The Book of Air and Shadows

daye.

    Soe now I write you being the laste thynge on earth I doe & I thinke me that though God did not call mee to stande among the greate still I am a man not a clod & my story bears telling if onlie to holpe in the breding of my sonne: who needs muste rise to manhoode lacking what ever poore model I might have supply’d.

2
    O n the evening of the little fire, the revelatory fire that changed his life, Albert Crosetti was working in the basement as usual, and so was the first one to detect it. He was there because Sidney Glaser Rare Books kept its computer in the basement. Mr. Glaser did not like the devices and resented that they were now essential to earning a living in the book trade. He preferred to proffer his treasures by hand, in a well-lit, paneled, carpeted room like the showroom in his shop. But some years ago, when in the market for a bookshop clerk, he had accepted the current reality and enquired of all candidates whether they knew enough about computers to set up and maintain a Web-based catalog, and he had hired the first nonsmoking person answering in the affirmative. This was Albert Crosetti, then age twenty-four. Crosetti came from Queens, and still lived there in a brick bungalow in Ozone Park, with his mother. She was a retired research librarian and widow, with whom he enjoyed a relationship minimally fraught with Freudian katzenjammer. Crosetti wished someday to make films and was saving up money to go to the famous film school at New York University. He was a graduate of Queens College and had started working for Glaser within a month of receiving his diploma. He liked his job; the hours were regular, the pay fair, and while Glaser could be something of a nut when it came to antique books, the old man knew he had a good thing in Crosetti and let him handle the mail-order business and its electronic impedimenta almost without supervision.
    His workspace consisted of a tiny alcove whose walls were shelves and glass cabinets and crates, all packed with books. Here he updated the online catalog, working from lists drawn by Mr. Glaser’s fountain pen in the beautiful penmanship of bygone days. He also kept the inventory current and accessed the various systems whereby requests for items were transmitted from bibliophiles around the world, printing these off for the proprietor’s later attention. Beyond that, his duties included unpacking and shipping books and other factotum work associated with the trade. He rarely ventured upstairs to the showroom, where quiet, well-dressed people handled old volumes with the care and tenderness due newborn babes.
    The only unpleasant aspect of this work was the smell, compounded of old books, mice, the poisons laid to keep these at bay, drains, heated paint, and beneath all-an olfactory bass note-the stink of frying grease. This last came from next door, an establishment called the Aegean, a joint typical of midtown New York, purveying danish pastries, toast, eggs, and weak coffee in the morning, and sandwiches, fried substances, and fizzy drinks for a couple of hours around noon. It was somewhat past that hour just now, on a fine July day, and Crosetti was wondering whether he should stop tweaking the Web site and take a lunch break or just phone and have the kid bring over a sandwich.
    Or he could skip lunch. He often thought that he was probably taking in from the Aegean sufficient calories through his lungs, mainly fat. Crosetti was not an exerciser, and he enjoyed his mother’s cooking: a bit of a spare tire hung around his waist, a face more jowly than he liked stared back at him from the mirror when he shaved. He considered asking the upstairs clerk to join him, assuming that Carolyn Rolly lived upon substances grosser than air scented by old books. She occasionally ate with Glaser, he knew; they would close up the upstairs and go out, leaving Crosetti laboring below. He allowed this fantasy a brief bubble of life, then shrugged it away. Rolly was a book person, and he was, at bottom, not, even though he had learned a good deal about the book business (prices and conditions and so on) as part of his work with the computer. She was not a beauty by the prevailing standards of meat magazines or movies, being tall enough but somewhat more solidly built than was the current fashion. Crosetti had read somewhere about women who looked better out of clothes than in them, and he thought Rolly was one of these. Clothed, certainly, she was undistinguished: she