ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching

Book Two, Chapter 71: Ernie’s Mating Call

My appointment with cognitive-behavior therapist Jene is at three, but he hasn’t opened the waiting-room door to beckon me in yet.

From a table by my chair I pick up a Smithsonian, and the magazine falls open to an article recounting the discovery in northeastern China of a 165-million-year-old double set of kaytdid wings pressed into stone.

An expert in biological sounds at the University of London reconstructed and reproduced the mating call these male wings would have made — the raspy edge of one wing scraping the underside of the other. The sound is a metallic ping, lower in register and louder than a cricket’s chirp of today. Back in this Jurassic period the undergrowth was denser, so the mating call had to be loud to woo the female, no matter how distant she was.

I think about Ernie’s call to me, his message left on our answering machine: Ernestinie. Ernestinie? Ernestinie!

Once I said to him: “When you call out my name, it sounds like a screech.”

“It’s a cry in the night that frequently goes unanswered,” he said back to me.