The prison librarian lets him keep the boxes in a corner, and every evening, Seymour, tired from walking the earth, sits on the floor and sifts through them. At the bottom of one, inside a folder stamped EVIDENCE, he finds five photocopied scripts the police recovered the night he was arrested, the night of the children’s dress rehearsal. On the last pages of one copy are multiple edits, not in Zeno’s hand, but in bright cursive.
While he was downstairs with his bombs, the children upstairs were rewriting their ending.
The underground tomb, the donkey, the sea bass, a crow flapping through the cosmos: it’s a ridiculous tale. But in the version rendered by Zeno and the kids, it’s beautiful too. Sometimes as he works, Greek words come flashing up from the depths of the facsimiles—？ρνι?, ornis, it means both bird and omen—and Seymour feels like he used to when he was caught in the gaze of Trustyfriend, as though he’s being allowed to glimpse an older and undiluted world, when every barn swallow, every sunset, every storm, pulsed with meaning. By age seventeen he’d convinced himself that every human he saw was a parasite, captive to the dictates of consumption. But as he reconstructs Zeno’s translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.
He cries at the end. Aethon steals into the garden in the center of the cloud city, talks to the gigantic goddess, and opens the Super Magical Extra Powerful Book of Everything. The academic articles among Zeno’s papers suggest that translators arrange the folios in such a way that leaves Aethon in the garden, inducted into the secrets of the gods, finally freed of his mortal desires. But evidently the children have decided at the last moment that the old shepherd will look away and not read to the end of the book. He eats the rose proffered by the goddess and returns home, to the mud and grass of the Arkadian hills.
In a child’s cursive, beneath the crossed-out lines, Aethon’s new line is handwritten in the margin, “The world as it is is enough.”
TWENTY-THREE
THE GREEN BEAUTY OF
THE BROKEN WORLD
* * *
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio Ψ
Debate continues over the intended location of Folio Ψ in Diogenes’s tale. By the time it was imaged, deterioration had progressed so far across the leaf that over eighty-five percent of the text was affected. Translation by Zeno Ninis.
… I woke…
… ·[found myself?]·…
… down from that high place…
… crawled in the grass, the trees…
… fingers, toes, a tongue to speak!
… the smell of wild onions…
… dew, the ·[lines?]· of the hills, … sweetness of light, moon overhead…
… the green beauty of the ·[broken?]· world.
… would wish to be like them… a god…
… ·[hungry?]·
… only a mouse quivering in the grass, in the ·[mist?]·
… the mild sunshine…
… falling.
NINE MILES FROM A WOODCUTTERS’ VILLAGE IN THE RHODOPE MOUNTAINS OF BULGARIA
1453–1494
Anna
They live in the cottage the boy’s grandfather built: stone walls, stone hearth, a peeled log for a ridge beam, thatch roof full of mice. Fourteen years of dung and straw and bits of food have compacted the dirt floor into something resembling concrete. No images hang inside, and only the simplest of ornaments adorn the bodies of his mother and sister: an iron ring, an agate strung on a piece of cord. Their crockery is heavy and plain, their leather untanned. The purpose of everything, from pots to people, seems to be to survive as long as possible, and anything that is not durable is not valued.
A few days after Anna and Omeir arrive, the boy’s mother walks along the creek and digs up a pouch of coins and the boy heads alone down the river road and returns four days later with a castrated bull and a donkey on its last legs. With the bull he manages to plow an overgrown series of terraces above the cottage and plant some August barley.
The boy’s mother and sister regard her with as much interest as they might a broken jar. And indeed, during those first months, what use is she? She can’t understand the simplest directives, can’t get the goat to stand still for milking, doesn’t know how to care for fowls or make curds or harvest honey or bundle hay or irrigate the terraces above the cottage. Most days she feels like a thirteen-year-old infant, incapable of all but the very simplest tasks.