The Hope Store Read online

  THE

  HOPE STORE

  a novel

  Dwight Okita

  Copyright © 2017 Dwight Okita

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1548379124

  ISBN-10: 1548379123

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.

  The First Edition was published in May 2017 through Kindle Direct Publishing. The Second Edition was published August 2017. The Third Edition was published through KDP after merging with CreateSpace. The font is Garamond 14.

  I dedicate this book to those

  who love to read novels and live alternate lives.

  Without you, I am shouting into the void.

  And to those amazing people

  who make my life fun and worth living.

  I see you at my slumber parties

  and I see you in my dreams.

  SYNOPSIS

  Two Asian American men, Luke and Kazu, discover a bold new procedure to import hope into the hopeless. They vow to open the world's first Hope Store. Their slogan: "We don't just instill hope. We install it." The media descend. Customer Jada Upshaw arrives at the store with a hidden agenda, but what happens next no one could have predicted. Meanwhile an activist group called The Natural Hopers emerges warning that hope installations are a risky, Frankenstein-like procedure and vow to shut down the store.

  Luke comes to care about Jada, and marvels at her Super-Responder status. But in dreams begin responsibilities, and often unimaginable nightmares soon follow. If science can't save Jada, can she save herself -- or will she wind up as collateral damage?

  WORKS BY DWIGHT OKITA

  NOVELS

  THE PROSPECT OF MY ARRIVAL

  Finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards

  THE HOPE STORE

  The book you're holding in your hands

  BEFORE I DISAPPEAR

  Novel-in-progress about a Chicago journalist's close encounter with

  love, reincarnation & gun lobbyists.

  POETRY

  CROSSING WITH THE LIGHT

  Poetry book, Tia Chucha Press

  Various poems have been reprinted in the following: Norton Introduction to Poetry, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), Hyphen Magazine, Breaking Silence (Greenfield Review Press), Premonitions (Kaya Production), Nit & Wit, Unsettling America (Penguin), Celebrate America in Poetry and Art (Smithsonian/Hyperion), and textbooks by Holt Rinehart Winston, McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Bedford/St. Martin's, and Macmillan among others.

  PLAYS

  RICHARD SPECK

  Commissioned & produced by American Blues Theatre

  THE RAINY SEASON

  Produced by Zebra Crossing Theatre/North Avenue Productions,

  published in Asian American Drama, Applause Books

  THE SPIRIT GUIDE

  Selected & presented at the HBO New Writers Project

  CONTENTS

  P E R I L

  1. I Come Unarmed

  2. Boomerang

  3. Garden Variety

  4. A Guided Tour

  5. What Matters

  6. Superstitious

  7. An Imaginary Life

  8 The Epidemic

  9. Party Crasher

  10. Tsunami

  11. A Parallel World

  12. Shame On You

  13. Important Meetings

  14. Small Humans

  R E S U R R E C T I O N

  15. Our Public Awaits Us

  16. Evil Spirits

  17. Audition

  18. The Magnetic Moment

  19. Check-In

  20. Weeks of Wonder

  21. Complex

  22. At The Movies

  23. A Dimming

  24. Hopers in Transition

  25. You Are Here

  26. Doghouse

  27. Famous

  28. Fancy People

  29. A Tiny Paper World

  Q U A N D A R Y

  30. Wide Awake

  31. Pre-Heated

  32. When You Believed

  33. Lovers and Lawyers

  34. A Good Man

  35. Encore

  36. Portal

  37. A Tough Room

  38. Loose Cannons

  39. A Parallel Girl

  40. Lucky People

  41. A Private Person

  42. Close Your Eyes

  43. Still Here

  44. Chopper

  PERIL

  "They say these evenings open up like parachutes

  and each night someone is saved: by string,

  white silk filling with air, snagging on the sky."

  -- from the poem "Parachute"

  -- OCTOBER --

  “Please excuse my daughter from school. She does not feel well.

  She may never feel well again.”

  JADA

  1. I COME UNARMED

  My name is Jada Upshaw.

  I started out as a girl without dreams and grew up to be a woman without a future.

  Mind you, it's not a story I'm especially proud to tell, but if I'm at a party and someone asks me what my story is, that's what I tell them. It's a conversation stopper all right, but whatcha gonna do?

  In my teenage years, I was diagnosed with a rare condition called desina sperara which means I was "born without the breath of hope." (If you say desina sperara quickly, you can see where the word desperate comes from.) My condition has something to do with a breakdown in the brain's reward system. My shrink says I have to work harder to process and pursue rewarding experiences, but basically, it means my pleasure center is totally shot and the act of hoping is just not in my bag of tricks.

  Despite my impairment, I managed to get a degree in graphic design (I liked the idea of making the world look more beautiful than it really is) and for a decade I held a job at a bank doing mind-numbing print ads about IRAs and ATMs. I'd still be there if it wasn't for my catastrophic hope breakdown which led experts to say, "Put this woman on disability! Pronto!"

  For those of you still listening, my name is pronounced JAY-duh -- as in jaded, as in been there /done that/won't be doing it again anytime soon. Today is the kind of dreary fall morning that Chicago can be so famous for -- dark and foreboding with 78% chance of rain. I'm sitting near the windows at Rendezvous Cafe nursing my Plain Jane latte, spending money I don't have. Though I'm surrounded by an army of laptops, I come unarmed and in peace, unless you count the two precious children, Angie and Willis, by my side as weapons as I sometimes do. They're my sister's kids and she conned me into taking them out in public by paying me three times my normal babysitting fee. I think she got the better end of the deal.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see the kids have decided to sit down at a table with a complete stranger. Lovely. I feel the need to save the man. I walk over to his table. "Uh, guys, seriously. You can't just plop yourselves down at this nice man's table without asking."

  The man seems more amused than annoyed. "I don't mind. Cute kids," he says and proceeds to type on his Mac.

  "Yeah, they're not mine," I say and smile. I yank them gently back to my table and order mocha iced lattes to keep them occupied.

  From time to time the man steals a glance at me. I guess I look all right for a forty-something woman. I have long straightened hair (thanks to a Spoil Me Salon gift certificate) and pleasant enough features. Picture Mary Tyler Moore if she were African-American and you're getting warm, though I'm not likely to throw my hat up into the air no matter how, uh, you know, uh, what's the word, exuberant I may feel. (If you're too young to remember Mary Tyle
r Moore, google her. She's an important part of our collective TV history.) I don't think I've ever been accused of being exuberant, but I can flash a smile on the outside even when I'm feeling nothing on the inside. Still, at a party, I'd be easy to overlook. You might look at me and say, "Now here's a woman with no story to tell," but you'd be wrong. My deep brown eyes see everything. There's no hiding from eyes like these.

  My goal today is to enjoy my coffee on this cool fall day, write two pages in my journal, and keep the kids from trashing the place. I open my spiral notebook and pull out a pen. I stare at the blank white page but nothing comes. Suddenly, I feel I'm being watched.

  "You know what your problem is, Aunt Jada?" says Angie. "You don't have any self steam. My teacher is teaching us to build up our self steam." Willis nods supportively.

  I smile at them. "Self steam, huh? Maybe I need to go back to school and get some of that myself." I know she meant to say self-esteem but why correct her? Every person needs a healthy dose of self steam to get their engine running.

  Eventually the kids start to slow down. Willis and Angie are quietly drawing pictures on their paper placemats and that's just fine with me. My eyes wander over to a huge poster that fascinates me. It is of the Sutro Baths in San Francisco, a huge steel and glass structure from the turn of the century that was considered quite ground-breaking for its day. Large steel and glass structures, especially of this size, had not been built before. They called the structure a naturarium and the water source was actually the Pacific Ocean. Somehow the indoor water pool was connected to the ocean so folks were swimming in real saltwater.

  I study the bathers, men and women, in their modest bathing suits. I wonder if I would have been happier in that era. At the Sutro Baths, if a person no longer wanted to swim, no longer wanted to be a part of this world -- all they had to do was stop paddling, stop fighting, and just let the water take them. They would sink like a stone to the bottom and never be heard from again. Their bodies would pass through a membrane and float out to sea.

  Last night when I was getting ready for bed I saw a story on CNN that caught my attention. There's a scientist -- an Asian guy, some mad scientist type with a pocket protector -- working on a new technique for increasing the amount of hope in hopeless people. To him, I say Good luck with that, sir. But don't expect me to hold my breath for a miracle. It takes a while for a new procedure to get the FDA seal of approval.

  By then, I'll be dead. I plan to have checked out of the Hotel of Life. If things go according to plan, I should be history before the start of the new year…just three months away. One-third the time it takes to make a baby. Three small pages torn from a wall calendar, and then it's adios.

  “Those who start life hopeless rarely acquire it later on. Those who are hopeful in their early years can sometimes lose hope. Can hopefulness be acquired? Can it be conjured or created? Some scientists think so.”

  -- AlternaScience Magazine

  LUKE

  2. BOOMErANG

  My name is Luke Nagano.

  I came into this world as a boy with a big heart but no idea where to put it.

  In kindergarten during nap time we spread our blankets on the cold linoleum floor. Donna, a blond girl with short bangs, kept staring at me as we napped. Finally, she smiled at me and said, "Aren't you gonna talk? You got to talk sometime." I pretended to be sleeping, but I heard her loud and clear. In order for me to speak, however, I had to have the corresponding hope that I had something interesting to say.

  I didn't know it then but I was in for a life of mild hope impairment that would limit me in ways I couldn't predict. I did, in fact, start talking. I dove deep down into myself and metamorphosed into a respectable ambivert… almost through sheer brute force. It took years for me to learn how to throw my voice out into the world and wait for it to come boomeranging back to me.

  But today is a new day…a sparkling, clear October morning. I can see sunlight peeking in through the powder-blue Levelor blinds. It might rain but so what? I'm a pluviophile, a rain worshipper. Already in my mid-thirties, most people peg me as twenty-something. (Thanks for the genes, Mom and Pop!) Kazu just hit forty but age is truly just a number when you believe in reincarnation. He's a card-carrying Buddhist. I fall more into the undeclared spirituality zone.

  I find myself waking up a few hours earlier than I usually do. Kazu is still asleep under the silver pinstriped bedspread. I am up to something. On the living room wall, I begin to hang a banner made from butcher block paper which reads:

  THE HOPE STORE.

  We don't just instill hope. We install it.

  Once I heard a politician jabbering on the six o'clock news and he said: "We have to install hope in young people!" He meant to say "instill," but it was funnier the way he said it. Creepier too. And that was the seed of my slogan. I love it. I reach up and touch the paper, touching it as if it were alive. A much nicer version of this banner will be hung in the store when we open our doors next week, but this is just for fun. This is just to surprise Kazu who appears to be deep in the REM stage. Kazu Mori is my partner, in more ways than I can name. Soulmate would be one of his monikers.

  In just a week, we will open the first store in the world to sell hope over the counter.

  This is going to be big.

  It gives whole new possibilities to those who are born with hope impairment and those whose hope supplies have eroded over time due to disappointment, disillusion, and brain chemistry disorders. Chartreuse Johnson is the main investor in The Hope Store and a smart cookie. She's also a tough cookie. She's made it clear that the store has got to be an overnight sensation if we want to continue receiving her investor checks. She's giving us three months: October, November, and December. So we have to make our mark in the world and leave a big footprint -- or we're toast, we go belly-up, and The Hope Store reverts to the Starbucks it once was.

  What do you want out of a store? An iced latte or an extra dose of hope? I know. Decisions, decisions.

  The day I first walked into LiveWell Laboratories, I went looking for answers. I had heard there was a new clinical trial to increase hope in the hope-challenged. I was enthralled. And what did I have to lose but my dignity? My job as a textbook editor paid my rent and covered my indulgent movie-going habit, but I didn't feel it was my calling. So it was a pleasure to meet Kazu Mori, scientist extraordinaire. Young by any measure, he had more prizes and awards for his scientific endeavors than could fit on the long shelf in his office. He was sure of himself and his purpose. And he was super cute. A tall Asian man, his long shiny black hair and clean-shaven face were in stark contrast to my buzzed head and the soul patch on my chin.

  If he came across as a rock star scientist on the verge of greatness…I came across more as an artist-in-residence on the verge of being discovered. At 5'6" I was compact, proving once again that good things come in small packages. Sometimes guys described me as a teddy bear, but the men I dated never stayed more than a year…no matter how nice I was to them.

  Though I was Japanese American (still am, by the way), it was hard to find a Japanese bone in my body -- aside from my love of sushi and Zen rock gardens and films by Nagisa Ôshima. My face was unmistakably Japanese -- the Epicanthic folds of my eyes, the humble nose -- but when I opened my mouth, only American ideas poured out. Kazu was born and bred in Tsukuba, Japan; I hailed from Chicago, Illinois. I read online somewhere that if I ever took a trip to Japan, I'd be shunned as a foreigner. I was like a baby bird that had fallen from its nest -- forever tainted by American ideas.

  The rock star scientist guided me past the many rooms of LiveWell with glass windows longer than a stretch limousine. Signs on the doors read: "Bio-Experiment in Progress." In one room a woman was running on a treadmill. There were three signs on the walls around her which announced: NEED, WANT, HOPE. As she ran, the signs on the walls began to move, to re-arrange themselves. "I don't know what any of this means, but I'm dying to find out," I said. "I can be patient and wait for the
official start of the clinical trials."

  "You have great self-control," said Kazu with a grin. "I like that. Let me tease you further by showing you my favorite room of all -- the room where it happens."

  We watched through the long glass window as a man sat as if upon a throne, his whole body encircled by a halo of white light. Confetti began to trickle down on him, but it wasn't the kind you see in parades. This confetti was shiny and fell in dream-like slow motion. What struck me was the expression on the man's face. He looked ecstatic, like he had just learned something that would change his life forever. If that's what it looked like to have hope installed -- I wanted to know that feeling too. I wanted to feel it right away.

  JADA

  3. GARDEN VARIETY

  Some people might think I'm morbid, looking at a beautiful poster of the Sutro Baths in a coffee-house and thinking of how people might end their lives. I prefer to think of myself as unfiltered. Porous.

  I suspect a whole lot of people with hope deficits go undiagnosed, and still others are misdiagnosed as having garden variety depression, and god knows you don't have to have desina sperara (DS) to be hope-impaired. You can be born hopeless, and you can become hopeless. Some people believe you can catch hopelessness just by sitting next to a stranger on a train. Not true. I myself have learned I am immune to the charms of antidepressants, talk therapy, hypnosis and homeopathic remedies, so I've pretty much been in free fall for my adult life. I often fantasize about the most painless way to kill myself. In my life, I've tried to kill myself twice. Here's hoping the third time's the charm.