Cages Read online

  “It’s just,” he hesitated and smiled, “let’s just say I’m the opposite of a male bird. You sing. I listen.”

  David hadn’t truly stuttered as a child, but as an adolescent he’d shown a lack of fluency when it came to putting emotions into words. His parents had assumed their son’s muteness in the face of feelings had more to do with teenage lethargy than anything else. It wasn’t until he met Sarah that he’d learned there was a name for his condition.

  They lay in bed one night. “Alexithymia,” she said.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Difficulty identifying feelings and describing them to others, lack of fantasies, operative thinking while appearing to be super-adjusted to reality.” She twisted a curl of his hair around her finger.

  “So now people who are well-adjusted and don’t feel the need to blab about their feelings all the time have disorders?” But he knew she was on to something and was glad that the room was dark. He didn’t know how he felt about being seen so clearly.

  “It’s not in the DSM as a disorder. It’s a personality trait. Patterns get set when you’re young. It’s like one of your birds that has learned to sing. You say that he’s crystallized his song, don’t you? Once he learns it, it can’t be changed.”

  He felt her lips on his neck, her hand caressing his arm.

  “It’s not severe, but noticeable. I think it’s why you gravitated towards nature and birds.”

  Sarah was probably right. David had discovered his ability to hear and identify sounds the way some children learned they’re good at throwing a baseball. Bird watching gave him permission to be alone, a sense of exploration, emotions that didn’t require explanation. From the earliest time he could remember, whenever he heard a sound, he was drawn to its source. Whether it was a bird, insect or squeaky faucet, he listened, made a mental note, and then he never forgot the sound again. At eight years old, he was explaining to his mother the differences between bird, chipmunk and squirrel sounds. By ten, he could identify over fifty species of birds, five or six mammals and a good number of insects. On his twelfth birthday, his parents gave him a microphone and tape recorder.

  As a teenager, he walked every morning before school through the wooded area behind his house. Setting out, his heart rate rose in anticipation of what he might see or hear. There was the feeling that he was sneaking up on something mysterious, seeing what no one else was seeing, hearing what others couldn’t understand. The world was a detail of sounds, and every year that world became more interesting, the soundscape more complex, his ability to hear subtleties more refined. He learned to distinguish a young robin from a seasoned singer. A mockingbird that migrated to Florida from one that flew instead to Costa Rica. People were impressed, but really it wasn’t so hard. Mockingbirds imitated songs from other birds, and only migrants to Costa Rica picked up songs from other Costa Rican birds. Before David met Ed, he didn’t know there was another like himself.

  The next day Sarah went to a pet store and brought home a parrot which she named Skinner. When David came in from the laboratory, he found her assembling a five-foot cage in the kitchen. Her long brown hair, parted in the middle, hung over her shoulders and covered her face. The bird, nervous in its new surroundings, paced left and right on a perch.

  “What’s this?” David asked. “A substitute for Ed?”

  “Just making sure you keep talking,” she said over her shoulder.

  David eyed the bird.

  “He’ll grow on you.” She reached out and the parrot stepped onto her hand. She placed him in his new cage and turned to kiss David.

  “Truth is,” she whispered, “I’m glad you don’t go off into the forest like Ed.”

  David wondered whether she was just saying this for his benefit. What did she see in him when there were other men, ruddy and fit, smart and adventurous, like his roommate? He felt her fingers at his waist, unbuckling his belt. He slipped his hands underneath her tank top and let his fingers move across the waves of her ribs to her breasts. Her personality defied the slightness of her body. He knew he was slow to put words on his innermost feelings, knew he wasn’t the best conversationalist, nothing like Ed who could charm a group with his stories of the tropics. The parrot let out a squawk. He hoped he was enough.

  “Like I was saying the other night,” she said between kisses. “It’s a lot more than signaler and receiver. It’s about context, perception and collaboration.”

  A week into the semester, David returned from lecturing and found a young woman with bright red hair at his laboratory door. “Waiting for me?” Clearly, she had disregarded the sign in the stairwell that read: Researchers only. No students allowed.

  “Yes. I’m in your class.” She fidgeted with her hands. “I want to work in your laboratory.”

  He laughed at her forwardness. “What’s your name?”

  “Rebecca.”

  “Rebecca, I’m sorry. I’m not hiring, but come on. I can suggest other people.” He scribbled the names of two labs that he knew were in need of undergraduate help, and could afford it, and handed her the paper, but she shook her head.

  “No, I really want to work in your lab.” She had a small diamond piercing in her nose.

  “Why?”

  “You said it in class, you know. Birds can tell us about the beginnings of language.”

  The diamond glinted in the sun when she turned her head and her blue earrings matched her eyes.

  “It’s more than that.” She was flustered. “They fly and sing and nest and seem, I don’t know, unbounded in the ways we are.”

  “Unbounded?” It was an interesting thought, but at the end of it all, he could have told her, everything was bounded and bounded in exactly the same way. “Really, I appreciate your interest, but I truly don’t have any projects for undergraduates right now. I’d be happy to suggest some reading material to you.”

  “I don’t mind what kind of work I do.” Her neck and face flushed red, and when she turned her head, there was the glint of her piercing again. “I’m drawn to them.”

  Her honesty and vulnerability were charming. If only more undergraduates could be so moved. He wished he actually had research funds; certainly he could use the help. “That’s a sentiment I can relate to. I’ve always been drawn to them too. I promise to call if anything comes up.” But the paper on which he took down her number was promptly buried by other papers on his desk. For the next week he noticed her in the back of the auditorium listening attentively to his lectures, scribbling notes. Once again, she returned to his laboratory.

  “You do get points for being persistent,” he said. He unlocked the door and they passed through his lab and conference room into his office. He moved a stack of papers from a chair and motioned for her to sit down.

  “I just wanted to say,” she said. “I mean, what you said in class today.” She looked at her notebook and read: “Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat.” She looked up at him. “That’s so poetic.”

  David didn’t tell her the sentence wasn’t his, but Steven Pinker’s, a much more famous scientist.

  “And you said, Birds might reveal the secrets of communication.”

  Anyone who paid that much attention in lecture had the potential to be good in the lab. “Ok, you’ve convinced me. I’m putting you on the payroll.” He would ask the institute’s director for emergency bridge funds if it came to that.

  A short time after she began working for him, he learned she wasn’t a student.

  “So what were you doing in my lecture?”

  “Crashing the course.”

  “Why?”

  She paused, as if unsure how to answer. “Like I said, I like birds. I’m drawn to them. I looked you up, was taken by what you’d written on your webpage. I thought your work looked fascinating.”

  “You lied?”

  “No, I never said I was a student, only that I wanted to work here.”

  Duri
ng the next few weeks David taught Rebecca to care for the birds. He taught her how to properly scrub their cages, how to give them the right amount of food, which supplements to use with different species. The zebra finches were fed peas and boiled eggs every other day. The robins, starlings and white-crowned sparrows got crickets. He showed her how to hold a bird in her palm, with the head between her second and third finger.

  “Too firmly and you hurt the bird. Too lightly, and it will escape your hand.”

  He stood beside her as she learned to put the colored identification bands on the birds. “Go palm up, it’s easier,” he said.

  She turned her palm up and with a forceps slipped a red band around the bird’s ankle.

  “That’s it. You’ve got it. Now squeeze the band completely shut with these pliers.”

  She looked up when she finished.

  “Well done. Now let’s do a few more.”

  The thin pencils she used to hold her hair in place on the top of her head stuck out like misplaced chopsticks. It made him think of an African grey-crowned crane. Food for the eyes, Ed called it after his trip to Kenya. David remembered Ed saying, In west Kenya, I stayed with an African doctor who runs a small farm, does everything from making methane fuel from cow manure to gravity-fed water systems and organic vegetables. He had a couple of gray-crowned cranes too, loose on the property grazing back and forth in the grass between the cows, and when I asked him why he kept the birds, he said: “People don’t just need food for their stomachs; they need food for the eyes.”

  Yes, food for the eyes. Rebecca was beautiful. There was a vibrancy about her, a confidence in the way she carried herself, though a distinct judiciousness to her speech. In the short time she’d been in the lab, she was proving to be a willing student, meticulous in bird care, always on time, all about the business of work, but she didn’t speak unless spoken to. As he stood next to her, he had two rapid, unrelated thoughts. She’s like a bird, and her quietness is unsettling. He didn’t know what to make of these thoughts. Was chattiness in humans tied to biochemistry? Recently, researchers in the Netherlands had shown that when injected with testosterone, the females of some bird species would begin to sing.

  Regardless of her quiet nature, David was grateful that by the time Anton, the Italian post-doc, arrived in four weeks, Rebecca would be fully trained. David would orient Anton to the laboratory, the surgery techniques and the experimental protocols. By the end of the first month, with Rebecca’s clean, organized cages, and a new set of birds, they would be ready to begin a series of intensive experiments.

  David’s conference room was really a library. There were hundreds of books on every shelf, as if he’d collected any title that included the word “bird.” Rebecca liked to spend time in the room, pulling books from their places, flipping through the pages and reading bits of information here and there. She was particularly drawn to the older volumes. She reached up on her tiptoes and took down one that looked quite old. The Zebra Finch: Notes on a Model Bird. She opened it to the beginning and read.

  In the dry central grasslands of Australia, the small finch, Taeniopygia guttata, lives in colonies of one hundred birds or more. Gregarious and boisterous, these birds can be easily identified by even the casual naturalist. Their upper bodies are gray, their bellies white. The tail is striped black and white, presumably giving the bird its name. Males are distinguished by rust colored cheek patches behind each eye. Both sexes have bright reddish-orange beaks and legs.

  Zebra finches feed in flocks, landing in one large swooping motion onto the ground, picking at fallen grass seeds, and occasionally, small insects. At the slightest noise or commotion, they rise as one and flutter back to the trees to empty their crops. Among them, there is an almost constant chorus of “tet tet” calls, resembling the beeping of a group of children softly tooting toy trumpets.

  In the field, they say, birds pair for life and both males and females care for the young. In the field, they breed from October to April, the females selecting nest sites, the males gathering the dry grasses and sticks that the female then uses to construct the dome-shaped nest. In the field, a female lays three to six eggs per nest. After two weeks, the eggs hatch and featherless pink chicks are born. At five weeks of age, the nestlings leave home.

  First, the zebra finch was collected because it was pretty, then, because they could be kept in captivity, breeding readily in a cage at any time of the year. They are easy pets and reasonably amusing companions to the curious naturalist. These birds are resilient and of great use to the experimental behaviorist. Bluntly put, one can accomplish a great number of experiments with the zebra finch and it will not die.

  She flipped to the beginning to check its publication year. 1952. She shut the book. Australia. The birds were not even on their original continent. She wondered whether they knew this, or could sense it. They seemed happy enough in the lab but they would probably be happier if she stopped reading and gave them their morning peas and eggs.

  During the first days, when Anton, the post-doc, arrived at the laboratory, he found Rebecca in the routine of feeding the birds. Zebra finches, flitting on and off their perches, chattered loudly, scattering seed onto the floor. There was the beating of wings against the wire cages, trills of canaries, high-pitched whistles from the starlings, and the sound of birdseed, like the frozen snow outside, crunching beneath his shoes.

  He unwound the orange scarf from around his neck, leaving it hanging over his shoulders while he unbuttoned his overcoat, took if off and hung it on a hook over a lab coat that looked like it had never been worn. His body was warm, glowing from the past hour he’d spent in the gym. The scar on his left cheek, usually imperceptible, stood out as a series of small white traces after exercise.

  He’d been sixteen, sitting in the living room tightening a guitar string. When he plucked it, the string snapped and hit his face just shy of his left eye. He sat stunned for a moment before he raised his hand and came away with a smear of blood. Setting the guitar aside, he went to the bathroom, washed, and then he stared into the mirror to study the damage. The string had slashed him at the top of his cheekbone. Sound vibration forever imprinted on his skin.

  That night at dinner he’d expected his mother to mention the mark, but absorbed in reviewing her newest photographs, she didn’t notice. Now the scar was only perceptible to those who came really close, or, he liked to think, like the dots and dashes of Morse code, decipherable only to those who bothered to learn.

  “Grüß Gott,” he said, directing the greeting at Rebecca.

  She turned to him and smiled. “That doesn’t sound like Italian.”

  “It’s not.” Her eyes were blue and intent. Most Americans, he noticed, didn’t hold eye contact for long, but she wasn’t afraid to look at him.

  “I thought you were Italian.”

  “Südtirolean.” He didn’t break the connection.

  She raised her eyebrows in question. “So what do people there speak?”

  “German mostly. Some Italian. A few people speak Ladin too.”

  “Latin?”

  “No, Ladin. Another language.”

  “I’ve never heard of that.”

  “You’ve never been to Südtirol.”

  There was a moment of hesitation. She looked away, clearly frustrated. “But which country do you live in?”

  “Depends. We go back and forth, depending on the year, the war, the government.” The words didn’t come out the way he wanted. Though completely competent in English, his accent sounded harsh and cumbersome to his ear. Although he practiced at night, try as he might, he could not make his mouth and lips move properly around the English words.

  “Which war?”

  “The latest. World War II.”

  She didn’t say anything before she turned back toward her work. Her red hair was twisted up on her head. A few strands curled around the nape of her freckled neck and he had the urge to reach out and touch them. He removed his blue and orange kni
t hat. Below, his dark hair was sheared short and even now, in his early thirties, thinning.

  “I thought you were Italian,” she said.

  “I am, half. My mother’s an Italian speaker, my father’s a German speaker. On the streets people speak mostly German. I speak both but I like German more.” He was aware of the fact that whenever he was in her presence there was a tingling on his skin and his English became even more self-conscious. More than once, he’d found himself thinking about her in the middle of the day.

  “Your parents don’t speak the same language?”

  Anton laughed. “Of course, they speak German together.” He’d never thought of it quite like that, but maybe language had been the fundamental problem between them. His mother had always insisted on Italian with him, which his father couldn’t understand. Her German, though fluent, always seemed strained.

  He watched Rebecca slide the gates up and reach into the cages, one by one, pulling out the half empty, feces-coated plastic water containers. She drew out the seed containers too, tipping the hulls into the trash and then tossing all the containers into the large black sink for washing. The insides of her wrists, when she dumped the containers, flashed pale white, the deep blue veins underneath the skin visible for just a second.

  She hesitated in front of a cage. “One of the finches has lost his band.”

  Without the band, the bird would be useless for experiments, there’d be no way to keep track of his movements, no way to follow his song.

  “Do you need help?” He moved to her side.

  She shook her head. She raised the gate, inserted her hand. The four birds in the cage fluttered up and back, calling out against the intrusion. The entire laboratory of zebra finches joined in their anxiety. She cornered the band-less bird in her palm and removed him. The laboratory went quiet again. She snapped a blue numbered band around the bird’s twiglike leg, raised him to eye level and stared at him for a moment before returning him to his cage. The small finch perched for a second, immobilized, as if taking in both his freedom and the confines of his cage once more. He bobbed his black and white striped tail as he balanced on the perch. His eyes were glassy and alert and the orange cheek patches below them jumped with every twitch of his head as if he were still considering Rebecca, only now from this new vantage point.