‘Metamorphic recovery,’ I said by way of correction.
‘Fine, his metamorphic recovery, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Even before that time I could see that he was somebody who had all the makings of a fraud. He only required the proper conjunction of circumstances to bring this trait out in him. And then along came that supposedly near-fatal illness of his that he says led to that, I can barely say it, metamorphic recovery. After that he was able to realize all his unused talents for being the fraud he was always destined to be and always wanted to be. I joined in this farcical excursion, or whatever it is, only for the satisfaction of seeing everyone else find out what I always knew and always maintained about Reiner Grossvogel. You’re all my witnesses,’ she finished, her wrinkled and heavily made-up eyes scanning our faces, and those of the others in the diner, for the affirmation she sought.
I knew this woman only by her professional name of Mrs Angela. Until recently she had operated what everyone among our circle referred to as a ‘psychic coffeehouse’ which, in addition to other goods and services, was known for its excellent pastries that she made herself, or at least claimed that she made, off the premises. Nevertheless, the business never seemed to prosper either on the strength of its psychic readings, which were performed by several persons in Mrs Angela’s employ, or on the strength of its excellent pastries and somewhat overpriced coffee. It was Mrs Angela who first complained about the quality of both the service and the modest fare being offered to us in the Crampton diner. Not long after we arrived that afternoon and immediately packed ourselves into what seemed to be the town’s only active place of business, Mrs Angela called out to the young woman whose lonely task it was to cater to our group. ‘This coffee is incredibly bitter,’ she shouted at the girl, who was dressed in what appeared to be a brand-new white uniform. ‘And these donuts are stale, every one of them. What kind of place is this? I think this whole town and everything in it is a fraud.’
When the girl came over to our table and stood before us I noticed that her uniform resembled that of a nurse more than it did an outfit worn by a waitress in a diner. Specifically it reminded me of the uniforms that I saw worn by the nurses at the hospital where Grossvogel was treated for, and ultimately recovered from, what appeared at the time to be a very serious illness. While Mrs Angela was berating the waitress over the quality of the coffee and donuts we had been served, which were included in the travel package that Grossvogel’s brochure described as the ‘ultimate physical-metaphysical excursion,’ I was reviewing my memories of Grossvogel in that stark and conspicuously out-of-date hospital where he had been treated, however briefly, some two years preceding our visit to the dead town of Crampton. He had been admitted to this wretched facility through its emergency room, which was simply the rear entrance to what was not so much a hospital, properly speaking, but more a makeshift clinic set up in an old building located in the decayed neighborhood where Grossvogel and most of those who knew him were forced to live due to our limited financial means. I myself was the one who took him, in a taxi, to this emergency room and provided the woman at the admittance desk with all the pertinent information regarding Grossvogel, since he was in no condition to do so himself. Later I explained to a nurse — whom I could not help looking upon merely as an emergency-room attendant in a nurse’s uniform, given that she seemed somehow lacking in medical expertise — that Grossvogel had collapsed at a local art gallery during a modest exhibit of his works. This was his first experience, I told the nurse, both as a publicly exhibited artist and as a victim of a sudden physical collapse. However, I did not mention that the art gallery to which I referred might have been more accurately depicted as an empty storefront that now and then was cleaned up and used for exhibitions or artistic performances of various types. Grossvogel had been complaining throughout the evening of abdominal pains, I informed the nurse, and then repeated to an emergency-room physician, who also struck me as another medical attendant rather than as a legitimate doctor of medicine. The reason these abdominal pains had increased throughout that evening, I speculated to both the nurse and the doctor, was perhaps Grossvogel’s increasing sense of anxiety at seeing his works exhibited for the first time, since he had always been notoriously insecure about his talents as an artist and, in my opinion, had good reason to be. On the other hand there might possibly have been a serious organic condition involved, I allowed when speaking with the nurse and later with the doctor. In any case, Grossvogel had finally collapsed on the floor of the art gallery and had been unable to do anything but groan somewhat pitifully and, to be honest, somewhat irritatingly since that time.
After listening to my account of Grossvogel’s collapse, the doctor instructed the artist to lie down upon a gurney that stood at the end of a badly lighted hallway, while both the doctor and the nurse walked off in the opposite direction. I stood close by Grossvogel during the time that he lay upon this gurney in the shadows of that makeshift clinic. It was the middle of the night by then, and Grossvogel’s moaning had abated somewhat, only to be replaced by what I understood at that time as a series of delirious utterances. In the course of this rhetorical delirium, the artist mentioned several times something that he called the ‘pervasive shadow.’ I told him that it was merely the poor illumination of the hallway, my own words sounding somewhat delirious to me due to the fatigue brought on by the events of that night, both at the art gallery and in the emergency room of that tawdry hospital. Afterward I just stood there listening to Grossvogel murmur at intervals, no longer responding to his delirious and increasingly elaborate utterances about the ‘pervasive shadow that causes things to be what they would not be’ or the ‘all-moving darkness that makes things do what they would not do.’
After an hour or so of listening to Grossvogel, I noticed that the doctor and nurse were now standing close together at the other end of that dark hallway. They seemed to be conferring with each other for the longest time and every so often one or both of them would look in the direction where I was standing close by the prostrate and murmuring Grossvogel. I wondered how long they were going to carry on with what seemed to me a medical charade, a clinical dumbshow, while the artist lay moaning and now more frequently murmuring on the subject of the shadow and the darkness. Perhaps I dozed off on my feet for a moment, because it seemed that from out of nowhere the nurse was suddenly at my side and the doctor was no longer anywhere in sight. The nurse’s white uniform now appeared almost luminous in the dingy shadows of that hallway. ‘You can go home now,’ she said to me. ‘Your friend is going to be admitted to the hospital.’ She then pushed Grossvogel on his gurney toward the doors of an elevator at the end of the hallway. As soon as she reached these elevator doors they opened quickly and silently, pouring the brightest light into that dim hallway. When the doors were fully opened I could see the doctor standing inside. He pulled Grossvogel’s stretcher into the brilliantly illuminated elevator while the nurse pushed the stretcher from behind. As soon as they were all inside, the elevator doors closed quickly and silently, and the hallway in which I was still standing seemed even darker and more dense with shadows than it had before.
The following day I visited Grossvogel at the hospital. He had been placed in a small private room in a distant corner of the institution’s uppermost floor. As I walked toward this room, looking for the number I had been given at the information desk downstairs, it seemed to me that none of the other rooms on that floor had any patients occupying them. It was only when I found the number I sought that I looked inside and actually saw a bed that was occupied, conspicuously so, since Grossvogel was a rather large-bodied individual who took up the full length and breadth of an old and sagging mattress. He seemed quite giantlike lying on that undersized, institutional mattress in that small, windowless room. There was barely enough space for me to squeeze myself between the wall and the bedside of the artist, who seemed to be still in much the same delirious condition as he had been the night before. There was no sign of recognition on his part that I was in the same room, although we were so close that I was practically on top of him. Even after I spoke his name several times his teary gaze betrayed no notice of my presence. However, as I began to sidle away from his bedside I was startled when Grossvogel firmly grabbed my arm with his enormous left hand, which was the hand he used for painting and drawing the works of his which had been exhibited in the storefront art gallery the previous evening. ‘Grossvogel,’ I said expectantly, thinking that finally he was going to respond, if only to speak about the pervasive shadow (that causes things to be what they would not be) and the all-moving darkness (that causes things to do what they would not do). But a few seconds later his hand became limp and fell from my arm onto the very edge of the misshapen institutional mattress on which his body again lay still and unresponsive.