Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  The Kid tries convincing the Professor that it’s a dumb idea to try to get his neighbors to meet together but the Professor doesn’t listen which the Kid has decided is typical of him and maybe typical of all professors although this is the only real professor he’s ever actually met in person. Assuming he is a real professor because you can’t be sure that anybody is what he says he is. Or she. He’s remembering the night he got busted and the watery feeling he got all over his body when he realized that nothing was what he thought it was and no one was who he and she claimed to be. He wonders if the guy that day at the Mirador he thought was O. J. Simpson really was the famous ex–football player and movie star who supposedly sliced up his wife and the guy she was with who the Kid heard was gay anyhow. If O. J. had known that, he probably wouldn’t have thought the guy was fucking his wife and he wouldn’t have killed them and he’d still be a rich and famous and beloved ex–football player and movie star instead of a guy playing golf in Calusa with an out-of-work small-time Central American diplomat. He’d be hanging in L.A. with Arnold and Sly. Maybe he wasn’t O. J. Maybe he was just a big black dude who happens to look enough like O. J. that he can fool these star-fuckers into buying him a fancy lunch at the Mirador and get Dario to comp him the best Rhône wine in his cellar. The world is full of people who aren’t who or what they say they are. The people who believe them aren’t who or what they say they are either. That’s the main thing the Kid has learned since the night he got busted and became a sex offender. Nobody’s who he says he is.

  One by one the returnees to the Causeway are introduced to the Professor by the Kid. The first is the Rabbit because the Kid can actually call him a friend unlike the others whom he thinks of as neighbors is all. Acquaintances. People who if he saw them off-island he’d only acknowledge with a nod and otherwise avoid. Also he’s worried about the Rabbit because he’s old and the last he saw of him a cop was whaling on one of his legs with a club the size of a baseball bat.

  The Rabbit is wearing a thick blue cast and boot on his right leg, the leg without the anklet the Kid notices, which is lucky. He hobbles along with a metal crutch toward the water with a bamboo fishing pole in his free hand.

  Yo, Rabbit, wassup?

  The old man turns and checks out the Kid and his huge companion in a three-piece suit and tie and he frowns with puzzlement and slight irritation. Who the fuck’s this? he says meaning the Professor who smiles through his beard at the Rabbit and extends his right hand and introduces himself by name and title.

  The Kid says, The Professor’s okay, he’s doing some kinda research for the university. Go ahead, Professor, you do the talking.

  The Professor more or less repeats what he told the Kid earlier about eliminating the pretexts for the police raids political and otherwise by organizing the residents beneath the Causeway into a law-abiding community that meets the Calusa city and county sanitary and safety regulations. He explains the need for a meeting of the current residents and the composition of a binding charter that will include a set of rules that all who choose to reside here must sign and obey. Also the formation of at least two committees, one to provide physical safety and protection of property and the other to be responsible for sanitation. They will need an executive committee of at least three persons that will make and administer policy with an executive director or chair of the executive committee who will act as spokesperson for the residents.

  The Rabbit stares at the Professor for a long moment. Finally he says, I gotta catch a fuckin’ fish for my supper. And starts to hobble away.

  I told you it was a dumb idea.

  The Professor calls after the Rabbit that everyone will meet in one hour at the Kid’s tent but the Rabbit ignores him and makes his slow limping way down to the edge of the Bay where he takes over a folding metal lawn chair abandoned there and tosses a few bread crumbs into the water to attract his supper and baits his line with a balled chunk of white bread.

  The Professor asks the Kid if he thinks the Rabbit will show up for the meeting. The Kid thinks so but only if he manages to catch a fish by then. He’ll probably come out of curiosity if nothing else. He points out that the Rabbit has a good sense of humor and will come for a laugh. The others—forget it.

  Undeterred the Professor heads for the next closest person who turns out to be Paco, and the Kid reluctantly follows. The Professor tells the Kid that he recognizes the man from Benbow’s and the Kid shrugs whatever. Paco’s pumping iron. He’s always pumping iron when he’s not riding his motorcycle or getting laid although the Kid’s not sure he gets laid as much as he claims or if he’s just making it up so you won’t think he’s one of those buff beach-buddy types with a tiny dick in a G-string who only wants to be looked at and not touched. He’s lying on his back on his weight bench which is a board held up by two cinder blocks doing presses with his homemade weights that he built from a boxcar axle and steel wheels he stole from the rail yard. His tattoo’d arm and shoulder muscles are like illustrated drawstring bags of coconuts. His abs are like writhing pythons. To the Kid he’s a cartoon character. Harmless and not very bright. The only complicated thing about him is the fact that he’s a sex offender. The Kid isn’t sure of the nature of his offense—the Rabbit figures he’s into giving blow jobs to teenage boys. That’s complicated, the Kid thinks: a guy built like a superhero from a video game likes hookers but still wants to suck teenage dick so he uses his huge muscles to attract the only kind of people who think a body like his is cool and sexy. With his ankle bracelet exposed as if he thinks it’s a come-on to teenage boys. Maybe it is. Maybe in combination with the muscles it turns them on. The Kid can hardly bear to look at Paco’s body. And it’s always out there to look at, shirtless and wearing cutoffs. When he introduces the Professor to him the Kid looks off at the Bay.

  Paco clanks his barbell to the ground and sits up, checks out the Professor and when the Professor extends his paw to shake Paco takes it in his and gives it a crunch. The Professor crunches back and Paco winces in pain.

  You don’t want to hurt my hand, bro! Paco speaks with a slightly tinted Spanish accent and though he looks like a café-au-lait Cuban or maybe Dominican the Kid suspects the accent is faked and Paco is really an all-American white guy with a tan. The chalk white brush of a mustache looks dyed and the Kid for the first time notices that he’s wearing eyeliner. Also his hair, glistening black, long and tied back with a rubber band, is way too black. Definitely a bad dye job. Maybe the only person he’s interested in turning on is himself, like his own looks instead of other people’s are what give him a hard-on and that’s why he looks the way he does.

  Paco says to the Kid, What you doing down here, man? I thought you was squattin’ over at Benbow’s.

  My parole officer made me split from there.

  I can dig it, man. Them guys is too wiggy when you get down to it, y’know? But here, man, is living like animals, no?

  Yeah, like animals.

  So, who’s this dude, amigo? What’s up with him? I seen him at Benbow’s. Them guys thought he was a cop. He a cop?

  He’s some kinda professor or something. The Kid doesn’t want to talk about the Professor. He’s the only civilian the Kid knows right now but he’s getting a little sick of the man. He takes up too much space, uses too many words, has too many theories and ideas. The Kid doesn’t want the Professor’s ideas and plans and words and his size to become his, the Kid’s. He likes living without any plans, not talking much, keeping to himself and making his life as small as possible.

  The Kid tells the Professor he should explain what he has in mind for the men who live under the Causeway and he steps back a ways and looks off in the distance again: the Bay, seagulls, boats, the skyline, cruise ships, stacks of gray clouds coming in from the east promising rain.

  Paco says sure he’ll come to a meeting if it helps get this place cleaned up and keeps the cops off their backs and the Kid and the Professor move on to the others. The Kid is surprised that Paco didn’t blo
w off the Professor’s plan and is even more surprised when Plato and P.C. and the others agree to meet together. Even Froot Loop who claims to be a surrealist whatever that is and Ginger, a redheaded black guy in his thirties whose main activity is pushing a pick through his Afro and checking out his freckles in a handheld mirror in search of skin cancer he says because his Irish father and his brother died of melanoma.

  And then there’s Lawrence Somerset who the Kid thought would not have to come back to the Causeway because of his political connections. But once you’re a convicted sex offender all your connections to society are broken no matter how much money you’ve got in the bank or how many houses you own or how big your boat is or how much power political or otherwise you used to have back when you were committing sex offenses in his case on little girls and buying kiddie porn and probably distributing it to other villains. That’s the word the Kid uses when he thinks of Lawrence Somerset—villain. It has the right old-fashioned association with a black top hat and a black suit and a long tweaked mustache and big white teeth with fangs that appear when he smiles like a vampire.

  He is a vampire, the Kid thinks. That’s what he’d name him if it was up to him—Vampire. Or Dracula. A guy who sucks the blood out of little girls, turning them into vampires too who can’t stand the light of day and have to live forever prowling the streets of Calusa at night and sneaking into the beds of other little girls and boys and sucking their blood while they sleep making more vampires forever and ever while the parents sit downstairs in the living room watching ha-ha TV shows.

  The Professor introduces himself to Lawrence Somerset. The Kid won’t do it even though at one time barely forty-eight hours ago he was willing to share his tent with him. Something happened at Benbow’s that darkened his view of Lawrence Somerset. He’s not sure what but it wasn’t the weird film those guys were shooting of the kids dancing half-naked in the mist which was probably only for a TV ad or a music video even though it looked like a trailer for a kiddie porn film. Actually the Kid thought the filming was interesting to watch because from the start he’d been behind the scenes and saw the crew set up the fog machine and lights and cameras and knew all along that it was real so he never saw it transformed into fantasy on a screen. He never saw the illusion they were creating. Just the tools they were using. Even the kids were tools. They were actors, not half-naked children. They had mothers or people who acted like mothers and agents who brought them to Benbow’s in the family van and probably dropped them off at school after the shoot.

  Maybe it was the story about the pirate and the treasure map and X marking the spot that the Professor told him about. When he first heard it the Kid felt his chest expand as if with helium and it made him feel lifted up. Literally uplifted as if he might float up and off the island and drift over the Bay high enough to see all the way west to the Great Panzacola Swamp. The Panzacola Swamp with its thousands of mangrove islands and mazelike waterways would have been a smart place to bury treasure. Maybe, the Kid thinks, the island on the Professor’s map is way inland someplace in the middle of the swamp. Maybe Captain Kydd and his men anchored their ship here in the Bay and rowed one of their lifeboats up the Calusa River for miles to where it originates in the endless shallow waters of the swamp where there are thousands of low hummocks and mangrove-covered islands and buried their treasure on one of the larger islands and using their compass and measuring rods drew a map of the island and wrote the exact longitude and latitude in code on it right where X marks the spot. A code the Kid with the Professor’s help could break.

  Call me Shyster, Larry Somerset says to the Professor.

  Really? Shyster. How’d you come by a name like that?

  The fellow over there fishing, Rabbit, he started it. I didn’t care for it at first, but now I rather like it. The irony of it.

  I take it you’re a practicing attorney.

  In a past life. An earlier incarnation, let us say.

  What was your name then?

  It doesn’t matter. Shyster will do well enough, thank you.

  Shyster looks a little beat up and bedraggled. He’s still wearing his suit coat and dirty white shirt but one sleeve of the jacket is half torn off at the shoulder and he has a raw contusion on his right temple the size of a poppy blossom. His narrow flat cheeks are covered with black and white stubble. He looks like he spent the last few nights sleeping in a Dumpster.

  Kid, you abandoned me! I don’t mean to whine, but we were tent-mates.

  Everyone for himself, Shyster.

  The Professor interrupts to say that’s just the sort of mentality he’s trying to eliminate here and proceeds to unfold his plan to Shyster. The ex-legislator quickly agrees. He’ll gladly cooperate and will volunteer his expertise as sergeant at arms for the meeting and will provide pro bono legal advice for such matters as the composition of the charter and other questions regarding the law should any happen to arise.

  I assume you’ve been disbarred, Shyster.

  True. But I haven’t been subjected to brain surgery. I still know what I knew and am willing to share it with my cohabitors here. In our common interests, of course.

  Thank you very much. Shyster, yours is precisely the attitude I’m hoping to foster here. We’ll see you at the meeting. We’ll be following Robert’s Rules of Order.

  The Kid can tell the Professor likes Shyster which disappoints him in the Professor and when they part from Shyster and make their way back to the Kid’s tent he reveals the lawyer’s real name to the Professor who immediately recognizes it. He remembers the case. Three years ago it made big news all across the state. The Honorable Senator Lawrence Somerset arranged on the Internet to meet at a hotel close by the airport with a woman who claimed to be the mother of two little girls, nine and seven years old. She was to bring her daughters to his room and in exchange for five thousand dollars in cash leave them with him for the night. They were to be freshly bathed and wearing party dresses. When the senator at the prearranged time answered the knock on his hotel room door he was wearing only his underpants. There were some reports that he was stark naked. But there were no little girls awaiting him. The woman claiming to be their mother was a police officer and with her was a pair of state troopers. They arrested and handcuffed the senator, threw a blanket over his paunchy body, and marched him off to jail. They held a press conference the following day at the Calusa County Courthouse where it was revealed that the near-naked state legislator, who had sat on the state parole board, had brought to the hotel room his laptop computer on which were found dozens of downloaded child pornography films. He also had in his possession what were described as “miscellaneous sex toys” and a jar of Vaseline and “a tube of lubricant commonly used by male homosexuals to facilitate anal sex.” Although the senator’s wife in a written statement declared her ongoing support for him and after describing his long struggle with alcoholism her belief in his essential innocence, his two grown sons shut down their real estate business, moved out of state, and changed their names. The senator was sentenced to ten years in prison but after serving two was released because of good behavior which had included weekly attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and group therapy for sex offenders.

  The Professor knew his story up to the time of his release from prison from the newspapers. Now he knows the rest of it.

  The guy’s wife brought him here, the Kid adds. Dropped him off after he got out of jail and split. That’s what everybody does. Wives, mothers, girlfriends, it don’t matter, he explains. They fuckin’ stand by their man so long as he’s in jail but when he gets out they drop him off someplace where the sun never shines and don’t return his phone calls or answer his letters anymore. You can’t blame ’em though.

  Why not?

  People in prison. They’re not quite real people. Except to each other. It’s only when you get out that you’re real again. Only now you’re a registered sex offender. It’s like you’re a leper and they let you out of the leper colony.

&
nbsp; Is that what happened to you? Your mother dropped you off here and now ignores your letters and phone calls?

  I don’t give her the chance. Look, it’s complicated, okay? Forget about it. The Kid doesn’t want to think about his mother; it gives him a headache. It makes him start missing Iggy again.

  I gotta feed my dog and my bird. He ducks into his tent and grabs a can of Spam for Annie and two plain doughnuts for Einstein. Tomorrow he’ll go to Paws ’n’ Claws and buy them proper dog and parrot food. He’s got to learn about parrot care. He’s never had to feed a bird before. He figures he’s got enough cash in his pocket and in his ATM account left from the money the Shyster laid on him his first night under the Causeway to last the three of them a week or possibly ten days although he thinks he’s soon going to be able to touch the Professor for what he’ll call a loan but it’ll actually be payment for these interviews he wants.

  The Kid has decided to embellish his story a little here and there, make it more interesting to the Professor so he’ll think he’s converting the Kid from being a sex offender into a regular law-abiding citizen with a normal sex life. Whatever that is. The Kid believes that in some sense he already has a normal sex life, as normal as anyone he’s ever known well enough to get a good idea of what they do. Except of course that he’s never done anything with or to anyone himself and is still technically a virgin. That’s not normal. He also admits that it probably was not normal to watch as much pornography as he did from the age of almost eleven until he was busted. Seven to eight hours a day and sometimes more from the time he got home from his afterschool job at the light store well into the night until he finally fell asleep in the gray dawn light. When his mother came in to wake him for school his computer screen would be showing three naked guys fucking a Chinese girl. His mother takes the mouse in her hand and says, You’re too young for this. You better be paying for it yourself this time, buster. Then she sits down at the computer and with her eyes dimming watches the gangbang drag out in front of her as if it was a Ninja video game. Hurry up and get dressed, you’re gonna be late for school.