The Sun Collective: A Novel Read online

  - 17 -

  “The usual, Harry?” the barber asked.

  “The usual.”

  The west wall of Franklin Avenue Barbers displayed a collage of variously colored male paraphernalia: a fishing net with several lures and rods and reels attached, and, behind the net, a picture of a speckled trout with an outraged expression, a hook in its mouth, leaping into the air. On the opposite mirror side, the wall facing the fish, there was—attached somehow with double-sided adhesive tape, next to the implements of haircutting and the jar of combs immersed in liquid green disinfectant—a collection of military patches prized by the barber, Elliott, who was, at this very moment, trimming Brettigan’s hair and passing on news, most of which was barbershop rumor concerning the neighborhood.

  Tuned to a classic rock station, a radio had been placed next to the cash register, the barbershop being a cash-only business, the last of its kind, and Brettigan couldn’t be sure that he had heard Elliott correctly over the tinny racket of the music. The barber seemed to be saying that the internet claimed there’d been trouble on the streets, but the trouble, Elliott said, had been invisible, and directed at what he called “invisible people.” “They’ve been disappearing,” Elliott said. “No one knows how. But”—he shrugged—“they don’t exist anyway. It’s just a story.”

  Meanwhile, in the next chair over, another man with thinning brown hair and a genial pockmarked face, who was being tended to by another barber whom Brettigan didn’t know, had started a loud monologue of sorts on the raising of children and homeownership. The man with thinning hair was saying that two years ago in late spring he had been up on a ladder, replacing the storm windows with screens. The storm windows, he said, were of the old-fashioned kind: rather heavy and difficult to hold on to, consisting of a wood frame and a large sheet of glass, but they were necessary to install for the winter months to protect the house from drafts. Besides, he had always taken considerable pride in completing householder tasks, the man asserted, because he possessed few handyman skills and could not repair plumbing or wiring problems; whenever he could do some practical chore, he did so with zest. Replacing the storm windows reinforced his masculine role in the family, so to speak, and would impress onlookers. His son, who was nine years old, had been standing at the foot of the ladder, holding it in place.

  It had been a hot day, the man with thinning hair said, sitting up straighter in his barber’s chair, one of those early-spring hot days, and the winter storm windows really had to be removed, and so he had placed the extension ladder—not a stepladder, which wouldn’t have gone high enough—in front of the house, close to the shrubbery, beneath the first front window he had to reach. If you leaned the ladder against the house, you could climb up and pull off the storm window from the hook-hinges that held it in place at the top. You pulled the window out at the bottom, grasped it on its sides, lifted it off the hooks, and climbed down the ladder with it.

  Everything had gone well with the removal of the first storm window, he said, but he hadn’t been able to get a good footing for the ladder beneath the second upstairs window, so when he climbed up, he could feel the ladder shaking with each step he took. The ladder this time was almost straight, hardly tilted against the house at all. So when he reached the upstairs window, he pulled and then lifted the storm window off its hook hinges at the top, as before, but more precariously.

  At that moment, after pulling the storm window out, he lost his balance and felt himself falling backward. He also realized that the window was falling with him, since he was still grasping it, and that he would land on the ground with the sheet of glass on top of him, and it would shatter all over him. But what was odd was that after the first moment of terror, he felt himself relax into it, into the act of falling, and as he fell he saw through the glass the sun and the sky, and though he feared falling on top of his son, he knew somehow that his son had moved away from the base of the ladder, and was safe.

  “It felt peaceful, that falling,” the man said, “one of the most peaceful moments of my life,” before adding that he hadn’t landed on the lawn, where he might have broken his back, but in the shrubbery, which had lessened the impact, even though the glass did indeed shatter all over him, but miraculously leaving very few cuts, nothing terribly serious, no stitches needed. What had upset him the most was not the broken glass, or the bruises left on his forehead from the window frame, but his son’s sudden hysterical crying, really closer to a scream, at the moment he landed.

  The other, funny thing about it, the man said, was that what upset him were not the cuts and the bruises or even his son’s loud outburst, but his failure in his role as the man of the house, in this case, being the man who performs a job incorrectly, incompetently, and dangerously, endangering his own son, and therefore appearing to be not so much the man of the house after all.

  The stories you heard in barbershops! Brettigan thought. You could be personal and anonymous here, and no one would care.

  * * *

  —

  With that, the man with thinning hair lapsed into silence. The only sounds in the barbershop were now emanating from the radio tuned to the classic rock station and from the electric shaver that Elliott was using on Brettigan’s hair. “Well, I don’t know,” the barber said quietly. Meanwhile, the man with thinning hair looked at himself in the mirror, his haircut having concluded, and he nodded, evidently pleased with the job. He rose from the other barber chair, the one closer to the door, paid for his haircut, and left.

  Brettigan began to feel drowsy, as he always did when his hair was being cut, but he felt that he needed information and that Elliott might be in possession of it. “Elliott,” he said, “have you ever heard of the Sandmen?”

  “The Sandmen? What makes you ask?” the barber said. Like Officer Lucas and Socrates, he answered questions with other questions.

  “There was a thing that happened in our neighborhood last night, this guy told me about these Sandman people. I’m not sure who they are.”

  The scissors behind Brettigan’s neck stopped moving. “Cops tell you anything?” the barber asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Nothing about the notes the Sandmen leave behind?”

  “No.” Ah: the notes again.

  “Well,” the barber said, “okay. What I’ve been hearing, and this is all secondhand, of course, just hearsay, is that the notes are statements. You know, like editorials. Why they’re doing it.”

  “What do they say?” Brettigan asked. “Are the police telling you anything?”

  “What do I know?” the barber asked. “I don’t know anything. You should go to the internet. That’s where the stories are. Not here.”

  Elliott stopped to examine the length of Brettigan’s hair.

  “You checked the internet about this?” Brettigan asked.

  “No,” the barber said. “Why should I? I just hear things that people tell me. These guys, they’re called the Sandmen because they got inspired by this novel, you know, Prometheus Unchained? By Sally Ann Surely? I understand that that’s her pen name. It’s got this hero, Ben What’s-his-name. They get their ideas from him.”

  “From that novel?” Brettigan asked.

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “No one reads novels.”

  “They read this one. And it’s like a thousand pages long. Okay, I think we’re done.” He gave Brettigan a hand mirror so that he could check out the haircut, and Brettigan nodded. The barber removed the cutting cape from around Brettigan, shook it out twice to remove the hair, and smiled. “So like I said, those are their ideas. They aren’t my ideas. I just cut hair, you know? That’ll be the usual seventeen dollars, Harry.”

  Brettigan handed Elliott a twenty, as he usually did, and, as usual, said, “Keep the change.”

  “Thanks,” the barber said, with an affable smile.

  * * *
/>   —

  Sally Ann Surely’s ideas had been spreading. Several members of President Thorkelson’s cabinet were members or former members of Sally Ann Surelyesque Rationalist Societies, as was the bodybuilder Speaker of the House of Representatives, “Little Bill” Hemble, who had once announced in an interview that the most influential book he’d ever read had been Prometheus Unchained, which had changed his life by presenting him with arguments on behalf of self-reliance and against self-sacrifice. Charity was a sin in this novel because it encouraged losers. Nothing was more sacred than a dollar. Brettigan suspected that Little Bill Hemble had probably never read Ralph Waldo Emerson, that tricky thinker who despised charity in most of its forms, but you could never be sure what anybody had read or left unread these days, President Thorkelson having a made a now-famous speech in which he cited “too much reading” as a form of trespassing compared to “looking into matters and places where you don’t belong.” He had proposed a forty-four percent tax on books, the same as on cigarettes.

  “Some things,” President Thorkelson had added with his trademark grin, “don’t bear very much looking into.”

  * * *

  —

  When Brettigan arrived home in the late afternoon, the dog and the cat greeted him in the foyer with uncommon enthusiasm, the dog lapping his tongue against his hand, and the cat, Behemoth, curling herself against his leg in a pantomime of cat sensuality. They were pretending to be affectionate as a mask for their disquiet; both of them looked worried about something that was going to happen.

  Brettigan smelled a meal being prepared in the kitchen—cinnamon and clove, which probably meant Indian cuisine—and he saw that the dining room table had been set for four. There would be surprise guests, though he knew who they’d be; the surprise was that Alma had invited them for this evening without consulting him. Pulling himself away from the two animals, and feeling for a moment as if he were falling backward off a ladder clutching a storm window that was also falling a few inches above and over him, Brettigan approached the kitchen, where Alma stood at the sink, peeling cucumbers. The late-afternoon sun was shining slantwise on the kitchen floor, creating an oddly chilly light.

  “The dog,” Brettigan said, “told me we’d be having guests tonight, people he says he doesn’t know.”

  She did not turn around. “Quite the chatterbox, isn’t he? Woland told you that?”

  “Yes. Was this occasion going to be a secret? This dinner?”

  “I explained to you that those two young people would be coming. I invited them. You just forgot. Like you forget everything.”

  “Oh, I remember: The Sun Collectivists.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Them. We need to have more friends, you and I. People whose ideas aren’t identical to ours.”

  “Ah.”

  Still she had not turned around. He had a good view of her back and of the knot tying her apron. “I think you’ll enjoy them. They’re people with principles. Anyway, I’ve met them and liked them. You haven’t.”

  “I’ve seen them. I just haven’t met them. And don’t worry about me. I always enjoy having strangers-with-ideas over for dinner,” Brettigan said. “It sharpens my wits. Just think of the excitement of trying to find common areas of interest when you’re conversing with principled strangers, people you know nothing about but are forced by circumstance to admire. Nothing better in life. Nothing better than a cozy, sociable evening with prospective friends. We can ask them about their ideals.”

  “ ‘Sociable.’ Haven’t heard that word in a long time. Where’d you dredge that word up from? Your crossword puzzles? Harry, don’t be like that. Are you going to be like that?”

  “Like what?”

  Now she turned around to face him, the peeler clutched in her right hand. “Oh, you know, making clever mean remarks, using words nobody’s heard of, editorializing on what everybody else is saying from your great Olympian height. Like a Brit in the House of Lords, or someone.”

  “My height isn’t so Olympian as all that,” he said. “More like the height of, I don’t know, an outhouse.”

  “Harry,” she said. “Please be nice. Put a limit on the irony. Do try to make a social effort with these kids, all right? For me, please? If you love me, you’ll do this for me.”

  “What are their names, again? You know how I always forget names.”

  “Hers is Christina,” she said. “And his is Ludlow. They’re revolutionists.”

  “Yes, I got that part. So I should expect some speechifying. And I can assume that they’re a couple?”

  “Sure. I mean, who can assume anything about anybody these days? I like your haircut, by the way.”

  “Thanks. Actually, you should thank the barber. He was very talkative today.”

  “About what?”

  “About the internet rumors. The campaign to eliminate the homeless by, you know, killing them off.”

  “Oh, that. Another everyday atrocity we have to take in our stride.”

  “How do you know about it?” he asked. “I thought it was a secret.”

  “You’re so senile. You told me about them, remember? Now you go upstairs and shave. Make yourself presentable. I’ll be up in a few minutes. Okay? Get on with it.”

  He turned and trudged up to their bedroom, followed by the dog and the cat, both of whom appeared to be shadowing him and studying him. On the landing, he glanced at the photograph of Timothy in which the boy, wearing his high school graduation robe, was smiling and frowning simultaneously as he watched some activity outside the frame. A smile and a frown: Timothy had always been adept at projecting compounded and contradictory emotions: he could be the very picture of amused despair, bored joy, excitable lassitude, and—his real specialty—restless calm. He typically gave the impression of someone who wanted to be somewhere else even when he seemed to be perfectly happy right here. With Timothy, the compass was always pointing in two directions at once. No wonder he was such a good actor. With consummate tact, he kept you from knowing what he really felt or thought whenever he was being torn in opposite directions and didn’t want to trouble you with his own suffering.

  And the picture of Virginia, their beautiful daughter. Older than Timothy, and always, from his birth onward, in his shadow.

  As the dog watched sympathetically, Brettigan felt the tears threatening and wiped his eyes with his shirtsleeve. Indifferent, the cat glanced away. Brettigan felt the necessity to compose himself. In two hours, when the guests would be here, he would have to serve up a façade of hospitality. Maybe he wasn’t so different from his son after all. Anyway, now he had to clean himself up.

  - 18 -

  Sometimes while shaving, Brettigan saw his father’s face returning his gaze in the mirror. There he was, his old man who’d died young, encased inside the glass and gazing out with the wry paternal skepticism that fathers sometimes bestow on their sons. Older friends of the family who had known Brettigan’s father said that Brettigan looked—uncannily, alarmingly—like his dad: similar facial expressions and hairline, same blue eyes: uncanny, they said. Brettigan’s father, an insurance salesman, had died when his son was a few months old, and even now Brettigan missed him in the way that you could miss a place you’ve heard about, such as Madagascar, without ever having been there. Brettigan didn’t believe in an afterlife but hoped if there was one that he’d have a chance to have a conversation with his father, an odd prospect, since Brettigan was now thirty years older than his father had ever been. He was his father’s elder.

  If you met people in the afterlife, how old would they be? No one had ever satisfactorily answered this important question.

  He wanted to ask his father’s ghost certain questions about revolution. The ghost would have opinions. Minneapolis had once been a hotbed of progressivist politics, an outpost of Trotskyists, full of radical socialist ferment that had left an almost invi
sible collective memory in the city’s psyche, as had another faction, corporate defenders of the status quo, the “Citizens Alliance,” so-called.

  What had it been like to see open warfare in the streets of this midwestern city during the Minneapolis General Strike in 1934? To have witnessed the melee when police and hired thugs wounded sixty-seven strikers and killed two of them? To have had a socialist governor in Minnesota, Floyd Bjørnstjerne Olson, who had grown up among Jews in North Minneapolis and who spoke fluent Yiddish when conversing with them and campaigning in their neighborhoods, a man who had had to call up the National Guard to restore calm? Olson had once said, “I am not a liberal. I am what I want to be—a radical.”

  The downtown battles in 1934 were pure class warfare out in the open, when workers fought managers over political principles. Brettigan felt that he was entering another such world, beginning with this evening’s dinner party, but without instruction or guidance from anyone about who the combatants would be and how their battles would be staged. And none of it would be out in the open. Insurrection was invisible now.

  Returning home during his freshman year from college at the Christmas break, Brettigan had come in through the front door after having taken a taxi from the airport, and his mother, startled, had looked up from her chair and said, “Oh, hi. It’s you. Welcome, weary traveler. Take off your coat and stay awhile.” And then she displayed her characteristic forced grin, which showed her lipstick-stained teeth. Still in her chair, she picked up her newspaper to resume her reading.

  The stepchild syndrome, the superfluous offspring: it occurred to him that most revolutionaries probably had backgrounds similar to his.

  Really, if the only problem was that he was not welcome anywhere or by anyone, then he was still given permission to live. He was permitted to eat, and to sleep, and to work. But then, half a century ago, there came the day when Alma had said to him after a bout of soul-stirring lovemaking in his dorm room that she loved him and then touched his face tenderly as tactile proof. They were both naked and sweaty. Of course, her claim seemed implausible, quite possibly a con, and it wasn’t until several months later, after she had repeated the claim of her love for him so often and had touched him so often and so sensuously that her love had become a joke in the face of his disbelief, that he felt she meant it, after all. It was as if he had successfully robbed a well-protected and thoroughly alarmed bank that contained love instead of money. He could not resist loving her in return; every minute he was not with her seemed like wasted time.