I am skeptical of behaviorism now, and my lab mates and I were skeptical of it when, ten years ago, the US Navy slammed the door on the Pelican initiative. And yet we stayed true to our word. The instant we reiterated our promise to keep our qualia to ourselves, convening no press conferences on the topic of Columbidae consciousness, Professor Skinner wept tears of gratitude. I continue to honor that commitment—indeed, I recently arranged for this memoir to remain under wraps until the second decade of the new millennium, by which time I’ll be dead and Skinner also will have gone to his, as it were, reward.
Amazingly, the saga of Project Organicon has a third act. Like a phoenixxx rising from the ashes, the notion of biologically controlled bombs did not die on that dreadful afternoon in the Office of Special Devices. Instead it transmuted into a British plan to exxxploit behaviorism in the struggle against totalitarianism.
During the early weeks of 1943, however, none of us had any inkling of Project Columbine. Inspired by the exxxample of Cher Ami, my lab mates and I allowed ourselves to be drafted into the Allied Signal Corps. For nineteen months I delivered messages and dropped poop all over the European Theater without any disabling misadventures. But then, on October 17, 1944, while I was carrying a dispatch from General Truscott to Général de Lattre de Tassigny following. Operation Dragoon, a German bullet tore through my rump, and I lost my right leg plus half my left-wing feathers to a second enemy volley. The message reached de Lattre’s headquarters, but I almost died on the operating table.
Realizing that I faced a long recuperation, de Lattre’s personal physician transferred me to a clinic in Nîmes. The vétérinaires whittled a wooden leg for le Reuben courageuxxx, just like Cher Ami’s, and spliced in replacement plumage to stabilize me until my feathers grew out again. Eventually I began to feel better. True, my soldiering days were over, but I figured I’d already made my contribution to the war effort. A bird could do worse than sitting out the rest of this global conflagration drinking Chablis in a therapeutic loft.
On the first day in November my little brother appeared at my side. He brought me a crouton and a newspaper article about my last mission. Le Figaro called me “le héros volant de l’Opération Dragoon.”
“Any news from the family?” I asked.
“It could be much worse,” Sasha replied, exxxtracting a mite from my nape. “Elvira’s still with Patton’s Third Army. She fractured a wing at Arracourt, but I’m told it healed just fine. Aaron lost most of his bill in the same battle. I heard he’s adjusting well to the prosthetic.”
“Somebody up there likes pigeons.”
“Here’s the really big news,” said Sasha. “Looks like I’ll be piloting a glider against the Nazis after all!”
Elaborating, he exxxplained that, two days after the Normandy landing, Skinner’s bête noire Admiral Plantinga got to swapping stories with a British naval officer named Eric Strawson. Plantinga told Commander Strawson about his encounter two years earlier with a crackpot Minnesota psychologist obsessed with putting pigeons in gliders. But Strawson decided that a bird-steered bomb was a capital idea, and he lost no time talking it up with Winston Churchill’s scientific adviser. Lord Cherwell immediately grasped the shrewdness of the system and inaugurated Project Columbine, whereby His Majesty’s military would build a score of single-pilot gliders, each equipped with a camera obscura lens, a viewscreen, and a dove-size cockpit.
“Last month Cherwell’s people asked our favorite psychologist to round up his twenty best pilots,” said Sasha. “Skinner tracked me down in Luxxxembourg and gave me the task of drafting the other nineteen.”
“I’m not well enough to guide a missile,” I said, sipping Chablis.
“Good heavens, Reuben, I came to visit you, not recruit you.”
Sasha proceeded to reveal that in four days he and the other volunteers would join Skinner aboard the British carrier Indefatigable, part of a convoy cruising Norwegian waters under orders to hunt down and sink German battleships. Evidently the boss wanted to be on the scene when all his hard work on organicon navigation finally paid off.
“This is my chance to redeem myself for pooping during the Plantinga demonstration,” said Sasha.
“Plantinga would’ve closed us down whether you’d pooped or not,” I said. “The man has no imagination. So what’s your primary target? Gneisenau?”
“Gneisenau is out of action, torn to pieces in a bombing raid. Scharnhorst capsized last year during the Battle of the North Cape. Get this, Reuben. Four days from now a squadron of transport planes will tow me and the other pilots to within striking range of our old nemesis, Tirpitz.”
“Tirpitz. Golly.”
“Strange are the ways of fate.”
“Promise me you’ll be careful,” I said, a ridiculous thing to tell somebody embarking on a suicide mission.
“Sure, I’ll be careful. You bet.”
“I’ll miss you, Sasha,” I said, encircling him with my good wing. “I’ll think about you every day for the rest of my life.”
“I love you, Reuben.”
And with that avowal, my stouthearted little brother bobbed his head, cooed vigorously, and flew away.
I spent another week convalescing in Nîmes, after which the vétérinaires gave me a clean bill of health and discharged me. Before long I decided to go feral and settle in le gaie Paris. Now that the Germans were on the run, la vie française held a special allure for me.
At first I thought I would imitate my fellow ferals, dining on hibernating bugs during winter and, come spring, consuming baguette crumbs tossed by visitors to le parc des Buttes Chaumont. But soon I began to miss my old life as an exxxperimental subject, so I took to hanging around the main plaza at the Sorbonne. I was netted in less than a week, then brought to the laboratory of a grizzled scientist named Jean-Marc Delrue, a recent convert to behaviorism, too old for the fight against Hitler. Despite wartime austerity, the rewards were splendid: croissant flakes, brioche chunks, macaron bits. I spent many gratifying hours letting Delrue believe he was conditioning me to assemble children’s jigsaw puzzles.
It was in the domain of le professeur that I met and courted my one true love, une jolie colombe named Marie. We bonded for life—I believe she was attracted to my status as an héros de guerre—and planned to start raising squabs after Der Führer abandoned his fantasies of a Thousand-Year Reich. Delrue must have sensed there was something going on between us. No sooner had he resolved to create a pigeon orchestra than he began teaching Marie and me to play duets on his great-grandfather’s harpsichord.
Early in May of 1945, two exxxtraordinary events occurred: General Alfred Jodl, having arrived at Allied headquarters in Reims, signed unconditional surrender documents for all German forces—and Professor B. F. Skinner came to the Sorbonne to give a lecture called “Engineering Human Happiness.” Shortly before he was to appear in the Amphithéâtre Richelieu, I importuned the great psychologist as he paced anxxxiously around backstage. He recognized me instantly. I bowed to him thrice. He reciprocated. Our telepathic conversation was brief but pointed.
I asked, “Can you tell me anything about—?”
“He’s dead,” Skinner informed me.
“I assumed as much.” A nugget of grief coalesced in my crop. “Tell me more.”
“The first missile to attack Tirpitz destroyed the aft turrets. The second strike turned the bow to scrap metal. And then came Sasha, piloting his glider straight for the main ammunition magazine.”
“I can see him pecking his heart out,” I mused.
“The exxxplosion tore an immense hole in the hull,” Skinner reported. “The ship capsized and sank in a matter of minutes, and so the other strikes were called off. Thanks to his skill and courage, Sasha saved—”
“Seventeen pigeons and God knows how many British sailors.”
“Quite so.”
“You trained him well,” I averred in a mildly sarcastic tone.
Skinner graciously disregarded my rudeness. “S
asha and the other fallen birds received Dickin Medals, the only ones awarded posthumously so far. The Victoria Cross for animals—have you heard of it?—very handsome, silk ribbon, bronze disc. The obverse reads ‘For Gallantry’ and, below that, ‘We Also Serve.’”
“Bonsoir, mesdames et messieurs!” came the amplified voice of le professeur, who then introduced the evening’s celebrated guest. I translated Delrue’s remarks for Skinner.
“I wish I could’ve died in Sasha’s place,” I added.
“Do you mean that?” asked the psychologist.
“No,” I replied. “I hope your speech goes well.”
“My interpreter, a young man from Boston, is very competent. Allow me to offer my deepest condolences.”
“War is hell,” I observed.
“Je vous présente Professeur B. F. Skinner!” declared Delrue.
The psychologist offered me a soft smile and strode toward the stage. “Good-bye, Reuben,” he called over his shoulder.
“Au revoir, Doc.”
I didn’t stay around for Skinner’s lecture on “Engineering Human Happiness.” The commodity in question, I feel, is not something one can engineer, and neither is avian happiness. And even if such a technology were possible, I would worry about the side effects.
So I left the auditorium and took to the air, headed for the lab and the lovely dove who awaited me there. Despite my war wounds I could still fly, albeit clumsily. Fluttering over the main plaza, I composed an epitaph for the recipients of the first posthumously awarded Dickin Medals.
A wonderful bird is the pigeon,
Whose mind holds much more than a smidgeon,
He can soar from the sod,
To the left eye of God,
And he does it without a religion.
Adieu, noble Sasha. Farewell, little brother. Good-bye, mon cher ami. You were a mysterious and irreducible creature. But then again, aren’t we all?
Here Be Monsters
Sallie Tisdale
DAN, THE YOUNG DIVEMASTER, set us up with weights and tanks for the required checkout dive, running through the park rules as he worked. The checkout dive was one of the rules. Taking coral or spearfishing outside permitted areas was against the rules; feeding fish was most definitely against the rules.
“Some idiot started feeding the moray eels hot dogs,” he said, swinging a tank to me. I pretended not to stumble when I caught it. “Some idiot.” He was half my age and naked except for a pair of ratty swim shorts. “They’re myopic, the eels,” he added. “They can’t tell the difference between your finger and an octopus tentacle and a hot dog. A woman had half her finger bitten off last year.” He paused. “Don’t be stuuupppid.”
I learned to dive in chill, dim Puget Sound, and promptly gave up on cold water. I had never dived in warm water or been to a subtropical island, except for Hawaii, where I went snorkeling for the first time and was seized with the need to go below, to stay down there. And Bonaire was a fever dream of a desert island, a tilting tabletop barely out of the sea. In the north, the narrow interior is scrub and cactus and tikitiki trees pointing to the southwest with the eternal wind. The arid land is filled with birds, wild donkeys, goats, and iguanas six feet long. The small towns in the center are sun scorched and still; the people are mostly African by descent, with Arawak and Spanish and Dutch and Portuguese mixed in. The south is salt flats, towering white cones lining the road beside giant loaders and pink evaporation ponds; twinkling crystalline drifts of salt powder float across the highway like low fog. A row of tiny slave huts is protected as a memorial, the size of dog houses and hot as saunas. A large flock of pink flamingos lives in the south. They step daintily through the shallows on silly delicate legs, turning their big heads completely upside down to feed on tiny shrimp. The birds chatter constantly, cho-go-go, go-go, the sound mixing with the wind, cho-go-go, go-go, cho-go, like gossip or the mild chronic complaints of old aunts. Sometimes they fly to Venezuela, fifty miles away—the flock rising at twilight all at once like a vapor flashing flame in the last light.
Sand and scraped sky above the waves; below, an immense work of eons. The naturalist William Beebe said of the coral reef, “No opium dream can compare.” The reef looks like the rumpled ruins of a great city, slumped boulders and bushes and pillars and branches cascading down and down, an architecture that is truly stone—the skeletons of tiny animals piled one atop another. I was a novice diver and a complete tyro on the reef. After a few days of barely coherent dives, I began to learn names: tilefish, wrasse, moon jelly, lugworm, overgrowing mat tunicate, southern sennet, whitespotted toadfish, honeycomb cowfish, porgy, the tiny scrawled filefish hiding in a gorgonian like a shivering leaf. I learned the names of things, but that is not the same as knowing the things one can name.
On the second day, I saw my first eel. Dan pointed to a rough rock near an overhang and I paddled over in stupefied and clumsy strokes. The big head, the jaws working—a green moray, all muscle and velvet.
Family Muraenidae in the order Anguilliformes. Hundreds of species of moray eels all created on the fifth day, if Genesis is to be believed. They are brown, green, ivory, gray, yellow, orange, black, and neon blue, and all these in combination: speckled, spotted, polka-dotted, striped, tessellated, piebald, brindle. A couple of the species are two-toned like saddle shoes. Morays live in every tropical and temperate sea, mostly in shallow water. They make dens in caves and crevices and holes in rocks; some live in hollowed-out burrows in the sand, mixing mucus and grains of sand into cement. They live alone, wolves sharing out the territory. The redface eel in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans is eight inches long at maturity; the slender giant moray in the Indian and the Pacific can reach twelve feet. A study in Hawaii found that up to 46 percent of the carnivorous biomass on the reef was moray.
They are fish but don’t look like fish; they have no pectoral fins, no fishiness. Instead the dorsal fin runs the entire length of the body, fimbriated and smooth from the aerodynamic head shaped like a jet cockpit to the tapering tail. Morays are covered in mucus. The green moray is really blue. Or is it brown? Or gray? Or a funereal black? I’m not sure; sources vary. The mucus is green, or perhaps yellow; the mucus is poisonous. Or not; sources vary. These are no long-distance swimmers; they are immensely strong but slothful, like high-school boys on a Sunday afternoon. Morays are mostly nocturnal, shy, and spend much of the time curled in their dens, often with just their heads peeping out. Morays don’t see well, but they have a great sense of smell, and mostly wait for prey to wander by—lobster, octopus, fish of all kinds. Divers and snorkelers are most likely to see only the wavering head, the long sinuous body curled out of sight in a den. (Often, if you look carefully, you can see that snaky body wound round and round the rocks and coral like loose rope.) Most morays stay in exactly the same place for years—the same part of the reef, the same den. Divers recognize specific eels, and tend to name the big ones.
Sources always vary in this world. Morays are dangerous, I read in a fish guide. They are aggressive, ugly, fearful beasts. Such adjectives recur again and again, in science as well as stories. My beloved Britannica says “they can be quite vicious,” an oddly subjective entry in that careful publication. My well-worn Peterson Field Guide warns, “Before sticking your hand into a crevice, look into it carefully. A dreaded moray eel may be hiding there.”
The mouth—that’s what scares people. The big, wide mouth and all those pointy teeth, gaping at you. Morays have small gills; breathing requires them to open and close their mouths continuously to force water through. They look contemplative, like a man working off the novocaine. Fish have a second set of teeth in pharyngeal jaws in the throat, to clench onto captured prey and pull it quickly down into the gut. Pharyngeal jaws seem odd, but they are common. Human embryos have extra jaws that fade into the skull early in development. The moray, however, is unique. They catch prey with the long, needle-sharp front teeth and then the pharyngeal jaws shoot out of the throat like a questing blind skull
and bite again. The front jaws let go and the pharyngeal jaws retract, and the prey ratchets down, gone in a second or two.
There are many videos on the Internet purporting to show moray attacks. Like dreaded or vicious, like ugly, the word attack is one colored by imagination. In many of the videos, divers are making faces and showing off, darting out of reach with a scared giggle, egging each other on. One of the most well-known shows a moray biting a diver’s thumb off with a crisp pop. (If a moray bites your finger, the pharyngeal jaws won’t let go—do we think they would reconsider if they could? Do we imagine an eel listening—Let go, you shouldn’t eat that?) If the eel gets a finger, it simply bites the finger off. If the eel gets hold of something bigger—an arm, a thigh—well, there’s not much to be done. The diver gets out of the water with the eel attached until someone can smash its head in and cut the jaws off. In the case of the thumb—in every case I’ve heard of in twenty years of diving—the divers were petting eels or teasing eels or trying to coax the eel out of its den to take pictures. These are big ones, eels with names, the reliable local celebrities that tourists want to see. They are conditioned to come out of their dens to be fed. Conditioned, but not domesticated. Mostly, the divers were feeding the eels hot dogs, which look, even to my human eyes, a lot like fingers.
One can let go of a surprising number of concerns underwater, drifting slowly down into the blue like a pebble in honey. After the first startled moment, the inside-out reorienting of the world that comes with sinking underwater, I’m at ease; at times, I’m so relaxed I can almost nap. Since that first dive off Bonaire, I’ve seen many morays: spotted and golden-tail morays, dwarf and zebra morays, and once a chestnut moray, a trick to find. Off Glover’s Atoll in Belize, I drifted down a huge boulder to a little sandy plain like a courtyard, falling without hurry through water clear as air. When I reached the sand I looked casually to the right and saw a green moray several feet long resting under a ledge with his eye on me: Gymnothorax funebris. Green morays can reach eight feet in length and weigh up to sixty-five pounds. Gymnos is thorax, and akos means the naked breast. The word funebris means funereal, for the dark color, perhaps. Or for the fear.
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