The fire flickers, and the brass pulls on the card catalogue drawers glimmer, and Zeno tucks his hands beneath his thighs as the second sister begins to read. In the story a lonely sailor, the loneliest man in the world, rides a raft for eighteen days before he is caught in a terrible storm. His raft is smashed, and he washes naked onto the rocks of an island. But a goddess named Athena disguises herself as a little girl carrying a pitcher of water and escorts him into an enchanted city.

The chief with wonder sees the extended streets, she reads,

The spreading harbors, and the riding fleets;

He next their princes’ lofty domes admires,

In separate islands, crown’d with rising spires;

And deep entrenchments, and high walls of stone,

That gird the city like a marble zone.

Zeno sits rapt. He hears the waves crash on the rocks, smells the salt of the sea, sees the lofty domes shine in the sun. Is the island of the Phaeacians the same thing as the Celestial City and did his mother also have to float alone beneath the stars for eighteen days to get there?

The goddess tells the lonely sailor not to be afraid, that it is better to be brave in all things, and he enters a palace that gleams like the rays of moonlight, and the king and queen give him honey-hearted wine, and seat him in a silver chair, and ask him to tell the stories of his travails, and Zeno is eager to hear more, but the heat of the fire and the smell of old paper and the cadence of the librarian’s voice join together to cast a spell over him, and he falls asleep.

Papa promises insulation, indoor plumbing, and a brand-new electric Thermador space heater ordered direct from Montgomery Ward but most nights he comes home from the mill too tired to unlace his boots. He sets a can of beef and noodles on the stove, smokes a cigarette, and falls asleep at the kitchen table, a puddle of snowmelt around his feet, as though he thaws a little in his sleep before heading back out the door at dawn to turn solid once more.