"Is there still, you know, someone in the window across the street?" Grissul asked.

"Do you think I should look?" Nolon asked back.

Grissul stared at the table, allowing moments to accumulate, then said, "I don't care, Mr Nolon, I have to say that what happened tonight was very unpleasant."

"Something like that would have happened sooner or later," Nolon replied. "He was too much the dreamer, let's be honest. Nothing he said made any sense to speak of, and he was always saying more than he should. Who knows who heard what."

"I've never heard screaming like that."

"It's over," said Nolon quietly.

"But what could have happened to him?" asked Grissul, gripping the shallow glass before him, apparently without awareness of the move.

"Only he could know that for certain," answered Nolon, who mirrored Grissul's move and seemingly with the same absence of conscious intent.

"And why did he scream that way, why did he say it was all a trick, a mockery of his dreams, that 'filthy thing in the earth'? Why did he scream not to be 'buried forever in that strange, horrible mask'?"

"Maybe he became confused," said Nolon. Nervously, he began pouring from the thin bottle into each of their glasses.

"And then he cried out for someone to kill him. But that's not what he wanted at all, just the opposite. He was afraid to you-know-what. So why would he-"

"Do I really have to explain it all, Mr Grissul?"

"I suppose not," Grissul said very softly, looking ashamed. "He was trying to get away, to get away with something."

"That's right," said Nolon just as softly, looking around. "Because he wanted to escape from here without having to you-know-what. How would that look?"

"Set an example."

"Exactly. Now let's just take advantage of the situation and drink our drinks before moving on."

"I'm not sure I want to," said Grissul.

"I'm not sure we have any say in the matter," replied Nolon.

"Yes, but-"

"Shhh. Tonight's our night."

Across the street a shadow fidgeted in the frame of a lighted window. An evening breeze moved through the little park, and the green glow of a candleflame flickered upon two silent faces.

THE VOICE IN THE BONES.

The blackness above was deep and unbroken. Rising toward it was a tower with a single opening which framed a pale, quivering light. The narrow aperture was fixed high within the darkness and was engulfed by its dense and voiceless unity. Below the tower was a scattering of other structures, while other lights emerged here and there in the lower darkness. One of these was a lamp set into a wall at the border of a fractured street. The lamp spread its glow upon the gray wall and upon two figures who stood motionless before it. No color in their tight, unblemished faces, no sign of breath under the dark covering of their forms: simple beings with long fingers and empty eyes. Yet their gaze was clearly focused on a building across that vacant street, rigidly directed toward a certain window there. Every so often someone would peer out along the very edge of that window, though he never looked for more than a moment before retreating out of sight. And he occupied a room where everything seemed to tremble with shadows.

The shadows moved slowly, obscuring so many of the objects within the room and appearing to change the outlines of the simplest furnishings. The room itself became altered in its dimensions. Over the course of slow transformations it pushed outward into a great abyss and squeezed inward to create a maze of strange black turnings. Every shape was imposing itself on another shape, breeding a chaos of overlapping patterns.

The occupant of the room remained on his guard in these surroundings. Now he saw something hiding inside a shadow moving along the woodwork by the window, using the shadow as a mask. He nudged his foot against the wall, which felt as if it softly gave way to his touch. But there was nothing in the shadow, or nothing any longer. And when he reached out slowly and pulled the dangling cord of a light, it was not illumination that filled the room but a voice.

"Mister Ha-ha!" it shrieked, echoing into many voices around him.

"Ha-ha," repeated a similar voice.

With lethargic caution he slid toward the window and peeked around the casement. He could not imagine that those keen and jagged voices belonged to the two figures across the street. He had never seen them open their mouths when they called out to him with some improvised name. They only stood firm and watchful by the high rough wall. He looked away.

"Mister Tick-tock!"

"Tick-tock, tick-tock."

He took another step, an intensely sluggish effort, and stood centered in the window frame. Now they would see him, now they would know. But the ones who had been so patient in their vigil had abandoned the scene. And shadows merged with fading echoes in the room.

Then there were new echoes for him to hear. Yet they did not lack definition or intent, as did so many of the sounds produced by the large building that contained him: a dull drawn-out crash or a brief crackling might come from anywhere without giving up its origin or identity. But these new sounds, these particular echoes, did not seek anonymity. And there was a focus, a center upon which they converged. Footsteps, the creak of a closing window or a slowly opening door, a fumbling among the objects of another room, all these noises spoke a strange language among the surrounding shadows and joined with them in a greater scheme.

He began moving from room to room in a laborious expedition and became a fugitive in a realm of twisted suppositions. A window might allow some glaze of illumination, a glassy luminescence, but he was often confused by certain deviations in the design of these rooms. Forced to turn an unseen corner, he was faced with a small door, and around its edges some thin lines of light alternately appeared and disappeared in the darkness. He opened the door. On the other side was a long low corridor with a row of small lamps that together blinked on and off along either wall. He stood and stared. For it seemed that something came into being during the intervals of darkness in the corridor, a swarm of obscure shapes that were but imperfectly dispersed by the returning light, gnarled specters that somehow belonged to the very walls and reached out with their shapeless limbs. He crouched and then crossed his arms upon his chest, so that his body would not touch anything which need not be touched. When the light next filled the corridor he ran across the floor and felt himself being thrust forward, strangely propelled by a power which was not his own and which he could not control. A railing caught him before he plunged down a stairwell reaching into the blackness below.

Yet these flights of stairs, which from above described a perfect vertical shaft, soon began to wander. They led him into unfamiliar regions of the building without offering a means of escape, only of retreat. And when he paused a moment to survey the dark and doorless world around him, he heard the echoing voices.

"Mister Fizzle," they shouted at him in unison.

He proceeded to descend the stairway and resigned himself to whatever destination it would lead him, always moving with that irresistible rapidity which had possessed his body and confused his thoughts. The echoes of other footsteps were now in pursuit. They appeared to catch up to him as small and barely visible objects, soft and irregular spheres that tumbled past him on the stairs and then faded before his eyes. Soon the others would be able to see him, soon they would reach him.

At last there came an end to the prodigious stairs, and he arrived at the abysmal fundament of the building. The ground upon which he now stood seemed to be of raw clay, cold and tallowy. Ahead of him was a crude passage, nearly a tunnel, which dripped with something that gave off a grayish glow. And there were other passages and also doors within the damp walls. It seemed he had no choice but to hide within one of these rooms. For upon that slippery ground he could no longer move with the same speed that had brought him there.

He turned down one passageway after another. By then the others were with him in those dim catacombs. It was time to take refuge behind one of the doors, each of which perfectly withheld the secret of whatever lay behind it.

The room in which he closed himself was lit by a dimmer light than that of the passages outside. It was an oily and erratic illumination which seemed to emerge from thick pools and patches of corruption that mottled the greasy clay of the floor. An atmosphere of filth and decay occupied the room, a rank presence that was the soul of slaughter. Indefinite in its dimensions, the chamber seemed to be a place of disposal for a kind of fleshy refuse. He was about to seek a more tolerable sanctuary when two figures stepped out of some dark recess within the room.

"Mister Thump," one of them said without the slightest movement of his thin mouth. So it was not they who spoke, but something else which spoke through them, something which practiced a strange ventriloquism.

When he turned to try and escape through the door, he found that it was stuck, jammed within its frame by shadows clogging its edges, oozing out like black suet.

"Thump, thump, thump," whispered the voices approaching him.

An interval of oblivion passed, and it was an entirely different room in which he awoke. This was a small, bare cubicle lit only by a peculiar radiance which shone through a narrow slot in the large, locked door. There were no windows in the room. The floor felt gritty and vaguely shifting, as if he were being supported by very loose sand. He lay against a wall in darkness, with only his thin legs projecting into the strip of light cast upon the floor.

A voice was whispering to him from somewhere. Slowly the words gained force, yet somehow they remained an abstract sound which merely flirted with messages, never really cohering. The voice seemed to be reaching him through the wall, for he was alone in that room. And still the tones were emphatic, even piercing, as if unaffected by the dulling interference of a barrier.

"Listen," the voice said. "Are you listening now? I am also a prisoner, but it is not the same for me. Things have changed in this place. I know that you wonder about those ones who brought you here, and about other things. Are you listening? Someone made them, you know. He is the one who made them, he could do such things. And he did something else, something that he is still doing. For he could never truly perish. Things have changed since he came to this place. He came here with strange dreams, and things began to change. He hid himself here and practiced his dreams. Bones and shadows, are you listening? Pale bones and black shadows. And now he is gone but he is not gone. I know my voice is not the same, if you are listening. It is only an echo now. I have heard so many voices, and how could I not become their echo? The echo of dreams, dreams of bones and shadows together. Do you know the shadows I mean? They draw you toward them, they take you into their blackness. But that is where you would go. Something in the very bones reaches out to the shadows and their blackness. He dreamed about this, and he practiced this dream. The bones themselves are only pale shadows, the dust of shadows. Where they are gathered, so are shadows gathered there. And they are dreamed together. These dreams have not gone from this place. Everything is the subject of shadows, everything serves them and their blackness. The bones are silent because the shadows have taken their voices. He dreamed about this. Now we are all servants of shadows, and they have taken voices from the bones to join with their blackness. The shadows have taken these voices now. And they are using them, listen to my words. Things have changed but everything continues as he dreamed it would be. Everything continues but is not the same. And are you..."

But the words were interrupted when the door groaned and swung slowly toward him, flooding his cell with a confusing radiance. In the open doorway were two figures which stood lean and dark and without features against the flaring incandescence. Yet they were not hindered by the brilliance and moved toward him with a mechanical efficiency. They positioned themselves on either side of his slouching form, then lifted him easily off the floor. He struggled awkwardly, at last gripping one of their pale hands and pulling on it. The skin slipped back from the wrist and bunched up like a glove; underneath was revealed a kind of stuffing composed of pale chips and slivers that cohered within a thick black paste.

They brought him out into the narrow circular corridor, where the brightness of a multitude of hanging lamps eliminated any suggestion of shadows. He noticed, as he hung in the grasp of the two servants, that the neighboring cell had its door wide open and was without an occupant. But when they began to proceed down the corridor there appeared to be something that moved upon the wall of that vacant cell, evading the light. They passed other cells, all of whose doors were open and all of which betrayed a stirring along the walls within that told him they were not wholly unoccupied.

His wordless escorts now pushed him through a peaked doorway cut into the gray inner wall of the corridor. On the other side was a stone stairway which twisted through the heart of the prison. He climbed the stairs slowly and stiffly with long-fingered hands guiding him. And now shadows appeared upon the bending wall, joining themselves into an unshapely creature, a chimerical guide that knew its way and led him to a place high above. There was no variation in the light around him, yet a sense of gradual darkening imposed itself on him with every ascending step. Now he was approaching some vast and massive source of the obscure, a great nexus of shadows, a birthplace and perhaps also a graveyard where things without substance waited, a realm of first and final dreams.

The stairs ended as they emerged through the floor at the center of a great room. And here a new species of illumination-a pale and grainy phosphorescence-could be seen spreading throughout the open space around them. This strange light appeared to emanate from several transparent vessels which were shaped like urns and had been randomly positioned upon the floor or atop objects various in size. Each of these containers seemed to be filled with a colorless, powdery substance from which a cold and gritty glow was sent forth. But this glow, this scintillating gloss, did not reveal the surfaces of the room as much as it coated them with another surface, transfiguring what lay beneath.

For in that troubled glare everything lost the density and presence it might have possessed. Wide and lofty cabinets seemed to waver, barely settled upon the uneven floor. The straight lines of tall shelves took on a slight tilt and threatened to disgorge the countless books so tenuously supported there. So many books were already scattered across the floor, their pages torn out and gathered in ragged heaps that might take themselves into the air at any moment. Located in a far section of the chamber was an armory of curious devices mounted upon the wall or suspended by wires, devices which could have been hallucinations, phantoms through which one's hand would pass on attempting to use them as they were designed to be used. And they seemed to have been designed for projects that involved rending and ripping, flaying and grinding. Yet all of these instruments apparently had lain idle for ages, displaying a corrosion which further removed them from their former substance and placed them in a category of phantasmal curiosities. Even the long low table about which these atrocious implements were congregated was dissolving with neglect.

Nevertheless, he was forced by his guardians to lie upon this coarse slab and be fettered by straps so decayed that he could easily tear them off. But the stern auxiliaries did not seem to be aware of the true condition of things: they continued to perform routine tasks that once may have had a purpose before being eclipsed by changes unknown to them.

Through the brittle haze of that room he watched his keepers as they went about some dutiful business, picking up obscure debris lying about the table, remnants of an undertaking long abandoned, or one no longer practiced in the same manner. This material they deposited in a large chest and locked it within. Then, with the studied automatism of pallbearers, they lifted the chest by its handles and carried it away, descending the stairs at the center of the room, their heavy feet scuffing the steps of that great prison tower. And echoes diminished in the depths below.

With the labored movements of a sleeper prematurely awakened, he turned himself from the table. And it was then he saw that the room was provided with a window, a single opening without glass. But so filled was this aperture with the blackness beyond that it seemed to be only a shadow painted upon the wall. He stepped slowly about the mounds of paper and other waste lying about the floor, careful of the deceptions of the room's fractured light, and leaned over the window's ledge. Far below he could see two tiny figures with a miniature box bobbing between them. They shrank farther into the quiet distance and finally disappeared into one of those dark hulking structures which were crowded together along narrow streets. So alike were these buildings that he could not keep his fix on the one they had entered, though he had his suspicions. Remaining at the window, he gazed into the great blackness above, which seemed to exert a strange magnetism, a tugging at the tower that rose so near to this mute and lightless firmament. After a few moments he turned away from the window. Now he was alone, with nothing to hold him to that place.

But as he moved toward the stairs to leave, he paused and scrutinized the piles of disjecta about him. Among this scattering of odds and ends there appeared to be something like bones or pieces of bones, broken leavings of some enterprise that had taken place here. And there was also such an abundance of jettisoned paper, pages dark with scribbling and sloughed off in the chaos of composition. Yet as he studied with greater intentness this mass of wild marks, he began to receive a few splinters of its theme, to read the wreckage of an unknown adventure. He seemed to see phrases, incantations, formulae, and almost to hear them spoken by a shattered voice. The pact of bones and blackness, the voice declaimed to him. The collection of shadows...shadows binding bones...skeletons becoming shadows. And he came to understand other things: the land stripped of flesh...the reeking earth ripped clean and rising into the great blackness. This reverberant discourse had made him its student, imparting theories and practice: bones pummeled into purity...parts turned to brilliant particles...the shadows seeded with the voice of skulls...the many voices within eternal blackness...the tenebrous harmony.

At last he turned his eyes from these words that were not words. Trying to draw away from them, he stumbled toward the stairs. But the voice which spoke these things continued to speak to him. It then became many voices speaking. Things had already begun to change. And now the stairs descended only into blackness, a blackness that was rising into the room as a great shadow around him. Shadows and their blackness and the voices they possessed. The one who had dreamed of bones and shadows-bones and shadows together-spoke in these voices and knew the name to speak, the name that would flay the flesh, the true name that called its bearer into the shadows as folds of blackness fell upon him and wrapped him in their shroud.

Now they had summoned him, now he was with them. Things had changed yet everything continued as before. And he cried out as the shadow sought his bones and as he felt his bones reaching into the blackness. Yet it was no longer his own voice that sounded in the tower, but the echoing clamor of strange shrieking multitudes.

PART 4.

Teatro Grottesco and Other Tales.

TEATRO GROTTESCO.

The first thing I learned was that no one anticipates the arrival of the Teatro. One would not say, or even think, "The Teatro has never come to this city-it seems we're due for a visit," or perhaps, "Don't be surprised when you-know-what turns up, it's been years since the last time." Even if the city in which one lives is exactly the kind of place favored by the Teatro, there can be no basis for predicting its appearance. No warnings are given, no fanfare to announce that a Teatro season is about to begin, or that another season of that sort will soon be upon us. But if a particular city possesses what is sometimes called an "artistic underworld," and if one is in close touch with this society of artists, the chances are optimal for being among those who discover that things have already started. This is the most one can expect.

For a time it was all rumors and lore, hearsay and dreams. Anyone who failed to show up for a few days at the usual club or bookstore or special artistic event was the subject of speculation. But most of the crowd I am referring to lead highly unstable, even precarious lives. Any of them might pack up and disappear without notifying a single soul. And almost all of the supposedly "missing ones" were, at some point, seen again. One such person was a filmmaker whose short movie Private Hell served as the featured subject of a local one-night festival. But he was nowhere to be seen either during the exhibition or at the party afterwards. "Gone with the Teatro," someone said with a blase knowingness, while others smiled and clinked glasses in a sardonic farewell toast.

But only a week later the filmmaker was spotted in one of the back rows of a pornographic theater. He later explained his absence by insisting he had been in the hospital following a thorough beating at the hands of some people he had been filming but who did not consent or desire to be filmed. This sounded plausible, given the subject matter of the man's work. Yet for some reason no one believed his hospital story, despite the evidence of bandages he was still required to wear. "It has to be the Teatro," argued a woman who always dressed in shades of purple and who was a good friend of the filmmaker. "His stuff and Teatro stuff," she said, holding up two crossed fingers for everyone to see.

But what was meant by "Teatro stuff?" This was a phrase I heard spoken by a number of persons, not all of them artists of a pretentious or self-dramatizing type. Certainly there is no shortage of anecdotes that have been passed around which purport to illuminate the nature and workings of this "cruel troupe," an epithet used by those who are too superstitious to invoke the Teatro Grottesco by name. But sorting out these accounts into a coherent profile, never mind their truth value, is another thing altogether.

For instance, the purple woman I mentioned earlier held us all spellbound one evening with a story about her cousin's roommate, a self-styled "visceral artist" who worked the night shift as a stock clerk for a supermarket chain in the suburbs. On a December morning, about an hour before sun-up, the artist was released from work and began his walk home through a narrow alley that ran behind several blocks of various stores and businesses along the suburb's main avenue. A light snow had fallen during the night, settling evenly upon the pavement of the alley and glowing in the light of a full moon which seemed to hover just at the alley's end. The artist saw a figure in the distance, and something about this figure, this winter-morning vision, made him pause for a moment and stare. Although he had a trained eye for sizing and perspective, the artist found this silhouette of a person in the distance of the alley intensely problematic. He could not tell if it was short or tall, or even if it was moving-either toward him or away from him-or was standing still. Then, in a moment of hallucinated wonder, the figure stood before him in the middle of the alley.

The moonlight illuminated a little man who was entirely unclothed and who held out both of his hands as if he were grasping at a desired object just out of his reach. But the artist saw that something was wrong with these hands. While the little man's body was pale, his hands were dark and were too large for the tiny arms on which they hung. At first the artist believed the little man to be wearing oversized mittens. His hands seemed to be covered by some kind of fuzz, just as the alley in which he stood was layered with the fuzziness of the snow that had fallen during the night. His hands looked soft and fuzzy like the snow, except that the snow was white and his hands were black.

In the moonlight the artist came to see that the mittens worn by this little man were actually something like the paws of an animal. It almost made sense to the artist to have thought that the little man's hands were actually paws which had only appeared to be two black mittens. Then each of the paws separated into long thin fingers that wriggled wildly in the moonlight. But they could not have been the fingers of a hand, because there were too many of them. And the hands were not paws, nor were the paws really mittens. And all of this time the little man was becoming smaller and smaller in the moonlight of that alley, as if he were moving into the distance far away from the artist who was hypnotized by this vision. Finally a little voice spoke which the artist could barely hear, and it said to him: "I cannot keep them away from me anymore, I am becoming so small and weak." These words suddenly made this whole winter-morning scenario into something that was too much even for the self-styled "visceral artist."

In the pocket of his coat the artist had a tool which he used for cutting open boxes at the supermarket. He had cut into flesh in the past, and, with the moonlight glaring upon the snow of that alley, the artist made a few strokes which turned that white world red. Under the circumstances what he had done seemed perfectly justified to the artist, even an act of mercy. The man was becoming so small.

Afterward the artist ran through the alley without stopping until he reached the rented house where he lived with his roommate. It was she who telephoned the police, saying there was a body lying in the snow at such and such a place and then hanging up without giving her name. For days, weeks, the artist and his roommate searched the local newspapers for some word of the extraordinary thing the police must have found in that alley. But nothing ever appeared.

"You see how these incidents are hushed up," the purple woman whispered to us. "The police know what is going on. There are even special police for dealing with such matters. But nothing is made public, no one is questioned. And yet, after that morning in the alley, my cousin and her roommate came under surveillance and were followed everywhere by unmarked cars. Because these special policemen know that it is artists, or highly artistic persons, who are approached by the Teatro. And they know whom to watch after something has happened. It is said that these police may be party to the deeds of that 'company of nightmares'."

But none of us believed a word of this Teatro anecdote told by the purple woman, just as none of us believed the purple woman's friend, the filmmaker, when he denied all innuendos that connected him to the Teatro. On the one hand, our imaginations had sided with this woman when she asserted that her friend, the creator of the short movie Private Hell, was somehow in league with the Teatro; on the other hand, we were mockingly dubious of the story about her cousin's roommate, the self-styled visceral artist, and his encounter in the snow-covered alley.

This divided reaction was not as natural as it seemed. Never mind that the case of the filmmaker was more credible than that of the visceral artist, if only because the first story was lacking the extravagant details which burdened the second. Until then we had uncritically relished all we had heard about the Teatro, no matter how bizarre these accounts may have been and no matter how much they opposed a verifiable truth or even a coherent portrayal of this phenomenon. As artists we suspected that it was in our interest to have our heads filled with all kinds of Teatro craziness. Even I, a writer of nihilistic prose works, savored the inconsistency and the flamboyant absurdity of what was told to me across a table in a quiet library or a noisy club. In a word, I delighted in the unreality of the Teatro stories. The truth they carried, if any, was immaterial. And we never questioned any of them until the purple woman related the episode of the visceral artist and the small man in the alley.

But this new disbelief was not in the least inspired by our sense of reason or reality. It was in fact based solely on fear; it was driven by the will to negate what one fears. No one gives up on something until it turns on them, whether or not that thing is real or unreal. In some way all of this Teatro business had finally worn upon our nerves; the balance had been tipped between a madness that intoxicated us and one that began to menace our minds. As for the woman who always dressed herself in shades of purple...we avoided her. It would have been typical of the Teatro, someone said, to use a person like that for their purposes.

Perhaps our judgment of the purple woman was unfair. No doubt her theories concerning the "approach of the Teatro" made us all uneasy. But was this reason enough to cast her out from that artistic underworld which was the only society available to her? Like many societies, of course, ours was founded on fearful superstition, and this is always reason enough for any kind of behavior. She had been permanently stigmatized by too closely associating herself with something unclean in its essence. Because even after her theories were discredited by a newly circulated Teatro tale, her status did not improve.

I am now referring to a story that was going around in which an artist was not approached by the Teatro but rather took the first step toward the Teatro, as if acting under the impulse of a sovereign will.

The artist in this case was a photographer of the I-am-a-camera type. He was a studiedly bloodless specimen who quite often, and for no apparent reason, would begin to stare at someone and to continue staring until that person reacted in some manner, usually by fleeing the scene but on occasion by assaulting the photographer, who invariably pressed charges. It was therefore not entirely surprising to learn that he tried to engage the services of the Teatro in the way he did, for it was his belief that this cruel troupe could be hired to, in the photographer's words, "utterly destroy someone." And the person he wished to destroy was his landlord, a small balding man with a mustache who, after the photographer had moved out of his apartment, refused to remit his security deposit, perhaps with good reason but perhaps not.

In any case, the photographer, whose name incidentally was Spence, made inquiries about the Teatro over a period of some months. Following up every scrap of information, no matter how obscure or suspect, the tenacious Spence ultimately arrived in the shopping district of an old suburb where there was a two-story building that rented space to various persons and businesses, including a small video store, a dentist, and, as it was spelled out on the building's directory, the Theatre Grottesco. At the back of the first floor, directly below a studio for dancing instruction, was a small suite of offices whose glass door displayed some stenciled lettering that read: T G VENTURES. Seated at a desk in the reception area behind the glass door was a young woman with long black hair and black-rimmed eyeglasses. She was thoroughly engrossed in writing something on a small blank card, several more of which were spread across her desk. The way Spence told it, he was undeterred by all appearances that seemed to suggest the Teatro, or Theatre, was not what he assumed it was. He entered the reception area of the office, stood before the desk of the young woman, and introduced himself by name and occupation, believing it important to communicate as soon as possible his identity as an artist, or at least imply as best he could that he was a highly artistic photographer, which undoubtedly he was. When the young woman adjusted her eyeglasses and asked, "How can I help you?" the photographer Spence leaned toward her and whispered, "I would like to enlist the services of the Teatro, or Theatre if you like." When the receptionist asked what he was planning, the photographer answered, "To utterly destroy someone." The young woman was absolutely unflustered, according to Spence, by this declaration. She began calmly gathering the small blank cards that were spread across her desk and, while doing this, explained that T G Ventures was, in her words, an "entertainment service." After placing the small blank cards to one side, she removed from her desk a folded brochure which outlined the nature of the business, which provided clowns, magicians, and novelty performances for a variety of occasions, their specialty being children's parties.

As Spence studied the brochure, the receptionist placidly sat with her hands folded and gazed at him from within the black frames of her eyeglasses. The light in that suburban office suite was bright but not harsh; the pale walls were incredibly clean and the carpeting, in Spence's description, was conspicuously new and displayed the exact shade of purple found in turnips. The photographer said that he felt as if he were standing in a mirage. "This is all a front," Spence finally said, throwing the brochure on the receptionist's desk. But the young woman only picked up the brochure and placed it back in the same drawer from which it had come. "What's behind that door?" Spence demanded, pointing across the room. And just as he pointed at that door there was a sound on the other side of it, a brief rumbling as if something heavy had just fallen to the floor. "The dancing classes," said the receptionist, her right index finger pointing up at the floor above. "Perhaps," Spence allowed, but he claimed that this sound that he heard, which he described as having an "abysmal resonance," caused a sudden rise of panic within him. He tried not to move from the place he was standing, but his body was overwhelmed by the impulse to leave that suite of offices. The photographer turned away from the receptionist and saw his reflection in the glass door. She was watching him from behind the lenses of black-framed eyeglasses, and the stenciled lettering on the glass door read backwards, as if in a mirror. A few seconds later Spence was outside the building in the old suburb. All the way home, he asserted, his heart was pounding.

The following day Spence paid a visit to his landlord's place of business, which was a tiny office in a seedy downtown building. Having given up on the Teatro, he would have to deal in his own way with this man who would not return his security deposit. Spence's strategy was to plant himself in his landlord's office and stare him into submission with a photographer's unnerving gaze. After he arrived at his landlord's rented office on the sixth floor of what was a thoroughly depressing downtown building, Spence seated himself in a chair looking across a filthy desk at a small balding man with a mustache. But the man merely looked back at the photographer. To make things worse, the landlord (whose name was Herman Zick), would lean towards Spence every so often and in a quiet voice say, "It's all perfectly legal, you know." Then Spence would continue his staring, which he was frustrated to find ineffective against this man Zick, who of course was not an artist, or even a highly artistic person, as were the usual victims of the photographer. Thus the battle kept up for almost an hour, the landlord saying, "It's all perfectly legal," and Spence trying to hold a fixed gaze upon the man he wished to utterly destroy.

Ultimately Spence was the first to lose control. He jumped out of the chair in which he was sitting and began to shout incoherently at the landlord. Once Spence was on his feet, Zick swiftly maneuvered around the desk and physically evicted the photographer from the tiny office, locking him out in the hallway. Spence said that he was in the hallway for only a second or two when the doors opened to the elevator that was directly across from Zick's sixth-floor office. Out of the elevator compartment stepped a middle-aged man in a dark suit and black-framed eyeglasses. He wore a full, well-groomed beard which, Spence observed, was slightly streaked with gray. In his left hand the gentleman was clutching a crumpled brown bag, holding it a few inches in front of him. He walked up to the door of the landlord's office and with his right hand grasped the round black doorknob, jiggling it back and forth several times. There was a loud click that echoed down the hallway of that old downtown building. The gentleman turned his head and looked at Spence for the first time, smiling briefly before admitting himself to the office of Herman Zick.

Again the photographer experienced that surge of panic he had felt the day before when he visited the suburban offices of T G Ventures. He pushed the down button for the elevator, and while waiting he listened at the door of the landlord's office. What he heard, Spence claimed, was that terrible sound that had sent him running out in the street from T G Ventures, that "abysmal resonance," as he defined it. Suddenly the gentleman with the well-groomed beard and black-rimmed glasses emerged from the tiny office. The door to the elevator had just opened, and the man walked straight past Spence to board the empty compartment. Spence himself did not get on the elevator but stood outside, helplessly staring at the bearded gentleman, who was still holding that small crumpled bag. A split second before the elevator doors slid closed, the gentleman looked directly at Spence and winked at him. It was the assertion of the photographer that this wink, executed from behind a pair of black-framed eyeglasses, made a mechanical clicking sound which echoed down the dim hallway. Prior to his exit from the old downtown building, leaving by way of the stairs rather than the elevator, Spence tried the door to his landlord's office. He found it unlocked and cautiously stepped inside. But there was no one on the other side of the door.

The conclusion to the photographer's adventure took place a full week later. Delivered by regular post to his mail box was a small square envelope with no return address. Inside was a photograph. He brought this item to Des Esseintes' Library, a bookstore where several of us were giving a late-night reading of our latest literary efforts. A number of persons belonging to the local artistic underworld, including myself, saw the photograph and heard Spence's rather frantic account of the events surrounding it. The photo was of Spence himself staring stark-eyed into the camera, which apparently had taken the shot from inside an elevator, a panel of numbered buttons being partially visible along the righthand border of the picture. "I could see no camera," Spence kept repeating. "But that wink he gave me...and what's written on the reverse side of this thing." Turning over the photo Spence read aloud the following handwritten inscription: "The little man is so much littler these days. Soon he will know about the soft black stars. And your payment is past due." Someone then asked Spence what they had to say about all this at the offices of TG Ventures. The photographer's head swiveled slowly in exasperated negation. "Not there anymore," he said over and over. With the single exception of myself, that night at Des Esseintes' Library was the last time anyone saw Mr. Spence.

After the photographer ceased to show up at the usual meeting places and special artistic events, there were no cute remarks about his having "gone with the Teatro." We were all of us beyond that stage. I was perversely proud to note that a degree of philosophical maturity had now developed among those in the artistic underworld of which I was a part. There is nothing like fear to complicate one's consciousness, inducing previously unknown levels of reflection. Under such mental stress I began to organize my own thoughts and observations about the Teatro, specifically as this phenomenon related to the artists who seemed to be its sole objects of attention.

Whether or not an artist was approached by the Teatro or took the initiative to approach the Teatro himself, it seemed the effect was the same: the end of an artist's work. I myself verified this fact as thoroughly as I could. The filmmaker whose short movie Private Hell so many of us admired had, by all accounts, become a full-time dealer in pornographic videos, none of them his own productions. The self-named visceral artist had publicly called an end to those stunts of his which had gained him a modest underground reputation. According to his roommate, the purple woman's cousin, he was now managing the supermarket where he had formerly labored as a stock clerk. As for the purple woman herself, who was never much praised as an artist and whose renown effectively began and ended with the "cigar box assemblage" phase of her career, she had gone into selling real estate, an occupation in which she became quite a success. This roster of ex-artists could be extended considerably, I am sure of that. But for the purposes of this report or confession (or whatever else you would like to call it) I must end my list of no-longer-artistic persons with myself, while attempting to offer some insights into the manner in which the Teatro Grottesco could transform a writer of nihilistic prose works into a non-artistic, more specifically a post-artistic being.

It was after the disappearance of the photographer Spence that my intuitions concerning the Teatro began to crystalize and become explicit thoughts, a dubious process but one to which I am inescapably subject as a prose writer. Until that point in time, everyone tacitly assumed that there was an intimacy of kind between the Teatro and the artists who were either approached by the Teatro or who themselves approached this cruel troupe by means of some overture, as in the case of Spence, or perhaps by gestures more subtle, even purely noetic (I retreat from writing unconscious, although others might argue with my intellectual reserve). Many of us even spoke of the Teatro as a manifestation of super-art, a term which we always left conveniently nebulous. However, following the disappearance of the photographer, all knowledge I had acquired about the Teatro, fragmentary as it was, became configured in a completely new pattern. I mean to say that I no longer considered it possible that the Teatro was in any way related to a super-art, or to an art of any kind, quite the opposite in fact. To my mind the Teatro was, and is, a phenomenon intensely destructive of everything that I conceived of as art. Therefore, the Teatro was, and is, intensely destructive of all artists and even of highly artistic persons. Whether this destructive force is a matter of intention or is an epiphenomenon of some unrelated, perhaps greater design, or even if there exists anything like an intention or design on the part of the Teatro, I have no idea (at least none I can elaborate in comprehensible terms). Nonetheless, I feel certain that for an artist to encounter the Teatro there can be only one consequence: the end of that artist's work. Strange, then, that knowing this fact I still acted as I did.

I cannot say if it was I who approached the Teatro or vice versa, as if any of that stupidness made a difference. The important thing is that from the moment I perceived the Teatro to be a profoundly anti-artistic phenomenon I conceived the ambition to make my form of art, by which I mean my nihilistic prose writings, into an anti-Teatro phenomenon. In order to do this, of course, I required a penetrating knowledge of the Teatro Grottesco, or of some significant aspect of that cruel troupe, an insight of a deeply subtle, even dreamlike variety into its nature and workings.

The photographer Spence had made a great visionary advance when he intuited that it was in the nature of the Teatro to act on his request to utterly destroy someone (although the exact meaning of the statement "he will know about the soft black stars," in reference to Spence's landlord, became known to both of us only sometime later). I realized that I would need to make a similar leap of insight in my own mind. While I had already perceived the Teatro to be a profoundly anti-artistic phenomenon, I was not yet sure what in the world would constitute an anti-Teatro phenomenon, as well as how in the world I could turn my own prose writings to such a purpose.

Thus, for several days I meditated on these questions. As usual, the psychic demands of this meditation severely taxed my bodily processes, and in my weakened state I contracted a virus, specifically an intestinal virus, which confined me to my small apartment for a period of one week. Nonetheless, it was during this time that things fell into place regarding the Teatro and the insights I required to oppose this company of nightmares in a more or less efficacious manner.

Suffering through the days and nights of an illness, especially an intestinal virus, one becomes highly conscious of certain realities, as well as highly sensitive to the functions of these realities, which otherwise are not generally subject to prolonged attention or meditation. Upon recovery from such a virus, the consciousness of these realities and their functions necessarily fades, so that the once-stricken person may resume his life's activities and not be driven to insanity or suicide by the acute awareness of these most unpleasant facts of existence. Through the illumination of analogy, I came to understand that the Teatro operated in much the same manner as the illness from which I recently suffered, with the consequence that the person exposed to the Teatro-disease becomes highly conscious of certain realities and their functions, ones quite different of course from the realities and functions of an intestinal virus. However, an intestinal virus ultimately succumbs, in a reasonably healthy individual, to the formation of antibodies (or something of that sort). But the disease of the Teatro, I now understood, was a disease for which no counteracting agents, or antibodies, had ever been created by the systems of the individuals-that is, the artists-it attacked. An encounter with any disease, including an intestinal virus, serves to alter a person's mind, making it intensely aware of certain realities, but this mind cannot remain altered once this encounter has ended or else that person will never be able to go on living in the same way as before. In contrast, an encounter with the Teatro appears to remain within one's system and to alter a person's mind permanently. For the artist the result is not to be driven into insanity or suicide (as might be the case if one assumed a permanent mindfulness of an intestinal virus) but the absolute termination of that artist's work. The simple reason for this effect is that there are no antibodies for the disease of the Teatro, and therefore no relief from the consciousness of the realities which an encounter with the Teatro has forced upon an artist.

Having progressed this far in my contemplation of the Teatro-so that I might discover its nature or essence and thereby make my prose writings into an anti-Teatro phenomenon-I found that I could go no further. No matter how much thought and meditation I devoted to the subject I did not gain a definite sense of having revealed to myself the true realities and functions that the Teatro communicated to an artist and how this communication put an end to that artist's work. Of course I could vaguely imagine the species of awareness that might render an artist thenceforth incapable of producing any type of artistic efforts. I actually arrived at a fairly detailed and disturbing idea of such an awareness-a world-awareness, as I conceived it. Yet I did not feel I had penetrated the mystery of "Teatro-stuff." And the only way to know about the Teatro, it seemed, was to have an encounter with it. Such an encounter between myself and the Teatro would have occurred in any event as a result of the discovery that my prose writings had been turned into an anti-Teatro phenomenon: this would constitute an approach of the most outrageous sort to that company of nightmares, forcing an encounter with all its realities and functions. Thus it was not necessary, at this point in my plan, to have actually succeeded in making my prose writings into an anti-Teatro phenomenon. I simply had to make it known, falsely, that I had done so.

As soon as I had sufficiently recovered from my intestinal virus I began to spread the word. Every time I found myself among others who belonged to the so-called artistic underworld of this city I bragged that I had gained the most intense awareness of the Teatro's realities and functions, and that, far from finishing me off as an artist, I had actually used this awareness as inspiration for a series of short prose works. I explained to my colleagues that merely to exist-let alone create artistic works-we had to keep certain things from overwhelming our minds. However, I continued, in order to keep these things, such as the realities of an intestinal virus, from overwhelming our minds we attempted to deny them any voice whatever, neither a voice in our minds and certainly not a precise and clear voice in works of art. The voice of madness, for instance, is barely a whisper in the babbling history of art because its realities are themselves too maddening to speak of for very long...and those of the Teatro have no voice at all, given their imponderably grotesque nature. Furthermore, I said, the Teatro not only propagated an intense awareness of these things, these realities and functionings of realities, it was identical with them. And I, I boasted, had allowed my mind to be overwhelmed by all manner of Teatro stuff, while also managing to use this experience as material for my prose writings. "This," I practically shouted one day at Des Esseintes' Library, "is the super-art." Then I promised that in two days' time I would give a reading of my series of short prose pieces.

Nevertheless, as we sat around on some old furniture in a corner of Des Esseintes' Library, several of the others challenged my statements and assertions regarding the Teatro. One fellow writer, a poet, spoke hoarsely through a cloud of cigarette smoke, saying to me: "No one knows what this Teatro stuff is all about. I'm not sure I believe it myself." But I answered that Spence knew what it was all about, thinking that very soon I too would know what he knew. "Spence!" said a woman in a tone of exaggerated disgust (she once lived with the photographer and was a photographer herself). "He's not telling us about anything these days, never mind the Teatro." But I answered that, like the purple woman and the others, Spence had been overwhelmed by his encounter with the Teatro, and his artistic impulse had been thereby utterly destroyed. "And your artistic impulse is still intact," she said snidely. I answered that, yes, it was, and in two days I would prove it by reading a series of prose works that exhibited an intimacy with the most overwhelmingly grotesque experiences and gave voice to them. "That's because you have no idea what you're talking about," said someone else, and almost everyone supported this remark. I told them to be patient, wait and see what my prose writings revealed to them. "Reveal?" asked the poet. "Hell, no one even knows why it's called the Teatro Grottesco." I did not have an answer for that, but I repeated that they would understand much more about the Teatro in a few days, thinking to myself that within this period of time I would have either succeeded or failed in my attempt to provoke an encounter with the Teatro and the matter of my nonexistent anti-Teatro prose writing would be immaterial.