For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light,
lest his deeds should be reproved.
–John 3:20
Rudd is a fractured boy. Like a mirror thrown to the ground and glued back together, he splits the reckoning of anyone who looks into his eyes beyond the comfort of recognition. To the other kids at school, he is a non-entity. To his mother, he is a “vague and lifeless avatar of Mormon ideals.” To himself, he is someone else, a candle flickering at the lips of a force he struggles to define. While some of this dissociation may be attributable to the angst and ennui any teenager might experience after years of ostracization, much of it links to dark corner pieces in the greater puzzle of who he may or may not be.
Words and phrases run circles in his head, each a temporary fixation leaving a permanent scar in the body envelope of his upbringing. “Everything was humiliating but desperately needed,” the narrator observes, thus framing Rudd as a soul whose identity is necessarily suspect by default. It’s as if the religious life promised by the local community were not so much a lie as an alternative truth by which the stitches of his coming of age are constantly pulled out and retied, pulled out and retied. Over time, this cycle of disinterest in the things of faith leaves him wandering in cold denial.
Rudd’s father is dead—suicide, we learn—and the legacy of that inherited family trauma is just now beginning to undress itself in the glare of young adulthood. This is perhaps why, one day, he finds himself rummaging through the deceased parent’s effects. Among them is a letter from his mistress, whose handwriting is barely legible in its faded state (a sign, perhaps, of its need for resolution). Cryptic phrases like “duty in your flesh” and other information hint at a half-brother named Lael, whose existence comes as a quiet shock.
Rudd’s mother is disinterested in digging up the past. “We know the truth,” she avers; case closed. And yet, Rudd demands to know about this extramarital son, to which she replies: “The only bastard around here is you, and you weren’t born that way. You had to grow into it.” And with that, his quest for family leads him to Lael, who shares his apathy.
In the midst of developing a connection with the sibling he never knew, Rudd becomes aware of his power. “Lael could leak into him,” we are told, “but not he into Lael,” setting a precedent for a dynamic that only intensifies with time. While working on a research project for school, Rudd peels away a layer of resistance from the onion that is Lael. He learns about William Hooper Young, the grandson of Brigham Young convicted of murdering a young woman in the name of “blood atonement,” an obscure and recanted Mormon tradition that provided soul retribution through the killing of those who had sinned so egregiously that the redemption of Christ was deemed insufficient. The deeper he gets into this history, the more he feels it to be inchoate in his connection with Lael. Even the latter knows school projects are vanity metrics designed to keep students busy and instructors feeling self-righteous: “Teaching’s not about truth. It’s about comfort.”
Curtains appear throughout the novel. Whether Rudd is looking through them at an inner part of himself in moments of reflection or being told to reach through them in a secret temple ritual, described in painful detail in the book’s second section, they are omnipresent. At their whim, Rudd catches only glimpses of events in which he may or may not have participated, including exhuming his father’s corpse, flirting with the identity of William Hooper Young, and beginning to see value in the blood sacrifice. (“God has drawn a curtain between myself and heaven,” he admits, “and there is no parting it.”) But the more he falls into bouts of missing time to the point of surviving a crime so heinous that his memory of it is as indefinite as his possible involvement in it, the more holes acquire an intimate significance. Holes in memory, space, and time speak in chorus of the porosity of lived reality.
In a bravado third act, do-overs and attempts at refashioning memory, space, and time serve as a baseline for getting away with abuse and possibly worse. And yet, we get the feeling that in a town of such limited means (as attested by the upside-down “L” that serves as a “7” in the elementary school’s marquee), the only thing one can hope for is to slip through the fingers of accountability.
Ultimately, it is violence that connects these characters (some of whom I am at pains to reveal without spoiling the plot) and the religion that holds their lives together on the shakiest of outstretched palms. Only when they come to themselves do they realize just how far the feet of their self-justification have traveled in search of asylum. Any hope we might pine for is tempered by the novel’s mission statement: “These painful moments of lucidity, an affliction. What can we do but wait for them to pass?” And so, we stand in the shadow of our allegiances, but whether or not we question our complicity in what we’ve just read is another question entirely. Only you can answer that for yourself.
The Open Curtain is available from Coffee House Press and fine booksellers.