SHE UNNAMES THEM | 593

Rover neither barked, nor fainted, nor cursed, nor wept. He really took it
very well.
“Where is the cat?” he asked at last.
“Where is the box?”
“Here.”
“Where’s here?”
“Here is now.”
“We used to think so,” I said, “but really we should use larger boxes.”
He gazed about him in mute bewilderment, and did not flinch even when
the roof of the house was lifted off just like the lid of a box, letting in the
unconscionable, inordinate light of the stars. He had just time to breathe,
“Oh, wow!”
I have identified the note that keeps sounding. I checked it on the mando-
lin before the glue melted. It is the note A, the one that drove the composer
Schumann mad.8 It is a beautiful, clear tone, much clearer now that the
stars are visible. I shall miss the cat. I wonder if he found what it was we lost?
1982

She Unnames Them

Most of them accepted namelessness with the perfect indifference with
which they had so long accepted and ignored their names. Whales and dol-
phins, seals and sea otters consented with particular grace and alacrity, slid-
ing into anonymity as into their element. A faction of yaks, however, protested.
They said that “yak” sounded right, and that almost everyone who knew they
existed called them that. Unlike the ubiquitous creatures such as rats or fleas
who had been called by hundreds or thousands of different names since
Babel,1 the yaks could truly say, they said, that they had a name. They dis-
cussed the matter all summer. The councils of the elderly females finally
agreed that though the name might be useful to others, it was so redundant
from the yak point of view that they never spoke it themselves, and hence
might as well dispense with it. After they presented the argument in this light
to their bulls, a full consensus was delayed only by the onset of severe early
blizzards. Soon after the beginning of the thaw their agreement was reached
and the designation “yak” was returned to the donor.
Among the domestic animals, few horses had cared what anybody called
them since the failure of Dean Swift’s2 attempt to name them from their
own vocabulary. Cattle, sheep, swine, asses, mules, and goats, along with
chickens, geese, and turkeys, all agreed enthusiastically to give their names
back to the people to whom— as they put it—they belonged.
A couple of problems did come up with pets. The cats of course steadfastly
denied ever having had any name other than those self-given, unspoken,

8. The German Romantic composer and pianist
Robert Schumann (1810–1856) died from mental
stress that included tinnitus, a per sistent ringing
in the ears.
1. Biblical city where God determined people
wouldn’t speak just one language.
2. Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift (1667–
1745), who in book IV of Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
depicts horses who are smarter and more humane
than people as a  way to mock human preten-
sions of higher intelligence.