999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [170]
“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and pamphlets, on the one hand, and, on the other, the abysmal failure of my treatise, which will remain forever unpublished and unread.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