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me in the Crampton diner: the photographic portraitist who was subject to coughing jags on my left, the author of the unpublished philosophical treatise An Investigation into the Conspiracy against the Human Race on my right, and Mrs Angela directly across from me.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, 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 donuts 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 donuts. What I could use at this moment is some of that anti-spasmodic 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 lavatory on the other side of the diner, I noticed that there were already a few others lined up outside the single door labelled 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 attributable to the poor quality of the coffee and donuts 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 his 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 no 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 enshadowed,” 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.’