The Dogs of Babel

SIXTEEN

I’ve had a dream that Lorelei speaks to me. In the dream, I’m sitting at the kitchen table, eating a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, when Lorelei walks in on her two hind legs. She speaks, and her voice is surprisingly high-pitched. She sounds like a character in a cartoon.

“Give me a meatball,” she says, “and I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

I spear a meatball with my fork and hold it out to her. She gives it a tentative lick, then grabs it with her teeth and charges out of the room. I jump up and run after her. When I catch up with her, she’s in my office, lying in front of a door I’ve never seen before.

“She’s in there,” says Lorelei, her mouth full of meat.

I open the door. Inside is a small closet. Lexy sits huddled on the floor. She’s dressed in a blue nightgown. She is very thin. “What took you so long?” she says.

I wake up then with a start, my chest filled with a wild joy. It’s a moment before I can situate myself, before I come to myself again and remember that I am alone in my bed and my wife is gone. Disappointment runs through me with a terrible heat.

I sit up and turn on the light. It’s almost dawn. Lorelei is sleeping on the floor next to the bed. “Lorelei,” I call. She raises her head. “Come on up, girl. Up, up.” I pat the bed.

This is an unusual request on my part, and I have to repeat it a second time before she obeys. She yawns, then stands and stretches, and finally jumps up on the bed and settles herself next to me. I stroke her fur. “I had a dream about you, girl,” I say. “Do you want to hear my dream?” She sighs deeply—one of her most human sounds—and closes her eyes.

I lie next to her for a minute, my hand on her stomach, feeling the sleepy rise and fall of her breath. I want nothing more than to close my eyes and to find my way back to Lexy’s hiding place, to gather her in my arms and lift her thin body out into the light, but as the moments pass, it becomes clear to me that I’m not going to get back to sleep, and I know that even if I do, I would probably find myself in a different dream entirely. The sad truth of dreams is that they rarely let you travel to the same place twice.

I decide to go for a walk. I get out of bed and put on my shoes, without changing out of the sweats and T-shirt I slept in. I grab my keys and my wallet and walk out into the misty dawn.

I’m not headed anywhere in particular, but after a few blocks I see the all-night supermarket looming ahead of me, an oasis of light in the dark landscape. It seems as good a destination as any.

The supermarket is a strange place at five A.M. You find a surprisingly wide cross-section of people—guys who have worked the night shift stopping by to pick up beer and cigarettes on their way home, mothers who have come out after a sleepless night to buy diapers, baby aspirin, Popsicles to soothe sore throats. I see a woman in a black cocktail dress buying a pint of ice cream. I see a homeless man with a basketful of groceries, holding up a jar of marinated artichoke hearts, examining it closely. He reads the ingredients on the back with great interest and then gently places the jar in his cart. I see that his cart is full of all kinds of luxury food—cans of smoked oysters, a cake from the bakery, a family-size frozen lasagne. I want to offer him some money—actually, I want to pay for his entire basket of food—but I have the sense that it would ruin the fantasy for him, the illusion that he’s just another customer wandering the bright aisles. I leave him in the condiment section, where he’s comparing two different brands of barbecue sauce.

I walk through the aisles like a ghost, my basket empty. What do I want? It’s all laid out before me, anything I could possibly need. I have only to choose. I remember a time early in our relationship when Lexy and I stayed up all night, talking and making love, and ventured out at dawn to walk to this very supermarket to buy bagels and juice. “Don’t think about it,” I say out loud. “Don’t think about it.” I think about my dream, Lexy hidden in the closet all those months, waiting for me to find her. And then I know what I want. I want spaghetti and meatballs.

I gather ground beef and parsley, tomatoes and bread crumbs and Parmesan cheese. I pay for my purchases and walk home under the pale morning sun.

I put on some music while I chop the onions and garlic, break the eggs, measure the bread crumbs. Lorelei comes into the kitchen as soon as I pull the cellophane from the package of meat, and she sits on the floor, watching me with interest. I focus on each small task completely, letting it occupy all of my mind. Now you heat the oil in the pan. Now you plunge your hands into the cold meat and squeeze it between your fingers.

By seven A.M., the house is filled with the warm scent of it. For the first time in months, it smells like someone lives here. I eat a big plateful, and when I’m done, I feed Lorelei three meatballs, one after another, from my fork. The way she takes them in her teeth is surprisingly delicate. I crawl back into bed and fall into a welcome, dreamless sleep.