in the morning. Then she 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, rushing 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 schoolyear, 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 the 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 attitude, 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 passed 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 glass doors I could see that only a few lights illuminated the spacious interior of the library.
After rapping on the glass 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.
“Hello, 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 space 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 normalsized 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 shining 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- fashioned 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 associated 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 high, 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 one whom I saw 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, perhaps even that which you yourself have experienced that gives source of inspiration for 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 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 that 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 longlived principles? I think it’s all
