by Martin Amis
nearby, part of the inner circle, but he kept on slackly turning to the man
who leaned over his shoulder, a suited sophomore intent on finishing his joke or his pitch or his ramble. It was then that Richard knew, for at least the thousandth time, that Gwyn was not an artist. If it was a woman he'dbeen talking to-then okay. But to be only half engaged, attending to some bloke, when you could be looking at a tiger … Equally but not quite equivalently remiss, Richard now tried to assimilate the animal as an artist ought to, and he greeted it first with fear, which was surely right; even Steve Cousins you greeted this way, with the thought of what the wilder thing could do to you if you two were really alone. Of course the tiger in question was no glittering savage of the rain forest or the tundra: it seemed detoxed or pre-tamed, displaced from its very phylum, and burdened with its camouflage gear-its worn sun-and-dust yellow, ridged with shadow. Even the essential severity of its stare felt disorganized. Richard feared for its teeth but they were intact, the feline's dirk-like canines revealed in its fixed yawns of hatred, hatred of the handler and the handler's stool. Hatred of the drug that dried its mouth, imparting desperate struggle, desperate servitude, to the tiger's yawns.
Soon it was gone and all the other animals gathered to take their curtain call-for the publicity boy was breaking everything up. One of the dogs started gagging and retching, either from delayed stage fright or from unimaginable wolfings before the show, and another dog inclined its trembling snout to sniff and lick the flesh-pink stew, and the publishers and booksellers of America all groaned, then gagged and so it went on, in relays of disgust.
At Denver's Stapleton International Airport, at five o'clock in the morning, nobody wanted to work. So they had a robot doing it. A computer, with a robot voice: female. Richard thought that the robot, considering it was a robot and every inch a slave, didn't take any shit, always telling him to move on, to unload quickly and move on, to deposit bags quickly and move on. He let his suitcase and his mail sack splash down onto the carousel, where he inadvertently but briefly joined them, and then while Gwyn went on ahead he picked himself up and retraced his steps to the door and the cold blue yonder, planning on a quiet cigarette. The cigarette was a cigarette-but not a quiet one. He coughed his heart out behind a baggage trolley and ralphed his ring out behind a soft-drinks machine and finally cried his eyes out leaning backwards against the glass and smoking another, quieter cigarette. These tears incorporated an element of relief, and of grateful mortality, under the big western sky, which happened to be practicing its quasar imitation: a
multitude of clouds had been foregathered, bright and compact and in
cluster-galaxy posture, surrounding and obscuring something strange and grand-the sun. The sun, as he watched, went from early-morning tumescence to full-face pallor, from red giant to white dwarf. When the
sun was white you had no trouble at all believing in black holes, in singularities. Because this ordinary star already looked half blistered out of space-time.
Mandated to hang around and deal with all the fallout from the circus thing, the publicity boy was catching a later flight. Therefore Richard would be traveling first class, up there with Gwyn. With Gwyn, who had to make some early interviews at the next city along.
"We're all a little discombooberated here," said the stewardess.
Richard told her that he was all right.
"Ah," said Gwyn, "an English breakfast."
"Coffee for you, sir? Coffee for you?"
"Have you got any brandy?"
"Any?"
"Brandy?"
Finding out how many kinds of skin and hair the world had, Richard looked out of his porthole all the way to the Pacific, while Gwyn capably slept. All the way, over the waffle fields and hanks of french toast sprinkled with confectioner's sugar, over salt lake, pious plain, desert, more desert, mountain, valley, and then the coniferous ridges of the continent's edge, all the way from tundra to taiga.
He thought the circus crowds in the Kafka story were probably right, to turn away from the hunger artist, from Der Hungerkunstler, who just lay there half buried by the straw in his cage, fasting, plangently not eating; the crowds were probably right to favor the panther which replaced him. Because the panther had no sense of servitude or even captivity, and carried freedom around inside its own body (somewhere in the jaws it seemed to lurk). In the photographs Kafka always looked so amazing, so amazed, perpetually spooked, as if he kept seeing his own ghost in the mirror.
When they landed they were given an additional hour, enplaned, on the ground. A technical matter, or a slave revolt; not even Gwyn could find out which-Gwyn, whose interviews were being stacked above him in the sky like tiers of jets . . . Richard had come to know the landscapes of airports-which were landscapes of the incomplete. Not the interiors, with their popcorn smell and cheerful yellow popcorn light, which were landscapes of incessant addition. The tacked-on Bs and Cs and Ds, the proliferating lego of elbow and kneejoint; and for every sundered couple there wag another kissing thirstily at six in the morning, and for every weeping granny there were familial burgeonings elsewhere-feasts of cousins. Planes moved at the same speed but the human travelers had different rhythms, hurrying, ambling, sprinting, sprawling. Outside,though, the landscape insisted on incompletion. The empty crew buses and stationary forklifts, the prefabricated portakabins. And then headless trucks and cabless wheel sets, staircases pointing upwards but leading nowhere, the joints of amputated corridors, stranded on the tarmac, both ends leading nowhere, insisting on the incomplete.
"We're just going to be thinking out loud here."
"Bear with us. Okay? Okay. Amelior …"
"Now. For us to care about this community, what we need is for it to be … threatened from outside."
"So we care."
"So we care."
"The community is threatened, if we're going to go with the eco thing, by … I don't know. Okay. Shoot me. Killer rats. Mutant rats."
"Please. Keep it human. The community is threatened …"
"By Nazi bikers. The Klan. I don't know."
"Way-wait. Solomon-Solomon's up on the hill, tilling it or whatever. With Padma and Jung-Xiao. Baruwaluwu shouts out! And Solomon sees …"
"The dust trail."
"The dust trail?"
"Of the Nazi bikers."
"Way-wait. A construction company plans to …"
"Build a highway through …"
"Wants to turn the community into a …"
"A chemical warfare facility."
"A casino."
"A bioengineering plant. Which gives us the eco thing. Do we want the eco thing?"
"Where they make mutant cattle."
"Mutant cattle?"
"Mutant . . . pigs. You know, like a block long with no head. Or mutant rats."
"For the military. And Solomon …"
"Figures out…"
"How to fuck them up. Way-wait."
Not even in his sweatiest dengues and beri-beris of facetious loathing had Richard ever seriously considered that he would one day be asked to face the prospect of a Gwyn Barry movie sale. But there they sat, Richard and Gwyn, on a sofa in a luxurious prefab within the Millennium precinct of Endo Studios, Culver City, in Greater Los Angeles. SoL.A. had brought fresh horror, and in the form of a double bill. Amelior Regained had been optioned. But Amelior was a firm sale.
"Yeah," Gwyn had said the previous evening in the hotel. "Millennium are doing it. Hey," he added to the publicity boy, newly arrived, and emerging plumply from the shower, "I don't want this to break until the Profundity thing is all straightened out."
The publicity boy looked at him.
"People will think I don't need it," said Gwyn in a wronged voice. "You know. Rich wife related to the Queen. Back-to-back best-sellers. Movie deals."
"Rock videos."
"Rock videos. They're bound to ask me about movie deals here. I've already been asked about nine times."
"Just say there'
s been movie interest."
"Okay. Yeah, that's good. Movie interest is good."
Richard still couldn't figure it. No matter how degraded or talentless, every work of art belonged to a genre. And the Amelior books belonged to the literary Utopias. There had been plenty of movies about failed Utopias and anti-utopias, but there had never been a movie about a nice Utopia, where everyone was happy all the time. Whole movies about nudist colonies, early Kulturfilmen, the iron jawlines of socialist realism: Utopia, in the cinema, belonged to propaganda and pornography. Besides, the big thing about Amelior, as a joint, was that it was cleansed of all incident-cleansed, too, of sex, violence, conflict and drama.
Such thoughts had evidently occurred to the three-person development team gathered there in the wheeled bungalow to toss ideas around in Gwyn's presence. The two guys wore complicated sports gear- reversible wetsuits. The woman wore a plaid skirt and a white blouse; and she smoked.
"Wouldn't it be better," said Gwyn, who, in this pre-Profundity period, had yet to commit to writing the screenplay, "if you made the conflict internal?" Gwyn opened his hands and fell silent again.
"Let's run with it. Like Gupta's one of them."
"A Nazi biker."
"No. A bioengineer."
"Gupta? Way-wait. Solomon …"
"Why always Solomon?"
"Okay. Abdelrazak…"
"Can you imagine the shit we'll have to sit through if it's Abdel-razak?"
"Okay. Jung-Xiao … tricks Gupta-?
"Not Gupta. How about Yukio?"
"Tricks Yukio? Are you kidding?"
"Okay. Piotr . . ."
"Yeah. Piotr."
"Jung-Xiao tricks Abdelrazak into revealing that Piotr … is one of them."
"A bioengineer."
"Or a Fed."
"Way-wait. Gupta hates Solomon, right?"
"Right. And so does Abdelrazak. And Yukio hates Jung-Xiao. And Eagle Woman hates Conchita. And Padma hates Masha."
"And Baruwaluwu hates Arnaujumajuk."
". . . Why in Christ's name would Baruwaluwu hate Arnaujumajuk?"
"Because they're always going after the same funding."
"Way-wait . . . Conchita is spreading a mutant disease through Amelior."
"… Which she got from the bioengineer: Piotr."
".. . Who's also having a thing with Jung-Xiao."
"… Who's putting out for Yukio."
". . . Who's feeding it to Abdelrazak."
".. . Who's deep in the jeep with Eagle Woman . . ."
Asked to comment, after an unusually long silence, Gwyn said,
"There's no love and no hate in Amelior."
"That's true, Gwyn. We wondered about that. And everyone has these diseases anyway."
"The hardback is in its eleventh printing," said Gwyn, who went on to list the hemispherical achievements of Amelior. "All this without love and hate. Perhaps you should think about that."
"There has to be love and hate, Gwyn. Even if it means hazing the ethnic distinctions-and making them all Americans."
"And losing the diseases. There has to be love and hate. So we care."
"So we care."
"So we care."
"While we're on the subject of caring," said Richard, who was about to take his leave (Gwyn would be lunching with the team), "can I ask a question? There's a big dump bin in reception, where we came in. It's got a little stenciled sign on it which says 'Caring Barrel.' What's a Caring
Barrel? It looks like a big trash can."
"Ah yes. That's the Caring Barrel. The Caring Barrel was placed there after the earthquake for-" "After the riots.?
"After the riots. The Caring Barrel is for concerned employees to … deposit food or warm clothes for …"
"Those who might be in need."
"Thanks," said Richard. On his way to the door he passed the third executive, who was frowning and massaging his eyebrows and saying,
"Is that what it is? I thought it was just a big trash can."
While the lady in reception called him a cab Richard had a good look at the Caring Barrel. It did indeed contain an old scarf and a pair of socks and a couple of packets of cookies and cereal, half hidden by all the regular trash tossed in there by employees who didn't know it was a Caring Barrel. Richard cared. Caring was what Richard was all about. If caring was wrong, then-yes-Richard was wrong. But he didn't know he cared so much. In later years, he supposed, he might have to spend a lot of time peering into Caring Barrels and caring about what they contained.
Back at the hotel he threw in a call to the Lazy Susan. Sure enough, sales were holding firm at one copy.
During the tour Richard had been solicitous of his own health, careful, for instance, to stop drinking every night when he was still a good milliliter clear of liver collapse; he quite often remembered to take his Vitamin C, until it ran out; and of course his smoking had been much reduced, or much rearranged. The confinement and immobility and canned air of modern travel, and the effects of at least three huge and ill-chosen meals a day, he offset with his frequent sprints to the bathroom and with his roilingly aerobic insomnias. But in Los Angeles he definitely started to let himself go. The thing seemed to be that he was making a superhuman effort to avoid thinking about the future, and it was taking a lot out of him.
Everyone said that Gwyn was meant to be taking it easy-secluding himself from the pressures ranged against the successful novelist. But he looked and behaved like a walking power surge, and continued to indulge and even embolden the publicity boy. When he wasn't being interviewed elsewhere, Gwyn Barry, wearing white tennis shorts and black espadrilles, was being interviewed out by the pool. Sometimes Gwyn would be accompanied by the publicity boy; sometimes (there were at least two occasions Richard knew about), the publicity boy's place was taken by Audra Christenberry, the young screen actress, and her publicity boy, or agent, or agent's agent: this young man was in any case Audra's reality-handler, just as Gwyn's reality was handled by his publicity boy. Audra, who claimed to be a great admirer of Gwyn's material, was up for the role of Conchita in Amelior. Richard had to say thatAudra didn't look the part. She was no longer the fresh-faced tomboy from Montana. After six months in Hollywood, Audra was now a corny phantasm of man-pleasing artifice-whereas Conchita, in the book, was just another fresh-faced tomboy in straw hat and coarse dungarees with green fingers and a chest condition.
But this was Hollywood, and Audra was heady effluvia from the dream factory. And Richard stood alone, he felt, in the real world. Stood before the mirror, in fact, where he auditioned or screen-tested himself in his swimming trunks, and decided no. There wasn't a publicity boy good enough to handle the reality that faced him. It was decidedly inopportune that his reading-and-signing engagement was scheduled for the end of the tour, in Boston. Had he read and signed in Washington, in Chicago, Richard thought, his mail sack might by now have been lightened, or even emptied. And then there were the biographies, which habit forbade him to discard. And anyway his suitcase, with its appalling tonnage, seemed to provide a chiropractic counterbalance to the sadistic burden of his mail sack.
The mirror said it was reality. He felt convinced that he had lost at least three inches in height since leaving London. He stood there, in the wizened trunks; his polyplike pallor was relieved only by the loud rash or broad abrasion that swathed his right shoulder. There was also a kind of bedsore in the corner of his clavicle. The right arm itself felt okay if it wasn't being asked to do anything but when he sobbed himself awake at night it felt numb and blood-logged and inflexibly swollen. When he could distinguish his hand, in the dawn, he expected it to look like a boxing glove. His one pair of shoes bore testimony to what gravity was doing to him: there they wallowed on the carpet, like cowpats indented by unfortunate footprints.
So he never went out. Except when the maid came, he never went out. He developed a liking for The Simpsons, a cartoon sitcom about an average American family, awkward-bodied, totem-faced; they bickered a lot. He
was also intrigued, as they say, by all the pornography. The television in his room went about its transmissions nonjudgmentally, but to Richard the set itself often seemed scandalized and even persecuted by these gladiatorial displays-this modern marriage of window-shopping and blood sport. Or this post-modern marriage: pornography tried to occupy the basements of other genres (sex Westerns, sex space
operas, sex murder mysteries), but it looked to be increasingly preoccupied by pornography: by "adult," as the industry called itself. Pseudo-documentaries about adult; rivalries between adult stars; the ups and downs of an adult director. There was also many a talentless parody ofother small-screen entertainments. There was even a loose parody of The Simpsons-called The Limpsons. All this footage had been bowdlerized, on the set, for hotel use, with a strategic lampshade here, a fruit bowl there. You saw faces, not bodies. The men perspired and bared their teeth, as if under torture. The women snarled and whinnied, as if giving birth. So: The Simpsons, The Limpsons, and room service.
Usually, around midmorning, propping up the mini-bar in a pair of black socks, Richard thought about calling home. It was his boys he wanted to talk to, for selfish reasons. Marco. Or Marius would be better. Marius had a telephone manner, he listened and paused (you could hear his warm young breath), whereas Marco just grabbed the receiver and babbled about whatever had happened to him in the last ten seconds. So Marco'd be no fucking good. And it all cost too much. When they checked out of these hotels, all these monuments of inflation and entropy, Gwyn strolled straight to the cab or the courtesy car while Richard queued at the desk and then weepily tallied his traveler's checks against his Extras: telephone calls, service charge, beverages, bed rental. Richard went over to the desk and resumed another long letter to Gina. As he wrote, three related anxieties competed for his attention. Letters were made of paper and had no bulk, no mass, to deflect or impede her; something on the doormat would be hopelessly outweighed by someone on the doorstep, ringing the doorbell: who? He felt, also, that his marriage and even the existence of the twins represented not a cleaner parallel to his mortal career but were simply more of the same-the product of literary envy, and literary neglect. Finally he imagined that all his letters to his wife would just be opened and skimmed and then filed or thrown away, and would remain unread like everything else he wrote. Or not even. Just trampled into the downstairs doormat along with all the other junk.