Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

This ain’t exactly a whorehouse, you know. You can’t keep your boy here.

I know. How much a week?

This is a place of business. The kid’s a convicted sex offender. I don’t want cops and social workers crawling all over the place. I already hadda talk to his caseworker or whatever the fuck she is.

I’ll take care of the caseworker. The Kid will only be here for a while anyhow, until I find him proper housing and a job. Maybe you could put him to work a few hours a day a few days a week.

I don’t need helpers. Unless you feel like paying his fucking salary too.

Depends. How much will you charge for his rent?

Let’s say two hundred a week. Up front.

And his salary?

Ten bucks an hour for cannin’ the empties and raking the place and whatever other janitorial duties I think up. Let’s say two hours a day times six days a week. That’s a hundred and twenty bucks a week. Three-twenty a week for the package.

Make it an even three hundred.

I still think you’re a cop. Except it’s usually me paying the cops, not vice versa.

I’ll be back in the morning with the first three hundred. You needn’t mention my involvement to the Kid. Let him think you’re merely a warm-hearted benefactor taking pity on him.

Your call.

Thanks.

Stick around and party awhile, Professor. The night’s young.

Can’t. Got to get home to the wife and kids.

Yeah. Sure.

THE PROFESSOR’S SEVEN-YEAR-OLD FRATERNAL twins are named Rani and Biswas. His wife is named Gloria, but from the day they met he has called her Glory. She’s his pride and glory, he tells her. She’s small and conventionally pretty and knows it’s an indirect, self-deprecating reference, tinged with irony, to his obesity, though she would never say it to him or even to herself. She takes it as a compliment. When he is exasperated by something she has done or said, attempting to soften irony with affection, he lapses into his marshmallowy Alabama accent and calls her Glory-Glory-Hallelujah. As in: Glory-Glory-Hallelujah! Please stop asking me so many questions about the distant past. Damn! Why do y’all insist on hearing from me a narrative y’all can never personally evaluate or corroborate?

I’m not insisting. I’m just—

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. What folks cain’t observe, folks cain’t measure at all. And what we observe, we disturb by observing and thus cain’t measure accurately. The only reliable information about our lives that’s available to us comes to us indirectly via algorithms based upon data generated by our bodies’ auto-response systems. The rest, Glory-Glory-Hallelujah, the rest ain’t nothin’ but fantasy and fear, darlin’, nothin’ but self-serving delusion and illusion.

Oh, please!

Life is a dream, m’dear. It ain’t that y’all don’t need to know my distant past. It’s that y’all cain’t know it. No one can. Not even me. It’s why they call it the past, m’dear. It’s more like the future than it is the present. And y’all never think to ask me about the future, do you now?

It’s not your “distant past” I’m asking about, for God’s sake. And I don’t need another lecture about your philosophy of life. All I want to know is where you’ve been so late.

She expected him home in time to drive the twins to their flute lesson at 5 P.M., so she could prepare dinner for them and they could eat together as a family, and here it is nearly eight and he has missed dinner altogether, and the kids and she once again have found themselves eating alone in front of the TV.

Gloria is a librarian employed at a branch of the Calusa County library system out on the Barriers and is the reason why the Professor has ended up serving on the library board of directors: her descriptions at home of her working conditions and the overall incompetence of her colleagues and superiors convinced him that the entire library system was woefully mismanaged by the cadre of elderly civic do-gooders who sat on the board. There’s not a professional book person, educator, or scientist among them, he noted. The Professor, although a social scientist, rather than a so-called natural or theoretical scientist, was all three. He put his name on the ballot, sent out e-mails to the membership listing his qualifications, and was promptly elected by an overwhelming majority.

Of the four candidates running for the position, one of whom was the eighty-seven-year-old incumbent, the Professor’s résumé was easily the most impressive. Included among his many qualifications were his summa cum laude (Phi Beta Kappa) bachelor’s degree from Kenyon College and his master’s degree in American studies and doctorate in sociology from Yale, his membership in Mensa and the Prometheus Society, his many professional publications and the several anthologies of monographic studies of homelessness that he has edited, his rank of senior tenured professor at Calusa State University, his position as deacon for the First Congregational Church of Calusa, and his volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity.

Which is pretty much everything his wife Gloria knows about him too — at least all she knows about his near and distant past. That plus the few additional bits and pieces of what he calls data that he’s conveyed to her in a seemingly casual way during their courtship and the nearly nine years they’ve been married: that he is an only child, and his father worked as an accountant for U. S. Steel in Alabama; that both parents were killed in an automobile crash when he was in his early twenties off doing fieldwork in Lima, Peru, and he has no other living family members that he’s close to; that he traveled widely for many years doing independent research for private foundations in Asia, Central and South America, and the Caribbean, before settling down to academic life in his middle forties here in Calusa; that he was never previously married nor, as far as he knew, has he fathered any children other than Rani and Biswas (a datum offered in a jocular fashion that implies a possibly hedonistic period in his youth).

The reason I’m late, then. The usual reason. Research. I’ve befriended a young homeless man who’s one of those sex offenders I told you about who are living under the Claybourne Causeway. I was arranging to interview the fellow. He’s naturally suspicious and needs to be courted a little first. He’s camped out on Anaconda Key for now. I went there after finishing my Saturday stint for Habitat.

You might have called me.

Would you have done anything differently if I had?

No. But I wouldn’t have worried.

Did you worry?

No.

Well, there you are, then.

He heads for the restaurant-size refrigerator that they purchased the first week of their marriage, when they realized they’d be sharing food storage, pulls open the door and scans the gleaming contents. Dozens of topped-off plastic, paper, and cardboard containers of ready-to-eat food — potato salad, macaroni and cheese, beef stew, lamb stew, curried chicken, fried chicken, pork dumplings, chicken pot pies, half a ham, chunks of cheese, egg salad, tuna salad, sliced meats, marinated tuna steaks, mashed squash, creamed spinach, meat loaf, Cuban, Chinese, and Indian takeout, Dominican meat patties and Mexican fajitas, and much, much more — all prepared over the last few days by Gloria or, as instructed and listed by the Professor, purchased at the Watson New York Deli or delivered to the house by the nearby ethnic restaurants, everything ready to be eaten cold or else easily heated in the microwave. In addition, stored for his eventual delectation, there’s plenty of backup in the freezer — loaves of bread, cakes, ice cream, custard pies, pizzas and chicken fingers, french fries, onion rings, waffles, and more. He also has a standing order with his wife to keep at the ready a gallon jug of sweetened iced tea and two unopened liters of Diet Coke and a gallon of milk.