The Sun Collective

by Charles Baxter

  “I can’t.” After a long, unpleasant pause, he said, “So you like this nice young couple who rescued you.”

  “Well, they’re very friendly and so unassuming. Just a couple of kids. Between the two of them, they really make an effort. Their names are Christina and Ludlow, and they’ve called me, and I went to their meetings twice. You never listen. I went to a meeting a few days ago, remember? Total chaos over there, very much fun. And I must say, I liked them, and I agreed with them and their ideas. That’s who they are.” She bit into another small square of roast and chewed thoughtfully. Because it hurt him to watch her consuming so much salt, he thought he probably still loved her. “Oh,” she said, “I think you’d like them. They gave me some of their literature. They even have a manifesto. They want a quiet revolution. They’ve got different projects. Fine with me. Harry, I’d like to invite them over here. We don’t know enough young people.”

  “We don’t know any young people. Knowing those two is not the same as knowing young people.”

  Abruptly, the cat and the dog left the dining room, the dog making an audible dog-groan as he departed.

  “I want to have them over here. I want to befriend them, Harry.”

  “Why? I don’t get why you want them here, in our house. What are we to them? They’re going to pick our pockets.”

  She put down her fork, and in a sudden rage balled up her cloth napkin and threw it at him, though she missed, so that the napkin opened and fluttered to the floor. The effort made one sprig of gray hair get loose and fall down almost to her eyebrow. “Pick our pockets? Listen to you!” she shouted. “What a doddering, complacent old man you’ve become! Here we are sitting at this table eating our very nice dinner, while more and more people in this country go hungry and homeless because the rich suck up all the wealth for themselves, and people just go around mindlessly buying things and shooting at each other with their concealed weapons as if it were the Wild West and open season on every citizen, and the minorities get stomped on over and over while the rich waddle around on their golf courses, and that idiot in the White House gambols and prances around like Marie Antoinette, and our son gets chewed up by all of it and you don’t give a shit!”

  “That’s not fair,” he said with enforced placidity. “I do. I do give a shit.”

  “It’s all collapsing!” she cried out. “The trail of blood leads straight to this house! I can’t bear it. I can’t bear being the cause of so many people suffering. The injustice of it. The madness. And I say that if they want to start bombing the malls and the…everything, well, let them! Blow it all up!” By now, the tears were running down her face. “This country is in a slow-motion catastrophe, and we’re in the slow-motion catastrophe, we’re part of it, and you just sit there in your chair, telling me not to salt my roast! It’s unbearable.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “All right what?” The dog and cat, attracted by the noise, had reappeared in the doorway and were watching both of them.

  “All right: invite them over here. All right, go to their meetings. Go to the Sun Collective. Do whatever.”

  “Now you’re trying to placate me. I know you.” She waited for a moment to compose herself. “I’m sorry.”

  “You aren’t about to go out and buy ammonium nitrate, are you?” he asked.

  “For what?”

  “For the bombs. They make bombs out of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m too old. Let the youngsters do that.” She dabbed the tears off her cheeks with her sleeve. “They should start with the country clubs and move on from there. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand any of it. I’m turning into a middle-aged nihilist. Did you really talk to a vagrant last night? That’s not like you.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He talked about his life. He said he walks around at night because he doesn’t like homeless shelters. He worries about the Sandmen.”

  “Who worries about them? I never heard of them. I’m sorry I ruined our dinner.”

  “Alma, do you still want to stay married to me?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because you were just now talking like a woman who doesn’t want to stay married to her husband anymore.”

  “I said I was sorry.” She dabbed at her eyes again. “I’m just being crabby. I already apologized.”

  “Okay, I accept your apology. The Sandmen? It’s internet folklore. This guy last night—he said his name was Albert—told me that they’re rich kids who go around killing homeless people.” He waited. “Those panhandlers are mostly anonymous anyway. You kill them, nobody misses them.” Reacting to his last sentence, she glowered at him. “Alma, that’s not my view; it’s what they think, according to the homeless guy I talked to. They’re—the Sandmen—are creatures of the internet. On the internet, they beat up the poor.”

  “Just my point,” she said. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “Which was what?”

  “I wish you’d pay attention to me now and then. You make me repeat everything because you don’t listen. You said ‘Nobody misses them,’ and what I just said to you is that if we had a good and just society, anybody’s death, even a homeless person’s, would diminish the rest of us.”

  “You didn’t say that. I don’t remember your having said that at all.”

  “Anyway,” she said, “I want to have that nice young couple over here. I feel as if I owe them something.”

  “Okay,” he said, putting down his fork. He had finished his meal a long time ago, and now he watched his wife cutting up and chewing and swallowing her salt-saturated meat. The worst part of it was that she didn’t seem to be enjoying her display of exasperated passionate irritation but continued simply because she wanted to follow through with what she had started. It was in her nature to take self-destructive steps to justify the steps she had already taken, no matter how many losing hands she was dealt.

  Brettigan contemplated his wife with what he knew to be becalmed, blind, and loving impatience. The delicate negotiations between married partners had all the subtlety and complexity of high-level global diplomacy, even when the stakes were so small as to be invisible to outsiders. Nothing would have mattered if they hadn’t loved each other, but, because they did, the wounds were reopened every night with each touch and each application of pressure, and the resulting infection had set in without either of them noticing until inflammation created this low-grade fever in both of them.

  When she had finished, he picked up his dinner plate and hers, along with the cutlery, and with a serving tray brought them to the kitchen. Still sitting at the dining room table, Alma opened a book where her napkin had been, a history of Tasmania she had taken out of the neighborhood Little Free Library. She was pretending to read it. Or maybe she was actually reading it; Brettigan wasn’t sure. Either way, she wouldn’t budge from her appointed space until Brettigan had done all the dishes and dried them; her immobility was a form of spousal surveillance. At the sink, he ran hot water halfway up his arm, added dish soap, and began scrubbing. His motions were so unnecessarily vigorous, escalating to aggrieved violence against the place settings that the first plate, his own, quickly broke into pieces under his assault. Reaching down, he picked up the remnants and dropped them into the garbage.

  “I heard that,” Alma said. “We should both try to calm down.”

  * * *

  —

  That night, sleepless again at two a.m., sporting a clean pair of blue jeans, and a windbreaker over his T-shirt, but with the same straw flat-brim hat he had worn the night before to give himself the appearance of genteel refinement, Brettigan put the leash on the dog’s collar, and together the two of them, man and dog, went out the front door and down the block, the dog nervously glancing up from time to time to inquire about the purpose
of this nighttime stroll.

  “You’ll see,” Brettigan told the dog quietly, so as not to rouse his neighbors. “I thought dogs liked adventures.”

  I was sleeping, the dog said. You woke me up.

  “You can sleep during the day if you want to,” Brettigan said, sotto voce.

  I still don’t get it. What are we doing out here?

  “Well, I was curious about Albert. I’m curious about the Sandmen.”

  “Talking to yourself?” And there she was, Alma, his wife, who had caught up with him and now put her arm in his. She was wearing anything that she had found in the dark bedroom after he had left: a T-shirt, jeans, and sandals. Here in the shadows, she was oddly sexy in a comfortable, middle-aged way. Together, arm in arm, they proceeded down the sidewalk, and she said, “I woke up, you were out, and I was curious about what depravity you were up to.” She bent her head toward him affectionately. “Are you still feeling rotten over me, Harry? I did apologize.”

  “And I accepted your apology. I don’t feel all that rotten.”

  “What an ill-tempered old broad I’ve become.” She leaned against him sleepily. “What are we going to do about ourselves?”

  “Just get along, I guess. The way we always have. We’re too old to get a divorce. And it’s too expensive, all those lawyers.”

  “I s’pose so. You go your way, I’ll go mine? I don’t even know what ‘my way’ is anymore. Isn’t that sad? I don’t know what I’d do without you, and I don’t say that as praise, either. It’s just a fact. What’s that up there?”

  Ahead of them, several blocks down, a small group of police and emergency rescue workers, lit by a group of flashing red, blue, and white lights, were loading someone or something onto a gurney. Two attendants, one on each side, lifted the person onto the gurney and then unfolded the wheels underneath it. At such a distance, Brettigan couldn’t discern any identifiable features, but as he and Alma approached, they could see that the patient was a man wearing scuffed saddle shoes but no socks that poked out from under the covering fabric; Brettigan didn’t need to see the face to know who it was.

  “Poor fellow,” Alma said. “What do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was the Sandmen.” The flashing lights were flickering over Alma’s face and over the dog’s as well; as if in response to the scene, the dog had planted himself with a wide stance, making it difficult to pull him forward, and he had started to make a low, guttural growl that sounded like a complaint about some imminent evil. “Here,” Brettigan said to his wife, handing the leash over to her. “Do me a favor. Stay back here.”

  When he approached the scene, the attendants had already closed the doors to the EMS vehicle, which seemed to be in no hurry to speed away, and from the group that remained, Brettigan singled out a policeman whose name tag read LUCAS and whose face gave the impression of toughened, unsentimental curiosity about everything of a criminal nature that might happen within his line of sight. When he saw Brettigan, he checked him out in a professional manner and then quickly observed Alma and the dog a block away, waiting there, and, having taken in the three of them—husband, wife, and leashed dog—he lost interest in the lot of them. Well, Brettigan thought, we wouldn’t harm a fly. Several other local homeowners had gathered on the other side of the street and were gawking.

  “Officer?” Brettigan began.

  “Yes?”

  “What happened here?”

  “Sir. Do you live nearby?” The cop glanced in the direction of the departing EMS vehicle and then returned his inquiring gaze downward to Brettigan’s creased trousers and shoes; the very edges of irritation and impatience were appearing on his face, as if something important had just happened, and now another, less important, event had interrupted it. In any case, everyone knew that cops did not like dealing with the bourgeoisie, with their terrible, subtle crimes. They preferred riffraff, whom they understood perfectly well. Brettigan immediately realized that his own questions, whatever they were, would probably be considered impertinent and would therefore be deflected and answered by other questions.

  “A few blocks away,” Brettigan said, having almost forgotten what he had been asked.

  “And what are you doing here? Now?”

  “My wife and I couldn’t sleep. We decided to walk our dog.”

  “Ah.” Officer Lucas threw his shoulders back and turned toward his squad car. He now seemed to be rather intensely uninterested in Brettigan. Not only was Brettigan a person of uninterest; he was simply in the way. “Well, we received a report of a homeless man in a state of collapse. And we responded. He was passed out.” There was obviously more to say about this particular situation, but Officer Lucas was not about to say it, and Brettigan knew he would not volunteer any information, germane or otherwise. A chatty cop was of no use to anybody.

  “Yes,” said Brettigan. “I could see his saddle shoes when you loaded him onto the gurney.”

  Officer Lucas now seemed to be struggling inwardly; boredom and a newfound suspicion were both somehow gaining ground with him. “You saw his shoes? The saddle shoes? Did you know this man?”

  Brettigan thought for a moment before saying, “No, I didn’t.” With a small, almost imperceptible shock, he noticed that Officer Lucas’s fingernails were jagged and bitten.

  A cop who bit his fingernails! That was one for Ripley’s.

  “Never saw him here before?”

  “No, not here.”

  “But somewhere?”

  Brettigan thought for another moment. “No.” Then: “I don’t think so.” He had never felt that he himself was a skilled or effective liar. “Did he have an ID?” Brettigan asked. “What was his name?”

  “No,” Officer Lucas said, “he didn’t have an ID. We don’t yet know his name. We’re unacquainted with the individual. However, I’d appreciate it if you’d write down your name and phone number for me in case we need to get in touch with you. Or if you should happen to see anything suspicious in…this neighborhood. After all, you say that you live close by.”

  “Okay.” Brettigan took out a pen from his shirt pocket, while Officer Lucas handed him a sheet of oddly tinted blue paper, on which Brettigan wrote “Albert Tauber” and a false local phone number.

  “Thank you,” Officer Lucas said, eyeing the name and phone number with an expression of distrust, at which point Brettigan worried that he would be asked for his driver’s license.

  * * *

  —

  “Well,” Alma said, steering the dog back toward their house, “what was the situation?”

  “The guy was passed out. Or he’d fainted. Officer Lucas did not elaborate.”

  “The poor man. As for Officer Lucas, he seems to have made short work of you.”

  “Short work? No, I wouldn’t call it that. I was very forthcoming with him. He didn’t care to tell me anything, that’s all. I was a mere aggravation to him.” The dog was pulling Alma forward, eager to get home. Something about the evening seemed to be getting on the dog’s nerves and was causing him distress. “I noticed that Officer Lucas’s fingernails were bitten. You don’t see that very often. Well, I suppose it’s a high-tension job.”

  “Well, aren’t you the Sherlock Holmes tonight? I hope you didn’t comment on his fingernails to him. He’d think you were a racist. You could be arrested for a microaggression.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Brettigan asked.

  “What do you mean, what do I mean? I meant what I meant: you can’t go around telling Black cops that you’ve noticed that they’re biting their fingernails. It’s not polite. It’s not done.”

  “I didn’t tell him that. You mean it’s a political thing? He was African-American? I guess so. I really hadn’t noticed, to be honest. Well, he was tall. I did notice that.”

  Alma snorted. “You’re so funny. Of course you saw tha
t he was African-American. How could you not see that?”

  “No. Really, I didn’t. He was a cop. What did I care what color he was?”

  “Don’t be smug. What did you write down for him? He was making a list and checking it twice, which I saw from way back here, and you were adding to it.”

  “My name. I gave him my name.”

  “Why would you do a thing like that? Why did he ask for it?”

  “I don’t know. Well, yes. He did ask. I was there, you know, showing up at the crime scene and all that. If there was a crime. I gave him a name because he asked for one. Anyway, you shouldn’t worry. He won’t be appearing on our doorstep anytime soon, the reason being, I didn’t give him my real name. I gave him an alias. I said my name was Albert Somebody.”

  Alma didn’t register any surprise. “Harry, you gave him an alias?” It was a rhetorical question. “I must say, you’re getting stranger and stranger all the time. You alarm me.” She did not, however, sound particularly alarmed; her voice was quiet, subdued, resigned. “The poor man,” she repeated, and for a moment Brettigan didn’t know whom she was referring to.

  “Because…” he said, to fill the silence. And there, only a few feet away from the front of their house, Harry Brettigan stopped, while his wife walked on ahead of him grasping the dog’s leash, momentarily oblivious to her husband’s hesitation behind her and having seemingly forgotten her own question, and at that moment Brettigan felt as if he had become invisible, or at least as invisible as the dead were, watching his wife go on up the street without him, not paying attention to the answer to what she had asked. He felt diminished and evasive, shielding Alma from the real story that was sinking down into his interior and that he kept trapped there. “Because I’m not myself,” he said aloud. “Because I’m not myself anymore.”

  In the distance a dog barked, a sound followed by a second answering bark, and then a third, a canine chorus rising, and Brettigan tilted his head back. Overhead he observed a sky without stars but also without clouds. Where had the stars, all those pinpoint suns, disappeared to? He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen them.