by Sylvia Torti
He sat up. “What? You think the birds feel emotional pain?”
“David knows they do. I can tell by the way he holds them and the way he talks to Munin. He and I talk about it.”
“David is a scientist. He just wants to get another Science paper and another grant. Don’t let him, or the attention he gives you, fool you.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean I’ve seen the two of you having those conversations and I’d just say this: you shouldn’t trust him.”
She stood abruptly and started to walk. “I’m going back to the car.”
Anton sat back on the rock and watched her moving away in large, quick steps. Her sudden departure surprised him and these repeated discussions about the birds frustrated him. Only privileged Americans had leisure time to spend on these thoughts. He looked up at the white mountains beyond. He closed his eyes and turned his head to face the sun, listening to the chirp of a chipmunk, the faint whoosh of the breeze through the pine trees, the drop of a pine cone. The muting work was going to change everything. He just needed to put in some long days and long weeks and they would produce the Science paper he was hoping for. He was homeward bound, intent on returning to the Alps. He stood and followed her down the mountain. They didn’t speak on the drive back to the city. When he pulled up in front of her house, she grabbed her bag, and gave the door a heavy slam. He put the car in drive and drove downtown to visit Francesco at the Italian deli.
They’re trying so hard to be heard. It was obvious to her. Why wasn’t it obvious to them? It was clear, as she leaned into the toilet that night, vomiting up the four gin and tonics she’d had. They only valued that which they could understand in words. Look at how much was happening because they couldn’t understand each other or maybe even themselves?
David had taken her seriously when she presented him with the question, and had surprised her in not answering as Anton had, but then their conversation had been interrupted. Still, she’d seen it in his eyes, hadn’t she? He didn’t want to harm the birds. David cared for them as Anton did not.
She waited for another wave of nausea. Who knew how many pounds of birds were thrown into the freezer each year? Accumulated. Incinerated. Bodies given up for science. To what end? She gagged and felt the burn of food move up her esophagus, knowing she was complicit by caring for them the way she had.
If you don’t speak, you won’t be heard. In that, they were wrong.
David got out of his car, pressed the lock button and listened for the beep. Now with the semester finished, the campus was deserted and quiet at this early hour, the birds no longer singing courtship or territorial songs. He heard a robin call first, then the quick whistling of a starling. A magpie, hardly bothered by his presence, flapped across the sidewalk in front of him. The robin called again and was answered by another male down the hillside. He walked quickly toward the institute, counting their short calls as he went. Robin, starling, magpie, house sparrow, an easy one, two, three, four. House finch-five, Lazuli bunting-six. Warbling vireo-seven. Flicker-eight. Downy woodpecker-nine. Sometimes, at this time of the year, he could make it to ten before arriving at the entrance. He slid his ID card through the box and opened the door.
Upstairs he unlocked the laboratory. The birds were awake, hopping and calling in their cages. He passed through the lab and conference room to his office to set his backpack on the desk. Back in the laboratory at Munin’s box, he unlatched the door. The bird cawed. David smiled.
“Hungry, are you? Come on, let’s get you some juicy worms.” Removing her from the box wasn’t exactly the right way to train her, but he liked the bird’s company. He reached in and took her in his hand. She turned her head and tried to bite his wrist. He lessened his grip. He no longer could feel her breastbone.
Using his left hand, he opened the refrigerator and removed a plastic container of worms, shook a few out onto a tray and replaced the container, kneeing the door shut. As they began to wiggle, Munin fixed her gaze on the warming worms. Back in his office, he put the tray onto a side desk and set Munin on the back of a chair next to the worms. Instead, she flew up into the air and perched on the light fixture.
“Fine,” he said, “but breakfast is down here.”
She cocked her head right and left. Sunlight coming through the windows made her purple feathers gleam. He turned his back to her and booted up his computer to check his email. A few seconds later, there was the faint swoosh of the bird dropping down to eat.
In his inbox he found an announcement from Science and clicked over to review the newest issue. He wasn’t surprised to see Stan’s phase II work on memory drugs published, but he was surprised at his ungenerous feelings about Stan’s success. He would have his own Science paper as soon as they finished the first round of stuttering experiments. In fact, he should put Munin back in her box and get to work.
“Come on now,” he said. “I know you don’t want to go in, but it’s time.”
The magpie fluttered her wings, but David was quicker and caught her in his hand.
“Here, bite my finger if it makes you feel better.”
Silence and then she let out a grating caw sound.
“It’s only for a while.” He carried her into the lab and put her into the Skinner box. “A change of scenery, Munin.” He closed the door.
Using the remote camera, he watched her inside. She hopped and pecked at the levers. When she pecked at the red lever, he played one tune. When she pecked green, a different tune. He’d done a scan of the literature. If Munin wasn’t stressed, he could expect her to live ten years, maybe more because birds in captivity always lived longer than those in the wild. Good food. Good care. No predators. Not such a bad life, was it?
“How is the memory?” Anton asked as he entered the lab.
“She seems to like either red or the song that goes with the red button.”
“You can switch them to find out.”
“I will.”
“Coffee?”
“Sure.”
“Where’s Rebecca?”
“She took some vacation days.”
Anton stopped what he was doing. She’d said nothing about days off, but of course, their last conversation during the hike hadn’t ended well. He would try to call her later. He poured water into the coffee pot. “I am thinking we can mute this memory of yours.”
David looked at him trying to gauge whether Anton was serious. “No way.”
“We are getting good ideas of finches and canaries when they sing without hearing themselves, but those birds all learn their songs after they’re born. What happens when you mute birds, like a magpie, birds that never learn, birds that are born knowing their songs? I wonder. Do they stutter too?”
“Your ignorance of birds, Anton, is remarkable. Magpies do sing and they do learn. They’re oscines but what you’re hearing are their calls and you’re right, those aren’t learned. You don’t hear their songs because they’re soft, like whispers.”
Anton pressed the button to grind the beans.
“Besides,” David said, louder now, to be heard over the grind, “it would be useless. A sample size of one.”
During the day Munin listened to sounds and pressed levers when she was asked, but mostly she flew around the laboratory. David set out flashy items, coins, pieces of tin foil, candy wrappers around the laboratory and waited for her to bring them back to her cache in his office.
“The animal care guy came by yesterday,” Anton said. “He wasn’t happy to see Munin out of her cage again.”
“What time?”
“Noon. He said he is going to write a report.”
“Okay,” David said. He whistled, held out a shiny quarter and Munin flew to his arm. He placed her back in the cage and gave her a mealworm.
That evening David repaired the old aviary that Sarah had built. He stretched new heavy wire cloth across the wooden frame and stapled it to the wood. He carried Munin’s cage to the aviary, pulled open t
he screen door, went in and let the door swing shut behind him. He undid the latch and opened the door. She didn’t come out. He opened a small plastic container and spilled some worms into the damp leaves in front of her opened door. From his pocket he took a quarter-sized piece of foil and wedged it into the wire of the cage. In the morning, sunlight would hit the foil and Munin would collect it for her stash of shiny treasures.
David left the aviary and mounted the twenty stairs to their house, his house now, which was quietly tucked among trees on the mountain without a view of any neighbors. Once inside, the first thing he always did was to go to the stereo and turn on music. Shaded by oaks and firs, the house was dark and so he moved around the room, switching on lights. At sunset, there was often a rush of emotion, a sensation of panic. It was a feeling that had increased lately.
“Science is like this,” he’d told Anton. “You only have the potential to be doing good stuff if you’re not sure, if you’re afraid. Whenever I’ve felt like my idea is a bit crazy or very stupid, those have been the moments when something exciting has happened. It’s like being on the edge of a precipice, and then for an instant, saying to hell with it all, and being brave enough to look down.”
David recognized the gleam in Anton’s eyes when he revealed the muting experiments, a look that had been so well fictionalized in movies. In real life, the look meant not a crazy scientist, but someone of vision and passion. If it was the difference between a magpie and a white-crowned sparrow, Anton, he knew, was a magpie.
A memory of Sarah came to David as he sat on the porch watching Munin in her aviary, the rippling sounds of Count Basie’s piano coming from the living room, from a time just after he’d started working on birds. He had been sitting at the kitchen table in the house they’d rented in Pennsylvania. It was their first winter and all the birds were inside. Sarah was in the living room, collecting seed containers, a water dish, talking to the parrot and to him at the same time, telling him the ups and downs of her work. She came back into the kitchen with the tray of containers.
“I love your voice,” he said.
His sudden declaration caused her to stop and turn mid-kitchen.
“When you speak, I feel the waves of energy.” Then he had continued. “I’m not sure where some of the sounds are generated. Definitely not a sinusoidal vibration because that produces a single, pure tone. You have all of these overlying harmonics. Sometimes, it’s hard to pick out the pattern.”
“Well,” she said. “I guess you’ll just have to learn how to calibrate.”
He realized that he had never learned. When she returned from the trip to Peru she surprised him by moving the birds out of the house.
“I’m a bit tired of it, birdsong in the morning, escaped crickets singing at night. Maybe they should go to the laboratory.” Except for Skinner who was given away to one of her patients. Now he saw it clearly. Calibrated perfectly. If their life together was a series of sounds, the trip to Peru was the oscillator, the thing that set forth the sound waves. The moving of the birds was meant to be those waves hitting his ears, his perception of a problem but at the time, he didn’t see, or hear, any of it. He joked as he filled the university van with the cages of zebra finches, conures and doves.
“I almost feel like part of me is moving out. Are you bidding me to go?”
She didn’t respond, but went back into the house for the heavy bag of seeds, and after that, she fetched the plastic containers of peas, corn and broccoli. Sarah began to take patients in the evenings. “People are busy during the day.” she explained. “They need me after work hours.”
Evenings without the birds were quiet. The mornings, painfully so. They were left with only the sounds of each other. David quickly learned that there were many kinds of silences.
Silence made up of not speaking.
Silence from not hearing.
Silence of not knowing.
Anton sat in a cubicle in front of the computer, humming, swiveling his chair left and right. These hours spent analyzing second after second of birdsong were exhilarating. He was separating those birds that stuttered after muting from those that didn’t. Rebecca was supposed to have returned from vacation, but she hadn’t shown up yet and so he had fed the birds and done the cleaning himself, which he didn’t mind, but she hadn’t answered his phone calls for the past four days, which he did mind. Clearly she was upset about their conversation on the mountain but he couldn’t understand why this had become such an issue. For all the past months, they’d navigated around their differences. Or at least, he’d thought they had. He no longer knew, and not knowing bothered him.
David had hired a small army of undergraduate students and the lab had gone from a quiet place to a crowded, drumming space that worked around the clock. The lights were on most of the time and the birds sang day and night. David forgot to cut his hair and kept brushing the long curls from his eyes, tucking the strands behind his ears. Anton went home only to shower and often forgot to shave, the stubble on his chin now matched his closely shorn, balding head. They ate most of their meals, order-in pizza and sandwiches, in the conference room, the garbage cans full of greasy cardboard boxes. “The tides have turned,” David said between bites. “We’re going to get a Science paper.”
Colleagues stopped by to inquire about the work. Anton heard David speaking to them.
“I’m incredibly excited by this. We can make non-stutterers, like the zebra finch, begin to stutter, and stutterers, like canaries, stop stuttering.”
“Is it genetic?” they asked.
There was the clicking sound of David’s heels as he paced across the floor. “Likely. Partly. Only certain birds do it.”
“Environmental?”
“That’s the interesting part,” David said. “These birds have only had computer parents. For the first time, stuttering can’t be blamed on the mother.”
The men laughed.
“Really,” David said. “Forget Stan Sommers and all his drugs for aging baby boomers. Who cares about an old person’s memory?”
“A lot of people care about memory,” a colleague said. “Especially the funding agencies.”
“But we can help people who are stuck say what they want to say right now.”
Anton smiled to himself. David did care about memory. Why else would he have named his pet magpie Munin, for memory? David’s mood had improved greatly in the last month. At first Anton thought it was the discovery of stuttering but now he suspected it also had something to do with the magpie, a sort of surrogate companion, traveling with him to work and home each day. He also knew that David wasn’t telling his colleagues everything. They had begun experimenting with delayed auditory feedback and were testing the idea that if stutterers couldn’t hear themselves singing, they stuttered less. It was another way into understanding the need for auditory feedback. He suspected that David felt the same way as he felt. Being involved in this new research project felt as if they’d both been given shots of adrenaline. As if they’d trained for a marathon and now were rewarded by the benefits of being close to its completion. Anton programmed the second analysis into the computer, checked the commands and then pressed start.
He turned from the screen and looked out the window. Outside the campus was green and alive, but that was only because the sprinklers came to life at all hours of the day, although in the late afternoon, much of the water misted upwards and disappeared into the dry air. Beyond the campus and the city, the desert was dry and brown, the summer heat having settled over the valley like a brittle shroud. Fires were burning over large parts of the state. There were house evacuations, fire fighters jumping into flames, helicopters dropping pink clouds of retardant. Some days, when the winds shifted and the air whitened with ash, he couldn’t get the burnt taste out of his mouth.
He noticed a black and yellow swallowtail butterfly move past the window, two slow wing beats followed by a long glide. Unlike birds, butterflies made no noise. Silent in both takeoff and flight
. Rather than song, they communicated by smell, micromoles of scent released by one butterfly and captured miles away by the tiny brushes of another butterfly’s antennae. A quiet experience. A deaf person would miss nothing watching a butterfly. A deaf person would see a butterfly exactly as it was.
He heard Rebecca’s voice and swiveled away from the window to turn toward her. The change was abrupt. No more red nest piled on her head with sticks, she’d cut her hair very short. The tiny diamond in her nose had been replaced with a blue gem. She didn’t make eye contact with him but directly began the day’s work recording information on the clipboard. She slipped the clipboard over a hook and let it go. There was the clank as it hit the wall, the pen dangling on a string. She moved on to the dove’s cage, pulled the water and food dishes out in one quick movement. She looked pale, maybe ill. He saw the characteristic absentminded milling motion of her jaw. Lately, he’d seen her taking bits of birdseed into her mouth.
He wondered why she was feeding birds and cleaning cages when she could be, should be, taking pictures. That winter day, when she’d fallen ill and he’d gone to her house with flowers, he’d been impressed by the photographs. They were good. She had talent. When he’d asked her again about the pictures she’d said that she wasn’t interested in photography anymore, but she hadn’t told the truth. Recently, he’d seen her on campus with a camera, the strap looped around her neck, taking pictures of the buildings. She was holding the camera in her hands like you might hold a newborn puppy.
She finished with the dove and was starting on the pale canaries. He swiveled again on his chair, booted up the second computer on the desk. If she wasn’t going to acknowledge him, he wasn’t going to make the effort either. He began to work. He had not written to his mother about Rebecca. What would he write? That he’d fallen in love with an American who didn’t speak a word of German or Italian, who had bright red hair, who was a photographer who fed birds? That for a few months he’d never felt as close to another person in his life but suddenly, for no apparent reason, they were moving around the lab like blind strangers?