The Sun Collective

by Charles Baxter

  “I won’t be long,” Brettigan said, before giving his own name back to Peter Schemp. “Nice picture of your family,” he said. “You have a beautiful daughter.” A mistake not to have mentioned the man’s partner? “A beautiful girlfriend, too.” Trying to find a conversational connection, Brettigan said, half in a panic, “I have a daughter, too. She’s a veterinarian, lives down in the South. Two grandchildren. And…a son.” The Jack Russell returned to Brettigan, and, displeased by his presence there, barked at him once irritably, as criticism, and ran back to the kitchen.

  “Quiet, Jack. Um, your daughter has a son, or you do?”

  “She does, but I do, too. But my son’s gone missing.”

  Schemp showed no surprise. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Some people do that. Do you want more water? Ice?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Something to eat? Piece of toast?”

  “No, thanks. Really, I should be going.”

  “Stay one more minute. Wait until the color comes back into your face. You’re, like, too white.” He smiled at his own joke. As Peter Schemp began bouncing his daughter gently on his knee, Brettigan had a sudden thought: the man, his daughter, and this entire household were deeply in the real world from which he himself had recently been ejected, and they didn’t realize it and wouldn’t begin to understand what he was talking about if he raised the topic in conversation. Of course they lived in the real world. Where else would they be?

  Brettigan glanced over at the playpen, then at the toys on the floor, the newspapers piled up in the corner, the electronic vape cigarette on the coffee table next to the cigarette papers and a library book on child care, How to Be Your Child’s Best Parent. On the book’s cover, a little white girl reached up happily toward her parents’ outstretched arms.

  “What’s your daughter’s name?” Brettigan asked, indicating her with a tip of his chin.

  “Rai-Ellen.”

  “Never heard that name before,” Brettigan said. “It’s nice.”

  “That’s how come we came up with it,” Peter Schemp told him. “Sure you don’t want toast?”

  “No. Thank you. Mr. Schemp, if I could, may I ask you something? Actually, two things. I don’t want to be intrusive. It’s just…well, I suppose I was feeling faint in the car, and I had this weird sensation that I won’t go into, so my question is, do you ever feel that the world, I mean the reality of—” When he saw an expression of early-warning bewilderment break out on the young man’s face, Brettigan switched topics. “I’m sorry. So…what do you do, if I may ask?”

  “Me? I’m a lineman for the power company. How about you?”

  “Retired. Maybe you can tell. I was a structural engineer.”

  “And you were headed over to the Sun Collective? What for?”

  “Yes. Well, my wife is interested in them. Have you been there?”

  “Totally. I mean, when I got out of the Marines, before I was married, they found me. They were like giving away free food and clothes. They set me up. They helped me get a job. There are people over there who will help you do that. It’s just what they do. And they’ve got a co-op food store near here, and they tell me they’re going to start a co-op bank, and they’ve got, like, gardens around this part of the city where you can grow your own vegetables. They’re sorta like angels if angels were practical and actually showed up to help you. So I mean, they also have other plans, trying to get their people elected to government. They aren’t crazy but they want more power. Whatever. I don’t care. I even met my girlfriend over there. Every neighborhood should have one. They saved me, did I say that already?”

  “Oh, well, that’s good. No, you didn’t say that.”

  “Well, you must have heard something. I mean, there are rumors, too. Maybe not everything is on the up-and-up.” He carried his daughter back to her playpen and gently let her down into it.

  “Rumors?”

  “So, what I heard was, and this is only a rumor from my neighbors, and what they say, is that over there at the Sun Collective some of the members, they want to neutralize the Utopia Mall.”

  “ ‘Neutralize’ it?”

  “Yeah. Like it was some sort of sinful place, entrapping people with stuff that they force them to buy. Criminal mind-control capitalists operating in the retail world, like that. Which is loser-thinking. I mean, it’s not like people are being ordered to go out there to the Utopia and buy the shit they’re selling. You can always, like, stay at home if you want to, plant tomatoes, fix the plumbing, play with your kids. It’s a free world.”

  “How would they neutralize it?”

  “Anthrax is what I heard.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Yup. You get some anthrax or some other airborne poison from somewhere, and you take it out there to the mall, and you get like an aerosol spray on a timer to blow it into the air, and that’s it, that’s the end of the Utopia Mall.” After a pause, he said, “Also the end of all the people in it. I’m not saying that I would do it, just that I heard that they might. So I mean they’ve got a light and a dark side. All I ever saw was the light. Maybe they’re keeping the crazies under wraps. You want another glass of water?”

  “No, thank you. I should be leaving now.”

  “Okay, you’re looking better.” He glanced down at his daughter. “Say goodbye to the man, Rai-Ellen.”

  The little girl turned around at the mention of her name, and through the playpen’s webbing she exchanged a glance with Brettigan before raising her hand to wave at him, and she said, “Bye bye,” in a clear voice, giving the impression that she had heard and remembered everything that had just been said and could comment on it if she wished, as long as she didn’t have more important matters to attend to.

  * * *

  —

  Brettigan parked his car in the lot outside the Sun Collective’s building, which had the appearance of a deconsecrated church clad in brown wooden siding, with an old church 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 even in broad daylight. Somehow the sun itself could not penetrate that glass, or its light was wholly absorbed by it. The glass produced an unwholesome effect.

  “Mr. Brettigan! What brings you here?”

  It was that young guy, Ludlow, of all people, from the other night’s dinner, approaching him. He held a pair of hedge trimmers on to which a few cuttings hung, and he wore a sunhat whose visor rose in the front and dropped in the back. Dark glasses with enlarged lenses gave his face an insect appearance. His expression was that of wary, goofy friendliness mixed with earnest theatrical embarrassment, as if he’d been caught out in the midst of a shameful activity and was doing his best to pretend that he wasn’t who he seemed to be and wasn’t doing what he appeared to be doing.

  “I wanted to see what you guys were up to, over here,” Brettigan said. “Some hunch sent me. And there’s something else.” Brettigan took a deep breath, as he often did before lying, and said, “I wanted to see where I could sign up. Incidentally, I didn’t know that you worked for them. You didn’t mention that fact, last time we saw you at dinner. Did they hire you for maintenance? And, by the way, as long as I’m asking, where do I find the big cheese? Your maximum leader. Is he inside?”

  “We’re anarchists. We don’t have a maximum leader. But I think Wye’s around. His specialty is speaking. Aloud.” Ludlow put his hedge clippers down and wiped the sweat from his face with a red handkerchief that he had snatched rapidly out of a side pocket of his jeans, both the jeans and the handkerchief stained with dirt and grass. With his other hand he pulled out his phone, apparently to read the messages there. The two actions seemed to be cons
tructed as a means of giving him time to think of what he was about to say after having been caught unawares.

  Watching him, Brettigan had two recognitions: first, that in his day, generations ago, people pulled out their hip flasks and surreptitiously emptied them when relaxing or anxious, hoping to stop the flow of overwhelming events; now, post-alcohol, they pulled out their phones to take a drink from the internet. His second recognition was that Ludlow, in his smilingly innocent way, had somehow entered a police state and was carefully monitoring himself for possible speech crimes. He seemed like a different person from the one Brettigan had seen at dinner.

  “Oh,” Ludlow said, “you just go in there.” He pointed to a doorway with a Gothic arch.

  “You work here?” Brettigan asked again.

  “Sure,” Ludlow said. “Sure. I do. You could say that.”

  “Is that recent?”

  “Oh, for sure. Just a few days now.” Ludlow smiled briefly before the smile broke apart into a smirking frown. “You go in through that door,” he said, in a tone of excited gloom, while he pointed again at the doorway. “Follow the signs and then just keep going. And don’t be discouraged. It’s a little bit of a labyrinth down there.”

  * * *

  —

  Inside the door, immersed in the sudden darkness, Brettigan grasped the handrail and descended several steps that led to a corridor on whose right-hand side was another stairway downward. Over the stairs, lit by a single incandescent bulb, was a joke mini-poster that said “The World is Yours!” in fun-house script. Wasn’t that the phrase from Scarface, that ode to cocaine-fueled appetites, world-gobbling egomania, and Miami chain saw bedlam? I’m so behind the times, Brettigan thought; maybe the sentence was harmless and had been set out for Sunday Schoolers.

  The corridor veered slightly to the left, apparently curved. The building was, indeed, a funhouse of sorts, and at the next doorway, he stepped into an assembly hall, what had once apparently been a modest Protestant sanctuary, with a cross-shaped floor plan, and, on either side of the aisle in the spaces where the pews had been, in the dim light cast by the sun through the thick stained glass, he saw card tables laid out symmetrically, and behind them, toward the back, other tables and a few folding chairs in no particular pattern, the room silent except for some buzzing static coming from a small radio plugged into an electrical wall socket, and, above him, a live bird, probably a sparrow, chirping and frantically flying back and forth over and under the roof’s support beams. No one seemed to be around, or tending to anything. That contemporary deity, the God of Neglect, lived here. In what had once been a locale for prayer and reverence and even joy, there was only this gray air emptied of comfort, filled with static, desolation, and the cry of a frightened bird.

  On one table Brettigan saw some Tarot fortune-telling cards spread out, showing the Magician, the Hierophant, and the Sun; on another table were some playing cards scattered here and there, disarrayed, it seemed, from a game of solitaire.

  “Those Tarot cards are a window to the future and to the past. May I help you, Mr. Brettigan?”

  The voice came from behind him, and when he turned, he saw a tall man, wearing a dark brown corduroy suit and what seemed to be a midnight-blue necktie, smiling beatifically. This expression seemed to light up what Brettigan could see of his face, but there was something provisional about the smile, as if the man were testing out an apparent friendliness that could be withdrawn in an instant. Also, he had a Mexican bandito mustache that looked glued on. On his head he wore an African shako.

  “Wye, I am, yes,” the man said. “Welcome to the Sun Collective. I believe the reason you’re here, this is a reason I know.”

  “Oh? You do?” Brettigan said nondirectively, trying to see the man’s eyes.

  “Why don’t you, down to my office, come? Just follow me. I apologize for the enforced gloom in our…facilities. My eyes are to the light somewhat sensitive. If you need to see where we’re going”—he laughed—“you may grasp onto my coat.”

  “Oh, I won’t need to do that,” Brettigan told him, wondering over the man’s inventive manipulation of English syntax, perhaps for comic effect.

  * * *

  —

  When the man started to walk away, his figure, in the corduroy suit, seemed to dissolve into the air behind him, as if he had pressed a button on a disappearance machine and had vanished from sight. He opened the darkness in front of him and closed it behind him as he walked. Brettigan followed his lead, stubbing a toe on a small box on the floor that seemed to have been nailed there, and after a moment he found himself descending another flight of stairs lit by Christmas tree lights, above which was a sign with the Sun Collective’s symbol, a pointing finger and a dark star: . The stairway led into yet another corridor also lit by Christmas lights, but the lights here were so helpless against the surrounding obscurity that they lit only themselves. Brettigan navigated mostly by sound, following Wye’s shuffling feet in bedroom slippers.

  At last Wye opened a door to a room that was apparently his office. Like the preceding hallways, the room was dimly lit, and Brettigan’s eyes took a moment to adjust to the greater darkness that was not only visible but palpable: he could feel it, as if the air were threaded and woven with black cotton against which he might lay his head and rest. On the other side of the room Wye sat or slumped in an easy chair upholstered in a faded-flower fabric. Above him, a framed poster of a Bonnard painting had been hung on the wall, but the room’s lighting contained so much murk that he couldn’t discern any of poster’s colors, though he could make out that the painting depicted a window opening to another window, and another one beyond that, with an indistinct figure resting on the window frame. Wye’s room itself had no windows and was a bunker of sorts.

  “And so here we are,” Wye said. “You have come here for Tim?” He flashed Brettigan a sour smile full of easygoing condescension.

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “Yes. Essentence is what we call the holographic radiance in us that shines outward. That’s how I knew.”

  As he spoke, Wye made a gesture that Brettigan had never seen before in his life: clasping his hands together just above his lap, Wye rapidly lifted his elbows up and brought them down rapidly and repeatedly, fluttering his arms in the air like birds’ wings.

  “Please tell me: Where is my son?”

  “Beyond essentence is luminarity and beyond that, occasionally, is pain, like the extraction of teeth. And if we—”

  “Oh, for chrissake,” Brettigan said. “Just please tell me where my son is, if you know.”

  “You are angry,” Wye observed. “That is the wounded ego speaking, the damaged and frightened bird on the sidewalk making its little chirps.”

  At that moment, Brettigan felt a pair of hands on his shoulders, pressing down gently. Turning his head backward, he saw, looming over him, his bearded son, Timothy, smiling serenely. “Dad,” he said, “here you are.”

  - 22 -

  In moments of deep emotional shock, Brettigan sometimes felt his surroundings giving way and becoming insubstantial, the world’s materiality crumbling. Of his wedding to Alma he could remember only the notes of an out-of-tune piano, Alma’s voice saying, “I do,” and the cascade of summer sunlight on the sidewalk outside. From that day, he also remembered the newfound sensation of the gold wedding band encircling his ring finger. When Virginia was born, he retained a single memory of his wife’s groans of pain during her contractions, followed by his daughter’s first piercing cries in the delivery room. From Timothy’s birth he could now recall nothing except a surge of emotion so powerful upon seeing his son for the first time that a nurse or someone wearing hospital scrubs had touched him on his back and bent him over so that he would not faint after he gave evidence of a light-headed unsteadiness.

  A voice from somewhere had said, “This happens to a lot of new dads.”
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  The passage of time had not insulated him. In contrast to several of his contemporaries who had been hardened by life, he had been softened. He felt this change as a weakness. His manhood was being revoked piece by piece. These days, everything got to him in its relentlessness, and Alma knew it. Sometimes he felt like a chick just hatched out of the egg.

  Now he felt his son holding him up and then dabbing away his tears with a handkerchief and saying, “It’s okay, Dad,” followed by sobs, apparently Brettigan’s own, that broke out from somewhere deep and untreated inside himself. Who was the child here, and who the man? Timothy Brettigan held his father with his right arm as they made their way up a flight of stairs out to the parking lot and to Brettigan’s car, and after Timothy deposited his father behind the wheel, having fished the car keys out of his father’s pocket, Brettigan said to his son, “Forgive me, it’s just that I—” followed by another emotional seizure, inside of which the car and the parking lot and the rest of the world desolidified and took on the insubstantiality of a stage set.

  After a minute, Brettigan said, “I’m okay now.” He wiped his eyes with his shirtsleeve. “I’m fine.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” Timothy said. “I guess I didn’t know—”

  “You don’t have to apologize.”

  “I know, but you’re sorta wrecked.”

  “I’m okay. Really.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  “I’m just so glad to see you,” Brettigan said, looking up at Timothy, standing next to the car door and blocking the sun so that he was outlined in light, all detail gone from his face. “That you’re doing so well.” Again he was embarrassed by his emotional excesses. “That you’re here—”