by Sylvia Torti
Marla came in from work at two a.m. “It’s disgusting, this bunch of bird parts you’ve got here.”
When Rebecca didn’t immediately comment, Marla lifted the brown cotton on a Tupperware and looked at the bird bones teaming with dark flat beetles. “Good god, Rebecca! Birds in the freezer, bugs in the kitchen.”
“Beetles, not bugs,” Rebecca said. “Sarcophagus.”
“Sarcophagus.” Marla repeated. “What’s that mean? That I’m living in an Egyptian bird morgue?”
“They’re completely harmless. They just clean the bones.”
Marla peered once more into the container before snapping the lid shut again. “I’m trying to figure out what happened to you in that laboratory.” She pulled out a chair and plopped down in frustration. “He’s not coming back.”
“I don’t want him to.”
Marla was wrong. It wasn’t only Anton. Or the laboratory. Or David. It was all of those things. Only Rebecca hadn’t tried to explain any of it because she realized the importance of everything she was leaving out. She had never told Marla about Chicago.
“Did you know,” she said, “that sound is a wave that gets caught, or depending on how you want to look at it, trapped in your ear?”
She made another snip, and using the tweezers, lifted out a piece of reddish flesh and dipped it in a bowl of alcohol. On the outside it was nothing more than a small Y of cartilage. Inside were tiny flaps, valves that vibrated when air was pushed past, making sound. She held the syrinx up for Marla to see. “This is it. The syrinx. The organ of sound and song. Without this, a bird can’t sing.”
Marla eyed the flesh.
Rebecca continued. “But even with this, most birds can’t sing unless they hear themselves. There must be auditory feedback.”
“You’re better off without him, Beca,” Marla said.
“For people too,” Rebecca said. “We have to hear ourselves. Otherwise we lose our ability to talk.” She dropped the quail’s syrinx into a vial with alcohol and screwed the cap on tightly. She printed in small clear letters: syrinx, male, Callipepla californica.
“You know,” Marla said. “I’ve been thinking that we become inhabited by the people we know. They get inside us and influence what we do and don’t do. Either we’re following in their good footsteps or rejecting anything that reminds us of them. Maybe by the time we’re old, we’re not even us anymore, just jumbles of the people we once knew.”
The photographer. His drunkenness, his hands around her throat, being locked in the dark room, the abortion. The idea that he was still inside, influencing her was not something Rebecca was willing to consider.
“Rebecca, are you listening to me?”
“Of course.”
“Well I think you should let this go. You need to stop dissecting dead birds. You need to get back to doing what you do best.”
“I happen to be very good at this.”
“You’re not good at it. Anyone can cut out a bird’s throat. You’re good at photography.” When Rebecca didn’t respond, Marla said, “I’m going to bed.”
Rebecca heard the sound of water running in the bathroom and then the click of Marla’s bedroom door closing. The kitchen was quiet again. Tomorrow she would mail the vial to a laboratory in Pennsylvania. Those syringeal specialists, the few souls in the world who studied the shape of this organ, would never know who sent the syringes. She liked to imagine their excitement each time another brown envelope arrived, how they would tear it open with happy curiosity wanting to discover which new syrinx, perfectly dissected and preserved, had been sent to them this time.
Rebecca didn’t know why, but she always stitched the birds back together again. Tonight while she sewed up the quail she was vaguely aware that this continual opening of dead birds, this dissection and preservation of tissues and organs, was a reckoning. She cut and sliced, labeled and shipped. With time she would learn that what felt like contrition could also be a salve.
Outside his office window, a mixed group of birds landed in the recently flushed oak. David wanted to get out into the evening, but he needed to finish writing a keynote address he’d been asked to deliver about the importance of the silent partner: the female bird that didn’t sing. Silence as a presence. Silence as a collaborator.
Some months after the sabotage, David had found a three-ring binder in the conference room library, which he hadn’t even known existed. The saboteurs had erased the computers and broken the CDs with the data, but here in this binder, he saw that Rebecca had been keeping track of the birds, recording which ones she’d bred, which ones had been involved with which experiments, which ones sang, which ones didn’t. She hadn’t only recorded information about the males, but she’d recorded which females had been used as well. As he paged through the sheets, he began to notice a pattern. Whenever the female “Blue 15” was used, the males sang a lot. He flipped through a few more, stopping to read the notes in the margins. On one page she’d written: “Blue 27” doesn’t stutter when “Blue 15” is put in front of him.
Unbelievable, to be sure, but here it was. Could stuttering be controlled by the receiver? Everyone studied male birds because they sang. Did this mean that for all these years, when they’d been ignoring the females, they’d been missing half the song?
He went back to his yellow notebooks, smiling when he saw Sarah’s handwriting alongside his own. He wanted to talk with her about this new idea. They’d begun to correspond again. Surely there were parallels in her work. Why did one therapist, listening and giving bits of feedback, work for a patient, but another therapist did not? He would write to her tonight.
He picked up the phone and called the distributors. Whereas before he’d been dabbling with any species that sang, trying to understand the mechanics behind song, now he wanted to focus. He ordered two new flocks of the scarlet-beaked zebra finches. One group he put in the aviary at the institute and began to breed them, keeping track of the mothers, the fathers, the number of offspring and their songs. The second flock went to the aviary by his house, where he did the same. Instead of breeding males and females in small cages, as he’d always done, he let them live together and choose their own mates, and then he spent hours recording their songs and behaviors to learn which males were attracted to which females and which ones produced the most clutches. The work didn’t require a large grant, and he wasn’t in a hurry.
After Sarah left, he thought that the rest of his life would be a slow process of loss—Ed, Munin, his research, but he had been wrong. Ironically, the act of sabotage had changed everything. From one day to the next, he was given a new life, a clean slate, an open door.
He returned to writing his keynote. His work was showing that the female listener had a great deal to do with a male bird’s song. Perception was as important as signal. Males sang to some females more than others. Some females could make a stuttering male fluent.
Sarah. David realized that grief had pushed them apart. Their communication, which could be seamless and synergistic, had become syncopated and out of time after Ed’s death. Destructive interference. Wavelengths cancelling each other out. Amplitude zero.
David imagined Ed’s smile if he were alive to learn that birdsong had helped to foster a revolution in brain science. And he thought of Anton, who had finally devised the technique to watch neurons connect when new behaviors were being memorized and then, when those memories were silenced with drugs, watch them disappear over time. In a very real way, the elusive engram had been found and Anton had found it. Everyone now knew that nerves were built and laid down not just once during development, but all throughout life. The brain was plastic, malleable, forgetting and remembering, again and again. Ed’s secret. I forget myself.
David finished his talk, left his office, and went into the foothills behind the institute. Lazuli buntings, towhees, and chickadees were singing in the clear, cool evening. He leaned into the hillside, lowered his head and began the climb. An hour later, he arrived at the top o
f the ridge, warm and exhilarated. The valley would change in the coming months, going from the fleeting green of spring to the drought of summer, and he hoped that this year, they would get the powerful thunderstorms in August. Sarah had written that she was coming home and he was counting the days. Their life together was inextricably bonded by time and memories, arguments and collaborations. Looking out over the valley, listening to the birds surrounding him, he thought, how could you ever know what it really cost any animal to sing?
Halfway down the mountain a large magpie landed in the clearing between the conifers, paused, turned its head left and then right, studying the corpse before it. Iridescent wings flashed purple, black and white in the sunlight. With a lowered beak, the magpie took a step in and prodded the limp bird, another magpie, this one with a shriveled leg. When there was no response, the magpie let out a loud, dissonant caw. A short moment later, a nearby bird answered the call, and soon, other magpies began to arrive, in groups of two and three, their white breasts and wing patches flashing in the sunlight as they swept down. Before long, twenty squawking, flapping birds had congregated around the dead magpie. One by one, they turned toward the dead bird, pushing at the limp body with their beaks and then letting out baying caws. They flicked their wings. They spread their tail feathers. They cawed and squawked and chattered as they moved around the bird, and then they abruptly stopped. They stood and waited together in the silence, listening perhaps to the hum of the city below, or to the sound of the rattling squirrel nearby. Then, almost simultaneously, they lifted up and without another sound, save the swoosh of their wings, dispersed towards the shimmering valley below.
When the moon’s reflection began to blink on the water, Rebecca looked up and saw that the birds were passing now, groups of twenty or thirty, mostly grebes, avocets, a few willets, migrating north. As they flew in front of the full moon, their dark silhouettes tapped out a sort of visual Morse code, dots and dashes made up of short and long flashes of moonlight. She stood, shaking out a cramp in one leg as she scanned the mangroves to her left and then peered out at the Gulf of Mexico, the water broad, and from this vantage point on its Mexican edge, seemingly endless. But it did end. Depending on the winds and weather, twenty or thirty hours from now these birds, thin and panting with tattered feathers, would touch down on the southern coast of Texas.
Without needing a flashlight, she walked over to her bag, took out her camera and set it gently on the ground. She slid open the legs of the tripod and fixed them into the sandy soil. Her watch read 4:00 a.m. Behind her she could hear sounds she couldn’t name, the groans and exhalations of a forest at night. Owls probably. Bats likely. The buzzes and calls of countless insects, monstrous and resilient, scurrying across the wet leaves. The creaking of tree trunks, the fall of a branch. The gulf before her gleamed like a mirror. The birds above, those migrating in intermittent waves, made no sound at all.
The naturalist from the lodge who dropped her off after midnight had offered to pick her up again at daybreak, but she’d refused and pointed at the pamphlet with the map. “It doesn’t look too far. I’ll walk. Morning is a good time for pictures.”
She stood now looking out at the Gulf. Moonlight and shadow. Black wings on a deep purple sky, which would lighten just enough in the next hour to get the pictures she wanted. To think that in this same spot, some sixty-five million years before, an asteroid, six miles wide, had slammed into the earth like a bomb, the atomic fallout bringing layers of dust and iridium, the death of the dinosaurs, the opening of the way for mammals. And now birds, small feathered relics of those dinosaurs, migrated over this watered crater twice a year. Two billion birds a year. North in the spring to eat and breed. South in the fall to eat and wait out the cold.
She bent and looked into the camera. For the next two hours, she studied the sky, focused and clicked as the birds above beat their wings in steady repetitive flaps, propelling themselves through the cool air over the Gulf, always north toward their final summer destination. As she watched them, intermittently pressing the button, hearing the sound of the shutter opening and closing, she felt she was the sole witness to a marvelous secret.
Just after first light, she put the equipment away. She hoisted the pack over her shoulders, snapped the waist belt and turned toward the path that would take her back to the lodge. A while later, just before the forest opened up to the place where she expected to find a trail to the left, she was stopped short by a series of sounds, songs she recognized, but that made no sense. Even before she considered the improbability of the species in the region, her binoculars were pressed to her eyes. Sure enough, she saw them. Zebra finches. Perhaps twenty of the gray frenetic, red-beaked birds fluttering and calling under a wire screening next to a small wooden house. Outside the house, on the other side of the enclosure, an old woman was hunkered over a reed mat, using the light of the morning to sort through rice grains. Rebecca saw a large black bird, a great-tailed grackle, swoop in behind the enclosure. It landed on the ground near the woman, its tail giving a broad upward bob before it inched its way toward the rice grains. The woman picked up a pebble and lobbed it at the bird. The grackle hopped to the left, easily sidestepping her toss. The woman made a shushing sound, felt into a pocket in her apron and threw a small handful of seeds off to her right, this time with more force. The bird ran quickly toward the seeds and pecked. The woman grunted softly, glanced up at Rebecca and nodded. Rebecca tried for a smile, but she was overcome with emotion—first the zebra finches and now this grackle, reminding her of Munin.
Instinctively, she counted the males. There were eight. The rest were gray females. She stepped closer and the birds set off in a fast flapping and lined themselves up along a swaying wooden perch. They took turns flitting off the perch to the wire walls of the enclosure. They hung sideways, grasping onto the mesh with their small red claws for a moment before returning to the perch. Their heads twitched nervously, left, right. Their black eyes, wary and expectant, stared at her. Unconsciously, she touched the tips of her fingers to her palms knowing the softness of feathers, missing the feeling of having a tiny, warm body in her hand, a heart pounding quickly under her thumb.
She heard Anton’s voice, the repetition, almost stuttering of her name. She heard the talking and laughing through dinner, the background of birdsong during the day, the hum of their whispers at night. His hand lifting her chin to kiss. His arms firmly around her from behind. The rough texture of his closely cropped hair. The baby-like softness of his skin in the places she most liked to touch. Their bodies meeting and separating and meeting again. She turned quickly away from the finches and continued on toward the lodge, no longer with an appetite for breakfast, wanting only the solitude of her room, the cocoon-like protection of a canvas hammock folded around her, and hopefully, the unconscious dumbness of sleep.
She woke a few hours later thinking of the laboratory, and lay in the hammock remembering. For some time, she had regretted her role in the lab, the work there, and what came at the end, but not anymore. Nor the time in Chicago. It had made her what she was now, a photographer recording the grainy stillness of birds without borders, birds heading north just as they had done for millennium, completely oblivious to her or anything else below. She thought of Anton, David, the birds, how their memories had woven threads into the fabric of her consciousness. She was connected to them all, and could never be free.
Anton rubbed his eyes, reached for his glasses on the table, but didn’t put them on. He felt a cool draft of air and instinctively ran his hand over his head. Disoriented by silence and cold, he realized that while he had been dozing mid-morning, dreaming in a half-sleep, noon had passed. Outside the light was dim, the winter sun low and weak. The silence took a moment longer to understand. It had snowed. A quality of silence he hadn’t heard in quite a while. The predicted afternoon storm must have arrived and must have been bigger than expected.
Snow was not a given any more in the mountains of Südtirol. Increased temper
atures, shifting weather patterns; global change, which the Americans had tried so hard to avoid by denial, had come anyway. The village children who came to his house for breads and cookies in the afternoons had no memory of great snows, and more than likely, if he told them about past winters, how the layers of snow built up between October and March, they would chalk it up to the faulty, nostalgic memory of an old man. One of these days he would take out his mother’s photographs and they would gasp to see how snow used to drift above the slate roofed houses, how cars were buried six months a year. He would tell them how all that snow reflected light, like a mirror, back into your face. It could make you think twice. It could burn you on a cold winter day.
The scent of lemon and yeast wafted from his kitchen and he realized that while he was dozing, he had been thinking about David’s laboratory. The birds. The laboratory. Rebecca. Their first lunch together. The muted bird. It was strange how memories of her came back like this, with emotional force when he was half-asleep. When he was awake he rarely thought of her; her existence erased from his daily consciousness.
Earlier that morning he heard a radio program about monarchs on their breeding grounds in Mexico. The program started with a loud, fluttering, flapping susurration, and he understood that he’d been mistaken in assuming that their wing beats were silent. Butterflies made noise. People just didn’t hear it. What was it the Greeks had said? Eyes and ears are bad witnesses for man. And Gianetti always said: Sensory systems are hypothesis generators. But if eyes and ears were not to generate those hypotheses, then what would? Eyes and ears were all anyone had.
Despite all the advances they had made in understanding memory, the excitement he had felt as he saw a nerve connection disappearing when the cells were turned off, the papers published in Science, his promotion to laboratory head when Gianetti retired, the engram having been “found,” he realized that he had learned little about his own memory. He still could not say how the experiences with Rebecca in the laboratory had become memories that hibernated and emerged, seemingly at their own will and with unpredictable emotional pull. And what erased a memory? Sadness, anger, or sheer will? Despite everything he had learned studying memory, he still could not answer that simple question. He could describe how a memory was formed, but not exactly how one was forgotten.