Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr

Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds.

“Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.”

“But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”

The gaze of one of the heralds stops on Omeir’s face and his expression twists in disgust, and the boy gets a flicker of what he and this place together must present: a rude dwelling carved into a hollow, home to a gash-faced boy, hermitage of the deformed.

Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.

Seymour shuts his eyes. The breeze feels as soft as the blue blankets at the Golden Oak, maybe softer, and the thistles are pumping off a smell like warm Christmas trees, and through the wall directly behind them is his very own room with stains on the ceiling that look like clouds or cougars or maybe sea sponges, and his mother sounds so happy that when she gets to the part in her song about the ewe bleating, and the bullock prancing, and the billy goat farting, he can’t keep himself from laughing.

From his spot at the base of the big dead tree, Seymour gazes up and the owl gazes down and the forest breathes and something happens: the unease mumbling at the margins of his every waking moment—the roar—falls quiet. There is magic in this place, the owl seems to say. You just have to sit and breathe and wait and it will find you. He sits and breathes and waits and the Earth travels another thousand kilometers along its orbit. Lifelong knots deep inside the boy loosen.

The owl blinks into the fading light. His head is the size of a volleyball. He looks like the souls of ten thousand trees distilled into a single form.

“I know why those librarians read the old stories to you,” Rex says. “Because if it’s told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.”

“Nuh-uh, no way, kid, you do not get to die, not without me.”

“In a time,” he says, “when disease, war, and famine haunted practically every hour, when so many died before their time, their bodies swallowed by the sea or earth, or simply lost over the horizon, never to return, their fates unknown…” He gazes across the frozen fields to the low, dark buildings of Camp Five. “Imagine how it felt to hear the old songs about heroes returning home. To believe that it was possible.”

“That’s what the gods do,” he says, “they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.”

“You said that what’s so beautiful about a fool is that a fool never knows when to give up.”

Mrs. Chen said Sybil was a book that contained the entire world: a thousand variations of recipes for macaroni and cheese, the record of four thousand years of temperatures of the Arctic Sea, Confucian literature and Beethoven’s symphonies and the genomes of the trilobites—the heritage of all humanity, the citadel, the ark, the womb, everything we can imagine and everything we might ever need. Mrs. Flowers said it would be enough.

Rex’s unit? He doesn’t know. Commanding officer? He doesn’t know. He has a name. He has East London. He wants to write: He fluttered his hand over his mouth when he yawned. He had a collarbone I wanted to put my teeth on. He told me that archaeologists have found the inscription ΚΑΛΟΣΟΠΑΙΣ scratched on thousands of ancient Greek pots, given as gifts by older men to boys they found attractive. ΚΑΛΟΣΟΠΑΙΣ, καλός ὁ παῖς, “the boy is beautiful.”

When they got to the New World (which was not new or called America, the America name came from a pickle seller guy who got famous because he lied about doing sex with natives)

“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.

“That is correct, little crow. The answer is nothing,” and the second guardian said, “ ‘He that knows all that Learning ever writ, knows only this—that he knows nothing yet.’ ”]·

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.

Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.

But as he reconstructs Zeno’s translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

In a child’s cursive, beneath the crossed-out lines, Aethon’s new line is handwritten in the margin, “The world as it is is enough.”

Down Park Street, away from the police vehicles, library at his back. Imagine, says Rex, how it felt to hear the old songs about heroes returning home. A quarter mile away is Mrs. Boydstun’s old house, no curtains on the windows, translations all over the dining table, five Playwood Plastic soldiers in a tin box upstairs beside the little brass bed, and Nestor the king of Pylos drowsing on the kitchen mat. Someone will need to let him out.