by Sylvia Torti
“Respectful? I work here too. I get to ask why we’re doing this.”
“That’s true,” David said. “You can ask, but why don’t you ask Anton? He devised the muting technique. Anton, why would we mute a bird?”
“Because we can,” he said, looking straight at Rebecca, incensed that she would be so brazen.
“That’s not good enough,” Rebecca said. “We can do lots of things but we don’t because it’s not right.”
“I agree with Rebecca,” David said. “That’s not a good enough reason.”
“Come on. They’re animals,” Anton said.
“They’re more than animals,” David said. “They’re collaborators.”
“Collaborators? What?” Anton said. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Or victims,” Rebecca said.
“No, I don’t believe that,” David said. “They’re not victims. We’re collaborators. We’re in this together.”
“Unfortunately, we are.” She wiped her hands on her jeans and looked at David.
David laughed again, an uncomfortable nervous laugh.
It seemed to Anton that David and Rebecca had shared an inside conversation, and the fact that he hadn’t been able to keep up angered him. “You’re both so American,” he told them and went back to work.
The conversation was never finished, but in the days that followed the discovery of stuttering, the lab buzzed with communal energy. David hired four new students and asked Rebecca to train them. He set up the cot in his office and it became clear to everyone that he was living in the laboratory. Anton might as well have been doing the same, returning home later each night and then leaving again first thing in the morning. Only Rebecca kept regular hours. The sudden discovery of stuttering birds had changed their schedules and now that Anton didn’t have time to cook or tell her stories, she began to sleep at her own apartment.
Anton began to mute the canaries and set up learning experiments to determine whether it mattered if birds were muted early in life or later in life. He believed that either way, when he looked at their brains, he’d see evidence of song memory patterned on their nerves. He’d see an engram form and disappear and form again. He didn’t care whether David believed in memory engrams. He would refine the technique, find the engram, and become the first to know how lived moments become memory.
Late at night David stared at the scribbles, wavy diagrams and numbers, a poorly rendered sketch of the syrinx that he and Anton had drawn earlier in the day, and contemplated the phenomenon of stuttering birds. If they could figure out the reason zebra finches began to stutter when they couldn’t hear themselves sing, could he also figure out why a person stuttered? If he could make a canary stop stuttering, could they do the same for a human being? Was it a processing problem in the brain? The inability to hear oneself correctly?
A tiny zebra finch feather, striped black and white, floated slowly downward in front of him. He caught it in his palm and then opened his hand and let it float down again along the invisible air eddies. The birds in the laboratory were still singing even though he’d turned out the lights. With the longer days, they were calling late into the evening, singing morning, night, anytime they sensed that a female was near. He could relate to them. His energy had increased as well. He stood and walked to bookshelves along the far wall and took down a small volume, Migration, by Edward Matheson. He looked at the author photograph. Ed was tan and fit. Behind his three-day beard, his eyes twinkled at the photographer as if they were sharing a secret. As always, binoculars hung from his neck. David missed Ed enormously. He’d been like a brother or perhaps better than a brother. A bond that David had believed could never be broken. He opened the book randomly to the middle.
Ruby throat
Every April, the three-inch, three-gram Archilochus colubris, Ruby-throated hummingbird, migrates over six hundred miles from Mexico to eastern North America. In September, it travels back again. Early one spring morning in the late 1960s, as a teenage bird enthusiast, I caught a ruby-throat in a mist net on my family’s farm in Indiana. I untangled the bird from the net and in my hand the tiny, static bird seemed wrong, no longer the bird I had always known it to be. Not a hyperactive, buzzing, nectar-sipping animal, but a tiny, quiet almost weightless, iridescent being. In the proximity of flesh and feather, the bird became something new and different. I snapped a tiny, numbered band around its leg, and let it go. The next spring, I caught the exact same bird in the same net in the same place on the farm. Again, I held the bird, and again, I let it go. The ruby-throat was once again a ruby-throat, dashing off on its migration and I was left to wonder, wait, and hope for next year.
David quickly shut the book. Proximity of flesh and feather. Had Sarah also become something new and different for Ed in Peru? Had there been proximity of flesh and feather? In many ways, he and Ed had lived parallel adolescences. Both rural, alone, obsessed by birds, but despite this, Ed had managed to develop an easiness with people that David had not. Ed and Sarah had always bantered and laughed together. Had that been all they’d had?
He heard a quick call from a male zebra finch and listened as the rest of the birds in the laboratory took up the cue, singing “tiah tiah tiah” in sync. Unlike the white-crowned sparrows and the robins, zebra finches did not exhibit zugunruhe behaviors. Zebra finches did not migrate, and in the laboratory, they didn’t have specific seasons for mating. He returned Ed’s book to the shelf. He gathered his things, folded up the cot and leaned it against the wall of his office. Tonight he would go home. He needed to let go. The past was just that and he wasn’t helping himself by this constant remembering.
Halfway up the canyon, he slowed down, lowered the window and listened for owl calls. He pulled onto the side of the road and got out of the car. Cupping his hands around his mouth he mimicked the hooting call of a Western screech owl, the hoo hoo hoo sounds that sped up toward the end of the call like a small rubber ball bouncing on the ground. He listened. He called again and waited, but nothing called back. Once home he was struck by the silence and immediately regretted having come back. The laboratory, it seemed, was now the only place he felt at ease, science the dam that held back his loneliness.
On his way to work the next morning, David glimpsed an injured magpie, jouncing and fluttering at the side of the road. He eased up on the gas and rolled to a stop along the shoulder, turned off the car and walked the tarmac back towards the animal, a fledgling magpie. The bird, one leg bent in half, flapped its wings and hopped with difficulty on its good leg. Confused by its injury and not yet sure of flight, David was able to catch it easily. Without exploratory surgery he couldn’t know whether it was a male or female because all magpies had the same white breast, iridescent purple-black feathers, long bobbing tails and black eyes. He studied the damaged leg and saw that it had been severely pinched. In his hand he could feel the bird’s thinness, its breast bone jutting out under his index finger. Except for the madly beating heart, the animal seemed frail. He lessened his grip. There was a sudden flapping and flailing as the bird jumped back to the ground. He reached down and grabbed it again, this time stretching his hand wide over the lean breast, holding more firmly. The bird turned its head, opened its long beak and bit onto the skin on the top of his hand.
“Ah, mad are you? Lucky, I’d say.”
He looked into the bird’s black eyes and saw panic, but he also thought he saw curiosity. He liked magpies. They were intelligent, related to ravens and crows. An idea began to form in his mind. Perhaps this magpie could be trained. The time for imprinting had passed. He’d never have it following him around like Konrad Lorenz’s ducklings, but the bird might be useful. Perhaps he could test ideas about hearing, do some sort of experiment on sound perception and memory. He might become a behaviorist after all. Sarah, if she knew, would be pleasantly surprised.
He returned to his car and transferred the bird to his left hand. With his right, he opened the trunk, found an old towel, shook it out and laid it across
the driver’s seat. He got in, sat on the towel and drove one-handed the rest of the way to the laboratory, the bird on his lap held steady with his free hand.
When Anton and Rebecca arrived, David introduced them to the magpie.
Anton eyed the bird skeptically as it beat its purple wings once against the metal bars, lose its balance, topple and then right itself again.
Rebecca stepped in close to the cage on the countertop. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Injured leg, looks like it’s been pinched but hard to know how it happened.”
Anton stepped away and began to make coffee. “Getting soft, David? Rescuing wounded birds?”
“I’ve found my Munin,” David said.
“Munin?” Rebecca asked.
“Norse mythology. Odin, the one-eyed god of poetry and war, had two ravens: Hugin and Munin. Hugin means thought and Munin means memory. Each morning at sunrise, Odin would open the shutters of his house, let the ravens out and the birds would fly around the world like spies. When they returned to the house in the evening, they perched, one on each shoulder, and whispered the news into his ears.”
“So now you have memory and cannot forget anything,” Anton said. “Sounds like a curse, David.”
David laughed. Even though Anton always had something quick to say, David suspected that his true thoughts, reserved only for himself, happened simultaneously on another track, in Italian or German, one translation away.
“Isn’t that what you want, Anton?” Rebecca asked. “To understand memory?”
David noticed that Anton ignored her question, opened the canister of coffee beans and tipped it to fill the grinder.
“I thought you said, David, that memory is not interesting to you. What did you say, it’s all faulty?”
“Engrams don’t interest me. Thinking you can locate memory in one place is futile, but figuring out how memories, even faulty memories, affect behaviors is interesting.”
Anton nodded his head.
“What will you do with this memory-magpie?” Rebecca asked.
“Put her in a Skinner box, see what she tells me about hearing.” A sense of regret passed through him as he said this, knowing that this would be a project without Sarah.
“How do you know your memory is a she?” Rebecca asked.
Anton pressed the button to pulverize the beans. Over the grinding whirr, neither of them could hear David’s answer.
Rebecca and Anton drove to the mountains to spend the day together. There had been a distance between them ever since the stuttering was discovered and the conversation with David in the laboratory. Before Anton had been focused on her but now he was thinking more about the birds and their stuttering. He had no idea what it might mean but as he maneuvered the curves of the mountain, he realized he hadn’t felt this good in years.
He parked the car and they got out, zipping up their windbreakers against the wind. It was late April but at the higher altitudes the snow had not yet begun to melt and the sky was a deep blue, the light blinding as it bounced off the white world. Rebecca squinted against the glare. She never seemed prepared for the elements. No hat and scarf in the winter, no sunhat in the spring. He dug into his backpack and tossed her a baseball hat. They began to climb, the snow below their boots giving a firm footing. He ascended more quickly than she did. The mountain was quiet. The white-crowned sparrows, tanagers and towhees, the few birds he’d learned to recognize, had not yet completed their migration back. He heard the rattle of a chipmunk or maybe it was a squirrel. Higher up he stopped at an exposed rock, removed his backpack and leaned it against a small conifer tree. He stretched his arms above his head and peered out at the steep white peaks. From here, the world was mostly frozen mountains and in the distance only a tiny triangle of the valley and city below. With snow these mountains reminded him of the Alps and the new research made him feel that much closer to home.
He sat down on the sun-heated rock and inspected the gray and green lichens covering its surface. He removed his orange cap and waited for Rebecca to finish the ascent. They ate lunch in silence and when they were finished he lay back on the rock and pulled her over to kiss. Just above there was a pair of birds in the tree, their tiny feet clasping and releasing the branches, their wings flicking with each high pitched call.
“Two birds, very close,” he whispered. He watched their hyper movements, the pale undersides of their yellow-gray bodies, the green and brown of the tree and above that, deep blue sky. Rebecca buried her head in his neck, and he felt her lips on his collarbone. He shut his eyes for an instant, listening to the rustling of their tiny bodies, the high repetitive see-see-see notes of their song. Whatever they were, they seemed to stutter too. When he opened his eyes again, they were gone.
“What’s the real reason you want to keep this relationship a secret?” she asked, her head resting on his shoulder.
“I told you. Jealousy and dynamics in the lab.”
“There must be something more. It just doesn’t make sense.”
“More? No.” He didn’t know how to tell her his truest feelings. The thoughts, formed effortlessly in his mind, the sounds so easy to make in Italian or German, did not materialize in English.
“There’s something different about you,” she said. “You’ve been acting distant.”
He rubbed his hand over her breast. “I am very close.”
“I don’t mean physically.”
“Rebecca, there has never been anyone else in my life like you.” Even so, he realized she might be right. Much like a male bird late in the season, having little reason to sing for a female or defend his territory, maybe he was disconnecting from her, reserving his energy for the upcoming migration home.
He looked out across the valley. In the winter, the mountains in Utah reminded him a bit of home but the parched desert summer that he knew was coming was nothing like summer there. At home, he would get up at sunrise and go up into the mountains to hike. Next to his grandfather’s village was another, even smaller village perched higher up on the mountain with only eight or nine houses, all made of stone, the roofs gray slate.
Walking through this village one day and on the way back from a hike he passed an old man, white hair, the grey stubble of a two-day beard, standing in the small doorway of his house. Usually, the local people were distant, never offering more than a curt hello, naturally suspicious of strangers, but this man motioned Anton over with a hand gesture. He saw the man’s half-sagging face and dangling arm and understood immediately that he couldn’t speak and assumed he’d suffered a stroke. With his good arm, the man bid Anton to come in, stooped below the low doorframe and disappeared into the darkness of the house. Anton ducked his head as well and followed the man inside. The house was cool, the thick stone walls and slate roof keeping out the heat. Along the long wall of the room there was a large table decorated with a Christmas village scene of little wooden figurines, hills, animals, a manger, Joseph, Mary and baby Jesus. The man leaned over, flipped a switch and the figures came to life. Anton saw women combing wool. Men milking cows. Sheep with bells. Mary’s hand rocking Jesus’ cradle, the three kings continuously approaching with their gifts, never getting to give them up. It was a whole village clinking and clanking, so well-imagined and engineered, it must have taken years to carve and dress the people and animals, wire up the electricity, make it all work.
Anton had the sense that in the future he was going to be like that man, tucked away in a stone house in the Alps, one bookshelf full of books and another with classical music, weeding a small garden, turning the soil over on itself, harvesting lettuce and basil in the summer, potatoes in the fall. Rebecca was right. He had become distant.
“I don’t understand how you can think it’s right to mute the birds,” she said.
Her voice brought him back to the moment. “Rebecca, we talked about this before.”
“And you didn’t answer well.”
“I didn’t answer what you wanted me to answer. I�
�m not sure we’ll find a cure for human stuttering.”
“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”
“You mean morally correct?”
She nodded.
“I don’t think it makes a difference. I think moral is a human creation. It doesn’t exist in the animal world.”
“But you live in the human world.”
“True, but I work with animals and only have to follow their rules.”
“Their rules? How can you possibly know what their rules are?”
The look on her face was something new, a look of disgust.
“You don’t have any guilt about subjecting them to experiments?”
“I think about it, of course. I am human, but guilt? No.” He propped himself up on his elbow. “Zebra finches have been bred for many, many generations. They are accustomed to captivity, and they are taken care of very well. You know this because you feed them. Food and water ad libitum.”
“But that’s not the point. There’s a difference between keeping a bird and playing Frankenstein with it.”
“Is there?”
“Of course there is!” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The surgeries are done with anesthetic. Plus, pain is relative. You Americans have low tolerance to pain.”
“We Americans? What do you mean by that? Pain is pain.”
“Definitely not,” he said. “Some people hardly feel it.”
She didn’t say anything. He could tell he was making her mad, which he didn’t want to do, so he tried to explain what he meant.
“In Europe, you go to the dentist and they don’t inject anesthesia when they work on your teeth.”
She looked at him with the look of disgust again. “I wasn’t only talking about physical pain.”
He waited for her to continue.
“Emotional pain. Spiritual pain, but I guess some people don’t feel that either.”