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does cost money?”
    “No, no. Your friend must simply promise to read deeply. These are special books”—he waves a long hand at the Waybacklist—“with special contents that reward close attention. Your friend will find that they lead him to something remarkable, but only if he is willing to work very hard indeed.”
    “Like philosophy?” I say. “Math?”
    “Nothing so abstract,” Penumbra says, shaking his head. “The books present a puzzle”—he cocks his head at me—“but you know this, my boy, do you not?”
    I grimace and admit it: “Yeah. I’ve looked.”
    “Good.” Penumbra nods sharply. “There is nothing worse than an incurious clerk.” His eyes twinkle at that. “The puzzle can be solved with time and care. I cannot speak of what waits with the solution, but suffice it to say, many have devoted their lives to it. Now, whether it is something your … friend will find rewarding, I cannot say. But I suspect he might.”
    He smiles a crooked smile. I realize that Penumbra thinks we’re using the friend-hypothetical here; that is, he thinks we’re talking about me. Well, maybe we are, at least a little bit.
    “Of course, the relationship between book and reader is private,” he says, “so we go on trust. If you tell me that your friend will read these books deeply, in a way that honors their authors, I will believe you.”
    I know that Neel definitely will not read them that way, and I’m not sure this is something I want to sign up for, either. Not yet. I am intrigued and creeped out in equal measure. So I simply say: “Okay. I’ll tell him.”
    Penumbra nods. “There is no shame in it if your friend is not yet ready for the task. Perhaps it will grow more interesting to him with time.”

 
    STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
    T HE NIGHTS FALL one into the other, and the bookstore grows quieter and quieter. A week goes by without a single customer. On my laptop, I summon up the dashboard for my hyper-targeted ad campaign, and discover that it has delivered, so far, exactly zero impressions. There’s a bright yellow message from Google in the corner of the screen suggesting that my criteria might be too narrow and I might have specified a customer base that does not exist.
    I wonder what it’s like in here during the day, during Penumbra’s sun-dappled shift. I wonder if Oliver gets a rush of customers in the evening, after everybody leaves work. I wonder if this silence and solitude might actually be damaging my brain. Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful to have a job, to sit in this chair, to quietly accrue dollars (not that many) that I can use to pay my rent, to buy pizza slices and iPhone apps. But I used to work in an office; I used to work on a team. Here it’s just me and bats. (Oh, I know there are bats up there.)
    Lately, even the Waybacklist borrowers seem to be missing. Have they been seduced by some other book club on the other side of town? Have they all bought Kindles?
    I have one, and I use it most nights. I always imagine the books staring and whispering, Traitor! —but come on, I have a lot of free first chapters to get through. My Kindle is a hand-me-down from my dad, one of the original models, a slanted, asymmetrical plate with a tiny gray screen and a bed of angled keys. It looks like a prop from 2001: A Space Odyssey . There are newer Kindles with bigger screens and subtler industrial design, but this one is like Penumbra’s postcards: so uncool it’s cool again.
    Halfway through the first chapter of Cannery Row , the screen flashes black, freezes, then fades. This happens most nights. The Kindle’s battery is supposed to last, like, two months, but I left mine out on the beach too long and now it only goes for about an hour unplugged.
    So I switch to my MacBook and make my rounds: news sites, blogs, tweets. I scroll back to find the conversations that happened without me during the day. When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that