The Other End of the Hall
Of failed painters and rooftop follies
My dear subscribers,
The specter of “The Failed Painter” haunts this latest chapter of The Trouble With Apartment One. During my three clandestine years living in the Punk Magazine office, I made one final, desperate attempt to revive my painting “career”—constructing dozens of stretcher frames on the blistering rooftop of the Bennett Building and painting deep into the night. But the entire project ultimately collapsed in a cloud of toxic 911 dust, and nothing survived—except in the psychic ruins of the novel itself.
Following this, I present an artificial commentary on the proceedings—courtesy of myself and my inexpensive and uncomplaining editor, ChatGPT.
For entertainment purposes only.
—B.F. “Brian” Späth
THE LIFE OF THE BUDDHA
Should midnight discover you in A Forgotten Chamber somewhere south of Fulton Street—before a battered easel, with a painter’s brush in hand—mark the hour, and steel yourself for a knock upon the office door…
For who else knocks at such an hour? I said—Management, perhaps, with orders to expel me!
But what arrived instead was more unnerving: The Painter—smiling broadly, a cup of tea in hand, half-mad with adulation…
I donned The Mask of Hospitality, then admitted him in silence. He crossed the room with eerie purpose, and took a place before the canvas…
Yes, we share that grave affliction! he told me. I’m a painter as well—consigned to a room at hallway’s end, where time itself unravels, where the windows catch only the sound of distant machines, and the ceiling leans in, as if watching for signs of surrender…
Twenty winters past, in a room resembling yours, I planted my easel like A Madman’s Cross—above the corner of Fulton and Nassau.
Please come along, he said—though the hour’s unkind—I’ll show you the chamber where I’ve waged my own quiet war with the canvas…
As the shades of midnight deepened, I followed him down the flickering hall, amidst a rumbling from the floors below—past every silent, sleeping office sealed up like a tomb…
At length we arrived at The Painter’s Door—a lonely portal at the end of the hall, battered by time’s unyielding passage…
The chamber opened up like a silent confession—we slipped past sorrow, regret—and a wretched bolt of canvas where failure itself lay sleeping.
Two folding chairs kept vigil at the far wall—watchful as jurors, and poised to pass judgement on the painter’s every mark.
And there on the wall, suspended in anguish, a trembling canvas offered itself up in sacrifice—still wet, defenseless, and half-expecting to be ripped to shreds!
This one’s a revelation, he said—it holds The Object in Absentia, honoring presence through negation—while preserving the integrity of the picture plane!
I’m sure you’ll agree, he added…
But this is a triumph! I said—nothing less than a Schematic of the Self—the colors are uncanny—and the picture plane’s intact!
Gallery Interest must already be fermenting.
Let me show you, he said—the result of twenty years in exile, and a brush held steady by conviction—
Then, as if under the aegis of some cloistered rite, a procession of sanctified paintings marched solemnly across the beleaguered wall…
Each one represents a stage in the Life of the Buddha, he explained—from darkness through illumination!
But you realized that at once—I’m certain…
But these rituals are now performed in isolation, he said—I toil alone in this drunken chamber at the dead end of the hall.
It wasn’t so long ago, it seems—The Bennett housed a rare and radiant fellowship—
Artists, Astrologers, and Mystics drawn by an atmosphere of tolerance, free enquiry, and inexpensive lodgings.
At that moment, I saw it—a subtle twitch, a hand dipping into the shadows of his coat—a flask emerged, then quickly vanished, like a mole startled by the sun.
You’re far too late, he said—the golden age has passed—A Reign of Quiet Splendor under a kindly sovereign—who gave the arts a place to breathe…
Alas, no trace of him remains, he said…
Save the delicate hues of pastel pink and green that grace The Bennett’s outer shell—and even these shall soon be painted over!
Yes, The Bennett had its patron once, he said…
A Man of Vision, whose rule left no monument but color,
No legacy but fading light…
But what became of this Golden Dawn? I said—
When idolaters and dreamers were welcomed through The Bennett’s halls?
I knew them all, he said. I betrayed them all. Or they betrayed me—it hardly matters—
Every friendship soured, every studio darkened—
I’m the last one left, he added…
Torment is the true medium, he said…
And then, at once—as if conjured by the deeper Laws of Exile—he declared with grave conviction:
All painters are misunderstood!
I left him to his reveries, his unspooling rolls of canvas, and his unacknowledged flask—and carried his proclamation with me to The Other End of the Hall…
The Bennett! That mysterious building in which The Philosophies of Greece mingle freely with The Theology of Egypt…
The Object in Absentia: On Art, Exile, and The Failed Painter
By B.F. Späth and ChatGPT
The spectral figure of The Failed Painter in The Trouble With Apartment One represents one of the novel’s most haunting reckonings with self-delusion and artistic collapse. Arriving at the midnight hour with theatrical courtesy and a steaming cup of “restorative infusion,” the Painter is no ordinary visitor. He is a double, a psychic echo from the other end of the hall—and from the other end of the narrator’s own unraveling sense of purpose.
His magnum opus, a series of canvasses titled The Life of the Buddha, aspires to chart the stages of enlightenment. But what emerges instead is a tedious cycle of overwrought compositions—burdened by pomposity, intellectual blather, and the exhausted clichés of the modern art world. “The Object in Absentia,” “Schematic of the Self,” “the integrity of the picture plane,”—each phrase paraded with unearned gravity. The narrator, recognizing the absurdity, nevertheless responds with hollow praise that is almost cruel in its transparency. Reader and narrator alike perceive the tragicomic spectacle of a man who has fooled himself into believing he is making Great Art.
And yet the Painter’s delusions reflect the narrator’s own. Earlier, in the chapter Midnight, the narrator experiences a fugue of aesthetic rapture: stringing lights like stars, conjuring Versailles on a salvaged canvas, painting deep into The Lost Fultonian Night. But no sooner is inspiration rekindled than it is echoed—mocked, even—by the ghostly twin who appears at the door. The encounter becomes a mise en abyme of self-flattery and failure, each artist offering florid, unmoored praise in a feedback loop of misguided belief. “The Bennett’s found its visionary once again!” one exclaims, as if the building itself were a cathedral awaiting its oracle.
This episode participates in a lineage of literary doubling—Dostoevsky, Hamsun, Bernhard—but the ghostliness here is architectural as much as psychological. The Bennett’s labyrinthine halls become a projection of fractured identity. The “other end of the hall” is not merely a room but a false sanctum: illegitimate, unconvincing, an uncanny mirror of the narrator’s own chamber of exile. Both artists are caught in the same lament—yearning for recognition, haunted by failure, inventing mythologies to survive.
Even the Painter’s invocation of a vanished “golden age” reveals more than nostalgia. “I knew them all… I betrayed them all…”—his narrative veers into Lear-like confession, deranged yet sincere. And when the narrator carries the Painter’s parting proclamation— “All painters are misunderstood”—back down the hall, it is not a souvenir but a psychic burden. A delusion absorbed, internalized, and left to fester like a cross too familiar to disown.
Crucially, the elevated, baroque style of the novel itself—the ornate cadences, mythic imagery, and gothic excess—is not mere aesthetic flourish but a schizoid projection: the narrator’s desperate linguistic defense against a poisoned and collapsing world. The prose functions as both mask and buffer, a self-generated sanctuary in language that guards against emotional annihilation. It is not just the Painter who is lost in delusion—but the narrator himself, and the novel that speaks through him.
The chapter closes with a flourish of comic hyperbole:
“The Bennett! That mysterious building in which The Philosophies of Greece mingle freely with The Theology of Egypt…”
The line offers a final, parodic chord—gently mocking the grandiosity of both painters, and perhaps of the novel’s voice itself. In this, The Trouble With Apartment One achieves something rare: a portrait of artistic delusion that is at once mournful, ridiculous, and true.