“Sybil, what is this?”

Sybil does not answer. A sign, partially buried in snow, reads:

Everything behind her in Lakeport remains the same: static, summery, locked in place, the way the Atlas always is. But here, at the corner of Lake and Park, beyond the book drop box, it’s winter.

Snow collects on the junipers; snowflakes blow into her eyes; the wind carries the taste of steel. As she heads up the walk, she hears her feet crunch in the snow; she leaves footprints behind her. She climbs five granite steps to the porch. In the glass in the top half of the front door is a sign in child’s handwriting:

TOMORROW

ONE NITE ONLY

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

The door creaks as it opens. Straight ahead is a desk with pink paper hearts taped to it. A day calendar reads February 20, 2020. A framed needlepoint says: Questions Answered Here. One arrow points left to Fiction, another points right to Nonfiction.

“Sybil, is this a game?”

No reply.

On three antediluvian computer monitors, green-blue spirals drill ever-deeper. A leak, seeping through a stained ceiling tile, falls into a plastic trash can half full of water. Plip. Plop. Plip.

“Sybil?”

Nothing. On the Argos Sybil is everywhere; she can hear you in every compartment at every hour; never in Konstance’s life has she called to Sybil and not received a reply. Is it possible that Sybil does not know where she is? That Sybil does not know this exists inside the Atlas?

The spines of the shelved books give off an odor of yellowing paper. She opens a hand beneath the dripping leak and feels the drops strike her palm.

Halfway down the center aisle a sign says, CHILDREN’S SECTION, with an arrow pointing up. Legs trembling, Konstance climbs the stairs. The landing at the top is blocked by a golden wall. Written across it in what Konstance thinks might be classical Greek are the words:

Ὦ ξένε, ὅστις εἶ, ἄνοιξον, ἵνα μάθῃς ἃ θαυμάζεις

Below the writing waits a little arched door. The air smells of lilacs, mint, and roses: a smell like Farm 4 on its best, most fragrant day.

She steps through the door. On the other side paper clouds on strings glitter above thirty folding chairs, and the entire far wall is covered by a painted backdrop of a cloud city, birds swinging around its towers. From all around her comes the babble of falling water, of creaking trees, of chirping songbirds. At the center of a small stage, illuminated in a shaft of light angling through the clouds, a book rests atop a plinth.

She drifts transfixed through the folding chairs and climbs onto the stage. The book is a gilded duplicate of the blue book on Father’s nightstand in Scheria: the cloud city, the many-windowed towers, the whirling birds. Above the city it says, Cloud Cuckoo Land. Below it: By Antonius Diogenes. Translation by Zeno Ninis.

LAKEPORT, IDAHO

1995–2019

Zeno

He translates one book of the Iliad, two of the Odyssey, plus an admirable slice of Plato’s Republic. Five lines on an average day, ten on a good one, scribbled onto yellow legal pads in his crimped pencil-writing and stuffed into boxes beneath the dining table. Sometimes he believes his translations are adequate. Usually he decides they’re terrible. He shows them to no one.

The county gives him a plaque and a pension, Luther the big brindle dog dies a peaceful death, and Zeno adopts a terrier and names him Nestor the king of Pylos. Every morning he wakes in the little brass bed upstairs, does fifty push-ups, pulls on two pairs of Utah Woolen Mills socks, buttons up one of his two dress shirts, ties one of his four ties. Green today, blue tomorrow, the duck tie on Wednesdays, penguin tie on Thursdays. Black coffee, plain oatmeal. Then he walks to the library.

Marian, the library director, finds online videos of a seven-foot-tall professor from a Midwestern university teaching intermediate ancient Greek, and most mornings Zeno starts his day at a table beside the large-print romances—what Marian calls the Bosoms and Bottoms section—with big headphones on and the volume turned up.

Past tense literally causes him back pain, the way it flings all the verbs into the dark. Then there’s the aorist tense, a tense unbound by time, that can make him want to crawl into a closet and huddle in the darkness. But at the best moments, working through the old texts, for an hour or two, the words fall away and images rise to him through the centuries—warriors in armor packed into boats; sunlight spangling on the sea; the voices of gods carried on the wind—and it’s almost as though he’s six years old again, in front of the fireplace with the Cunningham twins, and simultaneously adrift with Ulysses in the waves off the coast of Scheria, hearing the tide roar against the rocks.

One bright afternoon in May of 2019, Zeno is hunched over his legal pads when Marian’s new hire, a children’s librarian named Sharif, calls him to the welcome desk. On Sharif’s computer screen floats a headline: New Technologies Uncover Ancient Greek Tale Inside Previously Unreadable Book.

According to the article, a crate of severely damaged medieval manuscripts, stored for centuries at the ducal library in Urbino, then moved to the Vatican Library, had long been considered illegible. A little nine-hundred-year-old goat leather codex in particular piqued the interest of scholars from time to time, but water damage, mold, and age had collaborated to fuse its pages into a solid, illegible mass.

Sharif enlarges the accompanying photo: a puckered black brick of parchment, no longer even rectangular. “Looks like a paperback soaked in a toilet for a thousand years,” he says.

“Then left in a driveway for another thousand,” Zeno adds.

Over the past year, the article continues, a team of conservators using multispectral scanning technology has managed to image bits of the original text. At first, speculation among scholars surged. What if the manuscript contained a lost play of Aeschylus or a scientific tract by Archimedes or an early Christian gospel? What if it were the lost comedy attributed to Homer called The Margites?

But today the team is announcing that they have recovered enough of the text to conclude that it is a first-century work of prose fiction titled Νεφελοκοκκυγία by the little-known writer Antonius Diogenes.

Νεφέλη, cloud; kόκκῡξ, cuckoo; Zeno knows that title. He hurries back to his table, pushes aside drifts of paper, excavates his copy of Rex’s Compendium. Page 29. Entry 51.

The lost Greek tale Cloud Cuckoo Land, by the writer Antonius Diogenes, relating a shepherd’s journey to a city in the sky, was probably written around the end of the first century C.E. We know from a ninth-century Byzantine summary of the novel that it opened with a short prologue in which Diogenes addressed an ailing niece and declared that he had not invented the comical story which followed but instead discovered it in a tomb in the ancient city of Tyre, written on twenty-four cypress wood tablets. Part fairy tale, part fool’s errand, part science-fiction, part utopian satire, Photios’s epitome suggests it could have been one of the more fascinating of the ancient novels.

Zeno’s breath catches. He sees Athena run through the snow; he sees Rex, angular and bent from malnutrition, scratch verses with charcoal onto a board. θεοὶ is the gods, ἐπεκλώσαντο means they spun, ὄλεθρον is ruin.