by Sylvia Torti
While the water filled the basin, she went back to one of the zebra finch cages, having noticed that one of the birds had a strange looking feather. Checking that he was okay, she raised the gate and inserted her hand. The four birds fluttered up and back, calling out against this intrusion. The entire laboratory of zebra finches joined in their anxiety. She easily cornered the bird in her palm and removed her hand, too quickly though, rubbing her wrist on the way out against a sharp wire on the cage door.
The room went quiet again. Flutter like shutter, she thought. The shutter of a camera, brought about by the pressure of her finger as she let out a breath, her left eye accepting the momentary blackness of a long blink. It had been a while since she’d assumed that posture, a while since she’d looked at the world one-eyed through a camera lens. She squinted now at the bird in her hand drawing out his wings to inspect each feather. A bead of blood had seeped from the scrape on her wrist and she brushed it away.
Being in a space with the birds these past months had made her realize how mysterious their world was. She’d become convinced that they had secrets to tell and not just about communication. She was sure of it. They were made of air. Air moving constantly through buoyant air sacs, waves vibrating through the syrinx, up the trachea and out the beak. Their hollow bones were light for travel. They were sound ruffling through feathers. Their physiology was more dinosaur than mammal. Beacons of the past, they were meant to be free.
What had Anton said? Humans had a brain and an opposable thumb and technology and just having all of that made it alright. She would ask David what he thought when he got home from New York, how he justified the rights he had and the work he did. Certainly he’d have a better way of explaining himself than Anton. More of a visual thinker than a talker, she couldn’t quite put words on her thoughts, but deep within her she felt that Anton was wrong about the birds. It couldn’t be as simple as he made it out to be. He had shrugged his shoulders, as if he didn’t care, and said, We’re all in a cage to some extent.
She stopped scrubbing the seed and water dishes and looked around the laboratory. She closed her eyes so that she could hear better. What were they trying so hard to say? That they should be free to live and die as they chose? Now with the muting technique, they wouldn’t even be able to make sound and so she couldn’t hope to understand. She felt the stirrings of a new, fiercely awful thought. A feeling of dread. She’d been wrong about someone before. What made her think that she had any more insight now? And if Anton was wrong about the birds, then was she wrong about him?
STUTTERING
David arrived home from New York in a snowstorm, brushed off his car at the airport and drove slowly up the canyon and then even more slowly for the last mile of winding road, realizing as he neared his house that the plow had once again piled the snow in front of his garage door. He spent the next hour shoveling, listening to the sounds of his heavy breaths and the blade cutting into the wet snow, thinking of the letter of complaint he would write to the company. While moving pile after pile of snow he composed it, conscious of the fact that this was as far as any letter would ever get. Once he returned to the laboratory and the salt melted the snow, his irritation would disappear and the plowman, who never got it right, would be forgotten. Until the next storm. As he shoveled, he contented himself with the thought that despite his ambition he’d never used people as Stan did, never succumbed to firing human buckshot at anything. His relationships with all his previous graduate students and post-docs were supportive and congenial.
During the summer months he was happier for this mountain home, the idea for which had come from Sarah.
“I mean really, David, can you imagine yourself pushing a lawnmower, planting a geranium?”
“Maybe not geraniums,” he said, “but impatiens and irises.”
She rolled her eyes at him.
“No reason to kid ourselves into thinking we’ll ever be the gardening types,” she continued. “The more natural the better.”
It was all part of her “real” campaign, what she called authenticity psychology. She wanted to get to the basics of each person’s self, scrape the layers of defensive constructs out of the way, get rid of anything that wasn’t genuine.
“Grass in the West is ridiculous,” she said. “It’s inauthentic. I even think it might be responsible for some of the depression I’m seeing in women here.”
“I hope you’re not saying that in public. You might lose your license.” The connection between gardens and psychology and authenticity eluded him, but he was happy not to rake, dig, mow or water. Sarah, he admitted, begrudgingly to himself as he straightened his back and appraised his midnight shoveling work, would actually write and send the letter. Sarah would fix the recurring problem of the inconsiderate snowplow.
The next morning he rose at his usual early hour and had his normal breakfast of fresh squeezed juice from three oranges and then a bowl of cereal eaten standing at the sink. When he finished, glass, bowl and spoon were rinsed and put in the half-full dishwasher, which he ran once, or at the most, twice a week. He didn’t bother with coffee, waiting instead to drink a cup with Anton at the laboratory mid-morning. He dressed quickly, went down the steps into the garage and started the cold car. He let it warm a few seconds before backing it out into the dark morning, hearing the crunching of snow and ice under the tires.
Before Sarah left they’d always kept the house clean and neat and that’s the way he kept it now, not out of any effort, but mostly from absence. Some days, arriving from the laboratory in the evening, the empty house surprised him, as if he’d forgotten she was gone. Maybe it was because she was so present for him during the day when he imagined her analysis of every experiment, knew the language she’d use to ask questions about his work, questions that made him think more. He talked back to her in his mind. That sort of conversation, the kind that continued even in the absence of the other person, had never happened with anyone else in his life.
He pulled onto the canyon road and shifted into a lower gear. The plows had not passed and the road was covered with a film of snow. A conversation before she left played in his head.
“Birds in cages, like men in prison, tell lies,” she said. Her face and voice were neutral, letting him interpret the words however he chose. He couldn’t help but think that her clinical training after graduate school had made her difficult to read, her blank open stares receiving whatever information the patient chose to present. He knew that with her patients, she was delicate, the heat on low.
The lights of the city appeared, a halo of blue, just before he rounded the last curve in the canyon.
“Process,” she said. “Patience and process. You need to empathize first, understand what’s really going on before you can say anything helpful. That takes time. In a way, I’m trying to do the opposite of you.”
“Please explain,” he said.
“You’re trying to understand how birds, as a proxy for people, learn to sing. Learning and language. Sound and song. I’m trying to ignore words, see past what people say and help them unlearn thoughts and behaviors so that they can create new ones.”
Before she left, she had said, “Sometimes, I wish I believed it were as easy as you do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? When did I ever say it was easy?”
“I mean, I wish I believed I could stick an electrode in them, get them to talk and believe that whatever they said was important.”
He arrived at the institute, parked his car and crossed the dark parking lot quickly, the cold air stinging his face, freezing the moisture at his nostrils. At the time, her words had felt harsh but now with distance he could acknowledge that she’d had reason to be upset. He listened for calls, but heard only the crackling of frozen snow, the urgent whine of an ambulance approaching the hospital. He went into the building and at the top of the stairs he unlocked the double bolt and when he flicked on the lights, the birds came alive. The tiah-tiahs of the zebra finches mixed with
the hushed machine gun sounds of the Bengalese finches and the muffled coo of Sarah’s Inca dove.
Just after Rebecca started working in the lab, she asked whether the birds could have bigger cages, and he told her no, but then he noticed the old gray dove hunkering in its cage, its feathers dull and sparse, and he told her to give the dove a bigger cage. And all the food he would eat, too. Extra seeds, fruit, calcium supplements, boiled eggs. The works. The bird was nearing his end. He heard its second muffled coo, but avoided looking at it. He scanned the cages of experimental birds, checking for anything new since he’d been gone to New York. There was always the same anxiety when he returned from a trip, a sense of tension that did not fade until he had checked everything and assured himself that all the birds were as they should be. My worrying man, Sarah had whispered sweetly as she watched him counting the birds in their aviary on the front porch every night and then again in the morning. She would wrap her arms around him and together they would stand beneath the fluttering animals. She had understood how much the birds and their songs meant to him.
This morning the laboratory appeared in order. He shook his keys, found the right one and went through the conference room to his office. He unlocked the door and bent to pick up the mail that had been shoved underneath during the days of his absence. There was another letter from Sarah. He put it aside and spent the next hour catching up on the previous week’s issues of Nature and Science. At 8 a.m. he heard Rebecca arrive and got up and went into the laboratory to say hello. In the moment he saw her, the long red hair twisted up on the top of her head, chopsticks holding it in place, he felt a distinct pleasure and the feeling surprised him. She’d always been attractive, but today there was a different aura about her. He hadn’t realized he had been looking forward to this moment until it happened.
She glanced up at him and smiled, “Good morning.” From his side of the counter, her face and torso were half hidden by cages, bottles, plastic containers of seeds. There was a tattoo on her upper shoulder that he couldn’t remember noticing before. He saw her jaw moving slightly as if she were grinding her teeth. He paused to give her a chance to ask about his trip, but she looked back down at her work and didn’t say any more.
No chit-chat or questions. What would Sarah make of her? Rebecca was so quiet that sometimes he forgot her, but luckily she was there, a smart dependable, responsible lab technician doing exactly what she was supposed to do. There was that old adage “beware of those who talk too much.” He’d always thought they’d gotten it wrong. It was the silent ones who were hard to know, hard to predict. He couldn’t read Rebecca. Nevertheless, he was happy to see her after the cold days in New York. He wanted to tell her that he had come to rely on her and appreciate her, but these were not sentiments easily expressed. Was it the potential for her misunderstanding, or his own, that assured his silence?
He heard Sarah again. You are afraid of people. It had been a late night in graduate school. They’d been drinking and Ed was there. She was laughing, her eyes crinkled in smile. The conversation, having begun with the discussion of a new clinical study, became a tongue-in-cheek analysis of their respective fears. Ed had eventually left them to go out to look for owls and he and Sarah had ended the conversation in bed. Silent or not, fearful or not, he thought, Sarah and her theories about him were now irrelevant. Rebecca’s steady competence in the lab was gradually replacing Sarah’s presence in his mind.
“When you get a chance, can you find “Blue 17”?”
She looked up again, her hands soapy, her yellow apron splattered with wet seeds. “Sure. Where do you want him?”
“Bring him in here. We’ve got the space. We’ll use him for our cost experiment.” He heard the soft coo of the dying dove. “Or you can swap out the dove.”
With the sound of Anton’s whistle mid-morning David came out of his office into the laboratory. Rebecca and Anton were standing at the coffee maker.
“Coffee time?”
“Yes, sir. How was New York?”
“Cold, dark, cramped, and I got back at eleven and had to spend an hour shoveling my way into the garage. Somehow in only three days, my body adapted to Eastern time. I managed less than five hours of sleep.”
“Any good science?” Anton poured a cup of coffee for each of them.
“Not much. Heard a lot about Stan’s new business venture. Memory drugs. He thinks he’s going to get rich on the fact that all of us baby boomers are getting old and no one wants to forget anything.”
“Viagra for the brain?”
David laughed. “Perhaps.”
“Sounds promising,” Rebecca said. “I can think of all sorts of good uses for such a drug.”
“Such as?” David asked.
Rebecca smiled but before she could give an answer, Anton interrupted.
“If they have a drug for memory, it might be another way to see the engram.”
“Anton, you’re like Ponce de Leon looking for the fountain of youth.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“A man,” David said, “who was searching obsessively for waters that would restore his youth.”
“That’s an old version of history,” Rebecca said. “Now they teach us that he was ill and confused, or purposefully mislead by the natives.”
David laughed. He did not mention to Anton the memory engrams that Stan had showed him. They were not “crystal clear” as Stan had suggested during dinner and David was left unconvinced. The last thing he needed was the already idealistic Anton getting distracted by Stan’s blurry pictures.
“I don’t want to always be young,” Anton said, “but I do know that once we understand memory, we understand more about humans.”
“That’s absurd,” David said. “All animals, or almost all, I’d wager, have memory. It’s not special to humans.”
“That only makes it more interesting,” Anton said.
“Besides, memory is mostly projection,” David said.
“What do you mean by that?” Rebecca asked. “I’ve always thought that memory was like a photograph.”
“Far from it,” David said. The ideas and thoughts were Sarah’s but the words came from his mouth as though they were his own. Sarah had worked to figure out how to help people un-memorize, un-learn. For her, memory was unstable. “I take notes,” she’d once told him. “The story that a patient tells me one week can be very different from the story she tells me the next week, although she is sure it’s exactly the same. There’s a processing that goes on, and we’re not aware of the fact that we’re changing our stories.”
“I don’t think anything matters more than memory,” Anton said. “If we don’t have memory, then we don’t pass on information from one individual to another, from one generation to another. Without memory, there is no culture. We have to understand how the memory forms. We need to know the process, whether it’s physical, chemical or something else.”
“Something else?” David said. “Like what? I think we’re more like mirrors, unconscious momentary projections and reflections, and somehow our minds fool us into thinking our experiences are real, and so we call that memory.”
He’d rendered Anton speechless. Of course, at some level, David knew this was an absurd notion because memory did matter, but he really didn’t think it mattered as much as people thought it did. Thoughts could overwrite memory. Thoughts could be controlled. Too bad there wasn’t a drug on the market for the opposite, a drug to take away bad thoughts, make one stop creating unpleasant images, like the one he’d formed of Sarah in the rainforest with another man, a drug to make the sting of her absence disappear as easily as she had.
Rebecca crossed the laboratory and went into the conference room to find the blue notebook where she recorded information about all the birds, filing them by species, number, and if she knew it, parentage. She flipped through the pages and wrote the bird’s number and color, “Blue 17,” in a column and made a note: moved to individual cage. Back in the laboratory she
fastened together a new cage by clicking the metal roof onto the sides, and then she folded a sheet of old newspaper to fit onto the tray for droppings. She positioned a wooden perch crosswise inside the cage and then went down the hall to the aviary.
The birds were identified by tiny colored bands, plastic rings marked with black numbers around their legs. Blue, Red, Yellow. The colorful males were easy to distinguish from the gray females. She waved the net and caught a bird with a blue band. He fluttered in the mesh. She slid her hand into the net, and going by feel, slipped her index and third finger around his head and pulled him out. Wrong number. She let him go and tried again. After the thirteenth try, repeatedly swinging and missing, the birds fluttering in a panicked mob from perch to perch, their feathers and claws grazing her hair as they passed, she found “Blue 17.” In the main laboratory she slipped him into the cage. He hunkered down, legs splayed, belly low on the newspaper. He seemed fearful, not the least bit accustomed to life in a cage.
From the lab she went to the experimental rooms where she noticed that the robins and starlings were hopping nervously around their cages, pecking at and then gulping down the crickets and worms as soon as she fed them and following every meal with a burst of song. Spring was coming on and they were loud now, unstoppable, as if unable to be silenced. She liked all the birds but was particularly fond of the sad, quiet robins who watched her with timid turns of their heads, cocked one direction and then the other as if they were studying her as much as she was watching them.
She moved on to the soundproof boxes where the white-crowned sparrows lived in isolation so that they couldn’t hear each other’s songs, only the one version that was pumped in via speakers twenty times a day. And, of course, they could hear themselves sing. The white-crowned sparrows didn’t jump and flutter when she neared them as the starlings did. They were shy like the robins, but quieter. She opened a cage and suddenly, a sparrow darted out, but instead of flying toward the window or the light fixtures as the zebra finches did, it landed on the black countertop. Just as she was about to move toward it, the bird reoriented itself and flew straight back to the platform outside its box and then a moment later, it crawled inside through the open gate. She snapped the chamber closed, hearing his five-note song muffled through the box. At least this bird appeared comfortable in his cage.