David sat at the desk in his office and stared at the armadillo fetuses in the jar. The lab was quiet. He looked outside beyond the manicured lawns of the campus and noticed that the hue of the valley had turned, seemingly overnight, from summer to fall. Tinges of brown, red and yellow had crept into the green plants. Soon they’d be pulling back their chlorophyll, shutting down their veins, letting go of this year’s leaves.
David had been sitting in this same place when he received the news of Ed’s death. No phone call. No voice. Email, the quiet messenger, nothing more than a click on his mouse. Words typed and transmitted to a long list of recipients from the Rapid Assessment Program headquarters.
The accident happened a few months after Sarah’s trip to Peru. Ed’s six-person airplane had gone down in eastern Ecuador, and in a single stupid accident, the entire RAP team, the most gifted tropical surveyors in the world, were killed. David read the statement again. He saw Ed, tall and bearded, his smile sly as he handed over his list after a morning of birding together. David closed the email and opened it again. Minutes went by in blurry disbelief until finally, he picked up the phone to call Sarah at work.
“It can’t be true,” she said. David heard the click of the phone. Thirty seconds later, it was ringing again. He heard a gasp on her end.
“I’ll pick you up,” he said. “We’ll go home.”
For the next month they lived in a state of shock, Sarah bursting into tears several times a day. At first, they spoke of nothing but Ed and after that, they spoke little at all. Sarah became angry in a way that was completely new. David thought that it was just a passing stage of grief, but instead of lessening with time, it deepened. He became suspicious, countering her anger with silence and longer work hours.
David knew that one woman had survived the crash and that despite a broken leg, had miraculously crawled her way out of the forest. He knew he could call her to find out the details of Ed’s death, but he never did. He preferred to believe that Ed didn’t die on impact. He imagined that when the noise of the crash was over, after the alarmed birds had flown up in a loud cackle of calls, after the last tree had cracked and split, there was a moment of silence. He wanted to think that in that moment, before bleeding and shock set in, before the neurons exploded in one last desperate spasm, that the final sound to hit Ed’s ears was the song of an unknown species of bird.
In the weeks and months after Ed’s death, he learned about the loneliness of an increasingly quiet marriage, the sadness of slipping into bed, Sarah’s back to his side, and then rolling out of the same bed the next morning, barely a word or a touch, only misgivings and Ed’s death between them. He’d longed for their graduate school days when the two of them, and if Ed was home, the three of them, would stay up all night drinking and arguing about behavior, psychology and the nature of their work. Now sitting in his empty lab, he remembered a conversation they’d had all back in Louisiana.
“You’re more comfortable in the lab, David, because you can control things and you need to control things, or at least you need to think you are controlling them,” Sarah said.
“Of course,” he said. “If we’re not controlling the right variables, then we are just being natural historians.”
“I disagree,” Ed said.
“With what? That David likes to control variables?” Sarah asked.
“With the idea that you need to control variables to be a modern scientist.”
“I didn’t say modern scientist,” she said. “What kind of label is that anyway?”
“That’s absurd, Ed,” David said. “Of course you need to control variables to be a scientist. Otherwise, we’re just observing and making assumptions based on our perceptions. There’s no objectivity if you don’t control.”
“So, in your eyes, I’m not a scientist,” Ed said.
“I’m just saying that without controlled experiments, we can’t know what we’re learning with certainty.”
He had believed the words at the time.
Ed laughed. “You’re just upset, David. My bird list has gotten so long you’ll never catch up.”
“Ah,” Sarah said. “Now we’ve slipped into male-male competition.”
David laughed then too. “Especially if you keep discovering new species every time you go to the tropics.”
He missed those days with even more intensity now. Ed dead. Sarah gone. The birds destroyed. Sarah’s questions had always helped him hone his ideas, but their conversations had suffered with Ed’s death. As he’d gone deeper into mapping the bird’s brain, into understanding how a syrinx vibrated, and how air moved through the body, she had said she was stepping back, becoming more interested in the “unknowable” that guided a life.
“Sounds like mumbo jumbo to me,” he said.
“And what you do is less mumbo? You’ve got a bird in a cage and you can see what neurons fire for different behaviors, but what does that have to do with that bird’s life?”
“Everything,” he said.
She began to cry then, just softly at first and then in loud sobs, and although he wanted to go to her, something had held him back.
He wished now that he’d been more generous in that moment. He remembered a dinner party, also after Ed’s death, when a colleague’s daughter asked him about his work and Sarah had answered for him. The memory still pained him.
“He steals baby birds from nests, raises them up, and then sticks wires into the males’ brains to measure how they sing.”
He had laughed nervously, shocked at her glib response. She’d had too much to drink.
“But you can’t really know which ones are male when you collect them, can you?” Sarah continued. “I mean a baby bird, male or female, isn’t more than just a bit of pink chicken skin, is it?”
“So how do you know?” the young woman asked David.
“When they get bigger,” he explained, “you put them under anesthesia, open them up and look for ovaries. It’s a simple surgery.”
“And what do you do if they’re female?” Sarah asked.
He was embarrassed by her. She was talking too loudly. He leaned over to the young woman and whispered in her ear. “I set them free.”
The conversation hung between them, a swelling silence that grew. He despised the quiet evenings at the house and so he bought a folding cot, called home and left a message that he’d be working late.
A few months later, she’d spoken across the silence of the living room. “I guess I’m just not that interested in birds in cages anymore.” This time there was no anger in her voice. He remembered standing up and walking out of the room. He remembered the drive back down the winding canyon to the university. The night, turning and turning on his cot. The next morning, he drove back to their house, spoke to her even before she got out of bed.
“It’s because of you and Ed, isn’t it?”
She fixed him with a look, and he immediately felt shame. A violation of his friendship with Ed, a violation of his memory.
“I suppose so.” She sat up and stretched, her eyes blinking at him and the sunlight of the morning.
He waited. She offered nothing more.
“And?”
She pushed back the covers, as if brushing him away, and stood.
“Come on Sarah. That’s all you’re going to say?”
Her back to him, she took off her nightgown and began to dress. “It’s not what you think. Besides, Ed’s dead.”
“Damn it, Sarah! You’re so bloody verbal, so good at getting all your thoughts and emotions into neat little packages, everything described perfectly with just the right amount of emphasis on each word, and now I’m getting the silent treatment?”
She buttoned her blouse. She still hadn’t turned around. She spoke in a quiet, controlled voice. “I need some space.”
Afraid of learning more, he hadn’t challenged her.
He rummaged on his desk now for the letter she’d sent most recently and ripped it open.
I was trying to open a space for us. All you ever spoke about was the neuroscience of birdsong, not even the birds themselves, just the nerves and muscles that made a bird sing. You became stingy, told nothing of yourself or your feelings.
“Maybe I had nothing to tell?” he said out loud.
You even quit going out to watch birds. You were only interested in what you could do in the lab. And then you wouldn’t agree to visit Ed and I was so disappointed that you didn’t come. I thought you’d realize it when the birds left. Without the birds, I thought the living room might fill with new sounds.
What bothered him most as he read this letter was that he only had her words on paper. He couldn’t hear her saying any of this. He couldn’t tell if there was regret or relief in her voice.
A kind of fog had settled over his thinking. Certainty. He’d always wanted it and he’d relied on the ability of science to show him what was certain in the world. Of course, at some level he knew science was just one way of knowing. There were truths to be found, but also mysteries he’d never be able to answer. Ed’s absence meant he’d never have the chance to have another conversation about certainty or experimentation or a million other things he thought they’d have time for. The sabotage and death of the birds meant that the muting experiments were over. And he would never be able to ask Ed about Sarah’s trip to Peru, though he guessed he wouldn’t have had the guts to do that anyway. He suspected they had come closer, recognized a long-standing attraction and acted on it, and that Sarah had realized what she’d been missing all the years.
He folded the letter, picked up his bag and drove home. From inside the house, tucked within the spruce trees, he could hear the grumbling of an approaching thunderstorm as it worked its way up the valley and he knew that if he drove out to the ridge he would see the dark clouds, rain already coming down like a shroud being pulled across the sky. One of the few summer storms this year. He heard Munin squawk in her aviary and decided to bring her in so that she could wait out the storm in the house. Outside the moist wind whipped against his face as he descended the wooden steps toward the aviary. Munin spied him, jumped from one perch to another and squawked again. She opened her wings, black in this light and flew toward the door when he approached.
“Back now.”
She flew to the other side of the aviary, perched with her good foot, using her bad leg for balance, and waited. He unfastened the latch and entered the aviary, pulling the door shut behind him. He took a piece of foil from his pocket and held it in his left hand for her to see. Munin cocked her head. He held his other arm straight out so that she could land on his forearm. He flicked his left wrist, but in the dark light, the foil barely shimmered. Munin opened her wings and began to fly toward him, but in the last second there was a gust of wind. The door to the aviary banged opened and with a quick change in angle, she flew out, perching tentatively on the branch of a nearby spruce tree.
David hurried outside after her. “Munin, the shiny stuff’s down here.” He extended his left arm, gently rocking his wrist with the foil. It had gotten darker and the bird oriented toward his voice, studying him, as if she had just realized that she was not within the confines of the aviary. Strong gusts of wind blew his hair into his eyes. He twirled the foil and held his right arm stiff. The bird ruffled and opened her wings slightly before closing them again. He felt a first and then a second drop of water. A gust of wind slapped across his face. The bird puffed up again, this time opening her wings wide, and then she was gone.
How does a relationship end? Beginnings are easy. There are always fixed points. An irresistible voice, a smile, shared interests. An inexplicable tingling on the skin, a wrist taken abruptly, bread bitten straight from another’s hand. The channels of communication open, neurons sensitized, sensory organs available. There is a burst of energy, a frenzy of activity, something like a bird’s zugunruhe before migration. The beginning is fattening, restlessness, take-off, flight. A setting out for destinations unknown, a movement north or south, no questioning of why. The end is less exact. Weariness, suspicion, nostalgia, thoughts and sensations existing without a past or a future. In the end, there is the absence of sound, a cessation of neurons, a magpie’s quiet escape through an open door.
At first Anton didn’t discuss Rebecca with David, but her absence, like that of the birds, was palpable. In the weeks following their last conversation, Anton kept returning to the one thing he didn’t want to think about: Rebecca’s outrage. He had gone once more to her apartment, but when he knocked on the door, she didn’t come out. He cupped his hands and peered in through the dark window. He tried the doorknob and realized the door was unlocked. The place, which had been sparse when Rebecca lived there, was now bare. She had left a futon mattress, complete with sheets, and the bed light, but when he opened the closet door he saw an empty rack that before had been crammed with her clothes. Even the air smelled of something else, not lemon, something other than her, a musty smell as if the apartment had been closed for a long time. All traces of Rebecca were gone, as if she had never lived in that place.
He heard her asking: Doesn’t it bother you to work on them?
His answer: Of course.
“You think she did it?” Anton asked David in one of their last conversations. “Is that why you fired her?”
“I didn’t fire her, Anton. The market went south. I downsized.”
Unsure what he meant, Anton didn’t respond.
“Look, Anton, I don’t know if she did it. There were, how many, eight, ten people working in this lab the last couple of months? Plus, the weekend animal care folks. Do I suspect her? Yes.”
“She didn’t do it,” Anton said.
David raised his eyebrows.
“I know her.”
David looked out the window for a moment and then he turned back to Anton. “Just because you’re sleeping with someone doesn’t mean you know them.”
Anton shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” David said.
Right after the sabotage, Anton had wanted to tell David that he had suspected her too and then to confess how bad this thought made him feel, but to do so, he would have had to reveal their relationship and he hadn’t wanted to do that. Now it was clear that David had known about it all along. Perhaps Rebecca was right. He was a coward.
“You don’t have to leave,” David said. “We can order more birds, begin again.”
Again, David seemed to already know Anton’s plans.
“How do you know?”
“I got a call from Gianetti. He wanted a reference. He asked about new technical skills, the neuronal work. I told him you were a master, had figured out the muting technique.”
“Gianetti needed a reference? Has he got early dementia? He’s the reason I came here. He knows my work.”
“Anton, I hope you find the memory traces. I really do.”
The rest of September was hot as usual in the valley, but cool at David’s house. Below the conifer trees, night came earlier than in the valley. David sat on the deck at dusk, a whisky in hand and stared at the empty aviary, the door propped open. Every couple of days he still went down to put food inside in case Munin returned, but so far, he’d only been feeding raccoons. He swirled the glass. The two ice cubes clinked together, melting, and the water formed little eddies in the whiskey. He thought about the part of the poem in which Odin, the half-blind Norse god, worries about his two ravens: Hugin and Munin. Thought and Memory.
I fear for Hugin
That he may not return,
Yet more am I anxious for Munin.
One would always have new thoughts. It was the memories that went astray. He took another sip of the whiskey and felt the burn at the back of his throat. He didn’t have much of a taste for the drink, but lately, he’d been thinking about Ed and that had been Ed’s nightly ritual.
“After a day in the forest, you feel invincible,” Ed had said. “You sit at the lodge, feet up on the railing, a cold whiskey in hand, and watch the day go dark. You listen. Half the world goes to sleep. The other half wakes up.”
David heard a hermit thrush, its melancholy song clear and piercing, as fitting as any this night. He thought about the time in Louisiana when he had accompanied Ed to a fundraiser for a local conservation organization. As a challenge Ed had offered his ears and bet a thousand dollars that he could identify the birds on any tape brought to him from any place in the world. His only requirement was that he be given the name of the country where the recording was made. The challenge was put up for auction. A local businessman and avid birdwatcher bet ten thousand dollars that he could stump the bird man. Ed accepted the bet. On the agreed evening, in front of an audience of fifty, Ed sat alone on stage, smiling sheepishly at the murmuring crowd of bird fanatics gathered to watch him. The businessman walked up and ceremoniously placed a cassette player onto the table and said “Bolivia.”
Ed sat down and pressed the play button. The recording was low-quality and scratchy. Ed listened, cocked his head, finished listening to the tape, re-wound and listened again, this time taking notes. After the second re-wind, when he again pushed the play button, he began to name each species of bird as it sounded on the tape, skipping just one. Everyone was impressed. He’d just earned the conservation organization ten thousand dollars, but David could tell that Ed was disturbed. After the clapping ended, Ed went back to the one bird he hadn’t named. He played it over and over.
“That,” he said, leaning into the microphone, “sounds like an antwren in the Herpsilochmus genus, but I know all those wrens. It’s not one I know.”
Two years later, in Pennsylvania, David received a reprint of a paper reporting the existence of a new species of antwren, which lived only in remote tropical forests of Bolivia. David looked at the drawing of the small, brown bird. Across the top, Ed’s scribble. The one I heard on that Bolivian tape. Ed had identified, by sound alone, a species new to science.
It was dark on the porch now. The whiskey had warmed. There was no burning, just the heat of the drink going down. Unlike Odin, Ed had never worried over memory. Ed was a man who had never forgotten a song, not even the song of a bird he’d not yet heard.
David called Ed to congratulate him. “Once I get going on this neuroscience research I’m going to put you in a box, stick electrodes in you and take some scans while you’re identifying birdsong. I’m going to figure out how you do it.”
Ed laughed. “Sure, I’ll be up the Tambopata River. Just give me a call.”
As David took the last sip of whiskey he heard Ed’s voice, the sound clear. Ed was saying, You forget yourself. You could walk out into the forest, listen for as long as you want. You could keep going, and no one would ever find you.
Before he left the States, Anton went to the deli. Reading his face in an instant, Francesco came around the stainless steel counter, his apron dusted white and crisp with flour. The balls of soft dough and strips of pasta waiting to be cranked through the machine were left without a thought, even though they would be ruined from too much time in the dry air.
As soon as Anton sat down, he began talking. He told Francesco about Rebecca and David, about how he’d remained silent, kept the relationship a secret, about the muting and stuttering and sabotage.
“I think she is responsible,” he said. “She asked so many questions about the birds, morals, right and wrong, and her behavior lately was either incredibly sweet or angry.”
Francesco listened. When Anton was done, Francesco brushed the flour off his hands with a dry towel, went to a cupboard, took out two small glasses and a bottle of port.
“I lied to David. I denied that she could have been involved even when I think she was. I saw her a few times on campus with her camera, but she told me she wasn’t taking pictures anymore.”
A quick pull on the old cork and Francesco filled the glasses half way up.
“I didn’t ask her about having seen her with the camera.”
Francesco wrapped two fingers around his glass and raised it. “There is always risk in speaking.”
They tapped glasses ceremoniously, making little sound.
“And when I went back to her house, she was gone. Why wouldn’t she tell me?”
Francesco waited for Anton to continue.
“I feel like I betrayed David.”
They drank, emptying the small glasses.
“I also feel like I betrayed her,” he said. “Why do I feel this way?”
“Because you loved.”
Anton shook his head. “I don’t know if I did, really. There is so much I didn’t share with her. Couldn’t share.”
Francesco reached for the bottle and filled their glasses again. “We are rarely brave.”
Anton left the States, returned to Europe, and established himself in Gianetti’s laboratory in Turino where he was free to work on memory, which continued to be elusive and slippery. He felt confused by what had happened with Rebecca and disappointed that he and David had never accomplished much with the birds. He was back to mice, horribly passive creatures, but better suited to finding the keys to memory. He reacquainted himself with the work culture of Italy, to the regular lunch hour when everyone left the lab instead of eating over their desks. He drank espresso after lunch and chatted with his new colleagues. There was a hollow feeling whenever he thought of her and so he tried not to. He waited for his mother’s letters from Africa, for her upcoming return.
Fall was short that year and snow fell early in the Alps. The first chance he had, he went to his grandfather’s house in the mountain village in Südtirol where he’d spent summers as a child. He bought snowshoes and hiked for hours over the wet snow and then he ventured higher into the silent mountains, the snow deeper and harder, layers of crystallized water packed upon layers of crystallized water. Come spring there would be the sounds of bells on sheep, bleating goats, barking dogs. The migrant birds would return and nightingales would sing from early morning through most of the night. He was happy to be back in Europe but not as happy as he thought he would be. There was a sense of relief but also some disappointment that he couldn’t precisely understand.
He mentioned his depressed state to David. Time, David had written back, give yourself time. You’ll find the excitement again. It always comes back. Science is part of you. You can’t stop it. But he hadn’t expressed himself well to David. It wasn’t only a problem with science. He listened to the crunch of his shoes on the snow and remembered a conversation he’d had with Rebecca.
“So how does this bird-poem end?” she asked.
She was standing next to the open window, her hair still long, hanging over her back, the air coming in, the sweat of love-making evaporating off his skin. She lay down next to him and rested her head on his shoulder, her arm over his chest, her fingers massaging him.
“After the long trip through seven valleys,” he told her, “the birds arrive at the holy land. Only thirty remain. They are broken, their feathers ripped. They are hungry and very, very tired, but the door keeper tells them they cannot come in. They should turn around and go back. The birds say no. They feel tricked, disillusioned. They have traveled a long way. They want to see their king. They insist.”
“Finally, the keeper opens the door. Inside it’s bright, so bright that they cannot see. He hands each bird a piece of paper and tells them that once they read it, the real reasons for their journey will be revealed. The birds grab the papers and read.”
“What do the papers say?” she asked.
“Lists of sins, their sins. The birds feel shame and then they are angry because they feel like they flew the long journey for nothing. Then a big light comes toward them and at that moment, they see their god, and you know what god is?”
She shook her head.
“Themselves. A mirror. Apparently, in Persian, the two words have the same meaning. The Simorgh, which means thirty birds, see the Simorgh, which is the name of their god.”
The substance of their being was undone,
And they were lost like shade before the sun;
Neither the pilgrims nor their guide remained.
The Simorgh ceased to speak, and silence reigned.
“They reach silence, but I don’t think it is death,” he said. “More like understanding.”
“And that’s it? The end of the book?” she asked.
“No. It’s a strange book because after that scene, Attar, the poet, keeps writing for many more pages and tells another story, this story about a king who falls in love with a beautiful, lovely boy and he won’t let the boy out of his sight. The boy gets tired of being around the king, so one night, while the king sleeps, he runs away. When the king finds him, he gets very drunk and angry and orders the boy to be beaten, carried into the square, hung and left to die. Only the boy’s father saves him and hangs up another guy, a murderer who is going to die anyway. When the king wakes, he believes the boy is dead and he regrets his orders. And as his anger went his sorrow grew. He is very upset. He cannot eat. He loses weight. He understands that in killing the boy he loved, he killed himself.” He paused. “It’s a mirror, everything we do and say, what we love.”
She waited and then lifted her head. “That’s it?”
“No, no,” he said, “eventually the boy goes back to the king. He loved the king, too. The last thing Attar writes is that the king and the boy put their heads together, they whisper, and go off as one. No one ever hears what they say.”
“Hmm,” she said.
“What?”
“The boy shouldn’t have gone back.”
“Why not?”
“The king betrayed him.”
“It was a mistake. He learned that and besides, the boy betrayed the king too. He ran away.”
“Maybe he was afraid to stay.”
“I don’t know. I think the king deserved a second chance.”
Anton came out of the trees into a small clearing and stopped for a moment. He remembered her adamant response.
“I don’t agree. There aren’t any second chances. We do what we do and we deal with the consequences. You don’t get to go back and do it again.”
What had she meant? Afraid to stay? No second chances. Without second chances, new trials, experiments, nothing was possible. Without second chances, people would never progress. The statement reminded him of his mother, almost seemed to be something she might say about photography. You only had one shot to get the picture.
The snow crunched under his snowshoes as he trudged on across the open space. He heard the call of a jay, and then the reply from another further off. He stopped, removed his gloves and bent to scoop up a small handful of snow, wanting to taste freshness, but below the night’s dusting, the snow was hard and hurt his fingers. He pulled his hand back and sucked on his fingers to warm them. He replaced his gloves, repositioned his backpack and walked on. He didn’t realize he’d forgotten sunscreen. Later, he would feel how the sunlight, reflecting off the frozen snow, had burned his face just like it had in Utah.
What the sabotage really did was set David free, although it took him some time to realize this. After disposing of the birds in the lab and letting Rebecca go, after Anton’s departure and Munin’s escape, he passed weeks in a confused, depressed stupor. In the mornings he came into the laboratory, pulled the door closed behind him and sat in the conference room. He had felt crushed the day he put the birds to sleep, angry at the person who had rendered them useless by removing their bands. They had been made victims and he wouldn’t tolerate that. He suspected Rebecca, of course, but it didn’t add up, and he hadn’t wanted to think it was her, both for himself and for Anton, and maybe even for her.
Now, he no longer felt anger, only loneliness. The lack of birdsong drove him crazy, but he made himself persevere, waiting longer and longer each day before he turned on a radio, until he could sit in the silence of the empty laboratory for hours, looking at his library of books, or out the window at the desert, or at his collection of bottles, bits of bird parts lined across the windowsill.
The day before he’d found Sarah’s journal at home. He opened and closed it a few times but hadn’t had the courage to read it. Now he sat with the book on his lap. They had always shared their journals. Would she want him to read this one or not? When he opened and flipped through the pages, a set of folded sheets fell out. He picked them up from the floor and realized they were a letter intended for him. She’d never sent it or given it to him.
October 20th Tambopata, Peru.
Dear David:
First day: this morning I got up and dressed quickly, slung a small bag over my shoulder and went onto the verandah. I was the only one up. I stepped into a pair of cold rubber boots and began to make my way along the muddy path toward the forest. A few stars were blinking against the blue-black sky. The palm shrubs I passed, dark and huge in the budding light made me think of black-laced Spanish fans. Below the trees it was still dark. Water dripped from the leaves. At first light there was an explosion of sounds, the world going from nighttime to morning in one split second. How could any animal hear another? The line from sender to receiver, singer to listener, hopelessly confounded by crowd, defying everything I know about the importance of song for communication. The thought that came to me unexpectedly and unpleasantly was that everything in the laboratory is misguided.
Then just above me, there was a roar of a howler monkey. I jumped, looked up and saw a male, his mouth wide open and red, canine teeth exposed. His forehead, chin and neck grotesquely swollen with worms. When he called again it felt as if he was yelling in my ear. His ugliness, repulsive and fascinating. Another howler answered him and they began a loud dual. At least for these two, sender and receiver seemed to be working.
At mid-morning, I came out of the forest onto the path back to the lodge. I picked up my pace and then suddenly stopped at the sight of a quiet dark green hummingbird perched on a branch, perfectly still, so close I didn’t need to bother with binoculars. The bird turned its head and looked at me. Neither of us moved. I became conscious of a change in my mood. The binoculars hanging at my chest pulled on my neck. There was a faint burn when I blinked my eyes. Back behind me in the forest, the howler monkeys bellowed. I turned away from the hummingbird wanting to distance myself from its stare, and now as I write you, I think I’m finally acknowledging to myself how lonely I am.
He continued to read.
October 21st, Tambopata Lodge
Today after lunch Ed led our group on a walk and talked about the forest, ants, monkeys and jaguar. When we came to a clearing, a tree gap, he told us that tropical trees have shallow roots. The soil is spongy with water so sometimes, when the wind comes with force, it lifts all the trees up like a mini tornado. He showed us a giant ceiba, maybe the most beautiful tree I’ve ever seen. He said, the really, really big gaps are man-made and someone asked whether he meant slash and burn agriculture? In his typical witty fashion, which you would have appreciated, he shook his head and said: No, something much more efficient. Small airplane crashes.
David stopped reading and looked away from the letter. The irony was painful. He felt constriction in his throat. Why hadn’t Sarah told him this after the crash? Had she forgotten that Ed had said it?
Tonight, Ed said, “I have given myself over entirely to this world. It’s like a marriage. A commitment I can’t go back on; it’s what I know you and David have; you’re meant to be together.” And then he said something really strange. He said, “This is the only place on earth where I can forget myself.” He seems so alone. I miss you intensely.
The letter ended there. David folded it up and put it back in the journal. He read her final entry.
November 1, Flight from Lima to Los Angeles
Eight days in the forest and I’m on my way home. I have seen acres of bamboo, river otter, an ocelot and more species of parrot than I ever care to see again. I realize that I love two men whose principal love is not me, but birds and the sounds they make. They are men who pass through life listening. Men who only really understand the world with their ears. One lives in a wet forest and the other in a neat laboratory; it’s as if they both come from a foreign world where ears are tuned with precision and every sound carries layers of meaning that only they can decipher. I once read that what most marked Count Basie’s music is the silence, the space perfectly placed between the notes. They are two men who can hear such a difference. I am writing this as I land in Los Angeles. It is clear to me. The two men, who I love, share a language that I will never completely understand.
David shut the journal. He took a deep breath. He noticed a single zebra finch feather stuck between the corner of the wall and the carpet and he bent down to pick it up. He smoothed the tiny black and white striped feather between his finger and thumb and then put it on the table.
He stood and walked to the bookshelf along the wall and searched for the book that Ed once gave him on neotropical migrant birds. He couldn’t remember having lent it to anyone. His eyes skipped back to the beginning of the shelf and then he saw an unfamiliar book. He pulled it from its place on the shelf. It was a small paperback, the binding stiff from never having been opened, and the cover showed a group of birds around a stream. The Conference of the Birds. It wasn’t a book he’d ever bought. He heard Anton now. It was one of their last conversations.
“I am leaving you a book as a thank you.”
“No need,” David had told him.
“It’s not wrapped. You’ll find it later, I hope.”
Until now David had forgotten about the book. He flipped to the back cover and read the blurb. A long poem written in the 12th century. Birds as the main characters. An odyssey to find God. A hoopoe bird as guide. He returned to his chair, sat down and opened the book and flipped through a few pages, focusing here and there on the poem. Back at the beginning he started to read, but the fifth line of the book made him pause.
He knew your language and you knew his heart—
He closed his eyes and heard Ed. “Sometimes when I’m in the forest, wrapped in my hammock, I think of you and Sarah. I hear the two of you talking about some paper that’s just come out, the value of one methodological approach over another. I hear your low voice, the staccato cadence to your sentences, and then her voice trilling the way it does when she gets excited about something new. And then I hear those muffled whimpers that always come after those discussions. Whimpers and laughter, and I know there are no two people more suited to each other.”
There was a bareness whenever he thought of her, not unlike the empty cages in his laboratory, but he also realized that all these months she’d been gone, he’d been talking to her, continuing his conversations with her, silently to himself.
You stopped talking, she said in her letter explaining why she sent the birds away from their home aviary. Perhaps it was true. He’d said less and less out loud, but in his mind, he was always communicating with her. And she had stopped talking to him as well. The silence had gone both ways.
In his jealous state, his obsession with whether she’d had feelings for Ed in Peru, he had missed the cues, had not understood the magnitude of memories and emotions Ed’s death must have brought to the surface for her, irrespective of whether they’d been intimate or not. What had she said? If you suffer loss young, you learn a vocabulary for grief. Of course that wasn’t true. Ed’s death must have been doubly difficult for Sarah, triggering memories of the losses she’d suffered when she was young. Because he struggled so much to understand and put words on his own emotions, David had always deferred to her explanations of herself. Her psychologist’s vocabulary, her measured speech, her insistence that perception meant more than signal, and that the rational mind could mold perception to its will. Words, words, words. She talked. He listened and believed. Now, with Ed dead, and eight months of her absence, Munin gone, Anton gone, the research destroyed, he understood that grief was grief no matter how many times you experienced it. If you let yourself love, you felt grief when it was taken away. A true loss was, and always would be, irreplaceable. Sometimes, it was also unbearable.
She had called and written repeatedly, but in the last while, her correspondence had tapered off. He would write to her now. He went to his computer and whispered as he wrote, needing to try out the words before he committed them to email.
Dear Sarah,
You know that I’m not much good at writing, unless it’s in small yellow notebooks. The birds are all gone—sabotage—some animal rights activist, they tell me. They also erased all the data files. Anton, the post-doc went home. No need for a technician or undergraduates, and so now I’m the only one in the laboratory. Me, the books, the armadillo fetuses you gave me. What did you call them? The surrogate children you’d never have, always neotenic and cute, never crying for attention. They’re still here. Still floating. This is a silly thing to be writing you after so long, I know.
This summer I rescued an injured magpie. I named her Munin from the old Norse myth of two ravens. Munin for memory and Hugin for thought. She was beautiful. Purplish-black, sleek and smart, but she flew away in September. I consoled myself by thinking that at least I was left with thought. But you know what? Without you there aren’t a whole lot of good thoughts either. I haven’t put anything down in a notebook for months. Is it because I know you aren’t here to read it? I want you to tell me where you’ve been and what you’ve done and who you’ve met. I’m sorry I asked you to leave. I’m sorry that I was starving you. You’re still the only person I want to talk to. The only person I want to hear.
When he finished writing, he read it again. He missed her voice and her ideas, her feedback as important to the maintenance of himself as his own auditory feedback. He looked outside and saw two chickadees, white tail feathers flashing, flitting around in the dense green oak leaves.
He remembered the time they’d gone to the field when he’d first started studying auditory feedback. They’d found some lazuli buntings in the fresh green oaks behind the institute, and he’d recorded a male and then played his recording back to him. She’d asked, What happens when sound producer and receiver are one? Now he knew the answer to her question. There was a breakdown in the signaling. There was confusion, stuttering and then quiet. The mind needed more than recurring thoughts. He needed her, not memories of her.
One of the chickadees hopped to an outside branch on the tree, opened his beak and sang. David couldn’t hear the bird’s call from inside the building, but he heard the bird singing in his mind. Long ago, he’d memorized a chickadee’s sweet buzzy voice. No, he thought, there wasn’t a word for love. Not really. And no sound could symbolize its loss. Maybe it was better defined as quality of feeling, a sound most notable when it was gone.
He hit the send button on his email and then went back into the laboratory with a sense of relief. Without obligation to employees and birds, and having finally written to Sarah, there was only himself to contend with.