Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

CONSOLIDATED UNIVERSAL Long-Term Storage is a long, low span of gray that squats on the side of the highway just outside of Enterprise, Nevada. As I pull into the long parking lot, I can feel its blank mass pressing down on my spirit. It is industrial-park desolation given shape and form, but at least it holds the promise of treasures within. The Applebee’s three miles up the highway is also depressing, but there you know exactly what’s waiting inside.

To get into Con-U, I pass through two metal detectors and an X-ray machine and then I am patted down by a security guard named Barry. My bag, jacket, wallet, and pocket change are all confiscated. Barry checks for knives, scalpels, picks, awls, scissors, brushes, and cotton swabs. He checks the length of my nails, then makes me pull on pink latex gloves. Finally, he puts me in a white Tyvek jumpsuit with elastic at the wrists and built-in booties for my shoes. When I emerge into the dry, immaculate air of the storage facility, I am a man made perfectly inert: I cannot chip, scratch, fade, corrode, or react with any physical substance in the known universe. I guess I could still lick something. I’m surprised Barry didn’t tape my mouth shut.

Cheryl meets me in a narrow hallway, harshly lit by overhead fluorescents, in front of a door with the words ACCESSION/DEACCESSION stenciled on it in tall black letters. They look like they want to say REACTOR CORE.

“Welcome to Nevada, hon!” She waves and smiles a wide smile that makes her cheeks bunch up. “Awful nice to see a new face out here.” Cheryl is a middle-aged woman with frizzy black hair. She’s wearing a green cardigan with a neat zigzag pattern and dusty blue mom-jeans—no Tyvek suit for her. Her Con-U badge hangs on a lanyard around her neck, and the photo on the badge looks ten years younger.

“Okay, hon. The intermuseum loan form is here.” She hands me a crinkly sheet of pale green paper. “And this is the checkout manifest.” Another paper, this one yellow. “And you’ll have to sign this one.” It’s pink. Cheryl takes a long breath. Her brow furrows, and she says, “Now, listen, hon. Your institution isn’t nationally accredited, so we can’t do the pick and pack for you. Against the rules.”

“Pick and pack?”

“Sorry about that.” She hands me a previous-generation iPad wrapped in a tire-tread rubber casing. “But here’s a map. We have these neat pads now.” She smiles.

The iPad shows a tiny hallway (she pokes at it with her finger—“See, we’re right here”) that runs out into a gigantic rectangle, which is blank. “And that’s the facility, through there.” She lifts her arm, which jangles with bracelets, and points down the hallway toward wide double doors.

One of the forms—the yellow one—tells me the Gerritszoon punches are on shelf ZULU-2591. “So where do I find that?”

“Honestly, hon, it’s hard to say,” Cheryl says. “You’ll see.”

*   *   *

The Con-U storage facility is the most amazing space I have ever seen. Keep in mind that I recently worked at a vertical bookstore and have even more recently visited a secret subterranean library. Keep in mind, also, that I saw the Sistine Chapel when I was a kid, and, as part of science camp, I got to visit a particle accelerator. This warehouse has them all beat.

The ceiling hangs high above, ribbed like an airplane hangar. The floor is a maze of tall metal shelves loaded with boxes, canisters, containers, and bins. Simple enough. But the shelves—the shelves are all moving.

For a moment I feel sick, because my vision is swimming. The whole facility is writhing like a bucket of worms; it’s that same overlapping, hard-to-follow motion. The shelves are all mounted on fat rubber tires, and they know how to use them. They move in tight, controlled bursts, then break into smooth sprints through channels of open floor. They pause and politely wait for one another; they team up and form long caravans. It’s uncanny. It’s totally “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

So the iPad’s map is blank because the facility is rearranging itself in real-time.

The space is dark, with no lights overhead, but each shelf has a small orange lamp mounted on top, flashing and rotating. The lamps cast strange spinning shadows as the shelves make their complex migrations. The air is dry—really dry. I lick my lips.

A shelf carrying a rack of tall spears and lances comes whizzing past me. Then it takes a sharp turn—the lances rattle—and I see that it’s bound for wide doors on the far wall. There, cool blue light spills into the darkness, and a team in Tyvek lifts boxes off the shelves, checks them against clipboards, then carries them out of sight. Shelves line up like schoolchildren, fidgeting and jostling; then, when the white-suits are done, they scoot away and merge back into the maze.

Here, in the most advanced off-site storage facility serving the historical entertainment sector anywhere west of the Mississippi, you don’t find the artifacts. The artifacts find you.