also a little naughty, a little Bettie Page. No other girl in the church wore bangs like that, except for some of the younger ones, who wore them with braids. When Kirsten wore them with braids, I’d go a bit nuts.
Kirsten grew up in the prairies and had been saved since the age of eleven. Her parents divorced due to her mother’s whirlwind, torrid infidelity with Jesus Christ. Kirsten’s father was a town engineer who worked practically all the time, and her mother had been lonely, and initiates of my former church, in the small prairie town of Lacombe, Alberta, happened to be practising their guileless, welcoming faith nearby. They held a revival meeting one weekend, featuring a charismatic preacher from the States, and because it was a small town, even the irreligious were interested in coming out to see the fundies roll around. It seemed so deep-south, so voodoo. It was rumoured there might be laying on of hands and speaking in tongues.
People like Kirsten’s mother didn’t show up just to gawk, I am convinced. They might have told themselves that — I know, because I told myself that too, when I got around to sticking my own head in the proverbial tent: Should be good for a laugh. The truth is, you go because you want to be persuaded. After all, who can deny the power of God? Who really wants to? The truly religious are never entirely dismissive of other religions, no matter how whacked out — a believer’s a believer. Just look at Gord and me, camped out in front of Swaggart every Sunday. Even Sylvie sometimes used to speculate about her “past lives,” an idea that was in no way Catholic. But she had heard it on TV or read about it somewhere and she just liked the thought of it, of karma: returning to earth for a do-over. It sounded fair to her.
I think now that anyone who believes in God, even a little, can’t help but yearn toward the evangelicals. Let’s face it, theirs is the church we really want. We want to be swept up. We want to sob and roll around on the ground. We want to feel the Holy Spirit as a real living force and we want it to swoop down and kick us in the ass. We want it to heal our souls. We want it to remove every last doubt we ever entertained about our randomness as creatures of the earth. We want certainty. We want to see the face of Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich. We want to throw away our crutches. We want Satan, and we want him to want us too, so we can always be at war, because war makes our daily bullshit righteous and significant. We want to hear the voices — the ones that tell us what to do, and tell us how we’re loved. We want to be as little children and believe.
And Kirsten was a little child, so it was easy. She took one look at her mother’s rapturous face, and she believed. She was on board.
The town engineer sued for custody on the basis that his wife was actively engaged in sculpting religious fanatics of Kirsten and her brother. The family court of small-town Alberta, however, didn’t see excessive piety as a problem worth separating mother and child over. So Kirsten’s mother won custody and promptly headed east, away from the unholy “contaminating influence” of this godforsaken engineer, a man about whom Kirsten hardly ever spoke, of whom she had no pictures, and who I thought about a lot for some reason. I imagined him abandoned on the prairie, squatting like Job, befuddled in the dust.
20
08/06/09, 11:15 p.m.
APPARENTLY, IT CAN ALL BE traced back to Nixon. In the guise of conducting cancer research, the Nixon administration was actually neck-deep in biowarfare. Genetic engineering of viruses became a common practice under Tricky Dick. Sure, says Ivor, everyone these days thinks Nixon was a “total cock.” And he was, no doubt about it. But Watergate? Tapping a few telephone wires?
“Tip a the iceberg,” says Ivor, wiping his forever-running nose on his forever-crusted sleeve. “How about unleashing a plague that sweeps across the planet, killing millions? How many people did Hitler kill? Well, how many people did Nixon kill — how many people did the American government kill, Rank?”
“I don’t know,” says Rank, wishing some redneck Gold-
finger’s patron would attempt to kick in the teeth of another so that he