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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 stretcher 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 identifying number I had been given at the information desk downstairs, it seemed that none of the other rooms on that floor was occupied. 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 present in the 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.

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 a 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 subsequent 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 due to the fact that his works still remained on exhibit, and wherever we turned we were confronted by some painting or drawing or whatnot 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 its 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 at 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 prowling 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 confirmed in a monotone.

“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, as it turned out. I went home a few hours later. I was never admitted as a patient, I’m glad to say. That place, and I quote from my poem on the subject, was 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.

“I’m taking away all of this,” he said, gesturing broadly but quite gently toward the artworks of his that filled the gallery, none of which had been sold either on the opening night of his show or during the subsequent period of his disappearance. “I would appreciate your assistance, if you will give it,” he added as he began taking down paintings from along the walls.

The rest of us joined him in this endeavor without question or comment, and laden with artworks both large and small we followed him out of the gallery toward a battered pickup truck parked at the curb in front. Grossvogel casually hurled his works into the back of the rented, or possibly borrowed, truck (since the artist was never known to possess any kind of vehicle before that day), exhibiting no concern for the damage that might be incurred by what he had once considered the best examples of his artistic output to date. There was a moment’s hesitation on the part of Mrs. Angela, who was perhaps still considering how one or more of these works would look in her place of business, but ultimately she too began carrying Grossvogel’s works out of the gallery and hurling them into the back of the truck, where they piled up like refuse, until the gallery’s walls and floor-space were entirely cleared and the place looked like any other empty storefront. Grossvogel then got into the truck while the rest of us stood in wondering silence outside the evacuated art gallery. Putting his head out the open window of the rented or borrowed truck, he called to the woman who ran the gallery. She walked over to the driver’s side of the truck and exchanged a few words with the artist before he started the engine of the vehicle and drove off. Returning to where we had remained standing on the sidewalk, she announced to us that, within the next few weeks, there would be a second exhibit of Grossvogel’s work at the gallery.

This, then, was the message that was passed among the circle of persons with whom I consorted: that Grossvogel, after physically collapsing from an undisclosed ailment or attack at the first, highly unsuccessful exhibit of his works, was now going to present a second exhibit after summarily cleaning out the art gallery of those rather worthless paintings and drawings and whatnot of his already displayed to the public and hauling them away in the back of a pickup truck. Of course, Grossvogel’s new exhibit was promoted in an entirely professional manner by the woman who owned the art gallery and who stood to gain financially from the sale of what, in the phrase of the advertising copy associated with this event, was somewhat awkwardly called a “radical and revisionary phase in the career of the celebrated artistic visionary Reiner Grossvogel.” Nevertheless, due to the circumstances surrounding both the artist’s previous and upcoming exhibits, the whole thing almost immediately devolved into a fog of delirious and sometimes lurid gossip and speculation. This development was wholly in keeping with the nature of those who comprised that circle of dubious, not to mention devious artistic and intellectual persons of which I had unexpectedly become a central figure. After all, it was I who had taken Grossvogel to the hospital following his collapse at the first exhibit of his works, and it was the hospital—already a subject of strange repute, as I discovered—that loomed so prominently within the delirious fog of gossip and speculation surrounding Grossvogel’s upcoming exhibit. There was even talk of some special procedures and medications to which the artist had been exposed during his brief confinement at this institution that would account for his unexplained disappearance and subsequent reemergence in order to perpetrate what many presumed would be a startling “artistic vision.” No doubt it was this expectation, this desperate hope for something of stunning novelty and lavish brilliance—which in the minds of some overly imaginative persons promised to exceed the domain of mere aesthetics—that led to the acceptance among our circle of the unorthodox nature of Grossvogel’s new exhibit, as well as accounted for the emotional letdown that followed for those of us in attendance that opening night.

And, in tact, what occurred at the gallery that night in no way resembled the sort of exhibit we were accustomed to attending: the floor of the gallery and the gallery’s walls remained as bare as the day when Grossvogel appeared with a pickup truck to cart off all his works from his old art show, while the new one, we soon discovered after arriving, was to take place in the small back room of the storefront building. Furthermore, we were charged a rather large fee in order to enter this small back room, which was illuminated by only a few lightbulbs of extremely low wattage dangling here and there from the ceiling. One of the lightbulbs was hung in a corner of the room directly above a small table which had a torn section of a bedsheet draped over it to conceal something that was bulging beneath it. Radiating out from this corner, with its dim lightbulb and small table, were several loosely arranged rows of folding chairs. These uncomfortable chairs were eventually occupied by those of us, about a dozen in all, who were willing to pay the large fee for what seemed to be an event more in the style of a primitive stageshow than anything resembling an art exhibit. I could hear Mrs. Angela in one of the seats behind me saying over and over to those around her, “What the hell is this?” Finally she leaned forward and said to me, “What does Grossvogel think he’s doing? I’ve heard that he’s been medicated to the eyeballs ever since he came out of that hospital.” Yet the artist appeared lucid enough when a few moments later he made his way through the loosely arranged rows of folding chairs and stood beside the small table with the torn bedsheet draped over it and the low-watt lightbulb dangling above. In the confines of the art gallery’s back room the large-bodied Grossvogel seemed almost gigantic, just as he had when lying upon that institutional mattress in his private room at the hospital. Even his voice, which was usually quiet, even somewhat wispy, seemed to be enlarged when he began speaking to us.