“I wish I could see it the way you do, but I guess I’m too much of a cynic.”
“Oh, don’t say that. I can think of nothing sadder than cynicism.”
“It’s the way things are.”
Jilly shook her head. “Only if you see them that way.”
Woody would have agreed with her. Nobody invested everything she did with as much attention and meaning put into the smallest parts of it as Jilly did. Maybe she didn’t open up her own secret self, but she was open to everybody and everything. She was there to hear them, to mark the movement and meaning of their lives and bear witness, no matter who or what or how strange things were.
That was her real gift, and her burden.
When the fire had died down completely, I gathered some ashes in a paper bag and we went to scatter them on the steps of St. Paul’s.
My brother Christy drove me out to the airport in that old Dodge wagon of his, Jilly and his girlfriend Saskia coming along for the ride. They wanted to wait inside with me, but I knew that’d be too hard for all of us, so we said our good-byes outside. I got my seat at the ticket counter and went through security. All I brought with me was in a knapsack carry-on and my fiddle case. Everything else, what little I’d accumulated over the years, I’d put into storage in the basement of Christy and Saskia’s apartment. I figured for a new life, I’d need new belongings, things that didn’t carry too much old history in them.
Walls are hard to take down. I hoped that Tanya would have patience while I fumbled my way through the unfamiliar task.
I listened to Woody tell me stories all the way out on the flight to L.A. I’d swear he was sitting right there in the seat beside me, whispering in my ear, instead of in my memory. I promised him that I’d try my best to impart everything I did with meaning.
I’d start with Tanya.
Embracing the Mystery
I heard a dog speak once.
It was Christmas Eve, 1993. His name was Fritzie, a gangly, wirehaired, long-legged mutt that I inherited when my best friend Gina drowned herself. There’s a legend that for one hour after midnight on Christmas Eve, animals were given voices so that they could praise the baby Jesus. But Fritzie wasn’t praising anybody that night. Instead we talked about how much we missed Gina.
This isn’t something I imagined, though I can understand your thinking so. Truth is, I’m the last person to believe anything improbable, even given such an experience. I don’t care what anyone says. One miracle doesn’t make fairy tales and that weird world you can only find in supermarket tabloids suddenly real, though you wouldn’t know it from some of my friends.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
While I heard a dog speak, it was only that one time. Fritzie never spoke to me again. Not all through that year, not the next Christmas Eve when the bells struck midnight, nor on any Christmas Eve after that. Though it’s funny. Right now he’s looking at me as I write this—with that big, sad-eyed gaze dogs do so well—and it’s like he knows I’m writing about him. Still, that’s only my anthropomorphizing him.
It’s not that I don’t think he has feelings. I know he does. He just doesn’t talk, except for that one time, and I don’t know what that was. A miracle, I suppose. Or a dream that I want to have been real because right then, that night, I really needed to talk to someone who’d been as close to Gina as I’d been and there was no one else except for Fritzie.
I don’t know.
What I do know is that animals don’t talk. Hey-diddle-diddle, dishes and spoons can’t run. Neither Elvis nor Kurt Cobain will be gigging again any time soon. Sorry.
“Okay,” Jilly says, holding up a finger to get everyone’s attention. “Question: If you were the eighth dwarf, what would your name be?”
“Lazy,” Sophie says.
Wendy smiles. “As if. I’d be Willy,” she adds to a general round of laughter.
“What, what?” she asks.
“You don’t even have one,” Sophie says. “Not unless you’ve been keeping the operation from us.”
“Oh, please. I was referring to Shakespeare, as in poet, writer— you know, your general, all-purpose scribe.”
“What about you, Sue?” Jilly asks.
“Tired,” I say.
Jilly shakes her head. “Too close to Sleepy. Try again.”
“What would yours be?” I ask instead.
“Oh, that’s easy,” Wendy puts in before Jilly can answer. “She’d be Silly.”
Jilly attempts a stern expression while muttering, “Bloody poets,” but she can’t hold it.
“I think I’d have preferred Saucy,” she says.
“Or Spacy,” Sophie offers.
“Would it work the same for Spice Girls?” Wendy asks.
“Then I’d definitely want to be Saucy Spice,” Jilly tells us.
We’re sitting in the Yo-Man club, waiting for the band to come on stage, two artists, a poet and a city architect who spends more time in meetings than at her drawing board: Jilly and Sophie, Wendy, and me. They’re the ones who draw inspiration out of thin air to make their art, but I think of them as the three muses, my three muses, because they remind me of the world I’m not a part of. They ground me, connect me to the art I can’t seem to release from the end of my own pencils and brushes anymore.
Sometimes they’re like fairy tale presences in my life, moving to a hickory-dickory-dock sound track, three blind mice that can see more clearly than I ever can. They’re the wise women who live in those cottages deep in fairy woods with herbs drying from the rafters and dark-eyed birds perched in the corners. Three small, tangle-haired women with the knowledge of some otherworld in their eyes and enchantment in their fingers. It’s all so real for them. Wendy collects fairy tales. Jilly believes in fairy tales. And Sophie … well, Sophie pretty much is a fairy tale.
Like I said, I don’t really believe in fairy tales or the magical things that can happen in them, except for that one time, when Fritzie spoke. But I find myself thinking about Gina more and more these days, and now I really want to hear Fritzie’s voice again. I want him to remind me of things I might have forgotten, because while I can’t let go of Gina, I’m losing her all the same. I’m losing the details of who she was. I’m shedding them like snake skins until one day all I’m going to have left of her is the fact that she drowned herself.
Fritzie almost died after that Christmas Eve when he talked to me. It was as though, without Gina, there was no point in his living, and he just started to pine away. I brought him back. I don’t know how, exactly. Lots of loving, I guess. But even now, five years later, he still carries an air of melancholy. I know he hasn’t stopped missing her any more than I do. I know he needs to talk about her, too. And maybe he does, only I’m not able to hear him anymore.
“How long do dogs live?” I ask.
The question pops out of me during a lull in our conversation, out of the blue, with no connection to what’s gone before. But that doesn’t faze this group. They can jump from topic to topic, helter-skelter, as though all words are part of this one large ongoing conversation in which no subject is inappropriate.
“I think it would depend on the breed,” Jilly says. “Holly would know.”
Holly Rue has a used book store on the edge of town. Because of this Internet-based information storage program called the Word-wood that she helped to develop, all of her friends have taken to thinking of her almost as an oracle: If you have a question, Holly can find the answer. Anyone with a computer and a modem can access the Wordwood themselves, which is where Holly gets her answers, but most of this crowd don’t own either. I’ve logged onto it a couple of times, but something about the site bothers me and I haven’t pointed my web browser in its direction for a long time now.
“I think I heard somewhere,” Wendy puts in, “that little ones live longer than big ones.”
“Are you worried about Fritzie?” Sophie asks. “How old is he now?”
“I’m not sure. Ten or eleven, at least.
”
“Dogs can live a long time,” Jilly assures me.
Wendy nods. “I’ve heard of them living until they’re eighteen, or even older.”
Except the clock’s running out, I think. It’s ticking for all of us, but it moves much faster for animals. I take a breath, put aside the practical, commonsensical Susan Ashworth these women know, and say what’s really on my mind.
“I’d like to hear him talk again,” I say.
This is the only group to whom I could come out with something like that and not have them laugh at me.
Jilly and Sophie exchange glances.
“You really need to ask Holly,” Sophie says.
“Or visit the Wordwood yourself,” Jilly says. “You’re on-line, aren’t you?”
I nod, unsure how to explain that something about that place spooks me. In the end I don’t say anything at all.
But when I get home, I log on to my server, download my email, then activate the bookmark that will take me to the Wordwood. When the home page comes up, I sit there and look for a long time at the image of a deep, old English oak forest that probably doesn’t even exist in Britain anymore. Finally I type my question in the little box provided.
How can you make a dog speak?
And hit return. My cursor turns into an hourglass and I wait for a few moments. The Wordwood works a bit like this search engine called Ask Jeeves, except instead of bringing up a page of links to other sites, it brings up links to various books and discussions that might exist on its own voluminous site. Or it asks you to clarify your question.
That’s the thing that I find so eerie. No matter what the time of day or night, the Wordwood responds as though there’s a person manning a keyboard, somewhere out there in its pixelated kingdom, and we’re in chat mode. The words even appear on my screen as though they’re being typed, the letters dropping neatly into the somewhat larger white box that has replaced the one that was first waiting for me when I arrived at the site.
»When you say ‘speak’ are you referring to an actual, interactive conversation?
I hesitate for a moment, then type in “Yes.”
»This might take a moment.
I stare at the trees behind the box. They’re like a video, rather than a static image—real smooth streaming, too. I swear I can see leaves moving and there’s nothing jerky about their shivering movement. A sound like a breeze comes up out of my computer’s speakers. I leave the site when I think I see a little figure moving in the shadows behind an enormous branch just beside the white reply box—a small shape, the size of a squirrel, or a monkey, but human. Wearing clothes.
I’m not stupid. I know it’s not real. I know they can do pretty much anything with special effects these days, and the Internet’s always been cutting edge. But it spooks me all the same. I can’t shake the feeling that the image of that forest is a real-time video of some forest that only exists out there in whatever space it is that the World Wide Web occupies. Not the hard drives that house all those hundreds of thousands of Internet sites, but some other place that can’t be measured, or weighed, or touched. A place that should be impossible to access, like the other music that lies in the silences between the notes we hear in a song. The invisible words that lie between the lines of a story or a poem.
Between, between …
That’s where Jilly says all magic begins. In the hidden places that lie between things.
I turn off my computer and take Fritzie for a walk. That night I dream of Gina in a wood. An old oak wood like the one that was on my computer screen before I went to bed. She’s no bigger than the size of my hand, sitting there on a branch, looking down at me, and she’s about to tell me something very important but my alarm goes off and I wake up.
When I get off work that day, I go home and change, stick a few dog biscuits in my pocket, and take Fritzie for a walk. He seems a little confused because we’re not out as long as we normally are, but he perks right up when I take him to the car instead of back inside. I wish it were that easy for me.
I wasn’t joking when I said if I were the eighth dwarf I’d be called Tired. I’m forever tired these days, it doesn’t matter how much sleep I get. There’s always too much to do at the office, where downsizing only means that people keep getting laid off and their workload is divided up between those of us still left, like we weren’t already overworked. It’s impossible to get any sense of accomplishment because nothing ever seems to actually get completed.
Jilly keeps saying I should simply quit and go back to doing fine art like I did when we first met—”You were so good,” she’d say. But even then, it was a hobby for me, not a vocation. She doesn’t really understand that while I might have retained my motor skills as an artist—I still do some hands-on art at work, for all the endless meetings my department head insists upon—I don’t seem to have the heart of an artist anymore. I can appreciate. But I can’t create. At least not anything outside the realm of architectural drawings.
Fritzie doesn’t have to think about those kinds of things.
“Do you know where we’re going?” I ask him as I open the passenger door for him. “To visit Snippet.”
He gives me a grin, tongue lolling. Maybe he recognizes the name of Holly’s little Jack Russell, maybe it’s just because we’re together and going for a drive. Life’s simple for a dog.
I don’t really know Holly that well myself. She has a used book store up in the north end of the city. It’s not an area where I normally go on my own, but I’m forever giving rides to Christy and Jilly and the others, so I guess we’ve become something more than acquaintances over the years. And Fritzie and Snippet took to each other straightaway. Often when I’m chauffeuring someone up to the store, I leave them with Holly and just take the dogs out for a ramble in the fields behind the store.
I’m not a book person the way Holly and Christy are. I’m just as happy reading whatever’s new and in paperback as I am some rare old classic that hasn’t been in print for thirty years. Though I do have to admit that I was quite taken with a Robert Nathan novel that Holly lent me once; so much so, in fact, that when I realized none of his books were still in print—and how could that even be, he was so amazing—I went and borrowed them from the library, one by one, until I’d read them all.
I’m thinking of Nathan’s books as I pull into the small parking lot by Holly’s store. Maybe I should ask her to recommend someone else to me. But first things first.
I let Fritzie out of the car. He runs to a nearby telephone pole to check his pee-mail and leave a new message of his own, then rejoins me at the front of the store. We can see Snippet in the window, muzzle pressed against the glass just under the modest store sign that reads:
HOLLY RUE-USED BOOKS
When Fritzie notices her, the two of them dance and try to touch noses through the window. I can see Holly inside, laughing at the pair of them, and I wave to her.
The store is its usual jumble. I have to admit that I find something just a little disconcerting about a retail establishment that offers up its goods in such a haphazard manner. It feels like you have to be part pack rat, part spelunker, just to make your way through it all. I give Snippet and Fritzie each one of the biscuits I stuck in my pocket earlier, then make my way by a circuitous route to where Holly’s sitting.
She looks the way she always does, red hair held back from her face with bobby pins, hazel eyes bright and welcoming, the same fashion sense as Jilly: all baggy clothes on a small trim figure.
“This must be a first,” Holly says. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you up here on your own.”
I take a few books from a chair and put them on one of what seems like twenty cardboard boxes full of books that are clustered around Holly’s desk like livestock at a feeder.
“It’s possible I’ve gone all literary on my own, isn’t it?” I say as I sit down.
“Eminently so,” she assures me.
“But not true,” I tell her. “I’ve just co
me to pick your brain instead.”
Holly’s eyebrows rise in a question. I have to gather my courage—this isn’t Jilly or the others I’m talking to now.
“I was wondering,” I say, talking quickly to get it all out before I lose my nerve, “if you could check in the Wordwood to see if there’s a way to make a dog talk.”
“You mean bark?”
I shake my head. “No. I mean to really be able to communicate with them. Share a conversation.”
Holly smiles.
“I’m serious,” I say.
“I wasn’t making fun of you,” she tells me. “Or if I was, I was making fun of both of us, because I’ve already looked it up for myself.”
It takes a moment for that to register.
“What did you find?” I finally ask.
Holly shrugs. “Nothing terribly useful. The most effective method seems to be to get the Welsh goddess Cerridwen to let you stir her cauldron and then sneak a few drops of the magical brew when she’s not looking.”
I just look at her.
“Well, apparently it worked for Taliesin,” she says. “He was able to immediately understand the language of birds and animals after one taste.”
“A Welsh goddess...”
“I know. You won’t exactly find one setting up shop at the local mall... or even in the Market. One of my own favorite bits of animal lore comes from The Book of Bright Secrets by A. S. Ison. She says that if you look between a dog or cat’s ears, you can see what they’re seeing—not just what’s in front of them, but those mysterious things that only they can see.”
I know what she means. Fritzie can sometimes spend a half hour or longer simply staring at a corner of the room, like there’s a window to a whole other world hidden there.
“And then there’s Christy,” Holly goes on. “In one of his books he talks about this idea that if you put your forehead against that of a cat or a dog and lock gazes with them, you can see what they’ve seen.”
“Have you ever tried any of these things?” I find myself asking.