Sharif enlarges the accompanying photo: a puckered black brick of parchment, no longer even rectangular. “Looks like a paperback soaked in a toilet for a thousand years,” he says.
“Then left in a driveway for another thousand,” Zeno adds.
Over the past year, the article continues, a team of conservators using multispectral scanning technology has managed to image bits of the original text. At first, speculation among scholars surged. What if the manuscript contained a lost play of Aeschylus or a scientific tract by Archimedes or an early Christian gospel? What if it were the lost comedy attributed to Homer called The Margites?
But today the team is announcing that they have recovered enough of the text to conclude that it is a first-century work of prose fiction titled Νεφελοκοκκυγ?α by the little-known writer Antonius Diogenes.
Νεφ?λη, cloud; k?κκ?ξ, cuckoo; Zeno knows that title. He hurries back to his table, pushes aside drifts of paper, excavates his copy of Rex’s Compendium. Page 29. Entry 51.
The lost Greek tale Cloud Cuckoo Land, by the writer Antonius Diogenes, relating a shepherd’s journey to a city in the sky, was probably written around the end of the first century C.E. We know from a ninth-century Byzantine summary of the novel that it opened with a short prologue in which Diogenes addressed an ailing niece and declared that he had not invented the comical story which followed but instead discovered it in a tomb in the ancient city of Tyre, written on twenty-four cypress wood tablets. Part fairy tale, part fool’s errand, part science-fiction, part utopian satire, Photios’s epitome suggests it could have been one of the more fascinating of the ancient novels.
Zeno’s breath catches. He sees Athena run through the snow; he sees Rex, angular and bent from malnutrition, scratch verses with charcoal onto a board. θεο? is the gods, ?πεκλ?σαντο means they spun, ?λεθρον is ruin.
Better still, Rex said that day in the café, 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?
Marian stands in the doorway of her office cradling a mug with cartoon cats all over it.
Sharif says, “Is he okay?”
“I think,” says Marian, “that he’s happy.”
* * *
He asks Sharif to print every article about the manuscript he can find. The ink used in the codex has been traced to tenth-century Constantinople; the Vatican Library has promised that every folio that contains anything legible will be digitized and uploaded into the public domain. A professor in Stuttgart predicts that Diogenes may have been the Borges of the ancient world, preoccupied with questions of truth and intertextuality, that the scans will reveal a new masterpiece, a forerunner of Don Quixote and Gulliver’s Travels. But a classicist in Japan says the text is likely to be inconsequential, that none of the surviving Greek novels, if they can even be called novels, approach the literary value of classical poetry and drama. Just because something is old, she writes, doesn’t guarantee that it’s any good.
The first scan, labeled Folio A, is uploaded on the first Friday of June. Sharif prints it on the newly donated Ilium printer, magnified to eleven inches by seventeen, and carries it to Zeno at his table in Nonfiction. “You’re going to make sense of that?”
It’s dirty and wormholed, colonized with mold, as though fungal hyphae, time, and water have collaborated to make an erasure poem. But to Zeno it looks magical, the Greek characters seeming to glow somewhere deep beneath the page, white on black, not so much handwriting as the specter of it. He remembers when Rex’s letter arrived, how at first he could not allow himself to believe that Rex had survived. Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.
* * *
During the first weeks of summer, as the scanned folios trickle onto the internet and out of Sharif’s printer, Zeno is euphoric. Bright June light flows through the library windows and illuminates the printouts; the opening passages of Aethon’s story strike him as sweet and silly and translatable; he feels he’s found his project, the one thing he needs to do before he dies. In daydreams he publishes a translation, dedicates it to Rex’s memory, hosts a party; Hillary travels from London with an entourage of sophisticated companions; everyone in Lakeport sees that he is more than Slow-Motion Zeno, the retired snowplow driver with the barky dog and the threadbare neckties.