PLEASE REWIND AFTER. LISTENING. DO NOT REMOVE TAPE. I placed the headphones over my ears and pressed the PLAY button. 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 passages 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 brushing against my face.
I pressed the REWIND button 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 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 passed 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 dial. But although Dalha answered several calls during the time I was in her 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 entitled 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, space 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 passed 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 audiocassette 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 these streets, and I therefore never actually viewed even a single one of them 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, vanishing 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. The voice on the tape only presented an interior view of the bungalow house, never 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 only seen by me from an exterior perspective, their interiors being visible solely in my imagination as I projected it into these houses. And my memory of these interiors, once I had emerged from one of my imaginative projections, was always spotty and vague, lacking the precise physical layout provided by the bungalow house audiotape.
Even my recollection of the dreams I often had of these houses was spotty and vague, highly imperfect. Yet the sensations and the mental state created by my imaginative projections into and my dreams of these houses perfectly corresponded to those I experienced at Dalha’s art gallery when I listened to the tape entitled The Bungalow House. That feeling of being in a trance among the most vile and pathetic surroundings 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 not that I was simply hearing the words of that dream monologue but also that I was 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.