Boy Erased (20 page)

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”
I can tell all of this to you later, after the ceremony. I just have to wait for the right moment
.

“Are you sure?”

“Are
you
hungry?”
But
I'm afraid you'd be disgusted with me
.
I'm afraid you'd vomit again, right here in the car
.

“A little.” The car turned a sharp curve, a stray pen
tumbling out of the cup holder and rolling across the floorboard, a ping as it hit the metal bar beneath my feet. I could have picked it up, uncapped its top, and written my confession right then and there, had LIA's rules permitted it.

“Let's stop, then.”
I realize this now, that all of it might come down to me being afraid. That all of this supposed change is just to please him, to please you
.

“I'll pull into Sonic. What do you want?”

“Just some fries.”
But
I'm afraid of losing you. I'm afraid of what I'll become if I lose you. I'm afraid because I think I've already lost God
.
God's stopped speaking to me, and what am I supposed to do without Him? After nineteen years with God's voice buzzing around in my head twenty-four hours a day, how am I supposed to walk around without His constant assurance?

“An order of fries, please, and a Coke.” Beneath the speaker's static, the clanging of metal in an invisible sink. “And a Sonic burger.”

“Can I get tater tots instead?”
I don't even know what it would look like to be gay. I can't even imagine a life where my friends and family would want to talk to me if I was openly gay
.

“Make that tater tots instead of fries.”

“I'm not really that hungry.”
I can do this. I just have to fake my way through until I can take my big risk
,
whatever that will be.

“You're going to be hungry later,” my mother said, pressing the button for the automatic windows, the glass sliding behind
her and thudding into rubber insulation. “The ceremony's going to take a while and you're going to be hungry. Let's pray to God we don't have to stay for the reception.”

•   •   •

T
HE
CHURCH
was just as I remembered it. The sanctuary's walls were bright and eggshell white, with handsome wooden rows spaced evenly to the stage. A white projector screen took up stage center, and behind it stood the bottom of a large wooden dove backlit with shattered light that Brother Stevens had created, perhaps unconsciously, to mimic the great Roman Catholic artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini's golden flutes of light. This setup was a flaw in the sanctuary's design, covering up the most beautiful object in the room, but Brother Stevens made up for it by requesting that whoever ran the projector flip the button to retract the screen at the end of his sermon, at the exact moment when he began calling for people to walk down the aisle and accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior—“Would you do the right thing this morning? Would you follow Jesus where He leads you?”—the screen buzzing in the quiet auditorium, the dove revealed midflight, its wings flame-tipped, its light glistening on the blue baptismal waters below it, where on a good day Brother Stevens would baptize a new congregant “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” The slow reveal was breathtaking, and it had often worked, inspiring many people to take the first step out of their
pews and approach this holy dove, this one extravagant object in an otherwise bare sanctuary.

It would later occur to me that much of the success of the Baptist Church in this part of the country could be attributed to its elegant use of contrast. Unlike the heavily adorned Catholic Church, the Baptist Church sought to dazzle with just one or two displays of beauty—sensing, perhaps, that most of the congregants, who came from humble backgrounds, would feel overwhelmed by too much ostentation. People like Brother Stevens and my father were proud of the church's austere, Spartan embrace of utility. This plainness lent weight to my father's life story, rising as he had out of a modest family. You could see this sensibility reflected in the way congregants spoke of worldly possessions, quoting passages on the corruptive influence of money—“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”—the way they constantly joked about how poor they were, how abject their circumstances had become. It was a badge of honor to stand before the pulpit and reveal a testimonial that featured at least one fall from a great coffer-filled height. These, they believed, were the humble beginnings of Christ's church, barely modernized for today's audiences. These were the circumstances necessary and sufficient for grace, the ramshackle stable planted, as this church was, in the middle of an empty field.

A hand on my shoulder, pinching the back of my neck. “You must be so excited for your dad.”

Fingers gripping my elbow, spinning me in the direction of an elderly woman's worry-creased face, large glasses perched on the end of her nose. “Do you remember me?”

A middle-aged man at my side, poking me in the ribs. “Read
The Da Vinci Code
yet? Pretty blasphemous, but it really pokes fun at all those Catholics. All that ugly Mary worshipping.”

These people gathered here to celebrate my father's life, to usher this new family into the pastorate. These were the same good people I'd loved and trusted all of my life.
Still, we're all lying to ourselves
, I thought, my hand glued to the phone in my pocket, one quick press of a button and all of this would end.
Why are we all still lying to ourselves?
It was confusing to slip back into this crowd of people who cared for me and wanted only the best for me—all the while I knew that, had they known what I held in my hand, they would have run straight to Brother Stevens and demanded my father's immediate resignation. Everywhere I turned, another smile behind which I sensed a thousand swirling repressions. Hadn't we all heard the stories, the church rumors? The man who cheated on his wife with a dozen other women. The couple who videotaped a youth group sleepover at their house, the camera discovered by a young girl who spotted the blinking red light between stacks of church literature? Of course, I knew the whole world was filled with such things. The only difference here, in this sanctuary, was that people were trying to become something greater than the sum of their parts. Or, really, it was their parts that they were trying to erase, and this new Christ-filled body—this baptized,
cleansed, noncorporeal body—had no room, could spare no tolerance, for the old ways of living.

A trembling hand at the small of my back, Brother Nielson's wrinkled face staring up at me. Brother Hank at his side, holding the old man's thin elbow to steady him. “Finally back from your fancy college? Did you learn anything there you couldn't learn here?”

“Not too much,” I said.
I've learned that your nuke-'em-all philosophy isn't worth a damn
.
I went in with everything I had, and here I am, still as lost and confused as ever.
I gripped Brother Nielson's weak hand. He'd grown so fragile in the year since I'd last seen him at the dealership that I didn't want to tell him what I really thought. How it must have been so easy for him, a straight man, to live such an outstanding life and then sit back and watch the fruits of his labor flower before him in the form of younger deacons, younger preachers like my father whom he'd inspired with his unwavering devotion, his unerring connection to God. How he didn't have any idea what it felt like to be cut off without warning.
Pleasehelpmetobepure
.

“Leave the boy alone,” Brother Hank said, smiling, his teeth blindingly white. I'd once heard him brag that he used Crest White Strips every night since he'd become a car salesman. “Keeping myself pure, boys,” he'd said. “The customer can't resist.”

“It's fine,” I said.
It's not
.

A few more people crowded in, shook my hand. I spotted an empty aisle and made my way through it, hoping to move to a
less crowded part of the sanctuary. The space was narrow, my knees knocking against the polished wood, and I found myself in the awkward position of turning my back to most of the congregants just to get by. I could feel their eyes on my back, and I wondered, once again, when the lightning strike would come. Would God wait for the moment when I stood on stage and blatantly lied, or would He do it in this quiet moment, in this lull before the storm? The space around me was contracting, the lights brighter, blinding.

“Where have you been?” A familiar voice. I turned to face a smiling Wild Thing, his hand already waiting for mine.

“College, mostly.” I shook his hand. I wondered if he somehow knew where I'd been this past week.

“Always knew you were smarter than I was,” he said. He seemed even more clean-cut than when I'd last seen him at the county jail, his sideburns perfectly trimmed and his white shirt starched. “Got your Ph.D. yet?”

“Not yet.”
It's easy for you, too. Living out your life the way you want until someone like my father comes along and cleans you up. Now you do the same for others. But I've never really lived out my sinful life. I never knew what it was like, so I don't know the first thing about conversion.

“I'll be right back.”

Once I got out on the other side, a whole new crowd had formed, waiting and eager to greet me. I could feel the self-pity building behind my fake smile, but I couldn't stop it. My palm
felt hot against the RAZR. I was beginning to draw short of breath.

“It's been such a long time,” another voice said. “Where have you been?”

There was that question again, posed by another familiar stranger. I could never remember people's names, a shortcoming that sent a ripple of panic through my chest as the sanctuary began to fill up. My father simply knew too many people, had done too many favors for too many families, and so people knew my name by heart, prayed for me along with the rest of my family, worried over my future success because I was His Son. How many times had my father sat beside someone's hospital bed and prayed for God's healing power? How many times had he attended the funeral of one of his friend's distant relatives, usually a person he hadn't even seen, just to offer some extra emotional support? To most people in the church, the number seemed infinite.

I made a beeline to my old perch at the back of the sanctuary. I needed space. I thought my lungs were going to collapse. The air had disappeared from the room. I walked up the narrow steps leading to the empty booth and sat before the monitor. The projector had already been set up for the ceremony. Happy photos of our family standing next to the foyer's fake plastic plants, all of us beaming for the camera. My father with his hand on the hood of his award-winning 1934 Ford, the one he built himself. My father standing in front of our blue cotton
gin, ribbons of cotton plastered to his shirt.
BROTHER CONLEY'S ORDINATION
, the screen read. I highlighted the text and changed it to small caps instead of all caps, a small tweak that always made slides look better. Having something to do calmed me a bit, slowed my breathing. Later, I would come to recognize these symptoms as the first signs of a panic attack. At the time, they felt like the first symptoms of dying.

“Thanks for that.”

I turned to face my father for the first time since coming to LIA. He was looking up from the bottommost step, his hand on the booth railing. His smile was genuine, his eyes sparkling.

“Wish me luck.”

Three steps between us, but a thousand syllables between what I wanted to say and what I actually said. “Good luck.”

•   •   •

W
HEN
I
WAS
BORN
, after my mother and father held me and just before the nurse took me away to the nursery, my father had used the sharp point of his hunting knife to gently etch a small zigzag in the bottom of my left foot, a tiny scar that would prove I was his, a symbol to ensure that the nurses hadn't mixed me up with some other baby. He was paranoid. He had just witnessed a miracle. He didn't want to lose his son the way he'd lost the other one.

After my parents told me this, when I was eight or nine, I'd scanned my foot for this zigzag, tried to read the faint wrinkles for a sign of his penmanship, though, of course, it had faded
within a few days of my father's etching. It had filled me with pleasure, thinking about this special mark, and though I couldn't read it in the bottom of my foot, I felt it there, the way one feels love in a certain room without necessarily identifying its source. When I first read the Harry Potter books and learned about the lightning bolt scar on Harry's forehead, I thought,
Of course
. Of course love worked that way. Of course it left its mark on the beloved. This secret mark protected you, kept you safe from harm, reminded you of who you were. All it took was the smallest symbol and you were safe. As I grew older and discovered my love for literature, I externalized the markings, wrote them down in my Moleskine, kept my notebook close—so much so that when the LIA counselors took away my notebook years later, they took away much of this protection. But they didn't take all of it. The empty pages still carried ghosts.

As I made my way to the sanctuary stage to join my mother and father and all of the Baptist Missionary Association members, I thought of this secret mark etched into my foot, imagined it was leading me forward, keeping me protected as I mounted the stage. God's lightning bolt wasn't about to strike; it was already etched into my skin. It seemed one talisman had activated the other: Mark's number taught me that there were secret loves crouched and waiting in the last place you would likely go searching for them. What was Jesus's compassion anyway but some well-crafted graffiti on the corridors of history, an invitation to follow Him into the most unlikely places? Love could come to you even in a room that seemed drained of it.