999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [169]
“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 doughnuts 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 doughnuts. What I could use at this moment is some of that antispasmodic 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 other side of the diner, I noticed that there were already a few others lined up outside the single door labeled 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 attributed to the poor quality of the coffee and doughnuts 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man seated on my right began telling me about his “researches” and his “speculations” which formed the basis for his unpublished philosophical treatise An Investigation into the Conspiracy Against the Human Race, and how these related to his “intense suspicions” concerning Grossvogel.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 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,