The Sun Collective

by Charles Baxter

  “I keep wondering what we did to get on his shit list,” she said. “Or if he just went crazy for a little while.”

  “I think the latter.”

  Alma sat up slightly so that she could look down at Brettigan, whose eyes were closed. “There’s something I want you to do,” she said. “That boy, the one we had over for dinner, that kid full of purpose and nonsense, Ludlow, that one. The Sun Collectivist. I want you to hire him, Harry. I want you to call him up, you know, on the phone, and get him to find Timothy, because…because somehow I believe they know each other. Don’t ask me how I know. I just do. Something tells me that they’re acquainted. Something tells me that they’re in cahoots.”

  “What makes you say that?” he asked sleepily. He didn’t seem particularly surprised by her request.

  “I don’t know. They’re alike, somehow. You know: like reflections. Mirrors.”

  He ignored this observation by choosing not to reply to it or to interrogate it. “And what if he does find Timothy? What then?”

  “What sort of question is that?” she asked.

  “The sort of question I ask, that’s what kind. I mean, the point is, Timothy doesn’t want to be found. He’s not a missing person. He’s never been a missing person. He’s something else. If he wanted us to know where he was or is, he’d have told us by now. He’s hiding away. He’s the J. D. Salinger of sons. After all, he’s living on the streets. People do that.”

  “If they’re on drugs, they do. Please don’t use that tone on me. And please do this,” she pleaded.

  “Why don’t you call him, this Ludlow, if you want to talk to him so badly?”

  “A man should do it, not me.”

  “Do you think Timothy’s in the Sun Collective?”

  “I haven’t seen him over there.”

  “How many times have you been?”

  “A few times.” This was a lie. She’d been there multiple times.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll get in touch with him.”

  * * *

  —

  At the breakfast table, she gave him his birthday shirt and a funny birthday card with a grinning dog wearing a party hat on the front; the dog looked like Woland. Brettigan said he had to go out to run a few errands and would call that Ludlow person once he got back. After he kissed Alma on the forehead and thanked her for his birthday gift, he ambled out to the garage and started the car and drove off to wherever he was going. She had meant to tell him to pick up some tomato juice and a faucet washer, but she forgot.

  Alma sat at the breakfast table in the kitchen alcove and let the morning sun shine on her face. She had a moment of contentment, of pure mindless happiness, and as she shut her eyes, the dog padded in, his paws clicking on the linoleum, and put his head on her leg, with just an eyedrop of slobber, and the cat jumped up onto her lap and began purring. Outside, from down the block, she heard a lawn mower. Absentmindedly, she stroked the dog’s head with her right hand and scratched the cat with her left.

  Cover the clocks and the mirrors, then cut off two eyelashes, the man on the light rail had advised. How preposterous! We do not live in an age of miracle cures, Alma thought with an unconscious throat clearing, and we never have since the dawn of reason and the dark era of superstition: we have no evidence of miracles themselves, or magic, or of ghosts and hauntings, or of any of the side effects of divinity, including resurrections or walking on water or moral redemption or healings or telepathy or clairvoyance or transubstantiation or prayer. Wine didn’t turn into blood; it stayed wine, despite what the priests all claimed. And blood, usually shed for no purpose, didn’t turn into anything else as it flowed downward into the ground, fertilizing it with nutrients. The bread didn’t turn into flesh—who’s kidding whom? Who wants to eat the flesh of God? Miracles constituted the hope chests of the credulous and the insane. Priests were in the business of keeping everybody stupid and ignorant, and they kept busy by abusing the children in their care. She had been to all the churches and storefronts and synagogues and temples and cathedrals, and every one of them had promised miracles, and none of them had delivered or ever would, because they made promises as long as you gave them plenty of money and granted authority to their clerics, but none of them promised the return of her son, and none of them promised a cure for poverty or the salvation of the wretched of the earth, the door to heaven, which was nowhere, unless it was everywhere. Heaven! What a concept! So low you can’t get under it.

  Unless it was here, now.

  The dog looked up at her. Well, you could try it.

  Try what?

  What he suggested. The clock thing and the mirror thing and the eyelash thing.

  Don’t be ridiculous.

  Just a suggestion. What do I know? Scratch behind my ears, okay?

  Alma looked down at the cat. And what about you? What’s your opinion?

  I’m supposed to have an opinion?

  Just asking.

  Do whatever you want. I don’t care. You want caring, ask the dog.

  She checked the driveway for the car, stood up so quickly that the cat had to jump out of her lap and the dog had to lift his head abruptly away from her, and, both giddy and bent over with her burden, Alma climbed the stairs to the bedroom, feeling that her heart would break.

  No one really understands a mother’s love, its furnace blast. Not even her husband; not even him. No man. No power on Earth could equal it. She didn’t understand it herself or how it had control over her, like music played at full volume, which did not stop for rest and never seemed to diminish.

  Once upstairs, she unplugged the bedside digital clock, went into the two other bedrooms and did the same for the two electric clocks beside the now-unused beds, and after pulling out a flat bedsheet, she covered the vanity mirror above her dressing table by hanging the sheet over it. Searching in the drawer, she found her old-fashioned fingernail scissors flecked with tiny dots of rust, and, almost without thinking, lowered her left eyelid and clipped two eyelashes from there, holding the cut lashes in her fingers, feeling their unusual thickness, not like hair from the top of the head. Would Harry notice the missing eyelashes? No: he hardly glanced at her anymore or gave her a second thought, even when they made geriatric love. She wouldn’t wait until eleven minutes past eleven, or whenever it was that that crackpot doctor had instructed her. Whatever she had to do, she would do right now.

  After sitting down on the edge of the bed, which sagged slightly—really, they should shop around for a new mattress—Alma placed the two eyelashes onto the back of her left hand, and she closed her eyes and thought about her son. She waited for something to happen.

  Sometime later when she’d lost track of the time, she was startled to hear the doorbell ring and someone screeching for help. The voice was pitched in the frantic upper octaves. Alma collected herself and went downstairs, and at the front door, she saw her neighbor, a widow, Grace Wispely from down the street, peering in through the screen and making desperate cries.

  “Grace? What is it? Come in.”

  “Alma,” Grace cried on the other side of the screen while making little childish hops and holding her arms tight to her sides, an unlit cigarette in her right hand and lipstick smeared to the right of her mouth. Her coiled gray hair spewed out in all directions. “My house is on fire, and my phone doesn’t work! Its batteries are dead or something. Can I use your phone? Please help. Nobody else is around.”

  “Yes, of course,” Alma said, her eyes suddenly tearing up with fellow feeling for her neighbor. “Please, Grace, come in.” She held the screen door open, took Grace Wispely’s hand, and led her to the kitchen, where the landline phone, beautiful relic, sat on the kitchen counter next to the lime green Mixmaster. While her neighbor called the fire department in a trembling, rushed, and too-loud voice, giving information that she had to repeat, Alma returned to the front do
or and with the equanimity of a child gazed across the street, where Satanic black smoke flowered up and outward from Grace Wispely’s downstairs window, and the usual pedestrians gathered on the front sidewalk, hands on chins, thoughtfully offering commentary.

  Five minutes later, the welcome sirens wailed, and there was Grace, her friend and neighbor, sitting on her own front lawn as the firefighters strode quickly across the grass, unspooling their hoses. Sitting on her lawn? Apparently in shock, she had lost the ability to stand. Alma poured a glass of water and, crossing the street, carried it to Grace, who took it with thanks and drank it with one hand while simultaneously wiping her eyes with her other sleeve.

  “I don’t even know how it started,” Grace said, as Alma helped her to her feet, getting her out of the way of the firefighters and the pushy videographers from the TV news crews, and at that moment a sensation flooded over Alma, uninvited but nevertheless quite welcome: a feeling that, despite everything, she, Alma Brettigan, was a lucky woman and that God, who did not exist and in whom she didn’t believe, loved her. Or, if not God, something: something loved her, loved her for no reason at all.

  - 21 -

  Brettigan prided himself on his patience, but a wall that stood against his worst thoughts had crumbled somewhere inside him, and now he was speeding across Northeast Minneapolis, past churches and bars and single-family lots, the houses and buildings visibly rushing away on both sides as he advanced toward the headquarters of the Sun Collective, whose address, 4201 Roosevelt Avenue NE, he had found on Alma’s dressing table.

  In the middle of that night’s tableau of dreams he’d realized that that place, those people, were the key to his son’s disappearance, to his wife’s absentminded despairs, to the deaths of the homeless perpetrated by the Sandmen, and to the seemingly accidental deaths of the plutocrats out in Wayswater. The Sun Collective was responsible for everything, the dream informed him, including his own aging; this dream-insight had come to him while he was asleep, when he saw Alma, whom he loved, swept up by a huge wave that transported her away from the beach on which she had been standing, as she gazed out at the sea where the moon, shining and dead, was rising. He saw President Amos Alonzo Thorkelson pointing a finger at Alma and himself in the dream, saw a banner across the sky that read in Gothic script, , and now, this morning, when Brettigan glanced out of the car window at yet another Catholic church whose weeping Madonna stood in front, downcast, her palms open on both sides, inviting the little children inside to suffer, he turned to his left to see a wine store, and then a riverfront restaurant speeding by, as if the car were stationary and the landscape were moving, and he thought of his night terrors and the way that Alma had touched his back around two a.m., knowing that he was drowning in that oneiric tidal wave, and she had said, “Harry, wake up. Harry, it’s not real. You’re dreaming.”

  No, it wasn’t, and neither was he. Accelerating on the residential side street, Brettigan felt that he had somehow walked through a doorway that he hadn’t known was there, with the result that he had been ejected from the real, from realism generally. As this idea entered his head, producing an effect of dizziness, he understood that he had to calm down, right now. Was this feeling an effect of aging? Poor circulation, in every sense? Or retirement? No doubt it was. Or was he having a stroke? Perhaps that too. After turning the car toward the curb, he parked in a vacant spot in front of a modest two-story house with a cream-colored stucco exterior, a steeply pitched roof, and a storm door with glass that revealed a front hallway leading back toward someone’s living area. Upstairs he could see two sash windows with shades pulled halfway down. A black cat sat on the front stoop, eyeing him while licking its paw.

  The small lawn in front of the house had been recently mowed. Cut green grass, unraked, lay here and there at the lawn’s south border. Purple pansies, red petunias, and phlox had been planted underneath the house’s front window. Brettigan clutched at the padded steering wheel of his car and waited for the sensation of disorientation, or whatever it was, to pass. After putting the transmission into park, he turned off the ignition before leaning back and closing his eyes.

  He counted to twenty before he opened his eyes again, and as he came back to himself, he noticed that he was scratching his own knee while he examined the house in front of which he had stopped. The morning light of summer outlined the roof and gutters with the crisp certainty of a Dutch realist painting, but Brettigan, still waterborne behind the wheel, felt that this stranger’s house, with its green lawn and flower garden, was a stage set, not an actual house but a mock-up on a sham street populated by counterfeit men and women who did not live here but merely pretended to do so.

  Did other people ever feel that the world had turned into a facsimile of itself, a carefully constructed labyrinth of appearances?

  Watching a mailman advancing down the block, pushing his little trolley sack of letters before turning to drop some advertising brochures into a mail slot, Brettigan broke out into a cold sweat. He felt old and sick. Chills and fever burst into blossom gently along his spine. The doorway that had opened for him led into the Land of the Unreal, where most young people, their eyes fixed on their screens, lived nowadays. Realism was over. It had crumbled. This was the world we had now—this duplicate, the realm of unlikeness, even here on Haas Street where nothing solid remained, and bogus birds shrieked in the cardboard trees.

  “Hello? Pop? May I help you?” Someone was knuckle-knocking on the driver’s side window. Brettigan rolled the window down.

  “What?”

  A young man in a T-shirt and jeans stood there, leaning over, his hand on the car door. His thick forearms, tattooed with slogans and sayings and a Coptic cross, were speckled with dirt, and he sported a full blond beard. On his face was a calm, concerned expression. In his right hand, he held a plastic water bottle.

  “I saw you pull up here. I was upstairs.”

  “Oh, I’m all right,” Brettigan said.

  “The thing is, sir, you’ve been sitting there behind the wheel with the motor running for fifteen minutes now.”

  “I have?”

  “Yup. Here. You might want to take some water.”

  Brettigan reached out and took the plastic bottle from the man’s beefy hand. “Thank you.” He took a sip of the water, then another. He felt himself swallowing.

  “Do you want me to call 911 or something?”

  “No, I’m okay.”

  “You don’t look okay. Why don’t you at least turn off the ignition for a minute?”

  “I did turn it off.”

  “Maybe so, but the engine is still running. Could be you only thought it.”

  “Oh, all right.” Brettigan reached down to the key and switched off the engine again. The car had apparently started itself.

  “It’s actually been closer to half an hour you’ve been sitting there. That’s not good. I saw you holding on to the steering wheel. Are you really sure that you’re feeling all right?”

  “I think so. Well. Come to think of it, I’m not. Sure.”

  “You want to come inside my house for a minute? And, you know, sit down? Cool off?”

  “No, I think I’m fine out here.”

  “Reason I asked, you look like you been hit by lightning. So therefore my invitation. Do you remember where you were headed?”

  “The Sun Collective,” Brettigan told him. “I was going to talk to them.” He took another sip of water.

  “Oh, right. Well, you almost made it. Their building is only a few blocks from here. They’re great. They’re totally great. I can sing their praises. Are you sure you don’t want to come inside, Pop? Because actually I think you should come inside. You know: to, like, cool off.”

  “Oh, no. I don’t want to impose.”

  “Naw, it’s nothing. See, I’m babysitting my daughter, she’s in her playpen right now, and my girlfriend is out right now
running an errand, buying diapers, and…so I have to go back inside, where my daughter is right now, and why don’t you come in? I don’t think you should drive, to be honest.”

  Brettigan felt himself looking down at the young man’s tattoos. One of the slogans said, NEVER RETREAT. On the other forearm were the initials USMC. You had to trust a Marine, Brettigan thought; somehow they required it. “All right,” Brettigan said, and then said, “No harm done,” without knowing quite what he meant or why he had said it.

  * * *

  —

  Inside the Marine’s house, the man’s daughter, who, unlike her father, had dark skin, was lifting up and dropping her stuffed animals in the playpen, pretending to count them. She saw Brettigan, then glanced at her father before going back to her inventory. The man picked her up and carried her over to a chair, where he sat down after motioning Brettigan toward a sofa on which, at its opposite side, slouched a large, blankly staring stuffed giraffe. Toys were scattered here and there on the floor, little plastic horses and dollhouse furniture. Between the living room and the kitchen, a Jack Russell terrier ran back and forth, stopping to sniff Brettigan before returning to his OCD tasks. The room had the customary controlled chaos of a household with a toddler and busy, harried parents, and Brettigan could tell that some dish that smelled like stew was simmering on the stove, visible through an entryway opposite him. A pack of cigarette papers lay open on the coffee table. On the wall to the side of the flat-screen TV was a studio photograph of the man and his girlfriend—who appeared to be African-American—and their baby daughter, dressed up in a pink frilly outfit. She was clutching a little stuffed unicorn. They were all smiling, even the unicorn.

  On the opposite wall was a large framed poster of Prince, an expressionist painting complete with the musician’s purple hair and purple skin.

  “Yeah, that’s my family,” the man said proudly, seeing Brettigan scrutinizing the studio photograph. “Typical Americans, is all we are. By the way, my name’s Peter Schemp.” He took out his phone and began texting someone with his right hand, as he held his daughter with his left arm. “I’m just telling Shonda that everything’s fine, and we got ourselves a surprise guest here, which is you.”