Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

K: Okay. That’s what I thought. Who’s doing the targeting?

P: I’m not sure yet. It could be one of at least three of my previous employers. Let’s call them government agencies.

K: What government? You mean the government of the United States of America?

P: Yes. And the government of at least one foreign nation and possibly a second. Or all three in collusion.

K: So like, are we talking FBI and CIA and shit?

P: Not really. There are agencies that aren’t as well known as the FBI and CIA whose purposes and activities aren’t as closely monitored by Congress and the public. Agencies that are off the books, so to speak. Black-box agencies. But we needn’t go into that here. I don’t want to put you in any danger, and I certainly don’t want to endanger my family any more than I already have. My sole use for this interview is to provide some small comfort to them after my body is found. So I’ll spare you, and therefore them, some of the details.

K: Are you not really a professor then?

P: Oh, yes! I am who I say I am! A professor, husband, father, deacon, library trustee, et cetera. All that and more.

K: But you’re saying besides being a professor and all you’re also like “targeted” by these super-secret agencies.

P: That’s correct.

K: So why the fuck would they do that, target you? Why would they set it up so they can like kill you and make it look like you committed suicide because of some sex scandal?

P: (sighs) It’s a long story, Kid. I was recruited very early. While still in college, in fact. I was recruited because of my intellectual and linguistic gifts, no doubt, but also because my psychological and social profiles fit certain known and tested templates. I arrived early and stayed late, let us say, and consequently over the years I saw and heard and participated in much that if they became publicly known could cause great harm to powerful political and economic interests. Especially now that both political and economic interests are so intricately connected. Simply put, even though I was never anywhere near the top of the pyramid, I saw and heard and participated in too much. Those on top operate strictly on a need-to-know basis. It’s the people nearest the bottom, people like me, who know too much. More than they need to know.

K: Yeah, but so what? Lots of people know too much. They don’t get killed for it, so long as they don’t talk about it to anyone. Even me, I know shit for instance about the guys who live under the Causeway that I’d never tell about, stuff they told me or I saw them do that could get them sent back to prison, and nobody wants to kill me. They just trust me not to tell anyone what I know. Were you like planning on telling what you know about these secret agencies and so on, going on TV or writing it in a book or something? And somehow these guys found out about it?

P: No, nothing like that. But it’s assumed among my previous employers that people who lived as I did for years, for decades, can only be trusted as long as they are not who they say they are. It’s when they become who they say they are that they can no longer be trusted.

K: I’m confused. Trusted to what?

P: Not to reveal what they saw and heard and did in the past.

K: So now that you are what you say you are, a professor and such, married and all, you can’t be trusted anymore to lie about who you were in the past? Like you might start by telling your wife and then a priest or a shrink or the guys in your therapy group if you had one, and pretty soon some newspaper writer would hear about it or a book writer, and then the whole world would end up knowing what you know. And that would fuck up a lot of important people like in politics and so on?

P: Correct.

K: So that’s why they want to get rid of you?

P: Yes.

K: This sounds like a fucking movie. Are you sure you’re not making this shit up?

P: I’m not making any of it up. Unfortunately.

K: Were you like a spy, then?

P: Informant first. Then mole. Then spy. Counterspy. Double agent. That’s the usual progression for someone with my particular abilities and temperament.

K: How do you know they want to do you? The suicide thing.

P: Like I said, I know the script. The Calusa police have started an investigation. Two plainclothes officers came to my home asking to speak with me. They have already gone to the trouble to question my parents, which means the scandal will no doubt be set in my distant past. It will be a crime that I am accused of having committed when I was a young man, when my parents and I were still more or less in touch, before I decided to distance myself from them. It will therefore have to be an act for which there is no statute of limitations.

K: What’s that mean?

P: Misdemeanors and most felonies have to be prosecuted within a limited amount of time following the commitment of the crime. Crimes that society regards as particularly repulsive, however, have no statute of limitations. First-degree murder, for instance. Also, in most states, rape, distribution and possession of child pornography, and sexual abuse of children, especially in cases when the victim doesn’t remember the event until years later. My best guess is that someone has recently uncovered long-repressed memories of having been sexually abused by me when she or he was a child and has taken those resurrected memories to the Calusa Police Department.

K: But you didn’t, right? Abuse anybody. You’re not a fucking chomo, right?

P: Correct.

K: Dude, that’s some serious shit! You could end up living under the Causeway yourself!

P: It’ll never come to that. I’ll never be indicted or even arrested. I’ll never be tried or convicted. I’ll simply disappear. Then my accuser, whoever she or he is, will allow her- or himself to be interviewed by some local investigative journalist, or else one of the police officers will leak the nature of the accusation and investigation to the press. Sometime after that my body will be found, and the official cause of death will be ruled a suicide. Naturally, they can arrange it so my body is never found. But then my disappearance would remain an open case and would invite a long-term ongoing investigation. Who knows what would turn up? No, they want my wife, my children, my colleagues and students, the entire city of Calusa and especially the press and other news media to believe that I killed myself because I was about to be exposed as a child molester or rapist. It’ll make a titillating, convincing story. “So-called genius professor of sociology, an eccentric, bearded, fat man doing research on homeless convicted sex offenders, is a sex offender himself.”

K: How come you’re telling me all this in front of a camera, instead of telling your wife in person, say? Or the cops. Or why not go on TV and tell Larry King or some news guy? Or here’s an idea, why don’t you put it up on YouTube?

P: First of all, if I tell Gloria what is about to happen, she will want me to save myself in a way that will basically destroy her and my children’s lives. She’ll want us to flee to some undeveloped country and assume new identities, for instance. Which wouldn’t work anyhow. It would only shatter their lives and postpone the inevitable. All it would do is buy me a little extra time until they found us. Ten or fifteen years ago it might have worked. But the world is digitalized now and interconnected, so it’s impossible for a high-profile American man with a wife and two small children to flee the country and change his and his family’s identity. The first time one of us went online we’d be located. And if I go to the police, as you suggest, they will merely assume I’m lying in order to protect myself against my accuser. That would make my accuser go away, which is good, and the suicide script would be scrapped. Also good. But they’ll know I’ve been alerted to their intentions, so a different way to make me disappear will be contrived. Which is not good. In that script there’s usually an accident or a fire that takes out the whole family or several other people associated with the target, fellow workers or innocent bystanders. If I’m killed alone it will appear that my story is true. An “accident” that takes others with me is messy, perhaps, but not incriminating. The same thing will happen if I go public with it by posting this interview on YouTube, for instance, or tell my story to a journalist.