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By Root 2264 0

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 doughnuts 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, 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 doughnuts 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“ultimate physical-metaphysical excursion,” I was reviewing my memories of Grossvogel in that stark and conspicuously out-of-date hospital where he had been treated, however briefly, some two years preceding our visit to the dead town of Crampton.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 a decayed old building located in the same 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 facts of his identification, 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 increased throughout that evening, I speculated to both the nurse and the doctor, was perhaps due to 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 finally collapsed on the floor of the art gallery and was unable to do anything but groan somewhat pitifully and, to be candid, somewhat irritatingly since that time.

After listening to my account of Grossvogel’s collapse, the doctor instructed the artist to lie down upon a stretcher 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 stretcher in the shadows of that makeshift clinic. It was the middle of the night by then, and Grossvogel’s moaning had