Did it make you sad?, asks Soon. Old Man thinks about it before answering. No, not exactly, no … Blackbirds may be a plague, but they’re still birds!

Soon has always wondered why the simplest things are often so hard to believe. When it was her turn to explain herself, she got stuck, she hedged, she felt like she was lying even when she told the whole truth. Everyone was against her, and she, somehow, found herself with no choice but to turn against everyone. Who was that man, how had she met him, why did she see him every day, what did he want from her? Suddenly, she had to put it all into words, everything that hadn’t needed any words at all, or at least not the kind they were demanding. Who was that man?—that was something the girl couldn’t say. All she could say was who he’d been for her, but that part of Old Man was hers alone, she couldn’t share it with anyone even if she wanted to. Plus, what they really wanted to find out—full name, ID number, address, family history, medical record, criminal record, etc.—she didn’t know, because she’d never really been curious to find out: that was the difference between them, between those who asked—insistent, tenacious, with violence hidden behind the soothing tone adults use to talk to children—and her, the one being questioned.

Her answers—unsatisfactory, improbable—only served to lend more credibility to her diary: it was easier to believe that everything had happened than to admit that, possibly, nothing had.

(Of course, there were contradictions when it came to the diary—those between what she said and what she wrote, and even contradictions between what she wrote on one page and the next—though at that point Soon still didn’t know that they had read it, what an outrage.)

They told me you assaulted a woman, that you forced yourself on her. That precedent—that’s what they called it: a precedent—was what raised the alarm. She had to put the puzzle together herself, and eventually she realized they were talking about the woman from the bird sanctuary, the keeper. That’s why they locked him up in the mental hospital, not for any other reason. Now Soon wants to know the truth. She wants to hear how he defends himself.

Old Man shakes his head. I didn’t assault anyone, he says, I never touched that woman, Soon. They’ve told you the story all wrong! At the most, you could call it harassment. Maybe the word harass is similar to assault and someone mixed them up out of confusion or pure spite, but they’re very different! People tell the story wrong and it’s repeated like that, all wrong, everyone spreading that horrible lie. He squeezes his temples with his hands. How can Soon doubt him? Does she really believe that story is possible?

She doesn’t know how to answer. She’s heard so many disconcerting things said about Old Man that she’s unable to make up her mind. They were stories that incriminated him, turned him into someone completely different from who he is—or who she thought he was. The problem was that that deformed, perverted and adulterated vision of Old Man had its own internal logic, a logic that fit with what she had written in her diary. And so?