Carolyn Parkhurst - The Dogs of Babel

What’s it like, Lexy? You wake up and you feel—what? Heaviness, an ache inside, a weight, yes. A soft crumpling of flesh. A feeling like all the surfaces inside you have been rubbed raw. A voice in your head—no, not voices, not like hearing voices, nothing that crazy, just your own inner voice, the one that says “Turn left at the corner” or “Don’t forget to stop at the post office,” only now it’s saying “I hate myself.” It’s saying “I want to die.” It starts in the morning, as soon as you wake up. You see the sun through the curtains, it’s a beautiful day maybe, it doesn’t matter. You turn over to see if you can sleep some more, but it’s already too late for that. The day is upon you. You want to hide, to curl up in a ball, but that’s not really what you want either. After all. It doesn’t stop your mind, does it, it doesn’t stop the ache. It’s not an escape. The whole day in front of you. How will you bear it? You want to escape, but there’s no place you can go where it won’t be with you. Inside you like a nausea. Even sleep, really—you wake up with a jaw sore from clenching your teeth in the night and a feeling inside you like you’ve spent the whole night dreading this moment of waking up. The shining sun is of no use to you. Crying helps sometimes, the way that the wrenching act of vomiting can lead to a few moments’ respite from nausea. And the way it racks your gut is exactly the same.

You don’t want to get out of bed, but you don’t want to turn into that cliché, you know danger lies that way. So you get up, and you try to find pleasure in the little things, the first cup of coffee in a mug you like, the mint-burst in your mouth when you brush your teeth, but you can tell you’re trying too hard. You have breakfast with your husband, your sweet unknowing husband, who can’t see anything but the promise of a bright new day. And you say your apologies—you’re sorry, you’re always sorry, it’s a feeling as familiar as the taste of water on your tongue—and you kiss him on the lips as he walks out the door, and he’s gone.

You go through your morning, but your interactions feel false, all the little things you take for granted at other times, the need to smile at the neighbors on the street, the need to speak pleasantly to the awkward boy with the terrible face ringing up your groceries. The smile feels wrong on your face. You look at other people, and you know they have their problems, too, but it seems to come easier to them, all of it. They don’t have that hollow sound in their voices when they talk.

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.

Ifind 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?