“Ah, but it must go into the logbook, my boy. Here, write it as you tell it. Tell me.”
I tell him, and I write it down as I go. It makes me feel better, as if the weirdness is flowing out of my blood and onto the page, through the dark point of the pen:
“The store was visited by a presumptuous jackass—”
“Er — perhaps it would be wisest not to write that,” Penumbra says lightly. “Say perhaps that he had the aspect of … an urgent courier.”
Okay, then: “The store was visited by an urgent courier named Corvina, who—”
“No, no,” Penumbra interrupts. He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Stop. Before you write, I will explain. He was extremely pale, weasel-eyed, forty-one years old, with a thick build and an ill-advised beard, wearing a suit of smooth wool, single-breasted, with functioning buttons at the cuffs, and black leather shoes that came to sharp points — correct?”
Exactly. I didn’t catch the shoes, but Penumbra has got this one nailed.
“Yes, of course. His name is Eric, and his gift is a treasure.” He swirls his scotch. “Even if he is too enthusiastic in the playing of his part. He gets that from Corvina.”
“So who’s Corvina?” I feel funny saying it, but: “He sends his regards.”
“Of course he does,” Penumbra says, rolling his eyes. “Eric admires him. Many of the young ones do.” He’s avoiding the question. He’s quiet for a moment, and then he lifts his eyes to meet mine. “This is more than a bookstore, as you have no doubt surmised. It is also a kind of library, one of many around the world. There is another in London, another in Paris — a dozen, altogether. No two are alike, but their function is the same, and Corvina oversees them all.”
“So he’s your boss.”
Penumbra’s face darkens at that. “I prefer to think of him as our patron,” he says, pausing a little on each word. The our is not lost on me, and it makes me smile. “But I suspect Corvina would agree wholeheartedly with your characterization.”
I explain what Eric said about the books on the short shelves — about Penumbra’s disobedience.
“Yes, yes,” he says with a sigh. “I have been through this before. It is foolishness. The genius of the libraries is that they are all different. Koster in Berlin with his music, Griboyedov in Saint Petersburg with his great samovar. And here in San Francisco, the most striking difference of all.”
“What’s that?”
“Why, we have books that people might actually want to read!” Penumbra guffaws at this, and shows a toothy grin. I laugh, too.
“So it’s no big deal?”
Penumbra shrugs. “That depends,” he says. “It depends how seriously one takes a rigid old taskmaster who believes that everything must be exactly the same everywhere and always.” He pauses. “As it happens, I do not take him very seriously at all.”
“Does he ever visit?”
“Never,” Penumbra says sharply, shaking his head. “He has not been to San Francisco in many years … more than a decade. No, he is busy with his other duties. And thank goodness for that.”
Penumbra lifts his hands and waves them at me, shooing me away from the desk. “Go home now. You have witnessed something rare, and more meaningful than you know. Be grateful for it. And drink your scotch, my boy! Drink!”
I swing my bag up onto my shoulder and empty my cup in two stiff gulps.
“That,” Penumbra says, “is a toast to Evelyn Erdos.” He holds the sparkling gray book aloft, and speaks as though addressing her: “Welcome, my friend, and well done. Well done!”
THE PROTOTYPE
THE NEXT NIGHT, I enter as usual and wave hello to Oliver Grone. I want to ask him about Eric, but I don’t quite have the language for it. Oliver and I have never talked directly about the weirdness of the store. So I start like this:
“Oliver, I have a question. You know how there are normal customers?”
“Not many.”
“Right. And there are members who borrow books.”
“Like Maurice Tyndall.”
“Right.” I didn’t know his name was Maurice. “Have you ever seen somebody deliver a new book?”
He pauses and thinks. Then he says simply: “Nope.”
As soon as he leaves I am a mess of new theories. Maybe Oliver’s in on it, too. Maybe he’s a spy for Corvina. The quiet watcher. Perfect. Or maybe he’s part of some deeper conspiracy. Maybe I’ve only scratched the surface. I know there are more bookstores — libraries? — like this, but I still don’t know what “like this” means. I don’t know what the Waybacklist is for.
I flip through the logbook from front to back, looking for something, anything. A message from the past, maybe: Beware, good clerk, the wrath of Corvina. But no. My predecessors played it just as straight as I have.
The words they wrote are plain and factual, just descriptions of the members as they come and go. Some of them I recognize: Tyndall, Lapin, and the rest. Others are mysteries to me — members who visit only during the day, or members who stopped visiting long ago. Judging by the dates sprinkled through the pages, the book covers a little over five years. It’s only half-full. Am I going to fill it for another five? Am I going to write dutifully for years with no idea what I’m writing about?
My brain is going to melt into a puddle if I keep this up all night. I need a distraction — a big, challenging distraction. So I lift my laptop’s lid and resume work on the 3-D bookstore.
Every few minutes I glance up at the front windows, out into the street beyond. I’m watching for shadows, the flash of a gray suit or the glint of a dark eye. But there’s nothing. The work smooths away the strangeness, and finally I’m in the zone.
If a 3-D model of this store is actually going to be useful, it probably needs to show you not only where the books are located but also which are currently loaned out, and to whom. So I’ve somewhat sketchily transcribed my last few weeks of logbook entries and taught my model to tell time.
Now the books glow like lamps in the blocky 3-D shelves, and they’re color-coded, so the books borrowed by Tyndall light up blue, Lapin’s green, Fedorov’s yellow, and so on. That’s pretty cool. But my new feature also introduced a bug, and now the shelves are all blinking out of existence when I rotate the store too far around. I’m sitting hunched over the code, trying in vain to figure it out, when the bell tinkles brightly.
I make an involuntary chirp of surprise. Is it Eric, back to yell at me again? Or is it Corvina, the CEO himself, come at last to visit his wrath upon—
It’s a girl. She’s leaning halfway into the store, and she’s looking at me, and she’s saying, “Are you open?”
Why, yes, girl with chestnut hair cropped to your chin and a red T-shirt with the word BAM! printed in mustard yellow — yes, as a matter of fact, we are.
“Absolutely,” I say. “You can come in. We’re always open.”
“I was just waiting for the bus and my phone buzzed — I think I have a coupon?”
She walks straight up to the front desk, pushes her phone out toward me, and there, on the little screen, is my Google ad. The hyper-targeted local campaign — I’d forgotten about it, but it’s still running, and it found someone. The digital coupon I designed is right there, peeking out of her scratched-up smartphone. Her nails are shiny.
“Yes!” I say. “That’s a great coupon. The best!” I’m talking too loud. She’s going to turn around and leave. Google’s astonishing advertising algorithms have delivered to me a supercute girl, and I have no idea what to do with her. She swivels her head to take in the store. She looks dubious.