The Dogs of Babel

TWENTY-TWO

When I was a child, one of my favorite games on long car trips and rainy afternoons was to write a word, any word, at the top of a piece of paper and list beneath it all the words that could be made from its letters. The point wasn’t so much to count the number of words that I found, it was more to see what those words revealed about the word they came from. It was like magic to me, like a secret code to crack. Break apart family, and you find both yam, homey as Thanksgiving, and lam, the inevitable flight from the nest. Is it any accident that loser contains the letters to form sore?

I liked the surprise of the images this game conjured up and the way that the pictures it painted were often so right. I broke down father, and I saw the way my own father was like a raft, bobbing along, holding us all up. I broke down mother, and I saw the way my mother hovered around us like a moth.

I find myself playing the same game now, writing down names and seeing what they can tell me. Look inside Lorelei and you find roll and lie, two very doggy verbs, two things she does very well. But look further and you’ll see she carries within her a story to tell (see, there it is—lore) and a role she herself plays in that story.

Break open Lexy Ransome and you find omen and sexy and soar.Lost and rose.Yearn and near and anymore. See how it works? It doesn’t bear thinking about. It couldn’t be clearer. Only one letter away from remorse, and one letter away from answer.

My own name, Paul Iverson, holds a wealth of words within it. Many of them, disconcertingly, have to do with the life of the body. Look and you’ll see that I am made up of veins and liver and pores, nape and penis, loins and pulse. Try as I might, I cannot escape this body of mine that breathes and beats and lives, that still sweats in the sun and craves water to drink. That passes urine like any living thing. I am tangible as the earth. I am soil; I am vapor. But look again: I am more than my body, I am more than my living self. Look again and you’ll find soul and reason, prose and salve and lover. I am nervous and son and naive. I’m as human as you can get. I snore and I pine. (One letter away from passion. One letter away from reveal.)

These are the notes I made during my talk with Caitlin, and they tell me more than anything she said. She told me I had faced great sadness in my life. (And who, I wanted to ask her, who hasn’t? Who, at least among those willing to pay three hundred dollars an hour for advice, hasn’t faced some misery they don’t know how to bear?) She told me things would get better. She told me she saw a woman in my future, and when I balked, when I told her I couldn’t imagine such a thing ever again, she told me she saw a man. Granted, I didn’t give her much to work with. I told her my real birthday and my real name, but when she asked if I was married, I said only, “Not anymore,” and I left her to draw her own conclusions. I resisted her attempts to draw my story out of me; if she’s being paid to be a psychic, I thought, then let her figure it out. Part of me, I admit, wanted her to tell me something true; part of me wanted her powers to be real. It’s a strange role they play, these “psychics,” part priest-confessor, part therapist, and I was half hoping she would tell me something that would make everything make sense. I was half hoping that somehow she would save me. But in the end, she was just some woman from Ohio sitting in her living room, talking to a stranger in the middle of the night. And me, I was just some schmuck paying for a phone call he couldn’t afford.

Now, outside, the dawn is breaking. It’s been a very long night. I feel empty now, too tired to think anymore about Lexy and her call to Lady Arabelle and what it all means. When I go into the bedroom, I find Lorelei sleeping across the foot of the bed, and I decide not to shoo her off. I crawl between the sheets, curling myself into a ball so as not to kick her, and almost immediately, I am asleep.