“It’s a simulation of the Horsehead Nebula,” he said. Obviously.
Ashley was silent, staring. Her mouth hung open a little bit. Her keys were dangling on her finger, arrested in midflight toward the tidy peg where they lived, just above the chore checklist.
Mat had been living with us for three days.
Ashley took two steps forward and leaned in close, just as I had, and peered into the cosmic depths. A saffron blob was pushing its way up through a roiling layer of green and gold.
“Holy shit, Mat,” she breathed. “That’s beautiful.”
So Mat’s astrophysical stew simmered on, and his other projects continued in sequence, getting bigger and messier and taking up more space. Ashley took an interest in his progress; she’d wander into the room, put a hand on one hip, scrunch her nose, and make a deftly constructive comment. She moved the TV herself.
This is Mat’s secret weapon, his passport, his get-out-of-jail-free card: Mat makes things that are beautiful.
So of course I told Mat he should come visit the bookstore, and tonight he does, at half-past two. The bell over the door tinkles to announce his arrival, and before he says a word, his neck bends back to follow the shelves up into the shadowy reaches. He turns toward me, points a plaid-jacketed arm straight to the ceiling, and says: “I want to go up there.”
I’ve only been working here for a month and don’t quite have the confidence for mischief yet, but Mat’s curiosity is infectious. He stalks straight over to the Waybacklist and stands between the shelves, leaning in close, examining the grain of the wood, the texture of the spines.
I concede: “Okay, but you have to hold on tight. And don’t touch any of the books.”
“Don’t touch them?” he says, testing the ladder. “What if I want to buy one?”
“You can’t buy them — they’re for borrowing. You have to be a member of the club.”
“Rare books? First editions?” He’s already in midair. He moves fast.
“More like only editions,” I say. No ISBNs here.
“What are they about?”
“I don’t know,” I say quietly.
“What?”
Saying it louder, I realize how lame it sounds: “I don’t know.”
“You’ve never looked at one?” He’s paused on the ladder, looking back down. Incredulous.
Now I’m getting nervous. I know where this is going.
“Seriously, never?” He’s reaching for the shelves.
I consider shaking the ladder to signal my displeasure, but the only thing more problematic than Mat looking at one of the books would be Mat plunging to his death. Probably. He has one in his hands, a fat black-bound volume that threatens to unbalance him. He teeters on the ladder and I grit my teeth.
“Hey, Mat,” I say, my voice suddenly high-pitched and whiny, “why don’t you just leave it—”
“This is amazing.”
“You should—”
“Seriously amazing, Jannon. You’ve never seen this?” He clutches the book to his chest and takes a step back down.
“Wait!” Somehow it feels less transgressive to keep it closer to the place where it belongs. “I’ll come up.” I pull another ladder into position opposite his and leap up the rungs. In a moment, Mat and I are level, having a hushed conference at thirty feet.
The truth, of course, is that I am desperately curious. I’m annoyed at Mat, but also grateful that he’s playing the part of the devil on my shoulder. He balances the thick volume against his chest and tilts it my way. It’s dark up here, so I lean across the space between the shelves to see the pages clearly.
For this, Tyndall and the rest come running in the middle of the night?
“I was hoping it would be an encyclopedia of dark rituals,” Mat says.
The two-page spread shows a solid matrix of letters, a blanket of glyphs with hardly a trace of white space. The letters are big and bold, punched onto the paper in a sharp serif. I recognize the alphabet — it’s roman, which is to say, normal — but not the words. Actually, there aren’t really words at all. The pages are just long runs of letters — an undifferentiated jumble.
“Then again,” Mat says, “we have no way of knowing it’s not an encyclopedia of dark rituals…”
I pull another book from the shelf, this one tall and flat with a bright green cover and a brown spine that says KRESIMIR. Inside, it’s just the same.
“Maybe they’re recreational puzzles,” Mat says. “Like, super-advanced sudoku.”
Penumbra’s customers are, in fact, exactly the kind of people you’d see in coffee shops, working through one-sided chess problems or solving Saturday crosswords with blue ballpoints pressed perilously hard into the newsprint.
Down below, the bell tinkles. A jangle of cold fear makes a quick round-trip from my brain to my fingertips and back. From the front of the store, a low voice calls out, “Is anyone der?”
I hiss at Mat: “Put it back.” Then I hustle down the ladder.
When I step wheezing from the stacks, it is Fedorov at the door. Of all the customers I’ve met, he’s the oldest — his beard is snowy white and the skin on his hands is papery-thin — but also probably the most clear-eyed. He seems a lot like Penumbra, actually. Now he slides a book across the desk — he’s returning CLOVTIER — then taps two fingers sharply and says, “I vill need Murao next.”
Here we go. I find MVRAO in the database and send Mat back up the ladder. Fedorov eyes him curiously. “Anudder clerk?”
“A friend,” I say. “Just helping out.”
Fedorov nods. It occurs to me that Mat could pass muster as a very young member of this club. He and Fedorov are both wearing brown corduroys tonight.
“You hev been here, vat, tirty-seven days?”
I couldn’t have told you that, but yes, I’m sure it’s thirty-seven days exactly. These guys tend to be very precise. “That’s right, Mr. Fedorov,” I say cheerily.
“End vat do you tink?”
“I like it,” I say. “It’s better than working in an office.”
Fedorov nods at that and passes over his card. He’s 6KZVCY, naturally. “I vorked at HP”—he says it Heych-Pee—“for tirty years. Now, det vas an office.” Then he ventures: “You hev used a HP celculator?”
Mat returns with MVRAO. It’s a big one, thick and wide, bound in mottled leather.
“Oh, yeah, definitely,” I say, wrapping the book in brown paper. “I had one of the graphing calculators all through high school. It was an HP-38.”
Fedorov beams like a proud grandparent. “I vorked on de tventy-eight, vhich vas de precursor!”
That makes me smile. “I probably still have it somewhere,” I tell him, and pass MVRAO across the front desk.
Fedorov scoops it up in both hands. “Tenk you,” he says. “You know, de tirty-eight did not hev Reverse Polish Notation”—he gives his book (of dark rituals?) a meaningful tap—“end I should tell you, RPN is hendy for dis kind of work.”
I think Mat’s right: sudoku. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I say.
“Okay, tenk you again.” The bell tinkles and we watch Fedorov go slowly up the sidewalk toward the bus stop.
“I looked at his book,” Mat says. “Same as the others.”
What seemed strange before now seems even stranger.
“Jannon,” Mat says, turning to face me squarely. “There’s something I have to ask you.”
“Let me guess,” I say. “Why haven’t I ever looked at the—”
“Do you have a thing for Ashley?”
Well, that’s not what I expected. “What? No.”
“Okay, good. Because I do.”