Home > The Sun Collective

The Sun Collective
Author: Charles Baxter

 

             It’s complicated, being an American,

    Having the money and the bad conscience, both at the same time.

    Perhaps, after all, this is not the right subject for a poem.

          —Louis Simpson,

     “ON THE LAWN AT THE VILLA”

 

 

- 1 -


   Soon after he boarded the Blue Line light rail at the downtown Minneapolis station, keeping an eye out for his son, who had deliberately gone missing and was living on the streets, Brettigan checked the available space, saw two empty seats next to each other at the far end of the car, and aimed himself in their direction as the doors chimed shut. Having taken the one on the aisle, he removed his Minnesota Twins baseball cap and placed it beside him so that no one would drop down there. The translucent advertising sheath attached to the outside of the train car was filtering the sun and gave his hands a bruised discoloration, as if he’d been in a fistfight.

   A young couple shadowed him onto the train and sat down in the seats opposite his own.

   A man of retirement age, Brettigan wore an expression of studied neutrality whenever he found himself in public. He had the look of someone who possessed important secret information and who needed to fade into the background to avoid exposure. On his ring finger he wore a loose-fitting gold wedding band thickened with adhesive tape to secure it. Despite his age, he still had a full head of graying hair, rather bushy eyebrows, and penetrating blue eyes. Deep lines creased his face. With his khakis and cotton sports shirt, he gave an appearance of informality, but he sat as straight as a child who has been told not to slouch, and he gazed out the grimy window with the uneasy intelligence of someone who has few illusions to comfort him.

   Last week on this commuter train there had been an incident. A woman whose baby was in a stroller had pitched and rolled her way to the seat directly in front of him. Brettigan had been close to the window, near enough to hear her panting. From time to time she had uttered soft groans. Every few seconds, she would nod and say, “Uh-huh,” as if in conversation with a ghost companion. When an old man had walked past and leaned down to pat her stroller-bound infant on the head, the woman had started to shout, “Don’t you touch my baby!” She pointed at the aging passenger, who, alarmed, hurried out the doors at the train’s next stop. Then she had glared at Brettigan, still sitting there behind her. Collecting himself, Brettigan had pretended to stare at the landscape outside. Where he looked apparently didn’t matter. “Don’t nobody touch my baby!” she cried out suddenly in Brettigan’s direction. She smelled of wine. Her baby probably smelled of wine. The whole car smelled of wine and beer and Red Bull.

       But this morning the train had apparently been steam-cleaned, and the usual professional-managerial types—suited, accessorized, and iPhoned—were seated nearby, tapping out messages, talking into their Bluetooths, or reading The Wall Street Journal. Very few Victims of Capitalism were on the train today. Most people thought of them as the homeless, or vagrants, or the deinstitutionalized mad—one of Brettigan’s friends preferred to call them “scum”—but for Brettigan they were the Vs of C, that generously proportioned sector of the economy that had never had a single foothold on the ladder of success and who were lying on the ground anywhere they could fall unmolested. In midsummer you’d find them on the train rumbling out to the Utopia Mall, a terminal point where they would not disembark but stay right where they were, collapsed in heaps, half-asleep and therefore semi-alert, until the train started up again and returned to downtown Minneapolis. They had no purchases; they consumed nothing but air and food scraps. Even the tattered clothes they wore seemed borrowed from somewhere. Back and forth the trains would go, carrying their somnolent human freight.

   Whenever Brettigan exchanged glances with one of these people, he tried to make his face express compassion and kindliness. They looked back at him with sodden indifference or hatred.

       Months before at home, in the grip of insomnia, Brettigan had found himself watching a late-night movie that had apparently started a few minutes before he tuned in. An early talkie, statically photographed in old-style black-and-white and therefore comforting, the movie had pleasingly slow narrative rhythms, easily comprehended, or so it seemed at first. The film’s plot appeared to be deadpan fantasy: seven passengers dressed in formal evening attire were conversing in the lounge of a transatlantic ocean liner. The camera seemed to be stuck in one place, and the sound recording was rudimentary, but that was okay because the movie had quite obviously been adapted from a stage play, and the characters on the screen were as bewildered by the plot as Brettigan was. What were they doing on this ocean liner? No one seemed to have any idea. They kept asking themselves how they had gotten there. None of them could remember booking passage on this ship or by what means they had boarded. Perhaps a joke was being played on them. Where were they going?

   They were all dead, of course, and the ocean liner was taking them to the realm of shadows, and the movie was called Outward Bound, by someone named Sutton Vane (Brettigan had found this out by Googling the title once he had discovered it), and he thought of the movie whenever he was on the light rail here in Minneapolis or the New York City subway on those occasions when he visited his brother in Brooklyn. Judging by the appearance of their riders, one would think that the late-evening subway trains were populated almost exclusively by the dead or by people who wanted to be dead. Something about public transportation—you could also see it on the coaches in Amtrak train cars—had a narcotic effect and seemed to render the passengers half-alive, their heads flung back in comatose slumber. They didn’t appear to be asleep as much as anesthetized, lifeless, unticketed, and whenever he saw Victims of Capitalism in a heap in a corner somewhere, he remembered Outward Bound and the journey they were all on.

       Sometimes one of the Victims of Capitalism would awaken, and, weighed down with God, would start to shout inspired prophecy. “Look at my wounds,” someone had once commanded him on the A Train, though without specifying any location. Here in Minneapolis, a rider had paced up and down the car asking, “Where’s Duluth?”

   A retired structural engineer and bridge designer, Brettigan observed the traffic backed up on Hiawatha and noted, as he always did, the Sabo Pedestrian Bridge with its inclined tower and slender concrete deck. It had the appearance of an outer-space structure painstakingly transported to Earth. He thanked the gods that he had not been involved in its design, given the failure of two of the cables thanks to wind-induced fatigue cracking at the anchorages a few years after the bridge had opened. The cables had fallen onto the bridge deck below; fortunately, no one had been hurt.

   Now the light rail passed by several abandoned grain elevators, as blindingly white as the abstract geometries of a Charles Sheeler painting. At Thirty-eighth Street a well-tailored gentleman boarded. He wore a three-piece suit, a trench coat, and a soft black trilby hat. That hat made him appear as if he were in costume. He trailed a small suitcase on wheels. His glasses consisted of small tinted circles on thin gold frames, and some property in the lenses reflected light in such a way as to make his eyes nearly invisible. Standing in the aisle next to Brettigan, bathed in soapy blue sunshine, he looked down, smiled, and asked if the seat next to Brettigan’s, the one on which Brettigan’s baseball cap lay, was taken.

Hot Books
» House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1)
» A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire
» From Blood and Ash (Blood And Ash #1)
» A Million Kisses in Your Lifetime
» Deviant King (Royal Elite #1)
» Den of Vipers
» House of Sky and Breath (Crescent City #2)
» Sweet Temptation
» The Sweetest Oblivion (Made #1)
» Chasing Cassandra (The Ravenels #6)
» Wreck & Ruin
» Steel Princess (Royal Elite #2)
» Twisted Hate (Twisted #3)
» The Play (Briar U Book 3)
» The War of Two Queens (Blood and Ash #4)