LANGLEY GOT ME in his sights and decided I looked flabby. You’re getting soft, Homer, and that does not bode well for good health. He dug out the Hoshiyamas’ tandem bicycle with its flat tire and bolted it to frames that lifted the wheels off the ground so that I could pedal away and not go anywhere at the same time. And every morning we took a brisk walk down Fifth Avenue and back on Madison Avenue and once around the block for good measure. Of course that was just the beginning of his campaign. He had brought home a nudist magazine that was fervent in its advocacy of radical health regimens. Not that we were to go about without clothes, but that, for instance, heavy doses of vitamins A through E reinforced with herbs and certain ground nuts found only in Mongolia might not only ensure long life but even reverse pathological conditions such as cancer and blindness. So now I found at the breakfast table, beside the usual bowl of viscous oatmeal, handfuls of capsules and nuts and powdered leaves of one kind or another, which I dutifully swallowed to no appreciable affect as far as I could determine.I should say that there was nothing wrong with me — I felt fine, never better in fact, and I didn’t mind the exercise at all — but not wanting to hurt my brother’s feelings I went along with this dietary nonsense. Besides which I was moved by his concern for my welfare. That I was become one of his projects pleased me in some way.Among his collectibles that I had come across in the parlor was a bas-relief of a woman’s head that he’d hung from a nail on the wall. It was like a large cameo. I felt her features, the nose, the forehead, the chin, the waves in her hair, and it gave me tactile pleasure to run my fingers over this raised half face even as I knew the piece was of no great value, a reproduction perhaps of something hanging in a museum somewhere. But Langley had seen me, and it must have been on this occasion that he was inspired to do something about my woeful deprivation as a person to whom the fine arts were inaccessible.At first he brought in from his wanderings some miniature bone ivory netsuke carvings of Oriental couples making love. They were of the same proportions as the miniature ivories that the Hoshiyamas had left behind but we couldn’t have found those even if we had looked. I was invited to feel these small depictions of sexual bliss and figure out just what intricate positions the pairs of tiny heedless lovers had gotten themselves into. There were also masks of smooth-faced plaster of Paris creatures, and fearsome African deities carved from wood, that he had picked up at some flea market or auction. So in this manner what I called Langley’s Museum of Fine Arts began to distinguish itself from everything else of the inanimate world that, over the years, we had come to live with. And I was now engaged in a course of tactile art appreciation. But this wasn’t art for art’s sake: Langley had read up on the anatomy and pathology of the eye in our father’s medical library. Rods and cones are what make the eye see, he told me. They’re the basis of everything. And if a damn lizard can grow a new tail why can’t a human being grow new rods and cones?So just like my breakfast of Mongolian ground nuts, my course in art appreciation was a means of restoring my sight. It’s a one-two punch, Langley said. Herbal restoratives from the inside and physical training from the outside. You have the material for rods and cones and you train your body to grow them from the fingers on up.I knew better than to protest. Each morning I squinted my eyes into the morning light to see if things were any different. And each morning Langley waited for my report. It was always the same.After a while I grew irritable. Langley counseled patience — It’ll take time, he said.There was a week with children’s finger paints, those little tubs of dyed glop, which he had me smearing over sheets of paper to find out if I could learn to tell the color by touch. Of course I couldn’t. I felt degraded by the exercise. Another scheme had me going about the house and running my hands over paintings that I remembered from when I could still see: Horses on the bridle path in Central Park. A clipper ship at sea in a storm. My father’s portrait. That portrait of my mother’s great-aunt who had ridden a camel across the Sudan for no reason that anyone could determine. And so on. The worst part of this assignment was getting to the walls. Twice I tripped and fell. Langley had to move things, throw them out of the way. I knew each painting by its placement, but visualizing it by touch was another matter, I felt only brushstrokes and dust.None of this made much sense to me. I was beginning to feel oppressed. Then one day Langley opened the door for a delivery of art supplies — canvases stretched on frames of various sizes, a big wooden easel, and boxes of oil paints and brushes. And now I was to play the piano while he painted what he heard. The theory was that his painting would be an act of translation. I was not to play pieces, I was to improvise and the resulting canvas would be the translation to the visual of what I had rendered in sound. Presumably, when the paint dried, in some synaptic flash of realization, I would see sound, or hear paint, and the rods and cones would begin to sprout and glow with life.I considered the possibility that my brother was insane. I wished heartily that he would go back to his newspapers. I played my heart out. Never since I had first lost my sight had I felt so deprived, so incomplete as I felt now. The more he tried to improve things for me, the more aware I became of my disability. And so I played.I should have known that, having taken up art on my behalf, Langley would devolve into an obsessive amateur artist with all thoughts of my reclamation put aside. What did I know if I didn’t know my brother? I had only to wait. He did not limit himself to oil paints for his compositions, but attached to the canvas any manner of things as the spirit moved him. Found objects he called them, and to find them he needed only to look around, our house being the source of the bird feathers, string, bolts of cloth, small toys, fragments of glass, scraps of wood, newspaper headlines, and everything else that inspired him. Presumably he was making the work as tactile as he could for my sake, but really because dimensionality pleased him. Breaking rules pleased him. Why after all did a painting have to be flat? He would plant a canvas in front of me and have me touch it. What is the subject, I would say and he would answer, There is no subject, this piece does not represent anything. It is itself and that’s enough.How blessed were these days in which Langley had half forgotten why he had taken up painting. I would hear him at his easel, smoking and coughing, and I would smell the smoke of his cigarettes and his oil paints, and I would feel like myself again. Somehow those episodes in which he’d had me improvising on the piano had left me with an awakened sense of my possibilities as a composer, and so now I was improvising to forms — working up études, ballades, sonatinas and, being unable to write them down, fixing them in my memory. Langley in the other room understood what was going on with me because he went out and brought back a wire recording machine, and then, later, a couple of improved machines that recorded on tape, and so I was able to listen to myself and make changes, and think of new themes and record them before they got away from me, and I felt that neither of the Collyer brothers had ever been happier than at this time.My brother’s canvases from those days are stacked against the walls, some of them in our father’s study, some in the front hall, some in the dining room with the Model T. Some he hung on the staircase wall leading to the second and third floors. I can still smell the oils even after all this time. The recordings I made are somewhere in the house, buried under God knows what. My venture into composing was a finite thing, as was his life as a painter, but it would still be interesting, were I able to look for those tapes, those spools of wire, just to hear what I had done. I envision unwound tapes lying entangled among everything else, besides which I would not know where to look for the machines to play them. And finally my hearing … my hearing is not what it used to be, as if this sense too has begun to retreat to the realm of my eyes. I am grateful to have this typewriter, and the reams of paper beside my chair, as the world has shuttered slowly closed, intending to leave me only my consciousness.