999

by Al Sarrantonio

  It seemed that we had only ourselves and our own idiocy to blame for the situation we were in. Even though no one openly admitted it, the truth was that those of us who were present that day when Grossvogel entered the art gallery, gently requesting us to assist him in throwing all of his works on exhibit into the back of a battered pickup truck, were very much impressed with him. None of us in our small circle of artists and intellectuals had ever done anything remotely like that or even dreamed of doing something so drastic and full of drama. From that day it became our unspoken conviction that Grossvogel was on to something, and our disgraceful secret that we desired to attach ourselves to him in order to profit in some way by this association. At the same time, of course, we also resented Grossvogel’s daring behavior and were perfectly ready to welcome another failure on his part, perhaps even another collapse on the floor of the gallery where he and his artworks had already once failed (to everyone’s thorough satisfaction). Such a confusion of motives was more than enough reason for us to pay the exorbitant fee that Grossvogel charged for his new exhibit, which we afterward dismissed in one way or another.

  Following the show that night I stood on the sidewalk outside the art gallery, listening once again to Mrs. Angela’s implications regarding the true source of Grossvogel’s metamorphic recovery and artistic inspiration. “Mr. Reiner Grossvogel has been medicated to the eyeballs ever since he came out of that hospital,” she said to me as if for the first time. “I know one of the girls who works at the drugstore that fills his prescriptions. She’s a very good customer of mine,” she added, her wrinkled and heavily made-up eyes flashing with self-satisfaction. Then she continued her scandalous revelations. “I think you might know the kind of medications prescribed for someone with Grossvogel’s medical condition, which really isn’t a medical condition at all but a psychophysical disorder that I or any of the people who work for me could have told him about a long time ago. Grossvogel’s brain has been swimming in all kinds of tranquilizers and antidepressants for months now, and not only that. He’s also been taking an antispasmodic compound for that condition of his that he’s supposed to have recovered from by such miraculous means. I’m not surprised he doesn’t think he has a mind or any kind of self, which is all just an act in any case. Antispasmodic” Mrs. Angela hissed at me as we stood on the sidewalk outside the art gallery following Grossvogel’s exhibit. “Do you know what that means?” she asked me, and then quickly answered her own question. “It means belladonna, a poisonous hallucinogenic. It means phenobarbital, a barbiturate. The girl from the drugstore told me all about it. He’s been overdosing himself on all of these drugs, do you understand? That’s why he’s been seeing things in that peculiar way he would have us believe. It’s not some shadow or whatever he says that’s activating his body. I would know about something like that, now wouldn’t I? I have a special gift that provides me with insight into things like that.”

  But despite her purported gifts, along with her genuinely excellent pastries, Mrs. Angela’s psychic coffeehouse did not thrive as a business and ultimately went under altogether. On the other hand, Grossvogel’s sculptures, which he produced at a prolific pace, were an incredible success, both among local buyers of artistic products and among art merchants and collectors across the country, even reaching an international market to some extent. Reiner Grossvogel was also celebrated in feature articles that appeared in major art magazines and nonartistic publications alike, although he was usually portrayed, in the words of one critic, as a “one-man artistic and philosophical freakshow.” Nevertheless, Grossvogel was by any measure now functioning as a highly successful organism. And it was due to this success, which had never been approached by anyone else within our small circle of artists and intellectuals, that those of us who had abandoned Grossvogel upon hearing him lecture on his metamorphic recovery from a severe gastrointestinal disorder and viewing the first in his prodigious Tsalal series of sculptures, now once again attached ourselves and our failed careers to him and his unarguably successful body without a mind or a self. Even Mrs. Angela eventually became conversant with the “realizations” that Grossvogel had first espoused in the back room of that storefront art gallery and now disseminated in what seemed an unending line of philosophical pamphlets, which became almost as sought after by collectors as his series of Tsalal sculptures. Thus, when Grossvogel issued a certain brochure among the small circle of artists and intellectuals which he had never abandoned even after he had achieved such amazing financial success and celebrity, a brochure announcing a “physical-metaphysical excursion” to the dead town of Crampton, we were more than willing once more to pay the exorbitant price he was asking.

  This was the brochure to which I referred the others seated at the table with me in the Crampton diner: the photographic portraitist who was subject to coughing jags on my left, the author of the unpublished philosophical treatise An Investigation into the Conspiracy Against the Human Race on my right, and Mrs. Angela directly across from me. The man on my left was still reiterating, with prolonged interruptions of his coughing (which I will here delete), the charge that Grossvogel had perpetrated a “metaphysical swindle” with his high-priced “physical-metaphysical excursion.”

  “All of Grossvogel’s talk about that business with the shadow and the blackness and the nightmare world he purportedly was seeing … and then where do we end up—in some godforsaken town that went out of business a long time ago, and in some part of the country where everything looks like an overexposed photograph. I have my camera with me ready to create portraits of faces that have looked upon Grossvogel’s shadowy blackness, or whatever he was planning for us to do here. I’ve even thought of several very good titles and concepts for these photographic portraits which I imagine would have a good chance of being published together as a book, or at least a portfolio in a leading photography magazine. I thought that at the very least I might have taken back with me a series of photographic portraits of Grossvogel, with that huge face of his. I could have placed that with almost any of the better art magazines. But where is the celebrated Grossvogel? He said he would be here to meet us. He said we would find out everything about that shadow business, as I understood him. Furthermore, I have my head prepared for those absolute nightmares that Grossvogel prattled on about in his pamphlets and in that highly deceptive brochure of his.”

  “This brochure,” I said during one of the man’s more raucous intervals of hacking, “makes no explicit promises about any of those things you’ve imagined to be contained there. It specifically announces that this is to be an excursion, and I quote, ‘to a dead town during a time of year when one season is failing and the next is just beginning its rise to success.’ Grossvogel’s brochure also says that this is a ‘finished town, a failed town, a false and unreal setting that is the product of unsuccessful organisms and therefore a town that is exemplary of that extreme state of failure that may so distress human organic systems, particularly the gastrointestinal system, to the point of weakening its delusional and totally fabricated defenses—e.g., the mind, the self—and thus precipitating a crisis of nightmare realization involving …’ and I think we’re all familiar with the shadow-and-darkness talk which follows. The point is, Grossvogel promises nothing in this brochure except an environment redolent of failure, a sort of hothouse for failed organisms. The rest of it is entirely born of your own imaginations … and my own, I might add.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Angela, pulling the brochure I had placed on the table toward her, “did I imagine reading that, and I quote, ‘suitable dining accommodations will be provided’? Bitter coffee and stale doughnuts are not what I consider suitable. Grossvogel is now a rich man, as everybody knows, and this is the best he can do? Until the day I closed down my business for good, I served superlative coffee, not to mention superlative pastries, even if I now admit that I didn’t make them myself. And my psychic readings, mine and those of all my people, were as breathtaking as they come. Meanwhile, the rich man
and that waitress there are practically poisoning us with this bitter coffee and these incredibly stale, cut-rate doughnuts. What I could use at this moment is some of that antispasmodic medicine Grossvogel’s been taking in such liberal doses for so long. And I’m sure he’ll have plenty of it with him if he ever shows his face around here, which I doubt he will after making us sick with his suitable dining accommodations. If you will excuse me for a moment.”

  As Mrs. Angela made her way toward the other side of the diner, I noticed that there were already a few others lined up outside the single door labeled REST ROOM. I glanced around at those still seated at the few tables or upon the stools along the counter of the diner, and there seemed to be a number of persons who were holding their hands upon their stomachs, some of them tenderly massaging their abdominal region. I too was beginning to feel some intestinal discomfort which might have been attributed to the poor quality of the coffee and doughnuts we had been served by our waitress, who now appeared to be nowhere in sight. The man sitting on my left had also excused himself and made his way across the diner. Just as I was about to get up from the table and join him and the others who were lining up outside the rest room, the man seated on my right began telling me about his “researches” and his “speculations” which formed the basis for his unpublished philosophical treatise An Investigation into the Conspiracy Against the Human Race, and how these related to his “intense suspicions” concerning Grossvogel.

  “I should have known better than to have entered into this … excursion,” the man said. “But I felt I needed to know more about what was behind Grossvogel’s story. I was intensely suspicious with respect to his assertions and claims about his metamorphic recovery and about so many other things. For instance, his assertion—his realization, as he calls it—that the mind and the imagination, the soul and the self, are all simply nonsense and dreams. And yet he contends that what he calls the shadow, the darkness—the Tsalal, as his artworks are entitled—is not nonsense and dreams, and that it uses our bodies, as he claims, for what it needs to thrive upon. Well, really, what is the basis for dismissing his mind and imagination and so forth, but embracing the reality of his Tsalal, which seems no less the product of some nonsensical dream?”

  I found the man’s suspicious interrogations to be a welcome distraction from the intestinal pressure now building up inside me. In response to his question I said that I could only reiterate Grossvogel’s explanation that he was longer experiencing things, that is, no longer seeing things, with his supposedly illusory mind and self, but with his body, which as he further contended, was activated, and entirely occupied, by the shadow that is the Tsalal. “This isn’t by any means the most preposterous revelation of its kind, at least in my experience,” I said in defense of Grossvogel.

  “Nor is it in mine,” he said.

  “Besides,” I continued, “Grossvogel’s curiously named sculptures, in my opinion, have a merit and interest apart from a strictly metaphysical context and foundation.”

  “Do you know the significance of this word—Tsalal—that he uses as the sole title for all his artworks?”

  “No, I’m afraid I have no notion of its origin or meaning,” I regretfully confessed. “But I suppose you will enlighten me.”

  “Enlightenment has nothing to do with this word, which is ancient Hebrew. It means ‘to become darkened … to become enshad-owed,’ so to speak. This term has emerged not infrequently in the course of my researches for my treatise An Investigation into the Conspiracy Against the Human Race. It occurs, of course, in numerous passages throughout the Old Testament—that potboiler of apocalypses both major and minor.”

  “Maybe so,” I said. “But I don’t agree that Grossvogel’s use of a term from Hebrew mythology necessarily calls into question the sincerity of his assertions, or even their validity, if you want to take it that far.”

  “Yes, well, I seem not to be making myself clear to you. What I’m referring to emerged quite early in my researches and preliminary speculations for my Investigation. Briefly, I would simply say that it’s not my intention to cast doubt on Grossvogel’s Tsalal. My Investigation would prove me to be quite explicit and unequivocal on this phenomenon, although I would never employ the rather showy and somewhat trivial approach that Grossvogel has taken, which to some extent could account for the fabulous success of his sculptures and pamphlets, on the one hand, and, on the other, the abysmal failure of my treatise, which will remain forever unpublished and unread. All that aside, my point is not that this Tsalal of Grossvogel’s isn’t in some way an actual phenomenon. I know only too well that the mind and the imagination, the soul and the self, are not only the nonsensical dreams that Grossvogel makes them out to be. They are in fact no more than a cover-up—as false and unreal as the artwork Grossvogel was producing before his medical ordeal and recovery. Grossvogel was able to penetrate this fact by some extremely rare circumstance which no doubt had something to do with his medical ordeal.”

  “His gastrointestinal disorder,” I said, feeling more and more the symptoms of this malady in my own body.

  “Exactly. It’s the precise mechanics of this experience of his that interested me enough to invest in his excursion. This is what remains so obscure. There is nothing obvious, if I may say, about his Tsalal or its mechanism, yet Grossvogel is making what to my mind are some fascinating claims and distinctions with such overwhelming certitude. But he is certainly mistaken, or possibly is being devious on one point at least. I say this because I know that he has not been entirely forthcoming about the hospital where he was treated. In my researches for An Investigation I have looked into such places and how they operate. I know for a fact that the hospital where Grossvogel was treated is an extremely rotten institution, an absolutely rotten institution. Everything about it is a sham and a cover-up for the most gruesome goings-on, the true extent of which I’m not sure even those involved with such places realize. It’s not a matter of any sort of depravity, so to speak, or of malign intent. There simply develops a sort of … collusion, a rotten alliance on the part of certain people and places. They are in league with … well, if only you could read my Investigation you would know the sort of nightmare that Grossvogel was faced with in that hospital, a place reeking of nightmares. Only in such a place could Grossvogel have confronted those nightmarish realizations he has discoursed upon in his countless pamphlets and portrayed in his series of Tsalal sculptures, which he says were not the product of his mind or imagination, or his soul or his self, but only the product of what he was seeing with his body and its organs of physical sensation—the shadow, the darkness. The mind and all that, the self and all that, are only a cover-up, only a fabrication, as Grossvogel says. They are that which cannot be seen with the body, which cannot be sensed by any organ of physical sensation. This is because they are actually nonexistent cover-ups, masks, disguises for the thing that is activating our bodies in the way Grossvogel explained—activating them and using them for what it needs to thrive upon. They are the work, the artworks in fact, of the Tsalal itself Oh, it’s impossible to simply tell you. I wish you could read my Investigation. It would have explained everything; it would have revealed everything. But how could you read what was never written in the first place.”

  “Never written?” I inquired. “Why was it never written?”

  “Why?” he said, pausing for a moment and grimacing in pain. “The answer to that is exactly what Grossvogel has been preaching in both his pamphlets and in his public appearances. His entire doctrine, if it can even be called that, if there could ever be such a thing in any sense whatever, is based on the nonexistence, the imaginary nature, of everything we believe ourselves to be. Despite his efforts to express what has happened to him, he must know very well that there are no words that are able to explain such a thing. Words are a total obfuscation of the most basic fact of existence, the very conspiracy against the human race that my treatise might have illuminated. Grossvogel has experienced the essence of this co
nspiracy firsthand, or at least has claimed to have experienced it. Words are simply a cover-up of this conspiracy. They are the ultimate means for the cover-up, the ultimate artwork of the shadow, the darkness—its ultimate artistic cover-up. Because of the existence of words, we think that there exists a mind, that some kind of soul or self exists. This is just another of the infinite layers of the cover-up. But there is no mind that could have written An Investigation into the Conspiracy Against the Human Race—no mind that could write such a book and no mind that could read such a book. There is no one at all who can say anything about this most basic fact of existence, no one who can betray this reality. And there is no one to whom it could ever be conveyed.”

  “That all seems impossible to comprehend,” I objected.

  “It just might be, if only there actually were anything to comprehend, or anyone to comprehend it. But there are no such beings.”

  “If that’s the case,” I said, wincing with abdominal discomfort, “then who is having this conversation?”

  “Who indeed?” he answered in a distantly rhetorical tone. “Nevertheless, I would like to continue speaking. Even if this is only nonsense and dreams I feel the need to perpetuate it all. Especially at this moment, when I feel this pain taking over my mind and my self. Pretty soon none of this will make any difference. No,” he said in a dead voice. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  I noticed that he had been staring out the front window of the diner for some time, gazing at the town. Some of the others in the diner were doing the same, dumbstruck at what they saw and agonized, as I was, by the means by which they were seeing it. The vacant scene of the town’s empty streets and the desolate season that had presided over the surrounding landscape, that place we had complained was absent of any manifestations of interest when we first arrived there, was undergoing a visible metamorphosis to the eyes of many of us, as though an eclipse were occurring. But what we were now seeing was not a darkness descending from far skies but a shadow which was arising from within the dead town around us, as if a torrent of black blood had begun roaring through its pale body—roaring like a distant ocean moving in a bestial surge toward its shores. I realized that I had suddenly and unknowingly joined in the forefront of those who were affected by the changes taking place, even though I literally had no idea what was happening, no knowledge that came to my mind, which had ceased to function in the way it once did, leaving my body in a dumb state of agony, its organs of sensations registering the gruesome spectacle of things around me: other bodies eclipsed by the shadow swirling inside their skins, some of them still speaking as though they were persons who possessed a mind and a self, imaginary entities still complaining in human words about the pain they were only beginning to realize, crying out above the increasing roar for remedies as they entered the “nucleus of the abysmal,” and still seeing with their minds even up to the very moment when their minds abandoned them entirely, dissipating like a mirage, able to say only how everything appeared to their minds, how the shapes of the town outside the windows of the diner were turning all crooked and crabbed, reaching out toward them as if with claws and rising up like strange peaks and horns into the sky, which was no longer pale and gray but swirling with the pervasive shadow, the all-moving darkness that they could finally see so perfectly because now they were seeing with their bodies, only with their bodies pitched into a great roaring blackness of pain. And one voice called out—a voice that both moaned and coughed—that there was a face outside, a “face across the entire sky,” it said. The sky and town were now both so dark that perhaps only someone preoccupied with the human face could have seen such a thing among that world of churning shadows outside the windows of the diner. Soon after that the words all but ceased, because bodies in true pain do not speak. The very last words I remember were those of a woman who screamed for someone to take her to a hospital. And this was a request which, in the strangest way, had been anticipated by the one who had induced us to make this “physical-metaphysical excursion” and whose body had already mastered what our bodies were only beginning to learn—the nightmare of a body that is being used and that knows what is using it, making things be what they would not be and do what they would not do. I sensed the presence of a young woman who had worn a uniform as white as gauze. She had returned. And there were others like her who moved among us, their forms being the darkest of all, and who knew how to minister to our pains in order to effect our metamorphic recovery. We did not need to be brought to their hospital, since the hospital and all its rottenness had been brought to us.