LITMIR.BIZ

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myself acceptable.”

      I HAD SPENT the last several months trying to erase my “false personality.” I’d walked out of my college dorm one winter day and jumped into the campus’s half-frozen lake. Shivering, I walked back to the dorm in water-suctioned shoes, feeling rebaptized. In the hot shower that followed, I watched, dazed by the shock of icy heat on my numb skin, as a drop of water traced the edge of the showerhead. I prayed, Lord, make me as pure as that.

      During my stay at Love in Action, I would repeat the prayer until it became a kind of mantra. Lord, make me as pure as that.

      I REMEMBER little about the ride to the facility with my mother. I had tried to look away, to prevent my mind from recording what passed by outside the passenger’s-side window, though a few details remained: the muddy caramel-colored Mississippi passing behind the steel girders of the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge, the scale of our American Nile feeling like the perfect stimulant for my uncaffeinated mind; the glass pyramid glittering at the edge of the city, spreading its hot light across our windshield. It was early June, and by midmorning almost every surface in the city would be too hot to touch for more than a few seconds, everything sweltering by noon. The only relief came in the morning, the sun resting at the edge of the horizon, still only a suggestion of light.

      “Surely they could afford something better than this,” my mother said, steering us into a parking space at the front of a rectangular strip mall. The location was more upscale than much of rest of the city, part of a wealthier suburb, though this strip mall was arguably the least attractive landmark for miles around, a place for lower-end retail stores and small clinics to find a temporary home. Whitewashed red brick and glass. Double doors that opened onto a white foyer with fake plants. A logo above the entrance: inverted red triangle with a heart-shaped hole cut out of the middle of it, a series of thin white lines spreading across the gap. We stepped out of the car and headed toward the doors, my mother always a few steps ahead.

      Once we entered the foyer, a smiling receptionist asked me to sign my name in a ledger. The man looked to be in his midtwenties. He wore a polo shirt that fell loosely from his chest, and his eyes were a bright honest cobalt. I’d been expecting some wan-faced wraith who’d already erased everything interesting about himself. Instead, here was someone who looked like he’d be willing to play a few rounds of Halo with me, then use video-game analogies to tell me a little about what God had done for him. You have to fight against the enemies, the aliens trying to invade your soul. I’d met plenty of hip youth pastors with a similar look and attitude.

      I can no longer remember his name. I can no longer remember if there were any signs in that foyer of what was to come, any paintings on the wall, any rules posted. The foyer exists for me now as a blindingly white waiting room, the kind you see in Hollywood depictions of heaven: a blank space.

      “Can I see the place?” my mother asked. Something about the way her voice lifted into a polite question made me feel uneasy, as if she were asking to look at real estate.

      “I’m sorry, ma’am,” the receptionist said. “Only clients allowed in the back. Security reasons.”

      “Security?”

      “Yes, ma’am. Many of our clients deal with repressed family issues. Seeing a parent, no matter whose parent, no matter if it’s someone nice like you”—a winning, deep-dimpled smile—“can be a little unsettling. That’s why we call this a safe zone.” He stretched out both his arms at his sides, sweeping them wide—slowly and a little rigidly, I thought, as though his movements had once been much grander and he had since learned to rein them in. “Since you’re only in the two-week program, you’ll have access to your son at all hours except program time.”

      Program time would be from nine to five. Evenings, nights, and early mornings I would spend with my mother in a Hampton Inn & Suites nearby, leaving the room only for necessities. I was supposed to spend the majority of my free time in the room doing homework for the next day’s session. The schedule sheet the receptionist handed me was fairly straightforward, with each hour accounted for in a black-bordered square, words like “quiet time” and “activity time” and “counseling” written in all caps.

      The receptionist handed me a thick LIA handbook and a folder. I opened the handbook, its plastic spine crackling, and was greeted by a black-and-white welcome note with my name printed in large type. Beneath my name, a few Bible verses, Psalms 32:5–6, written in a casual modern English different from the formal King James Version I’d grown up with.

      I finally admitted all my sins to you and stopped trying to hide them. I said to myself, I will confess them to the Lord; and you forgave me! All my guilt is gone.

      I flipped through the pages at random as my mother peered over my shoulder. I wanted to close the book the minute I saw the obvious typos and clip-art graphics. I wanted my mother to think the best of the place before she left, not because I felt like defending the poorly designed handbook, but because I wanted the moment to pass as quickly as possible without any more of her overly polite interrogations. If she started asking questions about design and casual Bible language, she might start asking questions about qualifications, about why we were even here in the first place, and I knew this would only make things worse. Questions only prolonged the pain of these moments, and they almost always went unanswered. I was done with asking questions about how I had ended up in this situation, with searching for other answers, other realities, other families or bodies I could have been born into. Every time I realized that there weren’t any other alternatives, I felt worse for asking. I was ready to take things as they came now.

      “Call me if you need anything.” my mother said, squeezing my shoulder. She was all blond hair and heavy blue mascara, blue eyes and a perennial floral-print top: a spot of Technicolor in this drab place.

      “I’m sorry, ma’am,” the receptionist said, “but we have to keep his phone while he’s here.” For security reasons. “We’ll inform you if anything important pops up.”

      “Do you think that’s necessary?”

      My mother and the receptionist finished their conversation—“It’s the rules, ma’am. It’s in his best interest”—and then my mother was saying good-bye, telling me she was headed off to check us into the hotel, that she would be back to pick me up at five o’clock sharp. She hugged me, and I watched her go, her head high, her shoulders square, the glass double doors swinging closed behind her with a sigh from their pneumatic hinges. I’d seen her like this once before, during the year both my grandparents died. She had carried me through that year, patted a space for me next to her on the sofa as visitors wove in and out of our living room carrying casseroles and baskets filled with glazed pastries. She had run her fingers through my hair and whispered that death was a process, that my grandparents had both lived happy lives. I wondered if this was how she felt now, if she thought that LIA was part of a necessary process—difficult, yes, but easier to accept once you knew it was part of God’s plan.

      “Let’s get you checked in,” the receptionist said.

      I followed him to another room, also white walled and empty, where a blond-haired boy stood beside a table and asked me to remove everything in my pockets. The boy was barely older than I was, perhaps twenty, and he carried an air of authority that made me think he’d been here a while. He was handsome in a svelte, twinkish way, tall and angular, though he wasn’t my type. Then again, I didn’t really know what my type was.

      On the nights when I’d allowed myself to look up images of men in underwear on line, I’d only been able get halfway down the page, the pixels threading strand by strand in a slow-motion striptease, before I felt the need to exit the browser and try to forget what I’d seen, the laptop growing too hot in my lap. There were flashes, of course, hints of attraction emerging in my occasional fantasies—a toned bicep here, the sharp V of a pelvis there, a collage of various dimples beneath a series of aquiline noses—but the picture was never complete.

      The blond-haired boy waited, tapping his index finger on the folding table between us. I dug in my pockets and removed my cell phone, a black Motorola RAZR whose small screen suddenly lit up with an image of the

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