Boy Erased (25 page)

I didn't feel like answering her rhetorical question, so I kept quiet.

“No, this is a sexuality thing. And what your mom is worried about is how this is going to affect your future. You're already wasting away. Imagine what you'll be like when more people find out. Now, my question for you is, Do you want to
change? Because I know plenty of people who've accepted this part of themselves, and they've managed to make a good life of it. It's difficult, but they've managed. There are plenty of rumors, people who talk about them the minute their backs are turned, job opportunities lost because of personal vendettas, but they've managed. Is that what you want?”

“I want to change,” I said. “I'm tired of feeling this way.”

“It gets easier,” she said. “You can move somewhere else, to a bigger city.”

“I don't want to run away. I love my family.” It felt ridiculous to say these words. They were so simple, so childish. But I couldn't help myself. They were true.

“Listen,” Dr. Julie continued, turning toward the door, her stool squeaking, “I'm going to have someone draw blood to test for testosterone levels, white blood cell count, things like that. I don't expect to find anything irregular. I don't expect this to do anything but satisfy your mother. She just wants to know she's done everything she can.” She let this sink in for a few seconds. It was the equivalent of
Let's say we did and not
, though we would actually go through with the blood test out of formality and, weeks later, find everything to be perfectly normal. There would be no clear diagnosis. “If you ever need to talk to someone, you know I'm here, right?”

“I know,” I said.

“You wait here while I go get the nurse,” she said, leaving the room.

I fished out my vibrating phone from my jeans, the paper
tearing under my thighs. It was Charles. We hadn't talked in more than a week. I'd been in and out of the room to get my things but mostly kept to the library every night until midnight. “When are you coming back? Are you alright?” his text read. “You disappeared.”

I sent him a quick response so he wouldn't worry before I could think too much about my answer. “I'm a ghost,” I wrote. “Never better.”

Later that morning, when I walked outside with my mother, a patch of cotton taped to the crook of my elbow, I agreed to stay home for a few days just for her sake, knowing that these next few weeks would be harder for her than they would be for me.

“Let's go to the movies,” she said. “My treat.”

And after we finished watching some romantic comedy, the snow still hadn't fallen. I would wish for snow for the rest of the season, all of two weeks. I would imagine the two of us falling back into a pile of snow and sculpting wings as wide as our arms could go without breaking.

T
he Hampton Inn suite where my mother and I stayed during my time at LIA was large, but it felt too small. Though we shared separate rooms, the only privacy we had was a small plywood door that separated the living-room area from the bedroom where my mother slept. After my first week of therapy, details about the room we never would have noticed under other circumstances began to take on menacing qualities. At night, a single lamp glinted at us from the corner of the room, its defunct twin dark in the opposite corner. The overhead light connected to a fan and couldn't be switched on without the blades whipping the air above our heads into rapid, unpleasant currents. Our sturdy metal door's sliding-chain lock seemed suddenly inadequate in the dim light; it was easy to imagine a pair of pliers gripping the taut chain in its teeth. At any other time in our lives, this would have been a perfectly fine, safe room—and
yet each night I pushed the coffee table flush against the door, hoping I might at least hear scratching on the small patch of linoleum before an intruder could manage to fully enter the room. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I would imagine hidden cameras aimed at my naked body. Taking a shower, I would think of Hitchcock and his gleaming
Psycho
knife. I would think of Janet Leigh hightailing it out of town with a stash of stolen cash in her passenger seat, pulling into the one nondescript motel where she might find temporary asylum.

It was telling that my mother and I never asked anyone to fix these minor problems. Though I didn't realize it at the time, these problems comforted me, the space they occupied in my mind a bulwark against the more threatening intruders who crouched and waited somewhere beyond my limited perspective. Every inch of the room palpable in the dark, learned by heart:
the
room. One article out of place, one minor change, would have had the power to alert me to the more drastic changes occurring just outside of it. If the improvements started here, in
this
room, then they would have the power to continue ad infinitum outside of it. What then would stop me from immediately acting on my current plan?

•   •   •

S
UNDAY
NIGHT
, I snuck out of the hotel again sometime after midnight to run through the suburban streets. I ran so long and hard that I began to lose track of time, and in that timelessness I watched the moon slide down the night sky. I imagined
how small I must have looked from above. God was a bully, I decided, messing with such small people. Why had He done this to us, to our family?

“Fuck God,” I said to the moon, once again half expecting to be struck by inexplicable lightning. When nothing happened, I repeated the curse, louder each time, the words echoing through the empty neighborhoods. “Fuck God fuck God fuck God.”

I returned to the hotel room and doubled over near my cot, nearly vomiting from exhaustion and fear. Who was I? Who was this man who cursed God? Better yet, who was God? Had He abandoned me or had He never existed in the first place?

As I sat there trying to slow my breathing, I decided I would fake my way through this second week, grit my teeth and pretend that everything was fine. Therapy was turning me into someone I didn't recognize, and I needed to leave this place with my heart still relatively intact. LIA's logo, the heart-shaped cutout, glared up at me from my handbook each day, threatening excision, and I worried that what lay on the other side, post-op, was T and his many cardigans.

One thing was certain: I didn't want to act too quickly, alert the LIA staff to my intentions. I knew they would immediately inform my parents, and my parents would then be forced to suggest that I stay longer, do the three-month residency, then the one year, then the two years—until I wound up in the position of my counselors, trapped in a cycle of progression and regression, never knowing who I really was. In his own way, the blond-haired boy had already warned me of this. Thumbing
through my phone's contact list the next morning, he'd glanced up briefly, and said, “I hope you're serious about your time here. People are thinking you might not be serious.” I couldn't tell if he'd noticed Mark Bathroom's number, if he might use this information later as evidence against me, but it didn't seem to matter. The message was clear: The important thing was to keep things looking exactly as they had the week before.

And as Smid had walked us through our prelunch Authority and Trust session, as he began to speak of the evils and delusions of self-sufficiency, the sun haloing his graying blond hair, I'd nodded my head along with the others, smiled, plastered on a face of concern, the face of someone contemplating the words of a great leader. When asked, I turned to page thirty-three of my Addiction Workbook and read the words as Smid read aloud: “We strongly conclude that self-sufficiency will provide us with the security and comfort we're aching for. We start looking for a way to avoid or numb our pain.” I pretended that self-sufficiency would only lead to a dead end, that I had given up my life to the authority of the counselors and, by extension, to a God who had refused to answer my prayers since I'd come to the facility. I pretended that I didn't trust myself, all the while thinking
Fuck God
, repeating the curse in my head during those moments when Smid's words felt as though they might drag me back into the self-loathing I'd narrowly escaped at the ordination ceremony. I acted the devotee, but with a pinch of struggle. For inspiration, I consulted my childhood memories, but I never mistook the self-loathing I unearthed
there for the real thing. I couldn't forget the love that I'd felt emanating from some deep place inside my chest as I stood on the sanctuary stage with my family.

“We learn to manipulate,” Smid added. “We learn to be seductive, purposely unclear about our motivations in relationships as self-protection.” I looked up from the workbook. The words didn't seem so naked, so vapid, when he said them.

It was easier to lie when you believed the lie.

•   •   •

“I
T
'
S
STU
FFY
IN
THERE
,” my mother said that evening, closing the plywood door behind her. She entered the part of the suite where I slept each night on the foldout couch. Before the gap closed, I caught sight of her rumpled bed. It was rare for my mother to leave a bed unmade, and from where I was sitting, I could see that she had made no attempt to even tuck the ballooning edges of the white sheets into the corners.

I was sitting in the corner of the hotel room, trying to come up with another sinful transgression for my Moral Inventory. It was getting late, but I wanted to finish my homework before we ordered dinner, and though it was still painful to look directly at each of my sins, I was beginning to find enjoyment in the simple act of writing, in putting everything down in longhand. My cursive looped in arabesques, nearly diving off the edges of the pages. I practiced making each line perfect. Looking down at my yellow tablet notebook, I could squint until the words blurred into a single lead-colored tapestry. LIA's standard
phrases—
We are affected by a sinful world system, our sinful flesh, and the manipulative attacks of Satan
—became an exercise in wrapping each of my sloping
f
's beneath the letters preceding it in the word.

My mother sat on the couch and folded her hands in her lap, nodding her head to some inaudible and internal monologue. The kohl-like eyeliner circling her eyes had diminished to a thin band, and her hair was no longer in vibrant curls. The strands were slack, hanging limp on her shoulders. She'd stopped visiting the tanning salon during the long afternoons before she picked me up from the facility, but her skin was still darker than usual, as though she'd fallen asleep in a field somewhere and wandered back to civilization without ever bothering to check her reflection. She looked at least ten years older than when we'd first arrived in Memphis.

“Your dad asked how we're doing,” she said. I could see now that she clutched a pink cell phone in one hand, that she must have been talking to my father in the other room. “I told him we're okay.”

“Yeah.”

“We have a few more days,” she said, checking the cell phone for the time, the white screen lighting up in her palm. Though she hadn't said it, I knew how to complete the sentence:
for you to be cured
.

I tapped the mechanical pencil against the yellow tablet. I was halfway through the assignment, but nothing new was coming. I tried searching my memory for a longer sexual
fantasy, one to fill up a whole page, but I'd already exhausted most of them, and what was left seemed almost too minor to note. The many times in high school when my eyes had followed the sloping curve of a boy's leg until the shadowy interior of his gym shorts swallowed up the mystery. The underwear ads I would walk by in the clothing section of Walmart, pretending to be only casually interested in the cut and fit of the boxer briefs, squeezing the material behind the posing model's abs as though I were testing the strength of the material. It was a problem I was glad to face—being relatively free of sin—but it was still a problem. I had confessed this to J just that morning, looking to his extra months at LIA for guidance, and J had admitted that he now made up most of his stories.

“I ran out the first week I was here,” he'd said. We were alone on the patio, with no one around to hear us. “So I thought I'd try to imagine new ones.” The rest of the patients were huddled near the kitchen, secure in the air-conditioning. I could already feel the sweat beading at the top of my forehead, the sun burning my hair.

“Really?” It was almost always one-syllable answers with J. I felt stupid standing next to his intelligence, his pain. There were things I wanted him to know about myself that I couldn't say. How, under different circumstances, I could be really smart. How I read good literature. How I was going to be a writer one day. But I never knew how to work them into the conversation without sounding awkward and egotistical.

“If I repent for sins I haven't even committed,” J said,
tucking a long strand of hair behind his ear, “I figure God might even bump me up to Step Five.” According to J, Step Five took an infinitely long time. And Step Five was still seven rungs below the finish. In the distance between his current step, Step Four—
making a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves
—and Step Five—
admitting to our Heavenly Father, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs
—stood the vastness of the abyss, stood hellfire. It was one thing to admit the approximate nature of our wrongs, but the
exact
nature? We could barely understand our own sinful urges. Even had I been fully committed to discovering a cure at this point, from where I was standing at Step One, explaining these urges to another person in great detail seemed nearly impossible. Even Smid never claimed to have made it through all the steps without stumbling every now and then.

“Most of us learn to forgive ourselves for backsliding,” J said, brushing my shoulder as he turned to look back at our group, his touch a sudden jolt that left a metallic aftertaste under my tongue. “It's all part of the process. We acknowledge it, forget it, and move on to the next step.”

•   •   •

I
COULD
ALREADY
imagine the disgusted looks in the staff members' eyes as I said, “I experienced a fantasy,” and as one of them said, “Without describing too many sinful details, could you explain the situation?” It would be even worse during
my one-on-one therapy session with Cosby. I would be asked to describe the contours of my fantasy, the ways in which this fantasy had held me in Satan's vise grip, how it now disgusted me, Cosby's face twisting into a look of revulsion that I would need to mimic if I wanted to convince him of my progress.

I reread the sample MI in the handbook beside me, searching for inspiration.

I do not need sex or anything else to medicate with, even though I still desire to do so at times. I have a lot to say and I choose to share it appropriately. I have worth. I am intelligent, funny, caring and strong. I am masculine.

My mother and I kept silent for several minutes, my pencil poised over the page. “Masculine.” The word looked so greedy, sitting there at the end of the line, summing up everything that had come before it. But wasn't that the end goal? Masculine meant strong. Masculine meant straight. If we could only learn the essence of what it meant to be masculine, then we could learn the rest. I ripped out the page of cursive, wadded it into a ball, and threw it in the trash can. Too feminine. The best I could do at this point was copy everything down, write it in sloppy print, make myself appear as masculine as possible on paper and in person. I began a new sheet. My sentences grew shorter, my verbs blunter. Before the counselors took away my notebook, I had been producing poor imitations of Faulkner;
now, I tried imitating Chekhov, Hemingway, Carver. I wrote about my fantasies with a coldness I hadn't even known was possible.

When I first met him, I had impure thoughts. He was attractive to me. He was a vision of masculinity that I craved because I had been denied it at a young age. I was angry with myself for liking him. I knew I was wrong. I knew I needed to ask God for help.

I didn't even know who this fantasy person was. It could have been any boy I'd ever had a crush on. It could have been J. I added a few more stock details to make sure no one in our group thought it was J: “He was much older. He drove a pickup truck. He smoked Marlboro cigarettes.”

I'd been extra careful that morning, distancing myself from J to make sure no one noticed my growing attraction to him. Standing on the patio during break, just the two of us with the sun hot on our arms, I'd made sure to keep a generous patch of concrete between us. And when J said, “We aren't really supposed to be alone back here,” I agreed with him, walked up to the door without hesitation and slid it back and put a pane of glass between us. Rule number two:
WHEN IN DOUBT—DON'T
.