Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

Cool. What did you like consult about?

Various things. Cultural anthropology, let’s call it. Local customs and politics in far-flung places.

The Kid would like to interview the Professor. He’d like to ask him what serendipity means. And cultural anthropology, what’s that? There’s a lot the Professor could teach him. And now that he’s starting to have a story of his own he’d like to know the Professor’s story even though very little of it would be of any use to him. He has no desire to ever become a professor himself and never intends to use the word serendipity in a sentence no matter what it means and the only reason he wants to know the meaning of cultural anthropology is so that he can better understand the Professor’s story.

But the Professor’s a hard guy to interview. You ask him a simple direct question and he goes all complicated and indirect on you. The Kid tries asking him his age and the Professor answers with a question and chuckles as if he’s amused, Why do you ask?

The Kid explains that it’s hard to tell how old he is because of the beard and his size — he chooses not to say fat .

How old do you think I am? Another question.

The Kid guesses fifty and the Professor says, Close enough . Not really an answer.

He tries another tack: So where are you from? Originally. You got sort of a southern accent, you know.

Do I?

Yeah. What’s up with that? I didn’t know professors could have southern accents.

It’s sort of a disguise. Most of my students have southern accents. It puts them at ease if I have one too. It’s become a habit.

The Kid decides to come from another angle: What about a wife? You married?

The Professor just nods. Again, not really an answer but it’ll have to do. The Kid pictures the hugest woman he’s ever seen, a woman the size of a small car. It’s hard to imagine a man this fat being married to a woman not equally fat. But the Kid doesn’t know how to ask if his wife is as fat as he is. It’s what he wants to know though. Interviewing this guy is like trying to pry open a giant clam with only your fingers.

Kids? And here the Kid is obliged to picture the Professor having sex with his enormous wife, both of them naked and pink and hairy, their arms and bellies and thighs flopping and smacking against one another like slabs of beef and the Kid is sorry he asked — it’s the worst porn film he’s ever called to mind — and hopes the Professor says No. No kids.

But instead he says, Your curiosity piques my curiosity. Why the sudden interest in my private life?

I dunno. I guess on account of you being so interested in my private life. Interviewing me and all.

My interest in your private life, my friend, is strictly professional. I’m a social scientist and right now you are my object of study.

Like I’m a lab rat, you mean? In some kinda experiment?

In a manner of speaking, yes. But you needn’t worry. In the social sciences we take excellent care of our lab rats. Their life expectancy is nearly twice as long as in the wild.

The Kid says, Thanks a lot, and the Professor chuckles again and pulls the van into the parking lot of the Paws ’n’ Claws box store and parks.

THE PROFESSOR’S STORY ACCORDING TO THE PROFESSOR:

Since childhood, though the Professor has been celebrated for his remarkable memory, he’s a man whose life and mind are carefully compartmentalized, methodically divided into boxes that rarely share a single side, and when he’s living in one box or remembers having lived there and can therefore recount it to himself or to someone else, his wife, for instance, or colleagues or students or strangers or even the Kid, he has no memory of ever having lived anywhere else. It’s one of the reasons, when asked a direct question about his past or present life, he answers vaguely, indirectly, ambiguously, or changes the subject altogether. His life has no single unifying narrative. It has many distinct narratives, each of them internally consistent, with a beginning, middle, and end, but none of them is connected to the other, and for the most part none of them is even aware of the other’s existence.

He’s not a person with multiple personalities, however. In all his memories and accounts of his memories, no matter how they differ from one another in cast of characters, locale, and resolution and no matter the variety of roles he plays, he always presents the same personality to the world, just as he always presents the same physical body. All his adult life he has looked more or less the same as he looks now. As a child his body was merely a child’s version of the body he came to inhabit later. And all his life, man and boy, he has had the same affect, the same manner of speaking, the same set of facial expressions and physical gestures, the same bemused, slightly condescending chuckle. It’s why when he was a child he seemed so oddly and captivatingly adultlike.

Nor is he a pathological liar or even in the strict sense a liar at all. Because he’s able and is actually compelled when living in one box to forget the existence of the others, his descriptions of his life are truthful. He could have been a great actor. Perhaps great actors possess his same ability to play many different roles, from Caliban to Othello to Lady Macbeth, from Uncle Vanya to Blanche Dubois to Mother Courage, all the while never changing their essential personality, and in the Professor’s case never changing his costume either.

It would be easy to credit this unnatural mix of variety, inconsistency, and relentless constancy to his early childhood obesity and his amazing intelligence, to note how at the start of his life they situated him at the extreme outside edge of human interaction, imposing early on in an unusually sensitive and emotionally responsive child a sense of himself as both different from other children, almost freakishly so, and as special. His parents reinforced his sense of specialness, his exceptionalism. Everyone else helped him to feel at the same time strange and ill-formed, both more and less than human.

The Professor knows this much about his formative years. He wouldn’t argue that his oversize body and wildly praised and publicized precocity simultaneously alienated him from everyone and at the same time made him feel superior to everyone, even to his parents. Though his parents doted on him and they genuinely loved him, they also exhibited him to the world and basked in his reflected light, as if his unusual intelligence and intellectual and academic achievements embellished their own. They saw themselves as having been inexplicably exiled to a small mining town in Alabama where their natural aristocracy and refined educations were insufficiently honored, where no one, except each other, properly appreciated them, where the Professor’s mother was merely the town librarian, a position formerly held by unmarried older ladies not quite qualified to teach school, and where his father was merely the manager of the local absentee-owned coal mines, a kind of plantation foreman whose authority was derived from a higher authority located elsewhere, in a mansion on a hill in Pittsburgh.

Their son, therefore, was their homegrown exotic orchid, and they nurtured and nourished the innate qualities that distinguished him from the garden-variety flowers their neighbors grew. He was a large baby at birth, over eleven pounds, which amazed and delighted the doctor and nurses who helped deliver him, and led his parents to overfeed him from the day they brought him home. His appetite and expectations regarding food soon turned into need, as if he would shrivel and die if he were not overfed, and they now had no choice but to continue providing him with great heaping quantities of food at every meal and before and after meals until by the time he was three years old he spent more of his waking hours eating than doing anything else. By the time he was four, when not asleep he was reading and thus was able to take nourishment full-time. His mind and his body grew apace, and the world, at least the world of Clinton, Alabama, took notice of both and marveled. This pleased the Professor’s parents. The child saw this, and though it made him wish to please them still more, just as their overfeeding him had only increased his hunger, so too he came to feel superior to his parents at the same rate and in the same way that he felt superior to other children and their parents. By the same token, he felt different from everyone, including his parents. Alienated, isolated, alone. Utterly alone.