Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

He casts his gaze over the flooded encampment and notices that the surge seems to have receded a foot or two. The wind has diminished to a steady breeze and has shifted from the east around to the west and the rain has let up slightly. The men squatting up under the bridge have ventured out a ways to where they can stand in a low crouch and they’re talking to one another excitedly as if surprised at not having drowned, as if they think that soon everything will return to the way it was yesterday — as if the way it was yesterday was worth living for.

But the Kid knows it’ll never be like it was before the flood and the hurricane. Once you’ve seen your life and where you live for what they are they never look the way they did before. Illusions die hard especially when like the Kid you’ve only got a few to hold on to and when they’re dead and gone you can never get them back. He knows now what the Rabbit knew when he let himself fall: this life is the only one available and it’s not worth the effort. Fuck the Professor and his theories.

The rain has stopped and the sky is turning from dark gray to a buttery shade of yellow. The water is receding rapidly as if the Bay is being emptied out through Kydd’s Cut back into the ocean. His tent is gone, swept away by the flood. Like Rabbit. All the tents and huts have been demolished and dumped into the Bay. Chained to the stanchion his bike lies buried beneath a huge pile of dripping debris, garbage, old boards and plywood, and tangled sheets of polyethylene. He can barely make out its twisted and bent wheels and frame. Everything is beyond repair or simply gone.

He can’t think of what to do now or where to go. Maybe he should just stand where he is and wait for something to happen and react to whatever it is. As if he were an object, a thing instead of a human being. Because that’s what he feels like now.

Then he remembers that his water-logged duffel and backpack and few remaining possessions are up by the highway. What the hell, he can be a thing up there as easily as down here under the Causeway. Head down he starts trudging up the path and halfway to the top he lifts his head and sees Annie soaked and shivering tied to the guardrail and on the pavement next to her is Einstein miserable in his cage with his head tucked under a wing, his long tail-feathers a soaked mat on the floor of the cage.

The Kid never should have taken responsibility for Annie and Einstein. What was he thinking? It’s all the Professor’s fault, he thinks. He never would have taken them with him when he left Benbow’s if the Professor hadn’t given him the illusion that he was capable of taking care of them. That illusion is gone now too. Those two helpless creatures are way worse off with him than they were at Benbow’s.

Then to his amazement just as the Kid reaches the top and steps over the guardrail he sees the Professor’s van coming down the highway from the west. Every time he thinks about someone that person suddenly appears in reality. He should start thinking about people he actually wants to see except that he can’t think of anyone he really wants to see. Nobody he knows in person anyhow. He wouldn’t mind seeing Willow the French Canadian porn star. He wouldn’t mind seeing Captain Kydd the pirate so he could ask him about the buried treasure.

The van crunches to a stop beside the Kid. The Professor gets out of his vehicle and hurries up to the Kid. He’s in shirtsleeves with huge sweat circles under his arms and a gray wet blotch across his heaving chest. His face is red and he’s breathing rapidly as if he’s climbed several flights of stairs.

Put the animals and the rest of your gear in the van!

The Kid answers, You can take the animals if you want. But I’m stayin’ put. I don’t need you.

The Professor slides open the side door and lifts Annie into the back and sets Einstein’s cage beside her. Yes you do. The storm’s only half over. You can’t stay here. He reaches for the Kid’s backpack but the Kid yanks it back from him.

Fuck you, fat man! Like I said, I’m stayin’ put.

Look at you! You’re soaked through. He glances down the hillside at what was once the settlement beneath the Causeway. Your camp is wrecked. You can’t stay here.

Fuck you.

The Professor picks up the Kid’s duffel and places it on the backseat. Come with me. I’ll take you to my house. You can come back here and rebuild tomorrow or the next day, after the hurricane’s passed out to sea.

The Professor takes hold of the backpack again. This time the Kid doesn’t resist. He’s remembered that he’s an object, a thing, not a human being with a will and a goal, and that he’s only capable of reacting, not acting. The Professor’s the human being here, not the Kid. So he opens the passenger door of the van and gets in.

TO THE KID AS THEY DRIVE ACROSS THE city and along deserted suburban streets the Professor seems agitated and uncharacteristically urgent. Usually he’s calm, slow-moving, and talks in long complete sentences that keep your attention but today he rattles on about how until now he’s been protected and that’s all going to change so he’s going to have to protect himself. The Kid’s not sure what he’s talking about and thinks at first that it’s the hurricane that’s got the Professor in a lather so he asks him if he means protected from the hurricane.

No, no, of course not, the Professor’s not afraid of the storm, he’s been in far worse storms than this, he insists. He’s been in typhoons at sea in an open boat.

No shit, the Kid says, not knowing what a typhoon is exactly but admitting to himself that it does sound worse than a hurricane. Especially at sea in an open boat.

And besides , the Professor adds, wherever I go, the eye of the storm goes. The I of the eye. He laughs loudly at this, a joke the Kid definitely does not get. As you may have noticed, the big man says and laughs again.

Yeah, whatever .

Dodging fallen tree branches and uprooted foliage to the end of a looping tree-lined residential street, the Professor turns the van onto a driveway and pulls up before a double bay garage attached to a sprawling ranch house. He raises the overhead door with an electronic remote and drives the vehicle into the garage and parks it.

Lugging Einstein’s cage and leading Annie by her rope leash, the Kid follows the Professor into the house. The Professor, still in shirtsleeves and sweating, drags the Kid’s expedition backpack and duffel across the carpeted floor and drops them by the entrance to the living room. It’s a large comfortable tastefully furnished home, a professor’s and a librarian’s home with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, paintings and framed photographs on the walls, Oriental carpets, an elaborate stereo system and racks of CDs, a large flat-screened TV, and a long shelf of DVDs next to it. The Kid can’t remember ever being inside a house like this before. He wasn’t aware that comfy good-looking rooms like this even existed except in magazine ads and on TV. It’s more like a set for actors to use for an upscale porn film than a real home for real people, he thinks. Then he flashes on the night he got caught by Dave Dillinger and the girl he thought was brandi18. Except for the books and pictures this house is a lot like that one.

You don’t have like any hidden cameras or anything here, do you?

Of course not! What made you ask that?

Just wondering. Is this where you live?

Yes, it is.

You live here alone or with a wife?

With a wife and our two children.

They around?