The Sun Collective

by Charles Baxter

  Brettigan was grateful that he was an ordinary musician and not great. Greatness entailed a broken soul and too much suffering. He played nothing too severe. He loved pensive abstraction, the poetry of turning away, of mulling it over, of driving through the city at two a.m., only a few lights burning, only the night crew still awake, the night watchman at his post waiting for dawn and humming a tuneless tune to keep himself company. “The only music you’re good at is nocturnes,” one of his piano teachers had said. “That’s all you can really do.”

  As Brettigan thought about his son’s childhood, his fingers broke into a melancholy tango. Timothy was never very far away from his thoughts whenever he sat at the keyboard.

  This time, the tune began to stretch itself over several measures, and as he tried it out, Brettigan felt the leisurely melancholy of the key of A minor, a satisfying Where-have-they-all-gone? feeling, and he could feel himself doing his best to avoid the tug of C major, that white-bread, midwestern, let’s-all-be-happy-right-now key, A-minor’s first cousin with the smiley face, a really major major, so he dropped his left hand two octaves down and added a soft low tremolo. Jesus Christ, where did that come from? That death rattle, death ringing the doorbell? Someone buried and waking up underground and speaking with music instead of words?

  He heard the front door open, then the sound of Alma walking into the kitchen. He heard her put down a grocery bag.

  “Bloody hell?” his wife cried.

  “Welcome home,” he said loudly enough to be heard over the chords he was determined to play. Bah boom. The end.

  From the kitchen came sounds of struggle. She had ripped the grocery bag, and fresh fruits and vegetables and lettuce and asparagus—Brettigan knew their sounds—were being scattered onto the counter and into the crisper, accompanied by spousal mutterings rising to an irritated half-bark that summoned both the dog and the cat to observe her.

  “So you’ll never guess what I…” she was saying halfway across the house, the second half of the sentence drowned out by distance. She sometimes mumbled in order to force him to move to where she was. He lowered the lid over the piano keys before making his way back into the kitchen.

  “Hi,” he said. Alma was putting the last of her purchases, a bottle of oregano, into the spice rack. He kissed her tentatively and shyly to test her mood. It was unsettled. The heat and the humidity outside had caused her hair to curl and coil so that the silver strands looked like miniature bedsprings. Her cheek was damp and salty.

  “Did you see him?”

  “I never see him.”

  “All the same, I think he’s around, I can sense it.”

  “Yes. He’s here somewhere. Everyone says so. He’ll show up sooner or later.”

  “I hope you’re right. He’d better. You know that church, the one on Blaisdell? You’ll never guess what I saw as I was coming back from back there,” she said.

  “You were at church? You’ve converted to something? You’re a Muslim now?” He smiled. “You’ll have to start wearing that thing, the thing women wear, Muslim women, what do they call it, that thing?”

  “A niqab.” She was not amused.

  “That’s it. A niqab. With a little slit for eyes. A makeover. You’ll look all mysterious, just your eyes floating around the house, the rest of you hidden from view.”

  She turned around to pretend-glare at him, a preface to her own irony in combat with his irony and to the underlining that she gave to certain words. “No, Harry, I was not at church and I did not convert to Islam and I am not wearing a niqab. I was driving. To get our groceries. To feed us. To provide us with something for dinner this very evening. Do you want to hear my story or not?” She offered him a halfhearted expression in which love and irritability were equally mixed and fighting it out.

  “Sure,” he said, “I’m always eager to hear your stories, you know that—I mean, hey, what have we got? Your stories and nothing but time.” Her hair was a bit…disarrayed, a few strands falling over her forehead, which reminded him of the way she had looked—what? Forty years ago, when they were still young and she had the most beautiful eyes he’d ever seen, deep and soulful, and she was so beautiful in every possible way that she was just out of his league, untouchable in her grace, but she had loved him anyway back then and still contained a memory of that love, now, buried deep within her somewhere.

  “So there was this wrecking company,” she said, a curl bouncing against the middle of her forehead, “on Blaisdell, and you know that church there, the Blessed Church of the Fiery Holy Smoking Bleeding Heart of Jesus?”

  “Old building? Red stone exterior?” He reached for the celery before she took the stalks away from him.

  “You shouldn’t eat that without cleaning it. Um, the church, yes, that’s the one,” she said. “So there I was, sitting in my car, stalled in traffic, nothing moving including me.” She paused for dramatic emphasis.

  “You were sitting in your car, nothing moving including you,” he echoed.

  “Yes,” she said. “And do you know what they were doing? What those men were doing? Take a guess.”

  “Demolishing the church?” Brettigan said. “Wrecking ball? Dust and debris? Big lifting hook and crane? Spectators? Asbestos dust? Cancer?”

  “Yes,” she said. “How’d you know?”

  “It was in the paper.”

  “Well, I hadn’t been informed. No one had told me. And I was, I was sitting in the car, and, you know, I—I couldn’t breathe. Took the air out of me.”

  “The air…what’re you talking about?”

  “Oh, come on, Harold. Let’s try to keep up with the conversation here. Let’s pay attention. Give me my due. I was using a metaphor. I couldn’t, I’m saying I couldn’t breathe.”

  “I love you, Alma. And I always give you your due. How come you couldn’t breathe?”

  “Oh, do you give me my due? Well,” she responded with an increasingly argumentative tone, as she turned away from him, holding some fresh broccoli and waving it around like a whisk broom. “Be that as it may. There I was, in the car, not moving, the street all trafficked up.”

  “And?”

  “And they had this wrecking ball, and this particular wrecking ball was smashing into, what do you call them, the turrets, those little towers, smashing into that old red church brick. Bang. Crash.” Alma waved her arm with the broccoli back and forth, pantomiming wreckage.

  “The old must make way for the new,” Brettigan said quietly. “Dem’s the conditions that prevail.”

  “In that case, we’re sunk. Personally,” his wife said. “That place was beautiful, Harry. I loved driving past it.”

  “Right, okay, yes. But we weren’t members. You weren’t, I wasn’t. The Burning Heart of Jesus had to burn without you, all those years. We didn’t contribute, and we can’t complain.”

  “You bet I can complain. I’m complaining now. That’s what I’m doing. Can’t you understand anything? It gave me a moment.”

  “A moment? In the car?”

  “Yes.” She turned her face slightly away from his and put her hand on the kitchen counter. “They were so happy doing their demolishing, those men in their yellow hard hats over their hard heads, bent to their work, so serious. So officious. With their awful destruction machines. You boys are so proud of your machines.”

  “No,” Brettigan said. “Include me out of that.” He could see her eyes beginning to tear up, so he put his hand on her shoulder. “Okay, I’m sorry,” he said as gently as he could. It was an all-purpose apology. When you aged, all the small destructions began to add up. They were like paper cuts, and they hurt everywhere. After a while, you couldn’t stand it, and then, who knows, you might have a good day, and all the paper cuts healed, for a while.

  “All the old things,” she said quietly. She glanced out the window at the backyard bird feeder, and Bretti
gan followed her gaze to see a blue jay, large and bullying, eating the seeds and the suet. The smaller birds, the sparrows, had gathered on the ground for the husks. “I know I’m being sentimental but I can’t help it. Do you know what’s going up there?”

  “Where the church was?”

  “Are you even listening to me? What do you think I was talking about?” She wiped her eyes free of tears with her forearms.

  He hated to say it even though he knew. “Yes, I read about it. One of those franchise gyms. I think it’s called ‘Gopher Fit.’ For Minnesota, the Gopher State.” He waited. “Or ‘Go For It.’ Or ‘Gopher It.’ I don’t remember. Anyway it’s a fitness place. The church of fitness. Gophers are involved.”

  “Sometimes I can’t bear it,” Alma said quietly. “Any of it.”

  “I know. But we have to.” He debated inwardly whether to embrace her from behind, and he did, but he could tell—from the knowledge about her that he had accumulated in their long marriage—that the embrace could not comfort her and was an annoyance. She stiffened for a micro-moment. Nevertheless, he held her still. She smelled of lavender, from her soap, and he thought of her fleetingly as a boat and himself as her harbor.

  “And how was your morning, Harry?” she asked. “And all those senile geezer friends of yours?”

  “Well,” he said. “A man, a doctor, well, he said he was a doctor, spoke to me on the train. He gave me a cure for everything. Everything. You name it, he had the cure. And then there was a young couple at the mall, dropping pamphlets here and there. They were very cute.”

  “You can’t do that, dear,” Alma said, pulling away from him. “Pamphlets at the mall? It’s illegal. And also, it’s, what do they call it, an anachronism. People use the internet now to broadcast their mad opinions. Anyhow, that mall won’t let you do that. It’s private property, that place.”

  “Okay.” He watched her floating away from him across the kitchen. “I picked up one. It’s over there on the counter.”

  “This one?” She peered at it.

  “Yup.”

  “Oh, goodness,” she said, reading it. “This is all whoopee stuff.” Brettigan let her read it, and slowly she passed the pamphlet over to him. He bent down and raised his head slightly so that he could see the print through his bifocals. The print was large and thick, and the pamphlet showed signs of haste.

  A Survival Manifesto!!!

  The world has gone mad and we must put a stop to its self-extinction. You are all dying and may not know it. The love of accumulation is killing us and turning us into shadows. What comes after Postcapitalism? The dreaded something that they are keeping behind the barbed wire electrical curtain. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Something is wrong with capitalism.” And we know what.

  Stop bad love. Bomb this bad love and get right with your hearts. Bomb the power. Bomb the plate glass, bomb the store dummies, bomb the consumers, bomb the bankers, the businessmen, the hucksters, bomb the oligarchs, the thieves. The Mall is a disease. Do not be silent. Silence kills. Speak up. Remember the words:

  I once was lost but now I’m found

  Was blind, but now I see.

  Let us open our hearts. Let us brush the snow from our lips. Let us breathe in suffering and exhale charity. Let us be humble and leave this evil place and put good where there has been only its absence. Love one another. Consumption consumes us. Do not let them use God against us again. Love God, love Mohammed, love the Buddha. Befriend the poor. Do not wait. Love them right now. Love all the colors of humanity. Come to our meetings. Let us know how you live. Peace

  —The Sun Collective of Minnesota

  www.suncollectiverevolution.com

  4201 Roosevelt Avenue NE

  “Oh, those people?” Alma said. “I love those people. Harry, I’ve told you about them, don’t you remember?” He stared at her. “You never pay attention to me. I even went over there once. They sit around and talk and make plans. They’re extremely chaotic, but they do things. It’s very sweet.”

  The manifesto had cheered her up, Brettigan could see, the Earth-improvement project, all the desperate remedies.

  - 4 -

  He had once committed a murder.

  The trouble was, he couldn’t remember whom he had murdered or how exactly he had gone about doing it. One morning he had awakened bathed in sweat, his heart thumping like an engine about to seize up. Alma slept peacefully next to him, breathing through her mouth with delicate snores. The chalk outline of his victim, pointedly clear in his dream, had now faded away. How could you be a murderer if you couldn’t remember the specifics of your crime?

  And how had the murder occurred? The dream-memory had involved not a gun but a knife, infinitely sharp, sharper than a surgeon’s scalpel. Despite the gaps in the narrative, Brettigan did remember how blood seemed to be spurting everywhere, and the inner exposed body parts of his victim, and the screaming. He remembered the terrible baritone roar, the rattling, gurgling outburst of a man in his last moments dying under protest, the light going out in his eyes.

  But who was the victim? And where did the rage come from? He couldn’t remember. You don’t expect a man like Brettigan to be a murderer. It wouldn’t fit his profile stored up in all the algorithms that were forming slowly, like sea slugs, on everybody, inside the godlike computers that no one could unplug. Here he was, a virtuous man, a retired structural engineer, a bridge designer who’d volunteered in soup kitchens, tutored disadvantaged children, raised a beautiful daughter and a handsome son, driven them to softball games, soccer games, attended their piano recitals, helped them with homework, walked his daughter down the aisle at her wedding, paid everyone’s tuition—a model citizen! Hardly a blemish visible anywhere! If anyone was qualified for the role of devoted father and faithful husband, he’d be at the front of the line.

  And yet his dreams: his dreams would send him to the electric chair. Or the gas chamber. Which they didn’t have anymore. But they did have potassium chloride and would enthusiastically inject it into him.

  “You, Harold, a murderer? That’s a laugh. You’re harmless. Always have been,” Alma had said when Brettigan told her his dreams. She yawned, lying next to him, and treated him to a patronizing chuckle. “You’re the most harmless person I ever met.” And she kissed him on the cheek before getting up to take her shower.

  “Not that harmless,” he muttered. “I’m capable.”

  * * *

  —

  Weeks later in a bookstore, idly paging through a collection of European and African aphorisms and fables, he had come upon this passage, planted squarely in the middle of the page.

  In mid-life a man wakes up believing that he has committed a murder. He cannot, however, remember who his victim was or what method he has employed to do the killing. Despite his forgetfulness, for years the man is weighed down by the memory of his crime; his guilt becomes ineradicable and leads to his physical decline. On his deathbed he is visited by the angel of God, who tells him that his only victim was himself and that he has murdered his true self for the sake of the life he has actually led.

  It sounded like one of Kafka’s parables or a story by Henry James. (Brettigan had in his early twenties been a reader of fiction but in middle age grew to despise it; fiction was like quicksand, dragging you down.) He didn’t care who had written this quaint parable with its lethal, accurate truth. Stealthily, he closed the book and replaced it on the bookstore display table. No one would ever know that this book had found him out. No one had seen him reading it. The other customers—that lady, over there, in the threadbare flower-pattern print dress, who was trying to memorize a recipe in an unpurchased cookbook, or that man reading a guide to explosives—they were all oblivious to him. The book, with its fables and aphorisms, had his number and was selling for $24.95. He had checked the price. Somebody had stolen his dreams and had put them into this
book. The unconscious never takes a vacation. And capitalism sniffs out your secrets. It knows all of them by now and has lists with your name on them matched to a facial recognition file.

  Wherever you go online, the Big Computer knows what you want before you want it. It’s ready for you and waits patiently, humming. It knows where you will be tomorrow and what you will be doing, and it carefully calibrates the shame you carry with you in hopes that you will buy something to restore your peace of mind.

  * * *

  —

  He had had, he felt, a lucky life of good fortune and privilege, and if the sun was setting on people like him, middle-class white guys, well, okay. His only real cause for disquiet had been Timothy, their gifted boy. As the younger of their two children, he’d been born with an uncanny talent for mimicry, beginning at age six with imitations of his sister, Virginia, whose whine he could duplicate so accurately that if you were in the next room over or down the hall, you’d think she was speaking in her usual wheedling way. She dropped little pauses in her sentences and rushed her verbs and nouns together, and Timothy had somehow trained himself to parrot those habits too, so much so that the imitations gradually became distracting and weird, as Brettigan and his wife waited for Timothy to sound like himself. As he grew, the voices proliferated: he could sound like film stars or rock musicians or politicians or panhandlers or his parents. He could be anybody, but when he was himself, when the disguises disappeared and the masks fell, he seemed not to be present and accounted for. And he had a magician’s gift for vanishing, almost on the spot. He was there; you saw him; you looked away, and when you turned back, he was gone.