May 31, 2030

Dear Marian,

I know that I will never understand all the consequences of what I have done or apprehend all the pain I caused. I think of the things you did for me when I was young and you should not have to do any more. But I was wondering. During the trial I learned that Mr. Ninis worked on translations and that he was working on a play with the children before he died. Do you know what became of his papers?

Yours,

Seymour

Nine weeks later, he is called to the prison library. An officer wheels in a dolly stacked with three cardboard boxes marked with his name and red Scanned stickers.

“What’s all this?”

“They just told me to bring it here.”

Inside the first carton is a letter.

July 22, 2030

Dear Seymour,

I was happy to hear from you. Here is everything I could gather from the trial, from Mr. Ninis’s house, and that we recovered at the library. The police might have more, I’m not sure. Nobody ever did anything with all this, so I’m trusting you with it. Access is part of the librarian’s creed, after all.

If you can make any sense of it, I think one of the children Zeno worked with would be interested: Natalie Hernandez. Last I heard from her, she’s taking classes at Idaho State in Latin and Greek.

At one time you were a thoughtful and sensitive boy and it is my hope that you have become a thoughtful and sensitive man.

Marian

The cartons are crammed with legal pads covered with crimped pencil-writing. Sticky notes blanket every other page. Down the sides of each box someone has stuffed plastic sleeves containing eleven-by-seventeen-inch facsimiles of battered manuscript pages with half the text missing. There are books too, a five-pound Greek-English lexicon, and a compendium on lost texts by someone named Rex Browning. Seymour shuts his eyes, sees the golden wall at the top of the stairs, the strange lettering, cardboard clouds twisting over empty chairs.

The prison librarian lets him keep the boxes in a corner, and every evening, Seymour, tired from walking the earth, sits on the floor and sifts through them. At the bottom of one, inside a folder stamped EVIDENCE, he finds five photocopied scripts the police recovered the night he was arrested, the night of the children’s dress rehearsal. On the last pages of one copy are multiple edits, not in Zeno’s hand, but in bright cursive.

While he was downstairs with his bombs, the children upstairs were rewriting their ending.