Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

The wind is shifting gradually around to the north and the rain has intensified. It’s nearly dawn when he crosses the state line into Alabama, and finally it enters his mind that a hurricane has come in off the Gulf and he has been driving straight through it for the last several hours. He remembers a buzz off the CNN news loop on the TV monitors at the turnpike plaza earlier and glimpsing a headline in the morning paper that he neglected to pick up when he left home yesterday to meet the Kid at the Causeway. Hurricane George they’re calling it. A medium-size hurricane, it’s expected to pass over the northern half of the state and the southern half of Alabama and Georgia and spin out to the Atlantic where it will weaken and break up. No big deal. But a hurricane nonetheless, high winds and torrential, swirling rain, dangerous to drive through in a slab-sided van or any vehicle lighter than a sixteen-wheeler, especially up the Gulf Coast and into Alabama like this.

Palm trees sway like plumes and palmettos thrash the ground. Now and then his headlights or the lights of oncoming vehicles illuminate overflowing ditches and canals alongside the highway. Thick skeins of water erupt in fantails as the van plows through them.

He’s driving much slower now, losing time. He planned on arriving at the home — Dove Run: An Assisted-Living and Life-Care Facility, it’s called — early in the day, spending an hour or at most two with his parents, and then departing for Calusa well before noon. He planned on getting home by early evening, in time to prepare his class for Monday. He briefly considers turning back now, forgoing an in-person interrogation of his father and risking a call from a pay phone at one of the rest-stop restaurants. It would be foolish to call from his cell phone. But it’s too great a risk even from a pay phone — the old man’s phone is as surely tapped as his own. Besides, the hurricane is on top of him now, and he’ll no more escape it by turning south toward home than by plunging on ahead.

He could, of course, pull off the highway and park at a truck stop and wait for the hurricane to pass to the east. That would be the sensible thing to do. It’s apparently what the all-night truckers, the only other drivers still moving, are doing now, he observes, as a pair of sixteen-wheel behemoths pulls slowly off the highway into a parking lot illuminated by arc lamps atop tall aluminum poles. The rain drifts in shuddering sheets through the cones of pale light. He should have checked the weather report, he thinks. But no, it wouldn’t have made any difference. He’d still have left the house in the night and driven up here for the information he believes he needs in order to protect himself from whomever it was that came calling first on his father and then showed up at his door in Calusa claiming to be a detective in the Calusa Police Department. He knows it’s got nothing to do with his present life, or they wouldn’t have contacted his father. It’s his past that has come calling — but what part of his past? Which chapter? Which episode or linked series of episodes?

Over on his right the dark eastern sky has started bleeding to gray. Near the horizon the boiling clouds are dark green. He can make out flooded citrus groves, crushed gravel side roads, a soaked wind-flattened landscape with wildly scattered palm and palmetto fronds and here and there abandoned cars and pickups, mobile homes with water to their thresholds looking like houseboats set adrift, tricycles and brightly colored plastic yard toys half-drowned. And no people. Everyone is huddled inside waiting for George to pass over and on to wherever hurricanes go when they’re no longer here — onto the TV screen, the radio report, the Internet, someone else’s reality and thus no longer real at all.

The wind has ceased to buffet the sides of the Professor’s van, and he no longer struggles to hold it to the road, and the rain has let up. He’s situated at the eye of the storm, he thinks, the center of a two-hundred-mile atmospheric coil of low pressure twirling its way across the Caribbean and the Gulf like a colossal dervish. Right here at the still center is the place to stay, if only he can manage it — no wind, no rain, no turbulence or uncertainty. The morning sky is a smooth-sided pale green bowl, the pressure so low it feels like a huge vacuum pump has siphoned the air away. The music plays on — Bud Powell’s arpeggios and stomps — and the Professor feels calm and lucid and safe: almost invisible. The eye of the hurricane: it’s a metaphor for the mental and emotional space where he’s lived most of his life. He thinks this and smiles inwardly. Never quite thought of it that way. Nice, the way the world that surrounds one, the very weather of one’s existence, provides a language for addressing the world inside.

Delighted, he notices that the eastward direction of the storm has shifted ten degrees to the north, and soon after, as he drives on, fifteen degrees, so that he’s able to stay inside the eye, its still center, moving northeast with it into Alabama as if personally escorted by Hurricane George straight to Dove Run: An Assisted-Living Facility and for the first time in over forty years the physical presence of his father and mother.

THEIR HOME IS A TWO-STORY REDBRICK COLLECTION of small apartments, administrative offices and meeting rooms, recreation rooms, dining areas, and emergency medical facilities, with a wing that functions as a nursing home for the assisted-living residents who need more care than mere assistance provides. It resembles a large Holiday Inn, temporary quarters for travelers who will never return home, except to a funeral home or, for the believing Christians, the home prepared for them by their Lord and Savior.

The Professor knows what he should be feeling as he enters the building. He knows what a man his age meeting his parents for the first time after nearly a lifetime of silent, willed absence ought to be feeling, regardless of the reasons or excuses for his absence. He should be feeling dread, anxiety, fearful curiosity, shame, all mingled with a thickened low-key joy: a muddle of intense, conflicted emotions. And yet he feels none of it. Only a mild irritation, as if while reading a difficult text he’s been interrupted by a small household mechanical breakdown that must be attended to before he can continue reading where he was obliged to leave off. For most of his life it’s been a strength, to know what other people, normal people, feel in any given situation, without possessing those feelings himself. It began in his childhood as a consciously willed means of protecting himself against ridicule, on the one hand, and on the other as a response to his parents’ utter absorption in each other to the exclusion of everyone else, even their precocious, morbidly obese, increasingly eccentric and alienated son.

As a couple, the Professor’s parents, Jason and Cynthia, loved the couple itself and the idea of the couple as much as they loved themselves. They felt incomplete when apart and pined for the presence of the other, as if mourning the other. And when they were together they each became the happy center of the other’s universe, a solar system with twin suns at the center orbited by a single lonely planet spinning in darkness, except for the light cast by his parents as they danced on the porch to the music of those old 1940s jazz standards, while he sat on the wooden glider and pushed himself back and forth in slow time to the music and watched from an increasingly cold distance.

He knew what they felt for each other, and because it was for them essentially self-love, he could not share in it. Their feelings not only excluded him, they rejected him. He felt attacked by his parents’ strange mutual narcissism, causing him from an early age to cultivate his differences from them. Another child of such a pair might have tried to enter their charmed circle by emulating the qualities they seemed to admire in one another — their physical beauty, for both Jason and Cynthia were unusually handsome and healthy individuals; or their pragmatic, mechanical turns of mind, socially useful kinds of intelligence that are much admired in communities like theirs; or their natural ease, the ease of the oblivious, among people wholly unlike them, their friends and neighbors in Clinton, Alabama, their colleagues at work, U. S. Steel in Jason’s case, the Clinton Public Library in Cynthia’s, and the people they employed, everyone from the housekeeper and yardman to the inmates Jason hired from the state prison system to work for little or no pay digging the coal out of the Alabama hills. Although it was a variant of a folie à deux, his parents’ marriage was the kind that people with little or no knowledge of its implications and true nature envied. A pretty couple, a smart couple, a socially useful and reassuringly gregarious couple; and because they were from distinguished northern families and well educated and were probably left-leaning Democrats who made no attempts to impose their political views on anyone else, they were a slightly exotic couple as well. The Professor had none of this moderately attractive couple’s qualities. None.