Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  Some things have been viewed as obviously wrong for thousands of years which is the main reason they’re illegal. At first they’re regarded as immoral pure and simple—God’s law whether you believe in Him or not—and then when people keep doing those immoral things anyhow which is the same as breaking God’s law the majority of human beings gets together and votes to make them illegal as well. Man’s law. That’s okay, the Kid can live with laws like that. It’s democracy in action and everybody including the Kid is in favor of democracy.

  Then there are man-laws that are more like rules you agree to obey only they aren’t backed up by the Bible or any of those other ancient writings and if you break them you’re punished which is to be expected but it’s not because you’ve done something morally wrong. You’ve not broken God’s law, you’ve just broken a rule. Like when you join the U.S. Army which has a rule against distributing porn and you go ahead and do it anyhow because you want all your buddies to have a DVD starring your favorite porn actress and you want them to like and respect you but you aren’t aware of the rule against distributing porn so you get kicked out of the army. That’s like breaking a contract because you didn’t read the fine print. Or you didn’t realize that the lease said no pets. Too bad for you is all. It’s not necessarily wrong. Just stupid. Nobody pretends it’s immoral or against the Holy Bible or Shakespeare the way they do if you try to have sex with someone who says she’s fourteen years old and tells you to come on over.

  The Kid needs to check out God’s law. So he opens Larry Somerset’s Holy Bible to the book of Genesis and starts reading. It’s the King James Version and he can tell right away that even though it’s supposed to be in English it’s in more like a foreign language than any English he’s ever read before. Still with a little work and concentration he can figure out most of what’s being said there. It reminds him of the dialogue in certain video games and movies about Vikings that are set in medieval times.

  Right from the start God seems to be the president or the king of the universe and in charge of everything in it including the sea that surrounds it and the skies above. The various firmaments. Seven days go by in which He sets everything up so He can rule without any opposition and if He wants can even kick back and rest every seventh day. By then He’s got people living there, a man anyhow that He made from blowing into a pile of dust. God’s first real citizen. God’s homey. His name is Adam.

  The Kid sort of knows where this story is going but he keeps on reading anyhow. For the details. He likes the details. He can visualize the story and what you can visualize you can imagine. He’s imagining Calusa thousands of years before the white people arrived. Calusa and the Bay and the Barrier Isles and Keys and the Great Panzacola Swamp back when there weren’t any people living here, not even the Panzacola Indians. Only Adam and Eve. And no skyscrapers or hotels or malls or interstate highways and the whole of this part of the continent was covered with jungle and mangroves and the waters were filled with manatees and porpoises and crocodiles and endless schools of fish and whenever vast flocks of birds crossed overhead the skies darkened as if the sun were blocked by passing clouds.

  He can’t quite picture God except as a huge ball of light with an old man’s deep voice like in the pickup truck ads on TV coming out of the ball of light dictating the way everything in Eden is supposed to work. God’s got one big rule—no eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This is the first real basic right-versus-wrong rule that he’s seen in the Bible so far.

  No eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, okay?

  He likes that distinction: there’s good and there’s evil. Evil is worse than bad. And it’s a lot worse than merely dumb or unlucky or illegal. That’s what makes God’s rules superior to all other rules: if you break one you’re not just dumb or even bad, you’re fucking evil ! You have knowingly disobeyed God. To be evil is to be bad in an extreme way—sentenced to life without parole and locked up in hell for eternity after you die. If you believe in hell, that is. Which the Kid does although he does not believe in heaven. When you’ve had a life like the Kid’s so far it’s a lot easier to believe in hell than in heaven. Same as with God whom the Kid believes in when things go right but not when things go wrong. Which doesn’t make him an atheist exactly or an agnostic. Just inconsistent.

  Finally the talking snake comes into the story and it gets seriously interesting to the Kid especially because the Snake which in the Bible is called a serpent reminds him of Iggy somehow. He wonders if Iggy who is definitely a reptile could properly be called a serpent as well. Don’t go there, Kid. He doesn’t want to think about Iggy wrapped in a sleeping bag at the bottom of the Bay. But he doesn’t want to fall asleep either because he’s afraid the cops might come back in spite of what P.C. told him. And he’s afraid of his dreams. Don’t go there either. So he keeps reading.

  The Snake complicates the story which makes it suspenseful for the first time. The Kid tries to warn Adam and Eve: Don’t fall for it! The Snake’s only trying to make trouble between us humans and God! But he’s too late. The woman—probably because women are more trusting than men or at least they were back then in the beginning—believes the Snake. And of course once she’s taken a taste and likes it she talks Adam into eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil too. And suddenly they go from feeling innocent and like babies not even aware that they don’t have any clothes on to feeling guilty and also ashamed which is worse than just feeling guilty and when God shows up again to check on how His garden’s doing they hide in the bushes. When God calls Adam out at first Adam says I didn’t do it. Then he claims that actually the woman made him do it. And the woman turns around and says the Snake made her do it.

  The Kid knows how they feel. He’s felt that way since he was about eight or nine. Maybe even younger. First you deny that you did it and then when it’s obvious you’re lying you blame somebody else. It’s what people do when they’re ashamed. It’s always about sex too. First it was from watching his mother making it with some guy and then it was from jerking off all the time since he was ten and then skin magazines and Internet porn and when he got older it was porn DVDs and shows at sex clubs and sex chat room conversations on the Internet with teenage girls until finally he got caught in the act so to speak and busted by the cops and it’s all on YouTube for the whole world to watch and judge.

  The Kid wonders if it’s possible that this whole tree of knowledge of good and evil thing was set up by God as a kind of prehistoric sex-sting with the Snake as the decoy. Maybe from the beginning the Snake was secretly working for God who was mainly interested in testing Adam and Eve because in spite of being all-seeing and all-knowing He couldn’t be there in the Garden of Eden 24/7 to watch over them and protect their innocence. If God was going to trust them to behave themselves and follow His rules when He was elsewhere in the universe they would have to be capable of protecting their innocence from temptation on their own. They would have to be like angels. God probably wasn’t sure they could do that. Maybe God didn’t know what sort of creature He’d actually created when He blew into that handful of dust and came up with Adam and then later took out one of Adam’s ribs and made Eve.

  Without knowing it the Kid is drifting toward sleep and his theological and philosophical speculations are starting to shape and misshape his reading. According to the Kid the punishment that God lays on the Snake for beguiling the woman into eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil is to wrap the Snake in a sex offender’s sleeping bag and sink it to the bottom of the Bay, there to lie forgotten and despised by all mankind and mourned by none except for Adam who in a cowardly moment exposed himself to the fear of men with guns and abandoned the serpent to suffer their wrath. God punishes the woman by making her bear a son who will be dependent upon her for many years and will restrict her in her enjoyment of the company of men until she reaches the age when she no longer attracts them and then the son will disappoint the woman
and publicly humiliate and shame her all the remaining days of her life. And because Adam listened to the woman and ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil he is condemned to homelessness living in a tent somewhere east of Eden until he turns back into the dust from whence he came. Then there is something about Adam becoming a farmer and fathering two sons with Eve and naming them Cain and Abel but by now the Kid’s candle has burned down nearly to a stub and he is asleep and dreaming freely.

  All of a sudden the flap is pulled back and a bright white light floods the inside of the tent. The Kid wakes and sits up and rubs his eyes with his fists like a child. He hitches himself away from the light toward the rear of the tent. His first thought is to say What the fuck? but it might be God so he doesn’t say anything. The white light splashes against the sides and roof of the tent and bathes the Kid all over. It probably is God. And He’s finally found him although He must’ve known all along where on the planet the Kid was hiding because He’s all-seeing and all-knowing. He must’ve decided that because the Kid has been reading the Bible now is the right moment to confront him with the cold irrefutable fact that the Kid is evil and He’s come down from heaven to the Causeway to tell him in person and reveal the nature of his punishment.

  A low voice speaks from the source of the light which is located at the open tent flap—a man’s voice dark and old and thickly layered like the bass register on a church organ. It has a noticeable southern accent cleanly spoken but a little drawled and homey like some of those TV evangelists.

  I realize, my friend, that it’s late. But I would enjoy talking with you.

  Now?

  I will take only a few moments of your time, as it’s late for me as much as for you. To tell the truth, I did not expect to find anyone still here.

  The source of the bright tent-filling light drops and the Kid sees that it’s a high-intensity emergency lamp held by an enormous white man with a gray beard and a tangled mass of gray hair. His long shaggy beard and messy nest of hair look like He got buffeted by hurricane-force winds when He flew down from the sky or wherever He came from. He has red puffy lips and a face as broad as a shovel. His body is as wide as the tent and He’s very tall. He’s the largest man the Kid has ever seen. Assuming he is a man and not God—the Kid’s still not sure. He’s never seen a portrait of God before. No one has. Besides God can probably take any form He chooses depending on the circumstance and who He’s talking to. Right now He’s a gigantic bearded fat man in his early sixties dressed like a lawyer or a banker in a chocolate brown suit and white dress shirt and brown-and-yellow-striped tie and a vest buttoned tightly over his enormous belly.

  What . . . what do you want to talk to me about?

  Maybe this isn’t a good time. I didn’t think there’d be anyone still here. I just stopped on my way home to see the site of last night’s raid.

  On your way home.

  Yes.

  From?

  From the university.

  What do you want from me?

  A chat.

  This ain’t a chat room.

  Would you agree to talk in the morning? I don’t have a recorder with me tonight anyhow. It’s a bit of a surprise to find someone still here.

  Who the fuck are you anyhow?

  It doesn’t matter. I’m a professor at Calusa State. Chair of the sociology department.

  Why are you here?

  I moderated a panel discussion this evening at the university and was driving myself home. Listening to the local news on the car radio I heard what happened here last night. So I parked up there on the Causeway and made my way down to see where people like you have been living.

  People like me.

  It’s sort of my area. My academic specialization. Homelessness. Its causes.

  Okay. Whatever.

  Would you meet with me tomorrow morning? I’d like to interview you.

  I won’t be here in the morning. I’m moving.

  Where are you moving to?

  Why should I tell you, Professor?

  I can meet you there. We can do the interview wherever you like.

  The Kid thinks it over. The Professor is clearly not God and he’s not likely a cop or someone working for the state either so the Kid has nothing to lose in talking to him in the form of an interview. He can always lie or refuse to answer questions that might incriminate him: Did you or did you not eat of the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil? On advice of counsel I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me.

  It sounds like the Professor will do most of the talking anyhow. He’s a professor, after all. It’s possible the guy can help the Kid find a job at the university on the grounds crew or something and a more or less permanent place to live. You never know. The Kid has never met a real professor before but they’re supposed to be smart and people respect them and they don’t work for the cops or the state. Besides they’re like priests and shrinks, right? Everything you tell them is strictly confidential.

  You know where Benbow’s is?

  Benbow’s? Is it a restaurant? A homeless shelter?

  I can’t go to a homeless shelter. Not where there’s likely to be kids. It’s supposedly an old shrimpers’ camp on Anaconda Key. Out beyond the sewage treatment plant. That’s where I’m going tomorrow. Look for me in a day or two at Benbow’s, okay?

  I know how to get to Anaconda Key. And I’ve smelled the sewage treatment plant numerous times when the wind blows out of the south. Now tell me your name, young man.

  Kid. Just ask for the Kid.

  I have classes all day tomorrow. And meetings at night. I’ll have to get together with you late the following day, if that’s all right.

  Not this late.

  The Professor rumbles a laugh and says, No, son, not this late. He lowers his lamp and closes the tent flap and walks away. The Kid listens to his slick shoes crunching against the concrete. It must have been hard for a guy that fat to make his way down the path from the Causeway. And a lot harder getting back up. A guy his size could have a heart attack just getting out of his chair.

  The Kid lights his stub of a candle and opens Larry Somerset’s Holy Bible again and picks up reading where he left off. But after the story of Cain and Abel he comes to a whole lot of begats which except for the fact that everybody back then was living for hundreds of years at a time is really boring to the Kid.

  He closes the Bible and blows out his candle and lies back in the darkness with his eyes wide open and as he has done nearly every night of his life even when he was a little boy he plans his day tomorrow step by step. Break camp. Pack tent sleeping bag clothes cooking utensils containers toilet kit and other gear into backpack and duffel. Include some of Larry Somerset’s stuff. Tie duffel to bike rack, wear backpack, and ride or if it’s too much stuff walk bike to South Bay Causeway four miles south and cross to Anaconda Key. Find Benbow’s. Find Benbow himself if P.C. didn’t lie and he’s a real person and talk him into letting him pitch his tent temporarily and maybe ask for a job there as a busboy if it’s a restaurant and try to cadge a meal or two. Meanwhile make a quick late-night Dumpster dive and replenish home food supply. And hope things change for the better soon. He’s pretty sure they can’t get worse.

  PART II

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE PROFESSOR DIGS CLASSICAL JAZZ AND swing, music made in the 1930s, the decade before he was born in Clinton, Alabama, and in the 1940s, the decade of his early childhood. He was an only child, his mother the town librarian and his father an accountant for U. S. Steel. They were northerners, originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Both his parents were college educated, Episcopalians, suspected locally of being supporters of Franklin Roosevelt, and despite his father’s white-collar job at U. S. Steel, pro-union.

  The Professor’s father’s name was Jason. He kept the books that monitored the costs of inmates hired and often purchased outright from the state and county prisons and local jails. They were, with few exceptions, black men
, de facto slaves housed in the company labor camps, serving out their sentences in the dark airless mine shafts deep beneath the red hills. His mother, a high-spirited, easily bored post-debutante from an old Pittsburgh banking family, was named Cynthia.

  Classical jazz and swing was music made mostly by black people—Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Benny Carter, and Lester Young—and raffish whites like Jack Teagarden and Benny Goodman. It was the dance music of the Professor’s parents’ northern youth. When he was a child, he watched them after supper spike a stack of records on the old Victrola, set the needle, and as the music began, they would stroll hand in hand from the living room to the wide screened porch that faced the tree-lined street. Invariably the boy put down his book and followed his parents and climbed onto the porch glider. With the soles of his sneakers barely touching the floor, the boy got the glider swinging back and forth in time to the music. His mother and father were already dancing. It was as if they were putting their northern sophistication on defiant display. He watched his handsome young parents happily dance on the open porch where their disapproving white Southern Baptist neighbors could see them, and he fell in love as much with their public defiance as with their private music.

  But it’s music he himself never danced to, except when he was alone and no one, especially the neighbors, could see. Even after he went north at the age of fifteen to attend Kenyon College in Ohio and later in graduate school at Yale, he refused to be seen dancing to the music that he and his parents loved. He tapped his hands and feet to it and bobbed his head, keeping time. But he would not put himself on the dance floor for the simple reason that when he was a youngster he was both morbidly obese and taller by a head than any of his contemporaries. He was a child imprisoned in the body of a very fat adult, a boy who was strong and otherwise healthy but believed that when it came to taking part in physical activities of any kind—sports and outdoor games, hunting and fishing, even physical labor around the house, like mowing the lawn or planting flowers with his mother, but especially when it came to dancing—if he did not keep entirely to himself and out of public sight, he would look ridiculous.