Garrard Conley - Boy Erased

“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.