Finally, on a rainy afternoon, as I was working alone in my apartment (making Severini notes), the buzzer signaled that someone was downstairs. The voice over the intercom belonged to a woman named Carla, who was a sculptress and whom I barely knew. When I let her in my apartment she was wet from walking in the rain without a coat or umbrella, although her straight black hair and all-black clothes looked very much the same whether wet or dry. I offered her a towel but she refused, saying she ‘kind of liked feeling soggy and sickish,’ and we went on from there. The reason for her visit to my apartment, she revealed, was to invite me to the first ‘collective showing’ of the Exhibits from the Imaginary Museum. When I asked why I should be receiving this personal invitation in my apartment on a rainy afternoon, she said: ‘Because the showing is going to be at his place, and you’ve never wanted to go there.’ I said that I would think seriously about attending the showing and asked her if that was all she had to say. ‘No,’ she said as she dug into one of the pockets of her tight damp slacks. ‘He was really the one who wanted me to invite you to the exhibit. We never told him about you, but he said that he always felt someone was missing, and for some reason we assumed it was you.’ After extracting a piece of paper that had been folded several times, she opened it up and held it before her eyes. ‘I wrote down what he said,’ she said while holding the limp and wrinkled note close to her face with both hands. Her eyes glanced up at me for a moment over the top edge of the unfolded page (her heavy mascara was running down her cheeks in black rivulets), and then she looked down to read the words Severini had told her to write. ‘He says, “You and Severini” — he always calls himself Severini, as if that were someone else —“you and Severini are sympathetic…” something — I can hardly read this. It was dark when I wrote it down. Here we go: “You and Severini are sympathetic organisms.”’ She paused to push away a few strands of black, rain-soaked hair that had fallen across her face. She was smiling somewhat idiotically.
‘Is that it?’ I asked.
‘Hold on, he wanted me to get it right. Just one more thing. He said, “Tell him that the way into the nightmare is the way out.”’ She folded the paper once again and crammed it back into the pocket of her black slacks. ‘Does any of that mean anything to you?’ she asked.
I said that it meant nothing at all to me. After promising that I would most seriously consider attending the exhibit at Severini’s place, I let Carla out of my apartment and back into that rainy afternoon.
I should say that I had never spoken to either Carla or the others about my delirious episodes, with their sensations of a tropical sewer and the emergent concept of the ‘nightmare of the organism.’ I had never told anyone. I had thought that these episodes and the concept of the nightmare of the organism were strictly a private hell, even one that was unique. Until that rainy afternoon, I had considered it only a coincidence that the artworks inspired by Severini, as well as the titles of these works, served to call up the sensations and suggestions of my delirious episodes. Then I was sent a message by Severini, through Carla, that he and I were ‘sympathetic organisms’ and that ‘the way into the nightmare is the way out.’ For some time I had dreamed of being delivered from the suffering of my delirious episodes, and from all the suggestions and sensations that went along with them — the terrible vision that exposed all living things, including myself, as no more than a fungus or a collection of bacteria, a kind of monumental slime mold quivering across the landscape of this planet (and very likely others). Any deliverance from such a nightmare, I thought, would involve the most drastic (and esoteric) procedures, the most alien (and illicit) practices. And, ultimately, I never believed that this deliverance, or any other, was really possible. It was simply too good, or too evil, to be true — at least this is how it seemed to my mind. Yet all it took was a few words from Severini, as they reached me through Carla, and I began to dream of all kinds of possibilities. In a moment everything had changed. I now became ready to take those steps toward deliverance; in fact, not to do so seemed intolerable to me. I absolutely had to find a way out of the nightmare, it seemed, whatever procedures or practices were involved. Severini had taken those steps — I was convinced of that — and I needed to know where they had led him.
As might be imagined, I had worked myself into quite a state even before the night of the showing of the Exhibits of the Imaginary Museum. But it was more than my frenzy of dreams and anticipation that affected my experiences that night and now affects my ability to relate what occurred at the tumble-down shack on the edge of St Alban’s Marsh. My delirious episodes previous to that night were nothing (that is, they were the perfection of lucidity) when compared to the delirium that overtakes me every time I attempt to sort out what happened at the marshland shack, my thoughts disintegrating little by little until I pass into a kind of sleeptalking of my own. I saw things with my own eyes and other things with other eyes. And everywhere there were voices…