Something Missing_ A Novel - Matthew Dicks [18]
With a lifespan of up to eighty years, the African grays’ claim to fame is their incredible intelligence. With vocabularies of more than a hundred words (with some birds mastering more than two thousand) and the ability to understand and use these words properly, African grays are the most verbal of all birds able to reproduce speech. Grays can also mimic just about any sound that they hear and can perform many tasks on the same level as a four-year-old child, including distinguishing colors, shapes, and numbers of objects.
But Alfredo’s mental acuity wasn’t the only thing that had interested him. Martin’s career demanded that he work alone, and for the most part he enjoyed this element of his profession. He was his own boss, never saddled by inefficient or incompetent coworkers, yet there were times when he craved a little human contact. To combat this need, Martin maintained an almost continuous running monologue in his head, a mixture of play-byplay and commentary on his ongoing actions and decisions that filled the silence of his day. He was constantly analyzing, debating, and reconsidering his choices, and he actually found it difficult at times to turn this internal conversation off.
But there were occasions, such as when Jim told stories about interesting or unique coworkers, or spoke of receiving recognition for a job well done, that Martin lamented the solitary nature of his profession. Martin believed that he was the best there was at his work, but sadly there was never anyone with whom to share his success or celebrate his achievements.
It was also impossible for Martin to meet new people or make new friends, save at Starbucks, where Nadia and his three usual coworkers seemed to have plenty of time to chat with customers but not enough time for anything but pleasantries for their barista. Though he often said that he didn’t need anyone other than Jim (and almost always believed this to be true), Martin found people to be entertaining and enjoyed getting to know them better. More precisely, he enjoyed figuring people out, uncovering their predilections, understanding their nuances, and determining what made them tick. Without coworkers, these opportunities were unavailable to him.
Recently, Martin had found himself particularly envious upon learning about Jim’s new colleague, Peter. Peter was a vegan in the strictest of senses, refusing to eat even food that contained whey, a by-product of the making of cheese that manufacturers use in the production of crackers and cookies because it is both nutritious and illegal to dump into rivers and oceans (two reasons that always seemed to collide in Martin’s mind). Vegetarians of Peter’s ilk, as Jim had explained, do not eat whey because they do not eat cheese and eggs, and this was because of the impact that dairy consumption had on the nondairy producing animals such as bulls and roosters. Because they could not produce milk or eggs, bulls and roosters were instead killed for meat, and therefore dairy consumption indirectly contributed to the deaths of these animals.
This alone made Peter interesting to Martin. Then Peter’s marriage had recently ended when his wife of a dozen years realized that she was a lesbian and had fallen in love with another woman. Though the divorce had been relatively amicable, the couple underwent a complex negotiation over the four dozen animals that they had cared for as part of their animal rescue shelter in Milford. Peter’s vegan beliefs, the negotiated settlement of sheep, cats, dogs, chickens, piglets, and a goat, as well as the soap opera–type breakup, made him an interesting character in Martin’s mind, but one he would probably never have the opportunity to meet because of his own career choice.
Though Alfredo was hardly a militant vegan with a