by Sylvia Torti
Early on, people thought that memories might be recorded once and then set forever. If the wiring was right, they could be reviewed and revisited, but it wasn’t so. Memories, he had proven, were created anew each time they were called forth. They were imperfect, undependable, changeable, subject to twists and turns of neurons, brain chemistry, environment, time. Every rendition was a variation that came from, and was created out of, the present moment. Memory was less like a book that you could put on a shelf and take down from time to time, and more like a story you had to rewrite over and over—only as soon as one draft was written, the previous draft disappeared. Memories were as much about today as yesterday. And how many memories needed to be jettisoned at any one moment so that new information and thoughts could come in? You could never be sure.
There was still a sadness when he remembered her, a nostalgia for something lost. He couldn’t put words to it, but when he thought of her, he felt a kind of dissonance. It made him think of Pythagoras, who spent twenty years plucking and measuring sounds on his instrument, figuring out harmony. Pythagoras who believed there was a planetary harmony, a sound so sweet and constant that it couldn’t be heard until it was gone.
He saw the snow through the window, the dark day outside. It still bothered him sometimes. Was it David’s intentness, the mass euthanasia, or the uncertainty that had occupied his mind? Did she do it?
“The birds,” she said as she peered into the microscope, “it seems like they’re trying so hard to be heard.”
Anton put on his glasses and got up to make the breads. In the kitchen he mixed wheat flour with rye flour, yeast, warm water, oil and anise seed. He began kneading. What he sometimes liked to remember was the Sunday afternoon when they were at his apartment and she approached him from behind, slipping a blindfold over his eyes.
“Shh,” she said. She led him to the bedroom. “This is an experiment.”
He felt her undress him, heard the zip of his jeans and then the ruffle of them being pulled off. There was the click of his belt buckle as she folded the clothes and set them aside. Without his eyes, he listened, hearing one car after another moving down the street. There was the ring of a bicycle’s bell, a child perhaps. Behind that, the incessant chirps of house sparrows and then suddenly, the fast tick tick tick, cluck cluck cluck of a family of quail hurrying across the front lawn. He did not hear her undress but felt her body and then there was no sound at all. Just touch and kiss and breath. He neither saw nor spoke, but felt the sensation of her skin cool on his skin, her citrus scent.
It was as if they had gone to some far off place, lush and magical, their bodies writing words on the white sheet. Rebecca had known how to move past the barrier of language, his accent and awful mispronunciations, past the difficulty, or triviality, of words. Afterward, they held one another. Outside the humid space of their bodies was the American desert, the dry, cracked soil, withered leaves, the inevitability of fire. Between them was quiet, a world apart from the laboratory, far-away from the sounds of song.
Anton kneaded the dough, pushing and pushing, and then he stopped. The thought that came to him was that he had created his suspicion of her out of a motivation to leave. He had been afraid to stay, fearing it would mean he would be trapped like Francesco, or like the white-crowned sparrows, who upon escape, often turned and flew straight back through the open door of their cages.
He knew she had gone back to photography because he had seen her photographs in magazines. He could imagine her somewhere in a rainforest. She would be there taking pictures, her red hair grown long again. He began kneading the dough again. He measured out the figs, raisins, candied orange and lemon, walnuts and spices and doused the mixture with a bit of wine and rum. Now that he had begun remembering, he wanted her to remember too. He believed that she might also remember back to a time in her life when they had spent entire days together with the small manic birds, positioning cages of female finches in front of males, tempting them to sing, living day after day in a world of tiny birds and their whining songs. She had loved him. He knew that.
Anton passed the afternoon this way, letting his mind imagine new memories, while his hands formed breads for the children in the village. The children. They came in the afternoons. They smiled and laughed and handed him the coins their mothers had sent along. More often than not, he closed their fingers around the coins, nodded toward their pockets and watched as they slipped them away for safe keeping.
He mixed the dough with the fruit and kneaded some more. He thought about David and his stuttering work, about the little device that delayed auditory feedback so that people could communicate better and his finding that a silent female bird could determine the quality of a male’s song. He rolled out the pieces of dough, one-inch thick, and then carved them into bird shapes. He sensed now that it was fear that kept him from loving deeply, but he could not say what he had been afraid of. Just as birds needed to hear in order to sing, perhaps humans had to be loved in order to learn to love. Practice. He never had much of a chance to practice. With his mother, who was so often gone, nostalgia had become the most dependable emotion. Nostalgia a proxy for love.
He used pieces of candied cherries for the eyes, almonds for the beaks, candied orange for feathers. He slipped them into the oven. When they were done, he would coat them with honey syrup. He went to the cupboard and took down the birds he made the day before. He wrapped each in a separate way, tying blue, purple and red ribbons around the packages.
He realized how far away he was. He had spent most of his life missing his mother, and now, with her death in the war, he could never stop missing her. All those years he had resented her for being too quiet, though he realized now that she’d really been talking in her own way, in the only way she could. The photographs. The images. He hadn’t had the maturity to understand the silence between words, what could not be said.
And he missed Rebecca. You miss what is left incomplete, what you never totally understand, the people and relationships that die without revealing their purpose. Finding the memory traces, which he’d thought would be extraordinary and gratifying, had helped nothing in his life.
He looked out the window at the winter day and waited for the children. The snow that had fallen mid-morning, quieting the village, had begun to glisten in the afternoon sun. He remembered the feeling of ice spray pinging his face when he was young as they darted down the steep mountain on sleds. There was the long trudge up again, and the seconds of exhilaration coming down. The thought that today’s children didn’t experience snow as he once did, saddened him. He looked forward to their visits, shiny eyes, flushed cheeks, skittish energy. Their minds soft like dough, thoughts and memories forming for the first time. Memories laid down to be massaged and reformed through the years of life and new experiences. He wondered about sound. Was it really the last sense to go at death? He closed his eyes and listened. He thought he could hear them coming. Their voices, chimes in the wind.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is the product of a decade-long conversation with Franz Goller, who gave me space in his birdsong laboratory, and shared with me the mysteries, discoveries and troubles around communication. The sketches in the book are his.
For Joie Smith, who talked with me for over twenty years, and with whom I continue talking every day. I also thank Don Feener, always. To Lynn Kilpatrick, who originally pushed me to do more with a short story about birds, and to the readers who commented on multiple drafts: Frances Torti, Debra Baldwin, Cass McNally, Ellen Wilson, Lynn Cohne, Deborah Threedy, Julia Corbett, Franz Goller, Krista Caballero, Trudi Smith and Calvin Jolley.
Tim Schaffner, editor and publisher extraordinaire, saw the book’s potential and prodded it on to something much better. Thank you, as well, to: Sean Murphy, Jordan Wannemacher, Scott Manning, and Abigail Welhouse.
For support, I thank Centre d’Art i Natura, Farrera, Spain, and Mapping Meaning. Finally, gratitude and love to Calvin for his raw, naked and ardent atte
ntion to detail on and off the page.
SOURCES
The novel is a work of fiction. While the science of birdsong and memory is generally accurate, I have chosen to emphasize certain aspects for dramatic effect. The following books and papers were useful in the research.
The Conference of the Birds, Farid un-Din Attar, Penguin Classics 1984 Afkham Darbandi (Translator).
David’s quote: “Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat.” comes from The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, Steven Pinker. Harper Perennial Modern Classics. 2007.
In Search of Memory: The Emergence of the New Science of Mind. Erik R. Kandel. W.W. Norton & Company. 2006.
“The flourishing of one is never independent of the other.” When Species Meet, Donna Haraway University of Minnesota Press. 2007.
“Continuing the search for engrams: examining the mechanisms of fear memories.” Sheena A. Josselyn. Journal Psychiatry Neuroscience 2010, 35(4):221-8.
Origins in Acoustics: The Science of Sound from Antiquity to the Age of Newton, Frederick Vinton Hunt. 1978. Yale University Press.
“Searching for Engrams.” Mark Hübener and Tobias Bonhoeffer. Neuron 2010, 67: 363-371.
“What is memory? The present state of the engram.” Poo et al. 2016. BMC Biology: 1-18.
Some of David’s comments about the importance of stuttering were based on those of Dr. David Rosenfield of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas as recorded in “Flutter Stutter” by Matt Walker. New Scientist Issue 2209, published 23 October 1999.
“Hugin and Munin” poem. Rasmus B. Anderson’s translation at the Northvegr Foundation.
Hugin and Munin
Fly every day
Over the great earth.
I fear for Hugin
That he may not return,
Yet more am I anxious for Munin.
The character of Ed Matheson III was inspired by Theodore A. Parker III (1953-1993).