Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

It’s a desire not yet felt by him, however. He expects it to arrive soon, if he can’t somehow put his lifelong secrets back into the boxes that have held them all these years, held and kept them from knowing of one another’s existence. He drives down the Gulf Turnpike inside the eye of the hurricane, howling in pain and slapping at his body, twitching and twisting away from himself, batting at the idea of suicide, as if fighting off an avenging angel sent by an angry god to torment him.

One hundred miles east of the Professor’s van, the leading edge of the swirling hurricane has hit the city of Calusa and its sprawl of suburbs and malls, sucking the ocean inland in a widening surge that lifts the waters of the Bay and floods low-lying streets and boulevards. Torrents of rain wash across the highways and turnpikes in foot-high waves. The entire city is in an official hurricane evacuation zone, and most residents of the Great Barrier Isles have already started to migrate inland by car and bus to the county evacuation centers and the suburban homes of friends and family members.

The winds have followed the rain, quickly increasing in velocity, and soon sixty- and seventy-mile-an-hour gusts are bending the stalklike trunks of palms and tossing their fronds like unraveled turbans, ripping off the branches of live oak and cotton trees and flattening palmettos, disassembling carefully planted hedges and shrubs, shredding flower gardens and municipal park plantings, kicking trash cans over and blowing the contents into the streets and roads and into the canals and the Bay. The sky is low, thickened as if bearing a great weight, and though it is midmorning, it’s dusk-dark, and long lines of vehicles with their headlights on crawl bumper to bumper off the chain of man-made islands over bridges and causeways onto the mainland, merging there and flowing slowly on widening roads toward the slightly higher ground miles from shore, headed in the direction the Professor is coming from, still driving his van inside the eye of the storm somewhere out there just north of the Great Panzacola Swamp, still howling and slapping at his arms and chest like a gigantic, bearded baby lost in a tantrum.

THE CITIZENS OF CALUSA ARE ACCUSTOMED to hurricanes at this time of year, and most of the residents who have actual residences have followed the detailed instructions distributed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The day before the arrival of the storm they will have secured their homes as best they could by clearing their terraces and patios of outdoor furniture and toys, and those who have them will have double-tied their boats to pilings or put them in dry-dock storage, brought their satellite dishes inside, rolled their bicycles and garbage carts into their garages. They will have charged their cell phones and portable TVs and installed fresh batteries in their portable radios, gone to the nearest ATM machine and withdrawn as much cash as permitted by their bank, filled the car with gas, shuttered, taped, and in some cases boarded over windows with five-eighth’s-inch plywood, especially the windows with the nice view of the sea or the Bay. They will have put together a family disaster kit, its contents recommended on FEMA’s “Are You Ready” website (http://www.fema.gov/areyouready/hurricanes.shtm): bottled water, nonperishable packaged and canned food, manually operated can opener, change of clothing, rain gear, and sturdy shoes, bedding, first aid kit and all prescription medications, extra pair of glasses, battery-powered radio, flashlight, extra batteries, extra set of car keys, phone list of family physicians, special items for infants, elderly, or disabled family members, pet supplies, and should their neighborhood be secured by authorities after the storm due to damage, a current utility bill to prove residency. They will have an evacuation plan, especially those who live on the Barriers or adjacent to the Bay. Many of those who have pets will have packed a pet disaster kit with a two-week supply of food, bowls, water, portable carriers, collar, tag and leash, cat litter and litter box for the kitties, paper towels, plastic Baggies, and hand sanitizer for the doggies. They will bring their birds’ caged homes with them when they evacuate their own homes, carry their hamsters in closed boxes with air holes cut in the top, their pet snakes, turtles, and lizards, their ferrets and pet tarantulas. They will have had sufficient time, thanks to the official hurricane warning system, to be ready for the storm, and when the storm finally smashes into the city, they will simply slip under it and wait until it passes over and drifts out to sea.

The men who reside beneath the Claybourne Causeway, however, have neither been warned of the approaching hurricane nor would they be able to prepare for it if they were. Yes, they knew it was on its way, some hearing about it on the radio, a few others reading about it in newspapers pulled from Dumpsters and trash cans, or noticed the citywide preparations and the gardeners and yardmen employed at the hotels and condominium buildings cutting down low-hanging coconuts that the rising wind might otherwise toss through the air like cannonballs. Most of them know the storm is arriving soon, maybe today, possibly in five or ten minutes, but when you have not the means to follow the emergency instructions put out to the citizenry via radio, TV, newspapers, and Internet by city, county, state, and federal agencies, when you are in fact not a member of the citizenry, you tend to discount the warnings to the point where you simply are not aware of any emergency. For you, since you can’t do anything to protect yourself from it, there is no emergency. And so the men who live beneath the Causeway go about their usual domestic business as if a hurricane were not about to descend on them.

First the rain, then the surge. The pounding rain the Kid can handle. He’s got Einstein and Annie dry inside his tent with him. He’s got his own emergency kit — a half-gallon bottle of Sprite, a big bag of Cheez-Its and a jar of peanut butter to dip them in, his favorite between-meal meal. He’s got his stove and three cans of Spam and six hard-boiled eggs, a week’s worth of parrot and dog food, and a plastic bucket set outside under a drip off the Causeway to catch drinking and wash water. He’s chain-locked his bike to a steel stanchion. He’s got candles, a headlamp with fresh batteries, and the wind-up radio and telescope that the Professor gave him. It’s not exactly FEMA’s kit, but it’ll get him through the worst of what he’s expecting: a couple of boring days of heavy, wind-driven rain.

The rain hammers on his tent. He’s lit a candle and has pulled out the Shyster’s Bible again and is reading in the book of Numbers. This section of the Bible makes no sense to him because there’s no story. But he likes reading it anyhow. Mostly it’s rules and regulations being laid down by God and His main human Moses upon the ancient Israelites after they got away from the Egyptians. It’s a kind of moral menu for religious fanatics, the Kid thinks. He planned to return the Shyster’s Bible and the packet of papers in the briefcase he grabbed the other night during the police raid but has decided that he’ll read them first, both the Bible and the papers, before trading them back for something useful. Like money. The Shyster has the most money of anyone in the encampment and has been hiring the others to build his shack and buy his groceries and wash his clothes and his dishes and pots and pans. He’s even got Otis the Rabbit doing his cooking.

The Kid has started reading the fifth chapter of Numbers and it gives him a sudden chill, makes him sit up in his sleeping bag and keep reading: And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Command the children of Israel, that they put out of the camp every leper, and every one that hath an issue, and whosoever is defiled by the dead: Both male and female shall ye put out, without the camp shall ye put them; that they defile not their camps, in the midst whereof I dwell. ..