A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews Page B

live forever. And that’s when he threw me out. I’m not saying he was wrong or anything, I just couldn’t ever figure out what was going on. It seemed like we were in some kind of absurd avant-garde theatre, the way our conversations sometimes went.
    I once suggested that it was a really risky gamble to bet everything we had in this world on the possibility of another world, and in five seconds he was leading the entire class in prayer.
    Please Almighty Father, we just ask you to bring Nomi back within your fold. We just ask you for a miracle this afternoon, dear Jesus. (Was he praying to God, the Father, or Jesus Christ, the Son? If you’re going to terrorize the flock with spontaneous prayer, at least pray to whom it may concern.)
    We’re kind of a cult with pretend connections to some normal earthly conventions like getting dressed in the morning (thank God, Menno liked to cover up) and going to work or school, but that’s where it ends.
    There’s not a lot of interest in the present tense here. And it’s only slightly disconcerting that everyone’s related. If a Mennonite couple divorces do they still get to be cousins? Oh yeah, hilarious. Tash once said to my mom: Oh, so it’s wrong to move any part of one’s body in time to music but it’s perfectly okay to penetrate members of one’s extended family? My mother told her not to be silly.
    Silly was Trudie’s ultimate crime. Okay, she’d say, now you’re being silly, and then we knew it was time to shape up. We’d gone too far.
    The Mouth of Darkness loves the word groovy and the expression simply put. Simply put, we are not a groovy people. He’s in love with the notion of shame and he traffics the shit like a schoolground pusher, spreading it around but never personally using. He’s not a fire-and-brimstone guy. That’s not really our speed. Too animated. Too much like dancing.
    He reminds me of one of those statues on Easter Island. I’ve seen photos of him as a boy and even then he looked like unforgiving granite. Although my grandma once showed me a picture of him sitting in a canoe smiling, looking relaxed and happy, with the sun setting behind him. He’s holding his paddle straight up in the air like a spear. I often stare at that picture and wonder what he was thinking about and what happened to the happy little boy before he turned into The Mouth. Well, actually, that sounds really stupid, like the beginning of a lame flashback. Cue the spinning tunnel. I don’t really think about him that much. It would be like thinking about time, the nature of time. How it controls you, determines your destiny, and ultimately destroys you.
    I do know, because everyone in town knows and doesn’t talk about it, that The Mouth had some very bad experiences in his life when he was younger (oh, hmm, tell me…and what’s that like?) and that after those experiences he came back to Shitville to rule with an iron fist. That might have been what that upheld paddle was all about. I think he had tried to rebel against the thing he came back later to stand for and while living in the city doing God knows what he…I’m not sure…a girl ditched him, I think. Wouldn’t have him as her sunbeam. After he’d opened his heart to her and then mistakenly asked her to marry him. (Flash for Uncle Hands…it was the period of free love, dude.) And he couldn’t write poetry like the Beats and was mocked for it. And for his clothing that tried too hard and his eagerness to be hip and his inability to shave properly (don’t ask me—Trudie told me this) and countless other crimes of youth and eventually he gave up and came back here full of renunciations and ideas of purging every last bastion of so-called fun in this place and a greatly renewed interest in death and a fresh loathing of the world. In a nutshell. If I’d been his ringside coach I would have said now please get back in there.Re-enter the world. Just tone it down. Keep your mouth shut a little more often.