Rex looks at the sky as though awaiting instructions. The skin of his throat is drawn so thin that Zeno can almost see the blood ticking through his arteries. He seems too insubstantial for such a place, as though any moment he will blow away.

Abruptly he turns and starts down the trail again. Lesson over. Zeno picks up his bundle and follows. “The two librarians in my town read it to me. The Odyssey, I mean. Twice. Once after I moved there, again after my father died. Who knows why.”

They keep on for a few more paces and Rex pauses to collect more leaves and Zeno leans over his knees and waits for the ground to stop spinning.

“It’s like they say,” says Rex. High above them the wind is shredding a vast sheet of cirrus. “Antiquity was invented to be the bread of librarians and schoolmasters.”

He cuts his eyes to Zeno and smiles, so Zeno smiles back, though he does not understand the joke, and a guard at the top of the ridge shouts something down through the trees in Chinese and the two men continue along the trail.

“That was Greek, then? That you scratched into the wooden lid?”

“As a schoolboy, you know, I didn’t care for it. Seemed so dusty and dead. The classics master made us choose four pages of Homer, memorize and translate them. I chose Book Seven. Torment, or so I thought at the time. I’d walk the lines into my memory, one word at a time. Out the door: I could tell yet a longer tale of all the evils which I have endured by the will of the gods. Down the stairs: But as for me, suffer me now to eat, despite my grief. To the loo: For there is nothing more shameless than a hateful belly. But during a fortnight alone in the dark”—he taps his temple—“you’d be surprised what you can find etched in the old brain box.”

They walk several more minutes in silence, Rex slowing with each step, and soon they are at the edge of Camp Five.

Woodsmoke, a rumbling generator, the Chinese flag. The reek of the latrines. All around them the little hunched trees whisper. Zeno can see a darkness seize Rex, then slowly release him.

“I know why those librarians read the old stories to you,” Rex says. “Because if it’s told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.”

LAKEPORT, IDAHO

2014

Seymour

For months after the Eden’s Gate sign appears on the shoulder of Arcady Lane, nothing changes. The osprey leaves her nest atop the tallest tree in the woods and heads for Mexico, and the first snows blow down from the mountains, and the county plow plows it into berms, and Lake Street fills with weekenders driving to the ski hill, and Bunny cleans their rooms at the Aspen Leaf Lodge.