* * *
Twenty minutes later five kids sit in a ring around Zeno’s table, each studying a facsimile of a different folio. A girl with a bob that looks as if it was cut by a weed-whacker raises her hand, then immediately starts talking. “So okay from what you’re saying, this Ethan guy has all these insane adventures—”
“Aethon.”
“Should be Ethan,” says Alex Hess. “Easier.”
“—and his story gets written down a zillion years ago on twenty-four wooden tablet-thingys, which are buried with his body when he’s dead? Which are then discovered, centuries later, in a graveyard by Dyed-Jeans? And he recopies the whole story onto like hundreds of pieces of paper—”
“Papyrus.”
“—and mails it to his niece who’s like dying?”
“Right,” says Zeno, bewildered and excited and enervated all at once. “Though you should remember there wasn’t really mail, not as we understand it. If there was a niece at all, Diogenes probably gave his scrolls to a trusted friend, who—”
“Then that copy somehow got copied in Constant-a-wherever, and that copy got lost for like another zillion years, only it just got re-found in Italy, but it’s still a big mess because a ton of words are missing?”
“You’ve got it exactly.”
A slight boy named Christopher squirms in his chair. “So switching all this old writing into English is really hard, and you only have pieces of the story, and you don’t even know what order they go in?”
Rachel the redhead turns her facsimile this way and that. “And the pieces you do have look like somebody smeared Nutella all over them.”
“Right.”
“So like,” asks Christopher, “why?”
All the children look at him: Alex; Rachel; little Christopher; Olivia, the girl with the weed-whacker bob; and a quiet girl with brown eyes, brown skin, brown clothes, and jet-black hair named Natalie.
Zeno says, “You ever see a superhero movie? Where the hero keeps getting beat up and it always seems like he—”
“Or she,” says Olivia.
“—or she will never make it? That’s what these fragments are: superheroes. Try to imagine the epic battles they survived over the last two thousand years: floods, fires, earthquakes, failed governments, thieves, barbarians, zealots, who knows what else? We know that somehow a copy of this text made it to a scribe in Constantinople nine or ten centuries after it was first written, and all we know about him—”
“Or her,” says Olivia.
“—is this tidy handwriting, leaning slightly to the left. But now the few people who can make sense of that old writing have a chance to breathe life back into these superheroes so that maybe they can do battle for a few more decades. Erasure is always stalking us, you know? So to hold in your hands something that has evaded it for so long—”
He wipes his eyes, embarrassed.
Rachel runs her fingers over the faint lines of text in front of her. “It’s like Ethan.”
“Aethon,” says Olivia.
“The fool you were telling us about. In the story? Even though he keeps going the wrong way, keeps getting turned into the wrong thing, he never gives up. He survives.”
Zeno looks at her, some new understanding seeping into his consciousness.
“Tell us some more,” says Alex, “about the fishermen with the tree-penises.”
* * *
That night, at his dining table, with Nestor the king of Pylos curled at his feet, Zeno lays out his legal pads. Everywhere he looks he sees the inadequacies of his early attempts. He was too concerned about recognizing clever allusions, steering clear of syntactical reefs, getting every word right. But whatever this strange old comedy was, it wasn’t proper or elevated or concerned with getting things right. It was a story intended to bring comfort to a dying girl. All those academic commentaries he forced himself to read—was Diogenes writing lowbrow comedy or elaborate metafiction?—in the face of five fifth graders, smelling of chewing gum, sweaty socks, and wildfire smoke, those debates flew out the window. Diogenes, whoever he was, was primarily trying to make a machine that captured attention, something to slip the trap.
A great weight slides away. He brews coffee, unwraps a new legal pad, sets Folio β in front of him. Word gap wordwordword gap gap word—they’re just marks on the skin of a long-dead goat. But beneath them, something crystallizes.
I am Aethon, a simple shepherd from Arkadia, and the tale I have to tell is so ludicrous, so incredible, that you’ll never believe a word of it—and yet, it’s true. For I, the one they called birdbrain and nincompoop—yes, I, dull-witted muttonheaded lamebrained Aethon—once traveled all the way to the edge of the earth and beyond…