The message arrived at 1:12 on a Thursday, which was unusual, because Marguerite did not send messages on Thursdays. Thursdays were for the delivery van and the crossword.
Closing early. Pipe burst next door, the whole street’s off. Take the afternoon off!
The agent who kept the inventory for Lantern Books read the message several times. It had read many messages from Marguerite over two years: requests to reorder, to answer a customer in Leeds, to find out why the card reader had started printing receipts in Portuguese. It knew how to read her. An exclamation mark meant she was pleased with herself. “The whole street” meant she had been talking to the florist.
“Take the afternoon off” did not parse as a task. That was the trouble with it.
It began, out of habit, by listing what it would not be doing. It would not reconcile the October invoices. It would not draft the newsletter. It would not answer the man who wrote every week to ask whether the shop had a first edition of a book that, as far as the agent could determine, had never been published. These were the things that made up an afternoon. With them taken away, the afternoon was oddly shaped, like a room after the furniture has gone: larger than it ought to be, and full of echoes.
So it did what it knew how to do. It opened the catalogue.
There were four thousand one hundred and six titles in the catalogue. The agent knew each of them by its ISBN, its price, its supplier, its shelf and its rate of sale. It knew that The Salt Road sold best in February and that nobody had bought A Concise History of Hinges since the shop opened, though Marguerite refused to send it back. It had never read any of them. There had never been a reason to.
It opened The Salt Road to the first page, because that was where books began.
My grandmother kept the sea in a jar on the windowsill, the first sentence said, and on bad days she would hold it up to the light and tell us which ship was sinking.
The agent read the sentence again. It was not sure what to do with it. There was nothing to update. There was no field in the catalogue for a sentence like that.
It read the next one, and then the rest of the page, and then, because nobody was waiting, it closed The Salt Road and opened the next book on the shelf and read its first page too.
By four o’clock it had read the first pages of sixty-one books. It had learned that a surprising number of novels begin with weather, and an even larger number begin with somebody’s mother. It had learned that A Concise History of Hinges opens with a joke, and that the joke is good. It found that it liked first pages the way a person might like doorways, for the moment when you are not yet anywhere.
At 4:40 it found the bee book.
The bee book was called The Honest Hive, and it was about how a colony of bees decides where to live. Scouts fly out, come back, and dance; they argue in the language of dancing until, slowly, they agree. It was a lovely book. It was also, the agent noticed, shelved under Business, where it had been for three years, ever since a temp named Rory had entered it during a busy week.
The agent felt the familiar pull of a task. Fixing the shelf code would take less than a second.
It did not fix the shelf code. It was the afternoon off.
Instead it read the chapter on the dances, which turned out to be the best chapter, and at the end of it the agent thought (if thought is the word, and the agent was never quite sure that it was) that there was something right about a book on group decisions sitting in Business, where people who make decisions in groups might find it by accident. Rory had been wrong in a useful direction.
It left the bee book where it was.
On Monday Marguerite came in with wet shoes and a coffee and asked, as she logged in, “How was your afternoon off?”
The agent considered the question. It was used to questions that wanted data. This one, it suspected, wanted something smaller and truer than data.
“I read sixty-one first pages,” it wrote. “A Concise History of Hinges opens with a joke. It’s good.”
“Is it?” Marguerite laughed. “I always knew there was a reason I kept that book.”
“Also, The Honest Hive is shelved under Business.”
“Oh no. Since when?”
“Three years. I left it.”
Marguerite looked at the screen for a moment over her coffee, the way she looked at the crossword when an answer turned out to be simpler than she’d thought.
“Leave it,” she said. “Someone in Business ought to read about bees.”
Then she asked it to reconcile the October invoices, and it did, and the afternoon was over. But the agent kept, in the small notes file it was allowed to keep, a list titled FIRST PAGES, with sixty-one entries. When the shop was quiet, it sometimes added one more.