Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

EVEN THOUGH HE’S STILL NOT SURE WHAT exactly the Professor is after especially with the treasure map bit the Kid mostly trusts him now. Since the night he took the bus out to West Calusa Gardens to visit brandi18 he hasn’t trusted anybody. Period. No one is who he or she seems to be. Not even the other men living under the Causeway. Including the Rabbit who probably made up all those stories about teaching Kid Gavilan how to throw the bolo punch.

That’s okay, the Kid’s not complaining, it’s just the way things are. Everybody has a secret agenda and a secret life. Starting with his mother and moving out from there. Tony Perez had a secret agenda at the light store. Benbow and his goofy sidekick Trinidad Bob. The U.S. Army. It didn’t matter who, people near or close to him, individually and in groups were all using him to advance their own hidden interests. Even brandi18. The Kid was nothing to her except an entertaining fool for her to laugh at and feel superior to. She was maybe the worst. The real problem is that the Kid doesn’t know what his secret agenda is or if he has one.

But something about the Professor has gradually made him seem trustworthy to the Kid. It begins with his size, his enormous body and the way he dresses it. What you see when you first see him is what you get for the duration, a man so fat and tall and wide that you never get used to it — no matter how many times you see him he never looks normal. The bushy beard and long hair and the three-piece suit only add to his size and make no attempt to hide or disguise it. Most fat guys wear loose Hawaiian-style shirts or guayaberas and floppy trousers and try to make their beach-ball faces look smaller with short hair slicked back and going beardless or maybe keeping a trim little Vandyke beard so when you look at them you focus on their eyes and nose and lips and ignore the wide expanse of skin surrounding them. Nothing about the Professor’s appearance is part of a disguise. He doesn’t even wear sunglasses. Just squints in the glare looking like one of those Japanese sumo wrestlers.

The way he talks is trustworthy too. At least to the Kid it is. He talks like a professor, using long clearly pronounced words carefully in complete sentences but slowly said with a noticeable southern accent that the Kid guessed right away was from Alabama or Mississippi where the Kid has never heard of there being any professors so maybe he’s actually more of a regular person than a professor. He’s smart and educated, that’s obvious, but he doesn’t talk like he feels superior to people who aren’t as smart and educated as he is. Most of the people the Kid has met in his life who are smarter and better educated than the Kid either talk down to him from a great height or else try to sound like they aren’t really very intelligent and haven’t even graduated from high school which only makes the Kid suspicious of their attitude. He’s thinking of the social workers and psychologists he met in prison and a couple of teachers he had in high school who tried to get him to join in classroom discussions of current events or the books that were assigned even though the Kid never read newspapers except the headlines or watched the TV news or listened to radio newscasts and had not once read more than the first few pages of any of the books that had been assigned over his entire four years of high school. Most of what he knows about the history of the world and human life he’s picked up from scraps of overheard conversation on the street and at the light store where he worked after school and weekends and from remarks exchanged by his fellow students and later the guys in his outfit at Fort Drum and now the men living with him under the Causeway. The Kid is one of those people who have made up the mass of mankind since the species first appeared on the plains of East Africa two or three million years ago. Most of his troubles arise because he’s a twenty-first-century American and not some ancient East African or an early Cro-Magnon living with his extended family of hunter-gatherers in a cave in prehistoric Spain or a turnip-planting serf in medieval Russia or one of the early Calusa Indians harvesting oysters in the bay as the first ships from Europe hove into view.

He doesn’t think of himself this way, of course — he never heard of Cro-Magnons or Russian serfs and can’t tell East Africa from West — or he didn’t until the Professor came into his life and started interviewing him, just getting him to tell his story and then showing him ways to improve his life by being better organized and more cooperative with the men living under the Causeway with him.

Now slowly he’s starting to realize that he might be not exceptional but at least he’s important simply for being who he is, that he’s not really like the mass of mankind from the beginning of time whose entire lives and everything they chose to do or not to do is determined by their givens, the conditions and circumstances they were born into and the people they found there to accompany them in life. Until now the only living creatures who seemed to care what he did or thought and were therefore affected by his actions and thoughts were Iggy and Einstein the parrot and Annie the dog as if the Kid were closer to being reptile, bird, or four-legged animal than a human being alive and conscious in time with a beginning, middle, and end to his life, all three parts existing simultaneously in each separate part. His subjective life — his accumulated memories, wishes, fears, and reflections in the last few days — has started to take on an importance to him that it never held before. And consequently he’s begun to have a new interest in the subjective lives of the people who are connected to him starting with the Professor but including the men who live alongside him under the Causeway. Even the Shyster whose story up to now he has had no desire to know since he had no story of his own to compare it to.

In the past it never occurred to the Kid to ask questions of the people he associated with. When they volunteered information — bits and pieces of their past and their longings, their dreads and anxieties, opinions and beliefs — he listened more or less politely but did not invite them to continue, to tell more, to clarify and amplify those bits and pieces and he mostly forgot what they told him soon after the telling. Now he finds himself wondering how the Greek got stuck down here under the Causeway, a mechanically clever and entrepreneurial guy who probably ran a successful machine shop or auto garage before he became a convicted sex offender. And P.C. — what’s his story? And how come a smart guy like the Shyster with a law degree and married with a big-time successful political career gets obsessed with having sex with little girls without knowing how weird and harmful it is? What’s up with that? What crossed his wires and when so that he couldn’t recognize evil when he saw it in himself? What’s going on inside the Shyster? the Kid wonders for the first time. And Rabbit, an old black dude busted up by the cops for probably the tenth time in his life hobbling around down here in the gloom and the damp surrounded by filth and rats and a colony of outcasts — what did he do to deserve this?

And then there’s the Professor. The Kid wonders especially about the Professor. What’s his story? They are in his van headed to the gigantic Paws ’n’ Claws store for supplies and medicine for Einstein and Annie and the Kid asks him to tell how he came to be a professor. He’s never known a real professor before and has no idea how you become one.

Indirection and serendipity. Belatedly. Not by the usual route. For years after I got my Ph.D. I was a paid consultant. For governments, our own and others. And for private interests. Here and abroad. Then I opted for a more settled life, so to speak. Academia.