A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews Page A

that my mother’s silent raging against the simplisticness of this town and her church could produce avalanches, typhoons and earthquakes all over the world. But there is kindness here, a complicated kindness. You can see it sometimes in the eyes of people when they look at you and don’t know what to say. When they ask me how my dad is, for instance, and mean how am I managing without my mother. Even Mr. Quiring, the teacher I am disappointing on a regular basis, periodically gives me a break. Says he knows things must be a little difficult at home. Offers to give me extensions, says he’s praying for us. I don’t mind.

 
    seven
    M ain Street is as dead as ever. There’s a blinding white light at the water-tower end of it and Jesus standing in the centre of it in a pale blue robe with his arms out, palms up, like he’s saying how the hell would I know? I’m just a carpenter. He looks like George Harrison in his Eastern religion period working for Ringling Brothers. Whatever amateur made the sign put a red circle on each of his cheeks to make him look healthy, I guess, but healthily ridiculous. On the other end is another giant billboard that says SATAN IS REAL. CHOOSE NOW.
    Main Street is bookended by two fields of dirt that never grow a crop. They lie in perpetual fallow, my dad told me. Those words haunt me still.
    I can sense that Americans who come here think it’s strange. Main Streets should lead somewhere other than to eternal damnation. They should be connected to something earthly, like roads.
    Americans come here to observe our simple ways. Here, life is so refreshingly uncomplicated. The tourists are encouraged to buy a bag of unbleached flour at the windmill and to wander the dirt lanes of the museum village that is set up on the edge of town, depicting the ways in which we used to live. It’s right next to the real town, this one, which is not reallyreal. It’s a town that exists in the world based on the idea of it not existing in the world. It was created as a kind of no-frills bunker in which to live austerely, shun wrongdoers and kill some time, and joy, before the Rapture. The idea is that if we can successfully deny ourselves the pleasures of this world, we’ll be first in line to enjoy the pleasures of the next world, forever. But I’ve never really understood what those pleasures will be. Nobody’s ever come right out and told me. I guess we’ll be able to float around asking people to punch us in the stomach as hard as they can and not experience any pain, which could be fun for one afternoon.
    I once had a conversation with my typing teacher about eternal life. He wanted me to define specifically what it was about the world that I wanted to experience. Smoking, drinking, writhing on a dance floor to the Rolling Stones? Not exactly, I told him, although I did think highly of Exile on Main Street. Then what, he kept asking me. Crime, drugs, promiscuity? No, I said, that wasn’t it either. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I ended up saying stupid stuff like I just want to be myself, I just want to do things without wondering if they’re a sin or not. I want to be free. I want to know what it’s like to be forgiven by another human being (I was stoned, obviously) and not have to wait around all my life anxiously wondering if I’m an okay person or not and having to die to find out. I wanted to experience goodness and humanity outside of any religious framework. I remember making finger quotations in the air when I said religious framework. God, I’m an asshole. I told him that if I heard one more person say it wasn’t up to him or her to judge, it was up to God, while, at the same time, they were judging their freakin’ heads off every minute of every day (I mean basically they had judged that the entire world was evil), I would put a sawed-off. 22 in my mouth and pull the trigger. I told him I didn’t know what the big deal was about eternal lifeanyway. It seemed creepy to want to