Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

  I have the book wrapped up, and Lapin has her card out—6YTP5T—but then she glides over to one of the short shelves up front, the ones with the normal books. Oh, no.

  Long seconds pass. She works her way across the shelf marked ROMANCE, the peacock feather bobbing when she tilts her head to read the spines.

  “Oh, I think I’ll get this, too,” she says finally, returning with a bright red Danielle Steel hardcover. Then it takes her approximately three days to find her checkbook.

  “So,” she wavers, “that’s thirteen, let’s see, thirteen dollars and how many cents?”

  “Thirty-seven.”

  “Thirteen … dollars …” She writes with agonizing slowness, but I have to admit, her script is beautiful. It’s dark and looping, almost calligraphic. She presses the check flat and signs it slowly: Rosemary Lapin.

  She hands it to me, finished, and at the very bottom there’s a line of tiny type that informs me she’s been a member of the Telegraph Hill Credit Union since—oh, wow—since 1951.

  Jeez. Why am I punishing this old woman for my own weird ways? Something softens inside of me. My mask melts and I give her a smile—a real one.

  “Have a good night, Ms. Lapin,” I say. “Come again soon.”

  “Oh, I’m working as fast as I can,” she says, and smiles a sweet smile of her own that makes her cheeks puff out like pale plums. “Festina lente.” She slips her Waybacklist treasure and her guilty pleasure into her purse together. They poke out at the top: matte brown and shiny red. The door tinkles, and she and her peacock feather are gone.

  The customers say that sometimes. They say: Festina lente.

  I lunge back down toward the screen. When I unmute the speaker, Kat and Trevor are still chatting happily. He’s telling another story, this one about an expedition to cheer up some depressed penguins, and it is apparently hilarious. Kat is laughing. There is so much bubbly laughter coming out of my laptop speakers. Trevor is apparently the cleverest, most interesting man in the whole city of San Francisco. Neither of them is on camera, so I assume she is touching his arm.

  “Hey, guys,” I say. “Hey, guys.”

  I realize they’ve muted me, too.

  All at once I feel stupid, and I am sure this whole thing has been a terrible idea. The point of a party at Kat’s apartment is that I tell a funny story and Kat touches my arm. This exercise in telepresence, on the other hand, does not have a point, and everyone is probably laughing at me and making faces at the laptop just off-camera. My face is burning. Can they tell? Am I turning a strange shade of red on the screen?

  I stand and step away from the camera’s gaze. Exhaustion floods into my brain. I’ve been performing hard for the past two hours, I realize—a grinning puppet in an aluminum proscenium. What a mistake.

  I put my palms on the bookstore’s broad front windows and look out through the cage of tall golden type. It’s Gerritszoon, all right, and it’s a scrap of familiar grace in this lonely place. The curve of the P is beautiful. My breath fogs the glass. Be normal, I tell myself. Just go back and be normal.

  “Hello?” a voice pipes out of my laptop. Kat.

  I slide back into place behind the desk. “Hi.”

  Trevor is gone. Kat is alone. In fact, she’s somewhere completely different now.

  “This is my room,” she says softly. “Like it?”

  It’s spartan, not much more than a bed and a desk and a heavy black trunk. It looks like a cabin on an ocean liner. No: a pod on a spaceship. In the corner of the room, there’s a white plastic laundry basket, and scattered around it—near-misses—I see a dozen identical red T-shirts.

  “That was my theory,” I say.

  “Yeah,” Kat says, “I decided I didn’t want to waste brain cycles”—she yawns—”figuring out what to wear every morning.”

  The laptop rocks and there’s a blur and then we are on her bed, and her head is propped up on her hand, and I can see the curve of her chest. My heart is suddenly beating very fast, as if I’m there with her, stretched out and expectant—as if I am not sitting here alone in the dim light of this bookstore, still wearing paisley pants.

  “This was pretty fun,” she says quietly, “but I wish you could have come for real.”

  She stretches and presses her eyes shut like a cat. I can’t think of a single thing to say, so I just put my chin on my palm and look into the camera.

  “It would be nice if you were here,” she murmurs. Then she falls asleep. I am alone in the bookstore, looking across the city at her sleeping form, lit only by the gray light of her laptop. In time it, too, falls asleep, and the screen goes dark.

  Alone in the store after the party, I do my homework. I’ve made my selection: I gently pull logbook VII (old but not too old) off the shelf and get Mat his reference images: wide shots and close-ups, snapped with my phone from a dozen angles, all showing the same wide, flat rectangle of battered brown. I snap detail shots of the bookmark, the binding, the pale gray pages, and the deeply embossed NARRATIO on the cover above the store’s symbol, and when Penumbra arrives in the morning, my phone is back in my pocket and the images are on their way to Mat’s inbox. There’s a little whoosh as each of them goes.

  I’ve left the current logbook up on the desk. I’ll do that from now on. I mean, why put it on the shelf all the time? Sounds like a recipe for back strain if you ask me. With luck, this choice will catch on and cast a new shadow of normalcy in which I can crouch and hide. That’s what spies do, right? They walk to the bakery and buy a loaf of bread every day—perfectly normal—until one day they buy a loaf of uranium instead.

  MAKE AND MODEL

  IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOW, I spend more time with Kat. I see her apartment unmediated by screens. We play video games. We make out.

  One night we try to cook dinner on her industrial stove, but halfway through we judge the steaming sludge of kale a failure, so instead she pulls a neat plastic tub out of the refrigerator, full of spicy couscous salad. Kat can’t find any spoons, so she serves it up with an ice-cream scoop.

  “Did you make this?” I ask, because I don’t think she did. It’s perfect.

  She shakes her head. “It’s from work. I bring food home most days. It’s free.”

  Kat spends most of her time at Google. Most of her friends work at Google. Most of her conversations revolve around Google. Now I am learning that most of her calories come from Google. I think it’s impressive: she’s smart and enthusiastic about her work. But it’s also intimidating, because my workplace is not a gleaming crystal castle full of smiling savants. (That’s how I imagine Google. Also, lots of funny hats.)

  There’s a real limit to the relationship I can build with Kat in her non-Google hours, simply because there aren’t that many of them, and I think I want more than that. I want to earn entrance into Kat’s world. I want to see the princess in her castle.

  My ticket to Google is logbook VII.

  Over the course of the next three weeks, Mat and I painstakingly construct the logbook’s body double. The surface is Mat’s specialty. He starts with a sheet of new leather and stains it with coffee. Then he brings a pair of vintage golf cleats down from his attic aerie; I squeeze my feet into them and march back and forth across the leather for two hours.

  The logbook’s guts require more research. In the living room late at night, Mat works on his miniature city while I sit on the couch with my laptop, googling widely, reading detailed book-making tutorials out loud. We learn about binding. We track down vellum wholesalers. We find dusky ivory cloth and thick black thread. We buy a book block on eBay.

  “You’re good at this, Jannon,” Mat tells me when we set the blank pages into glue.

  “What, book-making?” (We do this on the kitchen table.)

  “No, learning things on the fly,” he says. “It’s what we do at work. Not like the computer guys, you know? They just do the same thing every time. It’s always just pixels. For us, every project is different. New tools, new materials. Everything?
??s always new.”

  “Like the jungle monster.”

  “Exactly. I had forty-eight hours to become a bonsai master.”

  Mat Mittelbrand hasn’t met Kat Potente, but I think they would get along: Kat, who believes so deeply in the human brain’s potential, and Mat, who can learn anything in a day. Thinking about that, I feel suddenly sympathetic to Kat’s point of view. If we could keep Mat going for a thousand years, he could probably build us a whole new world.

  The fake logbook’s crowning detail, and the toughest challenge, is the embossing on the cover. The original has the word NARRATIO pressed deep into the leather, and after zoomed-in scrutiny of the reference images, I discover that this text, too, is set in good old Gerritszoon. That’s bad news.

  “Why?” Mat asks. “I think I have that font on my computer.”

  “You have Gerritszoon,” I cluck, “suitable for emails, book reports, and résumés. This”—I point to the blown-up NARRATIO on my laptop screen—”is Gerritszoon Display, suitable for billboards, magazine spreads, and, apparently, occult book covers. See, it has pointier serifs.”

  Mat nods gravely. “The serifs are pointy indeed.”

  Back at NewBagel, when I designed menus and posters and (may I remind you) an award-winning logo, I learned all about the digital font marketplace. Nowhere else is the bucks-to-bytes ratio so severe. Here’s what I mean: An e-book costs about ten dollars, right? And it’s usually about a megabyte’s worth of text. (For the record, you download more data than that every time you look at Facebook.) With an e-book, you can see what you paid for: the words, the paragraphs, the possibly boring expositions of digital marketplaces. Well, it turns out a digital font is also about a megabyte, but a digital font costs not tens of dollars but hundreds, sometimes thousands, and it’s abstract, basically invisible—a thin envelope of math describing tiny letterforms. The whole arrangement offends most people’s consumer instincts.

  So of course people try to pirate fonts. I am not one of those people. I took a typography course in school and for our final project, everyone had to design their own typeface. I had grand aspirations for mine—it was called Telemach—but there were just too many letters to draw. I couldn’t finish it in time. It ended up capitals-only, suitable for shouty posters and stone tablets. So trust me, I know how much sweat goes into those shapes. Typographers are designers; designers are my people; I am committed to supporting them. But now FontShop.com tells me that Gerritszoon Display, distributed by FLC Type Foundry of New York City, costs $3,989.

  So of course I will try to pirate this font.

  A connection zigzags through my brain. I close the tab for FontShop and go instead to Grumble’s library. It’s not only pirated e-books here. There are fonts, too—illegal letters of every shape and size. I page through the listings: Metro and Gotham and Soho, all free for the taking. Myriad and Minion and Mrs Eaves. And there, too, is Gerritszoon Display.

  I feel a pang of remorse as I download it, but really just a tiny pang. FLC Type Foundry is probably somehow a subsidiary of Time Warner. Gerritszoon is an old font, its eponymous creator long dead. What does he care how his typeface is used, and by whom?

  Mat sets the word above a carefully traced outline of the bookstore’s symbol—two hands, open like a book—and with that, we have our design. The next day at ILM, he carves the whole thing out of scrap metal using a plasma cutter—in Mat’s world, a plasma cutter is as customary as a pair of scissors—and finally we press it into the false-weathered leather with a fat C-clamp. It sits silently embossing on the kitchen table for three days and three nights, and when Mat releases the clamp, the cover is perfect.

  So finally, it is time. Night falls. I take Oliver Grone’s place at the front desk and begin my shift. Tonight I will claim my ticket to adventure in Kat’s world. Tonight I will make the switch.

  But it turns out I would make a terrible spy—I can’t seem to calm myself down. I’ve tried everything: reading long works of investigative journalism; playing the computer version of Rockets & Warlocks; pacing the Waybacklist. I can’t stay focused on anything for more than three minutes.

  Now I’ve resigned myself to sitting at the front desk, but I can’t stop squirming. If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages.

  Finally, it’s quarter to six. The thinnest tendrils of dawn are creeping in from the east. People in New York are softly starting to tweet. I’m completely exhausted because I’ve spent the whole night vibrating.

  The real logbook VII is stuffed into my messenger bag but way too big for it, so it bulges out and looks, to my eye, like the most ludicrously incriminating thing in the world. It’s like when one of those huge African snakes swallows an animal whole and you can see it wiggling around in there, all the way down.

  The fake logbook is standing with its stepsiblings. When I slid it into place, I realized it left a telltale streak in the dust on the shelf’s edge. First I panicked. Then I ventured deep into the Waybacklist, scooped dust off the shelves there, and sprinkled it in front of the fake logbook until the depth and grade of the dust matched perfectly.

  I have a dozen explanations (with branching subplots) if Penumbra spots the difference. But I have to admit: the fake logbook looks great. My touch-up dust is ILM-caliber. It looks real and I don’t think I’d give it a second glance and, whoa, the bell tinkles over the front door—

  “Good morning,” Penumbra says. “How was the night?”

  “Fine good great,” I say. Too fast. Slow down. Remember: the shadow of normalcy. Crouch there.

  “You know,” Penumbra says, peeling off his peacoat, “I have been thinking. We should retire this fellow”—he taps the Mac Plus on the head with two fingers, a gentle thwack thwack—”and acquire something more up-to-date. Nothing too expensive. Perhaps you can recommend a make and model?”

  Make and model. I’ve never heard anyone talk about computers that way. You can have a MacBook in any color you want, as long as it’s bare metal. “Yeah that’s great,” I say. “Sure I’ll do some research Mr. Penumbra maybe a refurbished iMac I think they’re just as good as the new ones.” I say it all in one breath, already heading for the door. I feel sick.

  “And,” he says gingerly, “perhaps you could use it to construct a website.”

  My heart is bursting.

  “The store should have one. It is past time.”

  It’s done, my heart has exploded, and a few other small organs may have ruptured, too, but I am committed to this course—I am committed to Kat Potente’s corpus:

  “Wow that’s awesome we should totally do that I love websites but I’ve really got to go Mr. Penumbra see you later.”

  He pauses, then smiles a lopsided smile. “Very well. Have a good day.”

  Twenty minutes later, I’m on the train to Mountain View, clutching my bulging bag to my chest. It’s strange—my transgression is so slight. Who cares about the whereabouts of an old logbook from an obscure used bookstore for sixteen measly hours? But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like I’m one of the two people in the world Penumbra is supposed to be able to count on, and it turns out I can’t be trusted.

  All of this, just to impress a girl. The train’s rumble and sway put me to sleep.

  THE SPIDER

  THE RAINBOW SIGN next to the train station that points the way to Google’s campus has faded a bit in the Silicon Valley sun. I follow the pale arrow down a curving sidewalk flanked by eucalyptus trees and bike racks. Around the bend, I see wide lawns and low buildings and, between the trees, flashes of branding: red, green, yellow, blue.

  The buzz about Google these days is that it’s like America itself: still the biggest game in town, but inevitably and irrevocably on the decline. Both are superpowers with unmatched resources, but both are faced with fast-growing rivals, and both will eventually be eclipsed. For America, that rival is China. For Google, it’s Facebook. (This is all from tech-g
ossip blogs, so take it with a grain of salt. They also say a startup called MonkeyMoney is going to be huge next year.) But here’s the difference: staring down the inevitable, America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever the hell they want.

  Kat meets me at a blue security checkpoint, requests and receives a visitor badge with my name and affiliation printed in red, and leads me into her domain. We cut through a broad parking lot, the blacktop baking in the sun. There are no cars here; instead, the lot is packed full of white shipping containers set up on short stilts.

  “These are pieces of the Big Box,” Kat says, pointing. A semi truck is arriving at the far end of the lot, roaring and hissing. Its carriage is painted bright red-green-blue, and it’s towing one of the white containers.

  “They’re like LEGO blocks,” she continues, “except each one has disk space, tons of it, and CPUs and everything else, and connections for water and power and internet. We build them in Vietnam, then ship them wherever. They all hook up automatically, no matter where they are. All together, they’re the Big Box.”

  “Which does …?”

  “Everything,” she says. “Everything at Google runs in the Big Box.” She points a brown arm toward a container with www stenciled across the side in tall green letters. “There’s a copy of the web in there.” YT: “Every video on YouTube.” MX: “All your email. Everybody’s email.”

  Penumbra’s shelves don’t seem so tall anymore.

  Wide walkways curve through the main campus. There’s a bike lane, and Googlers whiz by on carbon-fiber racers and fixed gears with battery packs. There’s a pair of graybeards on recumbents and a tall dude with blue dreadlocks pedaling a unicycle.

  “I reserved some time on the book scanner at twelve-thirty,” Kat says. “Lunch first?”