Cloud Cuckoo Land (38 page)

1505

H
e sleeps beneath the same smoke-stained roof beam that he slept beneath as a child. His left elbow occasionally locks up, his inner ear throbs before storms, and he has had to pull out two of his own molars. His primary companions are three laying hens, a large black dog who frightens people but at heart is harmless, and Clover, a twenty-year-old donkey with breath like a graveyard and chronic gas but a sweet temperament.

Two of his sons have moved into forests farther to the north and the third lives with a woman in the village nine miles away. When Omeir visits with Clover, the children still shy from his face, and some openly burst into tears, but his youngest granddaughter does not, and if he sits very still, she'll climb into his lap and touch his upper lip with her fingers.

Memories fail him now. Banners and bombards, the screaming of wounded men, the reek of sulfur, the deaths of Moonlight and Tree—sometimes his recollections of the siege on the city seem no more than the residue of bad dreams, lifting into consciousness for a moment before dissipating. Forgetting, he is learning, is how the world heals itself.

He has heard that the new sultan (bless and keep him forever) takes his trees from forests even farther away, and that the Christians have sailed ships to new lands at the farthest edge of the ocean where there are entire cities made of gold, but he has little use for such stories anymore. Sometimes as he stares into his fire, the tale Anna used to tell comes back to him, of a man transformed into a donkey, then a fish, then a crow, journeying across earth, ocean, and stars to find
a land without suffering, only to choose to return home in the end, and live a last few years among his animals.

One day in early spring, long after he has lost all track of his age, a series of storms sweeps over the mountain. The river turns brown, and mudslides block the road, and the rumble of falling rocks echoes through the gorges. The worst night finds Omeir huddled atop his table with the dog beside him listening to a sloshing fill the cottage: not the usual dripping and trickling, but a flood.

Water flows beneath the door in sheets and streams trickle down the walls and Clover stands blinking up to her hocks in the rising water. At dawn he wades through dung and bark and debris and checks on the hens and leads Clover up to the highest terrace to nibble what grasses she can find and finally he looks up at the limestone bluff overlooking the ravine and panic lurches through him.

The old half-hollow yew has fallen in the night. He claws his way up the trail, sliding in mud. Moss-decked branches splay everywhere and the huge root network lies unearthed like a second tree ripped out of the earth. The smell is of sap and shattered wood and things long buried lifted into the light.

It takes him a long time to locate Anna's bundle in the wreckage. The oxhide is soaked. Little jangles of alarm ride through him as he carries the sodden bundle down to the cottage. He shovels mud out of the hearth and manages to start a smoky fire and hangs his sleeping rugs in the byre to dry and finally unwraps the book.

It is wringing wet. Leaves separate from the binding as he teases them apart, and the dense strings of symbols upon them—all those little sooty bird-tracks crammed together—seem more faded than he remembers.

He can still hear Anna's shriek when he first touched the sack. The way the book protected them as they left the city; the way it summoned a flock of stone-curlews to his snares; the way it brought their son back from fever. The quick humor in Anna's eyes as she bent over the lines, translating as she went.

He banks up the fire and strings webs of cording around the cottage and hangs bifolios over the lines to dry as if he were smoking game birds, and all this time his heart races, as though the codex were a living thing left to his trust and he has endangered it—as though he were charged with a single, simple responsibility, to keep this one thing alive, and has bungled it.

When the leaves are dry, he reassembles the book, uncertain that he is putting the folios back in the correct order, and wraps it in a new square of waxed leather. He waits for the first migrating storks to come over the ravine, a lopsided chevron of them following their ancient directive, leaving whatever distant place in the south where they have spent the winter and heading to whatever distant place in the north where they will spend the summer. Then he takes his best blanket, two skins of water, several dozen pots of honey, the book, and Anna's snuffbox, and pulls shut the door of the cottage. He calls to Clover and she comes trotting, ears up, and the dog rises from the splash of sunlight where it drowses beside the byre.

First to the house of his son, where he gives his daughter-in-law the three hens and half his silver and tries to give away the dog too, though the dog will have none of it. His granddaughter loops a wreath of spring roses around Clover's neck, and he starts northwest around the mountain, Omeir on foot and Clover, half-blind, climbing steadily beside, the dog at their heels.

He avoids inns, markets, crowds. When he passes through hamlets he generally keeps the dog close and his face hidden beneath the drooping brim of his hat. He sleeps outdoors, and chews the blue starflowers Grandfather used to chew to soothe aches in his back, and takes heart from Clover and her levelheaded gait. The few people they pass are charmed, and ask him where he found such a bright and pretty little donkey, and he feels blessed.

Now and then he gathers enough courage to show travelers the little enameled painting on the lid of the snuffbox. A few speculate that it might depict a fortress in Kosovo and others a palazzo in the
Republic of Florence. But one day, as he draws near the Sava River, two merchants on horseback with two servants each stop him. One asks his business in Anna's language, and the other says, “He's a wandering Mohammedan with one foot in the grave, he can't understand a word you say,” and Omeir removes his hat and says, “Good afternoon, sirs, I understand you well enough.”

They laugh, and offer him water and dates, and when he passes over the snuffbox, one holds it to the sun, turning it this way and that, and says, “Ah, Urbino,” and hands it to his companion.

“Fair Urbino,” says the second, “in the mountains of the Marche.”

“It's a long journey,” says the first, and gestures vaguely to the west. He looks at Omeir and Clover. “Particularly for one so gray in the beard. That donkey is no filly either.”

“Surely to live so long with a face like that must have taken some ingenuity,” says the second.

He wakes creaking and stiff, his feet swollen, and checks Clover's hooves for cracks, and some days it's noon before he can shake feeling into his fingers. As they turn south through the Veneto, the countryside grows hilly again, and the roads steepen, little castles sitting atop crags, peasants in fields, olive groves around tiny churches, sunflowers rolling down to tangled creeks. He runs out of silver, trades his last pot of honey. At night, dreams and memories mix: he sees a city, shimmering in the distance, and hears the voices of his sons when they were small.

Tell again, Mama, about the shepherd whose name means blazing.

And about the lakes of milk on the moon.

The eyes of his youngest blink.
Tell us
, he says,
what the fool does next
.

He approaches Urbino under an autumn sky, silver sheafs of light dropping through rifts in the clouds onto the twisting road ahead.
The city emerges atop a hill, built from limestone and adorned with bell towers, the brickwork looking as though it has grown out of the bedrock.

As he winds upward, the huge double-turreted facade of the palazzo with its tiers of balconies looms against the sky, the painting on the snuffbox made real: it's like a construction from a dream, if not one of his own, perhaps one of Anna's, as though now, in his last years, he moves along the paths of her dreams rather than his.

Clover brays; swallows cut overhead. The light, the violet-colored hills in the distance, the little cyclamens glowing like embers on either side of the road—Omeir feels like Aethon-the-crow spiraling down out of the stars, weary and wind-plucked, half his feathers gone. How many last barriers lie between him and Grandfather and his mother and Anna and the great rest to come?

He worries that gatekeepers will turn him away because of his face, but the town gates are open and people come and go freely, and as he and the donkey and the dog scale the maze of streets toward the palazzo, no one pays him much mind—there are many people about, and their faces are many colors, and if anything, it's Clover who draws looks for her long eyelashes and her pretty way of walking.

In the courtyard in front of the palace, he tells a crossbowman that he has a gift for the learned men of this place. The man, uncomprehending, gestures for him to wait and Omeir stands with Clover and puts an arm around her neck and the dog lies down and immediately goes to sleep. They wait perhaps an hour, Omeir drowsing on his feet, dreaming of Anna standing beside the fire, hands on her hips, laughing at something one of their sons said, and when he wakes he checks for the leather bundle with the book inside and looks up at the high walls of the palazzo, and through the windows he can see servants moving from room to room lighting tapers.

Eventually an interpreter appears and asks his business. Omeir unwraps the bundle and the man glances at the book, chews his lip, and disappears again. A second man, dressed in dark velvet, comes
down with him, out of breath, and sets a lantern in the gravel and blows his nose into a handkerchief, then takes the codex and leafs through it. “I have heard,” Omeir says, “that this is a place that protects books.”

The man glances up and back at the book again and says something to the interpreter.

“He would like to know how you came to possess this.”

“It was a gift,” Omeir says, and he thinks of Anna surrounded by their sons, the hearth glowing, lightning flashing outside, shaping the story with her hands. The second man is busy examining the stitching and binding in the lantern light.

“I assume you would like to be paid?” asks the interpreter. “It is in very bad shape.”

“A meal will suffice. And oats for my donkey.”

The man frowns, as though the stupidity of the world's imbeciles never ceases to amaze, and even without translation, the man in velvet nods, delicately closes the codex with both hands, bows, and takes the book inside without another word. Omeir is directed to a stable beneath the palace where a groomsman with a tidy mustache leads Clover to a stall by the light of his candle.

Omeir sits on a milking stool against the wall as night drapes itself across the Apennines, feeling as though he has accomplished some final task, and prays that another life exists beyond this one where Anna waits for him beneath the wing of God. He dreams he is walking to a well, and peers into it with Tree and Moonlight at his side, all three of them looking down into the cool, emerald-colored water, and Moonlight startles when a little bird flies up out of the well and rises into the sky, and when he wakes a servant in a brown coat is setting a platter of flatbreads, stuffed with sheep's cheese, beside him. Beside that a second servant sets a roll of rabbit meat seasoned with sage and roasted fennel seeds, and a flagon of wine, enough food and drink for four men, and one servant fixes a lit torch in a bracket on the wall, and the other sets a great clay bowl of oats beneath it, and they back away.

The three of them, dog, donkey, and man, eat their fill. And when they are done the dog curls up in the corner, and Clover sighs an immense sigh, and Omeir sits with his back against the stall, his legs stretched out in the good clean straw, and they sleep, and out in the dark it begins to rain.

NOSTOS

2057–2064

H
is work-release apartment has a kitchenette that overlooks a sun-hammered hillside of rabbitbrush. It's August and the sky is beige with smoke and everything wavers with heat blurs.

Six mornings a week he rides a self-driving bus to an office park where he crosses an acre of broiling asphalt to a sprawling stucco Ilium-owned low-rise. In the lobby a polyurethane raised-relief Earth, twelve feet in diameter, turns on a pedestal, dust gathered in the clefts of the mountains. A faded placard on the wall says,
Capturing the Earth.
He works twelve hours a day with teams of engineers testing next-generation iterations of the Atlas treadmill and headset. He's a ropy and pallid man who prefers to eat prepackaged sandwiches at his desk rather than visit the cafeteria, and who finds peace only in work, in accumulating mile after mile on the treadmill like some Dark Age pilgrim walking off a great penance.

Occasionally he orders a new pair of shoes, identical to the pair he has worn out. Besides food, he buys little else. He messages Natalie Hernandez once a week, on Saturdays, and most of the time she messages back. She teaches Latin and Greek to reluctant high schoolers, has two sons, a self-driving minivan, and a dachshund named Dash.

Sometimes he removes his headset, steps off his treadmill, and blinks out over the heads of the other engineers, and lines from Zeno's translation come winging back:
… Across its surface spread the heavens and the earth, all its lands scattered, all its beasts, and in the center…

He turns fifty-seven, fifty-eight; the insurgent inside him lives still. Every night when he gets home, he boots his terminal, disables its connectivity, and gets to work. Simmering on servers all over the world, the harvest of raw, high-density Atlas images remains: columns of migrants fleeing Chennai, families packed onto tiny boats outside Rangoon, a tank on fire in Bangladesh, police behind Plexiglas shields in Cairo, a Louisiana town filled with mud—the calamities he spent years expunging from the Atlas are all still there.

Over the course of months, he constructs little blades of code so sharp and refined that when he slips them into the Atlas object code, the system cannot detect them. Inside the Atlas, all over the world, he hides them as little owls: owl graffiti, an owl-shaped drinking fountain, a bicyclist in a tuxedo with an owl mask. Find one, touch it, and you peel back the sanitized, polished imagery to reveal the original truth beneath.

In Miami, six potted ferns stand outside a restaurant, a little owl sticker stuck to planter number three. Touch the owl and the ferns evaporate; a smoldering car materializes; four women lay crumpled on the pavement.

Whether users discover his little owls, he does not risk finding out. The Atlas is fading from the company's priorities anyway; whole regions of the Boise complex are being devoted to perfecting and miniaturizing the treadmill and headset for other projects, in other departments. But Seymour keeps constructing his owls, night after night, smuggling them into the object code, unweaving some of the lies he has spent the day weaving, and for the first time since finding the severed wing of Trustyfriend on the side of the road, he feels better. Calmer. Less frightened. Less like he has something to outrun.

Three days at a new resort on the lake in Lakeport. Airfare, all meals included, any water sports they want—all on him, for as long as his savings hold out. Families welcome. He relies on Natalie to handle
the communication. At first she says that she does not think all five will come, but they do: Alex Hess and two sons travel from Cleveland; Olivia Ott flies in from San Francisco; Christopher Dee drives up from Caldwell; Rachel Wilson comes all the way from southwest Australia with her four-year-old grandson.

Seymour doesn't drive up the canyon from Boise until their last night: no need to upset anyone by showing his face too soon. At dawn he swallows an extra antianxiety drop and stands on the balcony wearing a suit and tie. Out beyond the hotel docks, the lake sparkles in the sunlight. He waits to see if an osprey might come overhead but none do.

Notes in his left pocket, room key in his right. Recall things you know. Owls have three eyelids. Humans are complicated. For many of the things you love, it's too late. But not for all.

He meets the two Ilium technicians in a hexagonal lakeside room used primarily for wedding receptions, and supervises as they carry in five brand-new state-of-the-art multidirectional treadmills that they are calling Perambulators. The technicians pair them with five headsets and depart.

Natalie meets him there early. Her kids, she says, are finishing lunch. It's brave of him, she says, to do this.

“Braver of you,” says Seymour. Every time he inhales he fears his skin might unbuckle and his bones will fall out.

At 1 p.m., the families arrive. Olivia Ott has a chin-length bob and linen capri pants and her eyes look as though she has been crying. Alex Hess is flanked by two gigantic and sullen teens, the hair of all three bright yellow. Christopher Dee appears with a small woman; they sit in the corner, removed from the others, and hold hands. Rachel enters last, wearing jeans and boots; her face has the deep-grained wrinkles of someone who works long days under the sun. A cheerful-looking flame-haired grandson trundles in behind her and sits and swings his feet in his chair.

“He doesn't look like a murderer,” says one of Alex's sons.

“Be polite,” says Alex.

“He just looks old. Is he rich?”

Seymour avoids looking at their faces—faces will derail the whole thing. Keep your eyes down. Read from your notes. “That day,” he says, “all those years ago, I took something precious from each of you. I know I can never fully atone for what I did. But because I, too, know what it's like to lose a place you cared about when you were young—to have it taken from you—I thought it might mean something to you if I tried to give yours back.”

From his bag he takes five hardcover books with royal blue jackets and hands one to each. On the cover birds swing around the towers of a cloud city. Olivia gasps.

“I had these made from the translations of Mr. Ninis. With a lot of help from Natalie, I should add. She wrote all of the translator's notes.”

Next he distributes the headsets. “The five of you can go first. Then everybody else, if they'd like. Do you remember the book drop box?”

Nods all around. Christopher says, “ ‘Owl' you need are books.”

“Pull the handle on the box. You'll know what to do from there.”

The adults stand. Seymour helps them fit the headsets over their heads and the five Perambulators hum to life.

Once they're settled atop their treadmills, he walks to the window and looks out at the lake.
There are at least twenty places like that north of here your owl could fly to
, she said.
Bigger forests, better forests
. She was trying to save him.

The Perambulators whir and spin; the grown-up children walk. Natalie says, “Oh my God.”

Alex says, “It's exactly how I remember.”

Seymour recalls the silence of the trees behind the double-wide as they filled with snow. Trustyfriend on his limb, ten feet up in the big dead tree: he would twitch at the crunch of tires across gravel a quarter mile away. He could hear the heart of a vole beating beneath six feet of snowpack.

Pneumatic motors raise the fronts of the Perambulators. They
are climbing the granite steps to the porch. “Look,” says Christopher. “It's the sign I made.”

In the chair next to Rachel's vacant one, Rachel's grandson reaches over, picks up the blue book, sets it in his lap, and turns pages.

With her right hand, Olivia Ott reaches into space and opens the door. One by one the children enter the library.