Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore (30 page)

It took me hearing them to get it.

It’s late, past midnight. I double-park Neel’s car in front of the apartment and bang the wide button that sets the hazard lights blinking. I jump out, heave the cardboard box from the passenger seat, and dash up the steps. My key scratches the lock—I can’t find it in the darkness, and my hands are full, and I’m vibrating.

“Mat!” I run to the stairs and call up to his room: “Mat! Do you have a microscope?”

There’s a murmuring, a faint voice—Ashley’s—and Mat appears at the top of the stairs, wearing just his boxer shorts, which are printed with a full-color reproduction of a Salvador Dalí painting. He’s waving a giant magnifying glass. It’s huge and he looks like a cartoon detective. “Here, here,” he says softly, scampering down to hand it off. “Best I can do. Welcome back, Jannon. Don’t drop it.” Then he hops back up the stairs and shuts his door with a quiet click.

I take the Gerritszoon originals into the kitchen and turn all the lights on. I feel crazy, but in a good way. Carefully, I lift one of the punches out of the box—the
X
again. I pull it out of its plastic bag, wipe it down with a towel, and hold it under the glare of the stove’s fluorescent light. Then I steady Mat’s magnifying glass and peer through.

The mountains are a message from Aldrag the Wyrm-Father.

THE PILGRIM

I
T IS ONE WEEK LATER
, and I have got the goods, in more ways than one. I emailed Edgar Deckle and told him he had better come out to California if he wants his punches. I told him he had better come out to Pygmalion on Thursday night.

I invited everyone: my friends, the fellowship, all the people who helped along the way. Oliver Grone convinced his manager to let me use the back of the store, where they have A/V gear set up for book readings and poetry slams. Ashley baked vegan oat cookies, four plates of them. Mat set up the chairs.

Now Tabitha Trudeau sits in the front row. I introduce her to Neel Shah (her new benefactor) and he immediately proposes a Cal Knit exhibit that will have, as its focus, the way boobs look in sweaters.

“It’s very distinct,” he says. “The sexiest of all apparel. It’s true. We ran a focus group.” Tabitha frowns and knits her brows together. Neel goes on: “The exhibit could have classic movie scenes looping, and we could track down the actual sweaters they wore and hang them up…”

Rosemary Lapin sits in the second row, and next to her are Tyndall, Fedorov, Imbert, Muriel, and more—most of the same crowd that came out to Google on a bright morning not so long ago. Fedorov has his arms crossed and his face set in a skeptical mask, as if to say,
I’ve been through this once before
, but that’s okay. I’m not going to disappoint him.

There are two unbound brothers from Japan, too—a pair of young mop-haired men in skinny indigo jeans. They heard a rumor through the grapevine of the Unbroken Spine and decided it would be worth their while to find a last-minute flight to San Francisco. (They were correct.) Igor is sitting with them, chatting comfortably in Japanese.

There’s a laptop set up in the front row so Cheryl from Con-U can watch. She’s beaming in via video chat, her frizzy black hair taking up the whole screen. I invited Grumble to join in, too, but he’s on a plane tonight—headed for Hong Kong, he says.

Darkness blooms through the bookstore’s front door: Edgar Deckle has arrived, and he’s brought an entourage of New York black-robes with him. They aren’t actually wearing their robes, not here, but their attire still marks them as strange outsiders: suits, ties, a charcoal skirt. They come streaming through the door, a dozen of them—and then, there’s Corvina. His suit is gray and gleaming. He’s still an imposing dude, but here he seems diminished. Without all the pageantry and the backdrop of bedrock, he’s just an old— His dark eyes flash up and find me. Okay, maybe not that diminished.

Pygmalion’s customers turn to watch, eyebrows raised, as the black-robes march through the store. Deckle is wearing a light smile. Corvina is all sharp gravity.

“If you truly have the Gerritszoon punches,” he says flatly, “we will take them.”

I steel my spine and tilt my chin up a little. We’re not in the Reading Room anymore. “I do have them,” I say, “but that’s just the beginning. Have a seat.” Oh, boy. “Please.”

He flicks his eyes across the chattering crowd and frowns, but then he waves his black-robes into place. They all find seats in the last row, a dark bracket at the back of the assembly. Behind them, Corvina stands.

I grab hold of Deckle’s elbow as he passes. “Is he coming?”

“I told him,” he says, nodding. “But he already knew. Word travels fast in the Unbroken Spine.”

Kat is here, sitting up front, way off to the side, talking quietly with Mat and Ashley. She’s wearing her houndstooth blazer again. There’s a green scarf around her neck, and she’s cut her hair since the last time I saw her; now it stops just below her ears.

We are no longer dating. There has been no formal declaration, but it’s an objective truth, like the atomic weight of carbon or the share price of GOOG. That didn’t stop me from pestering her and extracting a promise to attend. She, of all people, has to see this.

People are shifting in their seats and the vegan oat cookies are almost gone, but I have to wait. Lapin leans forward and asks me, “Are you going to New York? To work at the library, perhaps?”

“Um, no, definitely not,” I say flatly. “Not interested.”

She frowns and clasps her hands together. “I’m supposed to go, but I don’t think I want to.” She looks up at me. She looks lost. “I miss the store. And I miss—”

Ajax Penumbra.

He slips in through Pygmalion’s front door like a wandering ghost, fully buttoned into his dark peacoat, the collar turned up over the thin gray scarf around his neck. He searches the room, and when he sees the crowd in the back, full of the fellowship—black-robes and all—his eyes widen.

I sprint over to him. “Mr. Penumbra! You came!”

He’s half-turned away, and he puts a bony hand up around his neck. He won’t look at me. His blue eyes are glued to the floor. “My boy, I am sorry,” he says softly. “I should not have vanished so—ah. It was simply…” He lets out a whispering sigh. “I was embarrassed.”

“Mr. Penumbra, please. Don’t worry about it.”

“I was so sure it would work,” he says, “but it did not. And there you were, and your friends, and all my students. I feel like such an old fool.”

Poor Penumbra. I’m imagining him holed up somewhere, grappling with the guilt of having cheered the fellowship forward to failure on Google’s green lawns. Weighing his own faith and wondering what could possibly come next. He’d placed a big bet—his biggest ever—and lost. But he didn’t place that bet alone.

“Come on, Mr. Penumbra.” I step back toward my setup and wave him along. “Come sit down. We’re all fools—all except for one of us. Come and see.”

*   *   *

Everything is ready. There’s a presentation waiting to start on my laptop. I realize that the big reveal really ought to happen in a smoky parlor, with the sleuth holding his nervous audience spellbound using only his voice and his powers of deduction. Me, I prefer bookstores, and I prefer slides.

So I power up the projector and take my position, the blank light burning my eyes. I clasp my hands behind my back, square my shoulders, and squint out into the assembled crowd. Then I click the remote and begin:

SLIDE 1

If you were going to make a message last, how would you do it? Would you carve it into stone? Etch it into gold?

Would you make your message so potent that people couldn’t resist passing it on? Would you build a religion around it, maybe get people’s souls involved? Would you, perhaps, establish a secret society?

Or would you do what Gerritszoon did?

SLIDE 2

Griffo Gerritszoon was born the son of a barley grower in northern Germany in the middle of the fifteenth century. The elder Gerritszoon was not rich, but thanks to his good reputation and well-established piety, he was able to snag his son an apprenticeship with the local goldsmith. This was a great gig back in the fifteenth century; as long as he didn’t screw it up, the younger Gerritszoon was basically set for life.

He screwed it up.

He was a religious kid, and the goldsmith’s trade turned him off. He spent all day melting old baubles down to make new ones—and he knew his own work was going to suffer the same fate. Everything he believed told him: This is not important. There is no gold in the city of God.

So he did what he was told, and he learned the craft—he was really good at it, too—but when he turned sixteen, he said so long and left the goldsmith behind. He left Germany altogether, in fact. He went on a pilgrimage.

SLIDE 3

I know this because Aldus Manutius knew it, and he wrote it down. He wrote it down in his
codex vitae
—which I have decoded.

(There are gasps from the audience. Corvina is still standing at the back and his face is tight, his mouth a deep grimace, his dark mustache pulled down around it. Other faces are blank, waiting. I glance over at Kat. She’s wearing a serious look, as if she’s worried that something might have short-circuited in my brain.)

Let me get this out of the way: There’s no secret formula in this book. There’s no magic incantation. If there truly is a secret to immortality, it’s not here.

(Corvina makes his choice. He spins and stalks up the aisle past
HISTORY
and
SELF-HELP
toward the front door. He passes Penumbra, who’s standing off to one side, leaning on a short shelf for support. He watches Corvina pass, then turns back toward me, cups his hands around his mouth, and calls out, “Keep going, my boy!”)

SLIDE 4

Really, Manutius’s
codex vitae
is just what it claims to be: it’s a book about his life. As a work of history, it’s a treasure. But it’s the part about Gerritszoon that I want to focus on.

I used Google to translate this from Latin, so bear with me if I get some of the details wrong.

Young Gerritszoon wandered through the Holy Land, doing metalwork to make a bit of money here and there. Manutius says he was meeting up with mystics—Kabbalists, Gnostics, and Sufis alike—and trying to figure out what to do with his life. He was also hearing rumors, through the goldsmiths’ grapevine, of some pretty interesting stuff happening up in Venice.

This is a map of Gerritszoon’s journey, as well as I can reconstruct it. He meandered around the Mediterranean—down through Constantinople, into Jerusalem, across to Egypt, back up through Greece, over to Italy.

Venice is where he met Aldus Manutius.

SLIDE 5

It was at Manutius’s printing house that Gerritszoon found his place in the world. Printing called on all of his skills as a metalsmith, but it bent them to new purposes. Printing wasn’t baubles and bracelets—it was words and ideas. Also, this was basically the internet of its day; it was exciting.

And just like the internet today, printing in the fifteenth century was all problems, all the time: How do you store the ink? How do you mix the metal? How do you mold the type? The answers changed every six months. In every great city of Europe, there were a dozen printing houses all trying to figure it out first. In Venice, the greatest of those printing houses belonged to Aldus Manutius, and that’s where Gerritszoon went to work.

Manutius recognized his talent immediately. He also says he recognized his spirit; he saw that Gerritszoon was a searcher, too. So he hired him, and they worked together for years. They became best friends. There was no one Manutius trusted more than Gerritszoon, and no one Gerritszoon respected more than Manutius.

SLIDE 6

So finally, after a few decades, after inventing a new industry and printing hundreds of volumes that we still think of as, like, the most beautiful books ever made, both of these guys were getting old. They decided to collaborate on a great final project, one that was going to take everything they’d experienced, everything they’d learned, and package it up for posterity.

Manutius wrote his
codex vitae
, and in it, he was honest: He explained how things really worked in Venice. He explained the shady deals he’d struck to secure his exclusive license to print the classics; he explained how all his rivals had tried to shut him down; he explained how he’d shut a few of them down instead. Precisely because he was so honest, and because if it was released immediately it would damage the business he was passing on to his son, he wanted to encrypt it. But how?

At the same time, Gerritszoon was cutting a typeface, his best ever—a bold new design that would sustain Manutius’s printing house after he was gone. He hit a home run, because those are the shapes that now bear his name. But in the process, he did something unexpected.

Aldus Manutius died in 1515, leaving behind a very revealing memoir. At this point, according to the lore of the Unbroken Spine, Manutius entrusted Gerritszoon with the key to this encrypted history. But something got lost in translation over five hundred years.

Gerritszoon didn’t
get
the key.

Gerritszoon
is
the key.

SLIDE 7

Here’s a picture of one of the Gerritszoon punches: the
X
.

Here it is closer.

And closer still.

Here it is through my friend Mat’s magnifying glass. Do you see the tiny notches in the edge of the letter? They look like the teeth of a gear, don’t they?—or the teeth of a key.

(There’s a loud, rattling gasp. It’s Tyndall. I can always count on him to get excited.)

Those tiny notches are not accidents, and they are not random. There are notches like that on all the punches, and all the molds made from the punches, and every piece of Gerritszoon type ever made. Now, I had to go to Nevada to figure this out; I had to hear Clark Moffat’s voice on tape to really get it. But if I’d known what I was looking for, I could have opened up my laptop, typed out some text in Gerritszoon, and blown it up 3,000 percent. The notches are in the computer version, too. Down in their library, the Unbroken Spine doesn’t deign to use computers … but up above, the Festina Lente Company hired some very diligent digitizers.