by Sylvia Torti
As he listened to Sarah talking about her trip, the towering trees, the mud, the jaguar tracks they saw early one morning, David’s mind kept shifting, two conversations merging, Sarah’s voice and phrases from Ed in the past.
“Intimacy is established so quickly,” Ed had said. “Perhaps it’s the humidity or the small groups, or the isolation. People come immediately closer.”
David imagined Ed, his eyes continuously scanning the skies, casually noting when a bird passed by. He imagined Sarah watching him as they motored up the river. He wondered about sudden intimacies.
“He asked about you,” she said, “and I told him that you’re focusing on neurons, trying to get to the smallest unit so that you can understand the initial generation of song.”
“And what did Ed say?”
“He said you’re the best at what you do.”
Once Ed had told David about the time he brought a wealthy man and his son up the Tambopata River. “Finnish or maybe Norwegian. I can’t remember. They were quiet, shy people, hardly speaking with one another and so I didn’t try to force the conversation. We’d gone about two hours upriver, the boat cutting through water, the sky hazy, the green forest to each side, when all of a sudden, the driver cut the motor and said my name. I turned and saw that a male jaguar had positioned himself out on a big snag over the water. He was relaxing with one paw over the other, eyes half closed. I could see his eyelashes. We were that close! In thirteen years in the tropics, seeing footprints occasionally, I’d never seen the real thing, and here he was. I took about five hundred pictures in thirty seconds. The Finnish. You know what they did? They took out their cameras, clicked a couple of shots, looked through their binoculars and smiled over at me. I don’t think they had any idea what they were looking at. I think they thought this was normal. You know, you go to the tropics and it’s like going to the zoo. You see animals. You take pictures. You buy a hotdog and go home.”
“Are you listening to me?” Sarah asked.
“Of course.” David refocused on what she was saying.
“I was saying that I felt weirdly lonely there. Small, but a different kind of small than I feel around mountains.”
“Ed once told me that the rainforest was the one place in the world where he didn’t feel lonely,” David said.
Sarah was silent for a moment and then she began to cry.
“Sarah, what is it?” He reached out for her, putting his hand on her shoulder, but she shook her head and stepped away.
“It’s nothing, sorry. I’m tired. It was a long trip. I think I need to get a good night’s sleep.”
That night she had slept in the spare bedroom.
In the small conference room off the laboratory, David sketched a diagram on the white board. Rebecca and the undergraduate students, Sasha and Stephanie, sat at the table, blank pieces of paper before them and waited while he drew. He turned to face them.
“Nerve pulses originate here in the HVC.” He circled the region on his sketch in red and drew arrows over what he’d just drawn, outlining the pathways that controlled vocalization. “What we hear as song starts out as information passed as action potentials from one group of cells to another. These electrical impulses travel in super speed down the axon from cell to cell.” He circled the HVC region again. “So, the action potentials start here in the HVC, pass to the RA, and then to the syringeal motor nucleus in the brain stem, which then sends a signal along this motor neuron to flex the muscles around the syrinx.”
He glanced at them. Stephanie and Sasha nodded their heads, but looked lost. Rebecca, as usual, was following without difficulty. He began to re-label the diagram, spelling out high vocal center for HVC, sketching out a new image of the trachea that branched into the syrinx.
“The bird’s syrinx is like your larynx,” he told them. “When you exhale to speak, air is pushed from your lungs past flaps of skin in your larynx. The flaps vibrate and create waves of sound.”
“Here, Rebecca,” he said, placing his fingers softly against the front of her throat. “Pretend you’re in a doctor’s office. Say ‘aaaa.’”
She voiced “aaaa.” He lifted her hand from the table and exchanged her fingers for his. “Do you feel the buzz?” She nodded. The other students began to “aaaa” as well.
“The buzz comes when the vocal folds partly cover the opening in the larynx called the glottis. Now make the sound lower. Now higher.”
The students did as they were told.
“For lower frequencies, the flaps are further apart, vibrating more slowly. For higher frequencies, they come close together and move very fast.”
Whether in humans or birds, every exhalation was a potential sound. The folds pulled in and vibrated. Or they did not. But unlike in humans, in birds the right and left sides of the syrinx could be controlled separately by nerves coming from left and right sides of the brain. David could snip a bird’s left syringeal nerve and instantly, the low frequency sounds were gone and the bird’s song shifted higher.
“From the syrinx,” he continued, “waves of air travel up and out the beak.” He drew a blue line for air from the syrinx, up through the trachea and out the beak. “Beaks function something like our mouth, tongue and lips to filter out certain frequencies, to create resonance.” He noticed that Rebecca had straightened herself in her chair. “Beaks held wide open enhance high pitched sounds. When the beak is more closed, the sounds are lower.”
His ultimate goal was larger. It was true that he wanted to know how a bird sang, how the impulse to make sound had been organized throughout millions of years of evolution, how air was pushed past the syrinx making it vibrate, but those were only the technical parts of the story, the relatively easy things to know, the questions he could pose in grant proposals and be sure, at least up until this year, to secure funding for. These were the questions that had kept his laboratory running for the last decade, kept the students busy with projects, but not the ones that kept him awake at night, not the ones that had drawn him to biology.
As a teenager he had walked a daily loop around his neighborhood. Behind the row of new houses, there was a field of undeveloped land bordered by a copse of trees, a small stream and a pond, the relics of a farmer’s property. He knew what he was likely to see and hear, knew at which spots the chipmunks and squirrels would rattle at him, which thrushes would flush from the ground as he approached. But some days there were surprises. Once he came upon the pond and found a purple gallinule standing still, one bright yellow leg bent, the other in the water. He stood frozen and watched as the gallinule made its way across the pond, poking its head into the water to eat, staying until the bird stretched its iridescent wings and took off. The next day he set out with great hope to see the bird again, but it was “an accidental,” a bird blown off course. He would have to wait until graduate school in the south before he would see a gallinule again.
“Rebecca, I have a project for you,” he said later that day.
“The aviary? I cleaned it yesterday.”
“No, a research project. You can do more than clean cages. You ask good questions and you’re good at handling the birds. I have to go to New York to give a seminar but when I return, I have a project for you about the cost of song.”
“What do you mean, cost?”
“Probably one of the biggest unanswered questions in birdsong. Imagine you’re a male bird singing to attract a female. How much oxygen and energy does it cost for you to serenade?
“It would depend on the lyrics, wouldn’t it?”
David smiled. She had the same freshness, ebullience, curiosity about the world, and raw smarts as Sarah.
“True. That’s what people have been looking for. Song structure, complexity, but what if structure doesn’t matter? I mean what’s probably more important are the indirect costs, not the oxygen consumed, but every moment spent singing is one less moment for foraging or nest building. Not to mention the fact that every time he sings, he’s giving up his location to
the predators.”
“I get that, but what I meant was,” Rebecca said, “maybe a trill is more expensive than a whistle.”
David looked at her again. No one had ever considered the cost of different syllable types, and he didn’t have any idea how he’d test such a thing, but she’d made him think. “Interesting,” he said. “Very interesting. I’ll think about how to test that on the plane tomorrow and we’ll get started when I get back.”
At five hundred miles an hour, the plane burned through the clouds, the jet engines leaving a trail of iced water behind. Stanley Sommers, his friend from their post doc years, had invited him to New York for a seminar. Outside the window he saw white.
He had just read that women preferred men with lower voices, especially around their time of ovulation. A curious finding. The evolutionary psychologists would have had a field day with that, concluding in their strict Darwinian way, that the preference was easily explained. In ancient humans, low voice equated with bigger men and bigger men were bound to be better protectors. As easy as that. In birds, he didn’t think pitch had much to do with it but maybe trills. Yes, Rebecca reminded him of Sarah, only Rebecca was quiet where Sarah was expressive. And then he reminded himself that Sarah’s gift for verbalization next to his inability to talk about his feelings, was probably half the reason she was gone. The other half, he didn’t want to think about.
The airplane was trembling, bumps of turbulence, pockets of higher and lower pressure air shook the plane like a toy. He looked away from the window and closed his eyes to the shaking. Was a female bird really more attracted to one song than another? Could she tell the difference? If so, how did his singing bring her in? The shaking stopped. He opened his eyes and looked out. They had come out of the clouds and he could see the land below. At this time of year, the tilled fields of the Great Plains were dark brown sprinkled with snow. From the height of the plane it looked as though a gigantic starling in white-spotted winter plumage had spread its wings upon the earth.
David’s seminar was a success, only he made the mistake of agreeing to stay with Stan, his wife, Helen, and their two children in their small New York City apartment. He was required to sit through noisy dinners in the cramped space with pre-teenagers and answer Helen, who bombarded him with questions. She asked about Sarah first, of course. David answered that she was fine. And she was. He just didn’t see the need to explain that they were no longer living together, that Sarah was probably, right now, hiking through the rainforests of Peru, tanned and sweaty, some ruddy, equally sweaty man by her side. He was grateful that the two couples hadn’t known one another better in Pennsylvania, the post-docs having divided out neatly into those who had children and those who did not. A lie of omission was unlikely to be found out but Helen wasn’t satisfied with bland answers and kept on with more questions. Like a dog on the trail of a pungent wild pig, he wondered if she could smell his loneliness. Fortunately for David, Stan was bored with Helen’s personal questions too. “So, David, let me tell you about the spin-off we’ve set up. You remember the paper I published in 1985? About the configurational changes to neurons during memory creation and retrieval?”
Helen excused herself.
“You mean the theoretical one about engrams that you’ve never been able to shore up with data?” David asked. He reached for the bottle of wine. Perhaps he’d be able to tell Anton that Sommers himself was giving up on the idea.
Stan laughed. “Right, that one. Although that’s about to change too.”
David set the bottle down quickly, his glass still empty. “You’ve got them? You’ve seen it happen?”
Stan was nodding. “Crystal clear. I’ll show you tomorrow, but it’s under the radar. This time we’re going to be extra sure before we release it.” Stan was smug. He reached for the bottle, took it from David’s hand and refilled both their glasses.
“But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about business ventures. Ever since Bayh-Dole, it’s been worth our while to invest in business, only most of us didn’t realize it. Now there’s real incentive. On top of knowing you’ve found a way to beat big diseases, there’s actual money to be made.”
“I’ve never been interested in business spin-offs, Stan. You know that.”
Stan took another sip of wine, letting a brief silence precede what he was going to say next. “We’ve got a new drug that enhances memory. It’s passed Phase I trials and has been accepted for Phase II, and you know what, David, it really works. It’s going to revolutionize the way we treat all sorts of age-related memory loss. Attention deficit disorder, too. In a couple of years Ralph and his research team will be done, dried up.”
Ralph Krest, premiere neuroscientist, memory expert and Nobel Prize candidate, had said Stan’s configuration theory of neuronal memory—the existence of engrams—was nothing more than wishful thinking. David had always agreed with Ralph but he’d never voiced his opinion to Stan.
The wine had made Stan more exuberant than usual. He might be getting a little ahead of himself, but his vehemently competitive spirit reminded David how pleased he was not to be Stan’s direct competitor. As it was, he knew Stan felt him to be a non-threatening colleague, a smart one to be sure, but someone who’d chosen the wrong animal to study. Stan believed that unlike mice and rats, birds would never reveal the essence of the human mind.
After three days with Stan, David was sick of New York. He didn’t understand how people could make it through the winter locked in by the tall buildings, the sky as grey as the wet streets. He was relieved when he boarded the afternoon flight out of JFK. Weary of questions from undergraduate and graduate students, he looked forward to the comfort of his own lab. They had asked: Where would neuroscience be in ten years? Would there still be enough subject matter for a student today to build a career on? Did he think there would be a neurological cure for Alzheimer’s? He’d forced himself to answer politely, to not say what he really felt, which was he didn’t know anything about an Alzheimer’s cure and he didn’t care that he didn’t know. He didn’t care about human diseases or how neuroscience could make life better. All the while he was responding to their youthful eagerness, he was hearing Stan in his pompous way.
“I tell you what you do. Forget the post-docs. You get three grad students for the price of one post-doc, four depending how your department supplements the funding, and you put them all on impossible problems. You shoot buckshot and chances are you’ll bring down something.”
Buckshot. He wanted to tell the students about Stan’s philosophy. Don’t you know you’re nothing more? Go find a lab where your time and energy isn’t the whim of a gambler. Sarah had never cared for Stan. A classic narcissist. He talks about himself constantly, his research success, his new house, even his physical workout schedule!
David didn’t know whether Stan was a narcissist or not, but he definitely was a bore. What he thought now, as the plane passed over the Rockies, was that he might have told the students the truth—that the only question worth knowing was this: How much does it cost a bird to sing and why do females think that some males sing better than others?
Rebecca hadn’t touched her camera in months but today, after she left Anton sleeping in bed and scribbled a short love note to him on the counter, she’d gone home to get it and carried it with her to the institute. She swiped her identity card through the magnetic strip and when the green light flashed, she pulled on the door and entered the cold stairwell. With a flick of her head, she knocked back the hood of her spring jacket and went up the stairs, her footsteps echoing in the hollow space, the crisp air pushing at her back. Three flights up, she opened another door and stepped into a broad hallway flanked by massive windows. This six-floored, rectangular glass building felt like a fishbowl. Down the hallway she passed four black leather chairs set around a pink granite coffee table. In the months since she’d been hired, she’d never seen anyone sitting in the chairs. Three science journals lay in a fan across the table, the cover
of the top journal showed a bird singing. Outside the laboratory door she dug into her jeans pocket for a key, but even with the door closed, she could hear the muffled calls.
“Uncovering the rules of speech,” was how David explained the work. She pulled on the heavy door, propped it open, and stepped around empty cardboard boxes and outdated electrical equipment.
The zebra finches, noisy, feathered holders of this speech secret, stacked two stories high along one wall of the laboratory, chattered loudly with her entrance, flitting on and off their perches, squawking, eating and fluttering, scattering seed grains everywhere. She was mesmerized by these small gray and white birds with their quick robotic movements, intrigued by their calls and songs, their necessity to make sound. Do they understand each other at all? Today when she was done feeding them, she would take some pictures.
She dug into her bag and pulled out the chocolate bar she’d brought for Anton. In his office, she drew a large heart on a piece of paper and placed the chocolate on top.
Back at her cubicle she took off her coat and looked out through the massive western-facing windows, glazed with gray film to protect against the afternoon sun. From this perch on the foothills she could see the entire valley: the university campus below her, the white dome of the state capitol, the Oquirrah Mountains to the west. The Great Salt Lake, on this clear morning, was a whitish blue line. She gathered her long red hair and twisted it up along the back of her head, holding it in place with two pencils from her desk, and tucked the shorter strands around her ear.
As she approached the row of cages a zebra finch opened his scarlet-orange beak to sing and the rest of the males, as if on cue, joined in, repeating the same nasal harmonic bleeps over and over. She watched them for a moment before she began to slide the cage doors up, one by one, to reach in and pull out the half-empty, plastic water containers. She drew out the seed containers too, tipping the seed hulls into the trash and then tossing all the containers into the large black sink for washing.