Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

  “No, just a card key.”

  “Mine’s supposed to recognize my face, but it wouldn’t let me in.” He frowns. “I think it only works for white people.”

  “You should sell your friend some better software,” I say. “Expand into the hospitality business.”

  Neel rolls his eyes. “Right. I don’t think I want to expand into any more markets. Did I tell you I got an email from Homeland Security?”

  I freeze. Does this have anything to do with Grumble? No, that’s ridiculous. “You mean, like, recently?”

  He nods. “They want an app to help them visualize different body types under heavy clothing. Like, burkas and stuff.”

  Okay, whew. “Are you going to do it?”

  He grimaces. “No way. Even if it wasn’t a gross idea—which it is—I’m doing too much already.” He slurps his shake and makes a bright cylinder of green zoom up the straw.

  “You like it,” I say lightly. “You love having a finger in eleven different pots.”

  “Sure, fingers in pots,” he says. “Not, like, whole bodies in pots. Dude, I don’t have partners. I don’t have business development people. And I don’t even do the fun stuff anymore!” He’s talking about code—or may be boobs, I’m not sure. “Honestly, what I really want to do is, like, be a VC.”

  Neel Shah, venture capitalist. We’d never have dreamed that in sixth grade.

  “So why don’t you?”

  “Um, I think you might overestimate how much money Anatomix throws off,” he says, raising his eyebrows. “This isn’t exactly Google over here. To be a VC, you need a lot of C. All I’ve got is a bunch of five-figure contracts with video game companies.”

  “And movie studios, right?”

  “Shh,” Neel hisses, casting his eyes around the lobby. “Nobody can know about those. There are some very serious documents, dude.” He pauses. “There are documents with Scarlett Johansson’s signature on them.”

  We take the subway. Grumble’s next message came through after breakfast, and it said:

  theres a grumblegear3k waiting for you at 11 jay street in dumbo. ask for the hogwarts special. hold the shrooms.

  It is probably the coolest message that has ever appeared in my inbox. It’s a dead-drop, and Neel and I are headed there now. We are going to supply a secret passphrase and get a special-ops book scanner in return.

  The train rumbles and sways through its tunnel below the East River. The windows are all dark. Neel is lightly gripping the bar overhead and he says:

  “You sure you don’t want to get into business development? You could head up the burka project.” He grins and lifts his eyebrows, and I realize he’s serious, at least about the BD part.

  “I am the absolute worst person you could get to do BD for your company,” I say. “I guarantee it. You’d have to fire me. It would be awful.” I’m not kidding. Working for Neel would violate the terms of our friendship. He’d be Neel Shah, boss, or Neel Shah, business mentor—no longer Neel Shah, dungeon master.

  “I wouldn’t fire you,” he says. “I’d just demote you.”

  “To what, Igor’s apprentice?”

  “Igor already has an apprentice. Dmitriy. He’s supersmart. You could be Dmitriy’s apprentice.”

  I’m sure Dmitriy is sixteen. I don’t like the sound of this. I change course:

  “Hey, what about making your own movies?” I say. “Really show off Igor’s chops. Start another Pixar.”

  Neel nods at that, then he’s quiet a moment, chewing it over. Finally: “I would totally do that. If I knew a filmmaker, I would fund him in a second.” He pauses. “Or her. But if it was a her, I’d probably fund her through my foundation.”

  Right: the Neel Shah Foundation for Women in the Arts. It’s a tax shelter created at the behest of Neel’s slick Silicon Valley accountant. Neel asked me to build a placeholder website to make it look more legit and it is, to date, the second-most-depressing thing I have ever designed. (The NewBagel to Old Jerusalem re-branding still holds the top slot.)

  “So go find a filmmaker,” I say.

  “You go find a filmmaker,” Neel shoots back. Very sixth-grade. Then something lights up in his eyes: “Actually … that’s perfect. Yes. In exchange for funding this adventure, Claymore Redhands, I ask this boon of you.” His voice goes low and dungeon master-y: “You will find me a filmmaker.”

  My phone guides us to the address in Dumbo. It’s on a quiet street along the water, next to a fenced-in lot bristling with Con-Edison transformers. The building is dark and narrow, even skinnier than Penumbra’s and much more run-down. It looks like there’s been a fire here recently; long black streaks rise up around the doorframe. The space would look derelict if not for two things: One, a wide vinyl sign stuck crookedly to the front that says POP-UP PIE. Two, the warm rising smell of pizza.

  Inside, it’s a wreck—yes, there was definitely a fire here—but the air is dense and fragrant, full of carbohydrates. Up front, there’s a card table with a dented money box. Behind it, a gang of ruddy-cheeked teenagers is milling around a makeshift kitchen. One is spinning dough in wobbly circles above his head; another is chopping tomatoes, onions, and peppers. Three more are just standing around, talking and laughing. There’s a tall pizza oven behind them, bare banged-up metal with a wide blue racing stripe down the middle. It has wheels.

  There’s music blaring from a set of plastic speakers, a crunchy warbling tune that I suspect no more than thirteen people in the world have ever heard.

  “What can I get you guys?” one of the teenagers calls out above the music. Well, he might not actually be a teenager. The staff here inhabits a whiskerless in-between space; they probably go to art school. Our host is wearing a white T-shirt that shows Mickey Mouse grimacing and brandishing an AK-47.

  Okay, I’d better get this right: “One Hogwarts Special,” I call back to him. Insurgent Mickey nods once. I add, “But hold the shrooms.” Pause. “The mushrooms, I mean.” Pause. “I think.” But Insurgent Mickey has already turned away from us, consulting with his colleagues.

  “Did he hear you?” Neel whispers. “I can’t eat pizza. If we actually end up with a pizza, it’s going to be your responsibility to consume it. Do not let me have any. Even if I ask for some.” He pauses. “I’ll probably ask for some.”

  “Tie you to the mast,” I say. “Like Odysseus.”

  “Like Captain Bloodboots,” Neel says.

  In The Dragon-Song Chronicles, Fernwen the scholarly dwarf convinces the crew of the Starlily to tie Captain Bloodboots to the mast after he tries to cut the singing dragon’s throat. So, yes. Like Captain Bloodboots.

  Insurgent Mickey is back with a pizza box. That was fast. “That’ll be sixteen-fifty,” he says. Wait, did I do something wrong? Is this a joke? Did Grumble send us on a wild-goose chase? Neel raises his eyebrows but produces a crisp twenty-dollar bill and hands it over. In return, we receive an extra-large pizza box, with pop-up PIE stamped across the top in runny blue ink.

  The box isn’t hot.

  Outside on the sidewalk, I crack it open. Inside, there are tidy stacks of heavy cardboard, all long flat shapes with slots and tabs where they fit together. It’s a GrumbleGear, all in pieces. The edges are burned black. These shapes have been made with a laser cutter.

  Written in thick marker strokes on the underside of the box’s lid is a message from Grumble, whether by his own hand or his Brooklyn minion’s, I will never know:

  SPECIALIS REVELIO

  On the way back, we stop at a gray-market electronics shop and pick out two cheap digital cameras. Then we make our way to the Northbridge through the streets of lower Manhattan, Neel carrying the pizza box, me with the cameras in a plastic bag bouncing against my knee. We have everything we need. MANVTIVS will be ours.

  The city is all bright squalls of traffic and commerce. Taxis honk underneath lights turning gold; long lines of shoppers clank up and down Fifth Avenue. There are loose crowds on every street corner, laughing and smoking and s
elling kebabs. San Francisco is a good city, and beautiful, but it’s never this alive. I take a deep breath—the air is cool and sharp, scented with tobacco and mystery meat—and I think of Corvina’s warning to Penumbra: You can squander what time remains out there. Jeez. Immortality in a book-lined catacomb down beneath the surface of the earth, or death up here, with all this? I’ll take death and a kebab. And what about Penumbra? Somehow he seems more like a man of the world, too. I think of his bookstore, with those wide front windows. I think of his first words to me—”What do you seek in these shelves?”—delivered with a big, welcoming smile.

  Corvina and Penumbra were fast friends once; I’ve seen photographic proof. Corvina must have been so different then … really literally a different person. At what point do you make that call? At what point should you just give someone a new name? Sorry, no, you don’t get to be Corvina anymore. Now you’re Corvina 2.0—a dubious upgrade. I think of the young man in the old photo giving a thumbs-up. Is he gone forever?

  “It really would be better if the filmmaker was female,” Neel is saying. “Seriously. I need to put more money into that foundation. I’ve only given one grant, and it was to my cousin Sabrina.” He pauses. “I think that might have been illegal.”

  I try to imagine Neel forty years from now: bald, suit-wearing, a different person. I try to imagine Neel 2.0 or Neel Shah, business mentor—a Neel with whom I can no longer be friends—but I just can’t do it.

  Back at the Northbridge, I’m surprised to find Kat and Penumbra sitting together on the low couches, deep in conversation. Kat is gesturing enthusiastically and Penumbra is smiling, nodding, his blue eyes shining.

  When Kat looks up, she’s smiling. “There was another email,” she blurts. Then she pauses, but her face is alive, jumping, like she can’t contain whatever comes next: “They’re expanding the PM to a hundred and twenty-eight, and—I’m one of them.” Her micromuscles are on fire, and she almost shrieks it: “I got picked!”

  My mouth hangs open a little bit. She jumps up and hugs me, and I hug her back, and we dance around in a little circle in the ultracool Northbridge lobby.

  “What does that even mean?” Neel says, setting down the pizza box.

  “I think it means this side project just got some executive support,” I say, and Kat throws her arms up in the air.

  To celebrate Kat’s success, all four of us sidle up to the Northbridge lobby bar, which is tiled with tiny matte-black integrated circuits. We sit on tall stools and Neel buys a round of drinks. I sip something called the Blue Screen of Death, which is in fact neon-blue, with a bright LED winking inside one of the ice cubes.

  “So let me get this straight—you’re one–one-twenty-eighth of Google’s CEO?” Neel says.

  “Not exactly,” Kat says. “We have a CEO, but Google is way too complicated for one person to run alone, so the Product Management helps out. You know … should we enter this market, should we make that acquisition.”

  “Dude!” Neel says, leaping up off his stool. “Acquire me!”

  Kat laughs. “I’m not sure 3-D boobs—”

  “It’s not just boobs!” Neel says. “We do the whole body. Arms, legs, deltoids, you name it.”

  Kat just smiles and sips her drink. Penumbra is nursing an inch of golden scotch in a thick-bottomed tumbler. He turns to Kat.

  “Dear girl,” he says. “Do you think Google will still exist in a hundred years?”

  She’s quiet a moment, then nods sharply. “Yes, I do.”

  “You know,” he says, “a rather famous member of the Unbroken Spine was fast friends with a young man who founded a company of similar ambition. And he said exactly the same thing.”

  “Which company?” I ask. “Microsoft? Apple?” What if Steve Jobs dabbled in the fellowship? Maybe that’s why Gerritszoon comes preinstalled on every Mac …

  “No, no,” Penumbra says, shaking his head. “It was Standard Oil.” He grins; he’s caught us. He swirls his glass and says, “You have found your way into a story that has been unfolding for a very long time. Some of my brothers and sisters would say that your company, dear girl, is no different from all the others that have come before. Some of them would say no one outside the Unbroken Spine has ever had anything to offer us.”

  “Some of them, like Corvina,” I say flatly.

  “Yes, Corvina.” Penumbra nods. “Others, too.” He looks at the three of us together—Kat and Neel and me—and he says quietly, “But I am glad to have you as my allies. I do not know if you understand how historic this work is going to be. The techniques we have developed over centuries, aided by new tools … I believe we will succeed. I believe it in my bones.”

  Together, with Neel reading the instructions from my laptop and Penumbra handing me the pieces, we assemble the GrumbleGear 3000 for the first time. The components are cut from corrugated cardboard and they make a satisfying thwack when you thump them with your finger. Slotted together, they achieve a preternatural structural integrity. There’s an angled bed for a book and two long arms above it, each with a cunning socket for a camera—one for each page in a two-page spread. The cameras connect to my laptop, which is now running a program called GrumbleScan. The program, in turn, hands the images off to a hard drive, a matte-black terabyte tucked into a slender box of Bicycle playing cards. The box is a nice roguish touch from Neel.

  “Who designed this thing again?” he asks, scrolling through the instructions.

  “A guy named Grumble. He’s a genius.”

  “I should hire him,” Neel says. “Good programmer. Great sense of spatial relationships.”

  I open my Guide to Central Park Birds and set it up on the scanner. Grumble’s design isn’t much like Google’s—it has no spidery page-turning appendages, so you have to do that part yourself, and trigger the cameras, too—but it works. Flip, flash, snap. The migratory pattern of the American robin spools onto the disguised hard drive. Then I break the scanner back down into flat pieces with Kat keeping time. It takes forty-one seconds.

  With this contraption in tow, I’ll return to the Reading Room just a little past midnight tonight. I’ll have the place entirely to myself. With maximum speed and stealth, I will scan not one but two books, then flee the scene. Deckle has warned me to be done and departed, leaving no trace, by first light.

  THE BLACK HOLE

  IT’S JUST PAST MIDNIGHT. I walk quickly up Fifth Avenue, eyeing the dark mass of Central Park across the street. The trees are black silhouettes against a blotchy gray-purple sky. Yellow taxis are the only cars on the street, despondently circling for fares. One of them flashes its brights at me; I shake my head no.

  Deckle’s key goes click in the dark doorway of the Festina Lente Company, and just like that, I am inside.

  There’s a dot of light blinking red in the darkness, and thanks to Deckle’s intel, I know it’s a silent alarm that signals a very private security firm. My heart beats faster. Now I have thirty-one seconds to enter the code, which I do: 1-5-1-5. That’s the year Aldus Manutius died—or, if you subscribe to the stories of the Unbroken Spine: the year he didn’t.

  The front room is dark. I pull a headlamp out of my bag and wind the strap around my forehead. It was Kat who suggested a headlamp instead of a flashlight. “So you can focus on flipping the pages,” she said. The light flashes across the FLC on the wall, casting sharp shadows behind the capitals. I briefly consider some extracurricular espionage here—could I delete their database of e-book pirates?—but decide my real mission is risky enough.

  I stalk through the silent expanse of the outer office, sweeping the headlamp through cubicles on either side. The refrigerator rattles and hums; the multipurpose printer blinks forlornly; screen savers twist across monitors, casting weak blue light into the room. Otherwise, nothing moves or makes a sound.

  In Deckle’s office, I skip the costume change and keep my phone securely in my pocket. I give the shelves a gentle push, and I’m surprised at how easily they split and swivel back, s
ilent and weightless. This secret way is well oiled indeed.

  Beyond, it is all blackness.

  Suddenly this seems like a very different undertaking. Up until this moment, I’d still been imagining the Reading Room as it was yesterday afternoon: bright, bustling, and if not welcoming then at least well lit. Now I am basically looking into a black hole. This is a cosmic entity from which no matter or energy have ever escaped, and I am about to step straight into it.

  I tilt my headlamp down. This is going to take a while.

  I should have asked Deckle about the light switch. Why didn’t I ask Deckle about the light switch?

  My footfalls make long echoes. I’ve stepped through the passageway into the Reading Room, and it is pure pitch-black, the blackest void I have ever encountered. It’s also freezing.

  I take a step forward and decide to keep my head down, not up, because when I look down, the headlamp’s light reflects on smooth rock, and when I look up, it disappears into nothing.

  I want to scan these books and get out of this place. First I need to find one of the tables. There are dozens. This isn’t going to be a problem.

  I start by tracing the chamber’s perimeter, trailing my fingers along the shelves, feeling the bumps of the spines as I go. My other arm is outstretched and sensing, like a mouse’s whisker.

  I hope there aren’t mice in here.

  There. My headlamp catches a table edge, and then I see a heavy black chain and the book that it binds. The cover bears tall silver letters that reflect brightly back at me: MANVTIVS.

  From my messenger bag, I produce first my laptop and then the dismantled skeleton of the GrumbleGear. The assembly process is more difficult in the darkness, and I fumble with the slots and tabs for too long, afraid I’ll break the cardboard. The cameras come out of my bag next, and I give one of them a test snap. The flash explodes and lights up the whole chamber for a bright microsecond and immediately I regret it, because my vision is ruined, swimming with wide purple spots. I blink and wait and wonder about the mice and/or bats and/or minotaur.