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“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 the 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 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 enshad-owed,’ 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.”

“Maybe so,” I said. “But I don’t agree that Grossvogel’s use of a term from Hebrew mythology necessarily calls into question the sincerity of his assertions, or even their validity, if you want to take it that far.”

“Yes, well, I seem not to be making myself clear to you. What I’m referring to emerged quite early in my researches and preliminary speculations for my
Investigation
. Briefly, I would simply say that it’s not my intention to cast doubt on Grossvogel’s Tsalal. My
Investigation
would prove me to be quite explicit and unequivocal on this phenomenon, although I would never employ the rather showy and somewhat trivial approach that Grossvogel has taken, which to some extent could account for the fabulous success of his sculptures and pamphlets, on the one hand, and, on the other, the abysmal failure of my treatise, which will remain forever unpublished and unread. All that aside, my point is not that this Tsalal of Grossvogel’s
isn’t
in some way an actual phenomenon. I know only too well that the mind and the imagination, the soul and the self, are not only the nonsensical dreams that Grossvogel makes them out to be. They are in fact no more than a cover-up—as false and unreal as the artwork Grossvogel was producing before his medical ordeal and recovery. Grossvogel was able to penetrate this fact by some extremely rare circumstance which no doubt had something to do with his medical ordeal.”

“His gastrointestinal disorder,” I said, feeling more and more the symptoms of this malady in my own body.

“Exactly. It’s the precise mechanics of this experience of his that interested me enough to invest in his excursion. This is what remains so obscure. There is nothing obvious, if I may say, about his Tsalal or its mechanism, yet Grossvogel is making what to my mind are some fascinating claims and distinctions with such overwhelming certitude. But he
is
certainly mistaken, or possibly is being devious on one point at least. I say this because I know that he has not been entirely forthcoming about the hospital where he was treated. In my researches for
An Investigation
I have looked into such places and how they operate. I know for a fact that the hospital where Grossvogel was treated is an extremely rotten institution, an absolutely rotten institution. Everything about it is a sham and a cover-up for the most gruesome goings-on, the true extent of which I’m not sure even those involved with such places realize. It’s not a matter of any sort of depravity, so to speak, or of malign intent. There simply develops a sort of … collusion, a rotten alliance on the part of certain people and places. They are in league with … well, if only you could read my
Investigation
you would know the sort of nightmare that Grossvogel was faced with in that hospital, a place reeking of nightmares. Only in such a place could Grossvogel have confronted those nightmarish realizations he has discoursed upon in his countless pamphlets and portrayed in his series of Tsalal sculptures, which he says were not the product of his mind or imagination, or his soul or his self, but only the product of what he was seeing with his body and its organs of physical sensation—the shadow, the darkness. The mind and all that, the self and all that, are only a cover-up, only a fabrication, as Grossvogel says. They are that which cannot be seen with the body, which cannot be sensed by any organ of physical sensation. This is because they are actually nonexistent cover-ups, masks, disguises for the thing that is activating our bodies in the way Grossvogel explained—activating them and using them for what it needs to thrive upon. They are the work, the artworks in fact,
of the Tsalal itself
Oh, it’s impossible to simply tell you. I wish you could read my
Investigation
. It would have explained everything; it would have revealed everything. But how could you read what was never written in the first place.”

“Never written?” I inquired. “Why was it never written?”

“Why?” he said, pausing for a moment and grimacing in pain. “The answer to that is exactly what Grossvogel has been preaching in both his pamphlets and in his public appearances. His entire doctrine, if it can even be called that, if there could ever be such a thing in any sense whatever, is based on the nonexistence, the imaginary nature, of everything we believe ourselves to be. Despite his efforts to express what has happened to him, he must know very well that there are no words that are able to explain such a thing. Words are a total obfuscation of the most basic fact of existence, the very conspiracy against the human race that my treatise might have illuminated. Grossvogel has experienced the essence of this conspiracy firsthand, or at least has claimed to have experienced it. Words are simply a cover-up of this conspiracy. They are the ultimate means for the cover-up, the ultimate artwork of the shadow, the darkness—its ultimate artistic cover-up. Because of the existence of words, we think that there exists a mind, that some kind of soul or self exists. This is just another of the infinite layers of the cover-up. But there is no mind that could have written
An Investigation into the Conspiracy Against the Human Race
—no mind that could write such a book and no mind that could read such a book. There is no one at all who can say anything about this most basic fact of existence, no one who can betray this reality. And there is no one to whom it could ever be conveyed.”

“That all seems impossible to comprehend,” I objected.

“It just might be, if only there actually were anything to comprehend, or anyone to comprehend it. But there are no such beings.”

“If that’s the case,” I said, wincing with abdominal discomfort, “then who is having this conversation?”

“Who indeed?” he answered in a distantly rhetorical tone. “Nevertheless, I would like to continue speaking. Even if this is only nonsense and dreams I feel the need to perpetuate it all. Especially at this moment, when I feel this pain taking over my mind and my self. Pretty soon none of this will make any difference. No,” he said in a dead voice. “It doesn’t matter now.”

I noticed that he had been staring out the front window of the diner for some time, gazing at the town. Some of the others in the diner were doing the same, dumbstruck at what they saw and agonized, as I was, by the means by which they were seeing it. The vacant scene of the town’s empty streets and the desolate season that had presided over the surrounding landscape, that place we had complained was absent of any manifestations of interest when we first arrived there, was undergoing a visible metamorphosis to the eyes of many of us, as though an eclipse were occurring. But what we were now seeing was not a darkness descending from far skies but a shadow which was arising from within the dead town around us, as if a torrent of black blood had begun roaring through its pale body—roaring like a distant ocean moving in a bestial surge toward its shores. I realized that I had suddenly and unknowingly joined in the forefront of those who were affected by the changes taking place, even though I literally had no
idea
what was happening, no knowledge that came to my mind, which had ceased to function in the way it once did, leaving my body in a dumb state of agony, its organs of sensations registering the gruesome spectacle of things around me: other bodies eclipsed by the shadow swirling inside their skins, some of them still speaking as though they were persons who possessed a mind and a self, imaginary entities still complaining in human words about the pain they were only beginning to realize, crying out above the increasing roar for remedies as they entered the “nucleus of the abysmal,” and still seeing with their minds even up to the very moment when their minds abandoned them entirely, dissipating like a mirage, able to say only how everything appeared to their minds, how the shapes of the town outside the windows of the diner were turning all crooked and crabbed, reaching out toward them as if with claws and rising up like strange peaks and horns into the sky, which was no longer pale and gray but swirling with the pervasive shadow, the all-moving darkness that they could finally see so perfectly because now they were seeing with their bodies, only with their bodies pitched into a great roaring blackness of pain. And one voice called out—a voice that both moaned and coughed—that there was a face outside, a “face across the entire sky,” it said. The sky and town were now both so dark that perhaps only someone preoccupied with the human face could have seen such a thing among that world of churning shadows outside the windows of the diner. Soon after that the words all but ceased, because bodies in true pain do not speak. The very last words I remember were those of a woman who screamed for someone to take her to a hospital. And this was a request which, in the strangest way, had been anticipated by the one who had induced us to make this “physical-metaphysical excursion” and whose body had already mastered what our bodies were only beginning to learn—the nightmare of a body that is being used and that knows what is using it, making things be what they would not be and do what they would not do. I sensed the presence of a young woman who had worn a uniform as white as gauze. She had returned. And there were others like her who moved among us, their forms being the darkest of all, and who knew how to minister to our pains in order to effect our metamorphic recovery. We did not need to be brought to their hospital, since the hospital and all its rottenness had been brought to us.

*  *  *

298

And as much as I would like to say everything that happened to us in the town of Crampton (whose deadness and desolation seem an illusion of paradise after having its hidden life revealed to our eyes) … as much as I would like to say how it was that we were conveyed from that region of the country, that nucleus of nowhere, and returned to our distant homes … as much as I would like to say precisely what assistance and treatments we might have received that delivered us from that place and the pain we experienced there, I cannot say anything about it at all. Because when one is saved from such agony, the most difficult thing in the world is to question the means of salvation: the body does not know or care what takes away its pain and is incapable of questioning these things. For that is what we have become, or what we have all but become—bodies without the illusion of minds or imaginations, bodies without the distractions of souls or selves. None of us among our circle questioned this fact, although we have never spoken of it since our … recovery. Nor have we spoken of the absence of Grossvogel from our circle, which does not exist in the way it once did, that is to say, as an assemblage of artists and intellectuals. We became the recipients of what someone designated as the “legacy of Grossvogel,” which was more than a metaphorical expression, since the artist had in fact bequeathed to each of us, on the condition of his “death or disappearance for a stipulated period of time,” a share in the considerable earnings he had amassed from the sales of his works.

But this strictly monetary inheritance was only the beginning of the success that all of us from that abolished circle of artists and intellectuals began to experience, the seed from which we began to grow out of our existence as failed minds and selves into our new lives as highly successful organisms, each in our own field of endeavor. Of course we could not have failed, even if we tried, in attaining whatever end we pursued, since everything we have experienced and created was a phenomenon of the shadow, the darkness which reached outwards and reached upwards from inside us to claw and poke its way to the heights of a mountainous pile of human and nonhuman bodies. These are all we have and all we are; these are what is used and thrived upon. I can feel my own body being used and cultivated, the desires and impulses that are pulling it to succeed, that are
tugging
it toward every kind of success. There is no means by which I could ever oppose these desires and impulses, now that I exist solely as a body which seeks only its efficient perpetuation so that it may be thrived upon by what needs it. There is no possibility of my resisting what needs to thrive upon us, no possibility of betraying it in any way. The medications that I and the others now consume in such prodigious quantities serve only to further the process of our cultivation, this growing and pulling and using of our bodies. And even if this little account of mine—my own Tsalal, if you will (nevermind the pronouns)—even if this little chronicle seems to disclose secrets that might undermine the nightmarish order of things, it does nothing but support and promulgate that order. Nothing can resist or betray this nightmare because nothing exists that might
do
anything, that might
be
anything that could realize a success in that way. The very idea of such a thing is only nonsense and dreams.