Boy Erased (28 page)

“I'm actually not very good with words,” I said, tossing the sheets back. I really had to get to class, and I was still in my pajamas from the night before. “I get frustrated. I can't capture what I want to capture.”

“Just keep doing it,” Caleb said, standing. “You've got to be insane. Never take no for an answer.” He walked to the corner of the room, lifted the marbled glass pipe from his desk, and began to pick at something that lay scattered at his fingertips. The orange light filtered through the blinds and played on his thighs, igniting blond hairs. He lifted his left heel and his calf contracted, a sharp wedge. How could I capture a fraction of what I felt in this moment? I could never be a poet.

I watched him pick at what I assumed were pieces of dried marijuana. I had no idea how drugs worked, and the whole business terrified me. I looked away. Something else was bothering me. I crossed my legs and leaned forward with my elbows
on my thighs. “Don't you think it's sort of hypocritical?” I said. “Trying to paint God at the same time you seduce freshmen boys?”

“What do you mean?” He began to pack something into the pipe with the wooden end of a stray paintbrush.

There was a long silence. I was trying to get at something I couldn't really explain. Wasn't Caleb trying to do the same thing as my father, reaching after a God he couldn't ever fully know? Yet his process seemed entirely different. For Caleb, it was inspiration, not sacrifice, that conjured his God. It didn't seem fair that someone with such a vastly different way of seeing the world could even refer to the angry God I knew. What about all of the sacrifices my father and I had made just to seem pure in God's eyes? What about the many nights I'd spent curled up in bed with the sharp scissors tucked into my fist, trying to bargain with God? Yet here was Caleb doing whatever he wanted with God, painting pair after pair of God's eyes just so he could declare them good and move on to the next project. No, it didn't seem fair to consider Caleb's God equal to our own. For the first time in months, I felt the need to defend my father's God.

“Don't you think you'd have to be perfect in God's eyes in order to paint God?” I said. “I mean, what about being gay?”

Caleb struck his lighter, the bowl igniting in a quick puff, smoke curling up into a slice of the sun. “What have they taught you? That God wants us all to just sit around and praise Him all day? Fuck God, if that's the case. I'd rather be in Hell with all the interesting people.”

“How do you know you're not just making Him in your own image?”

“I don't.” He inhaled deeply, held it. A long pause, and then he released the smoke with a low groan. The smell was sharp and pungent; it was like some dark part of the forest I'd explored so many hours behind my house, some musk at the center of its heart. “But I know being gay has nothing to do with it.”

What Caleb stood for was dangerous, just as dangerous as what Dr. Julie had told me, just as dangerous as the smoke that now filled the room and curled around me. My head was already dizzy from a lack of sleep, and now the smoke seemed to be entering the crevices of my brain, curling up beside Caleb's words. I needed to guard myself against all of this. I still believed, like my father, that Hell was real. I still believed that I would feel its fire licking my skin for all eternity if I continued on this path. I thought of the Masonic orphans who had once lived on this campus, of the fire that overtook them when they'd least expected it. If it had come for them, then it could surely come for me. I grew terrified of the pot smoke, of the Hell it signified, and within that delirious second I considered trying to convert Caleb. I could still turn my mistake into an opportunity for ministering. It wasn't too late for me. My mother wouldn't have to tick off any more boxes.

“Are you sure you've really searched your heart for the answer?” I said. “What if you're wrong?”

“Oh God,” Caleb said. “The good ones are always crazy.”

“I'm just asking.”

“My heart isn't separate from the rest of me.” He took another hit. “This is just me. All of me. See?” I was admiring all of him then, the way all of him, with his back bent over the table, formed a question mark against the orange sun. “Why would God give me so many feelings if he didn't want me to feel them? Why would God be such a jerk?”

“I have to go,” I said, standing up. Caleb's words were buzzing in my ears. I wanted so badly to believe him, but I was afraid of what would happen if I did.

“So? Be late.”

Despite my daring from the previous night, I was still a straitlaced student. I hated the idea of being late for class, of the professor asking my classmates where I was. My poetry course consisted of only ten students, and my absence would certainly be felt during workshop that day.

“Stay,” Caleb said. “They won't teach you anything. You can write a poem right here.”

I thought I might never leave if I didn't leave the room right then. The smoke was reaching its crooked fingers down my throat, hooking me.

“What?” Caleb said, releasing another puff of smoke, shaking his head at the sight of me squirming in my skin.

I wasn't the one to convert him. I was already lost.

T
here are no photographs from this day. There are no photographs from any of these days. A year of my life is missing, undocumented. My mother and I joke that this was the year we were abducted by aliens. This was the year of the body snatchers. But the truth: Even as all of this was happening, we knew we would never want to look back.

It would be easier with a photo. With a photo, I might read between the gaps in my memory, see in this boy's ex-gay smile an indication of the pain he was feeling. As it stands, there are only before and after photos: a chubby kid in a tight Tommy Hilfiger polo and husky jeans, followed by an emaciated Underground Man in a
Legend of Zelda
T-shirt. I don't even know if I'd recognize the boy between the two photos.

•   •   •

S
MID
'
S
INSTRUCTIONS
on my eighth morning at Love in Action, on how to recapture repressed memories: “If you're at a loss, begin with a small piece of your life. Try connecting this piece of your life to your father's life. Find the moment when everything changed for the two of you. Sometimes a second is all it takes.”

Our group was sitting in our usual semicircle in the main room. There was the smell of burned coffee and pencil shavings, the nervous tapping of erasers against the pages of our handbooks. There was the ticking of some distant clock I'd never noticed before.

“I want you to focus,” Smid said. “Think back to an important moment.”

I sat opposite J, who wouldn't look at me. This was a tactic it seemed we'd both adopted without consulting each other: to keep a distance between us at least half the day every day during our time at LIA. The counselors were growing more and more suspicious of me. When I had arrived that morning, Cosby had drawn me into his office to ask if I needed to tell him anything. He'd motioned to a chair beside his desk, but I'd stayed standing, shaking my head, trying to be as casual as possible.

“No,” I said. “Being here is a process. Some days are better than others.”

“Are you still praying?” His crow's-feet winked from the corners of his eyes.

“All the time,” I lied. The truth was, I hadn't tried praying for two days, not since my mother and I visited the Peabody, when I had felt, for a moment, what it might be like to live another life. “I wish we could stay here tonight,” I'd said, watching the dim candlelight play on my mother's self-tanned face, the odd auburn color converted to gold in this large elegant room: an alchemist's trick of light. I'd wanted to stay there and never leave. “Me, too,” my mother had said.

“Good,” Cosby said, walking me back to his office door, his hand briefly touching the space between my shoulder blades. “You're going to have to be more vigilant than ever. God's letting me see something in you right now. Something rebellious. I'm not sure you can even see it.”

My gaze fell to the carpet, to Cosby's gleaming black loafers, laces bound in tight Xs. It was the first time I'd noticed his small feet. This detail—his smallness—lent me a temporary strength.

“I'm working harder than ever,” I said. It wasn't a lie.

•   •   •

S
MID
WAS
standing in front of me. He was clasping his hands tightly together. “Close your eyes if you have to,” he said. “The devil wants to keep those memories repressed. The devil wants you to get confused. But we're not going to let Satan win here today.”

I kept my eyes open, watching Smid watch the other patients. He was wearing his white wrinkle-free button-down, one button unfastened, a little patch of thin white T-shirt underneath,
and beneath that, the pale peach of his chest. There were these cracks in the foundation everywhere you looked if you knew how to look for them.

S slid to her knees beside me, her hands gripping the edges of the padded seat. Her long hair kept her face hidden from view. I wondered if she was remembering the moment she'd told us about, the day her parents had found her with the dog. But, of course, this moment couldn't explain everything about her sexually deviant nature. One of LIA's many assumptions was that we were all here because of some kind of abuse, some kind of neglect. “The influence is clear,” our handbooks said. We were all here because sinful cycles of abuse continued in our families. “Logically, you'd think someone who'd suffered because of such sins would never follow the same course, yet we find just the opposite, strains of addictions running through many generations of a family.”

I tried remembering the moment when everything changed between my parents and me.

“Would anyone like to share?” Smid continued. “Has anyone here come to a realization today?”

•   •   •

D
URING
MY
EARLY
TEENS
when I worked for my father at the cotton gin, I used to walk to the edge of our property, to the place where we kept rows of dusty white modules, those large rectangular stacks of cotton the farmers gathered from the field with large combines, and I would hide from the world. I would
find a long module in the middle of the field, one at least ten feet tall, and I would gut the packed cotton from its sides, dig my fingers into the dirt and grime and the sharp pieces of boll until I hollowed out a space for myself in the middle. As I climbed inside, the cotton still warm from the fields, the smell of pesticide and dank earth flooding my nostrils and the bitter taste of the country on my tongue, I would think of my father's warning that the cotton could collapse at any second, that it could smother me without warning—and I would feel strangely safe. Here I was, curled up in the middle of this packed cotton, and the walls still hadn't collapsed. Hidden away from everyone, in a place where no one could find me, and the cotton hadn't swallowed me whole. The cotton soft on my back, I would close my eyes and drift into sleep and occasionally awaken to watch the fading blue patch of sky until it got to be too dark and I knew my parents would start to worry.

My father was predictably angry when he found out about the hollowed-out modules. “You'll kill yourself doing that,” he'd said. But what he was really thinking, what he must have been thinking, was
why
. Why would I want to hide? Why would I want to risk my life for something that didn't seem worth risking?

His response was to explain the whole process of cotton manufacturing in careful, plain language.

“One day this will be yours,” he'd said. “One day you will inherit this.”

He led me through the ginning process step by step, quizzing
me to see if I'd remembered what he said. I never did, never cared enough about cotton manufacturing to remember, but I would pretend to search my memory for the answers just to make him feel better. I was more interested in the way things looked than how they functioned, in the way the cotton pressed against the metal teeth, cottonseeds falling in a white waterfall to a receptacle that collected them for further use. The fuzzy streams that fell so beautifully and softly in the midst of all that din. As we walked through the steps, my father would shout over the sound of the machines, guiding me with his rough hand on my shoulder through the various stations, asking his employees to add some nuanced detail to the explanation. I would nod my head and pretend to listen, watching the dust and fuzz fly through the shafts of light around us, sniffing the air for the odd, intoxicating scent of a mechanized field.

The final product, the end of the ginning process, was a pure white bale of cotton wrapped in a burlap covering and held together by several metal bands. I thought it was a beautiful thing. I ran my hands along the surface of the warm, tightly packed cotton and closed my eyes, blocking out everything else around me—the loud machines, the scurrying employees, even my father. When I lay in bed at night, I imagined my pillow and sheets were from our very own gin, a sensation I would carry with me to every bed I've ever slept in, one that never fails to comfort me when I suffer from a bout of insomnia.

This is what my father gave me: a deeper appreciation for my isolation, an understanding of the work and sacrifice others
often make for my own personal comfort. The process of accommodation takes time. I never expected my father to accept every shifting detail of my life overnight, nor I his. Our moments of misunderstanding, though often damaging, were still far from abusive. This was something LIA could never understand.

“Do you have anything you want to say?” Smid said, looking down at me.

I looked away.

•   •   •

T
HAT
AFTERNOON
, our group was asked to sit in two rings of semicircles in LIA's auditorium. Sunlight filtered through the white slatted blinds, each of us cloaked in a separate silence. J sat beside me. I allowed myself this one afternoon of sitting next to him. I could feel his gaze at the edge of my own.

“This week has been tough,” Smid said, carrying a metal folding chair to the center of the auditorium stage. “Emotions are high. But it's important that we push ourselves as far as we can. We need to get to the bottom of our addiction.”

The rest of the morning session had been difficult, with T admitting, once again, to suicidal ideations he'd had the night before. As T stood before our group and confessed, we all repeated, “We love you, T.” But my heart hadn't been in it. I did feel sorry for T, and I would have told him so if I'd had the chance. But I didn't love him. How could I love someone who acted so broken all the time, who demanded my sympathy with each scar, each confession, who I didn't really know? It seemed
pathetic, and a little selfish, to mark oneself out for love. To think that God and the people around you would suddenly recognize your worth if you were seen as damaged and admitted it. This was LIA's currency, the trading of literal and proverbial scars, and I hated it. Everyone was trying to one-up everyone else, to render the most painful account. After all, Jesus was most identifiable by his scars, and we were being asked to take up His cross and follow Him. Some deeper cynicism was threatening to take control of my thoughts.

Smid flipped open the folding chair with a quick flourish, the hinges creaking like a startled crow. “You're going to face your fears today. You have the chance to show how courageous you really are.”

J pressed his leg against mine. “
This
is new,” he whispered. I slid my eyes down his chest to his legs, presently hidden from Smid's view by the chair in front of him, watching the way he pressed them together and pulled them apart. I thought of Bathsheba, King David's temptress, bathing at the edge of the palace. David a perched voyeur on his roof. Over the past few days, I'd begun to see something beautiful in J. Here was someone who could understand me. Unlike Chloe or Caleb or any of the counselors, J didn't demand anything of me other than what I was: that same confused, swirling mess I'd glued to the surface of my mask. One minute I wanted to walk out of the facility and put an end to my ex-gay therapy, and the next I wanted J to pull me under, hold me down here with him, force me to read the clobber passages again and again until I finally
understood them. His beauty made me think there might still be some truth to the ex-gay experiment.

Smid placed another folding chair opposite the first one. He dusted his hands, turned to us, and smiled until his Jeff Goldblum dimples showed.

“Who wants to go first?” he said.

The semicircle tensed, our collective breathing quieting. We didn't yet know what this activity was all about, but we knew it had something to do with the childhood abuse we'd explored in the morning session. Lie Chair, our schedules called it. I imagined a syringe filled with truth serum, or maybe a polygraph test, wires glued to my chest. I felt a spasm run through J's thigh as it swung back and pressed against mine. I pushed his leg away, too hard, and he nearly slid off his seat, the legs of the chair moving audibly against the tile.

“J,” Smid said, turning to face the sound. “You seem eager.”

“Yes, sir,” J said, pushing past me to the front of the auditorium. I moved my legs to one side, his thigh grazing my knee. He shot me a dark look as he passed.

“I want you to sit here,” Smid said, motioning to the chair. “I want you to sit here and imagine your father sitting across from you. I want you to sit here and imagine your father sitting across from you and you saying everything you've always wanted to tell him but couldn't.”

J did his best with a smile, settling into the chair and crossing his arms over his chest. He cleared his throat and stared into the spot where his father was supposed to be sitting. I
looked behind me to see if the others were buying it. S was biting her nails, and T was sitting beside her with his hands in the pockets of his black cardigan. The blond-haired greeter stood in the back of the auditorium with his hands crossed before the front of his navy slacks, his face at polite attention. He caught me looking at him and shot me a pay-close-attention-or-else look. I turned back. Cosby was nowhere to be seen, and I was happy for it, the room a little more relaxed without his military stare.

“Confession must come before healing can take place,” Smid said, quoting from the handbook. That it had to be a public confession was assumed, everything at LIA operating on a bare-all-and-be-saved basis. The Lie Chair was simple, Smid explained: Pretend to see a father you don't and confess everything negative you have ever felt toward him in front of a full room. “Don't worry about how it sounds. Just try to be honest.”

I watched a spell overtake J. The long sweep of his hair fell across his forehead, and he kept pushing it back, as though the act would deliver his real, breathing father before him. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, palms cupping his chin: a sloucher, the posture of a much younger boy. I could imagine him sitting like this on his living-room sofa reading a fantasy novel.