The Dogs of Babel Read Online Free

he heard a short piercing scream and then nothing more. It wasn’t until the next day, when he was playing loud music and one of the family members who had gathered next door to grieve came by to ask him to turn it down, that he learned what sound he had heard.
    I was in town a month or so later, and I stayed on his couch—this was during the young part of my life when I was happy to have someone else’s couch to sleep on. As we sat drinking on the balcony, we couldn’t stop talking about it. It haunted us, and every conversation seemed to lead back to it. Toward the end of the night, when we’d drunk quite a lot and had moved very quickly through the stages of grief for this man we hadn’t known, we began to joke about it. We looked down from the balcony and tried to imagine the trajectory the man’s body would have taken as it fell. We speculated about where exactly he might have landed—there was a building whose roof lay directly below us, ten stories or so down, but we thought that perhaps the wind might have blown his falling body out over the sidewalk—and it was only as dawn began to break that we realized we were talking quite loudly and that the young widow was sleeping next door. I never found out whether she heard us that night—I suspect not, because when she moved out a month later, she made a special point of thanking my friend for his kindness during that terrible time—but the very possibility of it still fills me with horror. If I were to meet this woman again (and I don’t even know that I’d recognize her all these years later), I would fall to my knees and beg her forgiveness; I would tell her that I only now understand that what I did to her, whether she knew I did it or not, is the unkindest thing I have ever done in my life.
    I was thirty-nine when I met Lexy. Before that, I was married for many years to a woman whose voice filled our house like a thick mortar, sealing every crack and corner. Maura, this first wife of mine, spoke so much while saying so little that I sometimes felt as if I were drowning in the heavy paste of her words. The most ordinary details of our lives had to be broken down and processed; in every conversation, I had to choose my words carefully, because I knew that any of them, innocuous though they seemed to me, might mire me in a nightlong conversation about my motives in uttering them. It seemed to me that Maura was anxious all the time, nervous she might not be doing it all right, and the only way she could keep control of the pieces of her life was to analyze them until there was no life left in them at all. Sometimes, in the car, we’d be driving in silence, and I’d glance over at her when her face was, for a rare moment, unguarded. “What are you worrying about right this second?” I’d ask. And she always had an answer.
    Toward the end, after I’d begun to refuse to participate with her in these dialogues, she began leaving me notes. Just normal things at first—“Please pick up some milk” or “Don’t forget dinner at Mike and Jane’s tonight”—but as time went on, they became more and more complex and increasingly hostile.
    Our marriage ended late one night when I came home to find a note that said, “I’ve asked you several times to do me the favor of putting your breakfast dishes in the dishwasher before you leave for work in the morning, and yet I’ve come home once again to find your coffee mug sitting on the table. I guess I’ve been wrong in assuming that I can expect you, as my husband, to listen to me when I voice my needs, and to honor my wishes with sensitivity and respect. We need to talk about this as soon as possible.” The last four words were underlined twice.
    I picked up a pen—this was not my finest moment, I’ll admit—and wrote “Fuck you. I’m sick of your fucking notes” across the bottom of the paper. I stuck it on the refrigerator for her to find in the morning. We left each other the next day, but not until