Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

The Kid doesn’t believe him. But the Professor is telling the truth. At least the part about his photographic memory and his ability to redraw a map he copied by hand years ago. The map, however, the original, as it were, was not in a dusty archive of eighteenth-century documents and charts at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. And it was not ten years ago that he copied it onto a sheet of notepaper for a report he was writing. The map he copied was the frontispiece in a 1911 edition of the novel Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. The Professor was twelve years old at the time, already a sophomore in high school, writing a book report that attempted to prove that the novel, far from being merely a children’s adventure story, was in fact an encoded philosophical treatise on the ethical and religious implications of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species .

The Professor tells the Kid none of this, of course. He wants the Kid to believe in the map’s authenticity. It’s the means by which he has ingratiated himself with the Kid, and he needs it, now that the Kid’s imagination has seized on it, to buy him cover and time enough to earn the Kid’s complete trust. Without that trust, he’ll not learn from the Kid what he needs to know in order to cure him of his pedophilia. And he needs to cure the Kid in order to prove his theory that pedophilia is the result of social forces, a sexual malfunction shaped by a malfunctioning society. It’s not a mystery; it’s not even a psychological disorder. Because if it is a mental illness, then the entire society is to one degree or another sick with it. Which makes it normal.

I’ll redraw the map tonight and bring it to you tomorrow. But first we have work to do here on this island.

Whaddaya mean?

Eliminating the pretexts. Remember? You’ve got to get this place cleaned up and made safe.

Who, me? No fucking way.

The Professor proposes to pay the Kid a small salary for organizing the residents into clean-up crews and establishing a public safety force. They will begin, he explains, by calling a meeting of all the men currently residing under the Causeway. The Professor will address the group and will inform them that he has hired the Kid to be the official director of the community until such time that the members of the community decide by secret ballot to replace him. A set of rules and regulations for all residents will be drawn up by a special committee appointed and chaired by the Kid. Anyone who violates those rules or refuses to abide by them will not be permitted to reside under the Causeway.

The Kid thinks this is the stupidest idea he’s ever heard and says so.

The Professor explains that all human beings need and want to be organized into social units that guarantee their comfort and safety. You start with what they have in common and build upon it. The men down here share a great deal: geography; gender; forced alienation from the larger community that they came from. And their basic needs are pretty much the same: shelter; sanitation; protection of property and self; freedom from harassment and persecution by outsiders. With a little organization and enlightened leadership, all these needs can be met. A problem can be turned into a solution. A negative can be made a positive. The citizens of Calusa will thank them — the Kid and his men who have been forced to live beneath the Claybourne Causeway. And if they are successful, if they are able to construct a coherent, efficiently functioning society of convicted sex offenders down here, then it may become a model for cities all across America to emulate. Communities of convicted sex offenders able to provide themselves with basic services while residing more than 2,500 feet from anyplace where children gather will start appearing beneath overpasses, causeways, bridges, and in abandoned buildings in hundreds of cities large and small. They could become linked into a nationwide network. As the number of convicted sex offenders grows — and the Professor knows that it will increase exponentially, keeping pace with the increase in law enforcement and fear of pedophilia among the general population — the political and economic power of convicted sex offenders will grow.

Sounds good to me, Professor. But what about the map? The pirate’s treasure map.

I’ll bring it tomorrow. First, let’s call a meeting of the current residents.

And don’t forget the veterinarian. I gotta take care of Little Orphan Annie here and Einstein.

Tomorrow, Kid. Tomorrow. After you’ve formed your safety committee and can leave the island for a few hours and know that your property is protected.

Yeah. Sure. Tomorrow.

THE PROFESSOR WANTS TO CALL A MEETING of the residents which the Kid thinks is a useless idea. Useless and therefore dumb. Despite being a fantasist or perhaps because of it the Kid is a pragmatist. The eight or ten guys he can make out in the gloom under the Causeway are all loners pretty much. Like him. Not the meeting types. They’re not exactly his friends or friends of each other and not colleagues for sure and this isn’t a condo or a fraternal order and if any of them has anything that resembles a social life it’s only with people who live elsewhere — what the residents call “off-island”: family members left behind when they became convicted sex offenders and wives and girlfriends for those that have them, friends from before their arrest and conviction all of whom have enough problems of their own, legal, sexual, and otherwise, not to give a damn about other people’s problems, legal, sexual, and otherwise. Yes, there are people whom the residents work with and for when they have jobs like the Kid had at the Mirador before Dario fired him for being a wiseass punk and of course the social workers and psychologists and counselors and even in some cases the parole officers when those relationships evolve as they sometimes do into something more personal than merely professional and obligatory.

Otherwise the men who live beneath the Causeway mostly keep to themselves. They give themselves or each other names that are not the names they’re known by on the National Sex Offender Registry. There’s the Rabbit and Plato the Greek and Paco the biker-bodybuilder and P.C. the coach and Ginger and Froot Loop and probably by now Lawrence Somerset is no longer Lawrence Somerset, the Kid thinks and wonders what the creep is calling himself now that he’s had a few days to ditch his old name. Those old names are like what black people call their slave names, the names by which they’re known to the cops and caseworkers and on the registry, the names they’re called by the people who knew them when they weren’t convicted sex offenders and by the people they work with and for, those that have jobs. There’s something tainted about their old names, their real names, something shameful about them or at best embarrassing and controlling so that a new name like Kid or Paco or Ginger or even a weird name like Froot Loop can be liberating in a small way. For a minute or at least for as long as you’re under the Causeway you’re almost off the registry of sex offenders. You’re almost somebody else and not anonymous either but a real person. Or almost real. As real as a character in a book anyhow.

The Kid tries convincing the Professor that it’s a dumb idea to try to get his neighbors to meet together but the Professor doesn’t listen which the Kid has decided is typical of him and maybe typical of all professors although this is the only real professor he’s ever actually met in person. Assuming he is a real professor because you can’t be sure that anybody is what he says he is. Or she. He’s remembering the night he got busted and the watery feeling he got all over his body when he realized that nothing was what he thought it was and no one was who he and she claimed to be. He wonders if the guy that day at the Mirador he thought was O. J. Simpson really was the famous ex — football player and movie star who supposedly sliced up his wife and the guy she was with who the Kid heard was gay anyhow. If O. J. had known that, he probably wouldn’t have thought the guy was fucking his wife and he wouldn’t have killed them and he’d still be a rich and famous and beloved ex — football player and movie star instead of a guy playing golf in Calusa with an out-of-work small-time Central American diplomat. He’d be hanging in L.A. with Arnold and Sly. Maybe he wasn’t O. J. Maybe he was just a big black dude who happens to look enough like O. J. that he can fool these star-fuckers into buying him a fancy lunch at the Mirador and get Dario to comp him the best Rhône wine in his cellar. The world is full of people who aren’t who or what they say they are. The people who believe them aren’t who or what they say they are either. That’s the main thing the Kid has learned since the night he got busted and became a sex offender. Nobody’s who he says he is.