Page 98

“Mmm. We will fly like parrots fly?”

“That’s a beautiful idea, but no. I am a person and you are an AI and neither of us have wings. We will fly in a machine, an airplane.”

“We will be free? Free as a bird? Free like the parrots?”

Now I have to think. Were we free then? I don’t know the answer, so I say, “Do you want to hear the rest of the story?”

“Yes, please.”

“Zǐ Yì and I made a plan. We hoarded our snacks for a week, until we had a bag of buns and nuts. We went down to the ground floor and laid a trail of treats from the courtyard to the hallway to the door that led outside. We hid in the entry so the lady couldn’t see us. When the lady let the parrots out, they flew around for a few minutes, then perched on a balcony. The lady closed her window. Zǐ Yì waved at the parrots, and they saw us and flew down, and we fed them each a little piece of bun. Then they saw the food we had laid out for them. They got excited and began to eat all the food. Zǐ Yì and I stood by the door, and when the parrots had eaten the last bites, we opened the door. Bǎobǎo and Cǎi Hóng stood there blinking, and I thought they weren’t going to escape, and I wanted them to not go—I regretted allowing them to be lost in that moment before they actually flew away.”

“The parrots flew? They are lost? They are free?”

“Yes, they flew away. They flew to a tree across the road from our building, a big plane tree. Zǐ Yì and I went up to his flat on the sixth floor and sat at the window, watching them. We heard the lady calling their names. Eventually we saw her run outside, calling Bǎobǎo and Cǎi Hóng. They called to her, but they didn’t fly to her. She left and came back with food, but they still didn’t budge.”

Isadora says confidently, “They were not hungry.”

“That’s true. They had just gorged themselves on snacks. But the lady came back again and again, and the parrots never flew down to her. They built a nest and had chicks, seasons went by. The lady would stand under the tree and talk to Bǎobǎo and Cǎi Hóng and they would reply, but they never flew to her.”

“They did not care for her.”

“That’s right, Isadora,” I say. “She cared for the parrots, but they did not return her affection.”

“The parrots were free?”

“Yes,” I tell her, oddly moved by her concern. “They were following their own nature. They no longer belonged to anyone. So it was good for them, being free. But it wasn’t so good for the lady, who must have been lonely without her parrots. And it wasn’t good for the neighborhood, which became overrun with thousands of parrots.”

“But the parrots are beautiful, so the neighborhood is beautiful?”

“No, the neighborhood was covered in parrot shit. No one could eat outdoors—the parrots would steal the food, and if you didn’t have food they would scold you. So no one wanted to live there, and as the population of the city declined, people moved away. Eventually it became a ghost neighborhood, and only parrots lived there.”

Isadora is silent. Finally she says, “You do not live there.”

“No. Four years after we set the parrots free, I went to London.”

“The lady died? She does not live there?”

“Ah, that is a surprising thing—I saw her again, recently. Even now, I sometimes time travel to my childhood home. Usually I find myself in our old flat, which is always empty. When my parents were taken to prison, they had to leave everything behind, and eventually, when our neighbors knew they wouldn’t come home, they began to take our belongings. But I can often find something to wear, and this time I chose a linen suit that had belonged to my father. So I was wearing his old suit and I went for a walk. It was strange to go outside, to see things I had seen so many times from my bedroom windows . . . Anyway, I walked across the street and was standing near the tree where Bǎobǎo and Cǎi Hóng had taken up residence many years ago. To my amazement, I saw the lady sitting on a little folding stool under the tree. She was much older, but it was certainly the same woman. She was feeding a mob of parrots who were all competing for her attention by yelling and dancing and hopping around. It was a funny scene, and it made me feel a bit less horrible about depriving her of her parrots, to whom she had been so devoted.”

“What is prison?”

Why does she ask for definitions? Surely Beck has given her a dictionary? “A place where people are kept in cages. Some of the people have been bad. Some of the people are there by mistake. Some people, like my parents, are there because they tried to do good, and powerful people didn’t like that.”

A long silence.

“How many parrots were there?” Isadora finally asks.

This seems to me very much beside the point. “A lot. Hundreds, possibly thousands.” I sound irritated, and I take a deep breath. No good will come of losing my patience with this infinitely patient AI. “Most of them were in the trees; twenty or thirty were begging the lady for food. She had a bowl of water, and a few parrots were taking baths. It was a sweltering hot day. As I stood there in the shade in my father’s suit, no shoes, shirtless, I became aware that the lady was staring at me. ‘Yang Ming?’ she called to me. That was my father’s name. I look a great deal like him. Perhaps she thought I was his ghost. I didn’t answer her, because just then I felt a wet splat on my shoulder. I took off the jacket, and of course it was besmirched with parrot shit. The lady started to laugh. It was such a harsh sound that all the parrots scuttled away and stood watching her nervously. I remembered why Zǐ Yì and I had never liked this lady—she was quick to delight in other people’s misfortunes.

“I started to walk away, feeling tired and ill in the heat, and then I found myself back in my own flat in London, naked on the carpet in my bedroom. I never saw the lady or the parrots again, although I suppose it’s always possible that I will. I have nightmares about it occasionally.”

“What kind of parrots were Cǎi Hóng and Bǎobǎo?”

“I don’t know. Why do you ask?” I remember our flat, the way it looked that day, the dust and mold, the broken things left behind by squatters. Someone had let a candle burn all the way down on our kitchen table, leaving a circular pool of soft wax. Something had chewed through the back of the sofa and made a nest inside it. I didn’t investigate, but I could hear squealing.

Isadora replies, “To see more precisely.”

I take a long breath and let it out slowly. “I think they were macaws. They were enormous and colorful. Does that help?”