by Sylvia Torti
He heard the caw of the magpie and saw the bird flying directly toward him. He ducked. David followed the bird into the laboratory.
“David, you’re going to get a citation for having free flying birds in here.”
David ignored Anton. “Rebecca, you’re back.”
“Yes.”
“How was your vacation?”
“Fine.”
“You cut your hair, very stylish. It’s nice,” he said.
“Do you know what happened to the temperature and humidity meter in this room?” she asked.
“Haven’t seen it. You Anton?”
“No, I haven’t seen it for a while either.”
“Anton,” David said, “I’m going to the seminar. Want to come?”
Anton shook his head. “No, I want to finish the analysis.”
David left the lab. Rebecca flipped noisily through the record sheets. “Then, if you haven’t had a temperature or humidity meter, how come you knew what to write for all these days that I was gone?”
“I made it up.”
The weather inside the buildings was pretty much unchanging and the truth was that humidity and temperature, which fluctuated little in these rooms, didn’t factor into their work. Recording it was merely part of animal care protocol. What mattered most, the light schedule, was on a timer. Twelve hours of light, twelve of dark.
“I thought scientists kept good records,” she said.
“What is bothering you, Rebecca?”
She looked at him, held his gaze. He could see her jaws grinding around a seed. “That you’re dishonest.”
He didn’t know how to respond and so he forced his attention back to the screen, to the paper he was writing. Rebecca turned and left the room.
The next day David called out from the conference room where he was mapping out new experiments on the white board. “Rebecca, we need more birds.” When she didn’t answer, he came into the laboratory, the magpie perched on his wrist, talking more quietly now. “From as many distributors as you can find.”
“How many victims do you want?” she asked.
David ignored the comment. “Thirty of everything. Zebra finches, Bengalese finches. The rest I will have to collect in the wild.”
The magpie let out a caw as it flew from David’s hand to the light fixture. From that perch, the bird shifted its head, as if taking in the laboratory, the cages, the black countertops, the surgical table, cubicles and computers. David went back to the conference room. Rebecca dialed the phone number and when the customer service agent came on the line, she made the order: twenty male zebra finches, ten females. Thirty Bengalese finches because with Bengalese finches the feathers didn’t tell you who was male and who was female; it was a matter of waiting to see which ones sang and then by elimination, the rest were females.
Some birds couldn’t be bought. Every summer, David spent days in the mountains collecting baby birds, the robins, starlings and white-crowned sparrows that couldn’t be bred in the lab or bought through a distributor. The undergraduates followed him like uncertain ducklings. He was pleased he could offer them this much at least, a window into the world of science. For many, even the bright undergraduates, this would be the last time they looked. Of course, he knew why they followed him so intently, coming to him more for the letter of recommendation they needed for medical school than any great interest in birdsong or scientific research, and he wondered why a letter from him should matter. What could he really say about any of them? Student Y, attentive and confident, arrived to work on time. Let him into medical school and he’ll master the techniques, show up for scheduled surgeries. Student X showed initiative and turned in well-written reports. She also listens well, smiles pretty. Patients will feel some comfort before they die.
As they proceeded up the mountain trail, he listened and pointed out the songs he heard, always trying for the softest, most far-away caller. “Hear that?” He imitated the song. “A ruby-crowned kinglet singing off to our left.” Of course, they hadn’t heard. He waited and then pointed with his finger as the bird sang again. This time, the two women heard, but the young man still did not. Probably deaf from years of sound abuse, music turned up too high, but he kept this thought to himself. Once he’d actually said it jokingly to a student and he’d been politely corrected, told that no, it wasn’t a problem of loud music, but the hearing loss was due to an untreated infection shortly after birth. Since then, David had become more careful with what he said.
The day was warm, the snow at this elevation gone, and ten or twelve species of birds singing loudly. He turned and continued hiking with long strides along the trail. If he moved quickly, he could be back in the laboratory by early afternoon. As he began to move uphill again with the student ducklings behind him, he thought of Aisha, the Lebanese-American interpreter, who yearned for a world without sounds. He wondered where she was. He’d asked for her email and had thought about contacting her many times, but the discovery of stuttering had distracted him.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Aisha had said to him, “there’s too much noise in the world.”
They had just made love and were lying in the bed together. “I hate it. It’s impossible to get away from noise. You can hear it right now, the hum of the refrigerator, the air conditioner, the sounds from people in the hallway. It’s just impossible to create soundlessness. You can put on a mask and stumble around in order to imagine blindness, but it’s impossible to mimic deafness.”
He thought to ask her whether she’d ever been tested for Lyme disease. He’d once read that it could cause a debilitating sensitivity to sound, but he didn’t say this. He ran his hand up and down her thigh. He had not touched another woman besides Sarah in over fifteen years and he’d always assumed that any other woman wouldn’t seem right. He was surprised to find how fine it felt to be with her.
“You know,” Aisha told him, “one time I was in Shanghai for a conference and I went out for a walk. You can’t imagine the noise. Motorcars, horns, stereos, squeals of bus brakes, bicycle bells. Decibels reaching at least one hundred but I made myself walk on because I didn’t want to have been in China and only seen the inside of a hotel. It was like being physically accosted by sound.” She paused to prop herself up on her bent arm. “Then I saw a park across the street and there was a huge group of people, a hundred, maybe more. They were wearing light clothing, white or pale yellow and moving simultaneously through these slow complicated gestures as if they were speaking to one another, miming in a language I’d never seen. Their heads were bowed and like a school of swimming fish, it was as if they were sensing direction and pace without having to see or hear. I stood watching them and suddenly, as if someone had turned down a dimmer, the blaring of the horns, the terrible, violent sounds of the city, became white noise and then completely disappeared. For a moment, there was perfect silence.”
David stopped hiking abruptly and the students stopped as well, standing quietly a few paces behind him. In his mind, he saw people, hundreds of them, going through their tai chi motions, their loose white clothing rumpled, sleeves slipping up and down their arms. He tried to imagine the soundlessness Aisha had spoken about. Then he heard the shrill alarm call of a female white-crowned sparrow.
“This way,” he said to the students behind him.
He stepped off the trail and into a small grove of conifers. The students hurried after him, impressed with his ability, the fact that he could recognize the squawk of a white-crowned sparrow defending her nest. They had never been in the field, trotting after a man who heard birds. They didn’t know that he was both common and special. There were thousands of bird watchers who listened and recognized songs, but few in the world were as good as he. They had no way to judge his ability, no scale on which to put him.
Once he found the sparrow’s nest with the chicks, no more than pale gaping beaks revealing hungry red insides, he reached in and in one handful, took the entire lot. He placed the three monstrously ugly chicks
, pink, wrinkled and featherless, into a canvas sack and handed it to one of the students to carry. During the next two hours, he hiked up and down the mountain, pointing out different songs and telling anecdotes about birds until he had succeeded in raiding two more nests. When each undergraduate carried a white canvas sack of birds, he nodded his satisfaction to them and began the descent toward the van. “Careful now,” he called back. “Try not to swing them around too much. We don’t want dizzy chicks.” The students giggled as expected.
Back at the lab, he left the nestlings on the countertop for Rebecca. She placed them in small plastic containers lined with industrial white paper towel and over the next few days, she fed them every thirty minutes. The insides of their mouths, cartilaginous red arrows, directed where to put the food. Using a toothpick, she would stuff globs of runny puppy chow down their throats, and afterwards, they would briefly stop their faint, high-pitched squeaks, hunker down to digest before opening their beaks wide again and stretching their featherless necks into the air, trying once again to out-beg their nest mates. Miraculously, these bald, wrinkled nestlings doubled in size every day, eventually growing feathers, turning fluffy and cute, hopping and pecking about. When they finally tried out their wings, it would be time to put them in cages.
Zebra finches, on the other hand, the standard lab rat of the neuroscientist, could be bred. David sent Rebecca to the aviary with a net to catch a showy male and a drab female and put them together in a breeding cage. In the notebook in the conference room she marked down the color and number of each bird’s ankle band and the date when she put them together. The birds mated and the female would lay eggs.
When David wanted isolated birds, those that hadn’t learned their father’s song, he told her to remove the father bird as soon as the eggs hatched. Sometimes, the mother bird, disturbed by the sudden absence of the male, responded by knocking the brood out of the nest, killing her flock. When that happened, Rebecca tipped the entire contents of the cage—broken eggs shells, scattered seeds, soiled newspaper, and dead chicks—into the trashcan and began the breeding protocol over again.
Whatever way David got the birds, by stealing or breeding, only the males interested him because only males sang. Once the wild-caught fledglings were big enough, he would put them under anesthesia, turn them over on their backs, make a small slit in their lower bodies and check for ovaries. The ones without, the males, were put back into cages. The others, the females, he popped head-first into small glass jars with chloroform-soaked towels, a quick sleepy death.
He glanced over at Rebecca, his face pained, and explained. “It’s humane. In the wild, half of them would die of starvation or predation anyway.” The insertion of female birds into glass jars was a seemingly simple motion. Those who didn’t know him would say that it appeared to be done without emotion or fanfare, much quieter than say, a person might swat at and kill a housefly.
Anton wasn’t expecting Rebecca when she arrived at his apartment very late. They hadn’t talked in two weeks, and he didn’t want to continue the conversation about birds, but when she stepped inside, he realized she hadn’t come to argue. Her fingers wrapped around his wrists. She lifted his arms, pulled his shirt up over his head and tossed it on the couch. She unzipped her dress, let it fall to the floor and took off his pants. She looked younger without her long hair. She said nothing and led him into the bedroom where he measured the space of her mouth with his tongue, the size of her breasts, the shape of her hips, the softness of her inner thighs. He wanted to make a map of her body so that later he could find his way back to her in his mind.
After she had fallen asleep Anton thought he could see traces of a smile on her face. He watched the rhythm of her breasts and stomach moving faintly with every inhalation and exhalation. The windows were open, and there was a breeze. Underneath her efficient exterior, her perfect skin, pale almost white against the dark blue sheets, there must be a bruise that would explain why she’d given up photography, why she was feeding birds, why she was so angry. The warmth he had felt from the beginning had returned. If she was bruised, it wasn’t because of his touch. Tomorrow he would invite her to lunch and they would talk and laugh and everything would be as it was before.
He rose carefully so as not to wake her and went into the living room. He switched on the light, sat down on the sofa and picked up the Sufi poem. As the birds journeyed across the seven valleys on their way to meet Simorgh, their god, they heard stories about kings and queens, dervishes and slaves. Many of the tales spoke of love between unequals, the transcendence across man-made boundaries as one moved toward Simorgh. The tales instructed how to let go of self, love, fortune and fame. He read about the Valley of Love and wondered, not for the first time, whether his mother’s leaving had had something to do with love’s flame and the knowing of no prudence. She’d never said what made her go off that first year to Africa. When he was a child he had always believed it was for her work. Now he imagined that there were other reasons as well. The clock said 3:00 a.m. He shut the book and slipped back into bed with Rebecca. It was true that he had wanted to keep the relationship from David, and not just out of fear of jealousy and the worry that it would change the dynamics in the laboratory. There was more. He didn’t want to reveal the relationship to David, or to his mother, or Francesco because that would mean he would have to admit it in a new way to himself. He didn’t want to think about the possibility that he could end up like Francesco, stuck in the U.S.A., resigned to no country at all.
When he woke the next morning, Rebecca had already gone. He looked on the dining room table, where she usually left a note, but there was nothing.
David drove his car into the institute’s lot. As always, at this early hour he had his pick of spots. There was a stuffy breeze. It was the hottest, driest summer on record and this day would be exceedingly hot. He swiped his security card through the machine. Inside, the building was cool. Up the three flights of stairs, he pulled on another door and walked down the hallway toward his laboratory, slowing his gait as he neared. He felt the silence without comprehending it. In the seconds it took for him to reach into his pocket for his keys, he understood that something was wrong. Quickly, he turned the key and flung open the laboratory door. No zebra finch calls greeted him. No whistles from starlings, no canary trills. Where there should have been scarlet-beaked birds flitting on and off their perches, there were rows of cages with open doors, all empty. He dropped his briefcase on the floor and ran to each cage, afraid to touch anything, but still not believing the birds were gone. He looked toward the light fixtures, where the zebra finches normally flew when they escaped. Nothing. He rushed to his office to call campus police, but stopped short when he saw what they had done.
On the conference room floor outside his office door they had left a cemetery for birds by fashioning hundreds of crosses out of white pipe cleaners and fastened tiny black and white zebra feathers to the ends. The crosses were lined up in neat rows, inserted in Styrofoam and together they resembled a miniature Arlington.
He turned away from his office, went back through the quiet laboratory and ran down the hallway toward the aviary. A swipe of his security card allowed him to open the door. Birds exploded out, careening in wild flight into the hallway. He quickly pulled the door shut behind him. The sound deafened, two hundred birds calling, flapping, swooshing in a mad panic around his head. After a moment, the birds that hadn’t flown out organized themselves somewhat naturally into the cramped space. The zebra finches, huddled on one side so as to avoid the more aggressive starlings and cowbirds on the other. The white-crowned sparrows were clustered, dehydrated and panting in a corner on the tiled floor. David felt his hair beginning to wet with perspiration. He needed to get out of the aviary, away from the chaos and noise to a place where he could think. He stepped backward, still not understanding, and then he found the door handle, pressed it down, leaned with his shoulder and fled through the crack in the door.
When Rebecca ar
rived at the laboratory, he was waiting for her, Munin perched on his arm. She looked at the empty cages and then at David. The two of them stood staring at one another in complete stillness. No words or movement. No birds. Just the hum of the refrigerator, the soft, usually imperceptible buzz of the computers, the muffled sounds of people scooting chairs, emptying trays, washing beakers in the mouse laboratory next door.
“I called animal care. They’ll call the police.”
And then there was a coo from the dove. David turned. Sarah’s old dove was still alive and in its cage. He’d entirely forgotten it. Oddly, it had been left alone.
They hadn’t killed the birds; they’d killed the research. They had understood that the birds had already been sacrificed, and there were more birds where those had come from. Instead of killing them, they’d removed the ankle bands from each bird and put the white-crowns, robins, starlings, zebra finches and cowbirds together in the aviary. The zebra finches became not “Blue 17” or “Red 39,” but male or female. The Bengalese finches, whose coloration didn’t change with sex, were just finches. But that wasn’t all. The computers had been cleared, the files erased. The two shelves in the laboratory that had held the binders with the back-up cds of files were empty.
The police agent who was called in to investigate asked for the names of everyone who had access to the lab. David listed himself, Anton, Rebecca, and stammered through the rest of the names, the students he’d recently hired: John, Valery, Amanda, Stefanie. They’d all had keys to the door.
“Do you think it could have been someone in your lab?”
David looked from the police officer to Rebecca, out the window and then back at the police officer. “No, it wasn’t anyone here.”
“We’ll dust for prints,” the officer said, “but I can already tell you, I won’t find any but yours and those of the people in your lab. There are two kinds who do this: those who want you to know who they are, and we would have heard from them by now, and those who think they are god, passing judgment. This is the way they get their message across. No words, no names.”