The Whole Beautiful World

by Melissa Kuipers

  “Would you like to help me finish this?” I blurted before I could fear the consequences. My empty stomach wasn’t sitting well. But I felt a strange sense of relief.

  She sat on my lap with the largest of my horsehair brushes gripped in a tight round fist dabbing irregular blotches of green and brown and gold over my linear arrangement of blue-grey shapes and shades. I bit my lip as, within a minute, she’d covered the tree I had spent hours perfecting.

  In the end, it wasn’t as bad as I had prepared myself for. Sharp delicate figures I had designed jutted out from between stripes and splats of abstract mixes of colour. I couldn’t show it, but it was a start.

  HAPPY ALL THE TIME

  MARCUS HANNIGAN WAS A CHUBBY kid, but he was also strong and everyone said he had great hair so his weight didn’t bother him, until Grade 7 when his mom married Frank, a nurse who ran marathons. Frank started switching the food packed in Marcus’s insulated Superman lunch sack from things like Fruit Roll-Ups and pepperettes to dried fruit jerky that shook like a dead fish and sheets of flatbread with goat cheese. Marcus would rather go hungry, but was afraid to bring the food back home since the only thing Frank ever said to him was, “Do you really think you need seconds, son?” Gone also were the occasional lunchbox notes on which his mother drew an eyeball followed by a fat heart followed by a giant capital U.

  Marcus didn’t get the chance to talk to his mother at supper anymore. Frank was busy telling her about the people he had helped throughout the day, about the elderly lady he had to carry to the examination table who asked him why he couldn’t have been born fifty years earlier, but then, she said, he probably would have been shot in the war as all the handsome men were. And there was the young girl who came in for dialysis and was too shy to ever talk to anyone, but every visit she tugged on the sleeve of Frank’s blue cotton scrubs and whispered that he was her favourite. Marcus wanted to storm into the hospital and show the old lady and the shy girl the kind of shit Frank was packing in his lunch.

  By the time Marcus reached high school, he had slimmed down to what Frank considered an acceptable weight, and he’d somehow gotten over the dead fish texture of his dried fruit. The girls thought it was pretty cool that he ate hummus, liked the way he listened so well to their feelings, and the way his blond hair fell perfectly without his doing anything to it. He was still a little shy, but they didn’t seem to mind. “You just get me,” they all said.

  Marcus’s father, Niko, swung by the school about once every two months, unexpectedly, and took him out for lunch, which was fine because Mom and Frank wouldn’t know, or for supper, which wasn’t fine because Mom and Frank freaked out when Marcus wasn’t home on time. He’d beg his dad to wait a few minutes so he could use the secretary’s phone to call home, but Niko would run his hand against his agitated salt and pepper hair, wavy like his son’s, and say, “Come on, Marcus—I want to get going. I’m a busy man, and I get to see you so rarely, I want to make the most of our time. Who’s this pretty friend of yours?”

  Marcus fumed the first time Niko spoke that way about whichever girl it was he happened to have at his side when his dad pulled his truck up along the curb in front of the school, but after he saw her face turn bright with a half fought-off smile, he understood his dad was showing him he cared, helping him out a little.

  One of the pretty girls, Stephanie, asked Marcus if he wanted to hang out after school at her house, in her room, where she pulled his shirt off and ran her hands all over his back and her lips all over his face and told him she loved how gentle he was. Stephanie’s dad had an electric guitar and started giving Marcus lessons. He had supper with her family a couple of times a week, and he watched as Stephanie and her sister bickered and laughed while mashing butter into potatoes, and as Stephanie repeated to her parents the stupid science joke her teacher had told. He thought about how it must feel to live with people who hear you.

  “I feel like you like hanging out with my dad more than me,” she said once as they walked along the ravine in her backyard. They had just returned from a drive into the city for a Blue Jays game, and Marcus had sat between Stephanie and her dad, but had forgotten for most of it that she was there.

  He didn’t like her tone, the way it reminded him of his mom saying over and over again, “You could give Frank more of a chance,” as if she were just making a suggestion.

  “What the hell?” he said angrily, and turned red because he didn’t know what else to say.

  “I don’t know,” she started. “I mean, I know you’re not close to your dad, and—”

  “Just because I don’t live with him doesn’t mean we’re not close. My dad just gets me, you know? No—maybe you wouldn’t know.” He stormed off back to her place, sat in the grey warmth of the basement, loudly strummed his five favourite chords and then left. After that he started to feel uncomfortable with her family, like maybe Stephanie had told her dad that Niko wasn’t a great father, and wasn’t Steph’s dad trying too hard to be nice, and didn’t the whole thing feel a little forced anyway.

  Margot had been sitting beside him in choir. He told her she had a lovely voice, and she told him the same. He started taking the old guitar Niko had given him out at lunchtime and played “Free Falling” and “Summer of ’69” for Margot. She thought he might like to come and play with her youth group sometime. The songs were easy to learn and the church smelled new to him despite its mustiness. He strummed the chords and watched Margot’s elated face, her voice flirting around the notes as she asked God to wrap his arms around her, to hold her close forever. Playing with the band felt the way dinners at home should feel, the youth leader swinging his lead guitar against his gut and the rest of the teenagers spilling messy bright sounds around them.

  The youth leader tried a little too hard to dumb down the bible stories, but Stan, the forty-year-old elder, who was balding and looked like the type to have a comb-over but didn’t, was calm and kind. He took Marcus out for coffee one week and asked him what he thought about God, and Marcus said truthfully he hadn’t given him much thought—the love and compassion thing sounded pretty good, but the stories were a little far-fetched. Stan lent Marcus the bible he had read as a teenager.

  It was good timing because when he asked Margot why they couldn’t get more physical, she told him to read his bible. She said it tenderly, with a promise behind it. So he started with Genesis and didn’t find much about sex but found it pretty poetic, loved the word void, whispered it out loud before bed, the weight of the book bearing peacefully into his knees. “Then there was light,” and he felt the warmth he felt when they prayed in the youth room surrounded by candles and standing lamps. The rest of Genesis started to get boring so he skipped over to the Psalms, where he loved the way David went rapidly from hope to despair. “That David was pretty emo,” he told Margot one day. She smiled, and he felt she knew he was finally getting it.

  The following year, having reached only second base, he was growing more excited about his spiritual life than about Margot. He loved sitting in the silence and listening to the thoughts in his head, trying to pull out the ones that were from God and the ones that might be from Satan. When he told Margot he needed to end things so he could focus on his faith, she smiled with both victory and pain. “Maybe it will work out again down the road, when we’re both stronger,” he said. With wet eyes she said, “I can’t argue with God’s will.” He revelled in the relief that came with knowing she could love him, knowing he could hurt her with good intentions.

  Stan met him for coffee a couple times a month, as often as Niko was supposed to see him, although Niko was swinging by unexpectedly only a few times a year now. Marcus told himself it didn’t matter because he had Stan and his bible and the youth group, and praying was supposed to take the pain away. “And I’m so happy, so very happy—I’ve got the love of Jesus in my heart,” he found himself humming through Frank’s hospital stories at supper, finishing quickly so he could rush off to practise guitar. “What’s most
important,” Stan emphasized, “more important than anything else in the world, is that you live according to Scripture.” And if Stan lived this way, it could only mean good things. “There is no need to please man. If you follow what God tells you above all else, you can live life abundantly.”

  By the time Marcus was finishing high school, he had sworn off dating completely. There was no need to tie himself to one person, to be controlled by his physical desires. He liked the feeling of the girls’ nearness when they swam in Stan’s pool and played games with the girls perched on the guys’ shoulders, their bare thighs wrapped around his neck. He liked the feeling of being so close and yet knowing he could keep them at bay, looking up from his guitar during youth group meetings and catching the eyes of a girl who was staring at him.

  A week before he left for college, the youth group gathered around to pray over him, each person putting a hand on his arms, his shoulders. He tried to flex a little as girls wrapped their thin fingers around his arms. In that moment he knew the connectedness he felt had become something to live and die for. Jenny pulled a finger across his cheek to wipe his tears away. “You know we’re all with you through prayer,” she breathed in his ear. Stan promised to take him out for coffee every time he came home.

  Frank drove Marcus to school, gave him a bike, looked his lean figure up and down and smiled at him with accomplishment. Marcus reached out to shake his hand before the man could hug him, but Frank pulled him in for one anyway, and the baby scent of his clean pressed scrubs stuck furiously in Marcus’s nose all afternoon. His mother cried. “I’ve done the best I could, and you’ve turned out better than I could have asked for,” she said with her hands wrapped around his cheeks.

  Within the first week of school he was pining for the youth group. He bought orange printer paper and printed flyers to hang from any available bulletin board or telephone pole at the school:

  LOOKING FOR SOMETHING MORE?

  Find God’s dreams for your life!

  Weekly Bible study, time of worship, and fellowship.

  Meets Mondays at 7:00 PM,

  in the Denver Hall Common Area.

  HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE!

  He bought two bags of chips and bottles of no-name pop, picturing fifteen faceless bodies spread across the stiff couches and fold-out chairs in the common room, but forty people showed up to his first meeting, big-eyed and sitting on their hands, waiting for him to begin. He started by making a joke about God needing to miraculously multiply the snacks he brought, and everyone laughed a little, shyly, acceptingly. Like sheep without a shepherd, he thought, and felt overwhelmed with affection for these people he had just met.

  Looking into their open faces, he deftly lifted Stan’s bible into his lap and turned to the last place he had read. He cracked open the book and started talking about how much the word of God meant to him, about how badly they needed it in a world full of twisted truth and false love. One boy nodded faithfully at the end of each sentence. Marcus traded the bible for his guitar as he spoke and began strumming. A girl’s eyes filled with tears. He began to sing, feeling the fullness of the tenor notes in his throat, his own sound washing over him. The evening turned into three hours, and at the end everyone stayed to talk long after the chip bags were empty. “This is exactly what I’ve been looking for,” the bleary-eyed girl told him afterwards. He hugged her, smelled her lavender hair.

  The group gained a few people each week, reaching a high of sixty-eight by exam season. Marcus loved how effortless it felt standing in front of everyone, filling the room with his voice. He would wake in the middle of the night, heart racing, and roll out of bed onto his knees to pray, to imagine all of the things he could say and ways he could inspire more intensity in his disciples. At the beginning of the second semester he announced that God was calling the group to meet twice a week.

  Marcus, now going by Mark, felt the fire in his bones burning deeper and deeper each week and knew the rest of the group was feeling the same. They couldn’t stand to be apart, couldn’t wait to meet again, so he added another Friday-night meeting, since no one serious enough to be dedicated to the group was into partying anyway. By the time he added the Sunday-evening meeting and told them they need not feel bad for missing the watered-down services of the traditional churches they were dragging themselves out of bed for, the group had shrunk back down to a devoted thirty.

  The Sunday sessions began with foot washing in the candle-lit common room, and because he couldn’t do it all, Mark let Brandon, a slight boy with an uneven, quiet face, play sensitive worship songs softly while Mark started the washing. Round plastic tub in hand, towel around his waist, he would kneel, his blond curls hiding his angled cheeks as he bent his head over a girl’s foot, massaging warm, sweet water into her sole, up the crest of her calf. Sometimes he started with a guy, to keep things balanced, but the guys welled up less often and left him feeling a little underwhelmed.

  The use of the dormitory common area hadn’t seemed to bother anyone until the all-night prayer vigils started every other week. The space filled with music, shouting, pacing, jumping, and all sorts of devoted activity that, according to Mark’s RA, freaked the other residents out a little. “We want to make room for your religious expression, but this might be a little too intense for a public area.” Mark knew discrimination could be expected when a group of people was committed to living passionately, but he still felt a little driven with righteous anger.

  He found a church near the school with a congregation of ten white-haired people who were more than willing to rent the facility out four to five nights a week to young Christians at a meagre one hundred dollars a month. After Mark told the members of his group they needed to start paying rent and passed a bucket around during foot washing, he understood how much he was changing lives, how deep was their gratitude. The extra money could go towards important expenses that he was incurring. Having been so devoted to the group, he had neglected many of his own needs and desires and now God was rewarding him for his sacrifice.

  “I KNOW THIS is all very exciting, Marcus,” Stan said over coffee, having driven up to visit him, concerned he hadn’t been home in so long, “but doesn’t it seem a bit much? You’re not getting rest, you aren’t plugged into a bigger community—”

  “Why would I need a bigger community? Who says bigger is better?”

  “Well, I’m not saying it needs to be big, but I think you need some balance. I think you need some rest. You’re doing so much work pouring into other people—who is pouring into you? Who’s taking care of you, Mark?”

  It was sweet that Stan worried, that he felt Mark should be provided for. Stan’s words swept over Mark in a way that made him feel like dropping his head to the table and crying himself to sleep right then and there, in the safety of the old man’s protective gaze.

  But Mark had grown resistant to the attraction of rest. He patted Stan’s bible, propped on the corner of the plastic table. “Right here. What else do I need?”

  “Accountability, Marcus. You need to listen to other voices—”

  And with that, a burning started in Mark’s gut. “What other voices? No one else I know is living a life of true passion, a life of complete sacrifice to God.” Marcus dipped the end of his pinky in the hot, black coffee, enjoyed the gentle burn he felt on his skin.

  “I don’t get it, Stan. I thought this is what you would want for me. I thought this was the point. You wanted me to be a leader. Now I am, having way more of an influence than I could have predicted. I thought you’d be happy.” I thought you’d be proud, he thought.

  Stan looked at him for a long enough time that Mark had to look away. He was searching for something in Marcus’s eyes, something Mark wasn’t ready for him to see. “Mark, aren’t you lonely? Aren’t you tired?”

  “The joy of the Lord is my strength,” said Mark. He thought about Stan, his gentle kindness and care. Was that enough? Wasn’t this all about radical sacrifice, about giving up the self? After all
these years of learning from Stan, it was time that Mark called Stan to account.

  “I think this is one of those ‘Get behind me, Satan’ moments,” Mark said. “You’re trying to get me off the narrow path God has set before me.”

  Stan sighed, reached across the table and ran his index finger along the ridge of his bible, cracked with years of use. Mark felt a little sad about the way the tables had turned, the way he was so much more passionate than his wise old mentor, who had so much to learn from Mark now—if only he could be bothered to open his heart.

  MARK’S CONVERSATION WITH Stan deepened his drive towards holiness, towards being set apart, unlike anyone else he knew. How easily he could have fallen for the devil’s devices, dressed as a kind, older man, the one who had inspired Mark’s faith the most over the years. How close he had come to falling for the seductive enticement to cool to lukewarm, the siren’s call of “balance,” “rest,” or “self-care.” These were words of the world that had no place in the life of devotion, and so Mark dedicated another hour of each day to prayer, waking at 4:00 AM to kneel at the side of his bed until his shins went numb.

  He was a little annoyed with the way the dark circles growing under his eyes were changing his face, and more annoyed with his RA for mentioning that he looked exhausted every time he crossed his path. “You really should be getting more sleep,” he told Mark, who replied, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

  “I don’t get it,” said the RA, shaking his head. “I just don’t get what you’re doing.”

  Mark put his hand on the RA’s forearm. “I’m praying that one day you’ll understand the passion I feel, what it means to live for more than comfort, what it means to have a spirit that drives you beyond human strength.”

  “Sure, but please don’t pray for me while you should be sleeping,” the RA said, rolling his eyes as he walked away. Mark had developed a tough skin against this sort of persecution, remembering that one day they would all understand: the guys in the dorm, Frank and Mom and Niko and even Stan—they would all know what they were missing.