The Sun Collective: A Novel Read online

  “Is he all right? Coping?”

  “Oh, sure. Mom, I gotta go. I’ve got an appointment in five minutes with a Dalmatian who’s got a broken leg. Anyhow, Tim’s a survivor. He’ll show up on your doorstep one of these days, no kidding, bright and cheerful, safe and sound. He will. You can kill the famous fatted calf when that happens, I promise. He says he’s been researching life.”

  “Researching life? He’s not in trouble?”

  “Oh, no. No more than you are. No more than me. He’s just adventuring, going places, doing things. I’m glad you’re okay, Mom. I was a tad worried. Listen, I’ve sent Daddy a birthday present, and I’ll call him on his birthday, okay? I love you, Mommy.”

  “And I love you, Ginny.”

  With the call ended, Alma collected herself, stood up, and headed into the mall from the train platform. When in the past had Virginia ever told her that Timothy was “adventuring” around the country, or wherever he was, as she claimed? Alma had the abrupt sensation—it wasn’t a thought so much as a feeling—that her son was everywhere and nowhere on the planet, and he might be, at this very moment, observing her in a scientific study whose purpose was to profile the behavior of mothers who had lost or misplaced their adult sons and daughters.

  Or maybe she was being told important information and was forgetting it, day after day. The thought made her shiver inwardly.

  Rising on the escalator into the first-floor shopping area, she observed the other consumers headed in the same direction as her own, and she noted how, once they reached the top of the moving stairway, they hurried off unsteadily, already intoxicated with a longing to acquire something that they didn’t yet have or hadn’t even known existed until they would see it for the first time, at which point they would desire it. For them the Utopia Mall was a carnival of consumable wonders. It just took you away, made you forget yourself. The shoppers were obeying an instinct, like insects eating their way through a leaf. Ahead of her, an obese ponytailed woman in sweatpants and a T-shirt, holding hands with her daughter, waddled off in the direction of a department store. On the back of the T-shirt were the words

  It’s not just

  For breakfast

  Anymore

  I shouldn’t be such a snob, Alma thought, straightening up and dusting herself off, catching a few hairs from Woland and Behemoth in between her fingers. I’m no better than anyone else here, she said to herself. I’m as off-kilter as they are.

  She passed an audio store, Unbound Sound, in whose window was a statue of Prometheus, wearing headphones. Inside, someone was playing a recording of Stravinsky’s Firebird, the sad parts. Ahead of her, near a corner of the mall, was some sort of commotion: in the middle of the walkway, a wild-eyed man with a widow’s peak was shouting with lunatic conviction and ferocity about Death Squads. What Death Squads? They’ve started the killing, he was saying, they’ve started on vagrants and street people, and they’ve got an agenda set by the Eclipse Global Group, which hired people called the Sandmen, and they’re planning to liquidate the rest of the poverts, all of them, using gangs of robots and drones. It’s a War on Poverty where they actually kill the poor! but at that moment three security guards arrived on the scene and hauled the bearded man away, advancing through an exit door that Alma hadn’t realized was there. The wall had opened to a secret passageway and absorbed all four of them before closing and becoming a wall again. As soon as the door shut behind them, the shouting stopped, and the mall’s customary bustle, its casino tumult, resumed.

  Alma’s legs took her into a store, Shirtz-and-Shooz!, where the salesclerk led her toward a selection of what she remembered had once been called, in another era, “dry goods.” Collared shirts in joyful colors were lined up on a counter in soldierly array. Still feeling slightly dazed, she asked the clerk, a young man with a disarmingly angelic face with one perfectly placed dimple, whether he had heard the man outside shouting and speechifying.

  “No, ma’am,” he said, shaking his head and chuckling. “They don’t let them do that here. It’s illegal.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You can’t do that here,” he repeated. “Public speaking. Editorializing. They put a stop to it in no time flat.”

  “Put a stop to what?”

  “Free speech. This is private property. You try to speak up, they’ll take you away, never to return. You have a thing to say, you gotta go somewhere else to say it, like in the middle of the highway or the street corner on your soapbox. Now here’s a nice shirt,” he said, holding up one with a pattern of vertical lines. “What’d you say your husband’s size was?”

  “Fifteen and a half, thirty-three,” Alma said, the words coming out of her mouth automatically. The angel-clerk nodded. The day seemed to be made up of one tectonic earthquake after another, and the angel seemed to be conscious of it all and able somehow to live with the tremors and the shivering beneath his feet. Well, some people could tolerate poison by taking little doses of it day after day, increasing the dosage until they had an immunity. Then Alma was clutching a patterned shirt and paying for it at the counter with her credit card. Following her purchase, which was nestled in a Shirtz-and- Shooz! carrying bag, she drifted on automatic pilot back to the light rail, where she took a seat before the doors chimed shut.

  A man wearing a trilby hat walked down the aisle toward her. He was conventionally well-dressed in a three-piece suit, and he carried a pointed umbrella with a carved mallard’s head for a handle. He had the appearance of someone on a stage, a character actor. He wore glasses, but some property in the lenses concealed his eyes behind them, giving him the appearance of a well-tailored rabbit. Or maybe a bug: Alma couldn’t decide. After sitting down on the other side of the aisle from Alma, lifting up the crease in his trousers in an old-fashioned gesture, he settled himself and blew his nose with a handkerchief that had popped up spontaneously from the pocket of his sport coat. He nodded in her direction as if to confirm that they were two of a kind, recognizable people-of-quality and identifiable as such to each other. He then lightly doffed his hat to her before gazing down at her shopping bag. The duck’s head umbrella was propped up to his right and angled so that the duck was looking at Alma.

  “I see,” he said, in a light southern accent, in its gentility very different from Ginny’s broad drawl, “that you have made certain purchases.” He smiled companionably.

  Alma nodded. “A shirt,” she volunteered. “For my husband.”

  “And what, if I may be so bold as to ask, would be the occasion of this particular gift?”

  “It’s his birthday. Two days from now.”

  “Aha.” The man nodded agreeably. “What I have always liked about birthdays,” the man said, “is not the acknowledgment of aging but the validation of the wish, any wish at all, prior to the blowing out of the candles. Every wish is an investment in the future. As we all know, the person whose birthday it is can extinguish the candles on the cake and make a wish. But these conditions are not the most propitious ones to make a wish come true. There are other, much more powerful means.” He paused for effect. “They are not well known,” he confided to her in a near whisper.

  Oh, God, he’s going to be one of those types, thought Alma, those talkative characters you run into on buses and airplanes and passenger trains, those people with demonic agendas, and theories and conspiracies expressed in a cloud of terrible, toxic bad breath reeking of wine and the despairs.

  “Well,” Alma asked, as the train’s doors closed, “what conditions are you thinking of? How does a person make a wish come true?”

  “It pleases me that you have asked me that question,” the man said, reaching into the other sport coat pocket and withdrawing a business card from it, which he then passed across the aisle to Alma, who, at the moment she grasped the card, felt a headache like a bolt of vertical lightning instantly streak through her brain before it vanished as qui
ckly as it had appeared.

  DR. ARVER L. JEFFERSON, M.D.

  PSYCHOANALYTIC AND

  ASSOCIATED THERAPIES

  Member: Midwest Institute of Proton-Analytics

  “What are proton-analytics?” Alma asked. “I’ve never heard of them.”

  “Very few people know how to make a wish come true,” the doctor informed her confidently, “unless they convert the wish into a prayer, but I am happy to pass on the secret to you as long as you are willing to believe in me.”

  “Believe you?”

  “Believe in me,” the doctor corrected her.

  “Like Jesus? All right. Sure.”

  “Here is what you do,” the doctor said, growing suddenly agitated and sitting up straight. “First, you must shut off the clocks and cover the mirrors in your house with clean cloth. Recently washed bedsheets will work perfectly well as long as they camouflage the images. And then—and this is the hard part—you must cut off two of your eyelashes with a pair of small scissors, just so, and place those two eyelashes on the back of your hand, and when eleven minutes past eleven in the morning comes—and you will have to make a good guess about the time, because your clocks will be stopped—you must make your wish. I give you my personal guarantee that this technique will work. There is literature to this effect among my people. It is proven. It is so.”

  “Well,” Alma said, “I imagine there’s no harm in trying.”

  “Indeed not,” the doctor affirmed. “The wishes that we make for others are the most effective ones of all the major types. A wish in that form constitutes a prayer to the all-powerful and all-consuming power of love, which coils within the membrane that interfuses all things and provides us with the spark of divinity. I pledge this truth. Now can you tell me,” the doctor asked, “what form such a prayer will take? What is your wish?”

  “I thought a person wasn’t supposed reveal that.”

  “You can tell me.” He smiled at her. “After all, I’m a doctor.”

  “All right,” said Alma, suddenly emboldened. “I want everyone I love to be safe.”

  The doctor settled back in his seat. “That is exemplary,” he said, “though it is slightly conventional.” With his right hand on the umbrella, he thrust his arm forward twice, giving the impression that the duck was nodding in agreement. “I don’t suppose one can expect originality when it comes to wishes. All the same, yours has the virtue of being honorable.”

  “Who cares if it’s honorable?” Alma said. “All I want is for all the people I love to be safe and to be cared for, and I’d wish that for everybody, even though I’m quite aware that that’s too much for any one person to ask.” She closed her eyes and began to weep quietly and unobtrusively. “I want everyone I love to be safe,” she blubbered. Outside, the landscape passed in a descending rattle of click-clacks from the rails underneath the train. Now they had stopped at the Veterans Administration hospital. A bearded Iraqi War veteran on crutches hobbled out of the train car. It had been one of the most upsetting days of her life. Dear God, where was her son Timothy on this Earth? And why was he hiding from her? The wooden mallard leaned down to watch her tears fall.

  - 20 -

  Lying in bed on the morning of her husband’s birthday, which had dawned with a racket of song sparrows warbling outside the bedroom window, Alma watched the ceiling fan rotating slowly, and she remembered the evening a few weeks ago when she had flipped on the light switch and had seen a bat circling the fan’s moving wooden blades. Feeling no particular alarm, she had shut the bedroom door, opened a window, popped the screen, and left the room, hoping that the poor winged creature, the Fledermaus, would depart through the window into the night, which it eventually did. In the meantime, the opportunistic mosquitoes had flown in and for the next few hours had buzzed her ears while she was trying to sleep, her husband tossing back and forth restlessly beside her. She’d never been frightened of bats or mice, but she had a deep, intractable fear of spiders that a reading of Charlotte’s Web years ago to her children had done nothing to diminish. You couldn’t choose your fears, after all.

  Once at the outdoor courtyard of a museum in Arkansas, she’d seen a Louise Bourgeois sculpture, Maman, representing a giant spider thirty feet high, with tennis-ball-size eggs held in an ovular cage underneath her, the most frightening artwork she’d ever seen in her life.

  Her husband, lying next to her and pretending to sleep, did not like elevators and as a young man would climb up several flights of stairs rather than get on one. The dog hid under the bed during thunderstorms. The cat, like many of its kind, was aquaphobic. Virginia hated to fly on airplanes and usually drank several martinis before she had to go anywhere. She’d show up at the baggage claim area tottering back and forth as she peered at the suitcases with a drunken smirk. “A successful flight,” she would say, “is one that does not crash.”

  Only Timothy had no fears. As a boy he’d climb any tree, talk to any stranger, ride any vehicle, skateboard down any incline and try any jump, and throw himself in front of anything powerful, animate or inanimate, that got in his way. He had advanced rapidly in the martial arts, particularly tae kwon do. He was fierce and loved fighting. Once, visiting the Pacific Ocean with his parents, he had thrown himself at the waves as the waves, in turn, threw him down. Again and again, he would stand, half-drowned and happy, like an adolescent sea god, and rush back into the surf. If you had a brave son, you had to do all the worrying for him.

  Now in bed under the rumpled covers, Alma turned toward her husband, the birthday boy. Filtered by the venetian blinds, the sun threw thin strips of parallel light onto the rumpled bedsheets, and the morning light rose, ladderlike, into dust-flecked air. Today, probably before either of them rose out of the bed, the two of them still in their pajamas, she would have to tell him that Virginia had been getting postcards and phone calls from Timothy. The postcards signified that Timothy was okay, maybe even thriving. He just wasn’t anywhere in particular. For them, he wasn’t locatable. He had chosen to be nowhere to them.

  His absence from their lives had a quality, Alma thought, of simmering rage that children sometimes felt toward their parents when a grievance couldn’t be spoken aloud or even described. But what was the grievance? Despite his fearlessness, or because of it, he’d always been a fierce, agreeable boy. But somewhere down in the depths of his soul, he harbored a certain homegrown, undifferentiated rage. That must be it.

  Now, in bed, with a chickadee singing outside—phee bee, phee bee—each time sounding out the descent of a minor third in notes way up there above the staff, Alma flinched involuntarily, thinking of her own carefully planned cruelties as a young woman. Her misbehavior had been decades ago, and she still flinched. That’s very odd, she thought. Well, everybody’s past was often dark with malice and error, and in youth those feelings are usually directed at the nearest target, the parents.

  So what had she and her husband ever done to Tim to make him invisiblate himself?

  Her husband tossed on his side of the bed. What time was it? A few minutes before seven. “Are you awake?” she asked him softly.

  It was a trick question. Without turning or opening his eyes, he said, “I’m always awake. You know that. I never sleep.” His eyes shut, he rolled over to face her and put his familiar hand on her shoulder almost as if the move were involuntary, done without thinking. He gave off the scent of the dreams he’d been having: she knew him so well, she could almost enter his dreams as a tour guide. One of his persistent delusions was that he had a murderer’s psyche. She had told him many times that his dream-homicides were fallacious and products of his vanity: he was completely harmless, an appraisal that he did not like.

  “Happy birthday,” she whispered.

  “Thanks.” He didn’t sound grateful.

  “How old are you, little boy?” she asked, mussing his hair a little.

  “One
hundred and two years old,” he said, “give or take a few decades. As old as Methuselah.”

  “I thought it was a hundred and three. But you don’t actually look your age. You don’t look a day over a hundred.”

  “Thanks. I owe it all to the baths I take in formaldehyde.”

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” she said, feeling the weight of his hand and grateful that his eyes were still closed. “I talked to Ginny. She said her brother’s been sending her postcards. Tim even calls her sometimes. Can you imagine that? They chat. So I guess he’s not gone and disappeared after all.”

  “I never thought he had disappeared,” Brettigan told her. After a pause, he said, “He always knew where he was. We just didn’t. Besides, I think I saw him a little while ago. I just never told you.”

  She let that information settle in as she decided whether to be angry. “You saw him? And where was this?”

  “Where was what?”

  “That you saw him. Timothy. Our missing son.”

  “Oh, a few blocks from here.” He was almost whispering. When he spoke softly, his voice began to crack; he sounded like an old AM radio.

  After she repeated his phrase as an enraged question, Brettigan sighed and said, “Yes. Right here. In town. He was…it was at night. You know: when it gets dark, and I was Mr. Insomnia, and I was walking around, and I got to the freeway overpass, where the homeless congregate, and there he was or at least someone who looked exactly like him, and I called out to him, but before I could talk to him, this person scampered away. I asked the vagrants if they knew who he was and they said that they did. His name, they said, was Tim.” He gave her another moment in which to process this news. “So it was probably him.”

  “I wonder if we should start calling his friends again, see if he’s contacted them—you know, let them know where he is.”

  “Maybe if he has, they won’t tell us.”