Ruffly Speaking

off before long, and it won’t teach him a thing, but, hey, no cage!” I tossed the muzzle on the table, then held up the little red plastic box in my right hand. “So now we move on to high tech, namely, the automatic bark-activated Yap Zapper with optional manual operation at a simple touch of this button.” I pointed the device straight at Rita and pressed. The Yap Zapper made an almost inaudible click, and its tiny red light flashed off and on. “And there you go! You can’t hear it, I can’t hear it, but any dog within—”
    Rita sat straight up, grabbed for her ears, and exclaimed, “What was that?”
    As I’ve said, from the human standpoint, or at least from my human standpoint, the Yap Zapper had done practically nothing. The click was as soft as the tap of a fingernail, and you had to look at the gadget to notice the little light that showed that the device was working.
    “Ultrasound,” I said. “It’s called a Yap Zapper. It gives a one-second burst of sound that’s—”
    “Do it again,” said Rita, all curiosity, her anger and defensiveness suddenly gone. “Or wait... The dogs...?”
    “They’re too far away,” I told her. “The range is ten °r twelve feet. It’s—”
    “This is so weird,” Rita said. “Press it again.”
    Once again, I aimed the Yap Zapper and pushed the button. Rita jerked her head as if she’d just climbed out of a swimming pool and was trying to shake the water out of her ears.
    “Rita, are you hearing it? Because, supposedly, it's… It’s supposed to be out of the range of human hearing. We—people—only hear up to whatever it is, but dogs can hear sounds way, way above what we can. Rita can you hear this thing?”
    “Not exactly,” Rita said. “That’s what’s so freakish. What I hear is total silence.”
     

26
     
     Maybe you’re quicker than we were; maybe you got it right away. Rita and I, however, had to hit the books. Back in graduate school, Rita had taken a course that touched briefly on human hearing, and sometime thereafter she’d refreshed her knowledge by cramming for the psychology licensing exam, but she’d soon forgotten everything except some psychoanalytic gobbledygook about the erotic significance of orifices, and in her recent reading about hearing loss and hearing aids, she’d ignored the technicalities and concentrated on what she called the socioaffective aspects of—believe it or not —dialoguing and their implications for—I swear to God— languaging. Therapists!
    I wasn’t much help, either. I knew that dogs could hear sounds pitched too high for human ears. To illustrate the point, I immediately produced the example of the so-called silent dog whistle inaudible to people but audible to dogs. My knowledge of the details, however, was as scanty as Rita’s.
    Before long, though, we’d strewn my kitchen table with what was, even for Cambridge, an oddly assorted collection of reference materials, and, soon thereafter, we understood almost everything, which is to say, everything except the trivial matter of who.
    But the how ? Rita’s deceitful no-hearing-dogs self-help guide informed us that human beings don’t hear sounds above 20,000 cycles per second. According to the canine authorities, dogs are vastly superior to people in this regard. (So what else is new?) Just how vastly superior? A couple of my books said that dogs hear sounds up to about 40,000 cycles per second, but Rita came across the suggestion that dogs may even hear some sounds within the range of 70,000 to 100,000 cycles per second. Are you with me? Cycles per second is frequency—pitch —as opposed to volume in decibels, which brings us to the hearing aids and the Yap Zapper. The operating instructions for Rita’s aids assured us that since an aid with a maximum sound pressure level greater than 132 decibels may impair hearing, this model safeguarded the user by cutting off sounds louder than 113 decibels. And the Yap Zapper promotion material? The bursts of sound were, as I’d known, high-pitched, and, as I hadn’t known, 120 decibels loud. In other words, the bursts were too high-pitched for a person to hear, but, nonetheless, loud enough to make Rita’s hearing aids momentarily and automatically quit working.
    Just like Stephanie’s. Rita and I reasoned that, far from malfunctioning, Stephanie’s aids were cutting out, as she described it, by responding to high volume, regardless of pitch. And Ruffly’s episodes? I hadn’t been