The Sun Collective: A Novel

by Charles Baxter

  “He’ll come back to us. I’m sure of it.”

  “I know,” she said. “But who will he be when he returns?”

  - 19 -

  Slowly, from the corners of the newspapers and apparently as afterthoughts on the broadcast news, came scattered reports that some deaths described as “mysterious” had recently befallen the citizens of the wealthiest west suburb of Minneapolis. One investment banker had been impaled when he’d fallen or stumbled onto the gnomon of his backyard sundial. Another, a VP in charge of international relations at a privately held grain milling company, had died when his high-end crossover vehicle had slipped out of park and rammed into him as he had tried to unstick the frozen lock to his gated community. Still another, a graduate of Vassar and Harvard Law, had drowned after having been tossed into the water when her sailboat, during a regatta, had turned about unexpectedly, and the boom had knocked her overboard. She had not been wearing a life preserver, and her boat had sailed on without her. There were instances of food poisonings at salad bars, strains of E. coli traced to the Bibb lettuce, and anomalous asphyxiations caused by cars left running in closed garages. A retiree had drowned in her five-inch-deep serenity pool; a CEO had had a fatal encounter with a band saw while making a small display case for his jade and ivory carvings; and a matron known for her garden club activities had had a fatal accident when, barefoot, she had switched on her electric treadmill, the one with faulty grounding.

  No malicious intent was assumed to be the source of these calamities, but the citizens of Wayswater collectively grew doubtful and pensive, and when the chief financial officer of Intaglio Bank Corp was struck by lightning on the green of the eighth hole at the Wawatosa Country Club (after raising his putter to the skies in triumph) and another vice president for international corporate relations had choked on his cocktail, a Bootleg—“Minnesota’s signature drink”—in the Wawatosa Country Club bar, the Wayswater Gazette ran a headline story about the apparent epidemic of misfortune afflicting the well-to-do. In the story, the reporter quoted a citizen as saying that accidents seemed accidental when there were a few of them, but when there were this many, a multitude of accidents, they didn’t seem accidental anymore. They seemed to be planned. Wherever a plan exists, there must be a cause.

  “What do the gods have against us?” one man asked the reporter. “Who or what is behind this?” On the internet, in a subreddit devoted to the subject of the epidemic haphazard deaths in Wayswater, anonymous contributors theorized that the citizenry of the town had been drugged, somehow, and were in a collective stupor. Another argued that the God of Righteousness had been punishing the rich and profligate, the worshippers of the Golden Calf. Still others claimed that distraction caused by iPhones had led to a kind of massive attention deficit disorder. A disgruntled Marxist prophesied in Town and Country Pages that what had happened to Wayswater would soon happen to Greenwich, Connecticut, and Westport, and Palo Alto, and Scottsdale, and the Hamptons: “They have it coming,” his irony-laced article asserted (later he claimed that he’d been joking—everybody seemed to be emulating the Joker). Others editorialized that the victims were privileged white people, so who cared? And one anonymous contributor argued that a small group of anarchists, the Sun Collective, noted for their hatred of the rich, must be the ones pulling invisible strings behind the curtain. A spokesman for the group, a Mr. Wyekowski, denied this particular accusation.

  “We have nothing against the rich,” he said, in a printed statement. “We have nothing against anybody. Everyone is a child of light.”

  And that was the end of it for a while.

  * * *

  —

  Following the dinner fiasco with Ludlow and his girlfriend, Alma was determined to cheer up her husband when his birthday arrived in four days. He deserved it; as he aged, he had grown more, rather than less, lovable. He’d become sweet and distracted. He needed kisses just to get by. He didn’t like presents or gifts generally, claiming that he had more than everything he needed; every object was a burden, a weight on the soul, and after all what did he look like—a king who required tribute? She was determined to get something for him anyway. He deserved something. Perhaps a shirt. A plain patterned shirt, short-sleeved, for summer. He might like that.

  Parking her car in a downtown lot, Alma took an escalator up to the Minneapolis Skyway and began walking through its corridors toward a shirt outlet-store. Built above the city streets and connecting one building to another, the Skyway always reminded Alma of those plastic tunnels constructed for hamsters, Habitrails or whatever they were called. All the professional-managerial people did their business up here, coatless in winter, laughing at the weather conditions outside, and rarely deigning to descend to the sidewalks below, where the street-creeps bided their time selling drugs, asking for handouts, spitting on the pavement, foraging in the trash cans, and in general making a nuisance of themselves. Sidewalks were for losers and junkies, the Skyway for the gentry. It hadn’t been intended that way, but that was how it had worked out.

  And there they were, the gentry, in front of her, striding forward, their corporate ID tags hanging by alligator clips to their pockets, beautiful and young, smiling forcefully, raucously alert, sexy and fragrant, while below, on the street, a hatless man sat at the corner with his derby upside down for passing change, and his cardboard sign—HOMELESS ANYTHING WILL HELP GOD BLESS—on display out in front of him. Alma stopped to look at him through the plate glass. He had the characteristic slumped posture of the truly forlorn. Gazing up, he saw her standing there in the Skyway studying him, and he winked at her and waved his hand in a festive manner. Panhandlers, those Morlocks, weren’t allowed up in the Skyway, which was private property devoted to the Eloi. She waved back at him, trying not to smile or to be pointlessly cheerful. Some Chopin piano music—she couldn’t remember which piece—was going through her head, an earworm, ta-ta-ta-tum-ta. She frowned, dropped her hand, and continued walking.

  Somehow, somewhere, she had picked up her husband’s obsession with the poor, along with his inability to know what to do about them, which in turn was accompanied by the conviction that if no action were taken to help them, the omission would be at the cost of one’s immortal soul. Maybe the Sun Collective knew what a person should do. She liked having found them. She liked their earnestness. Well, after all, that was what political action was for, devising strategies for public well-being. None of it had seemed personal until her son had dropped off the radar screen and had taken to living in the streets, or rented rooms, or whatever space it was that he occupied now. Otherwise, she might not have cared so much; she might have been like everybody else, blithely planning dinner parties, trips to the south of France, to the Dordogne, acquiring more kitchen accessories.

  Studying a Skyway storefront display window, she picked out an attractive and vaguely nautical shirt patterned with intersecting blue-and-red horizontal and vertical lines, but when she went inside to check its price, the salesperson told her that they didn’t have that particular item in her husband’s size, though they could order it. She thanked him and headed back out to the Skyway again, going north, where the passage led her away from the piped-in music, an instrumental version of “My Way.” In this section, the background noise consisted of a low, throbbing hum. She was beginning to feel slightly lost. Some of the windows here had been boarded up, and she didn’t recognize the structure she had entered. Thinking that another men’s clothing store was located on the other side of the old Commercial Exchange Building, she proceeded in that direction, but when she did so, she found herself in a corridor of the Skyway she didn’t recognize and where no other pedestrians accompanied her. The passageway had an abandoned, distressed appearance, sorrowful somehow, like a dream-hallway proceeding to an antechamber that in turn led to a rather specific nowhere where terrible outcomes were likely to occur. In the air was a distant scent of lemony cleaning fluid. The hum intensified, and Alma tho
ught she heard someone weeping in the distance. A doorway opened automatically in front of her, giving the impression that it had been patiently waiting for her, and she found herself in another dimly lit corridor with forest green wallpaper, with shapes meant to resemble the leaves of trees, maples and elms, behind which, here and there, incongruously appeared the floating faces of circus clowns advertising a clinic for children, now closed. A dead potted plant whose black, brittle leaves sagged toward the floor had been abandoned in the corner.

  On the wall to her left was a corporate logo shaped like a parallelogram whose lines ended with arrows pointing to the left and right, up and down. Below it was the single word QitterCo, and below that on the floor, in front of her, on all fours like a beast, was a human shape, someone groaning, smelling of excrement, moving forward. The shape turned its head to look at her. It was barefoot, wearing soiled blue jeans and a torn T-shirt, or pajama top, with several yellow spotted stains. The man’s hair stood up in all directions like pins in a pincushion. For a single instant, shocked into blank fear, Alma thought that the human being down there on all fours was associated in some way with QitterCo, an employee managing a complicated prank, a thought that she recognized a moment later as crazy. Out of the creature’s mouth came a growl or a groan, and, without thinking, Alma turned and fled in the direction from which she had come.

  A few moments later, without knowing how she got there, she found herself down on street level at the light rail stop. At the corner stood two policemen, their bulletproof vests beneath their blue shirts artificially thickening their chests. She approached them, but as soon as she tried to explain what she had just seen, a man on all fours in the Skyway, she found herself unable to say what she meant. The sight had been unspeakable. The cops looked at her with the skeptical, appraising expressions characteristic of their profession, and at that moment the train heading for the Utopia Mall arrived, and the doors opened, and Alma found herself backing up until she was inside one of the cars.

  The exterior of the train, sheathed in translucent advertising, gave the light a brownish blue cast, so that the backs of her hands, folded in her lap, seemed mottled and bruised. In the seat two rows in front of her a woman was speaking aloud to the air; then Alma saw the woman’s Bluetooth earbud. The woman said, “Yes,” then, more firmly, “No,” then, “That’s an exaggeration. I’ve never done that willingly. And I sure won’t do it with you.”

  And what was that woman referring to, the unspecified action she had never done willingly? These overheard conversations tormented Alma, since she regarded herself as a person with a natural curiosity about the human species, someone who had been around the block a few times and was not easily shocked, but she felt herself shaking still from the sight of the crawling man in a remote part of the Skyway, so that the cityscape passing by outside the window—a paint factory, a colossal football stadium in the shape of a Viking ship, a biker bar with multiple Harleys parked outside—seemed like a stage set for a play that she had entered after the first act was over and all the essential information had been laid out. She felt a residual trembling.

  For a single moment, she had the sensation that her life had been lived behind a screen and not sheltered, exactly—she had her family, after all—but artfully mismanaged and too carefully guarded from the base realities on the other side of the curtain.

  From inside her purse, her phone rang. She could never get used to the new technologies, and whenever the iPhone began its tiny impish xylophone chiming, she startled. Reaching in and pushing aside a hankie, her change purse, a tube of lipstick, and a ticket stub for some past concert or other, she finally managed to grasp the phone and pull it out.

  When she answered, she heard her daughter, Virginia, saying, “Mom?”

  “Oh, hello, dear,” Alma said. “How nice that you called. I’m on the light rail. I’m going out to the mall to get your father a birthday present. A shirt. How are you? How are the kids?” She knew she must sound breathless and distracted.

  “Mommy, are you all right?” her daughter asked, with the light, recently acquired southern accent that Alma could never get used to.

  “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know,” her daughter said. “I mean, this morning I was at work, and this thing, I don’t know what all to call it, this event concerning you hit me, and I thought: I gotta call my mommy. I cain’t tell you what the thing is. I just knew I had to call you from the hospital.” Alma’s daughter was a veterinarian.

  “Well, if you were worried that I had died, I haven’t. That’s very nice, that you called.” She decided not to tell her daughter about the creature on all fours in the Skyway. “The fact is, I’m all right. How are the children?” Alma braced herself for her daughter’s report, which would be, as it always was, a summer rain shower of beautifully sweet clichés, interrupted by odds and ends of southern locutions that Virginia had picked up after several years of living in North Carolina, just outside of Asheville. She and her husband, Robert, had two children: Bobby Jr., a red-haired boy, eight years old, and Sally, four years old, whose nickname was “Goobie.” Alma saw her grandchildren two or three times a year, and they talked to her via Skype every week or so. Alma loved her adult daughter in a slightly absentminded way, and she admired her daughter’s solid husband, a high school biology teacher, and she loved the two grandchildren without any effort or strain, although it nagged at her that they were all so ordinary, so normal, so lovely and fine; with such a surfeit of blandness, you almost didn’t know what to say to them or about them. You didn’t have to intervene with help and succor. You just had to skate conversationally back and forth on the surface of their pleasantries.

  Two years after getting married, Virginia had had a four-month affair with another veterinarian in the clinic, with whom she had fallen in love when she saw him gently examining a cat. Ecstatic, prideful, weeping when not giddy, she had called her mother to confess, and later, to confess again, apparently believing that she wasn’t the sort of person who went to motels in the afternoon to have sex, even though that was exactly what she had been doing. Having sex was bad enough. What was worse was that she enjoyed it; she admitted as much to her mother. She was burning up with it. “Sheer bliss,” she told Alma, who had never heard her use that noun before. Alma thought it peculiar that her daughter would confide in her on such a private manner. She would have never done so herself in Ginny’s place. Whatever had happened to discretion, to secrets? She herself had hundreds of them.

  During those calls Alma had tried not to be judgmental and had done her best to comfort her daughter. Alma knew the affair would end fairly quickly, and it did. Love like that didn’t have much staying power. Virginia’s magnanimous husband forgave her, and together they got on with life. Given her temperament and her love of gentility, Virginia would never again get carried away by love or the fundamental animal passions. Secretly, very secretly, Alma wished that her daughter’s flame would burn a bit brighter and hotter than it usually did, and she was touched that Virginia’s heart had been broken that one time by love-mania. To be fully human, Alma thought, you have to have been heart-singed. For that brief period, Virginia didn’t speak in clichés. Now she did, again, in rubbishy little phrases. Still, she had always been a low-temperature child and no trouble at all; it was Virginia’s brother, Timothy, whose flame never cooled; he was the family’s fever carrier.

  “I tell you what,” her daughter began. “Bobby here’s been a holy terror lately, kind of ripping up around the house without any reason except to attract attention and, you know, to get a rise out of people and create a mess and scenes, but, bottom line, he’s got a heart of gold, that boy. I don’t know what bed he got out of the wrong side of these past few days, though, I surely don’t. Still and all the other day he told me that when he grows up he wants to be a minister of God. So I asked him in what church, and he says the Church of Jesus. He says he knows already that
he’ll someday be able to perform miracles and bring corpses back from the dead, fresh as babies, full of that new-car smell. What ambition! He’ll be faith healing in no time. I do wonder how he’s going to practice his miracles, though. And on who. Goobie’s got that new stuffed silver unicorn you sent, just takes it everywhere she goes. Last night she sang to her daddy when he came home from work, just the sweetest ‘You Are My Sunshine’ you ever heard, accompanied by her music box, which is broken a little. They’re fine. We’re all fine. But something’s going on. I mean how come I was sure something happened to you this morning? I had this strong premonition like a ghost was talking to me. Oh, I just remembered. Will you wish Daddy a happy birthday for me?”

  The light rail had almost arrived at the Utopia Mall. When the sun fell all over Alma’s face, she turned toward it. Ah, Sunflower, weary of time, who countest the steps of the Sun. I’m that sunflower, she thought. Always have been. Just opposite her, a pale, stumpy passenger with an insolent expression was staring at her. She had to be brief. “Oh, well,” she explained to her daughter, “I had a bit of a shock this morning, just a little confrontation with a…panhandler, that’s all, one of those heartbreaking hopeless cases, but it’s so sweet of you to call to check on me. I worry so about your brother.”

  “Tim? Of course you do. But, you know, he sends postcards. To me and the kids.”

  “Postcards?”

  “Yeah. And he calls sometimes.”

  “He calls?”

  “Yes, Mom, he does. I’ve told you this before. He’s not a missing person, he’s a found person. He’s finding himself.”

  “Well, he doesn’t call us, your father and me.”

  “He can’t. He needs his space, I guess, for just now. Tim’s kinda unique. With him, they broke the mold, broke it in half, lost the other half.”