The Store Read online

“Please, Jacob. Let’s move on.”

  And move on we did. The next question was for Lindsay.

  “If you could visit just one place in the world for a week, where would that place be?”

  Oh, please don’t say New York, sweetie, I thought. I shouldn’t have worried.

  She answered: “The moon.”

  “Interesting…now, Megan, are you still in touch with any of your friends from elementary school?”

  “Megan, tell me one thing about Jacob that no one else in the room knows.”

  “Alex, what was your favorite toy as a child?”

  “Jacob, tell me two things about your wife that you find extremely irritating.”

  “Megan, what’s your ideal weight?”

  “Alex, do you care if someone is gay or lesbian?”

  “Jacob, if you could only wear a shirt of the same color for the rest of your life, what would that color be?”

  And so it went: sports teams, jobs, religion, sex, animals, food, education, the future, the past, and, finally, the Store.

  “Is the Store perfect?”

  Megan said, “Almost.”

  Alex said, “I really don’t know.”

  Lindsay said, “I guess so.”

  “And you, Jacob. Is the Store perfect?”

  “Nothing on earth is perfect.”

  Chapter 18

  THE CAR ride home from the “testing center.” The click of the doors locking. The click of the seat belts fastening. We were like a chorus bursting with the same inevitable question: “So what did you think?”

  We all asked it almost at once, and everyone except Lindsay jumped to answer it. Lindsay said she was too fearful of cameras and recording devices in the car to have a conversation. But the rest of us? We couldn’t wait to talk about the interview. The hell with surveillance.

  Megan said, “It was both better and worse than I had imagined. And I don’t think it should have been done as a group. What kind of kid wants to answer tough questions about his parents when the parents are right in the room?”

  “I thought it was all creepy,” Alex said. “Justin was creepy. The room was creepy. And the questions were stupid. What difference does it make if you want to play the trumpet or play baseball or whether you wish you were taller? I mean, the whole thing was just to make sure you want to be part of this stupid place.”

  I agreed with all their observations. And I said so. It was creepy and embarrassing…and also exhausting. Hours of questions about your past, present, and future. Then I added a useless comment: “Well, at least it’s over.” But of course I knew I was lying, and they knew I was lying.

  That’s when Lindsay spoke. “Is it really over, Daddy? Won’t there just be more bullshit? More nonsense? We take down the cameras, and they put them back up. They know you have a nut allergy. They know what toothpaste we use. They…” But then she squeezed her eyes tight. The tears seeped out anyway.

  “Come on, sweetie,” Megan said, unbuckling her seat belt and reaching toward the backseat. She took Lindsay’s hand and squeezed it.

  “Look. Once your mother and I…” I started to say, but was interrupted by Alex, whose voice was loud and high.

  “Speaking of books: holy shit! Will you look at that?”

  I pulled over and slammed on the brakes. To our left was the town library, which Megan and I had visited a few days earlier. Only something was very different: the library had been closed down.

  Wooden boards covered the windows. A thick steel chain and a few big padlocks prevented anyone from entering. The flagpoles held no flags. Even the lawn was suddenly scraggly and in need of watering.

  “What’s going on?” Megan asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “But whatever it is…it’s sure as hell not good.”

  We all looked at it for a few seconds, then I twisted myself around to face all three members of my family.

  “Get out of the car. Everybody. Now. This minute,” I said.

  They looked frightened, but they moved fast. Within seconds we were on the cracked sidewalk in front of the derelict little building.

  “You think there’s a bomb in the car, Dad?” Alex asked.

  “No,” I said. “But I’m sure there’s some sort of hidden recording device.”

  Their faces were filled with anxiety.

  “Listen, and listen carefully. This town isn’t a game or a joke. This place is scary as hell. From now on—and I really don’t know what else to say—from now on we’ve all got to be very, very careful.”

  I watched as Alex fought to hold back his tears.

  I watched as Megan drew the children close to her.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” said Lindsay. “But I’m really scared.”

  “That makes three of us, sweetie,” Megan said.

  “No,” I said. “That makes four of us.”

  Chapter 19

  WE HAVE friends whose apartments have been burglarized. They all say the same thing: “It feels like we’ve been violated.”

  I was learning how those friends must have felt. It seemed like every time we left our house, somebody or something from the Store came in. When we arrived home in the late afternoon after our “interview,” we discovered that it had happened once again.

  We walked into our house, and Megan said, “Looks like we’re having barbecue for dinner.” Sure enough, on the kitchen counter were a platter of pork ribs, a bowl of mashed sweet potatoes, and squares of buttered cornbread.

  The only thing that amazed me was this: we weren’t amazed. We were beginning to realize that being violated was part of life in New Burg.

  Our intruders must have had a busy time in our house. The broken hinges on the coat closet had been tightened; the clean clothes in the laundry room had been folded and put away. Megan said, “This is sort of sick. Someone—a person I don’t even know—is touching…well, touching my underpants, and it’s just perverted.”

  “Violated,” I said. “It makes you feel violated.” Megan shook her head.

  Then Alex spoke. As was often the case, he was standing in front of the open refrigerator.

  “Hey, Mom, remember how I asked you to drone in some Mountain Dew the next time you were droning in groceries, and you said no?”

  “What I actually said was…no way. It has too much sugar in it.”

  “I read that it has one cup of corn syrup in every twelve ounces,” Professor Lindsay added.

  “Well, whoever’s been sneaking around here doesn’t seem to agree. There’s two six-packs of Dew in the fridge.”

  Upstairs the beds had been made. Our bathroom cabinet had been stocked with Megan’s special prescription soap. The…then I stopped taking inventory and said, “Oh, shit. I gotta go see something.”

  I ran up the attic stairs. To our “book office.” And sure enough, our messy piles of index cards had been straightened out. A new box of toner sat on the floor next to the printer. And—holy shit!—they had put an air conditioner in the tiny window near our work desk.

  “Megan,” I shouted. “Come up here!”

  “I can’t. Someone’s at the back door.”

  By the time I’d made it down both flights of stairs, Megan and Lindsay were walking quickly toward the kitchen.

  “Did you see on the monitor who’s at the door?” I said.

  “Who do you think? It’s Fred and Ethel.”

  “Who are Fred and Ethel?” Lindsay said.

  “Forget it, honey. It was before your time,” Megan said.

  “Hell. It was before our time.”

  Megan opened the door for Bette and Bud. Hugs and kisses all around.

  “Heard you were having barbecue tonight. Thought we’d invite ourselves over. But we come bearing gifts, too,” Bud said.

  “Homemade peach pie and a bowl of real whipped cream,” Bette said.

  We didn’t bother asking how they knew what our dinner plans were. We had already learned by then that the magical Store tablets disseminated whatever informa
tion they wanted people to know.

  We settled down in the living room, and all four of us had a glass of Jackie D, as Bud called the Jack Daniel’s bourbon he seemed to love so much.

  “Nothing like an icy Jackie D and ginger ale on a hot night.”

  Damn it, I thought. I have a question, and I’m going to ask it. Yeah, I knew the surveillance cameras were whirling away. I knew there was no such thing as privacy in our own home. I didn’t really care. So I asked.

  “When you guys are away from your house, like shopping or at work…well, do people come in and do stuff? Change stuff? Like make the bed or put new grouting in the bathtub?”

  Both Bette and Bud chuckled. But I could swear that there was a kind of nervousness behind their laughter.

  “When we first got here stuff like that happened all the time. But then it stopped, and I think it’s ’cause they figured out we’re too ornery to care,” Bud said.

  “We’re not the cooperative types by nature,” Bette added.

  A strange pause stopped the conversation. Then Bette broke the silence.

  “Of course, this is New Burg. So you can’t be sure when we say something that we’re telling the truth,” she said.

  Another awkward pause. Megan took a sip of her Jackie D. Then she spoke.

  “And of course you can’t assume that Jacob and I are telling the truth, either.”

  “Well, I guess not,” Bud said.

  Then all four of us laughed.

  Megan didn’t have to say anything else. I knew what she was thinking.

  Ugga-bugga.

  Chapter 20

  BETTE AND Bud went home right after dinner, but we were happy to see that half a peach pie remained. Alex and Lindsay wandered into their worlds of Facebook and Instagram. And Megan and I went to work in our newly air-conditioned attic office. It was almost eleven o’clock, but we had the energy of two people who were just beginning their day.

  “This is the thing I’ve been wanting to show you all night,” Megan said as she tapped furiously away at her laptop.

  “Don’t look over my shoulder,” she said. “I want to have it all up on the screen.”

  After a few more seconds of my pretending not to look over her shoulder, she said, “Okay, now you can look. But understand. This isn’t one big document. I simply cut and pasted a bunch of stuff I had downloaded and put all the pieces in one file. I’m calling the file LOLB.”

  “I give up. What does LOLB stand for?”

  “Lots of legal bullshit.”

  “Oh, I should have been able to guess that,” I said sarcastically, but she was ignoring me.

  “Go ahead, now,” she said. “Take a look.”

  It was extraordinary.

  Bottom line: twenty-seven states had passed legislation that was clearly designed to be favorable to the Store. Oh, sure, the words the Store were never mentioned, but Megan and I knew what was going on.

  The Connecticut General Assembly had passed what was listed as a “consumer beneficiary act.” It prohibited any “land-based establishment” (that meant any brick-and-mortar store) from “reissuing pricing to coordinate with online offers without a seven-day interval.”

  Translation: if the Store had a Black & Decker power drill on sale for twenty-nine dollars, the town hardware store had to wait seven days before it could lower its price to match the Store’s.

  In Chicago, the aldermen had passed an act that was “designed for the financial improvement of the low-income housing access incentive,” allowing the city to give “free-of-charge electronic tablets and computers to all households with incomes below twenty-four thousand dollars. Within the first three months, said tablets and computers will only be able to access websites with retail marketing content.”

  Translation: the poor people of Chicago could get crappy free computers programmed only to allow them to visit sites where they could buy stuff. That would mean supermarkets and other big box stores, but it would overwhelmingly mean that they’d be clicking on the Store site, buying all sorts of shit they couldn’t afford and getting deeper into credit card debt.

  The pro-Store amendments and acts and laws rolled on and on.

  Not surprisingly, Nebraska had more pro-Store acts than any other state. It was as if Nebraska were preparing for a day when the Store would rule the state. The legislature in Lincoln had enacted environmentally dangerous rules in preparation for a time when the skies would be so blackened by drones that millions of trees would have to be cut down.

  In Florida it was assumed that Cubans would soon be flocking in huge numbers to South Florida, so why not pass a law that allowed “temporary” immigrants to be paid less than minimum wage? That’s what the state senate in Tallahassee did.

  The new air conditioner was working hard, but it could not stop our blood from boiling.

  “This makes me want to vomit,” I said.

  “And that’s putting it nicely,” Megan said.

  Megan said that she would forward me the entire file immediately. Then she very wisely suggested that we hand-copy the information onto index cards and erase all electronic evidence from our computers. We both assumed that electronic spying was more likely than conducting a home invasion in order to steal hard copy. (Yeah, I know. Never assume.)

  “When I say ‘erase,’ I mean erase,” Megan said.

  Not a problem for us. One of Megan’s “freelance from hell” jobs was writing a ten-page instruction booklet called “Ten Computer Hacks That Anyone Can Learn.” So she knew how to scrub a computer completely clean, way beyond the useless “Clear History” procedure that most of us amateurs use. (Yeah, I know this, too. There’s no such thing as completely clean.)

  Before I dug into the LOLB file, I pursued a Store-related project of my own. I had taken on the job of assembling information on the original founder of the Store. You’d think it would be easy to google and surf your way to a pile of facts about Thomas P. Owens, but information was shockingly scarce. Owens was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1939. That made him around seventy-eight years old now. He was living in Arizona, and he owned another residence in New York City. He had founded the Store about twenty years ago. It was a sloppy-looking, primitive website where Owens sold books, office supplies, and, of all things, long-forgotten candy brands like Necco Wafers and Bonomo Turkish Taffy.

  The business (then called Your Store) was successful enough to rate an article in the Wall Street Journal and Crain’s New York Business. In 1998 Owens sold the Store to an investment group.

  And I couldn’t find a damn thing about the guy from that day on.

  My fingers were dancing on the keyboard when Megan said, “Have you read the file on the LOLB stuff?”

  “Not yet. I’m about to. I was just doing some follow-ups on Thomas P. Owens.”

  “Yeah. Well, drop everything, buddy, and step over here. This is going to knock your head off.”

  Chapter 21

  CONFIDENTIAL

  READ THE FOLLOWING BEFORE PROCEEDING

  This electronic communication is for your eyes only. It will self-destruct within an hour of its opening. It is immune from forwarding, printing, and alteration. It is photography-immune. While some readers may wish to copy part or all of this communication, any publicized content will be categorically denied by the sender.

  RECIPIENTS: Senator Kathleen Langston, Senator Julio Ramiro Munoz, Senator Franklin Peterson, Senator Dominick Roselli

  FROM: Senator William Ward

  SUBJECT: Constitutional Amendment XXVIII

  This will serve as the final follow-up to our conversation of last Tuesday at the Four Seasons Hotel.

  At that meeting it was decided to advance the cause of a constitutional amendment abolishing all sales tax on consumer goods purchased over the Internet if more than 50 percent of the goods in any given purchase are manufactured in the United States.

  I am pleased to report that I have had several conversations with Roger Kendrick, CEO and president of TheStore.com. He h
as endorsed the idea enthusiastically.

  Gathering votes for a constitutional amendment is no small task, yet polls that TheStore.com has conducted privately indicate that it can be accomplished. As such, I am suggesting we create a call-on list of our Senate colleagues and, further, that we designate two of us to visit the Oval Office.

  I have made arrangements for our specific group of five to meet secretly Sunday evening at 8:00 p.m. in suite PH3 at the Ritz-Carlton in Georgetown.

  Accomplishing our goal of passage of Amendment XXVIII will be great for America, great for TheStore.com, and great for the five of us.

  WW/pb

  As I read the secret memorandum on the computer screen, my arms and legs were actually shaking. The only thing I could say was the ever-useful “Holy shit!” And I said it more than once.

  “Is this for real?” I asked.

  “For real.”

  “Double holy shit!”

  Members of the US Senate were plotting to add an amendment to the Constitution that would make the Store the most important and profitable company in America—and probably the world.

  I grasped Megan’s shoulders gently. “How’d you get this?” I asked.

  Without missing a beat, she said, “I hacked it.”

  “You hacked it?” I said. “When did—”

  “Don’t, Jacob. Don’t ask. Don’t worry about it. I just learned,” she said.

  This skill seemed way more advanced than the information in her computer hacking booklet.

  “Megan, this is serious shit. We could get killed for this,” I said.

  She stood up and faced me.

  “No, Jacob. This is serious shit because five senators are totally screwing with the people of the United States. This is serious shit because the Store is on some weird goddamn track to…I don’t know…take over the world. Are we going to do this research right or not? If the answer is no, then let’s get the hell back to New York and forget about New Burg and the Store and our book.”