The Sun Collective: A Novel

by Charles Baxter

  “Where?” she would ask sleepily.

  “Here and there.”

  “You smell funny.” She sniffed. “Are those chemicals?”

  “Go to sleep,” he said.

  So there she was, working at the bank by day, volunteering for community action in the evenings as a consumerist-addiction counselor, trying to combat the internet rumors spreading about the collective’s various projects, and trying, really trying, to figure out how to get Ludlow out of her life. He was hanging on to her like grim death. And because she usually knew what he was thinking without his having to say anything, she knew that he was contemplating newsworthy trouble and its lethal practical applications.

  * * *

  —

  In the mornings, Ludlow would often be gone again, engaged, he said, on secret projects he would not disclose to her, though in his absentminded manner, he left notes and drawings on the kitchen counter and the living room coffee table.

  Ck. on poss. of timers & sl. powder plus remstn

  Those boys. The boys ruined everything! You’d go to work, organizing urban neighborhood gardens and meetings on constructive, achievable happiness, and you’d march down to the streets and to the new SC homeless shelters, and you’d institute programs and procedures to help people get back on their feet, setting them up in affordable housing and work-training programs. Meanwhile, as you were doing all that, in the back of the room, the boys (you couldn’t really call them “men” when they got like that), including Ludlow, were talking, huddled together, whispering, hatching their little plans of revenge and ruination.

  And what they wanted to do was blow things up. Disintegration and de-creation were in their nature, buried in their hiding places underground, where their boy bomb-love could fester and grow. What she and her co-workers built up, they would tear down. She knew how these boys thought. All her life she’d watched them. Men looked at women, but women watched men; that was the difference.

  On his right shoulder, on the other side of his body from the YOU’RE WELCOME! on his left arm, Ludlow had acquired a tattoo with a death’s-head, signifying that he had become a soldier in some new private army dedicated to bloodletting, and she imagined him as a horseman with a skull’s face galloping down toward Earth where fuses were lit here and there for bombs that would put down a marker, it hardly mattered where, to send an underlined message, a notice in boldface type, that things would not go on any longer in the way they had. The pillars of the temple had to be knocked down. Force was required. The mass murderers also had to be put in their place, at least temporarily. Each week brought news of another unsociable boy who had opened fire on a bar or a nightclub where people were dancing—the mass murderers seemed to have a special hatred of dancing—and where the partiers were intolerably happy, the particular happiness that enraged solitary and lonely men. Mass shootings, however, were the wrong way to bring about the revolution. A mass shooting was a statement, all right, but an unintelligible one. You needed more firepower to make a genuine statement, one that everybody could agree with. Such was Ludlow’s thinking.

  Somehow the sunshine part of the Sun Collective hadn’t managed to shine down on those guys. What they wanted was the fusion part of the sun, a little manageable core of the H-bomb lit by a fuse before the perpetrator scurried away in his pickup. Nitromethane was more their style.

  She would have to talk to somebody about Ludlow, who was growing eerily calm, more detached and zombified, as if he were thinking constantly about something unspeakable. He was behaving like a man who is carrying on a clandestine affair—not with a woman but with an idea, one that he loved and that was probably, technically, criminal.

  To whom could she talk about him? Timothy Brettigan? Maybe not yet. What about Wye? Or someone. Just last night, when Ludlow came home, she had met up with him in the kitchen. She was seated at the kitchen table and he stood at the back door with that innocent look on his face. He had been beautiful once, when she still temporarily loved him. Now that the love was gone, he had become quite ugly.

  “Where’ve you been?” she asked. She was trying to project indifference.

  “Around. Doing stuff.”

  “Care to tell me?”

  “No.”

  “Are you seeing somebody else?”

  “No. Why? You mean another woman? No. I’m not like that.”

  “I think you’re planning something. I think you’re planning to hurt some people.”

  “What makes you think that?” he asked. He was actually grinning.

  “I know you.”

  “Not that well. I have curtains and screens. They make me invisible.”

  “You want to scare everyone. You’ve said so.”

  “People need to be scared. It wakes them up. You gotta break their heads open.”

  “Ludlow, you talk in your sleep, speaking of which. I hear what you’ve been saying.”

  He seemed startled. “Well, I don’t, I never—I don’t talk that much. And besides, it’s, um, better for you not to know what I’m about to do.” He thought for a moment. “It’s world-historical. I got the vision-goggles on.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “You have to, well, I have to wake people up, like I said. By any means necessary. I’m the person to do it.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk in clichés. I wish you were an ordinary guy. I wish I could love you. I wish you would just go away.” She was gazing at the floor, at her own bare feet.

  “You don’t mean that. Besides, there’s no getting rid of me. I’m here to stay.”

  “I’m not going to sleep with you anymore,” she told him, still looking down.

  “Okay,” he said amiably.

  “Someone should turn you in,” she said, “before you start hurting children, or whoever.”

  “Nobody will turn me in because, guess what, I haven’t done anything. Yet. Good night.” And he crossed the kitchen and headed toward the living room sofa.

  * * *

  —

  She was sitting at that same kitchen table two mornings later on a Saturday, following a sleepless night when she realized that she would have to talk to somebody. When you were dealing with anarchists, no one was in charge, so she might as well talk to Wye. Conversation with him was like listening to an oracle, but sometimes one had to put up with his platitudinous wisdom. When she called him, he told her that they should meet in the little public zoo on the other side of the Mississippi, not at Sun Collective headquarters. “Too many eavesdroppers here,” he said with a mirthless chuckle. She could hear his accompanying scowl over the phone. He often scowled when he laughed. The zoo was open 365 days a year, he told her, and the public was always welcome there, no matter what. The animals would also be pleased to see them. The animals were bored and lonely this time of year.

  “But it’s November,” she said, glancing out the window. “There’s already snow on the ground. No, wait.” She heard a tapping on the pane, as if someone were tossing pebbles. “It’s snowing now.”

  “The zoo is open every day of the year,” Wye repeated with an odd intensity. “Wear your overcoat and your boots. The zoo animals get forlorn when winter comes. Whenever the snow is falling, they overcome their distaste for human beings and welcome us. We should always talk to lonesome, deserted animals. In a snowstorm, they particularly need company.”

  Sometimes he could sound so…what was the word? Moralistic. Even though he was usually correct.

  “Oh, all right,” she said.

  “Let’s meet in front of the wolves,” he suggested.

  * * *

  —

  The snow was falling so thickly that her car’s wipers and the hot-air defrost blower couldn’t remove the flakes before they melted and refroze, and by the time she was a mile away from the zoo, her windshield had curved striations of ic
e blocking her view of the street. The weather reminded her of the first night she’d met Ludlow, months ago, last winter—the snow falling, the spectral playground inhabited by ghost-children, the tear in spacetime. She pulled over, parked the car in front of a boarded-up restaurant, The Serpent, swore to herself, and took out the ice scraper. Feeling the flakes of falling snow dropping like tiny cold insects inside her collar and forming little melting clusters of water that dripped down her back, she swore again as she removed the ice, chip by chip. She could feel her fingers inside her gloves burning with cold, and the tips of her toes deadening with incipient frostbite. She wished she had worn her thick gray woolen socks, the ones with the crisscross pattern. Why in God’s name did anyone live in a frigid climate like this one? You had to have a mind of winter to live here.

  Behind the wheel again, she skidded down a side street, the car fishtailing while the windshield wipers made horrible death rattles as they pulled themselves over the quickly reappearing snow-impacted ice, and when she finally pulled up next to the zoo and the little amusement park that stood out in front of it facing the street and the parking lot, she couldn’t see more than two car lengths ahead of her. To the side, the Tilt-A-Whirl ride was quickly being buried, obliterated, under layers of soft snow, its individual cars covered with blue protective plastic tarp gradually growing whitely indistinct, the ride standing next to a shuttered popcorn-and-donuts stand on top of which a solitary crow, apparently in charge of its surroundings, first surveyed the scene and then flew off after spotting Christina and uttering a single admonitory caw.

  The sounds of traffic—the sounds of everything—were muffled by the snowfall. Even the few cars passing by seemed to have been silenced, the only noise they made being the soft crunch of tires and the occasional anguished whine of spinning wheels.

  Lifting her feet to get through the drifts, she made her way toward the indoor botanical conservatory, and, once inside, she stamped her boots free from snow as she breathed in the warm, humid, artificially tropical air. The plant rooms—the ferns, the orchids, the flowers, the pools with goldfish—had a few visitors, refugees from winter, and in one of the sections of the conservatory, she saw a couple being married, the high glass dome over their heads darkening from the storm outside.

  The bride wore white, a gown resembling the snow falling onto the glass above them, and the handsome groom, wearing a dark blue tuxedo, red cummerbund, and tennis shoes, was now stumbling through his homemade improvised vows as he held the bride’s hands in his. “Edie, I promise you that I’ll always for sure be there for you, in like sickness, and, um, health also,” he said in a nervous monotone, staring into her eyes. “Because I love you and the love we have for each other is, like, cement.” Cement? Behind the couple was a ragtag group of friends and relatives, wearing flannel shirts and jeans, witnessing the vows.

  Christina felt herself tearing up. Those two were just strangers. She didn’t know them, and they were so young, they could be teenagers. They hardly knew each other, probably. Who cared what they were doing here, what vows they were making? Apparently, she, Christina, did: she wiped a few tears off her cheeks. The heat and the tropical air must have once inspired those two to get engaged; that must be it.

  She could imagine the scene: they’d been walking through the Fern Room a year or so ago, and, overcome with the indoor heat and humidity, the catalysts for love and lust, he’d gotten down on one knee and proposed to her.

  Christina despised love junkies but, standing there in the conservatory’s humid air, she wanted just a portion of all that for herself, and someone to love her.

  * * *

  —

  Bracing herself, and involuntarily bunching her shoulders together, she walked forward out of the conservatory and into the snowstorm outside, following a path that led into the little zoo. Almost no one was here. She saw one maintenance worker clearing a path on the sidewalk, and, ahead of her, a tall forlorn solitary man, though certainly not Wye, wearing a stocking cap, a red scarf, and a long brown winter overcoat, approaching her. The guy was walking with his head down, his hands in his overcoat pockets, past the primate cage. Another lost soul, she thought, somebody killing time by wandering through the zoo in November. Seeing Christina, he turned toward her and waved, a gesture of pure loneliness. Snow covered the lenses of his eyeglasses and was nestling in his eyebrows, though he must have seen her somehow, because, after all, he had waved at her. He coughed.

  What the hell: she waved back.

  Putting her hands back into her pockets, Christina plunged ahead, the snow now getting under her cap into her eyes and sticking to her eyelashes, as she walked into the Primate Building. Inside, the little monkeys, or whatever they were, were crouched in pairs grooming each other, and after studying their solicitous behavior, she walked out the other side of the building toward the western edge of the zoo where the wolves were caged.

  * * *

  —

  Their outdoor pen was about half the size of a football field. The wolves, like the snow, were white, and one of them was pacing back and forth at the edge of the opposite side near the high fencing. Each time the wolf reached the corner, it would turn and head back in the direction from which it had come. It seemed to be trying to solve a problem. The animal appeared to be thinking. What, Christina wondered, was it worrying about? Maybe the problem it was trying to solve was What am I doing here? How did I get here? And how do I get out? Christina projected her thoughts into the wolf’s mind, and thoughts from the wolf came back to her. There must be an answer, the wolf believed, in wolf-thought. In wolf-world, everything had a purpose, except being in a zoo. All caged and imprisoned creatures were forced to mull over such questions.

  For a moment, looking at the height of the fencing, Christina imagined herself inside the enclosure, and the wolf outside, free.

  On this side of the cage, only half-visible in the storm, stood Wye. He wore a bright blue parka matted with snow, thick mittens, and a woolen cap on which snow had already accumulated. His dark glasses, the ones that he customarily wore, had a curtain of snow over them, and more snow was accumulating in his scraggly beard. He looked like a sage in disguise, a snow-bespectacled shaman. As Christina approached him, she heard him muttering instructions to the wolves.

  “This is where the magic happens,” Wye said, studying the pacing wolf.

  “What? What magic?” Christina asked. “I don’t see any magic.”

  “You have come here,” Wye continued, still not turning around to acknowledge her—it was one of his gifts to know when people were nearby him, given his creepy extrasensitive human radar—“you have come here to ask about your boyfriend, Ludlow, and about the other one, Timothy.”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “Wolves don’t like human beings, did you know that?” Wye asked. “They detest and avoid us. They can’t stand the way we smell. Our smell offends them. Even when starving, they will not come into a city. If they come near us, it is against their nature.” All at once he let out a whistle, followed by a high keening cry, an ai-ai-ai that made both wolves regard him slowly and suspiciously, as if he’d spoken the password but mispronounced it. In response, however, the two wolves ambled toward Wye and Christina, on their side of the metal fencing. On the back of each wolf was a layer of snow. Wye reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of candy, a Skittle, but instead of feeding it to the wolf, he popped it into his mouth. It was a territorial gesture.

  “Wye, I think Ludlow is in some kind of trouble, and I—”

  “Oh, he’s not in any trouble, Christina dear. Don’t you worry. Anyway, I wouldn’t call it ‘trouble.’ ”

  “I think he’s constructing a bomb or something.” One of the wolves was still approaching the two of them, seemingly not afraid. “He won’t talk about it. I don’t know for sure, but I have this intuition. It has me worried. He talks in his sleep.”
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br />   “Did you know that the Aztec god of the sun was Huitzilopochtli?” Wye’s voice was phlegmy. “He was also the god of war, and so he did double duty. Tlaloc was the rain god. Both bloodthirsty gods required human sacrifice. It was the source of their power.” His narration grew soft and tender, at a bedtime-story level. “Thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children. Those being sacrificed—well, their beating hearts were sawed out with an obsidian knife and then burned, right at the top of the Aztec pyramid. Imagine the flow of blood down the steps, the great pools of blood at the bottom! Children, too, were sacrificed, their little hearts cut right out of them. The gods require terrible, unthinkable actions from us. They give themselves that particular permission. That’s why they’re gods. Gods don’t make requests. They make demands. You know: Abraham and Isaac. The Old Testament God was like that. Implacable.”

  “I wonder if there’s a god of winter.”

  “Ullr,” he said. “In other mythologies, Boreas.”

  “Wye,” she asked, as both wolves edged closer, “why are you telling me this? Why are we here? I’m freezing out here.”

  “Because, my dear,” he said, turning his dark glasses toward her, “the gods are about to ask something terrible of you, some actions that traditionally would cause fear and trembling, but now, in the modern age…”

  His voice trailed off, or perhaps he was still speaking, and Christina couldn’t hear his words because the snow continued to fall even harder than before, muffling his voice, and she was growing inattentive because, to her astonishment, the wolves continued to come nearer to them, as if Christina and Wye were their prey, but what was most odd about their presence before them was that their white fur had been camouflaged, subsumed, by the thick snowfall, producing a moment when, looking through the lattice-pattern fencing, all Christina could see of the wolves were their gray eyes seemingly floating in midair and fixed directly on her.