The Dogs of Babel (15 page)

But this isn’t enough. I have to teach her “sad.” I have to teach her “fall.” And “jump.” I have to make her understand the difference.

In the end, I just create symbols for every word I think I might need. I can always teach her the meanings later.

For the keyboard, I decide to go see an acquaintance of mine, a man named Mike Wolfe who works in the electrical engineering department at the university. Mike has an interest in linguistics, so I think he might be willing to help me out. A former student of mine once asked Mike to help him write a program that would put together random sounds to create nonsense words for a project the student was doing on language formation. It was a rather meaningless project—in fact, as I recall, the student left the department soon afterward without receiving his degree—but I was impressed with what Mike came up with.

So I go to see Mike, and I tell him what I’m looking for. I don’t tell him it’s for a dog; I tell him I’m working with severely disabled children. I emphasize that several of them will need to hit the buttons with their noses. He nods respectfully and seems to believe me, but when I return to pick up the machine two weeks later, I see a cartoon, clearly cut from the campus newspaper, posted to the office door of one of Mike’s colleagues in the department. It shows a dog sitting in front of a computer, tongue hanging out, with a goofy look on its face. Its paws are resting on the keyboard, and a string of nonsense words are visible on the screen. Behind the dog stands a man, looking nothing like me, I must say, peering over the dog’s shoulder. “Brilliant!” the man is saying. “Don’t stop now!” The cartoon’s caption reads, “Arguments Against Tenure.”

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.

T
he 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.

T
he 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.

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.