The Dogs of Babel

by Carolyn Parkhurst

  But the machine is everything I could have hoped for. Mike has modified an old laptop—it will be a bit slow, he tells me, but it should meet my needs. The keys are large and marked clearly with the symbols I gave him. Since he was working with a standard keyboard, the keys when pressed each type a single letter. I’ll simply need to make a note of which letters result from which symbols, and I can translate what Lorelei meant to type. BNL, for example, translates to “Lexy tree fall.” And so on.

  I spend two weeks working with Lorelei on memorizing the visual symbols before introducing the keyboard to her. First, I show her a flash card with a particular symbol on it—the symbol for tree, say—and I repeat the word several times. Next, I shuffle the card together with two other cards, making a big show out of it, like the magician I’m trying so hard to be, and I lay the three cards faceup on the floor.

  “Water, Lorelei,” I say. “Where’s the water? Go find the water.”

  At first, she doesn’t seem to understand what I want from her. The first time I give this order, she goes uncertainly to the corner of the room and picks up her toy giraffe in her teeth. Great, I think—now I’m making her question the meanings of words she already knows. So I begin to demonstrate what I want her to do. I cast my eyes down toward the card I want her to pick. I point to it. I bend and touch my own nose to the symbol. Eventually, she seems to understand. When she lowers her head to sniff at the card I’ve indicated, I praise her well.

  After two weeks, she’s pointing to the right card about fifty percent of the time. Not bad, considering she’s choosing from three cards; if she’d been simply picking cards at random, I’d expect only a thirty-three percent success rate. But still not great. It occurs to me that maybe the visual cues are a problem. Sight is not her best sense. Maybe I need to assign a different scent to each key. A scratch-and-sniff keyboard. But how do I sum up how Lexy smelled to Lorelei? Rub her sweater on the keys? Spray her perfume, dab her hair gel, smear her lipstick on a palette, and mix them together? What of Lexy’s own unadorned scent, the scent beneath all those other scents she added to her body? I can’t re-create that. (Oh, but if I could! If I could lift up an atomizer and spray that scent into the air!) And the smell of water? And the smell of an apple tree on an October day? Is the scent of air rushing as a person falls different from the scent of the air if that person jumps? Is the scent of the flying dust as the body hits the ground any different?

  So I suppose I must stick to the visual. But today, as I work with Lorelei on the flash cards, I realize something. I have neglected to make a card for myself. I have not created a symbol to represent the concept “Paul.” I suppose there has to be one. Certainly, I am a part of the story she has to tell. Or am I deluding myself? What if the story she has to tell has nothing to do with me or with Lexy but with her own puppyhood, of which I know very little? The story she chooses to tell, the one it’s most important for her to get out, may not be the one I want to hear. I think again about the story of how Lorelei came to belong to Lexy. Maybe this is what Lorelei will want to tell me about: salvation from the storm, the tearing pain in her throat. Or maybe something from even before that. Does she remember her mother, her brothers and sisters? The tragedy of puppies, taken from their families, all of them, never to see each other again. This is the sadness we inflict on the beasts we love. Am I anthropomorphizing? Of course I am. It can hardly be helped. But still. Who am I to know what heart beats beneath that fur? What leg-twitching dreams project themselves behind those wide, inscrutable eyes? Does she dream of walking on big, unsteady puppy paws, of struggling to find a place to suckle alongside her siblings? Does she remember all of that, or is it like our own infancy, lost in the prelanguage mist of babyhood?

  Maybe she wants to tell me about a single moment of summer grass, looking for something to chase, the feel of damp earth on bare paws. That may be what she has to tell me. The joy of muscle and bone working together to run as she chases a car. The wind blowing her ears as she sticks her head out a car window. The loneliness of the door closing, leaving her alone in the house. The patient waiting beneath the table, the smell of dinners not meant for her, the thrill of being in the right place at the right time when human fingers slip and a piece of meat falls to the floor. The drool-inducing terror of pulling up in front of the vet’s office. The sweet sadness of Lexy gone, the constant vigil for her return. Seeing things happen and not knowing why. The smells of other dogs. The softness of couch cushions. The satisfying give as a pillow rips apart in her teeth. The hunt. The sun. Rolling in the dirt.

  “Where’s the tree, Lorelei?” I say, nodding to the cards on the floor before me. “Where’s the tree?”

  She noses the card that means Lexy.

  “All right, girl,” I say. “That’s enough for now.”

  I am tired. I am so very tired. I gather up my cards and put them away. Then I sit down at my desk to write a letter to Wendell Hollis.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The night of the death-mask incident, Lexy didn’t come home at all. I sat up all night waiting for her. Finally, around eight in the morning, I heard her key in the door.

  She walked in looking tired and disheveled. She didn’t seem surprised to see me sitting in the living room.

  “Hi,” she said. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “Hi.”

  She just stood there, looking at the floor, her keys in her hand.

  “Where have you been?” I asked.

  “I drove to Delaware and back.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just started driving. I wasn’t going to come back.”

  “Ever?”

  “Ever. I was going to just disappear.”

  “That’s crazy, Lexy.”

  She laughed without smiling. “Yeah.”

  “What made you change your mind?”

  “I started thinking about you sitting here waiting up for me. I couldn’t leave you sitting here.”

  “Well, I wish you’d called,” I said. “I was afraid . . .” I didn’t finish.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. There was a long silence. “You’re scared of me now,” she finally said.

  “Well, yeah, a little.” I could hear my voice rising. I was angrier than I realized. I stopped and regulated my tone. “You were out of control,” I said as evenly as I could. “I didn’t know what you might do.”

  “Well, I didn’t know either.”

  “God, Lexy,” I said, and this time I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice. “Do you know how much it terrifies me to hear you talk like that? Do you know what it’s been like for me, sitting here all night, not knowing if you were alive or dead?”

  Finally, she raised her eyes and looked at me. I could see her face crumpling. “I’m sorry,” she said. She started to cry. “I’m sorry.”

  I watched her stand there crying, in the middle of the room. I couldn’t get up and go to her. I couldn’t.

  “Lexy, I think you need to get some help,” I said. “It scares me when you get like this. You need to talk to someone.”

  She began to cry harder. “You think I’m crazy,” she said.

  “No, I don’t think you’re crazy. I just think it might help you to talk to someone.”

  She turned from me, still sobbing. “I shouldn’t be here,” she said. “I should go away.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s not what I want. I just want to talk about this.”

  “I don’t want to talk now,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “I’m too tired. I just want to go take a shower.”

  She turned and walked away. She made her back look hard and sturdy as she walked, but as soon as the bathroom door closed, I could hear her sobbing grow louder. I heard her turn the shower on. I sat on the couch for a few moments more, then got up and walked to the bathroom. I knocked on the door.

  “Lexy,” I called. “Let me in.”

  “No,” she cried. “Leave me alone.”

  “Lexy,” I said. “It’s
going to be all right.”

  “Go away,” she said. “I can’t look at you right now.”

  “Lexy, we need to talk about this.”

  She didn’t answer me. I could hear her ragged weeping through the door.

  I tried the doorknob and found it was unlocked. “I’m coming in,” I said.

  Lexy wasn’t in the shower. She was sitting naked on the tile floor, her knees gathered up to her chin. Her face was hidden in her hands. The room was beginning to fill with steam.

  The sight of her sitting so forlorn broke something inside of me. I didn’t feel angry anymore.

  I knelt down beside her. “Shh, Lexy,” I said. “It’s going to be okay.”

  I reached out to touch her, but she jerked away.

  “Go away,” she said. “I don’t want you to see me. Go away.” She turned her blotchy face toward the wall.

  “I’m not going to go away,” I said.

  “Well, then I will,” she said. She was on her feet in a minute, but I was right behind her. I grabbed her and folded her reluctant body into my arms.

  “Let me go,” she said.

  “No. I will not.”

  She cried and struggled, but still I held her fast. I stood as strong as a tree, rooted firm to the ground. The more she pulled, the tighter I held.

  “I won’t let go,” I said. “I will not let you go.”

  Her skin was hot as iron. Her skin was hot to the touch.

  She let out a guttural sound, an animal noise of frustration and resistance. And still I held her fast.

  “Let me go,” she hissed, wriggling in my grip. She was slippery as an eel. And still I held her fast.

  We stood together in the bathroom steam, with Lexy twisting and crying out and me holding her tight, until her sobs quieted and I felt her body relax. Until at last I held her still and mother-naked in my arms.

  “My poor little girl,” I said into her hair. “You always thought you were the elf queen, didn’t you? But you’re not the elf queen. Don’t you see? You’re Tam Lin. You’re Tam Lin. And I will not let you go.”

  Later, when Lexy had calmed down enough to talk and the water in the shower had run cold, I asked her what she was going to do about the mask.

  “I’m going to make another one,” she said, “and I’m going to paint it exactly the same way. In spite of everything, I think I made the right choice to do it that way. If the parents don’t like it, I’ll make them one that’s more realistic. But I think they’re going to like it. I just wish I’d trusted myself from the beginning.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “So do I.”

  The parents did love the mask. The first mask, the ruined one, lay untouched on the basement table for several weeks; Lexy and I walked carefully around the wreckage, neither of us quite willing to throw it away. And if the colors on the second mask weren’t quite as bright, if the flowers painted across the face didn’t seem to dance quite as freely in the wind as they had before, the girl’s parents never knew the difference.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The letter I write to Wendell Hollis is fairly straightforward. I know from everything I’ve read about Hollis that he considers himself to be a noble figure, a martyr to science. I know that if I hope to receive an answer from him, I’ll have to play up to that image. Flatter him, I think. Show that you believe him to be a scholar, that you take his work seriously. Don’t appear to be scared off by his methods. Don’t give any hint of the revulsion you feel at the sound of his name.

  Here’s what I’ve come up with.

  Dear Mr. Hollis,

  You don’t know me, but I am very interested in the research you have done. As a fellow scholar in the area of canine language study, I feel I have much to learn from you. I have a dog named Lorelei, a Rhodesian Ridgeback, that I’ve been working with for several months with only minimal success. Can you give me any tips? How did you become interested in this topic? Do you have any plans to continue after you get out? Any advice you might have would be appreciated.

  Sincerely,

  Paul Iverson

  To my surprise, barely two weeks pass before I receive a response. When the letter appears in my mailbox, with Hollis’s correctional facility listed as the return address, I feel some sudden trepidation at what I’ve done, a feeling that only increases as I read what Hollis has written.

  Dear Paul Iverson,

  I get a lot of letters, not many positive I can tell you, so yours stood out. I’m glad to hear my legacy lives on while I waste away in here and I’m glad there are serious scholars such as yourself still working on the Dog Problem. Tell me more about what you’re doing with Lorelei. Have you started the operations yet? I’m sure a learned man like you knows she’ll have to be modified if you want to get results. I’m sending along some of the diagrams I used in my own surgeries. If you send me a picture of the dog you’re using that will help too.

  Here’s how I got interested dogs were always looking at me. I wanted to know what they were thinking when they looked at me like that. There was this one little dog that lived next door to me, wouldn’t stop barking. It was like he was yelling all the time without saying anything just noise. Day and night and when I’d see that little dog in the hallway with the old lady that owned him, that little ratdog would pull on his leash just for the pleasure of jumping at me and barking. And I thought What the hell’s your problem? You got something to say to me you say it. Well, one day the old lady drops dead, and I see all these cops in the hall, and I say what’s gonna happen to her poor little puppydog? Can’t you just hear me, I put on a good show. So they say we’re taking him down to the pound and I start laying it on about how me and the dog are such good buddies and please can’t you let me take him I’ll give him a good home. It’s what she would have wanted, she always said If anything happens to me, take care of my sweet little dog. So I lay it on real thick and the cops say okay cause this little yappy mutt’s driving them all nuts anyway. So I took that dog and the first thing I do is I build him a soundproof room. Well, actually, I just made some changes to this spare bedroom I had but it worked pretty well. And I put him down in the middle of the room and I say okay let’s see what you’ve been trying to say to me all this time. Let’s find out what you been trying to tell me all this time. And the rest is history, ha ha. He was a cute little guy, I got to admit it, but I didn’t let that get in the way. I had some real serious work to do with him, and I wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of my contribution to science.

  So that’s my story. Now you gotta tell me yours. I gave your name and address to a friend of mine, calls himself Remo, who lives in your area. He runs a group, kind of an underground club, for people who share our interests. He will be getting in touch with you.

  Write back soon. We men of science have to stick together.

  Yours,

  Wendell Hollis

  Attached to the letter are the diagrams Hollis has promised. Horrible sketches of dogs cut open, their bodies vivisected, their faces taken apart and put back together in entirely the wrong way. There’s a drawing of a dog’s brain, the different parts labeled with names like “speech node” and “hunger center” and “home of dog aggressiveness.” There’s a long handwritten explanation of how a human jaw might be attached to a dog’s skull, “if you can lay your hands on one without getting caught.”

  I put down the papers, horrified. Break down the words Wendell Hollis, and he reveals himself to be made up of lies and sin and Hell.Slew and woe. He is low. He is swine. What am I doing corresponding with this maniac? And who is this Remo who will be “getting in touch with me”? I shudder at the thought.

  And yet—how can I say “and yet,” you’re wondering, with all this carnage diagrammed before me, with this madman’s ravings fresh in my mind? But this is where my mind takes me—and yet, I think, it cannot be disputed that Wendell Hollis has succeeded where I have failed. A whole courtroom full of people heard Dog J speak his piece. I look at Lorelei dozing on the couch, her
body whole and untouched. No, I think, I will never resort to his methods. I will never do anything to hurt my dog. But what harm can it do to see what this Remo person has to say?

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I was glad when the death-mask business was over. Except that, as it turned out, it wasn’t over at all. The dead girl’s parents were so pleased with their mask that they put it on prominent display in their home and showed it off to all their friends, several of whom they’d met through a support group for families of cancer patients. As a result, Lexy started getting requests for death masks rather frequently. After the fourth or fifth one, she got a call from a reporter who’d seen one of her masks at a funeral; the dead man had been in a car accident, his body too mangled to allow for an open casket, so instead, his family displayed Lexy’s mask on top of the coffin. The reporter was haunted by the mask, he told Lexy, so ghostly and tangible at the same time, and he wanted to do a story for the paper. The headline was ARTIST FINDS BEAUTY IN DEATH, and the story hailed Lexy as a pioneer in a new “trend” in memorializing the dead. The reporter called her work “eerily delicate” and said that with each mask she succeeded in capturing “the substance and texture of grief itself, while still managing to celebrate life as it was lived by her subjects.” It was a glowing article, accompanied by several photographs of the masks (and one of Lexy herself—look how lovely she was!), and it started a flurry of interest in her work. She received so many requests for death masks that she was forced to put aside her other projects, her vibrant theatrical masks, her gaudy Mardi Gras faces, for how could she say no to a grief-sick mother or lover in order to work on something as trivial as a summer-stock play?