Zeno is hoping the conversation might come around to the night, in Camp Five, when Bristol and Fortier loaded Rex onto the flatbed truck, hidden inside a fuel drum, that he might hear the story of Rex’s escape, and whether Rex forgives him for staying behind, but Rex is enthusing about a trip he took to the Vatican Library in Rome where he combed through heaps of ancient papyrus salvaged from the dumps of Oxyrhynchus, little pieces of Greek texts buried in sand for two thousand years. “Ninety-nine percent of it is dull, of course, certificates, farm receipts, tax records, but to find one sentence, Zeno—even a few words—of a literary work that was previously unknown? To rescue one phrase from oblivion? It’s the most exciting thing, I can’t tell you: it’s like digging up one end of a buried wire and realizing that it’s connected to someone eighteen centuries dead. It feels like nostos, do you remember?” He’s waving his nimble hands and blinking his eyes, the same gentleness in his face he carried all those years ago in Korea, and Zeno wants to leap across the table and put his mouth on Rex’s throat.
“One of these days we’re going to piece together something really significant, a tragedy by Euripides or a lost political history, or better still, some old comedy, some impossible fool’s journey to the ends of the earth and back. Those are my favorites, do you know what I mean?” He raises his eyes and flames flare inside Zeno. For an instant he spins out a possible future, an afternoon argument between Rex and Hillary: Hillary pouts, Rex asks Hillary to leave, Zeno helps clean out all of Hillary’s detritus, carries boxes, unpacks his own suitcase into Rex’s bedroom, sits on the edge of Rex’s bed; they take walks, travel to Egypt, read in silence across a teapot from one another. For a moment Zeno feels that he might be able to speak it into existence: if he says exactly the right words, right now, like a magic spell, it will happen. I think of you all the time, the veins in your throat, the fuzz on your arms, your eyes, your mouth, I loved you then, I love you now.
Rex says, “I’m boring you.”
“No, no.” Everything tilts. “The opposite. It’s just—” He sees the valley road, the plow blade, the swirling ghosts of snow. A thousand dark trees whisk past. “It’s all new for me, understand, late nights, gin and tonics, the Underground, your—Hillary. He’s reading Chinese, you’re digging up lost Greek scrolls. It’s intimidating.”
“Ah.” Rex waves a hand. “Hillary is full of projects that go nowhere. Never finishes a one. And I’m a teacher at a middling boys’ school. In Rome I get sunburned walking from the hotel to the taxi.”
The café bustles, a baby fusses, the waiter pads noiselessly back and forth. Rain trickles down the awning. Zeno feels the moment slipping.
“But isn’t that,” Rex says, “what love is?” He rubs his temple, and drinks his tea, and glances at his wristwatch, and Zeno feels as though he has walked to the center of the frozen lake and fallen through the ice.
* * *
The birthday party falls on Zeno’s last day. They take a black cab to a club called The Crash. Rex leans on Hillary’s arm and says, “Let’s try to keep it tame tonight, shall we?” and Hillary bats his lashes, and they descend into a series of connected rooms that get sequentially stranger and more dungeon-like, each stuffed with boys and men in silver boots or zebra leggings or top hats. Many of the men seem to know Rex, clasping him on the arm or kissing his cheeks or blowing party noisemakers at him, and several try to engage Zeno in conversation but the music is too loud, so he mostly nods and sweats in his polyester suit.
In a final room at the very bottom of the club Hillary appears carrying three glasses of gin, wobbling above the crowd in his high boots and emerald topcoat like a walking tree-god and the gin sends heat roaring through the corridors of Zeno’s body. He tries to get Rex’s attention, but the music doubles in volume, and as if by some signal, every man in the room begins to sing, “Hey hey hey hey hey,” as strobe lights in the walls switch on, transforming the room into a flip book, limbs ratcheting here and there, mouths leering, knees and elbows flashing, and Hillary tosses his drink in the air and wraps his tree limbs around Rex, everybody doing a version of the same dance, launching first one, then the other arm toward the ceiling, as though shaping semaphores to one another, the air aflame with noise, and rather than let go, rather than join, Zeno feels so miserable, so deficient, so overwhelmed by his own na?veté—his cardboard suitcase, his all-wrong suit, his lumberjack boots, his Idaho manners, his misconceived hope that Rex invited him here because he wanted something romantic from him—we could scribble some Greek with paper and pen rather than stick and mud. He is, he sees now, so much of a yokel that he’s basically a barbarian. Amid the pulsing music and flickering bodies, he is surprised to find himself yearning for the monochromatic predictability of Lakeport: Mrs. Boydstun’s afternoon whiskey, the unblinking porcelain children, the air striped with woodsmoke, and the silence over the lake.