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."