Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

How old are you, Kid?

Twenty-two. Why?

Just wondering. How long have you been living like this?

Like what?

Well, under the Causeway. And now here. Homeless. And on permanent parole, so to speak.

Little over a year. Since I did my time. And I’m not on permanent parole. Just ten years. Nine to go.

How much actual time did you do?

Three months up in Hastings. Minimum security. I got three months off for good behavior, though. Or it would’ve been six months.

You want to tell me what you were convicted of?

No, not especially. Anyhow, you can look it up.

Not if I don’t know your real name.

No shit.

So do you want to tell me your real name?

What is this, a fucking quiz show?

The Professor chuckles. Quiz shows seem to be on everyone’s mind today. The coincidence amuses him and the irony comforts him: quizzes, tests, exams of all kinds are his specialty and have been since he was a schoolboy answering every question correctly on every test from kindergarten through graduate school; going off the charts on IQ tests, pulling perfect scores on his SATs and GREs; and even after graduate school rising through the ranks and becoming the highest nationally rated Mensa member before he was thirty years old. More recently he has moved beyond Mensa to the even more exclusive Prometheus Society, which requires applicants to take the Langdon Adult Intelligence Test, a test specifically designed to winnow qualified membership down to the one-per-million level, compared to Mensa’s paltry one-per-thirty-thousand. The Professor likes tests. It would be more accurate to say that he likes questions, questions with answers that nearly no one other than the Professor can answer. One person in a million.

It shouldn’t be difficult to answer the question of the Kid’s real name. No need to sit around waiting for the Kid to volunteer it. All he has to do is Google his way onto the National Sex Offender Registry, click find offenders, then search by location , and type in Calusa . A map will pop up pocked with little colored boxes, each box representing the location of a convicted sex offender, color-coded red, yellow, blue, and green to indicate the nature of the offense. Red is for offenses against children; yellow is for rape; blue is for sexual battery; and green is for “other offenses,” which is everything from “second-degree sodomy” and “second-degree sexual abuse” to “lewd and lascivious behavior.” That’s probably the Kid’s color, given the relatively short length of his sentence.

Blank boxes indicate the location of a school or playground. For a city the size of Calusa there would be thousands of blank squares and hundreds of green squares on the map, and it would take a while, unless he were lucky, for the Professor to click randomly onto the Kid’s box, and suddenly there on the screen he’d see a mug shot of the Kid, with his real name beneath it, a descriptive history of his convictions, his age at the time of the offense and the age of his victim, last known address, employer’s address, his race, height, weight, eye color, date of birth, and markings. Everything the Professor needs to know in order to start finding out what he wants to know.

It would be more pleasing to him, however, if he could pop the Kid’s real name into the conversation unaided. Relying on the National Sex Offender Registry feels a little like cheating, not that different from his students’ reliance on Wikipedia and other search engines to research their papers. It’s not exactly plagiarism, especially if they acknowledge the source, which they seldom do, but it is lazy and topic specific, so the students rarely learn anything beyond the narrow subject they’ve typed into the subject line. And what they do learn about the subject is no more reliable or authoritative or detailed than what the little colored squares reveal about the Kid’s offense. Yes, his mug shot may come up from under a green box, and maybe he will turn out to have been convicted on a certain date of “second-degree sexual abuse” against an unnamed victim who was eleven years old at the time, let’s say. But was the victim a girl or a boy? Was he or she a family member, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger? What exactly did he do to that little girl or boy? Was it a first offense? Was he alone? And why did he do it?

From his past study of the sexual offender laws of his home state of Alabama, he remembers that a person commits “sexual abuse in the second degree” (1) if he subjects another person to sexual contact who is incapable of consent by reason of some factor other than being less than sixteen years old; or (2) if he, being nineteen years old or older, subjects another person to sexual contact who is less than sixteen years old, but more than twelve years old. The Professor also remembers that in Alabama sexual abuse in the second degree is a Class A misdemeanor, unless that person commits a second or subsequent offense of sexual abuse in the second degree within one year of another sexual offense, in which case the offense is a Class C felony. Calusa’s not in the state of Alabama, but the Professor believes the definition is boilerplate for most southern states. He can check it easily enough. The Professor calls to mind the Internet address of the statute: Code of Alabama/1975/13A-6-67. Acts 1977, No. 607, p. 812, § 2321; Act 2000-728, p. 1566, § 1.

“Kid” is an alias, I take it.

You could say that.

Is it a first name or a last?

Both.

Sort of like Kydd’s Cut, then.

What d’ you mean?

The deep-water channel out there running between the Barriers and Anaconda Key. Kydd’s Cut. It leads from the Bay out to the ocean.

News to me.

Supposedly, the famous pirate Captain Kydd used it when he was prowling the Spanish Main and Calusa was his base of operations. All the other channels between the ocean and the low mangrove islands that were filled in and are now called the Barriers were too shallow for a ship to enter. The only way in or out of the Bay was through that one channel, which Kydd could easily defend with the cannon emplacements that he located here on Anaconda Key and over there by the high-rises on what’s now called Bougainvillea Shores.

No shit. The Kid has finished his eggs. He lights a cigarette and extends the pack to the Professor. Smoke?

No, thanks.

Quit?

Never smoked cigarettes.

Yeah, well, I’m in the process of quitting myself. Tell me more about this Captain Kydd dude, the pirate. How’d he spell it? Like, was it K-I-D, or what?

Variously, as K-Y-D-D and K-I-D-D . A few documents have it as K-I-D-D-E . He was Scottish, born around 1645, a commoner who ran away to sea at a young age. He was executed in London by the British crown in 1701. Actually, he was executed twice. The rope broke the first time, and they had to do it over. Then, as a warning to would-be pirates, they locked his body in an iron cage and hung it from a pole over the Thames River to rot. It hung there for twenty years until it finally disintegrated and the remaining parts fell into the river.

That’s hard, man. The fucking Brits. They’re fucking hard.

He left among his papers a piece of a coded map of the island where he buried his treasure, but no one’s been able to figure out where the island is located. Some think it was off Long Island, others say it’s Oak Island in Nova Scotia. There’s even a possibility he buried his loot on an island off the coast of Vietnam, where he sailed late in his career. On his map the body of water that surrounds the island is called the China Sea, which most people take to be code for Long Island Sound or the Bay of Fundy. But some of us believe it may refer to the actual China Sea, Nan Hai. Which would suggest the island of Cu Loo Hon or possibly Hon Tre, off the coast of Vietnam. I got a little bit involved with that myself back in the early 1980s.