The Sun Collective

by Charles Baxter

  “He said it’s called ‘the Sun Collective.’ But I don’t know what they are, really. I checked the internet, and they don’t even have much of a website. There’s almost nothing there. Who doesn’t have a website?”

  “Never heard of them,” Eleanor told her, leaning down to whisper, “And never trust a guy dressed in rags. I speak from bitter experience.” As she turned to walk away, Jürgen glided toward Christina’s desk, blinking his bright, owlish eyes.

  “Your stalker awaits,” he said, worriedly.

  * * *

  —

  Once he was settled in Christina’s car, Ludlow directed her toward Northeast Minneapolis. As soon as she had unlocked the door for him, he had dropped down on the passenger side, positioning his backpack on the floor, and, once the engine had warmed up, he directed all the available blower vents so that the air blasted out in his direction.

  For a moment, Christina imagined that this Ludlow person was a creature of one season, winter, and would melt if he should ever be exposed to heat, like one of those Japanese creatures she’d once heard about, the yuki-onna, a person made of snow who knocked on the door, begged for a glass of water, and then departed quietly, so as not to thaw in the presence of her host. Usually the yuki-onna was a woman. Forced to take a bath in warm water, she dissolved into little bits of floating ice. Ludlow’s existence here—and the mere fact that she herself was in this car and driving this guy, who was almost a perfect stranger, to a political gathering—none of this seemed properly scripted to her, and as she contemplated the peculiarity of it all, the recklessness, the possible tragic outcomes, she almost stopped and told him to get out.

  But her life had been so dull lately, so…wispy and thin and uninspiring. She was tired of realism and its wanton monotony and wanted a life that was not as real as the one she currently had. Her dreams bored her; they looked like previews of coming attractions that never arrived. Her job was so tedious that it made her ache. All the random men in her life recently had been narcissistic, money-obsessed, poorly educated assholes. She had almost signed up for lessons in swing dancing so that she could be thrown around a little by an exuberant strange man with a good sense of rhythm; she was that lonely. Given her chilly beauty, men hadn’t come calling lately. Somehow Ludlow’s appearance in her life seemed propitious. She felt unmoored but also slightly ironic about her life, as if she didn’t care what happened to her as long as the outcome was interesting.

  “I can tell you’re wondering about me again,” Ludlow said, slouching down in the passenger seat, his winter knit cap pulled down so that it covered his eyebrows but not his eyes, which peered out at the evening traffic. “You’re wondering what I’m all about.” He did seem able to access her thoughts, which was worrisome.

  “Of course, I’m wondering,” she told him. “Why shouldn’t I? I don’t know who you are, except you go to yoga classes and break into houses in the winter and recruit people for your little political group. The only reason you’re here is that I’m super-bored with my life. I really don’t give a shit what’s going to happen to me.”

  “First of all, it’s not a ‘little’ political group,” he said, his voice rising with irritation, “and you shouldn’t talk to me like that. I’m the best damn thing that’s happened to you lately. Your luck has changed: I told you that I was a bright angel. I told you that I was a messenger from heaven.”

  “Only crazy people say things like that. Well, don’t quit your day job. Oh, wait: you’re unemployed. If you’re a messenger, I’m Joan of Arc and Wonder Woman,” she said.

  “You’re smarter than they are.”

  “Wonder Woman’s pretty smart.”

  “All right,” he said, sitting up. “Wanna see me do something?”

  “I doubt it. Well, go ahead.”

  He took his left hand out of its glove and reached up and touched her lightly on her cheek with his fingertips, and as he did, they drove past a church whose bells began to ring plaintively. His fingertips were unexpectedly warm and then hot, and she felt her entire face heating up as if he’d ignited a brushfire, and an image entered her head, that of a young man eating an apple and sitting in the upper branches of a tree. Ludlow had performed the same trick this morning in the bank, when he’d palmed her cheek. He had a genius for the unexpected and unprotected caress. She didn’t like that.

  “You haven’t been touched by anyone for a while, have you?” he asked. “You haven’t been loved.”

  “Take your goddamn hands off me,” she said, driving a few more blocks and feeling that she was being threatened.

  “Well, we’re here,” he told her. “There’s the parking lot.” She turned the car in to an open area that hadn’t been plowed since last night’s snowstorm. A few cars were covered in snow. Apparently those cars had been here for days; maybe some people lived here. It was the Sun Collective, after all, and they had to exist somewhere.

  The parking lot adjoined what appeared to be a desanctified church clad in brown wooden siding, with an old signboard out in front displaying a few scattered letters from a broken sentence,

  Wel

  me tr

  t over!

  and two smaller characters, . The ex-church had a high vaulted roof and stained-glass windows whose images were too dark to see.

  She parked the Saab and noticed that several other people were arriving and walking toward the building. She’d expected that they’d all be as young as Ludlow, and a few had the youthful look—pierced and punked-up—but others were middle-aged, and several were bent over and made slow gingerly progress across the icy parking lot. These people had little in common except their clothing, which, like Ludlow’s, had the battered appearance of cast-off apparel (the punk kids wore strategically ripped skinny jeans, torn T-shirts, and unzipped hoodies), but as a group they all had eager expressions as they made their way toward the doorway over which a single lightbulb burned. To Christina they resembled mendicants or a procession of the poor—the lame, the halt, and the blind—arriving at Lourdes. She glanced up at the front apex of the building, where ordinarily a cross would be located, but instead of a cross she saw a dark sphere with lines sticking out of it, rays of the sun painted black, like an invisible star that burns only at night, radiating a deep shining darkness. Toward the rear was a steeple topped by a spire without anything at its peak.

  A man standing in the doorway had eyeglasses with peculiar squarish frames, with lenses that caused the blue of his eyes to curve slightly. He had the appearance of a mean-spirited bouncer at the portal of heaven.

  After reaching into her pocket, Christina clutched at a Blue Telephone and, with a furtive move, popped it into her mouth. No one saw her. She smiled winningly as she descended the stairs.

  - 10 -

  The next thing she knew, she was lying in bed at home, and her phone was ringing. I must have blacked out, she thought, as she reached over to the bedside table and saw that the caller was Eleanor. After Christina answered, Eleanor, sounding concerned, said, “Sorry to call at this hour. I tried texting you. You’re okay?”

  “Yes,” Christina said. “Why wouldn’t I be okay? I’m at home. I’m in bed. I seem to have my pajamas on.”

  “Thank God,” Eleanor said. “I was, well, I was worried about you, going off with that guy to that meeting or whatever it was. He seemed rather shabby to me. A man made of rags, if you know what I mean. Made of them, not just wearing them, with clothes instead of skin. Like those guys at intersections with cardboard signs. Not a good prospect.” She waited. “But, okay, credit where credit is due, I guess he was pretty cute, sort of.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Christina said. “He was harmless. They were harmless. I think. The Sun Collectivists.” Little by little, it was coming back to her, what had happened.

  “You’re not sure?”

  “Well, I got high before I got there.
I didn’t mean to, but I did. I was nervous, so. It’s still kind of a jumble in my memory now.” Slowly, with one detail after another downloading into her brain, she was beginning to see how the evening had come and gone. “But it’s getting unjumbled.”

  “Christina, you’ve got to lay off that Blue Telephone shit, I’m telling you. It’s a bad bad drug. I know you get sad and everything, we all do, and it helps, but you keep up that habit, you’re going to turn into just a mess of atoms, heh heh, you know, like a horror movie? You won’t even be a person anymore, just a puddle of unrecognizable molecules. I mean it. I saw this thing in the paper about how it alters reality permanently. You could turn into a tree or something.”

  “Reality isn’t what it used to be,” Christina said.

  “You got that right,” Eleanor replied. “I miss realism. But that’s life here in America. So that guy, did he put the moves on you?”

  “No.” She waited. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I’m beginning to,” Christina said. Now she was remembering everything piece by piece, though the sequence of events had somehow reconfigured its beginning, middle, and end, like a French art house film. What she remembered best was the warmth, the welcome she received at the Sun Collective, as if she’d returned after a long stay abroad in a place like Italy, maybe Siena, and she’d walked back through the entryway of her family home, and everyone had rushed to greet her and had covered her with hugs and kisses and exclamations of affection, even love—love for a stranger, which was herself. They had recognized her as a fellow soldier in the army of social reform. “They were happy just to see me,” she said quietly. “They welcomed me. It’s a community.”

  “How nice,” Eleanor said.

  “No, I mean it,” Christina insisted. “I felt as if I belonged there.”

  “Wow. Are you sure?”

  “You should come. It’s just…well, they said, they told me, that it had started as a neighborhood watch group, and after the world got worse after President Thorkelson was elected, that sort of transmogrified or something into a community garden collective, growing vegetables and sunflowers on a vacant lot, which is why they’re the Sun Collective, and then they branched out into neighborhood Free Boxes, with clothes and shoes and overcoats for poor people, and they’ve been working on restoring, no, that’s not the word, reclaiming…no, that’s not the word either, homeless people, anyway there are former homeless people at the meeting, ex-addicts getting straight, and, yeah, it’s kinda anarchic, with some universal basic income proselytizers and democratic socialists in other parts of the room, also they want to start a co-op bank, everybody arguing, just a bunch of chaotic subgroups including urban farmers, twelve-step groupies, you know, activists for this and that, and it’s sorta unruly, but the point is that it’s fun and they welcomed me in; they wanted me there.” She sighed. “It made me happy.” She sighed again. “And they were real, actual people. Human beings. Doing work in the world. It wasn’t like another fucking chat group on the internet.”

  “Are you sure about this?” Eleanor asked. “Because I have my doubts.”

  “Yes. I was there.”

  “Well, okay,” Eleanor said. “But you were high.”

  “It made me happy,” Christina repeated. “I felt there was finally some positive work I could do. Modest advances. Don’t you ever want that?”

  “Fight the power?” Eleanor asked. “Little ol’ me? Yeah, I guess so. Sometimes.”

  “Come with me to the meeting next time.”

  “Well, maybe,” Eleanor said. “Heh heh. You’re sure we all won’t be arrested?”

  “We’re United States citizens,” Christina said. “What can they do to us?”

  * * *

  —

  She had floated from one group to another, floating not so much from the drug but from the ideas and the activism, and—yes, they were as disorganized as anarchists usually are, feverish with ideas and wandering around from room to room, but they had moments of practicality when they reminded themselves that they lived in what remained of the real world: paying rent on their meetinghouse, restocking the Free Boxes they had set up around town, doing repairs on the meetinghouse wiring, and forming a new group that advocated affordable housing and another group charged with ending racism somehow. The majority of the Sun Collectivists were white, and Minnesotan, but several members were Native and African-American, along with a smattering of Asians, and one guy who looked like an Inuit and spoke with an upper-class British accent complete with aristocratic mumbling. The Blue Telephone seemed hot and sexy for once, given her involvement with what was being said and done, making her beautiful and desired, and another odd feature to the experience was that everybody seemed to know her name and seemed to assume that, of course, she would be one of us or already was one of us or perhaps had been one of us, from birth. People with smiles on their faces approached her and drifted away. They were so happy to see her. They said so.

  A warm rush of acceptance had washed over her, sweetly oceanic. She was beautiful. They were all beautiful.

  They seemed opposed to the internet on practical and ideological grounds.

  What had happened to Ludlow? He seemed to have disappeared. Who cared? He had just been her enabler, to get her here. She floated toward another subgroup, sat down on a folding chair that someone had thoughtfully unfolded for her, and immediately found herself immersed in a discussion of how to get control of the narrative, whatever that meant.

  What did it mean? Christina leaned forward to listen. Sitting next to her was a woman about her age, dressed in a red flannel shirt and blue jeans, a blue cap on her head even though the room’s temperature was tropical, wearing thick glasses over watery brown eyes. She gave off an aura of power held in check by force of will alone, and as she spoke, her jaw hardly moved, the words issuing from her like cigarette smoke but with greater mass and specificity.

  The woman, whose name was Rachel, was saying that it was just extremely stupid to think that they could get control of the narrative by passing out pamphlets like some of the collectivists were doing, at the fucking mall, for chrissake; that it was equally stupid to write letters to the editor, any editor; and it was criminally stupid to think that in an age of late capitalism the control over the spreading of information would be managed by means of Facebook pages, or internet chat groups, subreddits, et cetera. Something more radical was required, political action, praxis, she called it, but just as Rachel began to explain what that might be, Christina found herself relocated into another group, or maybe bilocated, where she was given a manifesto, also the website link to the manifesto, and then relocated again in front of a man who said that his name was Wye.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “W-y-e,” he said pleasantly. “Short for Wyekowski. Welcome to the Sun Collective.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “Did you start this? Seems kind of disorganized. Is all you do, is talk?”

  “No. Oh, we’re getting things done, all right,” Wye told her. “Just you wait and see. It’s only disorganized on the surface. Down below, where you can’t see it, it’s like I can’t tell you.” He laughed. His laugh sounded like a whooping cough. “We’re small but we’re big and getting bigger. Behind the curtain, plans get hatched. We’re like Jupiter, the planet? Big, but with a lotta gas in the atmosphere. The protective veil.”

  “What happened to Ludlow?” she asked him.

  “Who?” Wye’s glasses were thick and interrogatory.

  “This guy. Ludlow. I met him at yoga. He talked me into coming over here. I gave him a ride.” Thanks to the drug, she felt as if her mind was on an out-of-control thrill ride.

  “Ah. Well, he’s here somewhere.”

  “What do you do here, Wye?” Christina asked, forming the words with difficulty.

  “Oh, I’m sort of a spokesp
erson now and then. I turn on the charisma when they point a camera at me. I provide useful confusion when necessary.” Another whooping cough emerged from him. She turned to her right and saw Arturo Ui approaching her with a steady tread, and then her spacetime became slightly warped as she remembered seeing that very guy, that actor, Timothy Brettigan, playing Arturo Ui in Chicago, but here he was now, and here, also, was she, after blacking out and driving home and getting into her flower-pattern pajamas, remembering his face, which was no longer the face of a ruthless dictator but that of a thoughtful young man, taken in by the Sun Collective. Seeing him was like being hit in her stomach. She had tried to talk to him, but she could not, given the people who were in his way, and he disappeared as if he had never been there.

  “Christina, what would you like to do for us? To help our project along?”

  “What is your project?”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “To save the Earth. To help the poor. To reform. To fix. To right the wrongs created by President Thorkelson.”

  “Bingo,” Wye said. “Do you know how to do any of that?”

  “Offhand,” Christina said. “No.”

  “Well, next time you come here, why don’t you come in with a project? How about next week? To show us that you’re serious? Because after all the point is to repair our society, our culture, before the Thorkelsons of the world take over and destroy it. Which they almost have. We may be in the End Times. It’s serious business.”

  * * *

  —

  Then, still sitting up in bed, she was asleep with all the lights still on, asleep and conscious somehow that the lights were burning not with light but with fire, and wishing that she had put on her pink sleeping cap, knowing also that the Sun Collective, a harmless and maybe loony group but a welcoming one, was a logical and perhaps necessary response to the way things were and are, at which point a little girl who resembled Christina herself at the age of eleven approached her in the dream and said that she owned all the rights to the number eighteen, and if Christina wanted to use the number eighteen for any purpose at all, she would have to pay her, the eleven-year-old, a user’s fee.