‘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 title 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.’