Who says such things? And still Zeno steals glances: Rex’s mouth, his hair, his hands; there is the same pleasure in gazing at this man as in gazing at a fire.

Dysentery comes for Zeno as it does for all of them. The minute he returns from the latrine, he has to beg permission to go back again. Blewitt says he’d carry Zeno to the camp hospital but the camp hospital is just a shed where so-called doctors cut open prisoners and put chicken livers inside their ribs to “cure them” and that he’d be better off dying right here so Blewitt can have his socks.

Soon he is too weak to even make it to the latrine. At his lowest point he curls on his mat, locked in a thiamine-deficiency paralysis, and believes he is eight years old again, at home, shivering atop the frozen lake in his funeral shoes, inching forward into the swirling white. Just ahead he glimpses a city studded with towers: it flickers and gutters. All he has to do is step forward and he’ll reach its gates. But each time he tries, Athena tugs him back.

Sometimes he returns to awareness long enough to find Blewitt beside him, force-feeding him gruel and saying things like “Nuh-uh, no way, kid, you do not get to die, not without me.” At other hours it’s Rex who sits beside him, wiping Zeno’s forehead, the frames of his eyeglasses held together with rusted wire. With a fingernail, into the frost on the wall, he scratches a verse in Greek, as though drawing mysterious glyphs to scare away thieves.

As soon as he can walk, Zeno is forced back into his duty as a fireman. Some days he is too weak to carry his meager bundle more than a few paces before setting it down again. Rex squats beside him and with a piece of charcoal writes Ἄλφάβητος on the trunk of a tree.

A is ἄλφα is alpha: the inverted head of an ox. Β is βῆτα is beta: based on the floor plan of a house. Ω is ὦ μέγα is omega, the mega O: a great whale’s mouth opening to swallow all the letters before it.

Zeno says, “Alphabet.”

“Good. How about this?”

Rex writes, ὁ νόστος.

Zeno rummages in the compartments of his mind.

“Nostos.”

“Nostos, yes. The act of homecoming, a safe arrival. Of course, mapping a single English word onto a Greek one is almost always slippery. A nostos also means a song about a homecoming.”

Zeno rises, light-headed, and picks up his bundle.