The child's gaze was leveled at him. Marius said, declaratively, "You've got a big willy, Daddy."
"Well it's very nice of you to say so, Marius.?
this was how it went. This was what you did. What you did was: you took an individual and seized upon some obvious and invariably unfortunate characteristic-and talked about it the whole time, at every opportunity, all the hours there were, day in, day out. Whatever it might be: Bal was bald, Mai maladroit, Del delinquent, Gel gelatinous; Pel was plump; Hal sported an ill-advised and much-regretted tattoo on his throat (CUT HERE along the dotted line); Lol had had his right ear ripped off in an argument about zonal marking. With Richard, they really didn't know where to start or where to stop, so they called him Red Eye and Jethro and Scarecrow and Walking Dictionary and Mr. Pastry and Lord Byron . . . Often, in such quandaries, a TV tie-in can grant clarity; and usually, nowadays, they called him Cedric-after the affected old slob who presented an afternoon quiz show about words. Richard felt that he had a lot in common with the working classes (he understood hourly disaster), but he liked them better twenty years ago, when they looked worse. There was another nickname they had for him. He didn't know about it yet.
"All the way, Cedric. All the way."
And Richard was off. On the Knowledge, the questions recurred, so you needed memory. Richard had memory, a real memory, many magnitudes greater than what the million hobble by with, calling it their memory. It was open to doubt, at the Warlock, whether knowledge-the mind-counted for anything at all. But on the Knowledge, knowledge really seemed to matter, punctually rewarded by hot coins and an electric jingle. Sometimes, as now, the guys fell silent as Richard worked the machine, his face proud and nervous and aslant, giving glosses and derivations, sneering at the screen's bad grammar (for this oracle was only semi-literate, prone to danglers and pause-for-breath commas, confounded by all apostrophes) and smacking out the answers before anyone had time to read the questions. What is the collective noun given to crows? Set. Covey. Murder. "Yes, murder. They're weird, collective nouns. Always go-" What would an orologist study? Birds. Mountains. Metals. "Oros. Mountain. Always go for the really fanciful one. The precious one. An unkindness of ravens. A business of ferrets. "How many years ago was the last Ice Age? 10,000. 100,000. 1,000,000. "Not as long ago as you'd think. An exaltation of larks. They must have given collective nouns to some chick poet to do. Trecbeor: a cheat. Christ, look at that it's. 1968. Red shift.
One t, two /s. Don't ask me to spell. You can't spell. Randir. to gallop. Sk.
Mars. Jesus." And on he would go, 10p, 20p, 50p-until he was tripped up by some dead comic's catchphrase or rock star's cock size, and by thenlike Albert, Roger, and Bob. They turned, and greeted Gwyn, and Richard felt their humorous censure.
Pel said, "Quick. Here he is."
"Here he is," said Del. "Here's Cedric."
The Knowledge posed questions, offering multiple-choice answers (buttons A, B, and C), for modest cash prizes, depending on how far you traveled along learning's trail. To do well, to advance, you needed a good-sized crew round the Knowledge, all the smatterings you could get of history, geography, etymology, mythology, astronomy, chemistry, politics, popular music-and TV. Most crucially TV: TV down through the ages. It was in TV form that the other stuff was meant to be propagated anyway; and the newer knowledge machines, Richard had noticed, in the pubs he hung out in, actually were TVs: they fled the written, and embraced the audiovisual. The machine at the Warlock was trade-named Wise Money, and Richard, in his head, sometimes referred to it as the Profundity Requital, or the Aleph; but everyone else called it the Knowledge.
"Here, Cedric. What's . . . 'infra dig'?"
Richard squeezed up to the screen, which said:
Q. If a task was "infra dig," you would perform it
A. Quickly
B. Slowly
C. Unwillingly
"Complete non sequitur," brayed Richard, slapping the C. "You'd be just as likely to do it quickly or slowly. Beneath one's dignity. Infra dignitatem."
"That's Cedric," said Bal.
Now the screen said:
Q: D. H. Lawrence was a well-known writer. What does "D. H." stand for?
A. Donald Henley
B. David Herbert
C. Darren Henry
"Darren's good," said Richard. "Or what about Duane? Duane Lawrence."
"Do it, Cedric," said Lol. "Go for it, Cedric."
Cedric? When it came to interpersonal humor, here at the Warlock,true. He might have tried to laugh in your face. In any event he wouldn't have managed it. Out on court he felt he had forgotten how to play, but his body, with its sick nose, its damaged eye, seemed to remember the way it went. His body remembered. The low sun, the sun of winter, squinted into his face. When he threw the ball up to serve, an image scored itself onto the dark shutter of his eyelids; the ball burned in the bright orbit of his rackethead, like Saturn.
He had been a slave in his own life. Now he was a ghost in his own life.
How civilized, how spacious, how decent everything must have been, when his nose wasn't nuts, when his eye wasn't black. Everyone stared at him. No one sniffed at him, but everyone stared at him.
The only place he felt any good was in the Adam and Eve. No one stared at his black eye. No one noticed his black eye. This was because everyone else had a black eye. Even the men.
Gal Aplanalp didn't call.
At the Tantalus Press he continued to look kindly on the work of Keith Horridge. With poets, he realized, he was generally lenient. When in the year before he married her Gina started sleeping with writers, Richard found his jealousy reasonably easy to manage when she slept with poets- easier, much easier, than when she slept with novelists and (especially) dramatists. He liked poets because they had no power and no money. He wrote to Horridge, giving him advice on the stanza:
Spume retractile, the detritus of time. Stasis is epitaph- the syzygy of sand.
And Horridge reworked the stanza to make it more obscure. Maybe he should fuck up Keith Horridge. Maybe Keith Horridge was more his speed. But Richard wrote back, telling Horridge to justify the obscurity-telling Horridge that obscurity must be earned.
Horridge was twenty-nine. This sounded like a good age for a poet to be.
At The Little Magazine he secured favorable reviews for the paperback of
Saddle Leather, a collection of short stories by the Boston-based poet
and novelist Elsa Oughton, and for the out-of-print Jurisprudential by Stanwyck Mills, Sue and Ron L. Summerdale Professor of Law at the University of Denver.
Del and Pel and the others would be so lulled by his mastery, by his Knowledge know-how, that the clock would tick along its ratchet and hum warningly, and Richard would guess, furiously, and smack the wrong button, and the quest, the trail of gold, would evaporate and a new one would form. Because of course the quest for knowledge never really ended. Like the universe, it was a saga of augmentative abasement. Who was said to be the last man to have read everything? Coleridge. Hazlitt. Gibbon. Coleridge: it was Coleridge. Two hundred years on, nobody had read a millionth of everything, and the fraction was getting smaller every day. And every new book held less and less of the whole.
"Let's go," said Gwyn. "We're on."
Richard was staring at the screen-at the resumed quest. What is coprolite? Rock. Oil deposit. Fossil dung. Turning to leave, he thoughtlessly smacked A (thoughtlessly, because the opening question of any quest allowed two attempts, as was meet, as was only right). Then with impatience he smacked B. Also wrong. "Shit," he said.