Boy Erased (24 page)

It was Christ's body that finally turned His ideas into reality, the proof of its absence the very fact that finally convinced so many nonbelievers to convert to Christianity. It was David's body that first brought me to therapy. It was my lack of contact with Chloe's body that began all of this. If I can just learn to whittle my body down to a sharp blade, I might be able to harness this power of the body, this same power I will feel all over again while watching
The Passion
, this same one that my father knows how to wield so well in his sermons. All I need is a little help from Dr. Julie. I begin to hope. I feel the warmth from the kitchen on my skin, lending me strength, propelling me forward.

I'm still standing in the hallway, watching the Christmas
lights dance on the frozen lake outside. Someone is playing Nat King Cole. I remember Dominique telling me that she hates Nat King Cole. “That voice is so lifeless,” she'd said, though I don't agree. I think of Charles and Dominique singing their way through the holidays in a neighborhood so unlike my own. Charles once told me of a stray bullet that bored a hole into the side of his house, nearly making its way through to where he was sitting on the couch. An inch more, and Charles might not have been alive to tell me that story. I think of his pain, of what he's been through and where he's come from and where he is now, singing so beautifully in the college's cloistered theater. And before I can stop myself, I feel lucky to be alive in this moment—warm and happy—with this family who, despite the awkwardness with which they've treated me since they found out about my affliction, despite the fact that they've handled me as they would an unwanted piece of family china, are still a part of me, still share the same warm blood that's pulsing through my veins as I walk barefooted down the hall, the swell of their voices behind me now, a nice dull rhythm with indistinguishable words, not the words of anger or disgust or pity or love I imagine they've got poised in the backs of their throats, and so I step slowly, one foot in front of the other, out of the gold light toward the glittering lake, and I swear it's all too beautiful for one life, that I should be able to split into multiple versions of myself to savor the many flavors of this moment, knowing that these kinds of feelings might leave me once I visit the doctor's office, thinking,
How can I ever repay this gift?
How can I ever repay these people and the god these people worship and the god I still seem to worship?

The dog, Daisy, brushes past my leg, panting. She looks up at me, her eyes watery. Her naked trust is too much. I look away, grateful for the feel of her beside me in the dark with all that light behind both of us, as though the light is ready to buoy the two of us up directly into the window, hoist us out into the night sky above the lake.
How can I say no to all of this?
I think.
So many people have brought me to this moment, and I've trusted them. Couldn't there be even greater moments ahead if I only trust them again?

Tuesday comes and I don't visit Dr. Julie. “Something's come up,” my mother says. Nothing else. I'm as confused as ever. I wonder if my parents have lost hope, if maybe all of this might fizzle out. My mother and I go a week without talking. The silence worries me.

And it's only months later that I realize how strong the pact is that I made with myself that Christmas night with my family. It's only months later, after sitting for hours on a cold stone bench in a garden outside the humanities building, after walking in a daze down the path to the lake and staring into my dark silhouette in the placid water with all that moonlight at my back, my academic life packed squarely behind me, that I begin to realize just how far I will go. I will take this skinny frame and baptize it in the icy water, and I will walk back in my wet clothes, nearly frozen but more alive than ever, and with my exhausted body warming beneath the scalding shower
stream, eyes trained on a drop of water tracing the showerhead, between my chattering teeth I will mutter the simplest of prayers to that Great Physician:
Lord, make me pure
.

Exiting the shower, I will find my cell phone and text my mother, waking her from a dream. “I'm ready,” I'll write. “Dr. Julie.”

•   •   •

L
ESS
THAN
A
WEEK
after watching
The Passion
with Charles and Dominique, my mother and I were sitting in Dr. Julie's examination room.

“That painting's in almost every doctor's office,” my mother said. “It's a pretty good painting.” She couldn't seem to stop talking.

“Yeah?”

The painting was a print of a famous photorealistic Rockwell piece: the little boy pulling down his pants for the anonymous white-coated doctor, light streaming in from closed blinds behind him. The boy's gesture seemed so simple, part of the rosy-colored past Rockwell was so talented at capturing: A moment of fear just before the relief, all the more sentimental because the pain was such a minor thing, nothing to worry about, really, and the child would soon learn this after a few more visits to the doctor's office. The boy's fear was a fear most people got over early in their childhoods, and it was humorous, in the way adults often found childhood humorous, to see this
boy's fear as trivial, as a phase he simply needed to grow out of: A prick of the needle, and it would all go away.

“I wonder how long Dr. Julie will be?” my mother said.

“She'll be here soon,” I said stupidly. “She's always busy.” There was nothing else to say.

Dr. Julie did always seem to be a busy woman—flipping through charts and consulting medical records and prescribing medications on square white sheets and ripping them from their glued spine with a dignified flourish—but she always made it seem as though she didn't enjoy that part of her work nearly as much as she enjoyed the company of her patients.

“Let's get down to business, shall we?” she said once she finally arrived, as if by entering the examination room, she was fending off the technical part of her life—antiseptic, full of jargon—clicking the door shut on the tail of all that necessary nonsense so that she might finally crack her scrubbed knuckles, roll up her sleeves, and sit down on the creaking stool to hunch forward and stare into the eyes of the people who made her job worth it, becoming, in that instant, not a doctor per se but also the little girl from just outside Salem, Arkansas, who used to wake up early mornings before school to feed the chickens. There were moments when the little girl and the doctor shared the same features, though they were rare occasions. She had attended my college, a fact that felt particularly salient on the morning I finally decided to connect my college life with my family one.

“What brings you two here today?” As though she didn't
know, that farm-sunrise face of hers placid, loosed from the worries of the day, my mother sitting in all of her lace at the other end of the room, barely able to conceal the tremors that had seized her from the moment she'd first found out about my sexuality.

“I don't know where to begin,” my mother said, clutching her purse to her chest, though there was no other starting point than the ugly truth of it: the secret stain that had fallen on our family. I knew she had already talked to Dr. Julie about my sexuality, that the two of them were close, that Dr. Julie wanted to protect my mother from the stark reality of having a gay son in the South in a strictly religious community. I knew all of this just by the way they spoke to each other, sympathy running like a current through the room, my eyes now focused on the mottled tile beneath my dangling feet. I had the feeling that merely looking up at them would instantly sweep me into that current, so I kept my head down.

“Why don't we start with the obvious?” Dr. Julie said. “You're worried about your son.”

Shifting. The rustle of lace on lace. Despite everything, my mother had walked to my bedroom that morning to ask if I thought she looked cute, standing in my doorway like some kind of ice-draped queen, her purposefully yellowed Point de Gaze stacked in stitched layers across her chest and repeated as a skirt below a high-waisted black belt.
No
, I'd thought,
more like the snowdrop flower
, the
Galanthus
, in all of its wilted beauty. Even in her gloom and fear, my mother knew how to be
fashionable. It was the thing that took her out of the situation, this love of texture, of fine cloth and fine detail. She had wrapped herself in as much of its exaggerated beauty as she could, calling up the spirits of postantebellum anguish to defend her against what she now had to face in the light of a doctor's office. She was no Dolly Parton, as many Northerners erroneously assumed, with the heavily produced, heavily mascaraed optimism of a South no one would recognize in daily living; instead, she was fierce and determined, like many Southerners, if only you looked beneath the smile and the lace, a woman whose situation had changed for the worse in the past decade—first after losing her parents, then after becoming a preacher's wife, and now after finding this stain on the family that must have been there all along, right under the small nose she'd inherited from her mother's side. Nevertheless, she'd been taught to persevere, to wait it out within all of the glory she could muster. And what could she say now, sitting across from Dr. Julie, when she hadn't even admitted to herself that the words “gay” or “homosexual” might actually have currency in her life.

“I don't think he's eating enough,” she finally said. “He's lost at least ten pounds in the past month.”

I shifted my left leg so the blood could get to it, my toes already numb. Paper rustled under my thighs. No matter how I sat, I always managed to tear the paper. It was embarrassing, that quiet ripping sound in the middle of a quiet examination room, every motion amplified—and just beneath the paper, the squeaking plastic—as though part of the examination was
designed to measure your ability to sit perfectly still, to remain calm in the face of whatever diagnosis you might receive. I couldn't help but feel that each of my mannerisms was being recorded, graphed into a chart that could be used to determine the extent of my homosexuality.

“You do look a little skinnier,” Dr. Julie said, squeaking on her stool to face me.

“I'm eating the same,” I lied. “Just running more.”

The campus trees slipping past me in the dark, yellow lamppost after yellow lamppost guiding me into their narrow circles of light, the lake glistening moon white and wind whipped in the distance: That part was true. I hadn't stopped running since my parents told me we needed to consider therapy. The lie about the food, however, was pointless, though we all knew I needed to say something to account for my sudden weight loss, for the way my clothes no longer clung to me, my cotton sweater now meeting my skin only where it fell against my collarbone, my shoulders, the lengths of my skinny arms. I wasn't eating, and it was apparent to everyone in the room, as easily measured by the naked eye as a good tap on the knee measures the reflexes, though Dr. Julie tended to shy away from such formal introductions, skipping ahead to the heart of the ailment.

“I'm worried,” my mother said. “Nothing fits him anymore.”

Often, it felt like a small victory to realize that another point of contact had lost its hold on me. I was in control of how quickly I lost the weight, and it felt good not only to feel the
past leaving my body—all that fat like rings of a trunk now narrowing, disappearing—but also to see the shock on people's faces, the lack of recognition at first glance, the double take. I was a different boy.

“I think he's trying to torture himself,” my mother said, turning to face me, her high heels tapping against the tile. I remembered the cat-o'-nine tails falling across Christ's blood-ribboned back. No, this wasn't torture. This was control. Once Dr. Julie helped me increase my testosterone levels, I would gain even more control.

“Honey, I think you're trying to torture yourself.”

“I have some ideas about what's going on, Garrard,” Dr. Julie was saying, pronouncing my name as though it were a delicate thing caught in the grip of her slight cowgirl drawl. And it was truly delicate. Part of a family history that took pride in the men who inherited the name, passed down from great-great-grandfather to great-grandfather to grandfather and finally to me. My mother and Dr. Julie and I were aware that, should I fail the test of manhood, I might never add another namesake to our family line. Instead, my name might come to be associated with the moment our family fell apart, a big empty space beneath my entry on the family tree.

“Did you hear us?” Dr. Julie said. “We think it's best if I speak to you one-on-one.”

My mother was rustling out of the room. The door was closing. The lights were blurring on the tile, reemerging as bright orbs.

“Now,” Dr. Julie said, the room suddenly too quiet for her loud voice. This whole thing must have been new for her as well. Talking openly about the subject of sexuality wasn't an option in most Arkansan towns like this one, even, I suspected—no,
especially
—in a medical setting. The idea of a sin having a biological basis would have shocked most people in my congregation, but this was just what many churches were beginning to suspect as they began stocking their foyers with brochures from Love in Action. Most people simply didn't read the brochures, passing by the plastic sleeves without so much as a single glance.

I looked up from the tile to see Dr. Julie just inches from me, her face carrying a look of genuine concern.

“Listen,” Dr. Julie began, “I know what it's like to torture yourself. I've done it myself.”

“That's not what I'm doing,” I lied.

“Yes, you are,” she continued, crossing her arms over her chest. “And that's fine, as long as it's just a phase. I've always had a weight problem, and until I had gastric bypass surgery, I used to binge. If I thought this was purely a weight thing, I'd be all right with checking your weight every now and then, doing some checkups. But this isn't just a weight thing, is it?”