The Store Read online

  And for the first time I realized that Megan and the kids might be right: I was crazy.

  “Yes. They’ll come for me. Like soldiers, like Nazis, in the middle of the night. They’ll take me, and they’ll take my book.”

  There was no structure to my thoughts. As the ideas came to my head I vomited the words out into the air.

  “They know what I’m up to. They know everything. The Store is more powerful than anyone or anything. Nobody can escape it—especially a little nobody like me. The surveillance cameras. The recording devices. The spies at work. The spies in the San Francisco hotels. The drones. The neighbors who are not really neighbors. The friends who are not really friends. The family who…” I had to stop there.

  Alex’s eyes had not moved from his downward stare at his plate. Lindsay’s hand was shaking as it held her water glass. Megan’s eyes were wet.

  “I am not prepared for their arrival. Nobody can be. But I will be strong about it all. The exposé will go on. They can steal my book. They can burn my book. But the truth will come out.

  “You three are wrong. You preach at me to stop. You plead with me to stop. But you three are totally wrong. Totally.

  “What you don’t understand is this: I do understand!”

  Chapter 45

  “GET THE hell off my property,” I screamed.

  “Brandeis, we are here to enforce a town and state request,” said one of the two men banging their fists on our front door.

  “I said get the hell off my property.”

  It was three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. Cold and cloudy, and the weather was not made pleasanter by the fact that my family and I were barely speaking to one another.

  “Brandeis, let us in or we’ll have to use force,” said the same guy.

  Both men wore cheap-looking gray suits. One guy was tall and white and blond. The other guy was tall and black and bald. Both of them were annoyingly handsome. Both of them were alarmingly large. I figured that neither of them was from New Burg, because neither of them was smiling.

  “Let them in, Jacob,” Megan said. “Why are you always fighting, always causing problems?”

  I took a deep breath and began unlocking the door. The second I had completed the job, precisely when the door was unlocked, the blond guy put his hand through the open space and pushed me violently into the hallway. I fell to the floor. The bald guy was carrying a sledgehammer, which he used to smash the knob from the door. One quick and powerful movement. That door would be staying unlocked.

  “What’s this all—” I started to speak but was immediately interrupted by the bald-headed guy.

  “Jacob Brandeis, sir?” he said, exactly as I imagined an army sergeant leading basic training would say it. I was pulling myself up off the floor.

  “I’m asking you what this—” I tried again. The blond guy spoke next.

  “Answer, sir. Are you Jacob Brandeis?” He was even more hostile.

  “Look—” I tried yet again.

  “Jacob Brandeis? Answer me, sir. Answer me now!”

  Megan decided to answer for me.

  “Yes. He’s Jacob Brandeis.” Her voice was cold, precise.

  The bald guy said, “Your computer, Brandeis.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Give us your computer, Brandeis.”

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me,” I said.

  The blond guy now: “Your computer, Brandeis.”

  Then, like a little kid, I said, “You can’t make me.” I was nervous, and, of course, I felt like a sniveling six-year-old in front of my family.

  “It’s in his attic workroom,” Lindsay said. Like her mother’s, my daughter’s voice was quiet but stern.

  “You cannot come into my house like this and ask for me to give you my things.”

  “Yes, they can, Jacob,” Megan said.

  At that moment the blond guy grabbed hold of my upper arms with his hands and pulled me from the stairway landing. He flung me to the hall floor. The bald guy ran up the stairs, hurdling every three steps. The other guy was right behind him. I stood up and was about to follow them.

  Megan yelled, “Stop your dad!”

  To my astonishment, Alex made a lame attempt to push me back down. I ran up the stairs and arrived in the attic at the same moment one of the intruders was folding the power cord around my closed laptop. The other guy was making uneven stacks of every piece of paper—scraps, printouts, index cards—on my desk. I briefly noticed that neither of the men had taken Megan’s computer.

  Chapter 46

  “DO YOU have any other electronic equipment, Brandeis?” the bald guy said. The skin on his head glistened with sweat.

  I just looked at him.

  “Do you?” he repeated.

  “You know as well as I do what I have,” I said.

  “Check,” the guy said. He and his colleague each took plastic garbage bags from their briefcases and emptied the contents of the wastebaskets into them. They also swept the three unsorted, uneven stacks of papers from my desk into their bags. Then they pulled some loose planks from the steep incline under the roof. All they found was asbestos padding. Of course, I hoped they’d die from being so close to the toxic material.

  The bald guy and the blond guy then saw an unlocked trunk. They flipped open the top. Nothing but old CDs (Ludacris, anyone?), old college books (Middlemarch, anyone?), and old children’s drawings (“My Dad mak god raveoli”). They felt the inner sides of the trunk for secret panels. They seemed very pissed off that they found nothing incriminating. For me it was a small pleasure, but it was a pleasure nonetheless.

  Megan and Alex and Lindsay appeared at the doorway. Megan shook her head gently. The children? I don’t know. I’m not sure. Were they smug? Were they sad? Did they find me pathetic? Foolish? I couldn’t tell, and I regret to say that I was on the verge of not giving a shit.

  “Brandeis, we’ve finished our search-and-gather,” said the blond guy.

  “Search-and-gather?” I said. “That’s what you call it? It’s a basic violation of every American privacy law. But frankly, I don’t give a shit. It’s exactly what I was expecting.”

  I surveyed the strangely uncluttered room. The men stood next to their respective black garbage bags. The bald-headed guy read aloud from a large card:

  “Jacob Brandeis, the town and city of New Burg, in the state of Nebraska, have rightfully collected, with approval from the offices of the Nebraska Department of Justice, item or items that are considered of governmental consequence to the people of the state. This material may or may not be returned to you upon completion of examination.”

  There was a pause. Then, continuing to read, the bald-headed guy said:

  “Do you understand the statement I have just read to you?”

  “Sure,” I said. “And you can all burn in hell.”

  Chapter 47

  IT WAS precisely 5:00 a.m. I carefully got out of bed.

  Megan seemed to be sleeping soundly, making tiny sharp nasal sounds somewhere between snoring and loud breathing. I quietly opened the bedroom door and stepped out, closing it behind me. Then I briefly held my ear to the door of Alex’s room. Heavy snoring. Then I listened at the door to Lindsay’s room. I wasn’t absolutely certain that she wasn’t awake, but no light drifted into the hallway from under her bedroom door. I was pretty sure that my three housemates were asleep.

  I walked up the stairway to my barren workroom. Then I removed the red flash drive from my jeans pocket. I snapped the little piece into Megan’s laptop and typed:

  TWENTY-TWENTY

  The True Story of the Store

  by

  Jacob Brandeis

  I pressed Save, then ejected the red flash drive and returned it to my jeans pocket.

  I had stashed my backpack behind two stacks of old BusinessWeek magazines. The backpack itself was filled with a change of clothing, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a yellow legal pad, two pens, a bottle of Lipitor, a fifth of Jack Daniel’s, and my i
Pad, newly loaded with a bunch of classic novels and the first two seasons of House of Cards.

  I was ready to go.

  I closed the door to my workroom and headed down the attic stairs. As I passed by a closed bedroom door I heard a stage whisper: “Daddy, where are you going?”

  It was Lindsay.

  “I’ll be back in a little bit. Don’t worry,” I said.

  The breathy, rasping whisper followed me downstairs: “You really are crazy,” she said.

  Only I could hear my response.

  “So I’ve heard.”

  Chapter 48

  I TOSSED my backpack and a six-pack of Fresca on the passenger seat. With all the surveillance cameras hanging from trees and stoplights, I couldn’t race away, but let’s just say that I challenged the speed limit.

  Where was I headed? The only destination I had in mind was “anyplace that isn’t this place.” Away from my absurd family and town. I was, deep down inside, also hoping to escape from myself—from my overwhelming fear and paranoia.

  I quickly arrived at Interstate 80, the highway that runs from California to New Jersey. I had no idea whether to head west or east. Then I thought: Hey, what about the ski instructor who taught the kids two years ago, when we were on vacation in Vail? Amy and I had become very friendly; Megan thought we had become way too friendly, which, just to let you know, was absolutely untrue. I could call her. She’d remember me. Then my brain returned, and I realized she would have no memory of who I was.

  Bette and Bud were obviously out, and with the pathetic realization that I had no close friends west of the Mississippi, I headed east on I-80. At least I had a former college friend in some Chicago suburb, and I was pretty sure that my cousin the kidney specialist lived in Saint Louis.

  The highway was surprisingly busy for just after 5:00 a.m. My guesses: trucks hauling pigs and cows to slaughterhouses; tankards filled with corn oil, a Nebraska specialty; high-striving yuppies off to their cubicles at the Store.

  The farther I drove, the better I felt. The better I felt, the more certain I was that my book, Twenty-Twenty, was marked for success. The timing is absolutely perfect, I thought, slamming both fists on the steering wheel as I reached the outskirts of Lincoln.

  By seven o’clock that morning I was about to cross the state border into Iowa. It was then that I had what could modestly be called a brainstorm: I would call Anne Gutman, my editor at Writers Place. Sure, she had screwed me over a little by rejecting my and Megan’s music book, but I knew Anne had faith in me. And I knew she would see how hot my manuscript was.

  Yes. Twenty-Twenty. The phrase “marked for success” kept running through my mind. “Marked for success,” like George Orwell’s 1984. His exposé of a cultural nightmare was off by thirty-six years.

  Twenty-Twenty would be right on target.

  Chapter 49

  ONCE ANNE Gutman got over the initial shock of hearing my voice on the phone, she said something I hadn’t heard in a long time.

  “You’re in luck.” Then she added, “I have a friend who lives east of Des Moines in a sweet little town called Goosen Valley. Her name is Maggie Pine, and five years ago she did a magnificent coffee-table book for me on Mennonite quilts.”

  Thirty minutes later I was sitting and eating warm blueberry muffins in a kitchen in Goosen Valley, Iowa. The kitchen had an oak Hoosier cabinet and a collection of nineteenth-century mixing bowls, and Maggie Pine had a sweet face that would prompt a normal human being to trust her. I guess I was no longer a normal human being, because the charming kitchen seemed cold, and Maggie’s sweet face felt unfriendly…at least to me.

  While Maggie went upstairs to wash her face and “run a brush through my mop,” I walked around the backyard herb garden. The basil was sparse and dying. The rosemary plants were still standing tall. And a little plant sign that said BORAGE (I had never heard of it) stood beneath a giant ugly clump of weedy-looking green leaves.

  On the walk to her tiny newspaper office at the Goosen Register (Margaret Pine, editor and only full-time reporter), my new friend and hostess told me how “wonderfully helpful” Anne Gutman had been to her when she was “assembling and writing my quilt tome.”

  “She had me to New York City two times, and she put me up in a hotel on Fifth Avenue with a view of Central Park, hardly a place to think about Mennonite quilts, but I managed.”

  As we walked through the small downtown, I was amazed at how much it resembled New Burg. But this town was real, and by “real” I mean “really real.” The ice cream parlor had a hand-lettered sign above the door that said FOUR GREAT FLAVORS. The library exterior was a harsh mixture of old brick and new aluminum siding. Even the bookstore, called Good Books and Good Things, had a window that held not only books but also other items for sale: china teapots made to resemble cats, school supplies, jars of orange marmalade. New Burg wanted to be just like Goosen Valley; it just couldn’t do it.

  “Is there enough news in this town to fill a weekly newspaper?” I asked Maggie as we sat in her storefront office and she zipped quickly through her e-mail.

  “Well, we do the usual. One of the local teachers, he does the high school sports news. Everyone cares about that. Then I have a part-time woman who does the social news, such as it is. That’s birthday parties and anniversary parties and church news. But…now, don’t you go thinking we’re just a bunch of farmers. We have a monthly book club and read important books, and I don’t mean Fifty Shades of Grey. A retired doctor wrote a very thoughtful piece on eldercare and dementia. And when I did an editorial endorsing same-sex marriage, only two e-mails to the editor criticized me. Thirty-four others cheered me on.”

  I threw my hands up in the air.

  “You got me. Clearly Goosen Valley is the Paris of the Midwest. And I don’t mean that sarcastically. I wish New Burg had been more like this town,” I said.

  “Look,” Maggie said. “Anne gave me a brief synopsis of your problems, at least as she understands them after a short phone conversation. All I can say is that I hope you make peace with yourself. You can stay at my place until you’re ready to move on, Jacob. And with any luck…”

  Suddenly from outside I heard a very big thud. It was mixed with the sound of a buzzing motor. My head snapped toward the storefront window.

  “Not to worry,” Maggie said. “It’s just a drone delivery.”

  Chapter 50

  THAT NIGHT Maggie Pine fed me honey-glazed roasted chicken, lump-free mashed turnips, and, of course, corn on the cob made perfect with lots of butter and salt.

  Maggie was a very pretty red-haired woman, but this pretty woman and this great-tasting meal did not make me long for Maggie. It made me long for the old days in New York with Megan and Alex and Lindsay around the table. I really wanted to phone my family, but I stopped myself every time the idea tempted me. I knew it would be a stupid thing, a really stupid thing, to contact them. Tomorrow I’d be back on the road again. Maybe I’d feel different. Maybe then I’d call, or the next day…or the next…or…

  The guest bedroom in Maggie’s house was straight out of a bed-and-breakfast catalog: a canopy bed with a whole bunch of decorative pillows. The room was also a kind of Mennonite quilt museum—one quilt on the bed, two folded at the foot of the bed, and five others on an old steamer trunk under the window.

  I tried reading one of the books I’d grabbed from Maggie’s shelf, The Good Earth. It only made me wonder how they figured that book deserved the Pulitzer Prize back then.

  I tossed. Then I turned. Then I tossed some more. I remembered what my mother used to say: “When you can’t sleep, it means you’ve got a guilty conscience.” I got up and out of bed.

  When I walked to the window I could see the dark images of “downtown” Goosen Valley, a model of Americana, complete with steeple and water tower. Closer to my window were the branches of a tree that Maggie had identified as an ancient black walnut. The sun was just rising, darkness outside beginning to build to light. Two tiny stars, s
till hanging on in the morning light, sparkled through the branches of the black walnut tree.

  Everything was peaceful for a moment. Even me.

  Chapter 51

  MAYBE I had slept a little bit. Maybe for a few minutes? A half hour? Maybe I had just fallen asleep sitting on the window ledge? Maybe…oh, what the hell difference did it make? Here I was on a chair near the window in Maggie Pine’s guest bedroom. And it was suddenly morning. And I was sort of awake. And I could really use a shower to get totally awake.

  As I walked to the little bathroom attached to the bedroom I noticed a small framed antique sampler hanging on the wall. It said that it was created by a girl named Marie D in the year 1822. It was a line from the Bible:

  Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.

  I sure couldn’t argue with that.

  The bathroom had no shower, only a tub. Bathing in a tub never made sense to me. I’m not a guy who likes soaking in his own dirty water. So I did my best to wash away the previous day’s dirt and sweat by kneeling in front of the bathtub faucet. I let the water run, and I bent my head forward to wash my hair. Then I alternately soaped myself up and splashed myself off to get rid of the soap.

  On the small table near the tub were the perfect props for such a quaint little bathroom: dried flowers in a Mason jar, an engraved antique silver hand mirror, and a matching silver comb. Also on the table was a tin of Yardley talcum powder—lily of the valley.

  I dried myself with a big white towel, then I made a decision that was, for me, a daring one. I doused myself with a lot of the floral-scented powder.

  Because I’d left the bathroom door open, I had no trouble hearing the knock on the bedroom door. Then the door squeaked open.