After some moments I made my way out of Grossvogel’s private room and walked over to the nurse’s station on the same floor of the hospital to inquire about the artist’s medical condition. The sole nurse in attendance listened to my request and consulted a folder with the name Reiner Grossvogel typed in one of its upper corners. After studying me some time longer than she had studied the pages concerning the artist, and now hospital patient, she simply said, ‘Your friend is being observed very closely.’
‘Is that all you can tell me?’ I asked.
‘His tests haven’t been returned. You might ask about them later.’
‘Later today?’
‘Yes, later today,’ she said, taking Grossvogel’s folder and walking away into another room. I heard the squeaking sound of a drawer in an old filing cabinet being opened and then suddenly being slammed shut again. For some reason I stood there waiting for the nurse to emerge from the room where she had taken Grossvogel’s medical folder. Finally I gave up and returned home.
When I called the hospital later that day I was told that Grossvogel had been released. ‘He’s gone home?’ I said, which was the only thing that occurred to me to say. ‘We have no way of knowing where he’s gone,’ the woman who answered the phone replied just before hanging up on me. Nor did anyone else know where Grossvogel had gone, for he was not at his home, and no one among our circle had any knowledge of his whereabouts.
It was several weeks, perhaps more than a month, after Grossvogel’s release from the hospital, and apparent disappearance, that several of us had gathered, purely by chance, at the storefront art gallery where the artist had collapsed during the opening night of his first exhibit. By this time even I had ceased to be concerned in any way with Grossvogel or the fact that he had without warning simply dropped out of sight. Certainly he was not the first to do so among our circle, all of whom were more or less unstable, sometimes dangerously volatile persons who might involve themselves in questionable activities for the sake of some artistic or intellectual vision, or simply out of pure desperation of spirit. I think that the only reason any of us mentioned Grossvogel’s name as we drifted about the art gallery that afternoon was the fact that his works still remained on exhibit, and wherever we turned we were confronted by some painting or drawing of his which, in a pamphlet issued to accompany the show, I myself had written were ‘manifestations of a singularly gifted artistic visionary,’ when in fact they were without exception quite run-of-the-mill specimens of the sort of artistic nonsense that, for reasons unknown to all concerned, will occasionally gain a measure of success or even a high degree of prominence for their creator. ‘What am I supposed to do with all this junk?’ complained the woman who owned, or perhaps only rented, the storefront building that had been set up as an art gallery. I was about to say to her that I would take responsibility for removing Grossvogel’s works from the gallery, and perhaps even store them somewhere for a time, when the skeletal person who always introduced himself as a defrocked academic interjected, suggesting to the agitated owner (or least operator) of the art gallery that she should send them to the hospital where Grossvogel had ‘supposedly been treated’ after his collapse. When I asked why he had used the word ‘supposedly,’ he replied, ‘I’ve long believed that place to be a dubious institution, and I’m not the only one to hold this view.’ I then asked if there was any credible basis for this belief of his, but he only crossed his skeletal arms and looked at me as if I had just insulted him in some way. ‘Mrs Angela,’ he said to a woman who was standing nearby, studying one of Grossvogel’s paintings as if she were seriously considering it for purchase. At that time Mrs Angela’s psychic coffeehouse had yet to prove itself a failed venture, and possibly she was thinking that Grossvogel’s works, although inferior from an artistic standpoint, might in some way complement the ambience of her place of business, where patrons could sit at tables and receive advice from hired psychic counselors while also feasting on an array of excellent pastries.
‘You should listen to what he says about that hospital,’ Mrs Angela said to me without taking her eyes off that painting of Grossvogel’s. ‘I’ve had a strong feeling about that place for a long time. There is some aspect of it that is extremely devious.’
‘Dubious,’ corrected the defrocked academic.
‘Yes,’ answered Mrs Angela. ‘It’s not by any means someplace I’d like to wake up and find myself.’
‘I wrote a poem about it,’ said the neatly dressed gentleman who all this time had been marauding about the floor of the gallery, no doubt waiting for the most propitious moment to approach the woman who owned or rented the storefront building and persuade her to sponsor what he was forever touting as an ‘evening of Hermetic readings,’ which of course would prominently feature his own works. ‘I once read that poem to you,’ he said to the gallery owner.
‘Yes, you read it to me,’ she replied with barely any vocal inflection.
‘I wrote it after being treated in the emergency room of that place very late one night,’ explained the poet.
‘What were you treated for?’ I asked him.
‘Oh, nothing serious. I went home a few hours later. I was never admitted as a patient, I’m glad to say. It was, and I quote from my poem on the subject, the “nucleus of the abysmal.”’
‘That’s fine to say that,’ I said. ‘But could we possibly speak in more explicit terms?’
However, before I could draw out a response from the self-styled writer of Hermetic lyrics, the door of the art gallery was suddenly pushed open with a conspicuous force that all of us inside instantly recognized. A moment later we saw standing before us the large-bodied figure of Reiner Grossvogel. Physically he appeared to be, for the most part, much the same person I recalled prior to his collapse on the floor of the art gallery not more than a few feet from where I was now standing, bearing none of the traits of that moaning, delirious creature whom I had taken in a taxi to the hospital for emergency treatment. Nevertheless, there did seem to be something different about him, a subtle but thorough change in the way he looked upon what lay before him: whereas the gaze of the artist had once been characteristically downcast or nervously averted, his eyes now seemed completely direct in their focus and filled with a calm purpose.