The Sun Collective: A Novel

by Charles Baxter

  Christina said she didn’t need the number eighteen right now and went on her way. She noticed her own clothing, as one does in dreams: a cowgirl hat, leather boots, and jeans, and in her left hand a revolver. Am I supposed to kill someone? she wondered. Who?

  - 11 -

  At work early the next day, Christina was doing her best to appear professional—a model of smiling morning sobriety and calm, a spreadsheet kind of gal. Eleanor seemed to be avoiding her, but Jürgen, her boss, managed to find her in the staff lounge as she was brewing a fresh pot of coffee, one of her daily assigned tasks. The bank had not yet opened; they had a few minutes to chat. For a bank, the social norms were casual; it was a wonder they were still in business. By now the Blue Telephone had worn off—its effects usually departed on time with few aftershocks, leaving behind a calm midsummer mental haze that followed images of the city ravaged by earthquake, black smoke coming out of the sewers, the frightened residents running here and there—and Christina’s necessary clearheadedness alerted her to Jürgen’s presence and to his lonely man’s need to talk. She was always pleased to see him; his essential benevolence had an element of dependable, half-comic melancholy. He was so mild, you couldn’t help but like him. He seemed to be a nonstandard German.

  “You are looking shipshape this morning,” he observed. He smelled of tobacco and drugstore aftershave. She knew he meant to compliment her, but “shipshape” wasn’t close to how she felt. Where did he find his adjectives? In a book? His sentences in English sometimes sounded like grammar exercises.

  “Jürgen, that’s not the right word. Not for how I feel. Not this morning, anyway.”

  “What word should I have employed?” he asked. “I am trying to compliment you on your hummingbird pin and your speckled scarf without drawing unseemly attention to your appearance, as a creepy person might do.”

  “Nice would sound okay,” she told him.

  “Okay, nice. And your date with the homeless man last night, dressed in rags, how did that go? Did he take you home to his homeless home?”

  “Word gets around, doesn’t it? Oh, it was fine.” She dropped the coffee in over the paper filter. The ground beans poured out of their container, smelling of burnt toast. Why was this brand so famous? It was like drinking dissolved fireplace ash.

  “He took me to the Sun Collective,” she told him. “It’s this little neighborhood group of do-gooders, you know, um, neighborhood gardens, free giveaways of clothes and shoes, helping the homeless, redistributing wealth, environmentalism. Like that. Then I lost track of him.”

  Jürgen looked at his reflection in the coffeemaker’s stainless-steel exterior and fixed the Windsor knot in his tie. “Ah,” he said. “A revolutionary cell. Marxism?”

  “No. I don’t think they believe in that.”

  “What then do they think they are doing?”

  “I just told you.”

  “But, you will forgive me for saying, there is therefore no program here, except…cleansing. Cleansing of the individual conscience. These little ad hoc things you describe, they are like narrow dirt roads going through the woods and stopping in nowhere. To change the world, you need a system with sharp teeth. And the teeth must bite down hard into the skin of capitalism. Otherwise, no change.”

  “Jürgen, we work in a bank. We are capitalists.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “We help out the capitalists. We are the pet dogs that run with them only. We are forced to.” He listened to the coffeemaker’s brewing cycle, the spurting and bubbling, with something like satisfaction. “We are mere employees. You, me. We must do our work in order to, to do, what? To put food on the table, as you say here. We are the children of necessity. Forgive me if I say that what you need is a mass movement, with backbone and the teeth I just mentioned. Little neighborhood groups will not, what is the expression, cut it.” He made a gesture with his right hand. As a gesture, it didn’t seem to mean anything. “Though I do admire the modesty, the bravery of having no plan.”

  “Everybody has to do something,” Christina said, feeling a heavy cloud beginning to form over her head near the ceiling. She gave him her best dazzling smile. “I liked being there. I got it. I mean, I, well, I get it. The activities. The doing something.”

  “Christina,” Jürgen said. “My grandmother, as a girl, saw Hitler in a motorcade, going down the street in Hamburg, surrounded by mass hubbub. Do you know what she called him, whenever she told me about it? She said he was a mesmerist. We have this word in English also?”

  “Yes. Hypnotist.”

  “I did, I do not like it, that she thought she was hypnotized. That the whole country was under a spell. It takes all responsibility away.”

  “And your point is?”

  “Not to be hypnotized by good intentions.”

  “This is more than that,” she said.

  “How?”

  “Jürgen, I was only there for a little while. You can’t expect me to explain them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because…they have soup kitchens, they told me. They give away clothes and food. They’ve been taking in homeless people. They have gardens. I mean, it’s just a neighborhood group, but that’s, I mean, they—” She felt herself getting flustered. “It’s action. Not just intentions.”

  “You are a convert?” he asked, placing his index finger on his lip.

  “Maybe. Only not yet.”

  “I want to say this.” He picked up a soiled coffee cup labeled with his initials and filled it absentmindedly. “In Germany, people are suspicious of cleansing. Good intentions and practical taking care of, yes, that is okay, but cleansing, no. We did that and look what happened.”

  “Nobody’s talking about cleansing.”

  “Not yet. But soon, they will.”

  “You’re a defeatist,” she said.

  “Well, okay, but soon we must go to work, at our posts, so to speak. Do you know, have you heard of, the American poet Ezra Pound?”

  “Yes.”

  “One of my teachers went to visit him, in his old age, in Italy. He was saying very little, the poet, by then. He had wanted to reform the world, Pound, and the Italians put him on the radio, in Rome, during the war. He was advocating cleansing, the elimination of Jews, ‘kikes,’ he had always called them. He had other ideas. He was a man of ideas and the ideas were all bad. He liked cleanliness and purity. Social credit. He was lucky they didn’t hang him for treason. They said he was crazy. That saved him.

  “So my old teacher went to see Pound. They spoke Italian, but Pound didn’t say, well, he didn’t say much of anything. And my old teacher, who had taught me English, came back to Germany, and he told me, he and I were having coffee, and he said to me, about Pound, ‘He’s seen too much. His eyes are burnt out, like Oedipus’s.’ ”

  “Jürgen, they’re opening the doors. Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I fear this will all end in violence,” he said. “By the time this is all over, I fear you will have seen too much, and you will be like him.”

  “Now you’re exaggerating.”

  “Wait and see,” Jürgen said to her.

  - 12 -

  That night, in bed, half under the covers, her laptop set to the Sun Collective’s manifesto page, she found herself getting bleary and decided to read the paper copy instead. Manifestos interested her, with their rage and storm clouds and fists aimed at the outdated criminal heavens. But what an ugly typeface they had chosen for this one! Already the pages had started to yellow. The book seemed to have been printed by hobgoblins. And who wrote this thing?

  THE SUN COLLECTIVE: A MANIFESTO

  Note: the following is a statement produced by the Aims & Observations Sun Collective Subgroup and is not necessarily a reflection of the thinking of our members. It was crafted by the subgroup but, after lengthy discussion, was never brought up
for an affirmation vote and thus does not reflect the views of the Sun Collective as a whole. We offer it as a general outline but do not endorse its claims or necessarily agree with its proposals; nevertheless, it has a right to exist. The Sun Collective is in no way liable or responsible for consequences of the following paragraphs, and no Sun Collective members are to be recognized as its authors. Read at your own risk.

  We offer the following ideas in a spirit of humility.

  A specter is haunting America: the specter of millennial uprisings, of anti-consumption.

  What would our current lives look like, given a just distribution of goods and services in an environment providing the greatest possible happiness of the greatest number? What if every person had (1) meaningful work that served as a source of pride, (2) sufficient leisure to pursue a hobby or an art, (3) noninterference by the state apparatus, (4) loving relationship with others (if desired), and (5) an inner life that acknowledged and did honor to the sacred? How would these goals be met without damage to the planet and without damage to the individual or to our own natures? Would the end of racism and sexism also follow?

  These questions and collective hopes for their answers have led directly to the bloodletting of history and its arterial spray.

  * * *

  —

  She was enjoying the manifesto, but she really wanted a drink. After getting out of bed, she went to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of white wine, and brought it back to the bedside table.

  * * *

  —

  The gods are dead and with them their heavens and promised lands, leaving us the remnant-dump of our current reality. We live in the ruins of Valhalla, rehabbed as a flea market whose tiny gods are on display and for sale. Our era is therefore one of unrealism.

  All that is airy solidifies into dogma.

  We exist in a post-ideological age and have no choice but to reside there.

  Every day is a birthday whose celebrant is Death.

  Therefore, we state our first principle: No more utopias. The path to happiness lies elsewhere, in the middle kingdom, here, in our neighborhoods.

  Individual action without political or social organization cannot alone produce positive social improvement, as history has shown. To quote a noted American writer, “One guy alone ain’t got a chance.” The solo warrior working to correct societal wrongs becomes a comical, dangerous, and absurd figure (cf. Don Quixote, Kaczynski, et al.), and the solitary individual’s pent-up frustrations logically have their consequences in mayhem.

  A bomb explodes with the energy of meaninglessness and meaning mixed together. Meaningless in itself, the bomb creates a fugal nothingness as a by-product of suffering, dismemberment, and death. That must change. We will find the articulate, eloquent bomb, if we must.

  * * *

  —

  She took another sip of wine, a delicious Sancerre. She was tempted to ingest a Blue Telephone but refrained thanks to a massive effort of willpower. Those pills were ever so slightly addicting. But you couldn’t live in two places at once all the time. It wore you down.

  * * *

  —

  How do we undo our current unrealism, our ruination, without imagining a paradise?

  It can be assumed that anyone who is paying attention must feel a sense of outrage, a gasping breathless anger. We live in shameful times. Thorkelson is a symptom, not a cause, of collective shame. We wish to shed our shame. We feel this need for change as a flower feels the need for water, nutrients, and the sun.

  What is to be done about the hungry man or woman standing at a street corner and holding a cardboard sign saying, “Homeless. Anything helps. God bless”? The disheartened, the discriminated, the disinherited, the insulted and injured, must be solved.

  * * *

  —

  “The disheartened must be solved”? Alone in her bedroom, Christina expelled a laugh. Who wrote this? Someone with an uncertain grasp of English, an Eastern European, apparently, or some madcap whose convictions outstripped his eloquence. And the logic! All the same, she continued reading.

  First must come the diagnosis of the contemporary.

  Everywhere we see the Triumph of the spectacle. Thorkelson is a creature of the screen and exists only there. No one has ever experienced him as an actual. He is flimflam incarnate.

  The great tidal forces of technocapitalism and of Big Data stored in machines that cannot themselves be accessed threaten to overpower every political movement by multiplying those very movements through chat rooms, websites, Twitter feeds, Instagram, subreddits, and other forms of social media, a constant meme-scream. The end point of this process is a single person in a room yelling at the top of their lungs.

  Thus arrives the necessity of being unplugged, the necessity of anti-consumerism.

  Instead of asking, “Are you committed?” we must ask, “Are you unplugged?”

  We must begin, again, with print, with pamphlets. As a group, we must produce converts one by one. We will emulate the termite. In this one way we will also emulate the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the early Christians, termite-believers, while rejecting their “heaven.” We must engage in individual persuasion through speaking and writing and the sunlight of reason, and we must alter the conditions of our daily lives so that we consume less, and then less than that, and lesser still. We shall thus all be Hunger Artists.

  The most radical action in our time is to turn off the TV and to throw away the iPhone. Whoever can do both is one of us.

  We shall rely not on faith nor on ideology, but on the truth of our spiritual recognitions:

  Start with helping your neighbor; then take care of your neighborhood. Begin with gardens.

  Charity in all things, always, until it hurts

  Intercede for the poor

  Technocapital—digitized, tidal, opaque, supranational—is coded to be above the law, a Sphinx with an unanswerable riddle; do not collaborate with it but kill it

  We make the point that capitalism’s logic of inequality, waste, and spectacle lies at the heart of Thorkelsonism

  That we are desperate and our remedies are desperate

  That computers, the Internet, and all forms of cybernetic data warehousing that locate, target, and characterize the online person must somehow be vandalized or evaded or both

  That communities of every kind must be reformulated and reinstated

  That loving-kindness is our highest ideal and our only hope; we must say “No” to the narcissism of celebrity and beauty and accumulation and sexism and racism

  That not-wanting by necessity must be the path forward; we will be defined henceforth by an emancipation from acquisition, an activist asceticism especially tailored for women and people of color and LGBTQ persons

  In the absence of theory, we will still act

  State power must be placed in the hands of ordinary people

  That we shall freely offer our love to almost anyone, at any time, a love without desire

  That we shall be invisible, always

  We call for the end of capitalism without any claim as to what will replace it

  If not this, then violence—but not the hyperviolence of the state; we will invent a new form of effective termite microviolence. Such violence will be articulate and lyrical.

  As our guide, Marsilio Ficino, writes, “Now our own soul beyond the particular forces of our members puts forth a general force of life everywhere within us—especially through the heart as the source of the fire which is the nearest thing to the soul….The world’s body is living in every part—

  * * *

  —

  It went on for several more pages with more practical suggestions. She agreed with most of it but
thought it was rather ho-hum, being a kind of vulgarized Buddhism combined with a Pop Warner School for Revolution tone, and in certain parts the manifesto was just waving a white flag of surrender, though the effective microviolence interested her. What was that? How did you manage it? Exploding wristwatches? Bugs painted with anthrax? Tiny explosions of nitromethane on the subway? At least it didn’t attack the bosses with the usual Marxist shitstorm of unresolved oedipal difficulties. She looked up from the manifesto: her cell phone appeared to be ringing. When she answered, she heard Ludlow say, “Christina. It’s me. Listen, I almost got caught. I thought no one was home, but they were.” She could hear him panting.

  “Are you okay? Where are you?” she asked.

  “I’ve been running. They were about to shoot at me. I think maybe they did shoot at me. This guy. He had a gun, a revolver. Uh, actually, I’m outside the door to your building. I looked up your address and I got here.”

  “My address? How did you find it?”

  “Never mind. Could I please crash in your place for the night?”

  “Well.”