Cloud Cuckoo Land (31 page)

THE WONDERS OF

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

1972–1995

S
upper is boiled beef. Across the table looms Mrs. Boydstun's face, haloed by smoke. On the television beside her, a brush strokes the upper eyelashes of an enormous eye.

“Mouse poops in the pantry.”

“I'll set some traps tomorrow.”

“Get the Victors. Not the garbage ones you bought last time.”

Now an actor in a suit testifies to the miraculous sound of his Sylvania color television. Mrs. Boydstun drops her fork trying to bring it to her mouth and Zeno retrieves it from beneath the table.

“I'm done,” she announces. He wheels her into her bedroom, lifts her onto the bed, measures out her medication, pushes the TV cart and its extension cord into her room. Beyond the windows, out toward the lake, the last daylight evacuates the sky. Sometimes, at moments like this, as he scrapes the plates, the sensation of his flight home from London comes back: how it seemed as though the planet would never stop unspooling below—water then fields then mountains then cities lit like neural networks—it seemed to him that between Korea and London he'd had enough adventure for a lifetime.

For months he sits at the desk beside the little brass bed with the first verses of Homer's
Iliad
on his left and the Liddell and Scott lexicon Rex gave him on the right. He hoped that vestiges of the Greek he learned at Camp Five might still be embedded in his memory, but nothing comes easily.

Μῆνιν
, the poem begins,
ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος,
five words, the last the name Achilles, the second-to-last identifying that Achilles's father was Peleus (though also suggesting Achilles is godlike),
yet somehow, with only three words in play,
mênin
and
aeide
and
theā
, the line bristles with landmines.

Pope:
Achilles's wrath, to Greece the direful spring
.

Chapman:
Achilles's bane full wrath resound, O Goddesse.

Bateman:
Goddess, sing the destroying wrath of Achilles, Peleus's son
.

But does
aeide
fully suggest “to sing,” because it's also the word for
poet
? And
mênin
, how best to translate that? Fury? Outrage? Vexation? To select one word was to commit to a single path when the maze contains thousands.

Tell us, Goddess, about the wild temper of Achilles, son of Peleus.

Not good enough.

Speak, Calliope, about the outrage of Peleus's boy.

Worse.

Tell the people, Muses, why Peleus's kid Achilles was so fucking furious.

In the year following his return, Zeno sends a dozen letters to Rex, adhering strictly to questions regarding translation—imperative or infinitive? accusative or genitive?—ceding all romantic ground to Hillary. He sneaks the letters out of the house inside his shirt and mails them before work, cheeks burning as he slips them into the box. Then he waits for weeks, but Rex's replies do not come quickly or regularly, and Zeno loses whatever bravery he began with. The gods on Olympus, sipping from their cups of horn, peer through the roof of the house and watch him struggle at his desk, mockery on their faces.

The vanity of assuming that Rex might have wanted him in that way. An orphan, a coward, a snowplow driver with a cardboard suitcase and a polyester suit: Who was Zeno to expect anything?

He learns of Rex's death from Hillary in an airmail letter written in purple cursive. Rex, Hillary reports, was in Egypt, working with his beloved papyrus, trying to claw back one more sentence from oblivion, when he had a heart attack.

You were
, Hillary writes,
very dear to him
. His huge, loopy signature takes up half the page.

Seasons tick past. Zeno wakes in the afternoons, dresses in the cramped upstairs room, creaks downstairs, rouses Mrs. Boydstun from her nap. Puts her in her chair, brushes her hair, feeds her dinner, wheels her to her puzzle, pours her two fingers of Old Forester. Turns on the television. Takes the note from the counter:
Beef, onions, lipstick
,
buy the right red this time.
Before he leaves for work, he carries her to her bed.

Tantrums, doctor's appointments, therapies, a dozen drives to and from the specialist's office in Boise—he sits with her through it all. Still he sleeps upstairs in the little brass bed, Rex's
Compendium of Lost Books
and the Liddell and Scott entombed in a cardboard box beneath his desk. Some mornings, on the way home from work, he eases his plow to the side of the road and watches light seep into the valley, and it's all he can do to get himself to drive the final mile home. In the last weeks of her life, Mrs. Boydstun's coughs go submarine, as though she carries lakewater in her chest. He wonders if she'll share any last words, any memories of his father, any insight into their relationship, if she'll call him son or say she's grateful for his years of care, grateful that she became his guardian, or show any sign that she understands his predicaments, but at the end she's hardly there: just morphine and glassy eyes and an odor that carries him back to Korea.

On the day she dies he steps outside while the hospice nurse makes the necessary calls and hears a trickling and purring: roof draining, trees waking, swallows swooping, the mountains stirring, mumbling, buzzing, shifting. The melting world full of noise.

He removes every curtain in the house. Tugs the antimacassars off the chairs, dumps the potpourri, pours out the bourbon. Takes every rosy-cheeked porcelain child off every shelf, inters them in boxes, and deposits the boxes at the thrift shop.

He adopts a silver-muzzled sixty-five-pound brindle dog named Luther, walks him through the front door of the house, dumps a can of beef and barley stew into a bowl, and watches Luther engulf it. Then the dog sniffs around his surroundings as though in disbelief at his reversal of fortune.

Finally he yanks the discolored lace runner off the dining room table, retrieves the cardboard box from upstairs, and arranges his books across the old ring-stained walnut. He pours a cup of coffee and unwraps a new legal pad from Lakeport Drug and Luther curls up on top of his feet and lets off a ten-second sigh.

Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told him, there might be nothing more humbling, or more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don't know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we're doomed to fail. But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool's errand.

Zeno sharpens his pencil and tries again.

MISSION YEAR

64 DAY 276 INSIDE VAULT ONE

B
ehind her the line of traffic remains backed up for all eternity along the lakefront. The faceless kids in tank tops remain frozen mid-stride on the corner. But in front of her, things inside the Atlas are moving: the sky above the owl-shaped book drop box becomes a seething, swirling mat of silver, and snowflakes are tumbling out of it.

She takes a step forward. Unruly juniper hedges rise on either side of a snow-covered walk, and at the far end, a dilapidated, light-blue two-story gingerbread Victorian house shimmers into place. The porch leans, the chimney looks crooked; a blue
OPEN
sign flickers to life in a front window.

“Sybil, what is this?”

Sybil does not answer. A sign, partially buried in snow, reads:

Everything behind her in Lakeport remains the same: static, summery, locked in place, the way the Atlas always is. But here, at the corner of Lake and Park, beyond the book drop box, it's winter.

Snow collects on the junipers; snowflakes blow into her eyes; the wind carries the taste of steel. As she heads up the walk, she hears her feet crunch in the snow; she leaves footprints behind her. She climbs five granite steps to the porch. In the glass in the top half of the front door is a sign in child's handwriting:

TOMORROW

ONE NITE ONLY

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

The door creaks as it opens. Straight ahead is a desk with pink paper hearts taped to it. A day calendar reads
February 20, 2020
. A framed needlepoint says:
Questions Answered Here
. One arrow points left to Fiction, another points right to Nonfiction.

“Sybil, is this a game?”

No reply.

On three antediluvian computer monitors, green-blue spirals drill ever-deeper. A leak, seeping through a stained ceiling tile, falls into a plastic trash can half full of water. Plip. Plop. Plip.

“Sybil?”

Nothing. On the
Argos
Sybil is everywhere; she can hear you in every compartment at every hour; never in Konstance's life has she called to Sybil and not received a reply. Is it possible that Sybil does not know where she is? That Sybil does not know this exists inside the Atlas?

The spines of the shelved books give off an odor of yellowing paper. She opens a hand beneath the dripping leak and feels the drops strike her palm.

Halfway down the center aisle a sign says,
CHILDREN'S SECTION
, with an arrow pointing up. Legs trembling, Konstance climbs the stairs. The landing at the top is blocked by a golden wall. Written across it in what Konstance thinks might be classical Greek are the words:

Ὦ ξένε, ὅστις εἶ, ἄνοιξον, ἵνα μάθῃς ἃ θαυμάζεις

Below the writing waits a little arched door. The air smells of lilacs, mint, and roses: a smell like Farm 4 on its best, most fragrant day.

She steps through the door. On the other side paper clouds on strings glitter above thirty folding chairs, and the entire far wall is covered by a painted backdrop of a cloud city, birds swinging around its towers. From all around her comes the babble of falling water, of creaking trees, of chirping songbirds. At the center of a small stage,
illuminated in a shaft of light angling through the clouds, a book rests atop a plinth.

She drifts transfixed through the folding chairs and climbs onto the stage. The book is a gilded duplicate of the blue book on Father's nightstand in Scheria: the cloud city, the many-windowed towers, the whirling birds. Above the city it says,
Cloud Cuckoo Land
. Below it:
By Antonius Diogenes. Translation by Zeno Ninis.

1995–2019

H
e translates one book of the
Iliad
, two of the
Odyssey
, plus an admirable slice of Plato's
Republic
. Five lines on an average day, ten on a good one, scribbled onto yellow legal pads in his crimped pencil-writing and stuffed into boxes beneath the dining table. Sometimes he believes his translations are adequate. Usually he decides they're terrible. He shows them to no one.

The county gives him a plaque and a pension, Luther the big brindle dog dies a peaceful death, and Zeno adopts a terrier and names him Nestor the king of Pylos. Every morning he wakes in the little brass bed upstairs, does fifty push-ups, pulls on two pairs of Utah Woolen Mills socks, buttons up one of his two dress shirts, ties one of his four ties. Green today, blue tomorrow, the duck tie on Wednesdays, penguin tie on Thursdays. Black coffee, plain oatmeal. Then he walks to the library.

Marian, the library director, finds online videos of a seven-foot-tall professor from a Midwestern university teaching intermediate ancient Greek, and most mornings Zeno starts his day at a table beside the large-print romances—what Marian calls the Bosoms and Bottoms section—with big headphones on and the volume turned up.

Past tense literally causes him back pain, the way it flings all the verbs into the dark. Then there's the aorist tense, a tense unbound by time, that can make him want to crawl into a closet and huddle in the darkness. But at the best moments, working through the old texts, for an hour or two, the words fall away and images rise to him through the centuries—warriors in armor packed into boats; sunlight spangling on the sea; the voices of gods carried on the
wind—and it's almost as though he's six years old again, in front of the fireplace with the Cunningham twins, and simultaneously adrift with Ulysses in the waves off the coast of Scheria, hearing the tide roar against the rocks.

One bright afternoon in May of 2019, Zeno is hunched over his legal pads when Marian's new hire, a children's librarian named Sharif, calls him to the welcome desk. On Sharif's computer screen floats a headline:
New Technologies Uncover Ancient Greek Tale Inside Previously Unreadable Book.

According to the article, a crate of severely damaged medieval manuscripts, stored for centuries at the ducal library in Urbino, then moved to the Vatican Library, had long been considered illegible. A little nine-hundred-year-old goat leather codex in particular piqued the interest of scholars from time to time, but water damage, mold, and age had collaborated to fuse its pages into a solid, illegible mass.

Sharif enlarges the accompanying photo: a puckered black brick of parchment, no longer even rectangular. “Looks like a paperback soaked in a toilet for a thousand years,” he says.

“Then left in a driveway for another thousand,” Zeno adds.

Over the past year, the article continues, a team of conservators using multispectral scanning technology has managed to image bits of the original text. At first, speculation among scholars surged. What if the manuscript contained a lost play of Aeschylus or a scientific tract by Archimedes or an early Christian gospel? What if it were the lost comedy attributed to Homer called
The Margites
?

But today the team is announcing that they have recovered enough of the text to conclude that it is a first-century work of prose fiction titled
Νεφελοκοκκυγία
by the little-known writer Antonius Diogenes.

Νεφέλη,
cloud;
kόκκῡξ,
cuckoo; Zeno knows that title. He hurries back to his table, pushes aside drifts of paper, excavates his copy of Rex's
Compendium
. Page 29. Entry 51.

The lost Greek tale
Cloud Cuckoo Land
, by the writer Antonius Diogenes, relating a shepherd's journey to a
city in the sky, was probably written around the end of the first century C.E. We know from a ninth-century Byzantine summary of the novel that it opened with a short prologue in which Diogenes addressed an ailing niece and declared that he had not invented the comical story which followed but instead discovered it in a tomb in the ancient city of Tyre, written on twenty-four cypress wood tablets. Part fairy tale, part fool's errand, part science-fiction, part utopian satire, Photios's epitome suggests it could have been one of the more fascinating of the ancient novels.

Zeno's breath catches. He sees Athena run through the snow; he sees Rex, angular and bent from malnutrition, scratch verses with charcoal onto a board.
θεοὶ
is the gods,
ἐπεκλώσαντο
means they spun,
ὄλεθρον
is ruin.

Better still
, Rex said that day in the café,
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?

Marian stands in the doorway of her office cradling a mug with cartoon cats all over it.

Sharif says, “Is he okay?”

“I think,” says Marian, “that he's happy.”

He asks Sharif to print every article about the manuscript he can find. The ink used in the codex has been traced to tenth-century Constantinople; the Vatican Library has promised that every folio that contains anything legible will be digitized and uploaded into the public domain. A professor in Stuttgart predicts that Diogenes may have been the Borges of the ancient world, preoccupied with questions of truth and intertextuality, that the scans will reveal a new masterpiece, a forerunner of
Don Quixote
and
Gulliver's Travels
. But a classicist in Japan says the text is likely to be inconsequential, that none of the surviving Greek novels, if they can even be called novels,
approach the literary value of classical poetry and drama. Just because something is old, she writes, doesn't guarantee that it's any good.

The first scan, labeled Folio A, is uploaded on the first Friday of June. Sharif prints it on the newly donated Ilium printer, magnified to eleven inches by seventeen, and carries it to Zeno at his table in Nonfiction. “You're going to make sense of
that
?”

It's dirty and wormholed, colonized with mold, as though fungal hyphae, time, and water have collaborated to make an erasure poem. But to Zeno it looks magical, the Greek characters seeming to glow somewhere deep beneath the page, white on black, not so much handwriting as the specter of it. He remembers when Rex's letter arrived, how at first he could not allow himself to believe that Rex had survived. Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.

During the first weeks of summer, as the scanned folios trickle onto the internet and out of Sharif's printer, Zeno is euphoric. Bright June light flows through the library windows and illuminates the printouts; the opening passages of Aethon's story strike him as sweet and silly and translatable; he feels he's found his project, the one thing he needs to do before he dies. In daydreams he publishes a translation, dedicates it to Rex's memory, hosts a party; Hillary travels from London with an entourage of sophisticated companions; everyone in Lakeport sees that he is more than Slow-Motion Zeno, the retired snowplow driver with the barky dog and the threadbare neckties.

But day by day his enthusiasm dims. Many of the folios remain so damaged that sentences dissolve into illegibility before they become comprehensible. Worse, the conservators report that at some point over its long history the codex must have been disbound and rebound in the wrong order, so that the intended sequence of events in Aethon's tale is no longer obvious. By July he begins to feel as if he's trying to solve one of Mrs. Boydstun's jigsaw puzzles, a third of the pieces kicked under the stove, another third missing
altogether. He's too inexperienced, too undereducated, too old; his mind is not up to it.

Sheep Shagger, Fruit Punch, Pansy, Zero. Why is it so hard to transcend the identities assigned to us when we were young?

In August the library's air conditioner gives out. Zeno spends an afternoon sweating through his shirt as he agonizes over a particularly problematic folio from which at least sixty percent of the words have been effaced. Something about a hoopoe leading Aethon-the-crow to a river of cream. Something about a prick of doubt—disquietude? restlessness?—beneath his wings.

That's as far as he gets.

At closing time he gathers his books and legal pads as Sharif pushes in the chairs and Marian shuts off the lights. Outside, the air smells of wildfire smoke.

“There are professionals out there working on this,” Zeno says as Sharif locks the door. “Proper translators. People with fancy degrees who actually know what they're doing.”

“Could be,” says Marian. “But none of them are you.”

On the lake a surf boat roars past, its speakers thumping bass. A hot, silvery pressure hangs in the atmosphere. The three of them pause beside Sharif's Isuzu and Zeno feels the ghost of something moving through the heat, invisible, elusive. Over the ski mountain on the far side of the lake, a thundercloud flares blue.

“In the hospital,” Sharif says, as he lights a cigarette, “before she died, my mother used to say, ‘Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.' ”

“Who said that?”

He shrugs. “Some days she said Aristotle, some days John Wayne. Maybe she made it up.”