Wrong, says the other speaker, also with a silver beard, also wearing a bow tie. Diogenes clearly wanted to play with notions of pseudo-documentarianism, placing fiction on one side and nonfiction on the other, claiming the story was a true transcription discovered in a tomb, while constructing a contract with the reader that the tale was of course invented.
She shuts the book and the men disappear. The next title appears to spend three hundred pages exploring the provenance and tonality of the ink used inside the codex. Another speculates about tree sap found on some of the pages. Another is a numbing account of various attempts to arrange the salvaged folios in their original order.
Konstance rests her forehead in her hands. The English translations of the folios that she can find among the stacks mostly bewilder: either they’re boring and spangled with footnotes, or they’re too fragmented to make much sense of. In them she can see the contours of Father’s stories—Aethon kneels at the door of a witch’s bedroom, Aethon becomes a donkey, the donkey is kidnapped by bandits who rob the inn—but where are the silly magic words and the beasts drinking moon-milk and the boiling river of wine on the sun? Where’s the squawk Father would make when Aethon mistakes a gull for a goddess, and the growl he’d use for the wizard inside the whale?
The hope she’d felt minutes before flags. All these books, all this knowledge, but what’s any of it for? None of it will help her understand why her father would leave his home. None of it will help her understand why she has been consigned to this fate.
She takes a slip from a box, and writes, Show me the blue copy with the drawing of a city in the clouds on the cover.
A scrap of paper comes fluttering down. The Library contains no records of such a volume.
Konstance gazes down the unending rows of shelves. “But I thought you contained everything.”
* * *
Another NoLight, another printed First Meal, more lessons from Sybil. Then she climbs back into the Atlas, drops into the sunbaked hills outside Nannup, and walks Backline Road to her father’s house. Σχερ?α, says the hand-painted sign.
She crouches, twists, presses as close to the house as she can, the view through the bedroom window degrading into a quivering field of color. The book on the nightstand is royal blue. The cloud city in the center of the cover looks faded by sun. She goes to her tiptoes and squints. Beneath Diogenes’s name run four words in smaller type that she missed the first time.
Translation by Zeno Ninis.
Into the sky, out of the Atlas, back to the atrium. She takes a slip from the nearest desk. Writes: Who was Zeno Ninis?
LONDON
1971
Zeno
London! May! Rex! Alive! A hundred times he examines Rex’s stationery, inhales its smell. He knows that handwriting, squashed at the tops of the letters as though someone has stepped on the lines: how many times did he see it scratched into the frost and dirt of Korea?
What an absolute miracle to receive three letters from you all at once.
You could pay a visit if you’re able?
Every few minutes a fresh gust of lightness sweeps through Zeno. There was that name, Hillary, but what of it? If Rex has found a Hillary, bless him. He made it out. He is alive. He has invited Zeno to “a bit of a function.”
He imagines Rex in a wool suit in a tranquil garden, sitting down to write the letter. Pigeons coo; hedges rustle; clocktowers soar past oaks into a wet sky. Elegant, matronly Hillary comes out with a porcelain tea service.
No, it’s better without Hillary.
I can’t tell you how glad I am that you made it out.
A holiday of sorts.
He waits until Mrs. Boydstun goes out for groceries, then calls a travel agency in Boise, whispering questions into the telephone as though perpetrating crimes. When he tells Amanda Corddry at the highway department that he’ll be taking his vacation time in May, her eyes double in size.
“Well, Zeno Ninis, I’ll be shoveled sideways. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess you were in love.”
With Mrs. Boydstun, things are trickier. Every few days he slips it into an exchange as though spooning sugar into her coffee. London, May, a friend from the war. And every few days Mrs. Boydstun finds a way to spill food on the floor, or get a headache, or locate a new tremor in her left leg, and end the conversation.
Rex writes back, Delighted. Sounds like you arrive during school hours, Hillary will meet you, and March passes, and April. Zeno lays out his one suit, his green-striped tie. Mrs. Boydstun trembles at the bottom of the stairway in her robe. “You’re not really going to leave a sick woman by herself? What kind of man are you?”