The Dogs of Babel Read online

  ELEVEN

  There is a kind of grieving that dogs do, a patient waiting for homecoming, a sniffing for a scent that is no longer there. Since Lexy died, I have often seen Lorelei sitting at the top of the basement stairs, listening for noises from the workshop below. This morning, I find her in the bedroom, sleeping stretched out on one of Lexy’s sweaters. I must have left the closet door open, and I can only assume that Lorelei, drawn by the scent of Lexy’s perfume, her hair, her skin, still lingering on her clothes, jumped up and tugged at the garment until she had freed it from its slippery, padded hanger. I don’t take the sweater away from her. Instead, I walk quietly out of the room and leave her to breathe in her memories, whatever they might be.

  Today I have to go to the university to pick up some papers I left in my office. It’s the first time I’ve been back since the day two months ago when I announced my research plans to my colleagues. It wasn’t a very good day, the day I presented my proposal to the department; when I got to the part about canine language acquisition, the whole room turned very quiet, and people began to examine inanimate objects—their pens, their wedding rings, the conference table—with alarming intensity.

  I’m hoping I won’t run into anyone today, and in fact I’ve planned my trip for a time when I thought no one would be around, but it seems that in my absence they’ve changed the day on which faculty meetings are held. I arrive to find every professor in the department standing in the hallway outside the conference room, drinking coffee and talking. They grow silent as, one by one, they see me approaching.

  Julia Desmond is the first to speak. Julia is a tall woman, blessed with family money and prone to wearing extravagant jewelry. Today it’s rubies.

  “Paul,” she says brightly, coming toward me with her arms outstretched. “How are you?”

  I accept her embrace and kiss her lightly on the cheek. “Fine,” I say. “Just fine.” I look around at the group of people staring at me, smiles fixed on their faces. “I just came by to pick up a few things,” I say.

  “Great, great,” says Julia. “We’ve missed you around here.” She smiles at me a moment longer, her hands still on my arms. She seems unsure what to say next. “Well, good to see you,” she says finally. She retreats into the conference room.

  I make my way to my office, the crowd parting for me as if I were a holy man. Matthew Rice, the head of the department and a good friend of mine, comes up and stands beside me as I unlock the door. He follows me inside.

  “So how are you really doing, Paul?” he asks, shutting the door behind him.

  “So-so,” I say.

  “We’ve all been worried about you,” he says. “But you’re looking good.”

  “Thank you,” I say. I’m pretty sure he’s lying. I haven’t been paying much attention to my appearance of late. I know I’ve lost weight since Lexy’s death, and my clothes hang on me quite loosely.

  “Are you keeping busy?” he asks, and seems immediately to regret it.

  “Yes,” I say. “My research has been occupying most of my time.”

  He nods and looks away from me. “Are you still working on that . . . project?” he asks. “The one with the dog?”

  “Yes,” I say, perhaps too brightly. “It’s going quite well.”

  He doesn’t meet my eyes. “That’s great,” he says, after a pause. “You know, Eleanor and I have that little beach house in Rehoboth, and you’re welcome to borrow it if you’d like. It might do you good to get away for a while.”

  I think about it. Early morning walks on the beach with Lorelei running ahead of me, evenings bathed in the scent of sea air. It’s not an unwelcome idea.

  Matthew goes on. “The only thing is,” he says, “Eleanor’s allergic to dogs, so you wouldn’t be able to bring Lorelei. But you can always board her or something for a week or two. Julia has dogs; she might be able to give you the name of a good kennel.”

  Of course, I think. Of course. “Thanks anyway,” I say. My voice sounds thin and brittle as glass. “But I don’t think I can leave my research at this particular point.”

  Matthew nods, looking down at the floor. “All right, then,” he says, turning toward the door. He looks stricken. I soften a bit.

  “Really, I’m fine,” I say. “I’m sure this whole thing sounds crazy to you, but I really think there’s something there. I feel like I’m on the verge of something important. I just need some time to work it out.”

  He smiles doubtfully, but at least he’s meeting my eyes. “Just imagine,” he says, “what it will mean if you succeed.” He pauses thoughtfully, considering it. “Well, I’ve got to get back to the meeting. Keep in touch, okay?”

  “I will,” I say. “Give my love to Eleanor.”

  I gather up the things I need and prepare to leave. On my way out, I notice a scrap of pink paper that has, apparently, been slid under the door. I pick it up. It’s a While You Were Out slip. Scrawled across the top it says, “Your dog called.” In the message space below, there are two words: “Woof, woof.” I crumple up the note and throw it away.

  Back at home, I pick up Lexy’s sweater from the bedroom floor and hold it to my face. I wonder what she would think of the turns my life has taken. Lorelei wanders in to greet me, and I give her a little scratch behind the ears.

  “Where’s Lexy?” I say to her. She looks up at me sharply. “Go get Lexy,” I say. And all of a sudden, she’s off, running wildly from room to room. I watch, heart-struck, as she charges through the house, sniffing in corners and barking. “Lorelei,” I call after her. “No! Stop it, girl! Quiet! Come!” I run through every command she knows. But it’s no use. I can’t stop her, not now that I’ve spoken those magic words. Around and around the house she runs, searching and yowling for what she has lost.

  TWELVE

  The first time I asked Lexy to marry me, she said no. It was early December, about nine months since we’d first met, and we’d gone away for the weekend. We were staying at a small inn on the beach, and the day had been rainy and blustery. We’d spent most of our time inside, with the fireplace lit, playing board games and drinking wine.

  Now, as we lay in bed, Lexy reached over and picked up a felt-tip pen from the bedside table and took hold of both my hands. “This is what you give to me,” she said, and she began to write. She started on the backs of my hands and then turned them over to write on the palms. She covered my hands with words. Square eggs, she wrote, and beaches in winter. Your lips on my neck and a week of appetizers, and really bad music. She wrote, Coffee milk, and Scrabble and flowers that look like the devil. By the time she had finished, there was no space left at all.

  “Now it’s your turn,” she said. She gave me the pen and offered up her hands. I didn’t know what to write. Hunger, I thought, and fullness. A feeling like wings inside me. The days and the seasons and a dog with a rough velvet hide. But instead I took her hand, and writing upside down so she could read it, I wrote letter by letter and finger by finger, whole world.

  It was the truest, most romantic thing I had ever said, and I didn’t even say it out loud. Caught up as I was in the wide generosity of my emotions, I turned her hands over and, almost without thinking about it, wrote across her palms, Will you marry me?

  She drew back and pulled her hands away. “Are you serious?” she said. She wasn’t smiling.

  “I am completely serious,” I said, surprised to find that I was.

  “You’re asking me to marry you.”

  “I’m asking you to marry me.”

  She searched my face. “Well . . . no,” she said. She looked away. “I have to say no. We don’t know enough about each other yet.”

  I was perfectly calm. I was prepared to give her some time to get used to the idea. “You know everything there is to know about me,” I said. “And I know enough about you to know that I love you.”

  She turned away from me. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  She didn’t speak for a moment. She had made her back stiff a
nd hard, and when I reached out to touch her, she flinched away. “I know you love me,” she said finally. Her voice was ragged. “But how do you know that you love me?”

  “Well, I know it because I want to be with you all the time,” I began.

  “No. That’s not what I mean. I mean, how does it occur to you? How often do you really know it?”

  “Always. I always know it.”

  “Yes, you always know it, but it’s . . . it’s like in the back of your mind, right? It’s like . . . it’s like the way that you know that you’re going to die.”

  I reached for her shoulder and rolled her over so that she was looking at me again. “Lexy, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “Well, I mean, everyone knows that they’re going to die, right, but most of the time you let it slip from your mind. I mean, it’s always there in your head, and if anyone asked, you’d know the answer. But then there are some moments when all of a sudden you just know it, you know? It suddenly hits you that you’re going to die someday, and you say, ‘Oh, my God, this is the biggest fact of my life, and I’d almost forgotten.’”

  “Well, so what?” I said. “What does that have to do with anything? No, I don’t think about my own death every moment of every day, but that’s because I want to forget it. You can’t go on with your life if you don’t forget about it sometimes. But that’s not the way I feel about you.”

  “But still. That’s the way you experience it, right? It’s in fits and starts.” She turned away again.

  I ran my hands over my face, rubbing hard at the skin, trying to feel the sturdiness underneath. We had not fought like this before, and I felt as if I were trying to swim through molasses. “Come on, Lexy, why are you doing this? I love you all the time. It’s always with me. But what do you want me to say? You can’t maintain that level of intensity every minute of your life.”

  She was very quiet. “Well, I can. I do. I can’t take one breath, not one single breath, without knowing that I love you.”

  I just lay there for a moment, looking at the long line of her back. “Where is this coming from?” I asked.

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she turned and looked at me. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I guess you just kind of freaked me out a little, proposing like that, out of the blue.”

  “Do you want me to take it back?”

  She held her hands up in front of her face, looking at the words I’d written. “No,” she said. “I don’t want you to take it back.” She sighed. “But I can’t say yes yet. I don’t think you know enough about me. What if you find out more and you change your mind?”

  “Well, I don’t think that’s likely. But, okay, go ahead—tell me the things I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” she said. Her voice was very quiet and even. “I’ll marry you if you can answer this question for me: Do I have any tattoos?”

  I stared at her. I knew the whole of her skin by heart. Did she think there was anything I had missed? “No,” I said. “You don’t.”

  She lowered her head and parted her hair for me. I could see black ink on her scalp. “Sorry,” she said.

  I bent over her head, examining. I couldn’t make it out. “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s snake hair,” she said. “Like Medusa.”

  “Wow,” I said. I tried to follow the lines on her head, to make out the scales and the angry snake faces, but her hair was too thick. “When did you get it?”

  “When I was seventeen.” She pulled away from my hands, still resting in her hair, and raised her head to look at me. “I used to pull my hair out. It’s kind of a nervous disorder.”

  I nodded. “I’ve heard of that,” I said. “Let me think, what’s it called?” I puzzled out the possible Latin and Greek roots. “Trichotillomania?”

  Lexy stared at me and shook her head. “You know the damnedest things,” she said. “Anyway, my parents took me to a couple of different doctors, and they put me on medication for it, but nothing worked. So one day, I just decided to shave my head and be done with it.”

  I thought about my Lexy as a young girl, standing bald and brazen before the world. It was a strangely moving thought. “And did it work?” I asked.

  “Well, yeah. There was nothing left to pull on.”

  “Right.”

  “So I kept it shaved for a year or so, until I felt like things were better in my life and it’d be safe to grow it back. I got the tattoo as kind of a talisman. It’s my secret strength. It protects me from falling back into that place where I used to be.”

  I reached out tentatively. She took my hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For ruining your nice proposal.” She held her hands out before her and looked at the words again. “It was very sweet.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I just need some time,” she said. “To trust that this is all real.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  So I waited. I waited for five more months. And one morning, I awoke to find a single word printed across my palm. Yes, it said.

  THIRTEEN

  Here’s the thing: I wasn’t entirely honest with Detective Anthony Stack when he asked me if Lexy had ever mentioned suicide. In fact, I wasn’t honest at all. Which is not to say that I had any reason to believe Lexy was suicidal in the months and weeks leading up to her death; at least, I had no such reasons at the time. But it would be dishonest of me not to reveal at this point that she did, during the sweet, breath-holding time of our engagement, tell me that there had been moments in her life when she had thought about killing herself.

  The only time she came close, she told me, occurred during that hair-tearing year of her adolescence, the year the snakes took up residence on her scalp. Her parents were going through a divorce, and she was having a hard time in school—but I say that as if those are reasons. As if the fabric of human misery can be spooled apart into threads just like that. How many young girls that year had trouble in school, had trouble with their parents, and still never thought to pick up a knife and press its cold point against their wrist? No. There’s more to it than that, and more scientific minds than mine have yet to piece it all together.

  But whatever that fatal elixir is, that mixture of circumstance and temperament that leads a person to the edge of death and sometimes back again, it flowed through Lexy’s body like blood. She fell into a deep depression, and the effort of wading through each day, the weight she carried like a stone in her gut, left her exhausted. She would come home from school and crawl into her bed and stay there until it was almost time for her mother to come home from work, and she knew she had to rouse herself and create some semblance of normalcy. During those afternoons, lying in bed until the light faded, she wrote things on her arms and legs, places that she knew could be hidden with clothing, digging deep into her flesh with the pen. Sometimes, she wrote, I feel like I could start crying and not stop for a day and a night, and maybe that would be enough. And maybe it wouldn’t. She wrote, Sometimes I feel like I have a ragged hole inside me, and it gets bigger every day. She wrote, Once upon a time, there was a girl who just disappeared. She laughed when she told me these things, making fun of the drama of her teen angst, but I could see that it hurt her to remember. It was during those afternoons in bed that she began to pull out her hair. She wanted, she said, to make her pain tangible, to feel something on the outside. As she lined up the strands of hair on the sheet next to her, she told me, she felt a sense of accomplishment.

  It was on the night of her senior prom that all those months of unhappiness crystallized into a single moment of action, and she actually thought she would kill herself.

  Lexy had two close friends at the time, Brian and Sara. Brian was gay, and Sara had a boyfriend named Jon who was a year older and in college. Since Sara was going to the prom with Jon, it just made sense for Lexy and Brian to go together. Neither of them wanted to miss
out. So Sara and Lexy went dress shopping. Sara wanted something black and sexy, as unpromlike as possible. Lexy wanted to be pretty, in spite of herself. She wanted a prom dress. She found something perfect at a vintage clothing store, a pale blue 1950s strapless gown with a spray of pink roses embroidered diagonally across the dress from bodice to hem. She loved the dress, but she was embarrassed about her hair, about the bald spots that showed in between the few wispy tendrils that were left, so the day of the prom, she took a razor and shaved her head. She was pleased with the way it looked; she liked the way her smooth scalp felt when she ran her hands over it. The effect of the bald girl in the satin evening gown was unusual, to say the least, but it made her feel glamorous.

  The prom was not what she thought it would be. People stared at her newly shaven head with open disdain, and she felt lonely dancing with Brian, good friend though he was. She wanted to be one of the girls with boyfriends, handsome in their tuxes, boyfriends who stroked their bare shoulders and whispered in their ears what they would do to them later on. She didn’t even like these boys, there wasn’t a single one she could point to and honestly say she could imagine being with, but she wanted someone who wanted her back. She thought about dancing with a boy who’d become aroused at the press of her body, who’d close his eyes and touch his lips to the top of her head. She wanted the fantasy of romance and feeling grown-up, not her awkward friend Brian whose hands were light and unsure on her arms and whose eyes kept drifting to look at Michael Patterson, the boy he’d had a crush on all spring. She envied Sara, sophisticated in her sheer black dress and heavy eye makeup, who knew she’d be kissing someone and more when the night came to an end. Afterward, they went to a Holiday Inn where they’d arranged a couple of rooms for the night—Lexy’s mom had even agreed to pay her share, knowing nothing was going to happen between her and Brian—and got drunk, the four of them, until Sara and Jon started making out and decided to slip off to their own room, leaving Lexy and Brian alone together.