Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore (19 page)

I lean down, kiss her above the ear, and whisper: “Would you really freeze your head?”

“I would absolutely, positively freeze my head.” She looks up at me and her face is serious. “I’d freeze yours, too. And in a thousand years, you’d thank me.”

POP-UP

W
HEN I WAKE UP
in the morning, Kat is gone, already headed for Google’s New York office. On my laptop, there’s an email waiting—a message relayed from Grumble’s forum. The timestamp says 3:05 a.m., and it’s from—holy shit. It’s from Grumble himself. The message says simply:

bigger than potter huh? tell me what you need.

My pulse pounds in my ears. This is awesome.

Grumble lives in Berlin, but he seems to spend most of his time traveling, doing special scanning ops in London or Paris or Cairo. Maybe sometimes New York. Nobody knows his real name; nobody knows what he looks like. He might be a she, or even a collective. In my imagination, though, Grumble is a he, not much older than me. In my imagination, he works solo—shuffling into the British Library in a puffy gray parka, wearing the cardboard components of his book scanner like a bulletproof vest under his clothes—but he has allies everywhere.

Maybe we’ll meet up. Maybe we’ll become friends. Maybe I’ll become his hacker apprentice. But I have to play it cool, or he’ll probably think I’m from the FBI or, worse, the Festina Lente Company. So I write:

Hey Grumble! Thanks for replying, man. Big fan of your

Okay, no. I lean on the delete key and start again:

Hey. We can get the cameras and the cardboard, but we can’t find a laser. Can you help? P.S. Okay admittedly J. K. Rowling is a pretty big deal … but so was Aldus Manutius.

I hit send, smack my MacBook shut, and retreat into the bathroom. I think about hacker heroes and frozen heads while I scrub shampoo into my hair under the hot industrial blast of the Northbridge’s shower, obviously designed for robots, not for men.

*   *   *

Neel is waiting for me in the lobby, finishing a bowl of plain oatmeal and slurping a shake made from blended kale.

“Hey,” he says, “does your room have a biometric lock?”

“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 rebranding 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 ConEdison 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 selling 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.”