The Dogs of Babel (27 page)

You force yourself to go through the immediate stuff, the stuff that must be done, write the check for the gas bill, put the frozen things away in the freezer, but the more amorphous tasks, the things that are not so crucial right this minute but will ultimately shape your life into something worth remembering, those are harder to face. You’d rather lose yourself in something stupid that wastes your time but occupies your mind for a few moments—TV, a crossword puzzle, a magazine about celebrities. You’ve spent whole days doing things like that. And then you get scared because another day of your life is gone, and what have you done with it? What will they find, you wonder, when they find me dead? Years can pass this way. Years. The pleasures of the body, food and sex, walking under the autumn leaves, these can give you some small comfort, but even then your mind is running in the background, worrying, hurting, hating, despairing. Those snakes on your scalp don’t protect you from a thing. Maybe they never did. What can you do to make yourself happy? In all the wide world, there seems to be nothing. So how, how can you even imagine bringing a child into this life of yours? You don’t trust yourself for a second. You don’t trust yourself with anything. What will you do when you get like this? You will damage the child, it seems inevitable. How can you take that chance? Your child, Paul’s child, would deserve better than that.

You, giving in to temptation to lie in bed in the middle of the afternoon. Leaving the nonperishable groceries in their bags on the floor for two days. You notice a book under the couch, and it’s days before you bother to pick it up. Letting dust collect. How can you put a child in the middle of that? You wouldn’t do it right, and the stakes are too high to chance it. The funny thing is, it’s what you’ve always wanted. More than anything.

You felt hope in that moment, didn’t you, that moment when you found out you carried life inside you? You felt hope. You thought, yes. Maybe I can do this after all. But then we had a fight and anger ripped through your body. You remembered who you were. And had you known but yesterday what you know today…

But you know yourself. It can’t be done. You may need to give something up, that’s what the psychic told you, you may need to give something up for the sake of something more important. And any action is better than nothing. The relinquishing, it’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done. But perhaps the bravest. The most grown-up. You’re doing the right thing.

Your only worry is about Paul, about the pain you’ll cause him. But you know he’ll get through it. You leave him a note, written in book titles, a message in a collar, a puzzle for him to work out. Something to make him forget his grief. And Lorelei—you leave him Lorelei. That’s all that’s left to do. You do it, and you’re done.

So you go outside and you climb a tree. It’s harder to do than you remember from childhood, and by the time you reach the top, your hands are sore from gripping the rough, unyielding bark. You settle yourself on a branch, and you see what the view is from here. You wait to see if it makes things any clearer, this perspective, this view from on high. And it does. You don’t think about it, you don’t waver. You stand, balancing yourself on the branch. It’s a heady feeling, standing there like that. You feel like you’ve broken some law of physics. You feel like you’re walking on air. You stretch out your arms and you close your eyes. You lean backward, tipping your head back to feel the sun on your face. And you let go of everything, and it’s such a relief. And you fall.

This is where we’ll stop, with Lexy still in midair. A freeze-frame, a cinematic measure that keeps her from ever hitting the ground. Look at her, floating in the autumn sun, her hair blown upward by the force of the wind. Her arms are stretched wide, and her blouse billows out softly as it catches the air beneath it. She’s not looking down at the ground rushing toward her; she’s looking up at the sky. But her head is turned slightly away from us, and that’s what I keep coming back to. No matter how many times I look, I cannot see her face.

I
find myself at a loss now. I find myself unsure what I’m to do next. There are no more puzzles to figure out, no more clues to follow. My research is at an end; even if I didn’t have Lorelei’s wheezy rasping to remind me daily that my work will never succeed, I have the memory of Dog J to remind me that some things should never be attempted in the name of science or love. And yet I can’t seem to let it go. I sit here in my house, the house of Paul, with all my clues around me, and none of them seem to help. No matter how I lay them out, none of them seem to be able to tell me how to go on living.

I keep thinking about the steak Lexy cooked for Lorelei. I can see the picture of it—Lexy standing at the stove, Lorelei hovering nearby, drawn by the scent of the cooking meat. Lexy laying the steak down on the floor. The trail of meat juice and grease, waiting for Lorelei to lap it up. And Lexy’s body, maybe just minutes later, lying on the ground. What is the thread that ties it together? The blood spilled in the dirt and the blood spilled on the kitchen floor. What does it mean?

It’s partly to get away from these wearying thoughts that I decide to climb the tree. I just want to see how the world looks from up there. I just want to see what Lexy saw.

I close Lorelei in the kitchen and go out to the yard. It’s a hot day, but I’ve put on long pants and a shirt with long sleeves. It’s been quite a while since I’ve climbed a tree, and a middle-aged man with skinned knees and elbows makes a pathetic figure.

It takes me a few tries before I get the right grip to start shinnying upward. As I hoist myself onto one of the lower branches, wondering if it’s strong enough to hold my weight, I hear a curious scratching sound from the kitchen door. It’s Lorelei, trying to get out. We have a dog door that leads into the yard, but Lorelei never uses it. It was installed by a previous owner, who must have had a smaller dog, and it’s too tight for Lorelei; she has to squeeze to get through it. But now as I watch, I see the door flip open and Lorelei’s nose pokes through. Whining her soft, whistling whine, she wedges herself into the small space. I’m afraid she’ll get stuck.

“Lorelei,” I call out to her. “Stay inside. It’s okay, girl.”

But she wriggles and twists until she’s gotten her midsection through the hole, and then she comes barreling through, wide-eyed and alarmed, leaping and making the noise that now passes for barking. She bounds toward the tree. Staring up at me with wide, urgent eyes, she leaps and dances around the base of the trunk, barking her near-soundless bark.

An image pops into my mind, the image of the dog in the tarot cards Lady Arabelle described to me, the dog barking at the Fool about to walk off the cliff, and it hits me all at once. Lorelei tried to stop Lexy. It hits me like a blow, like a fall. It knocks the wind out of me. That’s why she cooked the steak for Lorelei. To distract her, to keep her quiet. Lexy went outside to climb that tree, her mind filled with thoughts of sacrifice, thoughts of the end. But Lorelei wasn’t going to let her go that easily. And how could Lexy complete her task, how could she do what she planned to do, in the face of such fierce, feral love? She couldn’t. There was no way. So she went inside and she gave her dog one last treat. She took the steak from the pan and put it on the floor at Lorelei’s feet, without even the playful teasing dialogue that dog owners love so much, the usual preliminary tantalus of “Who’d like a yummy treat?” And Lorelei, her tail wagging, Lorelei accepted it gratefully.

Look at it from Lorelei’s perspective. A steak laid at her feet. A gift, a reward for her vigilance. She’d done good, and here was the proof. I imagine her gratitude, her relief. And Lexy, pausing to watch this display of animal hunger and fulfillment, this voracious enjoyment of the appetites that give life its shape, did she stop and question what she was about to do? Did it give her pause? Did it make her reconsider, even for a moment? Or was she too focused on her goal—the time she had to fulfill it limited to the time it takes a hungry dog to gobble a piece of meat—to stop and think about it? Lorelei lost herself for a moment, only a moment, in the smell of the meat that filled the kitchen, the task of tearing apart the flesh with her teeth, and by the time she looked up, by the time she had finished licking the floor clean of the meaty juices, Lexy was gone. She was gone. Lorelei, betrayed by her belly and her fine sense of smell. Betrayed by the way her nose twitched at the aroma of the cooking meat and the way the saliva filled her mouth. It only takes a moment of inattention, the moment when a mother turns to answer the phone as her child nears the open window, the moment when the traveler, forgetting that the traffic goes the other way here, looks right instead of left. It only takes an instant, and all is lost. Lexy, dead on the ground. Lorelei, inconsolable, bereft. And all for a piece of meat.

Below me, Lorelei is jumping and gasping, spinning her body in frantic circles.

“It’s okay, girl,” I call to her. “I’m coming down.”

I measure the distance to the ground—I’m still pretty low—and I jump, landing on my feet with a small stagger. Lorelei leaps up onto me, nearly knocking me over. She licks my hands, my arms, whatever she can reach. I bend down to her and give her a hug.

“It’s okay, girl,” I say. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

Later on, I put Lorelei in the car and drive to the supermarket. She loves to go for rides, and these days I like to give her whatever small pleasures I can. I crack a window for her and leave her to snarl ferociously at all who dare pass by her car, while I run inside to the meat counter. I buy the two best steaks they have, one for me and one for my dog. At home, while I’m warming the grill, I pick up the phone and I call Matthew Rice.

“Matthew,” I say. “I want to come back to work.”

And so it is that a year has passed since Lexy’s death. Lorelei and I lead a quiet life. We go for long walks, the fallen leaves crunching beneath the weight of our six feet. I teach my classes and chat with my colleagues, who seem a little less wary of me with each day that goes by. I’m beginning to enjoy the pleasures of the living again, eating and reading and throwing a ball for my dog to retrieve. And when Grace from the animal shelter called me up last week and asked if I’d like to get together for a cup of coffee sometime, I only hesitated for a moment before I said yes.

Not too long ago, I had a dream that Lorelei and I walked into a bar, just like all the jokes had said we would.

“No dogs allowed,” the bartender said, just like I always knew he would.

“But you don’t understand,” I said, following a script I knew by heart. “This is a very special dog. This dog can talk.”

“Okay,” said the bartender. “Let’s hear it.”

I lifted Lorelei onto a bar stool. She opened her mouth, and the bartender and I waited to hear what she would say. But she didn’t speak. Instead, she leaned over to me and licked my face. Then, distracted by an itch, she turned away and started chewing on her paw.

“See?” I said to the bartender.

“You’re right,” he said, without a trace of sarcasm. “That’s quite a dog.”

When I woke up, I found that I was smiling.

I remember my wife in white. I remember her walking toward me on our wedding day, a bouquet of red flowers in her hand, and I remember her turning away from me in anger, her body stiff as a stone. I remember the sound of her breath as she slept. I remember the way her body felt in my arms. I remember, always I remember, that she brought solace to my life as well as grief. That for every dark moment we shared between us, there was a moment of such brightness I almost could not bear to look at it head-on. I try to remember the woman she was and not the woman I have built out of spare parts to comfort me in my mourning. And I find, more and more, as the days go by and the balm of my forgiveness washes over the cracked and parched surface of my heart, I find that remembering her as she was is a gift I can give us both.

Thank you, first of all, to my parents, Doreen C. Parkhurst, M.D., and William Parkhurst, my stepmother, Molly Katz, and my grandmother Claire T. Carney, for passing along their wisdom and for being my first and most supportive readers.

Thank you to Kim Alleyne, Cybelle Clevenger, Lee Damsky, Paula Whyman, and Katrin Wilde for their friendship, advice, insightful reading, and humor. And a special thank you to Matthew Rosser for his enthusiastic support and promotion.

Thank you to my agent, Douglas Stewart, for all his incredible work, and to everyone at Curtis Brown, especially Ed Wintle and Dave Barbor.

Thank you to my wonderful editor, Asya Muchnick, and to everyone at Little, Brown, especially Alison Vandenberg, Heather Rizzo, Michael Pietsch, Laura Quinn, and Sophie Cottrell.

Thank you to all the great teachers I’ve had, especially Kermit Moyer, Richard McCann, Matthew Klam, Roberta Rubenstein, Ann duCille, Annie Dillard, Mary Manson, Susan King, Judith Robbins, and Stephen Snow.

Thank you to Barbara Fuegner for talking to me about dogs and to Annie Hallatt for talking to me about masks.

Thank you to my son, Henry, whose impending birth provided me with the deadline I needed to finish this book and whose happy face reminds me daily of what really matters. And thank you, above all, to my husband, Evan, who has supported me in every way and who has provided the invaluable service of making me happy.

Finally, though they will not read this, I would like to thank all of the dogs who have let me share their lives, especially Chelsea, who was such a good puppy dog it’s hard for the layman to understand.

Carolyn Parkhurst holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from American University. She has published fiction in the
North American Review,
the
Minnesota Review, Hawai‘i Review,
and the
Crescent Review.
She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and their son.