Free Ajax Penumbra 1969 (Kindle Single) by Robin Sloan

A 24-Hour Bookstore
    A visitor walks the city, searching. He has a list: libraries and bookstores, museums and archives. He descends into the bowels of the
San Francisco Chronicle
, follows a sullen clerk to the morgue’s oldest files. There, the newsprint is brittle to the touch. He handles it carefully but confidently, his fingers trained for the task, but the
Chronicle
is too young. He does not find the name he is looking for.
    The visitor canvasses Chinatown, learns to say
Bookstore?
in Cantonese:
Shu diàn?
He braves the haze of Haight Street, speaks to a long-haired man selling books on a blanket in Golden Gate Park. He crosses the bay to Cody’s and Cal, ventures south to Kepler’s and Stanford. He inquires at City Lights, but the man behind the register, whose name is Shig, shakes his head. “Never heard of him, man. Never heard of him.” He sells the visitor a copy of “Howl” instead.
    It is 1969, and San Francisco is under construction. The great central artery of Market Street is a trench. South of there, whole blocks have been knocked down and scraped clean; a fence is festooned with signs that proclaim it the YERBA BUENA GARDENS , though there is not a single plant or tree in evidence. To the north, the visitor passes a construction site where a wide ziggurat reaches for the sky and a placard promises THE FUTURE SITE OF THE TRANSAMERICA PYRAMID above a fine-lined rendering of a shining spear.
    The visitor walks the city, disappointed. There is no place left to go; his list is folded and finished. He hikes to the Golden Gate Bridge, because he knowshis parents will ask him about it. A quarter of the way across, he turns back. He expected a view of the city, but the bay is filled with fog, and his short-sleeved shirt is flapping in the frigid wind.
    The visitor walks back to his hotel, going slowly, wallowing in his failure. In the morning, he will buy a train ticket home. He walks along the water for a while, then cuts into the city. He follows the border between North Beach and Chinatown, and there, wedged between an Italian restaurant and a Chinese pharmacy, he finds a bookstore.
    Inside the restaurant, the chairs are all turned up on red-checked tablecloths. The pharmacy stands shadowed, doors drawn tight with dark loops of chain. The whole street is sleeping; it is nearly midnight. The bookstore, though, is wide awake.
    He hears it before he sees it: the murmur of conversation, the tinny swirl of a song. The sound swells as the bookstore’s door swings open and bodies tumble out into the street. The bodies are young, trailing long hair and loose fabric. The visitor hears the
flick
of a lighter, sees a leaping spark. The bodies pass something around, sighing and exhaling long plumes that merge with the fog. The visitor hangs back, watching. They pass the something around again, then fling it out into the street and go back inside.
    He draws closer. The front of the store is all windows, top to bottom, square panes set into a grid of iron, entirely fogged over. Inside, it looks like a party in progress. He sees faces and hands, dark mops of hair, all madeImpressionistic by the foggy glass. The song is one he has heard elsewhere in the city; something popular.
    He pushes the door and a wave of yeasty warmth washes over him. Somewhere above, a bell tinkles brightly, announcing him, but no one notices. He cannot get the door entirely open; it bumps up against someone’s back, someone’s loose jacket covered with a constellation of patches. The visitor squeezes in sideways, muttering a quiet apology, but the jacket-wearer doesn’t notice; he is engrossed in conversation with a woman clutching a portable radio, the source of the swirling song.
    The bookstore is tiny: tall and narrow. From his position near the corner, the visitor surveys the space and decides that there are fewer customers here than at City Lights, probably less than two dozen—it’s just that they are all squashed into a fraction of the