Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

Unless that was the point. Unless that was the statement. The Writer reminds the Kid of the damage done to the Professor’s face by the crabs and who knows what other underwater creatures that got into the van through the open driver’s side window and ate at his eyes and ears. There are eels in those canals, and alligators.

True, it was very ugly. And strange. The Kid doesn’t want to remember how the Professor looked when the EMT guys finally succeeded in getting him out of the van.

Hemingway blowing off his head with a shotgun in the kitchen while his wife is asleep upstairs. There’s a statement for you.

Yeah? What was he stating?

He spent his life killing animals with guns. Big dangerous animals like lions and water buffalo and rhinos. He wasn’t about to kill himself in bed with a bottle of vodka and a jar of sleeping pills or by taking a flying leap off the Golden Gate. Not a big dangerous animal like Ernest Hemingway.

Who was he stating it to? That he was a big dangerous animal.

History, naturally. Literary history.

That seems dumb to the Kid but he doesn’t say it. He can’t imagine wanting to make a statement about who you really are to history. Especially “literary history”—whatever that is. Unless you’re a Hitler or a George W. Bush talking to history is a waste of time. You’d have to believe that people hundreds of years from now would give a shit about knowing who you really were. Still, the Writer is showing him something he never thought of before: that when you decide to kill yourself you also get to choose the method and therefore how you kill yourself in a sense can reveal who you really are. You don’t get to find that out for yourself of course because you’re dead by then but it is like a form of self-expression, your true last words after you’ve already said what were supposedly your last words. For the Kid this casts a slightly different light on many things: the Professor’s telling his super-spy assassination story and recording it onto a DVD; making the Kid agree to be the story’s delivery boy; then there’s the one hundred Benjamins nicely wrapped and waiting in the safe, the van in the canal, the bicycle locks — all the details that lead up to the Professor’s death and come shortly after it. With only one carefully planned detail yet to play out: the Kid’s actual delivery of the videotaped interview with the Professor to the Professor’s widow.

But what kind of man would think up and then arrange all that? If he did kill himself — and the Kid is now pretty sure that he did — then what does the way he went about it say to those who are still alive, to his wife and children, to the Kid himself, to the Professor’s students and fellow professors, to everyone who ever knew the man? Even to history like the big dangerous animal Ernest Hemingway?

It says the Professor was somebody with lots of secrets, the Kid reasons. With maybe a whole secret life. And that he was somebody who wanted people to believe that he was smarter than everyone else. Also a man who got off from observing people from a safe distance. A man who didn’t want to be known for what he was but at the same time did want to be known for what he was. A man who loved hiding the truth but also loved revealing it.

The Kid asks the Writer if at the press briefing he found out how the cops knew to search for the Professor’s body at that particular spot in that particular canal. There are hundreds of miles of canals in Calusa County that they could have searched just as easily and logically as this one only they would have come up empty-handed. It might’ve taken a year before they happened onto the right spot at the right canal. Somebody must’ve dropped a dime on where the van went in, he says.

Couldn’t have been the wife. The police told us she and their two kids were living with her mother temporarily and she hadn’t seen or spoken to him for days. That leaves only one person who could have done it.

Who?

You.

Very funny.

Well, when we left Appalachee you seemed to know precisely where they’d find him.

C’mon, I just remembered he was kind of interested in that one canal. Besides, I was way deep in the swamp since before he went off the radar. I couldn’t’ve called the cops.

Cell phones, Kid.

For a minute or two the Kid wonders if maybe he did call the cops from way deep in the swamp. He remembers being surprised by the NPR news coming as it did from what seemed like another planet than the one the Kid was on with Annie and Einstein in his houseboat out there in the sloughs among the mangroves like the crew of the starship Enterprise . And he remembers being frightened at first because he wasn’t sure how he was connected to the Professor’s disappearance but knew that somehow he was connected and it could turn out to be dangerous to him. He was backsliding right then, bored and generating head-porn and jerk-off fantasies which has always had a dulling effect on his awareness of what else was going on at the time and not much memory of it afterward so that often the next day if he was no longer bored he would remember his thoughts and actions of the previous day as if he had only dreamed them. Did he call the cops and tell them where they were likely to find the missing professor? Or did he only dream it? Or wish it?

He could have made the call. You just dial 911 and say, Look for the missing college professor at the Route Eighty-three Canal at Lock one-oh-seven. Then hang up. And the Writer’s not wrong, the Kid did have his cell phone with him out there and if he was in NPR range he was possibly in cell phone range too. He pulls his clamshell from his pants pocket and checks the recent-calls list. His next-to-last call, he notes with relief, was placed the morning after the cops busted up the encampment under the Causeway and before he got fired from his busboy job at the Mirador when for a few moments that morning he thought of renting an apartment for him and Iggy to live in and called a few Realtors before he was interrupted by the two Babes on Blades. His last call was to his parole officer from Benbow’s.

I never dropped no dime on the Professor, man. Not unless they got pay phones out there in the middle of the Panzacola. Which they don’t, believe me. But you already know that since you’re writing about it for your magazine and all.

I didn’t know that. Never thought of it, actually. No pay phones in the Panzacola? Nice detail. Mind if I use it?

Be my guest.

Wonder if you’re out of cell phone range there. Did you happen to check your reception out there?

Not that I remember. How come you hafta ask about stuff like this? Don’t you hafta be like some kinda expert on the Great Panzacola Swamp in order to write about it for a big fancy New York magazine?

Not really.

You ever actually been inside the swamp? Like in a canoe or a houseboat? Or even take a walk on one of those hiking trails they got for bird-watchers?

Not really.

But you’re okay with writing about it anyhow?

Sure. Jesus Christ, what’s that!

The Writer hits the brakes and brings the car to a sudden stop ten feet short of a gigantic mocha-colored serpent as long as the one-lane road is wide crossing the road slowly from left to right as if sleep-crawling over the hot pavement, sucking the heat through its scales into its cold blood as it undulates its way from greenery over concrete to more greenery and seems to be trying to make it last but is obliged nonetheless to keep moving in order not to get cooked by the sun-baked pavement or hit by a car or truck before succeeding in making it all the way across and into the safety of the jungle. Its head is as large as a Doberman’s and its swirling muscular body is as thick as the Kid’s body so that if its mouth could open wide enough it could swallow the Kid whole. This snake is evil. Its eyes are open but cold and not afraid or angry or curious and they’re nothing like Iggy’s, the only other eyes the Kid can think of comparing them to, eyes that always seemed friendly toward the Kid at least if not toward other people.