Inside, the flat appears bisected in two. On one side run tidy bookshelves while on the other tapestries, bicycle frames, candles, ashtrays, brass elephants, thickly frosted abstract paintings, and dead houseplants all seem to have been thrown into piles by a cyclone. “Make yourself at home, I’ll just wet some leaves,” Hillary says. He lights a cigarette from a stove burner and emits a titanic sigh. His forehead is unlined, his cheeks smooth-shaven; when Zeno and Rex were in Korea, Hillary could not have been more than five years old.

From the turntable exuberant voices sing, “Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes” and the realization hits: Rex and Hillary live together. In a one-bedroom apartment.

“Sit, sit.”

Zeno sits at the table while the record plays, gusts of confusion and exhaustion blasting over him. Hillary ducks light fixtures as he flips the record, then taps ashes into a houseplant.

“It’s such fun to have one of Rex’s friends visit. Rex never has friends visit. Sometimes I think he had none before I met him.”

Keys jingle at the door, and Hillary raises his eyebrows at Zeno, and a man comes into the apartment in a raincoat and galoshes and his face is the color of cheese curd and he has a little paunch sticking out over his belt and a concave chest and his eyeglasses are fogged and his freckles are faded but still exuberant in their quantity and it is Rex.

Zeno puts out a hand, but Rex embraces him.

Emotion rises unbidden to Zeno’s eyes. “Jet lag,” he says, and wipes his cheeks.

“Of course.”

A mile above them Hillary brings a cracked green fingernail to his own eye and scoops away a tear. He fills two cups with black tea, sets out a plate of biscuits, switches off the record player, wraps himself in a big purple raincoat, and says, “Right, I’ll leave you two old muckers to it then.” Zeno listens to him scuttle down the stairs like a giant multicolored spider.

Rex takes off his coat and shoes. “So, plowing snow?” The apartment seems to be teetering on the edge of a cliff. “And me, I’m still reading Iron Age poems to boys who don’t want to hear them.”

Zeno nibbles a biscuit. He wants to ask Rex if he ever wishes he were back at Camp Five, if he ever longs for the hours the two of them sat in the shadows of the kitchen shed, slatted with sunlight, and drew characters in the dust—a perverse kind of homesickness. But wishing you were back in a prison camp is raving mad, and Rex is talking about his trips to northern Egypt combing through the rubbish dumps of the ancients. All these years, all those miles, so much hope and dread, and now he has Rex all to himself and in the first five minutes he has already lost his way.

“You’re writing a book?”