THE INFORMATION

Midnight. Richard was on page seventy-three. He was also drinking from the mini-bar, which sounds comparatively prudent of him. Given a free hand, he might have been drinking from something bigger. Richard was drinking beer from the mini-bar only because there was nothing else left in the mini-bar, except for mixers and snacks. Slowly Richard's head jerked back. He stared at his drink with indignation. The softly humming liquid seemed disturbingly bland to his tongue. The suspicion formed that it contained no alcohol. Under the light he peered closely at

the bottle until he found some small print warning that its contents

might rack up pregnant women. And so he drank on, calmly nodding, mightily reassured.

The next day they were flying south.

Clearly there was a spiritual bond-a covenant, a solemn sympathy- between airports and junk novels. Or so it seemed to him.

Junk novels were sold in airports. People in airports bought and read junk novels. Junk novels were about people in airports, inasmuch as junk novels needed airports to shift their characters round the planet, and airports served, in junk novels, as the backdrop to their partings, chance encounters, reunions and trysts.

Some junk novels were all about airports. Some junk novels were even called things like Airport. Why, then, you might ask, was there no airport called Junk Novel? Movies based on junk novels were, of course, heavily reliant on the setting of the airport. So why wasn't one always seeing, at airports, junk novels being made into movies? Perhaps there really was a whole other airport, called, perhaps, Junk Novel Airport, or with a fancier name like Manderley International Junk Novel Airport, where they did them all. This wouldn't be a real airport but a mock-up on a soundstage somewhere, with everything two-dimensional and made of plastic and tinfoil and other junk.

Even when they found themselves in airports, characters in junk novels didn't read junk novels. Unlike everyone else in airports. They read wills and pre-nups. If they were intellectuals, connoisseurs, great minds, they were sometimes allowed to read non-junk novels. Whereas real-life people who read non-junk novels, even people who wrote non-junk novels, read junk novels if, and only if, they were in airports.

Junk novels have been around for at least as long as non-junk novels, and airports haven't been around for very long at all. But they both really took off at the same time. Readers of junk novels and people in airports wanted the same thing: escape, and quick transfer from one junk novel to another junk novel and from one airport to another airport.

Richard, as he made his way through all these airports, toting his mail sack of Untitledsand his burden of biographies, wouldn't have minded trying the odd junk novel, but he was too busy reading all this crap about third-class poets and seventh-rate novelists and eleventh-eleven dramatists-biographies of essayists, polemicists, editors, publishers. Would the day dawn when he reviewed a book about a book reviewer? Or a paper-clip salesman or a typewriter repairer. You didn't have to do much in the literary field, he thought, to merit a biography. So long as you knew how to read and write … Quite a few of the amblers and hurriers and sprawlers in these airports were sporting copies of Amelior Regained. This puzzled him. In Richard's view, certainly, Amelior Regained was junk. But it wasn't a junk novel. It was a trex novel. But it wasn't a junk novel. The heroes and heroines of junk novels, even when they were car-dinals or novitiates, remained ravenously secular. And look at Gwyn's little troupe of trundling dreamers, none of whom had any money or sex or facelifts or cool cars, and never went anywhere near airports.

Whatever junk novels were, however they worked, they were close to therapy, and airports were close to therapy. They both belonged to the culture of the waiting room. Piped music, the language of calming suasion. Come this way-yes, the flight attendant will see you now. Airports, junk novels: they were taking your mind off mortal fear.

Now, wearing woolen jacket, and bow tie, and two nicotine patches, and chewing (or sucking) nicotine gum, and smoking a cigarette, and feeling like something in a ten-gallon bag behind a nuclear power plant, humbly awaiting its next dreadful atomic declension, Richard lounged on a lounger: before him idled the uninviting Atlantic, in bayside calm; on either side the raked and watered sands of South Beach, Miami, stretched far away… Gwyn and the publicity boy were staying in a five-star citadel farther up the shore, whereas Richard was more informally lodged down here on South. And that was okay. Richard's snobbery was sincere snobbery; he didn't just pretend to be a snob because he thought it looked upper class. All right, he hadn't made it as a contemporary guy. He was a modern. But he wasn't a postmodern. So he really didn't want to be wallowing and languishing, with Gwyn, in that twenty-first-century nautilus, that regency spaceship offish tanks and startling energy bills, where every room had three televisions and five telephones (American luxury having much to do with the irreducible proximity of televisions and telephones), and in which money flew off you every minute whatever you did. Solacing himself, too (as always), with the fixtures of neglect, he liked his flaking medium-rise on South Beach, with its shot early-morning smell of damp plaster and India. Kafka's beetle didn't just pretend to like lying around on unswept floors beneath items of disused and disregarded furniture. To paraphrase a critic who also knew about beetles and what they liked, Kafka's beetle took a beetle pleasure, a beetle solace, in all the darkness and the dust and the discards.

Behind him, between the beach and the main drag, where resort commerce convulsed itself against an innocuous proscenium of art deco, lay a halfheartedly vegetated area, bounded by low brick walls, in which Gwyn Barry, and others, were making a rock video. Gwyn's role was more or less a passive one, it had to be allowed. He wasn't dancing in it or singing in it. He was just sitting in it-at the request of the featured band's lead singer, an Amelior enthusiast. All Gwyn had to do was place himself at a table that had a globe and a book on it; behind him they had positioned a flapping tapestry where bent sheep grazed, wisely watched over by white-haired pards holding crooks and lyres, aeolian harps. A squad of young black dancers were then to move past him, dipping and straightening, like cookie cutouts. Richard had stayed to monitor an edi-fying conversation, duly recorded in his notebook, between Gwyn and the sleek publicity boy. Something like:

"Trust me. This'll help Regained. It'll groundbreak it." "Maybe," said Gwyn. "But it might hurt the Profundity thing." "We have their guarantee that it won't screen until after the Profundity thing."

". .. How much will it help Regained?" "Major. Come on. Just think who it'll reach."

After that Richard had fled, down toward the sand and the sea, the eye-hurting metal of the sky. It was not the spectacle of vulgarity or venality that hastened his departure. The reason lay inward, as everything, now, lay increasingly and irreversibly inward. Richard fled the black dancers and their grip and torque of life, their raised temperature of youth and health. These little black stars, teenagers, every inch of their bodies primed and juiced, were nonetheless the opposite of artists in that they did what other people told them to, and unreservedly accepted the time and place they were living in. They were still enslaved. Richard could claim as his forebears only free men and women, but he was a slave and a ghost in his own life; the only bit of him that acted freely was the bit that planned and typed his fiction. Then, too, the dancers were at the top of the chattels business, cosseted calves, priceless specimens, skittish and exquisite. Whereas Richard … Still, it wasn't his thoughts that had driven him over the wall and onto the beach, where the sky glistened and pulsed more heavily than the sea, his head down, one forearm bent beneath the two big books he carried, the other raised to soothe or steady his flinching face. It was the burn of their brownness, and the colder clarity of their eyes and teeth, the pulp salmon of their tongues-which made him feel that from now on all life and love would be harbored elsewhere. It seemed as if the atrocious doses of powerful medications that he soon must surely take were already in dour operation, bringing down a thick and wobbling penumbra of turbulent air, the kind which, in larger quantities, makes big jets quake, secluding him, roping him off from life and love. Before him on the beach Americans exercised, and played games. American health got everyone where it hurt, in the pocket, and had things so arranged that each disaster for the body was a multiple disaster for you and everyone around you in your life. Loved ones, and so on. But those with the money were Clearly getting a lot out of it, the health deal here, and Miami, with all the robot methuselahs of Miami Beach, was the holy city of its miracles. On the faces of those who leapt and limped and hollered and panted in front of him Richard was seeing something that he hadheard about only in discussions of American foreign policy (and then not recently): American resolve. Visible on the face of the fattest jogger. American resolve, which is like no other resolve, not the steeliest, quite, but always saying that their right to it need never be examined. Seriously considering the removal of his bow tie, Richard lit another cigarette.