Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  It’s been a long time since the Kid has seen the dog, Annie. Or has it been a long time? When he wandered from his camp into the settlement the mist had already gathered at his feet and was starting to grow thicker and to rise from the ground and spread across the place, but now he can’t tell if that was moments ago or half a day earlier. He’s sure there are people nearby; there must be. He can’t be the only person left on the island. He can sense their ghostlike presence close by and standing farther off in twos and threes, but he can neither see nor hear them, except for an occasional shadowy shift in the gray mist, as if a low wind has blown across a wide curtain. He hears a murmur of human voices, as if someone were speaking quietly into a phone behind a closed door in a language he can’t identify.

  He’s almost forgotten why he came out here in the first place. Then he remembers that he left his tent to find Benbow so he could learn what his job will be today. But it’s not a memory; it’s a glimpse of one, and it’s gone. He remembers for a second that the Professor is coming to bring the copy of the map today and make a second interview with him. But then he forgets.

  For anyone other than the Professor and the Kid there are a hundred different reasons to drive out from Calusa, cross the narrow bridge onto Anaconda Island, and find oneself standing at the center of a cloud that has erased all sights and sounds of the known world and its inhabitants. You might have come in a delivery truck to restock the bar with beer and beverages or a panel truck loaded with ten cases of liquor. Maybe you came with drugs to sell, pot or Ecstasy or meth or coke; maybe you came to buy. You might have come out here to sample and purchase a half pound of Benbow’s famous smoked marlin. Maybe you’re a cop or an inspector from a government agency come to investigate a crime committed elsewhere in the city but with a possible connection to activities at Benbow’s; or you’re here to investigate a violation of county health board regulations. You may have left the city and come to the island for a fashion shoot or to make a pornographic film or act in one. Whatever brought you here this morning, you’ve lost touch with your intentions and desires for being here, as if you’ve taken a drug and can no longer remember the need or desire that induced you to swallow, smoke, or inject it in the first place. For there is something soothing about the enveloping mist: it’s placed you halfway between sleep and wakefulness, halfway into a dream and halfway out. The line of demarcation between inside and outside, between subject and object, has been erased, and a zone that is neither and both has replaced it. You feel like you’re watching a movie or making a movie or acting in one. Or all three at once.

  And then, stepping free of the mist on your right not far away, a child. Or is it a child? A very small person, female, white, and wearing a gauzy white scrap of cloth draped across one shoulder and over her belly and wrapped once around her pelvis. Bare shoulders, legs, arms, wearing sandals with thin golden straps. Her hair is long, blond, combed forward and covering her face. She drifts a few slow steps toward you, her arms floating at her sides, then rising to above her head, as if she is plucking a forbidden fruit from a tree. She turns and returns to the mist and disappears inside it.

  Another child floats toward you, this one a boy, also white and blond, also looped in a piece of gauzy white cloth, like a dancer in the role of an angel in a silent ballet. But a child; clearly a human child. A beautiful little boy. His eyes, like the eyes of the girl who preceded him, are expressionless, and his face is as still and unsmiling as a mannikin’s. A third beautiful angelic child, a boy with light brown skin and black locks covering his face, parts the mist. The piece of cloth that half covers, half reveals, his body is thin and loose like the others’, but is black, and the boy slowly approaches the first boy, touches his fingertips on both hands with his own, as if passing an electric current through them from one boy to the other, and the two boys turn on an axis, as if welded together at the tips of their fingers, a slow, erotic dance around an invisible Maypole, a dance that, despite its eroticism, is strangely chaste, impersonal, without desire or even shared awareness of the other. The blond girl now joins them, and a fourth child comes into view, a dark-haired white girl, and the four children hold hands in a circle, raise their hands over their heads and come close, face-to-face, expressionless, somber, cold, dead-eyed, turning clockwise.

  Behind them, nearly invisible but clearly there, are the dark shapes of four or five adults watching the dance of the children, the nearly naked, dancing children. The beautiful children. One can make out the boxy, black silhouettes of machinery back there, and scaffolding with bright squares of phosphorous light attached. Adult male voices now and then break through the silence, men giving quiet directions to other men and to women, who answer with insecure interrogatories, Here? Okay now? Slightly to my right or yours? They all speak English, both those giving orders and those following them, but without any knowledge of the subject, they might be speaking in a foreign language. The adults are either standing in the middle of the heavy mist or on the other side of it, for perhaps the mist is not as widespread as the Kid thought, perhaps it originates and has settled only here on the island, only here at Benbow’s. Perhaps it’s not natural, is made by one of the machines back there beyond the enchanted children.

  Their dance spirals forward out of the cloud and recedes into it, comes forward again, then halfway back. Are they enchanted, though? Entranced is more like it. Lost in a trance, mildly hypnotized or sedated. Their movements are choreographed and directed by someone you can’t see but can hear now in a voice amplified electronically, a man telling the children to turn and face him and come slowly toward the camera holding hands, that’s good, that’s very pretty, keep coming, don’t stop, come right to the camera, you two part to the right of the camera, you two to the left.

  And cut!

  CHAPTER NINE

  FOR CLOSE TO AN HOUR THE PROFESSOR HAS sat in his van, watching the shoot. He thought at first that the cameras and crew and the scantily clad children and their handlers were filming a commercial for television and tried to figure out what product the commercial was designed to promote. Not clothing, surely. Except for the pieces of cloth draped across them, the children were naked, or appeared to be naked. No electronic toys or games or sports equipment or team paraphernalia were visible, no bicycles, boogie boards, or plastic aboveground swimming pools, no sneakers or shoes, except for the gold-strapped sandals, no shampoos or soaps or toothpaste evident. No musical instruments, Frisbees, Hula Hoops, trampolines, or jungle gyms; nothing for children to play with or on or in, nothing to eat or drink or wear.

  There would be music added later, of course, and a voice-over to make the images cohere around the pitch, the sales pitch. But what are they selling? the Professor wonders. What product, what manufactured item, made probably in Mexico or China or Indonesia or Ecuador, could possibly be advertised using images of nearly naked children doing a faintly erotic slow-motion dance in a mist generated by a machine with shacks and shanties and rusting house trailers in the background, palms and mangroves and what appears to be the open ocean beyond, glimpsed for a second whenever the mist shifts and parts and then closes over the children again? It’s an island, yes, but not a deserted island. They must be filming a story about children for children. It’s an abandoned island, he decides, abandoned by castaway adults who have been rescued or have built themselves a raft of flotsam and moved on to another island, leaving behind these ghosts of their lost children, lost memories of childhood.

  The Professor suddenly realizes his mistake. He thought the images of children were being directed at children. No, the viewers are meant to be adults. Adult men, not women. Men with money. Young men too, and even adolescent boys. The dance would be meaningless to children and women, even as a mood or atmosphere. The figures of two boys and two girls caught between movement and stillness like figures on a Grecian urn would have no sexual charge and no ability to arouse in anyone a possessive desire of even a material nature—except in an adolescent or adult American male.
Maybe not just strictly American males. Maybe all males above the age of puberty would feel erotic heat from the sight, once the digital work was done and some thumping music added. You wouldn’t even need a narrative voice-over to get the job of selling done. The images of nearly naked children floating through clouds in an abandoned shantytown on an island thousands of miles from civilization—that could be enough to sell the targeted male viewer anything. A luxury automobile, cologne, a ticket on an airplane, a bottle of vodka, a hip hotel room with an oversize flat-screen plasma TV at the foot of the king-size bed and a full-length mirror on the opposite wall.

  The Professor eases himself from the van and peers into the fog, looking for the Kid. It’s like a London fog, only without cold, damp, uptight London. It’s a semitropical island set instead, it’s the end-of-the-road, beyond, before or after the rise and fall of civilization, where nothing matters and everything is permitted.

  They are selling an atmosphere, a mood, a feeling of low-key, nonthreatening sexual arousal that can be associated with a product, any product. The advertisers will add the product later digitally. Its mere name will be enough, or a flash of the thing itself, if the product is indeed a thing and not a singer or a song laid in behind the imagery. But can’t a singer or a song be construed as a thing? A product. It’s the imagery that does the selling, the Professor reasons, and the imagery is sexual, an old story, except that in this case, it’s sex of a particular kind: barely conscious fantasies of pedophilia.

  He wonders if it was always so, if it’s characteristic of the species for adult males to lust after the very young of the species. No other mammal shares this trait, if indeed it is a trait and is not, as he suspects, socially determined. He is a sociologist, after all, not an anthropologist or biologist. For him, social forces are the primary determinants of human behavior.

  Even among the other higher primates, our cousins the chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and bonobos, the adult males show no sexual interest in young females until after they pass menarche and are capable of breeding. But for the higher primate that we call Homo sapiens, the most socially determined creature of all, was it always so? Have Catholic priests always preyed on their young charges to such a scandalous degree that no parish in the world seems to be without a priest mutually masturbating his pretty young altar boys? Have cities in the past ever found themselves struggling to monitor and house whole colonies of pedophiles, creating an entire body of law and a nationwide tracking system designed to protect the young from sexual predators? The Professor doesn’t think so.

  To learn which crimes flourished in a specific period social scientists look to the period’s legal code. For the Professor, the need to reason backward from prohibition to behavior is a fundamental principle. He teaches it early and often. Specific laws against piracy, slavery, infanticide, sedition, and ground and air pollution and smoking reveal the antisocial activities likely to attract a reckless, greedy, frightened, mentally disturbed, or merely weak man or woman of a specific era. Until the modern, postindustrial era there have been very few laws against pedophilia, the Professor reasons, because there was not thought to be a need for one. Adult males of the species were not thought to be sexually attracted to premenarche children. If on occasion they were, it was sufficiently regulated by the family’s interests in protecting their young from predation. It generally only happened within the family anyhow—the weird uncle or cousin was not allowed to babysit the kids. Thus, until recent years, very few laws were passed against it. It was not thought necessary. The family, or at most the tribal elders, can handle it. Keep it in the village.

  What the hell is this?

  Startled, the Professor turns to face a short, round, black woman, her shining face fisted with angry disgust. Her thick arms are crossed over her pillowy chest. She is wearing tight jeans, running shoes, and a black T-shirt. No jewelry. No earrings. Close-cut hair. The Kid’s caseworker, the Professor assumes. A tough, uncompromising, lesbian cop with a Queens accent.

  I take it they’re shooting a commercial of some sort, he says. The Professor blankets the woman with his large shadow.

  You the guy I spoke to yesterday? The professor?

  Yes.

  You parta this?

  No.

  So where’s the Kid?

  I haven’t seen him today yet. His camp is over by the Bay. I’ll show it to you if you like.

  He parta this too?

  No. Neither of us has a thing to do with it.

  You got ID?

  The Professor hands her his card and his university ID, and with her lips pursed, as if memorizing the information, she studies them both carefully for a full minute: name, title, office address, home address, e-mail, telephone. She keeps the card and passes back his ID and tells him to take her to the Kid’s camp.

  This shit gives me the creeps, she mutters. I don’t know how these people find each other.

  What people?

  The parents of those half-naked kids over there. They gotta have parents. And the creeps making their fucking kiddie porn.

  It’s probably just a commercial. An ad for TV.

  Yeah, right. And I’m Jack Sprat.

  WITH THE COP AT HIS SHOULDER, THE PROFESSOR unzips and folds back the Kid’s tent flap and peers in. The Cop has a name, and the Professor knows it, but to him she’s the Cop—not the Caseworker or the Kid’s Parole Officer. The Cop. She has a steel grid in front of her mind, and for anything in the outer world to reach her it first has to squeeze through the bars of that grid. Information has to be broken into small cubes; information and data packaged in two-dimensional squares are preferable to three-dimensional cubes however: they pass through the grid more quickly and once they reach the Cop’s mind take up less space there.

  The Kid has cocooned himself in his sleeping bag. The dog, Annie, lies curled at his feet. Neither the Kid nor Annie acknowledges the arrival of the Professor and the Cop. They’re not sleeping; they’re hiding, both of them, the Kid from the children being filmed at Benbow’s, Annie from the people who don’t want her accidental presence to screw up their movie.

  The Cop tells the sleeping bag that the Kid inside it will have to pack up his stuff and move from here immediately. He’ll have to be gone by noon. Or the Cop will bust him back to prison. No arguments. No discussion. End of story.

  From inside the bag the Kid’s muffled voice asks where should he go?

  The Professor asks the same thing, Yes, where should the lad go?

  Gimme a fuckin’ break. The lad’s a felon, a convicted sex offender. You got kids? You want him in your neighborhood?

  He’s paid his debt to society.

  It’s not about paying your debt to society. It’s not about punishment. These fuckin’ guys are incurable.

  I’m not so sure. It depends on the nature and the cause of the offense. On what he did and why he did it. That’s why I’m interviewing him.

  You think he’s innocent?

  Legally innocent? No, of course not.

  You think he’s cured?

  I don’t know yet what he did and why.

  The Kid has sat up and is gently scratching the forehead of the dog, who appears now to be deeply asleep. Without looking at the Cop or the Professor, the Kid says: Why are you talking about me like I’m not even here?

  They look at him, the Cop with impatience, the Professor with compassion, in both cases mixed with mild curiosity. The Cop wonders if the Kid will decide to cut through his anklet and leave Calusa, go off surveillance and disappear into some other state far from here like an illegal immigrant, a Mexican or Haitian without a green card working in a motel somewhere out west. The Professor wonders what exactly the Kid did that made him a convicted sex offender. Whom he touched, if indeed he touched anyone, and exactly where.

  You got till noon to get yourself and your shit off this island.

  Can I take Annie with me? The dog?

  Am I in charge of your pets now? Jesus!

  The Pr
ofessor says to the Kid: I’ll help you move.

  To where?

  I don’t know. We’ll think of something.

  Can I bring the parrot? These guys are really cruel to animals, y’know. Benbow and them. I’ll have to steal it. They use the parrot for like a kind of prop.

  Yes, bring the parrot.

  What about the map? Did you bring the map?

  If you’re thinking of going off the reservation, Kid, fuggetabout it.

  It’s a treasure map, the Kid explains.

  The Cop looks at the Professor, and he nods slightly, leave it alone, please, and she returns his nod, all right, just get him the hell outa here.

  I brought the map. It’s in the van. I’ll show it to you later.

  Cool. Very cool.

  The Kid crawls over the sleeping dog and out of the tent. He stands in the sun and stretches.

  The fog machine is silent now, the mist has dispersed, and the children and the people filming them appear to have left Benbow’s, perhaps for another location—a suburban split-level home with a pool or a dingy motel room in the far North End or a white-walled downtown studio loft with large pillows on the floor, or maybe they’ve got enough footage now to head straight to the editing room.

  CHAPTER TEN

  EVERYTHING THE KID OWNS, INCLUDING his bicycle, the dog Annie, and Einstein, the gray parrot, has been stashed in the Professor’s van. The Cop watched as they loaded the vehicle, though she took a little walk when the Kid stole the parrot and its cage from the bar and afterward said, I didn’t see that. The Professor distracted Benbow in his trailer by explaining why the Kid had to leave the island. Trinidad Bob for reasons unknown had gone off with the film crew. The Professor paid Benbow the Kid’s rent for a week and half a week’s salary, and Benbow said fine, the Kid was a lousy worker anyway, and he attracted cops like the dog attracted fleas, so he was glad to be rid of both of them. Not that there was anything illegal going on here. He just doesn’t like cops. Or fleas.