Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  But now it looks to the old man as if it’s too late. In his most recent, unanswered e-mail to his son he wrote: Your mother’s memory of all but her own childhood is pretty nearly gone. She recognizes me, but she confuses me with her father. It’s very sad, he added, hoping to make his son sad enough to want to see his mother again. But he has never seen his son sad, even as a child, so it was probably useless to try arousing in him an emotion that he appeared incapable of feeling. Still, he had to try. But when the Professor read his father’s e-mail he felt relieved, not sad. Then he hit delete.

  He clears his throat. So now, after all these years, now you decide you need to know my past. We agreed, didn’t we, from the beginning that there was much about my life before we met that I could not reveal. Not to you, not to anyone. There were oaths I had taken and pledges I had signed. And you understood and accepted that. It was to protect you. You and the children.

  Yes, I understood. I did. I knew enough about you and your past, the public part anyhow, to accept not knowing more. But your parents? Why would you say your parents were dead, when they weren’t? Why would you lie about a thing like that?

  That, dear Glory, is one of those things I cannot reveal to you. So that when the police or anyone else comes ’round asking questions of you or of my parents, none of you has to lie in order to protect me. You’re free to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you Jesus. You don’t know enough about me to feel obliged to lie. I withhold information so that you don’t have to, m’dear.

  He has slipped into his genteel southern accent, and she knows what that means: he’s told her all of the truth that he’s going to. She reminds him that she promised the police detective that she would deliver his message to her husband. Will you be speaking with the police tomorrow?

  Tomorrow is Sunday. The Sabbath. The Lord’s Day. I’ll call him early Monday.

  All right. Good night, then.

  Gloria, I won’t be going to church with you and the twins tomorrow.

  You won’t?

  No.

  Why not?

  I b’lieve I should have me a little private discussion with my daddy.

  Your “daddy”? That’s a word I never thought I’d hear from you.

  Yes. Now that he exists, I can use it.

  Can’t you speak to him by telephone? It’s a day’s drive, practically.

  I said “private discussion.” I suspect his telephone ain’t private.

  She nods, turns away, disappears into the darkness. The Professor returns to his meal. For the first time he hears the heavy drumming of rain on the roof and the slosh of gutters overflowing. It has been raining steadily, he realizes, for at least the last half hour. If it’s more than a late-summer shower, it’ll slow his drive north to Alabama. He gobbles the last of the meat loaf and macaroni and cheese and empties his glass of iced tea and places the dishes into the dishwasher. The rain, he notices from the sound, is wind driven. He decides he’d better leave now.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THREE TIMES THE PROFESSOR STOPS ON his journey west and north to Alabama, twice for gas but otherwise for food, truck-stop food—stew and biscuits and pie and ice cream—and fast food—Big Macs and fries and more pies. He does this without deciding to do it, as if his hunger is a constant ongoing need that can never be satisfied. He has no reason to check in on it and ask whether he is actually hungry again. It’s always there, like his breath. It is who he is and has been for as long as he can remember, a never-ending appetite.

  The only thing that obliges him to push his plate away and pay the cashier and leave is the pressure of time: he’s obliged to keep driving. After all these years he has to speak with his father. Before he faces the Calusa police detective, or the man claiming to be a Calusa police detective, he has to learn what the man asked his father and what the old man answered. He has to know if the walls that separate the compartments that contain his past have started to erode and collapse. He cannot allow that to happen, not now, after so many years of constructing and reinforcing those walls, making the chambers they contain impenetrable even to the Professor himself. He’s not just trying to preserve and maintain the life he’s built for himself in the last decade here in Calusa; he’s also trying to hold on to the inner integrity and coherence of each box in the set of boxes that precedes his life in Calusa. The story of his life from Kenyon College on is like a long row of rented storage compartments in a warehouse outside a city that he never wants to visit again. As soon as he’s swung shut the door and snapped the lock, he deliberately misplaces the key. A year or two passes, and he departs from Kathmandu or Lima or one of a half-dozen other cities, even a few American cities, small towns, rural communes, and as if renting a new storage unit in the warehouse, he packs up all the details of the year or two of his life just ended and deposits them in the new compartment, clicks the lock shut and moves on, not forgetting to lose the key—tossing it from the window of the taxi on the drive to the airport, dropping it through a sewer grate on his way to catch the train, flipping it into a Dumpster as he approaches the security check at the shipyard.

  North of Calusa traffic on the Interstate is light. Rain beats against the flat front of the van. By the time he veers west and passes above the vast Panzacola Swamp on the old Panzacola Highway connecting the Atlantic to the Gulf, the night has worn on, and the only vehicles now are trucks with deliveries crossing from the cities on one coast to the cities on the other and the occasional beat-up pickup driven by a member of one of the remnant Indian tribes still making a life for themselves in the roadside camps and small ramshackle settlements along the northern edge of the swamp.

  The lights of Calusa and its suburbs have long since faded and gone dark behind him. Soon out ahead the lights of the cities along the Gulf Coast will begin to tint the western sky. There are no stars. No moon. It’s raining hard, slanted against the van by the wind out of the west. But the Professor barely notices. Since leaving the house, he’s not once thought of the Kid or of his wife and children, not even of his father or the reason for this sudden journey. He’s not thinking of anything or anyone in a focused way. For perhaps the first time in his life the Professor is experiencing panic. The Professor never panics. He admires that fact. But he’s panicking now, and knowing it frightens him and makes it worse. He’s sweating slick sheets and loosens his necktie and collar and turns on the air conditioner.

  At the Gulf Coast where the Panzacola Swamp merges with the sea, the old Panzacola Highway connects to the north-running Gulf Turnpike. The wind-blown rain slaps the van on its flat left side now, and he has to wrestle with the wheel to keep the vehicle in its lane. There are suburbs and cities clustered alongside the turnpike here, cloverleaves, overpasses, and exits to attend to and an enormous plaza where he refills with gas and eats another meal, pushes his way through the rain back to the parked van and resumes his drive on up the coast of the peninsula.

  Windshield wipers flop rapidly back and forth, but the rain is too heavy for them to wipe away, and his view ahead is blurred. Twice he narrowly misses vehicles moving slowly in front of of him, and several times like a drunk man he loses sight of the white line that divides the lanes and has to slow down almost to a stop before he finds it again. His pulse is racing, and it occurs to him to play some music. Yes, for God’s sake, play some music. Music will calm him, he thinks, and let him focus and organize his mind, his most powerful tool, his weapon against the world.

  For the last few hours, since Gloria revealed that she had spoken with his father and that the police had visited the old man at the home in Alabama and had come to his own door in Calusa asking to speak with him, since that moment the Professor has not been himself. He’s been out of his mind, and his mind, he believes, is his true self. He needs to get back inside it, and music will help.

  He punches up one of the hundreds of compilations of jazz standards he’s burned onto CDs and keeps in a black plastic CD file box inside the armrest next to
the driver’s seat, and soon his mind comes back to him: Tommy Flanagan’s “I Fall in Love Too Easily” and Art Farmer and Bill Evans on “The Touch of Your Lips” and Roy Hargrove’s “The Nearness of You.” By the time he hears the opening chords of Bud Powell’s “My Heart Stood Still” he’s found his true self again and is located there: calm, logical, detached. In control. And his body is where he wants it—on its own again.

  His panic has passed. The music, as it has always done, helps to separate his mind from his body. For most people it’s the reverse. Especially for people who, like the Professor, listen to classic American jazz. Jazz is one of the few subjects he never explains to other people. He’s perfectly willing to hold forth on the subject of European classical music from the Baroque to Post-Modern serialism or disco or funk or raga or reggae. But jazz is like a secret drug to him. It alone has the power to alter his brain waves and neurotransmitters such that he feels autonomous, immunized against the contamination of his body, which otherwise is nearly impossible to make go away.

  The wind is shifting gradually around to the north and the rain has intensified. It’s nearly dawn when he crosses the state line into Alabama, and finally it enters his mind that a hurricane has come in off the Gulf and he has been driving straight through it for the last several hours. He remembers a buzz off the CNN news loop on the TV monitors at the turnpike plaza earlier and glimpsing a headline in the morning paper that he neglected to pick up when he left home yesterday to meet the Kid at the Causeway. Hurricane George they’re calling it. A medium-size hurricane, it’s expected to pass over the northern half of the state and the southern half of Alabama and Georgia and spin out to the Atlantic where it will weaken and break up. No big deal. But a hurricane nonetheless, high winds and torrential, swirling rain, dangerous to drive through in a slab-sided van or any vehicle lighter than a sixteen-wheeler, especially up the Gulf Coast and into Alabama like this.

  Palm trees sway like plumes and palmettos thrash the ground. Now and then his headlights or the lights of oncoming vehicles illuminate overflowing ditches and canals alongside the highway. Thick skeins of water erupt in fantails as the van plows through them.

  He’s driving much slower now, losing time. He planned on arriving at the home—Dove Run: An Assisted-Living and Life-Care Facility, it’s called—early in the day, spending an hour or at most two with his parents, and then departing for Calusa well before noon. He planned on getting home by early evening, in time to prepare his class for Monday. He briefly considers turning back now, forgoing an in-person interrogation of his father and risking a call from a pay phone at one of the rest-stop restaurants. It would be foolish to call from his cell phone. But it’s too great a risk even from a pay phone—the old man’s phone is as surely tapped as his own. Besides, the hurricane is on top of him now, and he’ll no more escape it by turning south toward home than by plunging on ahead.

  He could, of course, pull off the highway and park at a truck stop and wait for the hurricane to pass to the east. That would be the sensible thing to do. It’s apparently what the all-night truckers, the only other drivers still moving, are doing now, he observes, as a pair of sixteen-wheel behemoths pulls slowly off the highway into a parking lot illuminated by arc lamps atop tall aluminum poles. The rain drifts in shuddering sheets through the cones of pale light. He should have checked the weather report, he thinks. But no, it wouldn’t have made any difference. He’d still have left the house in the night and driven up here for the information he believes he needs in order to protect himself from whomever it was that came calling first on his father and then showed up at his door in Calusa claiming to be a detective in the Calusa Police Department. He knows it’s got nothing to do with his present life, or they wouldn’t have contacted his father. It’s his past that has come calling—but what part of his past? Which chapter? Which episode or linked series of episodes?

  Over on his right the dark eastern sky has started bleeding to gray. Near the horizon the boiling clouds are dark green. He can make out flooded citrus groves, crushed gravel side roads, a soaked wind-flattened landscape with wildly scattered palm and palmetto fronds and here and there abandoned cars and pickups, mobile homes with water to their thresholds looking like houseboats set adrift, tricycles and brightly colored plastic yard toys half-drowned. And no people. Everyone is huddled inside waiting for George to pass over and on to wherever hurricanes go when they’re no longer here—onto the TV screen, the radio report, the Internet, someone else’s reality and thus no longer real at all.

  The wind has ceased to buffet the sides of the Professor’s van, and he no longer struggles to hold it to the road, and the rain has let up. He’s situated at the eye of the storm, he thinks, the center of a two-hundred-mile atmospheric coil of low pressure twirling its way across the Caribbean and the Gulf like a colossal dervish. Right here at the still center is the place to stay, if only he can manage it—no wind, no rain, no turbulence or uncertainty. The morning sky is a smooth-sided pale green bowl, the pressure so low it feels like a huge vacuum pump has siphoned the air away. The music plays on—Bud Powell’s arpeggios and stomps—and the Professor feels calm and lucid and safe: almost invisible. The eye of the hurricane: it’s a metaphor for the mental and emotional space where he’s lived most of his life. He thinks this and smiles inwardly. Never quite thought of it that way. Nice, the way the world that surrounds one, the very weather of one’s existence, provides a language for addressing the world inside.

  Delighted, he notices that the eastward direction of the storm has shifted ten degrees to the north, and soon after, as he drives on, fifteen degrees, so that he’s able to stay inside the eye, its still center, moving northeast with it into Alabama as if personally escorted by Hurricane George straight to Dove Run: An Assisted-Living Facility and for the first time in over forty years the physical presence of his father and mother.

  THEIR HOME IS A TWO-STORY REDBRICK COLLECTION of small apartments, administrative offices and meeting rooms, recreation rooms, dining areas, and emergency medical facilities, with a wing that functions as a nursing home for the assisted-living residents who need more care than mere assistance provides. It resembles a large Holiday Inn, temporary quarters for travelers who will never return home, except to a funeral home or, for the believing Christians, the home prepared for them by their Lord and Savior.

  The Professor knows what he should be feeling as he enters the building. He knows what a man his age meeting his parents for the first time after nearly a lifetime of silent, willed absence ought to be feeling, regardless of the reasons or excuses for his absence. He should be feeling dread, anxiety, fearful curiosity, shame, all mingled with a thickened low-key joy: a muddle of intense, conflicted emotions. And yet he feels none of it. Only a mild irritation, as if while reading a difficult text he’s been interrupted by a small household mechanical breakdown that must be attended to before he can continue reading where he was obliged to leave off. For most of his life it’s been a strength, to know what other people, normal people, feel in any given situation, without possessing those feelings himself. It began in his childhood as a consciously willed means of protecting himself against ridicule, on the one hand, and on the other as a response to his parents’ utter absorption in each other to the exclusion of everyone else, even their precocious, morbidly obese, increasingly eccentric and alienated son.

  As a couple, the Professor’s parents, Jason and Cynthia, loved the couple itself and the idea of the couple as much as they loved themselves. They felt incomplete when apart and pined for the presence of the other, as if mourning the other. And when they were together they each became the happy center of the other’s universe, a solar system with twin suns at the center orbited by a single lonely planet spinning in darkness, except for the light cast by his parents as they danced on the porch to the music of those old 1940s jazz standards, while he sat on the wooden glider and pushed himself back and forth in slow time to the music and watched from an increasingly cold dist
ance.

  He knew what they felt for each other, and because it was for them essentially self-love, he could not share in it. Their feelings not only excluded him, they rejected him. He felt attacked by his parents’ strange mutual narcissism, causing him from an early age to cultivate his differences from them. Another child of such a pair might have tried to enter their charmed circle by emulating the qualities they seemed to admire in one another—their physical beauty, for both Jason and Cynthia were unusually handsome and healthy individuals; or their pragmatic, mechanical turns of mind, socially useful kinds of intelligence that are much admired in communities like theirs; or their natural ease, the ease of the oblivious, among people wholly unlike them, their friends and neighbors in Clinton, Alabama, their colleagues at work, U. S. Steel in Jason’s case, the Clinton Public Library in Cynthia’s, and the people they employed, everyone from the housekeeper and yardman to the inmates Jason hired from the state prison system to work for little or no pay digging the coal out of the Alabama hills. Although it was a variant of a folie à deux, his parents’ marriage was the kind that people with little or no knowledge of its implications and true nature envied. A pretty couple, a smart couple, a socially useful and reassuringly gregarious couple; and because they were from distinguished northern families and well educated and were probably left-leaning Democrats who made no attempts to impose their political views on anyone else, they were a slightly exotic couple as well. The Professor had none of this moderately attractive couple’s qualities. None.

  Sheets of plywood cover the large windows of the lobby. The glass doors and remaining smaller windows facing the deserted street have been X’d with tape. The Professor parks his van in the lot adjacent to the sprawling compound and walks slowly up the path to the main entrance. He is sweating and breathing with difficulty, as much from the very low atmospheric pressure as from the humidity and heat.