It was only years later as a young woman at boarding school studying hard to be a dermal care technician, that Momo finally stumbled upon some information about “canaries.”

As a teenager she’d almost forgotten the term, but once when she was looking up the entry for “gold leaf” in the encyclopedia she glimpsed the words “gilded sparrow” in the term’s etymology and recalled that someone had mentioned a word like that to her once. “Gold leaf facials” were super trendy in the Asia-Pacific region when Momo was in school—they involved applying a thin coat of gold leaf to the client’s face as the name suggests. though the technique may have been inspired by the famous King Tutankhamun and his golden mask, it wasn’t Egypt where this technique was most popular. Rather it was in New Taiwan, where the gold-digging Taiwanese took the old expression about “gilding your face in gold (to make yourself look good)” quite literally. But Momo didn’t get it, so she looked it up in the encyclopedia discbook.

In the entry on canaries, a news item from old Japan caught her eye—it was dated spring 1995.

According to the discbook, on an ordinary morning that spring someone had released poison gas in a Tokyo subway, injuring and even killing many innocent passengers. The Japanese government named the Aum Shinrikyo cult as the prime suspect. When the police raided the cult’s headquarters, they found the chemical ingredient required to make toxic gas. Heavily armed and wearing gas masks, the police fore alarmed people so much they thought some kind of major disaster had occurred. A huge manhunt was underway, and nobody dared joke about it. Perhaps the only point of levity was the fact that, in addition to being armed to the teeth, the police also carried cages with canaries inside.

Yes, canaries. Wasn’t it a silly image to imagine the armed policemen, formal and proper, carrying caged canaries up the mountain? Though not for the canaries—for them it was an unparalleled tragedy. These beautiful, delicate little birds, with no chance to fly or sing just accompanying the police to battle. Because the police were fully fitted with gasproof gear, they had no way of sensing the colorless, odorless gas, or of knowing where it was emanating from—this was beyond the capacity of the human nose! So humans employed sacrificial canaries. Let the sarin gas take the lives of canaries instead of our invincible human defenders.

And so the police used the canaries as bait. If a bird showed signs of shock or died suddenly, it signaled that the toxin was in the vicinity of the cage. Without them, the police wouldn’t find the poison gas. Canaries died so humans could live.

Momo had no idea how many canaries the police used in their raids that day. the encyclopedia didn’t include that information; it wasn’t considered valuable enough.

Among the green hills
a troop of soldiers in black leave a gray factory
petals of cadmium yellow scatter among the green grass
each one a murdered canary
sarin gas the birds’ lament.

Even so, humans locked them in cages to keep them from flying away. They were caged not because humanity cherished them, but to torture them.

Why then, Momo wondered, did Andy call me a canary?

Momo now recalled encountering the word “canary” in a twentieth-century Argentinian novel called Kiss of the Spider Woman. The book mentioned a “panther woman,”half human and half beast, who could transform into a panther. When she was in a human state, she played happily with her caged canaries, but as soon as she began to transform into a panther, the canaries could smell it on her breath and would die on the spot. Typically, readers sympathized with the panther woman. But not Momo. She felt for the forgotten little birds. The panther could at least enjoy the passing thrill of biting into a bloody snack; at least her claws and teeth were put to their intended use, her talents weren’t wasted. Canaries lived their entire lives with wings and yet could never leave their tiny metal cages, let alone fly! The outside world was filled with terror and beauty, but they would never know either. they were trapped like trinkets in a toy chest, forever at the mercy of others.

Momo recalled that she and Andy had read Shakespeare’s The Tempest together in the hospital. In act 5, scene 1, after having lived on a desert island for many years Miranda delivers her famous speech in which she reveals her vision of their mortal world: “O wonder!/How many goodly creatures are there here!/ How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world/ That has such people in it!”

By the end of the play like a canary flying free from its cage, Miranda returns to live in the beautiful world just as she’s always dreamed. But there was nothing in the play about what happened to her afterward. Did Miranda regret going back to her father’s land? Did she escape the panthers and poison gas of the world beyond her cage? Having flown free, how did she know the outside world wasn’t just another, slightly bigger cage?

Perhaps it was Momo’s ambivalence that kept the well-known dermal care technician single and living a simple life at age thirty. Living and working out of Salon Canary, she was indifferent to the fact that people might associate the name with the beautiful isolation of a vintage birdcage. She was a celebrity in T City, but Momo had never been involved in a sex scandal. There were no rumors of her having a girlfriend or boyfriend. She didn’t subscribe to any pornographic disczines like Playgirl, Playboy, Sappho, or Dyke. Momo just lived alone, pure and simple. She didn’t seem to worry about feeling lonely and seemed to have no sexual needs She had no intention of practicing Buddhism and didn’t subscribe to any religion.

Momo claimed to be used to this life.