BUT MEMORIES ARE not temporally driven, they detach themselves from time, and all of that was much later than our recklessly spendthrift years when Langley and I went out almost every night to one nightclub or another where ladies with rolled stockings and short skirts sat on your lap and blew smoke in your face and surreptitiously felt along the inside of your thigh to see what you had there. Some of the clubs were rather elegant, with a pretty good kitchen and a dance floor, others were basement dives where the music came from a radio on a wall shelf broadcasting some swing orchestra from Pittsburgh. But where you went didn’t matter, you could die of the gin in any of these joints, and the mood was the same everywhere, people laughing at what wasn’t funny. But it felt good to establish yourself in this or that club, to be let in the door and be greeted like someone important. In these peculiar nights of Prohibition, the law only had to say No Drinking to get everybody plastered. Langley said the speakeasy was the true democratic melting pot. And it was true, at this one club, the Cat’s Whiskers, I became friendly with a gangster who said to call him Vincent. I knew he was the real thing because when he laughed other men at the table laughed with him. He was very interested in my sightlessness, this Vincent. What’s it like without eyes, he said. I told him it wasn’t so bad, that I made up for it other ways. How, he said. I told him that when I had a few drinks I regained something like vision. In fact I believed this. I knew I was hallucinating, I was seeing all right but into my own mind of thought and impression as I generated visions from what I learned from my other senses and added, by way of detail, my judgments of character and my attraction to this one or revulsion for that one. Of course when you’re sober you make the same deductions, I know that, but at these times my brain synapses firing with the fumes of alcohol, a clarity of organized impressions amounted to a kind of vision. Naturally I didn’t go into all that, I just said that with a lot of noise and music and booze, of course, and cigarette smoke heavy enough to float in, I could make shadows out pretty well.How many fingers am I holding up, he said. None, I said. I knew that old trick. He chuckled and slapped me on the shoulder. This bozo’s smart, he said. He had a thin whispery voice, tuneless except for a whistle that ran along the top of it as if one of his lungs had sprung a leak. He lit a match and held it up to my face to see the clouds in my eyes. He asked me to describe what he looked like. I reached out to touch his face and one of his henchmen yelled and grabbed my wrist. We don’t do that, he said. It’s okay, letim, Vincent said and so I touched his face, and felt sunken cheeks with pockmarks, a sharp recessive chin, a beaky nose, the head widening at the top and thick wavy wetted hair that rose back from a widow’s peak like feathers. He was all hunched over to accommodate me and I thought of a hawk maybe dressed in a suit and a shirt with cuff links. I told him that and he laughed.It was exciting talking to him like he was a normal person — sitting and chatting with someone you knew had no regard for the life of anyone he might disagree with. I found it to be true generally with the criminals we ran into that as a class they were extremely sensitive. The thought that I might inadvertently offend Vincent was exhilarating and made me careless of what I said. But showing no deference turned out to be the right way to deal with him. And I didn’t ask questions, I didn’t ask him as you might, with a normal person, what he did, what his profession was. It didn’t matter, did it? Whatever it was it made him a gangster. This was the kind of excitement Langley and I looked for when we went out in those days and were still expecting a return from social life. It was like what a lion tamer must feel when the beast is sitting on its stool but at any moment might leap for his throat. Vincent kept plying me with drinks. I was one of his entertainments, a blind man who could see. He was in effect holding court because people came over to say hello. A woman he knew took up residence on his lap, and so he had a new diversion. I could smell them both in all their glory, his cigar, her cigarette, the pomade on his hair, her gin reek. Her abrupt silences in mid-sentence told me he had his hand up her dress. Around me the noise was instructive. This was an elegant club for a speakeasy, it had a lively if predictable dance orchestra, a lot of bounce, the rhythm section predominating, a banjo, a string bass. The music was fast and mechanical though the dancers didn’t seem to mind, they hopped and stomped about, their feet thumping the floor on the downbeat. But also glasses were breaking, and the occasional shout and scuffle indicated to me the place might blow at any time. And there was always the possibility of a police raid though probably not with such as Vincent in the room. And then this girl who had settled on his lap, after a while I heard her say, You gotta stop that, honey. Oowheee, she said, or else. Or else what, babe, he said. Or else come to the Ladies’ with me, she said.Yes. I do remember that particular evening. When Langley and I said good night, my new friend Vincent had his car take us home. It was quite a car too, with a deep growl of a motor and plush seats and a man sitting up front next to the driver in some gangland equivalent of livery.The car pulled up in front of our door and after we got out it idled there for a long minute before it drove off. Langley said, Well that was a mistake. We stood at the top of the stoop. It must have been three in the morning. I had had a good time. The air was brisk. It was sometime early in the spring. I could smell the budding trees across the street in the park. I breathed in deeply. I felt strong. I was strong, I was young and strong. I asked Langley why it was a mistake. I don’t like it that now those scum know where we live, Langley said.
LANGLEY DID NOT SCOFF at my claim to be able to see when I had had a few. You know, Homer, he said, among the philosophers there is endless debate as to whether we see the real world or only the world as it appears in our minds, which is not necessarily the same thing. So if that’s the case, if the real world is A, and what we see projected on our minds is B, and that’s the best we can hope for, then it’s not just your problem.Well, I said, maybe it’ll turn out I have eyes as good as anyone’s.Yes and maybe someday you, as you grow older and know more, have more experiences stored in your brain, you should be able to see in sobriety what now you see when plastered.Langley was convinced of this because it fit right in with his Theory of Replacements, which he had by now developed into a metaphysical sort of idea of the repetition or recurrence of life events, the same things happening over and over, especially given the proscribed limits of human intelligence, Homo sapiens being a specie that, in his words, just didn’t have enough. So that what you knew from the past could be applied to the present. My deductive visions were in accord with Langley’s major project, the collection of the daily papers with the ultimate aim of creating one day’s edition of a newspaper that could be read forevermore as sufficient to any day thereof.I will speak for a moment about this because while Langley had many projects, as befitting a mind as restless as his, this one endured. His interest never flagged from the very first day he went out to buy the morning papers to the end of his life when his newspaper bales and boxes of clippings rose from floor to ceiling in every room of our house.Langley’s project consisted of counting and filing news stories according to category: invasions, wars, mass murders, auto, train, and plane wrecks, love scandals, church scandals, robberies, murders, lynchings, rapes, political misdoings with a subhead of crooked elections, police misdeeds, gangland rubouts, investment scams, strikes, tenement fires, trials civil, trials criminal, and so on. There was a separate category for natural disasters such as epidemics, earthquakes, and hurricanes. I can’t remember what all the categories were. As he explained, eventually — he did not say when — he would have enough statistical evidence to narrow his findings to the kinds of events that were, by their frequency, seminal human behavior. He would then run further statistical comparisons until his order of templates was fixed so that he would know which stories should go on the front page, which on the second page, and so on. Photographs too had to be annotated and chosen for their typicality, but this, he acknowledged, was difficult. Maybe he wouldn’t use photographs. It was a huge enterprise and occupied him for several hours each day. He would run out for all the morning papers, and in the afternoon for the evening papers, and then there were the business papers, the sex gazettes, the freak sheets, the vaudeville papers, and so on. He wanted to fix American life finally in one edition, what he called Collyer’s eternally current dateless newspaper, the only newspaper anyone would ever need.For five cents, Langley said, the reader will have a portrait in newsprint of our life on earth. The stories will not have overly particular details as you find in ordinary daily rags, because the real news here is of the Universal Forms of which any particular detail would only be an example. The reader will always be up to date, and au courant with what is going on. He will be assured that he reads of indisputable truths of the day including that of his own impending death, which will be dutifully recorded as a number in the blank box on the last page under the heading Obituaries.Of course I was dubious about all of this. Who would want to buy such a newspaper? I couldn’t imagine a news story that assured you that something was happening but didn’t tell you where or when or to whom it was happening.My brother laughed. But Homer, he said, wouldn’t you spend a nickel for such a paper if you didn’t have to buy another ever again? I admit this would be bad for the fish business but we have to think always of the greatest good for the greatest number.What about sports? I said.Whatever the sport is, said Langley, someone wins and someone loses.What about art?If it is art, it will offend before it is revered. There are calls for its destruction and then the bidding begins.What if something comes along that has no precedent, I said. Where will your newspaper be then?Like what?Like Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Like that Einstein fellow’s Theory of Relativity.Well you could say these theories replace the old ones. Albert Einstein replaces Newton, and Darwin replaces Genesis. Not that anything has been made clearer. But I’ll give you that both theories are unprecedented. What of it? What do we really know? If every question is answered so that we know everything there is to know about life and the universe, what then? What will be different? It will be like knowing how a combustion engine works. That’s all. The darkness will be there still.What darkness? I said.The deepest darkness. You know: the darkness deeper than any sea-dingle.Langley would never complete his newspaper project. I knew that and I’m sure he knew it as well. It was a crazy foolish hand-rubbing scheme that kept his mind in the mood he liked to be in. It seemed to give him the mental boost he needed to keep going — working on something that had no end other than to systematize his grim view of life. His energies sometimes seemed unnatural to me. As if he did all the things he did to keep himself among the living. Even so he would slip for days at a time into a discouraging lassitude. Discouraging to me, I mean. I would catch it sometimes. Nothing would seem to be worth doing and the house would be like a tomb.