Remember when we talked about getting married?, says Old Man, half-closing his eyes, rushing through the final moments. Yeah, says Soon, and she feels profoundly embarrassed. He reaches his hands toward her, his fingers crowned with paper rings. In the bird sanctuary where he worked, he tells her, he used to help the keeper ring birds. It was like a kind of wedding, a union until death! Ringing birds is a job that demands extreme care, their feet are all so delicate and fragile! He’d found the rings beautiful. Light, made of aluminum, with the pertinent numbers imprinted so no one could forget where, when, or by whom each specimen was ringed. A bird that is ringed here could appear years later and ten thousand kilometers away. It can happen! Thanks to that tiny little ring, we can track a lot of information: where the bird migrated, how long it lived, what it ate, and how it died. One time, he caught a shearwater that had been ringed fifty years before. You see, Soon? Fifty years! It would be good if the two of them could wear rings like that their whole lives. Even if they never saw each other again, it would be known when and why they put them on. But there are no rings like that for people. No one rings someone before letting them fly free, like they used to—the keeper and Old Man—at the sanctuary, with the birds.

Old Man takes off the rolled-up paper rings, one by one, and as he does he tears them up, leaving the table covered in shredded paper. Finally there’s only one left, the one on his ring finger, which he wiggles up and down, pointing it at her. Want it?, he finally says. She laughs, nods. But then she’ll have to make another one for him, they should exchange them, like in real weddings! Still laughing, Soon takes a napkin, tears it into strips, rolls one of the strips between two fingers into the shape of a ring. Here, she says, and as she says it she glances at the waitress, who by now is furious, because their five minutes are up and there the two of them still sit, degrading the place, playing with bits of paper, getting everything messy, interlacing their fingers with no respect, no decorum, disobeying authority. She sees them get up: the ridiculous, pathetic old man who looks spaced out and sick, and the scruffy girl, with her oversized clothes that she thinks hide her extra kilos, a neurotic girl, weird and naive. She watches them walk to the door, now without a glance her way, without even waving goodbye, without thanking her for the grace period she granted them, going out to the street absorbed in themselves, an unacceptable, illogical pair, stopping a little further down on the narrow, dirty sidewalk, looking at each other without speaking, without touching, and then they turn, each one heading in their own direction, the old man to the right, downcast, asymmetrical, with his crazy-person walk, toward the past; the girl to the left, downcast, asymmetrical, with her crazy-person walk, toward the future.