The Dogs of Babel (8 page)

“Always. I always know it.”

“Yes, you always know it, but it’s… it’s like in the back of your mind, right? It’s like… it’s like the way that you know that you’re going to die.”

I reached for her shoulder and rolled her over so that she was looking at me again. “Lexy, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Well, I mean, everyone knows that they’re going to die, right, but most of the time you let it slip from your mind. I mean, it’s always there in your head, and if anyone asked, you’d know the answer. But then there are some moments when all of a sudden you just
know
it, you know? It suddenly hits you that you’re going to die someday, and you say, ‘Oh, my God, this is the biggest fact of my life, and I’d almost forgotten.’”

“Well, so what?” I said. “What does that have to do with anything? No, I don’t think about my own death every moment of every day, but that’s because I want to forget it. You can’t go on with your life if you don’t forget about it sometimes. But that’s not the way I feel about you.”

“But still. That’s the way you experience it, right? It’s in fits and starts.” She turned away again.

I ran my hands over my face, rubbing hard at the skin, trying to feel the sturdiness underneath. We had not fought like this before, and I felt as if I were trying to swim through molasses. “Come on, Lexy, why are you doing this? I love you all the time. It’s always with me. But what do you want me to say? You can’t maintain that level of intensity every minute of your life.”

She was very quiet. “Well, I can. I do. I can’t take one breath, not one single breath, without knowing that I love you.”

I just lay there for a moment, looking at the long line of her back. “Where is this coming from?” I asked.

She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she turned and looked at me. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I guess you just kind of freaked me out a little, proposing like that, out of the blue.”

“Do you want me to take it back?”

She held her hands up in front of her face, looking at the words I’d written. “No,” she said. “I don’t want you to take it back.” She sighed. “But I can’t say yes yet. I don’t think you know enough about me. What if you find out more and you change your mind?”

“Well, I don’t think that’s likely. But, okay, go ahead—tell me the things I don’t know.”

“Okay,” she said. Her voice was very quiet and even. “I’ll marry you if you can answer this question for me: Do I have any tattoos?”

I stared at her. I knew the whole of her skin by heart. Did she think there was anything I had missed? “No,” I said. “You don’t.”

She lowered her head and parted her hair for me. I could see black ink on her scalp. “Sorry,” she said.

I bent over her head, examining. I couldn’t make it out. “What is it?” I asked.

“It’s snake hair,” she said. “Like Medusa.”

“Wow,” I said. I tried to follow the lines on her head, to make out the scales and the angry snake faces, but her hair was too thick. “When did you get it?”

“When I was seventeen.” She pulled away from my hands, still resting in her hair, and raised her head to look at me. “I used to pull my hair out. It’s kind of a nervous disorder.”

I nodded. “I’ve heard of that,” I said. “Let me think, what’s it called?” I puzzled out the possible Latin and Greek roots. “Trichotillomania?”

Lexy stared at me and shook her head. “You know the damnedest things,” she said. “Anyway, my parents took me to a couple of different doctors, and they put me on medication for it, but nothing worked. So one day, I just decided to shave my head and be done with it.”

I thought about my Lexy as a young girl, standing bald and brazen before the world. It was a strangely moving thought. “And did it work?” I asked.

“Well, yeah. There was nothing left to pull on.”

“Right.”

“So I kept it shaved for a year or so, until I felt like things were better in my life and it’d be safe to grow it back. I got the tattoo as kind of a talisman. It’s my secret strength. It protects me from falling back into that place where I used to be.”

I reached out tentatively. She took my hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“For ruining your nice proposal.” She held her hands out before her and looked at the words again. “It was very sweet.”

“That’s okay.”

“I just need some time,” she said. “To trust that this is all real.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

So I waited. I waited for five more months. And one morning, I awoke to find a single word printed across my palm.
Yes,
it said.

H
ere’s the thing: I wasn’t entirely honest with Detective Anthony Stack when he asked me if Lexy had ever mentioned suicide. In fact, I wasn’t honest at all. Which is not to say that I had any reason to believe Lexy was suicidal in the months and weeks leading up to her death; at least, I had no such reasons at the time. But it would be dishonest of me not to reveal at this point that she did, during the sweet, breath-holding time of our engagement, tell me that there had been moments in her life when she had thought about killing herself.

The only time she came close, she told me, occurred during that hair-tearing year of her adolescence, the year the snakes took up residence on her scalp. Her parents were going through a divorce, and she was having a hard time in school—but I say that as if those are reasons. As if the fabric of human misery can be spooled apart into threads just like that. How many young girls that year had trouble in school, had trouble with their parents, and still never thought to pick up a knife and press its cold point against their wrist? No. There’s more to it than that, and more scientific minds than mine have yet to piece it all together.

But whatever that fatal elixir is, that mixture of circumstance and temperament that leads a person to the edge of death and sometimes back again, it flowed through Lexy’s body like blood. She fell into a deep depression, and the effort of wading through each day, the weight she carried like a stone in her gut, left her exhausted. She would come home from school and crawl into her bed and stay there until it was almost time for her mother to come home from work, and she knew she had to rouse herself and create some semblance of normalcy. During those afternoons, lying in bed until the light faded, she wrote things on her arms and legs, places that she knew could be hidden with clothing, digging deep into her flesh with the pen.
Sometimes,
she wrote,
I feel like I could start crying and not stop for a day and a night, and maybe that would be enough. And maybe it wouldn’t.
She wrote,
Sometimes I feel like I have a ragged hole inside me, and it gets bigger every day.
She wrote,
Once upon a time, there was a girl who just disappeared.
She laughed when she told me these things, making fun of the drama of her teen angst, but I could see that it hurt her to remember. It was during those afternoons in bed that she began to pull out her hair. She wanted, she said, to make her pain tangible, to feel something on the outside. As she lined up the strands of hair on the sheet next to her, she told me, she felt a sense of accomplishment.

It was on the night of her senior prom that all those months of unhappiness crystallized into a single moment of action, and she actually thought she would kill herself.

Lexy had two close friends at the time, Brian and Sara. Brian was gay, and Sara had a boyfriend named Jon who was a year older and in college. Since Sara was going to the prom with Jon, it just made sense for Lexy and Brian to go together. Neither of them wanted to miss out. So Sara and Lexy went dress shopping. Sara wanted something black and sexy, as unpromlike as possible. Lexy wanted to be pretty, in spite of herself. She wanted a prom dress. She found something perfect at a vintage clothing store, a pale blue 1950s strapless gown with a spray of pink roses embroidered diagonally across the dress from bodice to hem. She loved the dress, but she was embarrassed about her hair, about the bald spots that showed in between the few wispy tendrils that were left, so the day of the prom, she took a razor and shaved her head. She was pleased with the way it looked; she liked the way her smooth scalp felt when she ran her hands over it. The effect of the bald girl in the satin evening gown was unusual, to say the least, but it made her feel glamorous.

The prom was not what she thought it would be. People stared at her newly shaven head with open disdain, and she felt lonely dancing with Brian, good friend though he was. She wanted to be one of the girls with boyfriends, handsome in their tuxes, boyfriends who stroked their bare shoulders and whispered in their ears what they would do to them later on. She didn’t even like these boys, there wasn’t a single one she could point to and honestly say she could imagine being with, but she wanted someone who wanted her back. She thought about dancing with a boy who’d become aroused at the press of her body, who’d close his eyes and touch his lips to the top of her head. She wanted the fantasy of romance and feeling grown-up, not her awkward friend Brian whose hands were light and unsure on her arms and whose eyes kept drifting to look at Michael Patterson, the boy he’d had a crush on all spring. She envied Sara, sophisticated in her sheer black dress and heavy eye makeup, who knew she’d be kissing someone and more when the night came to an end. Afterward, they went to a Holiday Inn where they’d arranged a couple of rooms for the night—Lexy’s mom had even agreed to pay her share, knowing nothing was going to happen between her and Brian—and got drunk, the four of them, until Sara and Jon started making out and decided to slip off to their own room, leaving Lexy and Brian alone together.

“So that was the prom,” Lexy said to Brian, reaching over for the bottle of vodka they’d gotten hold of. She poured some into her glass of orange juice.

“Yeah,” said Brian. “Kind of a letdown.”

“Michael looked good,” Lexy said. Brian ducked his head and looked down into his drink. He was still shy about talking about it, even though Lexy had done everything she could to be supportive.

“Yeah,” he said. “Do you think he and Bethany are having sex right now?”

“Probably,” Lexy said. “Probably everyone’s having sex with somebody except us.”

“Yup.” He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. “Everyone except the bald girl and the homo.”

“What would you do if Michael were here right now?” Lexy asked.

“Probably nothing. I’d probably clam up and be afraid to talk to him, as usual.”

“How drunk are you?” she asked.

“Pretty drunk.”

“Let’s pretend I’m Michael.”

He kept his eyes closed. “I don’t think it’s possible to get that drunk.”

She swallowed the rest of her drink. “Sure it is,” she said. “Come on. I’ll turn out the light.”

She lay down next to him on the bed and nuzzled his neck.

“Lexy,” he said.

“Quiet,” she said. She bit his earlobe lightly. “Think about Michael.”

As she touched him, she whispered to him all the things that Michael might do. “He’s wanted to do this to you all year,” she murmured. “He’s finally here with you. Just think about Michael doing this to you. Shhh,” she said as she felt Brian’s body respond to her touch. “Just pretend I’m Michael.”

Afterward, Brian reached out in the dark and squeezed her shoulder.

“Thanks, Lexy,” he said. “That was cool.”

She waited a few minutes until she was sure he was asleep. Then she went into the bathroom and closed the door and put her head in her hands and cried. She paced back and forth in the tiny bathroom, her sobs growing louder and more convulsive until finally she sat down on the edge of the tub and buried her face in a towel so Brian wouldn’t hear her. And it was as she was perched there on the narrow ledge of porcelain with her face pressed to the rough fabric that the thought came to her that she could kill herself, and she was filled with a sudden calm. I could just do it, she thought, and the idea had a kind of beautiful simplicity to it.

She stood up and began pacing the room again, but she wasn’t crying anymore. She was filled with a clarity of purpose that exhilarated her. I’m just going to do it, she thought, and then it will all be done. But how? She looked around the bathroom for inspiration. Brian had left a small bag of toiletries by the sink, and she considered breaking apart his safety razor, but the blade looked too small and dull to do the job. There was little else in the room that seemed promising—this was a hotel room, after all, and there were no bottles of prescription pills in the medicine chest, no kitchen nearby with a butcher block full of knives to choose from, none of the deadly everyday objects people fill their homes with.

Then she saw the water glasses sitting on the counter, each one topped with a white paper cap attesting to its cleanliness. She picked up one of the glasses and threw it onto the hard tile floor. It shattered with a loud crash, and she was afraid for a moment that Brian would wake up, but when a minute passed without any sound from the other room, she bent down and picked up a large pointed shard. She stood over the sink and looked into the mirror for a moment, seeing herself in the strange, harsh bathroom light, a bald girl with swollen eyes and mascara smeared on her cheeks. And she didn’t hesitate. She pushed the jagged point into her wrist.

She didn’t get very far; as soon as the first drops of blood hit the basin of the sink, she grew terrified and pulled the piece of glass away. She ran her wrist under water and pressed a washcloth to the wound until the bleeding stopped. Then she cleaned up the broken glass from the floor as well as she could and opened the door to the bedroom. Brian was snoring lightly on top of the bedclothes, his pants still unzipped. Lexy climbed into bed next to him, cradling her hurt arm beneath her, and cried to think what she had done.

No one ever knew. The cut on her wrist turned out to be fairly inconspicuous in the light of day; she was surprised to see how little damage there was. Two days after the prom, she went out by herself into the city and found a tattoo parlor. She presented her scalp to the man who owned the place—he was a big man, and his name was Goldie—and she asked him to cover her head with snakes. She wore long sleeves until the wound on her wrist had healed completely, and her parents thought that a snaky-haired daughter was the worst they had to fear. Within a few months, Lexy went off to college, and by and by, the heaviness that had inhabited her body for so long began to lift. But that night in the bathroom became part of her. Every breath she drew was colored by what she had learned that night.