The Dogs of Babel Read online

  Let me return for a moment to my preliminary comments regarding the project I am about to undertake. As I have mentioned, I have a dog named Lorelei, a Rhodesian Ridgeback. She was my wife’s dog before she was mine. It is my proposal to work with Lorelei on a series of exercises and experiments designed to help her acquire language in whatever ways are possible, given her physiological and mental capacities. It is my proposal to teach Lorelei to talk.

  I realize how this must sound. A year ago I would have been as skeptical as the rest of you. But you have to understand how the events of the past few months have changed my way of thinking. Let me remind you that we, as scientists, have witnessed in the past century the strange spectacle of apes speaking entire sentences with their hands. We’ve seen parrots who have learned to provide the punch lines of dirty jokes, much to the delight of their owners’ friends. We’ve seen guide dogs trained to turn on light switches and to listen for the crying of babies born to deaf parents. I myself have seen, on an amateur video show, a dog who has learned to make the sound “I love you.”

  I’m not suggesting that any of the above examples offer conclusive proof I’ll succeed. I’m aware, for a start, that dogs have considerably less cranial capacity than gorillas and other higher primates, and I’m not kidding myself that dogs who say “I love you” and parrots who curse like sailors are doing anything other than performing tricks they know will result in praise and bits of food.

  But in the evenings when I sit with Lorelei and she gazes up at me with her wide, inscrutable eyes, I wonder what she would tell me if she could. Sometimes I get down on the carpet with her to speak to her softly and ask her my questions while I rest my hand upon her great furrowed head. More than once I have awakened to find that I have fallen asleep with my head on the wide, rough expanse of her side.

  The conclusion I have reached is that, above all, dogs are witnesses. They are allowed access to our most private moments. They are there when we think we are alone. Think of what they could tell us. They sit on the laps of presidents. They see acts of love and violence, quarrels and feuds, and the secret play of children. If they could tell us everything they have seen, all of the gaps of our lives would stitch themselves together. I feel I have no choice but to give it a try.

  THREE

  There’s a talking-dog joke that goes like this: A man walks into a bar with a dog. The bartender says, “Sorry, buddy, no dogs allowed.” The man says, “Oh, but you don’t understand—this is a very special dog. He can talk.” The bartender looks skeptical but says, “Okay, let’s hear it.” The man puts the dog on a bar stool and looks deeply into his eyes. “What do you call that thing on top of a house?” he asks. “Roof, roof!” barks the dog. “And how does sandpaper feel?” the man continues. “Ruff, ruff!” answers the dog. “And who was the greatest baseball player of all time?” the man asks. “Rooth, Rooth!” the dog says. “All right, buddy,” the bartender says, “that’s enough. Out of here, both of you.” The man takes the dog off the bar stool, and together they leave the bar. As they’re walking out, the dog turns to the man and shrugs. “DiMaggio?” he says.

  This is what I’m thinking of as I sit on the floor with Lorelei, looking into her deep brown eyes. I’ve been working with her for two hours now, running a few preliminary intelligence tests, and I have to fight the urge to give up my teacher persona and start talking silly puppy-dog talk to her. “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” I want to murmur in baby talk, taking her front paws and lifting them up high until she flops onto her back, a little roughhousing game we have. “Huh, girl?” I want to say, rubbing her belly. “Where’s Joe DiMaggio?” But we’ve got a little more work to do, so I just give her a brief pat on the head and say “Good girl” in an authoritative tone of voice.

  Rhodesian Ridgebacks are big dogs; Lorelei’s head comes to well above my knee when we’re both standing up. They were originally bred to hunt lions, and they are extremely strong and agile when in pursuit of rabbits or other small game (lions being rather rare in our small college town), but in domestic situations they are exceptionally earnest and gentle. They get their name from a distinctive ridge of hair running down the middle of their backs, hair that seems to grow the wrong way, standing up like a long cowlick against their sleek brown coats. When you run your hand across it, it feels bristly, like the buzz cuts boys used to get when I was small. More than anything, it reminds me of a very stiff velvet chair my grandmother had in her house; the fabric felt prickly against the skin whichever way you rubbed it—it was impossible to sit in if your arms or legs were bare—but when you flattened a bit of the nap with your finger, you could feel the softness that lay between the individual threads.

  We began the morning by going through a list I’ve compiled of all the words I know Lorelei understands. She knows her name, of course; I did a brief experiment by calling out other words—broccoli, water bed, Santa Claus—in the same tone I normally use to call her name. She sat up and stared at me when she heard my voice and appeared to listen in a sort of rapture, but she didn’t get up and come running over until I called out “Lorelei.” Good girl, I told her. Good girl.

  Next, we moved on to commands. Come, sit, and stay. Down. Paw and other paw. Come on up (spoken while patting the couch cushion in invitation). Do you want to go out?

  In the early days of our marriage, Lexy taught her the command “Where’s Paul? Go get Paul,” and on Saturday mornings when I slept late and Lexy got tired of waiting for me to wake up, I would wake to find Lorelei hovering over me, her front paws up on the bed and her face looking down into mine. Strangely, I was never able to retaliate; I was never able to make Lorelei understand “Go get Lexy.” She responds splendidly to “Go get your ball” and “Go get your giraffe”—this last refers to a stuffed toy she likes because its long neck lends itself perfectly to games of tug-of-war—but never “Go get Lexy.” Did she simply not know Lexy’s name? Or did she understand me perfectly but refuse to obey, not wanting to violate the private joke she shared with Lexy, her first owner and love?

  All in all, Lorelei knows the meaning of about fifty different words. Dinner and treat. Car and ride. Good and bad. This corresponds roughly to the number of words a human child understands by the age of thirteen months. This is perhaps not a very useful parallel, since by sixteen months or so, a baby will have doubled or tripled that number and will have begun to form rudimentary sentences like “Mama juice” or “Big truck vroom,” whereas for a dog, the list of known words, once learned, will remain more or less static throughout his life. And, of course, at least to an outside observer, the capacity to link words and concepts into sentences as we know them remains outside the dog’s ability.

  What interests me, however, is that in children, language comprehension begins long before language production—between the ages of one and three, children understand about five times as many words as they can speak. By what mechanism does that thirteen-month-old make the leap from comprehension to speech? I believe this is the question that lies at the heart of my project.

  The one advantage Lorelei has over human infants is that the sharpness of her senses allows her to pick up on nonverbal cues that we, as humans, are barely aware of. She can hear the tying of shoelaces two rooms away, and she stands and stretches, knowing it means that someone is going to leave the house, and that perhaps she’ll be going with them. She understands the clatter of silverware in a drawer and the sound of someone settling down on the couch to read the newspaper. She knew what it meant for Lexy to stand before the bathroom mirror putting on her makeup, and when she smelled the particular combination of odors that comprised this event—perhaps the hair scent of the bristles on Lexy’s cosmetic brushes, combined with the perfumed clay of her foundation and the thick, painty smell of her mascara—she would appear, out of nowhere, in front of the bathroom, and finding the door slightly ajar, she would poke her nose through the crack, waiting to see if she was going to be invited along on whatever adventure Lexy was preparin
g herself for.

  Continuing my preliminary tests of Lorelei’s intelligence, I get a dog treat, show it to her, then hide it underneath a cup. She noses the cup, overturns it, and retrieves the treat in six seconds, by my stopwatch. This is very good; it demonstrates impressive problem-solving ability. Next, I test her memory by making a show of hiding a treat in a corner while she watches, then taking her into another room for five minutes. When we return to the living room, she goes right for it. I’m very pleased.

  Something odd happens during the third test. The test consists of covering the dog’s head with a towel and timing how long it takes her to shake it off. It’s another problem-solving task, and I’m expecting Lorelei to pass with flying colors. But when I put the towel over her head, she merely stands there, her head slightly bowed under the weight. I wait a full minute, then a minute and fifteen seconds. She makes no move to get out from underneath, and the hunched shape of her body, the thick green cloth covering her face as thoroughly as a widow’s veil, seems to me suddenly very sad. I’m about to remove the towel myself when the phone rings. I turn to pick it up, and by the time I’ve turned back—it’s a wrong number, and the call lasts no more than five or ten seconds—Lorelei has shaken off the towel and is sitting up, watching me. It occurs to me that maybe the reason she didn’t try to free herself while I was watching is that she wasn’t sure what it was I expected from her. Perhaps she thought I wanted her to stand quietly with a towel over her head. This was the strangest of all the strange games I’d spent the day playing with her, and for once, she couldn’t figure out the rules.

  Suddenly I feel tired; I think we’ve both had enough. I kneel down and put my arms around the dog. “Come on, girl,” I say. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  FOUR

  A friend of mine from college used to live on the nineteenth floor of a high-rise in New York City. His next-door neighbors when he moved in were a youngish couple with a dog. I remember sitting on his balcony, drinking with him into the night, and seeing the woman of this couple come out onto her balcony, right next door, with the dog, a little pug. They had covered the sides of the balcony with chicken wire so that the dog could sit out there safely, without danger of slipping through the bars.

  After my friend had lived there for a year or so, the man next door climbed onto the railing of the balcony and jumped. My friend was in bed when it happened—it was about one A.M.—and he heard a short piercing scream and then nothing more. It wasn’t until the next day, when he was playing loud music and one of the family members who had gathered next door to grieve came by to ask him to turn it down, that he learned what sound he had heard.

  I was in town a month or so later, and I stayed on his couch—this was during the young part of my life when I was happy to have someone else’s couch to sleep on. As we sat drinking on the balcony, we couldn’t stop talking about it. It haunted us, and every conversation seemed to lead back to it. Toward the end of the night, when we’d drunk quite a lot and had moved very quickly through the stages of grief for this man we hadn’t known, we began to joke about it. We looked down from the balcony and tried to imagine the trajectory the man’s body would have taken as it fell. We speculated about where exactly he might have landed—there was a building whose roof lay directly below us, ten stories or so down, but we thought that perhaps the wind might have blown his falling body out over the sidewalk—and it was only as dawn began to break that we realized we were talking quite loudly and that the young widow was sleeping next door. I never found out whether she heard us that night—I suspect not, because when she moved out a month later, she made a special point of thanking my friend for his kindness during that terrible time—but the very possibility of it still fills me with horror. If I were to meet this woman again (and I don’t even know that I’d recognize her all these years later), I would fall to my knees and beg her forgiveness; I would tell her that I only now understand that what I did to her, whether she knew I did it or not, is the unkindest thing I have ever done in my life.

  I was thirty-nine when I met Lexy. Before that, I was married for many years to a woman whose voice filled our house like a thick mortar, sealing every crack and corner. Maura, this first wife of mine, spoke so much while saying so little that I sometimes felt as if I were drowning in the heavy paste of her words. The most ordinary details of our lives had to be broken down and processed; in every conversation, I had to choose my words carefully, because I knew that any of them, innocuous though they seemed to me, might mire me in a nightlong conversation about my motives in uttering them. It seemed to me that Maura was anxious all the time, nervous she might not be doing it all right, and the only way she could keep control of the pieces of her life was to analyze them until there was no life left in them at all. Sometimes, in the car, we’d be driving in silence, and I’d glance over at her when her face was, for a rare moment, unguarded. “What are you worrying about right this second?” I’d ask. And she always had an answer.

  Toward the end, after I’d begun to refuse to participate with her in these dialogues, she began leaving me notes. Just normal things at first—“Please pick up some milk” or “Don’t forget dinner at Mike and Jane’s tonight”—but as time went on, they became more and more complex and increasingly hostile.

  Our marriage ended late one night when I came home to find a note that said, “I’ve asked you several times to do me the favor of putting your breakfast dishes in the dishwasher before you leave for work in the morning, and yet I’ve come home once again to find your coffee mug sitting on the table. I guess I’ve been wrong in assuming that I can expect you, as my husband, to listen to me when I voice my needs, and to honor my wishes with sensitivity and respect. We need to talk about this as soon as possible.” The last four words were underlined twice.

  I picked up a pen—this was not my finest moment, I’ll admit—and wrote “Fuck you. I’m sick of your fucking notes” across the bottom of the paper. I stuck it on the refrigerator for her to find in the morning. We left each other the next day, but not until she’d tried to engage me in one last conversation. I walked out without saying a word.

  I met Lexy less than a year later, and I knew from our first conversation that when she talked it was an easy thing, plain and open, with none of the byzantine turns and traps I found myself caught in when I talked to Maura.

  We met because she was having a yard sale, and I happened to follow her handmade signs from the main road. Going to yard sales was something I had taken to doing after my divorce. I liked the treasure hunt of driving through neighborhoods I’d never visited before, and I liked investigating the small mysteries of the lives of the people I met—how had they come to acquire this particular combination of things (shower radios and ornate liquor decanters, hand-crocheted baby sweaters and limited edition Super Bowl Coke cans long since emptied of their contents), and what had happened along the way to make them decide these items no longer had a place in their home? I found a strange, childlike excitement in the promise that I might discover something I had been looking for for years without even knowing it, and it reassured me, humbled me somehow, to see that other people’s lives, too, could be broken down into pieces and spread out on the lawn for anyone to examine.

  On this particular Saturday, I pulled up in front of a small green house, set back from the street by a tree-shaded lawn. Lexy was sitting on the front steps, reading a paperback. She had dark blond hair, dipping just below her chin, and she was wearing a loose cotton dress printed with a pattern of vines and flowers. She was very pretty—I won’t say I didn’t notice—but I did little more than register the fact and let it go. She was easily eight or nine years younger than I was, and I immediately added her to the “wouldn’t be interested” list that grew longer in my mind with each passing day.

  She looked up and smiled as I got out of my car. “Hi,” she called. “Let me know if you have any questions.”

  An enormous brown dog lay on the grass nearby. The dog looked up at me
with wide-eyed interest for a moment, then laid her head once more on her thick paws.

  I browsed the tables that had been set out. There was the usual collection of books and CDs, a worn-looking toaster oven, souvenir glasses with cartoon characters painted on them. I didn’t find much that interested me, but I didn’t want to leave just yet. At the back of the yard, toward the house, I noticed a rack of formal dresses of the shiny, oddly cut bridesmaid variety. A sign attached to the rack read, “Free to anyone who likes to play dress-up. One per customer. Free dyed-to-match shoes with every dress.”

  “Any takers?” I asked, pointing to the dresses.

  “A couple of little girls who took the choice very seriously, and a guy who fell in love with this awful off-the-shoulder floral thing. It actually looked great on him. Sometimes I think bridesmaids’ dresses are actually designed for drag queens.”

  I smiled. “My ex-wife has friends who still won’t talk to her.” I was surprised to find I had said this. Was I flirting? Letting her know I was available? This was certainly more information than I usually gave out to perfect strangers.

  I was afraid I might have put her off—Warning: pathetic, lonely man on the prowl—but she laughed. “What color?” she asked.

  “Lavender. With puffy sleeves and a big bow across the back.”

  “Ah, the butt bow. Why do they always insist on the butt bow?”

  “I just don’t know,” I said. I turned away, unsure of what to say next, and began to examine a collection of objects spread on a blanket. A small cardboard box, labeled Square Egg Press, caught my eye. The picture on the front showed a plate of hard-boiled white cubes on a bed of parsley. One of the cubes was cut into careful slices, displaying the square shock of yellow yolk inside. I opened the box and found a hard plastic cylinder with a squat square base. According to the instructions, you were supposed to place a hard-boiled egg, warm and quivering and rid of its shell, into the square chamber, then drop a sort of plastic hat on top of it. There was a screw-on lid, which, I gathered, pushed down on this egg hat, applying the pressure necessary to negotiate the egg into its new, unnatural shape.