The Sun Collective

by Charles Baxter

  Promptly at midnight, his car pulled up out front. He was driving a new used car, a Chevy, on which the rust had only started to appear. She hurried out to the car so that he wouldn’t come up and ring the doorbell, which would result in Woland’s terrified barking, followed by the awakenings of Harry and Alma and their dazed descent on the stairs, wearing their grotesque old-people pajamas, to see what was going on. Timothy didn’t even have time to get out and open her door for her. It was quite cold, for March—a frozen nighttime haze hung in the air. Once she was seated on the passenger side, he said, “Hi,” and as she belted herself in, he smiled and said that she looked great.

  She settled back and asked where they were going. As an answer, he pointed forward, and they began with the small talk: the weather, a slight cough he had acquired from somewhere, the closing of the Sun Collective headquarters. She hoped he wouldn’t ask her about Ludlow or the accident and Ludlow’s parents, if he even knew about them, and he didn’t ask. She was weighed down sufficiently with soul burdens without people making their polite inquiries. Timothy had a relaxed and thoughtful ease behind the wheel, and as he headed uptown, she found that his easefulness was spreading over to her. He asked her how it was, living in his parents’ basement, and she told him that she wasn’t down there anymore; she had moved upstairs into his old room. The bed was quite comfortable, she said. That quieted him down for a moment or two. His face, lit by the dashboard light, was not just handsome but beautiful, and he would still have been beautiful if she hadn’t liked him, but she did like him. Feeling brave, she asked him whether he might ever take up acting again. He said no.

  That was his past life, he told her, an occupation that was dazzlingly horrible in its way, a playground for people who didn’t know what or who they were, and he was never going back to it. “The Sun Collective saved me,” he said, “and they made me real,” and she felt the breath go out of her, making her ribs hurt, as she wondered how they accomplished that, how that group made anybody real, until it occurred to her that maybe she herself had become real in the past year, unlike Ludlow. For the first time in her life, possibly, she felt that she too had substance, a specific weight and gravity that she’d acquired by having ideals and a hope for the betterment of others, as foolish as those ambitions sometimes seemed. The weight she had didn’t amount to much, but it was a start.

  Of course she had helped to kill someone—had that helped the human betterment project?

  The melting, dirty snow clogging the side streets crunched under Timothy’s tires as he parked outside the midnight diner. The diner’s interior was brightly lit in that inevitable Edward Hopper way, but the diner’s customers, workers of the night, weren’t hunched over in the Hopper manner but were loud and cheerful. As she and Timothy walked to their table, everyone smiled at them as fellow proletarians, nocturnal laborers, here to get a cheeseburger and coffee before starting their jobs at two a.m.

  Once they had settled down on their red vinyl-covered seats, Timothy and Christina examined the laminated menus without speaking. The air smelled of hamburgers, slush, burnt coffee, and wet woolens. The old jukebox was playing something by Roy Orbison. Okay, so it was a throwback diner, its ambience a little studied and artificial, but the idea was to make its patrons happy, which was commendable.

  “What’re you going to have?” she asked.

  “It seems incorrect to order anything here except the Midnight Burger,” he told her. “If I wanted a salad, I’d’ve stayed home.”

  When the server came, she wrote down their orders while simultaneously nodding as she chewed her gum and expertly blew a bubble. “Got it,” she said, once the bubble had burst, and the gum reentered her mouth. “Two burgers for the young couple in Booth Five.” She turned and walked away, the best waitress ever, Christina thought, to call us a couple.

  “Are you tired?” Timothy asked. He glanced at his watch. “It’s half past twelve.”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Because I was a little afraid that you’d be sleepy, considering the hour.”

  “It’s okay. I wasn’t sleepy. I’m not sleepy now. I was looking forward to it. To this.”

  “Good. Me, too.”

  “What about you? It is late, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, I never get sleepy anymore. I’m wide awake all the time. In fact, I have insomnia.”

  “So what do you do, when you can’t sleep? Warm milk? Bananas?”

  “No,” he said, taking a sip of water. His upper lip was chapped; it must have hurt him to smile. “I do category games. You know: you have a category like baseball players or football players, and you go down the alphabet, thinking of them, somebody for every letter.”

  “It wouldn’t have to be sports, would it?” He shook his head. “You could do any category. Like, I don’t know, composers. Who’s A?”

  He thought for a moment. “I don’t know any A composers.”

  “Well, there’s Albinoni. How about B?”

  “Beethoven.”

  “C?”

  “Chopin,” he said, after a few seconds.

  “D?”

  “Um, Debussy? Don’t even ask about E. I can tell you already that I don’t know any E composers except maybe Duke Ellington.”

  “Ellington counts. Or Elgar,” she said triumphantly, breaking out into a grin, as their cheeseburgers and fries and coleslaw arrived.

  “Okay, you win. How about baseball players? Or rock stars?”

  “Well.” She bit into her cheeseburger. Who could ever be a vegan when food tasted like this? “Hank Aaron. He’s a baseball player, right?”

  “Yes. B.”

  Was this a real test or a pretend test? She tried to think of any baseball players at all. “Charles Barkley?”

  “Wrong sport. That’s basketball. You lose.” He nodded to himself, as if he were entertaining the thought that women rarely knew anything about sports, which was so odd about them as a gender.

  “I don’t lose. We both win.” He poured an extreme amount of ketchup on his hamburger. She was appalled, watching the red slurry slop downward over the sides of the meat, but also very happy to have learned one of his idiosyncrasies. When she gazed up at him again, she thought she heard a door closing somewhere. He had the particular shadowy expression of someone who has gone through a trial by suffering and has come out the other side, and the combination of his effortful cheerfulness and beauty made her almost want to cry out and take his hand to comfort him. She had been through a similar trial. But he wouldn’t like that; he was working diligently to be strong, and besides, they were just in a diner.

  When the bill came, she felt the slow, steady onset of something like love building up, a cloudbank on the horizon changing the air pressure. As he fished out his wallet and dropped some money on the table over the check, he said, “Now we go to the palace of the Moorish kings.”

  “No kidding. Where is that?”

  “Just a few blocks away. We get in through the back door.”

  She decided to play along. As they were walking, she wondered whether he would take her hand, and, if he did, whether she would like it. His face reminded her distantly of his father’s face: it had the same thoughtful asymmetry as Harry Brettigan’s, with one eye slightly lower than the other, but the shrewdness she saw there, the worldliness, came from somewhere else, maybe his mother, or possibly he had acquired it from life. Out of the blue, he said, “What’s the point of being alone, the streets and squares, they’re always empty.” She had the feeling he was quoting, maybe from a play.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Beats me. Are you quoting from somewhere?”

  “Come here,” he said. “We have to go into this alley.”

  The alleyway was lit by one distant streetlight that cast their shadows across the pavement, elongating them so that they both seemed like giants, winter creatures scavengin
g close to the dumpsters there in the semidark. Timothy took out a key and unlocked a side door of the building, ushering her inside. He said, “Welcome to the Alhambra. I work here.” Where Christina stood, everything was pitch black until Timothy flipped a wall switch, and another solitary light went on, and she could see that they stood in a hallway, an emergency exit to the street.

  “Walk straight down there,” he said and he flipped another switch. A dim utility light with a bare bulb near the ceiling went on, and she made her way up the aisle of the empty movie theater—yes, the Alhambra—restored and decorated like a Moorish castle with various arches and mosaics, arabesque designs, crenellations, and a painted fountain on each wall facing the small auditorium. The screen was a faint white square. After flipping yet another switch, Timothy said, “Look up,” and there in the ceiling were tiny twinkling lights, stars over this plaster-and-drywall Spain, like all those other movie palaces from the 1920s and ’30s, almost all of them gone. This one, perhaps because it was so small, had been saved somehow.

  “I’ve never been here before,” she said, with a trace of wonder. “What do they show here?”

  “Movies,” he said. “It’s a nonprofit now. They’re trying to keep it going before the internet kills movie theaters off. It’s a small theater, so it’s not too expensive to operate. It’s only the Alhambra. Take a seat.”

  Christina examined the empty rows, chose one chair in the middle, and sat down, checking to see whether Timothy would follow her. She hoped he wouldn’t go up into the projection booth just now. She wanted to sit here with him and for him to keep her company. Accordingly, he followed her and sat down next to her, both of them facing the blank screen.

  “Is anything going to come on?” she asked.

  “No.” He waited for a moment. “Maybe in your imagination. Or, I don’t know, ours.”

  “Like what?”

  “So tell me what you see on the screen.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Use your imagination.”

  “Timothy, there’s nothing there.”

  “Yes, there is. There’s something there, and you’re just not looking hard enough. Look harder, Christina.”

  She couldn’t remember when he had spoken her name until now. She liked it, the feeling that he was calling out to her. Her name from him gave her strength. “You go first,” she said.

  “Okay.” He leaned back, his eyes fixed forward. He put his legs over the seat in front of him, and as he did, he drew in a deep breath. “There’s a woman up there, a little bit like you, but different and more, I don’t know, sturdy, and the movie’s in black and white, kind of noirish, water on the cobblestones, echoing footsteps, and she’s on a mission, I guess, because look: she’s driving that small foreign car down that small foreign street, and nobody’s around except children—”

  “Maybe she’s headed for an assignation.”

  “No ‘maybe’ about it. She’s got a lover who’s in the Irish Republican Army, and he’s—”

  “Wait. This is Odd Man Out. You can’t do that.” She was getting into the spirit of things. “They’ve already robbed the bank or whatever, and James Mason has been shot. This is before Robert Newton and F. J. McCormick come into the picture. We have to start over.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean, yes, she’s up there. A little bit like me. Except she has a mole on her left cheek, which I don’t. And the movie is in Technicolor, 1950s, so the colors are like Popsicles, and there she is, in her kitchen, and she’s—no, that isn’t me. That isn’t my movie.”

  “What’s your movie?”

  “She’s with her lover, but they can’t be lovers because it’s the nineteenth century and anyway her lover is married, so they decide to die and get on a toboggan and go down a hill and hit a tree. Only he doesn’t die. He becomes a vegetable.” Christina didn’t know why she was saying what she was saying, and the silence that followed conveyed to her that Timothy didn’t know either, but he could guess. “She’s done terrible things. They…they weigh on her conscience.”

  “That’s from a novel I read in high school,” he said. “I can’t remember its name, though. It was assigned, that’s all I remember. You can’t do that. It’s against the rules. We both have to start over. We can’t do adaptations here.”

  “This is the strangest date I’ve ever had in my life.” She shifted in her seat to get more comfortable.

  “A date that tests your imagination.”

  “All right.” This time she took a deep breath. “The woman does something heroic. I’m trying to see what it is. She takes a stand for the poor, for the stupid and crazy, the people who sleep on the sidewalks, she decides not to lie down and let the big SUV of capitalism drive over her, she does something wonderful and inspirational to save her soul and other souls, and, modestly, the planet, too, and very much in the spirit of the times, which she embodies.”

  “What is it? What does she do?”

  For a long time Christina stared at the blank movie screen. As she did, Timothy Brettigan quietly took her hand. At last she flinched as if she had received a mild electric shock, and she said, “I’ve got it.”

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell you yet. But I will soon.”

  “Okay. Am I involved in what she does?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. And yours? Tim? What do you see up there?”

  “The same thing you do. Incidentally, what do you want out of your life?”

  “I want to be normal,” she said sadly.

  “What a sweet thing to say. But you’re lying. You want to be a total hero.”

  They sat there companionably in the quiet and half-dark until finally he got up the nerve to kiss her. After he was done, she said, “Ah, I get it. So that’s how the movie begins.”

  - 29 -

  Spring had come to Minnesota, and egged on by Christina and Timothy, who was now the manager there, Harry and Alma had decided to go to the Alhambra to see a Saturday matinee showing of Hitchcock’s Notorious. After the movie, they planned to walk through the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden or stop at a coffee shop. As she started the car, Harry said, “Have you ever noticed? If you’re a senior, all your dates are during the daylight hours.”

  Most films went through actual 35mm movie projectors at the Alhambra, and the auditorium was so small that you could hear the machines humming away in the projection booth. Occasionally an old print would get stuck in the machine’s aperture gate, and the frame would burn from the inside out, just like old times. The film would stop; the house lights would go on, and the audience would sit there, impatient and happy, eating popcorn, until the movie started up again.

  This time, the Alhambra had obtained a new print of the film, and Harry and Alma sat near the back holding hands, while on the screen, Cary Grant’s character and Ingrid Bergman’s character fell in love, though his character, Devlin, wouldn’t act on his love until her character, Alicia Huberman, was near death, from poison. In the last climactic minutes, by which time Harry had pulled his hand away from Alma, Devlin helped his beloved down the grand staircase and into the getaway car, out of the house where the Germans had plotted to kill her. When THE END appeared on screen, over the RKO logo, most of the audience, including Alma, applauded.

  Harry sat with his arms crossed. “Well, it’s great trash,” he muttered as they picked themselves up and headed for the exit.

  “Oh, Harry, it’s better than that,” Alma told him. “Don’t be a grump. It’s like a fairy tale. They’re both sleeping beauties. He wakes up first, and then he wakes her up.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Great trash.”

  * * *

  —

  Once in the car, with Alma behind the wheel—she enjoyed driving, and he didn’t—she kept at it. “He loved her. And because he loved her, he saved her.”


  “When was the last time you saw that movie?”

  “I don’t know. More than thirty years ago, I guess. Before that? Maybe in college.” She shrugged, turning left and then to the right, stopping at a corner where a sunburnt panhandler, with long brown hair, wearing a T-shirt with a beer logo on it, held out a sign: HOMELESS. PLEASE HELP. GOD BLESS. The man’s eyes were deep blue and disconcertingly sane.

  “It was more plausible thirty years ago,” he told her. “We were younger then. We believed everything. We thought love could save the world.” He waited for a moment before saying, “But I don’t believe movies anymore. I don’t believe in them, and I don’t believe their stories. They don’t seem real to me—just fantasy. Robots in space? Superheroes? Characters who look like Cary Grant? The only person who ever looked like Cary Grant was Cary Grant. Fantasy. And novels. All of it. It all looks made-up now. Bunch of imaginary puppets on strings, dancing around. When did we lose our grip on reality?”

  “I disagree,” she said. “I believed it. I believed he loved her. And because he loved her, he saved her.”

  “And the MacGuffin: uranium in wine bottles? Please.”

  On Hennepin Avenue they passed a large billboard paid for by some environmental group. A drawn picture of a withered tree stood at the center, and to the side were three lines of bold lettering:

  THE PLANET IS DYING

  WHAT WILL YOU DO?

  WWW.SAVEthisEARTH.ORG