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—