Every Sunday he sends a letter to a British veterans organization, seeking the whereabouts of a lance corporal named Rex Browning.

* * *

Time passes. The snow melts, falls again, a sawmill burns, is rebuilt again, the highway crew rocks over washouts, shores up bridges, and rain or rockfall washes them out, and they rebuild them again. Then it’s winter and the rotary plow throws its mesmeric curtain of snow over the truck cab. Cars are always freezing up or going off the roads, sliding into the slush or mud, and he’s always hauling them back up: chain, tackle, reverse.

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, καλός ὁ παῖς, “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.

Occasionally he gathers the courage to share tidbits of what he has read with Mrs. Boydstun: ostrich hunting in ancient Libya, tomb painting in Tarquinia. “The Mycenaeans revered spirals,” he says one night. “They painted them on wine cups and masonry and gravestones, on the armored breastplates of their kings. But no one knows why.”

From Mrs. Boydstun’s nostrils gush twin columns of smoke. She sets down her glass of Old Forester and pokes through her puzzle pieces. “Why,” she says, “would anyone ever want to know about that?”

Out the kitchen window curtains of snow blow through the dusk.

21 December, 1970

Dear Zeno,

What an absolute miracle to receive three letters from you all at once. The bureau must have misfiled them for years. I can’t tell you how glad I am that you made it out. I searched for reports on the releases from the camp, but as you know, so much of that was buried, and I was working on reorienting myself to the living. I am elated that you found me.

I’m still mucking about with ancient texts—rummaging in the dusty bones of the dead languages like the old classics master I didn’t want to become. It’s even worse now, if you can believe it. I study lost books, books that no longer exist, examining papyri dug out of rubbish mounds at Oxyrhynchus. Even been to Egypt. Appalling sunburn.

Years pass in a blink now. Hillary and I will be hosting a bit of a function for my birthday in May. I know it’s a terribly long way, but you could pay a visit if you’re able? A holiday of sorts. We could scribble some Greek with paper and pen rather than stick and mud. Whatever you decide, I remain,

Your trusty friend,

Rex

LAKEPORT, IDAHO

2016–2018

Seymour

Eighth-grade world studies:

Write three things you learned about the Aztecs.

In the library I learned that every 52 years Aztec priests had to stop the world from ending. They put out every torch in town and locked all the pregnant women in stone grainerys so their babies didn’t turn into demons and kept all the kids awake so they wouldn’t turn into mice. Then they took a victim (had to be a victim with zero sins) to the top of a sacred mountain called Thorn Tree Place and when certain stars (one book, NonFiction F1219.73, guessed maybe Vega, fifth brightest in the sky) passed overhead, one priest split open the prisoner’s chest and ripped out her hot wet heart while another started a fire with a drill where her heart used to be. Then they carried the burning heart fire down to the city in a bowl and lit torches with it and people wanted to burn themselves with the torches because to get burnt by the heart fire was lucky. Soon thousands of torches were lit with that one fire and the city glowed again and the world was saved for another 52 years.