The Sun Collective

by Charles Baxter

  - 7 -

  Behind them a full moon had risen over the snow-encrusted streets, and after she started the car and pulled out of the restaurant’s parking lot, with Ludlow slumped down on the passenger side, gazing with indifference at the lighted shops they passed, Christina saw that little dots of white crystals, the snowflakes that were harmless individually but treacherous when gathered into an army, were beginning to descend rapidly from the sky, obliterating the moon, and melting instantaneously on the front windshield before refreezing as ice. The snow had been unpredicted by the weatherpersons, or maybe she hadn’t been paying attention. Well, no one understood anything about weather anymore; weather was moody when it wasn’t overtly psychotic. “Turn left,” Ludlow said, and she did as he had instructed her, the left-turn signal’s tick-tock sounding like a heart monitor. The car fishtailed slightly down an empty street bordered on each side by warehouses that were gradually disappearing in the ever-increasing whiteness dropping all over them, all over everything. Minnesota winter weather could be like a series of lethal practical jokes. You walked out of the house, you fell down on the ice, you broke your leg, you got pneumonia. Ha ha ha. She turned up the blower for the defroster, and the windshield wipers scumbled over the glass with a sound like automotive flatulence—“wiper farts,” people called it. After another direction from Ludlow, she saw that they were passing Loring Park, whose pond was frozen, and whose geese, disconsolate, were huddled together under a tree.

  “Turn here again, left,” Ludlow said, his eyes mostly closed, as if he were navigating the car through some dreamworld he had managed to externalize onto the city’s grid, and as they made their way up Lowry Hill, the front-wheel-drive tires beginning to spin, he said, “Now go straight for a while.” His head was flung back. “So, Christina,” he said. “Tell me about yourself. What do you do? Do you do anything?”

  Christina’s hands were gripping the steering wheel. She was finding it hard to think. “I’m sort of between things,” she told him. The blood-clot-colored Saab advanced through the snow that was growing thicker now and gradually obliterating the bars and restaurants on either side of the street. “In college I was in critical theory and had a sort of cultural-studies major,” she told him, “and maybe like you, I was very political. You know: action-feminism, the environment, neighborhood organizing. I needed alternatives. I wanted to wake people up.” She said that she had gone on to graduate school for a while and had been interested in the purer forms of critical theory, but she had made a mistake: she had proposed a deconstruction of the Gettysburg Address. “I said that you can’t really establish an argument if your foundational word is hallowed. The argument gets unstable real fast.” There was more academic-style outrage, this time higher in the chain of command. She was asked to take a leave of absence.

  She decided not to tell him about her relationships. After all, she didn’t know him that well. Also, she still felt completely unspooled, thanks to the drug. “So I got myself here in Minneapolis and then I went to work as a receptionist in a bank out in the suburbs,” Christina continued. It was supposed to be a temporary job, but they had liked her out there, and they wanted to keep her and were begging her to stay on permanently. At a bank! As a receptionist! And they wanted to train her to be a loan officer! Talk about a sellout. You could smell the cancer in there. “But it pays the bills,” Christina said sadly, after taking another right turn into a residential area whose homes were occasionally visible behind the scrim of snow. “I have a fortune in student loans to pay back. I mean, really, all I want to do is save the world. I want to be helpful somehow. That’s not much. How about you?” she asked.

  He started talking, but Christina was concentrating so hard on not hitting the parked cars on the street and not sliding helplessly through icy intersections that she caught only dribs and drabs of what he was telling her. He’d grown up on a dairy farm out in the middle of nowhere North Dakota, it seemed. The closest town had been settled in the nineteenth century by Finns and Swedes, refugees from their own countries and then from the copper mines in northern Michigan, where the work conditions had turned them into emotional Marxists—they hadn’t actually read Marx but they knew what Marx meant, knew it emotionally, and believed it. Most of the businesses in town were co-ops. The community itself was somewhat insular, agrarian-based, and a weird hybrid of individualistic and communitarian principles. Everyone knew everybody else and had opinions about their fellow citizens that could not be changed by circumstances.

  As a smart kid from the sticks, he’d gotten a free ride and a full scholarship to the university, here in the cities. There, he’d taken a class on the reformist tradition, taught by this unbelievably brilliant and charismatic guy, a lecturer, whose name—Christina didn’t quite catch the next phrase—had once been Wyenakowski or something unsayable like that, though everyone called him “Wye” or sometimes “Why.” And this Professor Wye had, sort of surreptitiously, off the books, helped others to organize a neighborhood working group, a local anarchic-or-something cadre that would—

  “Watch out!” he said, interrupting himself, although his eyes were closed, as a snow-covered dog ran quickly in front of them before disappearing into the white. “I just realized something. You’re entirely stoned. You were macro-stoned when you took me out of there and you were stoned when you bought me dinner, and you’re stoned now.” Christina nodded, halfheartedly. “What’re you on?”

  “Blue Telephone,” she admitted in a blitzed whisper that sounded like a dog slurping at its water bowl.

  “Oh, that shit? Damn. Women really like that drug. It makes them feel like princesses in the pre-pumpkin phase. Lifts you up, spins you around, then drops you down. Messes up your quantum fields, if you want that. What I heard was, it—it’ll fuck up your here-and-now and you’ll live permanently in today or tomorrow-plus-today. Two places at once, both bad. You’re not careful, you’ll end up like Schrödinger’s cat.”

  “Well, I—”

  Languidly, and speaking slowly, he interrupted her. He was quite the interrupter. “You should get yourself cleaned up,” he said, speaking over her and all at once sounding calmly preemptive, as if he had taken off his former personality and changed into a new one. “Drugs are just an admission of defeat and make you into a passive-voice person and a Keyhoteeist. ‘I got fired,’ ” he said, raising his voice in falsetto mockery to sound like a ruined child. “ ‘I was abducted. I was demoted. I was disrespected. I was abused.’ ” He lowered his voice to its baritone rumble. “Well, no. This is what I’m saying to you. You gotta wise up. The oligarchs love it when you use the passive voice in any form whatsoever. That’s their first victory over us. Drugs induce the passive voice,” he said, too loudly, as all around them the snow blew down thickly, and Christina wondered what a Keyhoteeist was and why she had ever bothered to help get this guy up from the floor of the yoga studio, bought him a meal, and given him a ride home. “Every victim has got to be a willing accomplice to his victimization, even grammatically, don’t you know that?” he asked. “Unless they’re subalterns. Or…well, it’s complicated. That’s Politics 101. I have an idea: you should take boxing lessons. You should learn to punch. You could start with me. You could hit me as hard as you can. I wouldn’t mind. Stop here.”

  Christina put her foot on the brake pedal, an action that had no appreciable effect on the car, which slid gracefully down the street, its wheels locked, until it seemed to change its mind and slowly decelerated as it came gradually to rest, the engine humming quietly, in a massive descent of snow, a white curtain on all sides.

  “You need to learn how to punch,” Ludlow told her. “I mean, I shouldn’t give advice, being a guy, but, hey. You gotta get tough and learn how to fight. Reverse roles, you know? Women getting tougher and men getting, I don’t know, more…what’s the word I’m looking for? This is my stop. This is where I get out.” He put his hand on the door latch.

 
“Where are we?” Christina said. “And what gives you the right to tell me what women should or shouldn’t do? Jesus. I can’t see anything.”

  “We are where we are,” he said. He opened the door after reaching for his backpack. Christina wondered momentarily whether he would invite her in and then remembered that he was your basic breaker-and-enterer and a dangerous romantic prospect. He did have that outlaw glamour, and in a certain light, he was very good-looking and not particularly stupid in any of the customary masculine styles. Then she waited to see whether he would ask her for her phone number. Maybe he was de-telephoned. He stepped out into a drift as high as his midcalf.

  She asked, “Is this your…”

  “This is where I get out.”

  “What if…?” she started to ask but once again was unable to finish the sentence.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, poking his head inside the car. “I know how to find you. I know where you are. I got radar. It’s—I always know where you are. You send out signals.” He closed the door and was almost immediately obliterated by the snow as he walked away.

  * * *

  —

  Inching forward, the car cleared an intersection and chugged down another block, while Christina peered out at the blanketed landscape and asked herself whether she and the car would make it home. All at once, the snow began to let up, as if Ludlow’s presence had been an inspiration for its descent, and Christina saw to her left a city park with a baseball diamond and a playground. In the center of the playground were a swing set and a snow-covered climbing structure. Christina looked more closely, unsure of what she was seeing. There, suddenly illuminated by a parting of clouds and full moonlight, were two children in snowsuits on the swings, rising up in high arcs and then falling backward and up again, back and forth, playing in the silvered midnight dark. But something was wrong: listening to the two kids’ muffled cries of happiness, the only sound in the winter air except for the car’s interior fan blowing warm air onto her ankles and the engine’s intermittent rumble, she realized that their swings, as high as they were, were in slow motion. How, propelled so slowly, could they rise at all? One child swung backward, and at the top point of the arc, seemed to stop. The other child, on a forward arc, also ceased to move. In the frigid air, time itself had been frozen. She couldn’t breathe. Christina looked at the clock in the car, whose second hand stayed right where it was.

  It had to be the drug. She was still ratcheting back and forth in spacetime. She wasn’t quite where she was. Ludlow had maybe come to her from the future and then returned to it.

  She pressed her foot to the accelerator, and the car gamely inched forward down the street, past the playground where time had stopped, and onto Hennepin Avenue, where a snowplow in front of her escorted her homeward. She found herself shaking, though not from cold.

  - 8 -

  The next morning, two doors down from the entrance to the bank where Christina worked, a man wearing a heavy winter overcoat was speaking quietly and calmly, though in a voice thickened with rage, to a rather pretty woman, apparently his wife, who wore a red cloth coat with black buttons and a white scarf. Her face wore an expression of shock. The woman was kneading her hands together at waist level. They were both middle-aged. As Christina passed them, she heard the man say, “I always thought I could trust you, but then you…” Christina slowed down to hear how the sentence would end, but she couldn’t make out his words. He had grown quiet for fear of being overheard. She would have to finish the sentence for herself.

  Outside, the plows had done their work. She’d been hoping for a snow day to recover from yesterday’s events, but the sun shone down on the snow in the mall’s parking lot with a puritanical intensity.

  Inside the bank, she was hanging her own tattered overcoat up in the cloakroom while the phrases unreeled: I always thought I could trust you, but then you fucked my best friend. No, that wording was too coarse—and too straightforward—for this region. Did people make such accusations to each other out on the public sidewalk? In Europe they might, but they rarely did in America and never in the Midwest. In Paris, Christina had once witnessed a public quarrel between a young man and woman on the Rue Madame. Their obscenities were so eloquently and loudly vehement that Christina had felt the blood draining from her face as she listened. She had once spent a summer working on a French farm and thought she knew all the colloquialisms for sexual insult, but there on the Rue Madame, across the street from the Hôtel de l’Avenir, she had learned a few more, the sorts of personal verbal assaults that no one could ever forgive and that preceded murder.

  The two lovers in Paris had shouted at each other as if they themselves were Passion Monsters. The odd detail was that the young man had a clubfoot and advanced down the street like an insect. His limp did not end with his leg. It caused the entire left side of his body to give way, slump, and then recover.

  In America, especially here, public denunciations would be dull and muted, if they happened at all. Minnesotans distrusted passion and seldom knew what shouting was good for.

  So boring, these locals. Outbursts were not part of the repertoire in the upper Midwest. Everyone seethed and simmered instead. Returning to her station in the bank before the doors were unlocked, and carrying her cup of Americano, Christina caught a glimpse of herself in the front window and felt uplifted for a split second by the sight of her face before she turned away from it. She didn’t particularly enjoy being looked at, especially by herself. She felt she lacked the right sort of vanity, the kind that went hand in hand with a successful career.

  After getting out of the shower today, she had tried on a touch of Orgasm blush, matched with Springtime lip gloss, to counteract her natural pale color. She had a kind of fragile voluptuousness that occasionally excited the envy of other women, though she was rarely conscious of it herself and didn’t like it when customers (“guests” was the preferred usage) entered through the front door and caught sight of her, even though her job was to greet them. Men involuntarily smiled, and often women involuntarily frowned; she almost always had an effect on whoever was seeing her for the first time. She’d never known what to make of her appearance. It was a distraction from changing the world. Revolutionaries, she thought, should look seedy and uncompromising and implacable, with stringy unwashed ratty hair, without makeup and in rags that smelled of paint thinner.

  All through high school and then in college, she had found herself surrounded by eager boys, then eager men, most of them sweet and well meaning, but slightly oblivious to who she actually was, as if all they could see of her was this image, this goddess-effect she had on people. But who was she really? She didn’t know, not yet. A moderately angry person, for starters, but angry with privileges.

  All she really wanted was to do some good in the world. But how? She had a gift for acting and was a good musician and a real whiz at math and the sciences, but nothing seemed to define her in the minds of her classmates except her looks. The mean kids had called her “the Snow Queen” and “Little Ms. Brainiac,” though not to her face, because they feared her beauty and wit. Sometimes Christina envied the plain girls whom everyone left alone—the invisible ones who could walk down the hallways, lost to themselves, unremarked and untouched. They were the ones who would end up running things.

  Her first real love in high school had been for writing; she had written articles for the school newspaper and at home had completed the opening chapter of a children’s novel employing the style of Roald Dahl. The book was about a sinister clockmaker who knew how to make time run backward, causing unwary children to disappear. The site of their vanishing would be marked by bright green poisonous mushrooms. She liked the chapter but couldn’t figure out what would happen in chapter two. Somebody had to eat the mushroom; she just didn’t know who.

  And she’d had boyfriends, one in particular who said he loved her. Amused and flattered by his desire for her,
she had let him cure her of her virginity one summer night in the bed of his truck, with the radio playing country-western. It hadn’t hurt as much as she thought it would. Lying there on a scratchy blanket, on her back, she counted the stars in the night sky while he panted and moaned over her. On the radio Faith Hill sang “Mississippi Girl.” By the time he came, with a groan she’d never heard from a boy before, she had gotten to thirty-six.

  He said he’d write to her once they both were in college, though of course he never did.

  In college she’d been written up in the school’s alumni quarterly as a “Woman of Note”: the Ivy League college she’d attended had been in the center of a decaying industrial city plagued by drug use, unemployment, and crime, and she’d spent hours doing fieldwork in the local bars and pool halls talking with the townies, who were at first suspicious of her and then, very gradually, accepting of her presence, because she was a pretty good pool player who didn’t mind being hustled out of a few dollars now and then. She noticed how gregarious and angrily despairing these men and women were, and sometimes gruffly funny, though she often had to fend off the advances of the men with jokes and the claim that she already had a boyfriend. She was respectful with them, and polite. Occasionally she brought along a guy to act as her beard. Eventually the men gave up making passes at her. They accepted her presence among them, which pleased her. They called her “the little professor.” What they said behind her back, she never knew.

  She was curious about their politics. Why, considering their situation, didn’t they believe in revolution? What had happened to their sense of injustice, their knowledge that the plutocrats were grabbing every last dime for themselves and killing the planet in the process? Where was their rage? Where had it gone? Why all this stoicism? Why did they accept their own defeat? Their raucous despondency struck her as a form of cultural depression, a collective anger that had turned inward, as if the workers felt their condition was their own fault. This was a soul-error, though she never got up the nerve to tell them. That wasn’t her job, to be in a workers’ vanguard. Besides, all the vanguards had failed.