THE INFORMATION

That sneeze of tears: he thought it belonged to the female repertoire. Yet he had done it too, when his book was accepted by Bold Agenda . .. This had nothing to do with the dramatists, but Richard still wondered about female theatricality. Women did all this feeling, and seemed to need guidance from the theater. Still, men were theatrical too, insomuch as they needed to be, feeling less. As with the styles of trousers they wore, women liked variety. And men attended only one school of acting (the method), that of the cool. That's men. That's men for you: hams of cool.

"Is Audra Christenberry going to be Conchita?"

"She's a very talented actress. Such radiance. And vivacity." Gwyn nodded to himself, considering this. "Yeah, I think she'd be good." "She'll have to have her tits back out," said Richard, who wasn't cool,who had failed at cool. He was decreasingly a cool guy, and was abandoning cool. But was there anywhere else to go?

"Back out?"

"Yeah, back out. You know. Off again."

"Off again? I don't get you."

"In the book Conchita is flat-chested, right? She has a rather masculine chest."

"Not masculine. Just not pronounced."

"Flat."

"On the small side, I suppose."

"So what are you going to do about them?"

"About what?"

"About those two windsocks of silicone she's got now?"

"It's a different medium. Christ, the way you talk. How do you know they're false?"

"We've seen her in films before. We saw her in that film where I got my black eye. She didn't have any tits then. She had two backs. Perfect for Amelior."

"Maybe she's a late developer."

"Oh sure. When she turns a corner, she goes one way and they go the other. She goes indoors for a club sandwich, and they're still poolside, soaking up the rays."

"Jesus."

"She's like the girl in The Limpsons."

"What's that?"

"Pornography."

"I would never watch that stuff."

"Because?"

". . . Well, for one thing it objectifies women. It turns them into objects."

"It'd be a handy way for you to check on changing sexual styles. Whither fellatio, and so on. Actually you can never see anything because there's always some wine bottle or flower bowl in the way. It turns women into objects. Such as silicone."

"What's the matter with you?"

"I'm dying here."

"You're drunk. What's the matter with your voice? You sound like a farmer with adenoids. You better get your voice fixed by Boston. No one's going to understand a word you say."

Thus, occasionally, in the afternoons, Richard was venturing out, hopelessly dazzled, to the dazzled courtyard, in his antique T-shirt andlong khaki shorts. Usually he sat at a diffident distance from Gwyn and whoever Gwyn was with-and watched the bathers. By no means all of the women were as high-gloss and high-tech as Audra Christenberry. Many were as matte and as mottled as he, though no doubt at least twice his age. They did their laps, with that bent-arm crawl favored by women, especially American women, and with that expression, not pinched, but set-that expression of American resolve. This particular Hamlet, and physical ruin, felt no urge to mock American resolve. Unprecedentedly overweight, Richard was still pretty slim compared to the Texan couple with whom he had rode down to the mezzanine: a couple so fat that they had you rereading the installers' guarantee that the elevator could carry eighteen people. The men out here on the deck-these wonderful providers-swam and ate and telephoned; confidently occupying the sun beds, they sprawled on their sides with one leg crooked and one hand flat on the tensed belly, and talking provider talk with fellow providers, fellow prime-of-lifers. Richard felt, in Los Angeles, that he wasn't hard currency; he was a zloty, a despicable kopek. Nearby, Gwyn would be sampling a plain omelette, an iced tea, and answering questions. Writing is like carpentry. It's speculative, but there has been movie interest. I use a simple word processor, more like a typewriter with added functions. From breakfast until lunch, and a bit more in the late afternoons … Five feet away, the stress-equations of Audra Christenberry's swimsuit. Or else the hundred-percent expressionlessness of the publicity boy.

With his Iberian blood, Gwyn grew dark and sparkling in the sun. Richard's brief visits to the pool, in his nontransferable English flesh, gave him first-degree burns on his arms, thighs, neck, nose and forehead. When clothed he looked like a bit player in a cheap video, or in pornography, the repulsive patsy of slapdash makeup and deathwatch lighting. Naked, he felt he had the distinctive markings of a London pigeon. Even the skinny pigeon redness of his legs contributed to his homesickness. Other things were going wrong with him here in the Pacific city. He couldn't get his mouth wet, no matter what he drank. His tongue was curling up at the edges. Beads of information were traveling along his gum lines, information about the immediate future. In two locations (upper left, lower right) the pain fairies were already breaking little fairy eggs of fairy pain, at every second's throb. Then it would go away again. At night he reviewed biographies in his room, and marked up Untitled

for the reading in Boston, which was the end of the line.

Other things were going wrong with him here in the Pacific city, the city that went on being a city as far as the eye could see in every direction, forever and ever. A couple of times he accumulated the energy to bedriven out into it, when Gwyn did radio or TV, and he attended Gwyn's reading, in a mall somewhere. The city was like a city doing remarkably well so soon after that unfortunate all-out nuclear attack, after that Everest of a meteorite, that mile-high tidal wave; there were blips and glitches, square miles of them, but sun and enterprise and multicultural synergy were always getting the place back on stream. As Gwyn had truckingly told his audience, during the warmup at the reading, Los Angeles was Amelior .. . With differences. Nikita Khrushchev, flying in over the West's last stop and seeing all the swimming pools innocently open to the sky, knew at once that Communism had failed. And Richard's body knew that whatever it was Richard stood for-the not-so-worldly, the contorted, the difficult-had failed. Los Angeles sought transcendence everywhere you looked, through astrology or crystal or body-worship or templegoing, but these were stabs at worldly divination, tips and forecasts about how to do better in the here and now. What mattered was to prepare for the future. And Richard was not prepared for the future. Bodily knowledge of this seemed to pass in through his sinuses; knowledge of this presented itself not in the mind but in the ears and nose and throat.

Women, he thought, understood about time. (Gina understood about time.) Women could send their imaginations out over the future and situate themselves at certain points within it. Time is a dimension, not a force. But women felt it as a force, because they could feel its violence, every hour. They knew they would be half dead at forty-five. This information did not fall in the path of men. Men, at forty-five, were in "the prime of life." The prime? Prima (bora): first (hour)? They get the Change. We get the Prime. And this is the reason why our bodies weep and seep in the night, because we're half dead too, and don't know how or why.

"Wow," said the publicity boy. "Too bad about your face. Does it hurt a lot?"

Richard said, "Not as much as you'd think."

"Pardon me?"

"Not as much as you'd think."

"Pardon me?"

He shook his head no. That hurt a lot. Just before dawn Richard had got out of bed and moved toward the bathroom mirror with unusually intense disquiet. Sure enough, his face was the shape of a television. He looked like one of the Simpsons. He looked like Bart Simpson. In profile Richard resembled the joke figure in a newspaper cartoon about a den-tist's waiting room. Full face, though, he looked like Bart Simpson. Because he had two joke toothaches: lower right, upper left.