* * *
He learns of Rex’s death from Hillary in an airmail letter written in purple cursive. Rex, Hillary reports, was in Egypt, working with his beloved papyrus, trying to claw back one more sentence from oblivion, when he had a heart attack.
You were, Hillary writes, very dear to him. His huge, loopy signature takes up half the page.
* * *
Seasons tick past. Zeno wakes in the afternoons, dresses in the cramped upstairs room, creaks downstairs, rouses Mrs. Boydstun from her nap. Puts her in her chair, brushes her hair, feeds her dinner, wheels her to her puzzle, pours her two fingers of Old Forester. Turns on the television. Takes the note from the counter: Beef, onions, lipstick, buy the right red this time. Before he leaves for work, he carries her to her bed.
Tantrums, doctor’s appointments, therapies, a dozen drives to and from the specialist’s office in Boise—he sits with her through it all. Still he sleeps upstairs in the little brass bed, Rex’s Compendium of Lost Books and the Liddell and Scott entombed in a cardboard box beneath his desk. Some mornings, on the way home from work, he eases his plow to the side of the road and watches light seep into the valley, and it’s all he can do to get himself to drive the final mile home. In the last weeks of her life, Mrs. Boydstun’s coughs go submarine, as though she carries lakewater in her chest. He wonders if she’ll share any last words, any memories of his father, any insight into their relationship, if she’ll call him son or say she’s grateful for his years of care, grateful that she became his guardian, or show any sign that she understands his predicaments, but at the end she’s hardly there: just morphine and glassy eyes and an odor that carries him back to Korea.
On the day she dies he steps outside while the hospice nurse makes the necessary calls and hears a trickling and purring: roof draining, trees waking, swallows swooping, the mountains stirring, mumbling, buzzing, shifting. The melting world full of noise.
* * *
He removes every curtain in the house. Tugs the antimacassars off the chairs, dumps the potpourri, pours out the bourbon. Takes every rosy-cheeked porcelain child off every shelf, inters them in boxes, and deposits the boxes at the thrift shop.
He adopts a silver-muzzled sixty-five-pound brindle dog named Luther, walks him through the front door of the house, dumps a can of beef and barley stew into a bowl, and watches Luther engulf it. Then the dog sniffs around his surroundings as though in disbelief at his reversal of fortune.
Finally he yanks the discolored lace runner off the dining room table, retrieves the cardboard box from upstairs, and arranges his books across the old ring-stained walnut. He pours a cup of coffee and unwraps a new legal pad from Lakeport Drug and Luther curls up on top of his feet and lets off a ten-second sigh.
Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told him, there might be nothing more humbling, or more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don’t know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we’re doomed to fail. But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool’s errand.
Zeno sharpens his pencil and tries again.
THE ARGOS
MISSION YEAR
64 DAY 276 INSIDE VAULT ONE
Konstance
Behind her the line of traffic remains backed up for all eternity along the lakefront. The faceless kids in tank tops remain frozen mid-stride on the corner. But in front of her, things inside the Atlas are moving: the sky above the owl-shaped book drop box becomes a seething, swirling mat of silver, and snowflakes are tumbling out of it.
She takes a step forward. Unruly juniper hedges rise on either side of a snow-covered walk, and at the far end, a dilapidated, light-blue two-story gingerbread Victorian house shimmers into place. The porch leans, the chimney looks crooked; a blue OPEN sign flickers to life in a front window.
“Sybil, what is this?”
Sybil does not answer. A sign, partially buried in snow, reads:
Everything behind her in Lakeport remains the same: static, summery, locked in place, the way the Atlas always is. But here, at the corner of Lake and Park, beyond the book drop box, it’s winter.
Snow collects on the junipers; snowflakes blow into her eyes; the wind carries the taste of steel. As she heads up the walk, she hears her feet crunch in the snow; she leaves footprints behind her. She climbs five granite steps to the porch. In the glass in the top half of the front door is a sign in child’s handwriting:
TOMORROW