MATHILDA: thank u 4 reaching out sry for delay just needed

SEEMORE6: ur with bishop? at his camp?

MATHILDA: to verify

MATHILDA: ur not with authorities

SEEMORE6: not I swear

SEEMORE6: want 2 help want 2 join fight

MATHILDA: i have been assigned to u

SEEMORE6: want 2 break machine

At the end of the summer, a hurricane shatters two Caribbean islands, drought squeezes Somalia, the global monthly average temperature breaks another record, an intergovernmental report announces that ocean temperatures have risen four times faster than anyone expected, and the smoke from two separate megafires in Oregon rides eastward currents into Lakeport, where it collects in shapes that look to Seymour, in the satellite images on his tablet, very much like whirlpools.

He has not seen Janet since he smashed the big side window of the RV at the marina and ran. As far as he knows, she didn’t call the police; if the police somehow found her, he doesn’t think she told them about him. All summer he avoids the library, avoids the lakefront, works at the ice rink cleaning locker rooms and stocking sodas with the drawstring of his hoodie pulled tight. Other than that he stays in his bedroom.

MATHILDA: they say eighty dead in the flooding what they don’t count is how many depressed, how many PTSD, how many have no $ to relocate, how many will die from mold, how many

SEEMORE6: wait which floods

MATHILDA: will die of broken hearts

SEEMORE6: the smoke here is v bad today

MATHILDA: in the future they will look back and marvel at how we lived

SEEMORE6: not us tho? not you & me?

MATHILDA: our complacency

SEEMORE6: not the warriors?

In September collection agencies ring Bunny’s phone three times a day. The poor air quality keeps Labor Day tourists away; the marina is practically deserted, the restaurants empty; tips at the Pig N’ Pancake are nonexistent, and Bunny can’t find hours to replace the ones she lost when the Aspen Leaf closed.

Some swivel in Seymour has locked: he can no longer see the planet as anything but dying, and everyone around him complicit in the killing. The people in the Eden’s Gate houses fill their trash cans and pilot SUVs between their two homes and play music on Bluetooth speakers in their backyards and tell themselves they’re good people, conducting honorable, decent lives, living the so-called dream—as though America were an Eden where God’s warm benevolence fell equally across every soul. When in truth they’re participating in a pyramid scheme that’s chewing up everybody at the bottom, people like his mother. And they’re all congratulating themselves for it.

MATHILDA: sorry im late we only use terminals at night when chores are done

SEEMORE6: what chores

MATHILDA: planting pruning cutting hauling harvesting preparing pickling

SEEMORE6: vegetables?

MATHILDA: ya super fresh

SEEMORE6: don’t rly love vegetables

MATHILDA: tonight all the trees are standing up big and straight around camp so beautiful

MATHILDA: sky purple like eggplant

SEEMORE6: another vegetable

MATHILDA: ha u r funny

SEEMORE6: where do u sleep? tents

MATHILDA: tents ya also cabins barracks

MATHILDA:…

SEEMORE6: u still there

MATHILDA: they just said I could have ten xtra minutes

MATHILDA: because u are special u are important u have promise

SEEMORE6: me?

MATHILDA: ya not just to them to me

MATHILDA: to every1

SEEMORE6:…

MATHILDA: night birds flying over greenhouse creek trickling full tummy good feeling

SEEMORE6: wish I was there

MATHILDA: u will love it even the veggies ha ha

MATHILDA: we have showerhouse rec room armory plus beds are comfy too

SEEMORE6: real beds or sleeping bags

MATHILDA: both

SEEMORE6: is it like boys in one place girls in other?

MATHILDA: its whatever we want we don’t follow the old ways

MATHILDA: u will sees

MATHILDA: soon as u do your task

During classes his eyes cloud with visions of Bishop’s camp. White tents beneath dark trees, machine-gun nests atop stockades, gardens and greenhouses, solar panels, men and women in fatigues singing songs, telling tales, mysterious brewmasters brewing healthy elixirs from forest herbs. Always the imagination rotates back to Mathilda: her wrists, her hair, the intersection of her thighs. She comes down a path carrying two pails of berries; she is blond, she is Japanese, Serbian, a Fijian skin diver with ammunition belts crisscrossing over her breasts.

MATHILDA: u will feel so much better after you act

SEEMORE6: all the girls here are clueless

SEEMORE6: none of them get me

MATHILDA: u will feel so much power

SEEMORE6: none of them r like u

He looks it up: Maht means might, Hild means battle, Mathilda means might in battle, and after that Mathilda becomes an eight-foot-tall huntress moving silently through a forest. He leans back in bed, the edge of the tablet warm on his lap; Mathilda stoops through his doorway, props her bow against the door. Bougainvillea for a belt, roses in her hair, she blocks out the ceiling light and wraps one leafy hand around his groin.

Zeno

By mid-September Alex, Rachel, Olivia, Natalie, and Christopher want to transform the Cloud Cuckoo Land fragments into a play, dress up in costumes, and perform it. Rain falls, the smoke clears, the air quality improves, and still the children walk to the library on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school and gather around his table. These are the kids, he realizes, without club volleyball or math tutors or boat slips at the marina. Olivia’s parents run a church; Alex’s dad is searching for a job in Boise; Natalie’s parents work days and nights in a restaurant; Christopher is one of six kids; and Rachel is visiting the U.S. for a year while her Australian father does something involving fire mitigation at the local office of the Idaho Department of Lands.

Every minute he’s with them, Zeno learns. Earlier in the summer, all he could focus on was what he didn’t know, how much of Diogenes’s text wasn’t there. But now he sees that he doesn’t have to research every known detail about ancient Greek sheepherding or master every idiom of the Second Sophistic. He just needs the suggestions of story offered by what remains on the folios, and the children’s imaginations will do the rest.

For the first time in decades, maybe for the first time since the days with Rex in Camp Five, sitting knee-to-knee beside the fire in the kitchen shed, he feels fully awake, as though the curtains have been ripped off the windows of his mind: what he wants to do is here, right in front of him.

* * *

One Tuesday in October, all five fifth graders sit around his little library table. Christopher and Alex engulf donut holes from a carton that Marian has produced from somewhere; Rachel, rail-thin in her boots and jeans, leans over a legal pad, scribbling, erasing, scribbling again. By now Natalie, who barely spoke for the first three weeks, talks practically nonstop. “So after this whole journey,” she says, “Aethon answers the riddle, gets through the gates, drinks from the rivers of wine and cream, eats apples and peaches, even honeycakes, whatever those are, and the weather is always great, and no one is mean to him, and he’s still unhappy?”

Alex chews another donut hole. “Yeah, that sounds crazy.”