The Book of Air and Shadows

books down on it. It felt as solid as a marble plinth and had the simple elegance of the sort of thing you saw in the design showrooms.
    She unwrapped the folios and lined them up on the table. Even he could see that two of the volumes had sustained irreparable damage to their covers.
    “Nice place,” Crosetti said, when it became clear that Rolly was not about to start a conversation, or offer tea or a beer. No response. Her head was bent down over the ravaged cover of volume one.
    “What’s that smell?” he asked.
    “Mainly malt. There was a brewery here for about a century and then they stored chemicals.”
    “Mind if I look around?”
    Rolly answered this with “There’s a big package of paper towels on those shelves on the south wall. Bring it over here.”
    Crosetti took his time and made a slow circuit around the huge room. In one corner he found stacks of wooden pallets, dozens of them, and also stacks of boards resulting from their disassembly. The south wall was almost entirely occupied with shelving and cabinets constructed from this wood, sanded smooth, stained, and varnished. The shelving was packed with books, all hard-covered, most with dust jackets, some with plastic covers. He looked in vain for any personal items, framed photos, souvenirs.
    The work surfaces in the kitchen (which consisted of a double hot plate, a tiny microwave oven, and a small, chipped porcelain sink) were made of the same edge-on, tightly laminated planking as the big worktable, but coated thickly with amber-colored resin. Along the east wall he found a pallet of pallets, with a futon neatly rolled up on it and a table made from a cable spool and two of the sort of chairs one finds on trash heaps, all competently restored and painted cream. A chair for her and one for a visitor? Spoke to a social life and he wondered who. In the southeast corner an enclosure had been built, also out of pallet wood, within which he assumed was her toilet. Against this leaned a large battered wardrobe, hidden from the rest of the room by a folding screen of laquered wood and decoupaged paper. Interesting: she lived alone but had rigged a privacy screen. Spoke to sexual activity.
    He was about to take a peek behind this screen when Rolly called out testily. He found the six-pack of paper towels and rejoined her. Between every ten pages in the damp volumes a pair of paper towels had to be interleaved, and these towels had to be changed every hour. While they dried, the wet volumes were laid flat on the worktable and weighted down with cloth-covered steel plates to prevent swelling.
    “What I don’t get,” said Crosetti when the books were all interleaved and weighted, “is why you’re drying the whole of the set if you’re just going to break them for the maps and illustrations. Why not just pull the good stuff and junk the rest?”
    “Because it’s the right way to do it,” said Rolly after a brief hesitation. “The plates would curl if you pulled them wet.”
    “I see,” he said, not seeing at all, seeing the young woman in an entirely new and not very attractive light. He sat on a stool and studied her profile. “So…this is kind of interesting,” he said. “Watching books dry. I don’t think I ever did it before. Maybe you could point out the highlights, so I don’t miss anything.”
    He grinned at her and was rewarded with a tiny azure spark in her eyes, while her mouth assumed the set of one trying not to smile. “You’re welcome to read a book while you wait,” she said. “I have a good many of them.”
    “Alternatively, we could converse. I could tell you all my hopes and dreams and you could tell me yours, and the hours would fly past, and we could get to know each other.”
    “Go ahead,” she replied after a brief pause, uninvitingly.
    “No, ladies first. You look like you’ve had a lot more interesting life than I have.”
    A shocked expression appeared on her face. She gaped, then snorted, then blushed. “Sorry,” she said. “Oh, God! That is so opposite from the case. Why would you imagine that? That I have an interesting life?”
    “Oh, this place, for one thing. You live in a warehouse in Red Hook…”
    “It’s a loft. Thousands of people in the city live in lofts.”
    “No, they live in apartments in loft buildings. And usually they have furniture they bought in stores, not made out of pallets. Are you even legal here?”
    “The landlord doesn’t mind.”
    “Assuming he knows. Also