I kept looking at the green digital clock on the dashboard, seeing what time it was and then wondering what time it was. Nothing went into my head; it was too full, too scared, working too hard to sort and file, to understand, to insist it
would
understand if only I gave it another minute or two.
Near Kaprun I stopped the car and opened the door so I could get the light inside to go on. Whenever I’m reading, I mark words I don’t know, copy them down, and look them up the next time I’m near a dictionary. It’s rare when I don’t have one of these lists in my wallet or pocket. The one I had that night was on the inside of a matchbook cover. “Lenitive.” “Epigone.” “Garboil.” I closed my eyes and recited.
“Lenitive—alleviating pain or harshness. Epigone—an imitative follower, an inferior imitator. Garboil—a confused, disordered state. Mother of God, I know them. I know those words.”
What did it look like, driving by that car parked on the side of the road, the man washed in small yellow light looking at a slip of paper in his hand, eyes closed, talking to himself? Was he lost and looking at his instructions? Had he forgotten something and was trying to remember? Or resting after a long drive? How many times have we passed scenes like that and not given it a second thought or glance? I can tell you though, firsthand, sometimes it is much worse than that. Sometimes the road is the only solid thing beneath the man’s feet and he stopped because he must look at it, right now, to reassure himself it is there. Because nothing else is.
Hours later I pulled up to the building site and got out of the car. The driving had finally calmed me down but I knew I couldn’t return
to the hotel until I was exhausted and incapable of thinking anymore. I drove to the museum because I understood now and had to look at it with that knowledge, no matter the time.
Behind the chain-link fence the skeleton of the structure, floodlit from all sides, looked very much like a rocket ship on its launchpad. The lights, so harsh and intense, refused to admit darkness was behind them, beyond them. But the beams quickly disappeared once they flooded out past the museum and into the Alpine night. You would think so much candlepower could shine well up into the sky, but it can bully night only so far, which is not far at all.
I opened the fence with my key and slowly trudged up the hill. Had Venasque known when he was treating me? He must have. What
didn’t
that old man know? As I walked, I tried to bring up different conversations we’d had, searching for hints or clues in what he’d said to verify what I now believed to be true, to be the purpose of what I was doing. Clues. There had been so many of them! The dream of Robert Layne-Dyer and his edible house—“Everyone has a house inside them. It defines who they are … . You think about it all your life … . But only once do you get a chance to actually see it. If you miss that chance, or avoid it ’cause it scares you, then it goes away and you’ll never see it again.” Venasque showing me my music, written properly, under the water of the swimming pool in California. Big Top sacrificing himself in Saru, my conversation with Claire in Vienna about Brueghel’s
Tower of Babel.
Like the floodlights on the building, my own intelligence and insight shone brightly against the superstructure of my life, but once it moved past it was lost. I knew that was true about many other people, but the realization did nothing to comfort me at the moment. I am not a humble man because I don’t believe humility is the key to heaven. If you do a job well you are allowed to admit it, to agree with others’ positive assessments. We have enough demons hopping around inside, hurting and goading and helping us to do wrong things, why not applaud (as well as
appreciate) the few angels in there too? I had been comfortable with that attitude until that night.
Because no single human was capable of what I had done,
which
meant that what stood in front of me on the hillside, “my” building, was not my doing, my brainchild, but rather the creation of the powers that had moved me here and there to do and draw this, this, and this. And the whole time I thought it was mine. My own wonderful mine. It was like putting a twig in front of an ant and watching it move up the piece of wood as if that were its plan the whole time, rather than your moment’s silly diversion. Was I more angry at being manipulated, or frightened, having realized what I’d been manipulated into doing?
Looking at the structure, I could have bitten through steel. Because when it was finished, this was going to be one fucking lovely piece of work. Many times I’d wished the old Sultan had lived long enough to see his dream made real. One night I even lay in bed and imagined leading him on a tour of the finished Dog Museum. Showing him how certain materials worked together, the subtle touches and inspirations that combined to make the place whole yet eccentric in the best way.
The most important question, and the one I’ve asked myself repeatedly, is whether it was the best building I ever designed. It was not. That is not sour grapes either; I don’t say it because the concept was not ultimately my own. After years at a job one develops a good, fair sense about one’s work and knows what is good and what isn’t. The Dog Museum was original and substantial, with a sense of humor that wasn’t common in my work, but it was not the Radcliffe
pièce de résistance.
No way. With the amount of inspiration, magical and otherwise, that went into it, I’d thought at the beginning it would transcend everything else, but it did not. It was a prize winner, the kind of building that makes people turn their heads, stare, and perhaps even ask what it is or who designed it. But it was not the work
I’d take to my grave held tightly in my dying hands because it best defined me. It would be talked about because people would love the space it created, the way it complemented and accented whatever light entered, but it was not my final say. It was not. Claire said it was. Palm said it was. Even fatso Hasenhüttl said so, but who’s the expert here? Me.
As I approached the lights, a large form slipped down from a pile of lumber and came slowly toward me. Hasenhüttl.
“You’re out late, Harry.”
I could have cursed him but I wasn’t angry. I could have yelled at him for hiding essential information but what was the point? He might have told me if I’d asked earlier. Hadn’t he said he would answer certain questions? I just hadn’t known to ask. Now I did. Now I could have embraced him, my own private angel, and said, “Let’s have a drink. I understand. Let’s celebrate.” What I did instead was rather odd. When we got close enough, I reached out and took his hand as a child will its parents’. He seemed to think that was okay because he smiled and let me hold it.
“I know what’s going on here now.”
He nodded but said nothing.
“It is what I think, isn’t it?”
“Tell me what you think.” Although it was cold enough for me to be wearing a down ski jacket, he wore only a dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie. Our breath puffed out in gray clouds that went away as soon as they appeared.
I looked at him in his suit and over his shoulder at the museum. A moment of embarrassment passed before I spoke again, as if what I was about to say was risky or shameful.
“It’s the Tower of Babel, isn’t it?”
“Yes it is. It’s an attempt.”
“We’re building the Tower of Babel here.”
“Yes we are.”
“Okay.” I let go of his hand and looked at our feet. “I’m not even shocked by it. Why not?”
“When did you realize?”
“Tonight, at the movies. I went with Palm to see the new
Midnight.
Suddenly, twenty minutes into the film, I began understanding every word on screen. Then every language around me.”
“You can, Harry. I’m speaking to you in Arabic now. Tell me what happened after that.”
I noticed no difference in how he spoke. The words sounded the same, as did the tone and inflection. For the rest of our time together that night he’d stop every so often and tell me what language he had been speaking for the last five or ten minutes. There were many of them. Never once did I notice a difference. It never sounded as if he shifted from one to another for better emphasis or word choice. He simply spoke and I understood. I know someone who works as a simultaneous translator. Totally fluent in French. She says that fluency notwithstanding, there is always a moment’s pause between what is said in one language and her translation into the other. There has to be because there must be moments for the mind to work through the puzzle of inversion and declension so as to make the “jump” not only accurate, but as close to the original as possible. “Jump” was her word and it’s a good one. She compared it to jumping from one rooftop to another. But there was no need to jump with Hasenhüttl that night. There was a path, a straight path of language that was no effort to follow.
I told him about leaving the theater and driving around, trying to keep sane and figure out what was happening at the same time. When he asked how I’d “connected the dots” and reached my understanding, I said there was no connecting—only the unmistakable obviousness of what
was,
once I had the breath and calm to step back and think the whole thing through.
“But why me? Because I’m good, or because I was a student of Venasque’s?”
“Neither. Because you had the right mixture of belief, talent, and arrogance.”
“But what did I do? From what I see, I didn’t come up with zilch. It was all given to me. The inspiration came from outside. It isn’t my building, my design; it’s yours, or your boss’s.”
“No, Radcliffe, it
is
yours. It has to be yours or else it couldn’t be. The inspiration was yours, the concept, the design. The dream of Layne-Dyer was yours too.”
“Come on, man, you’ve been jerking me around for months! Ever since we met on the plane from Saru. What about that conversation I had with Claire? We just happened to talk about the Tower of Babel, but you tell me it wasn’t set up? I’m not
such
a fool, Hasenhüttl!”
“Believe it or not, we had nothing to do with that conversation. We’ve interfered very little in your life.”
“Well, tell me how you
did
interfere. Let’s start there. Now that I guessed the right answer to the big one, why don’t you just land on earth a while and give a few of those answers you
said
you’d give me. How ’bout cluing me in a tad as to what’s going on, okay? It’s my night, pal! Tonight I realized not only can I speak every language in the world but I have,
I
have, according to you, single-handedly re-created the Tower of Babel for the dead Sultan of Saru … as a Dog Museum! That sounds damned reasonable to me. Does it sound damned reasonable to you?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Why.
Why me? Why this? Why the Tower?
Why?’
Instead of answering immediately, he tilted his head back and looked at the sky. Suspicious that something with a halo or pitchfork might be about to land, I looked up too. Nothing there but a plane’s twinkling lights as it moved north. Without lowering his head, he
spoke. “While I was waiting for you I watched two dogs talk to each other. They do it through pissing, you know. One pisses his message on a wall. The other goes up, smells the first, then pisses his answer back. These guys must have lifted their legs to each other four times.
“Communication, Harry. Everything is talking to everything else, trying to get heard, but without much success. Remember in the seventies when that book came out about how plants had feelings too and how, if you tear off a leaf, the thing screams? One big talking world. Dogs piss on walls, plants scream, dolphins whistle … . Everything talks at everything else, but nothing understands. We can’t even understand our own groups! Think of how many languages we have, yet how few we speak. Or how few people speak their own well or with any clarity. Mankind is only now beginning to realize the enormous diversity of languages outside his own, and already it scares him terribly. Look at how he scoffs at the idea of screaming plants or messages from outer space.
“‘Now the whole world had
one language and few words.
And as men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.’ Remember that part of the story, Harry? ‘And they said to one another, Come let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’”The fat man turned and pointed at the museum. “It’s peculiar how painters invariably picture the Tower as a ziggurat or something that spiraled upward. The only thing that spiraled upward then was the language. Right to heaven. Man’s greatest failure was in trying to create something as complete and perfectly realized as the language he already possessed. A language understood by everyone and every
thing,
Radcliffe. It’s nearly impossible to imagine now, but you had a small taste this evening when your ears opened to every word spoken around you, no
matter what language. Imagine
that,
times a thousand, a million. Not only did those people comprehend the language of humanity, but also that of water, of blood, of sand and bees and color … . Everything spoke the same language. That’s what it was like in the time before the Tower. That’s why things were harmonious enough for Mankind even to conceive of building something from ‘brick and bitumen’ that might be the equivalent. But they didn’t want to build it as thanks to God for giving them this sacred gift of understanding. No, they wanted to build it because they were confused and dissatisfied with the opulence of God’s language and wanted to create their own—a language of objects. The Tower was going to be its beginning. The
A
in their alphabet. The stupidity! How dare they think they were capable of that. The
nerve,
imagining they could accomplish it in stone … .”