The Dogs of Babel

by Carolyn Parkhurst

  We walked down Main Street, U.S.A., and through Cinderella’s castle to Fantasyland. Lexy took my hand and led me, half running, to the ride. The sign told us to expect a forty-five-minute wait, but Lexy told me to ignore it.

  “They always tell you it’s going to take longer than it actually will. That way, you’re happy when you get there ahead of schedule.”

  She was right. About twenty minutes later, we were ushered into a row of our own to wait for the next boat.

  “We’re in the last row,” Lexy said. “Very romantic. If you like singing dolls, anyway.”

  The boat pulled up. The people in the back row climbed out, and we slid in the other side. But the people in the seat in front of us, a couple with two small girls, stayed put. The man stood and leaned toward the ride operator, a clean-cut teenager in a Venetian gondolier outfit.

  “Excuse me,” he said in a serious, man-to-man voice. “I wonder if you could let us go through again. The little girl in front of us was yelling so loud we couldn’t even hear the music.”

  The gondolier shook his head and said something I couldn’t hear. In front of us, the woman started to get up and gather her things, but her husband waved her back.

  “Please,” he said to the gondolier. It wasn’t a question. “We weren’t able to enjoy the ride. It would mean a lot.”

  The guy shrugged. “Yeah, go ahead,” he said.

  The man sat down, and the boat pulled slowly into the canal.

  “What’d you say, Daddy?” one of the little girls asked delightedly.

  “Daddy told a lie,” the man said in a stage whisper. “Daddy was bad.”

  His wife was shaking her head and laughing. “Yeah, kids,” she said. “Do as Daddy says, not as Daddy does.”

  I looked at Lexy and rolled my eyes. “Great role models,” I whispered.

  Lexy’s whole body had turned rigid. “I can’t stand people like that,” she said in a low, furious voice. “What makes them think the rules don’t apply to them?”

  I took her hand. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Look, singing dolls. Naive but well intentioned.”

  But she just sat still and stared straight ahead. Our boat sailed smoothly through the wide canals. The cool air felt good after the Florida heat. I watched the doll-children go by.

  “What country is that supposed to be?” I asked, pointing toward an icy-blue landscape peopled by singing penguins. “Antarctica?”

  Lexy shrugged.

  The man in front of us turned to his daughters. “Come on, Ashley, Madison,” he said. “You know the words. ‘There is just one moon and one golden sun.’” The girls joined him, singing in loud, high-pitched voices.

  “Shall we join in?” I said to Lexy. “Come on, Lexy, you know the words.”

  But she didn’t smile. She looked down at her lap.

  “‘There’s so much that we share,’” shrieked the girls in front of us, “‘that it’s time we’re aware . . .’”

  Lexy was still seething when we reached the end of the ride.

  “Come on,” I said, standing up and climbing out of the boat. “Let’s go get one of those ice creams shaped like Mickey’s head.” But she was looking the other way.

  “Excuse me,” she said loudly to the ride operator. The little family group turned to hear what she was going to say. “Can we go through again? The people in front of us were so morally reprehensible that we couldn’t enjoy the ride.” She got out of the boat and started to walk, her body stiff, her arms held tightly at her sides.

  “What does that mean, Daddy?” one of the girls asked.

  Lexy turned back. “It means your daddy’s an asshole,” she said. And she walked quickly on ahead of me.

  She was near tears when I caught up to her. I reached out to touch her arm, but she jerked away from me.

  “We were having such a good day, and now I’ve ruined it,” she said.

  “You haven’t ruined it,” I said. I’ll admit I had been a bit taken aback by Lexy’s outburst. I was surprised by the intensity of her emotion, the strength of her reaction to people she didn’t even know. But there had been so much that had surprised me in the last twenty-four hours, not least of all my own willingness to follow Lexy’s lead, to turn myself upside down to be with her. In my entire life, I’d never called anyone an asshole—not to their face, anyway—but it occurred to me now that maybe I should have. Maybe if I’d opened my mouth more often, let my own words come to the surface, I wouldn’t have lived my life so alone.

  “You were right,” I said. “Daddy was an asshole. Let’s go find him and kick his ass.”

  “I don’t know why I get this way,” she said, still not meeting my eyes. “If you want to just leave, that’s okay.”

  I took her face in my hands and turned it upward until she was looking at me. I smiled. “I don’t want to leave,” I said.

  “You don’t?” she said. Her eyes were bright with tears.

  “No. I don’t.”

  “You’re not—I don’t know, mad or freaked out or embarrassed to be seen with me? I mean, you hardly know me, and here I am causing scenes with complete strangers.”

  “Well, I won’t be cutting in line in front of you, that’s for sure,” I said. Finally, she smiled. “But how could I be mad at you? Look where you’ve brought me.” I spread out my arms to include everything around us, the colors and the music, the rides, the crowds, the Florida sun. “You’ve brought me where I needed to go. Now come show me the rest of it.”

  NINE

  I’ve mentioned the books, haven’t I? The books Lexy rearranged on the day she died? Today I’m going to sit down and begin to make a list. As far as I can tell, Lexy’s work on that day was concentrated on one bookcase in particular; even though every bookshelf in the house has been changed to some degree, with a single book removed here and there and a new one put in its place, it’s only the bookcase in my den where everything is different. Every book that was there when I left that morning has been taken out, although a few of them have been put back in a different spot than they originally occupied. The rest of the space has been filled with books from other places in the house. I begin to type the titles into my laptop, in the order she placed them, making notes about the subject matter and their history in our lives, as well as noting which books were hers and which are mine. So far, I can find no discernible pattern.

  I get as far as the top shelf, which is arranged as follows:

  Mary Had a Little Lamb: Language Acquisition in Early Childhood (Mine.)

  I Was George Washington (Lexy’s. A book about past-life regression. She always had a weakness for that kind of thing.)

  Love in the Known World (Hers. A critically acclaimed novel that was later made into a truly awful movie.)

  But That’s Not a Duck! (Mine. A book of jokes I bought for an academic paper I was writing about punch lines.)

  That’s Not Where I Left It Yesterday (Hers. A coming-of-age story about a girl in 1950s Brooklyn.)

  What You Need to Know to Be a Game Show Contestant (Mine. I never did get to be on a game show, but I always thought I’d be good at it.)

  I Wish I May, I Wish I Might (Hers. A book of childhood folklore and customs from around the world.)

  Know Your Rhodesian Ridgeback (Hers, although I’ve consulted it quite a few times lately.)

  Didn’t You Used to Be Someone? Stars of Yesterday and Where They Are Today (Hers.)

  I’d Rather Be Parsing: The Linguistics of Bumper Stickers, Buttons, and T-shirt Slogans (Mine.)

  Have You Never Been Mellow? The World’s Worst Music (Mine. A joke gift from Lexy, who always insisted that I had terrible taste in music.)

  How to Buy a Used Car Without Getting Taken for a Ride (Hers.)

  As I said, this is only the top shelf. As soon as I’ve written down the last title, I begin to question my actions. What exactly do I think I’m looking for, a message from beyond the grave, arranged neatly in my study? I have a sudden memory of the eerie excitem
ent I felt as a kid when the Beatles’ “Paul is dead” clues started to surface. I was thirteen the year that story broke, and I was thrilled by it, the goose-bumpy feeling of hearing backwards messages, the uncanny idea of secret clues hidden in plain sight. My friend Paul Muzzey, with whom I shared not only a first name but also the small excitement of being a namesake to the corpse in this conspiracy, kept a long list of all the clues published in music magazines and broadcast over the radio. He called me up one afternoon and said, “You’ve got to play ‘A Day in the Life’ right now. Go do it while I’m still on the phone.”

  “Backwards?” I asked.

  “No, just listen to it the right way. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

  So I put the phone down and walked over to the hi-fi in the living room. I pulled Sergeant Pepper out of its sleeve and put it on the turntable. My parents weren’t home, so I turned it up as loud as it went, then picked up the phone again.

  “Okay,” I said as the familiar chords began.

  “Okay,” he said. “Just close your eyes and listen.”

  I sat with my eyes closed, the phone to my ear, and listened to the song I’d heard a hundred times before. I heard nothing new. The first verse came to an end with “Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords,” and Paul said, “Did you hear it?”

  “Hear what?”

  “He said ‘house of Paul.’”

  “No way,” I said. “It’s ‘House of Lords.’ ‘Lords’ doesn’t even sound like ‘Paul.’”

  “Play it again and listen for it. He says ‘Paul.’”

  So I picked up the needle and dropped it back at the beginning of the song. And I heard it clear as day, my own name. “Nobody was really sure if he was from the house of Paul.” A chill went through me.

  “Oh, man,” I breathed. “He does say ‘Paul.’”

  Paul and I sat there on opposite ends of the line and listened to the rest of the song in silence. It was a holy moment, a moment weighted down by the truth we had found. The house of Paul. It was really true.

  Of course, it came out soon afterward that the whole conspiracy thing was a hoax and that Paul McCartney was very much alive. But to this day, I can’t hear that song without hearing “house of Paul.” I believe that what I learned that afternoon was true. I would swear it on any pile of books you gave me.

  Thirty years later, I’m still searching for hidden meanings in the ordinary objects that fill my life. Only now, I don’t have a nation of DJs and keen-eyed teenaged fans to help me. I’m all alone in this. All I have is forty-nine books arranged on a shelf. And what do I think they mean? Something. Or nothing at all.

  TEN

  Back in Disney World, back among the nightly fireworks and the children in mouse-eared hats, Lexy and I walk hand in hand forever. I sometimes think that if I could, I would round up all of the people who visited the park during the days we were there, and I would ask them to show me their photos and videotapes, just on the chance that one of them might have caught us on film. I feel certain, looking back, that we must have walked through someone’s family grouping at the exact moment the shutter closed; surely, some father wielding a video camera must have captured us somewhere, climbing into a teacup or reading the gravestones outside the Haunted Mansion, while his children, fidgety and drunk with excitement, ran around people’s legs in the foreground. What would I give for that, to see how we looked, the two of us together, when we had known each other barely a week? Me in my Eeyore shirt, and Lexy with the sun in her hair. Everything. I would give everything.

  We stayed in Orlando for four days. We arrived on a Sunday afternoon and didn’t turn back for home until Thursday morning. And all the time, we ate nothing but appetizers. Appetizers, snacks, and side dishes. We didn’t eat a meal until Friday night, when, almost home, we stopped again at the same Italian restaurant we had gone to the day of the wedding. We ate a big dinner, with entrées and desserts, wine and coffee, and then I dropped Lexy at her house and went home to grade my papers in an exuberant, generous mood. That was the end of our first date.

  I haven’t mentioned sleeping arrangements yet; I haven’t told you how we slept in the same tiny motel room for four humid Florida nights, and how it wasn’t until our last night there that Lexy crossed the room and came into my bed. How she whispered to me, “I don’t usually do this on the first date” as she ran her hands over my long-forsaken body. I mention these things, the warm air and cool sheets, the fresh joy of Lexy lying beside me, in the interest of not skipping over anything that might prove to be important. But in truth, they are not things I can speak of very easily. I touched her and it felt like coming home. What more is there to say?

  On Sunday afternoon, two days after our return, I arrived at Lexy’s house with flowers and a chew toy for Lorelei. The flowers, the first I ever gave her, were dahlias, so dark and red they were almost black.

  “Wow,” Lexy said as she took them from me. “These are gorgeous. I’ve never seen flowers this color. They kind of remind me of the devil.”

  “The devil?” I said. “Yes, that’s exactly what I was going for. It’s a test, to see if you’re receptive to the black arts. Now I can introduce you to the other members of the coven.”

  She laughed. “No, don’t you see what I mean? They’re this deep bloodred color, and they’ve got these kind of seductive honeycomb petals that just draw you in further and further.” She waited a moment and then added grandly, “I believe I shall carry these flowers at my wedding.”

  I only paused for a moment. “Well,” I said, “you’d better get married quickly. These are only going to last a day or two.”

  She laughed and put her arms around me. “Oh, I don’t think you’re going to get off that easily,” she said. “But see what I mean about these flowers? They seduced me into asking you to marry me on our second date. I think we’d better put them in the other room before I lose control completely.”

  “Oh, let’s keep them here and see what happens,” I said, and pulled her down with me onto the couch.

  Later that afternoon, she took me to see her basement workshop, the place where she made her masks. There was a large table in the center of the room, covered with an untidy litter of newspapers and jars of paint. Unfinished faces, bare and ghostly, were stacked in piles on the floor. Everything was coated with a fine white dust. I remembered the mask I had worn at the wedding.

  “I meant to ask you,” I said. “What does that mean, ‘You have taken the finest knight in all my company’? Is it from something?”

  “It’s from ‘Tam Lin,’” she said. “Do you know that story?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s from an old Scottish poem, but I first heard it as a fairy tale. There was a version of it on this record I used to have when I was a kid—I’ve always had trouble falling asleep, and I’d listen to these records of people reading stories, kind of like books on tape. It was always these washed-up actors doing the reading, people I’d never heard of but later saw on TV in old movies and stuff. Anyway, I loved this one. It’s the story of a woman named Janet who falls in love with a knight named Tam Lin, who’s been abducted by the fairy queen or the elf queen or something, and Janet has to rescue him and steal him back to the mortal world. She goes and waits for him in the woods at midnight on Halloween, and all the fairies ride by on horses, and Janet has to pull Tam Lin down from his horse and hold on to him while the fairy queen turns him into all kinds of horrible things—she turns him into a snake, and a snarling beast, and a red-hot bar of iron, but Janet has to hold on as tight as she can, until finally he turns into a ‘mother-naked man’—isn’t that a nice phrase, ‘a mother-naked man’?—and then he’s hers forever.”

  “So she’s standing in the woods at midnight with a naked man in her arms? And this was a children’s story?”

  Lexy laughed. “That’s nothing,” she said. “When I was in college, I went and found an early version of the poem, and it turns out t
hat Janet was pregnant. That’s something they left out of the kids’ version.”

  “So what about the ‘finest knight in all my company’ stuff?”

  “Oh, that’s the best part. After Janet rescues him, and everything’s okay, the fairy queen throws a fit. The way it went in my version was, Out then spoke the fairy queen, and an angry queen was she: ‘You have taken the finest knight in all my company.’ And then there’s this scary part that I found absolutely thrilling, where the fairy queen says to Tam Lin, ‘Had I known but yesterday what I know today, I’d have taken out your two grey eyes and put in eyes of clay. And had I known but yesterday you’d be no more my own, I’d have taken out your heart of flesh and put in one of stone.’ It still gives me goose bumps.”

  “Lighthearted little story,” I said. “I can see why that would stick in your mind.”

  She sank down onto a long, beat-up couch that ran along one wall. I sat down next to her. There was a series of soft thuds from the staircase as Lorelei loped down to join us. She came over to the couch and jumped up, insinuating her large, dense body into the small space between us.

  “Can I help you?” I said to the dog as she wedged herself against my knees. Lexy stroked Lorelei, looking thoughtful.

  “The thing is,” she said, “I always identified with the fairy queen.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe Janet was too goody-goody for me.

  “Except for the getting knocked up part.”

  She smiled. “Except for that.” She was quiet for a moment. “No, I guess I kind of identified with her anger. You know, she gets so mad, and it’s presented like she’s behaving totally inappropriately, but I can understand her point of view.”

  I considered it. “Absolutely,” I said. “She’s just doing her thing, being the fairy queen, and Janet comes along and steals away her finest knight.”

  “Right.”

  I watched her scratch Lorelei gently behind the ears. I thought of the queen in the story, stamping her feet and yelling into the night wind, and I thought of Lexy in the Magic Kingdom, leaning against a fiberglass tree, close to tears, trembling with all of an elf queen’s fury. I picked up her hand and kissed it.