The Sun Collective: A Novel

by Charles Baxter

  They had already decided to cremate their son’s body and take the ashes back to North Dakota to be scattered somewhere on the farm, they told her. “Mark was our little brilliant boy,” Ludlow’s mother said sadly, and Christina had to think for a moment to remember whom she was talking about. For her, he would never be “Mark.” He would always be “Ludlow”; it was more than a name. It was him. Mrs. Bagley continued to talk: her son had always been good at everything, so smart, the class valedictorian at South Branch Consolidated Schools, free ride at the university, he could have been anything he wanted to be. They did not ask Christina whether she wanted to attend the scattering. They did not ask her anything. They seemed frightened of her, or perhaps they weren’t used to asking questions of strangers.

  Fully five minutes into the conversation, the mother remembered to introduce herself as Violet Bagley, and her husband as Henry. Henry and Violet Bagley. Across the table, they all shook hands. With shaking hands she reached into her purse and drew out a photograph of Ludlow’s daughter, Astrid. “I’m sure he showed you some pictures,” Violet Bagley said. “He was so proud of her.” A pause. “Right after she was born. Not so much later.”

  Ludlow’s father had ordered the Mexican omelet, which was served with an immense helping of sour cream on top, a toxic mixture of cholesterol and saturated fat, which he then sprinkled with hot sauce, accompanied by a critical mass of ketchup on his hash browns. Christina sat transfixed as he wolfed it down, a heart-attack country breakfast, leaving the conversational side of things to his wife, a habit, Christina guessed, among rural couples. Well, you shouldn’t generalize about people. Ludlow’s mother was tearfully reciting the list of prizes Ludlow/Mark had won in high school and college: debate team, band (clarinet), captain of the basketball team, homecoming king (she still had the crown stored somewhere), and now what was he? Nothing but ashes. Clothes and shoes.

  Her voice seemed detached from her, Christina thought, floating in the air somehow, the way voices come to you just before you faint.

  It makes you think sometimes, she said, that it was no gift to be the smartest person in the county, or even North Dakota. Being smart had never really helped Mark one little bit. It was like a problem he had to solve.

  Her husband, Ludlow’s father, Henry, had not said a word during this time; he seemed to be dedicated to eating his omelet instead.

  Mark, so good-looking, had always liked girls, his mother said now, trying to smile in Christina’s direction, her voice still floating in the air, since Christina was the last of that blessed parade of girls, and of course those previous girls had always clustered around him like bees on a flower, and we, his father and I, were hoping that he’d choose one of them and settle down back in South Branch, but after Astrid’s birth he and his girlfriend broke up—the way people did now—and he got agitated and instead of being a good dad he had followed the “siren song” of city life and had just disappeared from their lives as if he didn’t care for the place he’d been brought up in, “almost as if he’d had no regard for us or his daughter or anybody,” she said, “even though we knew he loved us anyway,” and thank goodness his two brothers hadn’t been like that.

  “He had brothers?” Christina asked, involuntarily. The question came out of her mouth before she had thought of saying it. She was still feeling dizzy from the photograph of Astrid, who, even as a baby, had Ludlow’s features. A moment or two after she uttered the question, both of the Bagleys stopped what they were doing—Henry with his omelet, Violet with her oatmeal—to examine Christina. Yes, the mother said, her surprise unconcealed, two brothers who still lived near the farm. Thomas and Benjy.

  “I guess you didn’t know,” Ludlow’s father said, the first thing he had said in the past few minutes. “Modern times, not to know about family. Cone-of-silence thing. Not to care.”

  “Oh. We forgot to say grace,” Violet announced, touching her own cheek and interrupting the moment of Christina’s embarrassed ignorance of the Bagley family. Violet took her husband’s hand in her right hand and Christina’s in her left. Christina leaned over to take the right hand of Ludlow’s father, feeling a residual pain in her ribs, and once they were all holding hands, their heads bowed, Violet prayed, “For these and all Thy blessings, Lord, make us truly grateful. Amen.” When Violet released her hand from Christina’s, she said, “Are you in pain? I saw you wincing. And I could feel your injury through your hand.”

  “She’s psychic,” the father said, nodding in his wife’s direction but not looking up. “Always has been. You live with her, you get used to it. All her life, from grade school.”

  Christina clasped her hands in her lap while Henry Bagley finished up the last of his Mexican omelet. He had tucked his napkin into his collar so that it covered his shirtfront. His meal finished, he leaned back, took a large swig of coffee, and nodded in no particular direction before removing the napkin and folding it neatly on the table.

  “You probably think we’re pretty simple,” he was saying. “Coming from the farm and all. But here’s the thing: we’re Christians, and we believe in helping others, lending a hand in times of travail, helping the poor and the weak, and we believe in loyalty, and grace, and hard work, and forgiveness, especially, and not looking down on no one, no matter what. We never had many of the advantages, but we don’t think we’re superior to anybody, but then nobody’s superior to us, either. We’re all sinners here, and we’re all searching for the light. We practice humility. It’s part of our religion. I’m saying this to you,” he said, “because ever since Mark’s death, I have prayed for guidance about what to say to you, and I want you to know that whatever happened that night, the night he died and you were driving, we forgive you, my wife and me, we don’t hold it against you. We don’t bear grudges. We can’t. That’s not us. And another thing: we aren’t going to ask you how that accident happened. We prayed on it, and the prayer was answered. What I am seeing in you is a person who is suffering just like us. That is our bond with you: your suffering and our suffering. And that is all that I am going to say.”

  After a few moments, when the waitress came with the check—Christina grabbed it—Mrs. Bagley held out her hand again. “Could I touch your forehead?” she asked. After putting down the check, Christina asked why, and Ludlow’s mother said, “There’s a power I have though it don’t come from me. It comes from God. I can take away some of your suffering if you want me to. I can take away the burden that you are carrying. I can tell that you have a wound, and I can even try to heal it if you ask, so.”

  “Yes, please,” Christina said, the tears beginning to well up again in her eyes, whereupon Mrs. Bagley, this overweight woman in a cheap flower-print dress and a blue scarf, touched her callused fingers to Christina’s forehead, more lightly than Christina had expected, and the effect that followed was like nothing else that Christina had ever experienced, a feeling of bad air expelled from her soul, and Mrs. Bagley exhaled sharply and tilted her head back. More loudly than was seemly in public, Mrs. Bagley followed the exhalation with an ah that could be heard everywhere in the restaurant, so that the other patrons turned to see what was going on.

  Christina, not quite believing what had just happened to her, glanced at the walls, the servers, the woman behind the old-fashioned cash register, a ballpoint pen on her ear, the Hispanic-looking man just visible inside the kitchen, the other customers still eating their breakfasts, and the winter sun outside, and she felt the words “the peace that passeth all understanding” travel through her body. The words themselves were things and were now located inside her. What had just happened? Whoever the Bagleys were, they were better human beings than she was, spiritually and otherwise. Something in them had been transferred to their son, where it mutated in the darkness. Of that she was certain.

  “Now that we’re done eating, could you do us a favor?” Henry Bagley asked. “Could you take us to the Minnesota State Fairgrounds
?”

  “But it’s winter,” Christina said. “There’s nothing going on over there. I mean, the gates are open, but the fair’s not there.”

  “Oh, we know that,” he told her, “but we’d like to see it anyway. We love the fairgrounds. We go there every summer, and we’ve always said, we want to see it under a layer of snow.”

  So she took them there.

  * * *

  —

  Several days later, on the other side of the city, Harry Brettigan; his wife, Alma; and their son, Timothy, were headed to Northeast Minneapolis where the Sun Collective headquarters was located, and in the car Alma was saying that they should have called or texted or something because after all you couldn’t arrive at the Sun Collective unannounced, it would be rude, and from behind the wheel, where he sat watching the landscape pass by, their son told them, a bit too loudly, that of course you could arrive there unannounced because after all he knew people over there, and it was hardly momentous to drop in on a neighborhood community group and pick up some of his belongings, the ones he had left behind, before he moved into his own apartment.

  When they pulled into the parking lot, they saw immediately that the usual Sun Collective symbols, , were there on the front signboard, but below the symbols the message was new.

  The Sun Collective

  Is Closed but

  We Are Everywhere Now

  Watch for Us

  In the parking lot, pacing back and forth, was Christina, talking to several other collectivists. She saw the Brettigans’ car, and for a few seconds she seemed to freeze in place, apparently thinking of whether she would talk to them and, if she did, what she would say. Once they had parked, she walked over to them. “It’s boarded up!” she said, before they had even rolled down the windows. “You can’t go in. The police closed it. Or somebody did. Who the fuck decided that? It’s all locked with a notice on the door. Anyway, they’re not here. Wye’s not there. No one is there. What am I going to do?”

  Timothy rolled down his window first. “Why don’t you join us?” he said, motioning toward the backseat. “Get into the car. We’ll figure something out.”

  “Oh, all right.” She pointed with her thumb before opening the left rear door and getting into the car. Sitting down, she brought with her a contagious cloud of cold air. “We gotta get to the bottom of this.”

  “What happened?” Harry Brettigan asked. “What’s going on?”

  “Well,” she said, “what I’ve heard from those people I was just talking to is that we’re being called ‘terrorists.’ All of us. Anybody who ever went to a meeting in there. So I guess that includes all of you. Terrorists? For planting gardens in the city and having seminars on limiting consumption and lobbying and what we did? You call that ‘terror’? The police and everybody else—they’re all investigating us, and President Thorkelson has personally taken a personal interest, tweeting about us, another of his conspiracies, which is as bad as it can get, and now Wye has disappeared, nobody knows where, and we’re all going to be arrested and locked up.” Whatever peace she had found a few days before had apparently abandoned her.

  Timothy hadn’t turned off the car’s motor and, as Christina talked, he leaned back, giving the impression that he had heard all this before. “What does it mean, ‘we are everywhere now’?” he asked, rubbing his forehead.

  “It means underground. I have to hide,” she said. “That’s what it means.” Turning to Alma and Harry Brettigan, she asked, “May I come back to your house? I’m sorry, and I hate to invite myself in, but I’m sort of desperate. I don’t want to go back to my apartment right now. They’ll be looking for me.”

  “What about Ludlow?” Alma asked. “Where is he?”

  “He’s dead, Mom. Remember?” Timothy examined his mother carefully. “We told you. That accident? When Christina was driving? And he wasn’t belted in?”

  “Oh, yes.” Alma appeared to be preoccupied, thinking of something else. “I’m so sorry: I was woolgathering. Or maybe,” she said gleefully, “I’m sinking into dementia. Who can say? I hope I am. I pray for Alzheimer’s. I would just love to be out of it.” Instantly she came back to herself and turned to Christina. “There’s no real hiding, you know. Everybody gets tracked down eventually. How are you feeling, by the way? Have you recovered?”

  “Oh, that? Yeah, I’m okay. I’m almost fine.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “The bus.”

  For the first time, Harry Brettigan spoke up. “The impression I get,” he said, “is that through a complicated series of actions and commitments, you’re in trouble. It’s possible, of course, that you’re not in trouble at all and that all this worrying is a product of delusion common to all reformers in a period of crisis and self-contradiction.” He was enjoying himself. “Come with us, then. We have a couple of spare rooms. And there’s the basement.”

  “Harry, please stop talking, all right?” his wife said, shaking her head.

  “She gets impatient with me.” Brettigan laughed.

  In the backseat, Christina nodded, a gesture that Timothy took to mean that she had agreed to his father’s proposal, so he put the car into gear and headed homeward.

  * * *

  —

  In the car, she studied Harry Brettigan and his wife. Her own parents were long past caring about her. They had graduated from parenting. Both of them, affectively absentminded, had been married several times and left perfunctory, lightweight messages on her cell phone now and then, accompanied by pictures of themselves with their latest love partners, smiling in the brilliant fixed-income sunshine of the desert Southwest where they had both retired separately, and where they were living in gated communities of manifestly cheerful seniors. Her father played tennis, swam every day, and wrote limericks as a hobby. Her mother was in a bridge club, a book club, and a cooking class. They were smiling and pacified, so self-absorbed that it was as if they had never been parents at all. If she had given them grandchildren, the situation might have been different, but her current life had little interest for them, and whenever they talked to her, they forgot to inquire about her prospects. She was their sweet, adorable, prizewinning, blanked-out girl. She was living in someone’s basement? How nice! Harry and Alma Brettigan took more interest in her than her own parents did.

  And in return, during the following week she came to love them. She would take the bus to work at the bank and come back to the Brettigans. She loved their dog, Woland, and their cat, Behemoth, the Brettigans’ harmless quarreling, which seemed to be their pastime, the perpetual smell of toast in the kitchen, the strange recipes that produced unintelligible meals—what is that, on the dinner plate?— the framed picture of the Basque coastline in the living room, the books of history and poetry scattered around the house, their frumpy discontents and passions, and their seemingly endless kindness toward her, which had no reason for existing and was therefore implausible. They had adopted her out of love. They seemed to believe that she had great potential, and potential for greatness, and they were on edge to see what she would do next. The death of Ludlow was merely a prelude for the momentous next act.

  At night, in the Brettigans’ basement, she felt the presence of Ludlow standing at the foot of her bed as she tried to sleep. She had no unfinished business with him, but his spirit stood there with his hidden agendas, invisibly, immaterially present, not particularly minding that he was dead and that she had killed him, but letting her know, just by his being there, that the poor were still suffering, the apocryphal Sandmen might still be around, the Sun Collective manifesto was gathering dust, the Earth itself was in jeopardy, and bombs, those social-activist alarm clocks that would wake up the sleeping conscience-stricken, were not being constructed (although they should have been assembled by now) with the result that America was falling deeper into its unmindful decline and would fall further, unless s
he, Christina, took action: radical, unthinkable action, action that no one had ever dreamed of, action that would get onto the front page of the paper, above the fold: action action action action action was Ludlow’s unspoken, silent stutter, from the other side of Death, across the river of forgetfulness, straight to her from him, not deconstructed, and still audible.

  She was, she knew, blessed and afflicted with the scourge of empathy: she could not witness anyone in poverty or pain without feeling an inward wince that compelled her to seek some remedy, no matter how inefficient or futile. That was the message Ludlow had for her: every night he reminded her.

  Finally, days after she had moved in with his parents, Timothy called and asked her out on a date. Where are we going? she asked.

  To the Alhambra, he said, waving his arm to conjure Spain and the Moors.

  - 28 -

  Date Night: she had dressed up for Timothy and fussed a bit, putting a red dress on, but, really, she thought, who goes out on dates anymore? Nobody. There was no such thing. Courtship had evolved: you could go straight to the sex and bypass the love and the get-acquainted period if you wanted to, but then you were constantly dealing with anonymous strangers and their weird quirks—psychological, medical, personal—often at the last minute. And this particular date had an additional weirdness to it: he had insisted that he would pick her up at the stroke of midnight, and then they’d go to a midnight diner, and then…well, he said he had a surprise in store for her. Also, she felt the strangeness of being on a date, or whatever it was, with the son of the two people, Harry and Alma, under whose roof she was currently living, another one of those ironies subtly invading her life. At the last minute she ditched the dress, put on a pair of rather tight new jeans and her snow boots, a woolen cap, and a blue scarf to match her eyes.