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By Root 2222 0

abated somewhat, only to be replaced by what I understood at that time as a series of delirious utterances. In the course of this rhetorical delirium the artist mentioned several times something that he called the “pervasive shadow.” I told him that it was merely the poor illumination of the hallway, my own words sounding somewhat delirious to me due to the fatigue brought on by the events of that night, both at the art gallery and in the emergency room of that tawdry hospital. But Grossvogel—in his delirium, I supposed—only gazed about the hallway, as if he could not see me standing there or hear the words I had just spoken to him. And yet he now placed his hands over his ears, as though to shut out some painful and deafening sound. Afterwards I just stood there listening to Grossvogel murmur at intervals, no longer responding to his delirious and increasingly more elaborate utterances about the “pervasive shadow that causes things to be what they would not be” (and later: “the all-moving darkness that makes things do what they would not do").

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