The structure was awe inspiring, the way it so clearly asserted itself within the acres of woods that surrounded it. The front of the structure was a three-story building, all windows, a garden on the roof, while the rest of the buildings, all irregular heights and dimensions, were connected in a rectangular shape, a planned community, which is what it was intended to be. What made it so striking was that every exposed part of these concrete structures was covered in a specially designed olive green AstroTurf. It made the buildings seem both futuristic and camouflaged. The design had come from an architectural firm in Spain, shocked that anyone was interested in such a strange layout, but to Dr. Grind it had been perfect. It was enclosed, private, but with enough open spaces that it suggested the freedom to move around the complex without fear. The children, Dr. Grind knew from experience, would love it; the parents, well, they might take some convincing.
The foreman on the project met Dr. Grind at the front of the building and invited him to tour the grounds. There was only a skeleton crew left on-site to handle a few odds and ends with wiring, though the interiors of the buildings would have to be installed and furnished at a later date, but there was time enough for that. As he walked around and around the interior of the courtyard, he couldn’t help brushing his fingertips against the AstroTurf, the way it transformed the primitive concrete walls into something that a child might dream up, all dangerous things made soft with care. He walked through every room and imagined its future use, the dreaming made easier by the absence of any real detail to impede his wishes. He stayed out of the way of the workers whenever they stepped into a room in which he was standing. By the end of the day, the light golden through the trees, fading into a dimness, the foreman asked if he needed a ride back to his car in the makeshift parking lot at the entrance of the woods, but Dr. Grind declined. He said he would like to walk around a bit more, and though the foreman hesitated, he seemed to understand that Dr. Grind was important enough that he was allowed to do whatever he desired, this being his building. Once the men had left and Dr. Grind could hear them starting up their trucks, he walked up to the third floor of the main building, each floor as large as an auditorium. He found a ladder that had been set on its side and he set it upright and leaned it against one of the concrete walls. He climbed to the top of the ladder, his hand able to touch the space where the wall met the ceiling. Steadying himself, he reached for his wallet and produced a small photo of his wife and child. In the photo, his wife, Marla, was holding on to their son’s arms, spinning him around in a circle. Jody, his son, was a blur of motion, his face ghostlike and hazy, but he remembered when the photo was taken, and he knew his son was smiling, beaming with delight. He took the photo of his family, both of them now dead and gone, and he slid it into a slight, almost nonexistent space between the wall and the ceiling. He pushed the photo into the crack, little by little, until it disappeared into the structure. Though he did not believe in an afterlife, he hoped some aspect of them would filter into whatever it was he was trying to accomplish with this endeavor. He hoped, was it not too much to ask, that they would never leave him.
After he descended the ladder, finding himself relieved to be back on steady ground, he eased himself onto the floor. He sat quietly, legs crossed, and imagined what would come next, the new family he would bring into this wonderful space.
Three years ago, Dr. Grind sat in the vast waiting room of the headquarters of Acklen Super Stores, the largest retailer in the world, located in Knoxville, Tennessee. Mounted on the wall to his left, an enormous original painting by Helen Frankenthaler was proudly displayed, swaths of deep color that suggested a horizon. As he walked into the massive building, he’d noticed what he assumed was a Georgia O’Keeffe in the front entrance. In such a bland, inoffensive space, everything bright lights and sensible carpet, the only reading material on the coffee table the Acklen Super Store newsletter, it was strange to see major works of art presented without comment. It was as if a museum had decided to start selling time-shares over the phone and simply forgot to remove the art.
In the week since he had been summoned, almost entirely without pretext or explanation, to meet with Brenda Acklen, the matriarch of the Acklen family and fortune, he’d been reading up on her life. She’d met her husband, Terry Acklen, the founder of Acklen Super Stores, at an orphanage where both were wards of the state. Her husband had quickly turned a few discount stores in Knoxville into a global concern. Though it felt unseemly, Preston had checked and rechecked the fact that Brenda Acklen, eighty-two years old, was worth over nineteen billion dollars. Though she’d let her sons run the business after her husband died nearly eight years earlier, she remained active, funding several charities for underprivileged children and amassing a personal collection of virtually every important female artist of the twentieth century. And now, after a series of phone calls and e-mails with both her and her assistants, Preston had taken Mrs. Acklen’s private jet from New York to Knoxville in order to talk about, what Mrs. Acklen had mentioned in vague terms that would be irritating if the person wasn’t a billionaire many times over, something simple and elemental, something that Dr. Grind had devoted nearly all of his life toward understanding more completely: family.