Facing that is another desk on which is a big wooden box painted green that looks like an old fashioned radio. Gareth is sitting there waiting for me.
“Get him ready,” Lee turns and goes back outside again.
“Take your clothes off,” says Gareth, “all of them and sit on the metal chair.”
I strip as Gareth watches me.
“Now sit down on the chair.”
I move over behind the desk to sit down and see that the chair has restraints built into the legs. A wire runs into the restraint on the right leg and another wire comes from the top of the metal chair. The sight of it terrifies me. I realise this is going to give me an electric shock.
“I’m not sitting on that!” I push back against him.
“Are you going to try me again?” He grabs me by the shoulders.
“Don’t make me do it!” I try to pull away from him. He slaps me around the face so hard I taste blood in my mouth. In the time it takes me to recover he has me on the chair and tries to do up one of the restraints. I cry, howl and squirm. He punches me in the stomach, hard enough to make me struggle for breath so I can’t resist when he pushes my legs into place and tightens the buckle straps around my ankles. Then he picks up a large leather belt which puts round my chest, under my arms, and pulls it so I am tight against the chair.
This he fastens behind me. “You could have made that so much easier on yourself.”
Lee comes back in holding a bucket which drips with water. He goes behind me and puts it under the metal chair. Then he sits on the chair nearest my desk while Gareth returns to the other.
“I’m sorry if this all seems a little scary,” says Lee, “but we’re now going to start the next part of your treatment. You’ll be here for an hour every other day for the rest of the camp. Now all I want you to do today is look through the folder. That’s easy isn’t it?”
I nod.
“Now every so often you’re going to get a little electric shock. It won’t be enough to do any damage, it’s going to sting you.”
I shiver and I cry. “Please don’t do this to me.”
Lee puts his hand on my shoulder. “Come on now, be a man and take it. This is going to stop you thinking about boys and make you better. It’s worth a little pain isn’t it? To be normal…”
I don’t say anything. At the moment, if I had the choice, I would rather be dead. I pull against the belt and restraints but they are solid and far too tight. What would happen if I was able to get free from them? I don’t think I’d get out of the room.
“Now Gareth told me you confessed to him that you do get erections. Don’t worry, I’m not going to punish you for it. I still believe you’ve never done anything with another boy. That’s true isn’t it?”
“Yes.” I know I can’t do anything. I know I can’t escape this. The sweat is dripping down my shivering body.
“I’m going to give you a little shock so you know what to expect.” He nods at Gareth.
Gareth presses something on the box and a light shock hits me. It starts at my ankle and runs through my body. It’s enough to make my leg shake but it isn’t painful. It lasts only a second.
“So go ahead. Open up the folder.”
I turn the cover of the folder. I can see that there are hundreds of laminated sheets. They are photographs. The first one is of a naked woman lying on a bed with her legs apart. She is shaved and everything is on display.
“Now take your time. Look at it for a little while and I want you to play with yourself.”
“What?” And I thought this couldn’t get any worse.
“I want you to play with your penis and make it hard. Then I want you to masturbate while looking at the pictures.”
I look at him. I don’t do anything.
“Put it up a notch and give him three seconds.”
“No, pl…” The jolt hits me. This time it stings with pins as well as shakes. I make a noise I have no control of, gurgling and guttural. It stops and I gasp for air.
“Now are you going to comply?”
I look at the woman and play with my penis but nothing happens. Lee looks between my legs at what I am doing. This goes on for a minute.
“Now when you’re ready. Turn the page.” Lee’s eyes do not move.
I do so. On the next page is a picture of a naked young man holding his hard cock. He’s young and blond and gorgeous.
“Now keep looking at it and keep playing with yourself.”
It takes a few seconds for my cock to go hard. Then lee nods again and I’m hit by another three second electric shock. It’s as strong as last time but when it stops I feel the strap around my left ankle start to heat up. Where it’s touching my skin I’m already sore. My erection has diminished.
“Now turn the next page.”
I turn the page, again there is another woman. This time she has a finger inside her. I play with myself but nothing happens. No reaction at all. I look between her legs but it feels alien to me.
“Now turn the next page.”
“No! I don’t want to.”
Lee stands up and moves closer to me. He raises his hand high in the hair and slams it down on my thigh. The slap resonates around the brick room. It stings like crazy.
“Disobey me again and you’ll get the same. Now turn the page.”
The next page. A hairy, muscled man is masturbating. I get hard after about ten seconds and then there is another shock. My left ankle starts to burn.
Then after four of each, man and woman, the images begin to get more explicit alternating each time – gay, straight, gay, straight and a blast of electricity every time I get hard looking at the gay ones. As the pictures get more explicit the shocks become stronger and more agonizing. The chair itself begins to heat up and burns my skin. My ankle is being branded.
Then I see the first image of two men having anal sex. I masturbate and I know I am close to climax but the shock doesn’t come. I can see Lee motioning to Gareth out of the corner of my eye. Then I feel it building up and I come. The second it starts is when the next shock hits me. It is so intense and painful that I lose control of my arms and strong surge of pain shoots through my groin. It lasts for at least seven seconds. The dark room is lit up blue by the arcing of electricity from the chair to my lower body. I lose control of my bladder and can hear the piss hitting the bucket underneath me. When the shock stops I can’t breathe. I panic and pull against the straps. Lee holds the back of the chair to stop it shaking and falling over.
I breathe in and I feel the burns around my body. I retch and puke. Lee pulls the chair back and lets me puke on myself. After I stop he undoes the ankle straps and lets me sit there.
“Now keep looking at that picture.”
I shake. I can feel small burns up my legs and back and the burn around my ankle is blisteringly hot. I’m making a low, slow panting noise and shaking. I hear Lee and Gareth talking as I’m left to sit there but I don’t take in anything they are saying. I look at the anal sex photograph and taste the sick in my mouth. The pain around my body does not go away.
I can’t even escape into my mind. The pain is keeping me here. I look at the photograph and it is disgusting. I don’t know why anyone would want to do that. Why did it make me so excited? I have no idea.
Then Keith is undoing the strap and helping me up off the chair. I hadn’t noticed he’d come in. He leads me back through the woods to the shower block while I'm still totally naked. I can just about walk on my shaky legs. I feel like I’ve run a marathon and am ready to collapse.
Keith turns on the showers and puts me under the cold water. He strips naked then soaps his hands and washes me down as the water begins to heat up. I am shivering and feel like I could collapse at any moment.
When I’m all clean he pulls me out of the shower and faces me towards him. He puts his hand between my legs and touches me all over. He soaps his finger and forces it into me. I have no energy left to stop him. I don’t like the feeling. It’s sore and
it hurts when he moves it around. I slump to the floor and lie back. I don't think I'll ever manage to get up again.
“It’s okay,” he says, “lie back and rest.”
He pushes my legs apart and brings my ankles up to my arse. Then he slides his finger inside me again. With his other hand he keeps playing with me. With his finger still inside me, he starts playing with himself.
I feel that I don’t feel anything. It’s like this is something I have to go through now, something I don’t have a choice about. I do feel ashamed. I feel powerless but there is no anger or fear or anything like that any more, there is solid cold nothingness.
It’s not as if he fancies me or wants to be close to me. I could be any of the inmates here. That’s all I am, a plaything for him. I watch him masturbate. It's pathetic.
He licks and sucks me for a bit then he pulls his finger out and puts loads of soap on my arsehole.
I turn to the boy in the gown who’s lying beside me. A nurse is standing over him pulling his knees to his chin as a doctor prepares the needle for the spinal tap. Then I realise I am the boy and I see the nurse over me. The needle inches into my back and the electric pains shoot down my legs.
And the nurse says, “Yeah, that’s so good. That’s so good. Oh I love you. I love you so much.” She kisses my chest and licks my nipple.
I pass out and then I’m back in my dorm and I fall on the bed. I catch sight of Jacob – face down and unconscious – then I pass out myself.
When I wake I feel groggy and tired. I run my hand down the back of my leg and can feel slight burns all down me. My ankle is red raw and blistered and I can’t bare to touch it for long and I don’t let myself look at it. My leg, where Lee hit me, is throbbing. My arse is sore and it feels bruised. I touch it with my finger and there is blood. There is pain all over but beyond that I think I almost feel normal or maybe I don’t know what normal is any more.
Noah is curled up on his bed, sobbing. Jacob is sitting next to him, his eyes full of tears. His face is glazed over. The defiance is still there, somewhere but most of it has been replaced by something else. He looks like he’s given up. “Gareth raped him.”
I look at him and I want him to know and I don’t want him to know and I don’t want to say and I don’t know or don’t want to know but I do know and I pull down my bottoms. “Look.” And he shakes his head and walks over anyway and the boy in the gown is lying next to me and is red and hot and dying and tubes are coming out of him and Jacob collapses to the floor next to my bed and puts his arms around his head.
Chapter Thirteen
When I wake up the next morning, Noah is in bed with me, staring into my eyes as soon as they open. I don’t know what to say to him and I think my face shows it as clearly as his face shows it to me.
He reaches out and touches my face and that is all it takes. I feel the strength return to me as I swallow. “We’re going to get our of here.”
He nods.
Jacob stands at the foot of my bed and looks at us as worried as he was yesterday.
“I’m all right.” I sit up, then get to my feet. I look back at Noah and I feel strong again. Nothing has happened to me, nothing. Everything has happened to Noah and I have to get him out of here. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s get out of here as soon as we can.”
“We will,” says Jacob. I no longer know if he’s convinced. I can't tell in his face any more.
We go breakfast and there’s no conversation at the table. It’s obvious it was us and Keith’s group who got the electrocution treatment yesterday; everyone else is still animated. One of the boys from Tyson’s group asks what happened to us and I don’t know whether to tell him or not.
“Electric shocks,” says Jacob, “They’re going to make you look at porn and shock you every time you get hard.”
“Are you serious?” His eyes plead for Jacob to tell him it’s a joke.
“Sorry,” I say.
He hurries back to his table with the news.
Noah still hasn’t recovered from last night. It’s only with constant prodding from Jacob that he eats anything. Last night he let us look at him to check if he’d been hurt and there was some bleeding. He didn’t say anything all night, curled up into a ball and laid silent. We sat by and rested our hands on him so he'd know we were there. I’m sure there was something else we could have done but I didn’t know what. Neither of us knew. I was in pain and not in pain. I think the have shocks damaged my brain. I know I should be as effected by everything as Noah is but I'm not. If anything my mind is clearer and quieter than normal.
Lee arrives and tells everyone it’s a free day apart from those who didn’t get their treatment yesterday. Over the next six hours, the six inmates who didn’t go yesterday get dragged off one at a time to go to the electrocution room.
We play scrabble all day as it involves the least amount of talking. I let Noah win a couple of games while complaining about my tiles. The inmates who had their electrocution in the morning miss lunch and don’t arrive back until before dinner. As for the ones who go in the afternoon, we don’t see them for the rest of the day.
We still have to chop wood though and we have Tyson watching over us while Gareth is almost certainly at work electrocuting people.
I'm desperate to talk to Jacob about escape as tomorrow we have another electrocution session coming but even Jacob seems resigned to what’s coming. He talks to us to keep us going but escape is no longer mentioned.
That night Noah sits by my bed. “I understand if you don’t want me any more.”
How can he think that? I love him, I’ve told him as much.
“It’s not your fault. I love you, and I want to be with you forever.” I pull him down to me. He rests his head on my shoulders and cries while I hug him. Jacob wakes up and comes over to us. He sits on Noah’s bed.
I don’t want to say anything and disturb Noah because it’s obvious he needs this but I have to ask Jacob: “Don’t you think it would be better to tell Lee what’s going on?”
Jacob shakes his head. “You saw the way he left Lewis to get whipped. I don’t think he’ll care. Like Gareth said, he’ll probably blame us. Besides, even if he did accept it we’d still have to go through the shocks. We still have to try and get out of here. I’m still working on it.”
The next day it’s our turn again. We go in the afternoon and I’m after Jacob. Mine is almost the same as the first day but this time the shocks are harder and there are more of the big shocks and they only stop when I come. Again, I end up not being able to breathe for a few seconds and when I regain my breath I’m sick on myself. This time Tyson washes me and nothing sexual happens which makes me worry that he’s done something with Jacob. In the dorm no one speaks about it. We are all on our own now. I feel like I’ve failed in my promise to them.
The day after that Noah refuses to get up and is dragged into the punishment shed by Gareth. I stand there and watch and cry.
When it's our turn to chop the wood, Gareth does Noah’s share and when it’s my turn to cut he brings the logs to me. I had the idea he was running the electrocution machine for everyone but I can’t be too surprised at the thought that one of the other group leaders wants a go at torturing us.
The wood chopping process is now thoughtless and fully automatic. You could set a watch to the activity: Gareth’s placement of the log, my down stoke, and Jacob picking up the pieces. When I used to do physical activities like walking, my mind would wander off to other places and I’d come up with all sorts of ideas. Now my mind is an echoing room where no sound exists.
Lee comes round the side of the building and shouts for Gareth. My axe is in downward flight while Gareth’s hand is still on the log.
People say that when you’re in danger, like in a car crash, when you can see it coming and can do nothing about it, that time slows down. I am aware of Gareth’s hand and the trajectory of the axe head. I know that I have time to alter its course. To the left and he might be lucky,
or I might only take a fingertip, if it stays on its current mark I think it will take fingers or maybe it will cut right through from the back of his hand into his palm. If I aim right it will land on his wrist.
Of course he could pull his hand away in time if he realises what he’s done. His head is turning ever so slowly towards Lee in answer to the call. I catch sight of Jacob – his eyes are wide.
I think of Noah’s beautiful naked smile and how his body feels pressed against mine. I think of us getting a house together and moving in while at university. We make dinner in the kitchen with a radio on, playing songs that have nothing to do with Christianity. We play scrabble while we help one another cook the dinner and open a bottle of wine. Then he tells me to leave the dishes and we watch a film on TV and eat chocolates and snuggle on the couch.
Then he grabs me and throws me onto the floor and takes his top off and we rub one another’s bodies till we’re both too tired to do anything other than sleep.
Jacob comes by to visit us with his boyfriend and they stay in the spare room. We go out to a pub together and then to a restaurant. Jacob and his partner treat us as we don’t have much money.
When we graduate Noah asks me to marry him and I say yes. We invite all of our university friends and the gay people we know to the registry office and then we throw a massive party. We go on honeymoon to San Francisco and it’s a real holiday, none of the missionary stuff my parents do.
I work at a university doing post-doctoral research while Noah stays home and works on his art. He makes few sales to begin with and then, after a small exhibition in Soho where his work sells out, he starts to get recognised.
In a few years we’ve paid for our house in Oxford and we take long holidays in the South of France during the summer. I write my first book and it makes the New York Times bestseller list. We decide we’re ready and that we’re going to adopt some children.
The Crucifixion and Resurrection of Malachi the Queer Page 13
