(Only later will Soon find out that he once took poison. Not really to kill himself, he admits, he just did it to get attention, out of desperation, even knowing he ran the risk of dying. All he wanted to do was show the people at the clinic that he really did need to go out alone. If they let him walk alone, even if only for a little while—at night, for example, when there was no chance of meeting anyone—he would get well much sooner. He’d recover in no time! But his strategy had the opposite effect. They didn’t understand a thing. They didn’t leave him alone for a minute. They gave him new medicines, some drops that made him drowsy all day long and some very painful injections that got him smiling like a dummy. He realized that these people, the mind police, would only leave him alone when he followed all the rules one by one: schedules, doses, taking turns, group activities, teamwork, etc. He changed his tactics and was out of there in a year.

But all of this, for the moment, Soon does not know.)

Does she know that type of bird that doesn’t have feet, and since it can’t land anywhere, spends its whole life in the air? Propped on one elbow, Soon looks at him incredulously. That’s impossible, she says, there’s no such thing as birds without feet. Yes, there is, insists Old Man, I saw one once! Really, I saw a dead one! It had fallen to the ground, exhausted, and it was light blue, and its body was as small as a pinky finger. It weighed less than a feather, but its wings spread out were very wide, and so transparent you could see the color of the sky through them. That’s what’s called protection coloring, he explains. Camouflage. That way they protect themselves from hawks or other predators, for example, but it also keeps us from seeing them! These birds, Old Man goes on, do everything in the air, they spend their whole lives up there, they eat and sleep in the wind, and they only come down to the ground to die! I’d like to live like that, murmurs Soon. Old Man smiles. He would too, there are a lot of people who dream of being those birds, always flying and flying and never getting dirty on the ground. Uncorrupted, he adds, thoughtful.

They are both silent as they look at the sky, scrutinizing it. She asks for the binoculars and amuses herself with them for a good while. If he ever finds the body of another legless bird, she says, could he pick it up so he can show it to her? It’s not that she doesn’t trust him, it’s just really hard for her to imagine that a creature like that exists, and she would give anything to see it. If only it were possible to be so free, she thinks, to fly without touching the ground, but the truth is that all birds have legs and Old Man’s story must be a legend or a myth. Soon doesn’t believe in legends and myths, although she doesn’t say this to Old Man: she doesn’t want to make him mad or offend him.