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.
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.”