Measuring the Tower of Babel by Colin Dodds

The wise men came from one of those dusty, me-too kingdoms. Girgash, I think—one somewhere up north with more rubies, emeralds and downtrodden youths than table manners or common sense. Over the years, their king had sent an outsized amount of interns and treasure to the glorification of Nimrod’s Mighty Tower. And so we greeted the wise men with lavish receptions and lush accommodations.

They arrived as a trio, the traditional number for a royal fact-finding quest. Their boss was the Prime Magnate and so on and on of Girgash. Sit through enough of those introductions and you became grateful for the brevity of the tower’s titles—Nimrod, then Vice Nimrod, then Executive Vice Nimrod, then Executive Directing Vice Nimrod, then Executive Commanding Vice Nimrod and so on.

The Prime Magnate of Girgash, for reasons entwined with his own ever-tenuous position, had sent the wise men to find out the number of floors in the tower. He required an exact count, the foremost of the three told the glad handers and account executives at Potentate Relations. Of course, they said, and proceeded to wine and dine the three for two days straight.

Blinking their bleary eyes open the next day, the wise men asked their question again. And so a meeting was arranged with no less a personage than the Vice Nimrod of Communications—the boss of my boss’ boss’ boss—a guy named Dinyalu Abrogastus. No one called him anything shorter. He sat at the head of a great v-shaped table hewn from an impossible tree in an exclusive top-floor conference room.

Holding their hangovers in with all the wisdom and ambassadorial dignity they could muster, they endured the lengthy introduction ceremony where almost everyone gave their full rank and functional title. The foremost of the three wise men of Girgash introduced himself simply as Leyach. Once the introductions had ended and the room had gone still with anticipation, he asked Dinyalu how many floors there are in Nimrod’s Mighty Tower.

I was in attendance at our meeting with the wise men as part of our show of service, or force, depending on how you looked at it. I was easily the least senior one there.

Dinyalu smiled a tight smile. Finally our great Vice Nimrod broke the silence by saying that he would be happy to answer, and that he would assign an entire team to make sure they received a best-in-creation answer, and schedule a follow-up meeting. But in the meanwhile, they should enjoy this, and try that.

You mean you don’t know? Leyach said, interrupting the executive.

We all had our own idea of how tall the tower was. But numbers were elusive. I would dare that even Dinyalu didn’t have a number. The tower, at the time, added floors at the top regularly, and dug new basement floors almost as frequently.

Dinyalu said as much, adding that the answer was more complex than even that. The tower had stories, floors (or landings), levels and tiers, he said. But, give us a little time, he said, and we’ll get you the information you need. With that, he excused himself, leaving an uneasy absence in the room. My boss’ boss finally spoke up and arranged for a meeting a month hence.

In that month, the three wise men of Girgash stayed in their regent’s upper-floor apartments. Once the near-deadly extravagance of welcome receptions had run their course, the wise men went to work. They began to take the tower’s measure on their own. It was as if the promise of the Vice Nimrod of Communications meant nothing. They were wise men.

The Wise Men of Girgash project was a high-pressure assignment for Communications. It’s when we started working with the tower’s secret police (then called Language Unity & Mental Felicity, before it was reorganized into Verbal Discipline).

Our spies reported back to us when the three wise men took up a post atop a grain silo south of the tower. We spotted their spyglasses with our spyglasses. A search of their chambers uncovered charts and numbers marked on long sheets of animal skin. They were trying to count the tower’s floors by eye. The secret police recommended we leave them to it, and after eight days, the wise men could be seen arguing on the top of their grain silo. By ten, fisticuffs. The youngest of them, an informer relayed, had gone plain mad from counting. He wasn’t the first to be driven mad by looking too long or too closely at the tower. The young man was sent home.

Dinyalu delayed the meeting by another two weeks. The two remaining wise men, Leyach and Grozalel, packed up their compasses, skins and spyglasses, and left the top of the grain silo. Potentate Relations besieged the men with opulent entertainments and ceremonial obligations.

After a week, Grozalel disappeared, it seemed. As an Honored Guest, he had Nimrod’s seal and a Diplomatic Elevator Pass, which meant he could go almost anywhere in the tower. And, by switching through several ingenious disguises a day, he was hard to follow. It took more than a week for the secret police to piece together what he was up to—riding the elevators, notching marks in a half-dry clay tablet with his thumbnail. And he might have even pulled it off.

But it was summer, and he was from the barbarous wastes. The problem was the women. Living in the tower, you forget. But tower women aren’t like other women. The young, pretty wealthy ones come here to burnish their appeal with some professional credentials and to meet the young wealthy men. The poor pretty ones come here to escape their homes and improve their fortunes. The less pretty ones quickly learn all the tricks to keep up. The result, to a newcomer, is a seemingly impossible mass of impossibly gorgeous women.

It was hot that summer. Even the executive elevators were all sweat and perfume and breath. The non-executive ones were erotic and crowded, like being inside an overexcited gland. While counting, Grozalel became distracted. Even his thrice-daily trips to the Salons of Qetesh couldn’t get him back on track. Finally, the secret police placed a comely lady officer in the right elevator, flushed and pressed close to the wise man. She put him off-track for good. I heard she maintains a nice, if crude, little palace in Girgash to this day.

She was my idea. I ran the weekly meeting on the project. Dinyalu would send Jerr, my boss’ boss, into these meetings occasionally to knock down our ideas or share a nugget from Potentate Relations or the secret police. But mostly, it was me and a team of low-level Associates, a wearisome bunch with more ambition than imagination, so I looped Avram into the project. To keep the wheels moving, I added my real protégé at the time, Quasha.

Quasha was a lifer, a would-be Executive Vice Nimrod. She was smart and understood how the tower worked. She sat still and listened closely, with wide eyes, when I gave her the speech about how “the tower is actually made of attention.” She was a poor person’s lifetime younger than I. But I imagined she had a crush on me. It wasn’t so unlikely—I looked good for my age. I had a guy who cut my hair so it looked like going bald was my idea. And I had a tailor who made my paunch look like a fashionable accessory. And she let me believe as much. She was smart.

After our seductress had taken Grozalel out of the picture, Quasha suggested that, given the substantial resources devoted to the problem by Potentate Relations, we should try offering Leyach, the last wise man, the official answer, and see if that worked. The official answer was that the floors in the tower were countless, without precedent or antecedent, immeasurable, unspeakable and innumerable.

But Avram said there was no way Leyach would be satisfied with that—the official answer wasn’t an answer at all. Quasha responded by asking if a number even existed. The room went silent. The twilight between what could and couldn’t be said wasn’t a place anyone wanted to occupy in one of these meetings. We all knew that such a number existed. The tower’s engineers, builders, tax collectors, rent collectors, plumbers and elevator technicians all knew it. Communications didn’t. It was For Internal Use Only, and we were outside of that particular ring.

I reminded the group that our job was to give Leyach the feeling of having been informed, so he can take that feeling back to Girgash. But it had been made clear by Dinyalu and Jerr that the last thing we wanted to give Leyach was a number. A number could be used to track the tower’s progress, or lack of progress. More than that, a number, no matter how incredibly high would remove the tower from the majestic place it held in the surly heart of mankind. A number, no matter how high, can always be higher.

So with no answer to impart, we took Leyach on a tour. We took the dirty, crude elevator cars down the dozens of floors where the tower’s taproot extended to the wide, rough-hewn banks of the massive, swift underground river that powered and watered the tower. Some believe the well below the tower is as deep as the tower is high, I said, so would you like to include those levels in your report to Girgash?

Leyach nodded and said he’d let us know. He responded the same way when we queried about the mezzanines, duplexes, abbreviated landings, lofts, top- and mid-level scaffolding, the bunk offices in the warrens of Junior Associates and so on.

We took Leyach to the handful of floors of solid cement. Nimrod, reeling from some betrayal, had ordered the floors filled to contain a secret or something else he didn’t believe he could adequately kill.

But you can’t enter or stand on them, so are they floors? We only ask, because we’re committed to giving you the best answer to your question, I’d added. Transparency with our Regal Partners is a core value of the tower, as you well know. But before we can give you the very best answer to your question, you have to answer the question of what a floor is? I asked again.

Leyach said he’d think about it. The next day, he sent a messenger back to his Prime Magnate. The messenger never made it. But we knew we wouldn’t always be so lucky. We brainstormed furiously. As expected, Avram lobbied for honesty. The whole conference room took a deep exasperated inhale at once. But, Avram said, what if we told the truth, but told it in our own terms? Instead of floors, we could describe it in other units, like 1,100 tall men, or 2,200 ordinary snakes. That way, our answer would be accurate, while being indecipherable.

Because it was Avram talking, Quasha led the rest of the team in an eye roll. It was clear that Avram was not on his way up, so he was regularly and easily derided in meetings. Jerr stepped in this time and said that’s actually not a terrible idea. He suggested giving Leyach measures even a little farther afield, using the length of the mighty tower’s shadow, or its relation to the height of the moon, or the number and depth of the clay pits, quarries used to supply building materials, and so on.

The next day, I was herding poets from Nimrod’s lower court to a conference room with a handful of engineers and astronomers. Candles burned all night in the art and copying offices for a week. The document the payroll poets put together was filled with such lush and multifarious metaphors that Quasha asked if we needed to run it past One Language compliance.

The Communications Department made a ceremony of handing Leyach the gorgeous scroll. Leyach pored over it, reading faster than anyone expected someone from the distant kingdoms could. When he was done, he shrugged and again asked how many floors?

My boss, a middle-aged grinder with an armor of good cheer named Keptus, repeated the company line about how do you define a floor? Leyach stamped his foot hard, and said that is a floor, took a moment to collect himself, gave Keptus a gentle smile and left.

We returned to our desks, offices and cubes, mostly to figure out how to explain our costly failure to Jerr and Dinyalu. Being the boss on the project, Keptus was especially tense. As his direct report, the affair didn’t reflect well on me, either. But Keptus was the one who would take the biggest hit.

In the tower, your boss is your job. Whatever it is you say or make or destroy or manage or collect—that’s incidental. Those are just flowers you drop at the feet of your lover, the coins gathered to bribe your executioner. Your boss is the job.

No one was happy with how this was going. Communications rarely won in any clear equivocal way, rarely delivered any of the things the tower needed to thrive in a clear way. And now it was about to have a big loss on its record.

A week after the poetry-scroll fiasco, I was staying late in the office. The real try-hards were at their desks outside my door, laboring away on their tablets and scrolls. Avram and I were taking a break, shooting the breeze. The office wasn’t kind to him. And though I was his boss, I got the sense I was the guy’s only friend. He wasn’t ambitious, and so had the ability to be a friend. Some nights, he’d wander over to my office to ask a question, and we’d talk.

But we were both a little crushed that our poetic evocation had fallen so flat. It was a nifty piece of work. We weighed our prospects if Keptus got canned. Avram said he couldn’t figure out why Leyach hasn’t just bribed someone in the architect’s fellowship or the plumber’s league with a few of those rubies that he’s always fiddling with. After all, they could give him the number, easy.

I snorted and told Avram that was easy for him to say—he’s just a Senior Associate. He’d never been through the initiations into the executive mysteries.

So they sat in the dark and said a few oaths, Avram said, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t take the money.

The executive initiations were more than they seemed, I said. They turned your daily life inside out, unveiled the naked cosmos, and detailed how that cosmos hinges upon the proper administration of orderly meetings, and, well, I can’t go further. But you get the sense.

We went back and forth about the efficacy of the initiations. I argued for the power of the experience. He argued for the allure of emeralds. Finally, Avram said that if I was right, then we should just initiate Leyach.

We both stopped talking. The idea, it seemed, was golden. The initiation of a building maintenance manager should give Leyach the exact height, depth and dimensions of the tower. It was the full disclosure he asked for. But it was also a flood of so much information, and so many mystical numerological significances, coincidences and associations that he wouldn’t be able to honestly answer a simple question when he finally arrived back in Girgash. It was brilliant.

Avram asked if we should we have another meeting about the initiation idea. Not if we want it to work, I said.

But we still needed buy-in from someone higher up. I took the idea over Keptus’ head, straight to his boss’ boss—Jerr. This was a risky gambit. Jerr understood right away, and sold it up the chain. But I never got the credit. With the crisis averted, the Executive Vice Nimrods praised Keptus all the same. It was easier than learning my name.

When we told Leyach about the initiation, he was excited. It was, after all, a capitulation on our part, and the proper way of telling a secret. Beyond that, it was what we all wanted—a way to be deeper inside of the tower. Wise as he was, he had to feel a little like a rube in the tower.

The initiation, if my own experiences are any indication, would treat the wise man to a week of fasting, chanting, drugs, intensive memorization, mild sexual stimulation, regular interrogation, complex mathematics, ritual humiliation, followed by midnight schematics, recitations and oaths.

The whole affair peaked somewhere mid-tower, where Nimrod had replaced three whole floors with a tangle of staircases, many unclimbable, and most of them leading nowhere. He’d constructed the upside-down, sideways and abruptly abbreviated stairs in order to confuse the envious flood ghosts below and the murderous fire-wielding angels above.

Tucked among the staircases, I heard, is a mystery floor—a floor of a thousand floors, of floors within floors, of floors that disappeared into nothing. These rumors, whenever they did slip, almost always ended a conversation.

Leyach underwent the entire ordeal. And it worked. He felt all his questions to be answered in full. And back in Girgash, not only did he fail to deliver a simple answer of how tall the tower was, but he rebuked the Prime Magnate for making such a wrongheaded inquiry.

Suffice to say, he lost his position in the court. He returned to the tower many years later, a broken man. I heard some sympathetic soul from Potentate Relations fixed him up with a job giving tours to school groups from the surrounding kingdoms.

Colin Dodds is a writer. His work has appeared in more than 250 publications, been anthologized, nominated and shortlisted for numerous prizes, and praised by luminaries including Norman Mailer and David Berman. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter. See more of his work at thecolindodds.com.