|||
In 1949, the President overheard a story about the movie director Fritz Lang in which Fritz Lang had broken into the Berlin Zoo in 1930 and had let out all the animals. The animals were all recaptured the next day except for a Fijian parrot named “Morris.” Morris sang popular opera arias in German, Italian, English, French, and Russian. The Zoo offered 100,000 Reichsmarks for his safe return. Morris was never caught.
Later that night, the President dreamt that Morris, after many years of island-hopping, had made it to the east coast of the United States. Now he was flying across the country, singing arias on top of park lampposts, barns, and idling cabooses. In his dream, the President heard Morris sing his signature Mozart piece, “Queen of the Night,” before ever-growing crowds. Sometimes, when the cheers of “bravo, bravo, encore, encore” had subsided, Morris would squawk out a numerical sequence that was coincidently the same as the nuclear codes. Some in the crowd scribbled the numbers down on their palms, feverishly, as if they were revelatory symbols.
The President woke up whistling the aria. But an inquietude possessed him. His hands trembled. His palms itched. He decided to eat breakfast alone in the Oval Office. The headline of the newspaper, peeking up between his poached eggs and bacon, reported that 52,139 persons the day before had picked the winning numbers to the largest jackpot in the country’s history.
