Читать книгу Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith and Family - Garrard Conley - Страница 11

The men gathered in the showroom, the soles of their leather saddle shoes squeaking against the tile. The previous night had brought several inches of rain that by now had gathered in the gaps of their rough concrete driveways, settled into the foam-rubber seals of their car doors, and spilled out of the hidden reservoirs of suspension beneath their floorboards. It was as if the weatherman with the practiced Midwestern accent had been wrong and there had been no rain. The roads dry as usual, and in the haze of only the second or third cup of coffee of the morning, these men might never have noticed anything different if it wasn’t for the squeaking of their soles, a sound signifying that the night’s activities had gone on without them.

“I tell you it’s the End Times,” Brother Nielson was saying. Two men helped him limp to a black leather couch in the corner of the showroom. As Brother Nielson passed his reflection in the red Mustang parked in the center of the room, he smiled briefly at his hulking form then looked away. “War in the Middle East. Over what? Why don’t we just nuke them all?” Brother Nielson had earned his respect from twenty hardworking years as a deacon in our local Missionary Baptist church. As his health began to fail and his body slowly calcified, his stature as a pillar of the church and our small Arkansan town grew more pronounced. But in the end, his path to respectability had cost him his vanity. “I used to have all the girls a man could dream of,” he was known to say. “Hundreds of them. Lined up. Every make and model imaginable.”

Now, the hem of his khakis lagged behind his shoes, mopping up the hints of water that the other men had left behind. “I don’t know why people have to make things so complicated. CNN wants us to think we shouldn’t have gone over there in the first place. Don’t they know Jesus will be back any day now?” He sank into the couch with a leathery squeak. “I can feel it in my bones.”

Something my father and the other men liked to tell people about the Gospel: God has no time for anyone but a plain dealer. Speak your mind, and speak it clearly. “There is no neutral,” my father liked to say. “No gray area. No in-betweens.”

I watched them from the doorway of my father’s office, holding a leather-bound King James Bible in one hand, gripping the wooden doorjamb with the other. In less than five minutes I would be joining them on my knees in front of the couch, leading my father and his employees through the morning Bible study for the first time. Since my father moved to this town several years back to assume control of a new Ford dealership, he had held a Bible study every workday morning. Like most church members we knew, he was concerned with the lack of prayer in schools and businesses, and he believed that the country, though led by an evangelical president, was constantly trying to strip away all of Christ’s original glory from its citizens’ everyday lives, especially when it came to things like the Pledge of Allegiance and Christmas festivities, which were always rumored to be under attack. Like my mother, he had grown up in the church, and since there had been only one church where my parents had lived most of their lives, our family had always been Missionary Baptists, concerned with leading people to the Lord. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. My father took the verse literally, like all Missionary Baptists, and, like all evangelicals, he believed that the more souls you could gather in Christ’s name, the more souls you would be saving from eternal hellfire. Two souls was the minimum, three was adequate, but nine or ten or more was best. “I want to lead at least a thousand souls to the Lord before I die,” he would repeat to me almost daily.

Working for him as a car detailer each summer kept me at a respectable distance from the business of saving souls. At eighteen, I hadn’t yet performed any actual ministering duties. Though he never said it outright, each summer he required me to do the kind of manual labor that would help me turn out to be a normal red-blooded Southerner, the kind that would offset my more bookish, feminine qualities. My workday companions were spray bottles filled with sealants, polishes, body compounds, and tire glazes. Pink and purple and yellow liquids I hardly knew other than by the smell and feel of them baking into my sunburned skin, and then by the aggregations of foam that settled and eventually swirled into the shower drain at the end of each day. When my father would ask me how many customers I had witnessed to out on the lot, I was able to smile and say, “I don’t think the pressure washer has a soul, even if it does make those crazy humming noises.” And my father was able to say, “We need to get that thing fixed,” and turn his head away from the sight of me.

But when it came to the morning Bible study, jokes wouldn’t save me. I had to perform or else disappoint my father in front of the other men. Since I was seen as an extension of him—Going to turn out just like your old man; can’t wait to see what gift the Good Lord’s given you—great things were expected to pour from my lips. Wine from the jars of Cana: what was empty suddenly restored, the wedding feast continuing, the disciples believing in miracles.

When my mother would join us for our lunch breaks at the Timberline, one of the only restaurants in town, in a giant wood-paneled room whose walls were covered with splintering handsaws and rusty blades three times the size of my head, my father would look around at the people eating, and he would sigh, a wounded sound that left his voice hollow and quiet.

“How many souls in here do you think are headed straight to Hell?” he would say.

And before we could leave the restaurant, he would make a show of buying everyone’s lunch. He would stand up from our table, pull a waitress from her autopiloted course through the sea of grease-stained faces, and whisper the order in her ear. As customers brushed past us, my mother and I would stand near the entrance, waiting for him to finish paying. Sometimes a customer would walk up to my father and protest his charity, and my father would say something like “The Lord has blessed me. He’ll bless you, too, if you just let Him into your heart.” Most often, the customers would sit at their tables absorbing the smell of fried chicken livers into their jeans, T-shirts, and follicles, oblivious until it came time to pay, when they would stare narrow eyed at the passing waitress, as if she might somehow be responsible for their embarrassment. No one in this small Southern town liked to feel beholden, and no one knew this better than my father.

I JIGGLED the wooden doorjamb of my father’s office doorway until it almost came loose, listening as Brother Nielson and the others settled their speech into a steady rhythm. Many of the dealership employees regularly attended our church, some more devout than others, some perhaps exaggerating their piety for my father’s sake, but all of them my Brothers, a name the Missionary Baptists applied to any follower of Christ. Brothers and Sisters all serving the same Father in the name of the Son. I couldn’t make out their words, but I could feel their excited speech almost to the point of pain, each syllable a loud buzzing noise, a hurried wing beat.

“Another earthquake this morning,” my father said. “Are you ready for the Rapture?”

I could hear him typing at his computer behind me, one key at a time, adding his own metronomic countermovement to the ticking of the polished chrome clock above his desk. He had recently swapped his dealership’s 56k dial-up connection for high-speed DSL, and each morning he sped through Yahoo! headlines looking for Armageddon talking points. An earthquake killing hundreds somewhere in the Hindu Kush. A siege at the Church of the Nativity. The U.S. invading Afghanistan. All of this related to the predictions outlined by the dreams of St. John in the Book of Revelation. One simple logic guided these searches: If every word of the Bible was to be taken literally, then the plagues and fires of St. John’s testimony were certainly the plagues and fires of today’s news cycle. The only thing we could hope for in these End Times: the country announcing its allegiance to Jesus before the Rapture began, righting some of its wrongs, continuing to elect solid born-again Republicans into office.

“I’m ready,” I said, turning to face him.

I pictured the coming earthquake, the miniature hot rods lining his office shelves crashing to the floor, their tiny doors groaning, hinges cracking open. For someone who had built fourteen street rods from scratch, for a man who could boast of winning a national street-rod competition in Evansville, Indiana, with his aquamarine 1934 Ford, my father was ready—eager, even—to watch all of his work burn to the ground the minute the trumpets sounded. He could do nothing halfway. When he decided to build cars, he built not one, but fourteen; when he decided to work full-time for God, he did it in the only way he knew how without jeopardizing his family’s material well-being—by making his business God’s business. His idol was Billy Graham, an evangelist who used the public sphere to such an advantage that he had been able to shape our country’s political climate by whispering into the ears of no less than eleven presidents. Before my father came to be a pastor of his own church, his small-scale influence mirrored Graham’s in its intensity. Members of our town’s police force, who purchased their white square Crown Victorias from my father, never left the dealership without his admonishment to go out and bring order to our town—and, more important, to help spread the Gospel to unbelievers.

“We have to be vigilant,” my father said over his computer monitor. “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and they shall shew great signs and wonders.”

He clicked his mouse several times with his too-big hand, a hand that could take apart a carburetor but whose rough edges and burned skin made it difficult for him to operate a personal computer.

SEVERAL YEARS before I was born, my father had stopped on the side of the highway that passed through our hometown to help a man whose car had broken down. As my father crawled beneath the engine to check for any abnormalities, the stranger turned the key to his ignition, igniting the gas that had been leaking from the carburetor, an ignition that spread third-degree burns across my father’s face and hands. The burns left his nerves burned and dead so that now he could cup his hand over a candle flame for thirty seconds or more until my mother and I would scream for him to stop. When I was a colicky baby, he would comfort me by sitting in a wicker rocking chair with me and bringing a candle close to my face. He would press his palm flat against the open O of the glass holder until the fire almost fizzled out, repeating the act until I grew tired, my head falling against his chest while he quietly sang me to sleep with one of his many made-up lullabies.

He’s a good old friend to me

As simple as can be

He’s a good old pal

He’s a good old friend

He’s a good old pal to me

At certain moments in his life, my father must have asked himself why the stranger had turned the key. He must have asked himself why anyone would turn the key.

“Whatever you do,” my father had said, stepping around the stranger’s car to examine the motor, “don’t turn the key.”

There must have been some hiccup in communication, something in the stranger that said it was all right to start the engine at the exact moment the Good Samaritan crawled beneath the bumper of his car. Whatever his motivations, the stranger didn’t hesitate.

My mother later told me that when my father showed up at the front door, his clothes covered in ash and his face half burned and his whole body shaking, her first reaction had been to ask him to stay outside. She was vacuuming the carpet. She assumed he was simply caked with dirt.

“Go away,” she said. “Wait till I’m finished vacuuming.”

Hours later, standing beside my father’s hospital bed, waiting for his hand to heal so she could at least hold on to some part of him, what she felt in the place of love was pity and fear. Pity for a man who would risk his life for strangers without a second thought, and fear for a life lived with a once-handsome man, a twentysomething former quarterback with the cleft chin and deep dimples of a Saturday Night Fever John Travolta now transformed into—into what? No one could tell exactly. The bandages would have to be removed weeks later, and only then would doctors know if the grafted skin would resemble anything of his former face.

“TOO MANY earthquakes to keep track of,” my father said, tossing the mouse into a stack of papers beside him. He popped each of his knuckles. “But you don’t need shelter when you’re wearing the Armor of God.” He pointed to the Bible in my hand.

“Sure don’t,” I said. I pictured armor-plated locusts swirling in corkscrews from the clouds. Scores of unbelievers with their bodies run through by silver-plated scabbards. And somewhere in my conscience, the beginning of an idea that had recently begun to plague me: that I might be one of them.

AT EIGHTEEN, I was still very much in the closet, with a halfhearted commitment to my girlfriend, Chloe, whose predilection for French kissing ran a cold blade through the bottom of my stomach. A week earlier as we sat in my car outside her house, Chloe had reached for my leg. I had shifted away from her, and said, “It’s so cold in here,” flipping the lever for the heat, sliding back into the passenger’s seat, wishing there was an eject button. I had experienced my own Armageddon fantasy in that moment: the depressed button of a radio controller, a hooded insurgent walking calmly away from our flying debris, pieces of my flannel shirt flying through the air on flame-tipped wings, a thick-necked policeman picking through the charred remains of the explosion for Chloe’s purple hair scrunchie.

“Besides,” I said, thinking that this moment might lead to more intimacy than we had ever allowed. “We should wait until marriage.”

“Right,” she said, removing her hand. Since we had already been together for a year and a half, the church congregation was expecting us to marry before too many years of college could change us. Earlier in the summer we had traveled to Florida with my mother and my aunt. As we were leaving for the trip, Chloe’s mother leaned in through the driver’s-side window to stage whisper into my mother’s ear. “You know everything’s going to change after this, right?” she said. “All of you in the same hotel room. E-ve-ry-thing.”

But nothing had changed. Chloe and I sneaking out at night with my aunt’s wine coolers to sit by the neon pool and watch its waves ripple across the plastic lining, an angry tide pulsing somewhere in the darkness ahead. I had started to think we didn’t need anything other than friendship. Chloe had made me feel complete in a way no one else had. She made it fun to walk through the school hallways, to see the looks of approval on people’s faces. I could see in her eyes a real love I might one day be capable of returning. When we’d first met in church, her smile had been so genuine that I’d decided to ask her out right after the service, and we’d quickly settled into a happy routine. Watching movies, listening to pop music, playing video games, helping each other finish homework. It seemed there hadn’t been anything to confide until that intimate moment in the car, and suddenly there was this new pressure between us.

MY FATHER and I left his office to join the other men at the foot of the couch, each of us sinking to our knees on the cold tile. Above our heads hung a sign that read: NO CUSSING TOLERATED—THIS IS THE LORD’S BUSINESS.

The man to my left, Brother Hank, clamped his eyelids shut until faint white ripples appeared above his red cheeks. My father’s number one car salesman, Brother Hank could tailor his speech for any occasion. “Dear Lord,” he began, “give this boy the strength to deliver his message this morning.” He wrapped his heavy arm around my shoulders and tucked me close to his ribs. I could smell the sharp scent of menthol and, beneath that, the earthy smell of his farm, a place I had seen only in passing during one of my long walks through the forest paths surrounding our house.

Brother Hank continued: “Bestow upon him Thy divine grace and mercy.” He paused for a moment, allowing the distant ticking of my father’s chrome clock to sober each man’s mood. A few of the men groaned encouragement.

“Oh, yes, Lord,” they said.

“Yes oh yes oh yes oh yes oh yes Lord,” they said.

Brother Hank lifted his hand from my back and left it hovering above my hair, the way my father used to do before cracking an imaginary egg on my skull and causing the imaginary yolk to trickle down my cheeks. “Let him be a vessel for truth. Let no falsehood spill from Your blessed fountain. Amen.”

“Amen!” the men shouted, rising to their feet, knees popping.

We settled into a circle of chairs around the couch, Brother Nielson and my father taking up the middle. Brother Hank removed a stack of Bibles from a nearby desk drawer and fanned them out like a deck of cards, each man choosing carefully, examining his book before flipping open the cover.

“Tell me something before we begin,” Brother Nielson said, removing his own Bible from behind a couch cushion. His name glittered in gold on the front, along the bottom of the cracked leather cover. His cracked Bible said one thing to all of us: Here is a man whose fingers have creased and uncreased each page for the past twenty years. Here is a man who has quietly sobbed into the open spine, allowed his tears to wet and wrinkle the red letters of our Savior. “I’ve been talking with the men here,” Brother Nielson continued, “and I want to know one thing, boy. What’s your opinion on the Middle East problem? What do you think of our president’s decision?”

I froze. The existence of Chloe had shielded me from too much direct questioning about my sexuality, but there were certain opinions that would make me a suspect no matter what. I was always nervous when I had to give an opinion on anything that could open me up to judgment. To be counted a sissy was one thing; to be counted a sissy and an Arab sympathizer was another. To be counted a sissy and an Arab sympathizer would pave the way for others to finally detect the attraction I felt to men. And when they discovered that secret, nothing would stop them from retroactively dismissing each detail of my personality, each opinion of mine, as mere symptoms of homosexuality. I could boast of detailing more cars than any of my father’s other workers; I could point at a boy in high school and laugh at his tight jeans and coiffed hair; but once it was suspected that I felt certain urges or thought certain thoughts, I would cease to be a man in these men’s eyes, in my father’s eyes.

“Well, boy?” Brother Nielson said. He leaned forward and smiled a watery smile. It seemed to require all of his strength to lift his back from the leather couch. “Cat got your tongue?”

I had prepared a lesson on Job, the unluckiest of a luckless Old Testament cast. I thought that by sticking to the script I might avoid scrutiny, the feel of the showroom’s glass walls narrowing their yellow microscope light on my flagging belief, my suspect mannerisms. Now I didn’t know what to say or do.

I coughed into a closed fist and looked down at my Bible. I ignored Brother Nielson’s stare. “The lesson of Job is that we can never know God’s intentions regarding the world,” I said. “Why do bad things happen? Why do bad things happen to good people?”

I turned to the passage, trying to will my hands to be steady. I could feel the heat of Brother Nielson’s and my father’s twin gazes, but I didn’t look up. I flipped the pages back and forth, hoping my train of thought would return.

“Go on, boy,” Brother Nielson said. “Let the Holy Spirit work through you.”

I stared at the words until they became meaningless glyphs, until they swam across the pages. The simple declarative sentences I had prepared the night before refused to snap into place along the worn lines of reason the church had instilled in me three times every week since my first birthday.

“Job was a good man,” I said. “He didn’t deserve what he got. But his friends didn’t listen. They didn’t …”

What I was trying to say seemed impossible and too complicated for words. When everything went wrong in Job’s life, when he lost his wife and two children and all of his livestock to a bet between God and Satan, his friends could only think to ask him what he did wrong, why he deserved God’s punishment. To them, this seemed the only explanation: Bad things happened to bad people. But what happened when good things happened to bad people or vice versa?

I looked up at the showroom entrance in time to see Chloe drive up. She wore her long hair in a ponytail, her smile interrupted by a string of braces that I had used one too many times as an excuse to put an end to our French kissing. Though women didn’t usually attend the men’s Bible study, Chloe was a bit of a rebel when it came to the church’s separation of men’s and women’s roles, believing that women had just as much of a right to be church leaders as men, though she told me this in secret. Most of the women in my church, my mother included, believed that the Bible had clearly appointed men as the leaders of the church, though there were a few members who were beginning to question this assumption. For now, though, Chloe stayed outside in her car, watching me for signs of what my father and these men hoped I might possess: the confidence of a future church leader. The patriarchal chain would travel directly from Brother Nielson to my father and finally to me.

I could feel my face glow red. I slapped the book shut and stared at my feet.

“I don’t …”

The tile was dry now, and in the prints left behind by the men’s rubber outsoles rested a skim of ultraviolet pollen. There were floors to be mopped. Outside, rows of cars would need spraying down with the pressure washer, last night’s rain now dried water spots on my father’s inventory.

“It’s okay, son,” my father said, not looking up from his Bible. “We can do this some other day.”

My mouth was dry, my tongue a paperweight weighing down my syllables.

“I lost my train of thought,” I said, looking away, catching sight of our group’s reflection in the Mustang’s rear window. Our figures stretched by the convex glass, we looked like one long thin band of a gold ring, broken only by the space between my right leg and the arm of the couch.

Brother Nielson opened his Bible to another passage and cleared his throat. “That’s okay,” he said. “Some of us aren’t cut out for the reading of scripture.” He began to speak of the glories of Heaven and everlasting life.

SITTING WITH my mother and father and Chloe hours later at the Timberline, I would fume about Brother Nielson’s words. I would glare at the gigantic radial saw across from our table and imagine it lifting from the curved nail that pinned it to the wall. I would imagine it splitting our town in half. That night, I would dream of Brother Nielson standing at the edge of one half of a living room that had been split down the middle, drifting gradually away from the rest of our town, his sagging boxers flapping in the wind, unable to leap across the widening gap with his tired and broken body, lost in a continental drift.

The truth was, Job’s friends hadn’t understood. Not Eliphaz, Bildad, or Zophar. Job lost his livestock, his wife, his two beautiful daughters—everything. A toss of the coin, and everything was gone. Only a mediator like Elihu, the youngest of Job’s friends, could hint at the complexity of Job’s loss.

A good family, a good house, a good car. To these men, and to me at the time, these were the necessary elements in securing decades of good luck. No matter that we now traded in cars rather than in livestock; no matter that the machinery of war, of Humvees cutting desert paths, was something we would never come to see or understand. At the end of the story, God would provide Job with a different wife, a different set of children, new livestock. Whatever happened—no matter how much we might suffer—if we had faith, God would restore it all, graft the skin back in place, mold us new bodies from our bone-tired ones.

LIKE THE NIGHT BEFORE, a thunderhead was moving across the Ozarks. “A cold front that’ll break up by morning,” the weatherman had said, his Midwestern accent clipping his words before they could slide into a Southern drawl. “You’ll hardly feel it,” he said, smiling, hazel eyes sparkling in the studio lights.

I lay awake in my bed, rereading Job in the hopes of finding a simple explanation for the scripture. I tried to quiet the critical part of my brain, the one that had caused me to stutter and falter during that morning’s Bible study.

Sometimes it was simply the act of looking at the open Bible that gave me a sense of belonging. Sometimes opening the Bible and pressing the pages flat with my palm, adding an extra crack in the spine, brought me closer to my father. I ran my thumb down the indented tabs, pressed into the sides of the book until the words took on a heft I might carry and lift up as proof of my devotion. I closed the Bible and placed it on my nightstand.

Chloe texted me a few minutes later, the phone’s vibrations pulling me out of semiconsciousness: “What’s up?”

“Nothing,” I wrote, burying the clamshell phone under my pillow. I felt like smothering the vibrations until they stopped. From the moment she showed up at the dealership, Chloe had continually asked me how the Bible study had gone. I had evaded the question by mumbling a “fine” every now and then.

Because he wasn’t snoring as usual, I could tell my father also lay awake. I was afraid that the storm wasn’t what kept him from sleep. The reverberating claps that shook so many households awake that night, sending deer scurrying across roads to smash into the sides of cars, were less severe than those that must have accompanied my father’s own fears for his son. I listened for his praying for several minutes, wondering if he was experiencing another moment when Jesus stood over his bed and bled onto the sheets. My father claimed he was often burdened with such visions.

When he finally fell asleep, his snoring was almost loud enough to shake the gilded picture frames lining the hallway just outside my bedroom. Years before, my mother had moved to an adjacent guest bedroom, saying she needed time away from the earthquake that was my sleeping father, from the whining bedsprings accompanying each inhalation. When I was very young, seven or eight years old, I would wake from scripture-inspired nightmares—blue cones of flame licking my feet, chasm after chasm opening up out of a blackness more felt than seen—and walk the hallway to my father’s bedroom to stand at the edge of his bed and wish him awake. I thought he should have understood me without the need for words, that the current between us was so free-flowing and deep he would have no choice but to wake up that instant. I would stand beside the mirrored closet and see the reflected room limned by the blue light of the television he left going all night, shaking and furious, terrified that I would have to return to my nightmares. Hours later, I would cross the hallway to my mother’s bedroom to perform the same absurd ritual. But after only a few minutes, my mother would feel me standing there and pull me beside her in the bed, moving over so I could have the warm spot.

“Love,” she would say.

“Love,” I would mumble, turning on my side, gliding my hand across the warm sheets until the scent of her lavender body lotion covered my skin.

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.

IT 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.

Dear Pirate,

How are you? It’s nice to meet you even if I don’t know who you are. I’d like to know you, so please write back. Also, if you could, please send me treasure.

Your friend Garrard

We arrived back at our house, exhausted from a ten-hour car ride, to find a yellowed piece of notebook paper taped to the front door, a map of our yard with a giant X where the note claimed a pirate named Lonzo had buried his treasure. My mother feigned shock, pressing her fingertips to her cheeks and leaving ten red marks on her face after she dropped her arms. “This is wild,” she said. “This is just so wild.” My father helped me carry a shovel from the garage to the spot in the yard Lonzo had marked on his map. The X was spray-painted in silver on the grass. Together, we pressed our tennis shoes to each of the shovel’s shoulders and dug into the hard-packed clay. Three feet deep, we found a box filled mostly with costume jewelry but also with real jewelry that I would later discover belonged to my grandmother, items for which she had no further use. She and my grandfather had arranged the whole thing on the night my mother called to tell them about the message in a bottle.

After we ran water from a garden hose over the box, I kept the jewelry in the bottom drawer of my desk. I would take the shiny gold pieces out of the box and place as many of them as I could on my neck and wrists and stand in front of the mirror. Twirling. I did this again and again until my father walked in on me one day and told me I needed to stop, that Lonzo would feel sad if he saw me mocking his treasure that way.

“I want to live with Lonzo,” I said. “I want to be a pirate.”

“You probably wouldn’t like it,” my father said. “You’d have to mop the deck all day. He’d turn you into one of his slaves. You’d get sick of the water.”

THE COLD FRONT from the night before brought severe wind gusts that sent sheets of water from my pressure washer over the tops of other cars, leaving water spots on their windshields, the drops fizzling and evaporating on contact with the roasting metal. I stepped out of the service garage, shielded my eyes, and stared at the long line of car windows I would now have to Windex. Behind me, one of my father’s employees was pressing the button to a hydraulic lift, and Chloe’s car was being lifted to the height of the man’s shoulders so he could begin replacing the oil. I was to drive her car back to her house later that afternoon, leave my car at the dealership overnight, and carry out the plan.

Earlier that morning during Bible study, Brother Nielson had lingered in the showroom for a little longer than usual, holding himself upright with one hand on the side of the Mustang.

“I keep wondering,” he said, as I passed by carrying a handful of car keys, “if you’re ever going to answer my question.” I couldn’t tell if he was trying to test me or if he seriously wanted to know what I thought about the Middle East, to know that the next generation was secure in its fight against terrorism.

“Leave the boy alone,” Brother Hank said, sticking his head out of a nearby office.

“He’s not old enough to care about politics. Girls are all he’s got on the brain right now.”

“Girls, huh,” Brother Nielson said. “Nothing wrong with that.” He straightened his back as much as he could, wincing. “Just don’t forget there are bigger things in this world.”

He stuck his hand out in front of my path, and I moved the keys to my other hand and clasped his in a firm handshake that grew firmer with each second until the grip was so severe I thought we might crack each other’s knuckles. His eyes stared directly into mine, full of some secret knowledge. I felt almost as though he could detect the contamination I had passed into my palm earlier that morning before the sun rose, as though the condom I had purchased from the gas station carried a hidden scent or an oil undetectable except by the most righteous of men.

“We’re living in the End Times,” he said to me. “Stay sharp.”

I SET the pressure washer down on the concrete, grabbed the Windex bottle and some paper towels, and walked onto the blacktop lot to tackle the line of water-spotted windshields. In the distance ahead I could see the pine trees on the hills begin to sway in the wind, and I was grateful for this, for the relief of the current as it swept past me, even though I knew it might increase the chances of sunburn, my SPF-40 lotion already washed away by the water, the tips of my fingers already pruned.

I was on my fifth or sixth windshield when the woman approached me.

“Excuse me?” she said, her smile blending into the glinting line of the windshield’s sun glare. “Can you tell me something about this car? I’m looking to buy soon, and I really have no idea.”

I turned to face her. Her makeup was smeared along her dull-lidded eyes; she fidgeted with the black string of a purse draped haphazardly over one shoulder. The car in question was a standard Taurus, one among a long line of them. There seemed to be no reason for singling this one out. There seemed to be no reason for singling me out. I thought of something my father would say during Bible study: how every now and then God presented a moment of perfect opportunity. It was our job as Christians to seize that moment and lead one of His lost souls to salvation.

The woman’s dented, hail-beaten Camry idled behind her, the driver’s-side door left open. I thought of saying, Ma’am, you look lost. I thought of saying, Ma’am, there is no neutral. I thought of how happy it would make my father if I was able to tell him I’d ministered to my first customer. But I couldn’t do it. Her question had been so direct, so real, that to dodge it felt like a betrayal.

“There’s nothing wrong with a good Taurus,” I said. “Dependable. Fairly decent mileage. They hardly ever wear out on you if you take them in for tune-ups on time. But, you know, it’s just a Taurus.”

She placed her hand on my forearm and smiled again. “You’re so kind,” she said. “You didn’t have to tell me the truth.”

I wanted to fall against her chest and feel her arms wrap around my shoulders. I wanted to toss the paper towels and the Windex bottle on the asphalt, slide into her car, and disappear into the hills, then, whenever she wasn’t looking, toss the condom package out of the cracked window.

“THIS IS SO WEIRD,” Chloe said. “Where did they get these creepy sound effects?”

We watched as Janet Leigh stepped into the shower, her pale calf tensing. We knew what would happen next, but we held our breath. Though she didn’t need it, Chloe had applied extra foundation to her face, removing the shallow pockmarks where acne had once scarred her. She wore her hair down. We had both dressed for the occasion. I wore a black button-down and a light jacket that I had waited to remove until I was in the doorway. Chloe wore a dress I’d never seen before. If her mother thought there was anything strange about our outfits, she never said so.

We sat on the couch in her basement in front of the blue light of the television. Occasionally, Brandon would sneak down the stairs and hide behind the couch, jumping out to scare us.

“You’re too old for that,” Chloe said, after he had grabbed her arm just as the shower curtain parted. “Get a life.”

“You’re the one who needs to get a life,” he said, tossing his head back in a remarkably accurate parody of his sister. “Watching scary movies on your big romantic date night.”

Brandon was dressed in his Sunday-morning blazer. He wore a bright pink rose in his lapel, one he must have stolen from a neighbor’s garden. He liked to dress up like his favorite video-game characters. When we asked who he was today, he said, “I’m James Bond from GoldenEye,” and made a gun of his index finger and thumb. I was glad for his occasional interruptions, the way his sudden appearance caused Chloe to unconsciously scoot away from me.

Every movement on that couch was either a victory or a failure. Often both. I was on a different side of the war from one moment to the next.

Brandon removed a candy cigarette from his pocket and acted as though he were about to perch it delicately on the edge of his lips. Instead, he bit into it. “Don’t forget you’re rooming with me tonight,” he said, making a stabbing motion at me with what remained of the cigarette. “Psycho II. Bates strikes again.”

We watched the camera move in a gyre up from Leigh’s gaping pupil, Hitchcock’s shot held intentionally for one second too long, the fear excruciating in that second. Chloe scooted closer.

“It’s still scary,” she said. “Even with the stupid sound effects.”

I FIRST LEARNED about sex when I was Brandon’s age, on a stormless night when my father wasn’t snoring and I could be certain he was awake. I felt the house relax and settle into its hidden joints, and so I could walk through the dark living room without fear, running my fingers across the cool glass of the living-room table, fingering the sharp plastic jonquils in their china vases. I sat in my father’s leather recliner and switched on the television. Since the living room shared the same satellite connection as my father’s bedroom—but not my mother’s—I could see what he was seeing in those sleepless hours after he had already exhausted his prayer. I watched the snow-fizzled channels settle into hints of a bare thigh, an open mouth closing over something long and hard, bright red lipstick shining through static. I heard the woman’s low moaning—so scripted, so different from my father’s spiritual moaning. But the display didn’t last for more than a minute or two, the amount of time I imagine it took for my father to feel the weight of his guilt. Still, I would tell my mother of his transgression the next day, knowing even then that by airing his secret I might better hide my own darker secret.

“I’m sure it was by mistake,” she said, always the mediator. “Why would you spy on him like that?”

Then she forced a smile and said, “Let’s make crème brûlée tonight. We’ll get your grandmother’s silver out and everything.”

I HAD BEEN lying on a sleeping bag in the dark basement of Chloe’s house for about an hour. I decided to sit up and listen for Brandon’s steady breathing before I made my attempt up the stairs. I kept the condom package tucked into the elastic band of my pajama pants; the plastic scratched my skin, burning. I had no idea how I planned to do it. Sneak up to her room and announce my intentions? Stand in her doorway in the hopes that she made the first move?

“I’m not asleep, in case you’re wondering,” Brandon said. I heard him throw his sheets to the ground beside his bed. “Your movie kept me awake.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought it might be fun. Theft, murder, cars sinking into tar pits.”

“You know?” he said, bare feet slapping the concrete floor as he came toward me. I made out the outline of his cowlicked hair, then his thin arms sticking out of his pajama top. “You’re not like her other boyfriends. You’re a lot nicer.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

He stood at the edge of my sleeping bag, his toes wiggling into the taffeta lining. “Can I ask you something?”

My eyes adjusting to the dark, I could see that his face was contorted, twin wrinkles running down the center of his forehead. I could hear footsteps coming from the spot on the ceiling directly below Chloe’s bedroom floor.

“How do you get your character to level up to fifty?” He smiled an impish smile. Whatever he had planned to say was still unsaid.

He sat down on the edge of the sleeping bag. “Do you mind?” he said, holding the television remote close enough so I could see it. He switched on the television and crawled over to the PlayStation to press the power button. We settled into our gaming positions, hunching toward the screen. We were now standing in the chamber of a large Gothic castle lit by torchlight. Dark red carpet shot across the room from one door to the next, and guards in gold uniforms stood before every entryway.

Brandon’s eyes glazed over. He licked his lips unconsciously. “This part is tricky. Those guards will come running if I move another inch.”

“Check your inventory first.”

The two of us riffled through potions and equipped stronger weapons. Brandon had obviously not kept track of his inventory. Using too many potions when he didn’t have to. Tossing crossbows aside without first selling them in the market. Though I continued to think of Chloe in the bedroom above us, I tried to block her out. I had already crafted an alibi: How could I leave if her brother saw me?

After a few more hours of intense concentration, we both lay back on the sleeping bag.

Brandon propped himself up on his elbow, his palm cradling his chin. “You know what?” he said.

“I don’t,” I said.

“I think he’s probably gay,” he said, his voice suddenly breaking at the last syllable. He looked away. His breathing was shallow. It took several seconds for me to realize that he was talking about our avatar.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I really do,” he said. “So much hair gel.”

When he looked back at me, we both knew what we were.

We decided to keep playing until he reached the next level. By the time an orange sunrise worked its way through the blinds and shaped itself into slanted rectangles across the concrete, Chloe had already prepared breakfast by herself.

“Surprise,” she said, standing on the bottom step, refusing to touch the basement floor. She didn’t sound at all surprised. She hadn’t bothered to change out of her cotton gown. I tried to shut out her pain, kept my eyes on the wadded sleeping bag at my feet. “Breakfast is served.”

MY FATHER wrote a note to God, left it in my desk drawer, and told me never to open it. Never to touch it, but to leave it there. It was the formal promise he made to God after the car explosion that he had folded into a tiny square and tucked away behind the scores of mechanical pencils I would chew in frustration when I couldn’t get my journal entries to come out right.

That last summer I spent at his dealership, old enough for my curiosity to outweigh my reverence, I read the note.

Heavenly Father,

Thank you for saving me from literal hellfire. I have made a promise to you that I intend to keep. From this moment on, as for me and my house, we will serve You. I promise to raise my son in the church. I promise to be a God-fearing man and to bring others into Your divine flock. Please, spare my son from all that I have suffered, and from my mistakes. Spare him from the confusion of the world. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected praise. Let him rest in the truth of Your holy Word.

Your Servant

“WHY HAVEN’T you answered any of my calls?” Chloe asked.

A week of silence had passed since our failed night. I was sitting on my bedroom floor, the PlayStation controller tucked into the triangle between my crossed legs, the phone nestled against my shoulder. “I don’t know.”

“How do you not know? You either answer or you don’t.”

After a minute of silence, she hung up.

Another week passed. Two. I opened the phone, thought about pressing speed dial for Chloe’s number, snapped it shut.

“I don’t know,” I said to the screen.

It wasn’t relief I felt. More like fear: of the unknown, of myself. What kind of person was I becoming?

ANOTHER WEEK PASSED. My parents were concerned. They wanted to know why Chloe and I hadn’t been hanging out. Her mother was calling, people from church were asking, and nobody could believe we would end things so suddenly without any real explanation. I pretended I was sick on Sundays so I wouldn’t have to see her again at church.

Another week. When I could no longer fake being sick, I volunteered to work at the projector booth at the back of the sanctuary, far from the congregants’ questioning gazes. Chloe was sometimes there, sometimes not, but we made sure we never ended up in the same part of the church together.

Another week. It was almost time to move to the small liberal arts college where I’d been accepted. My mother and I took occasional trips to Walmart to buy what I’d need for the dorm, coming home with heavy sacks full of plastic storage containers, with jumbo packages of T-shirts and socks and underwear. Then, late one night, my father received a phone call from Chloe’s mother. She was hysterical. Brandon had been caught with another boy in his bed, a close friend. They had been experimenting. She couldn’t think of anyone else to call. She wanted to know if my father could come talk some sense into the boys. I sat in our living room for most of the night, trying not to shake, waiting for him to return, my mother beside me on the couch.

“Why did you two really break up?” she asked. “You were so cute together.” I couldn’t answer. There were no words, no clear explanations that didn’t involve some terrible admission. I knew my sudden silence was hurting my mother, was hurting all of us. But in only a few months I had already managed to ruin everything. I didn’t want to say anything else that might make things worse.

My father came home around four o’clock in the morning, his eyes red, his hair a mess. He wouldn’t tell us much of what happened, just stood in the kitchen shaking his head. The boys had made a mistake, he said. He had explained to Brandon and the other boy that continuing their sinful behavior would turn them against God, expel them from the Kingdom of Heaven. Brandon would grow out of it, my father said. His voice sounded unconvincing, and I could tell he was shaken by the visit, that perhaps he suspected something about me that he hadn’t suspected before. I turned away, walked to my bedroom, and shut the door.

Another week. Video games every night. I hardly thought about the next phase of my life. I hardly thought about anything other than what I would need to equip for my avatar’s journey through the wilderness. In the few moments when I wasn’t playing a game, I tried to ignore the fact that not talking to Chloe also meant that I would have to stop talking to Brandon. That the only person who seemed to know who I really was would never again be part of my life. That whatever either of us decided to do about our urges, we would be alone.

A month before I was to go to college, I finally put down the PlayStation controller. I walked into the living room, where my parents were sitting on opposite ends of the couch. I invited them to follow me to the bathroom to view the corpse of my gaming life.

“I want you to see something,” I said. I hardly knew what I was doing. I wanted to tell them everything: about why I broke up with Chloe, about how I was just like Brandon. I wanted to tell them, but I didn’t have the right words. I wanted to let them know that something was wrong, that I had been trying to ignore a part of me but that I wasn’t going to ignore it any longer. I was going to fix it.

In the center of the bathtub sat my PlayStation, its two controllers curled up beside it like sleeping cats. My parents stood in the doorway, wearing what-is-this-all-about looks on their faces. My father ran a hand through his thick black hair. My mother crossed her arms over her chest and sighed.

I slid back the clear plastic shower curtain and turned the knob for the shower. My parents and I watched the water rush over the console and swirl into an oval before disappearing with a hollow gurgle down the drain. I imagined the water trickling through the motherboard, following tributaries formed by the microchips. I kept the water running for a few extra seconds than needed until I heard my parents shift uncomfortably behind me. I slid the curtain back in place.

“I’m done with games,” I said.

Whatever I would face after this moment, I would face it directly.