The Sun Collective: A Novel

by Charles Baxter

Another woman dressed in tank top and tights, hair snarled in an unkempt ponytail, very homecoming-queen-on-a-bender, came into the ladies’ bathroom and looked at Christina with a split second of quasi-sympathy before racing into the toilet stall, from which ugly sounds emerged.

  Christina dried her hands on a…what was that? An old roller towel? Did they still have those anymore? Who made them? The same company that made manual typewriters and vacuum tubes? She pulled it down and dried her face on the cloth, and when she stepped backward, she saw that the towel had streaks of blue from her eyeliner, and the blue streaks seemed to be forming into words and sentences, and the sentences were speaking aloud, criticizing her, finding fault. Water from somewhere was dousing the sparklers of joy.

  Very untrustworthy, this drug. Also: the warm, you-have-a-fan-base feeling, the everybody-loves-you feeling, the highlight-reel feeling, all of them were creeping away and leaving behind a skid-row emptiness with several blocks of tenements and trash can fires and no plumbing and rats crouching over stale sandwiches.

  Time to return to the yoga studio. Time to straighten up. The session would begin in a few minutes. She would have to look normal. No more thoughts, not now, and no more voices. She would have to get her mind back inside her head, pronto, like toothpaste back into the whatchamacallit, the tube. No more conversations on the Blue Telephone. Got to hang that receiver up right now.

  But what a relief it was to be stupid for a while.

  Walking out of the ladies’ room, she made her way down the corridor, floating an inch or two above the surface of the floor, inasmuch as the soles of her feet were numb, to the entryway outside the studio. Two benches were arrayed on either side and, underneath the benches, discarded shoes. They were multitudinous. All the beginning, middle, and end-stage yogis had left their footwear out here in the hall, as if somehow the shoes were safe from theft, because anyway you couldn’t take them into the studio on your feet. That was a rule, being barefoot, the first one in a long list.

  Christina gazed down at the shoes. They reminded her of the shoe bin at Goodwill, where the Authorities of Charity kept in the center’s northeast corner a big gray box of harvested unmatched shoes for mismatched feet. Looking at all the footwear now outside the studio, mostly women’s sneakers and running shoes and one pair of hiking boots, she began to cry, because…well, because they had been left behind, and it was exactly like an orphanage, except of shoes. Also the brogues, sandals, clogs, sneakers, oxfords, ballet flats, and wedge pumps were huddled down there on the ground, mewling. She dried her eyes on her sleeve. Things were getting a bit out of hand. A soupçon too much Blue Telephone was coursing through her bloodstream for her own good, the jumbotron was blowing a few cherry bombs here and there, sorrow was being thrown around like inkblots splattered on the studio wall, invisible people were sobbing, and perhaps the time had arrived to sober up and straighten out.

  She set her shoulders, slipped off her sneakers, and strode with a thoughtful, determined air into the yoga studio carrying her yoga mat, which had materialized from somewhere.

  * * *

  —

  In the dim light from overhead and from the streetlights outside on Third Avenue, Christina unrolled her mat on the wood-slatted floor and began her stretching exercises. The streetlights gave the room a golden crepuscular glow that caused everyone to radiate with a warm physical aura as if they were lit from the inside. Yoga studios always had this apparitional sexiness, this heat; you could feel it. On either side of Christina and in front of her were the solid-citizen-in-tights brigade, the svelte young women who looked as if they could command the world with their power and strength and suppleness and beauty, and then there were the guys, always in the minority, typically rather wiry and stubble-bearded and New Agey and lacking authority, but given to the occasional sidelong wolfish predatory glance, especially when upside down.

  Directly ahead of her was someone she’d never seen here before. When he turned, she got a good look at him. He was quite noticeable: he wore sweatpants and an orange T-shirt with some sinister cartoon robot on it, and on his left bicep was a tattoo that said YOU’RE WELCOME! in Baskerville typeface—Christina knew her fonts—and above the sweatpants and the shirt and the pleasingly broad workingman’s back was a face that…well, you didn’t see eager faces like that often anymore, at least not on men. He possessed two raffish blue eyes, widely separated, and, below the high cheekbones, what used to be called a strong jaw, but the sum total of this face was that of an innocent warrior, a boy in a man’s body, because the eyes looked out at the world with a warrior’s fierceness but were also blank, as if he didn’t know what he was fighting for and possibly didn’t care. Maybe he was looking around for someone who would lead him into battle, someone who could give him some sensible orders to follow.

  She thought: I want that man in my army.

  But then he boldly stared in her direction for a moment, more knight than pawn, and very nonprotocol for yoga sessions, before raising his arms above his head, a stretch but also a display, an invitation, a come-and-get-it. With the supreme confidence of immaturity combined with male beauty, he turned around and gave her a view of his back before getting down on the floor to do a left twist with his left leg bent. Despite his strength he seemed unsteady, as if he hadn’t had a meal all day. He was trembling and doing his best to cover it up; the Blue Telephone, though fading away, helped Christina see within him, through his skin to the wall behind him. With sudden X-ray vision, she noted his frailty; she could see it through his solid musculature. She could see the hunger in his bone marrow.

  The yoga teacher entered the room, greeted everybody, rang her little Buddha bell, and started the session after lighting a candle. Concentrating on her poses and slightly hypnotized by the enforced, strained peacefulness of a yoga workout, Christina momentarily forgot about the boy warrior until in the middle of a handstand, his body propped up against a wall, he seemed about to fall, not a controlled fall but a collapse. Waving back and forth like a reed in a high wind, he tipped backward, and at that moment the residual effect of the drug she had taken caused the jumbotron to light up in some lower region of Christina’s consciousness, and she got to her feet and stood over him as he slowly crumpled into a non-yoga position on the floor.

  The staticky thought occurred to her, as if broadcast in shortwave from an asteroid, that this guy was weakened by malnutrition, and he was here to be picked up, in every possible sense. Or maybe it was all an act. You couldn’t tell with people like him.

  The instructor hurried over to him and asked if he was all right, and the boy said, “Affirmative,” in that faux-military way that Christina’s teenage brothers used to employ when they were hurt and wanted to sound tough. But he didn’t move. He just lay there, seemingly paralyzed, and the other students stared over at him with steely Zen detachment. Nor did the yoga instructor seem eager to help out. Something had to be done. Something always had to be done. Christina took his hand and raised him up.

  “Thank you,” he said. He gave her a flash of a smile. “You’re being useful, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes. Are you okay?”

  He dusted himself off, and Christina noticed that his large hands were trembling. The instructor, after doing a quick once-over of the boy, had returned to her place at the head of the class.

  “What’s the story?” Christina asked, as quietly as she could.

  “Well, okay. I could use a meal, that’s my story.”

  They were murmuring to each other, their faces very close together, the way intimate friends might talk.

  “So, all right, I get it. You’re hungry.” For a moment she considered whether she would make some kind of move, and as she did, the Blue Telephone, in its last gasp broadcasting from the future, the final long-distance call before the click of termination, said to her that no harm could come to her from this boy-man, because after all, look at
him, see how harmless he was? Like a water lily? And besides, wasn’t she, Christina, an adventurer? Wasn’t she the most fearless person she knew, across all the genders and ages and continents? And didn’t she despise the ruinous dull comforts of routine? She did despise them, every day. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Together they stepped around the other contorted bodies on the floor belonging to people who were now taking no notice of this particular situation: a couple exiting the dim room together. Just a mere yoga pickup. The oblivious, well-maintained, recently cleansed, low-fat bodies moved into a collective Downward Dog as Christina and the boy opened the studio door, and they exited, Christina going first. In the hallway outside, the boy slipped some white athletic socks onto his big feet and then searched around the floor in the mess of assorted discarded footwear until he found his battered running shoes, scrawled over with words in Magic Marker: SUN on the side of the left shoe and LIGHT on the right. Christina cracked a micro-smirk to herself as she found her own tennis shoes and her winter jacket, while the boy put on his gray hoodie and a backpack that had been hanging on a hook. He had no gloves; Christina looked down and saw that his hands, flecked with paint, were chapped with tiny lesions. Anyone could take control of this guy at any time, she could see. He wasn’t clueless so much as stupefied by his own masculinity, like the rest of them.

  “Anything you want?” she asked him, making sure that the question was sufficiently open-ended to give him a moment’s pause.

  “A beer,” he said, gazing at the floor. Now he was wearing blue jeans. Where had they come from?

  “How about a beer and a hamburger?”

  “Okay.”

  Minutes later, crossing the street to a restaurant, the Monte Carlo, she checked out his progress over the snow-covered sidewalk and the curb. Once again, he seemed ready to fall from hunger or exhaustion or sheer absentmindedness. Christina kept her hand extended slightly in his direction in case he happened to stumble into her. He seemed to be listening to extraterrestrial conversations and had no inkling of where he was going, swaddled in a very private and comfortable fog. Wherever he was, he wasn’t quite here.

  Inside the restaurant, standing next to each other, they both took in the glass shelves of liquor bottles behind the bar. These shelves, bathed in light, row upon row, rose to the stamped-tin ceiling like an altar of decorative temptations presided over by the priestly bespectacled bartender drying glasses with a soiled towel. As they were led to a booth, Christina felt her hand brushing against the boy’s thigh and was startled by how hard the quadriceps muscle was underneath the cloth. After being seated across the table from him, she said, “So. Have you thought of a name by now?”

  “For what?”

  “For yourself.”

  “Yeah, I have. What’s your name?”

  “Kristin,” she said, and when she saw the smiling disbelief on his face, she said, “No, you’re right. I lied. It’s Christina. But wait. What if we did without names, you and me? Or what if I gave you a name, and you took it, and then that was your name from then on, as if I had baptized you or something? That would be so, I dunno, transgressive.”

  “Are you always like this?”

  “Yes. No. Anyway, I mean, I’m sitting here, and I’m, well, I’m looking at you, and I’m thinking that you look like a Josh or a Matt, you know, one of those one-syllable names that doesn’t, uh, really signify anything. Like Slim, on fat people?” The server came by and gave them the menus, which the boy didn’t look at. “Because,” she continued, “I have a feeling that you’re not really one-syllabled…”

  “Cut it out,” the boy said. “You’re nervous. And your nervousness is making me nervous. Because, here’s the thing: which is, we’re strangers, and I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten for a while. Plus I’m feeling light-headed, and maybe you noticed a few minutes ago across the street that I started to pass out. So here you are doing this flirty routine with names like we’re on a date, which, so far as I know, we aren’t, and meanwhile I’m fucking starving, whatever your name is. This is…whatever. And I’d like to have a meal and then I’d like to get some sleep, and after that, well, if we’re okay with each other, I don’t know.”

  “How come you haven’t eaten in so long?” she asked.

  “Because I’m a revolutionary,” he told her with apparent seriousness and looked her straight in the eyes at such length that she eventually turned away.

  * * *

  —

  For a few minutes they sat silently like the strangers they were until his beer arrived; he gulped it down, and when his salad and his cheeseburger were delivered to the table—the burger so thickened with tomatoes, lettuce, cheese, and pickles that it seemed too awkwardly constructed to bite into—he devoured them quickly and without speaking. She herself dipped a spoon daintily into a bowl of chicken noodle soup. Finally he wiped his mouth and leaned back, suppressing a belch, and he smiled. “I’m Ludlow,” he said, extending his hand. She took his hand, feeling her own hand nestled inside the chapped skin clutching hers with a tight muscular grip, and he held on to her for a fraction of a second too long.

  “What kind of name is that? I’m Christina, in case you weren’t listening a minute ago.”

  “Do you have a car?” he asked. “Christina? You look like the sort of person who would have a car. An old beat-up Volvo that your dad gave you? An old rusty Plymouth?”

  “No. An old beat-up Saab,” she said. “It’s blood-clot-colored.”

  “Uh-huh.” He nodded. He continued to smile in a slightly menacing way. All the possible adjectives about him—insolent, overconfident—washed against her: whatever it was he possessed, he had something on her, some power that simultaneously drew her toward him and repelled her, but he wouldn’t offer the next topic of conversation and seemed instead to be enjoying her uneasy silence. Possibly he wasn’t as subservient as she thought he might be. “Because I could use a ride,” he said at last. “I could always take the bus, but I’d rather have a ride if you’d give it to me. To where I’m staying, I mean.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “You could say I’m housesitting.”

  “But you’re really not?”

  “No,” he said. “Do you really want to know? So, okay. I was staying with a friend, sleeping on his sofa, but he kicked me out for various reasons I won’t go into now. So the past few weeks, I’ve been breaking into houses whose owners are away on vacation or gone for the winter. You’d be surprised how many people in Minnesota leave their houses and go south once it gets cold. ‘Snowbirds,’ they call them. Hundreds of them, thousands. Houses without security systems are empty for weeks all over this city, though you have to know where to look, which I do. The very rich, those one-percenters, they have silent alarms, and the poor never go anywhere. It’s the middle you have to scope out, recent money, carelessness. Middle-classers. Where they live, the city is vacant. You want a free room? Easy-peasy: no lights on at eight o’clock, no lights on at bedtime. Besides, one job I had, I installed security systems, and I know what they look like. So in I go, and I house-sit for them; they just don’t know I’m doing it. I leave the house exactly the way I found it, except better. I take care of their valuables. I never steal because I don’t want what they have. I polish the silver and clean up. If there are dirty dishes in the sink, I scrub them spotless and put them away. The owners usually turn the heat down when they leave, but the electricity stays on, and anyway I don’t need much of that. All I need is enough light to read by. I’m a temporary tenant, on principle, mostly because I’m a temporary sort of guy—you know: here today and Guatemala. If I get a hint that someone’s coming back, like the paper suddenly gets delivered on the front stoop one morning, I find another place to stay. Anyway, daytimes I’m out, I’m working.”

  “But what if—?”

  “That? That’s only happened once. This person came home, an old
woman, kind of bent over and deaf, her gray hair in a ponytail, dropping her suitcases in the front hallway, the foyer. No, excuse me, the foy-yeh. I’d seen her from the, you know, upstairs window as she was getting out of a Yellow Cab. When she came in, grandmotherly type, very lonely and giving off those lonesome radio signals, she called out, ‘Hello?’ as if she guessed somebody was there, upstairs, but no one was in her house but me, and I left through the back door before she knew I’d been sleeping in her bed like the big bad wolf.”

  “Stealthy.”

  “That’s me,” he said. “I’m covert. But the thing is, I got the feeling that she really wanted somebody to be right there in her house, to greet her, hand her a cup of hot tea, ask her how her flight home had been, any unexpected turbulence, that sort of thing, and how was it down there in Tampa or wherever she’d been. Somebody, even a stranger, to greet her. To care about her a little, I would—well, care enough to ask how she was, and to wait for an answer. Not a wolf, but, you know, a messenger. So I almost did that. I almost stayed. I almost gave her a cup of hot tea. Chamomile, which I had spotted in her pantry.”

  “You’re a very strange person,” Christina told him.

  “And I could have done it,” he said, “I could have welcomed her back into her house and she wouldn’t have screamed, because you can tell by just looking at me that I’m a good person, I’m like the very best person you’ve ever met. I’m a bright angel; I’m a messenger from that place that’s just past heaven, and I make visitations. I give off light. I’m very radiant. I got the spirit moving around in me like a critical mass, like an atomic pile, glowing like that. I’ll show you. Finish your soup and we’ll do a visitation. I’m serious. Come on.”

  “Come on where?”

  “Finish your soup and pay the bill, and we’ll get into your blood-clot-colored Saab, and I’ll show you.”

  Christina glanced up at the server, who looked back at her with a bored expression on her face that seemed to say she had observed every kind of behavior here, and Christina nodded inwardly, having decided that this person, this Ludlow, was harmless. She felt herself thawing a bit in his presence, and when the bill came, she paid it.