Wrong Light

I work in the basement level of a university library in Reykjavik, which sounds fancier than it is. Special collections. Old paper, old glue, old problems. I'm twenty-five and I've been doing this for two years, mostly fixing manuscripts that other people damaged by breathing on them wrong.

The archive shares a wall with a small astronomy office. Not directly. There's an air shaft between us, maybe four feet wide, and at the top of it, mounted outside on a bracket that predates both of us, there's a neon sign.

The sign spells OVA.

I noticed it my first week. It bothered me in a low, constant way, like a pebble in a shoe. Not enough to do anything about. Just enough that every night when the lights came on in the astronomy office and I was still at my bench, I'd look up through the shaft and see OVA glowing pink against the dark, and think, that's not a word anyone meant.

Then in October I found the note.

It was taped to the wall of the air shaft, at about eye level if you're standing on the little stepladder near the drying racks, which I was. Paper, office supply, the kind from any printer. Block letters in pen.

THE SIGN IS MISSING AN N. STOP LOOKING AT IT AND FOCUS.

I stood there for a good minute. I looked up at the sign. I looked at the note. The sign is on the outside of the building. The note was on the inside of the shaft, which faces my workspace, which means whoever wrote it was in the astronomy office, writing about me, sort of, or at least about my habit of standing on the stepladder and staring at a broken neon sign like an idiot.

I took the note down. I don't know why. Habit, maybe. Conservators don't leave primary sources lying on dusty floors.

* * *

I asked Margret, who runs the reading room, about the sign. She's sixty-one and has worked here since before the building had proper heating.

"Oh, that thing," she said. "It was the photography studio. Before the university took the space. They wanted NOVA, like the star thing, very clever, and then they went out of business before the electrician finished the job. The N burned out in the first week, I think. Nobody ever paid to fix it."

"So it's been OVA for how long?"

"Twelve years? Fifteen? Long enough that nobody looks up anymore." She paused. "Except apparently somebody does."

I decided not to mention the note yet. It felt like evidence, and I wasn't sure of what.

* * *

The notes kept coming. That's the part I still can't fully explain to people without sounding like I've lost it. Every few days there'd be a new one taped to the shaft wall, always block letters, always about the sign.

I CHECKED. IT'S THE TRANSFORMER, NOT THE BULB. OR ALSO THE BULB.

IF YOU TAKE THE LADDER DOWN I WILL ASSUME YOU SAW THE NOTE AND ARE FOCUSING.

IT IS NOT 'OVA' IN ANY LANGUAGE THAT MATTERS. STOP.

That last one made me laugh out loud at my bench, alone, at ten at night, over a box of water-damaged nineteenth-century land surveys. It also told me two things. One, whoever it was had noticed my ladder habits, which meant they could see me through their window, which meant we'd been watching each other's workspace for a while in the least romantic way possible. Two, they cared about the sign more than they were letting on. You don't check the transformer for a stranger's curiosity.

I wrote back. I'm not proud of how long I spent on it. I used the same block letters, because it felt like the rules of the game.

I'M A CONSERVATOR. I FIX THINGS FOR A LIVING. THIS ONE'S OUTSIDE MY DEPARTMENT.

I taped it to the wall at ladder height and went back to a survey of a farm that no longer exists, and I don't think I've ever concentrated worse on anything.

* * *

The reply came two days later.

THE N IS STILL OUT. WHY HAVEN'T YOU FIXED IT. YOU SAID YOU FIX THINGS.

Fair point, honestly. I did some research that week, which mostly meant asking the facilities guy, Stefan, whether the sign was even on our electrical grid or the astronomy office's, and whether anyone owned it anymore, and whether climbing the outside of a listed building was a fireable offense.

"It's on our circuit, technically," he said, scrolling through something on his tablet with the resigned air of a man who already knew this conversation was going to cost him time. "The photo studio left it. It's technically abandoned property, which means it's the university's, which means if you fall off it, that's a very long incident report."

"I'm not going to fall off it."

"Nobody says that and then doesn't fall off it." He sighed. "The transformer's probably dead. I can order one. It'll take two weeks to arrive, maybe three, because everything takes three weeks."

"Can you order the transformer?"

"Can I order the transformer," he repeated, like I'd asked him something personal. "Yes, Dominique, I can order the transformer. Stop standing on that ladder in the meantime. The shaft gets condensation in winter, the rungs get slick, and I refuse to fill out that paperwork."

So that was happening, slowly, in the background of my actual job, which by November was a manuscript of Icelandic sagas with water damage along the fore-edge, and I liked my job, I will state that. I just also had a new small obsession running in parallel, and the obsession had started writing me notes in block capitals.

* * *

I found out her name by accident, which is a lie, I found it out because I walked past the astronomy office door one afternoon on my way out and there was a schedule taped to it, and one of the names on it was Jia Conner, PhD, with office hours listed and crossed out and listed again. There was a cancellation notice from a conference stapled next to it. Some big astrochemistry thing, cancelled for funding reasons three days before it started. People had paid registration. The whole sheet had been annotated in pen, angrily.

The conference was in the news for about a week. Funding pulled at the last minute, a whole international event called off, several hundred researchers stuck rescheduling flights. I remember thinking at the time that it sounded like a nightmare, and then forgetting about it, because that's what I do with other fields' problems.

But it explained the notes, maybe. A person stuck in an office she'd planned to escape, staring at the same broken sign I was staring at, with nothing to do but analyze data and get mad at wiring.

I didn't know what she looked like. That's the part that felt strange to admit even to myself. I knew her handwriting, her schedule, her opinion on transformers. I knew she stayed late. I knew she drank coffee from a machine because I could hear the machine through the wall, faintly, this little mechanical groan, twice most nights around nine and eleven.

I knew all of that and I had never seen her face.

* * *

In mid-November I left a new note.

TRANSFORMER IS ORDERED. STEFAN SAYS THREE WEEKS. I'LL DO THE BULB WHEN IT COMES. WHAT'S YOUR DEAL WITH THIS SIGN ANYWAY.

I know. Casual. It took me four drafts to get it that casual, and the first three drafts are in the recycling bin under my bench, and if anyone ever finds them I'm changing my name.

Her reply came the next night, and it was longer than anything she'd written before, which surprised me. Three lines turned into eight.

I SIT FACING THE SHAFT. THE SIGN IS THE ONLY THING MOVING IN MY VIEW. WHEN THE N WAS DEAD THE SIGN SAID 'OVA' AND I COULD NOT STOP READING IT AS A WORD, WHICH IT IS NOT, AND IT WAS MAKING MY DATA CHECKS WORSE BECAUSE MY EYES KEPT GOING TO IT. THIS IS A STUPID EXPLANATION.

IT WAS SUPPOSED TO SAY NOVA. I LIKE NOVAS. THAT'S THE JOB.

I sat with that for a while. It's not a stupid explanation. It's actually a very good one, and I recognized the shape of it, because I have spent entire evenings unable to look away from a misaligned margin or a botched repair someone made in 1911. The brain snags on the wrong thing and won't let go. She'd been stuck in that office with a word that wasn't a word, glowing pink, all night, every night, while her conference evaporated and her data refused to behave.

I wrote back:

MY BRAIN DOES THE SAME THING WITH PAPER. A WRONG CREASE AND I CAN'T SLEEP. I'LL FIX YOUR SIGN. NOVA BY CHRISTMAS, PROBABLY.

Then, because I'd apparently lost all sense:

YOU CAN COME WATCH IF YOU WANT. THE LADDER HOLDS TWO PEOPLE BADLY SO MAYBE DON'T CLIMB IT. BUT YOU CAN WATCH FROM INSIDE.

There was a pause of almost a full day, long enough that I worried I'd broken whatever weird paper-and-pen friendship we had going through a wall. Then:

OKAY. I'M JIA. OFFICE 214. COME KNOCK SOMETIME, THE NOTES TAKE TOO LONG.

So I knocked.

* * *

She opened the door on the second knock, and the first thing I thought was that she looked exactly like someone who'd been fighting with data for six weeks. Hair pushed back with what I think was a pencil. Cardigan over a t-shirt with a nebula on it. Coffee mug that said nothing, just coffee stains.

"You're the ladder person," she said.

"I'm the ladder person. Dominique."

"Jia." She looked at me like she was redoing a calculation. "You're younger than I pictured."

"You're exactly how I pictured, which feels unfair."

That got a laugh out of her, short and real, and she stepped back from the door. "Do you want coffee? The machine's terrible but it's mine."

"Yeah," I said. "I want to hear about the transformer theory."

"It's the transformer and the bulb. Both. I checked."

"I believe you. Stefan ordered the transformer anyway."

She rolled her eyes and went to the machine, and I looked past her, through her window, down into the air shaft, where my stepladder stood where I'd left it, and above it, glowing pink in the early dark of a Reykjavik afternoon, OVA.

The coffee was as bad as she'd promised. It tasted like hot cardboard with a grudge. I said so and she looked pleased, which told me something about her.

"It's the only machine on this floor that works," she said. "So everyone downstairs drinks it and complains and drinks it again."

"Margret downstairs would fight you over that. She has a kettle older than both of us."

We stood at her window with the mugs and looked down at the sign. From her side it hung there, pink, patient, wrong. From this angle I could see the dead socket where the N had been, a little dark cap at the end of the run.

"I checked it in October," Jia said. "Climbed out on the bracket like an idiot. Don't tell facilities."

"You climbed onto the bracket?"

"It was eleven at night and the data was bad. It seemed reasonable at the time." She shrugged. "The N tube is dead. Cracked, I think. You can see the crack if you're standing on a bracket in November wind, which I don't recommend."

I laughed. She didn't smile, exactly, but something in her face loosened. I noticed then how tight her shoulders were, up near her ears, like she'd been bracing for weeks. She caught me noticing and pulled the cardigan straight, and I pretended to be very interested in the window frame.

The transformer came the second week of December, three days before her predicted deadline of "probably Christmas." Stefan left the box outside my workroom door with a sticky note that said SIGN? in his handwriting, which looks like a seismograph. I signed for it properly in the log because Margret reads the log.

I waited until after five. The reading room empties by then and the basement goes quiet except for the dehumidifier, which hums like it's annoyed. I took the transformer and my tool bag and the new tube I'd ordered with my own money, because the university's catalog didn't stock that gauge and I didn't want to wait another month. Blue-white, cold rated, 3000 volts. It wasn't the pink the others were. It was the closest thing in stock and I told myself that was fine.

Jia was waiting in her office. She'd left her door propped open with a chair and she stood up when I came through with the ladder.

"Two people badly," she said, eyeing it.

"One person well. You watch. Those were the terms."

"I don't remember agreeing to terms."

"Consider it a contract. I work with old documents. Contracts are my whole thing."

She snorted and sat on the edge of her desk, mug in hand, and I took the ladder down the corridor and out the side door into the alley. The air shaft is four