The Dogs of Babel

TWENTY-FOUR

Lexy and I had been married six or seven months, I think, when she got the call to make the mask of the dead girl. She called me at work.

“Hi,” she said. “Do you know where Van Buren’s Funeral Home is?”

“Um, I’m not sure,” I said. “Why, did somebody die?”

“No. Well, somebody did, but it’s not anyone I know.”

“What?”

“I just got this call, out of the blue,” she said. “It was from a woman whose daughter just died, and she wants me to make a mask from the girl’s face.”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “And you’re going to do it?”

“Well, I was a little put off when she first started telling me what she wanted, but the more she explained it, the more sense it made. I guess this girl—she was nineteen, she was in college—it sounds like she had some kind of cancer. Her mother sounded very calm and rational; I think they knew this was coming for a long time. Anyway, this girl was a theater major, and she was kind of quirky, and she wasn’t afraid of death, her mother said. Her parents think she would’ve approved of this. They think it would be a nice way to remember her.”

“Uck,” I said. “I think it sounds creepy. Don’t you think? It doesn’t sound like a very healthy way to grieve, to keep a mold of your daughter’s dead face around. What are they going to do with it, display it on the coffee table?”

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “It’s kind of weird. But there’s something about this that appeals to me. It’s important work, you know? More important than most of the things I take on. I mean, this is the last chance they have to capture their daughter’s face the way it really looks.”

“The way it looks in death. Don’t they have any pictures of her, pictures of the way she looked when she was alive?”

Lexy sighed. “Maybe I’m not going to be able to explain it to you,” she said. “But I think I understand. You know, death masks have been around for thousands of years. And I read once that back when photography was new, people used to have pictures taken of their loved ones in their coffins. Or mothers would take their dead babies to be photographed. It would be the only thing they’d have to remember them by.”

“That’s very sad. But I still think it’s a strange request.”

“I don’t know. I think there’s something sacred about capturing the human face in the moment of death. Think about this—if no one ever wanted to remember the way their loved ones looked after they died, then why would we have open caskets at funerals?”

“Well, I’m not too crazy about that either,” I said.

“I think there’s something comforting about it,” she said. “You know, death is this big mystery, and it’s something we’re all afraid of, but when you see someone who’s actually dead, they look peaceful. It doesn’t look so bad. Especially if it’s someone who’s been through a lot of pain and is finally at rest. Maybe that’s what this girl’s parents want to capture.”

“I suppose,” I said. “But are you sure you want to be a part of this?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure.”

At the time, I found the whole business unsavory. It seemed to me an act of desperation on the part of the girl’s parents, an unwillingness to let go. Even without knowing this dead girl, I doubted she would have chosen this as the way she wanted her parents to grieve. To keep her dead face in their home, always in sight? To keep them rooted forever to the moment of her death? If the goal of grief is to learn to move on, I thought, to learn how to inhabit the same space as absence and to keep living anyhow, then surely these sad people were doing a disservice not only to themselves but to the memory of their poor lost daughter.

But now, having come to know grief as intimately as I have, having lived in its bare rooms for so long and walked its empty halls, I’m not so sure they were wrong.

When Lexy died, I admit I took some cloistered comfort in seeing that her face had not been bruised in the fall. And in spite of what I may have said, when the time came I did have an open casket at her funeral, and every time someone said to me, “Oh, she looks so beautiful,” it was like a balm to me. When I knelt by her coffin, my mind wiped suddenly blank of all my childhood prayers, and I reached out to touch her cheek, I stared as hard as I could bear to and I fixed in my mind every detail of the way she looked, because I knew it would be the last time I would ever lay my eyes on her. Would I want a mask of Lexy as she looked in death, to hang on the wall, perhaps, next to the mask of Lexy as she looked in life? No. But I would not presume to tell any other grief-sick wanderer that what he needs is wrong. I would not dare.

I was afraid that embarking on such a morbid project would throw Lexy into a fit of melancholy, but when she came home she was glowing.

“She was beautiful,” she said. “Very gaunt, from the illness, but you could see she had really beautiful features.”

I tried to picture the dead girl, waiflike on the slab. I could not quite imagine beauty there.

“They hadn’t put the makeup on her yet, you know, for the funeral, so her skin was very pale. I had to work quickly—they needed me to be done by this afternoon. But it didn’t take me very long to make the mold. Not to be morbid, but it’s easier when you don’t have to keep telling the person to stay still.”

“Was she cold?” I asked. I hadn’t spent much time around dead bodies. Even when my father died, I had kind of kept my distance at the funeral.

“Not ice-cold. But cool. Cooler than a living person.”

“Did you talk to the parents?”

“Yeah, of course. I sat down with them to discuss what they wanted the end product to be like.”

“And what were they like?” At this point, I still couldn’t imagine a healthy-minded person doing such a thing.

“They seemed very normal. Sad, of course. The father started crying at one point. But they were very grateful that I was willing to do this for them. They were afraid they wouldn’t find anyone.”

With good reason, I wanted to say. But I kept quiet.

“Listen,” I said instead. “What do you say we go out and get some dinner? After a day like that, you need to be among the living.”

“Actually,” she said, “do you mind if we just order something in? I’m kind of anxious to go downstairs and get to work on this while it’s all fresh in my mind.”

“Okay,” I said. I was disappointed. It was a Friday night, and I’d been looking forward to spending it with Lexy, doing something nice together, getting a start on the weekend. We were still newlyweds, after all. But it had been a while since I’d seen her so excited about a project, and as distasteful as I found it myself, I didn’t want to ruin her good mood. I went into the kitchen and ordered a pizza.

Lexy worked all weekend on the mask, coming upstairs only to get food from the kitchen or to pace around the living room, deep in thought. Lorelei spent most of the time down in the basement with Lexy, as she always did when Lexy was working, so it was a rather solitary couple of days for me. On Sunday night, I was sitting in the living room reading when I looked up to see Lorelei standing in front of me.

“Hi, girl,” I said. I reached out to pat her head, and as I did, I noticed there was a piece of paper sticking out of her collar. I removed it. It said, “Ms. Alexandra Ransome requests the honour of your presence in the basement for an unveiling of her latest work.” I laughed, and all was forgiven. I walked to the basement door, with Lorelei trailing behind me.

Lexy was stretched out on the battered couch when I got downstairs. The mask was on the worktable, covered with a cloth.

“Did you just get the note?” she asked, standing up. “I sent Lorelei up a half hour ago.”

“I guess the Ridgeback Express isn’t as quick as it could be. You never know when she’ll have to make an unscheduled stop to eat a bug or something.”

“So are you ready to see it?” I could feel her excitement from across the room.

“Absolutely,” I said. I steeled myself and got ready to lie when she asked me what I thought.

She sat me down and made me close my eyes. She put the mask in my hands. I opened my eyes with some trepidation.

It was beautiful, what she had made. I was surprised at how beautiful it was. In my narrow imagination, I had supposed she would paint the mask from life (or from death, as it were), the color of pale flesh, the lips blanched and barely pink, fine lash-lines highlighting the bumps of the closed eyes. I had imagined, I guess, that the mask would look dead. But that was not the way she did it at all. She had painted the face white, a stark white background, with a field of bright flowers that stretched from cheek to cheek. The colors were vibrant—no soft pastels, no pinks and baby blues. There were stems and leaves in bright, vivid greens, topped with blossoms of red and purple and yellow and teal, their petals touched with gold like a glint of sunglow. These were not the kinds of flowers that would have been sent to the girl’s funeral, formal and somber, carefully arranged. These were wildflowers, windblown and growing every which way.

The girl’s features were barely visible. Lexy hadn’t emphasized them at all; in fact, you could look at the piece and not realize right away that it was a face. The soft hollows of the eyes, the bump of the nose, the curve of the lips, were written beneath the flowers like a palimpsest. But once I noticed them, I couldn’t stop looking. I could see the youth in the face, the promise of a beauty she might have grown into. But the mask wasn’t sad, that was the extraordinary thing. Even knowing that the girl whose face had served as the model had since been laid in the ground, it didn’t make me sad to look at it. In a way, I think that a photograph of the girl, laughing and alive, might have been more upsetting—think of those yearbook photos that appear in the newspaper every spring alongside stories of tragic car crashes on graduation night. The lost potential of those newly dead kids, shown in their uncomfortable new suits and their formal smiles. It breaks your heart; it never fails. But this mask was different, somehow. It lacked that pathos. It portrayed what was, not what might have been. Looking at it, I saw that there can be grace in death, and beauty. I saw what I imagined the girl’s parents must have seen when they took Lexy by the arm and asked her to look upon their daughter.

I sat silent for a moment, gazing at the mask. All of the quick words of false praise that I had prepared melted away.

“Well?” Lexy asked.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “It’s nothing like what I expected.”

“You thought it would be terrible, didn’t you?” she said, smiling.

“Honestly? Yes.” I studied the mask a moment more. “But do you think it’s what the parents had in mind? It’s a little abstract. Maybe they’re expecting something a little more realistic.”

She regarded me warily. “What do you mean?” she said.

“Well, I just wonder if they were expecting more of a realistic likeness, painted the way she actually looked.”

Lexy stiffened. “It’s her face,” she said. “That’s what they wanted. They wanted her face.”

“Well, yes, of course, but did you tell them you might be doing something like this?”

“‘Something like this’?” she said. “What do you mean, ‘something like this’?” Her voice rose as she spoke.

I stood up and took a step toward her, reaching out to put my hand on her arm, but she shook it away.

“Don’t get upset,” I said. “I think this is wonderful—I think it’s one of the best pieces you’ve done. I just wonder if the parents are in the right state of mind to appreciate it.”

“You think they’re going to hate it,” she said. “You don’t think it’s good. Give it to me.” She grabbed the mask from my hands.

“No, Lexy, that’s not what I said at all. Calm down.”

She looked down at the mask, which was trembling in her hands. “You hate it,” she said, her voice ragged. She began to cry, painful, racking sobs. “You hate it. It’s terrible.”

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “You hate it.” She threw the mask to the floor and stepped on it hard. The pâpier-maché was stiff and resisted the force of her bare foot.

“Stop it, Lexy,” I said. “You’re being ridiculous. Stop it.”

She picked up the mask and flung it violently onto the worktable. She picked up a knife that she used to trim masks after they had hardened, and she pounded the blade into the mask again and again. The pâpier-maché splintered and sent up a cloud of fine white dust. She kept stabbing at it until the surface of the face was pocked with holes and the nose had dissolved into powder. Then she put the knife down and stared at what she had done. She dropped her face into her hands and sobbed until her body shook.

I stood back, horrified and a little angry. “What did you do that for?” I asked roughly.

“I don’t know,” she said. Her voice sounded strangled, as if she weren’t getting enough air. “I don’t know.”

I stood and watched her, unable to move forward and comfort her. Finally, she took her hands away from her face and looked at me. Her skin was red, and there was a string of pale crescents across her forehead, where she had dug her fingernails into her flesh.

“Do you see?” she said. “Do you see why I can’t have children?” She turned and walked up the stairs. I stood in the basement, staring at the ruined mask, and listened to her footsteps cross the floor above me. I heard the front door open and close, and I knew I was alone.