Meitner was always in the bedroom, perched behind my mother on the old rocking chair from the Big Island that Tutu, my grandmother, gave us, eyes closed, listening and waiting, soothed as if on a bough moved by wind.
Mom’s calm, measured words and soothing voice were always tinged with humor, as if she might laugh at any moment at her younger self, so intrepid and, perhaps, lacking good judgment. “I could hardly see because of the rain, but a short, dark woman yelled ‘Bienvenu!’ out the window of a beat-up Land Rover almost hidden by the brush, under a huge baobab tree. When I got to the car, she flung open the passenger door and said, ‘Hurry inside, hurry inside!’ She had a round face and a big smile. She said, ‘Call me Belinda.’ It wasn’t her real name; that was part of the plan. I thrust my pack inside and slid into the seat. She shifted into first gear and rocketed down a mud-dirt road. I had no idea how she could see. The wipers didn’t work at all. I held onto the sissy bar for dear life.”
Sometimes Meitner sidled back and forth on the top of the chair, head bobbing, barely able to contain her excitement at this, her own story. Sometimes she just listened, as if contemplating.
“Belinda said, ‘How was your trip?’ She looked at me for a long time, a huge grin lighting her face. I wanted to scream, ‘Keep your eyes on the road!’ but I didn’t want to distract her. I settled for ‘Interesting.’
“It was a horrible, rough, eight-hour-long ride. I started out feeling like an intrepid explorer, but pretty soon I realized that I was pretty low on the Martha Gellhorn scale—she’s a writer, honey. We drove over huge cloudy mountains. Like here. We got stuck behind big trucks and Belinda would get out and yell at them. We finally got to a place way back of nowhere, a house with a stone floor and big heavy beams, mostly open. Belinda took me to a tiny bedroom with high, open louvered windows and a bed covered with mosquito netting. The room was full of a beautiful smell that I wanted to inhale forever. I asked Belinda, ‘What’s that smell?’”
At that point I’d always say, “Wild ginger! Just like here.”
“Right,” Mom would say. “I fell onto that lovely bed, just for a minute, and didn’t wake until the next morning. The howler monkeys screamed all night, though.”
“Just like here,” Meitner and I would say, then laugh.
My mother said that she chatted with Belinda for two days, but she knew that Belinda was really giving her the final test. Mom’s background, her experience, her plans, were just what the activists wanted. She was perfect.
Finally, she met Meitner. This was the place in the story where Meitner always got excited. She’d flutter from the chair to the bed and back again, muttering in low, rapid French.
“Belinda said that I might want to take a walk down to the river. The man who brought Meitner was tall and thin. He had blue-ebony skin. He was nervous and left quickly.
“I picked up the big plastic parrot carrier that he left on the bank under the banana trees. What did you say, Meitner?”
Meitner raised her head, whistled, and imitated the sound of a car engine and some phone tones. Then she said, in a really cranky man’s voice, “Où allons nous?”
My cue to translate: “Where are we going?”
My mother responded, “Right! And what did I say?”
Meitner would say, “‘Maison.’ Home.”
And home—my future home—was where she would soon meet John Kalani, my father.
I am on a Kauai ridgetop, monitoring the feed from the Stinger ship, when I hear Jean’s voice, but after an instant’s shock, I realize that it is Meitner. Our former family member, up on that ship, with some kind of plan.
Awe, puzzlement, delight, dark loss, and emotions beyond the reach of the most nuanced languages stop my mind. A blast of cool wind brings a spatter of rain and then, for an instant, parts the clouds so that I see the steep range of cliffs, one behind the other, vanishing from deep green to blue, lavender, gray. Jean’s voice. A brilliant parrot. A murder. All long ago, and yet as close, in my mind, as yesterday.
The day I met Dr. Jean Woodward, she stepped from a rented Jeep into my backyard as I watched from my lanai. Her red hair glinted in the sun as she retrieved a cage containing her African Grey Parrot, Meitner, from the back of the Jeep.
I’m a Hilo boy who went to Silicon Valley by way of Cal Tech and got big, as they say. I made a lot of money on software and bought a chunk of rain forest on the island of Kauai.
An acquaintance from Cal Tech sent me Dr. Woodward’s proposal. She was searching for a habitat for an extraordinary parrot she had acquired. As it happened, there was a flock of African Greys in my backyard—a range of the steepest, rainiest mountains on the earth. Years ago, someone brought a flock of Greys to Kauai, illegally, as is the case with most of the fauna and flora in the Hawaiian Islands. So we have quite a population of non-indigenous creatures here—monkeys, aforesaid African Grey Parrots, other kinds of parrots, macaws—you name it, someone smuggled one in and let it go.
I’d read about the liberation of the lab animals a while back. All of the animals had vanished, but Dr. Woodward tracked down the parrot.
“Since all records were destroyed, I’m not sure how old she was when I got her,” Jean had told me over the phone a week earlier. “Or, when she got me.” That was the first time I heard Jean’s low, burbling chuckle. “I could almost hear her thinking how lucky she was to get such a pliable custodian. I know that she was at least three, because that’s when the iris turns from pale gray to yellow. Her language skills are amazing for a gray parrot of any age.” Her voice became fervent. “I want to help her discover who—or what—she is. I want all of her abilities to—unfold, just as they do in any living creature. I think she might be a bridge between us and other animals—or, at least, between us and parrots. Parrots and humans share speech-related genes and genetically expressed neural pathways. She needs a strong human presence in order to manifest her humanity. But she also needs the environment of a parrot in the wild. No one knows what might happen in Meitner’s instance. I want to be there when she needs human interaction and let her have distance when she needs to be a bird. Her wings have always been clipped, but I think that the development of innate parrot-intelligences are just as linked to the use of wings as the development of human intelligence is linked to use of the hands. It seems plausible that learning flocking behavior in flight is analogous to humans learning to navigate and explore their world, I…”
But she had me the second she said “flocking behavior.” That’s what I do—work on mathematical models of flocking behavior, synchronous movement that displays rules of spacing, momentum, direction, and individual choice that we observe in the movement of groups of birds, fish, insects, herds, and even, some claim, humans in social environments, both physical and in thought and opinion. That’s how I made my fortune. So, when I look back, it all seems inevitable.
Now I know that Jean dreamed of illuminating the nature of consciousness through a series of carefully articulated projects that she was busily mapping out when she acquired Meitner.
That first morning, I waved, shouted “Aloha!” and hurried through my wild yard to shake Jean’s hand. When I picked up the bird carrier I was startled to hear a man’s voice, cursing in French. I set the cage on the lanai; it was too unwieldy to carry on the hike to see Meitner’s possible new digs. As Jean and I passed through my orchid-laced yard and reached the trailhead, the curses blessedly receded.