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 bungalow house.”
In fact the tape recording entitled 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 avast plain, its broken windows accepting only the most meager haze of moonlight to shine 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. Yet how lucid 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 comfort I felt at hearing that monotonal and somewhat distorted voice singing words that I knew so well—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 of 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 flustered 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 audio tapes 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.
There was no return address on the 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 passes such a structure, which stands isolated in the distance just as the artist described it in his dream monologue.
That night I slept badly, thrashing 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 of my mind.”
Around three o’clock in the morning the telephone rang. In the darkness I reached for my eyeglasses, which were on the nightstand next to the telephone, and noted the luminous face of my alarm clock. I cleared my throat and said hello. The voice on the other end said hello back to me. It was Dalha.
“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.
“Yes, I told him about you. But I never knew what you did for a living. How long have you worked at the library?”
“Fifteen years. Did he say anything else to you?” I asked Dalha.
“No, nothing.”
“Maybe it was only a coincidence that he said he would meet me at the library and that I also work at the library,” I said. “People meet all the time at the library. I see them meeting there everyday.”
“Of course they do,” said Dalha, a little patronizing it seemed for someone who was so drunk at three o’clock
