Blewitt sits beside him in the yard. “Chin up, kid. Every hour we’re aboveground is a good hour.” But most hours Zeno does not feel like being aboveground anymore. Rex’s pale arms, aswarm with freckles. The intricate flickering of the tendons in the backs of his hands while he scratched out words. He imagines Rex arriving safely back in London, five thousand miles away, bathing, shaving, dressing in civilian clothes, putting books under one arm, heading off to a grammar school made of bricks and ivy.

His longing is such that Rex’s absence becomes something like a presence, a scalpel left behind in his gut. Dawn light glimmers on the surface of the Yalu and crawls up the hills; it sets the thorns on the brambles aglow; the men whisper, Our forces are ten miles away, six miles away, just over that hill. They’ll be here by morning.

If Rex was killed, did he die alone? Did he murmur to Zeno in the night as the truck rumbled away, assuming that he was in the barrel next to his? Or did he expect Zeno to fail him all along?

In June, three weeks after Rex’s disappearance, guards march Zeno and Blewitt and eighteen other of the youngest prisoners into the yard and an interpreter tells them they are being released. At a checkpoint two American MPs with shiny cheeks check Zeno’s name on a roster; one hands him a manila card that reads OK CHOW. There’s an ambulance ride across the demarcation line and then he’s brought to a delousing tent where a sergeant sprays him head-to-toe with DDT.

The Red Cross gives him a safety razor, a tube of shaving cream, a glass of milk, and a hamburger. The bun is extraordinarily white. The meat glistens in a way that does not look real. It smells real, but Zeno is certain that it is a trick.

He returns to the United States on the same ship that took him to Korea two and a half years before. He is nineteen years old and weighs 109 pounds. On each of the eleven days he is on board he is interviewed.

“Give six examples of how you tried to sabotage the Chinese effort.” “Who got better treatment than anyone else?” “Why was so-and-so given cigarettes?” “Did you ever feel any attraction to the communist ideology?” He hears that the Black soldiers have it worse.

At one point an army psychiatrist hands him a Life magazine opened to a photo of a woman in a bra and panties. “How does this make you feel?”

“Fine.” He hands the magazine back. Fatigue rolls through him.