Boy Erased (11 page)

“There's an evolutionary advantage to waking at almost any sound,” I said.

“You believe that stuff?”

“I don't know,” I said. “It's interesting to think that we might be the children of survivors. That maybe we're here because our great-great-great-grandparents were somehow stronger.”

“I don't like that word,” he said. He brushed something off his arm, as if he were peeling back my words from his skin.

“Grandparents?”

“No. Evolution.”

“I didn't say ‘evolution.' I said ‘evolutionary.'”

“C'mon,” he said. “Let's see what's on TV.”

We walked back to his dorm and headed to the lounge, where we could watch TV. We settled into armchairs that lined one wall of the room, and David began flipping through
the channels, landing on a popular infomercial about a revolutionary rotisserie grill. An orange-tanned man began to slide four raw chickens onto a rack. He wore a long green apron. Each time he stabbed another chicken onto the rack, his lips expanded into a wide smile.
I'll just walk over here
, he said, the camera zooming in on an oil-basted thigh.
I'll put these chickens in this new Promodel box, and then I'll—
the camera swirling in an arc to reveal a smiling audience composed of pale-skinned, middle-aged married couples—
what is it, audience?

I could see David shift in his chair out of the corner of my eye. The light from the television cut the room into dark polygons.

What is it, audience
? the orange-tanned man repeated.

“Set it,” David and the man shouted in unison, “AND FORGET IT!”

Anyone who watched late-night television that year knew that catchphrase. The studio audience repeated the phrase every time the man put another set of chickens inside the box. The man encouraged the audience to shout it louder each time.
It's so easy
, he said.
So incredibly easy
. It would run like a shamanic mantra through the hallways of our dorm. Stressed-out students would repeat it as a solution to heavy academic workloads. Leave it behind and walk away.

“You really think your grandmother was a monkey or something?” David said.

“Yes,” I said. “My grandmother could've been a monkey if she wanted. She could've been anything.”

I told him about a game my grandmother and I used to play. I would dangle one of her long pocket watches in front of her face—
you're getting sleepy now, so, so sleepy
—until her blue-veined lids would begin to flutter then clamp tightly. I would then give her orders for the day.
You're going to act just like a ghost until I snap my fingers three times
.
You're going to feel like you're under water, a mermaid, until I yell, “Mimi, wake up!”
You're going to do everything I tell you to do.
The watch would rest like a charm in my pocket for the rest of the day, my grandmother faithfully performing her roles. Once, she even entered her dining room on her hands and knees during one of her monthly ladies' bridge parties, barking like a dog, until I snapped my fingers again and again, embarrassed for her and more than a little terrified of the old ladies' exaggerated reactions, ones that I later realized were part of my grandmother's joke. One woman's cards spilled from her lap, red and black faces slipping into a zigzag formation behind her heels, and when she reached down to pick them up with her wrinkled, trembling hand, she nearly fell out of her chair.
Mimi, wake up!

Hypnosis, self-induced or otherwise: It was a talent my grandmother and I had shared, believing we could trick ourselves into being something we weren't. Perhaps it was even genetic.

“So, according to this evolution crap,” David said, “the longer you stay in a place, the more you begin to trust it?” He tapped the arm of my chair. I could feel the vibration through the armrest. “The easier it is to trust the people around you?”

“In a subconscious way, I guess.”

The orange-tanned man turned toward the audience, teeth sparkling.
Once I close this Promodel box, it's going to be so easy
, he said.
How easy will it be, people?

David switched off the television. The lounge snapped into darkness. I could still see his silhouette on the wall where I had been staring. The afterimage reminded me of one of those citizens of Pompeii, captured as they were before Mount Vesuvius trapped them in its ashen tombs.

Was this why people filled their frames with family photos? One sudden flash and the people you cared for would be preserved in their innocence, their happiness, before one could do harm to the other? The opposite seemed true for my father, who preached that the promise of a photograph was misleading, that our sinful states could only be transformed into goodness
after
the destruction,
after
the flash of the Rapture. He believed that our true bodies would be realized only once we ascended to heaven and stood face-to-face with God—no stretch marks, not an ounce of fat, no sinful urges—a white unwrinkled sheet draped between this life and the next. A tabula rasa glimpsed on this earth only once, if you were lucky, through the glittering baptismal waters, as your pastor guided the back of your head back to the surface, and you gasped for a new breath.

I felt safe. Invisible in the new dark.

“Set it,” David shouted, “AND FORGET IT!”

•   •   •

N
EED
HELP
?
The choice to accept help from David would come to seem oddly menacing. Later, I would spend too much time thinking about the choices I made that year. Irrational as it was, I sometimes believed he might not have raped me just a few months later—lowered my face to the keyhole fly of his cotton briefs and forced me to go down on him until I gagged on a cocktail of my own vomit and his semen, the intimacy I'd thought I wanted from him only a few minutes before now forced on me in such excess—if I'd only chosen to carry my own boxes into the dorm.

•   •   •

“W
HAT
ABOUT
CHURCH
?” David said. We were almost two months into the semester, and we still barely knew each other. After our late-night chat about evolution, I thought it might be best to keep my distance, though we occasionally ran into each other in one of the dorms. We had gone running together. He was sitting on the edge of a chair in the lounge, his red gym shorts sagging nearly to the ground. An early morning runner, he would sit for hours after a run to watch talk shows, his sweat drying, his breathing growing slowly calmer. He took a sip of water from a bottle that bore our college's insignia, wiped his crusty mouth with the back of his hand.

“I go,” I said, looking up from my copy of Dostoyevsky's
Notes from the Underground
. “Sometimes.” It was a lie. Two months into the semester, and I hadn't attended a single service. When my mother called, I would make up stories about how nice the people were at the local Baptist church, about the potlucks I would attend, the macaroni and cheese and green beans and roasted rotisserie chicken I would eat after Sunday services. I kept all of this a secret from David. Each night in my own room, I had stared into the constellations of my popcorn ceiling and imagined God might be looking down on me, that He might be deliberating on what to do about my sinful thoughts, the ones where I would think of sneaking down the ladder, out the door to David's dorm, to David's bed and curling up next to him, fitting my hardness into the groove of his ass, snapping something into place that couldn't be undone.

I licked my finger and flipped the page, shifted in my chair beside the window. Like Dostoyevsky's Underground Man, I hardly left my room or David's lounge unless absolutely necessary. I walked to class and back, barely making eye contact with my classmates, imagining each tiny exchange was portentous of something sinister. Girls, who had barely noticed me before I lost the weight, now whispered as I passed, their eyes shifting. Although I knew they were probably just trying to get my attention, I couldn't help but feel that they were whispering about my secret, that they could somehow detect the hidden part of me. For a fuck-off uniform, I wore a Radiohead
Kid A
–era jumble of jagged black-and-white lines resembling the sharp peaks of a nightmarish Kilimanjaro, and I made sure that
my eyes almost never widened in pleasure or surprise beneath the dark shelf of my brow. If I didn't say too much, if people didn't notice me, then I might also escape God's roving Sauron eye.

The only time I felt safe outside the dorm was in literature class discussing hypothetical lives, hypothetical sets of events that constructed hypothetical systems of morality. I found it ironic, secure in my Underground Man superiority, that the same professors who looked down on many of their students' love of video games never seemed to realize that they shared the same love of the virtual, of the vicariously lived life.

Without realizing it, I had leaped from the body of one avatar to the next. No longer able to trust in a post-Rapture mentality, I found comfort only in books. To convince myself that I wasn't sinning
too badly
, I focused on Doubting Thomas, who after seeing proof of Christ's resurrected body finally believed in God, or on Peter, who denied Christ three times but still went on to spread Christianity across a hedonistic Europe.
I can turn it around at any moment
, I told myself, given the right impetus. At the time, I had no idea what would inspire such a change, what form it would take.

“I'll make you a bet,” David said, squirting some of the water from the bottle's pull cap onto the front of his shirt. It spread like a dark breastplate across his chest. Sitting there in the beauty of his youth and averageness, he seemed invincible. “If I beat you in a race, you come to my church. I've even got a handicap. I've already run today.”

“Isn't it a sin to bet?” I said.

“Not when someone's soul is on the line.”

•   •   •

E
VEN
IF
you know the person—especially if you know the person—rape, and the memory of it, becomes a blinding flash. A brush against something bigger than yourself. Sometimes the experience takes the form of a divine visitation, such is our need to displace the reality of it. Like Lot's daughters at Sodom, those beautiful virgins offered up in the place of angels for lascivious Sodomites—
Behold now
, Lot entreats,
I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes
. Perhaps later they remembered the smell of the city market in the early morning; the feel of the sun as they turned their faces from one stall to the next; the shock of cool, stream-washed lentils passing through their fingers as they helped their mother prepare an evening meal. Like these daughters, I might remember, in ultraexposed detail, the swirl of wood grain at the base of David's bunk, the sound of the hallway doors closing one after another outside his room as my fellow freshmen returned from their nights of heavy drinking. But I would not remember the act itself.

I would never get close enough to the memory to see what was really there. For the longest time, I wouldn't allow myself to admit that it was rape at all. Like many victims, I was
embarrassed. How could I have let this happen? What kind of man let another man do this to him? David was hardly stronger than I was, so how could I have been so weak, so helpless? I had only really heard of rape happening to women, though I knew the Bible talked about male-on-male rape in the Sodom and Gomorrah story, that one of the reasons God had punished those citizens was that they had wanted to rape the male angels. Added to all of this shame was the knowledge that I had secretly pined for the opportunity to be this close to another man, and it was extremely difficult after my experience with David to consider gay sex as anything other than rape. Was this what my church had been warning me about the whole time? And if this was the punishment I had received on earth, how much worse was it going to be in the afterlife?

Small details, flashes: These would be all I could remember. Look directly at the burning light, and you become nothing but a pillar of salt, as Lot's wife learned. Just another object lesson on passive obedience. But still, I reach for a language. I walk right up to the edge of an unknown border, line up the tips of my white sneakers, and try to remember the details.

The feel of the midmorning air on my face the day before the rape, as David and I raced up the college hillside. The intermittent blaring of the marching band through the alders. The white sneakers I'd laced up so tightly because I wanted to win the bet so badly. The way I stared into the passing forest, counting the waltz of the ascending trees on either side of the
road—one two three, one two three—watching the high-line wires dip and sway through the branches. The way I tried to outstrip him until I ended up clutching my knees and doubling over, vomiting into the pebble-studded grass.

“Church it is,” David said, overtaking me. “I win.”

•   •   •

“Y
OU
'
LL
LOVE
IT
HERE
,” he said. It was the day after our run, a Wednesday evening, and I was true to my word.

David and I sat in padded folding chairs in an old post office, waiting for the Pentecostal service to begin. Old buildings like this one had lain dormant in this town for decades, their red brick walls crumbling, their wooden eaves sinking to steep angles from years of rain and rot. To cover up the decay, the church had draped a large banner over the brick front.
TH
E POST YOUTH GROUP
, it read. On my way in, a heavyset man with bright eyes told me more or less the same thing. He said he was a youth pastor.