Langley, they say, is missing and presumed dead, the victim of foul play. I have no compelling reason to dispute that; the facts appear to speak for themselves. The trashing of his apartment living room, the vandalistic destruction, the bloody smears on the wrecked sofa and similar splashes on the walls and floor, seem to tell the tale. Those close to him, including myself, can testify that in his final days he went in fear of his life. The only remaining mystery attached to the apparent crime should concern the identity of the culprit. Killer or killers unknown; and yet, given time, we may choose to believe that the forces of the law will bring the case to a satisfactory conclusion, all questions answered, justice upheld.

Well and good, if it works out that way; but speaking frankly, I have my doubts. Certain press reports, for what they’re worth, indicate puzzling factors, which may demand explanation in vain. I’ve read that all of the doors and windows were locked and bolted from the inside. The crime scene is located on an upper floor of a big building, full of people at all hours. How did intruders enter without leaving any definite traces of themselves? How did anyone, living or dead, manage an exit? The exact time of the supposed crime is known. Neighbors heard something– according to all accounts, they were terribly aware that something dreadful was happening– but they saw nothing. I’m not sanguine about the ongoing investigation, and wonder whether the police officials are qualified to illuminate a tragedy of this kind. There is too much they don’t know, or most likely won’t accept if they do. I know many things others don’t, or that others only suspect, about Langley’s last days. He confided in me, more so, I think, than to anyone else. I haven’t been especially forthcoming about what he told me, nor is it clear to me that I should. What purpose would it serve? At the very least I can write down what I learned and deduced from various sources, and decide later what to do with the information.

Already, even before the body is found (it won’t be; take my word on that), the eulogies are starting to come out, and so far the public releases have been uniformly favorable. We’ve lost the great Terrill Langley, artiste extraordinaire, composer in oils of daring and exotic images– that fine fellow– ah, yes, that clever painter chap… He might have appreciated a bit more such talk in life, although I don’t doubt the sincerity of those statements. In private, however, in conversation and commiseration with his associates, I detect sinister undercurrents. No one actually comes right out and says so, but there are those– more than a few– whose manner is oddly gleeful when they refer to his suspected demise. Unimpressive, you say? To be sure, those familiar with the art world know it to be rife with jealousies, antagonisms, and rivalries, professional and personal clashes which even the grave can not still. I’m perfectly aware of that– despite my best intentions, I’ve gotten involved in a few teapot tempests, and how they do drag on– but that isn’t what I mean. Just this morning I talked to a guy who could barely contain his joy. He’s glad that Langley is gone. He dwelt lovingly on the possible mechanisms of death. That isn’t normal behavior, not even in Langley’s circles.

If I’m right about the existence of this simmering hostility, is there an explanation for it? I’m afraid there is, and it doesn’t involve his personal quirks, though they were legion: his overweening vanity, his smug self-absorption, his shabby treatment of friends and, especially, women. There are a couple of girls out there who will always hate his guts, but nobody cares about that sort of thing around here. It has nothing to do with his private morality or his social opinions; as far as those went, he was about average for the crowd he ran with. Langley never had a good word for his own country, despised the “narrow-minded bourgeois” attitudes of anyone who wasn’t high-minded like himself, and confidently affirmed that the reigning political order was ripe for demolition. He enjoyed seeing the important and the proud knocked off their perches, and secretly seemed to think that some people– to the extent that they differed from himself– possessed way too much freedom to act and speak. His vociferously voiced views on the late Iraqi difficulties were tritely popular, following all of the safely subversive talking points of the day, and he rode a hobbyhorse– I can’t quite recollect what it was about– maybe something to do with saving the whales. Yes, he was that sort of character, and whatever you might think of his type, he didn’t lose any points for it among his cronies. None of that is the way to the answer. No, it all has to do with that ultimate painting of his, Langley’s self-proclaimed masterpiece, which was going to put him on the map once and for all, and raise him to the highest ranks of the artistic elites. Maybe it did that, or maybe it should have, but regardless, I can’t say that it did him much good. In fact, I think it led directly to his death. I will state for the record that I hope it got him killed, because– given my insider’s knowledge of the events leading up to his vanishing– I get the sickening feeling that the whole truth could be so much worse. And therein lies my tale.

I first met Terrill Langley seven years ago, when he was already an up and coming artist, but nowhere near the status he later attained.

Along the way I learned a few details of his earlier life: a troubled childhood somewhere in Idaho (I could find the state on a map, but wasn’t fully aware that it was inhabited); a father who didn’t encourage his creative leanings, a mother who did; difficult high school years, and then a scholarship to a local college for, of all things, mathematics (he was good with figures, if his grasp of money was any guide); throwing over the scholarship at the earliest opportunity in order to enroll in art classes; finally dropping out when he thought he’d accumulated sufficient technical skill, and fleeing to San Francisco, the home of everything weird and outrageous, where I found him two years after he arrived. I don’t know how he’d survived up to that time– it certainly wasn’t on the proceeds from his paintings– but he’d managed to ensconce himself in a cheesy loft in a wretched building populated by similar types, and there he did a lot of lazing around and a sufficiency of creative dabbling.

I saw that pathetic place somewhat later. We met at a seasonal open air art fair down by the bay, not too far from the big bridge, from which I’d gathered infrequent finds, and where he had presented a couple of his recent efforts for public perusal. Both were semi-expressionistic studies of obscurely menacing landscapes, with something in them to catch the eye, although the human figures in them didn’t quite measure up to the overall standard. I made a creditable remark to the fellow standing next to me, who turned out to be Langley himself. Concluding that I was intelligent and worthy of conversation, he embarked on a long harangue about his work’s “meaning”– the sort of desperate earnestness I’ve heard many times from many people– but he was young, lively, and really did know a thing or two. I didn’t buy, for, like most men in my position, I write more than I purchase, but I was impressed, and I remembered.

I won’t say that I was right about him, because one never can forecast this business, but I wasn’t surprised when Langley began to produce ripples in the local pond. A few months later I saw another work in a little gift shop at the foot of the Hill; not a fancy place, but in an upscale section of town. The price asked was ridiculous, yet the picture had merit, and I took the opportunity to hunt him up. He looked shabby then, like his lodgings, and thin. He couldn’t have been eating much. In his offhand way he was pleased to see me, perhaps more so by my offer to treat him to lunch. Others had noticed him in the meantime– I believe Hoskins had already published his small piece in The Benchmark– but Langley was actually keen to talk to me. From that time I saw him more or less frequently until the end, and remained generally aware of his doings.

I recall one statement of his from that coffee klatch long ago: “I want to paint that which the eyes can not see.” That was Langley to the core, the kind of professional gab that almost made sense, coming from him. I never figured out just what he meant, I don’t think, but that may be my lack, for he discoursed on the subject in painstaking detail throughout the years of our association.

“Painting is a medium,” he told me another time, “for the presentation of images and ideas. Second-raters focus on the one, or on the other. Masters handle both with equal facility. Yet I say, there are images within images, and ideas within ideas. Think of reflections bouncing endlessly between two mirrors, an infinite series. I want to paint that, to burrow down through all those levels, to open all the doors, and to reveal all that lies within. There is a way to do that– I am convinced– and I’m willing to spending my life learning it and finding it.”

On a separate occasion I asked of him, “Haven’t all artists felt that way? Every man has his own vision, and some are driven by internal forces to broadcast it. Aren’t you merely expressing the age-old need for the creator to create?”

“A producer of rubber ducks could say that much,” he retorted. “I mean much more than that. Let us not speak of interminable variations on the aspects of superficial appearances. Every child can make a stab at that by kindergarten. Every artist in history, no matter how grand, has simply built upon that universal capacity. They keep doing an admirable job of scraping the surface. That isn’t what I have in mind. I intend to dive deeply below, to get behind consciousness and matter; to see through the illusion of commonplace reality.”

And so forth. I’ve wondered where Langley got his fancified notions on art. Perhaps from one of those avant-garde courses he took, although he refused to give college classes any credit for developing his ideas, as opposed to technique. More likely he got them from books, for Langley read a great deal more than any other painter I’ve met. He had a sizable collection, many of them paperbacks, but a number of bulky, worn hardcover tomes. No novels, no outright fiction at all, but rather eldritch artistic studies, mathematical volumes, overly complicated works on optics and physics, and then those which I would only classify as strange. These books, by authors whose names meant nothing to me, dealt with wild supernatural or supernormal phenomena, and the nature of “true reality”, and related subjects that we peasants can’t be expected to understand. Langley ate up that stuff, and I guess events have shown that he took it very seriously indeed.