Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

But lately he’s started to wonder if the authorities have been misrepresenting the originals here and there or at least interpreting them in a way that is more to their own advantage than to the good use of people like the Kid who are both ignorant and pretty much powerless and therefore usually have to depend on the authorities to tell them what’s right and what’s wrong.

For instance he wonders where in the Holy Bible or the U.S. Constitution or the Declaration of Independence or Shakespeare it says you aren’t supposed to try and have sex with anyone under the age of eighteen. He’s pretty sure that somewhere in the Bible it says God doesn’t want you to have sex with animals or with your mother or your sister or daughter. Shakespeare was probably against all that too. Who wouldn’t be? But what about sex with hard-bodied flirtatious fourteen-year-old girls with navel rings and tattoos and you’re not related to them? What does the Bible have to say about going online and trying to have sex with them? Shakespeare might even be for it.

Some things have been viewed as obviously wrong for thousands of years which is the main reason they’re illegal. At first they’re regarded as immoral pure and simple — God’s law whether you believe in Him or not — and then when people keep doing those immoral things anyhow which is the same as breaking God’s law the majority of human beings gets together and votes to make them illegal as well. Man’s law. That’s okay, the Kid can live with laws like that. It’s democracy in action and everybody including the Kid is in favor of democracy.

Then there are man-laws that are more like rules you agree to obey only they aren’t backed up by the Bible or any of those other ancient writings and if you break them you’re punished which is to be expected but it’s not because you’ve done something morally wrong. You’ve not broken God’s law, you’ve just broken a rule. Like when you join the U.S. Army which has a rule against distributing porn and you go ahead and do it anyhow because you want all your buddies to have a DVD starring your favorite porn actress and you want them to like and respect you but you aren’t aware of the rule against distributing porn so you get kicked out of the army. That’s like breaking a contract because you didn’t read the fine print. Or you didn’t realize that the lease said no pets. Too bad for you is all. It’s not necessarily wrong. Just stupid. Nobody pretends it’s immoral or against the Holy Bible or Shakespeare the way they do if you try to have sex with someone who says she’s fourteen years old and tells you to come on over.

The Kid needs to check out God’s law. So he opens Larry Somerset’s Holy Bible to the book of Genesis and starts reading. It’s the King James Version and he can tell right away that even though it’s supposed to be in English it’s in more like a foreign language than any English he’s ever read before. Still with a little work and concentration he can figure out most of what’s being said there. It reminds him of the dialogue in certain video games and movies about Vikings that are set in medieval times.

Right from the start God seems to be the president or the king of the universe and in charge of everything in it including the sea that surrounds it and the skies above. The various firmaments. Seven days go by in which He sets everything up so He can rule without any opposition and if He wants can even kick back and rest every seventh day. By then He’s got people living there, a man anyhow that He made from blowing into a pile of dust. God’s first real citizen. God’s homey. His name is Adam.

The Kid sort of knows where this story is going but he keeps on reading anyhow. For the details. He likes the details. He can visualize the story and what you can visualize you can imagine. He’s imagining Calusa thousands of years before the white people arrived. Calusa and the Bay and the Barrier Isles and Keys and the Great Panzacola Swamp back when there weren’t any people living here, not even the Panzacola Indians. Only Adam and Eve. And no skyscrapers or hotels or malls or interstate highways and the whole of this part of the continent was covered with jungle and mangroves and the waters were filled with manatees and porpoises and crocodiles and endless schools of fish and whenever vast flocks of birds crossed overhead the skies darkened as if the sun were blocked by passing clouds.

He can’t quite picture God except as a huge ball of light with an old man’s deep voice like in the pickup truck ads on TV coming out of the ball of light dictating the way everything in Eden is supposed to work. God’s got one big rule — no eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This is the first real basic right-versus-wrong rule that he’s seen in the Bible so far.

No eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, okay?

He likes that distinction: there’s good and there’s evil. Evil is worse than bad. And it’s a lot worse than merely dumb or unlucky or illegal. That’s what makes God’s rules superior to all other rules: if you break one you’re not just dumb or even bad, you’re fucking evil ! You have knowingly disobeyed God. To be evil is to be bad in an extreme way — sentenced to life without parole and locked up in hell for eternity after you die. If you believe in hell, that is. Which the Kid does although he does not believe in heaven. When you’ve had a life like the Kid’s so far it’s a lot easier to believe in hell than in heaven. Same as with God whom the Kid believes in when things go right but not when things go wrong. Which doesn’t make him an atheist exactly or an agnostic. Just inconsistent.

Finally the talking snake comes into the story and it gets seriously interesting to the Kid especially because the Snake which in the Bible is called a serpent reminds him of Iggy somehow. He wonders if Iggy who is definitely a reptile could properly be called a serpent as well. Don’t go there, Kid. He doesn’t want to think about Iggy wrapped in a sleeping bag at the bottom of the Bay. But he doesn’t want to fall asleep either because he’s afraid the cops might come back in spite of what P.C. told him. And he’s afraid of his dreams. Don’t go there either. So he keeps reading.

The Snake complicates the story which makes it suspenseful for the first time. The Kid tries to warn Adam and Eve: Don’t fall for it! The Snake’s only trying to make trouble between us humans and God! But he’s too late. The woman — probably because women are more trusting than men or at least they were back then in the beginning — believes the Snake. And of course once she’s taken a taste and likes it she talks Adam into eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil too. And suddenly they go from feeling innocent and like babies not even aware that they don’t have any clothes on to feeling guilty and also ashamed which is worse than just feeling guilty and when God shows up again to check on how His garden’s doing they hide in the bushes. When God calls Adam out at first Adam says I didn’t do it. Then he claims that actually the woman made him do it. And the woman turns around and says the Snake made her do it.

The Kid knows how they feel. He’s felt that way since he was about eight or nine. Maybe even younger. First you deny that you did it and then when it’s obvious you’re lying you blame somebody else. It’s what people do when they’re ashamed. It’s always about sex too. First it was from watching his mother making it with some guy and then it was from jerking off all the time since he was ten and then skin magazines and Internet porn and when he got older it was porn DVDs and shows at sex clubs and sex chat room conversations on the Internet with teenage girls until finally he got caught in the act so to speak and busted by the cops and it’s all on YouTube for the whole world to watch and judge.