The Sun Collective: A Novel Read online

  “Darling,” Brettigan said, obviously shaken, “please don’t do that again.”

  “You could test me,” Alma said, “just by going over to the piano and playing that A, the A above the staff. You’ll see how accurate I was.”

  “No,” Brettigan said. “I don’t think so. Do you want another drink?” he asked Ludlow and Christina, as he stood up. Having apparently forgotten what he had just said, he walked over to the baby grand piano and lightly touched the A above the staff, and when he did, Alma nodded in triumph.

  “You see?” she said. “That was the note. I hit it, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, please, another drink,” Christina nodded, before closing her eyes. “God,” she said, “there’s really something to be said for bourgeois life. Right now, I feel so…entitled.”

  “Me too,” Ludlow said, holding up his martini glass. “Privileged.” He smiled. “The thing I always forget about parties is that all the drinks and the food are free, just like you said.”

  “Dinner will be served in a momento,” Alma told them, as she rose and smoothed down her apron, “in a few minutes, and, yes, it’s free. No charge.” Brettigan had taken their glasses into the next room and was busily refilling them. Everybody including himself was getting a little tipsy. “Ludlow,” she said, turning to the boy, “I hope you won’t mind if I ask you a few questions about something you said earlier. You were talking about a termite revolution. I don’t think I understand what you mean. Am I a termite? And I really do want to understand. I think we’re all trying to figure out how to live, what to do. Could you help us out?”

  “Yes,” Brettigan said from the other room. “Because we’ve been thinking about the internet stories, about the Sandmen, those goons who go around beating up the homeless, you know?”

  “The Sandmen?” Ludlow asked. “Well, it doesn’t matter. Besides, yes, I can tell you how I came to it. Because, here’s the thing: what the Sun Collective is all about is imagining a future. We’re not a religion because we’re not praying to anything and because we don’t want an apocalypse and the end of the world and all that. We want love and respect and kindness. And the thing about termites, about us, is that we’re all the people who have been invisible to everybody else, all the submerged populations, and we’re not just what Marx and everybody else called the ‘proletariat,’ because this isn’t just an economic revolution of workers, doing factory jobs et cetera, because there aren’t enough of those characters anymore, it’s something else, it…”

  “Yes,” Brettigan said, coming into the room with more drinks. “What is it?”

  Ludlow sat quietly, apparently thinking about what he would say. Brettigan handed Ludlow his second martini and noticed that the boy seemed to be both perplexed and slightly bedraggled by alcohol. He had the appearance of a loquacious character in Dostoyevsky who might fall off the chair and land on the floor, where he would have a seizure. Christina’s hand had dropped back again onto Ludlow’s thigh, seeming to take up residence there a few inches from his genitals, and she opened her mouth as if to help her boyfriend through this difficult logical puzzle, at which point he gazed toward the ceiling, and, following his own upward trajectory, stood, though for no particular reason. Christina’s hand fell off his leg back into her lap.

  “Termites,” he said, “eat out the house from the inside. They don’t knock it down. They undermine it. I mean, read our manifesto. We…”

  “I have,” Brettigan said, having sat down again. “I have read it. You believe in a more loving future, sharing everything you have communally, not wasting the world’s resources, getting rid of ideologies. You’re like the early Christian ascetics.”

  “No, we aren’t,” Ludlow said a bit too loudly, from where he was standing. A fly flew over to his arm, and he irritably swatted it away. Alma had retreated to the kitchen, and Brettigan could hear her putting the dishes on the table. Eventually this evening would come to an end. “They thought the world was apocalyptoid. They believed that the Kingdom of God was somewhere else. We think it’s here, now.”

  “Oh, okay,” Brettigan said, nodding. “I get it. What about the microviolence? The microviolence in the manifesto?”

  “I’ll get to that,” Ludlow told him. “Christina? Uh, Chris?” Christina appeared to be thinking or had fallen asleep: her eyes were closed, and she had leaned back against the sofa’s cushions, giving the impression that she didn’t like the direction the conversation had taken and would sleep through it until the talk arrived at a topic of her liking. “She’s dozing,” Ludlow said. “She doesn’t like it when I talk about politics. She’s talking on the Blue Telephone.”

  “I’m not asleep,” Christina said, her eyes still closed, her head tilted back. “I’m completely aware of everything that goes on. I can see through my eyelids. You know, like a lizard? In fact, I know exactly what’s going to happen. I’m right here in the future. You’re going to tell the story of the guy whose life you saved, and when we get to the table, Alma is going to tell a story, too. You see? The Blue Telephone keeps me up-to-date on everything and has a call-in to what’s about to happen.” She smiled, showing her front teeth, though her eyes were still closed. Brettigan flinched slightly at the sight of her eyes-shut smile. When she did it, she was both beautiful and homely.

  “The blue telephone?” Brettigan asked, suddenly curious.

  “Don’t ask,” Ludlow said. “It’s a pill.”

  “It’s more than a pill,” Christina asserted. “I can assure you.” She waited. “It’s a way of life. It bends time and space.”

  “Dinner is served,” Alma called from the dining room. “Come and get it.”

  As Brettigan herded the young couple toward the dining room, the sight of Ludlow and Christina together, along with the talk of the drug, produced a time-machine effect that transported him momentarily to a small farm in Wisconsin where he’d once lived for two months in a rural commune after graduation from Holbein College and before he’d entered graduate school. During that time, he’d been separated from Alma, who was then working in the Minneapolis Central Library. The two of them, Ludlow and Christina, were replicas of youngsters produced by that period, the late 1960s, weighed down with idealism and revolutionary intent and powerful illicit drugs, and he wondered, as the faint breeze from the past blew across his face, whether Christina and Ludlow were two contemporaneous incarnations of Alma and himself.

  * * *

  —

  Standing there, he remembered the churring locusts announcing the late-summer heat and invisibly clinging to the trees, as he remembered the telephone poles with their sagging wires leading away from the farm and following the county road down to the horizon flatly untroubled by hills. A tame crow whom they had named Bucky hung around the barn. Wind preceding a thunderstorm knocked the roof off the toolshed, and a bolt of lightning electrocuted the commune’s mascot, Nelly, a goat. At times the place seemed under a curse. The farm spread itself out on just over one hundred acres, hardly enough for sustainability, and only one of its members (the one who’d grown up in Iowa) actually knew how to plant, cultivate and harvest, pack and sell the fruits and vegetables they grew. Their only real source of steady income was the U-Pick apple orchard alongside the driveway. In August, their car wouldn’t start, and they couldn’t afford to buy a new battery for it. They didn’t know how they would get through the winter. Day after day, as the commune members grew poorer and more quarrelsome and sicker and hungrier, Brettigan watched the disappearance of their good intentions until, near the end of his stay, the beauty of their ideals, which had given them all an initial shine of attractiveness and energy and humor, turned to bad-tempered, moody despairs: no one was sleeping with anyone else; sex had become inconceivable, as had square meals; conversation had given way to remarks; and even the commune’s dog, Lila, had run away.

  He remembered their names: Opal, Sarah, and a girl who had onc
e been Barbara but had renamed herself SkyAir; and Big Mike, Little Mike, and Ben, a former philosophy major who rarely spoke. Brettigan himself was not a charter commune member, just a visitor who had been tolerated because he was willing to work on their plumbing and wiring and had brought some money with him (he had befriended Little Mike at summer camp when they’d both been counselors a few years earlier). When Brettigan left, no one had bothered to say goodbye. He felt like a defector. He had had his first lesson in loving what people were trying to do without being able to love them as individuals.

  And yet there had been moments now and then in the late afternoons and early evenings when he had finished his day’s work and rested on the front porch’s swing, and a peacefulness took him over, a calm spiritual ease that he had rarely, if ever, felt before in his life. A physical sensation, it began in his chest and moved outward. The churring of the locusts was like the pumping of blood through his veins and arteries. Somehow he knew that his heart brought him life and was a tree itself with roots and branches. No tasks pressed upon him; he had worked so hard all day that his face and hands were gritty with the evidence of his labor. All he had to do now was watch the red-winged blackbirds flying toward reeds surrounding the little pond out in back or listen to the sparrows under the eaves. In front of the house, the driveway, gray in dry weather and patched black with dirt after rain, went out to the county road, where the telephone poles traveled off lackadaisically toward the west horizon, and Brettigan thought that if he’d been a painter, he would have painted that driveway, making it beautiful, desolate, and calm, and he would put the telephone poles in the background as a reminder of distances. He would paint the peacefulness he felt. He understood the joy of inactivity. On that porch, Brettigan sat in the late afternoons with his glass of sun tea, his mind empty of anxious thought, and when the sparrows, who were used to him, flew down onto the edge of the porch, he would reach into his pocket for bread crumbs and toss them down. He was so inwardly calm, he was like St. Francis, and the birds knew it as they approached him.

  In those moments, he felt the peace that passes all human understanding, and he thought: This is what everybody wants. The Kingdom of God is on Earth.

  * * *

  —

  “It’s curry,” Alma said, seating Ludlow and Christina across from each other, and Brettigan and herself at the two ends of the table. The guests sat and appeared to be surprised by the place settings, the candles at the table’s center, the matching forks, knives, and spoons, and the folded cloth napkins, as if all this propriety were some kind of exhibit at a trade show.

  “This is so pretty,” Christina said, still with her eyes half-closed. “Where did you get all this?” she asked, apparently referring to the plates and the silverware.

  “Wedding presents. And at the store,” Brettigan said, lowering himself into his chair at the head of the table. “The store where they sell these appurtenances.”

  Christina nodded, while Alma flashed a don’t-be-like-that and don’t-say-those-words expression at her husband as she served the guests. “I hope you like curry,” Alma said. “There’s saffron rice and chutney and bread. And couscous. I used to serve this meal to guests—I suppose it’s my travelogue meal.”

  “Were you ever in India?” Ludlow asked.

  “No.”

  “Then how’d you learn to cook this?”

  “Cookbooks and practice. And somebody showing me.”

  “Because it’s really good,” Ludlow told her, his mouth full, spraying several grains of rice down toward the saltshaker, the boy having started the meal before everyone else had been served. Brettigan watched with mingled admiration and horror as Ludlow daintily picked up two of the grains of rice from the now-stained tablecloth and popped them back in his mouth. Across from him, Christina seemed to be watching her boyfriend through those same half-closed eyelids; she gave off, Brettigan thought, an odd aura of timelessness and immobility. When he turned back to Ludlow, he saw his dinner guest wolfing down the chicken and rice and papadums like an orphan who was desperate to eat before anyone nearby snatched the food away from his plate. The young man’s hunger had entirely eclipsed his good manners and deactivated his personality altogether. He ate like a peasant.

  “So somebody showed you to do this?” Christina asked her. “Um, sorry. I meant anybody ever show you how to do this?” She giggled. “When I have a drink, sometimes I get confused. I know what I mean, but not everyone else does.” Her speech subsided into a half-muttered whimper.

  “Well,” Alma said, “I can tell you in a minute, but, speaking of drinks, do you want anything more? The bar’s still open.”

  Both Ludlow and Christina shook their heads slowly, and Brettigan noticed that his wife was relaxing into a storytelling mood that was expansive and rare for her, possibly from the effects of the alcohol that she had already consumed.

  “When I was a young woman, right around the time I met him,” Alma said, pointing toward Brettigan, “I had another friend, this guy whose parents had been diplomats. He’d been all over the world. India, Pakistan, Tunisia, Morocco. The hot-weather countries. He loved them, he loved the people. He loved heat. Loved to sweat, made him feel alive. He went to their schools, this child of diplomats, and made himself a polyglot. Everywhere he’d been, he learned the language first, and then how to cook the local cuisine—curries and kebabs and merguez, asida and couscous. He was the first man I ever knew who could prepare food in a tagine, the first non-Arabic person I ever knew who could speak Arabic. He had a smattering of Hindi, too. He spoke so eloquently, even the pleasantries, in any language. He’d invite me over to his little apartment, and you could smell the spices from the sidewalk, kind of exotic for Minnesota, and then going up the stairs, you’d just be moonstruck by all the aromas he had cooked up and concocted. When you saw him in person, he was just beclouded…enveloped in those delicious…smells. He was almost succulent. You can’t say that about a lot of men.”

  “He was never her boyfriend,” Brettigan said.

  “He was never my boyfriend,” Alma affirmed, with a nod, “because by this time, he was”—pointing at her husband—“even though he was off at that commune in Wisconsin, and besides, the guy, this world traveler I’m talking about, had an attraction to me that was always kind of abstract and conceptual. It wasn’t really physical. At that age, a woman wants a man who’s a little bull with a ring through his nose who wants all of you, the whole package, all the time, and this guy, the tagine guy, wasn’t like that. He was always one step away from you, just a little remote and ironic and removed and displaced. You know: adrift. I didn’t like that. I had reservations about him as a man.”

  “Maybe his world travels had created that effect,” Brettigan said.

  “Yes, maybe his world travels had done that,” Alma continued, “but you could never tell with him. Still, I…” She couldn’t quite finish the sentence.

  “You loved him, a little,” Brettigan said, once again finishing her sentence for her, the words emerging like stones.

  “I loved him a little. He would invite me over, and he would cook a wonderful dinner for me, dishes and preparations that were new to me, and in return, I would sing to him. Well, you know. That was the price I paid: singing. You pay the piper with a meal, a meal that’s come straight to the dinner table from North Africa, well then, the piper plays for you. Among the languages he happened to speak was German. So I sang and played German songs to him, at the piano he had, this old broken-down spinet. ‘Erlkönig,’ songs like that. We were very high-toned in those days. German art songs. We were sick with culture, having gorged on it in college. Nothing but the best.”

  “ ‘Mein Vater, mein Vater,’ ” Brettigan said, quoting Goethe’s poem, ‘und hörest du nicht—’ ”

  “Oh, stop. This isn’t school, but, yes, correct, that’s the one.” Alma nodded irritably again at her husband down at the othe
r end of the table. Her two guests were now looking carefully at her. The story she was telling seemed to be treading down a weedy, overgrown path, with marital land mines nearby. Something, very subtly, was going wrong. “You have to forgive my husband. He likes to show off his German.”

  Brettigan kept his eyes on his plate. He had stopped eating by now.

  “Well,” said Alma. “The years passed, the calendar pages fell from the wall.” She took a forkful of curried chicken, held it up to examine it, then put it down. “And I forgot about him, that boy who smelled of spices, though sometimes I would read about him in the college alumni magazine, one diplomatic posting after another, because, as time passed, he himself went to work for the State Department. Like his father, he’d gone into the diplomatic corps and had been sent to Egypt, stationed in Cairo, I think. Then countries in North Africa: years in Morocco with side trips now and then to Algeria. Did he also speak French? I don’t remember.”

  “He did not speak French,” Brettigan said, still studying his dinner plate. “That was a language that he did not speak. Odd, for a diplomat.”

  The room, despite their voices, seemed to have gone quite silent. “No, you’re wrong. I think he did. And so the years passed,” Alma continued, “and one day I received an email from him—oh, forgive me, I haven’t told you his name, let’s call him Stepan, Stepan-the-diplomat, and the email informs me that he’s going to be in town for a meeting of former foreign service employees, though why these retirees would meet here in Minneapolis was a mystery then and now, but anyway they were going to gather together in one of the big hotels here, and he wondered if he could stop by on one of those days when he didn’t have a meeting, catch up on old times, which caused me a bit of…puzzlement, because I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, and I didn’t actually feel that we shared old times, all we had had was a passing acquaintance that involved cooking and singing, nor was I inclined to tell him about my life if that talk was going to include conversation about family. About children.”