The Dogs of Babel (19 page)

“That’s not too far off from my story,” he says. “I had some suspicions that my wife—my ex-wife, I should say—was cheating on me. I figured that the only one I could trust to tell me the truth was her poodle, Fluffer.” He smiles ruefully. “Always hated that name.”

“And did… Fluffer tell you?”

“She didn’t have to. I came home one day and found my wife in bed with the other guy. She left and took Fluffer with her. But by that time, I’d already met up with these guys”—he waves his hand to include everyone in the room—“and it was too late. I was hooked on the idea.”

I nod. This is a very strange group I’ve wandered into. But, in a way, I’m one of them.

The meeting begins with a brief greeting from a man named Jeff who seems to be the secretary. He reads a few announcements, then goes through the minutes of the last meeting. It feels just as ordinary and routine as any meeting I’ve ever been to, except for the vaguely sinister details that keep popping up: Jeff announces that a veterinary textbook has gone missing from the library and asks that it be returned as soon as possible; he reminds us that proper cleaning of surgical instruments is one of the conditions of membership. A man in the audience raises his hand and announces that he’s found a place that sells cheap dog food in bulk; another member announces that one of his dogs is pregnant, if anyone’s looking for puppies. I’m feeling more and more uncomfortable being here. I look at my watch. We’ve been sitting here almost twenty minutes.

Just then a hush falls over the room as Remo and Lucas return. They’re carrying a large dog crate between them, covered with a dark cloth. They set the crate down carefully, and Remo walks up to the podium. Jeff steps away and takes a seat in the front row.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” Remo says into the microphone. “And thank you, Jeff. This is a proud night for the Cerberus Society. It was about eleven years ago that I first made the acquaintance of a man named Wendell Hollis. I was nothing but an amateur then, trying the odd experiment here and there with a stray mutt I’d picked up at the pound. But meeting Wendell Hollis changed my life. Never had I met a man with such clarity of purpose, such unflinching devotion to a cause. He was a visionary in this new field, a true visionary, and everything I know I’ve learned from him. Unfortunately, as we all know, Wendell can’t be here tonight, due to the ignorance and shortsightedness of the United States penal system. But we have something even better. We have Wendell Hollis’s crowning achievement. Some people call him Hero, but I choose to call him by his true name. Gentlemen, I present to you… Dog J.”

Applause thunders through the room. Next to me, Aaron stands up and whistles through his teeth. Remo walks over to the crate, lifts the cloth, and opens the front grate. I crane my neck to see over the crowd, but as soon as the dog walks out of the cage, I have to look away. He has almost no face left. From the shoulders back, he looks like a normal yellow Lab, full grown but still young enough to walk with a puppy’s lope. But his head has been completely reconstructed. His snout has been shortened so much that his face looks almost caved in. His jaw has been squared and broadened to resemble the shape of a human jaw. Even from four rows away, I can see the scar tissue on his neck where, I know from the newspaper reports, Hollis opened him up to operate on his larynx.

Aaron leans over to me. “Beautiful work, isn’t it?” he whispers.

Remo picks the big creature up in his arms and sets him down on a wide stool in front of the podium. He adjusts the microphone so it’s level with Dog J’s poor scarred mouth. The room falls silent, and Dog J opens his mouth to speak.

The sound that comes out is unearthly. A cross between a howl and a yelp, the noise shapes itself into a string of random vowels and consonants. I’ve never heard a living creature make a noise like this before. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. But it isn’t speech.

“Ayayay,”
the dog says.
“Kafofwayo.”

I look around the room. The men are smiling and staring raptly.

“Woganowoo,”
enunciates Dog J.
“Jukaluk.”

“Amazing,” Aaron whispers. “
J
’s and
k
’s are very hard.”

I sit there, listening to the unholy noise and waiting for someone to react. But they all seem satisfied. Next to the podium, Remo is smiling beatifically. There’s a new light in his eyes, one that I see reflected in every face around me.

I wonder if it’s me. “What’s he saying?” I whisper to Aaron, but he waves me away.

“Just listen,” he says. “It couldn’t be clearer.”

Suddenly, there’s a pounding on the door. It’s loud enough to drown out the sad yowling, and I’m grateful.

“Police,” someone yells from the other side of the door. “Open up.”

Panic fills the room as the people around me jump up and run for the back door. Up at the podium, Remo grabs Dog J and heaves him back into his crate. I see him say something to Lucas, and they both turn to look at me for an instant. Then the two of them pick up the unwieldy crate and carry it out the back door. I stand still for a moment in the chaos, with people pushing past me on all sides. Chairs are overturned as everyone struggles to get out.

I’m glad the police are here. I want these people arrested, and I want those dogs freed. I’m on the verge of going to open the door for them, when something occurs to me: the police will think I’m one of
them.
How will I explain my presence here, interacting with criminals? The best thing is for me to go, to get in the car and drive home as fast as I can. I reach the back door just as the police break through the front. With all the chaos in the backyard, it looks like I can still get away. I run a convoluted path through neighbors’ yards until I get to the block I’m parked on. I jump in my car and drive home at top speed.

I pull into the driveway, drunk with adrenaline, and turn off the engine. I sit in the car for a moment, my heart beating wildly in the sudden quiet. I’ve just fled from the police. Am I in trouble? I remind myself that, apart from the actual running, all I did was attend a meeting. I try to think whether the police will find my name anywhere among Remo’s belongings. I never signed up, I never paid a membership fee, so I wouldn’t be listed anywhere on the club’s rosters. But of course—and here I feel a pang of fear—Wendell Hollis sent Remo my name and address. Certainly the police will want to examine all correspondence from Hollis, given the Dog J connection. And Lucas had my name and address on his clipboard. Calm down, I tell myself. Surely it will be clear that I’m no more than a bit player in this drama. I had nothing to do with the kidnapping of Dog J, and I’ve never taken part in the mutilation of a dog. I’ve done nothing wrong.

But right away I know it’s not true. I should never have been there. What the hell was I thinking, going to a place like that? I feel as if I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to forget the things I saw this evening. All I can think of, the only thing that will help, is to go get my dog and wrap my arms around the great furry mass of her. I step out of the car and fairly run across the front lawn.

But once I get to the back gate, I stop short and my skin turns cold. Because the yard is empty.

L
exy and I had fallen into a kind of quiet peace together after that awful night when she destroyed the first death mask, the night she tried to disappear and I brought her back by holding her fast in my arms. I knew she was embarrassed by her anger that night, by the unruly way it had presented itself, bounding forth like a big, muddy dog to leave its marks on the pristine fabric of the day. But I thought that she was being a bit too careful with me now, that she was keeping herself in check. I didn’t like this change in her; I wanted her the way she was, my wild and tempest-tossed girl. It concerned me, too, that she was spending so much time among the dead. It was time to bring her back to the world of the living.

I decided to whisk her away. She’d never been to Mardi Gras—can you imagine? Lexy, my maker of masks, and somehow she’d never gone. It was perfect. I’d take her away, spur of the moment, a sweet reminder of that first week we spent together. An escape from our dreary, soup-eating, winter selves. I would pack outrageous things for her. A sequined gown. A feather boa. We needed masquerade, disguise, revelry. A drunken debauch. I would take her where she needed to go. A romantic hotel with balconies and French doors and a lurid history. I would dress her up, her bosom sparkling with glitter. I would make her buy me with beads.

The timing worked out perfectly. Easter was late that year, not till mid-April, and spring break came a little earlier than it usually did. Of course, my spontaneity is never truly spontaneous—show up in New Orleans the week of Mardi Gras and expect to find a hotel room? The idea made me faintly ill. I spent months planning it, and somehow I managed to keep it a secret.

I told her the day before we were supposed to leave. I tried to pass it off as a spur-of-the-moment idea, but she saw through me pretty quickly.

“Hey, I have an idea,” I said. It was a Friday evening, the first night of my spring break. Just exactly the time of year when we’d first met. “Let’s fly down to New Orleans. For Mardi Gras.”

She looked up from her book. “Really? Just like that?”

“Just like that,” I said, snapping my fingers in a way that immediately struck me as too contrived. But she seemed not to notice. “It’ll be fun,” I added.

“What’ll we do with Lorelei?” she asked. “I think Jim’s out of town.” Our neighbor Jim sometimes looked after Lorelei when we went away.

“We’ll board her.”

“They might not have space for her on such short notice. You know, they get booked up weeks in advance. Remember last Thanksgiving when we had to take her with us to your sister’s?”

“Well, that’s a particularly busy time. Why don’t I call them? You never know, they might have a space open.”

She studied my face for a moment and broke into a smile. “You’ve already called, haven’t you? You probably called a month ago.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, trying to keep my face nonchalant. I’ve never been much of a liar.

“So if I go through your desk right now, I won’t find any plane tickets? Or computer printouts about the hotel we’re staying at?”

“Of course not,” I said. “I just came up with the idea two minutes ago.”

“So you haven’t gone out and bought a guidebook and reserved a rental car and printed out a list of New Orleans’s best restaurants?”

It was the restaurant list that got me. It had seemed a perfectly good idea—after all, why take a chance on a bad restaurant when it’s so easy to find a good one?—but the fact that she knew me so well made me laugh.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “You caught me. I did all that stuff. But so what? It’s the thought that counts, isn’t it?”

“Yes, and I’ll bet you’ve put
a lot
of thought into it.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. “Well, tomorrow morning I’ll be on a plane bound for New Orleans. Are you coming or not?”

“I’ll be there,” she said, giving me a kiss.

“With bells on,” I said.

“Well, I don’t know about that.”

“I do. I’ve already packed your suitcase.”

The only thing I’d left for Lexy to do was to pack masks for the two of us.

“Whatever you want,” I told her. “Whoever you want us to be.”

“I wish you’d told me earlier,” she said. “I could have made something special.”

“But then it wouldn’t have been so spontaneous and romantic.”

She smiled. “Well, romantic anyway,” she said. “That’s okay. I’ve got a lot to choose from. I’ll find something.”

She wouldn’t show me what she’d chosen. She packed the masks in a separate suitcase and told me I’d have to wait.

In New Orleans, we stayed at a hotel that was said to have a ghost in it: a young woman whose lover had been killed in a duel. She was known as Blue Mary for the cobalt of the gown she wore. There was a little pamphlet about her at the check-in desk. Look for her in the courtyard on warm nights, it told us, look for a woman with a gown of blue and a mass of dark ringlets piled on top of her head. She died of a broken heart, the story went, and now she walks the grounds, crying her lover’s name. Some claim they have seen him, as well, the lover. He walks across the courtyard with his dueling pistol still in his hand. They’re never in the same place at the same time. A pair of ghosts, eternally missing each other.

If you should meet Blue Mary, the pamphlet said, if you should come upon her on a moonless night, don’t run away. Sit with her and talk a while. Tell her what you know. Try to ease her mind. If you should see Blue Mary, take her hand. Try it. You will be surprised at the substance of it. It will be cold to the touch. Tell her to stay with you, to stay put for a while. When she asks if you have seen her lover, say yes. Say that he sends his love, and he wants her to rest. Tell her she can stop looking. Give her a single rose, the pamphlet advised. Tell her it’s from him. She will tell you she’s so very cold. Give her your jacket, lay it gently across her shoulders. And when she disappears, as she always does, say a prayer that this time it’s for good. There’s nothing scary about ghosts, after all. They are sad stories, all of them. She wanders forever, awaiting his kiss. The pretty girl in blue. You can go see her grave, if you like. They believe it’s this one here. Notice the angel carved on top. Run your hands over it. Go ahead.

Lexy was entranced by the story, but I didn’t believe it for a minute. I suspected the hotel of fabricating the whole thing, although the desk clerk seemed quite sincere about explaining it to us. It was all too neat, it was the stuff of those tragic sixties pop songs, “Last Kiss” and “Leader of the Pack” and all that. It smacked of urban legend, the hitchhiker who vanishes before you can take her home, the old woman answering the door with a sad smile on her face: “She died ten years ago tonight.” We’ve heard it so many times.