Cages

by Sylvia Torti

  “Healthy?”

  David stepped back and looked Anton up and down. “Yes. There’s a sort of glow to you. Anything new?”

  Anton shrugged his shoulders and poured the coffee. “Just—what do you always say—baby steps that add up over years.”

  David laughed again. Anton had taken on some of his expressions and they sounded amusing in his accented English. He told Anton about the newest results in deafness, implants and the genetics of birdsong, hoping that the FoxP2 might distract Anton from his interest in engrams and memory.

  “I thought you weren’t interested in human applications,” Anton said.

  It was true. FoxP2 and cochlear implants weren’t the only reasons for David’s enthusiasm. At the conference, he’d watched a woman interpreting for the deaf. Of course, this was nothing new; there were always interpreters at these conferences. He even knew a bit of Sign Language because he’d studied it at Sarah’s urging.

  Sign language appeals to me, she’d said. It flips our assumptions, puts more effort on the person watching, or listening, than the speaker.

  But there’s a reason no one chooses that form of communication, he’d told her, unless they’re forced to. It’s unnatural for us given we can speak and hear.

  Come on, it can be our private language.

  They’d gone to enough classes to pick up the basics, and he understood more than he could sign, but in the end he wasn’t motivated. Harder than learning a foreign spoken language, he knew there was no way he’d ever become fluent. Besides, they weren’t children and they didn’t need a secret language.

  The young interpreter had coal black hair pulled into a short ponytail and was dressed in a white blouse, a beige knee-length skirt, no socks and red tennis shoes. Besides her odd tennis player outfit, what drew his attention was the way she used her body to sign. Her hands moved, of course, and often her lips. That was normal but she also used her cheeks, eyes and eyebrows too. His attention repeatedly slid away from the projector screen toward her in the shadows on the side of the stage. He listened to the speaker but watched her. She swayed left or right with the words. A zebra finch song became a jutting out of elbows. A canary’s long trill was a hand to her ear and then a fluttering of the eyes. When she meant to emphasize a point, she lightly stamped her foot. Her rising eyebrows alerted the listener to the main points, the summary statements, what the speaker believed were his most interesting results. She gave motion to the speaker’s intentions.

  Afterwards, when he caught up with her outside the conference hall, her shirt was damp, beads of perspiration speckled her hairline as if she’d just walked off the tennis court after a strenuous match, which incidentally, he thought, she would have won.

  “Is this your first time?” he asked. Guessing at her age, he interpreted the perspiration as nerves.

  She laughed, her flushed face smiling. “No. I’ve been doing it forever.” She dabbed at her forehead with a tissue. “It takes a lot out of me, though.”

  He was surprised at the slight lilt to her speech. “Not American?”

  “Half-breed.” She plopped into a chair. “My mother is American, deaf. My father, Lebanese, deaf, but we left Lebanon when I was sixteen.”

  “That explains it.”

  She crossed one leg over the other, raised her eyebrows and waited.

  “The native signing, the slight accent in English. You look thirsty. Can I bring you some water?”

  She nodded. When he came back with the plastic cup of water, she took it and drank it in one swallow. People were still trickling out of the auditorium in groups of two and three. The importance of the FoxP2 paper from the day before was being debated around industrial-sized coffee pots. Camps were forming. There were those who believed FoxP2 to be the holy grail, the genetic tool that would allow bird research to flourish as mice research had, and there were the skeptics who cautioned restraint. Tomorrow there would be break-out sessions to discuss the implications of the gene. Normally, David would be standing side by side with them at the coffee pots, debating as well.

  “I recognize most of the interpreters here. That’s why I thought you were new.”

  She shook her head. “Not new, just lazy. I only work a few months a year.”

  “What do you do the rest of the time?”

  She laughed. “I live.” She glanced at her watch. “Show time.”

  He hadn’t planned on going to the next session, but he followed her and watched her move with the words, mimic the sounds and lack of sounds with her body. Her trance-like exhaustion returned him to a nagging question, and he began to wonder about effort and cost. At the end of the session, David’s brain was in hyper mode. He often watched male zebra finches move down the perch toward a female, swinging their bodies left and right and grasping and then un-grasping their toes as they went. They would stop in front of the female, ruffle their feathers, cock their heads one way and sing. Did that hopping, courtship dance, which he’d always ignored, have anything to do with their song? How much energy might the dance take? Did it add to the cost of singing? These were the thoughts he was thinking when he noticed that she was also looking at him. When she signed “follow me,” he stood up and followed.

  “You were watching me,” she said.

  “Not a hard thing to do.” He blushed.

  They made their way through the crowd of scientists, people identified by name, institution and rank with white nametags pinned to their chests. They waited at the elevator, looking at one another before glancing at the mirrors flanking the doors, each watching the other’s reflection.

  “You understand sign language?” she asked.

  “Some.” He hoped she didn’t ask why or where he’d learned.

  Inside the elevator she pressed the button for floor ten. “It’s the perfect job for me. I sign better than I speak. The direction is natural.” They walked down the hallway and she stopped at the door of her room. “A drink.” It wasn’t a question, just the utterance of a confirmation, something already understood between them.

  Once at her room, she gave him options: vodka, whisky or gin. He chose gin, she drank whisky. Quickly, he noticed. She excused herself to the bathroom. He took in the room, incredibly bland, marveling at how it countered his state, the excitement he’d felt during the previous day’s sessions about FoxP2 and now with her. When she came out a few minutes later, her hair still in a short pony tail, she was dressed in a robe and then, as if she’d known him for months, she slipped it off.

  Shocked at her naked body in front of him, he began to speak, the beginnings of an utterance, but she quickly raised her fingertips to his lips. “No.” she signed. “Undressed, no talking allowed.”

  She held out her hand for him. He stood. She smiled, unbuttoned his shirt, undid his belt, removed his pants, his shoes. She pulled back the bedspread and sheets, signed “lie down.” He stretched out cautiously on his back. She sat next to him on the edge of the bed. She spoke slowly, signing out what he should do, how he should touch her, how she planned to touch him. These were the words he understood. There were other phrases he was less sure about, and might have imagined: Mouth over you, your tongue in me. And there were movements he didn’t recognize as words, the way she brushed her fingertips over herself, touched her own breast, her lips. He reached out and took her hands in his, stopped her from saying more. They remained motionless for a moment longer, her sitting on the bed next to his prone body, hand in hand, eyes on eyes. Language rendered useless.

  The intensity of this memory created a quick flush in David’s body. He took another sip of coffee, shook it off and focused back on what he’d been telling Anton.

  “A family, the KE family, was brought to some British scientists. For over three generations about half the people in this family can’t speak properly. Their speech is essentially unintelligible and they’re taught sign language instead.”

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  “It’s incredible, a single mutated gene.”r />
  “A single gene controlling speech?”

  “That’s what the Brits said and so the popular press and science magazines were swarming all over the conference. They were calling it the language or grammar gene.”

  “But you don’t believe that?”

  “No, of course not. There can’t be one gene for grammar or language, just like there can’t be a single answer for memory.” David’s voice went up an octave, “Engrams do not exist.”

  Anton didn’t respond.

  “Seriously Anton. Anyway, it doesn’t need to be the language gene to be interesting. What’s cool is that this gene has a forkhead, and the fork codes for a transcription factor and because transcription factors turn things on and off, it has the potential to affect the expression of a lot of genes.”

  “And?”

  “Having a mutant means there’s the potential for experimentation. Once the research progresses a bit further, we might be able to use FoxP2 in our auditory feedback experiments.” David laughed. “You should have been there, though. It was a feeding frenzy. The reporters were saying they found the reason for the evolution of humans. Supposedly, this gene enabled us to speak, which in turn allowed us to evolve into the superior creatures we are. Utter rubbish, but I guess everyone, not just you, Anton, is looking for some kind of holy grail.”

  “Not a holy grail, David. Just some data, a few published papers, maybe eventually a job and someday a vacation to one of those tropical places where I really will hang out on the beach.”

  David laughed and set down his empty coffee cup. He thought of Sarah. “Vacations are overrated.”

  David woke in the faint blue gleam of his office, taking a moment to remember where he was. He lay for a few more seconds allowing his eyes to adjust before unzipping his sleeping bag and getting up from the cot. He didn’t think that anyone knew he slept in his office two or three nights a week and he preferred to keep it that way, although if he were ever asked, he could always use the winter weather as an excuse for not driving up the snowy canyon to his home.

  Outside there was a layer of late spring snow and the dark city was sparkling. From the institute, nestled in the foothills, he could see the flashing yellow lights of snowplows working their way through the streets. He loved the fleeting stillness of the laboratory when he woke in the morning knowing that in a few moments, when he flipped the light switch, the birds would come to life, fluttering and squawking. Silence to sound. And then later at night, when he turned out the lights again and there was only the glow of the computer screens, the birds would quiet once more, tucking their heads to the left or right to sleep.

  He rolled up the sleeping bag, tied it, and stored it in a bottom cupboard. He folded the cot in half, balanced it against the wall and then opened his office door to keep it in place. He switched on the light and checked his watch. 6:30 a.m. He glanced at his calendar knowing already that Rebecca and the undergraduate students would come in two hours, and he noticed, once again, the unopened letter from Sarah postmarked from eastern Peru where she’d gone back in a futile search for Ed.

  Taking a clean shirt and underwear from a drawer, he went through the dark lab, unlatching the double bolt quietly, careful not to disturb the sleeping birds. He walked down the hallway past the aviary and the experimentation rooms to the shower. When he returned a few minutes later, the dirty clothes bundled under one arm, the red light was flashing on his phone. He punched in his code to listen to the message.

  “David, hi, it’s me. Sarah. Look, I’m worried. I’ve been calling for months and despite the time changes, I think I’ve managed to call at every hour of the day. And you never answer, which means you’re not at home even during the hours when you should be, which means you’re working absurd hours at the lab, but now I’m calling the lab and you’re not answering either.” There was a pause. “And well, I don’t know what that means. So please, send me an email or something and I’ll try again.” Another pause. “Okay?”

  He heard the click of the phone and then pressed the number four so that he could listen again. Despite being in Peru, her voice sounded clear and crisp, as if she were in the next room, and as always, the clearness brought longing because it had been her voice, the timbre and cadence, that had drawn him first. As a graduate student he would arrive at class early, close his eyes and wait, trying to decipher if he could hear her coming down the hallway and entering the room. Usually she was laughing. In the beginning there was so much anticipation in knowing he would hear that voice and talk with her every day. After they’d begun living together, her verbal ease became the perfect counterpoint to his difficulties with expression, and he became so accustomed to her presence in his life that he’d never feared losing her, her voice, or the ease he felt with her. And then one day, she was gone. The machine’s recording came on and he listened again and this time when he was offered the option to delete or save, he hesitated, and then without choosing anything, he hung up the phone.

  His stomach growled. He needed a coffee and something to eat, but that could wait. Sarah frequently complained about his thinness. There’s nothing on you, no reserves. How is your body to keep working when you get ill?

  “I rarely get ill,” he said out loud.

  Once, just before they’d begun living together, he had recorded her. He’d gone to the university library where she was leading a study session for undergraduates and hidden behind a shelf of books. It was the end of the semester, the undergraduates were nervous about the final exam, and Sarah, being Sarah, felt a great deal of responsibility for them. She had always given more than anyone asked. Even with him, he realized now.

  Removing a book, he spied her through the shelves in jeans, a tank top and a man’s white shirt, unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. He slid a small microphone through the space and then hunkered down on the stepping stool to record her speaking, then laughing. Later, he’d filtered out the other students and noises so that he was left with the purity of her voice. He had listened to it over and over late at night back then, like one listens to a great piece of music or a favorite song.

  He hadn’t thought of it in years. Where was that recording now? He rummaged through cabinets in his office, emptied the contents of his desk drawers onto the floor. The tape had to be somewhere. Without cleaning up what he’d dumped on the floor, he went into the conference room to scan the bookshelves. He opened the glass cupboards and looked among the scraps of old recording machines he no longer used. There was a rising anxiety at not being able to locate the tape. He tried to remember when he’d last seen it. Had it been the year or two years before? He’d found it and played it for Sarah and they had laughed at his early shy approach to her.

  “You were stalking me!”

  “Not you, just your voice.”

  “I should report you.”

  Out in the main laboratory he heard the canaries and zebra finches making the first tentative sounds and he remembered that he planned to record their early morning songs today. He could do it another day. The tape was more important. He opened the door to the laboratory, flipped on the lights and the birds let out a single burst of sound, their songs overlapping, mixing and then echoing off the walls and windows, creating a dissonance that mirrored his anxiety. He pulled out drawers, fumbled through their contents before slamming them shut again.

  Could Rebecca have filed the tape away? He moved from one laboratory bench to another, opening each of the cupboards below the counters and looking through the shelves. The birds called, sang and fluttered against their cages just above his head. Would Rebecca have known it was something precious, not to be thrown out in one of her organizational cleanings? What if the tape was there, on one of these shelves, but in his haste, he’d missed it? He went back and looked in every cupboard again. He was sweating now, not from exertion but fear.

  The birds had quieted by the time he finally gave up his search. Next to the laboratory bench, his back against the wall, he
shut his eyes and tried to imagine how her voice would look if it were digitized by the computer. He could call up visual images for at least a dozen birds: harmonic stacks for zebra finch songs, trills for canaries, whistles and buzzes for white-crowned sparrows, but not her. There was the soft call from the Inca dove, the one that said no hope, no hope. Sarah’s favorite bird. He stood and went to its cage, removed the food dish, dumped the old seeds into the trash and filled the dish to the brim with new seeds. Back in his office he sat down, and for the first time since he was a boy, he cried.

  David remembered how much Sarah wanted them to visit Ed in Peru. There was no reason not to take the trip, but he hesitated. “I can’t. I’ve got all this stuff to finish. A grant deadline coming up. A paper to submit. You go.”

  And so Sarah had flown to Los Angeles and from there to Lima. In Lima she boarded a small plane that went up, stopped briefly in the Andes and then down into the forest at Puerto Maldonado. For the first time in years, they did not have daily contact. David rose alone in the morning, fed the birds at home and went to the laboratory, relieved that he could remain there for however long he liked. Other than knowing the date and arrival time of her flight, he gave little thought to her return. He had assumed that the space between them was temporary.

  When Sarah came back from Peru she said, “The forest sounds like a mess of jumbled noises, but Ed can distinguish them all.”

  “I’m not surprised.” It’s the only place where I can forget myself, Ed once said. Everything falls away, and I simply become ears that hear.

  “He’s so gregarious. You know the weird thing? He speaks Spanish, fluently. Of course, if I’d ever thought about it, I would have expected him to, but before getting off the plane in Maldonado, I’d never heard him say a word in anything other than English. Have you?”

  “Come to think of it, no,” David said.

  “It’s really beautiful. The first morning I went into the forest just as the sky was beginning to lighten and within a few minutes there was this explosion. A bunch of parrots came flying over me. You can’t imagine how loud they are. Skinner is one thing, but all of these together is quite another. A blitz of sound unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. Awful really. I don’t know how any animal can hear another.”