Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

How long you gonna need the houseboat for?

Not sure. I’m thinking maybe five days, maybe more. I’m sort of recovering from the war. Afghanistan. I’m just out of the military. Need to get my head together. Post trauma whatever.

Semper fi, sonny. Retired Marine. What branch?

Army. First Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, New York.

Well, damn! Welcome back, soldier. America thanks you for all your sacrifices. And we’re real glad you’re back home alive in one piece. The old Panzacola’s a good place for a man to get his head together. Especially after what you been through. Nothing out there but gators and slithery snakes and pretty birds. And they won’t bother you none. You can do a little fishing. Catch your own supper. No fucking rag-heads blowing themselves up and cutting off people’s heads on TV. It’s real peaceful.

That’s good.

I’ll give you a military discount. You gonna need supplies? Food, water, gas, and so on?

Yeah. Five days’ worth anyhow. And some dog food and birdseed if you got it.

We’ll fix you up good, son. He tells the Kid to leave his bags and animals here at the store and take one of the canoes that the colored guys are bringing out. There’s three houseboats tied to the mangroves about a hundred yards upriver. You won’t get lost. The river’s blazed. You’ll have to make three trips. Just tie the canoe to the boat when you bring it in and paddle it back for the next one. Shouldn’t take you more’n an hour a trip. You know how to drive a houseboat, sonny?

Sure.

There ain’t much to it anyhow. Pontoon boats, little pissy twenty-five-horse outboards, no wheel or tiller to worry about. They only draw about ten inches. Moron could drive it. Lots of ’em have. Water’s pretty deep out there now on account of the storm and you might run into some drowned trees coming in, so don’t try no water-skiing, sonny. Heh-heh.

Cat’s wife has been looking the Kid up and down in a kindly, warm open-faced way as if she recognizes the young man from someplace pleasant and can’t remember where it was. The Kid catches her gaze and feels the warmth of it and grows uncomfortable. It’s a familiar enough gaze to him, one that he usually gets from women. Especially older women. They seem automatically to trust him. He doesn’t trigger their usual alarms against strange young males nor does he in any way invite their erotic attention or desire, subliminal or otherwise. He doesn’t even make them feel maternal. It’s as if he’s outside all sexual potential, is without an erotic marker of any kind, has no sexual past or future. Somehow in his presence middle-aged and older women seem released from all their usual forms of sexual anxiety and feel instead a physical warmth toward him, unrestrained and unedited. It’s almost as if he’s a very old woman himself.

But whenever the Kid perceives this warmth flowing in his direction — which due to his deflective nature isn’t all that often — he grows itchy and uncomfortable. A little fearful. It makes his stomach churn, and his breathing speeds up and goes shallow. He’s afraid that if he doesn’t turn away from that onrush of female warmth he might literally start to cry.

So he ignores Cat’s wife, refuses even to look at her. Instead he walks a few yards away from the couple and turns his attention to the Professor.

Well, Haystack, I guess this is good-bye.

Yes. I doubt we’ll meet again. I’ll leave your backpack and duffel up at the ranger station.

Okay. Thanks. Well, it’s been… interesting knowing you. The Kid doesn’t understand why he suddenly feels so sorry and sad for the Professor. He can’t remember when he last felt both sorry and sad for someone — even the Rabbit whom he felt sorry for when the cops busted his leg and sad about when he drowned but never both at the same time. Most people seem to him not quite real, as if they’re on a reality TV show and are only pretending to be themselves like the guy who’s supposed to be the park ranger and the old guy who calls himself Cat Turnbull and his wife who the Kid doesn’t want to look at. It’s like they’re on a reality show called Swamp People. They’re not actors like you see in soaps and movies or even porn because they’re playing themselves instead of people invented by a writer to say words written in a script and do what a director tells them to do, smiling or crying or taking off their clothes and screwing each other or just talking to each other on their cell phones. The ranger and the old guy named Cat and his wife and pretty much everyone else the Kid meets aren’t actors, he knows that — they’re just not real in the same way that he himself is.

But the Professor is different. He’s starting to feel real to the Kid the same way the Kid feels to himself and he’s puzzled by the feeling. He’s never much liked the Professor or enjoyed his company the way he enjoyed Rabbit’s for instance or even Paco’s because of his goofy concentration on something as useless as pumping iron that turned him into a cartoon character. On the other hand he didn’t particularly dislike the Professor either, not the way he disliked the Shyster and certain other deviants under the Causeway or O. J. Simpson for instance whom he never actually knew personally but definitely did not want to know personally anyhow, not just because he was a stone-cold wife killer but because he was an arrogant asshole. On the likability scale until this moment the Professor has fallen somewhere between the Rabbit and O. J. Simpson. Which for the Kid is about where most people fall. Even his mother. That’s how he prefers it. It’s how he’s always preferred it.

You know all that shit you told me in the interview? About how you’re gonna get whacked and everything from becoming “expendable and therefore dangerous”? Only it’s supposed to look like it’s a suicide?

Yes.

That’s not true, is it? You just made it up so your wife will feel better if you kill yourself.

Kid, it’s all true. You don’t believe me?

Why do you want to kill yourself, Professor? If your wife and kids come back, except for being so fat you got a lot to live for. Even if they don’t come back and she wants a divorce, you still got a lot to live for. Nice house, big prestigious job at a college, all those books and pictures and nice stuff you live with. You can travel wherever you want, live wherever you want, get credit cards and bank loans, take friends out to fancy restaurants for dinners. If you lost some of that weight you could even probably get a fairly good-looking girlfriend if you wanted one. Christ, look at me, I’m the one who should be talking about suicide, not you. I can’t even vote in this state. Why do you want to kill yourself?

I don’t. And I won’t. Someone else will do the job. Only he’ll be masquerading as me. As it were.

That means he won’t really be you? People will just think he’s you?

Correct. Except for you and Gloria.

It doesn’t add up, Professor. You must be really bored with life. Like you’re too frigging smart for reality and other people so you make up this complicated spy story about how you’re not really gonna kill yourself, some secret government agent’s gonna do it, and then you go and kill yourself anyhow but you get to feel superior about it. ’Course, that doesn’t make much sense either. Once you’re dead you don’t get to feel superior to anybody. You don’t feel anything. Unless you’re a Christian who believes in God and heaven and all. But you’re a professor, so you don’t believe in any of that, do you?