The Sun Collective: A Novel Read online

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  After she buzzed him in, she put on a bathrobe and went to her entryway, hearing him clumping up the stairs, and after his knock, she unlocked and opened the door, and even from the distance between them she felt his winter condition from the cold that radiated out from him, and she saw how red his cheeks were, but what she noticed about him—she quickly realized—was secondary to what she noticed about herself.

  She was glad to see him. That came as a bit of a shock. There he was—lumpish, clueless, homeless, just another guy—and he was no one’s idea of a good prospect, much less a good human being, but there he was anyway, entertainingly earnest, shaking the snow off his cracked shoes and then stomping them on the floor, poor but sexy, and the truth was that if he actually believed the Sun Collective Manifesto, he probably had certain resources of sympathy, and idealism, and—who could say?—some other interesting qualities, so she reached out and took his hand and led him into where she lived.

  “That’s where you’ll sleep,” she said, pointing to the sofa, and he nodded.

  - 13 -

  She called in sick the next day and spent most of the morning with Ludlow, feeling a variety of hot peacefulness as the sun traveled across the sky, entering through the south-facing window and eventually landing on the living room carpeting. She was deciding about him—whether this man might possibly be a path to some sort of better life. She doubted it, but. By late morning they had both calmed down enough from their conversation to go to the kitchen, and while she brewed coffee, he stood behind her reading his iPhone. Maybe he hadn’t read the manifesto. Without warning, she felt his lips on the back of her neck, and she said, “Stop that. You know, I have to go back to work tomorrow,” and he nodded, raising his head so that his chin rested lightly on her hair. She had a residual cramp in her left foot from the moment last night when her leg had straightened involuntarily during a dream and knocked against the wall—the dream was about bliss, about having a purpose in life.

  In the afternoon they went out. Her mind had cleared sufficiently so that she could try to reconfigure her future, creating a space in it that he might occupy. She had decided that he had a kind of generic attractiveness, and despite his ragged appearance she liked his hands and blue eyes. She and Ludlow were both hungry, and they headed down the snow-encrusted sidewalk holding hands through her mittens and his gloves, eventually approaching a greasy spoon from which a hamburger smell—emanating from the one exhaust fan—could be detected hundreds of feet away.

  Once they were inside, sitting at a booth across from each other, Ludlow shook the snow off his hair. “This is the second meal we’ve had together,” he said quietly, not looking at her.

  “I paid for it last time,” she said.

  “Uh, right.”

  “Just teasing,” she told him.

  “Okay. May I say something?” he asked, with a serious expression. “You won’t mind?”

  “How can I mind if you don’t tell me what it is?”

  “Right.”

  “So?”

  “Well, I think you’re kinda beautiful, and I’m grateful that you took me in last night, and I like talking to you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I might as well be direct,” he said, picking up the saltshaker. “I’m not good at the sweet talk. It bores me. Life is too short. The thing is, and I’ll just say it, it’s— well, I want to fuck you.”

  “Well, we’ll see. Give it time.” So he was just a guy after all. She could see that he meant the statement as a compliment. It wasn’t love, but it wasn’t anything else, either. “I’m not even sure I like you,” she said, taking the saltshaker out of his hand and putting it back on the table. “I don’t know who you are. But I appreciate your friendly attitude.”

  “You don’t have to,” he said. “It’s not about appreciation.” He picked up his paper napkin and dabbed at his mouth.

  “It isn’t? I mean, I’m confused. I’m really confused here.”

  “About what?”

  “Okay, for starters, what was that actor, Tim, doing there last night? I thought I saw him. But most important, who are you? Every time I think I’ve got a handle on you, you slip away.”

  “I told you: I’m an angel.”

  “Oh, please. I hate talk like that.”

  “Take it or leave it.” He leaned toward her. “I’m just saying, I think we should have sex. It’d be the right thing to do. I’m attracted to you. We’re wasting our time otherwise.”

  “Jesus,” she said.

  “I didn’t know you were a Christian,” he said, as the server, a young woman with streaked mascara, and who was wearing a stained apron, approached them for their order. Chewing her gum, she took a ballpoint pen from behind her ear, shook it twice, and grimly asked them if they knew what they wanted. Christina ordered a bowl of soup, and Ludlow ordered something else, but Christina didn’t catch what his order was because her full attention had been sidetracked by the presence of a large white dog standing alone on the sidewalk outside the restaurant window. The dog had no collar and therefore no tags, but it seemed to know exactly where it was, unlike the abandoned or lost dogs that looked around and sniffed wildly to find some place or some scent that they recognized. This dog seemed almost like a sentry: planted firmly in its spot, it slowly moved its head in the direction of the restaurant window, and when it had finished turning, it fixed its gaze on the window and, through the window, on Christina, who found herself exchanging a glance with the animal. It seemed to be asking a question for which she might have an answer.

  “…and the other thing we need to do is,” Ludlow was saying. “Wait. You’re not listening to me.”

  “Yes. Sorry. There’s a dog out there.”

  Ludlow turned in the direction where she was gazing. “So?”

  “I don’t know. It looks like a stray.”

  “The city is full of stray dogs. Every city is full of stray dogs. I’m a stray dog.”

  “I know. But this one is asking a question.”

  “Christina,” he said. “Dogs don’t ask questions. They beg, but they don’t ask questions.”

  “This one does.”

  Ludlow sighed. “Okay. I’ll play along. What question is it asking you?”

  Just then, the server, whose name tag said her name was Lucille, returned to the table with Christina’s soup and Ludlow’s order. “Ah,” he said with a W. C. Fields accent, “my ham-bur-zhay,” but by now almost all of Christina’s attention was focused on the quizzical dog.

  “It wants to know something,” Christina said tentatively. “It wants to know who I am.”

  “I see. A serious dog, apparently. Are you high on that drug again?”

  “Anyway, you were saying…?”

  “I was saying that we have to start at the bottom. We can’t use the social media, with those goddamn posts and memes and chat rooms and subreddits and all that. They lead back to the NSA computers that will track us down and disable us. We gotta get to the phone zombies, the PZs, staring at their little screens. We’ve got to go out to places where the darkness is…darkest, like the Utopia Mall, and we have to drop our pamphlets out there, and, you know, create a stir that will spread out, you know, a contagion, and then we have to enlist people into our cause, and we—”

  “Ludlow, would you explain to me how come you know Timothy Brettigan? I mean, you know him, right? What’s he doing here?”

  “That’s for later.” He took a bite of his hamburger and commenced to chew thoughtfully, playing for time. “For right now, we have to get our message out, especially to those people who most need to hear it.” He was speaking as he chewed. “Those consumers. We have to make our way up the chain until we reach the President of the United States. We have to use our rage positively and not squander it in stupid, meaningless action like those fake revolutionaries in th
e 1960s and those creepy New Left people now with their stale academic neoMarxism and talk-you-to-death boring theories. Or like Occupy with their drum circles. All they do is chatter and argue. What did you tell the dog?”

  “What?”

  “Just now. You said the dog was asking you who you were.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Yes, you did. You said—”

  “Stop telling me what I said or didn’t say.”

  “Don’t be like that. Please.” Now his expression had changed, so that, with the light coming in through the window, he didn’t appear to be quite awake, in fact just barely conscious, and once again Christina had the unpleasant sensation that many of Ludlow’s sentences were practiced, pulled out of a bin of preconstructed sentiment, and as she was wondering why he had insisted on himself as an angel, an identity claim that no man—in her experience—had ever asserted for himself, a customer dressed in a blue parka entered, followed by the white dog. No one else in the restaurant seemed to notice the presence of the animal or to care. The dog trotted over to their table and sat down in the aisle, keeping its gaze fixed on Christina, who looked up in the direction of the server, who happened to be giving a menu to the customer in the blue parka, who had seated himself at the counter.

  “Somebody get this dog out of here,” Christina said. “Somebody should call the health department.”

  “What do you suppose it wants?” Ludlow asked.

  “Maybe it’s the restaurant owner’s dog. Maybe it lives here. Maybe it clears the tables.”

  “Why don’t you answer its question?” Ludlow suggested. “Why don’t you tell it who you are?”

  Paying no attention to the dog, the server came by and refilled their coffee cups. “Uh, miss?” Christina called out, as the waitress returned to the kitchen. The dog growled, as if it were growing impatient. All at once she heard hamburgers sizzling on the restaurant’s griddle as a dense cloud of greasy smoke and steam rose to the ceiling, and Ludlow leaned toward her, and something in the air or in the room or the sunlight made her skin prickle, as she felt herself lifted up, just as if she were about to give a speech. “I’m just so fucking sick of my life,” she began, “I mean, really sick of how meaningless it is, and I want to act and to be strong and to put my hand into the river, and I want change, real change, and I want to bring down the machines that are killing us. The way people are suffering has to end, and even though I’m nothing, just a dot on the landscape, I’ve got to become somebody who helps, you know? Because sometimes I feel that I’m not even here, that I’m already gone. Because really the only point is to change the course of history, and you have to have power to do that, and I know…I know that we have to make the right decisions, because the Earth depends on it, and we have to do what no one else has ever thought of doing. And I’m willing to give up my life for it.”

  What she had just said hadn’t made any actual sense in the real world, she knew. She felt herself turning red, shamed by the verbal garble she had just spoken. But it felt right and had made some kind of emotional sense, like an eloquent speech in a dream, and Ludlow had nodded.

  She breathed out. The dog had been gazing at her while she spoke, and when she was finished, it stood for a moment before bowing to her, lowering itself with its front legs extended and its chest and head resting on the floor, its rear end still in the air. Holding this posture for a few seconds and then straightening up and barking in agreement, it then turned and ran down the aisle between the tables toward the front of the restaurant, where it skidded before changing direction and racing back again in a kind of animal joy, a happiness so infectious that Christina thought she heard the sun itself laughing. Ludlow began laughing too, whereupon the dog altered its direction again and headed toward the counter, where the man in the blue parka tore off part of his hamburger and handed it down to the dog, now beginning to run in wild circles interrupted by its stops for handouts, everyone else in the restaurant dropping food down into the animal’s mouth until the dog’s running became so fast that it was almost a blur, an abstraction.

  “You know, these other people at the collective want us to shadow the Brettigans, Tim’s parents. There’s something about them that they want. Or need. I sorta remember that from the meeting.” It was all coming back to her.

  “Yes,” Ludlow said. “They told me. I know.”

  When the next customer came in, the dog pushed its way outside before the door closed completely and, full of new purpose, raced down the sidewalk away from where Christina could see it while Ludlow put his hand on her thigh and said, “You’re different now, aren’t you?” He leaned over and whispered in her ear. “I would kill for you,” he said. “And for the others, too. Believe me.”

  “I believe you,” she whispered and simultaneously thought: We’re going to become a couple, and we’re doomed.

  - 14 -

  Sitting on a barstool in the Hideaway Lounge as he waited for his friend Elijah, the pediatrician, to arrive, Brettigan felt the initial liftoff of early-stage inebriation. A genial, alcoholic warmth washed over him, beginning in his chest and radiating outward in all directions until he himself was a small friendly star shining in the night sky. Booze made you feel as if you were always welcome in a place where they were permanently happy to see you, and where, because they liked you without qualification, no mistakes were possible until later when the warmth departed, taking the good times with it.

  He nursed his second scotch and appraised the patrons behind him. They were visible in the huge mirror framed in mahogany on the north wall, and, watching their reflections, Brettigan thought they had the appearance of a painting by one of those American Ashcan School Realists—somebody like John Sloan, whose bartenders were little sources of luminescence in the taverns where the genteel drunks stood or reclined. In Sloan’s paintings, drunks just dissolved into the comforting background woodwork. Getting intoxicated was like that in those days. You slid right off the map into darkness, the little star that was you lighting the way.

  By contrast, these patrons, the ones who had just come in from the street, were shrill, triumphant capitalists full of themselves and their successes. They weren’t dissolving into anything. Alcohol just made them louder. The inaccurately named Hideaway had been filling up with them—division managers, project managers, low-level executives, and assorted lawyers and accountants—everybody fit and sleek from their workouts, and they were bellowing with earsplitting victory-laughter as they grasped their artisanal craft beers.

  What had happened to the low murmuring of alcoholic intimacy, the friendly mumbles of the guy sitting on the barstool next to yours whose wife had left him for a younger man? They were all extinct, that species, gone the way of the dodo. The quiet, sad bars of Brettigan’s youth, whose tables had been polished with the tears of the clientele, had been replaced with sports bars like this one, where the noise level resembled that of an ongoing ordnance blast. In these locales, everywhere you looked you saw a TV set depicting politicians or sports heroes, accompanied by commentary, under the din of surrounding real-time revelry.

  Brettigan set his gaze on the TV just above and to the left of the glass shelves; it had been tuned to a twenty-four-hour cable news outlet. The President of the United States, Amos Alonzo (“Coach”) Thorkelson, was on the screen, sitting on a chair in a charter school second-grade classroom and reading from Tommy the Runaway Truck to a collection of fidgety children who kept sneaking glances at the camera. Brettigan tried to hear what the president was saying. It was mostly unintelligible, but he could make out the general outlines. The truck, it seemed, had a mischievous streak, along with a parallel urge for freedom, and nothing, including speed limits, seemed capable of holding it back. Although its out-of-control behavior brought the Chief Executive to a high pitch of happy excitement as he read aloud, the children appeared to be frightened by the truck’s misconduct and President Thorkels
on’s delivery, which included spastic flapping movements of his right hand as he held the book aloft with his left. One child was sucking his thumb, and another, a little girl with pigtails, had put her hand over her mouth in a gesture of fear. Watching the screen, Brettigan realized that the truck’s impulse to go seventy miles an hour in residential neighborhoods and to plow through work zone barriers was meant to convey mechanical bravery, a pushing-the-envelope, out-of-the-box sort of thing. Even though the little truck slammed through a guardrail and tumbled down a hill at the story’s climax, rolling over several times, it landed right-side up, still smiling, and, a day later, was given a medal by the mayor of Paradise Valley for daring. Nobody arrested it or issued a citation for speeding. It was an über-truck and was maybe beyond good and evil. The End.

  Then President Thorkelson spoke up to editorialize on the story’s meaning. Brettigan still couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying, but the closed captioning at the bottom of the screen, all of it in capital letters, reported his words to the children. “ISN’T THAT AMAZING KIDS?” he was saying. “JUST AN INCREDIBLE TRUCK WHOSE FANTASTIC ATTITUDE CAN BE A WONDERFUL MODEL FOR BOYS AND GIRLS WHO WANT TO TRY OUT THEIR TERRIFIC COURAGE AND DON’T WANT TO EMULATE ALL THE OTHER FOLLOW THE LEADER WEAKER TRUCKS.”

  The president’s toupee was slightly off-center. “Weaker trucks?” Brettigan turned away and stared down at his drink. Why in God’s name had the doctor chosen this bar as a place to meet? Conversation would be impossible here, given all the background noise, which also included piped-in music that sounded like a health club aerobics class.

  After another few minutes, the front door opened, and the doctor waddled in and removed his overcoat, hanging it on a hook near the bar. Brettigan felt the autumnal chill from the street as Dr. Jones dusted off the barstool next to Brettigan’s and, with great deliberation, lowered his considerable weight onto it, simultaneously motioning at the bartender for his drink order. The doctor’s appearance and his unhurried motions were reassuring—he gave off an aroma of mellow fruitfulness, a scent of ripeness; and his wide face, benevolent and wise behind his tortoiseshell glasses, beamed at Brettigan as if Brettigan’s presence alone, his merely being there, brought him happiness.