Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

She stretches and presses her eyes shut like a cat. I can’t think of a single thing to say, so I just put my chin on my palm and look into the camera.

“It would be nice if you were here,” she murmurs. Then she falls asleep. I am alone in the bookstore, looking across the city at her sleeping form, lit only by the gray light of her laptop. In time it, too, falls asleep, and the screen goes dark.

*   *   *

Alone in the store after the party, I do my homework. I’ve made my selection: I gently pull logbook VII (old but not too old) off the shelf and get Mat his reference images: wide shots and close-ups, snapped with my phone from a dozen angles, all showing the same wide, flat rectangle of battered brown. I snap detail shots of the bookmark, the binding, the pale gray pages, and the deeply embossed NARRATIO on the cover above the store’s symbol, and when Penumbra arrives in the morning, my phone is back in my pocket and the images are on their way to Mat’s inbox. There’s a little whoosh as each of them goes.

I’ve left the current logbook up on the desk. I’ll do that from now on. I mean, why put it on the shelf all the time? Sounds like a recipe for back strain if you ask me. With luck, this choice will catch on and cast a new shadow of normalcy in which I can crouch and hide. That’s what spies do, right? They walk to the bakery and buy a loaf of bread every day—perfectly normal—until one day they buy a loaf of uranium instead.

MAKE AND MODEL

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOW, I spend more time with Kat. I see her apartment unmediated by screens. We play video games. We make out.

One night we try to cook dinner on her industrial stove, but halfway through we judge the steaming sludge of kale a failure, so instead she pulls a neat plastic tub out of the refrigerator, full of spicy couscous salad. Kat can’t find any spoons, so she serves it up with an ice-cream scoop.

“Did you make this?” I ask, because I don’t think she did. It’s perfect.

She shakes her head. “It’s from work. I bring food home most days. It’s free.”

Kat spends most of her time at Google. Most of her friends work at Google. Most of her conversations revolve around Google. Now I am learning that most of her calories come from Google. I think it’s impressive: she’s smart and enthusiastic about her work. But it’s also intimidating, because my workplace is not a gleaming crystal castle full of smiling savants. (That’s how I imagine Google. Also, lots of funny hats.)

There’s a real limit to the relationship I can build with Kat in her non-Google hours, simply because there aren’t that many of them, and I think I want more than that. I want to earn entrance into Kat’s world. I want to see the princess in her castle.

My ticket to Google is logbook VII.

*   *   *

Over the course of the next three weeks, Mat and I painstakingly construct the logbook’s body double. The surface is Mat’s specialty. He starts with a sheet of new leather and stains it with coffee. Then he brings a pair of vintage golf cleats down from his attic aerie; I squeeze my feet into them and march back and forth across the leather for two hours.

The logbook’s guts require more research. In the living room late at night, Mat works on his miniature city while I sit on the couch with my laptop, googling widely, reading detailed book-making tutorials out loud. We learn about binding. We track down vellum wholesalers. We find dusky ivory cloth and thick black thread. We buy a book block on eBay.

“You’re good at this, Jannon,” Mat tells me when we set the blank pages into glue.

“What, book-making?” (We do this on the kitchen table.)

“No, learning things on the fly,” he says. “It’s what we do at work. Not like the computer guys, you know? They just do the same thing every time. It’s always just pixels. For us, every project is different. New tools, new materials. Everything’s always new.”

“Like the jungle monster.”

“Exactly. I had forty-eight hours to become a bonsai master.”

Mat Mittelbrand hasn’t met Kat Potente, but I think they would get along: Kat, who believes so deeply in the human brain’s potential, and Mat, who can learn anything in a day. Thinking about that, I feel suddenly sympathetic to Kat’s point of view. If we could keep Mat going for a thousand years, he could probably build us a whole new world.

The fake logbook’s crowning detail, and the toughest challenge, is the embossing on the cover. The original has the word NARRATIO pressed deep into the leather, and after zoomed-in scrutiny of the reference images, I discover that this text, too, is set in good old Gerritszoon. That’s bad news.

“Why?” Mat asks. “I think I have that font on my computer.”

“You have Gerritszoon,” I cluck, “suitable for emails, book reports, and résumés. This”—I point to the blown-up NARRATIO on my laptop screen—“is Gerritszoon Display, suitable for billboards, magazine spreads, and, apparently, occult book covers. See, it has pointier serifs.”

Mat nods gravely. “The serifs are pointy indeed.”