Cages Read online

  Anton was close to her and wanted to say something, but what? That he was good at dancing, a better conversationalist in German, Italian or even French than in English? He looked at the birds. She was quiet like his mother. No need to speak when a nod or shake of the head would do. He opened his mouth, but then closed it again without saying anything. She turned to him and smiled and in that second, there was a flash of energy. He felt his face flush. He waited for her to say something else but she didn’t.

  He turned away to focus on “Red 31,” the bird for that day’s experiment, the finch that was going to provide the data he needed to publish his first solid paper. He noticed that David hadn’t yet removed the food dish from the cage, which violated the protocol he’d been taught, and so Anton pulled the food. Full stomachs didn’t go well with anesthesia.

  From the other side of the laboratory he brought a cage with female zebra finches and held it in front of the cage with “Red 31.” The bird hopped, puffed up his feathers and sang a half-hearted version of his song. “You won’t win any contests,” he said to the bird in German, “but you’re ready for your backpack.” He returned the cage of females to their spot on the counter.

  Anton took “Red 31” into his hand, slipped a white, elastic belt over the bird’s head and around his chest, just below the wishbone, and then, one at a time, he slid the bird’s wings free of the belt. Later, electrical wires could be connected to this belt, and then threaded out through the top of the cage, plugged into transformers and computers to measure nerve activity and breathing. He finished positioning the backpack and then released “Red 31” to his cage again, conscious all the while of Rebecca moving around the lab and the fact that both of them were glancing at one another intermittently.

  He flipped on the microphone and recorder and went back to the cage with female birds. When he slipped the gate up and inserted his hand inside, the birds flapped hysterically. He cornered one and waited while it fluttered up and down into his hand.

  “Males,” he’d heard David say, “aren’t choosey. Any female will do.”

  Anton returned to the cage with “Red 31,” raised the gate and slipped the female inside. The drab gray female perched next to “Red 31” and pecked him on the head. “Red 31” let out a single, half-hearted bleep, and hopped left and right. Anton took a step back. Single bleeps didn’t count. “Red 31” needed to sing a whole song. The female hopped to his side again. Another peck. The male leaned into her. She hopped away. “Red 31” quickly righted himself, and then, with a ruffle of his feathers, he danced right and left blurting a bout of song, a series of harmonic bleeps repeated over and over. Lines of data streamed across the computer screen.

  Convinced that the bird was going to perform, Anton left “Red 31” and went through the conference room with its library of books to David’s office to tell him that the bird was ready for surgery. He found David leaning back in his chair, eyes closed, his feet propped up on the desk next to the large glass with the grotesque armadillo fetuses. A strange thing to have in one’s office and Anton wondered why David had them. And, a strange position for David, who usually was moving around or at the very least, banging the keyboard of his computer writing another paper or grant proposal.

  “Good morning, David.”

  David swung in his chair, as if embarrassed at having been caught in stillness. “Ah, Anton. Finally!”

  Anton noted sadness in David’s face and glanced away out of respect. “”Red 31” doesn’t sing a lot, but he is ready.”

  “Terrific. I’ll meet you there in five minutes.”

  Out in the laboratory Anton prepared the surgical table and David recounted the article he’d read that morning.

  “I’ll say it again,” David said. “There’s no evidence for the engram. Even Lashley, thirty years after he first proposed the idea, concluded that he could not find memory traces. I’m sure you read the paper.”

  “Of course I read it, David, but Lashley also said in the same paper, that even with evidence against it, learning occurs and it has to be recorded somewhere. And Lashley didn’t have the modern tools of molecular and cellular biology that we have.” Anton could tell he was having little effect on David’s stubborn thinking. He put the scissors and forceps into the pot to be sterilized. “Besides, David, just because you don’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

  “Right, like God?” David asked. He turned on the sink water, waited for it to warm and lathered orange anti-bacterial soap in his palms, allowing the suds to travel up his forearms.

  “No, like gravity,” Anton said.

  David rinsed and dried himself with industrial paper towels before he slipped his hand into the cage and encircled the male zebra finch with his palm. He positioned the bird on the surgery table, his hands gently holding its head while it jerked into anesthetic sleep. He didn’t answer Anton.

  “Or atoms,” Anton said.

  David sat down, rolled the chair toward the table and focused the microscope onto the bird. Anton positioned himself at his side and together they began to work on the bird.

  “Or sonar of whales,” Anton said.

  “Whales?” David chuckled. “Definitely lots of atoms there and I can see them.”

  “But you can’t hear them singing. Just because you can’t see it or hear it doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

  “What’s an engram?” Rebecca asked.

  David spun around in the chair, surprised by her voice. “Excellent question!” She was nothing like the previous technician who hardly managed to feed the birds and clean their cages and certainly never asked a question. “An engram is wishful thinking.” He swiveled back to the bird.

  Anton turned to Rebecca to explain. “Engrams are…hypothetical.”

  David interrupted him, “Hypothetical is right!”

  “Hypothetical right now,” Anton said, “but theoretically, easy to model. They’re shape changes on nerves that store memory—basically, they are memory imprinted on nerve cells. They are something we think, with the right tools, we can see.” He turned back to David. “Engrams are why Stanley Sommers will win the Nobel Prize and you won’t even be invited to the ceremony in Stockholm.”

  David laughed. “I hate aquavit and pickled herring anyway.” He placed his eyes over the oculars of the surgical microscope and focused closer in on the zebra finch. “And you’re always welcome to go work for Sommers and search for invisible memories with him.”

  “They are not going to be invisible for long.”

  “Forget engrams,” David said. “Single neurons will not reveal memory. The sum of any animal’s recall, including a person’s, will always be much greater than its parts. Memory has to be a system that grows from emergent properties.”

  Anton didn’t say anything.

  David continued. “You’d need to have a way to watch the nerves take on and then lose shapes with different behaviors. If you could do that in an animal with learned language, which you never will, you might get invited to the herring fest. Besides, there are more important questions to be answered, like how and why does a bird learn to sing in the first place?”

  “Well,” Anton said. “I happen to like herring.” He looked over David’s head toward Rebecca and gave her a wink.

  Rebecca smiled back.

  “Are the thermistor probes ready?” David asked.

  Anton handed him a probe, and then stepped in to train his eye into the second ocular. David worked quickly and expertly, adding commentary only occasionally. He excelled at this part, the artistry of measuring every aspect of a bird’s song. Anton had come to David’s lab because he was known internationally for his ability to make birds sing. They sang with weights on their backs and magnets stuck to their beaks, or with half their air sacs packed with sponge. Despite the nerves he cut, the red, blue and green wires he threaded across their skulls, just below their skin, or the electrodes inserted above their hearts, or on their rumps, they sang.

  David spok
e quietly as he inserted the tiny thermistors into the bird’s bronchi, thermistors that would measure airflow through the two halves of the syrinx, the bird’s version of a larynx.

  “Herring,” David said. “You Europeans eat the strangest things. One time in Italy they gave me slivers of white pig fat and expected me to be happy.”

  “Lardo?”

  “Right, lard.”

  “Not lard. Lardo. It is excellent,” Anton said. “Cured in marble caves in Tuscany.”

  “This is the whole point I’m making, Anton. I’m trying to teach you good taste. If you want to be successful you’ve got to develop good taste in science. Not pickled herring or pig fat and definitely not engrams.”

  “Lardo is considered a delicacy.”

  “By whom? The Romans who ate themselves and their civilization to death?”

  Like that of most Americans, David’s knowledge of history was mediocre, but Anton refrained from making any more comments.

  “Pass me another probe,” David said.

  Anton put it in his hand. David positioned the probe in place and began to sew up the bird.

  “So is that what made you switch from mice to birds?” Anton asked. Like him, David had done his graduate work on mice.

  “Is what made me switch?”

  “Trying to find out how a bird learns to sing?”

  “Well…yes, that and the fact that I took a bet.”

  “A bet on what?”

  “On whether birds would be as good as mice when it came to studying the brain.”

  “Who did you bet?”

  “A friend in graduate school.”

  “And so, he lost?”

  David stopped working on the bird and looked up.

  “Indeed, he lost.”

  “You don’t seem happy that you won.”

  David was still for a moment, as if in a memory.

  “Maybe we should make a bet,” Anton said. “I’ll take the risk and gamble. That’s exactly what I’m proposing to do with the engram experiments.”

  David looked down at the bird again. “Damn it.” He pulled the bird from the anesthesia funnel. Anton stepped back. Rebecca rushed toward them. The bird lay limp on the table. David stood and the chair rolled out, hitting the laboratory bench behind him in a loud crash. He tapped his index finger in regular pulses on the limp bird’s breast, stopping for a second and then continuing the rhythmic tapping. His head an inch above the bird. “Breathe, Breathe.” Although it had been known to work, this bird didn’t respond to avian CPR. The three of them stood for a second looking down at the dead bird, until finally David, jaw muscles pulsing, turned and walked away.

  Anton stared at the bird for a moment longer before he leaned over to flip off the flow of anesthesia, absentmindedly moving the funnel back into its place, scooting the bird to the right, collecting the surgical instruments in his hand. Rebecca didn’t move. A few moments later they heard the click of David walking back, his heels syncopating the tiah-tiah calls from the zebra finches.

  “My fault. I’m sorry.”

  “No one is at fault.”

  “Another one on my conscience.”

  Anton continued dusting up feathers. He raised his eyebrows slightly and tried to feign indifference. “It happens.”

  “Yes, but we needed that bird. Now you have to start again.” Every death marked the premature end of an experiment, but some were particularly unfortunate, coming only days before the critical follow-up data had been collected.

  Anton brushed the tiny feathers, which had stuck to his palms, into the trash can. “Before that, I would like another cup of coffee.” He reached out and squeezed David’s shoulder briefly on his way to grind the coffee beans.

  David stood for another moment at the surgical table, unmoving, trance-like. Infuriating how quickly a zebra finch could go. One moment, the bird was under anesthesia, its heart beating slowly, the breaths regular, the surgery almost finished, and then suddenly, there were no breaths at all. “I don’t know what happened. I’ve done that surgery a thousand times. I had the anesthesia on low. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Maybe the bird didn’t want to…” Rebecca said.

  David waited for her to finish the sentence and when she didn’t, he asked, “Want to?”

  “Maybe it didn’t want to be studied.”

  A group of zebra finches erupted into a chorus.

  “Of course it didn’t want to be studied, but that doesn’t explain why it died.”

  “Maybe it chose to.”

  “What?” David’s voice was curt.

  “Chose to die.”

  “Birds don’t choose to die. That makes no sense.” He took a deep breath and continued. “You’re anthropomorphizing, Rebecca. It’s a common mistake, projecting human emotions and agency onto animals.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and continued cleaning the cages.

  David stood still looking down at the bird. There was nothing natural in it, nothing of the struggle between predator and prey, no overt brutality or violence. And certainly no choice. Simply a heart going from slow to stop. The air sacs collapsing onto themselves; the neurons, already asleep, now fully arrested. He raised his voice. “How can you think there is choice in this? The bird didn’t choose to die any more than I chose to kill it.” This was a death for no purpose, and more than anything he couldn’t abide subjecting an animal to experimentation for no purpose.

  “Do you want me to clean up?” Rebecca asked.

  David nodded and walked away.

  Rebecca rubbed the black surgical table with soap and then followed with alcohol. She picked up the zebra finch, and put him on a paper towel on the counter and went to find Anton in his office.

  Anton was sitting at his desk, hands interlaced, head bowed, the small thinning spot on the top of his head exposed. He heard someone at his office door and looked up.

  “Rebecca?” He emphasized the R.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “No problem,” he said.

  “Were you praying?”

  “Maybe. I do not know.” He forced a smile. A funny question. Most people assumed biologists weren’t religious. His eyes skirted to the window. “Thinking.”

  The view from this office was not of the valley to the west and north, but of the snowy foothills behind the institute. At midday the white hillside reflected sunlight into the building. The Alps were never so bright in winter.

  “I’m sorry.” She glanced out the window to where he was looking.

  “Have you noticed?” Anton asked. “We can look out these windows, but no one can look in. From outside, the glass reflects sky, snow, trees.”

  “Except at night,” she said. “At night, when the lights are on, these labs are like fish bowls.”

  He looked back at her. “True. Except at night.”

  “Was the bird really important?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Well, it’s not suffering anymore.” He was conscious of the fact that it wasn’t an honest response. Unlike David, the birds did not call to him in any special way. He cared about their well-being no more than he cared about the well-being of beef cattle, or chickens or pigs.

  “Does it bother you, I mean, to work on them?”

  He made eye contact with her, holding her gaze. “Of course.”

  There was a flash from the diamond stud in her nose as she tilted her head. Her skin looked pale and perfect against her dyed hair. He wanted to say something to her about his frustration with the bird research, his search to find engrams, his quest—for lack of a better word—to discover how memories were made and where they were stored. Instead he gave another slight shrug of his shoulders. “Mice are worse.”

  Rebecca placed the zebra finch in her palm, its head drooping between her thumb and forefinger. His body was still warm, a warmth that was expressly unsettling because she knew it was temporary. The hyperactive bird had been stilled and silenced. She held him closer and
blew on the soft orange cheek feathers and then smoothed them down again with the tip of her finger. From a drawer she pulled out a plastic bag and shook it open. Why did she feel sad? Was she more sorry for Anton, who she could tell was upset, or for the bird? Was it so bad, the bird dying? Or was it her own discomfort with the conversation and David’s anger? She couldn’t say, but she knew that death could be a choice. Hadn’t she also made the choice to end a life? She slipped the limp bird inside the bag, labeled and stored it away in the freezer.

  In the two years since college, Rebecca had been a lot of things: aspiring photographer, waitress, daycare substitute, merry maid, and then aspiring photographer once more before being hired as a technician in this laboratory. She didn’t count her other intervening occupation—girlfriend to the famous Chicago photographer. Didn’t count the months spent walking the windy streets of the city, confined by forbidding buildings and the glare of tempered glass. Didn’t count the blank moments she’d spent under his body or the time she’d been trapped in the deep red glow of the dark room.

  A few weeks after she returned from Chicago, she’d found David’s lab as she was scrolling through websites related to vocal cords. Her voice had become breathy in Chicago and she wanted to know whether it would correct itself or whether she needed to see a doctor, but as usual, she’d gotten lost on the internet, her attention taken from link to link. A reference to vocal folds had brought her to videos of humans singing opera clips. Someone had stuck cameras down their throats recording grotesque and mesmerizing images of vibrating flesh. That website had taken her to another page that mentioned birdsong and she’d clicked from page to page watching birds sing in slow motion, their beaks moving exquisitely in a kind of ballet, creating songs more complicated than she’d ever thought possible from a bird. And then she’d landed on David’s page, which had, just as she’d seen for people, videos of the vibrating vocal folds of birds, and she realized that the lab was here in the city.