The Dogs of Babel

TWENTY-FIVE

I call the Psychic Helpline compulsively every day, hoping to hear Lady Arabelle’s voice. Usually I hang up when I hear the psychic’s name, when I know that it’s not her, but sometimes, when I’m feeling lonely, I get pulled in by a certain voice, and I wait to find out what she has to tell me. (Or he. But it’s almost always a woman.) Sometimes I tell her my whole story, and sometimes I let her try to figure it out for herself. “I’m sure it was an accident,” they always say. “It sounds like she loved you very much.” They tell me, “You are not alone, although you might feel like you are.” They tell me that if I only wait a little longer, I’ll have financial windfalls and love will come my way. They tell me not to lose hope. They tell me that the cards show bright skies ahead. The Death card means change, not death. They ask me if I have a specific question, and I don’t know what to say. Did she kill herself? I can’t bring myself to form the words. Will I teach my dog to talk? How can I ask such a question without inviting ridicule? I asked one of them, “Do you see anything about animals? Do you see anything about a dog?” and she assured me that my lost dog was alive and well and would return home soon. Some of them are sly and cruel and will resort to anything to keep you on the phone. One of them told me I was sick, and one of them told me she foresaw an accident, but that if I stayed on the line a little longer, we might be able to find a way to prevent it. “Have you been feeling run-down lately?” they ask, and who can honestly say they haven’t when it’s one A.M. and they’re talking on the phone to a stranger? They say, “There’s a woman you work with… I’m seeing an S name maybe? Or an R name?” The first time one of them asked me if I knew a woman with an L name, I felt my heart quicken. But when I didn’t answer right away, not trusting my voice to be steady, she said, “No, maybe it’s a T name. Terry? Theresa?” and I knew she had nothing. On the occasions when I tell them about Lexy, and I must say those are becoming more frequent, they ask me for her birthday. They tell me to picture her face as they deal the cards. And I do. I focus on her face with all my might. They tell me things about our marriage based on my astrological sign and hers. It’s all kind of hit-or-miss. “She was very neat, wasn’t she?” they’ll say, and I’ll say no. But then they’ll say, “Sometimes you fought about money,” and I’ll remember a time when I forgot to record an ATM withdrawal, causing Lexy to bounce a check. “Yes,” I say, wanting it all to be true. “Yes. Sometimes we fought about money.” They know what I want to hear. Sometimes their questions are so right it makes my heart stop. “She died suddenly,” they’ll say, and it’s not a question. But then I realize they can hear it in my voice, in the desperate note I didn’t realize was there. They can tell it’s not the voice of a man who nursed his wife through a long illness. They can tell it’s the voice of a man who still wakes up every day surprised to find her gone.

But on the dog front, things couldn’t be going better. I’ve had the most wonderful idea, an idea that I think may be the key to the success of my project with Lorelei. The idea comes to me quite accidentally. I’m sitting in my study, working on my laptop—I’m cataloging the contents of the third shelf of books, the ones Lexy arranged on the day of her death—and I’ve typed in the following titles:

I Had a Dream: The Civil Rights Movement and Real Life (Mine.)

796 Ways to Say “I Love You” (Mine. I always wanted to be as spontaneous and romantic as Lexy, to be able to surprise her the way she always surprised me. So I bought this book to help plan my spontaneity. I didn’t know she knew about it.)

Things I Wish I’d Known (Hers. A book of poetry.)

Strange but True: Aliens in Our Midst (Hers. She bought this book for the illustrations after a customer of hers requested an alien mask for a play.)

Forget About Yesterday and Make the Most of Today (Hers.)

You’d Better Believe It! The World’s Most Famous Hoaxes and Practical Jokes (Mine.)

How to Be a Success While Doing What You Love (Hers.)

And No Pets Step on DNA (Mine. A rather silly collection of palindromes. The cover shows a laboratory full of dogs in lab coats. A sign on the wall shows a cat standing on a double helix, with a line drawn through it.)

More 10-Minute Recipes (Hers, though I often used it. It contains some surprisingly good recipes, although they seldom live up to the ten-minute promise.)

My Ántonia (Mine from college. I never read it.)

A Room of One’s Own (Hers from college. I don’t know if she read it or not.)

Places I’d Never Dreamed Of (Mine. A collection of travel writing.)

As I type, I’m attempting at the same time to eat a ham and cheese sandwich. It’s rather awkward, and at one point, as I take a bite out of the sandwich, a morsel of cheese and a drop of mustard fall onto the letters K and L on my keyboard. I set the computer down on the floor and go to the kitchen to get a sponge, and when I return, I find Lorelei standing in front of the computer, her head bent to the keys, lapping at the space where the cheese had been. I shoo her away—who knows what damage dog saliva might do to an expensive computer?—but when I bend to wipe off the keys, I see that something quite wonderful has happened. Beneath the title of the last book I listed, Lorelei has typed a string of letters with her tongue. KKKLKLLKIKKLMLK, she has written. And that’s when it hits me, this marvelous idea, that’s when it breaks on me like day: I am going to teach Lorelei to type.

It seems to me a perfect solution. Several weeks have gone by since the wa incident, with no further breakthroughs. Perhaps, I think, Lorelei’s vocal cords are not suited to speech per se, but that doesn’t mean communication isn’t possible.

I begin to devise a plan. I am not expecting her to type words, of course, but it occurs to me that if I can teach her to associate the words she already knows—“ball,” “out,” “treat,” “Lexy”—with specific visual symbols, I can then devise a special keyboard with those same symbols, and Lorelei can type an entire word with a single touch of her nose. The keys would need to be a bit bigger than usual, to allow for the wideness of her nose as well as to provide room to display symbols large enough for Lorelei to be able to “read” them. I get to work with the flash cards. I show Lorelei a card with a single wavy line. “Water,” I say. “Water.” Then a card with a childlike lollipop drawing of a tree. “Tree,” I say. And so on. I draw Lexy as a smiling face with a curl of hair coming down each side of her head. I draw “out” with an arrow. I draw “treat” with a bone.

But this isn’t enough. I have to teach her “sad.” I have to teach her “fall.” And “jump.” I have to make her understand the difference.

In the end, I just create symbols for every word I think I might need. I can always teach her the meanings later.

For the keyboard, I decide to go see an acquaintance of mine, a man named Mike Wolfe who works in the electrical engineering department at the university. Mike has an interest in linguistics, so I think he might be willing to help me out. A former student of mine once asked Mike to help him write a program that would put together random sounds to create nonsense words for a project the student was doing on language formation. It was a rather meaningless project—in fact, as I recall, the student left the department soon afterward without receiving his degree—but I was impressed with what Mike came up with.

So I go to see Mike, and I tell him what I’m looking for. I don’t tell him it’s for a dog; I tell him I’m working with severely disabled children. I emphasize that several of them will need to hit the buttons with their noses. He nods respectfully and seems to believe me, but when I return to pick up the machine two weeks later, I see a cartoon, clearly cut from the campus newspaper, posted to the office door of one of Mike’s colleagues in the department. It shows a dog sitting in front of a computer, tongue hanging out, with a goofy look on its face. Its paws are resting on the keyboard, and a string of nonsense words are visible on the screen. Behind the dog stands a man, looking nothing like me, I must say, peering over the dog’s shoulder. “Brilliant!” the man is saying. “Don’t stop now!” The cartoon’s caption reads, “Arguments Against Tenure.”

But the machine is everything I could have hoped for. Mike has modified an old laptop—it will be a bit slow, he tells me, but it should meet my needs. The keys are large and marked clearly with the symbols I gave him. Since he was working with a standard keyboard, the keys when pressed each type a single letter. I’ll simply need to make a note of which letters result from which symbols, and I can translate what Lorelei meant to type. BNL, for example, translates to “Lexy tree fall.” And so on.

I spend two weeks working with Lorelei on memorizing the visual symbols before introducing the keyboard to her. First, I show her a flash card with a particular symbol on it—the symbol for tree, say—and I repeat the word several times. Next, I shuffle the card together with two other cards, making a big show out of it, like the magician I’m trying so hard to be, and I lay the three cards faceup on the floor.

“Water, Lorelei,” I say. “Where’s the water? Go find the water.”

At first, she doesn’t seem to understand what I want from her. The first time I give this order, she goes uncertainly to the corner of the room and picks up her toy giraffe in her teeth. Great, I think—now I’m making her question the meanings of words she already knows. So I begin to demonstrate what I want her to do. I cast my eyes down toward the card I want her to pick. I point to it. I bend and touch my own nose to the symbol. Eventually, she seems to understand. When she lowers her head to sniff at the card I’ve indicated, I praise her well.

After two weeks, she’s pointing to the right card about fifty percent of the time. Not bad, considering she’s choosing from three cards; if she’d been simply picking cards at random, I’d expect only a thirty-three percent success rate. But still not great. It occurs to me that maybe the visual cues are a problem. Sight is not her best sense. Maybe I need to assign a different scent to each key. A scratch-and-sniff keyboard. But how do I sum up how Lexy smelled to Lorelei? Rub her sweater on the keys? Spray her perfume, dab her hair gel, smear her lipstick on a palette, and mix them together? What of Lexy’s own unadorned scent, the scent beneath all those other scents she added to her body? I can’t re-create that. (Oh, but if I could! If I could lift up an atomizer and spray that scent into the air!) And the smell of water? And the smell of an apple tree on an October day? Is the scent of air rushing as a person falls different from the scent of the air if that person jumps? Is the scent of the flying dust as the body hits the ground any different?

So I suppose I must stick to the visual. But today, as I work with Lorelei on the flash cards, I realize something. I have neglected to make a card for myself. I have not created a symbol to represent the concept “Paul.” I suppose there has to be one. Certainly, I am a part of the story she has to tell. Or am I deluding myself? What if the story she has to tell has nothing to do with me or with Lexy but with her own puppyhood, of which I know very little? The story she chooses to tell, the one it’s most important for her to get out, may not be the one I want to hear. I think again about the story of how Lorelei came to belong to Lexy. Maybe this is what Lorelei will want to tell me about: salvation from the storm, the tearing pain in her throat. Or maybe something from even before that. Does she remember her mother, her brothers and sisters? The tragedy of puppies, taken from their families, all of them, never to see each other again. This is the sadness we inflict on the beasts we love. Am I anthropomorphizing? Of course I am. It can hardly be helped. But still. Who am I to know what heart beats beneath that fur? What leg-twitching dreams project themselves behind those wide, inscrutable eyes? Does she dream of walking on big, unsteady puppy paws, of struggling to find a place to suckle alongside her siblings? Does she remember all of that, or is it like our own infancy, lost in the prelanguage mist of babyhood?

Maybe she wants to tell me about a single moment of summer grass, looking for something to chase, the feel of damp earth on bare paws. That may be what she has to tell me. The joy of muscle and bone working together to run as she chases a car. The wind blowing her ears as she sticks her head out a car window. The loneliness of the door closing, leaving her alone in the house. The patient waiting beneath the table, the smell of dinners not meant for her, the thrill of being in the right place at the right time when human fingers slip and a piece of meat falls to the floor. The drool-inducing terror of pulling up in front of the vet’s office. The sweet sadness of Lexy gone, the constant vigil for her return. Seeing things happen and not knowing why. The smells of other dogs. The softness of couch cushions. The satisfying give as a pillow rips apart in her teeth. The hunt. The sun. Rolling in the dirt.

“Where’s the tree, Lorelei?” I say, nodding to the cards on the floor before me. “Where’s the tree?”

She noses the card that means Lexy.

“All right, girl,” I say. “That’s enough for now.”

I am tired. I am so very tired. I gather up my cards and put them away. Then I sit down at my desk to write a letter to Wendell Hollis.