When the Professor returned from Benbow’s trailer to his van the parrot cage and parrot were in the rear on the floor covered by the Kid’s sleeping bag. He explained to the Professor that when you cover them like that, parrots think it’s night and go to sleep. They’re real smart except for that. As smart as iguanas. And they talk. I’m gonna teach him to have like real conversations. When can I see the map?
The Professor says later, when he gets the Kid settled. The Kid wants to know if he really thinks that the spot marked X is on Anaconda Island. He hopes not, now that he’s been kicked off it. There are hundreds of these little offshore islands scattered around the Bay and up and down the coast close enough to Calusa for pirates to hide out while they bury their treasure. He brags that he’s lived in Calusa all his life and knows these islands like the palm of his hand.
The Professor doubts that. But says nothing to discourage the Kid.
The Professor is now in charge of the Kid. It’s unofficial and the Kid is free to walk away if he wants, but with the addition of the dog and the parrot to his household, the Kid needs the Professor now more than he did yesterday, and the Professor will do what he can to make certain the Kid needs him even more tomorrow. He has a plan for the Kid, still vaguely formed, but a plan nonetheless. Unlike the Kid, the Professor makes a sharp distinction between plans and fantasies. And when he makes a plan he almost always implements it. The Kid doesn’t make plans. He never has.
The Professor intends to cure the Kid of his pedophilia. Not with psychotherapy or drugs or more radical means like feeding him female hormones or chemical castration. He intends to cure the Kid by changing his social circumstances. By giving him power in the world. Autonomy. Putting his fate and thus his character in his own hands. He believes that one’s sexual identity is shaped by one’s self-perceived social identity, that pedophilia, rightly understood, is about not sex, but power. More precisely, it’s about one’s personal perception of one’s power.
Where are we going?
They’ve crossed the bridge off Anaconda Island and have passed through downtown Calusa heading north along the Bay. Across the Bay the long line of beach hotels faces the open sea like lookouts.
Back to the Causeway.
Definitely not cool. Lemme out right here. Me and Annie and Einstein. And my stuff.
Don’t worry. I have a plan.
Yeah, right. I think you’re just another fuckin’ weirdo perv, you wanna know the truth. All you guys got “plans.”
This has got nothing to do with that. This has to do with getting you a home. And a job. Giving you control over your shelter and your economy.
Make fuckin’ sense, Haystack.
The Professor explains to his young charge that he has spoken with a friend who is a county commissioner and another friend who is an advocate for the homeless in Calusa and a third friend who is a state legislator. All have agreed that if the settlement of convicted sex offenders beneath the Causeway can be organized in such a way as to meet Calusa city and county health and safety ordinances and no criminal activities are taking place there, then convicted sex offenders up to a number yet to be determined will be allowed to reside there without interference or harassment by city, county, or state officials. Except for the international airport and the eastern edge of the Great Panzacola Swamp, the Causeway that crosses the Bay between the mainland and the man-made offshore string of barrier islands is the only place in Calusa County that is not also within twenty-five hundred feet of a school or playground or park where children gather and where illegal activities like those taking place on other islands, such as Benbow’s on Anaconda Island, do not occur. Or rather, need not occur. The pretext for the recent police raid at the Causeway, which was indeed driven by local politics and the upcoming municipal elections, was that health and safety ordinances were being violated there and criminal activities like drug use and prostitution were rampant.
If one eliminates the pretext, the Professor explains, there will be no more raids by the police, regardless of the politics. In fact, the problem, basically a housing problem, will have been solved by the residents themselves, and the politicians will be scrambling to take credit for it.
“Eliminate the pretext,” the Kid says. How the fuck do you do that? It’s a fuckin’ open sewer down there. Half those guys who end up there are junkies, the other half are total losers, drunks and nutcases or just fucked-up in the head like. . . .
Like who?
Well, like me, I guess.
I don’t believe you’re fucked-up in the head, Kid.
You don’t, eh? What do you know about me? Other than what you got off the Internet. And what I told you yesterday. None of that might be true, y’know. Except what’s on the Internet about me being a convicted sex offender. That’s true. As far as it goes. But it don’t go very far, does it? Believe me, I’m fucked-up in the head. Just like the rest of those guys down there.
The Professor pulls over and parks the van on the shoulder at the farther end of the Causeway. He gets out and follows the Kid, who’s carrying the parrot in its cage, and Annie down the steep, zigzagging pathway to the concrete island below.
Be careful, Haystack. One slip and you’re in the Bay, and I don’t think anybody here can get you out.
The Professor chuckles. “Haystack.” He likes the Kid’s sense of humor. He thinks it’s the key to his personality structure, the way in. It’s the only apparent opening the Kid has kept to the outside world, evidence that he still has an opening to the outside world. With enough support and encouragement, the Kid will be able eventually to widen that opening on his own and gain sufficient control of the world so that, for the first time in his life, he’ll feel powerful. Powerful enough not to need to demonstrate to himself that he has control of children. And animals. Iguanas, dogs, and parrots.
The Professor sits down on a tractor tire next to the parrot cage and, as instructed by the Kid, holds on to Annie’s collar while the Kid returns to the van for the rest of his belongings. The Professor’s theories about pedophilia are rapidly evolving. When a society commodifies its children by making them into a consumer group, dehumanizing them by converting them into a crucial, locked-in segment of the economy, and then proceeds to eroticize its products in order to sell them, the children gradually come to be perceived by the rest of the community and by the children themselves as sexual objects. And on the ladder of power, where power is construed sexually instead of economically, the children end up at the bottom rung.
The Kid may indeed be fucked-up in the head, but it’s because he’s a weak, relatively powerless member of a society that is fucked-up in the head. It’s led the Kid to believe that, except for him, there’s no one in the community who has less control over his or her fate than a child. A female child, the Professor surmises. He’s confident that the Kid is not sexually attracted to males. Although it wouldn’t alter his theory or change his equations a jot if the Kid had a predilection for male children. Because it’s not about sex, and it’s not about gender; they carry no weight in the equation. It’s about power. Control. Dominion. Dominance? Well, yes. When you feel you have nothing and no one you can dominate, you turn to children. And when children have been transformed into sexual objects and you have no other way of controlling them, you dominate them sexually. Thus the obsessive interest in pornography, the literal addiction to it: for the pornographic narrative is always a tale of dominance. Of men over women; of adults over children. If the Professor has lost himself in theory, a thing inconceivable to him, the Kid is lost in fantasy, a thing the Professor is now quite sure of.
When the Kid has lugged all his worldly possessions back down under the Causeway to his old campsite and has dutifully repitched his tent where it was before, he looks around him at the sad wreckage and desolation of the place and sighs and sits heavily down on the cast-off tractor tire next to the Professor. Most of the shacks and tents and polyethylene tarps have been restored to their earlier disheveled state. A few c
ook fires are burning in the distance. The place smells badly of human urine and feces. A scrawny gray cat spots Annie and changes its path to avoid her, but Annie seems not to notice. The parrot Einstein squawks twice and fluffs his feathers to get rid of some of the dampness of the place. It’s early afternoon but has already grown dark down here. A tinny radio speaker in the distance plays a country tune. Someone has a portable TV going and is watching Martha Stewart’s show, an irony not lost on the Professor, but not noticed by the Kid. To him it’s just part of the background noise, mixed with the quiet rhythmic slap of waves against the concrete pilings that hold up the Causeway, the rumble of vehicles passing overhead, the screeches of scavenging gulls, and the occasional dull honk of a boat horn from the Bay. There are a dozen or more gray figures moving about in the gloom, but they keep to themselves and are silent—the Kid recognizes several of the men out there by shape and posture and walk, but none of them comes to greet him. It’s as if he and the Professor and Annie and Einstein are invisible.
The Professor asks the Kid if he can make the parrot talk. He’s not heard the bird speak—not at Benbow’s and not in the van or here, either.
Not much. I think he only talks with that guy, Trinidad Bob. Actually, I never heard him talk with Trinidad Bob, either. He’s a loser parrot, I guess. A loser dog and a loser parrot. I don’t know why I took them with me. I guess I was just missing Iggy so much, y’know?
The Professor points out that Annie seems to be genuinely attached to him, and if he feeds and shelters her, she’ll prove to be a useful watchdog who will protect him and guard his campsite when he’s away from it.
The Kid says, No, man, she’s too fuckin’ old and feeble.
The Professor doubts she’s as old as she looks. She’s just malnourished and sick with mange and suffering from having been physically abused. She needs to be examined and treated by a veterinarian. Both these creatures need to be seen by a veterinarian, and once restored to health, they’ll make fine and faithful companions.
The Professor makes his first offer. He’ll carry both the dog and the parrot to a veterinarian in his van and pay for their treatment, even including having poor old Annie, who’s probably not that old, spayed and de-fleaed and X-rayed, if necessary. She may have broken bones or damaged internal organs. Einstein too needs to be properly fed and kindly treated. In short order they will be like family to him. He will be like the head of the family.
The Kid likes that idea. He smiles. Hey, what about the map? The treasure map!
Ah, yes. The map. It’s in my briefcase in the van.
The Kid says not to worry, he’ll get it. He jumps to his feet and scrambles up to the Causeway. A few moments later he’s back, looking puzzled and downcast, with no briefcase.
It’s gone. The fuckin’ briefcase. Where was it?
On the backseat.
Well, it ain’t there now, man. Some asshole stole it. We shoulda locked the van, Professor. The Kid is close to tears. It’s my fault. I shoulda locked it.
The Professor stands and places a hand on the Kid’s bony shoulder. No, it’s my fault. I wasn’t thinking. But don’t fret, son. There was nothing irreplaceable in it. Everything’s backed up on my computer.
Nothing irreplaceable? The map, Professor! What about the map? Was it the original? You don’t have that backed up on your computer, do you?
The Professor says no, it was a copy he drew of the original map ten years ago in Washington, D.C., at the Library of Congress. But the Kid can relax, the Professor says he has a photographic memory and can redraw the map exactly, even though he hasn’t examined it closely in a decade.
The Kid doesn’t believe him. But the Professor is telling the truth. At least the part about his photographic memory and his ability to redraw a map he copied by hand years ago. The map, however, the original, as it were, was not in a dusty archive of eighteenth-century documents and charts at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. And it was not ten years ago that he copied it onto a sheet of notepaper for a report he was writing. The map he copied was the frontispiece in a 1911 edition of the novel Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. The Professor was twelve years old at the time, already a sophomore in high school, writing a book report that attempted to prove that the novel, far from being merely a children’s adventure story, was in fact an encoded philosophical treatise on the ethical and religious implications of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
The Professor tells the Kid none of this, of course. He wants the Kid to believe in the map’s authenticity. It’s the means by which he has ingratiated himself with the Kid, and he needs it, now that the Kid’s imagination has seized on it, to buy him cover and time enough to earn the Kid’s complete trust. Without that trust, he’ll not learn from the Kid what he needs to know in order to cure him of his pedophilia. And he needs to cure the Kid in order to prove his theory that pedophilia is the result of social forces, a sexual malfunction shaped by a malfunctioning society. It’s not a mystery; it’s not even a psychological disorder. Because if it is a mental illness, then the entire society is to one degree or another sick with it. Which makes it normal.
I’ll redraw the map tonight and bring it to you tomorrow. But first we have work to do here on this island.
Whaddaya mean?
Eliminating the pretexts. Remember? You’ve got to get this place cleaned up and made safe.
Who, me? No fucking way.
The Professor proposes to pay the Kid a small salary for organizing the residents into clean-up crews and establishing a public safety force. They will begin, he explains, by calling a meeting of all the men currently residing under the Causeway. The Professor will address the group and will inform them that he has hired the Kid to be the official director of the community until such time that the members of the community decide by secret ballot to replace him. A set of rules and regulations for all residents will be drawn up by a special committee appointed and chaired by the Kid. Anyone who violates those rules or refuses to abide by them will not be permitted to reside under the Causeway.
The Kid thinks this is the stupidest idea he’s ever heard and says so.
The Professor explains that all human beings need and want to be organized into social units that guarantee their comfort and safety. You start with what they have in common and build upon it. The men down here share a great deal: geography; gender; forced alienation from the larger community that they came from. And their basic needs are pretty much the same: shelter; sanitation; protection of property and self; freedom from harassment and persecution by outsiders. With a little organization and enlightened leadership, all these needs can be met. A problem can be turned into a solution. A negative can be made a positive. The citizens of Calusa will thank them—the Kid and his men who have been forced to live beneath the Claybourne Causeway. And if they are successful, if they are able to construct a coherent, efficiently functioning society of convicted sex offenders down here, then it may become a model for cities all across America to emulate. Communities of convicted sex offenders able to provide themselves with basic services while residing more than 2,500 feet from anyplace where children gather will start appearing beneath overpasses, causeways, bridges, and in abandoned buildings in hundreds of cities large and small. They could become linked into a nationwide network. As the number of convicted sex offenders grows—and the Professor knows that it will increase exponentially, keeping pace with the increase in law enforcement and fear of pedophilia among the general population—the political and economic power of convicted sex offenders will grow.
Sounds good to me, Professor. But what about the map? The pirate’s treasure map.
I’ll bring it tomorrow. First, let’s call a meeting of the current residents.
And don’t forget the veterinarian. I gotta take care of Little Orphan Annie here and Einstein.
Tomorrow, Kid. Tomorrow. After you’ve formed your safety committee and can leave the island for a fe
w hours and know that your property is protected.
Yeah. Sure. Tomorrow.
PART III
CHAPTER ONE
THE PROFESSOR WANTS TO CALL A MEETING of the residents which the Kid thinks is a useless idea. Useless and therefore dumb. Despite being a fantasist or perhaps because of it the Kid is a pragmatist. The eight or ten guys he can make out in the gloom under the Causeway are all loners pretty much. Like him. Not the meeting types. They’re not exactly his friends or friends of each other and not colleagues for sure and this isn’t a condo or a fraternal order and if any of them has anything that resembles a social life it’s only with people who live elsewhere—what the residents call “off-island”: family members left behind when they became convicted sex offenders and wives and girlfriends for those that have them, friends from before their arrest and conviction all of whom have enough problems of their own, legal, sexual, and otherwise, not to give a damn about other people’s problems, legal, sexual, and otherwise. Yes, there are people whom the residents work with and for when they have jobs like the Kid had at the Mirador before Dario fired him for being a wiseass punk and of course the social workers and psychologists and counselors and even in some cases the parole officers when those relationships evolve as they sometimes do into something more personal than merely professional and obligatory.
Otherwise the men who live beneath the Causeway mostly keep to themselves. They give themselves or each other names that are not the names they’re known by on the National Sex Offender Registry. There’s the Rabbit and Plato the Greek and Paco the biker-bodybuilder and P.C. the coach and Ginger and Froot Loop and probably by now Lawrence Somerset is no longer Lawrence Somerset, the Kid thinks and wonders what the creep is calling himself now that he’s had a few days to ditch his old name. Those old names are like what black people call their slave names, the names by which they’re known to the cops and caseworkers and on the registry, the names they’re called by the people who knew them when they weren’t convicted sex offenders and by the people they work with and for, those that have jobs. There’s something tainted about their old names, their real names, something shameful about them or at best embarrassing and controlling so that a new name like Kid or Paco or Ginger or even a weird name like Froot Loop can be liberating in a small way. For a minute or at least for as long as you’re under the Causeway you’re almost off the registry of sex offenders. You’re almost somebody else and not anonymous either but a real person. Or almost real. As real as a character in a book anyhow.
Lost Memory of Skin Page 16