MATHILDA: in the future they will look back and marvel at how we lived
SEEMORE6: not us tho? not you & me?
MATHILDA: our complacency
SEEMORE6: not the warriors?
In September collection agencies ring Bunny’s phone three times a day. The poor air quality keeps Labor Day tourists away; the marina is practically deserted, the restaurants empty; tips at the Pig N’ Pancake are nonexistent, and Bunny can’t find hours to replace the ones she lost when the Aspen Leaf closed.
Some swivel in Seymour has locked: he can no longer see the planet as anything but dying, and everyone around him complicit in the killing. The people in the Eden’s Gate houses fill their trash cans and pilot SUVs between their two homes and play music on Bluetooth speakers in their backyards and tell themselves they’re good people, conducting honorable, decent lives, living the so-called dream—as though America were an Eden where God’s warm benevolence fell equally across every soul. When in truth they’re participating in a pyramid scheme that’s chewing up everybody at the bottom, people like his mother. And they’re all congratulating themselves for it.
MATHILDA: sorry im late we only use terminals at night when chores are done
SEEMORE6: what chores
MATHILDA: planting pruning cutting hauling harvesting preparing pickling
SEEMORE6: vegetables?
MATHILDA: ya super fresh
SEEMORE6: don’t rly love vegetables
MATHILDA: tonight all the trees are standing up big and straight around camp so beautiful
MATHILDA: sky purple like eggplant
SEEMORE6: another vegetable
MATHILDA: ha u r funny
SEEMORE6: where do u sleep? tents
MATHILDA: tents ya also cabins barracks
MATHILDA:…
SEEMORE6: u still there
MATHILDA: they just said I could have ten xtra minutes
MATHILDA: because u are special u are important u have promise
SEEMORE6: me?
MATHILDA: ya not just to them to me
MATHILDA: to every1
SEEMORE6:…
MATHILDA: night birds flying over greenhouse creek trickling full tummy good feeling
SEEMORE6: wish I was there
MATHILDA: u will love it even the veggies ha ha
MATHILDA: we have showerhouse rec room armory plus beds are comfy too
SEEMORE6: real beds or sleeping bags
MATHILDA: both
SEEMORE6: is it like boys in one place girls in other?
MATHILDA: its whatever we want we don’t follow the old ways
MATHILDA: u will sees
MATHILDA: soon as u do your task
During classes his eyes cloud with visions of Bishop’s camp. White tents beneath dark trees, machine-gun nests atop stockades, gardens and greenhouses, solar panels, men and women in fatigues singing songs, telling tales, mysterious brewmasters brewing healthy elixirs from forest herbs. Always the imagination rotates back to Mathilda: her wrists, her hair, the intersection of her thighs. She comes down a path carrying two pails of berries; she is blond, she is Japanese, Serbian, a Fijian skin diver with ammunition belts crisscrossing over her breasts.
MATHILDA: u will feel so much better after you act
SEEMORE6: all the girls here are clueless
SEEMORE6: none of them get me
MATHILDA: u will feel so much power
SEEMORE6: none of them r like u
He looks it up: Maht means might, Hild means battle, Mathilda means might in battle, and after that Mathilda becomes an eight-foot-tall huntress moving silently through a forest. He leans back in bed, the edge of the tablet warm on his lap; Mathilda stoops through his doorway, props her bow against the door. Bougainvillea for a belt, roses in her hair, she blocks out the ceiling light and wraps one leafy hand around his groin.
Zeno
By mid-September Alex, Rachel, Olivia, Natalie, and Christopher want to transform the Cloud Cuckoo Land fragments into a play, dress up in costumes, and perform it. Rain falls, the smoke clears, the air quality improves, and still the children walk to the library on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school and gather around his table. These are the kids, he realizes, without club volleyball or math tutors or boat slips at the marina. Olivia’s parents run a church; Alex’s dad is searching for a job in Boise; Natalie’s parents work days and nights in a restaurant; Christopher is one of six kids; and Rachel is visiting the U.S. for a year while her Australian father does something involving fire mitigation at the local office of the Idaho Department of Lands.
Every minute he’s with them, Zeno learns. Earlier in the summer, all he could focus on was what he didn’t know, how much of Diogenes’s text wasn’t there. But now he sees that he doesn’t have to research every known detail about ancient Greek sheepherding or master every idiom of the Second Sophistic. He just needs the suggestions of story offered by what remains on the folios, and the children’s imaginations will do the rest.