Cloud Cuckoo Land (13 page)

The mid-sized one nods, eyes shining. “And the mysteries beyond.”

Himerius looks up, his mouth full. “And if we were to find it?”

“Our master would be very pleased.”

Anna blinks. A book containing the entire world and the mysteries beyond? Such a book would be enormous. She'd never be able to carry it.

THE MILLER AND THE CLIFF

1951

P
olish this, swab that, carry this, grin when they call you a pussy, sleep the sleep of the dead. For the first time in his memory Zeno is not the darkest-skinned person in the group. Halfway across the South Pacific someone nicknames him Z, and he likes being Z, the skinny Idaho kid slipping through the clanging darkness of the lower decks, male bodies everywhere he looks, young and crew-cut, torsos flowering up out of narrow belts, veins twining round forearms, men with trunks like inverted triangles, men with chins like cowcatchers at the fronts of trains. With each mile he puts between himself and Lakeport, his sense of possibility builds.

In Pyongyang, ice glazes the river. The quartermaster issues him a quilted field jacket, a knit cap, and a lightweight pair of cushion-sole cotton-blend socks; Zeno wears two pairs of Utah Woolen Mills socks instead. A motor transport officer assigns him and a freckled private from New Jersey named Blewitt to drive a Dodge M37 supply truck from the air base in the city to forward outposts. Most of the roads are unpaved, single-lane, and snow-packed, hardly roads at all, and in early March of 1951, eleven days after his arrival in Korea, Zeno and Blewitt are driving a load of rations and fresh produce around a hairpin turn, following a jeep up a steep grade, Blewitt behind the wheel, both of them singing

I'm forever blowing bubbles,

Pretty bubbles in the air,

They fly so high,

nearly reach the sky

when the jeep in front of them tears in half. Pieces of it cartwheel off the side of the road to their left, gun barrels flash to their right, and a figure materializes in front of them waving what looks like an old potato-masher grenade. Blewitt cuts the wheel. There's a blaze of light, followed by a strange booming, like a steel drum being pounded underwater. Then Zeno feels as though the delicate parts of his inner ears are yanked out of his head all at once.

The Dodge rolls twice and comes to rest on its side on an open slope half-covered with snow. He sprawls against the windshield, something hot trickling out of his forearm, a high whine clogging both ears.

Blewitt is no longer in the driver's seat. Through the shattered side window Zeno can see soldiers wearing the woolen green uniforms of the Chinese seething down the scree toward him. Multiple sacks of dehydrated eggs, ejected from the back of the truck, have been punctured, and clouds of egg powder hang in the air, and one soldier after another passes through, their bodies and faces streaked yellow.

He thinks: I knew it. All the way to the other side of the globe and I still couldn't outrun it. They'll come now, all my deficiencies promenading past: Athena dragging me off the ice,
The Mermen of Atlantis
shriveling to black. Once, Mr. McCormack, the Ansley machine shop manager, told him his fly was open, and when Zeno, blushing, went to button it, Mr. McCormack said, don't, he liked it like that.

Fruit, the older men called Mr. McCormack. Sissy. Swish.

Zeno tells himself to locate his M1, climb out of the truck, fight, do what his father would have done, but before he can convince his legs to move, a middle-aged Chinese soldier with small beige teeth drags him out of the passenger's door and into the snow. In another breath there are twenty men around him. Their mouths move but his hearing registers nothing. Some carry Russian burp guns; some have rifles that look four decades old; some wear only rice bags for shoes. Most are tearing open C rations they've taken out of the back of the Dodge. One holds a can printed
PINEAPPLE UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE
while another tries to saw it open with a bayonet; another
stuffs his mouth with crackers; a fourth bites into a head of cabbage as though it were a giant apple.

Where is the rest of the convoy, where is Blewitt, where is their cover? Strangely, as he is prodded back up the slope, Zeno feels no panic, only a remoteness. The piece of metal sticking out of his forearm, and through the sleeve of his parka, is shaped like a willow leaf, but it does not hurt, not yet, and mostly he is conscious of the striking of his heart and the buzz of nothingness in his ears, as though a pillow is clamped around his head, as though he were back in the little brass bed at Mrs. Boydstun's house, and all this was an unpleasant dream.

He is directed across the road and through the icebound terraces of what might be a vegetable farm and pushed into an animal pen that already contains Blewitt, who is bleeding from the nose and ear, and who keeps miming that he needs a cigarette.

They huddle next to each other on frozen ground. All night they wait to be shot. At some point Zeno pulls the metal leaf out of his forearm and ties his sleeve over the injury and puts his field jacket back on.

At dawn they are marched across a jagged landscape, joining a few other rivulets of prisoners heading north: French, Turks, two Brits. Every day fewer aircraft come overhead. One man coughs incessantly, another has two broken arms, another cradles an eyeball still hanging from its socket. Gradually the hearing in Zeno's left ear returns. Blewitt suffers such intense tobacco withdrawal that, more than once, when a guard throws away a butt, he dives into the snow after it, though he never manages to recover one while it's still lit.

The water they are given smells of excrement. Once a day the Chinese set a pot of boiled whole-kernel corn down in the snow. A few shy away from eating the carbonized crust burned to the bottom of the pot but Zeno remembers the Armour & Company cans Papa used to heat on the wood stove in the cabin beside the lake and chokes it down.

Every time they stop, he unlaces his boots, peels off one pair of Utah Woolen Mills socks, tucks them inside his coat, up against his armpits, and puts on the warmer, drier pair, and this more than anything is what saves him.

In April they reach a permanent camp on the south bank of a river the color of creamed coffee. The prisoners are sorted into two companies, and Blewitt and Zeno are put with the healthier group. Past a series of wooden peasant huts stands a galley kitchen and storeroom; beyond that lies a ravine, the river, Manchuria. Spindly, wind-wracked conifers stoop here and there, their branches all sculpted by wind in the same direction. No guard dogs, no alarms, no barbed wire, no watchtowers. “The whole country's a damn ice-cold prison,” whispers Blewitt, “where are we going to run?”

Their quarters are thatched huts that accommodate twenty lice-tortured men arrayed on the floor on straw mats. No officers, all enlisted men, all older than Zeno. In the dark they whisper about wives, girlfriends, the Yankees, a trip to New Orleans, Christmas dinners; the ones who have been here the longest report that during winter they lost multiple men every day, that their lot has improved since the Chinese took over the camps from the North Koreans, and he comes to learn that anyone who fixates—who talks nonstop about ham sandwiches, or a girl, or a certain memory of home—is usually the next to die.

Because he can walk without trouble, Zeno is assigned duty as a fireman: he spends most of every day gathering wood to heat black pots hung over the fireplaces in the prisoners' kitchen. Those first weeks they eat soybeans or dry field corn boiled to a paste. For dinner there might be wormy fish or potatoes, none larger than an acorn. Some days, with his wounded forearm, it's all Zeno can do to gather a single load of wood, bundle it, drag it into the galley, and lie down in the corner.

Panic attacks come on late at night: slow, constricting things in
which Zeno cannot breathe for terrifying intervals and from which he worries he will never recover. In the mornings intelligence officers give speeches in broken English about the perils of fighting on behalf of warmongering capitalists. You are imperialist pawns, they say, your system is a failure, don't you know that half the people in New York are starving?

They pass around drawings of Uncle Sam with vampire teeth and dollar signs for eyes. Anybody want a hot shower and a T-bone steak? All you have to do is pose for some photos, sign a petition or two, sit in front of a microphone, and read some sentences condemning America. When they ask Zeno how many B-29s the U.S. Army keeps at Okinawa, he says, “Ninety thousand,” probably more airplanes than there have ever been in the history of the world. When he explains to an interrogator that he lives near water, the interrogator makes Zeno draw the marina at Lakeport. Two days later he tells Zeno that they lost the map and makes him draw it again to see if he draws it the same way twice.

One day a guard summons Zeno and Blewitt from their barracks and leads them behind the camp headquarters to the rim of a ravine the prisoners call Rock Gully. With the barrel of his carbine he points at one of the four isolation boxes there, then walks away. The box looks like a big coffin made from mud, pebbles, and cornstalks, with a wooden lid latched over the top. Seven feet long and maybe four high, it's big enough that a man could lie down inside, and possibly kneel, but not stand up.

Loathsome, abhorrent, repugnant: the smell as they approach surpasses adjectives. Zeno holds his breath as he undoes the latches. Waves of flies rise out.

“Holy Christ,” breathes Blewitt.

Inside, tucked against the far wall, is a corpse: small, anemic, pale blond. His uniform, or what's left of it, is the British battle-dress blouse with two huge chest pockets. One of the lenses of his
eyeglasses is cracked and when he raises one hand to thumb them higher on his nose, Zeno and Blewitt jump.

“Easy,” says Blewitt, and the man peers up as though encountering beings from another galaxy.

His fingernails are black and cracked and, beneath the seething flies, his face and throat are veined with filth. It's only when Zeno turns over the lid to set it down that he sees that, scratched into every available inch of its underside, are words. Half in English, half in something else.

ἔνθα δὲ δένδρεα μακρὰ πεφύκασι τηλεθόωντα
, reads one line, the strange printing sagging to one side.

Therein grow trees, tall and luxuriant.

ὄγχναι καὶ ῥοιαὶ καὶ μηλέαι ἀγλαόκαρποι.

Pears and pomegranates and apple-trees with their bright fruit
.

A throbbing starts in his chest. He knows this verse.

ἐν δὲ δύω κρῆναι ἡ μέν τ᾽ ἀνὰ κῆπον ἅπαντα.

And therein are two springs, one of which sends its water throughout all the garden.

“Kid? You gone deaf again?” Blewitt has climbed into the box and is trying to lift the man by his armpits, his face wrenched away from the odor, and the man is simply blinking through his broken glasses.

“Z? You planning to pick your nose all day?”

He gathers what information he can. The soldier is Lance Corporal Rex Browning, a grammar school teacher from East London who volunteered for the war, and he spent two weeks inside that box, sentenced to “attitude reorientation” for trying to escape, and was let out for only twenty minutes a day.

“A corner-turner,” someone calls him. “Sectionable,” another says, because, as everyone knows, successfully escaping from Camp Five is a fantasy. The prisoners are unshaven, they're feeble from malnutrition, and they're taller than the Koreans—instantly recognizable as Westerners. Anyone who managed to get past the guards would
have to pass undetected through a hundred miles of mountains, slip around dozens of checkpoints, make his way over gorges and across rivers, and any Koreans who might take pity on him would almost certainly be denounced and shot.

And yet, Zeno learns, Rex Browning the grammar school teacher tried. He was found a few miles south of camp, fifteen feet up a pine tree. The Chinese cut down the tree, then dragged him behind a jeep all the way back.

A few weeks later Zeno is gathering firewood from a hillside, the nearest guard several hundred yards away, when he sees Rex Browning picking his way along the trail below. Though his frame is skeletal, he doesn't limp. He moves with efficiency, pausing now and then to pluck leaves from plants and stuff them into his shirt pockets.

Zeno shoulders his bundle and hurries down through the brush.

“Hello?”

Thirty feet, twenty, ten. “Hello?”

Still the man doesn't stop. Zeno reaches the trail out of breath, and, praying the guards won't hear, calls, “
Such were the glorious gifts of the gods in the palace of brave Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians
.”

Rex turns then and nearly falls, and stands blinking his big eyes behind his broken glasses.

“Or something like that,” says Zeno, blushing.

The other man laughs, a warm, irresistible laugh. The grime has been scrubbed out of the folds of his neck, his trousers mended with neat stitches: he is maybe thirty years old. His cornsilk hair, his flaxen eyebrows, his fine hands—in other circumstances, in another world, Zeno realizes, Rex Browning is handsome.

Rex says, “Zenodotus.”

“What?”

“The first librarian at the library at Alexandria. He was named Zenodotus. Appointed by the Ptolemaic kings.”

That accent:
library
becomes
lie-brury
. The trees vibrate in the
wind and the firewood cuts into Zeno's shoulders and he sets down his load.

“It's just a name.”

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.