by Sylvia Torti
He heard rattling at the window and looked outside. A storm was moving across the valley. Frozen rain pelted the windows and the glass blurred. He’d arrived in the city on a night much like this one, cold and black, huge snowflakes coating the road. David had picked him up at the airport and given him a quick tour of the downtown, bright and shiny in the nighttime snow, the Temple Square, still lit in red, blue, gold and green, though Christmas had already passed.
He looked back at the drawing of the bird’s syrinx again, and suddenly he saw it. If he could keep the labia from moving, then theoretically there should be no sound. He thought he knew how he might do just that. He jumped from his chair and went to fetch a zebra finch. Even though the finch’s song was less interesting than the white-crown’s song, he wouldn’t try to mute a white-crowned sparrow. Those birds were reserved for David’s syntax experiment.
He slid the finch into the plastic funnel and waited for the anesthesia to work. When the bird was asleep he sterilized the tools. He cut tiny pins from pieces of metal, flipped on the microscope’s light and lined up everything on the table.
A few weeks after he’d arrived in Utah, he met Francesco, who owned the Italian deli downtown. Francesco leaned over the counter and spoke in Italian as if he were revealing a secret. “The church cranks out married couples every Sunday like ravioli from a pasta maker. The pope is supremely jealous. The Vatican only dreams of practitioners like these—no sex, no wine, no coffee…”.
“No coffee?”
“And ten percent of your paycheck, too.”
The religion didn’t bother Anton. What did affect him was the openness of the desert, the space and barrenness of the West. If he kept his vision on the mountains he felt at ease, but looking across the flat, gray valley or driving into the desert was disorienting. Just west of the city the salty lake hovered like a mirage just inches above the horizon. If you were at its shore on a sunny day, the white salt reflecting sunlight could blind you.
Space seemed to be one of the main things that made Americans different from Europeans. Anton had come to believe that fundamentally, the American experience was based on just that: dealing with loneliness in vast areas of land. Where Europeans had high density, medieval cities and two thousand years of ruins to temper their loneliness, Americans, especially those in the West, had horizon, massive rocks, thorny bushes, and a few ugly cities that looked like they’d been constructed overnight.
“Don’t you feel lonely out here?” he asked David once.
“Often,” David said, “but I love space. It’s liberating to be on a frontier where no one can tell me what to do.”
David didn’t mind telling others what they could and couldn’t do though. He’d forbidden Anton to work on engrams. Not my lab, not my funding, not my birds.
The zebra finch lay on the table before him, breast exposed, slow pulses up and down, breaths in and out. He had made a small opening in the bird, pinned the skin back and now he was looking down at the syrinx, a forked section of cartilaginous rings, the valves inside no bigger than rice grains. He meant to weave the tiny pins in one side of this ring and out the other. Picking up a pin with the forceps, he steadied his elbow on the table, moved in closer and held his breath.
“What’s it like?” his friends at home asked.
“Like a giant Ferris wheel.”
They presumed he was making a joke, laughed, lifted their glasses and sipped their wine, but he’d been serious. Coming to the States for the first post-doc was like stepping into the small cabin and hearing the door click shut. He remembered the beginning weeks of panic, disorientation, loneliness. Forget the fact that he could read and write in English, he could only make out half of what they were saying. Everything in the American accent sounded garbled and mispronounced. Language, he learned quickly, was a clear line, and you either stood on one side or the other. Making out the words was not enough. You either understood what a person was saying, or you did not.
The big wheel had begun to turn and then he’d experienced something new, the freedom of leaving Südtirol, his life there, his old self, behind. On the way up there was one new perspective after another, the horizon always larger, his vista longer. There was a brief time when the wheel stopped at the top, and he’d been perched there, feeling the gentle swing of the cage, enjoying it all, but then the wheel had begun to turn again. Heading to the bottom once more, he wasn’t so enamored. He felt caged, saw the bars more than the horizon.
He looked down at the bird. It appeared as though he’d succeeded in placing a pin through each labium of the syrinx but he wouldn’t know until the bird tried to sing. He tied off the last stitch and doused the suture with a bit of surgical glue. While he waited for the bird to wake up, he cleaned the table and tidied up the instruments. He wouldn’t say anything to David. If it worked, he would have to see that this was the definitive test. The engram would appear.
By the time he trudged down the hill from the laboratory, head bent against the wet snow, orange scarf wound around his chin, eyes squinting into the shimmer and dim glare of streetlights, he was feeling almost giddy. He looked into the sky, felt the snow hitting his cheeks and blinked the drops away from his eyes. In a few more hours everything would freeze once more, the slush turning to ice in the early hours of the morning. Tomorrow he’d be slipping and sliding as he walked up the hill toward the institute.
When he opened the screen door to his house, a small box wrapped in brown paper tumbled out. He bent to pick it up and squinted in the dim light to make out the return address. It was from his mother. At least, she was in Südtirol. For months he’d been following the Italian newspapers and the stories of the unrest in Somalia, the battle of Mogadishu, looking as always, for her photo credits. Feigning ignorance on this side of the world, he’d written. Can you give me an update? Over here, the news is fifty percent weather report. She’d understood what he really wanted to know and said she wasn’t on this assignment, but Anton hadn’t known whether to believe her or not. Lately, as if trying to make up for his childhood years, she seemed to have become protective of him.
He unlocked the door and went inside. He set the package on the small table, and passed into the kitchen. He filled a pot three-quarters full with water and put it on the stove. His mind was still turning on the possibilities of muting. Everyone said that once a bird settled on a song, once it crystallized, it couldn’t change, but he thought they were wrong. That was too simplistic. What if he could watch the birds lose song when they no longer made sounds? See the changes in the nerves when they forgot how to sing? And then later, if he could reverse the muting, would they get their old songs back? He would figure out how memories come and go.
From the cupboard he took down the sea salt, opened his palm to the white crystals and spilled them in a stream into the water. He dusted his hands over the pot, opened a drawer, removed a sharp knife and went back into the living room. He ran the knife along the side of the package, slit the thick paper. Underneath he found a thin cardboard box. He peeled back a piece of tape and opened the top. Inside there was a book. The Conference of the Birds. He studied the cover, a group of birds—a falcon, some ducks, parrots, herons, a peacock with tail flared—stood at the edge of a stream, their beaks and attention directed toward a strange-looking bird called a brown-crested hoopoe that stood before them.
He sat on the couch and opened the book’s cover. On the title page was his mother’s careful handwriting, in Italian as always, never German as he preferred:
Caro Anton,
Lines 2643-2649:
“The world, as far as I can see,
Is like a box, and we are locked inside,
Lost in the darkness of our sin and pride;
When death removes the lid we fly away—
If we have feathers—to eternal day,
But those who have no feathers must stay here,
Tormented in this box by pain and fear.”
--Tua mami
The boo
k his mother had sent was a Sufi tale, written in Persia in the 12th century, a long poem about birds searching for a god. He wondered how much had been lost in the poem as it was transcribed over and over through the years and in various languages. And why had she pulled out that quote about having feathers and the ability to fly off to eternal day? She’d never been religious or spiritual. His mother remained a mystery to him and he knew that if he asked her straight out about the lines of the poem, he wouldn’t get a satisfactory answer.
He closed the book and looked at the cover once more. She’d certainly never been shy of putting on feathers and flying away. She’d left the house when he was eight, leaving him with his father and grandparents so that she could wander Africa, photographing the news anywhere she could find it, making trips back for months between assignments.
Feathers for eternal day versus pain and fear for the flightless.
Both his mother and father had suffered from a sort of muteness. His mother had avoided conversation by fleeing; his father had been able to achieve the same end by staying. And now Anton was trying to mute birds to reveal the relationship between memory, sound and communication. The irony was unavoidable, and on this cold, wet night in the Western USA, reading this Persian poem, the thought made him feel particularly misplaced. He studied the book’s cover for another moment before setting it on the table, and then returned to the kitchen to prepare the pasta sauce.
The next morning, Anton boarded the train to see a photography exhibit at the library downtown. He wished he had invited Rebecca to join him, but he had no idea whether she would enjoy such a thing. He got off the train, stepped into the bustle of the small square and crossed over to the library. He passed through the massive revolving glass door and stopped at the entrance. Inside the library’s common area, sounds and voices were carried upwards disappearing into the air high above, leaving only a low hum below, a rumble that was quickly absorbed by the travertine floor. Even David’s shoes, which clicked back and forth in the laboratory during the day, would be quiet here. The glassed-in elevators to his right ascended and descended in silence. Somewhere in the great hall, a child was crying.
Avoiding the elevators, he climbed the curving stairs to the exhibit on the third floor. There was one other person in the room, a white-haired woman with glasses and a notepad moving methodically from photograph to photograph. He stopped in front of a picture of a man holding a potted plant. The man was smiling, his face shadowed by the faint, blurry trace of fencing, which on a closer look seemed to be prison fencing. Prison. Boxes. Working in the lab had become a sort of box as well. He felt condemned to failure. But those who have no feathers must stay here, Tormented in this box by pain and fear. Next week, he resolved, he would overcome his fear. He would invite Rebecca to lunch.
On weekends in the laboratory the Bengalese finches, starlings, and robins fluttered and called and ate and slept in the private space that the weekend created. Except for those attached to recorders, the birds were not being watched. The animal-care technician, a laconic, pale, too-thin student, came early in the morning. He was supposed to change the newspaper lining the cages, refresh the water, replace seeds and add egg whites, peas and carrots to the dishes, but on Saturdays, when no one was checking his work, he just added some new seeds here and there, filled the water containers if they were low, and left most of the cleaning and feeding until Sunday. No one knew that on Saturdays and Sundays, the birds danced and sang less readily. Nor did anyone suspect that when they slept, they dreamed of singing.
On Sunday, just before daybreak, David took Anton to the Great Salt Lake. “Bird watching is the appropriate Sunday alternative for a scientist.”
“Some people say birdsong is the voice of god,” Anton said.
“Of course it is.”
David drove north out of the city past the refinery, its tall towers rising like giant cigarettes giving off intermittent puffs of black smoke, past the few remaining fields of wheat and soy, past the shopping malls and fast food restaurants. When they’d left the city, the sky above the foothills had just begun to lighten; now it was turning quickly from deep blue to white.
“You know, this whole valley used to be covered in water. A big freshwater lake, the water as high as that smoke stack out there. As big as Lake Michigan.”
“What happened to it?”
“It drained about fourteen thousand years ago. The earth dam holding it in, up in Idaho, gave out and all the water rushed to the ocean, up and out through Oregon and Washington.”
It was easy for David to be with Anton because they had science as a broad point of contact. David knew he wouldn’t spend as much time with Anton if Sarah were home, but he felt a real affection for him. Underneath his accented English, European arrogance, and misdirected obsession with memory engrams, Anton was basically a sweet guy. Coming out of Gianetti’s lab in Italy, one of the best in Europe, he was more adept at math, physics, experimental design and techniques than most Americans, and he had an ability to remember intricate details of papers he’d read that reminded David of Ed.
David saw a hawk-shaped bird in the sky and wheeled the car to a fast stop at the side of the highway. The maneuver would have been dangerous, even deadly, any other day of the week, but on Sunday, without the heavy traffic, it was reasonably safe.
“Eagle,” David said.
Anton raised his binoculars to his eyes while David peered over the steering wheel.
“Looks young, still has whitish wing linings,” David said. “Probably last year’s.”
They sat together, heads crooked sideways, necks craning to look out of the front windshield watching the eagle fly upward. “One time I was out at the bay and it was wicked cold, the water completely frozen except for where the stream comes out of the culvert. I saw three or four eagles flying low and a bunch of California gulls and they were making a ruckus.”
“Ruckus? What does that mean?”
“Loud squawking noises. So I walk over to see what’s going on. There are small fish in the water and the gulls are fishing them out, only every time a gull gets a fish and hops up on the frozen bank to eat it, an eagle swoops down and steals it away. I watch for a good twenty minutes and see this happen over and over. A gull grabs a fish, flops it onto the bank, takes a peck or two of flesh and then loses the entire catch to an eagle.”
“Is that the behavior that makes eagles a great American symbol?”
David shook his head and laughed. “Our natural ease with competition you mean?”
“Or stealing,” Anton said.
“One doesn’t exclude the other.” David put the car into gear, glanced into the side mirror and accelerated quickly onto the highway. “Boy do I love this car, even if it is German.”
“It is strange,” Anton said, “how you Americans love many things.”
“It’s a manner of speaking.”
“I know, but it is funny to be always saying you love everything.”
Recently Anton had written to his mother: Americans like verbs and adverbs. Italians prefer adjectives. This is another difference between us.
“Well, I don’t love everything,” David said. “Only my car.” He giggled to himself and then popped a CD into the machine and they began their usual diversion of listening to bird songs and naming the species.
“There used to be this program on television,” David said. “Back in the ‘70s, called ‘Name that Tune.’ They would play the beginning few notes of a song and whoever guessed the song title fastest, won.”
The bird songs played and David named them all instantly.
“I think you memorized the tape,” Anton said.
“Okay, for your benefit, then, we’ll scramble.” David pressed another button and the songs were now played out of order, but he still named them all.
“I give up. You’re too good,” Anton said.
“Nothing like Ed.”
“Who is Ed?”
David slammed on the brakes and jerked the
car off the road again.
“David! You’ll crash!”
“Sorry. I thought I saw a rough-legged hawk.” He put the binoculars to his eyes. “Nope. Wrong. It’s a red-tail.”
They drove out along the causeway that connected Antelope Island with the mainland, the question of Ed momentarily forgotten. The water was low, the shoreline white, not with snow but salt.
They parked the car at the base of the mountain. “Every time I come to this place I feel like I am on another planet,” David said. He especially felt this way on the backside of the island where the air was heavy and white, the horizon misty, the rocks red, where all you could see was salt, the shimmering blue of the lake and sky. Bison roamed the lower fields, looking like prehistoric beasts with their heads weighted down with thick curly locks. David raised his binoculars to see them better and only then did he notice the small group of pronghorn antelope in the background. Red and brown, perfectly camouflaged, invisible to the naked eye. “Later we can go look for the foreigner,” David said.
“Foreigner?” Anton covered his short hair with his orange knit cap and wrapped a scarf around his neck.
“The chukar.”
“What’s a chukar?”
“It’s like a grouse, introduced from Asia. Sounds something like a chicken.”
They spent the day climbing the mountain, stepping around the early spring grasses and wildflowers that were sprouting between the rocks. David took off his sweater and tied it around his waist and unbuttoned his shirt. They searched for the chukar, but with no luck. They sat down on the red rocks, looked out over the murky blue water, unwrapped their sandwiches and ate in silence.
On the hike back to the car, Anton said, “House sparrows and starlings from Europe, chukars from Asia, all adapted in this place, not able to remember home.”
“Does that seem so bad? Perhaps not worth remembering,” David said.
“Francesco down at the deli told me that when you go to live in another country, you give up home forever.”
“That’s interesting.” David wondered whether Ed would agree. There was no way to ask him.