Cages
Copyright © 2017, Sylvia Torti
First Edition
Trade Paperback Original
Cover and Interior Design: Jordan Wannemacher
No part of this book may be excerpted or reprinted without the express written consent of the Publisher. Contact: Permissions, Schaffner Press, POB 41567, Tucson, AZ 85717
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Torti, Sylvia, 1968-author.
Title: Cages / Sylvia Torti.
Description: First edition. | Tucson, Arizona : Schaffner Press, Inc., [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016051879 (print) | LCCN 2016059184 (ebook) | ISBN 9781943156184 (softcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781943156214 (Mobipocket) | ISBN 9781943156207 (Epub) | ISBN 9781943156191 (Pdf ) | ISBN 9781943156191 (Pdf) | ISBN 9781943156214 ( Mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Animal welfare--Moral and ethical aspects--Fiction. | Triangles (Interpersonal relations)--Fiction. | Self-actualization (Psychology)--Fiction. | Self-realization--Fiction. | Scientists--Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / General.
Classification: LCC PS3620.O68 C34 2017 (print) | LCC PS3620.O68 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016051879
ISBN: 978-1-943-156-184 (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-943-156-214 (Mobipocket)
ISBN: 978-1-943-156-207 (Epub)
ISBN: 978-1-943-156-191 (Pdf)
Printed in the United States
CONTENTS
I. AUDITORY FEEDBACK
II. MEMORY
III. STUTTERING
IV. MEMORY
V. AUDITORY FEEDBACK
Acknowledgments
Sources
For Adrian
There you will understand unspoken words
Too subtle for the ears of mortal birds.
The Conference of the Birds
AUDITORY FEEDBACK
When the wall of windows glazed with first light, the birds rustled, wings against wire, and stretched their scaly toes from wooden perches. The robin un-tucked his head, and with short shakes, ruffled his feathers. An aging Inca dove scratched at the newspaper lining his cage. A starling, in white-speckled winter plumage, probed the air before his yellow beak, remaining to one side of the cage, not quite sure of the hollow space at the center. Six canaries lined themselves up on a dowel. Side by side, they preened pale yellow feather after pale yellow feather.
There were Bengalese finches, Brewer’s sparrows, cowbirds, yellow-headed blackbirds. Hundreds of zebra finches, housed four or five to a cage, hopped up and down, on and off perches. A male zebra finch landed in a food dish. As if surprised, he sat immobile for a moment before fluttering out once more, scattering seeds like shotgun pellets onto the floor. When he called, the others instantly erupted into a chorus of nasal mee mees, their small striped heads and orange cheek patches jerking right and left. Dissonant bursts, sounds understood only by them, perhaps meant to warn each other or appeal to drab females nearby.
On the floor a white picnic cooler served as a soundproof chamber. The white-crowned sparrow inside could not see the morning sun nor hear his fellow birds rustling, calling and hopping in the brightening laboratory. He knocked his beak against the plastic wall and let out a short whistle. The sound was followed by silence. He pecked at a seed. He flew up to his perch. He cocked his head to one side. Conscious of the limits to his auditory space, the fact that nothing could hear him, he sang again and listened to the whistle, buzz and trill of his own, five-note song.
From the hallway, David heard the muffled chirps of birds. He inserted a key and pulled on the heavy door. When he flipped on the lights, the birds responded with an urgent burst of sound. The laboratory turned from night to day. Silence into song. Each morning began exactly the same way. Birds beckoned him. Light and chorus marked his arrival.
He put down his briefcase, rolled up his sleeves and set to work, taking his time going from cage to cage, ensuring that each bird was okay. He stopped in front of the Inca dove, opened the cage and took hold of it. The dove, which had been hand-raised by Sarah, settled easily into his palm, its small black eyes staring back at him with unusual calmness. David rubbed his finger lightly on its breast and then set it free on the counter. The dove flew up, perched on a light fixture and let out an almost inaudible call, one that had always sounded to David like “no hope, no hope.”
He glanced at his watch. He had an hour to clean before he was due to teach the first class of the semester. Pulling the water and food trays from the first row of birdcages, he filled the sink with soapy water and began to scrub.
Outside the window, the winter morning had brightened. Beyond his own reflection, he saw a flock of waxwings swoop up the hillside and land in a serviceberry bush. Seven, eight, maybe twelve plump birds, unmistakable in silhouette. Birds that settled into the valley during the winter months and then migrated north to breed in the spring, and odd for songbirds because male and female waxwings looked and sounded alike. Mirrors of one another. In most birds, the males sang and the females listened, deciding which male song sounded best. Singing was a sex-specific behavior traced to brain wiring, to physiology, to ecology and evolution. It made sense, except that in waxwings it wasn’t that way. An exception that remained unstudied.
David filled the now clean containers with water and seed, slipped them back into the cages and pulled another set from the next row. With his upper right arm, he leaned in and brushed a curl of his long hair away from his eye. Over running water and background calls of hungry finches, he could hear Sarah’s voice. Fundamentally, you’re shy. Not exactly insecure, but there’s a curve to your chest, a shyness imprinted along your upper back. He rolled his shoulders back, stood up straighter. You blush easily. I think it’s why you keep your hair long.
He felt the low-grade pounding in his head, the pulse and thud of a persistent headache that had been with him for some months now. The comfort he’d once enjoyed at being known so well by Sarah had switched to irritation and uneasiness whenever he heard her voice in his head. Had she never considered the possibility that he was too busy to remember to make hair appointments? Couldn’t there be a practical explanation, rather than an underlying emotional or psychological reason, for his longer hair? He finished the morning routine, collected his computer and hurried off to class, the sound of birdsong fading as the lab door swung shut behind him.
Though shy, David was a master teacher. In front of a class, he found it easy to cultivate a lively persona. He began the lecture by projecting images of a human baby and a bird chick. “These two might not look similar, but songbirds are very much like humans,” he said. “They both develop learned vocal communication and they do it in a similar way. Like humans, baby birds first listen. Later, they babble. Finally, they learn to sing.”
He played a recording of a bird learning to sing. “Listen and you will hear these sounds changing from a kind of babbling to a fully developed robin’s song.”
In the early years, David had managed remarkable success. He’d been the first to poke through a bird’s skull and insert fine wires into single neurons, a technique that allowed him to survey a new landscape, mark the places on a brain that could, and did, acquire a type of language. When these antennae-crowned birds sang, the sounds and electrical impulses were recorded. Numbers were sifted through software programs, analyzed and written up into scientific publications. He was called a pioneer and received grant after grant. His technique, now used internationally, allowed scientists to listen in on the unconscious thoughts of birds, the neuronal firings that triggered song. Songs, although he would never say it out loud, that might be a proxy for love.
He moved the class through the basics of birdsong, explaining the difference between calls that a
ll birds made instinctually, and songs which they learned after hearing the males of their own species singing. And birds, too, had dialects. A white-crowned sparrow in Washington State had a different accent than one in Colorado. He told them that like humans, an isolated bird with no hearing could never learn to sing. And, like humans, if a bird went deaf later in life, it would lose its song just as deaf humans lose their ability to speak.
“When you talk your brain is paying attention,” he said, “comparing how you sound to a template for how you should sound in your head. If you lose the auditory feedback, you eventually lose your speech.” He played recordings, showed slides, paced across the lecture stage, answered questions, and then the hour was over.
“What’s the take-home message today?” He paused for emphasis. “To communicate with others, you must be able to hear yourself.”
After class he passed by the main office to retrieve his mail. There was a memorandum about a recent theft at the institute, another about a group of animal rights activists in Oregon. More and more sophisticated security measures were becoming necessary. Everyone was supposed to keep their lab doors locked at all times. Of course, there would be increased fees charged to researcher grants to cover these extra costs. Terrific. More overhead would be taken from his dwindling grant. He dropped both flyers into the recycle bin and then flipped through the table of contents of the new Neuroscience magazine. Cell, cell, cell. Reductionists, all of them. Searching for the smallest denominator possible, they wanted to find “the” cancer gene, “the” secret to cell-cell communication, or the holy grail: “the” memory engram.
Almost every neuroscientist dreamed of unraveling memory, of finding out where memories were stored. Back in the 1920s, the behaviorist Karl Lashley had come up with the word “engram” to name the place where he thought he would find evidence of memories imprinted on nerve cells. As if memories could be exposed like a photographic image on film. But so far, no one had found the physical engravings.
David rolled the magazine into his fist, clear on the fact that cell or engram, his lab had produced nothing for many months. The rate of success he’d enjoyed the past decade had abruptly decelerated. Shrinking research funds had forced him to let the animal care technician go. He had no undergraduate or graduate students, and was waiting for the arrival of a new post-doctoral fellow. Whereas before, his lab bustled with post-docs, graduate students, undergraduates and animal care technicians, now he was alone with no new resources in sight. How had the “Decade of the Brain” passed so quickly?
Ten years earlier, he and other neuroscientists had successfully lobbied Congress for funding, making the case that although the brain was composed of a hundred billion neurons, it could be and would be understood. Signal molecules had been retained throughout the millennia of evolution, they said. Electrical impulses and nerves connected all living beings. The brain was electricity. You flip the right switches, sections turned on. Flip other switches, and sections turn off. Everything that ails—Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s Chorea—not to mention drug addiction, epilepsy, even problems with speech, hearing and perception, could be cured if they understood the brain.
They promised to cut open the skull and tease meaning from pink fatty tissue. Studying neurons, they assured Congress, would allow them to create navigational maps much like early explorers did for Africa, the Amazon and the Arctic, maps that would help people find their way inward, from behavior to nerve to gene, helping them grasp the most elemental understanding of themselves and the sentient world. If nerves were like yarn, they said, they could loosen the skein, untwist the knots, find the beginning.
Congressional support was bipartisan: the brain and its diseases had no political enemies. A bill was passed and the president signed the “Decade of the Brain” into existence. Neuroscientists, buoyed by their swollen budgets, worked overtime in an exhilarating combination of collaboration and competition. Europe responded to the American investment with its own brain focus and everyone benefited from the increased funds, arriving early to work and trying to stay later than their competitors.
David became famous in those first years for teasing apart and piecing back together how a bird sang. He and his students showed that they could follow a molecule of air as it entered the nostrils and traveled down the trachea into the air sacs tucked behind a bird’s lungs. They figured out which nerves attached to which muscles, how the muscles expanded and compressed those air sacs like the bellows of an accordion, and how the sacs pushed breath out past the flaps of the syrinx to become waves that made sound. Their work was published in Science and Nature and every paper was celebrated with champagne, but unlike other laboratories, there were no cork dents in the ceiling, no uncontrolled frothing or spilling of cheap bubbling wine into plastic tumblers. In David’s lab, glass flutes were poured to perfection, a dry tangy drink to be savored, not gulped, a reward for good solid work, clever experiments, nifty techniques, and determined scientists. And always, they toasted the small, resilient singing birds.
Lately there had been no such successes. In the past eighteen months there had been dead birds and dead ends while the expiration date on his remaining grant advanced. There was an Italian post-doc set to arrive in a month and David hoped he’d be worth the balance of the funds. He walked faster down the hallway. If he didn’t have some sort of break through soon, he wasn’t going to be doing any research at all.
Back in his laboratory, he heard ringing and passed quickly into his office. The throb in his head had not lessened. As he leaned for the phone, he glanced at the caller ID and saw a jumble of numbers span the screen. An international call. Possibly Sarah. Probably Sarah. He let go of the Neuroscience magazine and it sprang open on his desk. He reached for the phone and then stopped, his hand hovering above the receiver. In the laboratory, a zebra finch tooted and a starling whistled. The ringing continued two, three, four more times and then it stopped.
He opened the top drawer of his desk and took out a bottle of aspirin. He popped the top, shook out two pills and swallowed them hard without water. He sat down at his desk and stared at the large glass jar of armadillo fetuses that Sarah had given him as a present. Four white armadillos with ridges on their backs, eyes closed, suspended in fluid, connected by a single umbilical cord, never to become adults. The babies we won’t have. Sarah. At every moment. Sarah. He closed his eyes. In twenty minutes the aspirin would be working, taking the edge off the pain. Thoughts and memories weren’t as easily dulled.
“It’s not as simple as that,” Sarah was saying. They were in their graduate school apartment in Louisiana and she was leaning against the armrest on the couch with her left leg bent, the other sprawled over David’s thigh. The evening was muggy and the rotating table fan did little to dry the perspiration beading on her tanned skin. Ed, their roommate and best friend, sat across from them on the wooden floor, back against the wall, his arms resting on his knees, a bottle of beer dangling from one hand. The room was mostly dark, only a pale fluorescence from the kitchen illuminated half of Ed’s face.
“Who said it was simple?” David asked.
“You did. You said there’s a signal, there’s a receiver, but…”
“That’s not the same thing as saying it’s simple,” Ed said. He set his beer down and pulled his long damp hair back into a tight ponytail at the nape of his neck and then took up his beer again.
David looked at Ed—bearded, rugged—and then back to Sarah. They’d been talking and drinking since dinner and now it was nearing midnight. Tomorrow Ed would be leaving again for four months in the tropics and neither David nor Sarah was anxious for him to go.
“All I’m saying is that signal and receiver are only part of communication, and only a small part at that. It’s more about collaboration.”
Both men took sips of beer, waited for her to keep going. Each loved it when she was like this, slightly drunk, excited and argumentative.
“Collaboration?” Ed said.
David looked over at Ed. “I told you. Beware of a formidable woman.”
Sarah kicked David in the thigh with her heel. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Everything,” Ed answered. And then, looking straight at Sarah, “And… that he’s in love with you.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. David held his beer bottle up to the light and realized it was empty. “Last round.” He lifted her leg from his thigh, stood up to go into the kitchen. “Sarah?”
She shook her head no.
“Ed?”
“Of course.”
From the kitchen David heard Ed say, “And you intimidate him a little.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Sarah said.
Two days after Ed left Sarah came home late from the clinic and found David sitting on the couch surrounded by papers about birdsong. Immersed in a new research topic, he barely glanced up.
“Do I intimidate you?”
David looked up. She stood in the doorway, hands on her hips, thin arms jutting out at the elbows like a cormorant drying itself after a dive. “Terribly.” He turned the page on the manuscript he was reading.
“Ed says I do.”
“Ed’s full of shit.”
Sarah sat down next to him on the couch. David put his papers to the side.
“You’re not serious are you?” he asked.
“Haven’t you noticed that we talk more when Ed’s around?”
“Of course. Three mouths versus two.”
“No, I mean you and me. You talk more when he’s here.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I think we’re more honest with each other, too, when he’s around.”
“We’re always honest.”
“Are you?”