the church. Richard tried to tell himself that he had looked terrible in London too. And memorably terrible. A week before departure he found that his passport, disused for some while, had quietly gone out of print, or been remaindered. So he breezed along to Woolworth's in Portobello Road and slipped into the booth, expeditiously, without even pausing to arrange his hair. Three minutes later he was shredding the strip of photographs with his fingernails-photographs in which he looked, at once, incredibly old, incredibly mad and incredibly ill. He returned to the beauty parlor of Calchalk Street, and then tried again; and he spent another six quid before he came up with anything he could seriously present at Petty France . . . The mirror had the power to hold him in position, like a vise. His face, it was nothing. It was scorched earth.

  Next door on the bed there lay a bundle of early reviews and a copy of the schedule and some bright new hardbacks and even a spray of flowers, all sent by the publisher. By Gwyn's publisher, that is to say: to help him with his piece-his piece about Gwyn. There was nothing from BoldAgenda, no message, no word and no meaningful reply to the calls he kept making from the bathroom telephone, with his nose an inch from the glass. Richard's requests to speak to Leslie Eviy got bounced round the office until they seemed to evaporate or else were pounded into submission and silence by a background cacophony of impulsive home improvement, complete with pummeled nailheads and creaking bucket handles and one-liners tossed back and forth by guys with names like Tug and Tiff and Heft. In twenty minutes he was due upstairs: to listen in on Gwyn being interviewed. Then, when that was over, he was going to arrange to interview the interviewer about what Gwyn was like to interview. Richard left the bathroom and went and sat on the bed and calmly smoked his way through a panic attack. He wanted his boys with him, Marius on this side, Marco on that side. Marius here, Marco there. The mirror was telling him that his body was close to death but his mind felt six months old.