Cloud Cuckoo Land (27 page)

1971

L
ondon! May! Rex! Alive! A hundred times he examines Rex's stationery, inhales its smell. He knows that handwriting, squashed at the tops of the letters as though someone has stepped on the lines: how many times did he see it scratched into the frost and dirt of Korea?

What an absolute miracle to receive three letters from you all at once.

You could pay a visit if you're able?

Every few minutes a fresh gust of lightness sweeps through Zeno. There was that name, Hillary, but what of it? If Rex has found a Hillary, bless him. He made it out. He is alive. He has invited Zeno to “a bit of a function.”

He imagines Rex in a wool suit in a tranquil garden, sitting down to write the letter. Pigeons coo; hedges rustle; clocktowers soar past oaks into a wet sky. Elegant, matronly Hillary comes out with a porcelain tea service.

No, it's better without Hillary.

I can't tell you how glad I am that you made it out.

A holiday of sorts.

He waits until Mrs. Boydstun goes out for groceries, then calls a travel agency in Boise, whispering questions into the telephone as though perpetrating crimes. When he tells Amanda Corddry at the highway department that he'll be taking his vacation time in May, her eyes double in size.

“Well, Zeno Ninis, I'll be shoveled sideways. If I didn't know better, I'd guess you were in love.”

With Mrs. Boydstun, things are trickier. Every few days he slips it into an exchange as though spooning sugar into her coffee. London, May, a friend from the war. And every few days Mrs. Boydstun finds a way to spill food on the floor, or get a headache, or locate a new tremor in her left leg, and end the conversation.

Rex writes back,
Delighted. Sounds like you arrive during school hours, Hillary will meet you
, and March passes, and April. Zeno lays out his one suit, his green-striped tie. Mrs. Boydstun trembles at the bottom of the stairway in her robe. “You're not really going to leave a sick woman by herself? What kind of man are you?”

Out his bedroom window a blue helmet of sky is fixed above the pines. He shuts his eyes.
Years pass in a blink now
, Rex wrote. How much more is written in the spaces between the lines? Go now or forever hold your tongue.

“It's eight days in all.” Zeno buckles his suitcase. “I've loaded the cupboards. Got extra cigarettes too. Trish has promised to look in on you every day.”

He burns so much adrenaline during the flights that by the time he gets off in Heathrow, he is practically hallucinating. Outside passport control he looks for an Englishwoman; instead a six-foot-six man with prematurely silver hair and apricot-colored pants that flare at the calf seizes his forearm.

“Oh, you are a little box of cocoa,” says the giant, and air-kisses both of Zeno's cheeks. “I'm Hillary.”

Zeno clutches his suitcase, trying to comprehend. “How did you know I was me?”

Hillary shows his canines. “Lucky guess.”

He plucks Zeno's suitcase from his grasp and marshals him through the crowds. Beneath a blue vest, Hillary wears what looks like a peasant's blouse with sequins randomly applied to the sleeves. Are his fingernails painted green? Is a man allowed to dress like this here? Yet, as Hillary's boots clip-clop across the terminal, as they
weave into a crush of buses and taxis, no one pays much mind. They clamber into a pocket-sized wine-colored two-door, something called an Austin 1100, Hillary insisting on holding the door for Zeno, then walking around the rear of the little car and folding his long body behind the right-hand drive, knees practically in his teeth as he works the pedals, his hair brushing the roof, and Zeno tries not to hyperventilate.

London is smoke-gray and endless. Hillary chatters: “Brentford on your right, old dunghead boyfriend lived right over there, big, disobedient nipper. Rex finishes school in one hour, so we'll surprise him at home. That's Gunnersbury Park there, see?”

Parking meters, creeping traffic, soot-stained facades. Wrigley's Spearmint Gold Leaf One of the Great Cigarettes Ales Spirits and Wines. They park outside a sun-deprived brick house in Camden. No gardens, no hedges, no warbling greenfinches, no matronly wife with teacups. A leaflet glued by rain to the sidewalk reads,
The easy way to pay.
“We go up,” Hillary says and bends through the doorway like a mobile tree. He carries Zeno's suitcase up four flights, his long strides skipping every other stair.

Inside, the flat appears bisected in two. On one side run tidy bookshelves while on the other tapestries, bicycle frames, candles, ashtrays, brass elephants, thickly frosted abstract paintings, and dead houseplants all seem to have been thrown into piles by a cyclone. “Make yourself at home, I'll just wet some leaves,” Hillary says. He lights a cigarette from a stove burner and emits a titanic sigh. His forehead is unlined, his cheeks smooth-shaven; when Zeno and Rex were in Korea, Hillary could not have been more than five years old.

From the turntable exuberant voices sing, “Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes” and the realization hits: Rex and Hillary live together. In a one-bedroom apartment.

“Sit, sit.”

Zeno sits at the table while the record plays, gusts of confusion and exhaustion blasting over him. Hillary ducks light fixtures as he flips the record, then taps ashes into a houseplant.

“It's such fun to have one of Rex's friends visit. Rex never has friends visit. Sometimes I think he had none before I met him.”

Keys jingle at the door, and Hillary raises his eyebrows at Zeno, and a man comes into the apartment in a raincoat and galoshes and his face is the color of cheese curd and he has a little paunch sticking out over his belt and a concave chest and his eyeglasses are fogged and his freckles are faded but still exuberant in their quantity and it is Rex.

Zeno puts out a hand, but Rex embraces him.

Emotion rises unbidden to Zeno's eyes. “Jet lag,” he says, and wipes his cheeks.

“Of course.”

A mile above them Hillary brings a cracked green fingernail to his own eye and scoops away a tear. He fills two cups with black tea, sets out a plate of biscuits, switches off the record player, wraps himself in a big purple raincoat, and says, “Right, I'll leave you two old muckers to it then.” Zeno listens to him scuttle down the stairs like a giant multicolored spider.

Rex takes off his coat and shoes. “So, plowing snow?” The apartment seems to be teetering on the edge of a cliff. “And me, I'm still reading Iron Age poems to boys who don't want to hear them.”

Zeno nibbles a biscuit. He wants to ask Rex if he ever wishes he were back at Camp Five, if he ever longs for the hours the two of them sat in the shadows of the kitchen shed, slatted with sunlight, and drew characters in the dust—a perverse kind of homesickness. But wishing you were back in a prison camp is raving mad, and Rex is talking about his trips to northern Egypt combing through the rubbish dumps of the ancients. All these years, all those miles, so much hope and dread, and now he has Rex all to himself and in the first five minutes he has already lost his way.

“You're writing a book?”

“Already wrote one.” From one of the shelves Rex slides a tan hardcover with plain blue capitals on the front.
Compendium of Lost Books.
“We've sold, I think, forty-two copies, about sixteen of those
to Hillary.” He laughs. “Turns out no one wants to read a book about books that no longer exist.”

Zeno runs a finger over Rex's name where it is printed on the jacket. Books have always seemed to him like clouds or trees, things that were just there, on the shelves at the Lakeport Public Library. But to know someone who made one? “Take the tragedies alone,” Rex is saying. “We know that at least one thousand of them were written and performed in Greek theaters in the fifth century B.C. You know how many we have left? Thirty-two. Seven of Aeschylus's eighty-one. Seven of Sophocles's one hundred and twenty-three. Aristophanes wrote forty comedies that we know of—we have eleven, not all of them complete.”

As Zeno turns pages, he sees entries for Agathon, Aristarchus, Callimachus, Menander, Diogenes, Chaeremon of Alexandria. “When all you have is a shard of papyrus with a few words on it,” Rex says, “or a single line quoted in somebody else's text, the potential of what's lost haunts you. It's like the boys who died in Korea. We grieve them the most because we never saw the men they would become.” Zeno thinks of his father: how much easier it was to be a hero when you no longer walked the earth.

But now the fatigue is like a second force of gravity, threatening to tip him out of his chair. Rex puts the book back on the shelf and smiles. “You're exhausted. Come, Hillary made up a bed for you.”

He wakes on the sleeper sofa in the bottom of the night with the acute awareness that two men share a bed through a closed door seven feet away. When he next wakes, spine aching from jet lag or some darker heartbreak, it is afternoon, and Rex left for school hours before. Hillary is standing at an ironing board, wearing what looks like a silk kimono, hunched over a book that appears to be in Chinese. Without raising his nose from the page, he holds out a cup of tea. Zeno takes it and stands in his rumpled travel clothes and looks out the window at a meshwork of brick and fire escapes.

He takes a lukewarm shower, standing in the bath and holding the nozzle over his head, and when he comes out of the bathroom Rex is standing in the tidy half of the apartment examining his thinning hair with a hand mirror. He smiles at Zeno and yawns.

“Shagging so many handsome lads tires the old man out,” whispers Hillary, and winks, and Zeno feels a shock of horror before he realizes Hillary is joking.

They see a dinosaur skeleton, ride a double-decker bus, and Hillary visits a makeup counter at a department store and returns with matching swirls of blue paint around his eyes, and Rex teaches Zeno about different brands of gin, and Hillary is always with them, rolling tight little cigarettes, dressing in platform shoes, in blazers, in an epic, monstrous prom dress. Soon it's the fourth night of his visit, and they're eating meat pies in a cellar after midnight, Hillary asking Zeno if he has reached the part in Rex's book yet where he writes about how every lost book, before it vanished forever, got down to one final copy somewhere, and how it made Hillary think about seeing a white rhinoceros in a zoo in Czechoslovakia once, how the sign said the rhino was one of the last twenty northern white rhinos in the world, the only one left in Europe, and how the beast just stared out through the bars of his cage, making a moaning sound, while flies swarmed his eyes. Then Hillary looks over at Rex and wipes his eyes and says that every time he reads that part, he thinks about the rhino and cries, and Rex pats his arm.

On Saturday Hillary heads off to “the gallery,” though Zeno does not know what to imagine—art gallery? shooting gallery?—and he and Rex sit at a café table surrounded by women with prams, Rex in a black tweed vest still dusted with blackboard chalk from the previous days' classes, which makes Zeno's heart race. A tiny waiter who makes no sound as he moves brings them a teapot painted all over with raspberries.

Zeno is hoping the conversation might come around to the night, in Camp Five, when Bristol and Fortier loaded Rex onto the flatbed truck, hidden inside a fuel drum, that he might hear the story of Rex's escape, and whether Rex forgives him for staying behind, but Rex is enthusing about a trip he took to the Vatican Library in Rome where he combed through heaps of ancient papyrus salvaged from the dumps of Oxyrhynchus, little pieces of Greek texts buried in sand for two thousand years. “Ninety-nine percent of it is dull, of course, certificates, farm receipts, tax records, but to find one sentence, Zeno—even a few words—of a literary work that was previously unknown? To rescue one phrase from oblivion? It's the most exciting thing, I can't tell you: it's like digging up one end of a buried wire and realizing that it's connected to someone eighteen centuries dead. It feels like
nostos
, do you remember?” He's waving his nimble hands and blinking his eyes, the same gentleness in his face he carried all those years ago in Korea, and Zeno wants to leap across the table and put his mouth on Rex's throat.

“One of these days we're going to piece together something really significant, a tragedy by Euripides or a lost political history, or better still, some old comedy, some impossible fool's journey to the ends of the earth and back. Those are my favorites, do you know what I mean?” He raises his eyes and flames flare inside Zeno. For an instant he spins out a possible future, an afternoon argument between Rex and Hillary: Hillary pouts, Rex asks Hillary to leave, Zeno helps clean out all of Hillary's detritus, carries boxes, unpacks his own suitcase into Rex's bedroom, sits on the edge of Rex's bed; they take walks, travel to Egypt, read in silence across a teapot from one another. For a moment Zeno feels that he might be able to speak it into existence: if he says exactly the right words, right now, like a magic spell, it will happen. I think of you all the time, the veins in your throat, the fuzz on your arms, your eyes, your mouth, I loved you then, I love you now.

Rex says, “I'm boring you.”

“No, no.” Everything tilts. “The opposite. It's just—” He sees the valley road, the plow blade, the swirling ghosts of snow. A thousand
dark trees whisk past. “It's all new for me, understand, late nights, gin and tonics, the Underground, your—Hillary. He's reading Chinese, you're digging up lost Greek scrolls. It's intimidating.”

“Ah.” Rex waves a hand. “Hillary is full of projects that go nowhere. Never finishes a one. And I'm a teacher at a middling boys' school. In Rome I get sunburned walking from the hotel to the taxi.”

The café bustles, a baby fusses, the waiter pads noiselessly back and forth. Rain trickles down the awning. Zeno feels the moment slipping.