Cages

by Sylvia Torti

  The birds were all so different. She couldn’t read them, couldn’t say what they might or might not feel, but she knew that the more she worked with them, the less sure she was.

  Anton came into the laboratory. “Rebecca!”

  “Ciao Anton.”

  “You speak Italian now?”

  “I figured I could manage that one word. Is it true that you say it for both hi and bye?”

  Anton laughed. “Yes. I guess Italians are always saying hello.”

  “Or goodbye,” she said.

  “Ciao,” he said, and went back to the soundproof room to copy the data from his muted bird.

  Rebecca continued down the row of white-crowned sparrow chambers, feeding and cleaning and checking on the birds. In the last chamber she found a dead bird. Its beautifully black and white-striped head lay at the bottom of the cage as if he were sleeping. Though it certainly wasn’t the first dead bird she’d found, she recoiled and stepped back. She didn’t know why she was hesitant to touch this one, but finally she reached into the cage and removed him. She looked him over but she could find no obvious reason for his death. She carried him in her palms into the main laboratory over to David at the surgical table.

  David stood up, his shoulders rounded toward her, a curl of hair falling in front of his face. “Oh no, my favorite bird.”

  Sadness took Rebecca by surprise. Her shoulders rose and fell and she tried to suppress her tears.

  “Rebecca, it’s okay.” He took the bird from her hand.

  “It’s not okay. It’s awful.”

  “Unfortunately, it happens. It’s hard for me too.”

  Silence. She bowed her head. David reached out to her shoulder and then moved his hand to her chin, lifting it so that her eyes met his.

  “It’s not fair,” she said. She’d never been this near to him, but she suddenly had the sense that he might find her attractive.

  “No, it’s not fair. The flourishing of one is never independent of the other.” His hand, pleasantly soft and warm, moved from her chin back to her shoulder.

  “What does that mean?” She wanted him to explain himself, to make the research with the birds, the need for the cages, and her own feelings, make sense.

  “We depend on the birds. We ask them to tell us how they work. A bird sings, we record him. He dies, we stop. Through the process, we do our best to listen carefully and understand.” Anton entered the lab and David pulled his hand away.

  “In every experiment,” David said, his tone of voice dropping, his hands hanging awkwardly at his side, “there are risks, unknown factors, unexpected results.”

  It sounded to Rebecca as if he was trying to convince himself as much as her. She glanced over at Anton, but he was gone.

  “We’re responsible for them,” David said.

  She looked to David and hesitated. “I have to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  Her neck reddened. “I don’t want to do the cost of song project.”

  He crossed his arms. “It’s alright. Tell me.”

  “I don’t want to hurt them.”

  He smiled and stepped closer to her, and placed his hand again on her bare shoulder. “You and I have this in common.”

  She shook her head and lowered it.

  “And yet we sometimes harm those we love.”

  Rebecca looked up at him. That was too much like the photographer’s: Pain is part of love. She stepped back abruptly. “But if you still do it, it’s on purpose. That’s worse than not caring at all.” She felt herself become enraged. She turned and ran from the laboratory.

  When she didn’t return, David finished feeding the birds, and went back to his office and shut the door. The letter from Sarah still lay unopened on his desk.

  The day he’d driven her to the airport, there had been a wet snow, the first of the year. They didn’t talk and the air inside the car got thick and heavy. The windshield wipers whined against the glass clearing the view only momentarily in front of their eyes. He hoped she would say something, anything. If they just could take some air into their mouths and lungs, he thought, the in and out movements might relieve the thickness. Afraid perhaps that they would suffocate, he rolled down the window.

  He had not answered her calls or letters. He knew she was worried about him. He was worried about her too. Neither had siblings and the bond between them and with Ed had been the most family they’d ever known. The feedback loops that he liked to talk about had been damaged.

  He got up and cracked open the door to his office and listened for the sounds of Rebecca in the lab, but she hadn’t returned. He shut his door again and sat down. Outside, spring was coming to the valley, though none of the trees had budded yet. He thought about the spring shortly after he had first become intrigued with the idea of auditory feedback. He and Sarah had gone together to the foothills behind the institute and hiked into the scrub oak where lazuli buntings were establishing their territories. They stopped near a brilliant blue and rust-colored male furiously singing and dueling with a nearby male. David pulled recording equipment from his bag, held the microphone out toward the bird and pressed record. “Watch this,” he whispered. A few seconds later, he pressed rewind, held the machine out to the air and played the sound he’d just recorded. Immediately, the bunting flew toward them and landed on a perch directly in front of them. The bird cocked his head right and left and hopped on the branch.

  “Curious fellow. He’s never heard this particular male,” he said.

  “You mean himself,” she whispered.

  “I mean himself as he sounds to others.” The bird hopped closer toward them to investigate the sound coming from the recorder, stayed for a few moments and then flew up to perch on a higher branch. David turned off the recorder. The bird sang his song. There was a response from the male in the next territory.

  “What happens,” David said, “when the sound producer and the receiver are one and the same?”

  Thinking about it now he realized he’d hit upon an interesting question. When producer and receiver were one and the same, was it like looking in the mirror and experiencing instantaneous recognition? Or was it utter confusion? And what could one really learn from instantaneous recognition anyway? With Sarah, their differences had pushed him to know himself more, while their similarities had led to collaboration—not cancelling out.

  What David hadn’t told Anton after his trip to New York was his increasing concern for purpose, his drive to understand the reason for song. Of course, birdsong was about communicating signal, transferring information, but what information and at what cost? He struggled against the presentiment that true measurements of cost, which would explain mate choice, might always elude him. And then there were the waxwings in which both sexes looked alike and sang the same song. How could any theory of sexual selection account for that?

  He thought of Aisha, the interpreter, and the conversations they’d had over the two days at the conference, sharing secrets because they had no fear and no need to hide from one another. He had told her about Sarah and Ed. She told him about the husband she didn’t love at home. He thought of their silent lovemaking, the energetic rise and fall of her eyebrows, and then he had a thought he knew he’d never share with anyone: birds sing first because they can and second just because they like to hear their own songs.

  At dinner that night Anton asked Rebecca about the dead bird. “Another sparrow died?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. I just found him in his chamber.”

  “That’s odd. What did David say?”

  “He doesn’t know either but I think they’re getting tired of the laboratory, especially the soundproof chambers.”

  “Tired? What do you mean?”

  “Tired of life in a box.”

  “That’s not possible, Rebecca.”

  “Why not?”

  “Birds don’t die like that.”

  “How do you k
now? You’d go crazy if all you did was listen to yourself all day.”

  “I saw him touching your arm.”

  “So?”

  “So, I don’t know. It made me uncomfortable.”

  “You sound possessive. Not a good quality. I’m not an animal in one of your books on sexual selection theories.” Though she’d hardly eaten, she moved her dish away. “What’s the real reason you haven’t told David about the muted birds?”

  “I told you. He will not understand.” Anton served himself another helping of pasta, aware that the answer wasn’t exactly truthful.

  “David has different ideas about the research, the right to work with animals than you do,” she said.

  “What are his ideas?”

  “You’ll have to ask him yourself and while you’re at it, you should tell him about the muting before I do. You know, my job is on the line here too. I’m responsible for all the birds, for keeping track of them. If any go missing, he’s going to blame me.”

  “He won’t blame you. He likes you. Maybe you’ve thought about that? Maybe you like him too?”

  “Oh my god.” She stood up, went to the window and looked out. “I’m going home.”

  It was the first time she had left without making love.

  Anton couldn’t find the right words to explain why he couldn’t tell David about the muting yet. As he rinsed their plates he thought about his master’s project where he had studied storks, voiceless birds that communicated not through song, but by tossing back their heads and then clattering their bills. For two years Anton listened, recorded, measured the length of their bills and the frequency of bill beats. He had figured out that certain tapping frequencies carried different messages. One for courtship. One for alarm. One for nestlings. He had broken the code. Until he told others, he was the only one who knew.

  And he could still remember the exhilarating sensation he’d felt the first time he slipped an electrode into a nerve and heard the bang-bang of a neuron firing realizing he could hear inside a cell. Although he certainly hadn’t been the first man to do that, the experience had been singular. There was a before and there was an after. He couldn’t explain that feeling in any language.

  Now this new ability to mute a bird was potentially big. Making a discovery in science was like being told a secret that no one else knew. Something to be enjoyed alone. He didn’t want to share it just yet.

  He put on his jacket and walked back up to the institute. The night was clear, the moon nearly full and bright. He had been working late, exercising more, sleeping little. David had said he looked happy and healthy. Was it Rebecca or the new muting work? When Anton arrived, he saw that David’s office was lit. He was sitting at his desk, his unruly hair like a halo around his head. What was he doing in the lab so late at night? Anton watched him stand, walk out of his office through the conference room and into the lab. The main lab lights came on. Anton followed him, walking around the building to see what he was doing inside. Strange that David, who usually insisted on a strict daytime/nighttime light regime for the birds, would be turning on lights and interrupting their schedule like this. He watched him stop in front of a birdcage and position a microphone. Birds didn’t sing at night. David reached in, took out a bird and then carried it over to the surgical table. With David in the lab, Anton’s plan to mute another bird was dashed, but he didn’t feel like going home either. He turned his back to the city and looked toward the white slope in the moonlight. He jammed the toe of his shoe into the hillside and began to run up the hill, feeling his heart beat faster and the cold air burn his lungs.

  “Risk, risk, risk,” David had said during one of their Sunday birding excursions. “Science is like falling in love.”

  Anton had laughed at him then, but maybe he’d been right; Anton was trying to find his first love again, trying to regain that high. Science had always been the one effort he could count on to repay him emotionally. Maybe David was trying to do the same. Perhaps David was staying late at work to take the edge off whatever he was feeling as well.

  Anton stopped at the top of the hill and looked down at the city. Despite the tension of the evening, the thought of Rebecca made him smile. She’d said, The birds, it’s like they’re trying so hard to be heard. He wished she were with him now to see how different everything appeared in the moonlight. He would put his arms around her, whisper something in her ear, press his lips to hers.

  When he came down the mountain, David had gone and Anton went into the lab. He sat in his office studying the data sheets as they inched out of the printer. When he’d first begun to work on birdsong he’d only seen squiggles and stacks of lines, shades of gray scratched onto paper, but with David’s help, he’d learned to read the print-outs. He looked at the three traces of lines. The top trace corresponded with the normal song, before the bird was muted, showing the undulating lines of the bird’s respiration. Inhalations circled down and were silent, exhalations went up and made song. It was true, as David said, the digitized tracings let you see sound. He labeled the syllables: 1, 2, 3 for the different notes in the zebra finch’s song. His face still felt hot from too much sun during the outing the day before. He often forgot how water and snow reflected sunlight, how susceptible pale skin could be at the end of winter. He got up to splash cool water on his face.

  When he sat back down, he lined up the sheets of paper, comparing the breathing patterns of the muted and unmuted birds, only they didn’t quite match up. At first, he thought it was a problem of perspective and turned the paper toward himself. He reached for a ruler, set it on the two traces and convinced himself there was a problem. He called up the file on the screen and looked at the monitor. He scrolled forward and backward in time and began to see a pattern. The muted birds were adding strange, albeit silent, syllables to their attempted songs. By sunrise, he’d reviewed enough files to be sure of what he’d found.

  As he left the building, the sky was mauve and the air fresh. The days were lengthening. Excited by his strange discovery, he stopped by Rebecca’s apartment to tell her the good news, but even though there was a light on in a back room, she didn’t come to the door. He stood for a few moments waiting and listening, thinking he could hear voices inside. He rang the bell once more before continuing home and crawling, elated, into bed.

  As soon as Anton arrived at the lab later that day, he told David about the muting experiment.

  “Keeping secrets, huh?” David said.

  “I wanted to be certain.”

  “Still trying to find the keys to memory?”

  “I will figure out how to show you an engram.”

  “How did you?”

  “Mute the bird?”

  David nodded.

  “Pins through the labia. Keeps them from vibrating.”

  David was quiet for a moment. “What is it, Anton, that you’re trying so hard to remember?”

  Anton ignored the question and spread out the sheets of paper with the traces on the conference room table. “But there’s more, David. The muted birds are behaving strangely, adding syllables to their silent songs.”

  Even stranger was the repetition of these syllables over and over, like a scratched record in the middle of a song. In their silence, the birds had begun to stutter.

  “Look at syllables one, four and five,” Anton said.

  “How old are these birds when you mute them?”

  “120-150 days.”

  “Past crystallization,” David said.

  “The song is supposed to be set at 90 days, and to not change after that,” Anton said, “but eighty percent of them do it.”

  David studied the sheets of paper, shifting them left and right, getting perspective, flipping from one to another. “Then it’s disrupted auditory feedback.” His voice was just louder than a whisper. “And that, it would seem, can disrupt song.”

  “And I can reverse them. I can take out the pins and un-mute them. It’s a way to test the engram idea. With a big sample of birds, w
e can study their brains before and….”

  “Forget engrams, Anton. This could be really important without dissecting bird brains. No one’s ever muted and un-muted a bird before. No one’s been able to make a bird stutter.”

  Rebecca, who had been listening, spoke up. “Why would you want to make an animal stutter?”

  “Think about it,” David said. “What do canaries do when they sing? They repeat over and over. First one syllable a bunch of times and then they switch to another syllable and repeat that one over and over before switching to another syllable.”

  “But they do that naturally,” Anton said.

  “Right, we could say they stutter normally. Repetition of syllables is the feedback they need to sound normal to themselves.”

  “You think we can stop their stuttering?”

  “Yes. And then we can compare the zebra finch, who begins to stutter when he can’t hear himself, with the canary who stops stuttering when he can’t hear himself.” David was excited. “And then, we’re going to find out why some humans stutter, why some people struggle to express themselves, and then we’ll figure out…”.

  Rebecca interrupted him. “Birds shouldn’t have to pay the price for human problems, for the inability of men to express themselves.”

  David laughed.

  “Rebecca, please,” Anton said. “That’s not respectful. It’s David’s lab.” Couldn’t she see that this was the best thing that had happened? He’d finally had a break-through in the work.