Zeno nibbles a biscuit. He wants to ask Rex if he ever wishes he were back at Camp Five, if he ever longs for the hours the two of them sat in the shadows of the kitchen shed, slatted with sunlight, and drew characters in the dust—a perverse kind of homesickness. But wishing you were back in a prison camp is raving mad, and Rex is talking about his trips to northern Egypt combing through the rubbish dumps of the ancients. All these years, all those miles, so much hope and dread, and now he has Rex all to himself and in the first five minutes he has already lost his way.
“You’re writing a book?”
“Already wrote one.” From one of the shelves Rex slides a tan hardcover with plain blue capitals on the front. Compendium of Lost Books. “We’ve sold, I think, forty-two copies, about sixteen of those to Hillary.” He laughs. “Turns out no one wants to read a book about books that no longer exist.”
Zeno runs a finger over Rex’s name where it is printed on the jacket. Books have always seemed to him like clouds or trees, things that were just there, on the shelves at the Lakeport Public Library. But to know someone who made one? “Take the tragedies alone,” Rex is saying. “We know that at least one thousand of them were written and performed in Greek theaters in the fifth century B.C. You know how many we have left? Thirty-two. Seven of Aeschylus’s eighty-one. Seven of Sophocles’s one hundred and twenty-three. Aristophanes wrote forty comedies that we know of—we have eleven, not all of them complete.”
As Zeno turns pages, he sees entries for Agathon, Aristarchus, Callimachus, Menander, Diogenes, Chaeremon of Alexandria. “When all you have is a shard of papyrus with a few words on it,” Rex says, “or a single line quoted in somebody else’s text, the potential of what’s lost haunts you. It’s like the boys who died in Korea. We grieve them the most because we never saw the men they would become.” Zeno thinks of his father: how much easier it was to be a hero when you no longer walked the earth.
But now the fatigue is like a second force of gravity, threatening to tip him out of his chair. Rex puts the book back on the shelf and smiles. “You’re exhausted. Come, Hillary made up a bed for you.”
* * *
He wakes on the sleeper sofa in the bottom of the night with the acute awareness that two men share a bed through a closed door seven feet away. When he next wakes, spine aching from jet lag or some darker heartbreak, it is afternoon, and Rex left for school hours before. Hillary is standing at an ironing board, wearing what looks like a silk kimono, hunched over a book that appears to be in Chinese. Without raising his nose from the page, he holds out a cup of tea. Zeno takes it and stands in his rumpled travel clothes and looks out the window at a meshwork of brick and fire escapes.
He takes a lukewarm shower, standing in the bath and holding the nozzle over his head, and when he comes out of the bathroom Rex is standing in the tidy half of the apartment examining his thinning hair with a hand mirror. He smiles at Zeno and yawns.
“Shagging so many handsome lads tires the old man out,” whispers Hillary, and winks, and Zeno feels a shock of horror before he realizes Hillary is joking.
* * *
They see a dinosaur skeleton, ride a double-decker bus, and Hillary visits a makeup counter at a department store and returns with matching swirls of blue paint around his eyes, and Rex teaches Zeno about different brands of gin, and Hillary is always with them, rolling tight little cigarettes, dressing in platform shoes, in blazers, in an epic, monstrous prom dress. Soon it’s the fourth night of his visit, and they’re eating meat pies in a cellar after midnight, Hillary asking Zeno if he has reached the part in Rex’s book yet where he writes about how every lost book, before it vanished forever, got down to one final copy somewhere, and how it made Hillary think about seeing a white rhinoceros in a zoo in Czechoslovakia once, how the sign said the rhino was one of the last twenty northern white rhinos in the world, the only one left in Europe, and how the beast just stared out through the bars of his cage, making a moaning sound, while flies swarmed his eyes. Then Hillary looks over at Rex and wipes his eyes and says that every time he reads that part, he thinks about the rhino and cries, and Rex pats his arm.
* * *
On Saturday Hillary heads off to “the gallery,” though Zeno does not know what to imagine—art gallery? shooting gallery?—and he and Rex sit at a café table surrounded by women with prams, Rex in a black tweed vest still dusted with blackboard chalk from the previous days’ classes, which makes Zeno’s heart race. A tiny waiter who makes no sound as he moves brings them a teapot painted all over with raspberries.