The man with the eyebrows glances down, into the backpack, the main compartment of which has become partially unzipped. When he looks back up, he’s frowning.

A thousand tiny black spots open in Seymour’s field of vision. A roar rises inside his ears. He sticks his right hand into the right pocket of his windbreaker and his finger finds the trigger of the pistol.

Zeno

Rachel pretends to strain as she lifts away the sarcophagus lid. Olivia reaches into the cardboard tomb and withdraws a smaller box tied shut with yarn.

Rachel says, “A chest?”

“There’s an inscription on top.”

“What does it say?”

“It reads, Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you.”

“Think, Master Diogenes,” says Rachel, “of the years this chest has survived inside this tomb. The centuries it has endured! Earthquakes, floods, fires, generations living and dying! And now you hold it in your hands!”

Christopher and Natalie, arms tiring, continue to wave the satin fog, and the organ music plays, and snow bats the windows, and the boiler in the basement groans like a stranded whale, and Rachel looks at Olivia and Olivia unravels the yarn. From inside she lifts an outdated encyclopedia that Sharif found in the basement and spray-painted gold.

“It’s a book.”

She blows pretend-dust off its cover and in the front row Zeno smiles.

“And does this book explain,” Rachel says, “how someone could be a man for eighty years, a donkey for one, a sea bass for another, and a crow for a third?”

“Let’s find out.” Olivia opens the encyclopedia and sets it on a lectern up against the backdrop, and Natalie and Christopher drop the satin and Rachel clears the tombstones and Olivia clears the sarcophagus, and Alex Hess, four and a half feet tall, with a lion’s mane of golden hair, carrying a shepherd’s crook and wearing a beige bathrobe over his gym shorts, takes center stage.

Zeno leans forward in his chair. His aching hip, the tinnitus in his left ear, the eighty-six years he has lived on earth, the near-infinity of decisions that have led him to this moment—all of it fades. Alex stands alone in the karaoke light and looks out over the empty chairs as though he gazes not into the second story of a dilapidated public library in a little town in central Idaho but into the green hills surrounding the ancient kingdom of Tyre.