* * *

He burns so much adrenaline during the flights that by the time he gets off in Heathrow, he is practically hallucinating. Outside passport control he looks for an Englishwoman; instead a six-foot-six man with prematurely silver hair and apricot-colored pants that flare at the calf seizes his forearm.

“Oh, you are a little box of cocoa,” says the giant, and air-kisses both of Zeno’s cheeks. “I’m Hillary.”

Zeno clutches his suitcase, trying to comprehend. “How did you know I was me?”

Hillary shows his canines. “Lucky guess.”

He plucks Zeno’s suitcase from his grasp and marshals him through the crowds. Beneath a blue vest, Hillary wears what looks like a peasant’s blouse with sequins randomly applied to the sleeves. Are his fingernails painted green? Is a man allowed to dress like this here? Yet, as Hillary’s boots clip-clop across the terminal, as they weave into a crush of buses and taxis, no one pays much mind. They clamber into a pocket-sized wine-colored two-door, something called an Austin 1100, Hillary insisting on holding the door for Zeno, then walking around the rear of the little car and folding his long body behind the right-hand drive, knees practically in his teeth as he works the pedals, his hair brushing the roof, and Zeno tries not to hyperventilate.

London is smoke-gray and endless. Hillary chatters: “Brentford on your right, old dunghead boyfriend lived right over there, big, disobedient nipper. Rex finishes school in one hour, so we’ll surprise him at home. That’s Gunnersbury Park there, see?”

Parking meters, creeping traffic, soot-stained facades. Wrigley’s Spearmint Gold Leaf One of the Great Cigarettes Ales Spirits and Wines. They park outside a sun-deprived brick house in Camden. No gardens, no hedges, no warbling greenfinches, no matronly wife with teacups. A leaflet glued by rain to the sidewalk reads, The easy way to pay. “We go up,” Hillary says and bends through the doorway like a mobile tree. He carries Zeno’s suitcase up four flights, his long strides skipping every other stair.

Inside, the flat appears bisected in two. On one side run tidy bookshelves while on the other tapestries, bicycle frames, candles, ashtrays, brass elephants, thickly frosted abstract paintings, and dead houseplants all seem to have been thrown into piles by a cyclone. “Make yourself at home, I’ll just wet some leaves,” Hillary says. He lights a cigarette from a stove burner and emits a titanic sigh. His forehead is unlined, his cheeks smooth-shaven; when Zeno and Rex were in Korea, Hillary could not have been more than five years old.

From the turntable exuberant voices sing, “Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes” and the realization hits: Rex and Hillary live together. In a one-bedroom apartment.

“Sit, sit.”

Zeno sits at the table while the record plays, gusts of confusion and exhaustion blasting over him. Hillary ducks light fixtures as he flips the record, then taps ashes into a houseplant.

“It’s such fun to have one of Rex’s friends visit. Rex never has friends visit. Sometimes I think he had none before I met him.”

Keys jingle at the door, and Hillary raises his eyebrows at Zeno, and a man comes into the apartment in a raincoat and galoshes and his face is the color of cheese curd and he has a little paunch sticking out over his belt and a concave chest and his eyeglasses are fogged and his freckles are faded but still exuberant in their quantity and it is Rex.

Zeno puts out a hand, but Rex embraces him.

Emotion rises unbidden to Zeno’s eyes. “Jet lag,” he says, and wipes his cheeks.

“Of course.”

A mile above them Hillary brings a cracked green fingernail to his own eye and scoops away a tear. He fills two cups with black tea, sets out a plate of biscuits, switches off the record player, wraps himself in a big purple raincoat, and says, “Right, I’ll leave you two old muckers to it then.” Zeno listens to him scuttle down the stairs like a giant multicolored spider.

Rex takes off his coat and shoes. “So, plowing snow?” The apartment seems to be teetering on the edge of a cliff. “And me, I’m still reading Iron Age poems to boys who don’t want to hear them.”

Zeno nibbles a biscuit. He wants to ask Rex if he ever wishes he were back at Camp Five, if he ever longs for the hours the two of them sat in the shadows of the kitchen shed, slatted with sunlight, and drew characters in the dust—a perverse kind of homesickness. But wishing you were back in a prison camp is raving mad, and Rex is talking about his trips to northern Egypt combing through the rubbish dumps of the ancients. All these years, all those miles, so much hope and dread, and now he has Rex all to himself and in the first five minutes he has already lost his way.

“You’re writing a book?”

“Already wrote one.” From one of the shelves Rex slides a tan hardcover with plain blue capitals on the front. Compendium of Lost Books. “We’ve sold, I think, forty-two copies, about sixteen of those to Hillary.” He laughs. “Turns out no one wants to read a book about books that no longer exist.”

Zeno runs a finger over Rex’s name where it is printed on the jacket. Books have always seemed to him like clouds or trees, things that were just there, on the shelves at the Lakeport Public Library. But to know someone who made one? “Take the tragedies alone,” Rex is saying. “We know that at least one thousand of them were written and performed in Greek theaters in the fifth century B.C. You know how many we have left? Thirty-two. Seven of Aeschylus’s eighty-one. Seven of Sophocles’s one hundred and twenty-three. Aristophanes wrote forty comedies that we know of—we have eleven, not all of them complete.”

As Zeno turns pages, he sees entries for Agathon, Aristarchus, Callimachus, Menander, Diogenes, Chaeremon of Alexandria. “When all you have is a shard of papyrus with a few words on it,” Rex says, “or a single line quoted in somebody else’s text, the potential of what’s lost haunts you. It’s like the boys who died in Korea. We grieve them the most because we never saw the men they would become.” Zeno thinks of his father: how much easier it was to be a hero when you no longer walked the earth.

But now the fatigue is like a second force of gravity, threatening to tip him out of his chair. Rex puts the book back on the shelf and smiles. “You’re exhausted. Come, Hillary made up a bed for you.”

* * *

He wakes on the sleeper sofa in the bottom of the night with the acute awareness that two men share a bed through a closed door seven feet away. When he next wakes, spine aching from jet lag or some darker heartbreak, it is afternoon, and Rex left for school hours before. Hillary is standing at an ironing board, wearing what looks like a silk kimono, hunched over a book that appears to be in Chinese. Without raising his nose from the page, he holds out a cup of tea. Zeno takes it and stands in his rumpled travel clothes and looks out the window at a meshwork of brick and fire escapes.

He takes a lukewarm shower, standing in the bath and holding the nozzle over his head, and when he comes out of the bathroom Rex is standing in the tidy half of the apartment examining his thinning hair with a hand mirror. He smiles at Zeno and yawns.

“Shagging so many handsome lads tires the old man out,” whispers Hillary, and winks, and Zeno feels a shock of horror before he realizes Hillary is joking.