Cages

by Sylvia Torti

  “You’d think so, but it isn’t. First off, you’ve got to figure a way to measure oxygen consumption in a bird. Second, even if you manage that, which I can’t figure out how to do, how do you measure tradeoffs?”

  “Tradeoffs?”

  “Ecological tradeoffs. In the spring, male birds can sing thousands of times a day and while they’re singing, they can’t be eating. What does it cost to sing that many times in terms of energy usage and then how much does it cost to do that instead of eating? I can’t figure out how to replicate it in the lab. They never sing as much in here as out there.”

  “Then just model it with mathematics.”

  David laughed. “The physicist’s solution to everything.”

  Anton had been sketching while David talked. He’d drawn a bird’s head and a balloon mask over the beak, held in place by a sort of helmet. “What about this? I think if you fixed something like this, a collar over the bird’s head, and you attached the balloon to that, the bird could still move its head around pretty freely.”

  “Maybe,” David said. He liked the idea of the helmet, and it might work with a zebra finch, but still, would he ever get a bird to sing enough with that mask on?

  “You would have to have an inlet and outlet tube,” Anton said, “but you might be able to measure small changes in oxygen and carbon dioxide.”

  “A good project for retirement,” David said.

  Anton continued drawing the inlet and outlets for the oxygen and carbon dioxide and was trying to work out an equation to measure the volume of air so that he could determine how sensitive the measurements would have to be.

  “There is one big unanswered question, Anton.”

  “I know. It’s volume. You need the balloon space to be as small as possible.”

  “No, the big unanswered question is whether Rebecca will go for you!”

  “Stop.”

  “Seriously. It’s the one question you don’t have a mathematical equation for. I want to know essentially the same thing. Of course I want to know how much it costs a bird to sing, but what I really want to know is why do females think that some males sing better than others?”

  At the end of graduate school, David was invited to interview for a postdoctoral research position in Pennsylvania. The position meant a move from Louisiana to Pennsylvania, from mice to zebra finches, but despite his love of birds, he hesitated. He would be studying communication, not cancer. There was less money for research on birds than mammals because the genome in birds hadn’t been sequenced as it had been in mice, and so there was no way to knock out sections of the genetic code and test hypotheses. His research questions, at least in the beginning, would be crude. Appreciating a bird in a tree was one thing. Trying to take apart the mechanics of singing in the laboratory was quite another. With doubts, he flew to Pennsylvania for the interview but from the first moment he was put in an aviary with the small chatty birds, he immediately forgot his hesitation. He realized his skill and practice in bird watching might be useful for studying the neuroscience of song, and within just a few hours, he began to recognize the songs of different males, much like the voice of a friend could be picked out of a group of people talking. Questions bombarded him and he spent the next two days in constant conversation with the laboratory director. On the plane ride home he filled his yellow notebook with questions.

  I want to know how birds sing. How do the muscles and nerves and breath work together to make sound? Do all birds do it in the same way? He wondered at his own inability to describe his emotions. Why did he find it so hard to put words on his emotions when other people seemed to know exactly what they were feeling all of the time? Do the variations make any difference? Did the fact that others could say how they were feeling mean they really knew? His reticence might be, as Sarah said, a disorder, but he thought it might also mean that he understood how difficult it was to understand the human brain and body, how almost-impossible it was to truly see into one’s own self. His reluctance to describe how he felt might represent deeper insight and honesty.

  He wrote: I want to understand language. I want to know why I choose some words and she chooses others.

  When he came home from the interview, he did what he would have previously thought impossible. He canceled a long-planned expedition with Ed to search for the probably, but not certainly, extinct ivory-billed woodpecker. Ed understood, unpacked half the food he’d already stuffed into a duffle bag and gone off to paddle the swamp alone. Meanwhile, David slipped into the world of neuroscience and sound, passing nights in the library where for once the quietness did not worry him because his brain was a mass of noise, making out the words in books, unpacking the research.

  Ed returned a week later with foot fungus and an impossibly long bird list.

  “This is amazing. Did you sleep at all?”

  “A bit,” Ed said.

  “I don’t see the ivory bill listed here.”

  “’Fraid that one’s gone.”

  David knew that sleeping “a bit” meant that Ed had crawled into a tent only after the owl hunting was over and risen a few hours later, always by 4:30 a.m. He would sleep a few more hours midday when the birds were quiet before dismantling his tent and paddling the rest of the afternoon to the next day’s location.

  At eighteen Ed had broken the North American record for seeing the most birds in one year. Few people understood what sort of ability and dedication that took. Most birdwatchers wouldn’t have the stamina to rise every morning for a year at 4 a.m. to hike miles in the cold or wet, ticking off bird species and then after a short nap, jumping into a car and driving, sometimes hundreds of miles, before falling asleep in the back seat, often too tired to undress or crawl into a sleeping bag, but never too tired to forget to set an alarm for the next morning. Day after day for one year. David knew that for most people this would be hell. For Ed, it was one of the best years of his life.

  “Obsessive,” Sarah said when Ed described his schedule that year.

  “There now, Ed, you’ve got it from the clinician herself,” David said. “You’ve been diagnosed obsessive.”

  Sarah looked at David. “I might add, the word works just as well in the plural.”

  David had been spending days and evenings in the library, shoulders hunched, neck crooked over an open journal, the tight dark curls falling over his face. He felt like a detective, retracing the steps of scientists, piecing together the history of birdsong from ecology, physiology to the present-day neuroscience. He loved the work, felt a certain confidence living within the collective mind of the scientific community. Sarah came to the library and implored him to come home.

  “I’m not tired yet.”

  She brought him food and a change of clothing.

  “You’re scaring me, David.”

  “Scaring you, how?”

  “By this obsession.”

  “It’s not an obsession. I’m simply interested in what’s been done before me. I need to get up to speed before I can start the post-doc.”

  “It’s not healthy. The books will still be there after you sleep.”

  When he finally fell into bed after two straight days and nights in the library she said, “You know, you’re experiencing a sort of pseudo-manic phase.”

  He pretended that he was asleep, snuggled up against her, and hoped she didn’t say more.

  Anton went into the makeshift experimental room that he’d created for the secret bird he’d tried to mute. He flipped through the files on the computer, all were blank. The bird had recovered from surgery but he couldn’t tell whether his attempt to immobilize the syrinx had worked because the bird hadn’t yet tried to sing. He would add a bit of enticement. Back in the main laboratory, as he was wrapping his palm around a bird, David walked in.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Testing a bird.”

  “What bird?”

  He stopped, his hand still stuck in the cage, the noisy birds fluttering around it. “A new one for a
replicate of our last experiment.” He tried not to look at David for fear he’d recognize the lie.

  “Why not take the whole cage? Multiple females usually work best.”

  “This is easier.” The experimental room where he’d hidden the muted bird was really just a tiny closet and too small for the big cage. “Besides, I thought you said that females aren’t choosey.”

  “Quite the opposite,” David said. “Of course they’re choosey. It’s the males who tend to be indiscriminant.”

  “Well then he should sing to this female as well as any other.” Anton really meant that he hoped the bird would try to sing and he hoped that when it did, it would be unable to make sound.

  Back in the experimental closet, he stood off to the side and watched as the female bird hopped around the cage. The male seemed oblivious to her presence. Why couldn’t David see that learning song, the process by which a bird mastered that miraculous feat of memorization, and by extension, the process by which any human memorized sounds and meaning, was the real question? How was memory formed? Where was it encoded in the brain?

  Early on, philosophers had thought that memories were stored in the heart and that the brain was more of a cooling system. Others believed that memory was stored in the kidney. It wasn’t until Descartes that people started understanding that memory, and all other cognitive processes, happened in the brain. Still, how to find definitive proof for a specific memory trace or engram?

  He decided to leave the female in the cage and come back later, only when he returned an hour later, the male bird lay at the bottom of his cage, limp and dead, the wires strung up and out of the cage, the computer measuring a flat line reflecting lack of breaths. Anton’s mood sunk. The female looked out as if accusing him of something. “It’s probably your fault,” he said to her. “He didn’t like you and so he chose to die.” It felt good to voice Rebecca’s anthropomorphic ideas just then, but still he felt defeated, as trapped as the birds. He unhooked the bird, unplugged it from the computer, and without looking at it, slipped it into a bag. Back at his desk he tossed it into the top drawer. He needed to get out of the lab and so he went to David’s office to tell him he was leaving, and in that moment, he decided what he would do. “Do you have Rebecca’s phone number?”

  David smiled. “Ah, I’m so often right. Maybe you can get her to talk.” He sorted through papers looking for her file, jotted the number on a slip of paper and handed it over to Anton.

  The thought of Anton with Rebecca irritated David and he immediately felt irritated at his irritation. Ridiculous emotions. She was twenty years too young for him. He heard Sarah. Jealousy is a teenager emotion. It was during an argument after she’d returned from Peru, though even she must have known that she was wrong. Emotions didn’t have ages.

  He thought back to a time when they lived in a house full of birds. First, the parrot, Skinner, and later, during their post-doc years, canaries, zebra finches, conures, doves. David came home from the laboratory one evening and found her perched on a ladder on the front porch, staple gun in hand. She stretched the mosquito screening along the wood frame, leaned over and placed a staple. She looked down when she noticed him. “Hi.” She quickly stepped off the ladder, scooted it over and mounted it again.

  He could tell she was happy. “What’s this? Trying to save us from the mosquitoes?”

  “An aviary for the zebra finches. I might even get some more tropical species. It will be like we’re following Ed to Peru and Ecuador, all those great places he goes.”

  David was quiet for a moment while she inserted another staple with a bang. He felt an irrational fear in his gut. He knew she held Ed in high regard. Of course he did as well, but her descriptions of Ed and his work seemed tinged with special emotion.

  “Zebra finches aren’t tropical,” David said. “They’re a temperate, grassland species. From Australia. Ed’s never seen them in the wild.”

  She looked down at him briefly, and blew him a kiss. “Better yet. Another continent altogether.” Again she stretched the screening, slid the staple gun down a few inches, pulled the trigger and then checked that the staple had been inserted well before stretching the screening some more.

  He wondered whether she harbored a secret desire to be with Ed, the adventurer. He’s discovering new species, documenting the world’s diversity, he heard her say. What could be more important than that? And he comes home with the most amazing stories.

  That evening she introduced the birds to the enclosed porch. One by one, she reached into the cages, cornered a bird and then walked out to the aviary where she opened her hand and waited while it flew into its new space.

  From that day on, he lay in bed in the early mornings and listened as she stepped outside to collect the seed and water dishes, whistling short melodies up and down, trying to mimic their songs. Back inside she washed the dishes, filled the water cups, smashed peas and generously doled out broccoli and chopped eggs. In the winter she moved the birds inside and situated the cages throughout the living room. For months of every year, the house became a clamorous, chiming aviary with two quiet people living inside.

  Anton arrived at Rebecca’s house with a bouquet of flowers. She was paler than normal. Her hair, usually pulled up, hung down to her shoulders.

  “You’re not well.” He handed her the flowers.

  “David told you,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re not dressing for winter. You need a hat, a scarf. How do you feel?”

  “Terrible.” She sat down on the sofa and pulled a blanket around her.

  He reached over and touched her forehead. It was cold. “You have a fever?”

  She nodded.

  “Are you taking some medicine?”

  “Yes.”

  They were silent for a moment.

  “How are the birds?”

  “Fine.” He didn’t want to admit the new death, afraid he might tear up at the thought of another experiment gone wrong.

  “They don’t miss me?” she smiled.

  “Of course they miss you.” And me too, he could have said. She had come to occupy large portions of his mind and he had no explanation why. He looked around the room. “Is that you?” He pointed at the framed photograph of a woman perched naked, folded over on herself, at the edge of a cliff. Behind her was an expanse of rock, canyon, sky, an enormous valley. The woman’s head was turned away, out to the horizon. There was black hair that gave evidence of wind. A broad back, arms encircling her legs, her hands lightly balancing on the rock at her feet. She was crouched, ready to take off and fly.

  Rebecca shook her head and reached for a tissue. “No, I took it.”

  He looked at her again. She was even more beautiful with her hair down and he wondered whether she always wore it up or only in the lab. “Why do you feed birds when you can do that?” He resisted the urge to reach out and touch her forehead again. He wanted to crawl under the blanket with her.

  “Because that doesn’t pay rent, and I like the birds.”

  “But there are other jobs for photographers—newspaper, magazine, weddings…”. He wanted to ask her whether she had a boyfriend, but had no idea how to do that.

  She started to laugh, a congested garbled sound. “That’s exactly what I used to do—weddings—and I got fired.”

  He got up and stepped closer to the photograph.

  “Once I made the bride look fat, cartoonish. On purpose.”

  He took in the rest of the room, the collages of photographs cut and pinned on the wall. For a moment, he was overwhelmed with the memory of his mother’s darkroom, remembering the smell of fixative, photographs clipped to string, others laid out on the countertop, the sound of water dripping slowly from a faucet. He could see his mother’s back, her head looking down as she studied which photographs to keep, some having already been discarded into the trash at her feet. He remembered standing quietly behind her, waiting, never speaking until she turned to him, as if darkness and silence went togethe
r. He scanned the animals on Rebecca’s wall. There were multiple exposures of the same dog, cat, some chickens, all against a background of desert. “Why didn’t you study photography?”

  “I did study photography, well sort of, fine art, but I did all my projects on photography.”

  “Not biology?”

  “No. I never liked science much.”

  He shook his head. “Only in America.”

  “You seem disappointed. Only what in America?”

  “Only here does a photographer work as technician in a laboratory. That would never happen in Europe. There, biology technicians are biologists.” He nodded toward a framed black and white photograph, three men, two of them holding handkerchiefs in front of their faces. “Is that a Weegee?”

  “You know him?”

  “Yes. 1930s, New York crime photographer.” He turned back to her, but kept his eyes on the photograph above her sofa, afraid to look directly at her, afraid his intense attraction and vulnerability would come through.

  “How come you know Weegee?”

  “My mother,” he said, “she’s a photographer too.”

  Anton could tell that Rebecca was tired, but he didn’t want to leave. He talked, a kind of nervous low chatter, telling her about the birds he’d seen with David when he was at the lake, the way the water shimmered and appeared bare but when you put up your binoculars you realized that there were thousands or millions of birds, black dots, scattered across the horizon.

  Her eyes looked heavy. “I will let you rest now,” he said.

  “No please don’t go. I mean, unless you need to. I feel lonely when I’m sick.”

  “Of course. I’ll stay.”

  “Tell me something else.” She smiled at him. “Maybe in one of those languages you speak.”

  And so he began to speak German, telling her about the book his mother had sent, which he’d begun to read, conscious of the fact that she did not understand, and conscious of the fact that in talking about the book he was trying to understand it himself. She nodded off and slept. He stopped talking and pulled the book from his bag, looking from time to time at her resting, the pale skin, freckles, bright red hair.