Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore (15 page)

“You don’t have enough memory.”

“Oh, come on—”

“Nope. You could never hold it all in memory. No computer’s big enough. Not even your what’s-it-called—”

“The Big Box.”

“That’s the one. It’s not big enough. This box”—Neel stretches out his hands, encompasses the sidewalk, the park, the streets beyond—“is bigger.”

The snaking crowd surges forward.

*   *   *

Neel gets bored and walks down the street to the Met, where he intends to snap reference photos of marble breasts from antiquity. Kat composes short urgent messages to Googlers with her thumbs, chasing down rumors of the new PM.

At 11:03 a.m., a stooped figure in a long coat totters up the street. My spider-sense tingles again; I believe I can now detect a certain strain of weirdness with lab-grade precision. The stooped totterer has a face like an old barn owl, with a furry black Cossack’s hat pulled down over wiry eyebrows that stick out into space. Sure enough: he ducks into the dark doorway.

At 12:17 p.m., it’s finally beginning to rain. We’re shielded beneath tall trees, but Fifth Avenue is quickly darkening.

At 12:29 p.m., a taxi stops in front of the Unbroken Spine, and out steps a tall man in a peacoat, pulling it close around his neck as he leans down to pay the driver. It’s Penumbra, and it’s surreal to see him here, framed by dark trees and pale stone. I’ve never even imagined him anywhere other than the inside of his bookstore. They’re a package deal; you can’t have one without the other. But here he is, standing in the middle of the street in Manhattan, fiddling with his wallet.

I hop up and sprint across Fifth Avenue, dodging slow-moving cars. The taxi pulls away like a yellow curtain, and, ta-da! There I am. First Penumbra’s face is blank, then his eyes narrow, then he smiles, and then he tips his head back and barks a loud laugh. He keeps laughing, so then I start laughing, too. We stand there for a moment, just laughing at each other. I’m also panting a bit.

“My boy!” Penumbra says. “You might just be the strangest clerk this fellowship has seen in five hundred years. Come, come.” He ushers me up onto the sidewalk, still laughing. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to stop you,” I say. It sounds strangely serious. “You don’t have to—” I’m huffing and puffing. “You don’t have to go in there. You don’t have to get your book burned. Or whatever.”

“Who told you about burning?” Penumbra says quietly, raising an eyebrow.

“Well,” I say, “Tyndall heard it from Imbert.” Pause. “Who heard it from, uh, Monsef.”

“They are wrong,” Penumbra says sharply. “I have not come here to talk of punishment.” He spits it out:
punishment
, as if it’s something far beneath him. “No. I have come to make my case.”

“Your case?”

“Computers, my boy,” he says. “They hold the key for us. I have suspected it for some time, but never had proof that they could be a boon to our work. You have provided it! If computers can help you solve the Founder’s Puzzle, they can do much more for this fellowship.” He makes a thin fist and shakes it: “I have come prepared to tell the First Reader that we must make use of them. We must!”

Penumbra’s voice has the timbre of an entrepreneur pitching his startup.

“You mean Corvina,” I say. “The First Reader is Corvina.”

Penumbra nods. “You cannot follow me here”—he waves his hand back toward the dark doorway—“but I would speak to you after I am finished. We will have to consider what equipment to purchase … which companies to work with. I will need your help, my boy.” He lifts his gaze to look over my shoulder. “And you are not alone, are you?”

I look back across Fifth Avenue, where Kat and Neel are standing, watching us and waiting. Kat waves.

“She works at Google,” I say. “She helped.”

“Good,” Penumbra says, nodding. “That is very good. But tell me: How did you find this place?”

I grin when I tell him: “Computers.”

He shakes his head. Then he tucks a hand into his peacoat and pulls out a skinny black Kindle, still activated, showing sharp words against a pale background.

“You got one,” I say, smiling.

“Oh, more than one, my boy,” Penumbra says, and produces another e-reader—it’s a Nook. Then another one, a Sony. Another one, marked
KOBO
. Really? Who has a Kobo? And did Penumbra just cross the country carrying four e-readers?

“I had a bit of catching up to do,” he explains, balancing them in a stack. “But you know, this one”—he produces a final device, this one super-slim and clad in blue—“was my favorite of the bunch.”

There’s no logo. “What
is
that?”

“This?” He flips the mystery e-reader around in his fingers. “My student Greg—you do not know him, not yet. He lent it to me for the journey.” His voice grows conspiratorial. “He said it was a prototype.”

The anonymous e-reader is amazing: thin and light, with a skin that’s not plastic but cloth, like a hardcover book. How did Penumbra get his hands on a prototype? Who does my boss know in Silicon Valley?

“It is a remarkable device,” he says, balancing it with the rest and patting the stack. “This is all quite remarkable.” He pauses, then looks up at me. “Thank you, my boy. It is because of you that I am here.”

That makes me smile. Go get ’em, Mr. Penumbra. “Where do we meet you?”

“The Dolphin and Anchor,” he says. “Bring your friends. You can find it on your own—am I right? Use your computers.” He winks, then turns and pushes through the dark doorway into the secret library of the Unbroken Spine.

*   *   *

Kat’s phone guides us to our destination. The sky is opening up, so we run most of the way.

When we find it, the Dolphin and Anchor is the perfect refuge, all dark heavy wood and low brassy light. We sit at a round table next to a window flecked with raindrops. Our waiter arrives, and he, too, is perfect: tall and barrel-chested, with a thick red beard and a disposition that warms us all up. We order mugs of beer; he brings those along with a plate of bread and cheese. “Strength in the storm,” he says with a wink.

“What if Mr. P doesn’t show?” Neel says.

“He’ll show,” I say. “This isn’t what I expected. He’s got a plan. I mean—he brought e-readers.”

Kat smiles at that but she doesn’t look up. She’s glued to her phone again. She’s like a candidate on election day.

There’s a stack of books on the table and a metal cup with pointy pencils that smell fresh and sharp. In the stack, there are copies of
Moby-Dick
,
Ulysses
,
The Invisible Man
—this is a bar for bibliophiles.

There’s a pale beer stain on the back cover of
The Invisible Man
, and inside, the margins are mobbed with pencil marks. It’s so dense you can barely see the paper behind it—there are dozens of different people’s marginalia jostling for space here. I flip through the book; it’s jam-packed. Some of the notes are about the text, but more are directed at one another. The margins tend to devolve into arguments, but there are other interactions, too. Some are inscrutable: just numbers back and forth. There’s encrypted graffiti:

6HV8SQ was here

I nurse my beer and nibble the cheese and try to follow the conversations through the pages.

Then Kat gives a quiet sigh. I look up across the table, and see her face crumpled into a deep frown. She sets her phone down on the table and covers it with one of the Dolphin and Anchor’s thick blue napkins.

“What is it?”

“They emailed out the new PM.” She shakes her head. “Not this time.” Then she forces a smile and reaches to pick a battered book from the stack. “It’s no big deal,” she says, flipping pages, making herself busy. “It’s like winning the lottery anyway. It was a long shot.”

I’m not an entrepreneur, not a business guy, but in that moment I want nothing more than to start a company and grow it to Google size, just so I can put Kat Potente in charge.

*   *   *

There’s a gust of wet wind. I look up from
The Invisible Man
to see Penumbra framed in the doorway, the tufts of hair over his ears matted down, turned a shade darker by the rain. His teeth are gritted.

Neel jumps up to usher him toward the table. Kat takes his coat. Penumbra is shivering and saying quietly, “Thank you, dear girl, thank you.” He walks stiffly to the table, gripping chair backs for support.

“Mr. P, good to meet you,” Neel says, extending a hand. “Love your store.” Penumbra gives it a solid shake. Kat waves hello.

“So these are your friends,” Penumbra says. “It is good to meet you, both of you.” He sits and exhales sharply. “I have not sat across from such young faces in this place since—well, since my own face was so young.”

I’m desperate to know what happened in the library.

“Where to begin?” he says. He wipes the dome of his head with one of the napkins. He’s frowning, agitated. “I told Corvina what has happened. I told him about the logbook, about your ingenuity.”

He’s calling it ingenuity; that’s a good sign. Our red-bearded waiter arrives bearing another mug of beer and sets it down in front of Penumbra, who waves a hand and says, “Charge this to the Festina Lente Company, Timothy. All of it.”

He’s in his element. He speaks again: “Corvina’s conservatism has deepened, though I barely thought such a thing was possible. He has done so much damage. I had no idea.” He shakes his head. “Corvina says California has infected me.” He spits it out:
infected
. “Ridiculous. I told him what you did, my boy—I told him what was possible. But he will not budge.”

Penumbra lifts his beer to his lips and takes a long sip. Then he looks from Kat to Neel to me, and he speaks again, slowly:

“My friends, I have a proposal for you. But you will need to understand something of this fellowship first. You have followed me to its home, but you do not know anything of its purpose—or have your computers told you that, too?”

Well, I know it involves libraries and novices and people getting bound and books getting burned, but none of it makes any sense. Kat and Neel only know what they’ve seen on my laptop screen: a sequence of lights making their way through the shelves of a strange bookstore. When you search for “unbroken spine,” Google replies:
Did you mean: unicorn sprinkle?
So the correct answer is: “No. Nothing.”

“Then we will do two things,” Penumbra says, nodding. “First, I will tell you just a little of our history. Then, to understand, you must see the Reading Room. There, my proposal will become clear, and I dearly hope you will accept it.”

Of course we’ll accept it. That’s what you do on a quest. You listen to the old wizard’s problem and then you promise to help him.

Penumbra steeples his fingers. “Do you know the name Aldus Manutius?”

Kat and Neel shake their heads, but I nod yes. Maybe art school was good for something after all: “Manutius was one of the first publishers,” I say, “right after Gutenberg. His books are still famous. They’re beautiful.” I’ve seen slides.

“Yes.” Penumbra nods. “It was the end of the fifteenth century. Aldus Manutius gathered scribes and scholars at his printing house in Venice, and there he manufactured the first editions of the classics. Sophocles, Aristotle, and Plato. Virgil, Horace, and Ovid.”

I chime in, “Yeah, he printed them using a brand-new typeface, made by a designer named Griffo Gerritszoon. It was awesome. Nobody had ever seen anything like it, and it’s still basically the most famous typeface ever. Every Mac comes preinstalled with Gerritszoon.” But not Gerritszoon Display. That, you have to steal.

Penumbra nods. “This much is well known to historians and, it appears”—he raises an eyebrow—“to bookstore clerks. It might also be of interest to know that Griffo Gerritszoon’s work is the wellspring of our fellowship’s wealth. Even today, when publishers buy that typeface, they buy it from us.” He goes sotto voce: “And we do not sell it cheap.”

I feel the sharp snap of connection: FLC Type Foundry is the Festina Lente Company. Penumbra’s cult runs on egregious licensing fees.

“But here is the crux of it,” he says. “Aldus Manutius was more than a publisher. He was a philosopher and a teacher. He was the first of us. He was the founder of the Unbroken Spine.”

Okay, they definitely did not teach that in my typography course.

“Manutius believed there were deep truths hidden in the writing of the ancients—among them, the answer to our greatest question.”

There’s a pregnant pause. I clear my throat. “What’s … our greatest question?”

Kat breathes: “How do you live forever?”

Penumbra turns and levels his gaze on her. His eyes are big and bright and he nods yes. “When Aldus Manutius died,” he says quietly, “his friends and students filled his tomb with books—copies of everything he had ever printed.”

The wind outside blows hard against the door and makes it rattle.

“They did this because the tomb was empty. When Aldus Manutius died, no body remained.”

So Penumbra’s cult has a messiah.

“He left behind a book he called
CODEX VITAE
—book of life. The book was encrypted, and Manutius gave the key to only one person: his great friend and partner, Griffo Gerritszoon.”

Amendment: his cult has a messiah and a first disciple. But at least the disciple is a designer. That’s cool. And
codex vitae
 … I’ve heard that before. But Rosemary Lapin said the books on the Waybacklist were
codex vitae
. I’m confused—

“We, the students of Manutius, have worked for centuries to unlock his
codex vitae
. We believe it contains all the secrets he discovered in his study of the ancients—first among them, the secret to eternal life.”

Rain spatters on the window. Penumbra takes a deep breath.

“We believe that when this secret is finally unlocked, every member of the Unbroken Spine who ever lived … will live again.”

A messiah, a first disciple, and a rapture. Check, check, and double-check. Penumbra is, right now, teetering right on the boundary between charmingly weird old guy and disturbingly weird old guy. Two things tip the scales toward charm: First, his wry smile, which is not the smile of the disturbed, and micromuscles don’t lie. Second, the look in Kat’s eyes. She’s enthralled. I guess people believe weirder things than this, right? Presidents and popes believe weirder things than this.