Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

K: Right. You must’ve been in the service, Professor. They passed it in the first Iraq War and updated it after 9/11. It bans you from drinking alcohol in Muslim countries plus doing other shit the Arabs dislike that Americans sort of take for granted, like gambling and drugs and borrowing money with interest, which means no credit cards except on the base. And no promoting Christianity. And no pornography. No porn at all. Nada. Not even skin magazines. Not when you’re stationed in an Arab country. The rest of the time the army don’t bother you about porn, so everyone is into it. I mean, what else are you gonna do with your free time? Everybody’s into porn, even the officers. Especially over there in Iraq and Afghanistan I heard. In spite of the rules. It’s practically un-American not to be into porn. Especially if you’re a guy although I heard the female soldiers are into porn pretty heavy too. Downloading from the Internet onto your computers and iPhones and swapping with your friends and family members and sending out pictures of your dick and your wife’s or girlfriend’s tits and bush to your friends and exchanging sex organ pictures with your wife or girlfriend back home to let her know you’re thinking of her and of course triple and quadruple X hard-core DVDs and jack-off magazines and other shit like that. Except for distribution. That’s out. You can collect and swap skin magazines with your buddies. You can watch porn videos and share them with your homies and exchange sex-oriented family photos with your wife or girlfriend or if you’re a female soldier with your boyfriend or husband. But if you’re U.S. military personnel you can’t like distribute porn, even here in the free world. Which is a pretty fine distinction, if you ask me. Between consuming and distributing. You can be one but not the other. Anyhow, I get back to the base from Ottawa with my stash of twenty copies of Willow’s Day Off , and before I have a chance to give them away to the guys, they do a surprise search of the barracks, and they find the DVDs. It’s called a “Health and Welfare Inspection,” but all it is is a drugs and non — U.S. Army issue weapons search. So they grab all my DVDs, even the ones in my personal collection, and impound my computer and toss me in the brig until a week later, when they haul me before the base commander where they had this hearing, and they shit-can me. They gave me a general discharge and my pay and returned my computer, but they kept all the DVDs and my signing bonus money and handed me a one-way bus ticket to Calusa. None of which made my mother happy, except that she was sick of taking care of Iggy by then and could turn his care and feeding back over to me. A good thing for Iggy as it turned out, because in another week or two my mother would’ve probably given him away or dropped him off at a golf course. He was practically dead of starvation anyhow when I got home.

P: Iggy. The iguana.

K: Yeah.

P: So there you are, back in Calusa, living in your mother’s house, without a job, no friends except Iggy. No girlfriend, I assume.

K: Yeah. I never had an actual girlfriend anyhow.

P: So what’d you do?

K: Pretty much stayed in my old bedroom. Watched television. Watched a lot of porn on my computer. I tried to get a job, but when they found out I was discharged from the army before completing basic, they said forget it. Plus my only work experience was in shipping for a light store, and the guy who owned it was murdered and the new guy still thought I was involved, but I wasn’t. I had a little money left over from my army pay and a debit card. So I started making friends and talking with people on the Internet. Not real people, just people I met in chat rooms and such. I mean, they were real enough. They were real girls who liked to talk about stuff. Some of it sex stuff, but mostly just passing the time. Only not people I knew like in person.

P: We’ve talked for an hour already. That went fast, didn’t it? Let’s quit for now and come back to this in a day or so. I still have a lot of questions. Incidentally, Kid, I really appreciate your doing this.

K: No problem. What about the treasure map? Did you bring it?

P: Oh, I’m sorry! I forgot it again! I’ll bring it next time, I promise.

K: Yeah. Try and remember, okay? It’s sort of our deal is how I understand it. Maybe you can bring a compass and one of those GPS things that can locate coordinates like latitude and longitude. You probably know how to use that kind of gear, being a professor and all. Were you in the military? They teach you how to use those things in the military, but I never got to that particular lesson, so I don’t know how to use a map to find a spot that’s marked with an X.

P: Was I in the military? No. When I was your age it was the 1960s, and I was deeply involved with the movement to oppose the war in Vietnam. The only honorable path for me when I was drafted into the army was to refuse to serve, which I did. I spent a little time in the brig myself. I was in effect a draft dodger. And I’ve never regretted it.

K: No shit. How’d you dodge the draft? I heard that was hard unless you said you were a fag. Was it by being so fat?

P: Neither. It’s a long story, Kid. I’ll tell it to you sometime.

K: Yeah, I’d like to hear it sometime. That and the treasure map. I’d like to see that map sometime.

P: You will. I’ll bring it tomorrow. I promise.

A THICK MIST HAS SPREAD ACROSS BENBOW’S settlement. It hovers low over the sandy grounds between the shacks and the bar and trailers, spreading into the mangroves toward the narrow inlet on one side and over the berm out to the point, where the Kid has pitched his tent, and on to the back side of the settlement, where the pickup truck and several vans, SUVs, and panel trucks are parked. As it grows in density and height it blocks the morning sun and blue sky above. The vehicles slowly disappear from view. The half-dozen men and women standing near them fade and are gone. The buildings and trailers and barrels filled with trash and empty bottles and beer cans are embraced and then swallowed by the silver-gray mist.

It’s hard to tell where the mist is coming from or if the entire island has been devoured by it or possibly the whole city of Calusa and its suburbs all the way west to the Great Panzacola Swamp and beyond to the Gulf of Mexico. Or if it originates out there in the Gulf and has been blown east across the vast swamp to the city and the Bay and Anaconda Island, driven by the morning breeze off the Gulf, the breeze stirred to life by the colossal swirl of a tropical storm named George three hundred miles at sea.

The mist here at Benbow’s is now so thick the Kid can’t see a person, building, or vehicle farther than ten feet away from where he stands. It muffles sounds — the lap of low waves off the Bay, the seagulls and waterbirds, the softly rocking, derelict shrimp boats tied to the posts of the crumbling, half-rotted dock by the inlet.

He knows he is not alone here; there must be dozens of other people close by. He heard their cars and trucks crackle across the crushed coral earlier, heard the doors of their vehicles open and slam shut. He heard them talking to one another, giving orders, arguing and discussing work of some kind. But he can’t hear them anymore, as if, when the mist swept in and settled and thickened, one by one everyone left Benbow’s settlement and the island. He can’t see or hear the parrot, because he can’t see the bar where its cage is kept; he doesn’t know north, south, east, or west, for the sun has long since disappeared; he can barely tell right from left.