Boy Erased (23 page)

“No,” Dominique said, “but I'm sure I will if I move back home. It's bound to happen.”

“It happens to everyone in our neighborhood,” Charles said, heading to the counter to fill several more paper cups with ketchup. There were never enough paper cups. It seemed as though someone had designed the cups so you'd have to get up for more ketchup every few minutes. It made the condiments seem precious, lined up in a row across our table, a string of rubies glistening beneath the fluorescents.

All of this is so fake,
I suddenly thought. I imagined walking into Charles and Dominique's neighborhood, watching a pedestrian get shot, blood sweeping across the face of a white T-shirt. Would everything seem less fake if I saw through to the heart of this violence?

“Doesn't it feel wrong,” I said, tossing the sandwich back on the table, the marbled sauce dripping on all sides, “eating after what we saw?”

“It seems natural to me,” Charles said, returning with the cups. “We have to eat.”

“Listen,” Dominique said, dipping another fry in the ketchup. “We only came because you wanted us to, and now you're acting like we did something wrong. So the movie was a little more intense than we thought it'd be. So what? We're here, we're alive, and we've got good grades. God would want us to be thankful for that.”

“God wants us to make good grades?” Charles said. “Oh, Lord.”

“And God would want you to eat that Big Mac,” Dominique added. “Speaking of which, are you going to eat that? Because if not . . .”

I pushed my Big Mac over to Dominique. “You don't get it,” I said.

This wasn't their fault, of course. I'd told them almost nothing of what I was going through with my family, and it must have seemed unfair to them that only a minute before I had been so nonchalant about my Christianity, whereas now I must
have looked like a zealot, like my father. I knew I would never be able to tell them what was going on, that no matter how many days we spent together I would continue walking through life with one foot in a world they'd never seen, just as they had lived with one foot in a neighborhood I'd never visited.

“You know what you need?” Dominique said, tapping her foot on the tile. “You need a song.”

I could feel the burger churning in my stomach now. It took all of my energy to keep from making a face.

“Please, no,” Charles said, rolling his eyes. “It's all we do.” A spot of ketchup clung to his bottom lip, garishly red. I thought of the article I'd read, the one about the new blood they'd developed for
The
Passion
, a sickeningly sweet one—red dye, fatty gums, all suspended in glycerin—in order to make it appear more viscous.

Dominique stood up, wiped her salt-covered hands on her navy blue blouse, and cleared her throat. She looked around for a few seconds. There were only about three or four people in the restaurant. Outside the windows a hazy orange fog roiled over everything, obscuring the road. A few snowflakes clung to the window, melted, and traced lines down the glass. For a moment it seemed we were part of some extravagant snow globe, that someone had shaken us up and turned the key for the music box. Dominique grabbed Charles under his arms and forced him to his feet, nearly toppling over the line of ketchup cups.

“Summertime,” she sang, incredibly in tune, incredibly out of season.

Some of the people turned their heads.
What are you doing with them?

Charles joined her. I kept quiet.

“There's a'nothin can harm you,” they sang in harmony, “with your daddy and mammy standing by.”

I rushed to the bathroom and closed the door on their singing. I stared into the placid water and waited, but nothing came. It was just the reflection of a skinny face I could barely recognize.

•   •   •

I
N
MY
SECRET
LIFE
, ex-gay therapy grows inside me, takes up residence under my excess skin, grips the lining of my stomach. My stomach churns with the tide of coffee and the Egg McMuffin my mother forced me to eat on the way to the session, the yellow wrapper crinkling and the car's tires thumping over the Mississippi-Arkansas Bridge. My mother has been doing this a lot lately, forcing me to eat calorie-rich food, sneaking real mayonnaise into my sandwiches when I'm not looking, and it's as though the work I've been doing to make myself invisible is all for nothing.

“Your thoughts are harmful to God,” the ex-gay counselor says, his eyes fixed on the glass-topped desk between us. From this angle, his eyebrows look like two large black commas. He is here to interrupt me. “They're disgusting, unnatural. An abomination.” I keep thinking about how he'd said the word “masturbation.” The word sits somewhere in the room, refusing to leave.

“I know,” I say. “I'm trying.”

“Your mother and I think you should attend the Source,” he says, holding out a sheet of paper. “It's a two-week program. Very brief, but effective.” The Source. The stories I write almost daily now also have the ability to hide the source of my pain, to obscure me from my sinful nature. When I'm not sitting in front of this counselor, when I'm instead sitting with Charles and Dominique in my dorm room and scribbling in my Moleskine, I forget about my affliction, feeling only the joy and frustration of the written word, how it refuses to wrap around what my mind is seeing. The writing is both bigger—and so much smaller—than what I'd imagined. But I can't run from my pain, as this counselor has told me many times. I can't run from my disgusting nature, no matter how skinny I get. Eventually, I must return to the source.

•   •   •

T
HE
CAMPUS
was quiet that night, with only the muffled thumping of fraternity subwoofers giving life to the evening air, a peaceful vibration that made it seem as though the unlit corners of the academic buildings might hold some promise of excitement, some other world just outside this one. The top floor of the humanities building shone in the distance, and on the terrace just outside the faculty lounge stood a lonely figure, a late-night studier on a Friday night, a skinny student who seemed to live inside the building at all hours. He never failed to arouse some feelings of guilt in me, some fear that I hadn't
read the assigned section of
The
Faerie Queene
as well as I might have. He could have been me, really—a far more focused me, someone with both feet planted solidly in one place, eyes trained on a future full of books and wood-paneled rooms and late-night coffee sessions. Years later, I would be jealous of people like him, people whose brains never seemed to turn against them, even though I really had no idea what he thought on all those lonely nights.

I slipped past a few more buildings, dead grass crunching under my shoes, the air cold since I sported only a light black sweater. “Why are you going out like that?” Charles had said. And I hadn't provided him a real answer, just that I was restless and wanted to feel the cold air on my skin.

I reached a small garden, kicked up gravel in my path, and made my way to a cold stone bench. A tall hedge kept me hidden from the quad, but just above its bare branches I could make out the campus chapel's steeple lit up on all sides by three generous floodlights. One night during the beginning of the school year, I'd climbed to this steeple with a group of friends, Charles and Dominique among them, David among them. We'd leaped over the struts of the chapel ceiling, big brass organ pipes gleaming in the refracted moonlight below, and made our way up a rusty ladder, trying to stifle our laughter the whole way. Just before we reached the very top, as we stood before a dark stairwell that would open onto a narrow terrace bounding the steeple, a senior pressed a finger to his lips and told us that we needed to know the truth about this place. He told us that the college used to be
a Masonic home for orphans that had burned to the ground in the early 1900s, killing several children. Three of those burned children were rumored to stand each night at the base of the steeple and hold hands. Three children with no names, their features erased by flames.

The story added a bit more adrenaline to what we already felt while climbing all those rungs in the dark, brushing past thick cobwebs and holding hands with people we barely knew but were already calling friends, already trusting those friends to hoist us across the gaps, the thought of all that scarred flesh, all those lonely children trapped inside with no one to mourn them, mixed with a kind of superstition that only complete darkness could still inspire in a student body as skeptical as ours. When we finally reached the top and the warm late-summer air met our skin, we were shocked to find only scuffed concrete and dust, and all of us held hands around the steeple in memory of those children, feeling, as we all must have felt, as I remember feeling with David's warm palm gripped in mine, that the bonds we formed that night would hold forever.

Outside the garden, fog was falling over the academic buildings, over the humanities boy who never stopped studying, and the bench I was sitting on began to feel like a tiny island adrift in a sea of white.
The Garden of Gethsemane
, I thought, remembering
The Passion
. The night before His crucifixion, Jesus had tried to comfort the disciples, to let them know that all of the pain they would soon endure would be worth it, that the violence would fulfill His promises. I wondered if it had
been the same for the orphans. Had there been someone around to comfort them before the fire began to lick their arms?

I hugged myself, wrapped my arms as tightly as I could around my chest, the feel of my skinny ribs good to me, the cold good to me. All of it was good, I realized, if you only trusted that everything would make sense in the end. The snow had yet to arrive—only the hint of it—but it would come, eventually, even if it was this late in the season. It would cover everything, build its strange gardens over secreted objects, sculpt the world into something new.

•   •   •

I
N
MY
SECRET
LIFE
, therapy engulfs me, swells over me until I am breathing only it, until my air is it. It's been only a week since my last visit to the counselor's office, and for perhaps the first time in many weeks, I'm not thinking about my next visit. I'm with my family. It's late evening. It's Christmas. Fire crackling in one corner, giant fir in another, overdecked hall stretched out between me and a view of the half-frozen lake that's polished and gleaming with a distant neighbor's twinkling Christmas lights.

The dark hallway yawns at my feet. My mother emerges from the kitchen to stand beside me. I can feel the warmth of the oven radiating from her self-tanned skin, a faint whiff of gingerbread trailing her. She's wearing a cashmere sweater whose central feature is a large snowman's face. The snowman's plastic carrot nose grazes my shoulder as she turns to speak to me.

“What about next week? Is next week okay?” she says. She can't help herself. The doctor's visit has been on her mind, and only hers, for the past few weeks. No one else wants to talk about it, especially my father. But someone has to keep everything together.

I look down at her shoes. Shiny and black, with clear plastic heels trapping two identical miniature Santa Clauses, a small heap of snow gathered around their own miniature black boots. Each time she walks, the Santa Clauses walk with her through twin blizzards, trapped in their isolated cells. When my mother used to pick me up from elementary school, my classmates would place bets on the outlandishness of her outfits. Would there be a red ribbon this time? Would there be a matching polka-dotted bag? It made me feel proud, those bets, but it also made me feel shameful, as though some part of me was reflected in her physical garishness.

“Dr. Julie's planning on checking your testosterone.”

“Oh,” I say. There's nothing else to say.

“It'll be quick. We'll have some answers.”

“Good,” I say. The twin Clauses stare up at me, snow settling at their feet.

“Make sure you tell your professors you'll be gone Tuesday.”

“Okay.”

“What's wrong, honey?” One of the Clauses edges closer.

“Nothing,” I say. “It's just weird.”

“I know,” she says. “It'll be over soon.” The Clauses turn their backs to me, lost again in their private blizzards. As my
mother walks back to the kitchen, her pale cashmere becomes a flicker of white flame in the dim.

I turn back to the hallway, to the glittering lake framed by the window. It is a dark gift waiting to be opened. It is precious, delicate, wrapped in all those twinkling lights. Perhaps this is just my low testosterone talking. Perhaps I will lose this precious image the minute Dr. Julie manages to spike my hormones. Perhaps I will lose all of my most treasured memories, those moments of transcendent beauty, when I finally visit Dr. Julie. Perhaps this is a small price to pay for a normal life. I stand in the hallway and try to will my testosterone levels to increase. If I can just make myself stop thinking.
Left hand, palm down. Do not say to yourself, “Turn the left hand.”
I clench my hand into a fist and dig my nails into the soft lake of my palm until my breathing draws short. I want to punch the wall, rip my knuckles on the splintering wood, draw blood—but I can't. I can't make myself feel something that isn't there. I can only feel what I wish wasn't there. I wonder what I'll do when I can no longer fake it. I wonder if people will notice. Perhaps the testosterone really will solve all of these problems, hijack my brain in a way meditation and prayer never could. Perhaps all of it really does come down to the body.

I remember the taste of unleavened bread on my tongue, the words
This is the Body of Christ
echoing through the sanctuary.
This is my body given for you. Do this in remembrance of me
. I remember the shock of grape juice, the Blood of Christ,
the fear that this juice might actually turn to blood in my stomach, though the Baptists never believed such a thing was possible. I remember the one time I felt guilty about eyeing the Brewer twins in the front aisle as I sipped my juice and listened to all that unleavened bread being ground to grist by hundreds of molars, the Brewer backs so straight and perfectly sculpted I couldn't help but look, and so I rushed to the bathroom after communion and forced myself to vomit up the Body and Blood of Christ, fearing I would be punished for my blasphemy if I kept Him inside of me, the sight of Christ's floating remains similar to the curdled flesh I'd later see on the movie screen. This should have been a sign, I realize now. I can now see how the body controls the spirit.