The Sun Collective: A Novel

by Charles Baxter

  She had learned the hermeneutics of suspicion and skepticism, and now…now here she was, working in a branch bank in a Minneapolis suburb, paying off her accumulated student loans. Every morning she felt her ideals disappearing into a remainder bin. After all, you couldn’t package and merchandise a revolution. The revolution was not for sale, everyone said.

  In those days, in graduate school in Chicago, she had a kind and thoughtful but occasionally bad-tempered boyfriend named Farrell, who’d started as a graduate student in math but had branched out into computer programming with a bit of high-end drug dealing on the side. He was a student in name only. Mostly he helped small businesses on the Near North Side with their inventories and their HR accounts, and he used his contacts to sell a bit of weed and other boutique concoctions whenever the moment seemed right. Farrell was the one who had introduced Christina to Blue Telephone. He knew personally its gnome-like inventor, who was Farrell’s second cousin once removed. The first time she’d tried it, she had a vision of her future, and Farrell did not appear in it as her lifetime partner, not that she thought he would. In this vision, which consisted of four discrete scenes, one of them set in a Greyhound bus station, she was beaten up and then murdered—stabbed—in the second scene, a black-and-white noir thriller, by someone who looked a lot like Farrell. She considered it a subtle warning sent by the future not to hang out with Farrell anymore and certainly not to sleep with any Farrell look-alikes, those seedy but handsome intellectual guys with staring eyes and oversize sweaters.

  When she broke up with him, over dessert in her apartment in Hyde Park—for the main course she had served pot roast—he picked up his steak knife, to which were still attached tiny shreds of meat, and waved it at her threateningly. He called her a monster whose specialty was lighthearted cruelty, the kind that only intelligent people could manage, which hurt because it was almost accurate; then he got down into the gutter and called her a sexist name, and a freeloader on his drug supply, which seemed anticlimactic. He called her other names as he put on his shoes and socks and sweater before storming out of the apartment. Through her upstairs window, she watched him walking down Fifty-seventh Street to the Metra station. He was shouting at no one and waving her steak knife—one of a set of four!—in the air. She murmured a prayer of thanks to fate and the Blue Telephone for warning her about him before he had had a chance to kill her. The steak knife was a minor sacrifice.

  Then a few weeks later, she had seen a play while under the influence of BT, gotten a little obsessive about the lead actor, and so now here she was in Minneapolis.

  Having taken up her station at the bank, Christina checked her iPhone for messages. She had heard it ding in her pocket. One text—Matilda gave birth last night to 5 puppies! But one died. So sad—was from her sister, Matilda being the family’s rescue dog. Christina texted back, Congratulations Mom but 2 bad! She went to her Facebook page and posted a message about last night’s snowstorm. She checked her Instagram account. She pulled out a hand mirror and gave herself a once-over.

  * * *

  —

  One night, post-Farrell, and very, very high on weed, BT, and a German mood-enhancing drug, EZ Straße, floating up there in the ionosphere, she’d gone to a Chicago professional theater company to see a production of Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui: A Gangster Spectacle. The lead was to be played by someone named Timothy Brettigan. The play started, and in the fourth scene of Act One, the young man came out made up to look like the current American chief executive, A. A. Thorkelson, in a tight-fitting double-breasted pinchback suit, the latest male fashion craze. Christina felt as if she’d been kicked in the stomach: everything else in her life fell away while she watched Timothy Brettigan–as–Thorkelson–as–Arturo Ui. He had the kind of animal sexuality that compelled attention. You couldn’t not look at him. The guy radiated hypnotic charisma promising the big illicit thrills, entirely appropriate for a murderer and a seducer, a sexual sportsman who left a trail behind him of broken women and dead bodies. In his opening speech, Arturo Ui complained that his name hadn’t appeared in the newspapers for two months. Like all narcissists in the public eye, what he wanted was recognition—favorable or not, it didn’t matter. He committed murders in order to become famous, Arturo Ui claimed, and to become an unavoidable presence, the sort of character who transfixed the masses and caused everybody to talk about him in an endless conversation about what he was really thinking and what actions that homicidal thinking would lead to. But lately no one had talked about him. More murders were therefore required.

  During the intermission, she felt weak in the knees and could hardly stand, and when the play was over, she stood floating at the stage door waiting for him to appear. When Timothy Brettigan came out, dressed in khakis and a plain cotton shirt, and wearing glasses, disguised as an ordinary man who had somehow in the theater been made up as preposterously handsome and dangerous, she asked him to autograph her program. “I loved your performance,” she said, her voice a bit shaky, and her mind so high from the drugs that she saw herself married to him someday, and he nodded after taking a quick appraising look at her. “You were the black heart of capitalism.” For once, she wanted to look beautiful. Whatever dark light he radiated while onstage, however, was now extinguished. He needed a stage to create that electricity, and here, out on the street, he seemed to be in a kind of low-wattage plainclothes disguise, just a guy, a mere actor. Maybe all he had were disguises. After he finished writing his name, she also wrote down her phone number and gave it to him. Very quietly, he asked her what her name was, and as soon as she told him, he took her hand in his and half-shook it, half-held it, before letting her go. “Hi, Christina,” he said. “I’m Tim.”

  He never called. What was it about these men who never called?

  Every once or so often, she thought about him and wondered where he was now and why he had disappeared from her life, considering that, on a whim propelled by a designer drug, she had moved to Minneapolis because her life in Chicago was over and was threatened by Farrell’s ongoing existence there.

  * * *

  —

  In a few minutes the doors at the bank would open. Christina’s friend Eleanor, a teller, was already at her post, humming, as she usually did, and her other friend at the bank, Jürgen, a lovable and rumpled German green-card immigrant who was the branch bank’s assistant manager, was picking tobacco—when not at work, he rolled his own cigarettes—off his tongue, as he lumbered toward his office. He was the perfect boss: firm when he had to be but essentially lackadaisical and good-natured; it was a wonder that their branch hadn’t been picked clean by embezzling rogue elements taking advantage of Jürgen’s essential benevolence. In Germany, learning to read English, Jürgen had fallen in love with the fiction of Sherwood Anderson and had come to America in a search for those lonely, emotionally volatile, and half-innocent citizens, and he had been a bit bewildered to discover that contemporary America no longer looked like Winesburg, Ohio. Having a secondary gift for accounting and management, he applied for a green card and was now working here, though he feared being kicked out, given the erratic content of President Thorkelson’s decrees concerning “aliens” and their wicked ability to get their hands on American money whenever they found it.

  A solitary, watchful man whose unpressed neckties occasionally exhibited food stains, though he had a disarming smile, Jürgen habitually drove around the back roads of the Midwest on weekends in search of the historical remnants of behavior he had found only in books. “This quality must be out there somewhere,” he had told Christina, his eyes expressing his weltschmerzlich German melancholy. “It is this American quality for which I search.” With his Hasselblad camera and his iPhone, he took photographs of pickup trucks, derelict barns, old wireless wooden telephone poles collapsing sideways into swamps, and the main streets of small towns abandoned by their industries and now given over to meth labs and massive opio
id addiction; occasionally he showed these photographs to Christina during their coffee breaks, checking her face for her reactions, and he had had one gallery exhibit, during which he had sold two photographs, one of a fading antique wooden barber pole standing in sunlight, the other of an old cigar box whose lid had been made into a pincushion.

  He was a bit of a lost soul and a photographer of lost worlds. Christina felt protective toward him, even though technically she was his employee. She ambled down to his office to say good morning.

  His head propped on his hand, Jürgen was at his desk, gazing fixedly at his computer screen, on which an Excel spreadsheet appeared, as if it contained important information, which Christina knew it did not.

  “Good morning,” she said. “Am I interrupting?”

  “You cannot interrupt when nothing of any great importance is happening,” Jürgen said, in his softly accented English. His clothes gave off a pleasantly reliable odor of cigarette smoke. “Whenever you interrupt me, you are not truly interrupting. This word—interrupt—is perhaps ill-chosen. Or it does not apply.” Jürgen enjoyed splitting hairs for comic effect. As a student, he had studied the philosophy of Heidegger. Once in a while he would talk about being “thrown” into his current job. He put aside the desktop screen. “Since you are so kind always to explain your country to me, Christina, could you also explain to me American lane usage?”

  “Lane usage?”

  “On the freeways. This morning, in broad sunlight, on my way to this very bank, I nearly had an accident in my little Chevrolet. Now, later, here, I feel lucky to be alive. I will tell you how it happened: I had possession of the center lane and had signaled a movement of my car into the right-hand slow lane. Somehow I had failed to see an immense black vehicle approaching me in that very lane. As I attempted with great effort to get into that lane, the immense black vehicle, hearse-like but in actuality an SUV called, I think, a ‘Subdivision,’ honked at me and almost rammed into me. I have never been so frightened in my life.”

  “Jürgen, people in this country pass in the right-hand lane. They shouldn’t, but they do. You know that.”

  “Yes. I have noticed. I feel that Americans lack lane discipline. This is only my opinion, which I offer to you.”

  “We do lack lane discipline,” Christina admitted. “It’s a free-for-all out there.”

  “Also, I fear American drivers,” Jürgen said. “I worry about being fired upon by enraged motorists holding tightly to their cell phones and their multiple handguns.” He leaned back and pulled his fingers through his flyaway hair. On his upper lip was a tiny shred of tobacco. “I apologize for saying so, but these large vehicles are vulgar, don’t you think so?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “One should try to be more sage in rush-hour traffic,” Jürgen said, tapping his fingers on the desk before checking his watch. Gazing toward the front plate-glass window, he pointed. “Who is that strange-looking person standing out there on the sidewalk, I wonder. What does he want from us?”

  Christina turned and saw, in the direction where Jürgen was pointing, a man staring into the bank’s front entryway: Ludlow. Well, that was quick. He had found her. How did he know that she worked here? Had she blurted out what she did for a living and had she, in a weak moment, specified the address? She couldn’t remember very clearly what had happened last night or what she had told that guy, though she did remember the yoga and the snowstorm and the Blue Telephone and the small but important detail that Ludlow seemed to have no fixed address.

  As soon as the front doors were unlocked, Ludlow came inside, looking around at the surveillance cameras and the tellers with the fixed, neutral expression of a man planning a robbery who naturally expects to be watched at all times. He seemed to have grown or expanded since she had last seen him. He had bulked up somehow. Too confidently, as if he and Christina had already slept together or had shared some other form of intimacy, he approached her just past the bank’s vestibule and told her he would meet her tonight as planned at the bank’s closing time. As a would-be reformer she was “needed” at a political meeting, and someone named “Why” was extremely eager to make her acquaintance, having been informed that she was a very brainy unattached political activist with ambitions to help out.

  “Besides,” he said, “I’m just following your suggestion that I should come out here this morning, to make arrangements.”

  “My suggestion? What? No, I didn’t make any such suggestion. How can you say that?”

  “You’ve forgotten. You, uh, you—you must have blacked out from that Wonderland drug you took. You don’t recall? You told me all about the actor, how he transfixed you, and you said I sort of looked like him, and because of him, this actor, you sort of moved to this city even though he wasn’t here maybe anymore. You gave me your whole life story. You talked for hours. We talked so long, they told us to leave the restaurant at closing time.”

  So shocked was she from these revelations that she stood quite still. She couldn’t remember any of these episodes he was reporting. They hadn’t happened. He was confabulating.

  “I’m busy tonight,” she finally told him, although she wasn’t.

  “No, you’re not,” he said. “Last night you said you had nothing going on this evening. Come on. Let’s not have—I’m—don’t bullshit me.” He palmed her cheek, a proprietary caress that caused her to flinch. “I’ll be back at five.”

  “Six-fifteen,” she said. She saw that Jürgen was watching them both, his hands clasped together on the desk in front of him, a posture that made Christina think that he was praying for her.

  “What political meeting is this?” she asked. “For what? For whom?”

  “The Sun Collective,” Ludlow whispered. “We have great plans.” Then he smiled. “Everyone should have great plans, don’t you think? In the absence of a great plan, a person is less than fully human. What are your great plans?”

  “I don’t have any,” she said.

  “So there you are. You should be ashamed of yourself.” He thought for a moment. “We’re going to alter the flow of history. Only great plans will accomplish that. We will give you our plans, and they will become yours,” he said. Having announced his ambitions, Ludlow collected himself and, without a word of goodbye, made his way out of the bank and into the superficially brilliant winter sunshine. He seemed to be absorbed by the sunlight so completely that Christina couldn’t tell in which direction he had turned, but perhaps his route didn’t matter, since he was a homeless transient anyway. Christina looked over at Eleanor, standing at her teller’s station, and Eleanor smiled thinly while simultaneously raising her eyebrows, half with admiration, half with scorn.

  - 9 -

  That evening, wearing an oversize and ratty-looking brown overcoat stained with blue ink on the back, Ludlow loitered outside the bank’s entrance, hopping occasionally to stay warm. He had appeared magically out of the frozen dark. One minute he hadn’t been there, and then he had materialized, seemingly clothed in fresh rags that very day by Goodwill. His right, ungloved hand held his backpack. The doors to the bank were locked, so he would have to wait near the fiercely illuminated ATM until Christina came out. Eleanor walked from her teller’s window over to where Christina was gathering up her purse, phone, and water, and gave her a nudge.

  “Who’s that guy?” Eleanor asked, nodding her head in Ludlow’s direction. “I saw you talking to him this morning.” A dour woman with a humorless chuckle that punctuated many of her statements, Eleanor wore drugstore perfume and gave off a scent of raspberries, making her seem friendlier than she actually was. For some reason, her brown tattered hair had always reminded Christina of asbestos. The hair had a vaguely carcinogenic appearance.

  “Oh, him?” Christina did her best not to look in Ludlow’s direction. “Just someone I met yesterday at my yoga class. He’s…well, I gave him a ride home through that snowstorm.
He had asked for a ride and so I gave it to him. I think that’s all I gave him. That’s it. He’s very political. He said he wants me to alter the flow of history. You know: just a small request on our first meeting. He’s got some gathering he says he’s going to take me to, tonight—I guess that’s where history will be…whatevered. So I was curious, and I kind of agreed to it. I mean, who doesn’t want to do some good in the world?” The business about giving Ludlow a ride home was a polite lie, of course, since Ludlow broke and entered wherever he slept, but with a white lie, on the innocent side of the spectrum, who cared?

  “Um, Christina,” Eleanor said, leaning in to her and lowering her voice. “Is he homeless? Just asking. Did you really take him home? You can’t take a homeless person home. Be honest. Because he looks kind of homeless to me, like one of those panhandlers, you know? With the cardboard signs? And the grocery carts and heroin addictions, heh heh?”

  “That’s about right, except for the addiction.” Christina was startled by Eleanor’s accurate guesswork concerning Ludlow’s transient lifestyle. “Anyway, I like how raggedy he is. He says he’s going to teach me to fight.”

  “Well, how would you know what he’s addicted to? I mean, you met him, like, yesterday. So, okay,” Eleanor said, “just be careful, all right? I mean, he’s cute and all but kinda on the grungy side, and so maybe he has a crush on you, but a homeless person? Raggedy? No, I don’t think that’s a good prospect even if he likes you. What’s this political group, by the way?”