The Sun Collective: A Novel Read online

  ALSO BY CHARLES BAXTER

  Fiction

  There’s Something I Want You to Do

  Gryphon

  The Soul Thief

  Saul and Patsy

  The Feast of Love

  Believers

  Shadow Play

  A Relative Stranger

  First Light

  Through the Safety Net

  Harmony of the World

  Poetry

  Imaginary Paintings and Other Poems

  Prose

  The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot

  Burning Down the House

  As Editor

  A William Maxwell Portrait

  (with Edward Hirsch and Michael Collier)

  The Business of Memory:

  The Art of Remembering in an Age of Forgetting

  Bringing the Devil to His Knees:

  The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life (with Peter Turchi)

  The Collected Stories of Sherwood Anderson

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Charles Baxter

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., for permission to reprint an excerpt from “On the Lawn at the Villa” from The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940–2001 by Louis Simpson. Copyright © 1963, 2001 by Louis Simpson. Reprinted by permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd. (boaeditions.org).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Baxter, Charles, [date] author.

  Title: The sun collective : a novel / Charles Baxter.

  Description: First edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2020

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019050883 (print). LCCN 2019050884 (ebook). ISBN 9781524748852 (hardcover). ISBN 9781524748869 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3552.A854 S86 2020 (print) | LCC PS3552.A854 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2019050883

  LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2019050884

  Ebook ISBN 9781524748869

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover photograph by Wenbin/Moment/Getty Images

  Cover design by Tyler Comrie

  ep_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Charles Baxter

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Two

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Three

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Four

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part Five

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  For Daniel,

  Hannah, Isaac,

  and Julia Baxter

  It’s complicated, being an American,

  Having the money and the bad conscience, both at the same time.

  Perhaps, after all, this is not the right subject for a poem.

  —Louis Simpson,

  “ON THE LAWN AT THE VILLA”

  - 1 -

  Soon after he boarded the Blue Line light rail at the downtown Minneapolis station, keeping an eye out for his son, who had deliberately gone missing and was living on the streets, Brettigan checked the available space, saw two empty seats next to each other at the far end of the car, and aimed himself in their direction as the doors chimed shut. Having taken the one on the aisle, he removed his Minnesota Twins baseball cap and placed it beside him so that no one would drop down there. The translucent advertising sheath attached to the outside of the train car was filtering the sun and gave his hands a bruised discoloration, as if he’d been in a fistfight.

  A young couple shadowed him onto the train and sat down in the seats opposite his own.

  A man of retirement age, Brettigan wore an expression of studied neutrality whenever he found himself in public. He had the look of someone who possessed important secret information and who needed to fade into the background to avoid exposure. On his ring finger he wore a loose-fitting gold wedding band thickened with adhesive tape to secure it. Despite his age, he still had a full head of graying hair, rather bushy eyebrows, and penetrating blue eyes. Deep lines creased his face. With his khakis and cotton sports shirt, he gave an appearance of informality, but he sat as straight as a child who has been told not to slouch, and he gazed out the grimy window with the uneasy intelligence of someone who has few illusions to comfort him.

  Last week on this commuter train there had been an incident. A woman whose baby was in a stroller had pitched and rolled her way to the seat directly in front of him. Brettigan had been close to the window, near enough to hear her panting. From time to time she had uttered soft groans. Every few seconds, she would nod and say, “Uh-huh,” as if in conversation with a ghost companion. When an old man had walked past and leaned down to pat her stroller-bound infant on the head, the woman had started to shout, “Don’t you touch my baby!” She pointed at the aging passenger, who, alarmed, hurried out the doors at the train’s next stop. Then she had glared at Brettigan, still sitting there behind her. Collecting himself, Brettigan had pretended to stare at the landscape outside. Where he looked apparently didn’t matter. “Don’t nobody touch my baby!” she cried out suddenly in Brettigan’s direction. She smelled of wine. Her baby probably smelled of wine. The whole car smelled of wine and beer and Red Bull.

  But this morning the train had apparently been steam-cleaned, and the usual professional-managerial types—suited, accessorized, and iPhoned—were seated nearby, tapping out messages, talking into their Bluetooths, or reading The Wall Street Journal. Very few Victims of Capitalism were on the train today. Most people thought of them as the homeless, or vagrants, or the deinstitutionalized mad—one of Brettigan’s friends preferred to call them “scum”—but for Brettigan they were the Vs of C, that generously proportioned sector of the economy that had never had a
single foothold on the ladder of success and who were lying on the ground anywhere they could fall unmolested. In midsummer you’d find them on the train rumbling out to the Utopia Mall, a terminal point where they would not disembark but stay right where they were, collapsed in heaps, half-asleep and therefore semi-alert, until the train started up again and returned to downtown Minneapolis. They had no purchases; they consumed nothing but air and food scraps. Even the tattered clothes they wore seemed borrowed from somewhere. Back and forth the trains would go, carrying their somnolent human freight.

  Whenever Brettigan exchanged glances with one of these people, he tried to make his face express compassion and kindliness. They looked back at him with sodden indifference or hatred.

  Months before at home, in the grip of insomnia, Brettigan had found himself watching a late-night movie that had apparently started a few minutes before he tuned in. An early talkie, statically photographed in old-style black-and-white and therefore comforting, the movie had pleasingly slow narrative rhythms, easily comprehended, or so it seemed at first. The film’s plot appeared to be deadpan fantasy: seven passengers dressed in formal evening attire were conversing in the lounge of a transatlantic ocean liner. The camera seemed to be stuck in one place, and the sound recording was rudimentary, but that was okay because the movie had quite obviously been adapted from a stage play, and the characters on the screen were as bewildered by the plot as Brettigan was. What were they doing on this ocean liner? No one seemed to have any idea. They kept asking themselves how they had gotten there. None of them could remember booking passage on this ship or by what means they had boarded. Perhaps a joke was being played on them. Where were they going?

  They were all dead, of course, and the ocean liner was taking them to the realm of shadows, and the movie was called Outward Bound, by someone named Sutton Vane (Brettigan had found this out by Googling the title once he had discovered it), and he thought of the movie whenever he was on the light rail here in Minneapolis or the New York City subway on those occasions when he visited his brother in Brooklyn. Judging by the appearance of their riders, one would think that the late-evening subway trains were populated almost exclusively by the dead or by people who wanted to be dead. Something about public transportation—you could also see it on the coaches in Amtrak train cars—had a narcotic effect and seemed to render the passengers half-alive, their heads flung back in comatose slumber. They didn’t appear to be asleep as much as anesthetized, lifeless, unticketed, and whenever he saw Victims of Capitalism in a heap in a corner somewhere, he remembered Outward Bound and the journey they were all on.

  Sometimes one of the Victims of Capitalism would awaken, and, weighed down with God, would start to shout inspired prophecy. “Look at my wounds,” someone had once commanded him on the A Train, though without specifying any location. Here in Minneapolis, a rider had paced up and down the car asking, “Where’s Duluth?”

  A retired structural engineer and bridge designer, Brettigan observed the traffic backed up on Hiawatha and noted, as he always did, the Sabo Pedestrian Bridge with its inclined tower and slender concrete deck. It had the appearance of an outer-space structure painstakingly transported to Earth. He thanked the gods that he had not been involved in its design, given the failure of two of the cables thanks to wind-induced fatigue cracking at the anchorages a few years after the bridge had opened. The cables had fallen onto the bridge deck below; fortunately, no one had been hurt.

  Now the light rail passed by several abandoned grain elevators, as blindingly white as the abstract geometries of a Charles Sheeler painting. At Thirty-eighth Street a well-tailored gentleman boarded. He wore a three-piece suit, a trench coat, and a soft black trilby hat. That hat made him appear as if he were in costume. He trailed a small suitcase on wheels. His glasses consisted of small tinted circles on thin gold frames, and some property in the lenses reflected light in such a way as to make his eyes nearly invisible. Standing in the aisle next to Brettigan, bathed in soapy blue sunshine, he looked down, smiled, and asked if the seat next to Brettigan’s, the one on which Brettigan’s baseball cap lay, was taken.

  “No, not at all,” Brettigan said, picking up his cap and putting it on. “Please sit.”

  The man dropped down in slow motion next to Brettigan, lifting the crease in his trousers in an old-fashioned gesture. “Thank you kindly,” the man said. He had a trace of a southern accent.

  A few moments passed. The man cleared his throat. “Thank you,” he repeated, looking straight ahead before checking his pocket watch, like the White Rabbit in Wonderland.

  “You have a plane to catch?” Brettigan asked, making a social effort.

  “Yes, you could say that,” the man said.

  “Where to?” Brettigan asked, trying to keep his questions on this side of politeness, the starchy affability one attempts with strangers.

  “Paris,” the man said. “I’m goin’ to a conference.”

  “Ah,” Brettigan said.

  “And you?” the man asked. “Where might you be goin’?” He turned to glance at Brettigan, but behind the lenses the man’s eyes remained invisible. Maybe he didn’t have eyes. Maybe he had something else.

  “Oh, me?” Brettigan shook his head. “I’m…headed out to the mall to get some exercise. I’ll meet with some friends out there, and then we’ll walk around until we tire. It’s air-conditioned, and although I don’t particularly care for—”

  “Yes,” the man said, agreeably interrupting him. “I’ve seen them. I should say, I’ve seen walkin’ around people like you. But tell me, why don’t you stroll around the lakes in the city? Or the parks? Outdoors? I myself enjoy the city’s recreational locales this time of the year. Birds, and…” The man thought for a moment. “Trees.” The stranger wore cologne, Brettigan noticed. The scent was like autumn—aromatic burnt leaves. And the man’s accent faded in and out as if he were imitating a southerner without actually being one himself.

  “I have a medical condition,” Brettigan informed him, “so I need to stay out of high temperatures, and therefore I—”

  “Go out to the mall,” the man said, interrupting again.

  “Yes.” Who was this character, prying into his early-morning life and finishing his sentences for him? “So,” Brettigan said, doing his best to take control of the situation, “if you don’t mind my asking, what conference are you going to?”

  Rather quickly and as if by magic, the man reached into his pocket and drew out a business card before handing it to Brettigan.

  DR. ARVER L. JEFFERSON, M.D.

  PSYCHOANALYTIC AND

  ASSOCIATED THERAPIES

  Member: Midwest Institute of Proton-Analytics

  The doctor’s email address and phone numbers had been printed at the bottom of the card, but the ink was smudged and mostly illegible.

  “I’ve never heard of proton-analytics,” Brettigan observed, putting the card into his shirt pocket. “What is it?”

  The doctor drew in a long breath. “I’ll give you an example. You see that man over there?” he asked, nodding in the direction of the young couple who had followed Brettigan onto the train. The man wore earbuds, and a stack of pamphlets lay in his lap. The woman seemed to be studying both Brettigan and the doctor. “Yes,” the doctor affirmed, “that one. As soon as I get off this train, he will ask you for money. He will test you. He will beg you for somethin’, anything. You must give him a dollar at least. Do you know the legend of Notre seigneur en pauvre, our Lord in rags?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a French-Canadian legend of Jesus,” the doctor said with low-level excitement as he warmed to his subject, “and in this legend Jesus is dressed as a beggar and is roaming the Earth, testing the generosity of everyone he meets. It’s a spot quiz for your salvation. You could think of that man over there as Jesus. I recommend that you do so. Did you say that you have a medical condition?
”

  Brettigan nodded.

  “The airport is coming up soon, and I shall have to be on my way,” the doctor informed Brettigan. “But I will tell you another legend that grew up among my people in the South. This one will help you, I guarantee. It will help you personally. Here is what you must do. What I have for you is a cure, a cure for afflictions.” The doctor now seemed nervously energized and was enunciating his words with care, as if he were speaking to a child with disabilities. “Find a mirror, the largest one that you can easily carry, let’s say a hand mirror, and take that mirror to a creek or even better to a flowing stream or best of all a river, and here is what you must do. You must lower the mirror into the water.”

  As he spoke, the doctor’s hands moved in the air in front of him, pantomiming, or so it seemed to Brettigan, a vigorous form of washing.

  “The water has to flow over the mirror or the cure won’t work, and once you have the water streaming over the glass, you wash your reflected face in the mirror. Not your actual face, but your mirrored face in the water. Holding the mirror so as not to lose it, you wash your face, your reflected face, your face in the mirror, and you will get well, you will recover, and, renewed, you will prosper. I give you my personal guarantee. Really, I promise you, you will get better, freed from all your afflictions. This is an ancient cure. It is proven. It is so. There is a vast literature to this effect.”

  The little recital sounded like nonsense to Brettigan, but even nonsense can serve a purpose sometimes.