The Dogs of Babel (12 page)

Lady Arabelle is her name. She could not be more of a cliché—colorful scarves knotted about her head, a jangle of gold necklaces at her throat—but there’s something so sincere about her you forget all that. Something about her manner, the warmth she displays, draws you in right away. I can see why you’d want to believe what she has to say. The people who phone in with their problems, she calls them honey and baby, and she makes it sound like she means it. There’s something distinctly motherly about her. If she called me baby, I think I’d want to cry.

“Check him out, honey,” she’s telling the woman on the phone. “Make sure his divorce is final, because I don’t think he’s being honest with you. He’s hiding something. Did he ask you not to call him at home?”

“Well, he told me he has this roommate he doesn’t like, so he’s not home much. He told me I should call his pager.”

“That’s no roommate, honey. That’s his wife.”

They flash a phone number. “Lady Arabelle knows all your secrets,” the voice-over tells me. “She answers your questions about the future, your questions about the past.” Well, that’s something. Your questions about the past. Idly, I imagine the conversation that would follow if I called the number on the screen. “I see a large dog. The dog has something to tell you.”

Another caller, a man this time. “I’m sorry, hon,” Lady Arabelle tells him. “But that’s not your baby.”

“It’s not?”

“No, honey, it’s not. Tell me this, did she go out of town a few months ago, maybe for her job? Did she go to an Eastern city?”

“Yeah,” he says, his voice gone flat. “She went to Boston in June.”

“Well, that’s when it happened. Ask her about it. Ask her if she ran into an old boyfriend in Boston, and see what she has to say for herself.”

I give some thought to this man whose marriage may now be over as the result of a phone call to a stranger. I wonder if it’s true, this scenario she’s put in his mind. I picture the confrontations that will follow this phone call.

Another voice-over, some fine print about rates per minute. I find myself tempted to write the phone number down. Then Lady Arabelle is back, talking to another woman.

“There’s something you’re not telling me about,” she says. “You’re all excited about something. Something you found in his coat?”

“Yes,” the woman says. “I found a ring. I think he’s going to propose!”

“Well, I’m gonna tell you something, baby. That ring’s for someone else. That ring is not for you.”

It’s the specificity that seals the deal. The Eastern city, the hidden ring. She’s very convincing. But something about the desperation of these callers, the faith they put in this woman who, sincere though she seems, knows nothing about their lives, bothers me. I stand up, ready to turn off the TV—I have the remote in my hand—but what I hear next makes my heart stop.

Because the next voice I hear is Lexy’s.

I
t’s her. It’s her. I know it the way I know the pound of my blood in my chest. Lexy’s voice, like a homecoming for me. Lexy’s voice, filling the room once more.

“I’m lost,” she says, and I lose my legs beneath me. “I don’t know what to do,” she says, and I make a sound like an animal struck.

My hands are shaking, and I feel dizzy. My heart is beating so hard I think it will break. I pick up the remote from where I’ve dropped it, and I turn the volume up as high as it will go. Lady Arabelle, her voice like a lullaby, gives her reply.

“Listen to me, honey,” she says, so loud I can feel it in my teeth. “You have more strength than you know.”

I wait for more, I wait for Lexy to come back and say something else, but that’s all there is. They’re back to the voice-over about rates and phone numbers.

Lexy’s voice gone once more. I cover my face with my hands and give myself over to the wave of sound racking my body. A tightness in my chest gives voice to a bottomless noise like a howl. I kneel on the floor in the half-light of the television and wail loud enough to wake the dead.

I feel a wet pressure on the back of my hand, and I look up to see Lorelei staring me in the face. “Lorelei,” I say, my voice wrecked and uneven. “Did you hear it, girl?” She licks my face. I gather her in my arms and lift her, all of her dense, heavy weight, onto my lap. I press my face into the rough warmth of her neck, the thick leather band of her collar. I’m sobbing now, and her fur grows damp beneath my face. “Did you hear it, Lorelei?” I say. “It was her, it was her, it was her.”

Later, later, when I’ve calmed down enough that my body has stopped shaking and I’ve quieted my breath, I get a piece of paper and I write down the number on the screen. I stare at the number. My head is pounding. What does it mean? For a wild minute, I imagine Lexy alive, sitting in a room someplace, with a phone pressed to her ear. But no. Just as quickly, I see it all again, Lexy lying in her coffin, her body strange and still. Who knows how long ago she made this call? It could have been months before her death, it could have been years. For the first time, I think about Lexy’s words. “I’m lost,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.” What kind of trouble was she in? And where was I? It occurs to me that there must have been more to this phone call. I have to talk to this woman. I have to hear the rest of the story. But will she even remember Lexy? She talks to a hundred people a day. And all their problems are the same. All the world’s troubles and secrets, none of them new. She gives them all the same advice,
Follow your heart
and
You know what you have to do.
There’s no mystery there. The people who call know the answers already. They just need someone to say them out loud.

I get up and walk to my study. For once I’m glad I never throw anything away. In my desk drawer, I find a thick folder filled with old bills, and I begin to go through it. Nothing’s in any order; I always just cram papers in here at random after paying the bills. Here’s a water bill from three years ago; here’s the credit card bill I paid last week. I go through, separating out the phone bills and throwing the rest on the floor.

It takes me an hour to find it. That phone number, the one I’ve just written down, 11:23 P.M. Forty-six minutes in length. What desperate night was this? While I slept, she sat in this very room and made a phone call to a television psychic. “I’m lost,” she said, and I was asleep. And then she came in and lay beside me. She was lost, and I had no idea. She lay beside me, lost and scared.

The charge is $229.54. How could I have missed this? I tend to be a bit absentminded when it comes to such things—it once took me six months to notice I was being charged a monthly membership fee for a health club I didn’t belong to—but a two-hundred-dollar phone call? And then I see the date. October 23 of last year. The day before Lexy’s death. Of course I paid my bills that month in a fog.

Lorelei comes into the room and whines to be let out. It’s late; she had her nightly walk hours ago, and there are hours still until morning. This is a strange night for us both. I follow her to the back door and let her out into the yard. She sniffs around the base of the apple tree. I wonder if Lexy’s scent is still there, embedded in the damp earth. Strange that Lorelei didn’t respond to Lexy’s voice on the TV. She slept through the whole thing, awakening only when she heard me cry out. How could she have missed it, with all her strong canine powers of hearing? Has she forgotten Lexy’s voice in this short time? Or is there something about the filtering effect of the tape recording, the tinny TV speakers, that reduces even the most beloved voice to mere background noise? I’ve noticed before that Lorelei doesn’t respond to familiar voices on the telephone answering machine either. The doorbell, though. Whenever she hears a doorbell on TV, she jumps up and runs to the door, barking. And our doorbell hasn’t worked as long as I’ve lived here.

After we come back inside, I go into the living room and pick up the phone. I dial the number I’ve written down. It rings once and picks up. There’s some tinny, mysterious-sounding music, then a recorded voice. “You have reached the Psychic Helpline, your gateway to psychic adventure. You must be over eighteen to enjoy our services. Our rates are four dollars ninety-nine cents per minute. The Psychic Helpline is for entertainment purposes only. Please hold for your personal psychic adviser.”

The extension rings, and a woman answers. She sounds young, Midwestern.

“Thank you for calling our Psychic Helpline. This is Caitlin, extension 79642. I’m going to do a tarot card reading for you today. Let me begin by getting your name, birth date, and address.”

“Um, actually, I’m not looking for a reading. I’d like to speak with Lady Arabelle.”

“Lady Arabelle’s not available right now. Why don’t you let me help you?”

“Well, maybe you could put me on hold. It’s very important that I speak to Lady Arabelle directly. I’m willing to wait until she’s free.”

“No, I’m afraid Lady Arabelle’s not here right now. Tell me, are you a Pisces? I’m getting a strong vibe here —”

“Maybe I could leave a message for you to give to her. Or maybe you could tell me when she’ll be there, and I can call back then?”

“I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible. But I assure you, I’m a qualified professional psychic, and I’ll be more than happy to help you. I’m sensing you’ve had some trouble in your life lately —”

“Listen,” I interrupt. “This is very important. It’s a matter of life and death.” Well, it is, in a manner of speaking. “You’ve got to tell me how to reach Lady Arabelle. I’m sure you’re not allowed to give me her home number, but maybe if I explain why I need to speak to her —”

Caitlin sighs. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have any idea how to reach her.” She’s dropped the ethereal quality she’s been trying to inject into her voice.

“What do you mean? She does exist, doesn’t she? I’ve seen her on TV.”

“Well, I’m sure she exists, but the thing is, there are hundreds of psychics who work for this network, and when you call, they just connect you to whoever’s available. You don’t get to pick who you get to talk to.”

“Well, even so, you all work together. There must be some way you can leave a note or something.”

“No, it doesn’t work that way. See, right now, I’m sitting here in my apartment in Dayton, Ohio, and for all I know, this Lady Arabelle, who I’m sorry but I’ve never heard of, could be in California or Texas or anywhere. It’s not like we’re all sitting around in some big psychic room or something, looking into crystal balls. We don’t all even work for the same company. There are, like, a hundred little companies, and they all sign up with this other company that runs a big central computer in Florida or someplace, and when someone calls, the computer checks to see who’s logged on, and then the phone rings right here in my living room, and I pick it up. You could call a hundred times and never get the same person twice.”

“I see,” I say. I feel deflated. “But there must be some phone number I can call to talk to someone who’s in charge. Whoever runs the big computer in Florida, I guess.”

“Well, if there is, I don’t know it.” Her voice softens a little. “But, listen, if you tell me a little more about this life-or-death situation, maybe I can help you find some answers. Come on, honey, tell me your birthday.”

It’s the “honey” that does it. Even in that thin, young voice of hers, the word makes my chest ache. Do I crave kindness and tenderness that much?

“September twentieth,” I say. I press the phone to my ear, ready to hear whatever she has to tell me.

W
hen I was a child, one of my favorite games on long car trips and rainy afternoons was to write a word, any word, at the top of a piece of paper and list beneath it all the words that could be made from its letters. The point wasn’t so much to count the number of words that I found, it was more to see what those words revealed about the word they came from. It was like magic to me, like a secret code to crack. Break apart
family,
and you find both
yam,
homey as Thanksgiving, and
lam,
the inevitable flight from the nest. Is it any accident that
loser
contains the letters to form
sore?

I liked the surprise of the images this game conjured up and the way that the pictures it painted were often so right. I broke down
father,
and I saw the way my own father was like a
raft,
bobbing along, holding us all up. I broke down
mother,
and I saw the way my mother hovered around us like a
moth.

I find myself playing the same game now, writing down names and seeing what they can tell me. Look inside
Lorelei
and you find
roll
and
lie,
two very doggy verbs, two things she does very well. But look further and you’ll see she carries within her a story to tell (see, there it is—
lore
) and a
role
she herself plays in that story.

Break open
Lexy Ransome
and you find
omen
and
sexy
and
soar.Lost
and
rose.Yearn
and
near
and
anymore.
See how it works? It doesn’t bear thinking about. It couldn’t be clearer. Only one letter away from
remorse,
and one letter away from
answer.

My own name, Paul Iverson, holds a wealth of words within it. Many of them, disconcertingly, have to do with the life of the body. Look and you’ll see that I am made up of
veins
and
liver
and
pores, nape
and
penis, loins
and
pulse.
Try as I might, I cannot escape this body of mine that breathes and beats and lives, that still sweats in the sun and craves water to drink. That passes urine like any living thing. I am tangible as the earth. I am
soil;
I am
vapor.
But look again: I am more than my body, I am more than my living self. Look again and you’ll find
soul
and
reason, prose
and
salve
and
lover.
I am
nervous
and
son
and
naive.
I’m as human as you can get. I
snore
and I
pine.
(One letter away from
passion.
One letter away from
reveal.
)