A Complicated Kindness

three

I met Travis five months ago at a New Year’s Eve party at Suicide Hill. Good Mennonites don’t technically celebrate the arrival of yet another year of being imprisoned in this world. It’s a frustrating night for them. But we weren’t good Mennonites.

Somebody had made a big fire and sparks were flying around nicely and people were laughing and coughing. Some were necking in the bushes. A few others were playing flashlight tag in the old Russian cemetery next to the hill. One or two were vomiting in the snow and I could vaguely hear Christine McVie singing “Oh Daddy” from someone’s car speaker. I was standing around with some girls from school talking about resolutions when Travis and this other guy, Regan, walked up to us and asked if they could smoke us up.

We all shrugged, non-committal, flipped our hair, bored to death. Enh, said Janine, the verbal one. After sharing the joint me and Travis started a conversation and the other people went over to the fire. You’re Tash’s sister, right, he asked.

I said yeah.

That’s bullshit, man, he said, referring I think to Tash not being around any more.

I shrugged.

You smell like patchouli, he said.

I smiled. We smoked. We looked up at the stars. We shook from cold.

What’s your name again, he asked.

Nomi, I said.

He was wearing an army jacket with lots of pockets, and Greb Kodiaks. He’d cut the fingers off his gloves.

You like reggae, right, he asked.

Kinda, I said. Some of it. And he said he did too. And then we just started talking about music because that was sort of the test of potential. Even a Menno sheltered from the world knows not to stick her tongue into the mouth of a boy who owns an Air Supply record. You might stick your tongue into the mouth of a boy who owned some Emerson, Lake and Palmer, but you would not date him on a regular basis, or openly. And then somehow Travis mentioned the name of Lou Reed without acting like a fawning dork about it and I knew then that I wanted to be his girlfriend so I stopped talking for a while and tried to act demure by keeping my lips a certain way.

Be mysterious, I told myself. I’d been going after that laughing-on-the-outside, crying-on-the-inside look for a while. It all had to do with the eyes and the mouth and certain pauses in your speech. It’s kind of tragic and romantic. I wasn’t very good at it but I liked the bullshit bravado of it, you know, the effort of trying to cover something up and show it at the same time.

You said Nomi, right, asked Travis. Yeah, I said, and your name again? Travis, he said. Right. Travis, Travis, I said, making a big exaggerated point of trying to remember. I’d known his name for years. After that we slowly walked towards the bushes and into this little clearing and then we sat down on a fallen tree and his arms were around me and he said talk to me, Nomi, so I started stupidly rambling on and on about the first thing that came to my mind.

I heard something once that I liked and I think about it a lot, I said.

Yeah? said Travis. What did you hear?

Well, I said, these two people, a guy and a girl, were standing on a dark street in some town somewhere and the girl really liked the guy and had thought about him all the time, about being with him, having a relationship, everything, and the guy, I don’t know, he might have liked the girl, he was a little older and way cooler, and they just happened to meet each other on the street around ten at night, both of them on their way home from somewhere, and the boy said to the girl, hey, hi, how’s it going, you’re uh…and the girl said uh, yeah, hey, and the guy said so talk to me, and the girl paused and smiled and then she said but you’re here. So, I said to Travis, like I had just concluded a lecture on the makings of the A-bomb or something. Do you know what I mean? He said yeah, yeah, he did. He asked me why I liked that and I said I didn’t know, it seemed emblematic of something or other, and he said but he was there and I was talking to him and I said yeah, that was true.

And then he asked me if I preferred the people I loved not to be around when I talked to them and I paused because I was confused but he understood my pause to be a dramatically flirtatious pause, maybe, and so when I finally did say no he said okay, good, and we sat there kicking snow and watching our breath evaporate and wondering, at least I was, what came next.

What did come next was a bunch of kids running up to us and saying it’s the countdown, it’s the countdown, like one minute to midnight, come on, come on, so me and Travis got up and walked over to where a different bunch of kids were pretending to throw this other kid, Kurt, or Little Metal Boy as he was often called, into the fire as a sacrifice to the Devil, and other kids, the feathered girls, loud and drunk as usual, were counting down and everyone was talking with a Scottish accent and Janine passed me a hash pipe and just as I was sucking back on it I got kicked in the face by Kurt’s flailing leg and the pipe rammed into the roof of my mouth and tore the skin and my eyes started filling up with tears and Travis put his arm around my shoulders and said happy new year and I whispered happy new year to you too while swallowing mouthfuls of my own blood and when Travis leaned over to kiss me I shook my head slowly but not enough for him to notice and then passed out in the snow.

Afterwards Travis told me I had fallen without a sound. Just like the explosion of chicken blood in my mom’s Jackson Pollock painting. That’s what snow is good for. That must be why Menno “I love the nightlife” Simons picked this place to wait out the rapture, a place where we could fall quietly and not bother anyone. I woke up a few hours later in the back of Travis’s dad’s work truck, with a carpet on top of me and Travis sitting cross-legged next to my head. His lips were blue and he could barely speak but what he said was: Oh Christ, thank fucking God you’re alive. I thought it was the most original thing I’d ever heard anyone say about me and I began to love him.

Trudie used to work in the crying room at church and we have these pictures of her and Tash and me hanging out in there and there’s this one picture of Travis stepping on my face. He was two or so with a giant diapered ass and I was just a baby lying on the floor and obviously in his way.

My mom used to unhook the wire at the back of the speaker in the crying room so she wouldn’t be able to hear the man, her brother, my Uncle Hans, who was The Mouth. Tash, when she was older, would bring in a transistor radio so we could listen to American stations while we helped my mom take care of the babies.

We had a lot of fun in the crying room. We could see the back of my dad’s head, on the men’s side, falling over and snapping back repeatedly while he tried to pay attention to the rebukes of Uncle Hands.

It was usually my job to watch out for mothers with screaming infants standing up in their pews because that meant they were headed our way and the radio had to be shut off so my mom wouldn’t get busted and disciplined by her brother’s notoriously harsh and badly dressed regime. This was the perilous line my father toed and still does, I guess. Torn — at least he was — between the woman he loves and the faith that keeps his motor running. Although with my mom gone, there’s not much of a conflict any more. I’d call the aura at our house a perversely peaceful one of hushed resignation. A few weeks ago my uncle came over to borrow my dad’s socket set and when he asked my dad how he was my dad said oh, unexceptional. Living quietly with my disappointments. And how are you?

I never know if he’s joking when he says things like that or not. He always signs off his Christmas cards to people with: In Sin and Error, Pining…Raymond.