Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

Perhaps that’s the one constant that is shared by all those separate compartments he lives in — a profound sense of isolation, of difference and a solitude that is so pervasive and deep that he has never felt lonely. It’s the solitude of a narcissist who fills the universe entirely, until there is no room left in it for anyone else. In every life he has led, every identity he has claimed for himself and revealed to others, his profound sense of isolation was then and is now his core.

While the Professor knows most of the facts of the various lives he has led and the public and private, often secret, identities he has held, he has no conscious memory of being inside them. No memory of living those lives from one day to the next, from month to month, in some cases for years, or of being that person in a continuing way. For the Professor it’s as if all the separate lives he has led belong to other people. And the life he leads now, it too belongs to someone else. He’s privy to the facts of each, but little more. For him, that’s enough. The facts. There is no use or point for him to remember what he actually experienced when he was perceived many years ago by his college and graduate school classmates and professors as a radical activist in the civil rights and antiwar movements, a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Students for a Democratic Society and for a few harrowing months a member of Weatherman. There is for him no reason to try to remember what he felt back then or believed when he first agreed to work for the government agency that wanted to protect the American people from the unintended consequences of the civil rights and antiwar movements. As far as he remembers, he felt nothing. He believed nothing. It was a game, a puzzle, a test of wits and intelligence, and the higher the stakes the more interesting the game, the more challenging the puzzle, and thus the greater proof of his superior wit and intelligence.

He believed he was smarter than the government agents he reported to and smarter than the people he reported on and needed to prove it, to himself if to no one else. For him it was merely a contest between patriotic careerists and dope-smoking ideologues, both equally deluded, equally utopian, equally clannish. And though both believed that he was one of them, he belonged to neither clan. He stood out too much, could never disappear in a crowd, was odd-looking and grossly overweight, spoke in a peculiar manner, was regarded by both groups as asexual, and was not known to drink alcohol or take drugs and seemed not to be interested in money. He remembers only that he loved the game, the secrecy, and took pleasure from knowing twice as much as either of the groups to which he was thought by the other to belong, even though within each group he was a minor figure. To the political activists in college and later in New Haven, the peculiar fat man was a carrier of signs in demonstrations, a late-night manager of the mimeo machine, a foot soldier in their small army of revolutionaries. To the several government agencies that over time employed him to report on the activities of that army, he was merely one of thousands of informants on college campuses and in ghetto flats and basements, garages, meeting halls, and safe houses all across the country. And later, as he traveled to Asia and Central and South America, ostensibly to extend his knowledge of languages and further his education, he was designated an asset, a reliable asset, but not an essential one, because for the most part the information he provided the agencies was of the type that merely corroborated what they already knew or confirmed what they believed. He was aware of that, of course, and didn’t mind at all. His relatively low status in both groups — or was it three or four organizations or five, and was it one government he worked for or two or three? — suited him perfectly.

He was as easily replaceable an asset in their ranks as among the activists and revolutionaries. If he didn’t volunteer to print and deliver to every dormitory room at Kenyon a copy of The Port Huron Statement, someone else would. If he weren’t available to be a link in the human chain blocking access to the administration building, there were hundreds ready to take his place. If, after he left Yale and on instructions from the FBI, went to San Francisco, he backed out of selling methamphetamine to the biker gangs of Oakland, there were dozens of entry-level undercover agents eager to step forward and do the deed. Those were the years when the government feared a possible coalition of biker gangs, Black Panthers, Weatherman, famous Beat poets, rock musicians, movie actors, and heiresses, so it was glamorous to be selling and delivering drugs to Hells Angels. You might run into Peter Fonda or Allen Ginsberg or Huey Newton. And when he hit the hippie trail to Kathmandu to learn Urdu and reported back to his handlers from there and ducked down into the Andes to learn Quechua and then off to research the descendants of escaped slaves on the Mosquito Coast until he finally came ashore in Calusa and found employment as a writer of policy papers on the Caribbean for a think tank called the Caribbean Basin Institute and had his papers vetted by the CIA — he was always just another easily replaced asset who appeared to be doing one thing while he was in fact doing another. He was a small enough cog in such a huge machine that he could well have been employed at the same time by the KGB while maintaining a safe house for the last of the Weather Underground to come in out of the cold.

He too came in out of the cold, inasmuch as when he quit working at the Caribbean Basin Institute and accepted a position in the sociology department at Calusa University, he created for himself a life that no longer had one, two, or three false identities. Merely a series of false pasts. For the first time since college he was more or less who he seemed to be, even if there was a disconnect between who he seemed to be and who he once had been. Though he had been many things — political radical, civil rights activist, antiwar warrior, drug dealer, independent scholar and student of exotic languages and cultures, hippie seeker of Eastern enlightenment, FBI and CIA informant simultaneously reporting to at least two other independent intelligence-gathering agencies and one or possibly two foreign government agencies as well — all these identities could conceivably have led separately to his becoming the man he now appeared to be, a happily married father of two children living in suburban Calusa, a somewhat eccentric, tenured professor of sociology at the local university, a member of the library board, a deacon in the Congregational Church, a man once portrayed in the newspaper as the smartest man in town, possibly the state.

But only if none of the men he had been once upon a time was aware of the felt, subjective existence of any of the others. They remained separate and distinct identities that knew of the factual existence of the others but did not identify with the others. They could not remember what it was like to actually be the others. And he, the Professor, can only remember what it was like to be himself in the years since he came in from the cold and ceased being an informant and gradually came to be solely who he seemed to be.

He is a man, therefore, without a past. A man with many pasts, who can, if forced, make a report on his life, but cannot tell his life’s story. Each of his pasts was designed at the time strictly to deny the existence of the others, just as his present life denies the existence of all his previous lives, giving him the freedom to make them up at will. He can claim to one man that he fought in Vietnam and tell the Kid that he was a draft-dodging opponent of the war and not in either case be lying. If everything is a lie, nothing is. Just as, if everything is true, nothing is.