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.