"You two are old friends."

He gave an economical nod.

"You know, he admires your work deeply. I heard him. Telling everyone on the phone what a truly marvelous writer you were. He loves you very dearly."

"No he doesn't. He might want you to think he does."

Surprisingly she said, "You think he's trying to hurt you?"

"He doesn't need to. The world will do it."

You live alone, right? This was what the greeters and credit-card ratcheters of American hospitals said to the pungent phantoms of the reception desk-to those rendered unpresentable by neglect, to those singled out and quarantined by neglect. Phyllis looked okay. Richard didn't understand that much about other people. But he understood neglect.

"You live alone, right?"

She made her blue eyes rounder and her closed lips wider; she gave him rich assent.

"Never any husband or anything?"

It made him despair twice over. Because he had believed, until then, that he wasn't ready for despair. Suddenly Richard thought of Anstice- but saw himself living with Phyllis: rigid among the chintz and dimity of her bedroom, in new pajamas (the pajamas, perhaps, were a key part of this fresh beginning), with Phyllis leaning over him and applying a moistened washcloth to his brow …

"I'm sorry," he said, and sat up straighter.

"That's okay," she said. "Now can I ask about Gwyn?"

The piece she intended to write was going to be borderline hostile anyway-before Richard even got started. As it turned out, Phyllis's editor would get no further than the end of the second sentence before deciding, with a practiced shrug, that the Barry profile had better be quietly spiked. In fairness, Richard never thought that Phyllis's piece would be influential enough to be worth contaminating. He was just getting in shape for later on.

Broadly satisfied, he left Phyllis in the lift and returned to his room. Over a club sandwich he roughed out a 550-word review of Time's Song: Winthrop Praed, 1802-1839 and then curled up with AntiLatitudinarian: The Heretical Career of 'Francis Atterbury. At one in the morning, by which point his day was twenty-five hours old, he went out into New York. A brief turn, in his mack, along Central Park South.

He knew American fiction, and he knew that fiction, considered in aggregate, would not lie. For him, coming to America was like dying and going to hell or heaven and finding it all as advertised. Take hell: black fire and darkness visible, the palpable obscure-and ice, to starve your soft ethereal warmth: the anti-universe of the damned. New York was out there and he didn't have any time to think about it. But he knew, the instant he arrived on its streets, that New York was the most violent thing that men had ever done to a stretch of land, more violent, in its way, than what was visited on Hiroshima, at ground zero, on day one. He looked up. He looked up and saw no difference: the usual metropolitan sky with its six or seven stars weakly guttering. Raw land can do nothing about them but cities hate stars and don't want their denizens to be reminded of how it really goes with ourselves and the universe.

"So!" said Leslie Evry, settling back in the swivel chair with his hands interjoined behind his head. "What brings you to our fair land?"

Richard had to hear this again. This was great. The whole adventure had lasted five seconds. And here he was: wiped out.

"I beg your pardon?"

"What brings you," repeated Leslie Evry, with brio, "to our fair land?"

Richard had been asked this question several times already-by liftmen, by barmen. Now he was hearing it from Bold Agenda. He was hearing it from his own future. Of course, Richard liked to think of himself as a virtuoso of rejection; his history of humiliation was long-was long and proud. The humiliated are always looking for consideration and getting the unconsidered, the offhand and ready-made. So Richard sat there, devastated, wiped out, by a reflexive banality from Leslie Evry.

"What brings me to your fair land? I somehow ran away with the idea that I had a novel coming out in your fair land."

"You certainly do. Seen this?"

He was handed a slender flyleaf or bookmark. On it were listed ten or twelve tides. There he was, near the bottom. Richard Tull. Untitled. $24.95. 441pp. Richard Tull recognized Richard Tull. The other names were not familiar, were in themselves unfamiliar; even the compilers of American telephone directories, he sensed, might have been impressed by their unfamiliarity. The only thing they reminded him of was the castlist of Amelior and Amelior Regained: Gwyn's identikit hominids-Jung-Xiao, Yukio, Conchita, Arnaujumajuk.

"Have you heard anything about any reviews or anything of that kind?"

"For sure," said Leslie. Smartly he flipped open a folder on his desk. "John Two Moons had some coverage in the Cape Codder. He keeps a fishing boat up there or something. And Shanana Ormolu Davis had a nice mention in the Shiny Sheet. In Miami. She's working with the hearing-impaired down there. At the Abbe L'Epee Institute?"

Two stamp-sized clippings were passed toward him. Richard looked and nodded.

"You know how John Two Moons got his name? It's kind of a nice story. Apparently-"

"Excuse me. What about Untitled?"

"Excuse me?"

"Untitled. Twenty-four-ninety-five. Four hundred and forty-one pages."

Then Leslie Evry did a terrible thing. He said "Excuse me?" again- and then lavishly blushed. "Not thus far. Insofar as we know."

"Is there a. prospect of any reviews?"

"A 'prospect'?"

"Is there anyone in the publicity department I should be talking to?"

"May I ask what this would be in regard to?"

In the past, Richard had often been known to be "difficult." Difficult was a word that applied to his person as well as his prose. Unfortunately, though, he soon failed to command much of an arena to be difficult in. There was surely no more elbow room for difficulty (difficulty was exhausted), he decided, after his yodeling stalk-out from the debating hall of the Whetstone Public Library Literary Association ("Whither the Novel?"). He stalked out because he was the only panel member who, in the cafeteria before the talk, had not been offered a biscuit with his tea. As he rode alone on the bus and, later, on the tube train, with his armpits ablaze, Richard recalled that he had been offered a biscuit. But not a chocolate one. Just a ginger-nut. And that same year he had to be expensively dissuaded from suing a reviewer of Dreams Don't Mean Anything for that dismissive filler in The Oldie . . . Richard considered being difficult now, and stalking out of Bold

Agenda. Then what? A few plangent inhalations, on Avenue B? Like all writers, Richard wanted to live in some hut on some crag somewhere, every couple of years folding a page into a bottle and dropping it limply into the spume. Like all writers, Richard wanted, and expected,the reverence due, say, to the Warrior Christ an hour before Armageddon. He said,

"Frankly, you surprise me. Roy Biv was full of ideas. As it happens I-"

"Ah, Roy! Roy Biv!"

"As it happens I've already fixed a few things. A reading and signing in Boston. I'm doing the Dub Traynor interview in Chicago."

"Dub Traynor? For the book?"

"For the book."

"Well that's great. Hey. May I introduce my co-director. Frances Ort. Frances? Come and say hi to Richard Tull."

Bold Agenda, as an operation, was still only half constructed. Frances Ort had not so much entered Leslie's office as wandered on to his floor-space. Behind her, big clean guys in overalls plodded about carrying sections of white wallboard. On arrival Richard had himself plodded about among them for a while, before finding Leslie. You could see how it was all going to look one day-cord carpets, white cubbyholes.