by Sylvia Torti
Three mornings after the sabotage, Anton found David at the counter near the surgical desk, his head bent over his work holding a glass jar on its side. An overcrowded cage with zebra finches, Bengalese finches, robins and starlings rattled at his side. Munin, perched on the light fixture above him, rustled her wings and peered down. With his free hand, he slid up the door of the cage, reached inside, and almost without looking, grabbed hold of a brown and white mottled Bengalese finch from the cage. He slipped the bird into the glass jar and held it firmly. Before him on the counter lay a row of dead birds. Robins, starlings, zebra finches, lined up from largest to smallest on sheets of industrial paper towel. The previous bird he’d put to sleep had been a female zebra finch.
Rebecca came into the laboratory with a tray of food dishes and then stopped a few feet away from Anton. “What are you doing?”
David’s lips were drawn back and there was the rhythmic bulging and pulsing of jaw muscles being clenched. He barely opened his mouth to speak. “Finishing what was started.” The words came out like a whisper.
“Stop! I’ll take them,” she said.
David looked up, the bird steady in his hand, and fixed her with a blank gaze. Just then, as he opened his mouth to speak, the female zebra finch, the last bird he’d put to sleep, began to tremble. Its thin right leg stabbed at the air and there was a quiver in the shoulders, the beginning of a flutter.
“Shit,” David whispered. His eyes were on the jerking bird, but his hand held the Bengal in the jar steady. He reached out with his other hand and covered the trembling zebra finch with his palm.
Anton also wanted to tell David to stop, but he didn’t know how to say it.
“Stop,” Rebecca said again. “I’ve cared for these birds. You have no right….”. She slammed the tray on the black countertop. The empty food dishes bounced and rattled onto the floor.
David looked up again, his voice calm, his cheeks now relaxed. “The lab won’t be needing any more animal care. I’ve already filed the paperwork. You’ll be paid for another two weeks. You’re free to go.”
The two of them stared at each other for a few moments, and then Rebecca, without a look in Anton’s direction, backed up a few steps, turned, and left the laboratory.
Later, what Anton would remember most about that day was a single image: David bent over the laboratory bench fighting against the jerky shakes coming from his body. David’s furtive gesture, the back of his hand wiping away a tear. David’s twisted face of grief. Anton had gone to David and put his hand on his shoulder. In his memory, though it hadn’t happened this way, he had looked out the window then, and seen Rebecca standing on the hillside outside the institute, looking in.
That night Rebecca came to his apartment. The sky was blackening and there was wind and lightning, but no thunder. The room went dark. There had not been rain for almost three months and there would be no rain tonight, only heat and muted breezes. They were sitting on the sofa. The Ferris wheel had indeed come full swing, settled abruptly at the bottom with a violent jerk. It was time to get off and go home.
“I know you want to know if I did it,” she said.
Anton didn’t answer her, fearing words would betray his suspicion.
“You believe him?”
He shook his head no, but shifted his eyes away from hers. He heard the things she’d said in the past, the questions she’d asked. Does it bother you to work on them? Have you ever thought of letting them go?
“You think I did it, don’t you?” she said, raising her voice.
An issue of morality. Spiritual pain.
He lowered his voice. “Did you?”
“It’s your fault.” Suddenly, she was yelling.
“My fault?”
“And cruel. You know? You can’t face me. You can’t say anything and it’s not only because you’re a half-fluent foreigner. It’s because you’re a coward. He wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for your stupid muting experiments.”
“What are you talking about?” Her explosion surprised Anton and he struggled to both hear and understand her words. Cruel. Coward. His fault? And who was he?
“You prayed for them.”
“What?”
“You did, or have you forgotten? That day just after your bird died and I found you in your office. Your head was bent and you said you were praying. You said you didn’t like to work on them, but that wasn’t true, was it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s true I don’t like to work on them but it’s not because I think they’re holy or special. I just don’t like them.” Her face was contorted, as if she was trying not to laugh. Anton didn’t like her in this moment. “What I remember,” he said. “Is that your hair was long, and I preferred it long.”
She stood. “You’re incapable of real love.” She turned and left, walking out the door, not bothering to pull it shut behind her.
He stared at the open front door, felt the hot air come in, and then got up to close it. He could see her walking down the sidewalk, getting smaller and smaller with each step until she crested the hill and went over the other side. He saw a group of birds, city pigeons, black against the evening sky, banking and turning and waving as one perfectly coordinated being, appearing and then disappearing as they swooped. Likely they were looking for a place to roost, and then suddenly, having found one, they were gone, swallowed by the dark.
That night he showered under cold water, and while still wet and naked, lay down on the bed, his arms and legs stretched out without any covers, too hot to have anything touching his skin. What had she said? That he was a coward. Did she really say that? Had he heard wrong? Incapable? What could she have meant? He felt the beads of perspiration forming on his skin. It wasn’t true that he was cold. And he did love. Intensely.
Outside, another lightning storm was approaching. He thought of the laboratory, the years of work and the only thing he’d accomplished was a single, three-page paper. What would David do now? No Sarah, no research, no post-doc. Only the magpie, whose name meant memory. He decided that he would write to Gianetti in the morning and see if there was a place in the laboratory in Turino. He’d work on any project. He didn’t care anymore. He just wanted to go home.
Anton had read once about a writer whose novel had burned in a fire, and afterwards, the novelist had never written another word. He hadn’t been able to understand that. The book must still have been in the author’s head. Couldn’t he have written it down again? It wasn’t like a photograph that you only got to take once. His mother, he knew, always kept her negatives in fire-proofed boxes buried in the backyard for just that reason. Now, given everything that had happened in the lab, Anton thought he did understand. It was possible to lose the urge to begin again.
He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but the lightning flashed into the darkness of the night, keeping him awake. What was the truth? It seemed to always come down to questions of perception. The one impossible and unquantifiable variable. His perception and Rebecca’s were completely at odds.
Even back in 400 B.C., people knew about vulnerabilities and the vagaries of personal state, that every sense could be subjective, that every truth was suspect. Eyes and ears are bad witnesses for men, Heraclitus said. They knew first-hand the problems that arose when sound and meaning were disconnected. They grew tired of misperceptions. And so had Anton.
The clouds moved off into the distance, but the lightning continued, silent and unrelenting. At every bright flash he imagined another wildfire sparked in the dry desert. Sagebrush went up in flames, a jack rabbit sprinted off, insects popped and crackled in the heat. From far off the sirens of firetrucks had begun and now they would scream all night.
For months, humiliation consumed her. She did not know whether she was to blame. The day of the sabotage she had rushed to her friend Marla’s house. “Marla, I think I said something crazy at that party we went to.”
“At the restaurant?”
“Ye
s, at the restaurant.” The whole evening was foggy. The place had been packed. She had sat at the bar with Marla and a group of out-of-towners, ordering mojitos. She drank gin and tonics instead, the effect of the cold, bitter drinks changing her sullenness to anger and then to giddiness. Everyone talked louder and louder making it harder and harder to hear.
“I can’t remember, but I think I made a mistake, a big mistake. I told this guy about the bird research.” Up close his skin was pale, the color of a cheap supermarket egg. His wrists were remarkably thin. Even in the flickering candlelight, she could make out all the bones of his hands.
“And what? He wasn’t interested in the birds?” Marla asked.
“No. I think they sabotaged the research.” She was frantic now.
“Whoa, slow down, Rebecca. Who’s they?”
“I don’t know.”
His clothing had been too big for his frame, as if puberty had skipped his body. He was young, maybe just turned twenty-one, and she remembered that there was a mixture of intelligence and curiosity about him. She had described the birds and how they sang. How the females didn’t sing. He leaned closer. He was interested.
“Where do they get them?” he asked.
“Oh, we breed them or order them or steal them from nests outside. That’s the easy part.”
“And you keep them?”
“Yes, that’s my job. My friend, Marla, says I’m a bird waitress and I guess it’s true. I feed, serve, and clean up the mess.”
“Where are they kept?”
“In the lab and different experimental rooms. I don’t know, maybe they don’t mind it. They do get regular food and all kinds of supplements that they have a hard time finding in nature.”
He ordered two more drinks. She was keenly aware of being drunk and yet she drank more.
“They tell me I’m anthropomorphizing, that I’m just sensitive because I’m a vegetarian. Of course, I don’t think we should eat animals, but should we be studying them like this?”
She shifted her voice to mimic a male’s voice.
“Where do you think new drugs are developed? That’s what they always say, and I get it, and I take medicine but still, something… When you look at them in their eyes, really see them up close.”
He moved closer to her.
“They just developed this technique where they can temporarily mute a bird and then use that to study, I don’t know what, hearing, auditory feedback, stuttering and maybe even memory.”
“Mute a bird?” He was appalled.
“That’s what I said too but you can reverse it, and then they start singing again, but at first when they do, it sounds like croaking.” The music got louder, the bass so loud that she could feel it through the bar stool. She leaned up and yelled in his ear. “I like robins the best. I have these fantasies of letting them go.”
They sat together, drinking, the music too loud for them to talk. She wondered whether he was trying to pick her up, wondered whether she wanted to be picked up, felt a weariness come on and excused herself to go to the restroom. When she returned, her purse was on the barstool and the young man was gone.
She thought of the day David euthanized the birds. Anton’s confused, inquisitive look. She had wanted him to say something to stop David but he’d stood mute and she was furious at his refusal to speak up and support her, his unwillingness to make David stop. She remembered the last time they were together, him naked and shuddering in her arms, his quivering scar. She doubted he was aware of how he held on to her like a pillow at night, as if afraid to let go. She could not have explained how she embraced him, murmuring and dreaming like a boy, as if she were a mother.
Now everything was over. She’d had two relationships in her life and both had ended in drama, disgust, dread.
MEMORY
David sat at the desk in his office and stared at the armadillo fetuses in the jar. The lab was quiet. He looked outside beyond the manicured lawns of the campus and noticed that the hue of the valley had turned, seemingly overnight, from summer to fall. Tinges of brown, red and yellow had crept into the green plants. Soon they’d be pulling back their chlorophyll, shutting down their veins, letting go of this year’s leaves.
David had been sitting in this same place when he received the news of Ed’s death. No phone call. No voice. Email, the quiet messenger, nothing more than a click on his mouse. Words typed and transmitted to a long list of recipients from the Rapid Assessment Program headquarters.
The accident happened a few months after Sarah’s trip to Peru. Ed’s six-person airplane had gone down in eastern Ecuador, and in a single stupid accident, the entire RAP team, the most gifted tropical surveyors in the world, were killed. David read the statement again. He saw Ed, tall and bearded, his smile sly as he handed over his list after a morning of birding together. David closed the email and opened it again. Minutes went by in blurry disbelief until finally, he picked up the phone to call Sarah at work.
“It can’t be true,” she said. David heard the click of the phone. Thirty seconds later, it was ringing again. He heard a gasp on her end.
“I’ll pick you up,” he said. “We’ll go home.”
For the next month they lived in a state of shock, Sarah bursting into tears several times a day. At first, they spoke of nothing but Ed and after that, they spoke little at all. Sarah became angry in a way that was completely new. David thought that it was just a passing stage of grief, but instead of lessening with time, it deepened. He became suspicious, countering her anger with silence and longer work hours.
David knew that one woman had survived the crash and that despite a broken leg, had miraculously crawled her way out of the forest. He knew he could call her to find out the details of Ed’s death, but he never did. He preferred to believe that Ed didn’t die on impact. He imagined that when the noise of the crash was over, after the alarmed birds had flown up in a loud cackle of calls, after the last tree had cracked and split, there was a moment of silence. He wanted to think that in that moment, before bleeding and shock set in, before the neurons exploded in one last desperate spasm, that the final sound to hit Ed’s ears was the song of an unknown species of bird.
In the weeks and months after Ed’s death, he learned about the loneliness of an increasingly quiet marriage, the sadness of slipping into bed, Sarah’s back to his side, and then rolling out of the same bed the next morning, barely a word or a touch, only misgivings and Ed’s death between them. He’d longed for their graduate school days when the two of them, and if Ed was home, the three of them, would stay up all night drinking and arguing about behavior, psychology and the nature of their work. Now sitting in his empty lab, he remembered a conversation they’d had all back in Louisiana.
“You’re more comfortable in the lab, David, because you can control things and you need to control things, or at least you need to think you are controlling them,” Sarah said.
“Of course,” he said. “If we’re not controlling the right variables, then we are just being natural historians.”
“I disagree,” Ed said.
“With what? That David likes to control variables?” Sarah asked.
“With the idea that you need to control variables to be a modern scientist.”
“I didn’t say modern scientist,” she said. “What kind of label is that anyway?”
“That’s absurd, Ed,” David said. “Of course you need to control variables to be a scientist. Otherwise, we’re just observing and making assumptions based on our perceptions. There’s no objectivity if you don’t control.”
“So, in your eyes, I’m not a scientist,” Ed said.
“I’m just saying that without controlled experiments, we can’t know what we’re learning with certainty.”
He had believed the words at the time.
Ed laughed. “You’re just upset, David. My bird list has gotten so long you’ll never catch up.”
“Ah,” Sarah said. “Now we’ve slipped into male-male competition.”<
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David laughed then too. “Especially if you keep discovering new species every time you go to the tropics.”
He missed those days with even more intensity now. Ed dead. Sarah gone. The birds destroyed. Sarah’s questions had always helped him hone his ideas, but their conversations had suffered with Ed’s death. As he’d gone deeper into mapping the bird’s brain, into understanding how a syrinx vibrated, and how air moved through the body, she had said she was stepping back, becoming more interested in the “unknowable” that guided a life.
“Sounds like mumbo jumbo to me,” he said.
“And what you do is less mumbo? You’ve got a bird in a cage and you can see what neurons fire for different behaviors, but what does that have to do with that bird’s life?”
“Everything,” he said.
She began to cry then, just softly at first and then in loud sobs, and although he wanted to go to her, something had held him back.
He wished now that he’d been more generous in that moment. He remembered a dinner party, also after Ed’s death, when a colleague’s daughter asked him about his work and Sarah had answered for him. The memory still pained him.
“He steals baby birds from nests, raises them up, and then sticks wires into the males’ brains to measure how they sing.”
He had laughed nervously, shocked at her glib response. She’d had too much to drink.
“But you can’t really know which ones are male when you collect them, can you?” Sarah continued. “I mean a baby bird, male or female, isn’t more than just a bit of pink chicken skin, is it?”
“So how do you know?” the young woman asked David.
“When they get bigger,” he explained, “you put them under anesthesia, open them up and look for ovaries. It’s a simple surgery.”
“And what do you do if they’re female?” Sarah asked.
He was embarrassed by her. She was talking too loudly. He leaned over to the young woman and whispered in her ear. “I set them free.”