The Sun Collective

by Charles Baxter

  “I was mostly always here.”

  “Maybe. Do you want some breakfast? Or lunch? I’ve lost track of time.”

  “Sure, Dad. Whatever you want.” A pause. “Can you drive?”

  “Yes. I think so.” Brettigan’s heart was both pounding and fluttering, but at least he was still alive. Timothy opened the passenger-side door and dropped himself in.

  * * *

  —

  Sticking to routes that he knew well, Brettigan drove to the nearest restaurant with which he had some acquaintance, The Egg and I. He parked his car in the adjoining lot beneath a billboard that read, YOU’LL LAUGH, YOU’LL CRY, YOU’LL BEG FOR MORE! next to a smiling 1950s-style waitress. His hands were still trembling as he turned off the ignition. Fearing destabilizing emotions and another outburst of tears, he gradually felt himself calming down into a condition resembling adulthood and maturity.

  His son, during this brief trip, had not spoken a word, quietly observing the pedestrians and the houses passing by with the greatest attention, as if he’d never seen their like before, though he did touch his father’s right shoulder from time to time as if to reassure him. Timothy had always been an observant boy, but his fixed concentration on the neighborhood they were passing through seemed, this time, an act of charity and kindness toward his father, allowing the old man several minutes to compose himself.

  As soon as they entered the restaurant, Timothy glanced around and sniffed. The restaurant smelled of bacon grease. “A breath of fresh air,” he said with the thinnest of smiles as he sat down in the closest booth, motioning toward his father to sit on the other side, opposite him. Elsewhere in the restaurant were clumped groups of customers, and against the wall opposite theirs, a pair of lovers sat on the same side of their table, feeding each other scrambled eggs, the girl’s right leg over the boy’s left leg, a sight that made Brettigan feel old. Lovers in public gave you a window into happiness, but what they did was always slightly theatrical, as if they were performing their love for someone else’s benefit or envy, or perhaps their own.

  Timothy glanced over at them before sitting down, raising an eyebrow with studied neutrality before taking out his iPhone to check for messages. With nothing there to occupy him, he put it back, picked up the menu, glanced at it, and handed it to his father, who was pretending to read his own menu but who was really absorbing the presence of his son into himself, incorporating him into memory so that if he ever disappeared again, he would have him there, internally.

  “I’m under a curse, you know,” Timothy said with a half-smile, glancing at the restaurant’s wall clock. “But I almost forgot to ask: How are you, Dad? And how’s Mom?”

  “You can see how I am by looking at me. As for your mother, you’ll see, soon enough,” Brettigan said.

  “But I’m interested in you telling me.”

  “It’s hard to summarize.” Brettigan instantly regretted the tone he was taking and tried to backtrack. He was so loaded down with emotions that he was almost speechless. “I’m fine, I guess,” he said with a dismissive shrug. “My ticker isn’t everything it could be. The valves and the flutter.” The server came by, asked him if he wanted coffee, and filled his cup. Meanwhile, the lovers on the other side of the room, having completed their breakfast, were kissing. “Your mother had a little stroke a while ago, but she’s okay now. She goes around the city looking for you.”

  “I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “People tell me.”

  “Who tells you?”

  “Ludlow and Christina.”

  “Oh, those two? The Sun Collectivists?”

  “Yeah,” his son said.

  “You’re one of them?”

  “One of them? If you put it that way, yes, I guess so. They have projects. I go over there sometimes. I help out. I saw Mom once. I hid from her. I wasn’t ready.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just wasn’t.”

  “You said you help out. Where?”

  “At their co-op. In the gardens. Other work. It’s a long story. I wanted to do some good in the world. And they found me. That’s what they’re all about.”

  “And why would you want to do that?” Even as he asked it, Brettigan knew that the question was nonsensical. It was simply the sentence that had come into his head, and because it was there, he said it; that was all.

  “Because I’m under a curse.”

  “You said that already,” Brettigan told him. “What sort of curse?”

  The server came over, took their orders, and left them there. Meanwhile, the restaurant had grown quiet. The lovers were obliviously kissing, waiting for their check. Seeing them, Timothy grimaced.

  “It takes some explaining. Remember when I was in Chicago? Playing Astrov in Uncle Vanya?” Brettigan nodded.

  His son began to talk: the theater Timothy had been working for, the Stage Players on the Near North Side, had given him a furnished apartment where he’d stayed while the Chekhov play had its two-month run. The director of the play, a witty, goateed, manipulative character with a small but easily detectable mean streak, had urged Timothy to push his characterization of Astrov to the edge: usually, Dr. Astrov is played as a weary, alcoholic country doctor obsessed with the ecological damage being done to the Russian countryside where he practices medicine halfheartedly. The director, Simonson, had wanted him to put, as he said, “more broken nerves on the stage”: to present Astrov as jittery and unkempt, alcoholic, half out of his mind with overwork, a male hysteric. Exhausted and solitary, Astrov is susceptible to a hopeless infatuation for Professor Serebryakov’s beautiful wife, Elena, and is meanwhile oblivious to Sonya’s desperate love for him, a classic triangle. All this plays out on the professor’s estate. Sonya, the professor’s daughter, is plain and attracts no one’s notice. In the play, everyone wants what’s not available, and, given the gift of eloquence, Sonya herself confesses her wretched condition to anyone who will listen. “You’ll be a walking nervous breakdown,” the director had said, smilingly. “Sonya and Astrov, you’re both wrecks. The audience won’t be able to keep their eyes off the two of you. It’ll be like driving past a head-on collision on the freeway with the bleeding bodies still groaning and twitching.”

  Another one of the director’s ideas was to cast a beautiful woman as Sonya and to “frump her down,” and to cast a homely woman as Elena and to “glamour and glitter her up” against type. The part of Sonya, one of the greatest roles in Western theater, usually taken by actresses who were eager to make themselves unlovely for the occasion, had in this case been cast with a woman who had typically been given dewy ingenue roles. Her name was Hazel Stearns, and she was a graduate of Juilliard’s theater program. She was beautiful—thick brown hair and deep, haunted eyes like the young Kim Novak—and she enthusiastically made herself as plain as she could for the part. “Sonya’s a beautiful woman who has been convinced that she isn’t,” Simonson had told her in front of Timothy as they were blocking out their scenes. “She’s been worn down by her daily work. You can look like that, can’t you, Hazel dear? Of course, you can. A little more stooped over, please. When you walk, remember to shuffle. No hand gestures, though. Sonya is Russian but not like that.”

  From the first table reading through the rehearsals, Simonson had done everything he could to push Hazel Stearns and Timothy together, teasing them and buying them drinks in the evening, arranging a love affair between them, and before long that possibility had become a probability and then given way to its inevitability: Hazel, channeling Sonya, had fallen in love with Timothy, but he, somehow, couldn’t reciprocate. He felt no love, just a dull and moderately insulting low-voltage heterosexual attraction to her. Astrov’s spirit had taken him over and swamped him. He was possessed by inappropriate longings, but not for her. One night, before the dress rehearsal, Hazel, leaning into him, had told him
, “I’m getting so I’m in love with you,” and, without thinking, either as himself or as Astrov, he had blurted out, “Well, I can’t say the same.” Nevertheless, trying to be decent, he’d taken her out to dinner after the rehearsal, and, then, after the dinner, he’d driven her back to his apartment near Lincoln Park for a drink. He brought out the ice and the whiskey bottle and the half-soiled glasses from the kitchen. On his living room sofa, she’d gotten drunk and pleaded with him.

  Out of the great repository of my bad impulses, Timothy told his father, those that proceed from pity are the worst.

  One thing had led to another. “I hate directors,” Timothy said. “Those Svengalis, I hate the effect they have.” All through the run, Timothy and Hazel were having low-down, dirty sex, usually after each performance. On her side it was desperate and sordid and crazy; on his, dutiful and mechanical and cruel. He even splashed cologne on himself as a repellent. Nothing worked. “I knew it was wrong,” Timothy told his father, as the server arrived with his cheese omelet and English muffin. “But I couldn’t stop myself.” He had degraded Hazel and found himself remorseless. She was compliant and would do anything he asked her to do and would do it repeatedly. You only think you’re in love with me, he had told her. No, she replied, I know I am. You’re in my bloodstream.

  “You know, I think maybe there’s such a thing as sin,” he told his father. “I didn’t think so before, but I do now.”

  On the opposite side of the restaurant, the lovers had paid, picked themselves up, and left.

  The relationship Timothy and Hazel Stearns were having had produced a static-electricity aftereffect onstage, just as Simonson had hoped it would. When Sonya gave her heartbroken curtain speech in the last act, even the stagehands wept night after night. After the final performance and the cast party, Hazel and Timothy had returned to his apartment and had sex for the last time. They fucked in a sad valedictory way. Lying there in the dark bedroom afterward, she had proposed marriage to him, and he laughed and told her that, after all, they’d just had a plain old showmance, familiar to all actors from high school onward.

  In the bed, he could feel her stiffen. “You’re a shit,” she told him.

  “Yeah, I guess so. I’m forced to agree.”

  “I love you and you’re walking away.”

  “It happens.”

  She drew in a breath. Then, sounding slightly like Sonya but in a dead calm, she said, “No one will ever love you. You’ll go to the end of your days, trying to love others, and no one will ever love you back. They’ll offer you a token friendship, but you’ll want more, and you’ll never get it. They won’t even care about you. Ever. I promise you, you’ll be solitary to the end of your days. You will live and die alone. And in your desert you’ll feel your solitude and be homeless everywhere.”

  “That’s a very impressive curse,” Timothy mumbled, naked, next to her. He rolled over and entered her again.

  “I feel like killing myself,” she whispered, just before she came.

  * * *

  —

  Hours later, she rose out of bed, picked up her clothes from the floor, dressed herself quickly, and let herself out.

  He was so tired from the performance and the sex, which was also a performance, that he didn’t get up to see her go.

  She killed herself the next week, throwing herself out of a sixth-floor downtown hotel room window. She didn’t leave a suicide note. She didn’t have to.

  * * *

  —

  “What happened to me after that,” Timothy said, finishing his omelet and taking his first sip of coffee, “was that I became, I don’t know, spellbound, I guess you’d say.” He’d gone to the memorial service in her hometown, Bar Harbor. The director hadn’t shown up; maybe he was busy somewhere. At the memorial, Timothy met Hazel’s parents, who, beyond an initial politeness, would not speak to him. One of her friends from high school approached him to say, “You’re the boyfriend? I’ve heard about you. You shouldn’t be here. You have a lot of nerve, coming to this thing.” She gazed at him with steady, eager hatred. She was quite beautiful and radiant with loathing.

  He returned to Chicago. He was offered the role of Estragon in Waiting for Godot at a theater in Minneapolis but initially refused it after informing the theater director that Estragon was a toxic role that wounded, sometimes permanently, the soul of the actor who played it; it was common knowledge among actors, a role that was worse luck than Macbeth. He would have to research it. Besides, he was impaired already; words and music were beginning to echo in his head all day long. He packed up his necessary belongings into his car, stored everything else in a friend’s basement, and took off for no particular destination.

  Avoiding the interstate highways, he made his way through one small midwestern town after another, stopping to eat at no-name diners and to rest at seedy motels without corporate affiliations, where the mattresses sagged and the TVs rarely worked and stray mongrel dogs sat out sunning themselves in the parking lots in front of the rusting metal porch chairs where no one ever sat. During the day, the trees and farmlands rushed past his car, not in a blur but as specific instances that he would remember each night: one hill after another plowed in parallel lines, every cornfield and individual haystack, every anonymous individual seen at a distance as if painted there, unmoving, but returning his gaze with fixed expressions.

  He felt himself searching for forgiveness. At night the familiar stars slipped further and further away.

  He found himself outside Iowa City in Coralville, where he lived in a Motel 6 for two weeks, walking around the University of Iowa campus and along the Iowa River on the jogging trails, and reading magazines and German philosophy in the library before he resumed his wanderings. Soon after, he landed for a week in Fort Collins, Colorado, where a bachelor friend from college, a high school teacher, put him up in the basement on an inflatable air mattress. He walked around the Colorado State campus and drank cheap draft beer in the student bars. He felt penitential and was beginning to see the elaborate abyss that was being prepared for him. In it, eyes without a face examined his soul and turned away with distaste. Forgiveness might be everywhere, but it was for others, not for him.

  The battery in his cell phone died; he threw the phone into a restaurant dumpster before he took off again and found himself in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and then Austin, Texas. He was comfortable for a while in these and other college and university towns where no one ever seemed to notice him or to mind his increasingly bedraggled appearance. With his backpack, shabby sweater, jeans, and running shoes, he fit right in. He began to talk to himself in a low, eloquent mutter. As his money dwindled and his credit cards maxed out, he considered his situation dispassionately, as if his life were being lived by someone else. He felt himself expanding into invisibility. Soon, he imagined, no one would be able to see him at all. He would just fade away and vanish before taking up occupancy in the spirit world where he would be as unwelcome as he was here.

  Outside Bentonville, Arkansas, the home of Walmart, his car wouldn’t start. He had it towed to the nearest garage, where the mechanic told him that the ignition switch needed to be replaced. After being given the estimate, Timothy asked the shop to go ahead and do the job, signed the work order, and while the car was being repaired, he walked to the Greyhound station and bought a ticket to Kansas City, Missouri. In Kansas City, he bought another ticket to St. Louis, where, for the first time, he stayed in a homeless shelter, on Tucker Boulevard. By now it was autumn. There, he was given a clean set of clothes and a dinner of beef stew, broccoli, and applesauce. Looking around the dining area, he saw men who were either silent, or, if they were talking, talked only to some inner part of themselves, interrupting their own monologues with gallows laughter.

  “People don’t realize how a curse can work,” he told his father, as he finished his third cup of coffee, and the restaurant’s other custom
ers paid for their meals and departed. “A curse can be very effective, if you do it right.”

  In St. Louis he made his way to the basilica on Lindell Boulevard to see whether the collective power of the Catholic Church could ease the weight of the darkness falling in thick layers over him. Darkness, this particular variety of it, had considerable weight attached to his back; he could feel it. All day he sat in a pew, studying the ceiling mosaics and the Sacred Heart Shrine. People came and went, lit candles, went to confession, and prayed. He heard a disquieted background murmuring—the sounds of perpetual contrition sent upward, to the highest reaches of the ceiling and beyond that to God. The basilica smelled of incense and blood. Toward evening, a priest, who introduced himself as Father Walling, came down a side aisle before sitting beside him and asking in a voice of practiced compassion whether there might be anything he could do. It had been noticed that he had been sitting there for several hours. Was anything the matter? Timothy shook his head. No. “The matter” wasn’t the matter. Well, Father Walling asked, in that case, what might be the trouble? Because I suspect that you have a troubled soul. How may I help?

  Timothy opened his mouth, intending to say that he had a problem but didn’t know how to name it or what it was, but nothing came out.

  Yes? asked Father Walling.

  Timothy opened his mouth again, but whatever brought words out of the mind’s reservoir of language had severed. Nothing came to him, and he felt darkness and its sister, silence, overtaking him completely, the heavy soundless darkness and its attendant speechlessness floating down lazily from the sky where they had originated. Looking at the priest’s brown eyes, blinking behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses accompanying his kindly expression, Timothy tried one more time. “—” he said, waiting for a sentence of his own to come to him. “—” he tried again.

  Do you speak English? the priest asked him. Timothy nodded. Well, then, why not say just anything?