Outside the Dog Museum

by Carroll, Jonathan

  Palm said nothing and I realized my face was hot. “Do I sound like an old fart?”

  “No, like you believe in what you’re doing. But maybe I am not a good judge, Harry, because I make doors and ladders. I believe in things that serve their function well and can be used again and again with trust. I have read about an artist who makes ladders that cannot be climbed—the steps go every which way. It’s an interesting idea, it challenges our sensibilities, but only for a minute. Then it’s just what you said—the work of a wiseguy. What I still can’t understand is why someone would put so much of their life and imagination into doing that every day. Building a ladder that goes nowhere is the same as making films about people hurting each other.”

  I reached over and punched his arm. “Then how come you’re going with me tonight?”

  “I like being with you. I like to hear what you have to say. Even at a stupid movie you’ll probably say something that will make me think when it’s over.”

  Since the Dog Museum crew moved into town, the Zell am See Kino on Saturday night was bedlam. Packed to the gills with Austrian, American, and Saruvian construction workers, as well as good-humored townspeople who knew what to expect, all films were dubbed in German, which meant only about a third of the audience understood what was being said. This made for interesting uproar. On screen someone would say something important. A Saruvian would ask in loud broken English, “What was it that this fellow has said?” Then either an Austrian would answer in equally broken English, “He tolt heem he’s going to shoot out his family, so watch out,” or an American would say, “I don’t know, Salim, how ’bout translating for me?” Which would then be rendered into two other languages and a few seconds later the laughter or the counterwisecracks would begin. You didn’t catch a whole lot of what was said in these movies but it was fun being there and I think it helped bring people closer. Often when they were done, we would walk out laughing over a comment so-and-so had made or how much better the repartee had been than the movie itself.

  The opening shot of Midnight Always Comes is of two lovers hotting it up in a graveyard. The light is blue-black, the music classic Bernard Herrmann—creepy. No credits yet, only the two kids groaning and wrestling each other’s clothes off. Usually at the three- or four-minute mark the cracks would start flying in the audience, but either because of the impending sex or violence, things were quiet. Strayhorn is clever, though, and knows you’re waiting for the worst. So he doesn’t give it to you, although the music builds and we’re shown foreboding shadows, or once in a while the kids look up from their tussle and say, “Did you just hear something?” In fact nothing happens in that first scene until the kids, smug and in love, walk out of the cemetery hand in sweaty hand. Then the camera moves to a monument three feet away from where they did the dirty deed and bingo—there’s Bloodstone having his dinner. It looks like he’s eating spare ribs but when the camera moves in close you see those ain’t no spare ribs. Gross enough, but to make matters worse, he eats daintily and even has a large white napkin to wipe his lips. Sighing, he gets up and walks the short distance to where the kids had lain. On the ground is a used condom. Smiling, he picks it up and puts the gray thing in his pocket.

  “Maybe he’s into recycling!”

  “Was hat er gesagt?”

  “Eine saubere Umwelt!”

  The Saruvians got their version of the translation and things were off and running.

  Months before, Palm noticed that if things were going badly at work, the men tended to say more and be louder when they went to these movies. You could judge a work week on the number and volume of their comments. I thought of this as the evening went on because it was quieter in there and when someone did say something it was funnier and less barbed than in recent memory.

  It was this relative quiet that led to my next step. A third of the way through the story, Bloodstone is in a telephone booth calling the heroine. The phone rings in her bedroom, she hesitantly picks it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Heather. I want to tell you you were very beautiful today. I watched you. I watched you the whole day. I liked the way your blue slip showed under the skirt. I liked the smell of that yellow gum you were chewing. I liked your smell.”

  This went on until the girl was so terrified that she dropped the receiver and ran from the room. But what jolted me was that halfway through the creep’s monologue, I began to understand every word he was saying. I do not speak German. I learned as much as I had to in school but forgot it immediately after examinations because I wasn’t interested. Watching Bloodstone’s impassive silver face, I heard what he said in a language I did not understand but from one instant to the next I knew the exact meaning of every word, every phrase. What’s more, there were a group of Saruvians sitting behind me and I understood what they were saying as well. I do not speak Arabic either.

  Astonished, I whipped around and stared at them as if to verify the fact they were Arabs speaking Arabic and I understood. They were. I did.

  Palm laughed at something in the film and said a line in Swedish under his breath. I understood. I didn’t have to think, figure out vocabulary or sentence structure, syntax, or fine points. I simply understood everything that was being said around me in every language.

  I turned to Palm. “Say that again.”

  “What?”

  “Say what you just said again.”

  “It was Swedish. I said—”

  I stood up. “I know what you said. I have to go. No, stay here, I just have to go. I’ll see you later. It’s okay, I’m okay, I just have to go.”

  Stumbling sideways out of our row, I all but ran for the door. I had to get out of there and get some air and clear my head and try to understand and just get out of there. I saw surprised faces look up as I blew by but it didn’t matter.

  Outside, the icy night air felt good but it wasn’t enough. I jogged down the main street not knowing where I was going, but knowing that I needed to move and empty my brain a while until I had some sanity back and could think about what had just happened. I passed an old man and woman speaking loudly to each other. He said to her in German he was goddamned sick of being constipated. I understood. Farther down the street a Saruvian worker walked along with a small boom-box radio under his arm playing Arabic music. A woman was singing in the high, swaying way that makes Mideastern music so instantly recognizable. I understood the words she was singing.

  Without being aware of it, I’d aimed myself at the hotel and when I got to the parking lot one of the first things I saw was my car. The key was in my pocket and in a minute I had started the engine and was moving down the road by the lake.

  When Venasque was helping me to come out of my madness he taught me a trick. “When you can feel the bad waves coming over you again, Harry, fix on a word, any word that has to do with how you’re feeling and say it over and over to yourself until it makes you sick. Concentrate on it till you forget everything else. It can be anything, but make sure it has to do with your craziness. That way your mind won’t think you’re trying to trick it out of how it feels. It’ll just think you’re trying to work out one little part.”

  The trick had worked well after I learned how to do it, so riding along through that tremendous night, I fixed on the word Langenscheidt. The company makes a little pocket computer that does instant translations from one language to another. Type in amour and out comes “love.” However, my word became “I’m a Langenscheidt. I’m a Langenscheidt.” Like a weird mantra, I kept saying that again and again as I wound in and around the Austrian countryside, the mountains, their own darker shadows, the knowledge of what had happened in the movie theater knocking away at my brain like a jackhammer. I was a Langenscheidt. I could understand every word in the world. I was sure I could pick up instructions in Swahili and understand, a phone book in Japanese, a recipe in Portuguese. I’m a Langenscheidt.

  I kept looking at the green digital clock on the dashboard, seeing what time it was an
d then wondering what time it was. Nothing went into my head; it was too full, too scared, working too hard to sort and file, to understand, to insist it would understand if only I gave it another minute or two.

  Near Kaprun I stopped the car and opened the door so I could get the light inside to go on. Whenever I’m reading, I mark words I don’t know, copy them down, and look them up the next time I’m near a dictionary. It’s rare when I don’t have one of these lists in my wallet or pocket. The one I had that night was on the inside of a matchbook cover. “Lenitive.” “Epigone.” “Garboil.” I closed my eyes and recited.

  “Lenitive—alleviating pain or harshness. Epigone—an imitative follower, an inferior imitator. Garboil—a confused, disordered state. Mother of God, I know them. I know those words.”

  What did it look like, driving by that car parked on the side of the road, the man washed in small yellow light looking at a slip of paper in his hand, eyes closed, talking to himself? Was he lost and looking at his instructions? Had he forgotten something and was trying to remember? Or resting after a long drive? How many times have we passed scenes like that and not given it a second thought or glance? I can tell you though, firsthand, sometimes it is much worse than that. Sometimes the road is the only solid thing beneath the man’s feet and he stopped because he must look at it, right now, to reassure himself it is there. Because nothing else is.

  Hours later I pulled up to the building site and got out of the car. The driving had finally calmed me down but I knew I couldn’t return to the hotel until I was exhausted and incapable of thinking anymore. I drove to the museum because I understood now and had to look at it with that knowledge, no matter the time.

  Behind the chain-link fence the skeleton of the structure, floodlit from all sides, looked very much like a rocket ship on its launchpad. The lights, so harsh and intense, refused to admit darkness was behind them, beyond them. But the beams quickly disappeared once they flooded out past the museum and into the Alpine night. You would think so much candlepower could shine well up into the sky, but it can bully night only so far, which is not far at all.

  I opened the fence with my key and slowly trudged up the hill. Had Venasque known when he was treating me? He must have. What didn’t that old man know? As I walked, I tried to bring up different conversations we’d had, searching for hints or clues in what he’d said to verify what I now believed to be true, to be the purpose of what I was doing. Clues. There had been so many of them! The dream of Robert Layne-Dyer and his edible house—“Everyone has a house inside them. It defines who they are … . You think about it all your life … . But only once do you get a chance to actually see it. If you miss that chance, or avoid it ’cause it scares you, then it goes away and you’ll never see it again.” Venasque showing me my music, written properly, under the water of the swimming pool in California. Big Top sacrificing himself in Saru, my conversation with Claire in Vienna about Brueghel’s Tower of Babel. Like the floodlights on the building, my own intelligence and insight shone brightly against the superstructure of my life, but once it moved past it was lost. I knew that was true about many other people, but the realization did nothing to comfort me at the moment. I am not a humble man because I don’t believe humility is the key to heaven. If you do a job well you are allowed to admit it, to agree with others’ positive assessments. We have enough demons hopping around inside, hurting and goading and helping us to do wrong things, why not applaud (as well as appreciate) the few angels in there too? I had been comfortable with that attitude until that night.

  Because no single human was capable of what I had done, which meant that what stood in front of me on the hillside, “my” building, was not my doing, my brainchild, but rather the creation of the powers that had moved me here and there to do and draw this, this, and this. And the whole time I thought it was mine. My own wonderful mine. It was like putting a twig in front of an ant and watching it move up the piece of wood as if that were its plan the whole time, rather than your moment’s silly diversion. Was I more angry at being manipulated, or frightened, having realized what I’d been manipulated into doing?

  Looking at the structure, I could have bitten through steel. Because when it was finished, this was going to be one fucking lovely piece of work. Many times I’d wished the old Sultan had lived long enough to see his dream made real. One night I even lay in bed and imagined leading him on a tour of the finished Dog Museum. Showing him how certain materials worked together, the subtle touches and inspirations that combined to make the place whole yet eccentric in the best way.

  The most important question, and the one I’ve asked myself repeatedly, is whether it was the best building I ever designed. It was not. That is not sour grapes either; I don’t say it because the concept was not ultimately my own. After years at a job one develops a good, fair sense about one’s work and knows what is good and what isn’t. The Dog Museum was original and substantial, with a sense of humor that wasn’t common in my work, but it was not the Radcliffe pièce de résistance. No way. With the amount of inspiration, magical and otherwise, that went into it, I’d thought at the beginning it would transcend everything else, but it did not. It was a prize winner, the kind of building that makes people turn their heads, stare, and perhaps even ask what it is or who designed it. But it was not the work I’d take to my grave held tightly in my dying hands because it best defined me. It would be talked about because people would love the space it created, the way it complemented and accented whatever light entered, but it was not my final say. It was not. Claire said it was. Palm said it was. Even fatso Hasenhüttl said so, but who’s the expert here? Me.

  As I approached the lights, a large form slipped down from a pile of lumber and came slowly toward me. Hasenhüttl.

  “You’re out late, Harry.”

  I could have cursed him but I wasn’t angry. I could have yelled at him for hiding essential information but what was the point? He might have told me if I’d asked earlier. Hadn’t he said he would answer certain questions? I just hadn’t known to ask. Now I did. Now I could have embraced him, my own private angel, and said, “Let’s have a drink. I understand. Let’s celebrate.” What I did instead was rather odd. When we got close enough, I reached out and took his hand as a child will its parents’. He seemed to think that was okay because he smiled and let me hold it.

  “I know what’s going on here now.”

  He nodded but said nothing.

  “It is what I think, isn’t it?”

  “Tell me what you think.” Although it was cold enough for me to be wearing a down ski jacket, he wore only a dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie. Our breath puffed out in gray clouds that went away as soon as they appeared.

  I looked at him in his suit and over his shoulder at the museum. A moment of embarrassment passed before I spoke again, as if what I was about to say was risky or shameful.

  “It’s the Tower of Babel, isn’t it?”

  “Yes it is. It’s an attempt.”

  “We’re building the Tower of Babel here.”

  “Yes we are.”

  “Okay.” I let go of his hand and looked at our feet. “I’m not even shocked by it. Why not?”

  “When did you realize?”

  “Tonight, at the movies. I went with Palm to see the new Midnight. Suddenly, twenty minutes into the film, I began understanding every word on screen. Then every language around me.”

  “You can, Harry. I’m speaking to you in Arabic now. Tell me what happened after that.”

  I noticed no difference in how he spoke. The words sounded the same, as did the tone and inflection. For the rest of our time together that night he’d stop every so often and tell me what language he had been speaking for the last five or ten minutes. There were many of them. Never once did I notice a difference. It never sounded as if he shifted from one to another for better emphasis or word choice. He simply spoke and I understood. I know someone who works as a simultaneous translator. Totally fluent in French. She says tha
t fluency notwithstanding, there is always a moment’s pause between what is said in one language and her translation into the other. There has to be because there must be moments for the mind to work through the puzzle of inversion and declension so as to make the “jump” not only accurate, but as close to the original as possible. “Jump” was her word and it’s a good one. She compared it to jumping from one rooftop to another. But there was no need to jump with Hasenhüttl that night. There was a path, a straight path of language that was no effort to follow.

  I told him about leaving the theater and driving around, trying to keep sane and figure out what was happening at the same time. When he asked how I’d “connected the dots” and reached my understanding, I said there was no connecting—only the unmistakable obviousness of what was, once I had the breath and calm to step back and think the whole thing through.

  “But why me? Because I’m good, or because I was a student of Venasque’s?”

  “Neither. Because you had the right mixture of belief, talent, and arrogance.”

  “But what did I do? From what I see, I didn’t come up with zilch. It was all given to me. The inspiration came from outside. It isn’t my building, my design; it’s yours, or your boss’s.”

  “No, Radcliffe, it is yours. It has to be yours or else it couldn’t be. The inspiration was yours, the concept, the design. The dream of Layne-Dyer was yours too.”

  “Come on, man, you’ve been jerking me around for months! Ever since we met on the plane from Saru. What about that conversation I had with Claire? We just happened to talk about the Tower of Babel, but you tell me it wasn’t set up? I’m not such a fool, Hasenhüttl!”