Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  Perhaps that’s the one constant that is shared by all those separate compartments he lives in—a profound sense of isolation, of difference and a solitude that is so pervasive and deep that he has never felt lonely. It’s the solitude of a narcissist who fills the universe entirely, until there is no room left in it for anyone else. In every life he has led, every identity he has claimed for himself and revealed to others, his profound sense of isolation was then and is now his core.

  While the Professor knows most of the facts of the various lives he has led and the public and private, often secret, identities he has held, he has no conscious memory of being inside them. No memory of living those lives from one day to the next, from month to month, in some cases for years, or of being that person in a continuing way. For the Professor it’s as if all the separate lives he has led belong to other people. And the life he leads now, it too belongs to someone else. He’s privy to the facts of each, but little more. For him, that’s enough. The facts. There is no use or point for him to remember what he actually experienced when he was perceived many years ago by his college and graduate school classmates and professors as a radical activist in the civil rights and antiwar movements, a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Students for a Democratic Society and for a few harrowing months a member of Weatherman. There is for him no reason to try to remember what he felt back then or believed when he first agreed to work for the government agency that wanted to protect the American people from the unintended consequences of the civil rights and antiwar movements. As far as he remembers, he felt nothing. He believed nothing. It was a game, a puzzle, a test of wits and intelligence, and the higher the stakes the more interesting the game, the more challenging the puzzle, and thus the greater proof of his superior wit and intelligence.

  He believed he was smarter than the government agents he reported to and smarter than the people he reported on and needed to prove it, to himself if to no one else. For him it was merely a contest between patriotic careerists and dope-smoking ideologues, both equally deluded, equally utopian, equally clannish. And though both believed that he was one of them, he belonged to neither clan. He stood out too much, could never disappear in a crowd, was odd-looking and grossly overweight, spoke in a peculiar manner, was regarded by both groups as asexual, and was not known to drink alcohol or take drugs and seemed not to be interested in money. He remembers only that he loved the game, the secrecy, and took pleasure from knowing twice as much as either of the groups to which he was thought by the other to belong, even though within each group he was a minor figure. To the political activists in college and later in New Haven, the peculiar fat man was a carrier of signs in demonstrations, a late-night manager of the mimeo machine, a foot soldier in their small army of revolutionaries. To the several government agencies that over time employed him to report on the activities of that army, he was merely one of thousands of informants on college campuses and in ghetto flats and basements, garages, meeting halls, and safe houses all across the country. And later, as he traveled to Asia and Central and South America, ostensibly to extend his knowledge of languages and further his education, he was designated an asset, a reliable asset, but not an essential one, because for the most part the information he provided the agencies was of the type that merely corroborated what they already knew or confirmed what they believed. He was aware of that, of course, and didn’t mind at all. His relatively low status in both groups—or was it three or four organizations or five, and was it one government he worked for or two or three?—suited him perfectly.

  He was as easily replaceable an asset in their ranks as among the activists and revolutionaries. If he didn’t volunteer to print and deliver to every dormitory room at Kenyon a copy of The Port Huron Statement, someone else would. If he weren’t available to be a link in the human chain blocking access to the administration building, there were hundreds ready to take his place. If, after he left Yale and on instructions from the FBI, went to San Francisco, he backed out of selling methamphetamine to the biker gangs of Oakland, there were dozens of entry-level undercover agents eager to step forward and do the deed. Those were the years when the government feared a possible coalition of biker gangs, Black Panthers, Weatherman, famous Beat poets, rock musicians, movie actors, and heiresses, so it was glamorous to be selling and delivering drugs to Hells Angels. You might run into Peter Fonda or Allen Ginsberg or Huey Newton. And when he hit the hippie trail to Kathmandu to learn Urdu and reported back to his handlers from there and ducked down into the Andes to learn Quechua and then off to research the descendants of escaped slaves on the Mosquito Coast until he finally came ashore in Calusa and found employment as a writer of policy papers on the Caribbean for a think tank called the Caribbean Basin Institute and had his papers vetted by the CIA—he was always just another easily replaced asset who appeared to be doing one thing while he was in fact doing another. He was a small enough cog in such a huge machine that he could well have been employed at the same time by the KGB while maintaining a safe house for the last of the Weather Underground to come in out of the cold.

  He too came in out of the cold, inasmuch as when he quit working at the Caribbean Basin Institute and accepted a position in the sociology department at Calusa University, he created for himself a life that no longer had one, two, or three false identities. Merely a series of false pasts. For the first time since college he was more or less who he seemed to be, even if there was a disconnect between who he seemed to be and who he once had been. Though he had been many things—political radical, civil rights activist, antiwar warrior, drug dealer, independent scholar and student of exotic languages and cultures, hippie seeker of Eastern enlightenment, FBI and CIA informant simultaneously reporting to at least two other independent intelligence-gathering agencies and one or possibly two foreign government agencies as well—all these identities could conceivably have led separately to his becoming the man he now appeared to be, a happily married father of two children living in suburban Calusa, a somewhat eccentric, tenured professor of sociology at the local university, a member of the library board, a deacon in the Congregational Church, a man once portrayed in the newspaper as the smartest man in town, possibly the state.

  But only if none of the men he had been once upon a time was aware of the felt, subjective existence of any of the others. They remained separate and distinct identities that knew of the factual existence of the others but did not identify with the others. They could not remember what it was like to actually be the others. And he, the Professor, can only remember what it was like to be himself in the years since he came in from the cold and ceased being an informant and gradually came to be solely who he seemed to be.

  He is a man, therefore, without a past. A man with many pasts, who can, if forced, make a report on his life, but cannot tell his life’s story. Each of his pasts was designed at the time strictly to deny the existence of the others, just as his present life denies the existence of all his previous lives, giving him the freedom to make them up at will. He can claim to one man that he fought in Vietnam and tell the Kid that he was a draft-dodging opponent of the war and not in either case be lying. If everything is a lie, nothing is. Just as, if everything is true, nothing is.

  That’s the story the Professor tells himself.

  CHAPTER TEN

  K: Yeah, sure I was scared. I thought about not going out there at all, just fuck it, stay home again and bash the bishop in front of my computer pretending I was getting a BJ from brandi18, who was a real person with probably bee stings for tits and scared of me, instead of an actress with inflatable boobs and a cooch-light shining on her bush moaning Fuck me harder fuck my ass et cetera. It wasn’t on account of brandi18 said she was only fourteen and a virgin, which I didn’t believe anyhow, the virgin part at least, because of her Facebook pictures which she must’ve snapped with her cell phone in her bedroom wearing what looked like pj’s with valentines all over and the top half unbuttoned and the ot
her picture with really short cutoffs and a too-tight Disney World T-shirt.

  P: The fact that she was fourteen and you were twenty-one wasn’t why you were scared?

  K: Well, she only said she was fourteen. You can be a talking dog online. She could’ve been a fifty-year-old guy for all I knew. Although I did believe her. I thought she was fourteen, only not as innocent as she was saying. I was thinking I’m the innocent one, I’m the real virgin, all I’ve ever done is beat my banana and watch porn and tell lies to guys that nobody believes. I never even kissed a girl before. Still haven’t.

  P: Why are you telling me this? It’s the truth, isn’t it?

  K: You’re the only one who’s interested in the truth. Not the cops. Not the judge. Not even the shrink in prison or my parole officer. Whenever I told them the truth, even the guys in my therapy group in prison, they thought I was lying, so I stopped telling the truth. I dunno, maybe you think I’m lying too.

  P: That you’ve never kissed a girl and yet you’re a convicted sex offender? No, Kid, I believe you. Not that I don’t think you broke the law. Obviously you broke the law. There you were, arranging to meet a fourteen-year-old girl at her mother’s home, all alone, bringing her beer, a pornographic movie, condoms. Anything else?

  K: Well, when I bought condoms I saw this tube of stuff, K-Y jelly, which I bought, I figured on account of my dick being pretty big and in case she really was a virgin it might come in handy. I mean, even though I was totally inexperienced at sex I actually know a lot about it from watching so much porn and listening to other guys. You can learn a lot about sex from porn, y’know. And from just listening.

  P: Really? Like what?

  K: You learn what gets you off, for instance. And what doesn’t get you off. Like I’m not all that into bondage. Or chubbies. No offense. And guys on guys kinda leaves me limp. And you learn what girls like or at least what they say they like. And from listening to what guys talk about when they talk about sex you learn how to talk about sex. With other guys, that is. I’m not sure how to talk about sex with girls. Not in real life anyhow. I can do it online, okay? Or I could. Like with brandi18.

  P: So you went out there to her mother’s house in West Calusa Gardens?

  K: Yeah. I took the bus and it let me off a couple blocks from the address, so I walked the rest of the way. It was dark but she had the porch light on and I could see the number. Nice neighborhood and all. Two-car attached garages, mowed lawns, pools in back. I had the beer and other stuff in my backpack and was wearing shorts and sneakers and a Bob Marley tee on account of it was pretty hot that night. I stood there awhile on the sidewalk and checked out the house, which looked normal with lights on in the kitchen I could see and most of the rest dark except for a room upstairs that I figure is brandi18’s room, and thinking about that got me sort of hot and made me forget that I was doing something that could get me in a lot of trouble. Then I see brandi18 walk past the kitchen window. She has a little ponytail and is wearing a pink tank top, has little tits which turn me on more than jugs do, and is sort of short so the rest of her is below the windowsill and I couldn’t see but figured she had on cutoffs, and I’m already getting a woodie just from that glimpse of her in the kitchen. She stops and looks out and sees me standing on the sidewalk out front in the streetlight and kind of waves like she isn’t sure it’s me, so I wave back and she gestures like come on in. So I go up the front walk to the door which is open except for a screened door and she hollers from the kitchen in this teenage girl’s kind of voice, I gotta switch the laundry to the dryer! I’ll be right there! There’s some cookies and lemonade on the counter so help yourself, she says from someplace beyond the kitchen, a laundry room, I figure.

  P: So you walk through the door. You cross the line, so to speak. A line once you’re over you can never cross the other way.

  K: You got that right, Professor. I walk through the living room and dining room which are pretty fancy with wall-to-wall rugs and designer-type furniture, I notice, even though the only lights on are in the kitchen which is where I settle on a stool beside the counter where there’s a plate with Oreo cookies and a glass of lemonade with ice cubes, like she just poured it when she saw me standing outside. I’m thinking this is cool. I feel like frigging Santa Claus. I put my backpack on the floor and eat an Oreo and take a sip from the lemonade when the door to what I figure is the laundry room swings open and this dude in a suit and tie walks into the kitchen, a guy like in his forties with blow-dry hair who looks like a TV Christian telethoner.

  P: Uh-oh.

  K: Duh. I stand up and he says sit down. So I sit down and try to swallow the Oreo, but it’s crumbly and dry so I gulp some lemonade and try to look natural. The guy has a wide face like a frog and this orange dyed hair. He asks my name and I tell him my first name only and say what’s his name. Dave, he says. Dave Dillinger. I say are you her father? He says who? Brandi, I say. The girl who lives here. I’m hoping maybe it’s Brandi’s mother’s boyfriend or a preacher for real that Brandi’s mother asked to check on Brandi while she was away. But he doesn’t say. Instead he asks me what I’m doing here and I say I came to see a friend. Brandi’s your friend? he says. Yeah, sort of. We like met online. He goes, What were you planning on doing with Brandi tonight? I dunno. Watch TV. Hang out. Whatever. Now I’m thinking maybe this guy Dave Dillinger is Brandi’s real boyfriend even though he’s in his forties and he thinks she’s fucking me on the side because he’s an old guy and I’m closer to her age group. I don’t want to have to fight the guy even though I’m still in good shape and know a few moves from the army, as he’s quite a bit bigger than me and looks in good shape too. It’s okay, I say. I’ll leave. I was just stopping by. He goes, No, sit down. He has a few questions. For the first time I wonder if he’s a cop so I ask him. No, he’s not a cop, he says. He asks me what I’ve got in my backpack. I tell him beer. A six-pack of Bud Light. Do you know how old Brandi is? he wants to know. I say I dunno, maybe eighteen or nineteen. I was gonna drink it myself, I add. Eighteen or nineteen? he says. Then I notice he’s carrying a file folder and he takes out a bunch of papers and he reads down a couple of sheets. iggyzbro. Is that you? he asks. I say yeah, I guess so. He reads from the papers. iggyzbro: how old r u? brandi18: 18. iggyzbro: r u on facebook? mayb I’ll check u out 4 real. brandi18: u can friend me if u want. iggyzbro: K. brandi18: I’m really 14 like it sez on facebook. Sorry.

  P: So he has a transcript of your e-mails? Which he no doubt got from Brandi. Assuming there is a Brandi.

  K: Yeah. Anyhow, he reads some more. Like where I ask her if she’s a virgin and everything. And where I suggest watching porn and tell her I’ll bring condoms.

  P: You wrote that down? And now this man has the printed transcript?

  K: I didn’t know brandi18 was like a real person. I mean, we were just e-mailing. Of course it turns out she wasn’t a real person anyhow.

  P: What do you mean?

  K: I mean she was like one person online and another person that night in her mother’s house when I went out there thinking we were gonna hook up. It’s complicated. Anyhow, I ask the guy if he’s her father or is he like her boyfriend, since I’m remembering that brandi18 told me her ex-boyfriend was older but I didn’t think this much older. The guy reminds me of the dude on a TV show called To Catch a Predator on MSNBC that I sort of watched a couple of times, and I suddenly think maybe I’m on the show and I’m like this week’s contestant. I always thought they had like a script and the sleazoids they trick online into trying to have sex with underage girls were all actors ’cause some of them were really old, and this one guy was even a rabbi and another was an ex-cop and a couple of them had teenage daughters of their own. I thought it was like a situation comedy reality TV series only not funny. I never knew it was reality. So I’m getting ready for a TV cameraman and another guy with a mike on a boom to come out of the laundry room like they do on the show, when the old dude says he’s Brandi’s father. I go, Whoa! I thought this was Br
andi’s mother’s house and shit, and he says it is and he thanks God that Brandi called him to come over when she learned I was coming here to the house tonight.

  P: Wait a minute. Brandi called him? And gave him the printout of your chats and e-mails?

  K: Yeah. Which is pretty fucked up, if you ask me. Totally fucked up. Anyhow, the guy asks me, How old are you? I tell him twenty-one, and he asks was I in the army like I said to his daughter Brandi, which is how I’m thinking of her now instead of brandi18, and I go, Yeah but I’m not now. And you were in Afghanistan? he says. And I go, No. I was only like talking that way, the way you do when you’re online. He looks really happy to be disgusted. He wants to know what else I’ve got in my backpack besides the Bud Light and can he have a look? I just shrug why not. Whatever happens happens, I’m thinking. So he goes into my pack and pulls out the condoms and holds the package up. Condoms? he asks. Yeah. Were you planning to use these with a fourteen-year-old girl? he wants to know. Actually, he already knows. He just wants me to confess it. Not really, I say. I wasn’t planning on anything. This is true, because I was mostly hoping, not planning. He goes back into my pack and pulls out the DVD and reads the title out loud, Willow’s Day Off, and notes that it’s quadruple-x-rated. Not exactly appropriate for a fourteen-year-old girl to be watching with a twenty-one-year-old man, is it? he says. I shrug again and say it was all I had, which is pretty lame, I know, but also happens to be true. He pulls out the tube of K-Y jelly and says what’s this? I tell him it’s a lubricant. That really gets him off into happy deep disgust. A loo-bricant! he says. He repeats it a couple more times with his voice going lower each time like any minute he’s going to come just from saying loo-bricant! Finally his eyes clear again and he asks if I’m married, and I say no, and he wants to know where I live, and I tell him North Calusa. Long ways out here, he says. Did I drive? No, I took the bus. So it took some effort and planning to get out here to meet up with a fourteen-year-old girl, he says. Yeah, it did. Pretty late to come calling on a fourteen-year-old girl, wouldn’t you say? It’s not a school night, I point out, meaning to joke but he doesn’t get it. It’s like he’s not just her father, he’s also a cop or he thinks he’s a cop because that’s how he’s treating me. It’s like all of America has turned into a cop whose main job is to protect their fourteen-year-old virgins from creeps like me. He asks me who I live with, and I had to say I live with my mother, which let him ask me what would my mother think if she knew I was arranging to meet a fourteen-year-old girl alone late at night apparently for sex and brought beer and pornography and condoms and a loo-bricant with me.