Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  The receptionist, a stout white-haired lady in a bright red nylon tracksuit, makes him sign the visitors’ register. Recognizing his last name, his parents’ last name, she smiles with a fake slick and says, First time you all been here to visit your momma and daddy, am I correct to say?

  He nods yes. She tells him the number of their apartment and gives him a floor plan of the building, which is laid out like a medieval monastery. He feels nothing, or no more than if he were making a delivery for the dry cleaner. The receptionist appears to know this and waves him on dismissively in the direction of the carpeted corridor that leads to the independent-living wing. The walls and carpeting are the color of oatmeal. You’ll find ’em waitin’ in unit 119, she says and picks up the house phone to notify his father that he has a visitor, thinking, A very odd visitor, more like a circus freak than the son of those nice-lookin’ folks in 119.

  At the door, the Professor raises his open hand, about to make a fist and knock, and he looks at it—it’s the hand he had as a child, the same fingernails, knuckles, thin blue veins, the same small purse of flesh between thumb and forefinger—and when he turns it over he recognizes the palm, the same creases, lines, and whorls. For a moment he studies the hand, then puts it out in front of him and fans out the fingers and waggles the hand slowly back and forth, as if from the window of a departing train.

  A sudden wave of fear surges over him, and he wants to turn around and flee from the eye of the hurricane back into the storm’s full fury. He’s panicking again, afraid to go forward, unable to retreat. And no music to calm him, nothing to bleach out his wild emotions and make his mind translucent and hard and rational as a ladder. His eighty-nine-year-old father and his mother with her perforated memory are on the other side of the door waiting for him. They’re waiting to present him with himself, as if to introduce him to his fratricidal twin.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE PROFESSOR DROPS HIS PALE HAND AND turns away from the door of unit 119 and pumping his heavy arms walks rapidly down the long corridor of numbered doors to the lobby. He strides past the surprised receptionist who calls out, Your folks are home! They expectin’ you, mistah! Then shakes her head in disgust as, ignoring her, he hurries past.

  Don’t that beat all? she wonders. First he comes finally to check on his poor momma and his daddy to make sure the hurricane ain’t gonna get them, after never once showing his face before this, and then he acts like they ain’t worth the trouble. You got to wonder what they done to deserve that from their own flesh and blood, she thinks. But she’s seen hundreds, maybe thousands, of grown men and women who don’t seem to know they’re somebody’s flesh and blood, sons and daughters who put their mommas and daddies into Dove Run and say good-bye and are never seen walking through that door again. It’s not like it was in the old days when she was a girl and Grandma died in the upstairs back bedroom. Back then parents and grandparents grew old and died before your very eyes, and it was as if a part of you yourself was growing old and dying alongside them. You didn’t have these Dove Runs where you could park and hide old people, and back then, if you wanted to forget that you too would someday grow old and die, which is natural to want, you couldn’t. She thinks about her own grown son and daughter and their children, and she wonders if she’s flesh and blood to them—kin—and decides, sadly, that the answer is no. They’re just like the man who blew past her a moment ago, and when the time comes they’ll make her live in Dove Run or someplace like it, while they go on living in a world in which no one, no one visible, grows old and dies before their very eyes. She sighs. She’s almost sixty years old, and in her lifetime the world has changed, and human beings have changed too.

  How can that be? She always believed that human nature was permanent, unchangeable, that human beings were the same always and everywhere, for better or worse, and when conditions changed for the better, as they sometimes did, like for black people and for women, it was because people, including white people and men, were essentially good and their better nature was letting them recognize their kinship with black people and women. Such were the receptionist’s thoughts as the Professor in flight from his intended meeting with his parents bustled past her desk, pushed through the door, and rushed across the parking lot to his van.

  PART IV

  CHAPTER ONE

  FOR HOURS THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE HAS enveloped the Professor like a moving bell jar. It has shifted its course just as he has shifted his, and now the storm slides south along the peninsula with him inside it toward the Great Panzacola Swamp, where it veers off to the east, crossing the state again, headed this time for Calusa and the open ocean beyond. The Professor’s van is inside an enormous meteorological bubble that protects him from the fury of the storm that rages beyond and behind him. Hurricane watchers and meteorologists and TV weather forecasters say that the hurricane was briefly stalled over land by an enormous offshore high-pressure area, slowing and turning it away from its predicted eastward path toward the Atlantic, gradually spiraling it back over the Gulf for a few hours, where it regained force and refilled with moisture, then resumed its slow assault on the land and the cities at the lower end of the peninsula. But for the Professor, cosseted by the eye of the hurricane, the storm has ended; it’s dissipated; gone. The wind has abated, and the rain has ceased to fall. The sky is pale yellow, except at the horizon way out there in front of him over the Atlantic, where it’s dark green and sooty gray, and above the Gulf behind him, where great masses of black clouds have piled up.

  The only storm the Professor is aware of is the one raging inside his brain. The music blasting from the van’s speakers doesn’t work anymore to cool his roiled mind. He’s sweating and has shucked his jacket and necktie and loosened his collar. He has the music cranked up to top volume, trying to make a wall of it around his secrets, but they keep breaking through the sound and make him feel like he’s under attack from them, as if they are hornets and he’s accidentally bumped their nest and busted it apart with his unprotected head. He’s not in physical pain, but he howls as if he’s being stung again and again, and he slaps at his cheeks and neck and the top of his head, slaps at the sides of his enormous, soft arms and his pillowed chest, twists and turns in his seat like a man possessed by a demon.

  The Professor knows very little about his deepest self, but as one who has studied the field and the phenomenon, he knows that this is the point in a secretive man’s long life of compartmentalization and disguise that one’s thoughts turn longingly toward the idea of suicide. This is when the walls fall and the contradictions collide openly with one another. He’s read the literature, the journals, the reports, and has paused over them in deep reflection and vague recognition. There was the Polish writer Jerzy Kosinski, who may or may not have been a Holocaust survivor, and many master spies, and another writer, Michael Dorris, who may or may not have been an American Indian, and doubtless thousands upon thousands of unknown others. That’s as close as he himself can get to the pure idea of suicide, of self-annihilation—close enough to know that it’s a desire felt by others who found themselves in his present situation.

  It’s a desire not yet felt by him, however. He expects it to arrive soon, if he can’t somehow put his lifelong secrets back into the boxes that have held them all these years, held and kept them from knowing of one another’s existence. He drives down the Gulf Turnpike inside the eye of the hurricane, howling in pain and slapping at his body, twitching and twisting away from himself, batting at the idea of suicide, as if fighting off an avenging angel sent by an angry god to torment him.

  One hundred miles east of the Professor’s van, the leading edge of the swirling hurricane has hit the city of Calusa and its sprawl of suburbs and malls, sucking the ocean inland in a widening surge that lifts the waters of the Bay and floods low-lying streets and boulevards. Torrents of rain wash across the highways and turnpikes in foot-high waves. The entire city is in an official hurricane evacuation zone, and most residents of the Great Ba
rrier Isles have already started to migrate inland by car and bus to the county evacuation centers and the suburban homes of friends and family members.

  The winds have followed the rain, quickly increasing in velocity, and soon sixty- and seventy-mile-an-hour gusts are bending the stalklike trunks of palms and tossing their fronds like unraveled turbans, ripping off the branches of live oak and cotton trees and flattening palmettos, disassembling carefully planted hedges and shrubs, shredding flower gardens and municipal park plantings, kicking trash cans over and blowing the contents into the streets and roads and into the canals and the Bay. The sky is low, thickened as if bearing a great weight, and though it is midmorning, it’s dusk-dark, and long lines of vehicles with their headlights on crawl bumper to bumper off the chain of man-made islands over bridges and causeways onto the mainland, merging there and flowing slowly on widening roads toward the slightly higher ground miles from shore, headed in the direction the Professor is coming from, still driving his van inside the eye of the storm somewhere out there just north of the Great Panzacola Swamp, still howling and slapping at his arms and chest like a gigantic, bearded baby lost in a tantrum.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE CITIZENS OF CALUSA ARE ACCUSTOMED to hurricanes at this time of year, and most of the residents who have actual residences have followed the detailed instructions distributed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The day before the arrival of the storm they will have secured their homes as best they could by clearing their terraces and patios of outdoor furniture and toys, and those who have them will have double-tied their boats to pilings or put them in dry-dock storage, brought their satellite dishes inside, rolled their bicycles and garbage carts into their garages. They will have charged their cell phones and portable TVs and installed fresh batteries in their portable radios, gone to the nearest ATM machine and withdrawn as much cash as permitted by their bank, filled the car with gas, shuttered, taped, and in some cases boarded over windows with five-eighth’s-inch plywood, especially the windows with the nice view of the sea or the Bay. They will have put together a family disaster kit, its contents recommended on FEMA’s “Are You Ready” website (http://www.fema.gov/areyouready/hurricanes.shtm): bottled water, nonperishable packaged and canned food, manually operated can opener, change of clothing, rain gear, and sturdy shoes, bedding, first aid kit and all prescription medications, extra pair of glasses, battery-powered radio, flashlight, extra batteries, extra set of car keys, phone list of family physicians, special items for infants, elderly, or disabled family members, pet supplies, and should their neighborhood be secured by authorities after the storm due to damage, a current utility bill to prove residency. They will have an evacuation plan, especially those who live on the Barriers or adjacent to the Bay. Many of those who have pets will have packed a pet disaster kit with a two-week supply of food, bowls, water, portable carriers, collar, tag and leash, cat litter and litter box for the kitties, paper towels, plastic Baggies, and hand sanitizer for the doggies. They will bring their birds’ caged homes with them when they evacuate their own homes, carry their hamsters in closed boxes with air holes cut in the top, their pet snakes, turtles, and lizards, their ferrets and pet tarantulas. They will have had sufficient time, thanks to the official hurricane warning system, to be ready for the storm, and when the storm finally smashes into the city, they will simply slip under it and wait until it passes over and drifts out to sea.

  The men who reside beneath the Claybourne Causeway, however, have neither been warned of the approaching hurricane nor would they be able to prepare for it if they were. Yes, they knew it was on its way, some hearing about it on the radio, a few others reading about it in newspapers pulled from Dumpsters and trash cans, or noticed the citywide preparations and the gardeners and yardmen employed at the hotels and condominium buildings cutting down low-hanging coconuts that the rising wind might otherwise toss through the air like cannonballs. Most of them know the storm is arriving soon, maybe today, possibly in five or ten minutes, but when you have not the means to follow the emergency instructions put out to the citizenry via radio, TV, newspapers, and Internet by city, county, state, and federal agencies, when you are in fact not a member of the citizenry, you tend to discount the warnings to the point where you simply are not aware of any emergency. For you, since you can’t do anything to protect yourself from it, there is no emergency. And so the men who live beneath the Causeway go about their usual domestic business as if a hurricane were not about to descend on them.

  First the rain, then the surge. The pounding rain the Kid can handle. He’s got Einstein and Annie dry inside his tent with him. He’s got his own emergency kit—a half-gallon bottle of Sprite, a big bag of Cheez-Its and a jar of peanut butter to dip them in, his favorite between-meal meal. He’s got his stove and three cans of Spam and six hard-boiled eggs, a week’s worth of parrot and dog food, and a plastic bucket set outside under a drip off the Causeway to catch drinking and wash water. He’s chain-locked his bike to a steel stanchion. He’s got candles, a headlamp with fresh batteries, and the wind-up radio and telescope that the Professor gave him. It’s not exactly FEMA’s kit, but it’ll get him through the worst of what he’s expecting: a couple of boring days of heavy, wind-driven rain.

  The rain hammers on his tent. He’s lit a candle and has pulled out the Shyster’s Bible again and is reading in the book of Numbers. This section of the Bible makes no sense to him because there’s no story. But he likes reading it anyhow. Mostly it’s rules and regulations being laid down by God and His main human Moses upon the ancient Israelites after they got away from the Egyptians. It’s a kind of moral menu for religious fanatics, the Kid thinks. He planned to return the Shyster’s Bible and the packet of papers in the briefcase he grabbed the other night during the police raid but has decided that he’ll read them first, both the Bible and the papers, before trading them back for something useful. Like money. The Shyster has the most money of anyone in the encampment and has been hiring the others to build his shack and buy his groceries and wash his clothes and his dishes and pots and pans. He’s even got Otis the Rabbit doing his cooking.

  The Kid has started reading the fifth chapter of Numbers and it gives him a sudden chill, makes him sit up in his sleeping bag and keep reading: And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Command the children of Israel, that they put out of the camp every leper, and every one that hath an issue, and whosoever is defiled by the dead: Both male and female shall ye put out, without the camp shall ye put them; that they defile not their camps, in the midst whereof I dwell. . . .

  Not cool, the Kid thinks. Even lepers deserve a break and shouldn’t be abandoned and put under a bridge someplace outside the city like garbage just because they’re sick. That’s what hospitals are for. And who doesn’t have issues anyhow? Everybody’s got issues with something. You don’t have to be a convicted sex offender to have issues. He’s not sure what it means to be defiled by the dead but it can’t be as bad as defiling the dead which he thinks means sex with dead people, a thing he’s heard about but has almost as hard a time imagining as sex with little children like the Shyster and most of the other guys under the Causeway are guilty of doing. Even they wouldn’t have sex with dead people but if they did instead of putting them outside the city you’d want to get them to try and talk about it and figure out why it interested them so much. Which probably goes back to their early childhoods and not having any confidence because of stuff that happened to them back then so that the only people they could picture having sex with was people who couldn’t reject them. Like dead people. Or little kids. The trick would be getting them to have enough confidence not to be sexually attracted to dead people. Or little kids.

  Maybe the Professor’s theory about sex offenders is right, he thinks. Put them in charge of something. Something they can’t fail at. So they’ll get enough confidence not to worry about being rejected if they decide to hit on a living adult woman instead of a little kid or a dead person.

 
; The Kid has charged his windup radio and with the volume up as high as it will go is listening on earbuds to WBIG which plays mostly rap with very few advertisements and no news. Rap suits him fine as background music because he can’t understand most of the words and doesn’t especially want to since all the music with words that he’s ever heard hasn’t got anything to do with his real life unless of course it’s used as background music for pornography or for a pole dancer in a strip club for instance. Songs that are just songs are sung by and to people whose lives aren’t anything like his and all they do is remind him of that fact. It’s the steady pulsing beat of rap and the rhymes—the pure sound of the words and not their meaning—that he likes. It’s the same for him with any music, even when it’s just a soft-rock or pseudosamba sound track for a porn film. When the words happen to come in standard white people’s English which is the only language he understands except for a little Spanish he almost always tunes them out and hears only the rhythm and the instrumentation and the rise and fall of the human vocal sounds and uses them to help him concentrate on what he’s looking at which in this case instead of pornography or a stripper is a page of the Shyster’s Bible.

  So he hears neither the rising wind that batters the sides of his tent nor the angry shouts and frightened cries of his fellow residents. The water off the Bay has risen over the sloping ledge at the edge of the concrete island and is now flooding the low-lying flats where many of the men have built their shanties and pitched their tents. Several of the shanties have already been demolished by the surging waves and washed into the Bay. The nearly completed latrine has been tipped over by the wind and floats like a narrow coffin-shaped raft toward one of the support pillars where it is smashed back into scrap lumber. The Greek has pulled his generator up under the overpass to the highest level place he can find there and parked it in the dark cavelike area where until now none of the residents has elected to settle because there’s barely room to stand and it smells of rotted food and human feces and urine. It’s where only the rats have made their nests. No people.