The Dogs of Babel

by Carolyn Parkhurst

  “What is this?” I asked, turning back to her.

  “Well,” she said, reading from the copy on the box, “apparently, it turns ordinary hard-boiled eggs into a unique square taste treat.”

  “Does it work?” I asked.

  “You know, I never tried it,” she said. “It belonged to an old roommate of mine, and when she moved out, she left it behind. I think she actually got it at a yard sale, too. She was an art history major in college, and she wrote a paper about it for a class on surrealism.”

  “Surreal is one word for it,” I said. “How much are you asking?”

  “Fifty cents,” she said, turning the box over in her hands. She looked thoughtful, and a little troubled. “I can’t believe I’ve had it all this time, and I never made a square egg.”

  “Well, I was going to buy it, but you don’t have to sell it if you don’t want to.”

  She shook off her troubled look and smiled. “No, no,” she said. “It’s the kind of thing that should be passed around to as many people as possible. Maybe someday when you’re finished with it, you can sell it to someone else.”

  “Absolutely,” I said. I gave her the money and stood there for a moment. “Well, thanks,” I said. “Good luck with your sale.” I started back toward my car.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Good luck with your square eggs.”

  I drove away with a feeling like laughter caught in my chest. I felt happier than I had felt in a long time. So I went home and made some square eggs.

  It was late in the afternoon by the time I returned to her house, and she was beginning to take her unsold items inside. She was facing away from me as I drove up, the late sun in her hair, and I sat and watched her for a moment before I got out of the car. The plate of eggs sat beside me on the passenger seat. I had arranged them on a bed of parsley, just like the picture on the box, and cut one into careful squares. I hesitated for a moment—what odd courtship ritual was this?—but just then, she turned and saw me, and I figured I’d have to go through with it.

  I walked toward her, holding out my strange offering. “I thought you might like these,” I called out.

  “Square eggs,” she said. Her voice was almost reverent, and as she took the plate from me, her face was filled with a kind of wonder. “I can’t believe you made me square eggs.”

  She looked up from the plate and studied my face. She smiled a slow smile that grew until her whole face was lit with it. “I’m going to ask you out on a date,” she said.

  “Well,” I said. “Well. I’m going to say yes.”

  And we stood there smiling, with the plate between us, the egg cubes glowing palely in the growing dark.

  FIVE

  Here’s another talking-dog joke. My colleagues have been sending them to me by e-mail. A man walks into a bar with a dog. He says to the bartender, “I’ll sell you this dog for five bucks. He can talk.” “Yeah, right,” says the bartender. The man nudges the dog. “Go on, show him,” he says. The dog looks up at the bartender and says, “Oh, please, kind sir, please buy me. This man mistreats me. He keeps me locked in a cage, he never takes me for walks, and he only feeds me once a week. He’s a terrible, terrible man.” The bartender is amazed. “This dog could make you rich,” he says. “Why do you want to sell him for five bucks?” The man replies, “Because I’m sick of all his damn lies.”

  It’s just a joke, but it brings up an interesting point: Who’s to say that your average talking dog would be any more honest than your average talking person? Who’s to say that Lorelei, if I could loose her tongue, would speak the truth?

  I had never owned a dog before I married Lexy; to be honest, I was rather afraid of them. When I was a child, I knew a great mammoth of a dog named Rufus who was angry all of his days. His owner was a bitter and reclusive man named Bucky Jones who used to terrify neighborhood children by gutting deer carcasses in his yard and throwing bits of bloody viscera in our paths as we walked by on our way to school. I’m quite sure he abused the dog on a regular basis, but even so, Rufus was devoted to him. The same dog who spent his days tied to a tree, leaping and snarling bloody murder, would whimper with sweet puppy joy whenever his owner came into the yard. On summer evenings, when Bucky used to climb up onto the roof to sit and drink beer and say wild things to no one, he’d hoist Rufus up there with him, and the strange silhouette they made against the night sky is something I see in my dreams to this day.

  The first time I met Lorelei, apart from the wary once-over we gave each other the day of the yard sale, was when I arrived to pick up Lexy for our first date, a date that, as it turned out, would last a full week. As soon as I rang the bell, I could hear the enormous noise of Lorelei’s bark beginning at some distant corner of the house and moving with alarming speed toward the other side of the door. I took an involuntary step backward and cowered against one of the porch posts as Lexy opened the door. Lorelei bounded out and leaped toward me, landing with her paws just below my shoulders. I stood rigid as she peered up into my face for a long moment, no longer barking, and I felt an unexpected calm run through me as I met her eyes. For one strange moment, my anxieties about the evening ahead of me faded, and without even thinking about it, I reached out and rested my hand gently on her head. This is the beginning of our story, mine and Lorelei’s, a story separate in many ways from the one Lexy and I would begin to create that night. For the first time, I looked into those earnest eyes and touched that rough-soft fur. For the first time, I felt a hint of tenderness for this dog who has, through time and the earthly miracle of canine trust, come to be my own. All that we are together now, the sum of our grief and our play, the daily movement of man and dog through an empty house, following the passage of sun from room to room until it’s gone, all of it began that moment on the porch, with Lexy standing in the background.

  When she stepped forward then, my Lexy, and I turned finally to look at her for the first time that day—she was pulling the dog off me and apologizing, chiding Lorelei in low tones as she maneuvered her into the house and shut her inside—I felt nothing of the rapt nervousness, the deep-bone stage fright, I had felt on all the other first dates of my life. Lexy had kept our plans for the evening deliberately vague, which had left me with some uneasiness, an unfamiliar tilting feeling of not knowing where I might end up, but now as I watched her negotiate all of the everyday hubbub of calming the dog, putting on a jacket, locking the door, I knew that somehow, without even realizing it, I had made the decision to follow her wherever she wanted to take me.

  “Hi,” she said, turning to face me and relaxing into a smile. “I’m sorry about Lorelei. She’s really a sweetie, but sometimes it’s hard to tell.”

  “Oh, I could tell,” I said.

  She looked lovely. She was wearing a kind of silky black T-shirt and a long slim skirt, and she had pulled her hair back from her face. In the week since we had met, it seemed as if I had spent my time doing nothing else but conjuring her image in my mind, but I saw now that I had remembered everything wrong. I saw now that the brown of her eyes was lightened with flecks of amber and that the heart-shape of her face was more round than angular. I saw the complex layering of pale gold and dark honey in her hair and the rose-flush of her skin. I saw now that she was beautiful.

  “So,” I said as we walked toward my car, “where are we going?”

  “Well,” she said, sounding rather apologetic, “I’m afraid the first thing we have to do is go to a wedding.”

  “A wedding.” I did my best to quell rising panic. Socializing with strangers is not something I do well, as anyone I know will tell you.

  She went on in a rush. “I know that’s a really weird first-date activity, but they’re clients of mine and I promised I’d put in an appearance. We don’t have to stay long—don’t worry, I’m not going to know anyone there either, and I promise we can do something fun afterward.”

  “Great,” I said resolutely. “That sounds like fun.”

  She laughed. “No, it doesn’t,
” she said. “And if you want to back out, I won’t mind. But I guarantee you, it won’t be like any other wedding you’ve ever been to.”

  I opened the car door for her. “Well, then,” I said. “What are we waiting for?”

  We drove, following a small hand-drawn map that I imagine had been included in the wedding invitation.

  “So,” I said. “You said these people are clients of yours. I don’t even know what you do.”

  She smiled. “Oh, that will become apparent,” she said. “I think I’ll keep it a secret for a while longer.”

  “Am I going to be dressed all right for this thing?” I asked. “It’s not formal, is it?”

  “No, not at all. I think it’s going to be kind of New-Agey, actually. They made a big deal on the invitation about this being the day of the vernal equinox—you know, when day and night are equal. They called it ‘the day the sun marries the moon.’” She laughed. “I guess they were looking for something more dramatic than just ‘the day Brittany marries Todd.’”

  We were in the country now. It was late afternoon, nearing sunset. Eventually, we turned down a long dirt road that dead-ended at a patch of tall grass and wildflowers. A path had been cut into the growth and marked with garlands of roses on either side.

  A woman was standing at the entrance to the path, holding a large basket twined with ribbons. She smiled as we approached her, and she held the basket out toward us.

  “Please choose your masks,” she said.

  I glanced at Lexy, who was watching me and smiling. “You go first,” she said.

  I leaned forward warily and looked into the basket. I think I was expecting something like the Halloween masks I wore as a child, flimsy plastic monster faces and shiny superheroes with no backs to their heads, elastic bands stapled to the sides of the masks to keep them from slipping off your face. Instead, the basket was filled with wonders the likes of which I had never seen. A dozen papier-mâché faces looked up at me with cutout eyes. I saw a frog first, then a zebra. A sunflower with vibrant yellow petals framing its face. A tall golden feather with ghostly features pressed into its wavy barbs. There were three-quarter-length masks with wrinkled brows and outrageously curved noses, and wild-looking jesters decked out in playing cards. A snaky-haired Medusa and a Bacchus crowned with grapes. I felt giddy with the choice.

  “Go on,” Lexy said. “What do you want to be today?”

  I reached in and pulled out the first one I touched. It was a book, a thick, old-fashioned kind of book with its pages spread open. Eyes, nose, and mouth protruded from the gilded text.

  “That’s perfect,” Lexy said. As she bent to rummage in the basket, I examined my mask. Across the two pages, a single phrase was written in a long, sloping hand: You have taken the finest knight in all my company. I fixed the mask to my face.

  “Oh, good,” I heard Lexy say. “I was hoping this one would still be here.”

  I turned toward her. She had covered her own lovely face with the smiling face of a dog. An earnest, familiar face.

  “That’s Lorelei,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “It is. So have you figured out what I do for a living?”

  “You made all these?” I asked.

  “Mm-hmm,” she said. She took my hand. “Let’s go to the wedding.”

  We walked down the path until we reached a clearing. There were chairs set up around a center aisle, and each of them was filled with a person wearing a mask. I saw a sea nymph with starfish caught in her hair talking to a man with the head of a bull. I saw an angel with a halo talking on a cell phone. We took our seats, in between a splendid butterfly-woman and a man with an enormous iceberg perched on his head, the Titanic broken in two across the top.

  Up at the front, a string quartet dressed in formal wear, with silver stars spread across their faces, began to play. We rose and turned to see the sun and the moon walking toward us through the crowd. The bride wore a dress of palest yellow silk with layer upon layer of iridescent gauze catching the light. Her face was a dazzling circle of gold, framed with fiery rays. The groom wore a tuxedo, his face masked with a tall crescent of silver. They were beautiful.

  Lexy leaned toward me. “I’m curious to see how they’re going to do the kiss,” she whispered. I reached out for her hand and held it as we watched the sacred joining of sun and moon, silhouetted by the falling dusk.

  SIX

  Ah, but I’ve already let it slip, haven’t I, that our first date lasted a week. It didn’t end there in that perfect sunset moment of the masquerade wedding. There’s more, there’s always more to tell, and I’m already getting caught up in the accumulation of moments that led from the day of that wedding to the day of Lexy’s fall.

  But the more I think about Lexy, the more I try to sort it all out, the more I neglect my research. The truth is, now that I’ve arranged for a sabbatical and given myself all the time and space I could possibly need, I’m not sure how to proceed. My desk is piled with books on canine physiology and psychology, papers on language acquisition in apes and in children, studies of “the talking dog as motif” in folklore and literature. I have folders full of notes that I have compiled on famous dogs, ranging from Cerberus to Snoopy. Just yesterday, I spent several hours in the microfilm room of the university library, collecting clippings about the trial of Wendell Hollis and its star witness for the prosecution. The dog who sent Wendell Hollis to jail had been named Dog J by his captor, simply because he was the tenth in a series of alphabetically named dogs that Hollis had purchased from pet stores, picked up at pounds, or snatched off the streets, but after his rescue, the New York Post held a contest to rename him. Suggestions ranged from the cheerily naive Lucky to the wrongly gendered and grandiosely silly Harriet Pupman, but the name that stuck was Hero, and even the Post’s blaring headline of HERE, HERO! emblazoned above the famous photo of the dog being escorted out of the courthouse by a group of smiling police officers failed to detract from the dignity and the rightness of the name. This story fascinates me more than I can say, for reasons that should be obvious: This is a dog I would like to talk to.

  So you can see I have been working; my desk is littered with the reading I have done, the tangents I have been willing to follow. But as I sit here, sifting through the paper, with Lorelei lying at my feet as inscrutable as ever, I realize that I have no idea where to begin.

  I suppose the first step in teaching a dog to speak might be to teach her to “speak.” That is, to teach her to bark on command in the parlor trick usually referred to as “speaking.” I get a biscuit and call Lorelei over to me.

  “Sit,” I say, and she does.

  “Speak.” She just looks at me. “Speak,” I say again. Uncertainly, she lies down.

  “Up, up,” I say. She stands.

  “Good girl. Now sit.” We’re back to the beginning. She stares at me intently, her nose twitching at the nearness of the biscuit I hold. She sneaks a glance at the treat; hasn’t she already performed several tricks?

  “Speak,” I say firmly. Then I start to bark at her. “Rrr, ruff!” I say, staring into her eyes. “Ruff, ruff! Speak! Ruff, ruff!”

  Lorelei cocks her head to the side. This is unprecedented behavior on my part. Never before have I gotten down on the floor and barked at her. She waits to see what I’ll do next.

  “Speak, girl!” I say, pulling my face closer to hers. Our noses are almost touching. “Grr,” I say, staring into her eyes. “Ruff! Ruff!” I’m nearly shouting. Finally, it works. Lorelei lets out a noise, not quite a bark, not quite a whine. It sounds, more than anything, like an expression of frustration—When the hell do I get the biscuit?—but it’s progress.

  “Good girl!” I say effusively. I break the biscuit in two and give her half. She settles down to gnaw on it. I wait until she’s finished, then urge her back into a sitting position. I show her the other half of the biscuit. “Speak!” I say. “Ruff, ruff!” This time she gives a full-throated bark, and then another. “Good dog,” I say, “
good speak!” I hold out the other piece of biscuit, but she ignores it. She stares into my eyes, her brow furrowed, and continues barking.

  “Okay, now, good girl, quiet,” I say. I pull away slowly, sliding back on the carpet, still sitting. “Quiet now!”

  Lorelei stands up, drawing herself to her full height. She has to lean down to continue barking in my face.

  “Good girl,” I say soothingly. She’s making me nervous. I stand up; my books have told me that in situations like this I need to assert my position as alpha male. “Quiet,” I say more firmly. She looks up at me searchingly and barks again. She’s less aggressive now, but I can’t get her to stop. I reach out and gingerly pat her head. “Do you want a cookie? Nice dog, nice cookie.” Finally, she takes the biscuit. She retreats to a corner of the room, where she drops it on the floor and pretends to bury it, using her nose to draw the folds of the carpet over the biscuit.

  “Good girl,” I call from across the room. I sink down on the sofa and watch her concentration as she goes about her task. I pick up my notebook. “Taught Lorelei the command Speak,” I write. “Results inconclusive.” I lean back and close my eyes. Across the room, Lorelei picks up her biscuit and takes it into a different corner to start over again.

  SEVEN

  I became a linguist in part because words have failed me all my life. I was born tongue-tied in the most literal sense: the tissue connecting my tongue to the floor of my mouth was short and thick, limiting lingual movement. It’s a common enough condition; the doctor simply snipped the membrane in the delivery room, and I grew to speak like any normal child, with no lingering impediments. But the image stays with me as a kind of metaphor for all my subsequent dealings with language: I was born with a tongue not meant for speaking, and despite all artificial attempts to loosen it, it has stayed stuck in place at every important moment of my life.