“Oh, very good, better now,” he will breathe, taking the package with shaking hands. “Making progress, slow, steady, sure! Festina lente, thank you, thank you!” Then the bell will tinkle again as he hurries back out into the street. It will be three in the morning.
Is this a book club? How do they join? Do they ever pay?
These are the things I ask myself when I sit here alone, after Tyndall or Lapin or Fedorov has left. Tyndall is probably the weirdest, but they’re all pretty weird: all graying, single-minded, seemingly imported from some other time or place. There are no iPhones. There’s no mention of current events or pop culture or anything, really, other than the books. I definitely think of them as a club, though I have no evidence that they know one another. Each comes in alone and never says a word about anything other than the object of his or her current, frantic fascination.
I don’t know what’s inside those books — and it’s part of my job not to know. After the ladder test, back on the day I was hired, Penumbra stood behind the front desk, gazed at me with bright blue eyes, and said:
“This job has three requirements, each very strict. Do not agree to them lightly. Clerks in this store have followed these rules for nearly a century, and I will not have them broken now. One: You must always be here from ten p.m. to six a.m. exactly. You must not be late. You cannot leave early. Two: You may not browse, read, or otherwise inspect the shelved volumes. Retrieve them for members. That is all.”
I know what you’re thinking: dozens of nights alone, and you’ve never cracked a cover? No, I haven’t. For all I know, Penumbra has a camera somewhere. If I sneak a peek and he finds out, I’m fired. My friends are dropping like flies out there; whole industries, whole parts of the country, are shutting down. I don’t want to live in a tent. I need this job.
And besides, the third rule makes up for the second:
“You must keep precise records of all transactions. The time. The customer’s appearance. His state of mind. How he asks for the book. How he receives it. Does he appear to be injured. Is he wearing a sprig of rosemary on his hat. And so on.”
I guess under normal circumstances this would feel like a creepy job requirement. Under the actual circumstances — lending strange books to stranger scholars in the middle of the night — it feels perfectly appropriate. So, rather than spend my time staring at the forbidden shelves, I spend it writing about the customers.
On my first night, Penumbra showed me a low shelf inside the front desk where, lined up, there was a set of oversized leatherbound tomes, all identical except for bright Roman numerals on their spines. “Our logbooks,” he said, running his finger down the line, “going back nearly a century.” He hauled up the rightmost tome and laid it on the desk with a heavy whump. “You will help to keep them now.” The logbook’s cover bore the word NARRATIO, deeply embossed, and a symbol — the symbol from the front windows. Two hands, open like a book.
“Open it,” Penumbra said.
Inside, the pages were wide and gray, filled with dark handwriting. There were sketches, too: thumbnail portraits of bearded men, tight geometric doodles. Penumbra gave the pages a heave and found the place about halfway through, marked with an ivory bookmark, where the writing ran out. “You will note names, times, and titles,” he said, tapping the page, “but also, as I said, manner and appearance. We keep a record for every member, and for every customer who might yet become a member, in order to track their work.” He paused, then added, “Some of them are working very hard indeed.”
“What are they doing?”
“My boy!” he said, eyebrows raised. As if nothing could be more obvious: “They are reading.”
So, on the pages of the book labeled NARRATIO, numbered IX, I do my best to keep a clear, accurate record of what transpires during my shift, with only an occasional literary flourish. I guess you could say rule number two isn’t quite absolute. There’s one weird book I’m allowed to touch in Penumbra’s. It’s the one I’m writing.
When I see Penumbra in the morning, if there’s been a customer, he will ask me about it. I’ll read a bit out of the logbook, and he will nod at my record-keeping. But then he will probe even deeper: “A respectable rendering of Mr. Tyndall,” he’ll say. “But tell me, do you remember, were the buttons on his coat made of mother-of-pearl? Or were they horn? Some kind of metal? Copper?”
Yes, okay: it does seem strange that Penumbra keeps this dossier. I can’t imagine a purpose for it, not even a nefarious one. But when people are past a certain age, you sort of stop asking them why they do things. It feels dangerous. What if you say, So, Mr. Penumbra, why do you want to know about Mr. Tyndall’s coat buttons? and he pauses, and scratches his chin, and there’s an uncomfortable silence — and we both realize he can’t remember?
Or what if he fires me on the spot?
Penumbra keeps his own counsel, and the message is clear: do your job, and don’t ask questions. My friend Aaron just got laid off last week and now he’s going to move back in with his parents in Sacramento. In this economic environment, I prefer not to test Penumbra’s boundaries. I need this chair.
Mr. Tyndall’s coat buttons were jade.
MATROPOLIS
TO RUN MR. PENUMBRA’S 24-Hour Bookstore around the clock, one owner and two clerks divide the circle of the sun into thirds, and I get the darkest slice. Penumbra himself takes the mornings — I guess you’d call it prime time, except that this store doesn’t really have one of those. I mean, a single customer is a major event, and a single customer is as likely to show up at midnight as at half-past noon.
So I pass the bookstore baton to Penumbra, but I receive it from Oliver Grone, the quiet soul who carries it through the evening.
Oliver is tall and solid, with thick limbs and huge feet. He has curly, coppery hair and ears that stick out perpendicular to his head. In another life, he might have played football or rowed crew or kept low-class gentlemen out of the club next door. In this life, Oliver is a graduate student at Berkeley, studying archaeology. Oliver is training to be a museum curator.
He’s quiet — too quiet for his size. He speaks in short, simple sentences and always seems to be thinking about something else, something long ago and/or far away. Oliver daydreams about Ionian columns.
His knowledge runs deep. One night I quizzed him using a book called The Stuff of Legend, snagged from the bottom of Penumbra’s tiny HISTORY section. I covered the headings with my hand and showed him the photos alone:
“Minoan bull totem, 1700 B.C.,” he called out. Correct.
“Basse Yutz flagon, 450 B.C. Maybe 500.” Yes.
“Roof tile, A.D. 600. Gotta be Korean.” Also yes.
At the end of the quiz, Oliver was ten for ten. I’m convinced his brain simply works on a different time scale. I can barely remember what I ate for lunch yesterday; Oliver, on the other hand, is casually aware of what was happening in 1000 B.C. and what it all looked like.
This makes me jealous. Right now, Oliver Grone and I are peers: we have exactly the same job and sit in exactly the same chair. But soon, very soon, he will advance by one very significant degree and accelerate away from me. He will find a place in the real world, because he’s good at something — something other than climbing ladders in a lonely bookstore.
Every night I show up at 10:00 p.m. and find Oliver behind the front desk, always reading a book, always with a title like The Care and Feeding of Terra-Cotta or Arrowhead Atlas of Pre-Columbian America. Every night I rap my fingers on the dark wood. He looks up and says, “Hey, Clay.” Every night I take his place, and we nod farewell like soldiers — like men who uniquely understand each other’s circumstances.