by Sylvia Torti
When she woke an hour later, he made her tea. While she drank it he went to the kitchen and despite that fact that there was little food in the refrigerator, he managed to make a simple soup that his grandmother made when he was ill. Broth, tiny chopped carrots, sprinkles of oatmeal and a beaten egg. He served her the soup, promising that it would work wonders, but secretly hoping that it wouldn’t, that he’d be given another opportunity to cook for her, to serve her, speak in German, and remain at her side while she slept.
Not wanting to go home after leaving Rebecca’s house, Anton went back up to the lab. He sat at his desk listening to the hum of the laboratory, the late night occasional bleeps of the zebra finches. He had not been given a word of explanation when his mother left. One morning she was there, as always, warming milk for his breakfast, checking that his books were in his school bag, dressing for work. That afternoon he watched as she packed a suitcase, spreading skirts and blouses out onto the bed, folding them in half and pressing them flat. She did not explain. When she finished the suitcase, she closed it with a click and looked up at him.
“Shall we get started on your homework?”
Later that evening she left the house and his grandparents moved in. If there were fights, he didn’t hear them. If there were tears, he didn’t see them. There was silence and separation.
She’d abandoned him in the time when there was no divorce, opting for her own freedom, the world of journalism and her camera. Over the next ten years, from eight to eighteen, he would come home from school to his grandparents, his father arriving much later in the evening, often not in time for dinner.
On Friday afternoons, when she wasn’t in Africa on an assignment, she would pick him up from school in her battered car and he would spend the weekend at her house in the mountains, which had also been her parents’ house, a cold and dark place in the winter that became glorious in the summer. She gave him liberty to explore the overgrown garden, the abandoned village houses and the mountains beyond, never making him stop playing to come inside to eat as his grandmother did, but instead she served cold sandwiches outside in the little garden. At night, she rinsed him off, slowly rubbed his hair dry with a towel and gave him a cup of warm milk to drink.
Anton filled the quiet space of these weekends with his own chatter, invented stories, fights between bad guys, good guys rushing to the rescue. He became a boy who knew how to play alone. The boy who could wash his own scraped knees. The boy who knew when to talk and when to keep quiet. He remembered his fascination with the mystery of breakdown, burying things in the garden and then later digging them up. He covered pieces of cheese, hard bread, once an entire apple, and returned weeks later to dig them up, wanting to see how fast they had changed. His mother was never far off with her cameras, attaching lenses, snapping photos, setting up pieces of material to create shade. He didn’t know that she was also watching him, taking pictures of him. Years later, in a catalog from a photography exhibit, he found a photograph of himself as a child. She’d captured him with an inquisitive look on his face, sitting in the dirt, legs spread wide around the rotten objects he’d unburied.
He opened the drawer and shook the dead zebra finch from its bag onto his desk. How had he gotten it wrong? He picked up the bird and went into the main laboratory to the surgery station. He would try an autopsy and see whether he could learn something about why this bird had died. He flipped on the microscope light, lay the bird on its back and opened him up with a scalpel.
From his fascination with decomposition in early childhood, he’d moved on to guitar, electronics and the physics of sound. He didn’t know why sound physics interested him so much. At first he thought it came from guitar but later he realized that there might be other reasons. He’d come to believe that sound and guitar became especially important because they were what filled the silence with his mother. During his adolescent years, their time together consisted of the lunch hour. His mother had a dislike for cooking and so he learned to cook, refining his skills year after year, setting the table and calling her from her studio to eat. During lunch, she used language sparingly, as if she were on a diet, never saying a word that didn’t need to be said, and so he learned to become an entertaining talker. She spent hours every morning in the darkroom, emerging only to eat, and then she would return to her room and work until very late at night. He fell asleep early so that he could rise at first light to hike in the mountains.
He peered into the opened bird, refocused the microscope down lower and looked at the red fleshy labia of the syrinx. On the left side, he could see the pin he’d woven through the two sides, but on the right side, there was no pin.
He remembered a time when he was a child, perhaps ten, he’d called her from her studio.
“There is something funny about sound,” he told her.
She waited, probably not sure what he was talking about.
“Come and look.”
She followed him into the living room.
“I put my tuner here in front of my guitar and play. See? The light blinks for the different notes.”
“Yes?”
“But now look.” He went through the living room and back into her studio. She followed. “I put the tuner here, on this side of the wall. Wait here.”
He left her with the small note tuner and went back into the living room. He played his guitar.
“Do you hear the guitar?”
“Yes.”
“Is the tuner making light?”
“No.”
“See? You can hear it, but the tuner can’t.”
His mother told him that she’d once heard something about sound being like waves, but then said that it probably had more to do with the sensitivity of the tuner. Coming back into the studio, he stopped her before she could say anything more.
“I’m going to study that,” he announced. “I’m going to study sound, how it moves and how it stops. Then I’m going to write a book about it.”
The book, of course, was forgotten, but his interest in guitar and sound continued through high school and into the university. He studied Bream, Segovia, Domeniconi and de Lucia. Classical music, pure unaltered, non-synthesized, non-amplified sound. Sound. How it moved and how it stopped.
He began to hunt inside the bird for the missing pin, finally finding it lodged in the heart tissue. Maybe he hadn’t secured it in place well enough. Next time, because yes, he had just determined that he would try it again, he would use a longer pin and more surgical glue. Convinced of this decision, he flipped off the microscope light and sat in the darkened laboratory.
What he remembered most about their weekends together was the slip and click of the camera’s shutter, the metallic ting of a lens being screwed on. Without a camera in her hands, his mother was a nervous woman, constantly scratching at her arms and legs. At times her calves were raw and bleeding. Later, he learned that she’d been suffering from microfilariae, an infection of threadlike worms that were transferred through the bite of an African black fly. Once inside the body, they burrowed under the skin, replicating and sending out tiny copies of themselves. Quiet inhabitants who only made their presence known at their death, after which there was inflammation, intense itching, and if they traveled to the eyes, blindness. She never explained any of this to him. She never complained. She took her medicine and eventually after some years, managed to rid her body of the infection, but even after the worms were gone, she continued to scratch at her legs out of habit, shedding layers of flaky cells. For his whole life, he would associate those dry, rasping sounds with his mother.
In the first days of March, David prepared to leave for a week-long symposium in Florida. “They’re using birds as test subjects for cochlear implants in deaf humans. I’m not much interested, but this is where all the money is,” David told Anton. “If we sell our projects right, we can use this human funding to get more of the auditory feedback work going. Maybe you should come too.”
They stood at the counter in the
laboratory where they had carved out space for a coffee maker. Anton poured out two cups. “I will leave the conference to you.” He spooned sugar into his cup and stirred. “I’m not much good in crowds.”
“You sure? It’s Miami, warm tropical breezes, salsa dancing, seafood…”
“Right.” Anton took a sip. “You’ll spend all your time in the conference center eating American doughnuts, drinking watered coffee from paper cups and then you’ll eat dinner in the top-floor restaurant of the hotel. I won’t miss anything.”
David laughed. “You’re probably right. Anyway, I’ll fill you in.”
On the plane to Miami David leafed through a yellow notebook. He had written:
Why can mockingbirds learn new songs during their entire lives? In winter, they migrate from Pennsylvania to Costa Rica and come back singing a good rendition of some tropical bird’s song. Why can the mockingbird do what the zebra finch cannot?
As soon as he began serious work on zebra finches he knew—instinctively—that he would win his bet. Ed had said that songbirds were too complicated to be useful for neuroscience, but Ed had been wrong. Complicated enough to be interesting, not so complicated as to be impossible to understand, birds offered perhaps the only clear, non-human window into learned communication. Unlike owls, hawks and the like that were born screeching and cawing, songbirds had to learn to sing. A baby bird was like a child at birth. Just like human babies, they needed to listen and practice. They needed to be spoken to.
He had written: When do learning and recognition flip over into memory and instinct?
Early on, people had thought that language was mystical. Everything that passed from one human being to another, the grunts, hisses and spurts of sound that became words, the transmission of ideas magically passed from one head to another was supposed to be impossible to understand. David didn’t think language was mystical at all but it was true that its origins, communication by sound, sound into speech, grammar, dialect, remained an unanswered question and David intended to understand it from the inside-out.
Why can Ed keep learning and fine tuning his ability to recognize songs whereas I am finding it harder and harder to learn more?
When David and Sarah moved to Pennsylvania, Ed stayed on in Louisiana and took a job leading birding tours to the tropics. Between sessions with clients, he recorded birds, learned songs, wrote papers. Within a year he had founded the Rapid Assessment Program or RAP team, as they were called, the best group of tropical biologists ever brought together. Every few months, Ed was off on a RAP trip to another remote location. His team of experts would swoop into a forest, spend eighteen hours a day—light and dark—making fast inventories of plants, mammals, birds and insects.
The botanist walked hundred meter transects, back and forth, recording the canopy trees one way and then returning, more slowly along the same line to identify the understory. He looked, touched, smelled and wrote down the name of each plant, easily topping two hundred species per transect. The ones he didn’t immediately know were, by definition, species new to science and so he collected their leaves, seeds and flowers for future identification.
The entomologist stretched out a plastic sheet below a tree and blasted the canopy with insecticide fog and then waited while the insects rained down. Too numerous to be identified in the field, it would take him months back at the Smithsonian to even estimate the insect diversity.
Before dawn, Ed set up mist nets and stood sentry. When a bird hit the net, he untangled it, figured out which species it was, looked it over for sex, health, and then let it go. If it was a bat, he radioed the mammologist to come and do the same. Eighteen hours a day, weeks on end, no showers or beds and barely enough food to eat, they listened, sorted, counted and recorded. For many tropical areas, their surveys were the first time biologists had ever visited. In several cases, their visits meant the difference between deforestation and protection.
David envied Ed’s trips, but only in a distant way. He imagined the exotic locations Ed described, thought about the birds he must be seeing and hearing, but despite many invitations, he’d never gone along. He was too busy with his own birds, he always said, but there was another, unspoken reason. He was never sure whether it was purely a reluctance to leave his work in the lab, or whether he unconsciously feared the chaos of the forest, the ways it might upset the ideas he was forming about birdsong. And then, there was always the unstated fear that the reason he’d declined was that he didn’t want to confront Ed’s genius, preferring to admire it, without competition, from afar.
The day after David left for Miami, Anton arrived earlier than usual to the laboratory, coming through the door just as a white-crowned sparrow escaped from one of the top isolation chambers where Rebecca was working. The bird buzzed toward the wall of windows and then veered left, stopping just short of slamming itself against the glass. Sensing that he could not get to the world beyond, he landed in a panting plop at the corner of the desktop. He struggled to find a grip, but his claws splayed on the smooth, slippery surface.
Rebecca stepped off the ladder to follow him, but Anton beat her to it, the desire to help her outweighing the distaste for the sensation of a bird in his hand. When she took the animal from him, he felt a tingle of electricity. He wondered whether she felt it too. She clasped the bird’s head between her second and third fingers.
“I didn’t need the help,” she said on her way back up the ladder.
“I know.” Anton watched as she returned the sparrow to his cage. “Perhaps there is an ulterior motive.”
“Perhaps?” She smiled down at him. The metal gate slid shut over her hand and this time she made sure it closed completely. The sparrow hopped to the plastic perch and peered out with his tiny black eye. She stepped down off the ladder and turned to Anton.
He placed a hand on her shoulder. “How are you this morning?” She didn’t move away.
“Besides two escapees, I’m fine.”
“I thought you might come to lunch with me.”
“That’s the ulterior motive?”
They took the train to Francesco’s deli downtown and sat at a small wooden table for two. Speaking in Italian, Francesco asked Anton what they wanted for lunch.
“Doesn’t he speak English?” Rebecca asked when he’d walked away.
“Yes, of course, but he doesn’t like to.” Francesco had told Anton that after thirty years he’d grown tired of never being able to say what he wanted. In English, Francesco said, nothing sounds right.
Two plates of food arrived. Layers of see-through meat rippled across white ceramic plates, tomatoes cut in half, bits of celery sprinkled like cheese. Francesco drizzled olive oil over each plate. Anton began to eat and then realized that Rebecca was not eating. “You do not like bresaola?”
“I’m vegetarian,” she said.
Well, she had one flaw, then. She’d joined the American vegetarian fad. In the five years he’d been in the States more and more people, especially young people, seemed to be rejecting meat, milk, cheese. He’d even met one who wouldn’t eat honey. He hoped she wasn’t one of those and he hoped his disappointment didn’t show. “I’m sorry.” He picked up her plate, scraped the meat onto his own and then went to find Francesco. He returned with bread and a plate of roasted vegetables.
“Thank you.”
“Try this bread.” He broke off a piece of crust and popped it into his mouth and broke off another, larger piece, and handed it to her. Instead of taking it, she leaned over, took hold of his wrist and bit into the bread directly from his hand. She nodded her head as she chewed. He was acutely aware of the effect that her gesture had on him. He waited and then broke off another piece and held it out to her knowing he’d sit there all day feeding her if he could. Why did he feel so comfortable? So far they’d shared only a few hours and yet here they were flirting and courting, saying little but making their desires and intentions clear to one another and probably anyone else who happened to be watching.
“I looked Südtirol up on the map,” she said. “Your home.”
“Yes? What did you find?” He liked the surprised expression in her eyes when she spoke.
“Mountains, churches, blue lakes.”
He laughed. “We have lots of those. You’re interested in the Alps?” The prominent blue veins under her pale skin were like roadways on a map.
“I’m interested in—” she hesitated. “I’ve never traveled anywhere, never been further than Chicago. I guess I just wonder what it’s like on that side of the world.”
When they finished eating, he ordered espresso but she declined. He stirred in the sugar. Normally, he would drink the sweet coffee in two swallows, but he took sips wanting the lunch to extend for as long as possible. He told her about the bells, how he missed the ding of the goats being led up into the fields in the mornings and the clang of cows moving from pasture to pasture during the day. In the evening there were church bells and children laughing, and nightingales singing into the dark. “I could take you there,” he said. The idea seemed more wishful than a possibility. He’d begun to doubt he’d ever get back there himself.
“When?” She laughed. “I can go anytime.”
Back at the laboratory, they were both flush with energy.
“Come, I want to show you something.” So far, he’d done just one muting and now that David was gone for a few days, he intended to do more. He prepped the table for a surgery. They stood side by side. There was the scent of lemon and roasted garlic. His own breath carried hints of espresso.
“I have not told David yet. I want to see if it works, but I think I know how to test the engram idea. I mute a bird…”
“Mute a bird? That’s terrible!”
“No, no, I fix it afterwards.” He turned to the cage on the counter behind him. Slipping open the gate, he inserted his hand and, with a flick of his wrist, caught a gray, black and white striped zebra finch. “I’ll show you.”
With the bird in his left palm, he turned the knob for the anesthesia with his right. When the drug was flowing, he inserted the bird’s small head into a plastic funnel and held it steady while it fell asleep. Black and white dotted feathers poked out from underneath his hand. He was aware of her arm next to his, the warmth of her skin.