The Dogs of Babel

by Carolyn Parkhurst

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

A poignant and beautiful debut novel explores a man's quest to unravel the mystery of his wife's death with the help of the only witness--their Rhodesian ridgeback, Lorelei.

Release date: June 1, 2003

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 272

Sample

Here is what we know, those of us who can speak to tell a story: On the afternoon of October 24, my wife, Lexy Ransome, climbed
to the top of the apple tree in our backyard and fell to her death. There were no witnesses, save our dog, Lorelei; it was
a weekday afternoon, and none of our neighbors were at home, sitting in their kitchens with their windows open, to hear whether,
in that brief midair moment, my wife cried out or gasped or made no sound at all. None of them were working in their yards,
enjoying the last of the warm weather, to see whether her body crumpled before she hit the ground, or whether she tried to
right herself in the air, or whether she simply spread her arms open to the sky.


I was in the university library when it happened, doing research for a paper I was working on for an upcoming symposium. I
had an evening seminar to teach that night, and if I hadn’t called home to tell Lexy something interesting I’d read about
a movie she’d been wanting to see, then I might have taught my class, gone out for my weekly beer with my graduate students,
and spent a few last hours of normalcy, happily unaware that my yard was full of policemen kneeling in the dirt.


As it was, though, I dialed my home number and a man answered the phone. “Ransome residence,” he said.

I paused for a moment, confused. I scanned my mental catalog of male voices, friends and relatives who might possibly be at
the house for one reason or another, but I couldn’t match any of them to the voice on the other end of the line. I was a bit
thrown by the phrase “Ransome residence,” as well; my last name is Iverson, and to hear a strange man refer to my house as
if only Lexy lived there gave me the strange feeling that I’d somehow, in the course of a day, been written out of my own
life’s script.


“May I speak to Lexy?” I said finally.

“May I ask who’s calling?” the man said.

“This is her husband, Paul. Iverson.”

“Mr. Iverson, this is Detective Anthony Stack. I’m going to need you to come home now. There’s been an accident.”

Apparently Lorelei was the one responsible for summoning the police. As our neighbors returned home from work, one by one,
they heard her endless, keening howl coming from our yard. They knew Lorelei, most of them, and were used to hearing her bark,
barrel-chested and deep, when she chased birds and squirrels around the yard. But they’d never heard her make a sound like
this. Our neighbor to the left, Jim Perasso, was the first to peer over the top of our fence and make the discovery. It was
already dark out—the days were getting shorter, and dusk was coming earlier and earlier each day—but as Lorelei ran frantically
between the apple tree and the back door of the house, her movements activated our backyard motion-sensor lights. With every
circle Lorelei made, she’d pause to nudge Lexy’s body with her nose, stopping long enough to allow the lights to go out; then,
as she resumed her wild race to each corner of the yard, the lights would go on again. It was through this surreal, strobelike
flickering that Jim saw Lexy lying beneath the tree and called 911.


When I arrived, there was police tape marking off the backyard gate, and the man I had spoken to on the phone met me as I
walked across the lawn. He introduced himself again and took me to sit in the living room. I followed him dumbly, all my half-questions
stalled by the dread that seemed to have stopped the passage of air through my lungs. I guess I knew what was coming. Already,
the house felt still and bare, as if it had been emptied of all the living complexity that had been there when I left. Even
Lorelei was gone, having been sedated and taken away by animal control for the night.


Detective Stack told me what had happened as I sat there, numb.

“Do you have any idea what your wife might have been doing in the tree?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. She had never, in the time I had known her, shown any interest in climbing trees, and this one couldn’t
have been an easy one to start with. The apple tree in our yard is unusually tall, a monster compared to the dwarf varieties
you see in orchards and autumn pick-your-own farms. We had neglected it, not pruning it even once in the time we’d lived there,
and it had grown to an unruly height of twenty-five or thirty feet. I couldn’t begin to guess what she might have been doing
up there. Detective Stack was watching me closely. “Maybe she wanted to pick some apples,” I said weakly.


“Well, that seems to be the logical answer.” He looked at me and at the floor. “It seems pretty clear to us that your wife’s
death was an accident, but in cases like this when there are no witnesses, we need to do a brief investigation to rule out
suicide. I have to ask—did your wife seem at all depressed lately? Did she ever mention suicide, even in a casual way?”


I shook my head.

“I didn’t think so,” he said. “I just had to ask.”

When the men in the yard finished taking their pictures and collecting their evidence, Detective Stack talked to them and
reported back to me that everyone was satisfied. It had been an accident, no question. Apparently there are two ways of falling,
and each one tells a story. A person who jumps from a great height, even as high as seven or eight floors up, can control
the way she falls; if she lands on her feet, she may sustain great injuries to her legs and spine, but she may survive. And
if she does not survive, then the particular way her bones break, the way her ankles and knees shatter from the stress of
the impact, lets us know that her jump was intentional. But a person who reaches the top branches of an apple tree, twenty-five
feet off the ground, and simply loses her footing has no control over how she falls. She may tumble in the air and land on
her stomach or her back or her head. She may land with her skin intact and still break every bone and crush every organ inside
her. This is how we decide what is an accident and what is not. When they found Lexy, she was lying faceup, and her neck was
broken. This is how we know that Lexy didn’t jump.


Later, after the police had left and Lexy’s body had been taken away, I went out into the yard. Underneath the tree, there
was a scattering of apples that had fallen to the ground. Had Lexy climbed the tree to pick the last of the apples before
they grew rotten on the branches? Perhaps she was going to bake something; perhaps she was going to put them in a pretty bowl
and set them someplace sunny for us to snack on. I gathered them up carefully and brought them inside. I kept them on the
kitchen table until the smell of their sweet rot began to draw flies.


It wasn’t until a few days after the funeral that I began to find certain clues—well, I hesitate to use the word “clues,”
which excludes the possibility of sheer coincidence or overanalyzing on my part. To say I found clues would suggest that someone
had laid out a careful trail of bits of information with the aim of leading me to a conclusion so well hidden and yet so obvious
that its accuracy could not be disputed. I don’t expect I’ll be that lucky. I’ll say instead that I began to discover certain
anomalies, certain incongruities, that suggested that the day of Lexy’s death had not been a usual day.


The first of these anomalies had to do with our bookshelves. Lexy and I were both big readers, and our bookshelves, like anyone’s,
I imagine, were halfheartedly organized according to a number of different systems. On some shelves, books were grouped by
size, big coffee-table books all together on the bottommost shelf, and mass-market paperbacks crammed in where nothing else
would fit. There were enclaves of books grouped by subject—our cookbooks were all on the same shelf, for example—but this
type of classification was too painstaking to carry very far. Finally, there were her books and my books—books whose subject
matter reflected our own individual interests, and books each of us had owned before we were married that just ended up in
their own sections. Beyond that, it was a hodgepodge. Even so, I came to have a sense of which books belonged where. A mental
impression that I had seen the novel I had loved when I was twenty sitting snugly between a book of poems we’d received as
a wedding gift and a sci-fi thriller I had read on the beach one summer. If you asked me where you might find a particular
textbook I coauthored, I could point you right to its place between a Beatles biography and a book about how to brew your
own beer. This is how I know that Lexy rearranged the books before she died.


The second anomaly has to do with Lorelei. As far as I can piece together, it seems that Lexy took a steak from the refrigerator,
one we’d been planning to barbecue that night on the grill, cooked it, and gave it to the dog. At first I thought she must
have eaten it herself and merely given Lorelei the bone to chew on—I found the bone several days later, hidden in a corner
of the bedroom—but the thing is, there were no dirty plates or cutlery, only the frying pan sitting on the stove where she
left it. The dishwasher was locked, having been run that morning after breakfast, and when I opened it up, I could still recognize
my own handiwork in the way the dishes had been negotiated into place. The dishwasher hadn’t been touched, the dish rack next
to the sink was empty, and the dish towels weren’t even moist. I have to conclude that one of two things happened: either
Lexy surprised Lorelei with an unprecedented wealth of meat or she stood in our kitchen on the last day of her life and ate
an entire twenty-ounce steak with her fingers. As I think about it now, it occurs to me that there might be a third scenario,
and it might be the best one of all: perhaps the two of them shared it.


Maybe these events mean nothing. After all, I am a grieving man, and I am trying very hard to find some sense in my wife’s
death. But the evidence I have discovered is sufficiently strange to make me wonder what really happened that day, whether
it was really a desire for apples that led my sweet wife to climb to the top of that tree. Lorelei is my witness, not just
to Lexy’s death itself but to all the events leading up to it. She watched Lexy move through her days and her nights. She
was there for the unfolding of our marriage from its first day to its last. Simply put, she knows things I don’t. I feel I
must do whatever I can to unlock that knowledge.


Perhaps you’re familiar with some of the more celebrated cases of language acquisition in dogs, but allow me to provide a brief
history to refresh your memory. First off, of course, is the case of the sixteenth-century child-dog of Lyons. This dog, by
most accounts a keeshond brought into the area by Dutch traders, was adopted at birth by a grieving mother whose baby had
died soon after childbirth. The woman suckled the dog like a child and dressed him in little nighties and bonnets. As the
pup grew, his “mother” took great pains to teach him to speak and succeeded to some degree by sheer perseverance, though listeners
often had to ask the woman to translate. The dog became a celebrated member of the community but never learned to frolic and
play like other dogs. The dog and his mother lived happily together for thirteen years, until the woman grew ill, and when
she lay on her deathbed, the dog never left her side. On the night the woman closed her eyes for the last time, the dog spoke
his last words: “Without your ear, I have no tongue.” (I need hardly point out the double meaning of both the English “tongue”
and the French langue, which refer both to the physical tongue and to language.) Though the dog lived another year after his mother’s death, he
never made another noise, either canine or human. After his death, the people of Lyons erected a statue in his honor, with
his final words engraved on the base.


I think this story, so full of fairy-tale magic and sadness yet so well documented by the greatest scientific minds of their
age, will be the perfect opener for my book, my earnest and scholarly work in which I try to explain to my baffled colleagues
why, after twenty years of devoting my time to the study of linguistics, I have decided to turn my energies to teaching a
dog to talk.


I’ll need to begin with case histories to prove that I at least cracked a book before going completely off the deep end. They’ll
want me to remind them of the strange case of Vasil, the eighteenth-century Hungarian who, influenced by a philosopher named
Geoffrey Longwell, who believed that dogs were the lost tribe of Israel, performed a series of experiments on a litter of
vizsla puppies. Vasil took as his inspiration the biblical story of the Garden of Eden; though the Bible is unclear as to
whether there were dogs in Eden, Vasil concluded that God would certainly not have omitted such a fine species of animal.
Taking as evidence the serpent’s speech to Eve, Vasil postulated that all animals must have been blessed with the power of
speech in the earthly paradise, a power they lost when Adam and Eve left Eden. He felt that if he could restore that power,
which had been unfairly wrested from the animals, he would uncover the first language ever spoken.


To recapture this language, Vasil placed each puppy in a walled-off garden, each one separate from its brothers and sisters,
and attempted to re-create the conditions of Eden. He provided them with plentiful food and water, and he massaged their throats
daily to encourage speech. He met with varied success. One puppy never spoke at all, one made sounds that resembled a mumbled
French (although later researchers found it to be an Alsatian creole), and one learned only the Hungarian word for roast beef.
The remaining five puppies merely barked, although they all seemed to understand one another.


Vasil’s theories drew condemnation from the Church, especially his premise that God had acted unfairly in revoking dogs’ powers
of speech, and he spent the last twenty years of his life in prison. The vizslas were instrumental in his arrest; the dogs
escaped and ran through the streets, with the French-speaking one barking out naughty and insulting limericks and the Hungarian-speaking
one calling for roast beef, until the amazed crowd followed them to Vasil’s house.


The real clincher, I think, will be the tragic case of Wendell Hollis, which, my colleagues will certainly recall, is the
most prominent example of this kind of inquiry in the modern era. Over a period of several years, Hollis performed surgery
on more than a hundred dogs, changing the shape of their palates to make them more conducive to the forming of words. Several
of the dogs died as a result of the surgery, which Hollis performed in his New York apartment, and many of the others ran
away. Hollis was arrested after the police received a complaint about the noise; after years of putting up with the mangled
barking, a neighbor called the police when one of the dogs learned to cry for help. This one dog, with a scarred throat and
misshapen mouth, testified at the trial. Though he didn’t speak in complete sentences, he was able to say “hate” and “fire
pain” and “brothers gone away.” The jury took only one hour to reach a verdict, and Hollis was sentenced to five years in
prison.


None of these cases can be considered completely successful, of course. But it’s the very form these failures took, the “almost”
quality of each half success, that makes me think there’s more in this area to be explored.


In fact, I find lately that I can think of nothing else.

But if I am to keep my good name in the academic community, something I’m no longer sure I care about doing, I can’t allow
such subjectivity. I have to begin by telling my colleagues that there’s a whole body of work out there already, nearly as
old as the study of language itself. I have to tell them that I’m not doing anything new at all.


If I could, though, I would begin the way poets used to do when they told their stories of love and war and troubles rained
down from the heavens. I would begin like this:


I sing of a woman with ink on her hands and pictures hidden beneath her hair. I sing of a dog with a skin like velvet pushed
the wrong way. I sing of the shape a fallen body makes in the dirt beneath a tree, and I sing of an ordinary man who wanted
to know things no human being could tell him. This is the true beginning.


Let me return for a moment to my preliminary comments regarding the project I am about to undertake. As I have mentioned,
I have a dog named Lorelei, a Rhodesian Ridgeback. She was my wife’s dog before she was mine. It is my proposal to work with
Lorelei on a series of exercises and experiments designed to help her acquire language in whatever ways are possible, given
her physiological and mental capacities. It is my proposal to teach Lorelei to talk.


I realize how this must sound. A year ago I would have been as skeptical as the rest of you. But you have to understand how
the events of the past few months have changed my way of thinking. Let me remind you that we, as scientists, have witnessed
in the past century the strange spectacle of apes speaking entire sentences with their hands. We’ve seen parrots who have
learned to provide the punch lines of dirty jokes, much to the delight of their owners’ friends. We’ve seen guide dogs trained
to turn on light switches and to listen for the crying of babies born to deaf parents. I myself have seen, on an amateur video
show, a dog who has learned to make the sound “I love you.”


I’m not suggesting that any of the above examples offer conclusive proof I’ll succeed. I’m aware, for a start, that dogs have
considerably less cranial capacity than gorillas and other higher primates, and I’m not kidding myself that dogs who say “I
love you” and parrots who curse like sailors are doing anything other than performing tricks they know will result in praise
and bits of food.


But in the evenings when I sit with Lorelei and she gazes up at me with her wide, inscrutable eyes, I wonder what she would
tell me if she could. Sometimes I get down on the carpet with her to speak to her softly and ask her my questions while I
rest my hand upon her great furrowed head. More than once I have awakened to find that I have fallen asleep with my head on
the wide, rough expanse of her side.


The conclusion I have reached is that, above all, dogs are witnesses. They are allowed access to our most private moments.
They are there when we think we are alone. Think of what they could tell us. They sit on the laps of presidents. They see
acts of love and violence, quarrels and feuds, and the secret play of children. If they could tell us everything they have
seen, all of the gaps of our lives would stitch themselves together. I feel I have no choice but to give it a try.


There’s a talking-dog joke that goes like this: A man. . .