The Miseducation of Cameron Post (43 page)

And I, for one, was dumbfounded, not only because she’d asked the question almost sweetly, certainly more good cop than bad, but mostly because in asking it she was relinquishing some control, handing it over to a disciple, and that I’d definitely never seen from her. For his part, Mark also seemed sort of taken aback; he shrugged his shoulders and wedged his eyebrows down and in toward his nose, and said, quietly, “I don’t know. I can talk about whatever you think is best.”

The last time he’d shared, I remembered, he’d talked a lot about one or two
impure
daydreams he’d had about an assistant pastor from his father’s church. Fairly chaste daydreams, it had seemed to me. In one of them the two of them held hands outside while hiking. Maybe they were shirtless, too—but really, not much happened. I guess he could have stripped them free of any of the more damning details, just to make sure they were cleared for retelling, but I doubt it. I think Mark Turner’s struggles were likely almost entirely those of thought and emotion, battling the way he felt about men—the way some part of him wanted to feel about them—but not anything he’d actually ever done with them.

“Okay,” Lydia said, still flipping through her notes, but pretty obviously doing so to gather her words and not because she was actually gleaning anything new from them. “I know that you’ve had an especially hard couple of weeks, and I thought that maybe there was something more pressing than not for you right now.”

“Every week is especially hard,” Mark said, not looking at her but flicking the cover of his Bible so that it lifted open some and then fell back against his finger where he flicked it again. “Everything is pressing.”

“Okay,” Lydia tried again. “But is there something—”

“How about everything,” Mark said. “How about every single thing.” He had raised his voice some, which was weird coming from him, unexpected, and he almost seemed like he was pulsating energy or rage or something, like it was sort of racquetballing around inside his small body, smacking here and there, and it was taking work to keep it contained. I was across the circle from him but I could see the way his neck muscles were taut, all of him rigid and uncomfortable. He gritted out this next part: “If you want me to say something about my father, then you should just say so.”

Lydia, pen poised above her notebook, said, “It sounds to me like it’s you who wants to talk about your father’s decision.”

“What’s there to say?” he asked. “You read the letter, Lydia, same as me.” He paused then, looked around the circle, a strange sort of grin on his face. “But I can share it with the group, the important part.” He puffed himself up some, there on his chair, and changed his voice, made is a shade deeper. “‘Your visit home at Christmas confirmed my fears that you are still very feminine and weak. I cannot have this weakness in my home. It sends the message to my congregation that I approve of it when I do not. You will stay the summer and we will readdress your progress come August. You are not ready to come home.’” He settled back in his chair, not much, but enough to tell us that he was done. He tried to look pleased, to smirk, but he wore it wrong. His face just looked, in that moment, feral. “‘You are not ready to come home,’” he said again.

Through all of this, Lydia was calm as ever. She didn’t even react to his comment about her role as mail screener. She finished writing something and asked, “What specific thing happened at Christmas, Mark? What led to your father’s decision?”

He snorted. “I happened. Just me. Like always. It’s enough for me to just walk in the room the way I am.”

“What way are you, Mark?” she asked.

“I want to read something,” he said, his voice louder than before, just edging on frantic but not quite there. “Can I read a passage? It’s one of my father’s favorites. He reminds me of it every chance he gets.”

“Please do,” Lydia said.

So then Mark stood and read aloud a passage that I don’t think I’d ever heard before that day, but one that I’ve revisited again and again since: Second Corinthians 12:7–10. Maybe I shouldn’t say that he read the passage, because even though he had his Bible open and held out in front of him, he didn’t need to look at it very often.

“And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me.”

He paused here, looked up to the ugly paneled ceiling of the classroom, or beyond that, probably. He was such a small guy, and everything about him usually so composed. I’d heard him read Scripture lots of times before, his voice always clear and assured, just like the Sunday-morning Bible Hour broadcast. Mark’s voice as he spoke this passage on this day, though, kept that nearly frantic tremble in it.

“And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”
He paused again here, squinted his eyes, and bunched up his face to keep from crying. He shook his head back and forth, fast, and then somehow forced out the rest of the passage through the clench of his jaw, each word its own victory over a complete breakdown.
“Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.”

Mark breathed out hard when he finished, like some guys do when they’re repping weights, and he closed his Bible and in the very next instant let it drop from his hands. Its descent was impossibly slow, like it took movie editing to make it happen, but its sharp smack against the floor was entirely of the moment, and as loud and uncomfortable as it could possibly be.

Lydia tried to subdue that moment with her typical ice, and said, “There’s no need for cheap theatrics. If you sit down, we can talk about the passage you’ve selected.”

But Mark wasn’t done with the theatrics, and he sure as hell wasn’t sitting down. “I didn’t do the selecting. Weren’t you listening?” he said. “My dad selected it for me. He’d have it tattooed on my back if tattoos weren’t condemned in Leviticus 19:28.
Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD
.”

Lydia half stood and motioned her hand for him to take his chair. “Sit down, Mark. We can talk about all of this.”

But instead of sitting, he moved into the center of our small circle, the farmer in the dell, and said, “You know the best thing about my dad’s passage?” He didn’t wait for anyone to answer him. “It has
for Christ’s sake
built right in. It’s built right in.”

He started doing jumping jacks. He did. Perfect-form, hand-clap-above-the-head jumping jacks as he shouted, “‘For when I am weak then am I strong!’ In my dad’s passage, weakness actually equals strength. That means I have the strength of ten Marks. Twenty! Eighty-five! All my weakness makes me the strongest man alive.”

He stopped short the jumping jacks and crouched down then, so fast, and with military precision he put his two palms flat on the floor and shot his small legs out behind him, leveled off his back, and knocked out push-ups, one after another, chanting, “For Christ’s sake,” as he pushed back into start position from each. “For Christ’s sake! For Christ’s sake!”

He’d done at least five, Lydia saying, “Stop it, Mark. Stop all of this right now!” before she managed, as he was in the down position, to get her right foot, a foot clad in a black loafer, planted squarely on the small of his back. She seemed to apply enough weight to keep him from rising back up. She remained in that position while she said, “I’ll remove my foot when you’re ready to stand up and get control of your behavior.”

But then Mark, with the strength of eighty-five Marks, like he’d said, grunting and sort of squealing through the grit of his teeth, the clench of his jaw, started extending those elbows and raising himself back off the ground, and Lydia, shifting her hip to allow for this new position, lost her balance, and though, once she was steady again, she tried to apply more weight to the foot, you could tell it was too late. Mark was powering through, and then, sure enough, he was all the way up, Lydia standing stupidly with one foot still on his back, but now looking like an explorer in a snapshot with her foot up on some rock or outcropping.

But just as soon as he’d made it, he was done, and he collapsed back to the floor, sobbing now, his face mashed into the laminate. He was making all kinds of noises, and saying things, I’m not sure what, exactly, I know I heard
sorry
a couple of times, and
I can’t, I can’t do it
. Lydia crouched down next to him, put her hand on his back, she didn’t rub it or anything, she just placed it there and said, not to him, but to all of us, “Go to your rooms until dinner. Go directly to your rooms and nowhere else.”

And when none of us moved, she said, “You will go right now and not a moment later.” And we did. We gathered our notebooks and pretended, poorly, not to linger, watching Mark, who was still crying on the floor. As the rest of us walked to the door, I noticed Dane hover next to his chair, trying to stay, I guess. But Lydia shook her head no at him, and then he joined the rest of us in the hallway, where we looked at one another with big eyes and open mouths. And even though we walked back to our rooms as a group, we were a silent group, nobody really sure what to say, or what to make of what had just happened.

Finally Steve said, lowly, “That was intense—that was more intense than anything.”

“If it was intense for you, think about how it was for him,” Dane said, sharp and mean. “It wasn’t nothin’ for all of us, faggot.”

“Jesus,” Steve said, “I didn’t even mean it like that.” But Dane pushed past him, and after that none of us said anything; we just went to our rooms like we were told.

Mark wasn’t at dinner. By then most all of the other disciples knew what had happened and I could tell everyone was waiting for him to show up. When Adam walked into the dining hall alone, there were obvious glances and whispers from the cliques in the food line and those already pulled up to a table, starting in on their mac ’n’ cheese with cut-up hot dogs and a side of green beans and canned pears.

“What’s the full report?” Jane asked Adam as he joined our table, his plate holding three ice-cream scoops of the synthetic orange, glumpy noodles and pink hot dog bites.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t even know anything had happened, and then I come back from evangelical detail and find Rick and Lydia in our room and Mark is like out of it, completely, a total zombie; he’s sitting on the edge of his bed and the two of them are practically on top of him saying all sorts of shit, but he’s in la-la land. And I’m going, Is anybody gonna clue me in, here?”

“What were they saying to him?” I asked.

“Just like the usual junk:
It’s gonna be all right; you’re facing your sin and that takes courage; you just need to rest and pray
; whatever. None of it was penetrating, at least as far as I could tell.” Adam had been loading up his fork with noodles since he’d sat down. I usually loved to watch him eat mac ’n’ cheese, or anything else made with elbow noodles. It took him forever. He’d maneuver one noodle onto each fork tine, four in all, little tubes stacked one next to another, and then spear a piece of hot dog on the end, and then take a bite. But that night his dedication to his food routine was annoying me.

His fork was loaded now, so he took his bite and said, “I didn’t hear much anyway, because two minutes after I walked in, Lydia sent me to Steve and Ryan’s room. But then at least Steve told me all about Mark’s show of strength, if Steve can be believed. Did he really knock out a push-up with Lydia standing on his back?”

“She wasn’t completely standing on it,” I said. “But she had one foot on it, some of her weight.”

“Our group never has this kind of entertainment,” he said, scowling at Jane as if it was her fault for not bringing the drama. “Couldn’t you do cartwheels or something?” He was loading his fork again.

“I used to be able to do a spectacular crab walk,” she said. “All the way across the floor and up a wall.”

“That could work,” Adam said.

I knew they were just doing what we always did, making a joke out of everything because it sucked to be here and we didn’t want any part of it and why not just laugh everything off because we obviously knew better than any of the assholes running the place, but this time—I don’t know, maybe because I’d actually been there and had seen Mark, had seen him lose his shit, had seen him sobbing with his face in the floor—the way we were treating what had happened made me even more annoyed, and I guess sort of angry, too.

“I can also juggle a little,” Jane said, picking up the bowl her pears had been in and tilting it to her mouth, drinking the Vaseline-colored juice, then wiping her face before saying, “How do you think I could work that into a share session?”

“Maybe you could—” Adam started, but I cut him off.

“It was scary,” I said, not looking at either of them but talking more loudly than I normally might. “He was completely out of control. It was hard to watch. I mean, it seemed funny at first, and great that Lydia couldn’t get him to sit down, but when he just kept going, it really wasn’t funny at all.”

“It must have been a little bit funny,” Jane said.

“Not really,” I said, looking at her. “Not if you were in the room as it was happening right in front of you.”

Jane made her patented unreadable Jane face, but I’d come to associate it with her disapproval or doubt or both.

“I get what you’re saying,” Adam said. “I guess it’s just because we didn’t see it that it seems too crazy to be taken seriously.”

“It was crazy,” I said. “And it was completely serious, too.”

Jane kept her blank face on for the rest of the meal, but she didn’t talk anymore about crab walking or juggling, either.

Later, in our room, the Viking Erin said she needed a hug and so I gave her one and it was not the worst thing ever. It was actually seminice. Then she said she was going to pray for Mark and asked me if I wanted to join her and I said I did. And I did. And it was sort of nice, too. Maybe not the praying itself so much as treating what had happened with a certain amount of respect. It felt like something better than just making a joke out of it, anyway.