The Sun Collective: A Novel

by Charles Baxter

  Befogged by sleep and melancholia, Brettigan was startled from his personal reveries and from his curiosity about the dog to discover that someone a block away was approaching him on the sidewalk—a man wearing trousers too large for him, the pants’ cuffs flapping back and forth above the spindly exposed ankles, the trousers themselves held up by what seemed to be a necktie in a pattern of polka dots. The man wore scuffed saddle shoes with no socks. He was clearly not of this place—he shambled like a tourist-vagrant with no particular destination in mind. The man’s T-shirt had sentences on it that Brettigan couldn’t make out, though he could discern a faded M. The other letters had washed out, as had the man’s face in the half-lit dark. As they approached each other, Brettigan tried to see the markers of identity, but the man’s face had the unfinished quality of someone whose birth had been incomplete and who had never loved anyone who could love him back, and whose face, as a result, had no emotion in it except dismay when he gazed at an inhospitable locale, this particular Earth to which he had been consigned. He had probably staggered through life in solitary confinement and was still staggering. The guy had several days’ growth of beard, and eyes emerging out of the darkness that fixed on Brettigan with a kind of melancholy indifference.

  The guy stopped in front of Brettigan, blocking his way. Looking off in no particular direction, and almost frail, he was not physically imposing, though he also seemed to feel no obligation to step aside, and Brettigan felt no particular alarm for himself, just an idle nighttime curiosity. The man gave off a smell of burnt wiring and dirty motor oil, creating around himself an entire atmospheric zone of rancid chemical odors. He swayed as if pummeled by a strong wind, but here there wasn’t a breath of air.

  “Hey,” the man said, still being careful not to look directly at Brettigan.

  “Yes?”

  “You got a menthol cigarette?” the man asked.

  “I don’t smoke. Sorry.”

  “How about a buck for a beer?”

  “The bars are closed,” Brettigan told him.

  “But not the all-night groceries,” the man said. His voice had the distant inflection of someone who isn’t thinking about what he’s saying, and whose sentences come out of the mouth without anything behind them.

  “You really have to drink?” Brettigan asked. Too late, he realized how patronizing he sounded.

  “You from AA?” the man asked.

  “Sort of.”

  They stood together on the sidewalk, neither one moving. A stranger, seeing them from a distance, might have thought that they knew each other and had met here by arrangement. Still trying to see the man’s face, which seemed both broken and inhospitable, and noting that the man didn’t appear to be headed anywhere, Brettigan decided to engage him in conversation. Behind him, the dog trotted away.

  “How come you’re still up this late at night?” Brettigan asked.

  “I don’t like the homeless shelters,” the guy said, shaking his head. “So here I am.”

  “How come you don’t like the shelters?”

  “There are bad people in there. I don’t feel safe. Besides, they don’t let me in, usually.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m a drunk.” The guy breathed out: an impressive sensory blare of brutal wine, whiskey, and other industrial fluids. “You show up at the door drunk, they don’t let you in.”

  “Why don’t you quit drinking?” Brettigan asked.

  “I can’t,” the man said, firmly.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m crazy.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s too bad. What did you say your name was?”

  “Albert.”

  What an odd name for a homeless guy! “Albert, where do you sleep at night?”

  “I don’t sleep at night. I walk around. Like this here. And then during the day, I get on the light rail and I go to sleep there. Or I sleep on the benches outside the library. Could you please give me a dollar?”

  “Why don’t you sleep at night?”

  “You sure got plenty of questions. At night I stay alert, because of the Sandmen. They’ll come and get you and kill you. Wipe out the poor people. They call us ‘poverts.’ I’ve seen their gangs. Didn’t you say that you would give me a dollar? I’d like that now, if you please.”

  “The Sandmen?” So it really was a rumor. Brettigan reached into his wallet and in the streetlight’s dim illumination tried to see what was in there, but the only bill he had was a five, which was too much money to give away to an uncompliant stranger. Shrugging to himself, he pulled it out and handed it to the man anyway.

  “Thank you,” Albert said. “I’ll say an Our Father and a Hail Mary for you.” He spoke the sentence grudgingly, as if he didn’t really mean to invoke God but was required to do so by convention.

  “Could I ask you a question? How’d you get here?”

  “I walked,” the man said.

  “No, I didn’t mean that. I mean, how did you get to be a person who has to walk up and down the streets all night and who lives the way you do? What did you do? What happened to you?” Brettigan waited. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me.” After another moment’s wait, he added, “I’m sorry I asked. But I did just give you five dollars. What’s your story?”

  “Me? I didn’t do nothin’ ever in my life. My daddy, he used to drunk himself up and beat on me, broke my arm once. So I dropped out of school before I graduated and then signed up myself into the Army. Got my GED there. Even went to Afghanistan. I wasn’t a shadow like I am now. I was a warrior back then, twice my size. The Army turned me loose but I didn’t care for Afghanistan and you could say I lost my mind over there after I killed this guy in hand-to-hand combat when his sweat fell into my mouth, which poisoned me, and also saw my best buddy die, shot through the head, so they had to discharge me because I got so lunatic. I came home to nothin’ and nobody. You want a guy who’s got no skills, you’re looking at it.”

  Brettigan realized from this little outburst that the man was young, though he didn’t look it. Youthfulness had drained out of him. “You could learn.”

  “Learn what? No, I can’t. I’ve learned everything I’m ever going to learn.”

  “What about the VA?” When the man looked puzzled, Brettigan said, “The Veterans Administration?”

  “I tell you what: they ain’t no good to nobody. They just boiling up the red tape over there in a vat, making more of it. They tried to mend me. They couldn’t. I’m too busted to fix.”

  “What’s this you were saying about the Sandmen?” Brettigan asked. The man’s reek was intensifying and becoming more emotional somehow, an odor that somehow conveyed an entire lifetime of loss and despondency. Brettigan tried to breathe through his mouth in order to lessen the effect.

  Albert looked up and down the street. “You shouldn’t talk about them. Or say their name either.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’re devils,” the man said in a tone just above a whisper. “They come at night in their cars, real stealthy, quiet-like. They creep up on you and kill you for fun, and they take your soul and sell it on the soul market downtown, in those sheds they’ve got. Like I said, they’re devils. You speak their name, they come for you. You been warned. I gotta go now.”

  “Oh, that’s just an internet meme,” Brettigan said.

  “No, it ain’t.”

  With one last look at the street, the man—Albert—pocketed the five-dollar bill and shuffled rapidly, getaway-style, down the sidewalk, throwing furtive, guilty glances from side to side as he scurried along until he was absorbed by the darkness. Brettigan, now that he had a moment to think about it, felt that he had met this man somewhere before, but, no: the man—he had to keep reminding himself that the guy had a name, which was “Albert”—was just a standard-issue panhandler, down on his luck, someone in con
stant contact with misfortune and its delusions, and was no one familiar and certainly no one he would ever have to call by name again.

  In this genteel neighborhood, you could be arrested for walking around the way Albert was doing, creating a public nuisance by simply being alive.

  Maybe he was hoping for jail. After all, they sort of took care of you behind bars, in their own way.

  Standing under the streetlight, casting a shadow that seemed thicker than usual, Brettigan heard a car approaching from up the street, a gray Escalade with red clay mud splashed across its fender. As it approached, the car slowed down, and from behind the smoked glass someone seemed to be taking a long gangster-movie appraisal of Brettigan before speeding away. At least no one would mistake him, Harry Brettigan, for a vagrant: his light windbreaker, though slightly soiled at the elbows from gardening, was a product of a famous brand-name haberdashery firm headquartered in New Hampshire, though the clothes it sold were made in China by factory workers earning pennies per hour, and his beautifully tailored blue chambray shirt and pressed chinos and Ecco shoes constituted an impressive ID card in this or any other American neighborhood. His flat-brim hat from Old Navy was a tasteful marker of his respectability.

  The evening’s stroll had cleared his mind of nightmares, but instead of turning around and heading back home, Brettigan set out again down the block before walking east toward the freeway and its overpasses, where the homeless, the ones who hadn’t been taken in anywhere, gathered to sleep. He wanted to see them. He felt he had the right.

  * * *

  —

  As he approached the freeway, the residential homes gave way to apartment buildings, including one from which music emerged: something with heavy orchestration, Brahms, maybe, feeling inconsolable. From another window, he heard a woman shouting, “Carl, are you over there?” and, in response, a male voice shouted back, “No.” The night air was full of voices. Brettigan heard the increasing background noise of the freeway, and when he looked off to his right, he saw, two floors above a mom-and-pop corner grocery store, another figure standing at a window in a thoughtful posture, again a woman, her left arm supporting the right at the elbow, the right hand cupping her chin, surveying the street. She seemed to be wearing a wedding dress. When Brettigan looked more closely, however, he saw that this figure wasn’t a human being at all but a mannequin, standing there in front of the window, a fully gowned dressmaker’s dummy sporting a tiara.

  Brettigan increased his walking speed. This excursion would be good for his heart. His cardiologist constantly badgered him to drive less and to stroll more. Brettigan reminded himself that the Thundering Herd would be gathering the day after tomorrow at the Utopia Mall, where he would report on the Sandmen. Surely the drug dealer would know where the Sandman story came from. He was acquainted with all the local stories.

  Up ahead, on the other side of the street, Brettigan saw a clutch of homeless people, Victims of Capitalism, four or five of them encamped together under the prestressed concrete highway overpass. They looked like a ragged platoon that had been through a terrible winter battle in Russia and were now in retreat after having traveled hundreds of miles through snow. They were huddled together for shelter. Some sort of fire guttered nearby inside a barrel, the fire itself invisible though it gave off sparks that shot upward.

  Gazing in shadow from across the street at this raggedy human assemblage, Brettigan felt transported to all the world cities where threadbare cast-off men and women gathered under public structures for protection, return-to-sender subterraneans, the clustered hollow-eyed irregulars who…but wait: as he drew closer, he saw that the five individuals were seated on the ground, not crouching, passing around a bottle of what was probably vodka. On the left was a tattered young man wearing a shabby red flannel shirt too heavy for late summer, seated next to someone with long, greasy, stringy hair identifiable as neither gender, possibly not gendered at all, this person in turn located next to a young man who was leaning back on his elbows and whose clothes were slightly cleaner than those of the other wasted vagrants, in fact so incongruously clean that he seemed to be in costume, an actor pretending to be a homeless drifter, and as Brettigan drew closer, he saw that the young man was, even at this distance, alert enough to return his gaze, and as Brettigan’s eyes came into focus and his mind cleared, he thought that he was looking at his own son, sitting there like a guard or protector of the others, and Brettigan called out to him, crying his name, before the young man stood up and ran out from under the bridge and down the street toward the sidewalk, disappearing into the distance and the night.

  - 16 -

  “I’ve met the most wonderful young couple,” Alma said at the dinner table, repeating herself. “And I think you should meet them. I’ve told you about them, and we need to make some plans. Pass the salt, please.”

  Brettigan pointed his fork downward at the roast. “Really? It’s very tasty. It doesn’t need salt.”

  “Well, it might.” She sat back. “Please, Harry. Don’t be a trial to me.”

  “I thought we had agreed on this point. No more added salt? Your doctor warned you about salt and high blood pressure and all that, didn’t he?” He smiled pleasantly, somewhat against his will and better judgment. But when he looked up, Alma’s face had taken on an expression of familiar dismay and a sadness that she was trying to disguise with an uncertain, tired nod. Dismay: Where had he seen that emotion recently? On Albert, the walking vagrant last night, that was where. How strange to see a homeless man’s facial expression on your wife’s face at the dinner table! The succession of life’s small jokes at every human being’s expense seemed to have no limit.

  “Harry, why do you think you know what’s good for me better than I know it?”

  “No, I don’t think that. I didn’t say I did.” He put down his fork and tried out yet another agreeable countenance on her.

  “Of course you did. Salt. You were badgering me about the salt. I asked you to pass the salt and you started to scold me. I am not a child. All I had was an episode of fainting, and suddenly everybody knows what’s best for me. And by the way, where were you last night? Middle of the night, I woke up, and you were gone. Have you acquired a mistress, at last? I can’t wait to hear about her. Does she drink? Is she a gold digger?”

  “No. I told you,” he replied. It was going to be one of those evenings. He would have to explain and justify everything he did and said and everywhere he went. “I couldn’t sleep. So I went out walking, that’s all.”

  “Why couldn’t you sleep?”

  “How should I know? I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t sleep. Now you’re the one doing the badgering.”

  “You’re a man with a bad conscience,” she said, with an innocent, beatific expression. “And you have bad dreams. I know you. So. Where did you walk?”

  “Around. Around the neighborhood. I talked to a vagrant.”

  “I’ll bet.” She stood up, reached across the table, grabbed the saltshaker, and vigorously scattered salt on her portion of the roast. Brettigan prayed for her to stop, and eventually she did. Then she cut into the meat. After one bite, still chewing, she asked, “Why can’t you sit downstairs and watch TV or read like every other old insomniac in town?”

  “Sometimes I do. Remember when I saw Outward Bound? But sometimes, my love, my dearest heart, I can’t. I’m…restless. You know?” She nodded ironically. “I am unsleeping and unsleepable. Rest does not come to me. Sometimes I feel as if I’m going to jump out of my skin. That’s how I feel.”

  “Poor Harry,” she said. “You’re a queer one.” She sprinkled more salt on her meat to spite him.

  “I wish you wouldn’t use that adjective. It belongs to gay people.” So far, he had not mentioned seeing their son at the vagrants’ encampment the night before. Telling her that particular piece of information would involve making reassurances that he wasn’t prepared to
articulate; he didn’t feel reassured about anything. He hadn’t figured out how to break the news to her. Besides, why was their son among those homeless characters? It had been Timothy, hadn’t it? Of that, he felt relatively certain. What had he been doing there and what was his mission? How could anyone know? “What young people?” he asked, though he knew the answer, to change the subject.

  “What?”

  “A minute ago, you mentioned a ‘wonderful young couple.’ Who are they? Where are they? What are they?”

  “Oh, those two? The ones in the park. And I met them at this meeting, this…well, they call themselves a ‘collective’ but they don’t live together or anything, they’re just people who are working for equality and justice and so on.”

  “What collective is this?” He was playing dumb.

  “The Sun Collective,” she told him.

  “Oh, right. Them. Right. Now I remember. You told me. Zoroastrians?”

  “Not so far. I mean, not literally.” She cut into another piece of salty roast. “Not the sun sun in the sky. More like the eternal light, if you know what I mean. They’re against buying things you don’t need and they’re for being modest and advancing up the ladder spiritually and social reform and I don’t know what all.” As she finished the sentence, the dog and the cat padded into the dining room, the dog leading the way. Together, as if synchronized, the two animals sat down near the door to the kitchen, the cat a few feet away from the dog, both of them focusing a concentrated attention on Alma, who dropped her hand at her side so that it reached toward the floor. The cat walked up to her hand and put her head under Alma’s palm. Alma cocked her head to listen.

  “Behemoth says that you’re thinking bad thoughts. Really terrible thoughts. About what?”

  “The cat lies,” Brettigan said.

  “Not this cat. What bad thoughts are you thinking, Harry?”

  “Since when did a cat get the right to set the conversational agenda?”