This chapter is dedicated to Word in Brooklyn, New York. Brooklyn is full of kick-ass indie stores, but if I had to pick just one to visit (thankfully, I don't!), it would be Word, the tiny, adorable, perfect little store with the big basement that is a hub for community events. They're smart, sassy, and forward-looking, and their staff room (where visiting authors get to sit down and eat a quick take-out dinner) is full of funny stickers and posters -- even moreso than the usual indie store staff-room.

Word: 126 Franklin St, Brooklyn, NY 11222, +1 718 383 0096

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They burn a lot of stuff at Burning Man. Of course, there's the burning of The Man himself on Saturday night. I'd seen that on video a hundred times from a hundred angles, with many different Men (he is different every year). It's raucous and primal, and the explosives hidden in his base made huge mushroom clouds when they went off. The temple burn, on Sunday night, was as quiet and solemn as the Man's burn was insane and frenetic. But before either of them get burned, there are lots of "little" burns.

The night before, there'd been the burning of the regional art. Burner affinity groups from across America, Canada and the rest of the world had designed and built beautiful wooden structures ranging from something the size of a park bench up to three=story-tall fanciful towers. These ringed the circle of open playa in the middle of Black Rock City, and we'd gone and seen all of them the day we arrived, because we'd been told that they'd burn first. And they did, all at once, more than any one person could see, each one burning in its own way as burners crowded around them, held at a safe distance by Black Rock Rangers until the fires collapsed into stable configurations, masses of burning lumber on burn-platforms over the playa. Anything that burned got burned on a platform, because "leave no trace" meant that you couldn't even leave behind scorch marks.

That had been pretty spectacular, but tonight they were going to burn the Library of Alexandria. Not the original, of course: Julius Caesar (or someone!) burned that one in 48 B.C., taking with it the largest collection of scrolls that had ever been assembled at that time. It wasn't the first library anyone had burned, and it wasn't the last, but it was the library that symbolized the wanton destruction of knowledge. The Burning Man Library of Alexandria was set on twenty four great wheels, on twelve great axles, and it could be hauled across the playa by gangs of hundreds of volunteers who tugged at the ropes affixed to its front. Inside, the columned building was lined with nooks that were, in turn, stuffed with scrolls, each one handwritten, each a copy of some public domain book downloaded from Project Gutenberg and hand-transcribed onto long rolls of paper by volunteers who'd worked at the project all year. Fifty thousand books had been converted to scrolls in this fashion, and they would all burn.

LIBRARIES BURN: it was the message stenciled at irregular intervals all over the Library of Alexandria, and sported by the librarians who volunteered there, fetching you scrolls and helping you find the passages you were looking for. I'd gone in and read some Mark Twain, a funny story I remembered reading in school about when Twain had edited an agricultural newspaper. I'd been delighted to discover that someone had gone to the trouble of writing that one out, using rolled-up lined school note-paper and taping together in a continuous scroll that went on for hundreds of yards.

As I helped the librarian roll up the scroll -- she agreed that the Twain piece was really funny -- and put it away, I'd said, unthinkingly, "It's such a shame that they're going to burn all these."

She'd smiled sadly and said, "Well, sure, but that's the point, isn't it? Ninety percent of the works in copyright are orphan works: no one knows who owns the rights to them, and no one can figure out how to put them back into print. Meanwhile, the copies of them that we do know about are disintegrating or getting lost. So there's a library out there, the biggest library ever, Ninety percent of the stuff anyone's ever created, and it's burning, in slow motion. Libraries burn." She shrugged. "That's what they do. But maybe someday we'll figure out how to make so many copies of humanity's creative works that we'll save most of them from the fire."

And I read my Mark Twain and felt the library rock gently under me as the hundreds of rope-pullers out front dragged the Library of Alexandria from one side of the open playa to the other, inviting more patrons to get on board and have a ride and read a book before it all burned down. On the way out, the librarian gave me a thumbdrive: "It's a compressed copy of the Gutenberg archive. Fifty thousand books and counting. There's also a list of public domain books that we don't have, and a list of known libraries, by city, where they can be found. Feel free to get a copy and scan or retype it."

The little thumbdrive only weighed an ounce or two, but it felt as heavy as a mountain of books as I slipped it gravely into my pocket.

And now it was time to burn the Library of Alexandria. Again.

The Library had been hauled onto a burn-platform, and the hauling ropes were coiled neatly on its porch. Black Rock Rangers in their ranger hats and weird clothes surrounded it in a wide circle, sternly warning anyone who wandered too close to stay back. Ange and I stood on the front line, watching as a small swarm of Bureau of Land Management feds finished their inspection of the structure. I could see inside, see the incendiary charges that had been placed at careful intervals along the Library's length, see the rolled scrolls in their nooks. I felt weird tears in my eyes as I contemplated what was about to happen -- tears of awe and sorrow and joy. Ange noticed and wiped the tears away, kissed my ear and whispered, "It's okay. Libraries burn."

Now three men stepped out of the crowd. One was dressed as Caesar in white Roman robes and crown, sneering magnificently. The next wore monkish robes and a pointed mitre with a large cross on it. He was meant to be Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria, another suspect in the burning of the Library. He looked beatifically on the crowd, then turned to Caesar. Finally, there was a man in a turban with a pointed beard -- Caliph Omar, the final person usually accused of history's most notorious arson. The three shook hands, then each drew a torch out of his waistband and lit it from a firepot burning in the center of the Library's porch. They paced off from one another, and stationed themselves in the middle of the back and side walls, and, as the audience shouted and roared, thrust their torches lovingly in little holes set at the bottom of the walls.

There must have been some kind of flash powder or something in those nooks, because as each man scurried away, great arcs of flame shot out of them, up and out, scorching the Library walls. The walls burned merrily, and there was woodsmoke and gunpowder in the air now, the wind whipping it toward and past us, fanning the flames. The crowd noise increased, and I realized I was part of the chorus, making a kind of drawn-out, happy yelp.

Now the incendiary charges went, in near-perfect synch, a blossom of fire that forced its way out between the Library's columns, the fire's tongues lashing at sizzling embers -- fragments of paper, fragments of books -- that chased high into the night's sky. The heat of the blast made us all step back from one another, and embers rained out of the sky, winking out as they fell around us like ashen rain. The crowd moved like a slow-motion wave, edging its way out of the direction of the prevailing wind and the rain of fire. I smelled singed hair and fun fur and a tall man in a loincloth behind me smacked me between the shoulders, shouting, "You were on fire, sorry!" I gave him a friendly wave -- it was getting too loud to shout any kind of words -- and continued to work my way to the edge.

Now there were fireworks, and not like the fireworks I'd seen on countless Fourth of July nights, fireworks that were artfully arranged to go off in orderly ranks, first one batch and then the next. These were fireworks with tempo, mortars screaming into the sky without pause, detonations so close together they were nearly one single explosion, a flaring, eye-watering series of booms that didn't let up, driven by the thundering, clashing music from the gigantic art cars behind the crowd, dubstep and funk and punk and some kind of up-tempo swing and even a gospel song all barely distinguishable. The crowd howled. I howled. The flames licked high and paper floated high on the thermals, burning bright in the desert night. The smoke was choking and there were bodies all around me, pressing in, dancing. I felt like I was part of some kind of mass organism with thousands of legs and eyes and throats and voices, and the flames went higher.

Soon the Library was just a skeleton of structural supports in stark black, surrounded by fiery orange and red. The building teetered, its roof shuddered, the columns rocked and shifted. Each time it seemed the building was about to collapse, the crowd gasped and held its breath, and each time it recovered its balance, we made a disappointed "Aww."

And then one of the columns gave way, snapping in two, taking the far corner of the roof with it, and the roof sheared downward and pulled free of the other columns, and they fell, too, and the whole thing collapsed in a crash and crackle, sending a fresh cloud of burning paper up in its wake. The Black Rock Rangers pulled back and we rushed forward, surrounding the wreckage, crowding right up to the burning, crackling pile of lumber and paper and ash. The music got a lot louder -- the art cars were pulling in tight now -- and there was the occasional boom as a stray firework left in the pile sent up a glowing mortar. It was glorious. It was insane.

It was over, and it was time to get moving.

"Let's go," I said to Ange. She'd taken the news about Masha calmly, but she'd said, "There's no way I'm letting you go out there alone," when I told her that Masha had insisted on meeting me.

"That's what I told her," I said, and Ange stood on tiptoes, reached up, and patted me on the head.

"That's my boy," she said.

We threaded our way through the dancing, laughing crowd, getting facefulls of woodsmoke, pot smoke, sweat, patchouli (Ange loved the smell, I hated it), ash and playa dust. Soon we found ourselves through the crowd of people and in a crowd of art cars. It was an actual, no fooling art car traffic jam: hundreds of mutant vehicles in a state of pure higgledy-piggledy, so that a three story ghostly pirate ship (on wheels) found itself having to navigate through the gap between a tank with the body of a '59 El Camino on a crane arm that held it and its passengers ten feet off the ground and a rocking, rolling electric elephant with ten big-eyed weirdos riding on its howdah. Complicating things was the exodus of playa bikes, ridden with joyous recklessness by laughing, calling, goggled cyclists and streaming off into the night, becoming distant, erratic comets of bright LEDs, glowsticks, and electroluminescent wire.

EL wire was Burning Man's must-have fashion accessory. It was cheap and came in many colors, and glowed brightly for as long as the batteries in its pack held out. You could braid it into your hair, pin or glue it to your clothes, or just dangle it from anything handy. Ange's jawa bandoliers were woven through and through with different colors of pulsing EL wire, and she'd carefully worked a strand into the edge of her hood and another down the hem of her robe, so she glowed like a line drawing of herself from a distance. All my EL wire had been gotten for free, by harvesting other peoples' dead EL wire and painstakingly fixing it, tracking down the shorts and faults and taping them up. I'd done my army surplus boots with EL laces, and wound it in coils around my utility belt. Both of us were visible from a good distance, but that didn't stop a few cyclists from nearly running us down. They were very polite and apologetic about it, of course, but they were distracted. "Distracted" is a permanent state of being on the playa.

But as we ventured deeper into the desert, the population thinned out. Black Rock City's perimeter is defined by the "trash fence" that rings the desert, not too far in from the mountain-ranges that surround it. These fences catch any MOOP ("matter out of place") that blows out of peoples' camps, where it can be harvested and packed out -- leave no trace and all that. Between the trash fence and the center of the city is two miles of open playa, nearly featureless, dotted here and there with people, art, and assorted surprises. If Six O'Clock Plaza is the sun, and The Man and temple and the camps are the inner solar system, the trash fence is something like the asteroid belt, or Pluto (allow me to pause for a moment here and say, PLUTO IS TOO A PLANET!).

Now we were walking in what felt like the middle of nowhere. So long as we didn't look over our shoulders at the carnival happening behind us, we could pretend that we were the only people on Earth.

Well, almost. We pretty much tripped over a couple who were naked and squirming on a blanket, way out in the big empty. It was a dangerous way to get your jollies, but nookie was a moderately good excuse for being a darktard. And they were pretty good-natured about it, all things considered. "Sorry," I called over my shoulder as we moved past them. "Time to go dark ourselves," I said.

"Guess so," Ange said, and fiddled with the battery switch on her bandoleer. A moment later, she winked out of existence. I did the same. The sudden dark was so profound that the night looked the same with my eyes open and shut.

"Look up," Ange said. I did.

"My God, it's full of stars," I said, which is the joke I always tell when there's a lot of stars in the sky (it's a killer line from the book 2001, though the idiots left it out of the movie). But I'd never seen a sky full of stars like this. The Milky Way -- usually a slightly whitish streak, even on clear, moonless nights -- was a glowing silvery river that sliced across the sky. I'd looked at Mars through binox once or twice and seen that it was, indeed, a little more red than the other stuff in the sky. But that night, in the middle of the desert, with the playa dust settled for a moment, it glowed like a coal in the lone eye of a cyclopean demon.

I stood there with my head flung back, staring wordlessly at the night, until I heard a funny sound, like the patter of water on stone, or --

"Ange, are you peeing?"

She shushed me. "Just having a sneaky playa-pee -- the portasans are all the way back there. It'll evaporate by morning. Chill."

One of the occupational hazards of drinking water all the time was that you had to pee all the time, too. Some lucky burners had RVs at their camps with nice private toilets, but the rest of us went to "pee camp" when we needed to go. Luckily, the bathroom poetry -- "poo-etry" -- taped up inside the stalls made for pretty good reading. Technically, you weren't supposed to pee on the playa, but way out here the chances of getting caught were basically zero, and it really was a long way back to the toilets. Listening to Ange go made me want to go, too, so we enjoyed a playa-pee together in the inky, warm dark.

Walking in the dark, it was impossible to tell how close we were to the trash fence; there was just black ahead of us, with the slightly blacker black of the mountains rising to the lighter black of the starry sky. But gradually, we were able to pick out some tiny, flickering lights -- candle-lights, I thought -- up ahead of us, in a long, quavering row.

As we got closer, I saw that they were candles, candle lanterns, actually, made of tin and glass, each with a drippy candle in it. They were placed at regular intervals along a gigantic, formal dinner table long enough to seat fifty people at least, with precise place settings and wine glasses and linen napkins folded into tents at each setting. "W. T. F.?" I said, softly.

Ange giggled. "Someone's art project," she said. "A dinner table at the trash fence. Woah."

"Hi there," a voice said from the dark, and a shadow detached itself from the table, and then lit up with EL wire, revealing itself to be a young woman with bright purple hair and a leather jacket cut down into a vest. "Welcome." Suddenly there were more shadows turning into people -- three more young women, one with green hair, one with blue hair, and...

"Hello, Masha," I said.

She gave me a little salute. "Meet my campmates," she said. "You've met before, actually. The day the bridge went."

Right, of course. These were the girls who'd been playing on Masha's Harajuku Fun Madness team when we'd run into them in the Tenderloin, moments before the Bay Bridge had been blown up by parties unknown. What had I called them? The Popsicle Squad. Yeah. "Nice to see you again," I said. "This is Ange."

Masha inclined her chin in a minute acknowledgement. "They've been good enough to let us use their dinner table for a little conversation, but I don't want to spend too much time out here. Plenty of people looking for me."

"Is Zeb here?"

"He went for a pee," she said. "He'll be back soon. But let's get started, okay?"

"Let's do it," Ange said. She'd stiffened up beside me the minute I'd said hi to Masha, and I had an idea that maybe she wasn't as cool about this meeting as she'd been playing it. Why should she be?

Masha brought us down to the farthest end of the table, away from her friends. We seated ourselves, and I saw that what I'd thought were bread-baskets were in fact laden with long-lasting hippie junk-food: whole-wheat pop-tarts from Trader Joe's, organic beef jerky, baggies of what turned out to be home-made granola. High energy food that wouldn't melt in the sun. Masha noticed me inspecting the goods and she said, "Go ahead, that's what it's there for, help yourself." I tore into a pack of jerky (stashing the wrapper in my utility belt to throw away later at camp -- turning gift-economy snacks into MOOP was really bad manners) and Ange got herself a pop-tart, just as Masha leaned across the table, opened the little glass door in the candle-lantern, and blew the candle out. Now we were just black blobs in the black night, far from the nearest human, invisible.

I felt a hand -- Masha's hand -- grab my arm in the dark and feel its way down to my hand and then push something small and hard into my fingers, then let go.

"That's a USB stick, a little one. It's a crypto key that will unlock a four-gigabyte torrent file that you can get with a torrent magnet file on The Pirate Bay and about ten other torrent sites. It's called insurancefile.masha.torrent, and the checksum's on the USB stick, too. I'd appreciate it if you would download and seed the file, and ask anyone you trust to do the same."