The Sun Collective

by Charles Baxter

  “—”

  You would be better off, the priest said, if you stood up. You’ve been sitting here for too long. You look like an educated man. But I have to tell you that you can’t spend the night here. What has happened to you? Something terrible must have happened to you. Would you like to see the front of our basilica? The baldachin? I believe that you must be a visitor from somewhere. What’s the matter with you? My goodness, even your hands are sweating.

  Timothy opened his mouth one more time, and this time, words that were not his own came out. “ ‘I haven’t had much time to myself,’ ” he said, as Astrov. “ ‘I’ve grown shabby, and why not? Life drags you down, and you’re in the company of characters and crazy people…’ ” The voice wasn’t his; it was Chekhov’s doctor speaking. Somehow he’d gotten locked inside the part and couldn’t get out, just as Hazel had been locked in hers. The only sentences he had left belonged to Astrov, who’d gotten them from Chekhov, who’d gotten them from Russia in the late nineteenth century.

  What? the priest asked.

  “ ‘This quiet,’ ” Timothy-as-Astrov recited. “ ‘The pens write, the crickets chirp. Warm, cozy…I don’t feel like leaving here. There, they’ve brought the horses. All I need to do is to say goodbye to you, my friends, to say goodbye and…soon I’ll be gone.’ ”

  I think you need help, the priest said. More than the help that we can give you. I’m going to call somebody.

  Without any sensible transition, Timothy found himself in another location with institutional walls and beds, and nurses at first who took his temperature and his pulse and his blood pressure, and other male attendants who bathed him and asked him who he was. “Michael,” he said. “Dr. Michael Astrov,” he managed to say. One morning when he woke, his wrists were tied to the side rails of the bed.

  They had no record on any of their databases of any such Dr. Astrov. He carried no other ID with him because he had discarded his own somewhere back there in Kansas City. Eventually when they thought he was marginally lucid, they let him go, and he dipped downward onto the streets.

  * * *

  —

  “That’s the last solid memory I’ve got,” Timothy told his father, “before I came back to myself a few months ago.” He had clasped his hands together, both elbows on the table, and propped his chin at the top of the triangle formed by his arms. “I seem to have made my way back here, and the Sun Collective people put me together after I was in pieces.”

  Brettigan took a final sip from his coffee cup.

  “A middle-aged woman found me one day on the street and said she recognized me. She took me to the Sun Collective. They gave me a meal and a clean set of clothes. I remember taking a shower. I was there for several days, and it was as if I was waking up. I woke up there. They acted as if I wasn’t cursed. They acted as if I was forgiven. They forgive almost everybody. That’s their thing.”

  By now, it was early afternoon, and the restaurant, which served only breakfast and lunch, was closing up: two employees were mopping the linoleum floors and putting the chairs upside down on the tables near where Brettigan and his son sat alone, while seemingly random sounds came out of the kitchen as the cooks yelled in Spanish to each other over the background noise of water spray on the dishes and the clattering of a pail that someone dropped on the floor.

  “I guess we have to go,” Brettigan said. “And where are you living now?” he asked his son. “There’s so much I want to ask you.” He waited. “I’ve missed you.”

  “I know.”

  “Well?”

  “What?”

  “Please tell me: Where are you living?”

  “They brought me back to life,” Timothy said. “The Sun Collective. They found me. They gave me a purpose. They told me who I was. And they have a program. ‘Reclamation,’ is what they call it.”

  “So you’re living there?”

  Timothy nodded. “No. I have a little apartment. And I have a job. I’m working as the assistant manager of a movie theater, the Alhambra. It’s uptown.”

  “What should I say to your mother? Will you come home with me and have dinner with us?”

  “Not just now.”

  “Why?”

  “All I want is an ordinary life, as myself,” Timothy said, looking straight at his father. Brettigan felt himself shrinking backward. “I don’t want to do great things.” He waited for his father’s reaction. “And, oh, I meant to ask: How are you, Dad? And how’s Mom?”

  “You already asked,” his father said. “Several hours ago. I told you that I was getting by and that your mother had a small episode.” He waited a moment. “You know, I missed you.”

  “I missed you too, Dad. It’s too bad about Mom.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes. Sometimes I saw your face. You were smiling. You were proud of me.”

  “Yes, I was. Are you telling me that you don’t remember living on the streets? Because I think I once saw you.”

  “Yes,” Timothy said. “I was out there, with them, that society of souls. But it was like living in a dream. The thing is…” He stopped to think. “The thing is, out there, something happens to you, and you don’t remember it. None of it gets remembered. Nothing registers. Nothing.” After smiling for no reason at all, he stood up. “Those people found me, and they reclaimed me. And I awakened. Do you know their motto? ‘What’s been done can be undone.’ Those words saved me. And now you have to take me back to my apartment.”

  “No,” his father said. “I’ll take you there, but first you have to see someone else.”

  * * *

  —

  Brettigan parked on the driveway of his house, seeing Alma’s car nestled in the garage. His son, slumped down on the passenger side and knowing where they were, kept his eyes closed until Brettigan said, “You know, you really have to do this. You have to see your mother.”

  “I don’t want to. I can’t. Shouldn’t we warn her?”

  “Why?”

  Timothy squirmed for a moment, then said, “She’s going to collapse or something when she sees me. And she won’t forgive me, either, for what I’ve done. For disappearing for so long.”

  “How long has it been? Since you’ve seen her?”

  “Months. I don’t know. I mean, I don’t— Years.”

  “You just have to do it. She’s been worried about you for so long now.”

  Timothy’s eyes were still closed. “The house looks the same. The lawn looks the same. Everything looks the same. Even the sky is the same. I feel about five years old. Jesus, I hate homecomings.”

  “I know.”

  “Oh, all right.” With a gesture that seemed violent even though it was slow and measured, Timothy opened the car door and got out, blinking at the afternoon sun that had acquired a hazy reddish tinge from distant forest fires to the west. He bent down to touch his toes and then stood straight, turning his face toward the sky in a gesture that reminded Brettigan of prayer, specifically of supplication, and he sniffed the air. “Smoky,” he said, “like everything’s burning down. Maybe it’s not all the same.”

  “Well, you know, climate change. Global warming. Last rites.”

  “Let’s get this over with,” Timothy said. “I mean, I love Mom and everything, but, you know, I’m just—” He seemed to be temporarily out of words.

  They walked toward the front door, directly across the lawn, and Brettigan pulled out his key chain and turned the lock. The two men crossed the front entryway and the living room, Brettigan going first, followed by his son, and Brettigan called, “We’re home.” The dog and the cat came over to examine them. The cat, who did not like strangers, retreated from Timothy, running up the stairs. Something was cooking: the air held the smell of onions, garlic, and tomatoes. The dog, who was more hospitable, wagged his tail.

  “We?” Alm
a was in the kitchen.

  “Come see.”

  “Christina?”

  “Well, not exactly, no,” Brettigan said, as Alma came out of the kitchen wearing a red bib apron stained with blue and brown streaks. With the back of her wrist, she pushed a strand of hair away from her forehead. Seeing Timothy, she froze, six feet away from where he was standing.

  “Hi, Mom,” Timothy said, his voice higher than usual from the strain. Neither he nor his mother rushed across the room to embrace each other.

  “Timothy? Tim?” she asked, blinking, before she jerked back, as if she’d been kicked in the stomach. “Is it you?”

  “Yup,” he said, “it’s me.” He gave her an uncertain smile.

  The blood having drained from her face, Alma turned to her husband. “This isn’t him,” she said. “That’s not Timothy. It can’t be.”

  “Yes, it is, honey.”

  “But look at him!”

  “Well, he’s changed.” Brettigan put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “We’re all older, you know,” he said, a bit helplessly.

  Alma walked toward Timothy, never taking her eyes off him, and, holding her hand out, as if to shake his, reached for his right hand and examined his wrist, where a faint scar in the shape of an inverted V seemed to be outlined in pale scar tissue.

  “Oh my God,” she said, gazing up at him, “oh my God oh my God.” She closed the distance between them, leaning and then caving herself into her son, wrapping her arms around him as he, more tentatively, took his mother into his arms. “Oh ramcist munerobt,” she said, her face pressed against his chest. She seemed to be speaking in tongues, in her grief and joy.

  Before her legs gave way, her son had the presence of mind to lock his hands behind her back so that she would not fall. On his face was an expression that somehow mingled tender love, pity, and stark terror.

  - 23 -

  Days and weeks passed, summer turned into autumn, and from her desk at the bank, Christina watched the sun cross the sky as it marked the hours, the sands in her mental hourglass falling almost audibly as Ludlow became indefinable and distant, full of projects that he would allude to but not explain. Something in him had slowly curdled and turned sour. By November, Christina found herself waking up next to Ludlow and wondering who he was, exactly. Was he unknowable or just secretive? Perhaps both. On top of the usual opacity of men, Ludlow had added to the mix a kind of furtiveness, like someone in a spy organization under orders to keep his mouth shut. And she was beginning to think that he might be operating some kind of confidence trick with her. Where were his parents, for example? His siblings? Why didn’t they ever call? His last name, Schmitz, struck her as bogus, and his behavior was becoming, well, erratic: occasionally now he would lean back on her sofa and talk at length about what he called “necessary violence,” though he never specified what form the violence would take or against whom it would be directed. Then he would stand up and dance a little jig, sit down, and resume his monologues about the coming End Times. How do you get rid of a man like that?

  She had wanted to steal his wallet to check his driver’s license, but he didn’t carry a wallet.

  Dumping him would be difficult because he had nowhere to go. She believed she would need help doing it—someone to lean down with her, pushing hard on the crowbar to pry him loose. You needed at least two people for that. He was like a used car with a thirty-day warranty, which had run out; there was no getting rid of him now.

  He gave her bad dreams. He was a bad dream. Of course, Amos Alonzo Thorkelson was making everybody crazy these days, but Ludlow’s craziness was more personal and apocalyptic than that of most of them. Even his lovemaking had a subtle undercurrent of violence, although he never hurt her. His orgasms were like psychic calamities during which he made noises as if an explosive device had detonated inside him, requiring first aid.

  But if he had loved her, she might have managed somehow. On that score, he’d set her straight. Her car had been in the shop for repairs, and they had decided to take a night off for dinner and a movie. To get there and to return, they would have to take public transportation. When they were a block away from their local bus stop, the Number 4 pulled up and disgorged its passengers. Ludlow let go of Christina’s hand and sprinted toward the bus, squeezing on just as the doors were closing and the bus pulled away. She was left behind, watching it roar down the street. He got off at the next stop, but even so, she knew from the way he had abandoned her there on the sidewalk that he had never loved her; he did not love her now, and he would never love her.

  Also he had started to complain about her kisses. He seemed to have developed an aversion to her tongue and the way she used it during sex. He would stop the show, turn on the bedroom light, and lecture her about what her tongue should and should not do. He took obvious pleasure in humiliating her. How many more warning signs did she need?

  In the middle of his lengthy disquisitions he seemed to be looking through her, not at her; she felt that she was gradually eroding away in his eyes. Soon she might not be there at all.

  But that wasn’t the real problem with him. The real problem lay elsewhere. He had an unkempt and disorderly soul.

  * * *

  —

  In the meantime, the Sun Collective had mostly branched out as a group, though they occasionally met together in Northeast Minneapolis, occasionally in secret. For greater political efficiency they had divided themselves into smaller cells using the models of the early Christians and the Comintern. Reluctantly, they had gone online to combat the internet chatter about them. One group appeared to be engaged in legislative lobbying, while another, filled with refugees from the business world, was starting the co-op bank and operating a co-op grocery and food shelf; while a third seemed to be engaged in rehabilitations of homeless street people and converting civilians to Sun Collective principles through the manifesto, persuasion, and free food and clothing. The less visible you were, the more you could do. Termite actions.

  One new motto they had was “We’re not a group, we’re an idea, and we’re doing good works everywhere.” Another motto was “We’re implausible. Believe in the implausible.” A third was “You can’t see us, but we’re here.”

  During her time away from the bank, Christina had taken on the semi-ironic title of Minister for Propaganda for the collective and was posting her very own ten-step program on her blog, titled “Happiness in a Corner,” whose goal was the quiet serenity that she claimed was within reach, once you realized that whatever you possessed already would be enough to sustain you. You didn’t have to buy much of anything. You could de-consume; there was no such word, but soon there would be. She herself felt no serenity whatsoever thanks to Ludlow—his dead eyes, his boredom with her, his distaste for her kisses—but believed that if she made the effort, eventually happiness would arrive on her doorstep somehow. Joy would take her over like a benevolent bout of flu she might have caught by breathing.

  The collective had designated Wye, not Christina, to be its spokesperson. She felt she would have looked better on TV than he did. He still believed in visibility and publicity. “We are not Fight Club,” he claimed. “We can talk about ourselves. We are not afraid of ourselves.” He went around quoting everybody and anybody. “All of humanity’s problems,” he intoned on Channel 5’s evening news, “stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” He was a sententious son of a bitch.

  Still, something had to be done. If you watched TV and saw the news, or if you noticed what people were posting on Facebook, and what they were tweeting about, you would see President Amos Alonzo Thorkelson (“Call me ‘Coach’ ”) issuing edicts—securing the borders, temporarily closing down the Supreme Court by using the New Executive Army, and issuing personal “consumer vouchers” through the Commerce Department (ten dollars per adult-age individual, fifteen dollars for those on Social Security, thirty dollars
for those on Medicare) to be spent only in certain friendly retail outlets whose CEOs had supported Thorkelson’s most recent presidential campaign. “We’re getting America back to work again! And we’re spending like there’s no tomorrow! Because, who knows, maybe there isn’t!” he said with his gameshow grin. His rallies ended with twenty- and fifty-dollar bills fluttering down from the ceiling to the supporters below, all of them roaring with happiness and holding out their hands turned upward as the Chief Executive beamed at them with his arms crossed, surrounded by his bodyguards.

  You had to apply to get into his rallies. “Many are called, but few are chosen,” President Thorkelson said with another trademark expression, pointing at the camera like Uncle Sam.

  The real problem was what people were saying on the internet. A new rumor had started to the effect that the Sun Collective was a front organization secretly invented and funded by Amos Alonzo Thorkelson himself to create a convenient false-flag enemy. They weren’t just a local activist group that had started up in a neighborhood, these rumors said; no, the word was out that the Sun Collective was an invention of President Amos Alonzo Thorkelson himself, a man who needed idealistic enemies to mock and belittle. On Twitter, the president had suggested that the Utopia Mall itself might be in danger, menaced by local “crazies,” as he called them, and commentators were quick to name the Sun Collective as exactly that: an unhinged, untethered political group whose agenda was one of terror and whose goal was to bring down the Utopia Mall. They hadn’t said so, but you could just tell.

  After putting up notices about workshop sessions in co-ops and independent businesses, and posting other notices on social media, Christina would return home to her apartment unsure whether she wanted Ludlow to be there, but he had his own schedule by now and usually didn’t return until after midnight. Tired and unclean, he would climb into bed and curl himself around her, and when she asked him where he had been, he would say that he had been out there in the big, wide world. He had projects, he murmured.