The Collected Short Fiction by Thomas Ligotti Part 28

'The challenges and obstacles facing me in that bungalow house were becoming more and more oppressive,' whispered the voice on the tape. 'There was something so desolate about being in that place in the dead of night, even if I did not know precisely what time it was. And to see upon the pale, threadbare carpet those verminous bodies, some of which were still barely alive; then to try each of the lamps and find that none of them was in working order-everything, it seemed, was in opposition to my efforts, everything aligned against my taking care of the problems I faced in the bungalow house. For the first time I noticed that the bodies lying for the most part in total stillness on the moonlit carpet were not like any species of vermin I had ever seen,' the voice on the tape recording said. 'Some of them seemed to be deformed, their naturally revolting forms altered in ways I could not discern. I knew that I would require specialized implements for dealing with these creatures, an a.r.s.enal of advanced tools of extermination. It was the idea of poisons-the toxic solutions and vapors I would need to use in my a.s.sault upon the bungalow hordes-that caused me to become overwhelmed by the complexities of the task before me and the paucity of my resources for dealing with them.'

At this point, and many others on the tape (as I recall), the voice became nearly inaudible. 'The bungalow house,' it said, 'was such a bleak environment in which to make a stand: the moonlight through the dusty blinds, the bodies on the carpet, the lamps without any lightbulbs. And the incredible silence. It was not the absence of sounds that I sensed, but the stifling of innumerable sounds and even voices, the m.u.f.fling of all the noises one might expect to hear in an old bungalow house in the dead of night, as well as countless other sounds and voices. The forces required to accomplish this silence filled me with awe. The infinite terror and dreariness of an infested bungalow house, I whispered to myself. A bungalow universe, I then thought without speaking aloud. Suddenly I was overcome by a feeling of euphoric hopelessness which pa.s.sed through my body like a powerful drug and held all my thoughts and all my movements in a dreamy, floating suspension. In the moonlight that shone through the blinds of that bungalow house I was now as still and as silent as everything else.'

The t.i.tle of the tape-recorded artwork from which I have just quoted was The Bungalow House (Plus Silence). I discovered this and other dream monologues by the same artist at Dalha D. Fine Arts, which was located in the near vicinity of the public library (main branch) where I was employed in the Language and Literature department. Sometimes I spent my lunch breaks at the gallery, even consuming my brown-bag meals on the premises. There were a few chairs and benches on the floor of the gallery, and I knew that the woman who owned the place did not discourage any kind of traffic, however lingering. Her actual livelihood was in fact not derived from the gallery itself. How could it have been? Dalha D. Fine Arts was a hole in the wall. One would think it no trouble at all to keep up the premises where there was so little floor s.p.a.ce, just a single room that was by no means overcrowded with artworks or art-related merchandise. But no attempt at such upkeeping seemed ever to have been made. The display window was so filmy that someone pa.s.sing by could barely make out the paintings and sculptures behind it (the same ones year after year). From the street outside, this tiny front window presented the most desolate hallucination of bland colors and shapeless forms, especially on late November afternoons. Further inside the gallery, things were in a similar state-from the cruddy linoleum floor, where some cracked tiles revealed the concrete foundation, to the rather high ceiling, which occasionally sent down small chips of plaster. If every artwork and item of art-related merchandise had been cleared out of that building, no one would think that an art gallery had once occupied this s.p.a.ce and not some enterprise of a lesser order. But as many persons were aware, if only through second-hand sources, the woman who operated Dalha D. Fine Arts did not make her living by dealing in those artworks and related items, which only the most desperate or scandalously naive artist would allow to be put on display in that gallery. By all accounts, including my own brief lunchtime conversations with the woman, she had pursued a variety of careers in her time. She herself had worked as an artist at one point, and some of her works-messy a.s.semblages inside old cigar boxes-were exhibited in a corner of her gallery. But evidently her art gallery business was not self-sustaining, despite minimal overhead, and she made no secret of her true means of income.

'Who wants to buy such junk?' she once explained to me, gesturing with long fingernails painted emerald green. This same color also seemed to dominate her wardrobe of long, loose garments, with many of her outfits featuring incredible scarves or shawls that dragged along the floor as she moved about the art gallery. She paused and with the pointed toe of one of her emerald-green shoes gave a little kick at a wire wastebasket that was filled with the miniature limbs of dolls, all of them individually painted in a variety of colors. 'What are people thinking when they make these things? What was I thinking with those stupid cigar boxes? But no more of that, definitely no more of that sort of thing.'

And she made no secret, beyond a certain reasonable caution, of what sort of thing now engaged her energies as a businesswoman. The telephone was always ringing at her art gallery, always upsetting the otherwise dead calm of the place with its cracked, warbling voice that called out from the back room. She would then quickly disappear behind a curtain that hung in the doorway separating the front and back sections of the art gallery. I might be eating a sandwich or a piece of fruit, and then suddenly, for the fourth or fifth time in a half-hour, the telephone would scream from the back room, eventually summoning this woman behind the curtain. But she never answered the telephone with the name of the art gallery or employed any of the stock phrases of business protocol. Not so much as a 'Good afternoon, may I help you?' did I ever hear from the back room as I sat eating my midday meal in the front section of the art gallery. She always answered the telephone in the same way with the same quietly expectant tone in her voice. 'This is Dalha,' she always said.

Before I had known her very long even I found myself using her name in the most familiar way. The mere saying of this name instilled in me a sense of access to what she offered all those telephone-callers, not to mention those individuals who personally visited the art gallery to make or confirm an appointment. Whatever someone was eager to try, whatever step someone was willing to take-Dalha could arrange it. This was the true stock in trade of the art gallery, these arrangements. When I returned to the library after my lunch break, I continued to imagine Dalha back at the art gallery, racing between the front and back sections of the building, making all kinds of arrangements over the telephone, and sometimes in person.

On the day that I first noticed the new artwork ent.i.tled The Bungalow House, Dalha's telephone was extremely vocal. While she was talking to her clients in the back section of the art gallery, I was left alone in the front section. Just for a thrill I went over to the wire wastebasket full of dismembered doll parts and helped myself to one of the painted arms (emerald green!), hiding it in the inner pocket of my sportcoat. It was then that I spotted the old audiotape recorder on a small plastic table in the corner. Beside the machine was a business card on which the t.i.tle of the artwork had been hand-printed, along with the following instructions: PRESS PLAY. PLEASE REWIND AFTER LISTENING. DO NOT REMOVE TAPE. I placed the headphones over my ears and pressed the PLAY b.u.t.ton. The voice that spoke through the headphones, which were enormous, sounded distant and was somewhat distorted by the hissing of the tape. Nevertheless, I was so intrigued by the opening pa.s.sages of this dream monologue, which I have already transcribed, that I sat down on the floor next to the small plastic table on which the tape recorder was positioned and listened to the entire tape, exceeding my allotted lunchtime by over half an hour. By the time the tape had ended I was in another world-that is, the world of the infested bungalow house, with all its dreamlike crumminess and foul charms.

'Don't forget to rewind the tape,' said Dalha, who was now standing over me, her long gray hair, like steel wool, almost brus.h.i.+ng against my face.

I pressed the REWIND b.u.t.ton on the tape recorder and got up from the floor. 'Dalha, may I use your lavatory?' I asked. She pointed to the curtain leading to the back section of the art gallery. 'Thank you,' I said.

The effect of listening to the first dream monologue was very intense for reasons I will soon explain. I wanted to be alone for a few moments in order to preserve the state of mind which the voice on the tape had induced in me, much as one might attempt to hold on to the images of a dream just after waking. However, I felt that the lavatory at the library, despite its peculiar virtues which I have appreciated over the years, would somehow undermine the sensations and mental state created by the dream monologue, rather than preserving this experience and even enhancing it, as I hoped the lavatory in the back section of Dalha's art gallery would do.

The very reason why I spent my lunchtimes in the surroundings of Dalha's art gallery, which were so different from those of the library, was exactly why I now wanted to use the lavatory in the back section of that art gallery and definitely not the lavatory at the library, even if I was already overdue from my lunch break. And, indeed, this lavatory had the same qualities as the rest of the art gallery, as I hoped it would. The fact that it was located in the back section of the art gallery, a region of mysteries to my mind, was significant. Just outside the door of the lavatory stood a small, cluttered desk upon which was positioned the telephone that Dalha used in her true business of making arrangements. The telephone was centered in the weak light of a desk lamp, and I noticed, as I pa.s.sed into the lavatory, that it was an unwieldy object with a straight-that is, uncoiled-cord connecting the receiver to the telephone housing, with its enormous circular dial. But although Dalha answered several calls during the time I was in the lavatory, these seemed to be entirely legitimate conversations having to do either with her personal life or with practical matters relating to the art gallery.

'How long are you going to be in there?' Dalha asked through the door of the lavatory. 'I hope you're not sick, because if you're sick you'll have to go somewhere else.'

I called out that there was nothing wrong (quite the opposite) and a moment later emerged from the lavatory. I was about to ask for details of the art performance tape I had just heard, anxious to know about the artist and what it would cost me to own the work ent.i.tled The Bungalow House, as well as any similar works that might exist. But the phone began ringing again. Dalha answered it with her customary greeting as I stood by in the back section of the art gallery, which was a dark, though relatively uncluttered s.p.a.ce that now put me in mind of the living room of the bungalow house that I had heard described on the tape-recorded dream monologue. The conversation in which Dalha was engaged (another non-arrangement call) seemed interminable, and I was becoming nervously aware how long past my lunch break I had stayed at the storefront art gallery.

'I'll see you tomorrow,' I said to Dalha, who responded with a look from her emerald eyes while continuing to speak to the other party on the telephone. And she was smiling at me, like muted laughter, I remember thinking as I pa.s.sed through the curtained doorway into the front section of the art gallery. I glanced at the tape recorder standing on the plastic table but decided against taking the audioca.s.sette back to the library (and afterward home with me). It would be there when I visited on my lunch break the following day. Hardly anyone ever bought anything out of the front section of Dalha's art gallery.

For the rest of the day-both at the library and at my home-I thought about the bungalow house tape. Especially while riding the bus home from the library, I thought of the images and concepts described on the tape, as well as the voice that described them and the phrases it used throughout the dream monologue on the bungalow house. Much of my commute from my home to the library, and back home again, took me past numerous streets lined from end to end with desolate-looking houses, any of which might have been the inspiration for the bungalow house audiotape. I say that these streets were lined from 'end to end' with such houses, even though the bus never turned down any of them, and I therefore never actually viewed even a single street from 'end to end.' In fact, as I looked through the window next to my seat on the bus-on either side of the bus I always sat in the window seat, never in the aisle seat-the streets I saw appeared endless, vanis.h.i.+ng from my sight toward an infinity of old houses, many of them derelict houses and a great many of them being dwarfish and desolate-looking houses of the bungalow type.

The tape-recorded dream monologue, as I recalled it that day while riding home on the bus and staring out the window, described several features of the infested bungalow house-the dusty window blinds through which the moonlight shone, the lamps with all their lightbulb sockets empty, the threadbare carpet, and the dead or barely living vermin that littered the carpet. Thus, I was afforded an interior view of the bungalow house by the voice on the tape, not a view from the exterior. Conversely, the houses I gazed upon with such intensity as I rode the bus to and from the library were seen by me only from an exterior perspective, their interiors being visible solely in my imagination. Of course my sense of these interiors, being entirely an imaginative projection, was highly vague, lacking the precise physical layout provided by the bungalow house audiotape. Similarly, the dreams I often had of these houses were highly vague. Yet the sensations and the mental state created by my imaginative projections into and my dreams of these houses perfectly corresponded to those I had experienced at Dalha's art gallery when I listened to the tape ent.i.tled The Bungalow House. That feeling of being in a trance while occupying, all alone, the most bleak and pathetic surroundings of an old bungalow house was communicated to me in the most powerful way by the voice on the tape, which described a silent and secluded world where one existed in a state of abject hypnosis. While sitting on the floor of the art gallery listening to the voice as it spoke through those enormous headphones, I had the sense that I was not simply hearing the words of that dream monologue but also reading them. What I mean is that whenever I have the occasion to read words on a page, any words on any page, the voice that I hear saying these words in my head is always recognizable in some way as my own, even though the words are those of another. Perhaps it is even more accurate to say that whenever I read words on a page, the voice in my head is my own voice as it becomes merged (or lost) within the words that I am reading. Conversely, when I have the occasion to write words on a page, even a simple note or memo at the library, the voice that I hear dictating these words does not sound like my own-until, of course, I read the words back to myself, at which time everything is all right again. The bungalow house tape was the most dramatic example of this phenomenon I had ever known. Despite the poor overall quality of the recording, the distorted voice reading this dream monologue became merged (or lost) within my own perfectly clear voice in my head, even though I was listening to its words over a pair of enormous headphones and not reading the words on a page. As I rode the bus home from the library, observing street after street of houses so reminiscent of the one described on the tape-recorded dream monologue, I regretted not having acquired this artwork on the spot or at least discovered more about it from Dalha, who had been occupied with what seemed an unusual number of telephone calls that afternoon.

The following day at the library I was anxious for lunchtime to arrive so that I could get over to the art gallery and find out everything I possibly could about the bungalow house tape, as well as discuss terms for its acquisition. Entering the art gallery, I immediately looked toward the corner where the tape recorder had been set on the small plastic table the day before. For some reason I was relieved to find the exhibit still in place, as if any artwork in that gallery could possibly have come and gone in a single day.

I walked over to the exhibit with the purpose of verifying that everything I had seen (and heard) the previous day was exactly as I remembered it. I checked that the audioca.s.sette was still inside the recording machine and picked up the little business card on which the t.i.tle of the exhibit was given, along with instructions for properly operating the tape-recorded artwork. It was then that I realized that this was a different card from the first one. Printed on this card was the t.i.tle of a new artwork, which was called The Derelict Factory with a Dirt Floor and Voices.

While I was very excited to find a new work by this artist, I also felt intense apprehension at the absence of the bungalow house dream monologue, which I had planned to purchase with some extra money I brought with me to the art gallery that day. Just at that moment in which I experienced the dual sensations of excitement and apprehension, Dalha emerged from behind the curtain separating the back and front sections of the art gallery. I had intended to be thoroughly blase in negotiating the purchase of the bungalow house artwork, but Dalha caught me off-guard in a state of disoriented conflict.

'What happened to the bungalow house tape that was here yesterday?' I asked, the tension in my voice betraying desires that were all to her advantage.

'That's gone now,' she replied in a frigid tone as she walked slowly and pointlessly about the gallery, her emerald skirt and scarves dragging along the floor.

'I don't understand. It was an artwork exhibited on that small plastic table.'

'Yes,' she agreed.

'Now, after only a single day on exhibit, it's gone?'

'Yes, it's gone.'

'Somebody bought it,' I said, a.s.suming the worst.

'No,' she said, 'that one was not for sale. It was a performance piece. There was a charge, but you didn't pay.'

A sickly confusion now became added to the excitement and disappointment already mingling inside me. 'There was no notice of a charge for listening to the dream monologue,' I insisted. 'As far as I knew, as far as anyone could know, it was an item for sale like everything else in this place.'

'The dream monologue, as you call it, was an exclusive piece. The charge was on the back of the card on which the t.i.tle was written, just as the charge is on the back of that card you are holding in your hand.'

I turned the card to the reverse side, where the words 'twenty-five dollars' were written in the same hand that appeared on all the price tags around the gallery. Speaking in the tones of an outraged customer, I said to Dalha, 'You wrote the price only on this card. There was nothing written on the bungalow house card.' But even as I said these words I lacked the conviction that they were true. In any case, I knew that if I wanted to hear the tape recording about the derelict factory I would have to pay what I owed, or what Dalha claimed I owed, for listening to the bungalow house tape.

'Here,' I said, removing my wallet from my back pocket, 'ten, twenty, twenty-five dollars for the bungalow house, and another twenty-five for listening to the tape now in the machine.'

Dalha stepped forward, took the fifty dollars I held out to her, and in her coldest voice said, 'This only covers yesterday's tape about the bungalow house, which was clearly priced at fifty dollars. You must still pay twenty-five dollars if you wish to listen to the tape today.'

'But why should the bungalow house tape cost twenty-five dollars more than the tape about the derelict factory?'

'That is simply because this is a less ambitious work than the one dealing with the bungalow house.'

In fact the tape recording ent.i.tled The Derelict Factory with a Dirt Floor and Voices was of shorter duration than The Bungalow House (Plus Silence), but I found it no less wonderful in picturing the same 'infinite terror and dreariness.' For approximately fifteen minutes (on my lunch break) I embraced the degraded beauty of the derelict factory-a narrow ruin that stood isolated upon a vast plain, its broken windows allowing only the most meager haze of moonlight to s.h.i.+ne across its floor of hard-packed dirt where dead machinery lay buried in a grave of shadows and languished in the echoes of hollow, senseless voices. How utterly desolate, yet all the same wonderfully comforting, was the voice that communicated its message to me through the medium of a tape recording. To think that another person shared my love for the icy bleakness of things. The satisfaction I felt at hearing that monotonal and somewhat distorted voice speaking so intimately of scenes and sensations that perfectly echoed certain aspects of my own deepest nature-this was an experience that even then, as I sat on the floor of Dalha's art gallery listening to the tape through enormous headphones, might have been heartbreaking. But I wanted to believe that the artist who created these dream monologues about the bungalow house and the derelict factory had not set out to break my heart or anyone's heart. I wanted to believe that this artist had escaped the dreams and demons of all sentiment in order to explore the foul and crummy delights of a universe where everything had been reduced to three stark principles: first, that there was nowhere for you to go; second, that there was nothing for you to do; and third, that there was no one for you to know. Of course I knew that this view was an illusion like any other, but it was also one that had sustained me so long and so well-as long and as well as any other illusion and perhaps longer, perhaps better.

'Dalha,' I said when I had finished listening to the tape recording, 'I want you to tell me what you know about the artist who made these dream monologues. He doesn't even sign his works.'

From across the front section of the art gallery Dalha spoke to me in a strange, somewhat fl.u.s.tered voice. 'Well, why should you be surprised that he doesn't sign his name to his works-that's how artists are these days. All over the place they are signing their works only with some idiotic symbol or a piece of chewing gum or just leaving them unsigned altogether. Why should you care what his name is? Why should I?'

'Because,' I answered, 'perhaps I can persuade him to allow me to buy his works instead of sitting on the floor of your art gallery and renting these performances on my lunch break.'

'So you want to cut me out entirely,' Dalha shouted back in her old voice. 'I am his dealer, I tell you, and anything he has to sell you will buy through me.'

'I don't know why you're getting so upset,' I said, standing up from the floor. 'I'm willing to give you a percentage. All I ask is that you arrange something between myself and the artist.'

Dalha sat down in a chair next to the curtained doorway separating the front and back sections of the art gallery. She pulled her emerald shawl around herself and said, 'Even if I wished to arrange something I could not do it. I have no idea what his name is myself. A few nights ago he walked up to me on the street while I was waiting for a cab to take me home.'

'What does he look like?' I had to ask at that moment.

'It was late at night and I was drunk,' Dalha replied, somehow evasively it seemed to me.

'Was he a younger man, an older man?'

'An older man, yes. Not very tall, with bushy white hair like a professor of some kind. And he said that he wanted to have an artwork of his delivered to my gallery. I explained to him my usual terms as best I could, since I was so drunk. He agreed and then walked off down the street. And that's not the best part of town to be walking around all by yourself. Well, the next day a package arrived with the tape-recording machine and so forth. There were also some instructions which explained that I should destroy each of the audiotapes before I leave the art gallery at the end of the day, and that a new tape would arrive the following day and each day thereafter. No return address is provided on these packages.'

'And did you destroy the bungalow house tape?' I asked.

'Of course,' said Dalha with some exasperation, but also with insistence. 'What do I care about some crazy artist's work or how he conducts his career? Besides, he guaranteed I would make some money on the deal, and here I am already with seventy-five dollars.'

'So why not sell me this dream monologue about the derelict factory? I won't say anything.'

Dalha was quiet for a moment, and then said, 'He told me that if I didn't destroy the tapes each day he would know about it and that he would do something. I've forgotten exactly what he said, I was so drunk that night.'

'But how could he know?' I asked, and in reply Dalha just stared at me in silence. 'All right, all right,' I said. 'But I still want you to make an arrangement. You have his money for the bungalow house tape and the tape about the derelict factory. If he's any kind of artist, he'll want to be paid. When he gets in touch with you, that's when you make the arrangement for me. I won't cheat you out of your percentage. I give you my word on that.'

'Whatever that's worth,' Dalha said bitterly.

But she did agree that she would try to arrange something between myself and the tape-recording artist. I left the art gallery immediately after these negotiations, before Dalha could have any second thoughts. That afternoon, while I was working in the Language and Literature department of the library, I could think about nothing but the derelict factory that was so enticingly pictured on the new audiotape. The bus that takes me to and from the library each day of the working week always pa.s.ses such a structure, which stands isolated in the distance just as the artist described it in his dream monologue.

That night I slept badly, thras.h.i.+ng about in my bed, not quite asleep and not quite awake. At times I had the feeling there was someone else in my bedroom who was talking to me, but of course I could not deal with this perception in any realistic way, since I was half-asleep and half-awake, and thus, for all practical purposes, I was out my mind.

Around three o'clock in the morning the telephone rang. In the darkness I reached for my eyegla.s.ses, which were on the nightstand next to the telephone, and noted the luminous face of my alarm clock. I cleared my throat and said h.e.l.lo. The voice on the other end was Dalha's.

'I talked to him,' she said.

'Where did you talk to him?' I asked. 'On the street?'

'No, no, not on the street,' she said, giggling a little. I think she must have been drunk. 'He called me on the telephone.'

'He called you on the telephone?' I repeated, imagining for a moment what it would be like to have the voice of that artist speak to me over the telephone and not merely on a recorded audiotape.

'Yes, he called me on the telephone.'

'What did he say?'

'Well, I could tell you if you would stop asking so many questions.'

'Tell me.'

'It was only a few minutes ago that he called. He said that he would meet you tomorrow at the library where you work.'

'You told him about me?' I asked, and then there was a long silence. 'Dalha?' I prompted.

'I told him that you wanted to buy his tape recordings. That's all.'

'Then how did he know that I worked at the library?'

'Ask him yourself. I have no idea. I've done my part.'

Then Dahla said good-bye and hung up before I could say good-bye back to her.

After talking to Dalha I found it impossible to sleep anymore that night, even if it was only a state of half-sleeping and half-waking. All I could think about was meeting the artist of the dream monologues. So I got myself ready to go to work, rus.h.i.+ng as if I were late, and walked up to the corner of my street to wait for the bus.

It was very cold as I sat waiting in the bus shelter. There was a sliver of moon high in the blackness above, with several hours remaining before sunrise. Somehow I felt that I was waiting for the bus on the first day of a new school year, since after all the month was September, and I was so filled with both fear and excitement. When the bus finally arrived I saw that there were only a few other early risers headed for downtown. I took one of the back seats and stared out the window, my own face staring back at me in black reflection.

At the next shelter we approached I noticed that another lone bus rider was seated on the bench waiting to be picked up. His clothes were dark-colored (including a long, loose overcoat and hat), and he sat up very straight, his arms held close to his body and his hands resting on his lap. His head was slightly bowed, and I could not see the face beneath his hat. His physical att.i.tude, I thought to myself as we approached the lighted bus shelter, was one of disciplined repose. I was surprised that he did not stand up as the bus came nearer to the shelter, and ultimately we pa.s.sed him by. I wanted to say something to the driver of the bus but a strong feeling of both fear and excitement made me keep my silence.

The bus finally dropped me off in front of the library, and I ran up the tiered stairway that led to the main entrance. Through the thick gla.s.s doors I could see that only a few lights illuminated the s.p.a.cious interior of the library. After rapping on the gla.s.s for a few moments I saw a figure dressed in a maintenance man's uniform appear in the shadowy distance inside the building. I rapped some more and the man slowly proceeded down the library's vaulted central hallway.

'Good morning, Henry,' I said as the door opened.

'h.e.l.lo, sir,' he replied without standing aside to allow my entrance to the library. 'You know I'm not supposed to open these doors before it's time for them to be open.'

'I'm a little early, I realize, but I'm sure it will be all right to let me inside. I work here, after all.'

'I know you do, sir. But a few days ago I got talked to about these doors being open when they shouldn't be. It's because of the stolen property.'

'What property is that, Henry? Books?'

'No, sir. I think it was something from the media department. Maybe a video camera or a tape recorder. I don't know exactly.'

'Well, you have my word-just let me through the door and I'll go right upstairs to my desk. I've got a lot of work to do today.'

Henry eventually obliged my request, and I did as I told him I would do.

The library was a great building as a whole, but the Language and Literature department (second floor) was located in a relatively small area-narrow and long with a high ceiling and a row of tall, paned windows along one wall. The other walls were lined with books, and most of the floor s.p.a.ce was devoted to long study tables. For the most part, though, the room in which I worked was fairly open from end to end. Two large archways led to other parts of the library, and a normal-sized doorway led to the stacks where most of the bibliographic holdings were stored, millions of volumes standing silent and out of sight along endless rows of shelves. In the pre-dawn darkness the true dimensions of the Language and Literature department were now obscure. Only the moon s.h.i.+ning high in the blackness through those tall windows revealed to me the location of my desk, which was in the middle of the long narrow room.

I found my way over to my desk and switched on the small lamp that years ago I had brought from home. (Not that I required the added illumination as I worked at my desk at the library, but I did enjoy the bleakly old-fas.h.i.+oned appearance of this object.) For a moment I thought of the bungalow house where none of the lamps were equipped with lightbulbs and moonlight shone through the windows upon a carpet littered with vermin. Somehow I was unable to call up the special sensations and mental state that I a.s.sociated with this dream monologue, even though my present situation of being alone in the Language and Literature department some hours before dawn was intensely dreamlike.

Not knowing what else to do, I sat down at my desk as if I were beginning my normal workday. It was then that I noticed a large envelope lying on top of my desk, although I could not recall its being there when I left the library the day before. The envelope looked old and faded under the dim light of the desk lamp. There was no writing on either side of the envelope, which was bulging slightly and had been sealed.

'Who's there?' a voice called out that barely sounded like my own. I had seen something out of the corner of my eye while examining the envelope at my desk. I cleared my throat. 'Henry?' I asked the darkness without looking up from my desk or turning to either side. No answer was offered in reply, but I could feel that someone else had joined me in the Language and Literature department of the library.

I slowly turned my head to the right and focused on the archway some distance across the room. At the center of this aperture, which led to another room where moonlight shone through tall, paned windows, stood a figure in silhouette. I could not see his face but immediately recognized the long, loose overcoat and hat. It was indeed the statue-like individual whom I had seen in the bus shelter as I rode to the library in the pre-dawn darkness. Now he was there to meet me that day in the library, as he had told Dalha he would do. At that moment it seemed beside the point to ask how he had gotten into the library or even to bother about introductions. I simply launched into a monologue that I had been constantly rehearsing since Dalha telephoned me earlier that morning.

'I've been wanting to meet you,' I started. 'Your dream monologues, which is what I call them, have impressed me very much. That is to say, your artworks are like nothing else I have ever experienced, either artistically or extra-artistically. It seems incredible to me how well you have expressed subject matter with which I myself am intimately familiar. Of course, I am not referring to the subject matter as such-the bungalow house and so on-except as it calls forth your underlying vision of things. When-in your tape-recorded monologues-your voice speaks such phrases as "infinite terror and dreariness" or "ceaseless negation of color and life," I believe that my response is exactly that which you intend for those who experience your artworks.'

I continued in this vein for a while longer, speaking to the silhouette of someone who betrayed no sign that he heard anything I said. At some point, however, my monologue veered off in a direction I had not intended it to take. Suddenly I began to say things that had nothing to do with what I had said before and that even contradicted my former statements.

'For as long as I can remember,' I said, continuing to speak to the figure standing in the archway, 'I have had an intense and highly aesthetic perception of what I call the icy bleakness of things. At the same time I have felt a great loneliness in this perception. This conjunction of feelings seems paradoxical, since such a perception, such a view of things, would seem to preclude the emotion of loneliness, or any sense of a killing sadness, as I think of it. All such heartbreaking sentiment, as usually considered, would seem to be on its knees before artworks such as yours, which so powerfully express what I have called the icy bleakness of things, submerging or devastating all sentiment in an atmosphere potent with desolate truths, permeated throughout with a visionary stagnation and lifelessness. Yet I must observe that the effect, as I now consider it, has been just the opposite. If it was your intent to evoke the icy bleakness of things with your dream monologues, then you have totally failed on both an artistic and an extra-artistic level. You have failed your art, you have failed yourself, and you have also failed me. If your artworks had really evoked the true bleakness of things, then I would not have felt this need to know who you are, this killing sadness that there was actually someone who experienced the same sensations and mental states as I did and who could share them with me in the form of tape-recorded dream monologues. Who are you that I should feel this need to go to work hours before the sun comes up, that I should feel this was something I had to do and that you were someone that I had to know? This behavior violates every principle by which I have lived for as long as I can remember. Who are you to cause me to violate these long-lived principles? I think it's all becoming clear to me now. Dalha put you up to this. You and Dalha are in a conspiracy against me and against my principles. Every day Dalha is on the telephone making all kinds of arrangements for profit, and she cannot stand the idea that all I do is sit there in peace, eating my lunch in her hideous art gallery. She feels that I'm cheating her somehow because she's not making a profit from me, because I never paid her to make an arrangement for me. Don't try to deny what I now know is true. But you could say something, in any case. Just a few words spoken with that voice of yours. Or at least let me see your face. And you could take off that ridiculous hat. It's like something Dalha would wear.'

By this time I was on my feet and walking (staggering, in fact) toward the figure that stood in the archway. All the while I was walking, or staggering, toward the figure I was also demanding that he answer my accusations. But as I walked forward between the long study tables toward the archway, the figure standing there receded backward into the darkness of the next room, where moonlight shone through tall, paned windows. The closer I came to him the farther he receded into the darkness. And he did not recede into the darkness by taking steps backward, as I was taking steps forward, but moved in some other way that even now I cannot specify, as though he were floating.

Just before the figure disappeared completely into the darkness he finally spoke to me. His voice was the same one that I had heard over those enormous headphones in Dalha's art gallery, except now there was no interference, no distortion in the words that it spoke. These words, which resounded in my brain as they resounded in the high-ceilinged rooms of the library, were such that I should have welcomed them, for they echoed my very own, deeply private principles. Yet I took no comfort in hearing another voice tell me that there was nowhere for me to go, nothing for me to do, and no one for me to know.

The next voice I heard was that of Henry, who shouted up the wide stone staircase from the ground floor of the library. 'Is everything all right, sir?' he asked. I composed myself and was able to answer that everything was all right. I asked him to turn the lights on for the second floor of the library. In a minute the lights were on, but by then the man in the hat and long, loose overcoat was gone.

When I confronted Dalha at her art gallery later that day, she was not in the least forthcoming with respect to my questions and accusations. 'You're crazy,' she screamed at me. 'I want nothing more to do with you.'

When I asked Dalha what she was talking about, she said, 'You really don't know, do you? You really are a crazy man. You don't remember that night you came up to me on the street while I was waiting for a cab to show up.'

When I told her I recalled doing nothing of the kind, she continued her anecdote of that night, along with an account of subsequent events. 'I'm standing there so drunk I can hardly understand what you're saying to me about some little game you are playing. Then you send me the tapes. Then you come in and pay to listen to the tapes, exactly as you said you would. Just in time I remember that I'm supposed to lie to you that the tapes are the work of a white-haired old man, when in fact you're the one who's making the tapes. I knew you were crazy, but this was the only money I ever made off you, even though day after day you come and eat your pathetic lunch in my gallery. When I saw you that night, I couldn't tell at first who it was walking up to me on the street. You did look different, and you were wearing that stupid hat. Soon enough, though, I can see that it's you. And you're pretending to be someone else, but not really pretending, I don't know. And then you tell me that I must destroy the tapes, and if I don't destroy them something will happen. Well, let me tell you, crazy man,' Dalha said, 'I did not destroy those tape recordings. I let all my friends hear them. We sat around getting drunk and laughing our heads off at your stupid dream monologues. Here, another one of your artworks arrived in the mail today,' she said while walking across the floor of the art gallery to the tape machine that was positioned on the small plastic table. 'Why don't you listen to it and pay me the money you promised. This looks like a good one,' she said, picking up the little card that bore the t.i.tle of the work. 'The Bus Shelter, it says. That should be very exciting for you-a bus shelter. Pay up!'

'Dalha,' I said in a laboriously calm voice, 'please listen to me. You have to make another arrangement. I need to have another meeting with the tape-recording artist. You're the only one who can arrange for this to happen. Dalha, I'm afraid for both of us if you don't agree to make this arrangement. I need to speak with him again.'

'Then why don't you just go talk into a mirror. There,' she said, pointing to the curtain that separated the front section from the back section of the art gallery. 'Go into the bathroom like you did the other day and talk to yourself in the mirror.'

'I didn't talk to myself in the bathroom, Dalha.'

'No? What were you doing then?'

'Dalha, you have to make the arrangement. You are the go-between. He will contact you if you agree to let him.'

'Who will contact me?'