Lost Memory of Skin
He pushed back from the computer and lighted a cigarette. He was sweating and noticed that his hands were trembling. He was frightened of what he was doing, had done, would do if given the opportunity. But it was too late to back off now. What had begun as an itch had turned into a barely conscious fantasy that had become a plan and now a promise. He wasn’t frightened because she was only fourteen—he had almost blocked that out and besides she looked and sounded older on Facebook and in her e-mails. He was scared and nervous because he had never invited himself to visit a girl at her house alone, had never dared to—no girl had let him believe that he wouldn’t be laughed at for even asking her for more than the time of day. And here this pretty girl was asking him to bring beer and a skin flick and see what happens.
Okay, he’ll see what happens. He’ll have to buy some condoms. How many or what kind or size he wasn’t sure. He’d never bought condoms before, had never even checked the rack to see if they came in different sizes. He figured he’d need extra-large probably unless they only came in one size and were really flexible.
And he’d have to rent a movie from the adult section of Moviemasters, nothing too hard-core, no gangbang or cum-shots although maybe cum-shots are sexy to girls and not just guys. He wasn’t sure what was sexy to girls. Except for vibrating dildo films and the occasional chick-on-chick lesbian films which didn’t really get him excited anymore porn seemed pretty much designed for guys. She was white so she’d probably only want to see white people fucking at least this first time. Maybe down the road she’d be interested in watching a black dude with a donkey-dong getting blown by a white girl.
She’d probably want to see something with a story attached at least at the beginning—one of those movies that start out with the husband going off on a business trip leaving his beautiful wife home alone and horny and this young stud comes over in his tight cutoff shorts and no shirt to clean the pool while she’s watching from the window upstairs and getting all wet so she puts on her bikini and goes down to the pool and lies on a chaise to sunbathe. The pool guy checks her out and asks for a glass of water and she brings it to him from the kitchen and when he finishes and sets the glass down she runs her finger down his bare chest to his crotch. And then the action starts and you don’t need the story anymore till the end where the husband comes home and suggests jazzing up their tired sex life by inviting someone to join them and they look out the window at the pool guy and the next scene has both guys fucking the wife one from behind and her blowing the other and the two guys come at the same time: The End.
He’d look for one of those at Moviemasters tomorrow which was Thursday and watch it alone first to make sure it had enough of a story to interest a fourteen-year-old girl. It wouldn’t matter if it didn’t interest him because he’d already seen it and hundreds of others just like it. He’d be dealing with reality this time. Not illusion. He’d be watching and actually touching a real female human being’s body, skin, breasts, legs, ass, vagina, instead of just pictures made from electronic pixels whose colors and movement and arrangement on a screen were predetermined and controlled by a script and director and a half-dozen camera angles. That’s what frightened him. That’s why his hands were trembling as he lighted another cigarette. He was about to bump up against and break through an invisible membrane between the perfectly controlled world locked inside his head and the endlessly overflowing unpredictable, dangerous world outside.
CHAPTER EIGHT
EVEN THOUGH HE’S STILL NOT SURE WHAT exactly the Professor is after especially with the treasure map bit the Kid mostly trusts him now. Since the night he took the bus out to West Calusa Gardens to visit brandi18 he hasn’t trusted anybody. Period. No one is who he or she seems to be. Not even the other men living under the Causeway. Including the Rabbit who probably made up all those stories about teaching Kid Gavilan how to throw the bolo punch.
That’s okay, the Kid’s not complaining, it’s just the way things are. Everybody has a secret agenda and a secret life. Starting with his mother and moving out from there. Tony Perez had a secret agenda at the light store. Benbow and his goofy sidekick Trinidad Bob. The U.S. Army. It didn’t matter who, people near or close to him, individually and in groups were all using him to advance their own hidden interests. Even brandi18. The Kid was nothing to her except an entertaining fool for her to laugh at and feel superior to. She was maybe the worst. The real problem is that the Kid doesn’t know what his secret agenda is or if he has one.
But something about the Professor has gradually made him seem trustworthy to the Kid. It begins with his size, his enormous body and the way he dresses it. What you see when you first see him is what you get for the duration, a man so fat and tall and wide that you never get used to it—no matter how many times you see him he never looks normal. The bushy beard and long hair and the three-piece suit only add to his size and make no attempt to hide or disguise it. Most fat guys wear loose Hawaiian-style shirts or guayaberas and floppy trousers and try to make their beach-ball faces look smaller with short hair slicked back and going beardless or maybe keeping a trim little Vandyke beard so when you look at them you focus on their eyes and nose and lips and ignore the wide expanse of skin surrounding them. Nothing about the Professor’s appearance is part of a disguise. He doesn’t even wear sunglasses. Just squints in the glare looking like one of those Japanese sumo wrestlers.
The way he talks is trustworthy too. At least to the Kid it is. He talks like a professor, using long clearly pronounced words carefully in complete sentences but slowly said with a noticeable southern accent that the Kid guessed right away was from Alabama or Mississippi where the Kid has never heard of there being any professors so maybe he’s actually more of a regular person than a professor. He’s smart and educated, that’s obvious, but he doesn’t talk like he feels superior to people who aren’t as smart and educated as he is. Most of the people the Kid has met in his life who are smarter and better educated than the Kid either talk down to him from a great height or else try to sound like they aren’t really very intelligent and haven’t even graduated from high school which only makes the Kid suspicious of their attitude. He’s thinking of the social workers and psychologists he met in prison and a couple of teachers he had in high school who tried to get him to join in classroom discussions of current events or the books that were assigned even though the Kid never read newspapers except the headlines or watched the TV news or listened to radio newscasts and had not once read more than the first few pages of any of the books that had been assigned over his entire four years of high school. Most of what he knows about the history of the world and human life he’s picked up from scraps of overheard conversation on the street and at the light store where he worked after school and weekends and from remarks exchanged by his fellow students and later the guys in his outfit at Fort Drum and now the men living with him under the Causeway. The Kid is one of those people who have made up the mass of mankind since the species first appeared on the plains of East Africa two or three million years ago. Most of his troubles arise because he’s a twenty-first-century American and not some ancient East African or an early Cro-Magnon living with his extended family of hunter-gatherers in a cave in prehistoric Spain or a turnip-planting serf in medieval Russia or one of the early Calusa Indians harvesting oysters in the bay as the first ships from Europe hove into view.
He doesn’t think of himself this way, of course—he never heard of Cro-Magnons or Russian serfs and can’t tell East Africa from West—or he didn’t until the Professor came into his life and started interviewing him, just getting him to tell his story and then showing him ways to improve his life by being better organized and more cooperative with the men living under the Causeway with him.
Now slowly he’s starting to realize that he might be not exceptional but at least he’s important simply for being who he is, that he’s not really like the mass of mankind from the beginning of time whose entire lives and everything they chose to do or not to do is deter
mined by their givens, the conditions and circumstances they were born into and the people they found there to accompany them in life. Until now the only living creatures who seemed to care what he did or thought and were therefore affected by his actions and thoughts were Iggy and Einstein the parrot and Annie the dog as if the Kid were closer to being reptile, bird, or four-legged animal than a human being alive and conscious in time with a beginning, middle, and end to his life, all three parts existing simultaneously in each separate part. His subjective life—his accumulated memories, wishes, fears, and reflections in the last few days—has started to take on an importance to him that it never held before. And consequently he’s begun to have a new interest in the subjective lives of the people who are connected to him starting with the Professor but including the men who live alongside him under the Causeway. Even the Shyster whose story up to now he has had no desire to know since he had no story of his own to compare it to.
In the past it never occurred to the Kid to ask questions of the people he associated with. When they volunteered information—bits and pieces of their past and their longings, their dreads and anxieties, opinions and beliefs—he listened more or less politely but did not invite them to continue, to tell more, to clarify and amplify those bits and pieces and he mostly forgot what they told him soon after the telling. Now he finds himself wondering how the Greek got stuck down here under the Causeway, a mechanically clever and entrepreneurial guy who probably ran a successful machine shop or auto garage before he became a convicted sex offender. And P.C.—what’s his story? And how come a smart guy like the Shyster with a law degree and married with a big-time successful political career gets obsessed with having sex with little girls without knowing how weird and harmful it is? What’s up with that? What crossed his wires and when so that he couldn’t recognize evil when he saw it in himself ? What’s going on inside the Shyster? the Kid wonders for the first time. And Rabbit, an old black dude busted up by the cops for probably the tenth time in his life hobbling around down here in the gloom and the damp surrounded by filth and rats and a colony of outcasts—what did he do to deserve this?
And then there’s the Professor. The Kid wonders especially about the Professor. What’s his story? They are in his van headed to the gigantic Paws ’n’ Claws store for supplies and medicine for Einstein and Annie and the Kid asks him to tell how he came to be a professor. He’s never known a real professor before and has no idea how you become one.
Indirection and serendipity. Belatedly. Not by the usual route. For years after I got my Ph.D. I was a paid consultant. For governments, our own and others. And for private interests. Here and abroad. Then I opted for a more settled life, so to speak. Academia.
Cool. What did you like consult about?
Various things. Cultural anthropology, let’s call it. Local customs and politics in far-flung places.
The Kid would like to interview the Professor. He’d like to ask him what serendipity means. And cultural anthropology, what’s that? There’s a lot the Professor could teach him. And now that he’s starting to have a story of his own he’d like to know the Professor’s story even though very little of it would be of any use to him. He has no desire to ever become a professor himself and never intends to use the word serendipity in a sentence no matter what it means and the only reason he wants to know the meaning of cultural anthropology is so that he can better understand the Professor’s story.
But the Professor’s a hard guy to interview. You ask him a simple direct question and he goes all complicated and indirect on you. The Kid tries asking him his age and the Professor answers with a question and chuckles as if he’s amused, Why do you ask?
The Kid explains that it’s hard to tell how old he is because of the beard and his size—he chooses not to say fat.
How old do you think I am? Another question.
The Kid guesses fifty and the Professor says, Close enough. Not really an answer.
He tries another tack: So where are you from? Originally. You got sort of a southern accent, you know.
Do I?
Yeah. What’s up with that? I didn’t know professors could have southern accents.
It’s sort of a disguise. Most of my students have southern accents. It puts them at ease if I have one too. It’s become a habit.
The Kid decides to come from another angle: What about a wife? You married?
The Professor just nods. Again, not really an answer but it’ll have to do. The Kid pictures the hugest woman he’s ever seen, a woman the size of a small car. It’s hard to imagine a man this fat being married to a woman not equally fat. But the Kid doesn’t know how to ask if his wife is as fat as he is. It’s what he wants to know though. Interviewing this guy is like trying to pry open a giant clam with only your fingers.
Kids? And here the Kid is obliged to picture the Professor having sex with his enormous wife, both of them naked and pink and hairy, their arms and bellies and thighs flopping and smacking against one another like slabs of beef and the Kid is sorry he asked—it’s the worst porn film he’s ever called to mind—and hopes the Professor says No. No kids.
But instead he says, Your curiosity piques my curiosity. Why the sudden interest in my private life?
I dunno. I guess on account of you being so interested in my private life. Interviewing me and all.
My interest in your private life, my friend, is strictly professional. I’m a social scientist and right now you are my object of study.
Like I’m a lab rat, you mean? In some kinda experiment?
In a manner of speaking, yes. But you needn’t worry. In the social sciences we take excellent care of our lab rats. Their life expectancy is nearly twice as long as in the wild.
The Kid says, Thanks a lot, and the Professor chuckles again and pulls the van into the parking lot of the Paws ’n’ Claws box store and parks.
CHAPTER NINE
THE PROFESSOR’S STORY ACCORDING TO THE PROFESSOR:
Since childhood, though the Professor has been celebrated for his remarkable memory, he’s a man whose life and mind are carefully compartmentalized, methodically divided into boxes that rarely share a single side, and when he’s living in one box or remembers having lived there and can therefore recount it to himself or to someone else, his wife, for instance, or colleagues or students or strangers or even the Kid, he has no memory of ever having lived anywhere else. It’s one of the reasons, when asked a direct question about his past or present life, he answers vaguely, indirectly, ambiguously, or changes the subject altogether. His life has no single unifying narrative. It has many distinct narratives, each of them internally consistent, with a beginning, middle, and end, but none of them is connected to the other, and for the most part none of them is even aware of the other’s existence.
He’s not a person with multiple personalities, however. In all his memories and accounts of his memories, no matter how they differ from one another in cast of characters, locale, and resolution and no matter the variety of roles he plays, he always presents the same personality to the world, just as he always presents the same physical body. All his adult life he has looked more or less the same as he looks now. As a child his body was merely a child’s version of the body he came to inhabit later. And all his life, man and boy, he has had the same affect, the same manner of speaking, the same set of facial expressions and physical gestures, the same bemused, slightly condescending chuckle. It’s why when he was a child he seemed so oddly and captivatingly adultlike.
Nor is he a pathological liar or even in the strict sense a liar at all. Because he’s able and is actually compelled when living in one box to forget the existence of the others, his descriptions of his life are truthful. He could have been a great actor. Perhaps great actors possess his same ability to play many different roles, from Caliban to Othello to Lady Macbeth, from Uncle Vanya to Blanche Dubois to Mother Courage, all the while never changing their essential personality, and in the Professor’s case never changing his co
stume either.
It would be easy to credit this unnatural mix of variety, inconsistency, and relentless constancy to his early childhood obesity and his amazing intelligence, to note how at the start of his life they situated him at the extreme outside edge of human interaction, imposing early on in an unusually sensitive and emotionally responsive child a sense of himself as both different from other children, almost freakishly so, and as special. His parents reinforced his sense of specialness, his exceptionalism. Everyone else helped him to feel at the same time strange and ill-formed, both more and less than human.
The Professor knows this much about his formative years. He wouldn’t argue that his oversize body and wildly praised and publicized precocity simultaneously alienated him from everyone and at the same time made him feel superior to everyone, even to his parents. Though his parents doted on him and they genuinely loved him, they also exhibited him to the world and basked in his reflected light, as if his unusual intelligence and intellectual and academic achievements embellished their own. They saw themselves as having been inexplicably exiled to a small mining town in Alabama where their natural aristocracy and refined educations were insufficiently honored, where no one, except each other, properly appreciated them, where the Professor’s mother was merely the town librarian, a position formerly held by unmarried older ladies not quite qualified to teach school, and where his father was merely the manager of the local absentee-owned coal mines, a kind of plantation foreman whose authority was derived from a higher authority located elsewhere, in a mansion on a hill in Pittsburgh.
Their son, therefore, was their homegrown exotic orchid, and they nurtured and nourished the innate qualities that distinguished him from the garden-variety flowers their neighbors grew. He was a large baby at birth, over eleven pounds, which amazed and delighted the doctor and nurses who helped deliver him, and led his parents to overfeed him from the day they brought him home. His appetite and expectations regarding food soon turned into need, as if he would shrivel and die if he were not overfed, and they now had no choice but to continue providing him with great heaping quantities of food at every meal and before and after meals until by the time he was three years old he spent more of his waking hours eating than doing anything else. By the time he was four, when not asleep he was reading and thus was able to take nourishment full-time. His mind and his body grew apace, and the world, at least the world of Clinton, Alabama, took notice of both and marveled. This pleased the Professor’s parents. The child saw this, and though it made him wish to please them still more, just as their overfeeding him had only increased his hunger, so too he came to feel superior to his parents at the same rate and in the same way that he felt superior to other children and their parents. By the same token, he felt different from everyone, including his parents. Alienated, isolated, alone. Utterly alone.