Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

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.

*   *   *

When I’m done with my shift, it’s six in the morning, which is an awkward time to be set loose in the world. Generally I go home and read or play video games. I’d say it was to unwind except that the night shift at Penumbra’s doesn’t really wind a person up. So mostly I’m just killing time until my roommates rise to meet me.

Mathew Mittelbrand is our artist-in-residence. He’s rail-thin, pale-skinned, and keeps strange hours—even stranger than mine, because they’re less predictable. Many mornings I don’t have to wait for Mat; instead, I come home to discover that he’s been up all night toiling on his latest project.

During the day (more or less) Mat works on special effects at Industrial Light and Magic in the Presidio, making props and sets for movies. He gets paid to design and build laser rifles and haunted castles. But—I find this very impressive—he doesn’t use computers. Mat is part of the dwindling tribe of special-effects artists who still make things with knives and glue.

Whenever he’s not at ILM, Mat is working on some project of his own. He works with crazy intensity, feeding hours like dry twigs into the fire, just absolutely consuming them, burning them up. He sleeps lightly and briefly, often sitting up straight in a chair or lying pharaoh-like on the couch. He’s like a storybook spirit, a little djinn or something, except instead of air or water his element is imagination.

Mat’s latest project is his biggest yet, and soon there won’t be room for me or the couch anymore. Mat’s latest project is taking over the living room.

He calls it Matropolis, and it’s made out of boxes and cans, paper and foam. It’s a model railroad with no railroad. The underlying topography is all steep hills made from packing peanuts held in place with wire mesh. It started on one card table, but Mat has added two more, both at different levels, like tectonic plates. Spreading across the tabletop terrain there’s a city.