Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  The Writer goes back to the e-mails and quickly scans three or four in particular, wincing as he reads. He asks the Kid what makes him think this Doctor Hoo is in fact his professor friend.

  The Kid hesitates before answering, as if afraid of the answer. Finally he says, I just know it’s him. I mean, I believe it’s him. Because of all that stuff in there about little buried treasures, which you can tell are in reality little kids for sex, and secret maps, which are Internet kiddie-porn sites, and the mentions of Captain Kydd, who is himself. It’s like a code. It’s not really about pirates. It’s about sex with little kids and how to find them on the Internet. And it’s like all a big joke to those two. Anyhow, the Professor sort of talked like that. Nobody else talked that way. Nobody I ever met anyway. Especially that stuff about Captain Kydd. He used the same words when he was telling me about him and the map and so on. Only I thought at first he was talking about a real secret treasure map and an actual pirate’s treasure and that there was a real island where it was buried. I even got into trying to find the treasure using this old map that he gave me that was supposedly Captain Kydd’s secret map. I thought maybe it was buried under the Causeway, which was originally an island before they paved it with concrete and built the Causeway over it. That’s how dumb I was. I even thought because his name is spelled the same as mine maybe he was related to me.

  The Writer scratches his bristly beard and continues to peruse the e-mails, as if looking for something to argue against the Kid’s conclusions. He doesn’t want to find himself trapped in dark self-designed delusions: he’s all too familiar with his affection for bad news and conspiracies. It’s had a negative effect on his career. After a moment he asks the Kid if he thinks the person who told the police where to find the Professor’s body was Big Daddy. The Shyster.

  The Kid says no, the Shyster wouldn’t have known where to send the cops unless the Professor tipped him off in advance where he was going to drown himself. Which he wouldn’t have been able to do via e-mail since the Shyster can’t go online anymore due to being a convicted sex offender. Plus the Kid is pretty sure that when the Professor met the Shyster in person down under the Causeway he had no way of knowing he was actually meeting Big Daddy. Any more than the Shyster knew he was meeting Doctor Hoo. No, it had to be somebody else who called the cops.

  Who?

  Yeah, Hoo. Could’ve been Doctor Hoo himself, assuming he was definitely gonna kill himself then and there. So maybe he made a last-minute 911 call or mailed a tape to the cops or a letter scheduled to arrive a few days after he did the deed.

  The Kid goes silent for a moment. The Writer asks if he has anything to drink and the Kid says sure and gets up and digs two cans of beer out of the cooler, apologizing for their not being very cold. He forgot to buy more ice from Cat earlier. The Kid sits on the edge of his cot again and goes back to stroking Annie’s forehead. Without looking up he says, Or else it was somebody else. Somebody not Big Daddy or Doctor Hoo. Somebody who bike-locked him to his van and then drove the van into the canal. Somebody who wanted the Professor’s body discovered and ID’d and declared a suicide.

  The Writer looks him over carefully. You know something I don’t know?

  Sort of. I shouldn’t be telling you all this. You’re probably gonna write about it.

  The Writer shakes his head. No way I’ll write about it.

  Yeah? Why not?

  Who’d want to read it? Kiddie porn and child molesters, pedophiles and suicidal college professors? Jesus! Besides, I’m just a freelance travel writer, not some kind of investigative journalist or a novelist trying to depress people. I have to make a living. The stuff I write is designed strictly to make people want to spend money on hotels and airlines that advertise in my employers’ magazines. Believe me, this is not a story likely to be welcomed by the Calusa County Chamber of Commerce or the local tourist board. They’d probably pay me not to write it.

  Throughout this conversation, throughout the entire afternoon, the Kid has felt himself warming to the Writer, feeling less and less suspicious of his motives and intentions, enjoying the man’s company, not because the Writer is amusing or especially friendly like Dolores or even interesting in a challenging way like Cat but because the Writer’s jumpy ongoing attention makes him feel less alone in the world. Even before the Professor disappeared, from the moment that he turned over the DVD of their interview and paid him to deliver it to his wife Gloria the Kid has felt unaccountably lonely. Up to this point the Kid has rarely felt loneliness—he had been merely one of those people who later, after it comes out that he’s an assassin or a terrorist, is described in puzzlement by people who knew him as a “loner,” a quiet solitary boring person who seemed to have no family or friends going all the way back to childhood, someone who was incapable of committing the act that made him however briefly the center of the known universe. And with the Professor’s DVD in hand and ten thousand dollars in his duffel the Kid has unexpectedly gone from being a mere loner to someone desperately lonely, as if for the first time in his life he’s potentially the center of the known universe only nobody knows it yet.

  It’s because the Kid possesses information that no one else has. And he’s starting to believe that if he shares it with the Writer it will give him the feeling of actually being at the center of the universe which will in turn end his loneliness, at least until everyone else has the same information. Maybe then he’ll have to come up with something else that only he possesses and find someone else like the Writer to share it with. But for now he decides to tell the Writer about the DVD in which the Professor aka Doctor Hoo predicts his own assassination by secret government agents who will stage his death as a suicide caused by the threat of imminent public exposure of a shocking sexual scandal.

  He begins with the dark and stormy night of Hurricane George after the Professor picked him and Annie and Einstein up at the flooded encampment under the Causeway and brought them to his house. He adds in passing that the Professor’s wife had just left him and had gone to her mother’s with their two kids. He doesn’t mention her note taped to the refrigerator door.

  So you were alone with him. Did he try anything? Anything . . . sexual, I mean.

  The Kid laughs at that and says that the Professor’s only interest in him was for testing out some dumb theory he had about making homeless convicted sex offenders into sexually normal people. It had something to do with organizing them into little committees and voting on how to run the camp under the Causeway and various aspects of personal hygiene and the Kid and the other men living there had more or less gone along with it for a while until the hurricane hit.

  It takes the Kid fewer than five minutes to summarize the content of his interview with the Professor, partly because he neglects to include in his account anything about the ten thousand dollars. Though from the beginning it must have been a part of the Professor’s plan, taking the money is more about the Kid than the Professor and it still slightly embarrasses him. He merely says that he was charged with the responsibility of getting the DVD of the interview into the hands of the Professor’s estranged wife so that she will believe that he did not kill himself and the sexual scandal was bullshit.

  To the Kid’s surprise the Writer who he thought was the skeptical type, being a writer and all, easily believes his brief description of what the Professor said in the interview. He buys into the Professor’s account of why he will be murdered and who will do the murdering. He believes that it will be made to look like a suicide and that information about the Professor’s involvement in a sexual scandal probably involving pedophilia, child pornography, and child prostitution, though false, is about to be made public. The Writer believes all this because he believes in conspiracies and that in fact there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of secret government operatives with supernatural competence, double and triple agents, spies and moles working outside the law. And apparently for many years the Professor was one of these operatives—he was a certified genius
after all—and must have been about to go off the reservation as they say in the movies and perhaps write a tell-all book or turn a stash of secret documents over to a blogger or testify to a congressional committee and reveal all the heinous deeds committed for decades by agencies that we don’t even know exist. The Professor had become a threat to national security and was therefore dispensable.

  The Writer says, So it wasn’t a suicide after all! Wow! That explains a lot.

  Like what?

  Like how the cops knew where to look for his body. The quick official designation of his death as a suicide. The way he was chained to the steering wheel and accelerator. Et cetera.

  Suddenly, having revealed to the Writer the Professor’s account of his approaching death and seeing how easily the Writer accepts it as the truth, the Kid no longer believes it himself. There’s a big difference between knowing something is true and believing it’s true and the Kid doesn’t want to be a believer. They were bike locks, he points out again. Not chains. Bike locks are cool. Chains are definitely uncool.

  The Writer cocks an eyebrow and stares at the Kid. You think he was trying to tell us something?

  Maybe. Yeah. That the suicide is a phony. Maybe he was trying to tell us he didn’t really kill himself, someone else did it. So his wife and anybody with a suspicious nature wouldn’t buy the Big Daddy and Doctor Hoo kiddie-porn and suicide story, which he figured was gonna come out and is why the Shyster was saving those e-mails. The Professor must’ve known it was coming. Like he says on the DVD. But when you think about it, it’s like he went to too much trouble to make his so-called suicide look phony.

  What do you mean, too much trouble?

  If these super-spies and all are so good at killing people who they don’t trust anymore, they oughta be able to fake a suicide without clamping the guy to his car with bike locks and driving it into a canal, right? I mean, he’s such a fat guy they could’ve made him run on a treadmill or up and down a beach dune until he had a heart attack and died and they could just leave him there. They coulda pushed him off a bridge if they wanted to fake his suicide. Drop him off a boat in the Gulf. There’s a hundred different ways to make it look like a suicide without also making it look like a murder. If that’s what you want. The only one who wanted it to look like a murder was the Professor. But he also wanted to make it look like a suicide. He needed it both ways, or nobody’d believe his story. The murdered ex-spy cancels out the child-molester professor. And vice versa. They both disappear. Like that snake slithering into the swamp.

  And we end up not knowing which one he really was.

  Maybe he was both, the Kid says. Maybe neither. He was supposedly a genius, remember. And he liked playing games with people.

  What’re you going to do with that DVD?

  Take it to the wife. Like I said I would.

  Tomorrow?

  Yeah, I guess so.

  I’ll drive you there. I’ll cancel my flight back and take you to the Professor’s wife.

  You’re not gonna write about this, are you?

  God, no!

  Where you gonna stay the night?

  I’ll rent myself a houseboat so I can write about sleeping in a houseboat deep in the Great Panzacola Swamp instead.

  Research.

  Yep.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WHEN THE PROFESSOR’S WIFE ANSWERS the Kid’s light knock on the door she opens it only a crack at first, as if expecting someone she doesn’t want to speak to: another reporter or a nosy neighbor faking concern and offering condolences and a casserole; or a police officer with more of her husband’s “effects” as they call his clothing and the contents of his pockets and car. Her skin is chalky white and dry and she has large dark circles under her green eyes. She doesn’t appear to have been crying, but she looks haggard and exhausted as if she hasn’t slept for days. Her shoulders are slumped and her hands, even though both are clamped to the edge of the door, tremble visibly.

  She pushes the door open a few more inches and peers out at the Kid and the big bearded white-haired man in the Hawaiian shirt and baggy shorts standing behind him and asks them what they want. Something about the small young man with the military buzz cut is familiar to her. Did he do some yard work for them? He looks like the kind of young unskilled white man who does yard work for people in neighborhoods like this. Or maybe he’s selling magazine subscriptions and the older man behind him is his supervisor who’s training him.

  The Kid asks if she’s the wife. He can’t remember her actual name—the only time he saw it was on her typed good-bye note that she taped to the refrigerator and the Professor barely mentioned her by name, just referred to her as my wife. To the Kid therefore she’s the Wife so that’s what he calls her.

  She says yes and asks them again what they want, a little less confrontational now than the first time. She opens the door farther. She’s starting to remember that she met the young man briefly at the library once, but is unsure of the circumstances or when—recently no doubt. Possibly she interviewed him for an afterschool job but did not hire him. But if she met him at the library and it was about a job she never gave him, why would he seek her out at home?

  Oddly—at least it strikes her as odd—she likes his looks, especially compared to the looks of everyone else she’s had to talk to lately: she likes the angle of his cocked head and the way he stands at an opposing angle with all his weight on one foot like a watchful bird. He seems slightly bored and a little annoyed with having to stand here at the door. He doesn’t appear to want anything from her. She likes that too. Everyone else has wanted something from her—information about her husband mainly, his disappearance and death—and has tried to conceal that fact with false expressions of sympathy and insincere offers of comfort and help: neighbors, friends and colleagues from the library and from her husband’s university, the several reporters who called on her, the police. Even her mother. If there’s anything I can do . . . , Don’t be afraid to call on us . . . , I know how hard this must be for you, ma’am, but. . . .

  She knows what people thought of her husband when he was alive—he was not a popular or particularly admired man to anyone except his wife and his children—and she knows what they think of him now that he’s committed suicide and abandoned that loving wife and those well-behaved pretty children, the only people who knew him and did not think he was odd and ugly and arrogant. But he is or rather was a very intelligent man, people always note that. A genius.

  But nobody likes a genius. Especially one who is obese and eccentric. And she knows—because of the way he killed himself and because he was a fat weird opinionated genius—that everyone thinks the Professor had secrets, dark secrets, probably secrets of a sexual nature. People who are neither fat nor geniuses always think fat people who are geniuses have strange secret sex lives. And because she was married to him and bore him two children, people probably believe that she too has, or rather had, a strange secret sex life. She senses the presence of that belief especially now in friends and colleagues as much as in strangers. Even in her mother. It’s one of the reasons she was hesitant about leaving the children with her mother while she dealt with the aftermath of her husband’s disappearance and death. But her mother had said, Please, dear, please let me help by taking care of the children for a few days. You have enough to handle, Lord knows, and with me they’ll be more protected from the . . . from the facts of the situation.

  As if the facts were somehow sexual. And peculiar. But they weren’t. Were they?

  The Wife’s mind is primed by her darting dark thoughts, so when the Kid says, I have something your husband wanted me to give you, and holds out a clear plastic case with what looks like a CD inside she remembers suddenly and clearly her one and only meeting with the Kid. He’s the same skinny young man who walked stiff with anxiety into the library on Regis Road one afternoon and asked her to help him look up his neighborhood, his own house in fact, on the National Sex Offender Registry. His is the face that came up
on the computer screen, the convicted sex offender who said he was sorry and she told him not to be sorry. Although she had no idea what she meant by that. Ever since, she’s wondered what she was thinking then and has wished he had not fled and instead had stayed and told her what he was sorry for. Whatever it was, she was sure, from the horrified expression on his real face when he saw its digitalized version on the computer screen and from the rigid quick-stepping way he steered his body from the library like a mortified comedian in an early silent movie, that he could not have done something that he should be sorry for. She has believed ever since that she was not wrong to tell him that.

  At the same instant the Kid recognizes her too. She’s the fizzy red-haired research lady at the library he was dumb enough to ask for help the afternoon he wanted to see for himself what anybody in the world with a computer and an Internet connection could see. He remembers the afternoon with embarrassment and shame. It’s how he remembers most of his life up till then only sharper because that was the afternoon before the night the cops tore up what passed for his home and killed Iggy. It was the afternoon before the next morning when he was humiliated by the bikini babes on Rollerblades and then got fired from his job at the Mirador on account of his joke about the guy at O. J. Simpson’s table who wanted half a pear. His first and only visit to the library was when everything started going from bad to worse, from simple to complicated, obvious to confusing. It was the day before the night the Professor first came knocking at the door of his tent. And now it’s suddenly all come full circle and feels almost like he’s back at the library again looking at his mug shot on the computer screen with the nice research lady except that it’s much worse this time because not only does she know some of his secrets he knows some of hers.

  The Wife’s tired eyes get very large and her mouth opens to speak but nothing gets said. She nods and takes the plastic case from the Kid’s extended hand in silence. For a moment the Wife and the Kid stare at each other as if waiting for an answer to a question that neither of them wishes to ask.