by Sylvia Torti
“They reach silence, but I don’t think it is death,” he said. “More like understanding.”
“And that’s it? The end of the book?” she asked.
“No. It’s a strange book because after that scene, Attar, the poet, keeps writing for many more pages and tells another story, this story about a king who falls in love with a beautiful, lovely boy and he won’t let the boy out of his sight. The boy gets tired of being around the king, so one night, while the king sleeps, he runs away. When the king finds him, he gets very drunk and angry and orders the boy to be beaten, carried into the square, hung and left to die. Only the boy’s father saves him and hangs up another guy, a murderer who is going to die anyway. When the king wakes, he believes the boy is dead and he regrets his orders. And as his anger went his sorrow grew. He is very upset. He cannot eat. He loses weight. He understands that in killing the boy he loved, he killed himself.” He paused. “It’s a mirror, everything we do and say, what we love.”
She waited and then lifted her head. “That’s it?”
“No, no,” he said, “eventually the boy goes back to the king. He loved the king, too. The last thing Attar writes is that the king and the boy put their heads together, they whisper, and go off as one. No one ever hears what they say.”
“Hmm,” she said.
“What?”
“The boy shouldn’t have gone back.”
“Why not?”
“The king betrayed him.”
“It was a mistake. He learned that and besides, the boy betrayed the king too. He ran away.”
“Maybe he was afraid to stay.”
“I don’t know. I think the king deserved a second chance.”
Anton came out of the trees into a small clearing and stopped for a moment. He remembered her adamant response.
“I don’t agree. There aren’t any second chances. We do what we do and we deal with the consequences. You don’t get to go back and do it again.”
What had she meant? Afraid to stay? No second chances. Without second chances, new trials, experiments, nothing was possible. Without second chances, people would never progress. The statement reminded him of his mother, almost seemed to be something she might say about photography. You only had one shot to get the picture.
The snow crunched under his snowshoes as he trudged on across the open space. He heard the call of a jay, and then the reply from another further off. He stopped, removed his gloves and bent to scoop up a small handful of snow, wanting to taste freshness, but below the night’s dusting, the snow was hard and hurt his fingers. He pulled his hand back and sucked on his fingers to warm them. He replaced his gloves, repositioned his backpack and walked on. He didn’t realize he’d forgotten sunscreen. Later, he would feel how the sunlight, reflecting off the frozen snow, had burned his face just like it had in Utah.
What the sabotage really did was set David free, although it took him some time to realize this. After disposing of the birds in the lab and letting Rebecca go, after Anton’s departure and Munin’s escape, he passed weeks in a confused, depressed stupor. In the mornings he came into the laboratory, pulled the door closed behind him and sat in the conference room. He had felt crushed the day he put the birds to sleep, angry at the person who had rendered them useless by removing their bands. They had been made victims and he wouldn’t tolerate that. He suspected Rebecca, of course, but it didn’t add up, and he hadn’t wanted to think it was her, both for himself and for Anton, and maybe even for her.
Now, he no longer felt anger, only loneliness. The lack of birdsong drove him crazy, but he made himself persevere, waiting longer and longer each day before he turned on a radio, until he could sit in the silence of the empty laboratory for hours, looking at his library of books, or out the window at the desert, or at his collection of bottles, bits of bird parts lined across the windowsill.
The day before he’d found Sarah’s journal at home. He opened and closed it a few times but hadn’t had the courage to read it. Now he sat with the book on his lap. They had always shared their journals. Would she want him to read this one or not? When he opened and flipped through the pages, a set of folded sheets fell out. He picked them up from the floor and realized they were a letter intended for him. She’d never sent it or given it to him.
October 20th Tambopata, Peru.
Dear David:
First day: this morning I got up and dressed quickly, slung a small bag over my shoulder and went onto the verandah. I was the only one up. I stepped into a pair of cold rubber boots and began to make my way along the muddy path toward the forest. A few stars were blinking against the blue-black sky. The palm shrubs I passed, dark and huge in the budding light made me think of black-laced Spanish fans. Below the trees it was still dark. Water dripped from the leaves. At first light there was an explosion of sounds, the world going from nighttime to morning in one split second. How could any animal hear another? The line from sender to receiver, singer to listener, hopelessly confounded by crowd, defying everything I know about the importance of song for communication. The thought that came to me unexpectedly and unpleasantly was that everything in the laboratory is misguided.
Then just above me, there was a roar of a howler monkey. I jumped, looked up and saw a male, his mouth wide open and red, canine teeth exposed. His forehead, chin and neck grotesquely swollen with worms. When he called again it felt as if he was yelling in my ear. His ugliness, repulsive and fascinating. Another howler answered him and they began a loud dual. At least for these two, sender and receiver seemed to be working.
At mid-morning, I came out of the forest onto the path back to the lodge. I picked up my pace and then suddenly stopped at the sight of a quiet dark green hummingbird perched on a branch, perfectly still, so close I didn’t need to bother with binoculars. The bird turned its head and looked at me. Neither of us moved. I became conscious of a change in my mood. The binoculars hanging at my chest pulled on my neck. There was a faint burn when I blinked my eyes. Back behind me in the forest, the howler monkeys bellowed. I turned away from the hummingbird wanting to distance myself from its stare, and now as I write you, I think I’m finally acknowledging to myself how lonely I am.
He continued to read.
October 21st, Tambopata Lodge
Today after lunch Ed led our group on a walk and talked about the forest, ants, monkeys and jaguar. When we came to a clearing, a tree gap, he told us that tropical trees have shallow roots. The soil is spongy with water so sometimes, when the wind comes with force, it lifts all the trees up like a mini tornado. He showed us a giant ceiba, maybe the most beautiful tree I’ve ever seen. He said, the really, really big gaps are man-made and someone asked whether he meant slash and burn agriculture? In his typical witty fashion, which you would have appreciated, he shook his head and said: No, something much more efficient. Small airplane crashes.
David stopped reading and looked away from the letter. The irony was painful. He felt constriction in his throat. Why hadn’t Sarah told him this after the crash? Had she forgotten that Ed had said it?
October 25th, Tambopata Lodge
Tonight, Ed said, “I have given myself over entirely to this world. It’s like a marriage. A commitment I can’t go back on; it’s what I know you and David have; you’re meant to be together.” And then he said something really strange. He said, “This is the only place on earth where I can forget myself.” He seems so alone. I miss you intensely.
The letter ended there. David folded it up and put it back in the journal. He read her final entry.
November 1, Flight from Lima to Los Angeles
Eight days in the forest and I’m on my way home. I have seen acres of bamboo, river otter, an ocelot and more species of parrot than I ever care to see again. I realize that I love two men whose principal love is not me, but birds and the sounds they make. They are men who pass through life listening. Men who only really understand the world with their ears. One lives in a wet forest and the other in a neat laboratory
; it’s as if they both come from a foreign world where ears are tuned with precision and every sound carries layers of meaning that only they can decipher. I once read that what most marked Count Basie’s music is the silence, the space perfectly placed between the notes. They are two men who can hear such a difference. I am writing this as I land in Los Angeles. It is clear to me. The two men, who I love, share a language that I will never completely understand.
David shut the journal. He took a deep breath. He noticed a single zebra finch feather stuck between the corner of the wall and the carpet and he bent down to pick it up. He smoothed the tiny black and white striped feather between his finger and thumb and then put it on the table.
He stood and walked to the bookshelf along the wall and searched for the book that Ed once gave him on neotropical migrant birds. He couldn’t remember having lent it to anyone. His eyes skipped back to the beginning of the shelf and then he saw an unfamiliar book. He pulled it from its place on the shelf. It was a small paperback, the binding stiff from never having been opened, and the cover showed a group of birds around a stream. The Conference of the Birds. It wasn’t a book he’d ever bought. He heard Anton now. It was one of their last conversations.
“I am leaving you a book as a thank you.”
“No need,” David had told him.
“It’s not wrapped. You’ll find it later, I hope.”
Until now David had forgotten about the book. He flipped to the back cover and read the blurb. A long poem written in the 12th century. Birds as the main characters. An odyssey to find God. A hoopoe bird as guide. He returned to his chair, sat down and opened the book and flipped through a few pages, focusing here and there on the poem. Back at the beginning he started to read, but the fifth line of the book made him pause.
He knew your language and you knew his heart—
He closed his eyes and heard Ed. “Sometimes when I’m in the forest, wrapped in my hammock, I think of you and Sarah. I hear the two of you talking about some paper that’s just come out, the value of one methodological approach over another. I hear your low voice, the staccato cadence to your sentences, and then her voice trilling the way it does when she gets excited about something new. And then I hear those muffled whimpers that always come after those discussions. Whimpers and laughter, and I know there are no two people more suited to each other.”
There was a bareness whenever he thought of her, not unlike the empty cages in his laboratory, but he also realized that all these months she’d been gone, he’d been talking to her, continuing his conversations with her, silently to himself.
You stopped talking, she said in her letter explaining why she sent the birds away from their home aviary. Perhaps it was true. He’d said less and less out loud, but in his mind, he was always communicating with her. And she had stopped talking to him as well. The silence had gone both ways.
In his jealous state, his obsession with whether she’d had feelings for Ed in Peru, he had missed the cues, had not understood the magnitude of memories and emotions Ed’s death must have brought to the surface for her, irrespective of whether they’d been intimate or not. What had she said? If you suffer loss young, you learn a vocabulary for grief. Of course that wasn’t true. Ed’s death must have been doubly difficult for Sarah, triggering memories of the losses she’d suffered when she was young. Because he struggled so much to understand and put words on his own emotions, David had always deferred to her explanations of herself. Her psychologist’s vocabulary, her measured speech, her insistence that perception meant more than signal, and that the rational mind could mold perception to its will. Words, words, words. She talked. He listened and believed. Now, with Ed dead, and eight months of her absence, Munin gone, Anton gone, the research destroyed, he understood that grief was grief no matter how many times you experienced it. If you let yourself love, you felt grief when it was taken away. A true loss was, and always would be, irreplaceable. Sometimes, it was also unbearable.
She had called and written repeatedly, but in the last while, her correspondence had tapered off. He would write to her now. He went to his computer and whispered as he wrote, needing to try out the words before he committed them to email.
Dear Sarah,
You know that I’m not much good at writing, unless it’s in small yellow notebooks. The birds are all gone—sabotage—some animal rights activist, they tell me. They also erased all the data files. Anton, the post-doc went home. No need for a technician or undergraduates, and so now I’m the only one in the laboratory. Me, the books, the armadillo fetuses you gave me. What did you call them? The surrogate children you’d never have, always neotenic and cute, never crying for attention. They’re still here. Still floating. This is a silly thing to be writing you after so long, I know.
This summer I rescued an injured magpie. I named her Munin from the old Norse myth of two ravens. Munin for memory and Hugin for thought. She was beautiful. Purplish-black, sleek and smart, but she flew away in September. I consoled myself by thinking that at least I was left with thought. But you know what? Without you there aren’t a whole lot of good thoughts either. I haven’t put anything down in a notebook for months. Is it because I know you aren’t here to read it? I want you to tell me where you’ve been and what you’ve done and who you’ve met. I’m sorry I asked you to leave. I’m sorry that I was starving you. You’re still the only person I want to talk to. The only person I want to hear.
When he finished writing, he read it again. He missed her voice and her ideas, her feedback as important to the maintenance of himself as his own auditory feedback. He looked outside and saw two chickadees, white tail feathers flashing, flitting around in the dense green oak leaves.
He remembered the time they’d gone to the field when he’d first started studying auditory feedback. They’d found some lazuli buntings in the fresh green oaks behind the institute, and he’d recorded a male and then played his recording back to him. She’d asked, What happens when sound producer and receiver are one? Now he knew the answer to her question. There was a breakdown in the signaling. There was confusion, stuttering and then quiet. The mind needed more than recurring thoughts. He needed her, not memories of her.
One of the chickadees hopped to an outside branch on the tree, opened his beak and sang. David couldn’t hear the bird’s call from inside the building, but he heard the bird singing in his mind. Long ago, he’d memorized a chickadee’s sweet buzzy voice. No, he thought, there wasn’t a word for love. Not really. And no sound could symbolize its loss. Maybe it was better defined as quality of feeling, a sound most notable when it was gone.
He hit the send button on his email and then went back into the laboratory with a sense of relief. Without obligation to employees and birds, and having finally written to Sarah, there was only himself to contend with.
AUDITORY FEEDBACK
Rebecca crossed the porch. She squinted up into the spotless blue sky. Every year, spring and summer seemed to begin earlier than the year before. She had promised to meet her housemate, Marla, for lunch, but she was reluctant to leave the shade of the porch. As she went down the wooden steps, she heard clomp-clomp-clomp and looked up in time to see a male California quail tumbling, head over foot, from the roof. He landed in a thud on the grass next to the walkway. She picked him up and studied his plump chestnut belly, streaked white on the sides. His legs and feet were dark gray and leathery, strong as they should be for a bird that lived his life on the ground. What was he doing on the roof anyway? Up close, the bird’s markings were astonishingly beautiful. She ran a finger over the soft black feathers of his chin and then across the white stripe above his eyes. The curlicue feather rising from his forehead, bobbed over her sweaty palm like a large black teardrop. She went back inside the house. In the kitchen she slipped the quail into a plastic bag and pressed the seal shut. She opened the freezer, felt a blush of cold air, placed him inside, and then she left for her lunch.
Dead birds no longer surprised her. At first, i
t was the cat who delivered them. She had returned home one spring evening to find the black neighborhood cat skulking at her front door. When she mounted the stairs, he nodded his head and dropped a greenish-gray female hummingbird at her feet. She picked up the tiny, drab bird, almost weightless in her hand. The next week, the cat brought her another hummingbird, this time a male with metallic green feathers and red chin.
“There are dead birds in our freezer,” Marla said when she noticed.
“I know,” Rebecca said.
“Why?”
“Habit, I guess.”
“Well, can you put them in Tupperware or something? I can’t stand those black beady eyes staring at me every time I get a popsicle.”
“I’ll wrap them in foil.”
Rebecca thought little about these first two, but dead birds kept coming. She found a starling in the driveway, then a mourning dove in the park, their bodies stiff, but substantial in her hand. Over the weeks, the count mounted to include a house finch, two sparrows and a robin. When a small kestrel slammed into the living room window, she raced outside to fetch it and held it while it died. The print of its feathers, head and beak on the mottled glass, appeared briefly each evening in the diminishing light of sunset.
Except for the kestrel and the hummingbirds, she could find no reason for the deaths. The birds were not sickly or starved. There was no obvious injury, no blood, no boys with sling-shots. When she opened them up, their stomachs did not wriggle with parasites. They were perfect. Only dead. In the dark, quiet hours of the night she began to cut them open and remove their organs of song.
She put the thawed quail onto the counter on his back. She screwed the portable light onto the table edge and focused it onto the bird. Quails, being large, were easy birds, but still she moved slowly. Using tweezers, she plucked out the bird’s neck feathers. She clipped open the bulging crop with scissors. Pale round seeds tumbled out. Commercial bird feed. Clearly, his last meal had been an easy feast. She brushed the seeds off the table and into the trash and set about opening up the breast. She whistled softly to herself.