Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

The Professor suddenly realizes his mistake. He thought the images of children were being directed at children. No, the viewers are meant to be adults. Adult men, not women. Men with money. Young men too, and even adolescent boys. The dance would be meaningless to children and women, even as a mood or atmosphere. The figures of two boys and two girls caught between movement and stillness like figures on a Grecian urn would have no sexual charge and no ability to arouse in anyone a possessive desire of even a material nature — except in an adolescent or adult American male. Maybe not just strictly American males. Maybe all males above the age of puberty would feel erotic heat from the sight, once the digital work was done and some thumping music added. You wouldn’t even need a narrative voice-over to get the job of selling done. The images of nearly naked children floating through clouds in an abandoned shantytown on an island thousands of miles from civilization — that could be enough to sell the targeted male viewer anything. A luxury automobile, cologne, a ticket on an airplane, a bottle of vodka, a hip hotel room with an oversize flat-screen plasma TV at the foot of the king-size bed and a full-length mirror on the opposite wall.

The Professor eases himself from the van and peers into the fog, looking for the Kid. It’s like a London fog, only without cold, damp, uptight London. It’s a semitropical island set instead, it’s the end-of-the-road, beyond, before or after the rise and fall of civilization, where nothing matters and everything is permitted.

They are selling an atmosphere, a mood, a feeling of low-key, nonthreatening sexual arousal that can be associated with a product, any product. The advertisers will add the product later digitally. Its mere name will be enough, or a flash of the thing itself, if the product is indeed a thing and not a singer or a song laid in behind the imagery. But can’t a singer or a song be construed as a thing? A product. It’s the imagery that does the selling, the Professor reasons, and the imagery is sexual, an old story, except that in this case, it’s sex of a particular kind: barely conscious fantasies of pedophilia.

He wonders if it was always so, if it’s characteristic of the species for adult males to lust after the very young of the species. No other mammal shares this trait, if indeed it is a trait and is not, as he suspects, socially determined. He is a sociologist, after all, not an anthropologist or biologist. For him, social forces are the primary determinants of human behavior.

Even among the other higher primates, our cousins the chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and bonobos, the adult males show no sexual interest in young females until after they pass menarche and are capable of breeding. But for the higher primate that we call Homo sapiens, the most socially determined creature of all, was it always so? Have Catholic priests always preyed on their young charges to such a scandalous degree that no parish in the world seems to be without a priest mutually masturbating his pretty young altar boys? Have cities in the past ever found themselves struggling to monitor and house whole colonies of pedophiles, creating an entire body of law and a nationwide tracking system designed to protect the young from sexual predators? The Professor doesn’t think so.

To learn which crimes flourished in a specific period social scientists look to the period’s legal code. For the Professor, the need to reason backward from prohibition to behavior is a fundamental principle. He teaches it early and often. Specific laws against piracy, slavery, infanticide, sedition, and ground and air pollution and smoking reveal the antisocial activities likely to attract a reckless, greedy, frightened, mentally disturbed, or merely weak man or woman of a specific era. Until the modern, postindustrial era there have been very few laws against pedophilia, the Professor reasons, because there was not thought to be a need for one. Adult males of the species were not thought to be sexually attracted to premenarche children. If on occasion they were, it was sufficiently regulated by the family’s interests in protecting their young from predation. It generally only happened within the family anyhow — the weird uncle or cousin was not allowed to babysit the kids. Thus, until recent years, very few laws were passed against it. It was not thought necessary. The family, or at most the tribal elders, can handle it. Keep it in the village.

What the hell is this?

Startled, the Professor turns to face a short, round, black woman, her shining face fisted with angry disgust. Her thick arms are crossed over her pillowy chest. She is wearing tight jeans, running shoes, and a black T-shirt. No jewelry. No earrings. Close-cut hair. The Kid’s caseworker, the Professor assumes. A tough, uncompromising, lesbian cop with a Queens accent.

I take it they’re shooting a commercial of some sort, he says. The Professor blankets the woman with his large shadow.

You the guy I spoke to yesterday? The professor?

Yes.

You parta this?

No.

So where’s the Kid?

I haven’t seen him today yet. His camp is over by the Bay. I’ll show it to you if you like.

He parta this too?

No. Neither of us has a thing to do with it.

You got ID?

The Professor hands her his card and his university ID, and with her lips pursed, as if memorizing the information, she studies them both carefully for a full minute: name, title, office address, home address, e-mail, telephone. She keeps the card and passes back his ID and tells him to take her to the Kid’s camp.

This shit gives me the creeps, she mutters. I don’t know how these people find each other.

What people?

The parents of those half-naked kids over there. They gotta have parents. And the creeps making their fucking kiddie porn.

It’s probably just a commercial. An ad for TV.

Yeah, right. And I’m Jack Sprat.

WITH THE COP AT HIS SHOULDER, THE PROFESSOR unzips and folds back the Kid’s tent flap and peers in. The Cop has a name, and the Professor knows it, but to him she’s the Cop — not the Caseworker or the Kid’s Parole Officer. The Cop. She has a steel grid in front of her mind, and for anything in the outer world to reach her it first has to squeeze through the bars of that grid. Information has to be broken into small cubes; information and data packaged in two-dimensional squares are preferable to three-dimensional cubes however: they pass through the grid more quickly and once they reach the Cop’s mind take up less space there.

The Kid has cocooned himself in his sleeping bag. The dog, Annie, lies curled at his feet. Neither the Kid nor Annie acknowledges the arrival of the Professor and the Cop. They’re not sleeping; they’re hiding, both of them, the Kid from the children being filmed at Benbow’s, Annie from the people who don’t want her accidental presence to screw up their movie.

The Cop tells the sleeping bag that the Kid inside it will have to pack up his stuff and move from here immediately. He’ll have to be gone by noon. Or the Cop will bust him back to prison. No arguments. No discussion. End of story.

From inside the bag the Kid’s muffled voice asks where should he go?

The Professor asks the same thing, Yes, w here should the lad go?

Gimme a fuckin’ break. The lad’s a felon, a convicted sex offender. You got kids? You want him in your neighborhood?

He’s paid his debt to society.

It’s not about paying your debt to society. It’s not about punishment. These fuckin’ guys are incurable.