The Sun Collective

by Charles Baxter

  “The MacGuffin?”

  “Oh, you know. That’s Hitchcock’s term for the object they’re all chasing after. The meaningless thing that gives meaning to everything else. It’s the element in the story that has no content. It’s hollow. It’s meaningless in itself. A football in a football game is a MacGuffin—it doesn’t mean anything but it gives meaning to all the activity around it. The hollow Maltese Falcon. The uranium. The microfilm. Whatever. Incidentally, you wouldn’t ever put uranium into wine bottles.”

  “You might.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. It’s all made-up.”

  They drove for several minutes in silence, Alma glancing from time to time at her husband, who sat frowning at the springtime flowers and trees beginning to green out, to blossom and bloom. Somehow a fuse had been lit. The oddest combination of topics could ignite disgruntlement in him—speakable topics that were articulated stood in as placeholders for other hypertoxic topics that had to remain unspoken—but this one baffled her. He had placed his hand over his chest, as if his heart were hurting him.

  “Explain the MacGuffin to me again,” she said, to break the spell. “How it got that name.”

  “It’s from a joke,” Brettigan told her. “Two men are in a train compartment. One of them looks up at the luggage rack above them and points to a large wrapped object belonging to the other passenger. ‘What’s that?’ the man asks. ‘Oh, that?’ his companion says. ‘That’s a MacGuffin.’ ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’ the first man inquires. ‘A MacGuffin,’ the companion explains, ‘is a weapon used to kill mountain lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ The first man objects: ‘But there are no mountain lions in the Scottish Highlands,’ to which the second man replies, ‘Well then, that’s not a MacGuffin.’ ”

  Neither of them laughed. She could tell that the entire category was causing him some odd spiritual or psychic turmoil. Well, he would get over it.

  “It’s meaningless, but it gives meaning to everything around it,” he repeated. “It’s hollow, a nothing, and all your hopes and fears go in there.”

  She parked the car, and together they climbed the stairs to the bridge over the highway to the sculpture garden. She noticed that he was taking the steps slowly and with evident effort, pausing periodically to get his breath. As they crossed, Brettigan glanced at the upper-left-hand corner of the enclosed span, where a John Ashbery poem, commissioned for the bridge and whose words started at one end and ended at the other, seemed to accompany every pedestrian. “ ‘And now I cannot remember,’ ” Brettigan recited, almost in a whisper, reading the words, “ ‘how I would have had it.’ ”

  “Please be quiet. Don’t do that.”

  Brettigan ignored her and then resumed reading aloud.

  “I never understood that poem,” Alma told him, after he had finished. They both descended the stairs together in the brilliant sunshine, Alma holding on to her husband’s arm, and as they made their way toward a George Segal sculpture of a walking man wearing a trench coat, Brettigan said, “I have to sit down.” He seemed winded. Together, in the bright sunshine, they sat on a bench, looking toward the Claes Oldenburg giant spoon on whose tip a maraschino cherry was perched. Water sprayed out of the cherry’s stem.

  Somewhat off to the side, in the shade, a young couple, teenagers, standing together, were entwined in each other’s arms and were kissing ostentatiously. His cap’s brim faced backward, and she was barefoot, holding her shoes in her right hand behind her boyfriend’s back. In northern climates, when the air finally turned warm, people like that wanted to throw their clothes off. The young couple didn’t want to look at the art; they wanted to be the art, Alma decided. They were like the couple she’d seen months or years ago in Minnehaha Park. Nearby, a solitary man, hands in his trouser pockets, sauntered past, deep in thought. It was odd to see a man walking through the sculpture garden but not looking at anything. Several children ran past Harry and Alma, one of the girls wearing a bright yellow dress and a red ribbon in her hair and scuffed patent-leather shoes. Another young couple, speaking Spanish, walked past in the other direction, toward the Calder, holding hands with their two little children, all four of them smiling. The two little boys were wearing coats and ties.

  “I always feel like a sculpture myself when I’m here,” Alma said, glancing toward a Henry Moore mother-and-child in one direction and a Sol LeWitt structure in the other. “And everybody and everything starts to look like art when you’re here.”

  He nodded. “I have something to say,” he announced. Alma braced herself. Had he finally had enough of her, after all these decades of marriage? Was he finally going to leave her? Had he chosen the sculpture garden to announce a separation? He usually didn’t preface his pronouncements with a pay-attention declaration, so whatever he had on his mind must have some weight and consequence.

  “God is a MacGuffin,” he said.

  She waited. This will pass, she thought.

  “And the Sun Collective is a MacGuffin.” Saying these two sentences appeared to require enormous physical effort from him, more than was demanded by the steps up to and then down from the bridge. He slumped over, and when Alma raised her hand to his forehead, she felt cold sweat on his skin.

  “I don’t want to walk. I don’t feel well,” he said. He seemed to be suffering physically from the statements he had just made: his right hand had started to shake, and he continued to lean forward to catch his breath. Inside his windbreaker, he visibly shivered, though the day was warm. Re-collecting himself, he leaned back, then sat up straighter while Alma glanced around to see whether anybody in their vicinity had the appearance of working in the health-care professions. But instead of passing out, Brettigan began talking softly, almost inaudibly.

  Under his breath, he said that if power corrupts, and if absolute power corrupts absolutely, then God is, or would have to be, the most corrupt entity in the known universe. Alma told him to shush, he was talking nonsense, but he ignored her. He was raving quietly and politely. He would not raise his voice even though something had possessed him. Traffic on the nearby highway hummed as he spoke. Overhead, Alma saw a brown butterfly. Brettigan said that he was having a vision of homelessness, of thousands of people living in their cars, in tents, on the streets, hungry, most of them, knocking at the door with their malnourished and pitifully crying children, armies of Jesuses, Marys, and Josephs. The rise and prevalence of zombie movies and books were a manifestation of capitalism’s response to the homeless, to the armies of the poor, and the only way a person could cope with such a reality was by shutting it out or by trying to do something, anything. If you actually cared, while living within a structured system of indifference, if you were afflicted with empathy and compassion for the destitute, and for the plainly suffering natural environment of the planet—the fires and hurricanes and droughts, he said, were forms of planetary mania—if you cared about all this suffering, human and natural, or any of it, you would be susceptible to all the MacGuffins set up by charlatans like Wye and Lenin and Siddhartha, or, on the other side, lords of—

  “Oh, Harry,” she said. “Stop. Calm down. You’re not making any sense.”

  —the lords, he continued, of complacency, of things-as-they-are, you would be in the counterarmy commanded by President Amos Alonzo Thorkelson, but you would not be safe, he whispered, there would be the knock on the door eventually, the armies of the poor would find you, and then, and forever, there would be no forgiveness, you would be eternally in the category of the unforgiven. I am unforgiven, Harry Brettigan said with an anguished sigh. There will be no forgiveness in this life we have led, lives of vanity and vexation. Demons have entered me.

  “Please stop talking. Come on,” Alma said. “Stand up.”

  She brought him to his feet. “Do you know,” he asked her, “what the most valuable object in the city of Minneapolis is?” He fixed her with a look. Was he out of his mind? He wa
sn’t like this. The most valuable object? For a second even his nose appeared to be askew.

  “Harry,” she said, “we have to get back to the car.” She held on to his left arm and urged him forward, out of the sculpture garden, back toward where she had parked. The sun continued to shine; birds sang in the distance; the bells in the basilica were ringing; other families approached them; it was a perfect day otherwise.

  “What’s the most valuable thing?” he asked her again. They were now on the sidewalk, at the corner crossing the street. They would not go back up on the bridge.

  She decided to play along. “The money at the Federal Reserve? All those dollar bills?”

  “No,” he said. “That Goya painting. In the Institute of Art. Self-Portrait with Dr. Arrieta. It’s the most valuable human creation in this whole damn city. Dr. Arrieta is giving Goya his medicine, and his face is weighty with compassion, and Goya’s face…his eyes are closed, he’s in pain.”

  “Harry, I—”

  “And behind Goya, in the dark behind his bed, there are those three demons. The demons that Goya saw in his illness. Alma, I’m seeing them now.”

  At the corner, they waited for the light to change. If only, she thought, if only they could get back into the car and drive home, they would be all right.

  And then they were in the car headed up Lowry Hill toward their neighborhood, everything quite in order again, and her husband gazed out the window at someone’s tulips planted on either side of the walk leading to a front door. It was a fine, pleasant neighborhood, like a tranquil setting in a Twilight Zone episode in the minutes before all hell breaks loose. Complain about the bourgeoisie all you want, but at least they mowed their lawns and planted their gardens. “Really, Harry,” she said. “Your bad conscience is just a neurosis.”

  “Ah, yes. The voice of sanity,” he said with self-mocking contempt. “Goya’s last self-portrait, complete with demons, in Minneapolis? Impossible. But we own those demons now. They’re ours. They’re here.”

  Well, at least he wasn’t talking about MacGuffins. In her jacket, her iPhone made its customary ringtone announcing a text. She fished it out. The message was from Timothy: Get home now, it said. Something has happened.

  - 30 -

  In the Brettigans’ living room, on the tattered sofa beneath the picture of the Basque coastline, Timothy was sitting, bent over Christina, who was curled up in his lap, her eyes closed.

  “What’s going on?” Brettigan asked. Alma stood beside him, her hands clasped together.

  “She’s blind,” Timothy told his father. “Christina is blind. She…this was her doing.”

  Christina raised her head, opened her eyes, and Brettigan saw that something was wrong. “My God,” he said. “What have you done to yourself?”

  “I saved them all,” she said hoarsely but with a great calm and serenity. “It’s posted on YouTube. You can see it there. It’s gone viral. Thousands of hits. All over the world. We won.” She lay her head back in Timothy’s lap.

  * * *

  —

  She had only taken one single recreational-weekend Blue Telephone, a habit she could not break, when the doorbell had chimed ding dong, and the vision-messenger stood there at last, all in white like an angel, sent from somewhere—where did they find these beautiful men, men whose beauty rivaled her own? this one as brown, however, as Detective O’Connor had been but not as worn down by daily life, this newfound particular angel sent to fetch her, an adult angel fresh and unused from the cosmic womb, as beautiful as the twilight sky? white shirt, white trousers, white tennis shoes?—and he identified himself as Michael, so that was it: he wasn’t like an angel, no, he was one, he’d been tasked by someone somewhere to fetch her, because her moment had come at last. The Blue Telephone, maybe connected to the cosmos after trying one wrong number after another, was telling her that today was the day to carry out the plan she had concocted in the Alhambra. She and three others, another woman and two men, all photogenic, would be the chosen ones. There is something you need to do, the man said in a voice that originated from the other side of the universe, a voice suffused with divinity, the kind of voice that you cannot say no to. This is the last request we will ever make of you. After this sacrifice, your life will be yours, among the sky-and-earth order of the blessed.

  Because: the word had gone out, some said from up high, that the Sun Collective, despite being ragtag, was practicing sedition as outlined in the Sedition Act of 1918. Countermeasures had to be taken.

  The authorities had asked around about the collective’s symbol, the pointing finger and the star, , which the authorities said was quite possibly not a star but was a bomb, exploding. That was evidence enough. That was enough to round up just about everybody else associated with the group for friendly questioning.

  The idea: four members—any lesser number would not be enough, three or fewer would have the aspect of a freak show—would have to dress from head to toe in white, don’t ask why, if you had to ask, you would never know, and appear together, as a group, in Theodore Wirth Park, in a hillside clearing a week from now, where it had been arranged to have a videographer who would record the proceedings, along with a group of twenty witnesses, some SC members, and others recruited at random, when and whereupon the four would stand, midmorning, each one speaking individually first, demanding that attention must be paid, anyone’s and everyone’s hearts had to be converted, given the harmlessness of the Sun Collective, given its essentially benign and life-affirming and benevolent ideas, which could be found online at www.suncollectiverevolution.org, including their manifesto, and then each member would, and did, recite a line from Marsilio Ficino’s The Book of the Sun, and, once the line had been spoken, would look straight into the solar light, knowing the consequences, creating a media event whose repercussions would cause poverty to be eradicated, and the Earth to be saved.

  What they had asked to do, and agreed to do, would be a sign of their faith. She would have no trouble finding three other volunteers.

  It had gone according to plan.

  The first person, a woman, said, “In proportion to the strength you receive from the Sun, you will almost seem to have found God, who placed His tabernacle in the Sun.”

  The second person said, “This pure light exceeds the intelligence just as in itself sunlight surpasses the acuity of the eyes.”

  Christina said, directly to the camera, “The divine light shines into the darkness of the soul.”

  The last person said, “God kindles a light for us believers here which purifies and converts, before it bestows the intelligence of divine things.”

  And then together the four of them lifted their faces to the sun’s light, staring into it. To blind yourself takes a long time, as it happens, and is an act of willpower worthy of the gods.

  The cameras concentrated on Christina, because, of the four, she was the prettiest.

  Besides, as the Sun Collective had once said collectively, “In an age of distraction, when nothing important lasts longer than fifteen minutes, the only true contemporary art is the art of getting everybody’s attention and keeping it for as long as you can.”

  * * *

  —

  The event had created an immense internet sensation, with thousands of responses, some of which claimed that the scene had been faked, or was preposterous, or just plain crazy. Four people, all in white, voluntarily blinding themselves by staring into the sun? To indicate their belief in everything the Sun Collective believed and stood for? Who does that? No one. Well, they had, and they had multiple witnesses who would testify that they had indeed performed an action that the YouTube video and the Instagram stream showed, which was why it had turned into a world historic event, watched and rewatched eventually by the masses. Four people blinding themselves: it was like Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire, but on a diminished scale.

 
A collectivist was quoted as saying that when you considered what was being done to the Earth, and you combined that destruction with what was being done to the poor and people of color, then blinding yourself to get attention for these problems didn’t seem particularly outrageous or implausible. The only category of action these days that got the attention of everybody was…the inconceivable. To save the Earth and the poor, you had to do what no one could believe you would do. You had to fight the power with the implausible.

  On social media, arguments continued to rage about the event’s effectiveness: a posting from someone in California noted that, if indeed we are in the End Times, with the planet growing ever more uninhabitable and with growing disparity between the rich and poor, and an increasing global population of the hungry and homeless, then no action to raise social and ecological consciousness should be considered overwrought or hysterical. The posting concluded, “These four people are champions for the poor and the Earth. The revolution starts here. They are secular saints. They have sacrificed themselves for us. Bless them.”

  And there were outraged responders, who claimed that left-liberalism had reached a new low of lunacy, that leftists and bleeding hearts were blind anyway, and that it had all been only a computer-generated publicity stunt. Just a bunch of raggedy, half-assed neighborhood insurrectionists, one person said. Reference was made to the blind leading the blind, to Brueghel.

  The debate continued for weeks and months. Here and there, other social activists blinded themselves in similar ways, but the impact, having lost its novelty, was greatly lessened, given the passage of time and its diminishing effects. No longer so effective now, as part of a copycat syndrome, and therefore idiotic.

  In the end, the consensus was that the Sun Collective had triumphed, and the four would be henceforth treated as heroes, but their actions were unrepeatable.

  But that would come later. For now, Christina lay on the Brettigans’ tattered sofa, her head in Timothy Brettigan’s lap, and to Alma she seemed calm in a peculiar manner, as if she had finally found a fate that suited her and her ambitions and had answered a calling. The peace beyond all understanding, Alma thought. And Alma could also see that her son, Timothy, who had not loved Christina up until now, had probably not loved anybody so far in his life, had indeed become transfixed with her, almost instantaneously now that she was a martyr, despite, or because of, her blindness.