Cages Read online

  On the home page there were six birds on a background and as she scrolled over each bird, she heard its song, the melodies lovely and sweet. Could it be that she’d never truly listened to a bird sing? We study how and why birds sing. And below that: Our work bridges the neural control of a complex learned behavior to its evolutionary and ecological relevance in the natural environment. She didn’t really know what that statement meant. She clicked on David’s name and saw a round-faced man with dark curly bangs almost covering his eyes. Her first thought was that he needed a haircut and a better photographer. She discovered that he was teaching and on a whim, decided to go to the class. She sat in the back of a 250-person lecture room, and although she’d never been much interested in biology in high school, his animated lectures about birds drew her in. She returned for the next lecture and the next.

  It took her a while to convince him to let her work in the lab, but he finally agreed. She was made to understand that punctuality was critical, and so she arrived at 8:30 sharp. He moved with ease within the regular spaces of the building. His clean-shaven face, quick boyish smile and equally boyish body had a disarming effect. The two of them spoke little but he was patient and kind and quick to laugh. Only now, as she’d just learned, he had a temper as well, a measured rage as he tapped his index finger in regular pulses on the limp bird’s breast, hissing a useless command to it to breathe. That outburst unsettled her, as did the conversation about choice afterwards. He seemed angry, and in her discomfort, she sought out Anton. She suspected Anton didn’t really want to research birds but the thought made no sense. If he didn’t want to research birds, then he wouldn’t be doing it, would he?

  She looked around the lab. Black countertops, computers, wires, bottles of chemicals, cages stacked on top of cages. Theirs was the only laboratory at the institute that studied birds, the only one that smelled of dust and seed, the only one where feathers floated like snowflakes in a glass paperweight. The other neuroscientists studied mice which were kept in the basement. David had taken her down for a tour and she’d seen the rooms, each with hundreds of twelve by twelve-inch cages. Bred to express one gene or another, only their blood, cells and DNA mattered. Once the right strains were achieved, the mice were guillotined and frozen or ground in a blender. Liquid samples of blended skin or neat slices of brain could then be brought up to the laboratories for analysis. “Unlike our birds,” he said, “you don’t need to see or hear a mouse.”

  She had loved what he’d said in a lecture. “Birds will tell us about the evolution of language. They might reveal the secrets of communication. Unlike you and me, a bird can be opened up. We can see what’s on the inside.” She liked that idea more in theory, as a metaphor, than she did now in practice.

  She heard a white-crowned sparrow pecking inside his soundproof box, a repeated angry sounding tap. These are angry times, the photography professor had said with a shrug of his shoulders, excusing himself. Thinking of him brought on the usual frightening sense of defeat.

  She made her way over to the birdcages, stepping around computers, microphones and amplifiers, mobile recording stations connected to one another by thick red, black and green wires. The stations were rolled about during the day, moved in front of one birdcage or another during experiments, rarely turned off or put away at night. She looked in at the Inca dove. He was the only one of his kind in the lab and she wondered whether he was lonely.

  In the first days of the job, she had tripped again and again over the cables, and David, watching her untangling herself, had said nothing, only raised his eyebrows. Likely he had worried that, at best, her trips would unleash the machines, zero out the electrical signals, stop the collection of data. At worst, she might jerk the birds from their tethers, leave them hanging in midair, fluttering and panicked, undoing the hours of wiring surgery he’d done.

  Forget it, she told herself when she returned from Chicago. Think of it as a bad picture, out of focus, poorly exposed, but she had not succeeded in destroying the memories. There were still frightful pushing, pulling dreams at night, followed by moments like now when she could hear him speaking and almost feel the heavy breath of his whisper in her ear. These are angry times. Days in which she worried a part of him had been left, forever imprinted on her body, that despite the cleaning out of her womb—the suction, scrape and bleeding that followed—he had not been totally removed.

  She went down the hallway to the aviary, opened the door and stepped inside. She had no business in the aviary right now, nothing to do here, but she wanted to be alone. In this space, amidst one hundred flying, tooting zebra finches, she knew she wouldn’t be bothered because no one ever came in except her and the student who fed the birds on the weekends. She leaned against the wall while birds zipped around one another, the sounds of caged wings echoing off of the narrow, tiled walls.

  Photographers should be seen and not heard. His eyes were dark green, waterless. He was a visiting professor, quite famous, who’d been brought to the university for a two-month course. He singled her out after he had seen her photograph and invited her to coffee.

  It seems that you already understand that. A pause. Personality can only come through the photographs. He’d touched her arm gently. You don’t want people to notice you. It interferes with the work.

  She smiled back, felt his leg muscle flex against her thigh under the table.

  Quite remarkable to already know that at your age.

  His fame excited her. His attention, in those months focused solely on her, meant she had true talent. He was her reason to leave, her gate to a real city, her introduction to working artists. By the time he left, she’d made plans to move to Chicago.

  A zebra finch singing near her stopped suddenly. She watched him cock his head, approach his food container, and then eat a seed. Standing now in the aviary among the birds tooting and bleeping around her, she tried to quiet her mind and remind herself that she was as far away from Chicago and the photographer as she could get. The bird laboratory was a kind of refuge, a place where she was safely in the company of two scientists tapping away at computers, scribbling diagrams on white boards, fighting about whose hypothesis was right. Surrounded by birds. Beautiful, loud, trilling, squawking—but speechless—birds.

  She took a deep breath and left the aviary. Back in the laboratory, she sat down at the main computer. Every day after the birds were fed and the cages cleaned, her job was to make three copies of all data recorded the previous day. She stored the cds in large, three-ring folders that were kept on bookshelves in the conference room. She inserted a blank disk, dragged the files and clicked on the green button. While the files were copying, she lifted her head and looked outside. The pink morning had turned blindingly bright, the sun reflecting off the frozen crust of a new snow.

  She heard a zebra finch sing a series of songs and looked over at him. His backpack held wires that were woven up, through, and out the cage. Plugged into computers, they recorded his breaths, heart beats, and any songs he chose to sing. This one was a loud and prolific singer.

  When the data were copied, she hit the eject button, removed the disk and used a fine black pen to write the bird’s number, the names of the files and the date. She inserted another, dragged, double clicked and stared at the lifeless screen while the computer worked. She heard Anton’s whistle and listened to him humming and moving around the lab behind her. She sat up straighter in her chair. He seemed to be in a better mood again.

  There was something appealing about him, but she was struggling to put words on just exactly what it was. He seemed simultaneously accessible and inaccessible, strong and vulnerable, serious and light-hearted. The scar on his cheek had twitched as they’d spoken in his office. Was he winking at her again? Was that wishful thinking? She didn’t know him at all. They’d hardly exchanged more than a hundred words. She imagined his type was quite common in Italy, or wherever he was from, but she wasn’t accustomed to men like him. She didn’t trust her feelings.

>   Since starting to work in the lab, she had begun a new plan. She would save money so that she might travel and take pictures of birds. In her spare time, she read about them, their hollow bones, the air sacs pumping air through their lungs, their funny voice boxes imbedded in the middle of their chests, their ability to fly up and immediately away, migrating to a new place two times a year. She fed them, scrubbed their cages, scanned their nests for eggs. She did as she was told, positioned cages with female birds in front of those with males, tempted them to sing. She was a twenty-four-year-old woman at an interim job. Temporary and safe. And with Anton and his accent, the many species of birds, it almost felt exotic. She had no expectation that she would slip day by day, imperceptibly at first, and then obviously, into love with a man and the sound of his voice, or birds and the world of their bleating songs.

  The week his bird died, Anton stayed late at work every night. On Friday he sat in his office, papers spread across the desk, staring down at printouts of songs. The building had mostly cleared out. Rebecca left at five and David had gone to dinner downtown.

  Computers were powered down, doors pulled shut, the internal alarm system enabled. Even the post-docs were relaxing. In the bathrooms, women were hanging up their lab coats, pulling on winter boots and lining their lips with shades of red. Soon, like David, they would be stepping into restaurants humming with conversation, sitting down at tables, poring over menus, ordering lamb, pork or steak, clinking glasses of beer or wine. Anton liked to be alone in the lab at night with only the birds, quiet in their cages, and the hums and purrs of computers and machinery.

  He was glad to have the space to himself, never inclined to join them because he usually ended up feeling confused like an old man who was hard of hearing. Crowds and background noise made understanding English, not to mention being understood by others, more difficult. Instead, he often worked late, returning to the laboratory after dinner, walking from his apartment up and across the empty campus in the dark. He would swipe his card through the security system, wait for the green light to flash, and enter the institute.

  He took out a piece of paper and began to write an over-due letter to his mother. He could see the blue envelope of her last letter on the table at his house, where it had been for weeks, and tonight he finally felt like he could cross the distance and write. She wanted to know what this western American city looked like. He could have just taken a picture and sent it to her but he’d always refused to buy a camera. Instead, he wrote:

  The city is constructed of boxes. The institute that houses our laboratory is a transparent, well-guarded rectangle. Inside this rectangle there are smaller spaces, mostly squares. The outer walls of the building are constructed of red brick and glass, the inner walls of the same. Rooms are delineated by plasterboard, doors and glass. Half-walled small spaces define work cubicles for students. My office is a perfect square. In the conference room, the walls are cut into parallel lines by the bookshelves and each book a small rectangle of its own. Down the hall, the aviary is a dirty, noisy square. The experimentation room, lined with thick, white Styrofoam, where I spend most of my time, is soundproof. Outside the walls, the desert is grey and flat and leads to another mountain range. I do not know what’s on the other side.

  The problems with his research worried him. He didn’t know what it meant but lately there had been a lot of dead birds and the death of the bird this week was a major set-back. He took down the blue binder and flipped through the pages until he found the one for “Red 31.” In her neat handwriting, Rebecca had printed the date and next to that the word deceased. He studied the bird’s history looking for clues as to why it suddenly had died, and without finding any, he closed the binder. He wrote:

  I’m not as sure as David, who came to neuroscience through a love of birds and their songs, that we are uncovering the truth of birdsong, and at times I doubt that it can even be done. Unlike him, I just want to understand circuitry, the wiring of memory. Truth is, I don’t care much for research with birds.

  It was funny how the act of writing made feelings more concrete and the act of writing his mother, in particular, with whom he’d shared more words on paper than in person, brought out his loneliest self.

  Birds. Anton didn’t like them much. Plain and simple, though they’d been a constant presence in his life. His grandfather’s nightingales. The storks he worked on for his master’s thesis. And now this work. He avoided looking at their eyes and at the sloughing epidermis where their beaks met their faces. He didn’t like the scaly feeling of their spindly legs or the way their toes sometimes curled around his pinky finger when he held them. He didn’t like the feeling of their quickly beating hearts or warm bodies in his hand, and the truth was, he resented them deeply when they died.

  All I want to do is use the bird to understand how memory works. Measure it. Distill it. How does our brain memorize patterns of sounds? If we can memorize, does that also explain how we can forget? Is forgetting the opposite of learning?

  The talking part, at least, was relatively easy for him. There were other, larger, problems. Computers crashed. Expertly placed electrodes failed to record a pulse. Some days his hands shook and he couldn’t be trusted to open a bird, or like this week, the bird died for no apparent reason.

  Rebecca had suggested that the bird had died by choice.

  “Surely, it’s an absurd notion,” David said to him later, “but I don’t have a better reason for that bird’s death.”

  Choice. An interesting concept. He continued writing.

  Everyone knows that birds don’t migrate east and west. South American species come north. European birds fly south. I feel I’ve been blown off course, like one of those confused “accidentals,” mistakes that bring delight to the bird fanatics who spot them. Just like those birds, I fear I’m destined to die of starvation, disorientation, or both.

  What would his mother make of this letter? They’d never talked much when he was a boy, but since coming to the States, their letters, for Anton at least, seemed to function as a type of journal. They never responded directly to what each other had written, though they continued writing back and forth in an old-fashioned way with pen and paper and stamps.

  He heard a soft whistle coming from a tiny microphone in one of the white-crowned sparrow coolers. Enclosed as they were, they didn’t know day from night. He listened for more. There was a buzz and trill, a tremolo of sorts, and then the descending sweep. No outside stimulus seemed to be needed. As it was, in its solid enclosure, this bird could only be singing to itself.

  Anton had been in the States for almost five years and he was ready to go home. He’d come at the urging of a professor, and then finally, his mother.

  “One of your professors stopped by today.” She was at the table sorting through photos while he arranged cold cuts and cheese on a plate.

  “Which one?”

  “Gianetti. He said he admired my work.” There was a slight smile on her face.

  Everyone admired his mother’s photographs and he wondered what else Gianetti admired about her.

  “He said that the USA is the only place to do neuroscience.”

  Anton cut a slice of cheese.

  “He said that here his technicians spend their days washing pipette tubes, but in the USA they use them and throw them away like bottle tops. A garbage can-full a day. He said his lab needs another fifteen years just to catch up to what they’re doing over there.”

  Anton placed the plate on the table beside her, careful to not get the food too close to her photographs. Their lab was not fifteen years behind and he doubted Gianetti, with his quiet but constant ego, would have ever admitted such a thing even if it were true.

  “He said you’re too talented to stay here. He needs you over there.”

  The first post-doc, four years in St. Louis, got him a couple of scientific publications and landed him this second post-doc with David; but now he needed results worthy of publication in Science or Nature. Dead ze
bra finches were not a ticket home. He heard David say, This is how science is done. Baby steps that add up over the years. Anton didn’t have time for baby steps. He needed the elusive engram that David didn’t believe in.

  The world of neuroscience had grown quickly. When David was a post-doc, there had been about six thousand neuroscientists, but by the time Anton went to his first meeting, attendance had doubled, and now they were predicting that there would soon be twenty thousand neuroscientists worldwide. Whereas David was on the forefront of the first wave, Anton was a late arrival. If he had any hope of a career in neuroscience, he needed to sprint. He needed a big win, a World Cup goal.

  The white-crowned sparrow sang again, and Anton half-heartedly sketched how the song would look if digitized. Whistle, buzz, buzz, trill, trill, downward sweep.

  Tremolo always preceded by a trill. Auditory awareness of one thing seemed to bring on the other. Was that fixed in the brain?

  Everyone knew that auditory feedback was important. The definitive experiments had been done long ago. Take out a bird’s ears and not only does he go deaf, but slowly he loses his ability to sing. What if he could turn that tidbit of information about deafness into a tool to find engrams? What if Anton could take away the bird’s ability to sing, but not the ability to hear? What would happen if the bird sang but made no sound? He ought to, if predictions held, forget how to sing. Could he then see changes in the bird’s nerve cells as it began to forget its songs?

  He reached for a piece of paper and began sketching the syrinx, the bird’s voice box, imagining how it might be possible to temporarily keep it from vibrating, devising how he might be able to mute a bird.

  He labeled the parts. A syrinx was an awfully small place to work, no bigger than a rice grain. How would he keep the bird from making sounds?