The Dogs of Babel (9 page)

Suicide is just a moment, Lexy told me. This is how she described it to me. For just a moment, it doesn’t matter that you’ve got people who love you and the sun is shining and there’s a movie coming out this weekend that you’ve been dying to see. It hits you all of a sudden that nothing is ever going to be okay, ever, and you kind of dare yourself: Is this it? You start thinking that you’ve known this was coming all along, but you don’t know if today’s going to be the day. And if you think about it too much, it’s probably not. But you dare yourself. You pick up a knife and press it gently to your skin, you look out a nineteenth-story window and you think, I could just do it. I could just do it. And most of the time, you look at the height and you get scared, or you think about the poor people on the sidewalk below—what if there are kids coming home from school and they have to spend the rest of their lives trying to forget this terrible thing you’re going to make them see? And the moment’s over. You think about how sad it would’ve been if you never got to see that movie, and you look at your dog and wonder who would’ve taken care of her if you had gone. And you go back to normal. But you keep it there in your mind. Even if you never take yourself up on it, it gives you a kind of comfort to know that the day is yours to choose. You tuck it away in your brain like sour candy tucked in your cheek, and the puckering memory it leaves behind, the rough pleasure of running your tongue over its strange terrain, is exactly the same.

This is what we know, those of us who can speak to tell a story: Lexy didn’t jump. The wounds she suffered in her fall, the break of her bones and the wreck of her organs, the haphazard spill of her blood in the dirt, have told us this much. But perhaps, and this is where my breath catches in my throat, perhaps she let herself fall. The day was hers to choose, and perhaps in that treetop moment when she looked down and saw the yard, the world, her life, spread out below her, perhaps she chose to plunge toward it headlong. Perhaps she saw before her a lifetime of walking on the ruined earth and chose instead a single moment in the air.

I
think it was fairly early in our courtship that Lexy told me the story of how Lorelei came to be her dog. Lorelei was maybe five months old when she first entered Lexy’s life. She showed up on Lexy’s doorstep one day during a sudden summer storm, a big bleeding puppy under a dark and shrunken sky. Lexy was walking around the house, closing windows, when she heard a low whine from outside, followed by a short, insistent bark. She opened the door to find a puppy with big ears and a ridge down her back and a gash in her throat that matted her fur with blood. “Hi,” Lexy said. “Who are you?” She bent down to check for a collar and tags, but there were none. “Wait here,” she said, and she ran to get a towel. She brought the dog inside and washed the cut with a warm soapy cloth. Lorelei flinched as Lexy touched the cloth to the wound, but she didn’t make a sound and she didn’t snap at Lexy. The gash wasn’t big, but it looked deep. Lexy took the phone book down from the top of the refrigerator, and she looked up veterinarians. When she brought her back home from the vet, Lorelei had four stitches in her throat. The doctor wasn’t sure what had caused the injury. There were no bite marks, so he didn’t think it had resulted from a fight with another dog. He thought that perhaps Lorelei had gotten tangled in some low brambles or had somehow torn her flesh on a piece of rough metal, although the edges of the cut were fairly smooth. He allowed that the wound could have been inflicted by a human being, although he couldn’t imagine what the purpose might have been.

Lexy had had every intention of trying to find the puppy’s owner, but this last possibility made her hesitate. Besides, the more time she spent with Lorelei, the more reluctant she was to give her up. The “Found Puppy” ad she had composed to send to the paper sat on the kitchen table unmailed, and the signs she had photocopied to post around the neighborhood never went up. She kept an eye out to see if anyone reported a missing Ridgeback—the doctor had identified the breed for her—but when no one did, she was glad. By then, Lorelei was sleeping in Lexy’s bed every night, her big puppy paws twitching in dreams, and following Lexy around during the day as she worked. And that’s how Lorelei and Lexy came to belong to one another.

Lately, my work has involved studying Lorelei’s vocalizations, the sounds she already knows how to make. So far, I’ve isolated and cataloged six distinct kinds of bark, four different yelps, three whines, and two growls. There is, for example, a certain sharp, staccato burst of noise she makes only when she has been trying to get my attention when it’s past her feeding time, say, or time to go for a walk, and she utters it only when a sustained period of sitting at my feet and staring pointedly up at me has failed to elicit a response. There is a soft, low growl, almost leisurely in its cadences, that rises from deep in her throat when she hears the slam of a car door outside the house, which is entirely different from the angry warning growl that precedes a bout of barking in the event that the owner of said car has the nerve to walk up the front steps and knock on the door. When I arrive home after an absence, she greets me in short, joyful syllables, and when I make a wrong step and inadvertently land on her tail, the sweet, shocked outrage of her yelp can nearly bring me to tears. I have come to recognize the differences in these sounds and the wide spectrum of canine emotion contained within them in the same way that a new mother learns to understand the different pitches and tremors of her child’s wail. I have reached the point where, when Lorelei makes a sound, I know exactly what she means.

I’ve been paying special attention to the sounds she makes that might be translated into human language, the English phonemes buried within every bark and every whimper. The rolling
r
of her growl, for example, and the wide
o
of her howl. It’s an alphabet rich in vowels and softly voiced consonants. She can make a
w
sound as well as a kind of
h,
which evolves into a hard, guttural
ch
when she coughs. When she lies on her back and offers me her belly, the lolling of her tongue sometimes results in something close to an
l
. The sounds that elude her are the harder consonants, the ones that require movement of the lips: she has no
b,
no
p,
no
v
in her repertoire. She will never speak my name, that much seems clear, but I still dare to hope she may one day speak her own.

I read yesterday that the prison which houses Wendell Hollis has just instituted a program that allows inmates in good standing to train guide dogs for the blind as part of their rehabilitation. It seems unlikely—at least, I hope it is—that the infamous Dog Butcher of Brooklyn will be eligible for participation. But how must it be for Hollis, after three years condemned to the company of humans, when he looks out of the narrow window of his cell and sees dogs at play?

I cannot say exactly what it is that fascinates me about Hollis. I suppose I feel a sort of kinship with him. Whatever the differences in our methodologies, we are both driven by the same desire. We both want, more than anything, to coax words from the canine throat. The only difference is that I would not use a knife to do it.

I am curious about him. The turns my life has taken to bring me to the jumping-off point for this strange inquiry I have undertaken are so complex that I can hardly imagine them replicated in a single other life. And yet here we are, the two of us; we have wound up in the same place.

I think I may write him a letter.

L
exy and I had a small and lovely wedding. Lexy wore a sheath of white silk and carried red dahlias. She let her bridesmaids pick their own dresses. We wore no masks at all, save those of our own shining faces.

The morning after we were married, Lexy woke up and said, “I had the strangest dream. I have to remember to write it down in my book.”

“What was it about?” I asked.

“Well, I was a writer, and I was really famous, but I had only ever written one sentence.”

“What was the sentence?”

“‘I remember my wife in white.’ It just made people weep to hear it. In the dream, I couldn’t even say it all the way through without choking up.”

She was beautiful in the morning sun, and I gathered her to me. We were naked except for our wedding rings, and I had never been so happy.

“‘I remember my wife in white’?” I said into her hair.

“Yeah. Everybody just thought it was the saddest sentence that was ever written. And it didn’t matter if I never wrote another word. This one sentence had put an end to the need for any future sentences. I had said it all.”

I could see her wedding dress hanging in the wardrobe next to my tux from the night before. I liked the tableau it created, the two of us dancing together without our bodies.

“I don’t think it’s a sad sentence,” I said. “My whole life I’ll remember the way you looked last night, and there’s no way it could ever make me anything but happy.”

She smiled. “Know what it’s time for?” she said.

“Room service?”

“No. I think it’s time to reconsummate the marriage. I’m not sure it took the first time.”

On our honeymoon, we went on a cruise, and Lexy was sick for two days. For two days, I wandered the ship on my own, playing cards with the old men and looking out at the great sea, returning from time to time to check on my bride, who lay weak in the bed and retched emptily into the commode in the tiny lavatory.

On the third morning, Lexy sat up and asked me to bring her some breakfast. I ordered a feast for her—eggs and sausages and fresh fruit, bacon and coffee and tiny pancakes arranged prettily on a plate. I persuaded the waiter to give up his white jacket for a few moments so that I could deliver the food to my wife myself. When I returned to Lexy, I found her sitting up against the pillows, her hair lovely and wild around her face. Now, I thought, our life begins.

I fed her with my fingers until she protested that she had better not overdo it. Then I helped her dress and took her out to see what she had been missing. Here is the sea and the bright hot day. Here are the men playing cards. Here I am with the woman I love, walking under the sun.

I
’ve had a dream that Lorelei speaks to me. In the dream, I’m sitting at the kitchen table, eating a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, when Lorelei walks in on her two hind legs. She speaks, and her voice is surprisingly high-pitched. She sounds like a character in a cartoon.

“Give me a meatball,” she says, “and I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

I spear a meatball with my fork and hold it out to her. She gives it a tentative lick, then grabs it with her teeth and charges out of the room. I jump up and run after her. When I catch up with her, she’s in my office, lying in front of a door I’ve never seen before.

“She’s in there,” says Lorelei, her mouth full of meat.

I open the door. Inside is a small closet. Lexy sits huddled on the floor. She’s dressed in a blue nightgown. She is very thin. “What took you so long?” she says.

I wake up then with a start, my chest filled with a wild joy. It’s a moment before I can situate myself, before I come to myself again and remember that I am alone in my bed and my wife is gone. Disappointment runs through me with a terrible heat.

I sit up and turn on the light. It’s almost dawn. Lorelei is sleeping on the floor next to the bed. “Lorelei,” I call. She raises her head. “Come on up, girl. Up, up.” I pat the bed.

This is an unusual request on my part, and I have to repeat it a second time before she obeys. She yawns, then stands and stretches, and finally jumps up on the bed and settles herself next to me. I stroke her fur. “I had a dream about you, girl,” I say. “Do you want to hear my dream?” She sighs deeply—one of her most human sounds—and closes her eyes.

I lie next to her for a minute, my hand on her stomach, feeling the sleepy rise and fall of her breath. I want nothing more than to close my eyes and to find my way back to Lexy’s hiding place, to gather her in my arms and lift her thin body out into the light, but as the moments pass, it becomes clear to me that I’m not going to get back to sleep, and I know that even if I do, I would probably find myself in a different dream entirely. The sad truth of dreams is that they rarely let you travel to the same place twice.

I decide to go for a walk. I get out of bed and put on my shoes, without changing out of the sweats and T-shirt I slept in. I grab my keys and my wallet and walk out into the misty dawn.

I’m not headed anywhere in particular, but after a few blocks I see the all-night supermarket looming ahead of me, an oasis of light in the dark landscape. It seems as good a destination as any.

The supermarket is a strange place at five A.M. You find a surprisingly wide cross-section of people—guys who have worked the night shift stopping by to pick up beer and cigarettes on their way home, mothers who have come out after a sleepless night to buy diapers, baby aspirin, Popsicles to soothe sore throats. I see a woman in a black cocktail dress buying a pint of ice cream. I see a homeless man with a basketful of groceries, holding up a jar of marinated artichoke hearts, examining it closely. He reads the ingredients on the back with great interest and then gently places the jar in his cart. I see that his cart is full of all kinds of luxury food—cans of smoked oysters, a cake from the bakery, a family-size frozen lasagne. I want to offer him some money—actually, I want to pay for his entire basket of food—but I have the sense that it would ruin the fantasy for him, the illusion that he’s just another customer wandering the bright aisles. I leave him in the condiment section, where he’s comparing two different brands of barbecue sauce.

I walk through the aisles like a ghost, my basket empty. What do I want? It’s all laid out before me, anything I could possibly need. I have only to choose. I remember a time early in our relationship when Lexy and I stayed up all night, talking and making love, and ventured out at dawn to walk to this very supermarket to buy bagels and juice. “Don’t think about it,” I say out loud. “Don’t think about it.” I think about my dream, Lexy hidden in the closet all those months, waiting for me to find her. And then I know what I want. I want spaghetti and meatballs.