“A corner-turner,” someone calls him. “Sectionable,” another says, because, as everyone knows, successfully escaping from Camp Five is a fantasy. The prisoners are unshaven, they’re feeble from malnutrition, and they’re taller than the Koreans—instantly recognizable as Westerners. Anyone who managed to get past the guards would have to pass undetected through a hundred miles of mountains, slip around dozens of checkpoints, make his way over gorges and across rivers, and any Koreans who might take pity on him would almost certainly be denounced and shot.
And yet, Zeno learns, Rex Browning the grammar school teacher tried. He was found a few miles south of camp, fifteen feet up a pine tree. The Chinese cut down the tree, then dragged him behind a jeep all the way back.
* * *
A few weeks later Zeno is gathering firewood from a hillside, the nearest guard several hundred yards away, when he sees Rex Browning picking his way along the trail below. Though his frame is skeletal, he doesn’t limp. He moves with efficiency, pausing now and then to pluck leaves from plants and stuff them into his shirt pockets.
Zeno shoulders his bundle and hurries down through the brush.
“Hello?”
Thirty feet, twenty, ten. “Hello?”
Still the man doesn’t stop. Zeno reaches the trail out of breath, and, praying the guards won’t hear, calls, “Such were the glorious gifts of the gods in the palace of brave Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians.”
Rex turns then and nearly falls, and stands blinking his big eyes behind his broken glasses.
“Or something like that,” says Zeno, blushing.
The other man laughs, a warm, irresistible laugh. The grime has been scrubbed out of the folds of his neck, his trousers mended with neat stitches: he is maybe thirty years old. His cornsilk hair, his flaxen eyebrows, his fine hands—in other circumstances, in another world, Zeno realizes, Rex Browning is handsome.
Rex says, “Zenodotus.”
“What?”
“The first librarian at the library at Alexandria. He was named Zenodotus. Appointed by the Ptolemaic kings.”
That accent: library becomes lie-brury. The trees vibrate in the wind and the firewood cuts into Zeno’s shoulders and he sets down his load.
“It’s just a name.”
Rex looks at the sky as though awaiting instructions. The skin of his throat is drawn so thin that Zeno can almost see the blood ticking through his arteries. He seems too insubstantial for such a place, as though any moment he will blow away.
Abruptly he turns and starts down the trail again. Lesson over. Zeno picks up his bundle and follows. “The two librarians in my town read it to me. The Odyssey, I mean. Twice. Once after I moved there, again after my father died. Who knows why.”
They keep on for a few more paces and Rex pauses to collect more leaves and Zeno leans over his knees and waits for the ground to stop spinning.
“It’s like they say,” says Rex. High above them the wind is shredding a vast sheet of cirrus. “Antiquity was invented to be the bread of librarians and schoolmasters.”
He cuts his eyes to Zeno and smiles, so Zeno smiles back, though he does not understand the joke, and a guard at the top of the ridge shouts something down through the trees in Chinese and the two men continue along the trail.
“That was Greek, then? That you scratched into the wooden lid?”
“As a schoolboy, you know, I didn’t care for it. Seemed so dusty and dead. The classics master made us choose four pages of Homer, memorize and translate them. I chose Book Seven. Torment, or so I thought at the time. I’d walk the lines into my memory, one word at a time. Out the door: I could tell yet a longer tale of all the evils which I have endured by the will of the gods. Down the stairs: But as for me, suffer me now to eat, despite my grief. To the loo: For there is nothing more shameless than a hateful belly. But during a fortnight alone in the dark”—he taps his temple—“you’d be surprised what you can find etched in the old brain box.”
They walk several more minutes in silence, Rex slowing with each step, and soon they are at the edge of Camp Five.
Woodsmoke, a rumbling generator, the Chinese flag. The reek of the latrines. All around them the little hunched trees whisper. Zeno can see a darkness seize Rex, then slowly release him.
“I know why those librarians read the old stories to you,” Rex says. “Because if it’s told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.”
LAKEPORT, IDAHO
2014
Seymour
For months after the Eden’s Gate sign appears on the shoulder of Arcady Lane, nothing changes. The osprey leaves her nest atop the tallest tree in the woods and heads for Mexico, and the first snows blow down from the mountains, and the county plow plows it into berms, and Lake Street fills with weekenders driving to the ski hill, and Bunny cleans their rooms at the Aspen Leaf Lodge.