A fourteen-year-old girl sits cross-legged on the floor of a circular vault. A mass of curls haloes her head; her socks are full of holes. This is Konstance.
Behind her, inside a translucent cylinder that rises sixteen feet from floor to ceiling, hangs a machine composed of trillions of golden threads, none thicker than a human hair. Each filament twines around thousands of others in entanglements of astonishing intricacy. Occasionally a bundle somewhere along the surface of the machine pulses with light: now here, now there. This is Sybil.
Elsewhere in the room there's an inflatable cot, a recycling toilet, a food printer, eleven sacks of Nourish powder, and a multidirectional treadmill the size and shape of an automobile tire called a Perambulator. Light comes from a ring of diodes in the ceiling; there is no visible exit.
Arranged in a grid on the floor lie almost one hundred rectangular scraps Konstance has torn from empty Nourish powder sacks and written on with homemade ink. Some are dense with her handwriting; others accommodate a single word. One, for example, contains the twenty-four letters of the ancient Greek alphabet. Another reads:
In the millennium leading up to 1453, the city of Constantinople was besieged twenty-three times, but no army ever breached its land walls.
She leans forward and lifts three scraps from the puzzle in front of her. The machine behind her flickers.
It is late, Konstance, and you have not eaten all day.
I'm not hungry.
How about some nice risotto? Or roast lamb with mashed potatoes? There are still many combinations you have not tried.
No thank you, Sybil. She looks down at the first scrap and reads:
The lost Greek prose tale Cloud Cuckoo Land, by the writer Antonius Diogenes, relating a shepherd's journey to a utopian city in the sky, was probably written around the end of the first century C.E.
The second:
We know from a ninth-century Byzantine summary of the book 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.
The third:
The tomb, Diogenes wrote to his niece, was marked Aethon: Lived 80 Years a Man, 1 Year a Donkey, 1 Year a Sea Bass, 1 Year a Crow. Inside, Diogenes claimed to have discovered a wooden chest bearing the inscription, Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you. When he opened the chest, he found twenty-four cypress-wood tablets upon which were written Aethon's story.
Konstance shuts her eyes, sees the writer descend into the dark of the tombs. Sees him study the strange chest in the torchlight. The diodes in the ceiling dim and the walls soften from white to amber and Sybil says, It will be NoLight soon, Konstance.
She picks her way through the scraps on the floor and retrieves what's left of an empty sack from beneath her cot. Using her teeth and fingers, she tears away a blank rectangle. She places a little scoop of Nourish powder into the food printer, pushes buttons, and the device spits an ounce of dark liquid into its bowl. Then she takes a length of polyethylene tubing, the tip of which she has carved into a nib, dips her makeshift pen into the makeshift ink, leans over the blank scrap, and draws a cloud.
She dips again.
Atop the cloud she draws the towers of a city, then little dots of birds soaring around the turrets. The room darkens further. Sybil flickers. Konstance, I must insist that you eat.
I'm not hungry, thank you, Sybil.
She picks up a rectangle inscribed with a dateFebruary 20, 2020and sets it beside another that reads, Folio A. Then she places her drawing of a cloud city on the left. For a breath, in the dying light, the three scraps seem almost to rise up and glow.
Konstance sits back on her heels. She has not left this room for almost a year.
He escorts five fifth graders from the elementary school to the public library through curtains of falling snow. He is an octogenarian in a canvas coat; his boots are fastened with Velcro; cartoon penguins skate across his necktie. All day, joy has steadily inflated inside his chest, and now, this afternoon, at 4:30 p.m. on a Thursday in February, watching the children run ahead down the sidewalkAlex Hess wearing his papier-m?ch¨¦ donkey head, Rachel Wilson carrying a plastic torch, Natalie Hernandez lugging a portable speakerthe feeling threatens to capsize him.
They pass the police station, the Parks Department, Eden's Gate Realty. The Lakeport Public Library is a high-gabled two-story gingerbread Victorian on the corner of Lake and Park that was donated to the town after the First World War. Its chimney leans; its gutters sag; packing tape holds together cracks in three of the four front-facing windows. Several inches of snow have already settled on the junipers flanking the walk and atop the book drop box on the corner, which has been painted to look like an owl.
The kids charge up the front walk, bound onto the porch, and high-five Sharif, the children's librarian, who has stepped outside to help Zeno navigate the stairs. Sharif has lime-green earbuds in his ears and craft glitter twinkles in the hair on his arms. His T-shirt says, I LIKE BIG BOOKS AND I CANNOT LIE.
Inside, Zeno wipes fog from his eyeglasses. Construction paper hearts are taped to the front of the welcome desk; a framed needlepoint on the wall behind it reads, Questions Answered Here.
On the computer table, on all three monitors, screen-saver spirals twist in synchrony. Between the audiobook shelf and two shabby armchairs, a radiator leak seeps through the ceiling tiles and drips into a seven-gallon trash can.
Plip. Plop. Plip.
The kids scatter snow everywhere as they stampede upstairs, heading for the Children's Section, and Zeno and Sharif share a smile as they listen to their footfalls reach the top of the staircase and stop.
Whoa, says the voice of Olivia Ott.
Holy magoley, says the voice of Christopher Dee.
Sharif takes Zeno's elbow as they ascend. The entrance to the second story has been blocked with a plywood wall spray-painted gold, and in its center, over a small arched door, Zeno has written:
The fifth graders cluster against the plywood and snow melts on their jackets and backpacks and everyone looks at Zeno and Zeno waits for his breath to catch up with the rest of him.
Does everyone remember what it says?
Of course, says Rachel.
Duh, says Christopher.
On her tiptoes, Natalie runs a finger beneath each word. Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you.
Oh my flipping gosh, says Alex, his donkey head under his arm. It's like we're about to walk into the book.
Sharif switches off the stairwell light and the children crowd around the little door in the red glow of the EXIT sign. Ready? calls Zeno, and from the other side of the plywood, Marian, the library director, calls, Ready.
One by one the fifth graders pass through the little arched doorway into the Children's Section. The shelves, tables, and beanbags that normally fill the space have been pushed against the walls and in their places stand thirty folding chairs. Above the chairs, dozens of cardboard clouds, coated with glitter, hang from the rafters by threads. In front of the chairs is a small stage, and behind the stage, on a canvas sheet hung across the entire rear wall, Marian has painted a city in the clouds.
Golden towers, cut by hundreds of little windows and crowned by pennants, rise in clusters. Around their spires whirl dense flights of birdslittle brown buntings and big silver eagles, birds with long curving tails and others with long curving bills, birds of the world and birds of the imagination. Marian has shut off the overhead lights, and in the beam of a single karaoke light on a stand, the clouds sparkle and the flocks shimmer and the towers seem illuminated from within.
It's says Olivia.
better than I says Christopher.
Cloud Cuckoo Land, whispers Rachel.
Natalie sets down her speaker and Alex leaps onstage and Marian calls, Careful, some of the paint may still be wet.
Zeno lowers himself into a chair in the front row. Every time he blinks, a memory ripples across the undersides of his eyelids: his father pratfalls into a snowbank; a librarian slides open the drawer of a card catalogue; a man in a prison camp scratches Greek characters into the dust.
Sharif shows the kids the backstage area that he has created behind three bookshelves, packed with props and costumes, and Olivia pulls a latex cap over her hair to make herself look bald and Christopher drags a microwave box painted to look like a marble sarcophagus to the center of the stage and Alex reaches to touch a tower of the painted city and Natalie slides a laptop from her backpack.
Marian's phone buzzes. Pizzas are ready, she says into Zeno's good ear. I'll walk over and pick them up. Be back in a jiff.
Mr. Ninis? Rachel is tapping Zeno's shoulder. Her red hair is pulled back in braided pigtails and snow has melted to droplets on her shoulders and her eyes are wide and bright. You built all this? For us?
One block away, inside a Pontiac Grand Am mantled in three inches of snow, a gray-eyed seventeen-year-old named Seymour Stuhlman drowses with a backpack in his lap. The backpack is an oversize dark green JanSport and contains two Presto pressure cookers, each of which is packed with roofing nails, ball bearings, an igniter, and nineteen ounces of a high explosive called Composition B. Twin wires run from the body of each cooker to the lid, where they plug into the circuit board of a cellular phone.
In a dream Seymour walks beneath trees toward a cluster of white tents, but every time he takes a step forward, the trail twists and the tents recede, and a terrible confusion presses down on him. He wakes with a start.
The dashboard clock says 4:42 p.m. How long did he sleep? Fifteen minutes. Twenty at most. Stupid. Careless. He has been in the car for more than four hours and his toes are numb and he has to pee.
With a sleeve he clears vapor from the inside of the windshield. He risks the wipers once and they brush a slab of snow off the glass. No cars parked in front of the library. No one on the sidewalk. The only car in the gravel parking lot to the west is Marian the Librarian's Subaru, humped with snow.
4:43 p.m.
Six inches before dark, says the radio, twelve to fourteen overnight.
Inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for four. Recall things you know. Owls have three eyelids. Their eyeballs are not spheres but elongated tubes. A group of owls is called a parliament.
All he needs to do is stroll in, hide the backpack in the southeast corner of the library, as close as possible to the Eden's Gate Realty office, and stroll out. Drive north, wait until the library closes at 6 p.m., dial the numbers. Wait five rings.
Boom.
Easy.
At 4:51, a figure in a cherry-red parka exits the library, pulls up her hood, and pushes a snow shovel up and down the front walk. Marian.
Seymour shuts off the car radio and slips lower in his seat. In a memory he is seven or eight years old, in Adult Nonfiction, somewhere in the 598s, and Marian retrieves a field guide to owls from a high shelf. Her cheeks are a sandstorm of freckles; she smells like cinnamon gum; she sits beside him on a rolling stool.