NIGHTINGALE

Luscinia megarhynchos: narcotic effect;
voice that signals spring.

WHAT IS THIS? Skeet asks, reading through the handwriting of voices written out on a faded blue grid.

Vocalization: 3:45 p.m. west of Albion Hills. A liquid bubbling in descending scale. Sounds like water running out of a bottle.

Juvenilia. I found it yesterday. An old notebook. Back when I only knew how to anthropomorphize. Before I used equipment. I pause and then say, Before anything had become anything.

Frame?

Yes?

I need to talk to you.

I’m trying to remember when I last saw you.

Paris, he says, slightly impatiently.

Hotel du Nord, was it? Yes. I had missed the presentation of your paper on chorus howls. I remember you walked into the restaurant telling me that you always know you are in Paris because of the tang of dogshit.

Frame, I—

God Skeet, what am I going to do? I close my eyes, still hearing the harmonic high-frequency wolf sounds, the ones associated with agnostic inner states. I understand there are probably no practical suggestions.

I’ve been trying to work that out the whole way here, Skeet says.

Skeet? I look around at all the fieldbooks and papers filling the room.

Yup.

Sometimes I wonder if it might be too late.

Horseshit, he says.

Science began under a sliver of a new moon in Toronto, my chest pounding like the mice hunted by owls from the sound of their sped-up heartbeat alone. I had come from Paris having trouble doing the simplest things, sleeping, eating, talking. I’d walled grief into one of the remote, inaccessible corners. But something pierced a bright hole in my mind, allowing a moment of transparency where I was able to see everything. Like sincere huge-headed woodland creatures in fables that instruct you what to do. Everything seemed clear and possible. I wanted a place that had no history. Here there were once forests of trees so thick the sky was black when you looked up. The settlers cut the trees from the water’s edge and moved north, building the city out of the lumber until most of it burned down and they had to start again. On a short, cold black night in winter, whole city blocks were swallowed up, the glow of the fire seen from distant towns. Mother had once dismissed the entire country as dirty, a place full of lumberjacks, men who lived in grubby cabins and tore at meat with their fingers. When I stepped off the boat, it was late fall. Grey. I looked around at the trees and thought, They haven’t any leaves. The winter light was quick and sharp, though in the summers it stretched long into night, and everything grew and grew.

I took up the hem on my wool dress so that I could walk freely. Movement was essential to fieldwork. I quickly discovered a route, past the piano factory and the brick quarry to the ravine thick with sumacs and thistles as high as my collarbone. A route that became much easier when I later had a bicycle. There was skeletal milkweed, the heart-shaped leaves of lilacs, and new bitter little smells. According to the man who sold me vegetables, not long ago black bears scooped salmon straight from the river. Crouched on the steep grade that rolls down to the water, the wet cool plants brushed my neck, flecked with dirt. Hair in gusts. I waited and heard the creak of trees in the wind, and then the haunted low tones of a pair of barred owls. Later, when I read over my transcriptions, it looked like You you you.

Crossing the bright green circle of grass toward the biology building at the university felt like a piece of luck. Recording animal sounds at the art academy was like trying to figure out an answer without knowing the question. In Toronto, all the lectures—evolutionary biology, ecology, organic chemistry—pointed to atoms and cells, charged with electricity. I found the biology courses exhilarating. Practical theories that would lead to magical work. It seemed a sturdier place for the mind. But it didn’t come easily. I struggled with calculations. I sank into despair after accidents and failures due to my inexperience. Nothing was clear to me, just the need to immerse myself in something real. I developed a taste for experimental research right away, though learned to keep most of my ideas to myself. Or when speaking of them, to use dull adjectives and the dry technical language they favoured. I loved the laboratory, its order, its precision. Clean, with rows of glass-covered cabinets containing equipment and stacks of yellowed papers with observations, including eclipses, earthquakes, and meteorological bulletins from the past century. There was a faint, burning wax scent. Afterward, I bent silently over books at the library or at the wooden table in my rented attic room, too fond of quiet to share lodgings. I studied and worked, nothing else counting. I spent any spare time outdoors, wandering through the muddy ravine, scrambling above the river, full of curiosity and daring, with dozens of ideas in my head, while the other students were inside back at the lab, conducting delicate experiments. A return to the wilds. The green leaves and branches and vines that twined with the fallen oaks. That aliveness. The screeches and twitterings and low-rumble calls. I slowly felt a thaw, an edging toward the possibility of happiness. Not the kind that rolls in like a storm, but the ordinary kind, the kind that lasts.

An Edison phonograph and a box of wax cylinders from the music department in an old cardboard box had been left in the corridor. It was the same model that Koch used to record the owl sounds. The First World War marked his shift from music to wildlife. As a boy, he had met the great Franz Liszt and played in Clara Schumann’s music room, where Brahms was a frequent visitor. The phonograph was an early model that had the ability to both record and play back sound. I carried it home and up to the attic and cleaned all the parts carefully with a cloth. There were cardboard tubes containing dark blue cylinders, coloured, I later found out, because the dye layer reduces the surface noise. I opened the window to the sterling high pitches of two mockingbirds in conversation, the whistling of a train, and played it back, the sounds magically preserved in tinfoil. I marched madly around the flat as if this could not be heard sitting down. Eventually I undressed and lay down in the narrow bed, though unable to sleep. The dark was silent, punctuated by the squeal of a distant engine, low voices in the hall below, eyes open to the ceiling.

The most important thing, Professor Tapping said, is to keep your eyes open. He first had me observing crows, which I thought perfectly suitable. It seemed folkloric, as when the hero on an adventure is advised to pick the lesser creature out of a stable of nobler ones. The simple, even ugly language asks for nothing. It loses everything except meaning, what the creature wants to say. Fairy tales and nursery lore are crammed with creatures. Coded reminders that we once knew animals to be on the same footing as us.

I read that in Greek, vulture, cathartes, means cleanser. Something clicked into place.

A crow will snatch a sandwich from a picnic table, Professor Tapping said. They prosper in cities, in close proximity to us. He doesn’t know I’ve seen crows sold for fifteen francs a piece to mothers who put them in soup and feed it to their angular children.

We walk to the Necropolis Cemetery in Cabbagetown. Cemeteries are, he says, the best place to observe birds in urban ecologies.

In the afternoon light a large bird does eventually loop down from the sky, its broad black wings spread like something after a fire. Scrawny feet. Scorched-looking face. Its neurotic pinprick eyes glancing at us as it makes an unnerving sound suspiciously like laughter. Of course, I think, he chooses these birds to observe. Black with torn wings, charred voices, the carriers of death. I remember something about them as takers of the soul, to the other side. But then its head lobs down in garbage and guzzles a dropped breadslice. It is both a cindered heart and just another grubby creature. I notice the dirty feathers. How can it fly with those feathers? I find myself paralyzed by simple questions, the questions of a child.

This is good, Professor Tapping nods enthusiastically, bits of bread flinging out of his mouth. He has brought cheese sandwiches wrapped in waxed brown paper. Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.

Aristotle?

Euripides, he says, waving the other sandwich in my direction, suddenly making me aware of how hungry I am. We eat in silence as he pulls out a lined notebook and begins to draw what looks almost like an architectural diagram.

Was he the one torn apart by dogs? I finally say.

Who?

Euripides.

I haven’t a clue, he says. They often congregate in cemeteries, the crows. They protect themselves in mobs. Unlike pigeons that require buildings to shield them from predators. The crows sit on top of the cold bones as well as the still-warm, the just-dead.

Corvus, Skeet reads out loud from one of the fieldbooks. Both crows and ravens make loud raspy signature calls, caw and kraa respectively. Why, he asks, all the birds, now?

It’s what I began with. They work best with the cymatic imagery. Visual symbols and patterning give us clues that sound alone cannot, I say to Skeet, who is studying the nightingale images. You know, you might be the only person who understands my logic. I hope you can continue the work when I am—gone.

Frame—

Skeet. Please. Don’t let them use the dictionary to make ring tones for European mobile phone networks, or for relaxation, like that station, bird radio. Or sit, I plead, like Mme. Curie’s papers, sealed away in boxes lined with lead. It makes me think how fearless she was. But in my experience, I say, searching for my cigarettes, it is the young who are afraid of life. Only the old are afraid of death.

Except you, Skeet says.

Well when it’s no longer an abstraction, when it’s actually bearing down on you, it is a significant deadline. It helps you concentrate magnificently.

He shakes his head. You really are like those aristocratic women who plant goddamn rosebushes in the face of ruin, he says, handing me the small glass filter I’m supposed to use when I smoke this much. He has on a blue jacket like the French workers wear, faded to grey and missing most of the buttons. His skin is brown and the tips of his hair glint gold. The sun has both darkened and bleached him out.

I’ve come full circle, I say, exhaling. Reduced to my senses alone.