The underground tomb, the donkey, the sea bass, a crow flapping through the cosmos: it’s a ridiculous tale. But in the version rendered by Zeno and the kids, it’s beautiful too. Sometimes as he works, Greek words come flashing up from the depths of the facsimiles—ὄρνις, ornis, it means both bird and omen—and Seymour feels like he used to when he was caught in the gaze of Trustyfriend, as though he’s being allowed to glimpse an older and undiluted world, when every barn swallow, every sunset, every storm, pulsed with meaning. By age seventeen he’d convinced himself that every human he saw was a parasite, captive to the dictates of consumption. But as he reconstructs Zeno’s translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

He cries at the end. Aethon steals into the garden in the center of the cloud city, talks to the gigantic goddess, and opens the Super Magical Extra Powerful Book of Everything. The academic articles among Zeno’s papers suggest that translators arrange the folios in such a way that leaves Aethon in the garden, inducted into the secrets of the gods, finally freed of his mortal desires. But evidently the children have decided at the last moment that the old shepherd will look away and not read to the end of the book. He eats the rose proffered by the goddess and returns home, to the mud and grass of the Arkadian hills.

In a child’s cursive, beneath the crossed-out lines, Aethon’s new line is handwritten in the margin, “The world as it is is enough.”

TWENTY-THREE

THE GREEN BEAUTY OF

THE BROKEN WORLD

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio Ψ

Debate continues over the intended location of Folio Ψ in Diogenes’s tale. By the time it was imaged, deterioration had progressed so far across the leaf that over eighty-five percent of the text was affected. Translation by Zeno Ninis.

… I woke…

… ·[found myself?]·…

… down from that high place…

… crawled in the grass, the trees…

… fingers, toes, a tongue to speak!

… the smell of wild onions…

… dew, the ·[lines?]· of the hills,

… sweetness of light, moon overhead…

… the green beauty of the ·[broken?]· world.

… would wish to be like them… a god…

… ·[hungry?]·

… only a mouse quivering in the grass, in the ·[mist?]·

… the mild sunshine…

… falling.

NINE MILES FROM A WOODCUTTERS’ VILLAGE IN THE RHODOPE MOUNTAINS OF BULGARIA

1453–1494

Anna