Boy Erased (6 page)

The phone buzzed again under my pillow. The buzzing grew stronger, louder, until the blurred edges of my vision snapped into focus. I stared into the slats of the bunk bed I had kept even through high school because my mother would sometimes take the top bunk in the middle of the night, falling asleep with one thin arm dangling over the side. Now I pictured the wood cracking, the board coming down hard. Finally, after several rounds of buzzing, I reached under the pillow and snapped open the phone.

“Why are you ignoring me?” Chloe said.

“I'm just tired,” I lied. I knew she was the one who could most comfort me, but I was afraid that by telling her about my failure at the dealership I'd have to reveal a truth I wasn't ready to admit to anyone. Not just that I might not be cut out for my father's line of work, but that I might not be cut out for any of the Lord's work, that just by having certain urges and entertaining certain thoughts I had already ended up on the wrong team.

“The storm.” When she grew worried, her voice rose nearly an octave. I wanted to be the kind of boyfriend who felt like her
natural protector, the one to shelter her, even if it now seemed I needed her much more than she needed me.

“It'll be okay,” I said. When was the right time to tell her what was going on? What would I even say? And if I told her, if I just came out and said it, what would stop her from leaving me for someone more promising, someone with less baggage? I knew it was wrong to assume she'd just quit on me. Chloe wasn't the kind of person to give up on anyone; she was one of the most optimistic people I'd ever met. But I couldn't imagine a scenario in which she stayed, in which we both had to live with the knowledge of my brokenness. Telling her the truth would end whatever tenuous grasp I now had on a normal life. Whereas if I could just work through it on my own, if I just had enough time, I might be able to preserve our innocence. If it all worked out in the end, I might be able to live with my deception, and my past urges would come to seem like nothing more than lies Satan had tried to make me believe. I would have the satisfaction of knowing that I had never listened to those lies, never given them a proper expression, that I had chosen the true version of our life together. None of this felt like selfishness at the time.

We were now settling into the silent part of our conversation. The part where I felt anger and guilt until boredom finally conquered all. But underneath that boredom was the sense that God wanted us to be together. How could it be otherwise? How could our church be wrong? What feelings I couldn't muster for her must only be side effects of our immaturity. We would grow
into it: into each other, into God. So we would wait like this for hours each evening, Chloe on the other end of the line reading a book or watching TV while I played video games, both of us silent and waiting for the next chunk of awkward conversation to arrive.

I sat up, threw the sheets off, and sat down cross-legged in the center of my bedroom, my sunburned knees flaring with pain, the phone tucked into my neck. I could still smell the false lemony scent of the dealership's chemicals on my skin. I turned on the TV in front of me, picked up the Sony PlayStation controller I'd left on the carpet, and pressed start. The pause menu split into thirds and disappeared to reveal the image of a tall male avatar with spiky black hair standing in the center of a vast forest. He wore a fur-lined leather jacket and a long chain that dangled from his thick black belt, and carried a sword that fascinated me not because it was part blade and part gun, but because of the gaudy silver embellishments running along its hilt. The details reminded me of my mother's collection of Brighton bracelets, the way they sparkled in any light and rested their outsize beauty on her thin wrists.

The goal of the game was to travel from town to town in search of special items and adventure. Traveling was treacherous: There were few cars in this world, most things were done by foot, and at any moment the screen could swirl into a vortex, the colors of the forest bleeding into one another, until I was firmly planted in front of an enemy, usually some chimera that
could have easily been lifted from an eighteenth-century bestiary, like horses with roaring lion heads, green slime globs with tree limbs for arms and canine fangs. A victorious battle would yield shiny new accoutrements, objects that, once itemized and collected neatly in the main menu, yielded a sense of accomplishment.

Like order out of chaos. The face of God moving over the waters of the deep. In the book of Job, it is the Creator piercing the fleeing Leviathan.

There were times when I would stare for hours into the virtual rooms of a baroque palace, never moving from my spot on the carpet, while the avatar scratched his head and shifted into the kind of
contrapposto
pose the men of the dealership would have considered sexually suspect. I felt that to move would be to break the spell, cause me to reenter a world where I was too old to crawl into bed with my mother if the fear of Hell got to be too bad.

When I first hit puberty and started fantasizing about men more often, I had become so entranced with the world of video games that I would hardly ever move from the carpet for entire weekends. On the few occasions when I could no longer ignore my body, I would stand up to release angry streams of piss onto the carpet at the foot of my bed. I had no way of knowing if my mother ever entered my bedroom while I was at school, but I wanted her to; I wanted her to interpret the damp hieroglyphs I had spelled out for her—sometimes my name; more
often a figure eight or, depending on the angle, the symbol for infinity—even if I didn't understand them myself. Feeling guilt after I arrived home from school, I would sneak into the bathroom, steal some cleaning chemicals, and spray them into the carpet until the room no longer smelled like piss. Though I'd stopped all this by the time I turned sixteen, I still felt like violating our house in some way, and I would sometimes even fantasize about the whole place going up in flames, our little family huddled outside while the walls collapsed in slow motion. It wasn't that I thought violence would solve our problems. It was just that the need to tell my parents something—anything—was overpowering, and at the time I didn't have a proper language for it.

I moved my avatar deeper into the forest path, his footfalls like wooden shoes dropped from a great height. The trees folded around him, and in the distance appeared the mouth of a cave. I moved him toward the cave and hunched forward, forgetting the phone at my neck until I heard Chloe's sigh.

“We have to do something,” she said. “I'm worried.”

“The storm will be over soon,” I said.

“No,” she said. “About us. We have to do something drastic.” We hadn't talked about how we would stay together once we went off to college at the end of the summer, how we would manage to pull off the miracle of a successful long-distance relationship. We'd been admitted into different colleges, would be heading in different directions, though we'd still be in the
same state. It was another of the many topics I had pushed to the back of my mind. She was right. If we were going to hold this relationship together, we needed to do something drastic. But neither one of us knew what. Do
it
? Not do
it
? Get married? Break up? The questions themselves were driving us both crazy. We debated the question of virginity. Whose virginity? Mine? Hers? And if we did
it
, when?

“There's no such thing as time anyway. Time only exists on earth. In Heaven there won't be any time, so we're technically already married. We're technically already doing it.”

“Then we've technically
always
been doing it. So what's the point?”

“Because we still have free will. I think God is telling us to act now in order to demonstrate our love for Him.”

At the beginning of our relationship, Chloe would sit with me while I played video games, pointing excitedly as some new creature bounced across the screen. When we first met in church a few years back, I had felt something I rarely experienced outside of the virtual world: a leveling up, a sense of worthiness, of a whole group of people smiling in approval. During lunch breaks at school, I no longer had to crouch on the toilet seat to hide from overcrowded lunch tables. There had been an easiness between us as we explored the forest behind her backyard with her younger brother, Brandon, who still liked to pretend he was on a safari. We could drive around in one of my father's new cars, making up directions as we went, asking
Brandon in the backseat whether we should turn left or right or keep going straight. “Go to Memphis,” he would say, confident as a distinguished playboy, faux-smoking a candy cigarette. “Let's see the glass pyramid, boys.” With Brandon between us, it was less confusing; we had something to focus on other than ourselves.

The storm was growing louder, the thunder nearer. “Okay,” I said, the phone hot against my ear. “We'll figure it out.”

Another silence stretched out between us. I stood and walked to the bedroom window and lifted one of the aluminum blinds with my index finger. Yellow lamppost lights cradled low-hanging clouds. A line of pine trees shook in the wind, their needles spilling onto the driveway. Headlights flickered for a moment on a distant highway then disappeared beneath a heavy sheet of rain that passed almost as quickly as it came. I could hear no thunder.

Unlike Brother Nielson's and my father's bombastic doomsday scenarios, I feared Armageddon would take the quiet form of radio static. White noise: after the thunder, the world suddenly muted by the sound of heavy rain. Even more terrifying than my nightmares was the thought of being left behind by my sleeping family, their bodies turned to husks. I might arrive home from school one day to find only a simmering pot on the stove, the radio droning on in my parents' absence. After my parents decided to move their old television into my bedroom, I used to stay awake to watch the midnight news so I could imagine there were other people still awake, other people doing
things at that moment, and I would think about how God wouldn't leave so many people behind and I would feel safe for a few minutes. With Chloe, I had always felt safe, at least before she reached for me in the car. Until that moment I felt like God might grant me a free pass, since I was
trying
to be the man my father could recognize as a peer. Now, with Chloe's growing intimacy, I thought I would need to perform. Without hesitation, without stuttering, without alternate interpretations. Perhaps one sin would be a substitute for the even greater sin of homosexuality, and then we'd at least have a chance to live our godly lives together.

“Still there?” Chloe said.

“Yeah.”

We arranged a date to watch a late-night movie at her house. There seemed to be something hidden in this arrangement, something we left unsaid but that we both must have known. When the time came for sleep, I figured Chloe could express interest in cooking a big breakfast with me the next morning and insist that I sleep in the basement, not far from Brandon's bed. Her mother might slide her eyes at us, but she would eventually give in; after all, we had already spent the night in the same hotel room in Florida. We would be quiet. Safe. I could buy a twenty-five-cent condom from a gas station vending machine in a distant town, telling my parents I needed to go on another long drive to clear my head, to talk to God. Then, if conditions seemed right, I would sneak up to her room and see what happened between us.

When thinking about sex, I had never before wondered
how long it would take. I had never wondered what postsex breakfast might taste like or what movie might be most appropriate before commencement. Most important, I had never wondered whether or not sex—not kissing or cuddling or grinding, but
sex
, jumping right into the very act itself and skipping all the other steps—might finally turn me, if not straight, at least into someone capable of performing straightness. I had never assumed I would want to go this far, that I would break one of the cardinal rules in our church. When I had fantasized about men, I'd always shut down the thoughts before I imagined myself entering the fantasy. It had always been one body, performing alone, performing only for me. What would it be like to do something with another person, a person you'd have to face for the rest of your life, both of you living with the knowledge of what you did in your most desperate moment? Would you ever be able to make it up to God? And what if it didn't work? What if the transgression led to failure, and you were left alone to rot in your sin?

“Is it raining there now?” Chloe said, yawning. “It's raining here.”

“No,” I lied, listening to the sound of raindrops pinging against the shingles. I wanted to keep our lives separate. Then I was afraid of what it would mean if I did. “I mean yes.”

“How can it be both?” she said.

“I don't know. It just is.”

I sat back down on the carpet and pressed the start button on the controller. “It's not both. I don't know why I said it was both.” The cave was now directly in the avatar's path. There
was no other way around it. Whatever was hidden inside was probably going to be worth it.

•   •   •

I
T
WAS
my mother's treasures, her silver necklaces and gaudy rings, their shiny symbolism, the way many of them were handed down through the maternal line, the way these symbols could make up a home and present a family history with more than one plotline—it was their complexity I craved each time I urged my PlayStation avatar to open another treasure chest, to sink deeper into the cave with its quivering stalactites.

When I was nine, these treasures had taken on a literal quality that I could never quite shake from my mind. My family and I were on a soon-to-be-condemned pier. We were on vacation in Florida. The pier shook each time the tide slapped its splintering pillars. There was a groaning as the water made contact with its rusted metal joint bars. My father ruffled my hair. I threw a plastic Coke bottle into the water, and inside that bottle was a message.