by Sylvia Torti
“Birds are like humans,” he said. “Like babies, at first, they listen. Later, they babble. Finally, they learn to sing.”
He positioned a small piece of clay, like a pillow, under the bird’s neck and the limp head fell back. Air coming from the anesthesia funnel ruffled its wispy, white neck feathers. Their forearms touched but she didn’t move away.
“If you keep a baby bird isolated and don’t give him songs to listen to, he won’t learn to sing.” She was peering so intently at the quivering bird that he wasn’t sure she was listening. “Like a child. If you don’t talk to them, they don’t learn how.”
Anton hoisted himself onto the high chair and scooted closer to the surgery table. “Once their song is memorized, people say it can’t be changed, but I’m not sure. I want to see if adults can change their songs.”
“Like learning a new language?” she asked.
He could feel the breath of her words in his ear. “Right,” he said, his eyes still on the bird, “learning, but also memory, how we remember the things we learn.”
The bird’s dark legs kicked out and stiffened. Anton pinched a toe to see if it was fully asleep. The bird didn’t flinch. “It’s the same with human speech. A deaf human baby will be mute.” He adjusted the chair and then moved the microscope and light so that he had a good view of the bird. “Maybe you don’t know this, but when you speak, your brain is listening, judging the sounds you make against a model for how they should sound.”
With a Q-tip coated in brown antiseptic he dabbed and smoothed the gray chest feathers out of the way. He picked up the forceps and plucked out four small feathers that were still in his way. Underneath the feathers, the bird’s rosy skin was thin and wrinkled, almost translucent.
He sat back from the microscope for a moment and turned to her. Their faces were close. Her eyes beryl blue. Small freckles dotted her cheeks. The tiny diamond stud in her nose glittered with each nod of her head. “I am trying to understand how much birds use their own singing to sing.”
He leaned in again and looked into the scope. With his right hand, he turned the focus knob. “If I understand auditory feedback in birds, I might understand how song is learned and memorized and then forgotten. Right now, it’s all unknown. I mean, is it recorded like a music score, note by note? Or is it laid down in one big chunk, and if you lose it, the whole thing is gone forever?”
The same questions could be applied to human memory, he thought. No one knew how memories were formed, let alone why some parts of life became embedded in intense, beautiful, and sometimes even unwanted detail, whereas other moments, days or years, just slipped away like the hairs from a head?
With his left hand he pulled the bird’s skin taut and now he could see the hollow bones and tissues below the skin. With the tip of the forceps, he punctured a hole below the bird’s rib cage and inserted a short piece of clear plastic tubing into one of the bird’s air sacs. One stitch and some surgical glue, and he would be able to record the bird’s breathing, breaths in and breaths out.
“What’s that for?” she asked.
“Breathing patterns change during song. This tube in the air sac will tell us whether he is singing or just breathing normally, even if he does not make a sound.”
She was quiet.
“Come, look through this ocular. You’ll see better.” He repositioned his ocular higher up on the bird’s body and turned his attention to its chest. As he worked, the instruments, Q-tips, forceps, scissors, appeared and disappeared from view.
“It’s interesting,” she said, “when I’m looking into the scope with this tunnel vision, the lab gets louder. I hear the birds singing around us more clearly.”
Anton made a straight slit, and suddenly, they were looking down into the red insides of a bird’s chest, the tendons pulsing rapidly with each breath.
“He’s beautiful,” she said.
He positioned the pins through one side of the tissue, into the syrinx, the bird’s voice box, and out the other side. His right fingers stopped moving. He took a Q-tip and dabbed at the blood.
“The pins keep the flaps from vibrating when air is pushed past. No vibrations, no song. Afterward even though the bird can’t make sound, he will try to sing. I’ll record his muscle movements and respiration as he silently beaks.”
“Isn’t it like cutting out a person’s tongue?”
“No,” he searched for the words, “more like long-term laryngitis. Later, I think I can take out the pins and make the muting go away, and when he sings again, after not hearing himself for a long time, I can see whether he is singing his old song. I can see how much song memory he lost when he couldn’t hear himself.”
He felt a touch on his arm, her fingers lightly clasping around his bicep. Unsure of what this meant, he continued working.
“I wish I could do this on humans. We know nothing about memory.” With forceps he brought the bird’s sticky skin back together and then began to stitch the wound closed with black silk thread. More than ever, he willed this bird not to die. He tied off the final stitch and with tiny scissors snipped the black thread just above the knot. He removed the bird from the anesthesia funnel, took a deep breath and leaned back in the chair. It was the second time he’d done it. Hearing her shallow breaths, Anton was afraid to look at her. Her hand still around his bicep, they waited together for the bird to wake.
“You know,” he said, “they say that babies can hear in the womb, that the waves of a mother’s voice travel through skin and fluid.” Finally, the bird flicked its foot, uncurled a toe and quivered on the table. He turned to her then and she slid her hand from his arm. “They also say that hearing is the last sense to go at death.” Her eyes were glassy, as if from exhilaration, and he knew that like her, his own brow and upper lip were also dotted with sweat.
The next morning Rebecca hurried down the long hall to the soundproof room to check on the muted bird, passing refrigerator-sized machines, all humming and purring at their own frequencies, the sounds of shaking and jiggling, the soft clinking of glass flasks being agitated on electrical stir plates. Sometimes other researchers greeted her as they passed in the hallway, more often they nodded silently, while some never even managed that but averted their eyes at the last second as if they were strangers on a city street rather than people who worked together daily. She had learned to meet their silence with silence, countered their bent heads with her own. The bulk and purr of the machines, the faces of the other people, had become familiar. Non-communication, a comfortable habit. She didn’t need to talk with them because she knew what they were doing when they opened the massive subzero freezers or when they slipped tubes of liquid into the centrifuge circle. They hoped that the bits of blood, protein and flesh they carried in their gloved hands back to the labs, would reveal secrets about the inner workings of the mind.
She unlocked the experimentation room with her identification card. The acoustics inside the foam-lined room were altered. Sounds were absorbed, echoes lost. There were three birds: a starling, a robin and “Blue 27,” the muted zebra finch who had not yet sung. The microphone was angled toward the cage, the amplifier stacked on top of the computer, everything was set to go. All they needed was for “Blue 27” to get excited and try to sing. So far, he’d refused.
The door behind her opened and Anton stepped in and smiled at her. Because the microphone was sensitive and because it was important to have as little background noise as possible, neither spoke. Anton unplugged the wires coming from the bird’s backpack, untwisted them and plugged them back into the amplifier again. Since it had turned five circles since the previous afternoon, the wires had gotten tangled up and needed to be unwound. Anton leaned in to the screen as he clicked through the empty computer files.
Rebecca began to feed the birds. A few moments later, she felt Anton’s fingers on the nape of her neck. She turned to him and he brushed her cheek lightly, and then quickly, he leaned toward her and touched his lips firmly to her forehead. When
he moved back he placed his index finger to his mouth, backed up, and left the room, clicking the door softly behind him.
Rebecca stood still and alone in the soundproof room. The stuffiness of the small space usually reminded her of the dark room, making her sweat so that most days she came in and out as quickly as possible, but today, the excitement of Anton’s kiss overpowered the fear.
The muted zebra finch, as if frustrated and desperate with his condition, ruffled up his feathers, opened his beak and let out a series of soft, almost imperceptible toots. Wave-like traces rushed across the computer screen, the measure of inhalations and exhalations that always accompanied song. The bird closed his scarlet beak and the respiration lines returned to their regular pattern: lines swooping down for inhalations, up for exhalation. He ruffled once again, opened his beak and sang a series of almost silent syllables once more. She felt a sense of elation, though she couldn’t be sure whether it was because Anton’s experiment had worked, and the bird seemed unharmed or because of the fact that she could now rush to deliver him the good news in his office.
“Your bird has begun to sing.”
“Shoot.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t mean sing as in sound. I mean sing as in trying to sing, opening and closing the beak.”
Anton jumped out of his chair and rushed to the soundproof room. She followed him and waited as he clicked the mouse and reviewed the recorded files. “Yes! The bird’s song is silent. David will not believe this!”
He looked at her. “We did it!” He wrapped his arms around her, picked her up for a split second and kissed her on each cheek. They stood close looking at each other, and in the next instant, lips touched lips and tongue met tongue. Next to them, “Blue 27” breathed out another silent song.
MEMORY
The lights inside the laboratory made it brighter than the overcast day outside. Zebra finches tooted at one another, scattered seeds, flitted up and down. A male, wired for research, hopped along the perch in his cage and cocked his head. He twisted around, faced backwards and then twisted back again. Ample food, water, predictable temperatures. Regular daylight. Regular darkness. The hum of computers, keyboards and human talk, all familiar sounds to generations of birds accustomed to life in the laboratory.
Outside, a flock of waxwings landed in a serviceberry tree, their plump bodies and crested heads scattered among the branches. A male called out a high zeee whistle. A female tipped her head, answered the call with her own, and flew up. With a red berry in his beak, the male hopped toward her, turned his head to the left and presented her with the berry. She leaned in and took it into her beak and then hopped away. At the end of the branch she turned and hopped back with the berry once more. The male inched closer, accepted the berry when she offered it, mimicked her dance to the opposite end of the branch and returned. Around them, the other waxwings made hissy, high-pitched whistles. The sun was low in the sky. The valley stretched beyond them. The two birds passed the berry back and forth a few more times, and then, quite suddenly, the male swallowed the berry and the entire flock took flight into the gray afternoon light.
Zugunruhe. From German. Zug meant movement or migration; Unruhe was for anxiety, restlessness. Zugunruhe was everything a bird did before migration. After the fat had been added to muscle, the restlessness began. It was the energy before flight, the anticipation of mating season. It was what made the robins crazy to sing. And then months later, when the days got shorter and the singing stopped, when the babies had—alive or dead—left the nest, zugunruhe described a bird’s behavior before it flew back to its wintering ground. It was an orientation towards a home, either north or south. It was a frenetic jumping, hopping, a mad fluttering of wings, birds in love with life.
Anton and Rebecca spent the next seventy-two hours together, walking to the laboratory after coffee, cleaning cages, setting up experiments, checking on “Blue 27.” Late at night, they raced, hungry and elated, down the hill to Anton’s house. He cooked dinner. They ate and drank with the eagerness of children and then afterwards, he put on traditional Südtirolean music and taught her to dance. She loosened her hair, laughed and mimicked his moves.
He told her about the book his mother had sent him. “The birds must pass through seven valleys before they get to their god. And one is the valley of love.”
“There’s a valley of love?” Rebecca leaned over his shoulder. Lemon. Always the scent of lemon. She nuzzled against his neck but she was too close to his ear and he couldn’t decipher her muffled words, only felt her gently bite down on his ear lobe. She leaned in and kissed him, holding her lips to his for a long moment and then they moved a few inches apart. She ran her hand over the scar on his cheek.
“What’s this from?”
“Guitar.”
“How?”
“I was sixteen, tightening a guitar string. It snapped and hit my face just here.” He didn’t tell her that his mother hadn’t even noticed. “Now I have sound vibration forever imprinted on my skin.”
“It’s not very obvious.”
He pulled her close. “I like to think it’s like the dots and dashes of Morse code, comprehensible only to those who bother to learn the code.”
They stared into one another’s eyes in the evening light, not speaking, just touching. There was a freedom in their togetherness, a mutual relaxation, an implicit understanding that neither had experienced before, as if they were a set of mirrors, seeing themselves anew, seeing how the other could see. They did not begin, as some lovers do, to tell each other of their pasts. Setting their conversations only in the hungry immediacy of the present, the past was left to involuntary recall.
When Anton turned eighteen, his father took him out for a night on the town. He would have avoided the evening if he’d been given some warning, but there was no one to warn him. His mother was in Africa, absent as she was so often during those years and his grandmother was surely oblivious to the plan. They were to go to dinner, which they did, and to a movie, which they did not. Instead of a film, he took Anton to a hotel outside the city, where he ordered more drinks, and as it turned out, women.
The women were in their thirties. Forward. Uninhibited. One woman sat on Anton’s father’s lap at the bar, her skirt high up on her leg, her lips red, as if she were acting a clichéd part in a movie. Anton disliked her immediately. He’d never seen his father with a woman and couldn’t imagine him liking a person so different from his mother, who was reserved, sophisticated, smart. The other woman drank, smiled, and laughed at whatever Anton’s father said. Anton didn’t speak.
Anton remembered protesting when his father told him they’d be staying the night. Pushing him into a room, he said, “What’s wrong? You a fag?” Anton remembered the woman, who both scared and excited him. Breasts. Wetness. The scent of fusty, overly-perfumed sweat. It was all over quickly. Afterward, she laughed and caressed his face as if he were a child. He slapped her hand away. She continued laughing and left the room. There was knocking on his father’s door. Anton got up, showered and then got back into bed, lying awake long into the night, overwhelmed by a rage that surfaced toward his mother. And then he fell asleep.
The next morning, the women were gone. He and his father breakfasted in the hotel restaurant, coffee and toast, read the newspaper and then drove back home in silence. The mutual, but awful, experience was concluded by a hard thud delivered by his father onto his back as they entered into the house. Anton could not say now what she had looked like. Whether she’d been tall or short, blond or dark. Until Rebecca, he had associated sex with that night, sex with shame and anger. The memories, fragmented by wine, whiskey and a will to forget, could still make him shudder.
Anton woke from a dream and found Rebecca beside him, her fingers lightly touching his arm. “I fell asleep,” he said.
“I know.” She smiled at him.
“I was dreaming.”
“Was it bad?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
&nb
sp; “You twitched. Your face was sad. What was it?”
“I think it came from the book I’ve been reading. In the dream, I was in the book, going through the valleys with the birds, but I got stuck in one place. It’s hard to explain now, but it was really frightening. There were parrots but they didn’t act like parrots; they buzzed around like flies and I kept having to duck out of the way so that they couldn’t bombard me.”
“Like Hitchcock’s movie?”
“Sort of, but the parrots were yelling. They told me that I would never be able to leave, that I would suffer, that I would have misfortunes, that I would fail.”
“You’re not going to fail. Besides, that’s why we say ‘it was just a dream,’ right?”
“Indeed,” he said. “Just dreams.” Strife and grief. What was the dream trying to tell him? That he had to stay in the United States? He couldn’t give up on the muting. That he didn’t really have a choice? He pulled her close. “Please stay with me tonight.”
She inched closer to him. “I’m going to stay with you every night.”
Rebecca spent the week at Anton’s apartment, but he didn’t want David to know.
“I think he is alone.” They were eating cheese and olives at the kitchen table. “Only the laboratory and birds, nobody at home. Someone told me that his wife moved out.” Anton leaned over and kissed her. “I am afraid David will be jealous.”
She laughed. “Anton, he doesn’t even look at me.”
“I am Italian and male. I know things you cannot.”
“I thought you were Südtirolean.”
“In this, we are all the same.” He held an olive up to her lips and she took it into her mouth. “Women, I think, understand very little about men. Like boys, we do not know how to handle feelings. Jealousy is a dominant gene. The weaker the man, the more he needs power. Our parents learned this during WWII: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini.”