Boy Erased. Garrard Conley
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