Homer & Langley by E. L. Doctorow

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 anotherever 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 likedto 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.
NOR WAS THERE any true consolation to be had in the whores that none other than Vincent, the gangster with the squeaky voice, sent over one night as a present to me, his best blind friend. Jacqueline, you will have to forgive this: but you did tell me to be fearless and write what comes to mind. There they were at the door as our clocks struck midnight, two girls whose broad smiles I could hear, and with a big cake on a rolling table that the same driver who had brought us home a month before rattled into the hall, and a half dozen bottles of champagne packed in ice.
It takes some drinking to dissolve the wariness that comes over one who is the recipient of a gift from a gangster. It wasn’t my birthday, first of all, and second of all, because some time had passed since the night we had met Vincent, what other inference was possible than that (a) we were now a pin on his map, and (b) without any choice in the matter we could be incurring