Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

Lapin doesn’t notice. “Well,” she says, gliding up to the front desk, “I’m not sure how to pronounce it, but, I think it might be Par-zee-bee, or perhaps, perhaps Pra-zinky-blink—”

You have got to be kidding me. I try my best to transliterate what she’s saying, but the database comes up empty. I try again with a different set of phonetic assumptions. Nope, nothing. “Ms. Lapin,” I say, “how do you spell it?”

“Oh, it’s P, B, that’s a B, Z, B, no, sorry, Y…”

You—have got—to be kidding—me.

“B again, that’s just one B, Y, no, I mean, yes, Y…”

The database says: Przybylowicz. That’s just ridiculous.

I race up the ladder, pull PRZYBYLOWICZ so violently from the shelf that I almost make its neighbor PRYOR pop out and drop to the floor, and return to Lapin, my face set in a mask of steely annoyance. Kat is moving silently on the screen, waving to someone.

I have the book wrapped up, and Lapin has her card out—6YTP5T—but then she glides over to one of the short shelves up front, the ones with the normal books. Oh, no.

Long seconds pass. She works her way across the shelf marked ROMANCE, the peacock feather bobbing when she tilts her head to read the spines.

“Oh, I think I’ll get this, too,” she says finally, returning with a bright red Danielle Steel hardcover. Then it takes her approximately three days to find her checkbook.

“So,” she wavers, “that’s thirteen, let’s see, thirteen dollars and how many cents?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Thirteen … dollars…” She writes with agonizing slowness, but I have to admit, her script is beautiful. It’s dark and looping, almost calligraphic. She presses the check flat and signs it slowly: Rosemary Lapin.

She hands it to me, finished, and at the very bottom there’s a line of tiny type that informs me she’s been a member of the Telegraph Hill Credit Union since—oh, wow—since 1951.

Jeez. Why am I punishing this old woman for my own weird ways? Something softens inside of me. My mask melts and I give her a smile—a real one.

“Have a good night, Ms. Lapin,” I say. “Come again soon.”

“Oh, I’m working as fast as I can,” she says, and smiles a sweet smile of her own that makes her cheeks puff out like pale plums. “Festina lente.” She slips her Waybacklist treasure and her guilty pleasure into her purse together. They poke out at the top: matte brown and shiny red. The door tinkles, and she and her peacock feather are gone.

The customers say that sometimes. They say: Festina lente.

I lunge back down toward the screen. When I unmute the speaker, Kat and Trevor are still chatting happily. He’s telling another story, this one about an expedition to cheer up some depressed penguins, and it is apparently hilarious. Kat is laughing. There is so much bubbly laughter coming out of my laptop speakers. Trevor is apparently the cleverest, most interesting man in the whole city of San Francisco. Neither of them is on camera, so I assume she is touching his arm.

“Hey, guys,” I say. “Hey, guys.”

I realize they’ve muted me, too.

All at once I feel stupid, and I am sure this whole thing has been a terrible idea. The point of a party at Kat’s apartment is that I tell a funny story and Kat touches my arm. This exercise in telepresence, on the other hand, does not have a point, and everyone is probably laughing at me and making faces at the laptop just off-camera. My face is burning. Can they tell? Am I turning a strange shade of red on the screen?

I stand and step away from the camera’s gaze. Exhaustion floods into my brain. I’ve been performing hard for the past two hours, I realize—a grinning puppet in an aluminum proscenium. What a mistake.

I put my palms on the bookstore’s broad front windows and look out through the cage of tall golden type. It’s Gerritszoon, all right, and it’s a scrap of familiar grace in this lonely place. The curve of the P is beautiful. My breath fogs the glass. Be normal, I tell myself. Just go back and be normal.

“Hello?” a voice pipes out of my laptop. Kat.

I slide back into place behind the desk. “Hi.”

Trevor is gone. Kat is alone. In fact, she’s somewhere completely different now.

“This is my room,” she says softly. “Like it?”

It’s spartan, not much more than a bed and a desk and a heavy black trunk. It looks like a cabin on an ocean liner. No: a pod on a spaceship. In the corner of the room, there’s a white plastic laundry basket, and scattered around it—near-misses—I see a dozen identical red T-shirts.

“That was my theory,” I say.

“Yeah,” Kat says, “I decided I didn’t want to waste brain cycles”—she yawns—“figuring out what to wear every morning.”

The laptop rocks and there’s a blur and then we are on her bed, and her head is propped up on her hand, and I can see the curve of her chest. My heart is suddenly beating very fast, as if I’m there with her, stretched out and expectant—as if I am not sitting here alone in the dim light of this bookstore, still wearing paisley pants.

“This was pretty fun,” she says quietly, “but I wish you could have come for real.”