The boy lowers his gun. The phone inside the backpack rings a second time. There, past the welcome desk blocking the door, beyond the porch, waits the next world. Does he have the strength?
He crosses the space to the entry and leans into the desk; power flows into his legs as though sent by Athena herself. The desk slides away; he clutches the backpack, pulls open the door, and charges into the glare of the police lights.
The phone rings a third time.
Down the five granite steps, down the walk, into the untracked snow, into a web of sirens, into the sights of a dozen rifles, one voice calling, “Hold fire, hold fire!” another—perhaps his own—yelling something beyond language.
So much snow pours from the sky that the air seems more snow than air. Down through the tunnel of junipers Zeno runs, moving as well as an eighty-six-year-old man with a bad hip can run in Velcro boots and two pairs of wool socks, the backpack pressed against his penguin necktie. He runs the bombs past the yellow owl eyes on the book drop box, past a van that reads Explosives Ordnance Disposal, past men in body armor; he is Aethon turning his back on immortality, happy to be a fool once more, the shepherds are dancing in the rain, playing their pipes and plucking their lyres, the lambs are bleating, the world is wet and muddy and green.
From the backpack comes the fourth ring. One ring left to live. For a quarter second, he glimpses Marian crouched behind a police car, sweet Marian in her cherry-red coat with her almond eyes and paint-flecked jeans; she watches him with a hand over her mouth, Marian the Librarian, whose face, every summer, becomes a sandstorm of freckles.
Down Park Street, away from the police vehicles, library at his back. Imagine, says Rex, how it felt to hear the old songs about heroes returning home. A quarter mile away is Mrs. Boydstun’s old house, no curtains on the windows, translations all over the dining table, five Playwood Plastic soldiers in a tin box upstairs beside the little brass bed, and Nestor the king of Pylos drowsing on the kitchen mat. Someone will need to let him out.
Ahead is the lake, frozen and white.
“Why,” says one librarian, “you don’t look warm at all.”
“Where,” says the other, “is your mother?”
He runs through the snow, and for the fifth time the phone rin