The Dogs of Babel

FOURTEEN

I think it was fairly early in our courtship that Lexy told me the story of how Lorelei came to be her dog. Lorelei was maybe five months old when she first entered Lexy’s life. She showed up on Lexy’s doorstep one day during a sudden summer storm, a big bleeding puppy under a dark and shrunken sky. Lexy was walking around the house, closing windows, when she heard a low whine from outside, followed by a short, insistent bark. She opened the door to find a puppy with big ears and a ridge down her back and a gash in her throat that matted her fur with blood. “Hi,” Lexy said. “Who are you?” She bent down to check for a collar and tags, but there were none. “Wait here,” she said, and she ran to get a towel. She brought the dog inside and washed the cut with a warm soapy cloth. Lorelei flinched as Lexy touched the cloth to the wound, but she didn’t make a sound and she didn’t snap at Lexy. The gash wasn’t big, but it looked deep. Lexy took the phone book down from the top of the refrigerator, and she looked up veterinarians. When she brought her back home from the vet, Lorelei had four stitches in her throat. The doctor wasn’t sure what had caused the injury. There were no bite marks, so he didn’t think it had resulted from a fight with another dog. He thought that perhaps Lorelei had gotten tangled in some low brambles or had somehow torn her flesh on a piece of rough metal, although the edges of the cut were fairly smooth. He allowed that the wound could have been inflicted by a human being, although he couldn’t imagine what the purpose might have been.

Lexy had had every intention of trying to find the puppy’s owner, but this last possibility made her hesitate. Besides, the more time she spent with Lorelei, the more reluctant she was to give her up. The “Found Puppy” ad she had composed to send to the paper sat on the kitchen table unmailed, and the signs she had photocopied to post around the neighborhood never went up. She kept an eye out to see if anyone reported a missing Ridgeback—the doctor had identified the breed for her—but when no one did, she was glad. By then, Lorelei was sleeping in Lexy’s bed every night, her big puppy paws twitching in dreams, and following Lexy around during the day as she worked. And that’s how Lorelei and Lexy came to belong to one another.

Lately, my work has involved studying Lorelei’s vocalizations, the sounds she already knows how to make. So far, I’ve isolated and cataloged six distinct kinds of bark, four different yelps, three whines, and two growls. There is, for example, a certain sharp, staccato burst of noise she makes only when she has been trying to get my attention when it’s past her feeding time, say, or time to go for a walk, and she utters it only when a sustained period of sitting at my feet and staring pointedly up at me has failed to elicit a response. There is a soft, low growl, almost leisurely in its cadences, that rises from deep in her throat when she hears the slam of a car door outside the house, which is entirely different from the angry warning growl that precedes a bout of barking in the event that the owner of said car has the nerve to walk up the front steps and knock on the door. When I arrive home after an absence, she greets me in short, joyful syllables, and when I make a wrong step and inadvertently land on her tail, the sweet, shocked outrage of her yelp can nearly bring me to tears. I have come to recognize the differences in these sounds and the wide spectrum of canine emotion contained within them in the same way that a new mother learns to understand the different pitches and tremors of her child’s wail. I have reached the point where, when Lorelei makes a sound, I know exactly what she means.

I’ve been paying special attention to the sounds she makes that might be translated into human language, the English phonemes buried within every bark and every whimper. The rolling r of her growl, for example, and the wide o of her howl. It’s an alphabet rich in vowels and softly voiced consonants. She can make a w sound as well as a kind of h, which evolves into a hard, guttural ch when she coughs. When she lies on her back and offers me her belly, the lolling of her tongue sometimes results in something close to an l. The sounds that elude her are the harder consonants, the ones that require movement of the lips: she has no b, no p, no v in her repertoire. She will never speak my name, that much seems clear, but I still dare to hope she may one day speak her own.

I read yesterday that the prison which houses Wendell Hollis has just instituted a program that allows inmates in good standing to train guide dogs for the blind as part of their rehabilitation. It seems unlikely—at least, I hope it is—that the infamous Dog Butcher of Brooklyn will be eligible for participation. But how must it be for Hollis, after three years condemned to the company of humans, when he looks out of the narrow window of his cell and sees dogs at play?

I cannot say exactly what it is that fascinates me about Hollis. I suppose I feel a sort of kinship with him. Whatever the differences in our methodologies, we are both driven by the same desire. We both want, more than anything, to coax words from the canine throat. The only difference is that I would not use a knife to do it.

I am curious about him. The turns my life has taken to bring me to the jumping-off point for this strange inquiry I have undertaken are so complex that I can hardly imagine them replicated in a single other life. And yet here we are, the two of us; we have wound up in the same place.

I think I may write him a letter.