The Store Read online

  I could not be certain, but I suspected that the round face and wide shoulders I saw in the mirrors belonged to the same cop who gave us the scary-stern warning for jaywalking.

  Why wasn’t he getting out of his police car?

  The light kept whirling. Then another siren. This one from another car, a different police car. Now this new car pulled in front of my own stopped car. Then the siren stopped. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to get out of my car…yet I was vaguely recalling that you’re supposed to stay in your car…on the other hand, if I didn’t get out I might piss off the cops. Suddenly a blast of sound erupted from the loudspeaker on the patrol car behind me.

  Police info for halted vehicle. Police info for halted vehicle.

  Please proceed to place of residence. Repeat. Please proceed to place of residence. Maintain legal speed limit. Proceed now.

  “What are we going to do now, Dad?” Alex asked.

  At that moment I was feeling virtually every feeling a man could feel. I felt furious, stupid, embarrassed. I hooked on furious, of course, and I fired back at my son.

  “Are you deaf? The guy couldn’t have been clearer. We’re supposed to drive home. You know, our goddamn place of residence. You heard him as well as I did.”

  There was a creeping numbness in my arms and hands. But I managed to pull out into the very light traffic. As I did, the police car in front of me anticipated the move. He, too, pulled out, staying in front of me. I couldn’t pass the legal speed limit even if I wanted to.

  Yet in all the chaos and confusion I was suddenly aware that Megan had remained very quiet.

  “Whaddya think?” I said softly.

  “I think we should do what they ask,” she said, equally softly.

  Then from the backseat, Lindsay spoke: “Any ideas, Daddy?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Nothing?” Alex asked.

  They seemed just short of stunned that the dad with all the answers—“You work with your knees for a jump shot”; “A little more reading and a little less computer wouldn’t kill you”—had absolutely no answer.

  In almost no time—no time at all—it seemed that we were turning into our driveway. I glanced up at the surveillance cameras, still there. I saw a neighbor trimming the bushes under her dining-room window.

  The cop cars stopped in front of and behind me.

  I was uncertain whether or not my family and I should exit the car. Then the front patrol car made a U-turn and left the driveway. The one behind me remained.

  I was expecting something bad. The police officer behind me stepped out of his car. He walked toward my car. He motioned us to exit. I unlocked the doors. We stepped out.

  Yes, it was indeed the same pink-faced asshole who had stopped us for jaywalking, who lectured us and frightened us and pretty much humiliated us.

  “So there you are,” the officer said with a big fat smile on his big fat face. “The Brandeis family got a fancy police escort home. The New Burg police wanted to prove that we can be your enemy…or we can be your friend.”

  He gave us an informal two-finger salute and walked back to his car. He opened the car door. Just before he got in he spoke.

  “You all have a nice day, now.”

  Chapter 12

  THAT SATURDAY night, after a drone had delivered a delicious dinner of veal parmigiana, arugula salad, and pizza margherita from the Pizza Store (we were quickly embracing the various conveniences of living in the world of the Store), Megan and I settled into our “office” in the attic—a tiny corner space where we had decided to write our tell-all book.

  People told us the dry heat of the Midwest would be a relief after the humid heat of Manhattan. They lied. Our attic was scorching. The central air-conditioning didn’t reach that far up, and the fan served mainly to toss around our index cards and printer paper.

  We had chosen the attic in case there were still some cameras we may have missed in other rooms. Yes, a few spycams were most likely hidden in the attic (we’re not that naive), but after we removed two that were attached to wooden roof beams we thought we had a good shot at privacy.

  But who the hell knew with these people?

  One lightbulb dangled over the small card table we were using as a desk. The heat was so intense that we had stripped down to our underwear. The ice cubes melted in our iced coffees.

  Most of the house felt like it had been built the previous week, but the attic looked like it was two hundred years old: cobwebs and rodent droppings on most of the beams, creaking floorboards, and, in the stifling heat, something we couldn’t explain—an occasional shot of very cold air.

  More troubling than that, however, was the question Megan asked before we had written a single word of our book.

  “How did this happen, Jacob? How did we end up sitting half naked in a hundred-and-ten-degree attic in Nebraska writing a book about some insane company?”

  It was a good question, one that I had also been pondering. Unfortunately I didn’t have the remotest idea of a good response.

  “Maybe we’re just destined to write this book,” I said.

  “Not to be cynical, sweetie, but that’s way too strange an answer—like God wants us to write the book.”

  “Not God,” I said. “But I don’t know. Maybe fate.”

  “‘Fate’ is just shorthand for ‘God.’”

  “I guess,” I said. “But it does seem that everything just kind of came together—the rap book being turned down, our becoming really aware of the Store, then our needing the job and the money. It’s like we enlisted in the army for a war, kind of a holy war.”

  “I guess,” she said, but it was clear that we were both a little scared. She went on. “If we get caught, we’ll be…well, I can’t even imagine what they could do to us.”

  “Ugga-bugga,” I said.

  “Ugga-bugga is right,” Megan answered. No smile. Yes, we definitely were scared. Then she said, “Why don’t we just get to work?”

  And so we did. Both Megan and I used the same system when we were writing nonfiction. We wrote everything, every little piece of fact or opinion or interview quotation, on index cards. We filed them and sorted them and filed them again. We kept small files of cards as subfiles of large files. Eventually we would have thousands of cards, stored carefully and sorted precisely, in hundreds of plastic boxes (which, of course, we bought from a stationery supplier on the Store’s website).

  Although, like most people our age, we lived our lives excessively on our laptops, we could not find a satisfying way to put our nonfiction research on the computer. We somehow needed to see the shoe boxes, to riffle through them, to move the index cards and Post-it notes around as new information came into the work.

  Oh, we still used the Internet a lot.

  The original Indian name of New Burg, Nebraska? Go to Google. (The name, by the way, is an anglicized form of nom-bah, the Quapaw word for the number 2.)

  Do consumers believe there is a significant difference between items bought online and those purchased in brick-and-mortar stores? Hello, Google. (Turns out that most people don’t care.)

  That night, however, we were mainly in index-card territory. A number of cards were written about Deb the librarian and her husband, who had been “transferred.” There were about ten cards about the guy coming out of the Pizza Store. Brick Street meeting Mortar Street. The surveillance-camera search. The neighbors who came to help. The cop and his kind “warning.” On and on and on.

  Our number 2 pencils scratched away, interrupted only by an unexpected whoosh of icy air.

  Our shoulders seemed to start aching at about the same time. We arched our backs. We stretched our arms.

  Then Megan said, “When did they deliver that box over there?”

  I looked around. She pointed to a box marked THE STORE HOME OFFICE SUPPLIES.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “Is it stuff you ordered?”

  “No. I haven’t ordered a thing since we got to New Burg.” />
  We walked the few yards to the box. It was snuggled under a wooden slope in the roof. We opened it easily enough and looked inside: two cellophane-wrapped packages of number 2 pencils, fifteen packets of index cards in various sizes and colors, a small cardboard box containing ten Rolling Writer pens, and, weirdest of all, two thick memo pads. One said FROM THE DESK OF MEGAN BRANDEIS. The other was identical except, of course, it had my name at the top.

  “Are you sure you didn’t order these?” Megan asked. “I mean, Jesus, it’s exactly the stuff we use.”

  “Yeah, like the peanut butter and the cereal they had for us.” Both of us simply did not want to discuss it.

  It was almost 2:00 a.m. And it was clearly time to call it a night.

  “Somehow I feel about ten times more awake than I did when we started,” Megan said.

  “Good. Let’s not waste the energy,” I said. “Pull up the Store site.”

  Megan threw me a what-are-you-up-to look, but the site came up, and the page read as it always did:

  Welcome to the Store

  It’s All You Need in Life

  I took the laptop from her, and Megan watched over my shoulder as I tapped away.

  I went to “The Store for Books.” This is how the Store had begun its merchandising conquest of the world—selling books. They maintained the largest collection of books in the world, bigger than the collection at the Library of Congress. Classics, bestsellers, textbooks, kids’ books, porn—everything you could imagine putting between two covers.

  In addition to all those traditional books was a unique section: “Request a Book You’d Like to See Written.” This section of the Store website was filled with title suggestions for books that didn’t yet exist—How to Spay Your Pet at Home (I swear) and The Tao of Algorithms were two of many thousands.

  I moved to the subsection headlined with the letter U. There, right after the title The Ultimate Book of Zen Orchestral Accompaniment, I clicked on “Submit your book request.”

  I carefully typed in “Ulysses: The Perfect Sleep Aid.”

  The following sentence filled the screen: “We’ll get to your request as soon as possible. Check back frequently.”

  I looked at Megan, who was laughing. Then we kissed.

  The kiss was filled with a mixture of love and sex and fear.

  “I hope they have a sense of humor,” Megan said.

  “We’ll soon find out.”

  “Yeah,” said Megan. “We’ll check back frequently.”

  “But for now, let’s beat it,” I said.

  “Yes, let’s. I’m getting really cold,” Megan said.

  I looked at my computer screen. It read: TIME: 2:14 A.M. TEMP: 45 F.

  Chapter 13

  “HEY, IT’S Sunday,” I said. “Let’s all go to church.”

  From the astonished expressions on my family’s faces and the long silence that followed, I might as well have said, “Let’s all go to Mars.”

  Alex spoke first. “What’s up with you, Dad? Are you, like, trying out a stand-up comedy routine?”

  I didn’t respond, but fifteen minutes later, the kids having opted to stay home, Megan and I—she in a yellow dress printed with white daisies, I in a blue linen blazer—were driving toward the only church in New Burg for the eleven o’clock service.

  The two of us were not particularly religious. As a couple, the last time we had been in a house of worship was eighteen years earlier, when we got married at the Larchmont Temple. Then we were in a holy place because of love. This time we were going for research.

  The church was called the New Burg Church of God, a perfectly okay name but without a touch of creativity to it. You know, like Catholic churches called the Most Precious Blood of Jesus or Our Lady, Sorrowful Star of the Sea. Same with temples whose names always sounded like my grandmother’s Yiddish expressions: Anshe Emeth Shalom or Temple Shaaray Tefila.

  At 10:55 the church parking lot was packed. Whatever they were selling at the New Burg Church of God, the people of New Burg were certainly buying it. Latecomers like us, arriving only a few minutes before curtain time, had to park at the far end of the lot.

  We got out of the car and instinctively tugged at our clothes and patted our hair. Megan and I were strangers in a strange land.

  Then we heard a voice.

  “Don’t worry. You both look just fine.”

  It was a man’s voice—slow, deep, and slightly slurred—and it was coming from the passenger side of a car parked directly next to ours. Megan and I flashed embarrassed smiles, and I said something inane: “Thank you very much. So do you.”

  “Well, frankly, we don’t. See for yourself,” said the man.

  He opened the car door, stood up, and stretched himself out to about six feet tall. He was dark-skinned, maybe East Indian, maybe Mediterranean. His hair was sloppy, and his sport shirt was wrinkled, but he was also handsome. He had that I-just-swam-in-the-ocean look that a lot of women seem to like.

  His female companion moved out from the driver’s side. She was pretty hot. She was almost as tall as he was, with long blond hair. Both of them looked about our age.

  Something else got out of the car with them—the thick, sweet, beautiful scent of marijuana smoke. I know there’s no such thing as a contact high, but if I were ever going to get one, that would have been the time. Our parking-lot neighbors must have been smoking with the car windows rolled up, because the smell of weed was moving toward us like a tiny cyclone.

  “My name is Bud, Bud Robinson, and the slightly stoned blonde over there is my wife, Bette—that’s Bette with an e, not a y—and you do pronounce the e.”

  I was still processing the spelling and pronunciation of Bette’s name when I saw Bud looking at his cell phone. He began reading aloud.

  “And you two are Megan and Jacob Brandeis. Jacob, a former writer and an NYU grad. Megan, also a former writer and—woo-hoo—a Stanford grad.”

  Bette was exhaling from a long hit on the joint they were sharing. Then she spoke. “It’s all kinda creepy, isn’t it?”

  Bud built on her question: “Ya know, how everybody knows everything about everyone else. That’s the Store for you.”

  “Is it all because of the Store?” Megan asked.

  We were both being cautious.

  The response to Megan’s question was a burst of laughter from Bette and Bud. My translation of their laughter was: “Are you two so simple that you couldn’t figure that out for yourselves?”

  Bette had passed the joint to Bud. He had taken a hit. Then he offered it to Megan.

  Megan took it, took a small puff, then handed the joint to me. It was pretty clear that we were going to be late for church.

  Bud rubbed his head and spoke.

  “Now, the other thing it says on my old handheld here is that you live at 400 Midshipman Lane. We live at 420 Midshipman.”

  “I guess that makes you the only people in the neighborhood who didn’t come and help us unpack,” Megan said.

  “We were preoccupied with recreation, if you know what I mean,” Bud said, and he tipped his head toward the new joint he was rolling.

  Then Bette said, “I’m just curious. I like asking all the newcomers this question.”

  “Shoot,” I said.

  “Have you found the surveillance cameras yet?”

  “Well, uh…yeah,” I said. Then Megan added, “The first night here.”

  “I’ve got some advice for you,” Bud said. “Don’t even bother trying to remove those cameras.”

  “Too late,” I said.

  “The Store’ll just sneak them back in. They’ve probably got a robot drone in your house right now, messing around with all new cameras.”

  Bud inhaled the weed deeply, and he let it out slowly.

  “You folks going into the church service?” he asked.

  “I guess we should. Better late—” I said.

  “You don’t have to go in,” Bette said. She then explained that last year they learned that
the surveillance cameras took attendance by recording the cars entering the parking lot, not by recording the people actually entering the church.

  “Are you sure of that?” I asked.

  “Not really,” Bette said. “With the Store you can never be absolutely sure of anything.”

  I realized that I was liking these people. This cool guy and his hot wife. Yet I was afraid to like them too much.

  I don’t think Bette could read my mind, but she sure could read the situation. Suddenly but calmly she said, “I bet you two are thinking, ‘We just met these people. Can we trust them?’”

  Megan and I smiled. Nervously.

  Then I said, “Well, can we? Can we trust you?”

  Bud’s voice was full of hearty laughter as he spoke.

  “Of course not! Are you crazy? We work for the Store.”

  Chapter 14

  MONDAY MORNING Megan and I went to work. At the Store fulfillment center.

  Eighteen buildings covering three square miles. Eighteen buildings connected by causeways and tunnels and bridges and trams with miles of escalators and conveyor belts in between. Drones flew above the buildings, and humans in navy-blue jumpsuits worked within them.

  NO WORRIES

  That was the sign that hung on the walls, on the backs of chairs, on the free soda machines, the free snack machines, the free coffee-cappuccino-espresso machines.

  NO WORRIES

  That was the sign that hung over the thousands of video monitors, over the entrances and exits, even over the urinals in the men’s rooms.

  Of course Megan and I had nothing but worries. Would we be caught taking notes? Would we be found out?

  We had just joined thousands of workers. Hundreds of those workers said, “Welcome, friends” as we were escorted by a smiling young woman to the fulfillment center’s underground garage. It was in that massive garage that we saw our first Stormer, a computer-controlled driverless vehicle.

  If a golf cart and a Porsche had given birth, their offspring would be a Stormer, an efficient merchandise-gathering machine that plied the lanes of the fulfillment-center buildings. Gatherers like Megan and me jumped on and off to gather what everyone at the Store called the stuff.