The Sun Collective: A Novel

by Charles Baxter

  The train entered a long tunnel, and the sudden change in air pressure caused Brettigan’s eardrums to pop as soon as he swallowed. He saw his own reflection in the window and was startled. Across the aisle, the half-sleeping young man wearing earbuds sat up and rubbed his face. In his lap, the collection of pamphlets appeared to levitate. Next to the young man, the woman gazed fixedly at the tunnel before taking out her flip phone and tapping a message into it.

  “I must go now,” the doctor said, standing up and gazing at Brettigan one last time. His opaque lenses gave the doctor the appearance of a walking oracle. “Enjoy your walk, and do as I say. You will get better, I guarantee. You will be saved.” As he turned, his glasses reflected the sun. “Perhaps you shall see me again, and you can tell me how you got well.”

  The doors of the train opened, accompanied by a two-note electronic chime, and the doctor hurried out, pulling his suitcase and checking his pocket watch, and as he exited, Brettigan thought he heard the doctor say, “You never told me your name,” but he might have imagined those words, tossed into the air behind the black trilby hat in the general tumult of passengers rushing out toward the terminal where the TSA would soon examine them for concealed weapons and malevolent intent.

  Now the light rail car was mostly empty. Brettigan counted only a dozen or so passengers, including the young man and woman still sitting across the aisle from him—the man who, the doctor had predicted, would soon ask him for money. In preparation for this request, Brettigan reached into his wallet and opened it, taking out a five-dollar bill, which he folded into his palm. The young man watched him do so without interest and then went back to straightening and fussing with his pile of pamphlets. As the train erupted from the tunnel into the sunlight, Brettigan waited to be asked for money, to be put to the test, to be saved by Notre seigneur en pauvre, but the young man had turned his head to observe the landscape of hotels and businesses passing by, and Brettigan, clutching his money, realized that he wouldn’t be tested today, nor would he be saved.

  - 2 -

  The Codgers Club, a group of retirees also known as “the Thundering Herd”—a schoolteacher, a pediatrician, a morose mechanic, and a man who seemed to have spent his life as a successful high-society drug dealer and who was now noted for his dapper outfits, impeccable manners, and straight talk—were all waiting for Brettigan near the Utopia Mall food court, in front of a shuttered Asian fast-food outlet, the peculiarly named Slow Boat to China. They had all been in high school together and through the years had remained semi-friends.

  “Look who’s here,” the pediatrician said, wagging a fat finger in Brettigan’s direction. “You’re late.” The pediatrician, the oldest morbidly obese person Brettigan knew, was lovable and soft-spoken, although this morning his speech was interrupted by a coughing fit with broken chords of phlegmy notes scattered up and down the scale. “What,” he coughed, “happened to you?”

  “I met someone,” Brettigan announced, smiling down at his assembled aging acquaintances. “I met someone on the light rail.” Chaz, the drug dealer, was drinking his usual herbal tea from a thermos and seemed preoccupied. He gazed in the direction of the Mountain Music store, which, because of the early hour, was also shuttered, all its guitars and banjos under lock and key.

  “You met someone?” Celia, the schoolteacher, asked. She was a smoker, and her breath smelled like an ashtray. “So? Why’d that make you late? Did this person slow down the train?”

  “This someone,” Ken, the mechanic, inquired gloomily, “was she beautiful?”

  “Well, no,” Brettigan told them. “It was a doctor. He. He was a doctor. He said he was a doctor. I have his business card right here somewhere. This guy gave me a cure for everything and told me that a French-Canadian version of Jesus would give me a test this morning for my salvation.” Brettigan scratched a mosquito bite on his forehead. “But there was no test. Jesus didn’t show up.”

  “Oh, that guy?” The drug dealer was suddenly alert and paying close attention. “The physiognomist? With the trilby hat and the glasses?” Brettigan nodded. “I know him,” the drug dealer said, without elaborating.

  “He didn’t mention anything about physiognomy. His card said he was a psychoanalyst.”

  The drug dealer shrugged. “No, it didn’t say that. Guy’s a four-flusher. He calls on Jesus, but guess what, Jesus ain’t coming. That’s all I know.” He took another swig of his herbal tea. “No Jesus today, no Jesus yesterday, no Jesus tomorrow. Jesus has left the building.” He smiled. “Did he want to give you a cure for old age? He does that. Fountain of Youth type thing. No such cure. I have news for him: old age is lethal. No one survives it.”

  “Okay. Forget Jesus. Let’s get going,” the schoolteacher said, rising with some difficulty to her feet, supported by her cane whose ivory handle was carved in the shape of a cocker spaniel. “You guys. Who’s got the stopwatch?”

  “We already talked about this,” the mechanic said, sounding impatient. His face was a succession of masks. He really had no face of his own. “We’re not using the damn stopwatch. This is not a race, for heaven’s sake. We are not competing. How many times do I have to say that? I refuse to be pressured. I told you all this only last week.”

  “Well, it may not be a race, but don’t forget that the Hungry Dumpster is always gaining on us,” the drug dealer said, raising his finger in the air to make his point.

  “Chaz, stop with the metaphors. I hate them,” the schoolteacher said. “All right. No stopwatch? Fine. But we agreed that we needed to pick up the pace, didn’t we? I thought we had agreed about that.”

  “You agreed,” the mechanic said. “You agreed with yourself. You can break free from us any time you want.” He made another face, this one for exasperation. “I won’t mind.”

  “We all seem rather irritable this morning,” Brettigan observed. “We need to exercise. Come on. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  —

  As he walked, Brettigan contemplated his environment, as he always did. A dream palace owned by Canadians, the largest of its kind in the United States, the Utopia Mall had no windows to the outdoors and no visible clocks to note the time of day, producing in the visitor a disorienting spatial-temporal rupture. You didn’t know where you were or what time it was, and after a while you might forget why you had come there and who you were. The mall didn’t look like a shopping center so much as a casino that had somehow taken the form of a labyrinth. The mall had a center, but the Thundering Herd had disagreed about where it was located and what could be found there and whether trapped spirits resided at its core. Constructed in the early 1990s, the mall contained millions of square feet of retail space, and untold visitors annually. One of these visitors, his hands crossed over his chest in an X so that his right hand grasped his left shoulder and the left hand the right shoulder, a look of sheer mad terror on his face with Thorazine-associated tongue waggings, was now headed toward Brettigan, who stepped out of the man’s way just before the stranger tottered off in no particular direction.

  “Look at that American. A wack job. Haven’t seen him before,” the drug dealer said, giving Brettigan a slight nudge in the ribs. “And believe me, I’ve seen most of them and done business with them.”

  The Thundering Herd accelerated slightly as they made the turn past a bicycle store, once called Pedalphilia until protests from the community caused it to be renamed A Bicycle Built for You, and an audio outlet, Unbound Sound. Behind the gated window was a statue of a god, Prometheus, wearing headphones and chained to a rock. Next door was a seafood restaurant, The Prawnbroker. Brettigan felt a twinge in his knee. Would there ever be an end to the cutesy marketing names? No. Among other things, retail capitalism was all about disguises—Jack the Ripper wearing a clown mask. Most of the stores were still closed and would not open for another hour. This time of day, the light seemed to have been artificially sweetened, and from a dis
tant source, music of no particular character or expressivity dribbled downward over everybody.

  Ahead of him, Brettigan saw the red-haired and freckled young man who’d been sitting across from him on the light rail, making odd zigzag motions as he sauntered forward, first toward another shuttered store, Shirtz-and-Shooz!, then toward the courtyard, where he seemed to be inspecting the floor while beside him his girlfriend opened up her flip phone before tapping out more text messages. She had a determined, unhesitating stride. Her hair was done up and covered with a red scarf, and periodically she would look over at the young man as if seeking cues from him, and as she did, her eyes narrowed, giving Brettigan the impression that the two of them were engaged in some sort of clandestine activity, though perhaps what he was witnessing was just love, clandestine in its own way. They had all the raggedy charisma of youth and its attendant health. They seemed to be up to something, but Brettigan couldn’t tell what their mission was. The boy still clutched his stack of pamphlets tightly, and the Thundering Herd moved on past them, turning another corner in front of Hare Today, a sports outlet for runners, and My Back Pages, a bookstore. The food court lay ahead of them at the end of their first circular lap. At its center was a coffee shop, Caf Fiend.

  Beside Brettigan, Elijah, the pediatrician, huffed and puffed. Brettigan could see tiny beads of sweat on the old man’s brow. “How’s Alma?” the pediatrician asked. “And any sign lately of your son?”

  “Tim? Sometimes I think I see him everywhere, in every street person. His friend Rusk told me that he’s around. He’s not missing, exactly. More like misplaced. Alma’s okay. How’s Susan?”

  “Sometimes,” Elijah said. “Sometimes I don’t have an opinion. Forty years we’ve been married. Can you imagine? I can, because I lived it. Our history says that we’re married, you know what I mean? And sometimes we’re not? We have a connection, fine, we have it, and then it’s gone, dissolved, and we’re strangers. No ties holding us together at all, bingo, we’re staring at each other—who is that? What is she doing, having breakfast, and talking to me and making no sense? She gets strange, like from Mars. Well, I get strange, too. Of course, I love her, and everything.”

  “Right.”

  The pediatrician looked up. “This place is like a cathedral.”

  “It is?”

  “Sure. Look at how high it goes. It’s awe-inspiring. The gods live here.”

  “They do?”

  “I’m pretty sure—” His thought was broken off by what sounded like an explosion at the other side of the mall.

  “Terrorists!” the drug dealer announced excitedly, pointing in no particular direction. “Let’s go see the mayhem. Come on.” He picked up his own pace and seemed to be herding the group toward the source of the noise. “They probably have their assault rifles out right now.” He thought for a moment. “We’ll stop them. We’ll be heroes. We’re old and have got nothing to lose. This is our time. Let’s roll.”

  When they rounded the next corner, past a Minnesota-themed restaurant, Cry of the Loon, they saw that some workmen up on a scaffolding had inadvertently dropped a piece of equipment whose crash landing on the floor had been the source of the noise. The equipment resembled a mechanical squid that was now in its death throes ejecting bile or ink. While several other workmen rushed toward the scene with maintenance equipment—mops, pails, and another machine with a long tube apparently designed to suck up anything in its path—the Thundering Herd stopped and gazed at the mess that was almost instantaneously being cleaned up and obliterated by this group of men, all of them speaking excited Spanish.

  “They should do this at night,” the mechanic said. “This is for the janitorial staff. They don’t do this kind of work in the daytime. Somebody could’ve been hurt, with that falling gizmo.”

  “I guess it’s emergency maintenance,” the drug dealer said, sounding disappointed.

  “Look.” Brettigan gestured toward a shaded corner where several sheets of thick paper had been deposited. At that moment he realized that the boy and his girlfriend, the ones he had seen on the light rail, had been walking around the mall unobtrusively dropping these pieces of paper here and there in the corners. Nobody in his group of friends seemed particularly interested in Brettigan’s discovery. Ignoring him, they had set off again. He went over to pick up one of the sheets, and even from a few feet away, he could see that the top of each one contained a headline printed in bold lettering.

  A Survival Manifesto!!!

  Well, those two were just unripe kids, entering the age of death metal, all-night sex, and three-exclamation-point manifestos. They would get over it. They would calm down. Everyone did, eventually. And the mall’s silent and mostly invisible security staff would pick up their pamphlets soon and if possible escort the kids to a holding jail in the mall’s sub-basement where they would fester and age. Brettigan folded the sheet of paper. He then forced it down into his pocket next to the business card he had acquired from the doctor and set off to catch up with the Thundering Herd.

  - 3 -

  The telephone was ringing when Brettigan returned through the back door. He let it peal away while he wiped his shoes on the unwelcome mat, a novelty item he had once acquired with the words GO AWAY in raised rubber lettering on it. Alma had not bothered to answer the phone either—that is, if she happened to be home. He wondered where his wife was. She hadn’t told him whether she’d be running errands, so he called her name, but the house answered with a returning moment of silence before he was greeted at the entryway by the dog and the cat, Woland and Behemoth. Reaching down, he scratched the dog behind the ears and patted the cat on the head. The dog closed his eyes with pleasure, and the cat answered his gesture by raising her tail, giving him a quick meow. As if he’d just heard something at the front of the house, the dog trotted off, trailed by the cat.

  They were inseparable, those two, and presented a queasy-making cornball spectacle. After his daughter had grown up and left the house, and after their son, Timothy, had found some temporary gainful employment as an actor, Brettigan and his wife needed help filling the hours. After considering the matter, they found at the Humane Society a nondescript mongrel puppy and an equally nondescript mongrel kitten, both from the slums. They were the offspring of shiftless vagrant animals. These two pets would be employed to keep Brettigan and his wife company, provide them with caretaking responsibilities, and populate the empty nest with themselves. After seeing to their vaccinations and the subsequent neutering and spaying, Alma set up the foundlings in different geographical sectors of the house.

  Thinking that the dog and the cat would never get along, Brettigan house-trained the puppy in the back hallway and the kitten in the front rooms, giving her the living area and the half-bath, where her litter box was located under the sink. If she so desired, she could sit on the front windowsill and contemplate the birds she would kill if she were ever allowed outdoors.

  The arrangement had not lasted for long. The two animals had both raced through any open door to get together and to mix it up, with the dog squeak-growling merrily, rolling onto his back while the cat pounced on him or pretended to swat him. The dog nipped at the cat, but as they grew, their play seemed to turn into affectionate and almost surreptitiously loving behavior, as if they were shameful traitors to their species.

  The scenes of their interactions grew treaclier and more sentimental by the day, a living pet-kitsch greeting card. The two began to groom each other, licking each other’s faces, sleeping with each other, the cat curled up against and sometimes on top of the dog, her head on his belly. Aww, so cute, their friends would say before launching into predictable sermons about how if dogs and cats could get along, why couldn’t et cetera. Having decided that such dog and cat behavior could not last and was against nature, Brettigan and his wife let the two animals spend their days together until the inevitable moment when they would discover that t
hey hated each other and were incompatible. After the war—barking, snarling, spitting—would come mediation, the divorce, and the division of playthings.

  But now, fully grown and immune to criticism, the two creatures followed each other around in their own Peaceable Kingdom. When the dog went out for a walk, the cat would yowl piteously until he returned. When the cat spent two days at the vet, the dog moped around the house, not eating, whimpering at night, and searching the corners. Upon the cat’s return, the dog ran mad circles around the house, leaping on sofas, barking happily, his orderly life restored.

  The two did not share all interests. The cat watched snobbishly indifferent and bored when the dog chased after a ball, and the dog had no interest in studying birds or in killing and eating the mice in the basement. Watching the cat do her predatory work, the dog yawned.

  * * *

  —

  In the kitchen, inhabiting the loud silence left behind by the no-longer-ringing telephone, Brettigan poured a cup of burnt coffee from the little electric percolator on the counter next to the radio permanently tuned to NPR. When she was out running errands, Alma left the radio on to deter break-ins. Burglars hated NPR, she believed. Today the radio was off. Brettigan called out, “You home?” given the possibility that she was upstairs and had not heard him. The silence he received in return convinced him that he could go to the back den and play the piano for a while, without bothering her. She didn’t like his playing. They were both musicians, but she had developed a distaste for music, especially his.

  He emptied his pockets onto the kitchen counter. The manifesto uncurled a bit, opening itself like a flower.

  At the piano, he felt a stinging of notes in A minor play themselves, doodling down and then upward as a sort of introduction before an odd bluesy tune interrupted the chords he had been vamping around with. The tune started in his right hand before moving to his left, sounding vaguely like an absentminded jazz pianist remembering Bill Evans but as Bill Evans, debilitated and in a cocaine haze, might have remembered Debussy. All of Brettigan’s music was filled with memories of other music.