Better still, Rex said that day in the café, some old comedy, some impossible fool’s journey to the ends of the earth and back. Those are my favorites, do you know what I mean?

Marian stands in the doorway of her office cradling a mug with cartoon cats all over it.

Sharif says, “Is he okay?”

“I think,” says Marian, “that he’s happy.”

* * *

He asks Sharif to print every article about the manuscript he can find. The ink used in the codex has been traced to tenth-century Constantinople; the Vatican Library has promised that every folio that contains anything legible will be digitized and uploaded into the public domain. A professor in Stuttgart predicts that Diogenes may have been the Borges of the ancient world, preoccupied with questions of truth and intertextuality, that the scans will reveal a new masterpiece, a forerunner of Don Quixote and Gulliver’s Travels. But a classicist in Japan says the text is likely to be inconsequential, that none of the surviving Greek novels, if they can even be called novels, approach the literary value of classical poetry and drama. Just because something is old, she writes, doesn’t guarantee that it’s any good.

The first scan, labeled Folio A, is uploaded on the first Friday of June. Sharif prints it on the newly donated Ilium printer, magnified to eleven inches by seventeen, and carries it to Zeno at his table in Nonfiction. “You’re going to make sense of that?”

It’s dirty and wormholed, colonized with mold, as though fungal hyphae, time, and water have collaborated to make an erasure poem. But to Zeno it looks magical, the Greek characters seeming to glow somewhere deep beneath the page, white on black, not so much handwriting as the specter of it. He remembers when Rex’s letter arrived, how at first he could not allow himself to believe that Rex had survived. Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.

* * *

During the first weeks of summer, as the scanned folios trickle onto the internet and out of Sharif’s printer, Zeno is euphoric. Bright June light flows through the library windows and illuminates the printouts; the opening passages of Aethon’s story strike him as sweet and silly and translatable; he feels he’s found his project, the one thing he needs to do before he dies. In daydreams he publishes a translation, dedicates it to Rex’s memory, hosts a party; Hillary travels from London with an entourage of sophisticated companions; everyone in Lakeport sees that he is more than Slow-Motion Zeno, the retired snowplow driver with the barky dog and the threadbare neckties.

But day by day his enthusiasm dims. Many of the folios remain so damaged that sentences dissolve into illegibility before they become comprehensible. Worse, the conservators report that at some point over its long history the codex must have been disbound and rebound in the wrong order, so that the intended sequence of events in Aethon’s tale is no longer obvious. By July he begins to feel as if he’s trying to solve one of Mrs. Boydstun’s jigsaw puzzles, a third of the pieces kicked under the stove, another third missing altogether. He’s too inexperienced, too undereducated, too old; his mind is not up to it.

Sheep Shagger, Fruit Punch, Pansy, Zero. Why is it so hard to transcend the identities assigned to us when we were young?

* * *

In August the library’s air conditioner gives out. Zeno spends an afternoon sweating through his shirt as he agonizes over a particularly problematic folio from which at least sixty percent of the words have been effaced. Something about a hoopoe leading Aethon-the-crow to a river of cream. Something about a prick of doubt—disquietude? restlessness?—beneath his wings.

That’s as far as he gets.

At closing time he gathers his books and legal pads as Sharif pushes in the chairs and Marian shuts off the lights. Outside, the air smells of wildfire smoke.

“There are professionals out there working on this,” Zeno says as Sharif locks the door. “Proper translators. People with fancy degrees who actually know what they’re doing.”

“Could be,” says Marian. “But none of them are you.”

On the lake a surf boat roars past, its speakers thumping bass. A hot, silvery pressure hangs in the atmosphere. The three of them pause beside Sharif’s Isuzu and Zeno feels the ghost of something moving through the heat, invisible, elusive. Over the ski mountain on the far side of the lake, a thundercloud flares blue.

“In the hospital,” Sharif says, as he lights a cigarette, “before she died, my mother used to say, ‘Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.’ ”

“Who said that?”

He shrugs. “Some days she said Aristotle, some days John Wayne. Maybe she made it up.”

EIGHTEEN

IT WAS ALL SO MAGNIFICENT, YET…

* * *

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio Σ

… my feathers grew shiny and full and I flapped about eating whatever I pleased, sweets, meats, fishes—even fowls! There was no pain, no hunger, my ·[wings?]· never throbbed, my talons never ·[stung?]·.

… the nightingales gave ·[evening?]· concerts, the warblers sang love songs in the gardens ·[and]· no one called me dull-witted or muttonheaded or lamebrained, or spoke a cruel word at all…

I had flown so far, I had proven everyone wrong. Yet as I perched on my balcony and peered past the happy flocking birds, over the gates, over the ruffled edges of the clouds, down at the patchwork mud-heap of earth far below, where the cities teemed and the herds, wild and tame, drifted like dust across the plains, I wondered about my friends, and my little bed, and the ewes I’d left behind in the field. I had traveled so far, and it was all so magnificent, yet…

… still a needle of doubt pricked beneath my wing. A dark restlessness flickered within…

THE ARGOS

MISSION YEAR 65

DAY 325 INSIDE VAULT ONE

Konstance

Weeks have passed since Konstance discovered the little ramshackle library hidden inside the Atlas. She has painstakingly copied three-quarters of Zeno Ninis’s translations—Folios Alpha through Sigma—from the golden book on the pedestal in the Children’s Section onto scraps of sackcloth in the vault. More than one hundred and twenty scraps, covered with her handwriting, now blanket the floor around Sybil’s tower, each alive with connections to the nights she spent in Farm 4, listening to the voice of her father.

… I rubbed myself head to toe with the ointment Palaestra chose, took three pinches of frankincense…

… Even if you grew wings, foolish fish, you could not fly to a place that is not real…

… he that knows all that Learning ever writ, knows only this—that he knows nothing yet.

Tonight she sits on the edge of the cot, ink-stained and weary, as the light turns leaden. These are the hardest hours, as DayLight bleeds into NoLight. Each time she’s struck anew by the silence beyond the vault, where she fears no living person has stirred for more than ten months, and the silence beyond that, beyond the walls of the Argos, that stretches for distances beyond human ability to comprehend them. She curls onto her side and pulls her blanket to her chin.