In a final room at the very bottom of the club Hillary appears carrying three glasses of gin, wobbling above the crowd in his high boots and emerald topcoat like a walking tree-god and the gin sends heat roaring through the corridors of Zeno’s body. He tries to get Rex’s attention, but the music doubles in volume, and as if by some signal, every man in the room begins to sing, “Hey hey hey hey hey,” as strobe lights in the walls switch on, transforming the room into a flip book, limbs ratcheting here and there, mouths leering, knees and elbows flashing, and Hillary tosses his drink in the air and wraps his tree limbs around Rex, everybody doing a version of the same dance, launching first one, then the other arm toward the ceiling, as though shaping semaphores to one another, the air aflame with noise, and rather than let go, rather than join, Zeno feels so miserable, so deficient, so overwhelmed by his own naïveté—his cardboard suitcase, his all-wrong suit, his lumberjack boots, his Idaho manners, his misconceived hope that Rex invited him here because he wanted something romantic from him—we could scribble some Greek with paper and pen rather than stick and mud. He is, he sees now, so much of a yokel that he’s basically a barbarian. Amid the pulsing music and flickering bodies, he is surprised to find himself yearning for the monochromatic predictability of Lakeport: Mrs. Boydstun’s afternoon whiskey, the unblinking porcelain children, the air striped with woodsmoke, and the silence over the lake.

He fights his way back up through the various rooms to the street and wanders frightened and ashamed through Vauxhall for two hours without any sense of where he is. When he finally gathers the nerve to wave down a cab and ask if he can be taken to a brick house in Camden beside a Gold Leaf cigarette sign, the cabbie nods and drives him directly to Rex’s building. Zeno climbs the four flights and finds the door unlocked. A cup of tea has been left on the table. When, a few hours later, Hillary wakes him so that he does not miss his flight, he touches him on the forehead with a gesture so tender that Zeno has to turn away.

Outside Departures Rex parks the Austin, lifts a wrapped box from the backseat, and sets it on Zeno’s lap.

Inside is a copy of Rex’s Compendium and a bigger, thicker volume. “Liddell and Scott, a Greek-English lexicon. Indispensable. In case you wanted to take a crack at translating again.”

Outside the car a rush of passengers spurts past and for a moment the ground beneath Zeno’s seat opens and he is swallowed and then he’s back in the seat once more.

“You had a knack for it, you know. More than a knack.”

Zeno shakes his head.