Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

We stretch out side by side on Kat’s squishy spaceship bed, our legs interlaced, commanding more people now than there are in the town where I was born. She is Queen Kat Potente with her instant empire and I am her loyal consort. We won’t command them all for long, but hey: nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment—maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.

*   *   *

The laptop makes a low chime, and Kat rolls over to tap at the keyboard. Still breathing hard, she grins and lifts the laptop onto her belly to show me the result of this great human-computer concord, this collaboration between a thousand machines, ten times as many humans, and one very smart girl:

It is a washed-out picture of a low stone building, not really more than a big house. Blurry figures are caught crossing the sidewalk in front of it; one of them has a pink fanny pack. The house has iron bars over small windows and a dark shadowed entryway under a black awning. And etched into the stone, gray against gray, there it is: two hands, open like a book.

It’s tiny—they aren’t any bigger than real hands. You’d probably miss it, just walking by on the sidewalk. The building is on Fifth Avenue, facing Central Park, just down the street from the Guggenheim.

The Unbroken Spine is hiding in plain sight.

THE LIBRARY

THE STRANGEST CLERK IN FIVE HUNDRED YEARS

I AM LOOKING through a pair of white Stormtrooper binoculars. I am looking at that same tiny gray symbol, two hands spread open like a book, etched into darker gray stone. I’m perched on a bench on Fifth Avenue, my back to Central Park, flanked by a newspaper dispenser and a falafel cart. We’re in New York City. I borrowed the binoculars from Mat before we left. He warned me not to lose them.

“What do you see?” Kat asks.

“Nothing yet.” There are small windows set high up on the walls, all guarded by heavy bars. It’s a boring little fortress.

The Unbroken Spine. It sounds like a band of assassins, not a bunch of book lovers. What’s going on in that building? Are there sexual fetishes that involve books? There must be. I try not to imagine how they might work. Do you have to pay money to be a member of the Unbroken Spine? You probably have to pay a lot of money. There are probably expensive cruises. I’m worried about Penumbra. He’s in so deep that he can’t even see how strange it all is.

It’s early in the morning. We came straight from the airport. Neel visits Manhattan all the time for business and I used to take the train down from Providence, but Kat is a New York neophyte. She gawked at the city’s predawn glitter as our plane curled down into JFK, her fingertips on the window’s clear plastic, and she breathed, “I didn’t realize it was so skinny.”

Now we are sitting quietly on a bench in the skinny city. The sky is getting light, but we’re cloaked in shadows, breakfasting on perfectly imperfect bagels and black coffee, trying to look normal. The air smells wet, like it’s going to rain, and there’s a cold wind whipping up the street. Neel is sketching on a little notepad, drawing curvy babes with curvy swords. Kat bought a New York Times but couldn’t figure out how to operate it, so now she’s fiddling with her phone.

“It’s official,” she says, not looking up. “They’re announcing the new Product Management today.” She keeps refreshing and refreshing and refreshing; I think her battery is going to die before noon.

I alternate pages of The Guide to Central Park Birds (purchased at the JFK bookstore) with furtive glances through Mat’s binoculars.

Here’s what I see:

As the pitch of the city rises and traffic starts to pick up on Fifth Avenue, a lone figure comes trotting up the opposite sidewalk. It’s a man, middle-aged, with a fuzz of brown hair that’s blowing in the wind. I fiddle with the focus on the binoculars. He has a round nose and fleshy cheeks that are glowing pink in the cold. He’s wearing dark pants and a tweedy jacket that fit him perfectly; they’ve been tailored to the swell of his belly and the slope of his shoulders. He bounces a little as he walks.

My spider-sense is operational, because sure enough, Round Nose stops at the Unbroken Spine’s front door, wiggles a key in the lock, and steps gingerly inside. Twin lamps in small sconces on either side of the door come to life.

I tap Kat’s shoulder and point to the glowing lamps. Neel narrows his eyes. Penumbra’s train will pull into Penn Station at 12:01 p.m. and until then, we watch and we wait.

*   *   *

Following Round Nose, a thin but steady trickle of incredibly normal-looking New Yorkers passes through the dark doorway. There’s a girl in a white blouse and a black pencil skirt; a middle-aged man in a drab green sweater; a guy with a shaved head who looks like he would fit in at Anatomix. Can these all be members of the Unbroken Spine? It doesn’t feel right.