Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

He admitted he was short, five eight, he said, adding three inches. But yeah, pretty muscular though not bulging like a bodybuilder. He wasn’t sure if he looked like anybody she knew from TV but people sometimes told him he reminded them of Michael J. Fox who had some kind of disease he was always going on about, Parkinson’s or epilepsy or something, although he looked pretty normal to the Kid. It was his mother who had pointed out his resemblance to Michael J. Fox which at the time he had not taken as a compliment except for the fact that the actor was famous and presumably rich. i don’t have any diseases, he reassured Brandi. i’m clean and healthy as a teenager.

lol, she wrote back. u don’t know teenagers.

used 2 be 1 myself a few years ago.

She asked him his real name and he told her. Why did he use iggyzbro for his online name? she wondered and he told her his pet iguana was named Iggy.

She was surprised to learn that there really was an iguana after all and wanted the Kid to describe Iggy in detail because she had never seen one before and wondered why anyone would want an iguana for a pet.

So he described Iggy in affectionate detail and when he got to the part about the two penises and that Iggy was going through his brief sexually active cycle and was turning from green to orange he realized he was starting to flirt about sex with brandi18 again as if he himself were turning from green to orange and had two erect penises. He didn’t mean to go there. He didn’t need reminding that she was only fourteen and he was twenty-one but somehow her questions and comments kept drawing him back to sexual innuendo and inquiry until they both, the Kid and brandi18 too, were getting dangerously explicit — dangerous at least for the Kid. When he read back over their string of e-mails it seemed she was only being playful yet her play kept drawing him forward until finally he typed id rly like 2 hang with u some nite when your mom’s away.

what wld we do?

whatever we want 2 do. just c what happens. i could bring beer and a movie.

what kinda movie?

a sexy 1. u ever watch p?

whats p?

u no. porn.

o ya, i watched a couple on pay-per-view when my mom was away. she found out frm the bill and was pissed.

turn u on?

ya!

were u alone? or w yr bf?

no!! only alone.

wld be fun 2 watch p 2gether.

maybe.

The Kid asked her for her street address and she gave it to him which he took as a clear invitation to visit her. He asked when her mom would be away next and she said this coming weekend she was going on a gambling cruise on a ship out of Calusa with the people who worked at her office.

all weekend? he wondered.

ya!

He said he’d come over.

She reminded him that his car was still in the shop. He’d not be able to drive out to West Calusa Gardens unless he could borrow a car. Better wait till his Beemer was fixed.

He said no, he could take a bus. He’d do a search on MapQuest and find the closest bus stop and walk from there. He lived in the north end of the city and there were buses running west to the suburbs and back every half hour till midnight and every hour after that. Even if they hung out till late he could still get home, he said and waited for her answer to come up on his screen.

After a long five minutes he finally heard the ping signaling the arrival of a new e-mail and the announcement from the AOL woman, you’ve got mail . It was brandi18. Who else? He never got e-mail, never heard that announcement except for spam. He clicked it open.

sorry. had a phone call from my mom checking up on me. i’m sorta grounded.

what 4?

grades. so r u coming fri or sat?

i’ll come fri. c what happens and maybe sat. 2 if u like. u might invite me 2 stay over.

yr 2 old. and a guy. my moms’ll kill me if she finds out.

she wont.

bring the beer. my moms counts her stash when she gets home.

k. i’ll bring some surprises 2.

like what?

u’ll see. Around 10 ok?

k. bye. gotta log out and delete. my moms is home. sometimes she reads my e-mails when she gets home. she’s a bitch. c u fri around 10.

He pushed back from the computer and lighted a cigarette. He was sweating and noticed that his hands were trembling. He was frightened of what he was doing, had done, would do if given the opportunity. But it was too late to back off now. What had begun as an itch had turned into a barely conscious fantasy that had become a plan and now a promise. He wasn’t frightened because she was only fourteen — he had almost blocked that out and besides she looked and sounded older on Facebook and in her e-mails. He was scared and nervous because he had never invited himself to visit a girl at her house alone, had never dared to — no girl had let him believe that he wouldn’t be laughed at for even asking her for more than the time of day. And here this pretty girl was asking him to bring beer and a skin flick and see what happens.

Okay, he’ll see what happens. He’ll have to buy some condoms. How many or what kind or size he wasn’t sure. He’d never bought condoms before, had never even checked the rack to see if they came in different sizes. He figured he’d need extra-large probably unless they only came in one size and were really flexible.

And he’d have to rent a movie from the adult section of Moviemasters, nothing too hard-core, no gangbang or cum-shots although maybe cum-shots are sexy to girls and not just guys. He wasn’t sure what was sexy to girls. Except for vibrating dildo films and the occasional chick-on-chick lesbian films which didn’t really get him excited anymore porn seemed pretty much designed for guys. She was white so she’d probably only want to see white people fucking at least this first time. Maybe down the road she’d be interested in watching a black dude with a donkey-dong getting blown by a white girl.

She’d probably want to see something with a story attached at least at the beginning — one of those movies that start out with the husband going off on a business trip leaving his beautiful wife home alone and horny and this young stud comes over in his tight cutoff shorts and no shirt to clean the pool while she’s watching from the window upstairs and getting all wet so she puts on her bikini and goes down to the pool and lies on a chaise to sunbathe. The pool guy checks her out and asks for a glass of water and she brings it to him from the kitchen and when he finishes and sets the glass down she runs her finger down his bare chest to his crotch. And then the action starts and you don’t need the story anymore till the end where the husband comes home and suggests jazzing up their tired sex life by inviting someone to join them and they look out the window at the pool guy and the next scene has both guys fucking the wife one from behind and her blowing the other and the two guys come at the same time: The End.

He’d look for one of those at Moviemasters tomorrow which was Thursday and watch it alone first to make sure it had enough of a story to interest a fourteen-year-old girl. It wouldn’t matter if it didn’t interest him because he’d already seen it and hundreds of others just like it. He’d be dealing with reality this time. Not illusion. He’d be watching and actually touching a real female human being’s body, skin, breasts, legs, ass, vagina, instead of just pictures made from electronic pixels whose colors and movement and arrangement on a screen were predetermined and controlled by a script and director and a half-dozen camera angles. That’s what frightened him. That’s why his hands were trembling as he lighted another cigarette. He was about to bump up against and break through an invisible membrane between the perfectly controlled world locked inside his head and the endlessly overflowing unpredictable, dangerous world outside.