They pass around drawings of Uncle Sam with vampire teeth and dollar signs for eyes. Anybody want a hot shower and a T-bone steak? All you have to do is pose for some photos, sign a petition or two, sit in front of a microphone, and read some sentences condemning America. When they ask Zeno how many B-29s the U.S. Army keeps at Okinawa, he says, “Ninety thousand,” probably more airplanes than there have ever been in the history of the world. When he explains to an interrogator that he lives near water, the interrogator makes Zeno draw the marina at Lakeport. Two days later he tells Zeno that they lost the map and makes him draw it again to see if he draws it the same way twice.

* * *

One day a guard summons Zeno and Blewitt from their barracks and leads them behind the camp headquarters to the rim of a ravine the prisoners call Rock Gully. With the barrel of his carbine he points at one of the four isolation boxes there, then walks away. The box looks like a big coffin made from mud, pebbles, and cornstalks, with a wooden lid latched over the top. Seven feet long and maybe four high, it’s big enough that a man could lie down inside, and possibly kneel, but not stand up.

Loathsome, abhorrent, repugnant: the smell as they approach surpasses adjectives. Zeno holds his breath as he undoes the latches. Waves of flies rise out.

“Holy Christ,” breathes Blewitt.

Inside, tucked against the far wall, is a corpse: small, anemic, pale blond. His uniform, or what’s left of it, is the British battle-dress blouse with two huge chest pockets. One of the lenses of his eyeglasses is cracked and when he raises one hand to thumb them higher on his nose, Zeno and Blewitt jump.

“Easy,” says Blewitt, and the man peers up as though encountering beings from another galaxy.

His fingernails are black and cracked and, beneath the seething flies, his face and throat are veined with filth. It’s only when Zeno turns over the lid to set it down that he sees that, scratched into every available inch of its underside, are words. Half in English, half in something else.

ἔνθα δὲ δένδρεα μακρὰ πεφύκασι τηλεθόωντα, reads one line, the strange printing sagging to one side.

Therein grow trees, tall and luxuriant.

ὄγχναι καὶ ῥοιαὶ καὶ μηλέαι ἀγλαόκαρποι.

Pears and pomegranates and apple-trees with their bright fruit.

A throbbing starts in his chest. He knows this verse.

ἐν δὲ δύω κρῆναι ἡ μέν τ᾽ ἀνὰ κῆπον ἅπαντα.

And therein are two springs, one of which sends its water throughout all the garden.

“Kid? You gone deaf again?” Blewitt has climbed into the box and is trying to lift the man by his armpits, his face wrenched away from the odor, and the man is simply blinking through his broken glasses.

“Z? You planning to pick your nose all day?”

* * *

He gathers what information he can. The soldier is Lance Corporal Rex Browning, a grammar school teacher from East London who volunteered for the war, and he spent two weeks inside that box, sentenced to “attitude reorientation” for trying to escape, and was let out for only twenty minutes a day.

“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.”