Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore (28 page)

How do curators not just stare at this terminal all day long?

First-graders are streaming into Cal Knit, yelping and shrieking. Two boys grab knitting needles out of the bucket by the front door and start dueling, making buzzing light-saber noises accompanied by sprays of saliva. Tabitha shepherds them to the activity stations and starts her spiel. There’s a poster on the wall behind her that says
KNITTING IS NEAT
.

Back to the Accession Table. On the other side of the terminal, there are graphs, obviously configured by Tabitha. They track accession activity in different areas of interest, areas such as
TEXTILES
and
CALIFORNIA
and
NO ENDOWMENT
.
TEXTILES
is a spiky little mountain range of activity;
CALIFORNIA
has a clear upward slope;
NO ENDOWMENT
is flatlined.

Okay. Where’s the search box?

Over by Tabitha, the yarn has come out. First-graders are digging through wide plastic containers, looking for their favorite colors. One of them falls in and shrieks, and her two friends start poking her with needles.

There is no search box.

I jab random keys until the word
DIRECTORY
lights up at the top of the screen. (It was F5 that did it.) Now a rich, detailed taxonomy unfurls before me. Someone somewhere has categorized everything everywhere:

METAL, WOOD, CERAMIC.

15TH CENTURY, 16TH CENTURY, 17TH CENTURY.

POLITICAL, RELIGIOUS, CEREMONIAL
.

But wait—what’s the difference between
RELIGIOUS
and
CEREMONIAL
? There’s a sinking feeling in my stomach. I start exploring
METAL
but there are only coins and bracelets and fishing hooks. No swords—I think those are filed under
WEAPONS
. Maybe
WAR
. Maybe
POINTY THINGS
.

Tabitha is leaning in close with one of the first-graders, helping him cross two knitting needles together to make his first loop. His brow is furrowed with utter concentration—I saw that look in the Reading Room—and then he gets it, the loop forms, and he breaks into a wide giggling grin.

Tabitha looks back my way. “Found it yet?”

I shake my head. No, I have not found it yet. It’s not in
15TH CENTURY
. Well, maybe it is in
15TH CENTURY
, but everything else is in
15TH CENTURY
, too—that’s the problem. I’m still stuck looking for a needle in a haystack. Probably an ancient Song Dynasty haystack that the Mongols burned along with everything else.

I slump forward with my face in my hands, staring into the blue terminal, which is showing me a picture of some lumpy green coins salvaged from an old Spanish galleon. Did I just waste a thousand of Neel’s dollars? What am I supposed to do with this thing? Why hasn’t Google indexed museums yet?

A first-grader with bright red hair runs up to the front desk, giggling and choking herself with a tangle of green yarn. Um—nice scarf? She grins and jumps up and down.

“Hi there,” I say. “Let me ask you a question.” She giggles and nods. “How would you find a needle in a haystack?”

The first-grader pauses, pensive, tugging on the green yarn around her neck. She’s really thinking this over. Tiny gears are turning; she’s twisting her fingers together, pondering. It’s cute. Finally, she looks up and says gravely, “I would ask the hays to find it.” Then she makes a quiet banshee whine and bounces away on one foot.

An ancient Song Dynasty gong thunders in my head. Yes, of course. She’s a genius! Giggling to myself, I pound the escape key until I’m free of the terminal’s awful taxonomy. Instead, I choose the command that says, simply,
ACCESSION
.

It’s so simple. Of course, of course. The first-grader is right. It’s easy to find a needle in a haystack!
Ask the hays to find it!

The accession form is long and complicated, but I race through it:

CREATOR: Griffo Gerritszoon

YEAR: 1500 (approx.)

DESCRIPTION: Metal type. Gerritszoon punches. Full font.

PROVENANCE: Lost ca. 1900. Recovered via anonymous gift.

I leave the rest of the fields empty and thwack the return key to submit this new artifact, entirely made-up, to the Accession Table. If I understand this right, it’s now scrolling across all the other terminals, just like this one, in every museum in the world. Curators are checking it out, cross-referencing it—thousands of them.

A minute ticks past. Another. A slouchy first-grader with a dark mop of hair slinks up to the desk, stands on tiptoe, and leans in conspiratorially. “Do you have any games?” he whispers, pointing to the terminal. I shake my head sadly. Sorry, kid, but maybe—

The Accession Table goes
whoop whoop
. It’s a high, rising sound, like a fire alarm:
whoop whoop
. The slouchy kid jumps, and the first-graders all turn my way. Tabitha does, too, with one of her big eyebrows arched up.

“Everything okay over there?”

I nod, too excited to speak. A message in fat red letters blinks angrily at the bottom of the screen:

ACCESSION DENIED

Yes!

ARTIFACT EXISTS

Yes yes yes!

PLEASE CONTACT: CONSOLIDATED UNIVERSAL LONG-TERM STORAGE LLC

The Accession Table rings—wait, it can ring? I peer around the side of the terminal and see a bright blue telephone handset clipped into place there. Is this the museum emergency hotline?
Help, King Tut’s tomb is empty!
It rings again.

“Hey, dude, what are you doing over there?” Tabitha calls across the room.

I wave brightly—everything is just fine—then snatch up the handset, clutch it close, and whisper, “Hello. Cal Knit.”

“This is Consolidated Universal Long-Term Storage calling,” says the voice on the other end of the line. It’s a woman, and she speaks with just the tiniest twang. “Put me through to accessions, could you please?”

I look across the room: Tabitha is pulling two first-graders out of a cocoon of green and yellow yarn. One of them is a little red in the face, like she’s been suffocating. On the phone I say, “Accessions? That’s me, ma’am.”

“Oh, you are so polite! Well, listen darlin’, somebody’s taking you for a ride,” she says. “The—let’s see—ceremonial artifact you just submitted is already on file over here. Had it for years. You
always
need to check first, hon.”

It’s all I can do not to jump up and start dancing behind the desk. I compose myself and say into the phone, “Gosh, thanks for the heads-up. I’ll get this guy out of here. He’s totally sketchy, says he’s part of a secret society, they’ve had it for hundreds of years—you know, the usual.”

The woman sighs sympathetically. “Story of my
life
, hon.”

“Listen,” I say lightly, “what’s your name?”

“Cheryl, hon. I’m real sorry about this. Nobody likes a call from Con-U.”

“That’s not true! I appreciate your diligence, Cheryl.” I’m playing the part: “But we’re pretty small. I’ve actually never heard of Con-U…”

“Darlin’, are you serious? We are
only
the largest and most advanced off-site storage facility serving the historical entertainment sector anywhere west of the Mississippi,” she says in one breath. “Over here in Nevada. You ever been to Vegas?”

“Well, no—”

“Driest place in the whole United States, hon.”

Perfect for stone tablets. Okay, this is it. I make the pitch: “Listen, Cheryl, maybe you can help me out. Here at Cal Knit, we just got a big grant from, uh, the Neel Shah Foundation—”

“That sounds nice.”

“Well, it’s big by our standards, which isn’t that big at all. But we’re putting together a new exhibition, and … you’ve got the real Gerritszoon punches, right?”

“I don’t know what those are, hon, but it says here we’ve got ’em.”

“Then we’d like to borrow them.”

*   *   *

I get the details from Cheryl, say thanks and goodbye, and fit the blue handset back into place. A ball of green yarn comes arcing through the air and lands on the front desk, then rolls into my lap, unraveling as it goes. I look up, and it’s the redheaded first-grader again, standing on one foot, sticking her tongue out at me.

The first-graders jostle and fidget on their way back out into the parking lot. Tabitha closes the front door, locks it, and limps back to the front desk. She has a faint red scratch across her cheek.

I start spooling up the green yarn. “Rough class?”

“They’re quick with those needles,” she says, sighing. “What about you?”

I’ve written the name of the storage facility and its Nevada address on a Cal Knit memo pad. I spin it around to show her.

“Yeah, that’s not surprising,” she says. “Probably ninety percent of everything on that screen is in storage. Did you know the Library of Congress keeps most of its books outside of D.C.? They have, like, seven hundred miles of shelves. All warehouses.”

“Ugh.” I hate the sound of that. “What’s the point, if nobody ever gets to see it?”

“It’s a museum’s job to keep things for posterity,” Tabitha sniffs. “We have a temperature-controlled storage unit full of Christmas sweaters.”

Of course. You know, I’m really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.

*   *   *

On the train back to San Francisco, I type three short messages into my phone.

One is to Deckle, and it says:
I’m on to something.

Another is to Neel, and it says:
Can I borrow your car?

The last is to Kat, and it says simply:
Hello.

THE STORM

C
ONSOLIDATED UNIVERSAL
Long-Term Storage is a long, low span of gray that squats on the side of the highway just outside of Enterprise, Nevada. As I pull into the long parking lot, I can feel its blank mass pressing down on my spirit. It is industrial-park desolation given shape and form, but at least it holds the promise of treasures within. The Applebee’s three miles up the highway is also depressing, but there you know exactly what’s waiting inside.

To get into Con-U, I pass through two metal detectors and an X-ray machine and then I am patted down by a security guard named Barry. My bag, jacket, wallet, and pocket change are all confiscated. Barry checks for knives, scalpels, picks, awls, scissors, brushes, and cotton swabs. He checks the length of my nails, then makes me pull on pink latex gloves. Finally, he puts me in a white Tyvek jumpsuit with elastic at the wrists and built-in booties for my shoes. When I emerge into the dry, immaculate air of the storage facility, I am a man made perfectly inert: I cannot chip, scratch, fade, corrode, or react with any physical substance in the known universe. I guess I could still lick something. I’m surprised Barry didn’t tape my mouth shut.

Cheryl meets me in a narrow hallway, harshly lit by overhead fluorescents, in front of a door with the words
ACCESSION/DEACCESSION
stenciled on it in tall black letters. They look like they want to say
REACTOR CORE
.

“Welcome to Nevada, hon!” She waves and smiles a wide smile that makes her cheeks bunch up. “Awful nice to see a new face out here.” Cheryl is a middle-aged woman with frizzy black hair. She’s wearing a green cardigan with a neat zigzag pattern and dusty blue mom-jeans—no Tyvek suit for her. Her Con-U badge hangs on a lanyard around her neck, and the photo on the badge looks ten years younger.

“Okay, hon. The intermuseum loan form is here.” She hands me a crinkly sheet of pale green paper. “And this is the checkout manifest.” Another paper, this one yellow. “And you’ll have to sign this one.” It’s pink. Cheryl takes a long breath. Her brow furrows, and she says, “Now, listen, hon. Your institution isn’t nationally accredited, so we can’t do the pick and pack for you. Against the rules.”

“Pick and pack?”

“Sorry about that.” She hands me a previous-generation iPad wrapped in a tire-tread rubber casing. “But here’s a map. We have these neat pads now.” She smiles.

The iPad shows a tiny hallway (she pokes at it with her finger—“See, we’re right here”) that runs out into a gigantic rectangle, which is blank. “And that’s the facility, through there.” She lifts her arm, which jangles with bracelets, and points down the hallway toward wide double doors.

One of the forms—the yellow one—tells me the Gerritszoon punches are on shelf
ZULU-2591
. “So where do I find that?”

“Honestly, hon, it’s hard to say,” Cheryl says. “You’ll see.”

*   *   *

The Con-U storage facility is the most amazing space I have ever seen. Keep in mind that I recently worked at a vertical bookstore and have even more recently visited a secret subterranean library. Keep in mind, also, that I saw the Sistine Chapel when I was a kid, and, as part of science camp, I got to visit a particle accelerator. This warehouse has them all beat.

The ceiling hangs high above, ribbed like an airplane hangar. The floor is a maze of tall metal shelves loaded with boxes, canisters, containers, and bins. Simple enough. But the shelves—the shelves are all moving.

For a moment I feel sick, because my vision is swimming. The whole facility is writhing like a bucket of worms; it’s that same overlapping, hard-to-follow motion. The shelves are all mounted on fat rubber tires, and they know how to use them. They move in tight, controlled bursts, then break into smooth sprints through channels of open floor. They pause and politely wait for one another; they team up and form long caravans. It’s uncanny. It’s totally “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

So the iPad’s map is blank because the facility is rearranging itself in real-time.

The space is dark, with no lights overhead, but each shelf has a small orange lamp mounted on top, flashing and rotating. The lamps cast strange spinning shadows as the shelves make their complex migrations. The air is dry—really dry. I lick my lips.

A shelf carrying a rack of tall spears and lances comes whizzing past me. Then it takes a sharp turn—the lances rattle—and I see that it’s bound for wide doors on the far wall. There, cool blue light spills into the darkness, and a team in Tyvek lifts boxes off the shelves, checks them against clipboards, then carries them out of sight. Shelves line up like schoolchildren, fidgeting and jostling; then, when the white-suits are done, they scoot away and merge back into the maze.