Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

And then I went into the empty living room and sat on the floor away from the shattered window. I closed my eyes and saw nothing but I heard her voice, serious but not, at the same time.

Tash: Do you know what a hard-on is?

Me: Of course.

Tash: That’s all you need to know.

Me: Get out.

Tash: Nomi, world. World, Nomi.

It was time to make Ray’s birthday dinner. It wasn’t much of anything but it was very elegant in its nothingness. Paper-thin crêpes with a fine syrupy drizzle, and cantaloupe. I dimmed the lights and closed the curtains and lit a couple of scented candles and put on Tash’s record of Keith Jarrett playing a live concert somewhere in Sweden.

I gave my dad a green ceramic frog that goes on the outdoor sprinkler tap and some goofy-looking socks for his golf clubs and a bag of Glad Garbage Bags for the dump and a new shirt from Schlitzking Clothing that had a special section in the front pocket for a pen. Then I brought out a cake I’d made called One Two Three Four Cake with a bunch of candles on it and a sparkler in the middle. Sorry, I said, I couldn’t afford forty-three. But I sang. And the whole time he had the sweetest smile on his face and he kept rolling his shirt sleeves farther and farther up his arms and then when I was finished singing he blew out the candles and I said no girlfriends, and he said nope and then I took the cake back to the counter and cut us both giant pieces.

It was the same cake my mom had baked for me when I suffered my first major disappointment, at the age of four. My grandpa, my mom’s dad, had died and I missed him a lot so one day I decided to write him a letter in heaven, something like: Dear Grandpa. I hope you are having fun. I am having fun. I miss you. I love you. Please write me back when you get this. And then on a very windy day I took it outside and stood on the back steps and threw it up into the wind so that it could be carried up to my gramps in the sky. I watched it blow around for a while and then sure enough, the wind took it straight up to God. Every day I’d sit on those stupid steps for hours waiting for my grandpa to drop me a letter. And then one day I went outside and there it was sitting in the middle of the yard and I was really excited and happy and grabbed it and went running inside and showed it to my mom and she read it to me. Grandpa was fine and feeling good and missing me too. He said he’d have a place all ready for me to live in when I got there but that wouldn’t be for a long, long time so I should just forget about it and have fun with other kids and run around and play and not worry. Or words to that effect.

About a week later my mom and I were getting out of the car and I saw a scrunched-up piece of paper wedged against the fence by our driveway and I ran over to it and picked it up and smoothed it out and realized it was my letter to my grandpa. How can this be here? I asked my mom. It’s supposed to be in heaven. That means he didn’t get it, did he? I started to cry and my mom took my hand and we went inside and sat down at the kitchen table and she told me that she had written that letter supposedly from my grandpa because she couldn’t bear to see me so sad and hopeful at the same time. She told me it was impossible to send a letter to heaven because the wind does not go there. Heaven is always calm, with no wind. She said other stuff but I didn’t really understand it. I understood there was no wind in heaven. That’s partly why I love the wind that blows around in this town. It makes me feel like I’m in the world. And then she and I baked a One Two Three Four Cake together and during that time I stopped crying and feeling sad and even had a little fun especially when we surprised Tash and my dad with the cake when they got home from school.

My dad said thank you very, very much Nomi, this is quite a surprise. And I said you’re very, very welcome. Happy birthday, Dad. And then he took off his old shirt and put on the new one and I gave him a pen from the drawer to put in the special pocket and he said look at that.

We ate our cake and smiled at each other while Keith Jarrett played and moaned and when I asked him if he wanted another piece he said no thank you, then I will have eaten to superfluity. Afterwards we carried the TV outside and plugged it into the outlet near the garage and sat in lawn chairs watching a baseball game in Detroit while the sun set without us noticing. We had one of our usual discussions about that particular phenomenon.

Hey Dad, it’s dark, did you notice the sun setting? No, did you? No. Weird. Very. He told me it had been a super birthday, just super. He said I spoiled him.

After the game my dad went to bed and I called Travis and he came to pick me up in the truck. I helped him paint the goat barn red.

We were getting so much paint on our clothes that we decided to take them off. I let him paint weird hieroglyphic things all over my body with a big fat exterior brush and I put a target on his ass. Then we put plastic down on the front seat of his dad’s truck and drove to The Golden Comb’s place and hosed ourselves off with purple gas. Travis chased me around for a while with a lighter, flicking it and trying to set me on fire. We drove to the pits and rinsed the purple gas off in the water which made it beautiful and we floated around in gassy rainbows for hours talking about stuff and lighting the gas with Travis’s lighter so it was like we were in hell. Rainbow pools of fire in the pits, the smell of smoking stubble, the hot wind, dying chickens, the night, my childhood.

How do you remember a town that’s not supposed to exist in the world?

Went home. Came down. Got sad. There was a note on the kitchen table. Nomi: Any plans for after graduation? That’s how we communicated large, vague ideas. On paper that can burn up in less than one second. I stared at the words for an exorbitantly long time.

Then I wrote. Dear Dad: I intend to become a model of courage and dignity.

I went into the bathroom, puked, passed out in my bed, and briefly died, until the sun rose once again reminding me of renewed hope and promise and other abiding things. I needed to find something large and dark to put in my window or I would slowly die of fatigue.

I sat down on my French horn on the corner of Second and Kroeker and lit a Sweet Cap and wondered why I hadn’t practised more. The French horn, when played well, is the most beautiful instrument in the world, according to Tash. That was the reason why I picked it. She chose the flute because she dug the way the case looked like it could also contain a sawed-off shotgun. She used to play “Oh Shenandoah” in her room with her blinds down, burning cones of incense in a teacup. I’d lie in bed and listen to the funny way she had of breathing while she played.

It was so hot I could see the heat. I could feel my internal organs warming up. I wondered if I could boil in my own blood. I heard the second bell but I couldn’t move. I was moulded to my French horn case like the Ken doll is to his underwear. I leaned over and fell off my case hoping that the hard impact with the concrete would encourage some kind of re-entry into the world but all it did was hurt me.

A woman came out of an aluminum house and asked me in the language of our people if I was all right and I thought about the question for a while and then said yo, yo, fane, schmack, and a few other words I could remember from talking with my grandma on the rare occasions when she was sober and we were not guarding her from the crabapple tree. Zeia gute, danke, I said, waving.

The woman frowned. Yo? she asked.

Oba yo! I said. She went inside and slammed the door while I rose to my hands and knees and prayed for a cloud, one cloud. I’d plant a church somewhere in Africa for one fucking cloud. Why do you hate me? I cried out, yeah, cried out, to the sun. I heard a locking kind of click coming from the door vicinity of the aluminum house.