The Sun Collective: A Novel Page 5

  It was her face from that dance that he saw gazing back at him from the hand mirror he had lowered into the flowing water of Minnehaha Creek, and now, with his sunhat fixed to the top of his head to protect his skin from the ultraviolet rays that inspired squamous cell cancers that were probably already taking root there, he drew his hand across the image of her nineteen-year-old face, touching the image, caressing it and washing it as she looked at him from the puzzled distance of forty-five years ago, and she smiled uncertainly, not exactly wanting to be a girl again, not now, not ever. Please stop. No, she didn’t want to be back there, her eyes said; she had been there, she had been young once, and now she wanted their precious daily lives unaltered, and she wanted Timothy, her son, to be safe and to be aboveground, somehow. This trick, this magic, had something decidedly terrible in it. The Fountain of Youth flowed only in one direction, toward you, with poison. You had to drink the poison to make it work. And as it did its work, it erased you. “What are you doing?” she cried out.

  Brettigan turned to see Alma closing her eyes and then shaking her head to clear her thoughts, the age lines in her cheeks reinstated, the liver spots on the backs of her hands reappearing as soon as he looked down at them and as the music from the bad local band playing “Wild Horses” faded away. Turning her head slowly toward him, she said, “Something is wrong,” as she tried to stand up. In the static humming silence, the song of the birds now began to intrude, the show they had quieted themselves to watch being over.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She stood momentarily before staggering a few steps backward, out of the direct rays of the sun. “I don’t feel well,” she told him, slurring the words. She bent, tilted, toward him. “Oh, Harry,” she said. He couldn’t help himself: he turned to the left to see the mirror he had abandoned in Minnehaha Creek, but of course Alma’s face wasn’t there anymore. It was beside him, her jaw working in spasmodic up-and-down movements. Seeming to recognize the trouble she was in, she raised her left arm around his neck, and she slurred, “Mister, do you love me?”

  After decades of being married to him, she had apparently forgotten his name.

  Brettigan grasped her hand and lowered his right arm to her waist, feeling her weight falling against him, as if she could no longer support herself. At first she seemed capable of walking, but as he retraced their steps up alongside the creek bank, he noticed that her steps had grown more uncertain, more like the steps of a toddler, less balanced. After a minute, her feet were stumbling in the sand, leaving the trace of dragged lines. Where were the other visitors to the park? The people who might help? They were gone, all of them. They always disappeared when you needed them. Alma’s weight fell against him. She muttered unintelligible words.

  “Help!” he cried. Then louder, “Someone please help!”

  He reached into his pocket for his cell phone, but as he touched a collection of furry, linty coins, he remembered that he’d left it behind at home on the dresser: in his mind’s eye he saw it residing there, charging up, useless. With each passing moment, Alma’s deadweight was growing deader. Brettigan cried out for help again, and this time the two young people he’d seen earlier blowing and popping soap bubbles appeared from behind a tree almost as if they’d been hiding there, but, no: behind the tree was an open field where they’d been congregating.

  “Here,” the young man said. He drew Alma’s right arm around his neck, and together he and Brettigan brought her up the stairs, back to the picnic tables where they had been before. The young woman had taken out her cell and was now talking to the 911 operator, describing Alma’s symptoms.

  When they reached the shady spot where they’d been before, Brettigan and the young man lowered Alma to a sitting position. All at once she opened her eyes and said, “What just happened?”

  “You fainted,” Brettigan said to her, sitting beside her, holding her hand. “I thought you’d had a stroke.” He noticed absently his wife’s hand, to which, in all his confusion and panic, he had held firm.

  “Well, maybe I did.” Turning toward her husband, she asked, “Who are you?” When he gave her a stricken expression, she said, “Kidding!” Pivoting in the direction of the young man, she said, “And you? Who are you?”

  “Ludlow,” he told her. The boy’s face had a triumphant, transparent absence of guile: from his straw-blond hair, to the blue eyes, and the vague affability visible in his open, brilliantly white smile—he looked like an actor in a toothpaste commercial—and the tattoo on his left arm that said, YOU’RE WELCOME! he appeared to have no agendas, hidden or otherwise, except to enjoy himself in the company of people who were as guileless as he himself was. He gave off an aura of sloppy and slightly unintelligent benevolence: an adult child, a plaything, someone’s toy. “My name’s Ludlow.”

  “Unusual name,” Alma said, patting away the dampness from her forehead with a hankie she had produced from somewhere. “And you?” she asked the young woman. “Who might you be?”

  “He’s Ludlow because he’s a Luddite,” the young woman said, rather sharply. Brettigan quickly examined her. She, too, had blondish hair—Minnesota had a contagion of these stubborn blondes; they were everywhere—and she carried herself with an upright, regal bearing, the perfect posture of a ballet dancer, but her eyes had none of Ludlow’s guilelessness. Instead, she projected a quiet, commanding authority on the cool side of the spectrum, as if she were accustomed to giving orders and having them followed and in addition always kept a trove of carefully considered punishments ready to be deployed whenever correction might be necessary.

  “Didn’t I see you last week?” Brettigan asked her, as the EMS siren became audible from the distance, drawing up in the nearest possible spot, the siren’s wail abruptly silenced as the medics hopped out and ran in the direction that a third man, who was formally dressed, had indicated. “I saw you at the mall. I read your pamphlet. You’re the Sun Collective. You want to befriend the poor.”

  “No,” she said, “that wasn’t us. That was somebody else. But, yeah, we’re part of that, too. Everybody is a child of the sun. Including you. Both of you.”

  * * *

  —

  And then everyone was talking at once: the EMS technicians were speaking to Alma, holding three fingers in front of her and asking her to count them, taking her pulse and her blood pressure, inquiring if she felt light-headed and could stand up or would be more comfortable lying down, while Brettigan described his wife’s fainting fit and made an effort to explain why he hadn’t let her sit by the creek but had, instead, tried to make her walk back to the picnic area in the fireman’s carry he’d used; and the young woman, seemingly oblivious to the medical emergency taking place in front of her, said to Ludlow, “What now?” while he doggedly grinned at her as if he didn’t understand English; and meanwhile a small crowd had gathered and then dispersed.

  After a few minutes, the EMS guys asked Alma to stand, and she did. She announced that she felt fine. With a few blunt but polite phrases, she refused to be taken anywhere for further observation. She had had a little episode, she said, and she wished to be left alone now. “Thank you,” she said to the two EMS technicians, one of whom was speaking to someone else on a headset, “and now please go in peace.”

  Go in peace? She must still be out of it. She never used such phrases.

  But there still remained documents to sign. Both Brettigan and his wife had to apply their signatures to them, agreeing to this and that, and as they did so, the young woman glanced down to witness it. She interrupted what she was saying to Ludlow and turned to Brettigan.

  “So it says here you’re Harold Brettigan,” she said, “and so you’re Alma, his wife,” locking eyes with the two of them, taking them in. Instead of saying, “Nice to meet you,” or some other clichéd civility, she lowered her head to study her fingernails. All she seemed to want were their names, stripped of pleasantries. />
  “And who might you be?”

  “Christina,” the young woman said, after a hesitation. “Brettigan, Brettigan, hmm: Is your son the actor? I saw him once years ago, in Chicago.”

  “Really? You did? Well, everyone has a name,” Alma remarked, “and that’s ours, and that’s his.”

  “Okay, and thank you for your help,” Brettigan said. After having walked arm in arm with Alma back to their picnic table, he began now to gather up their picnic things: the slippery, sweating, chilled wine bottle, whose exterior moisture seemed excessive; the brown picnic hamper with its remnants of sandwiches; the uneaten peaches and cookies; the paper napkins folded into halves. As he put the odds and ends back into the basket, Brettigan glanced over at his wife, who was smiling in no particular direction: first at the trees, then at the sky, in a kind of outdoors charm offensive. But it was a smile without an audience. A mood had come over her, as if she were thinking of a topic that she would not broach just yet; nevertheless, she had the look of someone who is preparing an announcement of the greatest possible importance.

  “Come to the meetings, if you want to find out about the Sun Collective,” the girl said. “Haven’t we seen your wife there? Yes, we think so. And now we want to see you.”

  “Right.”

  “We can help. We’re under our own instructions to help. To help you. To help everybody. You would love us.”

  “No kidding. You’re sure? Help who?

  “You. Your wife. Come meet us. Meet Wye.”

  “Wye?”

  “Yeah. You could say that he’s the ambassador to old people like you.”

  After turning away at the mild insult, Brettigan noticed a mere moment later that the boy, Ludlow, and the girl, Christina, both had seemingly dematerialized. They appeared and vanished without warning, having some sort of spectral means of transportation, or as if he had left his theater seat and entered the lobby, only to return to find the primary actors gone.

  “Come on,” Brettigan said, grasping the picnic basket with his left hand and taking Alma’s hand with his right. “Dear, let’s go home.”

  Behind them, the birds, once again, grew suddenly quiet, as if taken aback for a second time.

  * * *

  —

  After having accompanied Alma up the stairs to their bedroom, where he thought she would take a nap, Brettigan was emptying the picnic basket in the kitchen, where the deviled eggs wrapped in waxed paper were still out there on the counter, when he heard his wife’s voice from the second floor: she was speaking—almost singing—in a high, unnatural register, her sentences interrupted by pauses and by deep laughter, the exceptionally lively half of a conversation apparently going on with someone whose cleverness was inspiring her to new heights of gleeful agreement. To whom could she possibly be speaking? What was going on? Surely it must be their daughter. But Brettigan had never heard Alma talking to Virginia in this excited and almost adolescent manner, at least not since their daughter had grown up and acquired a husband and formed a family of her own. Alma took a mature, measured tone with her daughter. Perhaps she was speaking to one of their two grandchildren. Nor had she ever spoken to Timothy that way. He hadn’t heard that quality in his wife’s voice in years, and he struggled to think of the proper word for it. Delighted. As of someone who’s being flirtatious. Someone who, caught by surprise and love, might be having an affair.

  He lifted the receiver of the kitchen’s landline telephone to eavesdrop and was met with a dial tone.

  After removing his shoes in the mudroom by the back door, he took the stairs one by one, skipping the step fifth from the bottom, whose prominent creak would announce his movements up toward her. What was he doing, spying on her like this? Surreptitiously, with neither of them bothering to have secrets from each other anymore? At this age, they had outgrown shame and therefore possessed nothing worth hiding and had almost nothing left to reveal except for the specific content of their dreams. The whole boatload of their lives was all out there in the open, all of it. Nevertheless, he felt in his bones, all the way down to the roots of his soul, that at this moment he must be watchful. He felt the hairs at the back of his neck standing up: Something is going on here, and you don’t know what it is, do you?

  No, he thought, I don’t.

  Reaching the top of the stairs, he stood next to the linen closet, easing his way toward the bedroom without being detected. Just past the doorway, he saw his wife, who sat at the edge of the bed, her back to him, the dog and the cat positioned in front of her by the window, both of them fixedly staring at her. The dog sat on the floor, and the cat was perched on the windowsill. Brettigan felt a cold breeze start at the top of his head and travel electrically downward. The dog, sensing Brettigan’s presence, raised his muzzle and gave Brettigan a brief, irritated look.

  Meanwhile, Alma continued to speak animatedly, waving her hands in the air as if she were grasping little flags and watching a motorcade pass by. To the dog, she said, “I felt a bolt of God’s lightning, right on the very spot,” and then she paused, not speaking, during which time she turned her face toward the cat. For several seconds, she sat quietly in a posture of listening, nodding in assent. Listening to the cat! That was it! She was—Brettigan couldn’t quite believe it—carrying on a conversation with their two household pets, both of whom were apparently making assertions with which she found herself in total agreement.

  For a moment, Brettigan thought of the future: the parade of doctors and neurologists, the expensive tests for stroke, the rehabilitations, the MRIs. After all, she was hearing voices now, animal voices. The doctors would put a stop to it; that was their job. Science demanded it. Well, yes, but he too had heard Mrs. Schimmelpfennig’s voice and a bad local band from decades ago. He and his wife were hearing things in tandem.

  The dog, with an odd movement, seemed to indicate to Alma that Brettigan was standing behind her, and accordingly she turned to see him, and when she did, she smiled broadly and happily, her eyes wet with tears. In his entire life, and during their long marriage, he had rarely seen his wife so happy, so transported with gaiety.

  She was so happy, she was no longer herself. She seemed to be someone else entirely.

  “Oh, Harry,” she cried out, joy spreading across her face, “the most wonderful thing has happened.”

  - 6 -

  One evening the previous winter, Christina had glanced in the mirror above the sink, and what looked back at her was this grimacing female gargoyle, only without horns. There she was, in the ladies’ bathroom at the yoga studio, trying to give the appearance of a slightly down-market Junior League solid citizen, but when she turned the old-fashioned porcelain faucet handle labeled COLD to wash the gargoyle weirdness off her face, hot water came streaming out, so hot that she couldn’t put her hands in it to normalize herself. Yet another prank of the gods. They were always on the job, setting traps, laughing up there on Olympus, spewing lava-scented spooge over everybody. When you needed cold water to straighten yourself out, you got the opposite. From curiosity, she tried the faucet labeled HOT, and of course cold water gurgled into the sink, which was irony, or something.

  Christina dipped her hands in the cold water labeled HOT and in slo-mo bent over to splash it on her cheeks and eyes and forehead, which still hurt from the door she had walked into a few hours ago. She didn’t quite have a handle on this drug that her downstairs friend Lucille had given her. A designer concoction purportedly from a basement chemical laboratory in Memphis operated by a genius misfit albino dropout from MIT, it blew things pleasingly out of proportion and produced temporary blackouts, during which you were in two places at once, and sometimes in both the present and the future. Also, it conferred on its users a feeling of blessedness that lasted for an hour, depending on the weight of your past sins. Under its effects, you tended to lie down on the floor, unless you were levitating. Its street name was BT, “Blue
Telephone,” in honor of its blue-black exterior coating. She’d had it before, in Chicago, but its effects were getting more specialized, more targeted to warping spacetime. There was no Operator once you swallowed it, however, though there were plenty of messages, such as “You are a total genius,” and “Everybody loves you and thinks you’re beautiful.” And the other one: “Why did you ever worry about anything? Paradise is here, now!” A brushfire of undifferentiated acceptance and love spread out over her interior landscapes, spitting up hot coals of joy.

  People said it was like a haphazard combination of LSD and crystal meth and heroin and psilocybin, but with the sight-and-sound dial turned down to manageable levels, but they were so wrong: it wasn’t, it had nothing to do with LSD or meth or heroin or manageability; it was made of invented vagabond molecules meant to rip a hole in quantum fields. It would dement you but in a good way.

  Her high, however, was making her slightly more unsteady than she would have liked: right now, her thoughts had grown marquee-gigantic and were appearing on a jumbotron overlooking a huge empty stadium, which was her mind.