Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  The Kid knows nothing of this five-millennia-long sequence. He only knows what has happened to him in his personal twenty-two-year-long narrative. And of that he’s aware of mostly unconnected bits and thus has no comprehensive sense of his lifetime’s arc. But while he sleeps in paradise beneath the stars and the moon aboard his houseboat deep in the Great Panzacola Swamp with his old yellow dog sprawled on the deck beside him and his companion parrot in a cloth-covered cage next to the dog, he dreams the pictures and sounds of the slow making of his paradise.

  A dream can compress eons into minutes, and that way the Kid lives through thousands of years of silence broken only by the sound of the waves lapping the shore and the clatter of palms in the warm winds off the sea, centuries of birdsong and the mating calls of frogs, the hoot of owls in the night, the splash of a gar snagging a mullet and an alligator’s scrambling rush from shore into the water in pursuit of the gar, a sudden thrash in the saw grass as a panther brings down an unwary deer: everything heard and seen in his dream signifying merely the constant presence of the wind, the sea, and the slow-flowing waters over the land, the search by all the creatures living on the land and in the waters for mates for procreation and the necessary death of one creature strictly to feed another: the natural world in its evolutionary passage through time.

  Centuries pass quickly into millennia, and while the Kid sleeps aboard his boat, continental and global weather patterns shift again. Rainfall, especially in summer and autumn in the north and central parts of the peninsula, is heavy now, creating large shallow inland lakes that seasonally flood and spill over their southern banks onto the drought-dried flatlands beyond, the floodwaters flowing slowly in sheets and wide meandering streams toward the Caribbean and the Gulf where gradually in the lower southwestern corner of the peninsula a vast wetland grows, the beginnings of the Great Panzacola Swamp. Old temperate flora and fauna from the late Pleistocene and the Ice Age get gradually displaced by tropical and subtropical wetland plants, insects, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Large stands of cypress trees appear along the coasts, and mangroves proliferate and spread from the estuaries into the inland waterways, clogging the streams and regularly rerouting them. Tidal ridges laid down at the birth of the peninsula by the action of ancient waves and midden heaps built by the first humans become low-lying tree islands and densely forested hammocks surrounded by sloughs and threaded by slow-flowing rivers and streams.

  It’s on these tree-covered ridges and hammocks and the wet grasslands beyond that the new natives, the domesticated descendants of those early hunters, settle. Calling themselves the Calusas and the Tequestas, they begin to fire and decorate clay pots and manufacture elaborately carved shell and bone ornaments; they develop societies divided into classes of ruling priests, administrators, and workers and build communal longhouses and places of worship with cypress, slash pine, and thatch.

  This is the moment when the serpent enters Paradise. At least in the Kid’s dream that’s how it happens. From the underbrush near the mouth of the Appalachee a half-dozen Calusa men step forward to greet the bearded pale-faced strangers and admire up close their shiny helmets and breastplate armor, their brightly colored pantaloons and their, to the Indians, colossal triple-decker canoe. It should be a simple matter to exchange food and other locally processed and manufactured goods with these humans for some of their steel and woven possessions. For decades they have been hearing about white-skinned people from a faraway land, heard tales of their several gods and their marvelous inventions and weaponry from fellow tribesmen and -women who have traveled overland along the canals and rivers to the peninsula’s eastern coast where the white people are rumored to have made a permanent settlement at the mouth of a river flowing to the sea from the mountains of the north. The Europeans who have settled over there are said to be for the most part peaceful and mainly interested in trade with the natives and fighting off other Europeans at sea.

  It’s hard for the six Calusa men to know which of the two types of Europeans has come ashore here—the traders or the slavers. These fellows seem friendly enough however and are not carrying manacles or chains. In fact they have rowed from their great canoe to the mouth of the river and have spread out on the grassy shore large bundles of beautiful cloth and steel axes and knives apparently for trade.

  The six native men emerge from the palmetto bushes and holding their bows down and their arrows stashed walk gingerly but with a basic trust in their shared humanity toward the Europeans—who draw their steel weapons and quickly surround them and clamp manacles on their ankles and wrists and chain them together.

  The Kid wakes from his dream that has turned into a nightmare. He is swiftly relieved for he realizes that all along he has been asleep and dreaming. Everything’s going to be okay. But then, seconds later, years have passed. Centuries. The last of the twenty thousand Calusas and Tequestas, fewer than three hundred of them now, mostly children and old women and men who have not been enslaved or killed by the Europeans, in a final raid are rounded up by Spanish soldiers and shipped to Cuba.

  There are now no human inhabitants of the swamp and the marshlands surrounding it, no one living on the tree islands and hammocks and in the saw grass plains north and east of the wetlands. From the thousand estuarine islands along the coast to the large central lakes inland the entire region has returned to its paradisal state. The mounds and midden heaps and the cultivated gardens and cornfields are covered over with trees and palmettos, and the longhouses and thatched huts of the villages have fallen to the ground and rotted and disappeared into the soil. The banks of the canals and irrigation ditches have been washed away by flood and hurricane and invaded by mangroves, coco plum, and strangler pine. The man-made grid of canals and ditches has been integrated into the swamp’s vast constantly shifting natural system of waterways, marshes, and sloughs.

  Once again the only sounds and sights in the Kid’s dream are those of a semitropical world in which there are no humans. He believes that he is lying half-awake aboard his houseboat on a mattress beneath a cheesecloth mosquito net with his dog and parrot asleep beside him. He thinks he is awake. He is still trembling but is relieved to have escaped from the Spanish slave catchers and the British soldiers and now from agents sent down from Georgia and the Carolina plantations to sail along the coast hunting escaped African slaves.

  For nearly a century the Kid is the only human being residing in the Great Panzacola Swamp—until he learns that there are many people besides him scattered throughout the wilderness. He’s been joined by people driven south from their ancient Appalachian homeland by the American army, Creek and Miccosukee Indians. He smells the smoke from their fires, hears them chopping trees on the hammocks to build huts, sees them pass along the streams in their canoes, fishing in the sloughs, gathering oysters from the bays. They hunt with rifles and weave beautiful multicolored fabric for their clothing. They call themselves Seminoles and this entire corner of the peninsula has become their homeland, their Seminole nation.

  Gradually in the last few moments the Kid has begun to realize once again that he has not wakened. He only thought he woke: he is still asleep and dreaming. He feels an unease, a serious discomfort with that information. He fears that if he cannot wake from his sleep and break off this dream, something really bad will happen to him. He is afraid that whatever will happen to the Seminoles at the hands of the white people in the century and a half yet to come will also happen to him. It’s as if his personal history has been locked down in a cell alongside their tribal history, as if their fate and the fate of the Panzacola wilderness are now his as well.

  He tries to concentrate and will himself awake. He grunts and groans, trying to make animal noises that he can hear in his sleep and that ought to wake him. But he stays asleep. He says to himself, It’s only a dream, a fucking dream. If I can wake up, everything will be okay, and I’ll be in Paradise again. Really bad things won’t happen to me. I won’t be a loser with no place to live and no friends or
family to turn to for comfort and help and company, I won’t be a pathetic convicted sex offender on more or less permanent parole with a tracker clamped to my ankle, I won’t be an ex-whackoff addict and an ex-porn freak kicked out of the army and without a job, paying my way with probably dirty money taken from a superfat weirdo professor of sex-offensiveness studies who for reasons unknown is paying me to help make people think he’s on a secret spy agency’s hit list. If I can just wake myself up, I won’t be a total limp dick in every way possible. If I can only wake myself up and stop myself from dreaming, I won’t be me anymore!

  CHAPTER TWO

  ALARMED BY THE KID’S GROANS IT’S Annie’s single frightened bark and a squawk from Einstein that wake him from his multilayered dream. And while it would be truly a paradise for the Kid if when he awoke he was not himself anymore he is in fact still the same person he was yesterday when he took his rented houseboat up the Appalachee and anchored it at Turner Slough. The sole consequence of his dream is that he knows today that he’s not living in Paradise like he thought he was last night but in a fallen world and if he had a computer he’d probably be watching porn and jacking off right now.

  But he remembers that he has to feed his companion animals and though his lascivious desires dwindle they don’t quite go away. He learned from the group therapist in prison that there’s a difference between a desire to get high and a craving for it and that the same is true for any addiction, even for an addiction to porn and jacking off. The main difference—according to the therapist who was explaining all this to the inmates in the group which except for the Kid was made up of drug addicts and alcoholics—is that a desire doesn’t go away until it’s satisfied but if you think about something else like feeding your companion animal, a craving unlike a desire will disappear. She told them addicts have cravings, not desires. And although the Kid mostly believed her at the time lately he’s begun to wonder why the cravings keep coming back if they’re not desires. Maybe the psychologists distinguish between the two even though they know there’s really no difference between them so you’ll use a few mental tricks and be able to go for a long time without satisfying either and they figure you’ll lose the desire eventually along with the craving and it won’t matter that there’s no difference between them.

  Until today it was working pretty well for the Kid—since the night he got busted by Brandi and her father he’s had no desires to watch porn or whack off and no cravings either that he couldn’t make dissipate by thinking deliberately of something else. But finding himself in the middle of the Panzacola wilderness alone on a houseboat with Annie and Einstein and feeling first like he was in Paradise and then having to fight his way out of a densely tangled dream of slaves and dead Indians and alligators and other wild animals and reptiles have left him feeling the old cravings for porn again and desire for what has passed for sex since he was ten or eleven years old.

  Glumly he anchors away and steers the Dolores Driscoll out into the slough on a northwest heading in the direction of the Turner River which flows into the slough from what appears on the map to be a chain of small lakes linked by streams wide and deep enough to accommodate a houseboat. By noon he’s already bored with this adventure. It sounded exciting back when he and the Rabbit were discussing it under the Causeway and when he told the Professor of his plan and later when he rented the boat and bought all his supplies from Cat Turnbull. But now it just feels weird and lonely to him in spite of having Annie and Einstein aboard. It’s just water and mangroves and the occasional stand of trees and some jungle flowers and birds he doesn’t know the names of. It’s thickets of mosquitoes and heavy wet heat. Sometimes it’s open water and sometimes it’s dark tunnels winding under overhanging mangroves on streams that curl through the jungle to another stretch of open water. There are plenty of alligators to look at as he passes along the muddy shores of islands and now and then water moccasins and turtles and twice he sees a large silver long-nosed fish with a mouth full of saw-teeth that reminds him of his dream. But the landscape and waterways and the animals, birds, and reptiles and the abundance of tropical and semitropical vegetation and the blood-sucking mosquitoes don’t distract him from his cravings or desires much because even though he’s only been doing it for one night and two days, being on a houseboat in the Great Panzacola Swamp is basically boring to him.

  Maybe what the psychologists and the shrink in prison were trying to get the addicts to overcome was boredom instead of desires and cravings and in reality the main cause for addiction is being bored and his desire for porn and his cravings for a good chub-a-dub are only ways to make his life seem interesting to himself.

  By late afternoon he’s made his way up the Turner River into the second of the chain of three Mullet Lakes, the one called Little Mullet. He decides to put in there for the night and instead of fishing for his supper he’ll heat up a can of Dinty Moore beef stew. He’s already sick of fish even though since he shipped out on the houseboat he’s only eaten it once. Fishing in Little Mullet is boring. Eating fish caught in Little Mullet is boring. He’s thinking that maybe after supper he’ll flop a while in his cot and try running a porn flick in his head and go for a blanket bop and afterward smoke his ninth and tenth cigarettes of the day.

  Then he remembers that he should give Annie a land-walk so she can do her daily business, an idea that partially distracts him for a while. He draws the boat up to an island campsite close enough to step ashore without getting his sneakers wet with the dog in his arms and Einstein perched on his shoulder like a pirate’s parrot and stands at water’s edge watching Annie circle the open sandy space where people who are obviously not scared of alligators or snakes pitch their tents and sniff at the blackened fire pit until she finally squats near a clump of palmettos and does her business. The Kid uses a stick and buries the turd in the sand.

  When he gets back aboard the houseboat with Annie and Einstein he realizes that for about five minutes he didn’t once think about watching porn or jerking off, confirming his theory about boredom being the main cause of addiction because during those five minutes he was wholly and solely interested in watching his dog take a shit and for part of it pretending he was a pirate with a parrot on his shoulder looking for a good place to bury his ill-gotten gains although all he had to bury was a fresh dog turd, and that was all he thought about until he got back to the boat.

  While he cooks and then eats his supper of canned beef stew and drinks two warm beers he wonders what the Professor would think of his theory. One good thing about being with the Professor is that the Kid was never bored. He was sometimes pissed, once in a while suspicious, occasionally admiring, and most of the time confused. Which causes him to remember the crank-powered portable radio that the Professor gave him when he first visited him at Benbow’s and he realizes that he can kick back and be distracted by listening to the radio as long as he’s not too far from so-called civilization to get any reception and if he is then he can always wave off his cravings by doing a little reading in the Shyster’s Bible instead or maybe he’ll check out the Shyster’s briefcase full of papers that’s still in his duffel and which he only glanced at quickly the night the cops raided the Causeway and busted Rabbit’s leg and killed Iggy.

  Okay, so his situation isn’t perfect here and he’s spending a lot of time and energy just fighting off boredom and addiction and still going through porn and masturbation withdrawal but he’s glad all that’s behind him now—living under the Causeway and getting fired from his job at the hotel and camping at Benbow’s and the deaths of Iggy and Rabbit bound together forever beneath the dark waters of Calusa Bay and the hurricane that wrecked the Professor’s planned community for homeless sex offenders. Maybe he was never bored back then like he is now and therefore wasn’t tempted by mental porn flicks and a real-life woodie waiting for his wet hand but he was definitely in a lot of continuous ever-complicating mental pain.

  He digs through his duffel and comes up with the little red plastic radio
with the crank. He turns the crank for five minutes or so until he’s generated enough juice for the power indicator to register green. Switching the radio on he runs the dial up and down without locating a station anywhere except for one signal that’s reasonably free of static and turns out to be the National Public Radio affiliate broadcasting from the town of Belvedere where there’s an air force base and not much else about forty-five miles north of Little Mullet Lake. NPR—the Kid hates that network and all its affiliates that you can’t get away from no matter where in America you go and has never been able to stand listening to it for more than twenty or thirty seconds before flipping the dial on to something else, anything else, even soft rock like James Taylor and Joni Mitchell or college baseball, anything other than National Public Radio with the puzzle-master Will Shortz setting little language-and-number mousetraps designed to make you feel stupid and that weird deep-throated guy who sings folk songs his grandparents liked and tells definitely not-funny stories about pie-eating Lutherans from Minnesota and some breathless woman interviewing writers and politicians you never heard of and of course constant news, national and local news and weather told by people trying to sound like they’re English.