The Sun Collective: A Novel

by Charles Baxter

  He had gravitated toward the theater, his natural home. He was astonishingly good-looking and had a handsome man’s indifference to engaging in intimate conversation and to exerting himself in courtship. In high school he played the Stage Manager in Our Town with a perfect New Hampshire accent. At the university he played the Gentleman Caller in The Glass Menagerie and Sir Fopling Flutter in The Man of Mode and Rosalind in an all-nonbinary As You Like It and King Creon in Antigone and Deeley in Pinter’s Old Times. Whenever he came home for visits, he sat in the living room staring at his iPhone screen, or he disappeared into the basement, where he memorized his next part. Conversations seemed to cost him a great deal of effort, and he never asked polite questions and could not feign interests that he did not have. Emotionally, he was always somewhere else, flirting with oblivion, a place where his parents could not find him.

  He had many girlfriends, all of whom were initially delighted to be in his company and who thought they could turn his habitual half-smile and easygoing affability into a grin that signified love. But the half-smile was frozen in place, as was the affability, and the pleasant, speculative expression on his face never varied much in mixed company. Some coolness resided at his center, a little pinpoint of ice. He could be wonderfully wicked and entertaining, though it all felt scripted, and not by him, so the discouraged girlfriends drifted away from him or were discarded, confounded by his glacial surface and their own inability to melt it.

  He had no cruelty in him, just an emotional absentmindedness that seemed to be part of his character.

  After earning a BFA in acting, there he was, in Chicago, a star, playing the lead in Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. And there he was, again, as Dr. Astrov in Uncle Vanya. And he would return to Minneapolis, he told his parents, for the role of Estragon in Waiting for Godot, but then something happened to him, a mystery he refused to explain. There had been a girlfriend to whom a calamity had occurred. “I need to become a person,” he told his father over the phone. There was an urgency in his voice that Brettigan had never heard before. What sort of person? The question encountered a silence. He claimed that he would live on the streets for a time, “as an experiment.” What sort of experiment? He would not explain.

  He moved from apartment to apartment, sometimes telling his family and friends where he was. But then he became unreachable, unlocatable. At first he had called his parents to say he was all right, but he was going to “de-phone”; then he let his cell phone service lapse. He was somewhere here in the city, drifting, though no one seemed to know exactly where. One of Brettigan’s friends claimed to have seen Timothy sitting in front of the luggage carousels at the airport, sitting there unmoving, minute after minute. When asked whether he was meeting anyone getting off a flight, Timothy had said, “No. I just like to see families reunited. I like to see happiness. Don’t you?”

  And once Brettigan had seen a bearded man on a city bus who might have been his son, but the man got off before his father could reach him. At other times Timothy seemed to be over there, on the other side of the street, ambling without destination, studying the sidewalk, distantly walking away, like an urban ghost who gave you glimpses of himself before dematerializing. He was only visible out of the corner of the eye—fleetingly, in a crowd leaving a stadium, or in the distance on an escalator, at the ballpark eight sections over, or in the backseat of a taxi speeding away.

  You couldn’t report him because he wasn’t really missing. He was here somewhere. And now his mother dropped in on churches, the ones with their doors open, and cathedrals, Quaker meetinghouses, basilicas, synagogues, Kingdom Halls, chapels, mosques, storefronts, and meditation centers, sneaking in quietly and sitting in the back, surveying those who sat and prayed, trying to imagine him back into existence as a happy solid citizen in one of these congregations, but half-seeing him, instead, on street corners, on benches, with the ragged and rusted-out street people with their staring empty eyes.

  He will turn up someday.

  Only God knew where he was. And another question: Where had God gone to?

  - 5 -

  Across the way in Minnehaha Park, seated at a picnic table underneath the shade of a large maple tree but still visible to Brettigan and his wife, a young couple, accompanied by a toddler, were smoking cigarettes and unwrapping their sandwiches while their daughter played nearby with a half-inflated yellow balloon. As Brettigan watched, the man transferred his cigarette to his left hand, inhaled, then took a bite out of his sandwich, and as he chewed and talked, cigarette smoke emerged from his mouth. The woman spoke to him, and he laughed softly without smiling, a married laugh, whereupon more cigarette smoke issued from his mouth and nose as if his head were on fire. He could smoke and eat sandwiches and laugh at the same time. How strange people were!

  A cool front had descended from Canada, so the day was unexpectedly mild, with high wisps of clouds, and as Brettigan unwrapped his own sandwich, a bologna-and-lettuce-and-cheese concoction sprinkled with a few drops of mild green Tabasco, he felt a yearning for a deviled egg as a marker of summer. He put the sandwich aside and peered into the cooler.

  “Hey,” he said. “Where are you?” His glasses slid lower on his nose, a result of sweat and the thinning effects of age.

  “Where are you what?” Alma asked. “And what who?”

  “I was talking to the deviled eggs,” Brettigan said, “which aren’t here. Which I thought we had packed. Which…I want to eat them.”

  “They’re not hiding,” Alma told him. “They’re absent and forgotten.”

  “Forgotten by whom?”

  “By me,” she said. “In the kitchen, where I made them and left them behind, all freshly wrapped up in waxed paper on the counter. I can almost see them this very minute.” After reaching into the cooler and pulling out a bottle of white wine, she poured a drink for him in a plastic cup. “Sorry, Harry. It’s another modest senior moment. Here,” she said. “Have some wine. Drink up. You’ll forget what I forgot, those eggs. Isn’t it a beautiful day?” She examined the sky. “It’s one of the most beautiful days ever.”

  Last night, rain had fallen for an hour, and today the air seemed to have been washed clean and somehow sanitized. Beyond the picnic table where the eating-and-smoking man and his wife were sitting, other couples and families sat or strolled in Seurat-like calm. In the distance was a sun-bleached playground, where little kids clambered over tubular structures. Other kids, shouting with glee, sat in swings pushed by their parents. As Brettigan bit into his sandwich, he had a thought: History has stopped today. History is powerless here.

  “What are you thinking?” Alma asked. “You have that look you get.” She put her hand on his shoulder.

  “The weather. I was thinking about the weather.”

  “No, you weren’t. Your face had that faraway mask. You look like that when you have thoughts.”

  “I was thinking about nothing. It was very pleasant.”

  “Over there.” Alma pointed at something behind her husband. He turned to see: off on the other side of the picnic area, a guy in jeans and a T-shirt was blowing soap bubbles, and a young woman, similarly clothed, was dancing around, popping the bubbles with her fingers and occasionally leaping up to pop them with her bare feet. She was remarkably agile, and her movements resembled those of a martial artist. A third person, seated at a nearby picnic table, oddly dressed in clothes too heavy for the weather, was observing them.

  “Sweet as a couple of bunnies,” Alma said, removing her hand from her husband’s shoulder and nervously touching a brown spot on her forearm. “Too cute for words.”

  Brettigan had always had a weakness for picnics, for summer and its long, drawn-out days, for laziness and the sweet languor that accompanied it. During the summer, time stretched out to accommodate whatever you needed to do, particularly when you didn’t need to do anything, and you were occupied watching the runner at s
econd base, and the count was three-and-two, and the home team was losing, and no one, absolutely no one, really cared. You ate your salt-in-the-shell peanuts and waited for something to happen. Chewing his sandwich, he remembered the two years before he and Alma had had children, and they had paraded around the house naked and had gone on camping trips and had made love outdoors as if it were summer all year long. Their honeymoon lasted for quite a blissful period, and they had thought themselves very daring in those days, before they settled in to the hard labor of parenthood.

  Having finished his sandwich, Brettigan bit into a carrot.

  “You’re daydreaming,” Alma said. “You’re having one of those fantasies of yours.” No one could say that she didn’t know him. She’d always had a rather frightening ability to access his thoughts and say them aloud before he could. Did all longtime married couples share each other’s thoughts? She put her hand on his arm and gave his open palm a brief involuntary caress. “We were like that. You didn’t miss out on anything.”

  Something about the two young people, especially the girl popping the soap bubbles, seemed familiar, but Brettigan couldn’t quite place them. Young people were beginning to look generic to him. What individuality they had didn’t matter anymore.

  “They haven’t done anything we didn’t do,” Alma told him with a trace of pride in her voice. “We were once beautiful, too. Don’t forget that. I’m sorry I said you were harmless. That was unkind.”

  “Do we know those two?” he asked.

  “They look like anybody,” she said. “Finish your carrots, Harold. I want to walk somewhere.” She closed her eyes and tilted her head so that the sun bathed her face, as if she were taking a shower in it. Her expression radiated a transitory peacefulness.

  After he put his paper napkin and the waxed paper wrapping back into the cooler, he took his wife’s hand with a slight upward pressure, encouraging her to stand. She smiled and nodded before rising. They were both expert at these little marital pantomimes and enjoyed occasions of semi-comical tenderness. She asked, “Should we leave all this here?” meaning the cooler and the tablecloth and the cups of wine, and he nodded and escorted her onto the sidewalk that angled in toward the pavilion. All at once he drew back. “No, wait,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “I just thought of somebody I haven’t thought of for…I don’t know. Forty years. Longer. Decades.”

  “Who?”

  “Give me a minute.”

  “Harry, what is it?”

  Feeling himself caught and hooked in a memory, he returned to the picnic bench. His surroundings had rather suddenly become abstract: the park that had been painted by Seurat was now splattered by Jackson Pollock, and Brettigan felt himself pulled out to sea by a tidal wave of memory.

  * * *

  —

  When he’d been a boy and the world had seemed impossibly large, his parents had hired a woman to clean the house, an affable German-American named Mrs. Schimmelpfennig from a nearby farm community. She cleaned other houses in town, singing German school songs as she dusted and swept. She walked around in an aromatic lemon cloud from the furniture polish she applied to the tables and chairs.

  She’d owned an old two-story house with a wide front porch, and she did occasional babysitting and had taken care of Brettigan on a few occasions when his parents were out. She enjoyed teaching him songs in German. While she sang, he’d been fascinated by her watery blue eyes and uncombed fairy-tale brown hair. He could remember the German sounds but couldn’t quite remember what she had told him they meant.

  Abends, will ich schlafen gehn,

  vierzehn Engel um mich stehn:

  zwei zu meinen Häupten,

  zwei zu meinen Füssen,

  zwei zu meiner Rechten,

  zwei zu meiner Linken,

  zweie, die mich decken,

  zweie, die mich wecken,

  zweie, die mich weisen

  zu Himmels Paradeisen.

  * * *

  —

  Now he remembered, and out of some resource of spontaneity he suddenly knew its meaning, the German words no longer a barrier but a portal to that moment when you went to bed and were about to go to sleep with the help of angels who would transport you to heaven. Its equivalent in English was “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, bless the bed that I lie on.” Sitting in the park with Alma looking down at him, Brettigan felt the German words slide through him, accompanied by Mrs. Schimmelpfennig’s quavering voice in the summer air as a visitation.

  “Zu Himmels Paradeisen,” he said now, glancing at Alma. She observed him warily.

  “I worry when you lapse into German. Are you okay now?”

  “I think so,” he told her. “I just had a memory of a babysitter I once had.”

  “Oh, that one? The one who was murdered by a drifter?”

  “Yes, that one. How’d you know?”

  “I’m omniscient,” she said, sitting down next to him and massaging his back. “I’m the eye at the top of the pyramid. What haven’t you told me by now? Nothing. Everything you have to tell me, you’ve told.” She took his hand. She had the stern but encouraging expression of a grade school teacher. Brettigan noticed that she had a small purple stain on her blouse from the plum she had just eaten. “Let’s go for a walk,” she said, pointing in the direction of Minnehaha Falls and the creek that drained into the Mississippi.

  He stood up, took his wife’s hand again, and nodded. Over there, under the shade of a maple tree, the young couple now sat at a table.

  Past the park pavilion where children were gathered to buy ice cream at a concession window, their shrieks and cries echoing against the concrete, Brettigan and his wife monitored each other for balance as they walked forward, before descending the stairs leading to the base of the falls. Hearing birdsong, they both looked up to see a female cardinal hovering in the air above them and then landing on a branch, and above the cardinal…what was that? A hot-air balloon with rainbow colors on one side and a bearded man’s face on the other floated silently overhead, seemingly aloof and imperturbable.

  “Look,” he said, as they stopped halfway down the stairs. He pointed at the balloon. “Aren’t there power lines around here?”

  “Who’s the guy?”

  “Who’s the guy who?”

  “On the balloon. The face. It’s like an ad for something.” She held her head back, her right hand at her forehead, shielding her eyes from the sun.

  Brettigan took off his glasses, breathed on the lenses before cleaning them on his shirtfront, wiped the sweat off his nose, and put the glasses back on as he said, “Jesus. That’s who it is.”

  “That’s not Jesus,” Alma told him. “That’s the man on those, those cigarette papers. The ones you used to roll joints with. Remember? That guy? I can’t think of the brand. It’s been too long.”

  “Zig-Zag,” Brettigan said loudly, still gazing at the hot-air balloon now drifting away in a northerly direction, obscured by trees. “Zig-Zag cigarette papers.” He thought for a moment. “What’s a hot-air balloon doing here? We’re close to the airport. That has to be completely illegal.”

  “No.” Instead of shaking her head, she nodded. “It’s a good omen, don’t you think? That balloon? Come on.” She led him down the remaining steps, and they stood watching the falls for a few minutes before they turned and without speaking advanced down the pathway alongside the creek. Behind them and then on each side, the birds cried and sang as if they were announcing some important breaking news in bird-bulletins, some wonderful or terrible event that was about to happen and whose preview they had already seen.

  Overhead, the illegal hot-air balloon advertising cigarette papers having drifted away, the trees on either side of Minnehaha Creek formed a canopy producing a shade so thick that Brettigan seemed to see dots
of shadow wherever he turned his head, as one does with the onset of fever. Alongside Brettigan and his wife, the flowing water chuckled, and the still air had a supersaturated vegetative aroma with something angry and sour in it like the oxygen in a locker room after a losing game. A sparrow hopped from a maple tree to a blighted cedar, following them, it seemed, with interest. From a great distance came a low, thundering sound, the roar of an airplane clearing its throat, and the air moved, though not with wind, as the branches of the neighboring maples and poplars began to gesticulate in their direction—some kind of sign language, Brettigan suddenly thought, conveying secret information.

  Alma turned to her left, took her hand from his, and, bending down, riffled her fingers in the creek water. “It’s not that cold,” she said, standing up and retaking his left hand in hers, the water from the creek and now from her hand wetting his fingers. They walked past a few other couples and some scattered children toward a slight leftward bend in the creek where a gap in the trees produced a thick rivulet of vertical sunlight, and after advancing into it, they were alone, standing in the brilliance produced by the absence above them both. Alma knelt, putting both hands in the flowing water, and Brettigan knelt down beside her. From his shirt pocket he removed a small hand mirror.

  “What’s that?” she asked, nodding at it, the question directed not so much at the mirror’s existence as at its function. “You brought a mirror?”

  “Take a look,” Brettigan said. Lowering the glass into the creek’s flowing water, he angled it so that he saw her face reflected, darkened and tinted by the moving current, which at first altered her expression so that she seemed to smile and produced a shimmering outline to her face, as if what he saw there had entered a time tunnel, a wormhole extended to the shadow side of an alternative universe where a previous Alma lived, no longer his wife but instead an anonymous beauty in blue jeans and penny loafers whom he had met at a college mixer in the university’s student union when he had walked up to her and said, “Wanna dance?” extending his hand as the bad local band had lurched into the opening chords of “Wild Horses.” She had nodded gamely before they nervously and urgently strolled toward the middle of the room where in the obscurity produced by the other dancers they would not be noticed. Instead of staggering around to the song’s shuffling lust-drugged rhythms, the anonymous girl who she then was had unexpectedly fallen into his arms as a refuge, before reaching around him in a clutching embrace as if she had known him all her life or somehow understood that she would know him for the rest of it, as was true now and would be forever.