Things occasionally go haywire with Mrs. Boydstun. Her moods seesaw. She forgets what she is supposed to buy at the store. She trips over nothing; she tries to put on lipstick but trails it back along one cheek. In the summer of 1955, Zeno drives her to Boise and a doctor diagnoses her with Huntington’s chorea. The doctor tells him to watch for slips in her speech or for involuntary jerking movements. Mrs. Boydstun lights a cigarette and says, “You watch your mouth.”
* * *
He writes to the British Commonwealth Forces Korea. He writes to a recovery unit at the British Commonwealth Occupation Force. He writes to every person named Rex Browning in England. What replies come back are conscientious but inconclusive. Prisoner of war, no known status, we regret we have no further information at this time. Rex’s unit? He doesn’t know. Commanding officer? He doesn’t know. He has a name. He has East London. He wants to write: He fluttered his hand over his mouth when he yawned. He had a collarbone I wanted to put my teeth on. He told me that archaeologists have found the inscription ΚΑΛΟΣΟΠΑΙΣ scratched on thousands of ancient Greek pots, given as gifts by older men to boys they found attractive. ΚΑΛΟΣΟΠΑΙΣ, καλ?? ? πα??, “the boy is beautiful.”
How could a man with so much in his head, with so much energy and light, be erased?
A half-dozen times over the coming winters, he’s leaning over a frozen engine out on the Long Valley Road, or unhooking a chain, when a man will brush his elbow, or fit a hand into the space between his bottom rib and the crest of his pelvis, and they’ll go into a garage or climb into the cab of the Autocar in the foggy dark and grapple each other. One particular ranch hand contrives to make this happen several times, as though deliberately driving his car into a snowbank. But by spring the man is gone with no word, and Zeno never sees him again.
Amanda Corddry, the highway department dispatcher, asks him about various girls in town—how about Jessica from the Shell station? Lizzie at the diner?—and he cannot avoid a date. He wears a necktie; the women are unfailingly nice; some have been warned about the supposed perfidy of indoctrinated POWs in Korea; none understand his long silences. He tries to use his fork and knife in a masculine way, cross his legs in a masculine way; he talks about baseball and boat engines; still he suspects he does everything wrong.
One night, waves of confusion crashing over him, he almost tells Mrs. Boydstun. She’s having a good day, her hair brushed and her eyes clear, two loaves of raisin bread in the oven, and it’s a commercial break on the television, Quaker Instant Oatmeal, then Vanquish headache medicine, and Zeno clears his throat.
“You know, after Papa died, when I—”
She gets up and turns down the volume. Silence blares in the room as bright as a sun.
“I’m not—” he tries again, and she shuts her eyes, as though bracing for a blow. In front of him a jeep tears in half. Gun barrels flash. Blewitt swats flies and collects them in a tin. Men scrape carbonized corn from the bottom of a pot.
“Spit it out, Zeno.”
“It’s nothing. Your program is back on now.”
* * *
The doctor suggests jigsaw puzzles to maintain Mrs. Boydstun’s fine-motor skills, so he orders a new one every week from Lakeport Drug, and becomes accustomed to finding the little pieces all over the house: in the basins of sinks, stuck to the bottom of his shoe, in the dustpan when he sweeps the kitchen. A splotch of cloud, a segment of the Titanic’s smokestack, a section of a cowboy’s bandanna. Inside a terror creeps: that things will be like this forever, that this will be all there ever is. Breakfast, work, supper, dishes, a half-completed jigsaw of the Hollywood sign on the dining table, forty of its pieces on the floor. Life. Then the cold dark.
Traffic increases on the road up from Boise, and most of the county plowing shifts to night. He pursues the beams of his headlights through the dark, beating back the snow, and some mornings, at the end of his shift, rather than go directly home, he parks in front of the library and lingers between the shelves.
There’s a new librarian now, Mrs. Raney, who mostly lets him be. At first Zeno sticks to National Geographic magazines: macaws, Inuits, camel trains, the photographs stirring some latent restlessness inside. He inches his way into History: the Phoenicians, the Sumerians, the Jōmon period of Japan. He drifts past the little collection of Greeks and Romans—the Iliad, a few plays by Sophocles, no sign of a lemon-yellow copy of The Odyssey—but cannot bring himself to pull anything off the shelf.