Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

Sheets of plywood cover the large windows of the lobby. The glass doors and remaining smaller windows facing the deserted street have been X’d with tape. The Professor parks his van in the lot adjacent to the sprawling compound and walks slowly up the path to the main entrance. He is sweating and breathing with difficulty, as much from the very low atmospheric pressure as from the humidity and heat.

The receptionist, a stout white-haired lady in a bright red nylon tracksuit, makes him sign the visitors’ register. Recognizing his last name, his parents’ last name, she smiles with a fake slick and says, First time you all been here to visit your momma and daddy, am I correct to say?

He nods yes. She tells him the number of their apartment and gives him a floor plan of the building, which is laid out like a medieval monastery. He feels nothing, or no more than if he were making a delivery for the dry cleaner. The receptionist appears to know this and waves him on dismissively in the direction of the carpeted corridor that leads to the independent-living wing. The walls and carpeting are the color of oatmeal. You’ll find ’em waitin’ in unit 119, she says and picks up the house phone to notify his father that he has a visitor, thinking, A very odd visitor, more like a circus freak than the son of those nice-lookin’ folks in 119.

At the door, the Professor raises his open hand, about to make a fist and knock, and he looks at it — it’s the hand he had as a child, the same fingernails, knuckles, thin blue veins, the same small purse of flesh between thumb and forefinger — and when he turns it over he recognizes the palm, the same creases, lines, and whorls. For a moment he studies the hand, then puts it out in front of him and fans out the fingers and waggles the hand slowly back and forth, as if from the window of a departing train.

A sudden wave of fear surges over him, and he wants to turn around and flee from the eye of the hurricane back into the storm’s full fury. He’s panicking again, afraid to go forward, unable to retreat. And no music to calm him, nothing to bleach out his wild emotions and make his mind translucent and hard and rational as a ladder. His eighty-nine-year-old father and his mother with her perforated memory are on the other side of the door waiting for him. They’re waiting to present him with himself, as if to introduce him to his fratricidal twin.

THE PROFESSOR DROPS HIS PALE HAND AND turns away from the door of unit 119 and pumping his heavy arms walks rapidly down the long corridor of numbered doors to the lobby. He strides past the surprised receptionist who calls out, Your folks are home! They expectin’ you, mistah! Then shakes her head in disgust as, ignoring her, he hurries past.

Don’t that beat all? she wonders. First he comes finally to check on his poor momma and his daddy to make sure the hurricane ain’t gonna get them, after never once showing his face before this, and then he acts like they ain’t worth the trouble. You got to wonder what they done to deserve that from their own flesh and blood, she thinks. But she’s seen hundreds, maybe thousands, of grown men and women who don’t seem to know they’re somebody’s flesh and blood, sons and daughters who put their mommas and daddies into Dove Run and say good-bye and are never seen walking through that door again. It’s not like it was in the old days when she was a girl and Grandma died in the upstairs back bedroom. Back then parents and grandparents grew old and died before your very eyes, and it was as if a part of you yourself was growing old and dying alongside them. You didn’t have these Dove Runs where you could park and hide old people, and back then, if you wanted to forget that you too would someday grow old and die, which is natural to want, you couldn’t. She thinks about her own grown son and daughter and their children, and she wonders if she’s flesh and blood to them — kin — and decides, sadly, that the answer is no. They’re just like the man who blew past her a moment ago, and when the time comes they’ll make her live in Dove Run or someplace like it, while they go on living in a world in which no one, no one visible, grows old and dies before their very eyes. She sighs. She’s almost sixty years old, and in her lifetime the world has changed, and human beings have changed too.

How can that be? She always believed that human nature was permanent, unchangeable, that human beings were the same always and everywhere, for better or worse, and when conditions changed for the better, as they sometimes did, like for black people and for women, it was because people, including white people and men, were essentially good and their better nature was letting them recognize their kinship with black people and women. Such were the receptionist’s thoughts as the Professor in flight from his intended meeting with his parents bustled past her desk, pushed through the door, and rushed across the parking lot to his van.

FOR HOURS THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE HAS enveloped the Professor like a moving bell jar. It has shifted its course just as he has shifted his, and now the storm slides south along the peninsula with him inside it toward the Great Panzacola Swamp, where it veers off to the east, crossing the state again, headed this time for Calusa and the open ocean beyond. The Professor’s van is inside an enormous meteorological bubble that protects him from the fury of the storm that rages beyond and behind him. Hurricane watchers and meteorologists and TV weather forecasters say that the hurricane was briefly stalled over land by an enormous offshore high-pressure area, slowing and turning it away from its predicted eastward path toward the Atlantic, gradually spiraling it back over the Gulf for a few hours, where it regained force and refilled with moisture, then resumed its slow assault on the land and the cities at the lower end of the peninsula. But for the Professor, cosseted by the eye of the hurricane, the storm has ended; it’s dissipated; gone. The wind has abated, and the rain has ceased to fall. The sky is pale yellow, except at the horizon way out there in front of him over the Atlantic, where it’s dark green and sooty gray, and above the Gulf behind him, where great masses of black clouds have piled up.

The only storm the Professor is aware of is the one raging inside his brain. The music blasting from the van’s speakers doesn’t work anymore to cool his roiled mind. He’s sweating and has shucked his jacket and necktie and loosened his collar. He has the music cranked up to top volume, trying to make a wall of it around his secrets, but they keep breaking through the sound and make him feel like he’s under attack from them, as if they are hornets and he’s accidentally bumped their nest and busted it apart with his unprotected head. He’s not in physical pain, but he howls as if he’s being stung again and again, and he slaps at his cheeks and neck and the top of his head, slaps at the sides of his enormous, soft arms and his pillowed chest, twists and turns in his seat like a man possessed by a demon.

The Professor knows very little about his deepest self, but as one who has studied the field and the phenomenon, he knows that this is the point in a secretive man’s long life of compartmentalization and disguise that one’s thoughts turn longingly toward the idea of suicide. This is when the walls fall and the contradictions collide openly with one another. He’s read the literature, the journals, the reports, and has paused over them in deep reflection and vague recognition. There was the Polish writer Jerzy Kosinski, who may or may not have been a Holocaust survivor, and many master spies, and another writer, Michael Dorris, who may or may not have been an American Indian, and doubtless thousands upon thousands of unknown others. That’s as close as he himself can get to the pure idea of suicide, of self-annihilation — close enough to know that it’s a desire felt by others who found themselves in his present situation.