He fights his way back up through the various rooms to the street and wanders frightened and ashamed through Vauxhall for two hours without any sense of where he is. When he finally gathers the nerve to wave down a cab and ask if he can be taken to a brick house in Camden beside a Gold Leaf cigarette sign, the cabbie nods and drives him directly to Rex’s building. Zeno climbs the four flights and finds the door unlocked. A cup of tea has been left on the table. When, a few hours later, Hillary wakes him so that he does not miss his flight, he touches him on the forehead with a gesture so tender that Zeno has to turn away.
* * *
Outside Departures Rex parks the Austin, lifts a wrapped box from the backseat, and sets it on Zeno’s lap.
Inside is a copy of Rex’s Compendium and a bigger, thicker volume. “Liddell and Scott, a Greek-English lexicon. Indispensable. In case you wanted to take a crack at translating again.”
Outside the car a rush of passengers spurts past and for a moment the ground beneath Zeno’s seat opens and he is swallowed and then he’s back in the seat once more.
“You had a knack for it, you know. More than a knack.”
Zeno shakes his head.
Horns honk and Rex glances behind them. “Don’t be so quick to dismiss yourself,” he says. “Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.”
Zeno gets out of the car, suitcase in his right hand, books under his left arm, something inside him （regret） thrusting to and fro like a spearman, pulverizing bone, destroying vital tissue. Rex leans over and puts out his right hand and Zeno squeezes it with his left, as awkward a handshake as there’s ever been. Then the little car is swallowed by traffic.
LAKEPORT, IDAHO
FEBRUARY–MAY 2019
Seymour
In February he and Janet huddle shoulder-to-shoulder over her smartphone in a corner of the cafeteria. “Gotta warn you,” she says, “he’s kinda scary.” On-screen a little man in black denim and a goat mask paces back and forth across an auditorium stage. He goes by the name of “Bishop”; an assault rifle is slung over his back. Start, he says,
with the Book of Genesis. “Be fruitful,” it begins, “and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
The video cuts to a restless mash of faces. For 2,600 years, the man continues,
those of us in the Western tradition have been assured that the role of humanity is to subdue the earth. That all creation was created for us to harvest. And for 2,600 years we pretty much got away with it. Temperatures remained constant, seasons stayed predictable, and we cut down forests and fished out oceans and elevated one god above all others: Growth. Expand your property, increase your wealth, enlarge your walls. And when each new treasure you drag inside your walls doesn’t relieve your pain? Go get some more. But now? Now the human species is beginning to reap what it has—
The bell sounds and Janet taps the screen and Bishop freezes mid-sentence, arms outstretched. A link flashes at the bottom of the screen: Join Us.
“Seymour, give me my phone. I need to get to Spanish.”
* * *
At the new Ilium terminal in the library, he puts on headphones and hunts down more videos. Bishop wears a Donald Duck mask, a raccoon mask, a Kwakiutl Nation beaver mask; he’s in a clear-cut in Oregon, a village in Mozambique.
When Flora got married, she was fourteen. Now she has three kids and the village wells are dry and the nearest reliable water source is a two-hour walk from her home. Here in the Funhalouro District adolescent moms like Flora spend about six hours a day searching for and transporting water. Yesterday she walked three hours to harvest water lilies from a lake so her kids would have something to eat. And what do our most enlightened leaders suggest we do? Switch to e-billing. Buy three LED bulbs and get a free tote bag. Earth has eight billion people to feed and the extinction rate is a thousand times higher than it was at pre-human levels. This is not something we fix with tote bags.
Bishop is recruiting warriors, he says, to dismantle the global industrial economy before it’s too late. They will, he says, rebuild societies around new thought systems, where resources will be shared; they will reclaim the old wisdom, seek answers to the questions commerce cannot answer, meet the needs money cannot meet.
The faces Seymour can make out in Bishop’s audiences glow with purpose; he remembers how it felt, his whole body taut, when he sprung the lid off the crate of Pawpaw’s old grenades for the first time. All that latent power. Never before has someone articulated his own anger and confusion like this.