The Sun Collective

by Charles Baxter

  She could also see that her husband, Harry Brettigan, with his drawn face, his distanced expression, was not well, was possibly gravely ill, and yet, in spite of all that, he was interested in life again, almost smiling as he tried to help, as if all those demons that he talked about had departed temporarily.

  * * *

  —

  They insisted on taking her to the hospital. Initially, she refused to go. After an examination, she was diagnosed with solar retinopathy, with lesions evident in the retinal tissue lining the back of the eye. The emergency room physician told her that, as far as he knew, there were no standard medical treatments for her condition. She should bathe her eyes, wear dark glasses, stay inside, and rest. Oh: and never, ever do that again.

  - 31 -

  Alma Brettigan has read the newspaper twice and is growing deeply irritated at her husband, who is late coming home from that geezer group of his, the walking club or whatever they call themselves these days, out at the Utopia Mall. They had planned to go an hour ago to a flower-and-plant nursery to buy some seedlings, if it’s not too late in the spring for planting. She prides herself on her heirloom tomatoes. Minnesota has the most unpredictable of season changes: snow one week in spring, followed by hot weather a few days later. You have to be an expert to know when to plant your garden around here.

  Also, she has some news: Timothy and Christina are engaged. She can hardly contain her excitement, and her irritation with Harry grows in exact proportion to her excitement. In a weird way, her son and that young woman, for all her oddities, make a good pair. Anybody can tell how they’ve fallen for each other, those two rescuers. Good news piles on good news: Christina has confided in Alma that she has missed her period, and soon…well, we will wait and see.

  Alma tosses the newspaper down on the coffee table, takes off her reading glasses, and waits for the explanatory and apologetic phone call from her husband. Maybe he left his cell phone at home, as he often does. What a case she can build against him! She is preparing a bill of particulars, an indictment against which he will be humbled and defenseless. As she waits, Woland, followed by Behemoth, ambles into the living room. Both animals sit together in front of her, as they do when they’re ready to chat.

  Where’s my husband?

  Doing whatever he does, the cat answers. You should learn to wait. Patience.

  I’ve been patient with that guy all my life.

  In that case, be patient now.

  Another hour passes, and now Alma’s irritation is being mixed increasingly with worry and a glimmer of fear.

  Where is he? This isn’t like him.

  What’s like him?

  To let me know where he is. If something happens.

  He always returns, the dog observes. Same time every day.

  You say that because you’re a dog.

  So?

  I just don’t know what’s got into him. He never does this. He never does this. He just never does.

  Maybe he got lost, the cat says. Maybe he took off for somewhere.

  You’re heartless, Alma says aloud to the cat.

  No. Realistic.

  The room is beginning to darken slightly as the afternoon goes on.

  He’ll come back. He always comes back, the dog repeats.

  How do you know? Alma wonders.

  Loyalty and love, the dog says. What else is there?

  - 32 -

  On an early Saturday morning at the Utopia Mall, Brettigan stood outside the shuttered Unbound Sound store and watched while the Thundering Herd power walked past him. This particular morning, after two difficult Sisyphean circuits, he had had enough and was about to sit down on a bench in the courtyard in front of the fast-food Slow Boat to China, now open, where they were serving soybean milk, tofu pudding, and deep-fried dough sticks for breakfast. So far, they’d had no customers, and the chef, a Latino, was reading something on his iPhone.

  At this time of morning, with only a handful of businesses like the Boat already open, the mall was unlittered by noise before the racket of eager customers arrived. Celia, the retired teacher, wearing a jaunty red cap, walking stick in hand, was leading the others in the Herd, but the retired drug dealer, sporting a blue sweatshirt, and slightly bent from osteoporosis, would soon catch up to her. Celia was tough and temperamentally optimistic. She could outrace anybody despite her cigarette habit. Every day seemed to enliven her; no challenge was too great for her concentrated, hungry will. Her high spirits were relentless. In old age she was intact and unbroken. Her love of every detail of life’s banquet gave her superpowers that no one else her age could even pretend to possess. Brettigan found her almost intolerable.

  As Brettigan sat down, his friend Dr. Elijah Jones gave him a qualified smile, a halfhearted wave, and a concerned, diagnostic glance as he ambled behind the others.

  The members of the Herd had been annoyed by Brettigan’s frequent absences and were unenthusiastic about his recent tendency to drop out of the group and sit down whenever he was winded, as often happened. Dr. Jones had told him that he needed to have a checkup with his cardiologist, and soon. Brettigan had the feeling that if he himself should die of a heart attack, the Herd would express disappointment rather than grief. In America, with its strange pragmatism, the idea was that you could postpone death indefinitely if you simply took the proper steps and followed the self-help advice given out by paid-programming dietitians and fitness experts who could also be found expounding their theories on the internet. If you died, you would be criticized for your bad habits: too much pasta, a sedentary lifestyle, whiskey instead of herbal energy drinks, pessimism. Your death would be all your fault.

  Immortality, one TV and internet doctor had claimed, was nearly within our grasp. But you had to work for it.

  Sitting on the bench in front of the Slow Boat, Brettigan felt a mood of summing-up enfolding him: he complimented himself that in his long life, he had never murdered anybody, though he knew himself to be capable of homicide, and had not been an arsonist, a rapist, or a despoiler. He hadn’t divorced Alma, although he’d been tempted a few times, and he had helped to raise two children who were getting by. The criminality he knew he possessed had not been enacted. His daughter, Virginia, a true American down there in the wilds of Asheville with her newly acquired southern accent, would always be sturdy and fine, a lovely human being, with her husband and children. He loved her and his grandchildren, a family that was perfection itself. And his son—

  The Herd came around again, this time with the drug dealer in the lead.

  His son, Timothy. When Brettigan closed his eyes, Timothy’s face floated in front of him in the darkness, but the details of that face remained hazy. Some feature of Timothy’s personality, or his character, would always be hidden away from his view. Fathers did not need to understand their sons, and, according to Western myths, they shouldn’t try, given the risk of soul-carnage. If that son happened to be an actor whose self-presentation could change daily, he might go beyond mood swings into personality swings, an occupational hazard, and that meant that he would always be unknowable, masked, as all actors are unknowable. Besides, you could love people without really knowing them. You didn’t have to carry on Russian conversations with your children about the purpose of life and the contents of the soul. Simply to survive, sons may lock up their hearts against their fathers and refuse entry. Most aging fathers were simply grateful for any charity at all thrown in their direction from their children. King Lear should have settled for a few bread crumbs. Only young men need a crew.

  But, he reminded himself, his son was no longer an actor. He managed a movie theater and was a social activist. He had expressed great love for his parents. He was becoming himself.

  Brettigan leaned forward, trying to get his breath. The oxygen here in the Utopia Mall seemed to have come out of a plastic machine. It was monetized, manufactured plastic
air.

  Timothy and Christina had been publicly fondling each other lately and were planning to move in together soon. They had found an affordable barrier-free apartment in Northeast Minneapolis, and after not being in love, their hearts had undergone a conversion, and they were now—through some kind of long-term dramatic irony—weirdly infatuated with each other. A surprise ending: Christina’s blindness had altered their personal psychic relationships. It shouldn’t have happened according to any progressive theory of gender dynamics, but it had. They were inhabiting a prefeminist setup: holding hands, kissing in public. Her blindness played into her unspoken wish to be comforted and to have someone take care of her, a role that Timothy was more than happy to perform; and now that Christina couldn’t see him, Timothy didn’t have to worry about his appearance, didn’t have to be conscious of being observed, a condition that suited him, and he didn’t have to pretend to be somebody he wasn’t. With her, he didn’t have to perform. In this way, her blindness was a kind of solution.

  The Thundering Herd came around again, this time with the retired garage mechanic in the lead. The others had slowed down, given the effort of their conversation, which had taken over from the power walking. Dr. Jones trailed behind them all.

  Christina, whose sight was slowly returning, had quit her job at the bank and was serving in an advisory capacity to a neighborhood ecology, gardening, conservation, and consciousness-raising group. She had started jogging again, holding hands with Timothy on the wide jogging trails alongside the Mississippi River they’d found together. She always wore her dark glasses. She had not spent much time grieving that other guy, Ludlow, whom Brettigan had not liked, and she had not spoken much about the Sun Collective, whose members were active but invisible. Maybe it was just in the nature of radical reformist groups to be shattered and fragmented.

  Still, one must try. There was always a new struggle demanding a person’s attention.

  Brettigan had never known his son to be as happy—a fragile happiness, to be sure—as he was now in Christina’s company, and Christina herself seemed to have had a burden lifted from the localized part of her consciousness that’d been weighed down by an obligation she had obviously felt toward the wretched, the poor, and the homeless: all those miserable people in rags who stagger toward you in dreams and in real life with their hands out and their eyes imploring you to help and to save them. She had paid off their pain with her eyesight. It seemed to have been a sufficient sacrifice. “We never did have a coherent platform,” she finally admitted to Brettigan, “but no one else does, either.”

  * * *

  —

  And what had become of that guy, Wye, the spokesperson? On the internet, there was speculation that he had never existed. One posting claimed that every appearance he ever staged had been a performance by an actor, one of several actors, like department store Santas, so the argument ran. This explanation accounted for the dark rooms in which Wye preferred to appear. Another school of thought posited that Wye was not a human being at all but a hologram, projected from the other side of the universe by means of quantum entanglement.

  Charismatic figures had a habit of vanishing into thin air after they had disturbed their communities anyway. They all did it, and Wye had apparently read the playbook.

  Meanwhile, remnants of the Sun Collective were said to be re-forming here and there in other cities, with the most significant consequence of the Great Blinding being a revival of interest in food pantries, urban gardens, racial inclusivity, and treatment for addictive consumers. Inspired by the group’s parting event, and Wye’s disappearance, the members of the collective now wore dark glasses all the time as their secret sign of membership. Whenever you saw someone wearing shades these days, indoors or out, you might be in the presence of a Sun Collectivist. Besides, it made them look cool and slightly above it all.

  In every age there would be a call to arms; in every city, someone would knock at your door with requests or demands. The armies of the poor trudged ever onward, peeing on the sidewalk and living in tents. And even now, the Sandmen were still around in urban legends, creating bedlam. The more things change…

  Brettigan gazed up at the many-colored glass dome of the Utopia Mall, staining the white radiance of eternity. The glass at the top had the word Utopia lettered into it. The first time he saw it, he misread it and thought the word was Alma. The Alma Mall. I’m losing it, he thought, as a storefront security gate in front of Unbound Sound rattled upward for the opening of the business day. Yesterday he’d come into the house and found Alma talking loudly and happily about the possibility of Timothy and Christina getting married and starting a family. Fine, except she was carrying on this conversation with the dog and the cat. Alma was leaning back on the living room sofa, and both animals were seated in front of her, listening intently, and, for all Brettigan knew, taking it all in. The dog would welcome the news; the cat would not. Cats did not love anything, on principle.

  He and Alma had been married so long that love didn’t really figure into the whole business anymore, and their tolerance for each other’s eccentricities didn’t matter much either—Alma was like water: you didn’t have to love water when you were thirsty. You just needed it to live. That’s how they were with each other. They had gone from love to post-love, where each one for the other was a necessity. Necessity was the infrastructure on which the superstructure of love rested. If he couldn’t hold her in his arms at night, he would die. Well, he thought grumpily, sooner or later he would die anyway.

  It was a sin against God and His creation to be tired of life, but on some days Brettigan was heartily tired of all of it, with one exception: holding his wife in his arms. He had never tired of that.

  “You look like you’re thinking?” Dr. Jones said, lowering himself onto the bench next to Brettigan. He huffed and puffed; his face held a thin sheen of fat man sweat. “Of what?”

  “Oh, this and that,” Brettigan said.

  “People our age shouldn’t think,” the doctor opined. He was still breathing hard.

  “No? What should they do?”

  “Lie in the sun and accept the applause.”

  “You should lose some weight, Elijah.”

  “I should do a lot of things,” the doctor said. “My point is, you oughta stop thinking and start to enjoy all the wonders. Thinking never did anybody any good. Enjoy the great diversions.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, you take this mall. Everything a human being requires is here. Except groceries and hardware and love. There’s no love here. But almost everything else a human being wants, you can find that here, too. All the wonders of the visible world.”

  “Elijah,” Brettigan said. “I gotta go.” Brettigan stood up.

  “Stay. Stay with us, stay with your aging friends awhile. We’re going to drink tea, and we’ll talk as we always do.”

  “I have to go,” Brettigan said. It seemed urgent to him now that he head homeward. The feeling that he should do so was very strong, an implicit order from somewhere.

  “Whatever you say,” the doctor said. When the Thundering Herd rounded the corner near them, Brettigan waved at them wearily before walking away.

  * * *

  —

  On the light rail headed toward Minneapolis, Brettigan let the sun shine on his face, and once again the light had acquired a blue tint from the advertising sheath that covered the exterior of the train car. When Brettigan glanced at his hands, he noticed that they appeared to be slightly blue, as if bruised. The train burst out of the tunnel into the light and stopped at Fort Snelling, where an old woman with a prominent bald spot got on, giving Brettigan an aura of pain around his heart.

  He closed his eyes and thought of a bridge he would design for her, for all of them. It would be a pedestrian bridge, formed by a slender and heavily post-tensioned concrete deck, the cables anchored to stiff foundatio
ns at either end. A stress ribbon bridge would have the shape of gently sloping catenary curves, not unlike the rope pedestrian suspension bridges that humanity had been building since prehistory. To support the deck, the post-tensioning cables would exert large horizontal forces at the abutments, suited to locations where the ground consisted of solid rock at the ends of the span. The ribbon bridge that Brettigan saw in his imagination would be well suited to a river…he saw all of them, the shadows, crossing over on his bridge to rest in the shade of the trees.

  At the next stop, at the VA Hospital, a war-torn African-American man with a U.S. Army Iraq War badge on his jacket sleeve came hobbling in, supported by a crutch on his left-hand side. His other sleeve displayed a marksmanship medal with a cross and a circle surrounding it. On his neck was a cross tattoo, and another cross hung down on a leather band over his chest. He wore an oversize black boot over his left foot, large enough to surround the wound dressings that were surely enfolded underneath the leather. Using his crutch, his face a mask of pain that, as the old preachers used to say, would make Jesus weep, he headed toward the front of the car, where he engaged the first set of passengers in conversation.

  The train continued toward Minneapolis, passing several grain elevators lit by the midmorning sun. In the distance a dog ran down the sidewalk followed by a red-haired boy on roller skates. Brettigan closed his eyes.