Love their faces. Damn it! Love 'em.... He'd show 'em. He'd talk to the lights in the street. Why not?
"Do you know what? Do you know? It's all a humpty dumpty. Egg-heads falling off a wall and smashing. But I know what. I got your number. Wait...."
There was something to say. Why? Damn it ... not that way. Hit poor, sad ones on the head. Better the dirty swine in the City Hall. Aw huh! Wring their necks. What for? Wrong. Something else. They were like him. Brothers, everybody. You could kill the whole of them and there would be something left behind that was good--Life. But a better way than that.... Don't hit. Arms around them, lips to their hearts and talk like that. Make the hyenas sigh. Make the jellyfish weep softly. Make the stars dance in their idiot thoughts. Sing them songs. If only the songs came out.
It was evening, spring evening in a dirty lighted street, and he walked biting his pipe. He said to himself, "What's there to this thing? Let us study it. Many people in many houses and many streets. And each of them a known thing. But when you take all of them together, that's an unknown thing. If you know me, if you know one--what then? Nothing. It remains only one known. There is still everything else to know. One man multiplied by a million isn't a million men but an infinitude of millions."
He would get the hang of them all though, all the millions. He would think it out, get his fingers on something that didn't exist for fingers to touch. That was art. It was easy when you figured it that way.
He walked along often figuring it that way and understanding something that had no words, living with something that was like a strange phantom in a great dark deep. This phantom was a stranger inside him. A phantom like an insane companion that had a way of putting its arms around him, inside him, and a way of holding him like a horrible mother. Then when it did, he stopped calling himself nuts ... nuts. He became silent then and vanished.
The phantom devoured him. All there was of him that everybody knew, that even he knew, all that vanished. The phantom devoured him and it was easy then. But the phantom let him go, took its arms off him, and he came back, out of the deep. Then he felt himself leaping up with a choke in his lungs, leaping through layers and layers with no surface to reach. He must go up, up from the easy embrace of the phantom and keep on raging, yelling out to himself that something had sent him shooting up.