Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

The jury didn’t buy my claim that by posing online as Big Daddy I was merely trying to entrap a child molester who happened to be a well-respected Calusa pediatrician known in certain Internet circles as Doctor Hoo. It’s the old legal strategy of trying to confuse the jury or at least one member of the jury by providing too much information. One holdout and you’ve got a hung jury. Surprised me that the judge admitted the e-mails as evidence, since by then the good doctor was dead and no longer available to testify on his own behalf. Or on mine, as it were. Wasted effort.

Was it true?

Was what true?

That you were trying to entrap this doctor. This fat perv who was all into kiddie porn and sex with little girls. Or was it boys?

In his case, boys. And he was hardly fat. He was one of those Ironmen. A competitive triathlete. Zero body fat. But puh-lease, I was merely trying to avoid going to jail. The same as everyone living down here. It’s the same for everyone everywhere, Kid. It’s what people do. We tell stories that proclaim our innocence. All of us. We tell them to ourselves and to anyone who’ll listen. Even your old friend the late lamented Rabbit with his boxing stories did it. No doubt your professor friend too. Even you. And it’s not just us pervs. Everyone has a story that proclaims his innocence. It’s human nature. I’m a lawyer, Kid. I’ve heard them all.

The Kid lowers his face and looks down at his feet. He turns slowly away from the lawyer and returns slump-shouldered to his teepee. Brushing the plastic door flap aside he steps in and sits down on the cement floor facing out. The view of the Bay and downtown Calusa isn’t as appealing as it was a few minutes ago. Nothing is.

He’s almost back where he started. If the Professor wasn’t Doctor Hoo then the Shyster couldn’t have been the one who told the cops where to look for the Professor’s body. The Kid realizes that he’s disappointed: on some deep level he wanted the Professor to have been Doctor Hoo. Even if repellent and disgusting it would have made him finally known to the Kid. There isn’t much about people that he lets disgust him because there’s always a chance people aren’t what they seem to be or say they are. But if he knew the Professor really was a chomo then he would at least be free to be disgusted.

But if it wasn’t the Shyster who phoned in the location of the Professor’s body, it must have been whoever put him there. The Professor’s story proclaiming his innocence, his story about the spies and counterspies, could still be true, right?

Unless it isn’t. Unless the Professor himself was the one who told the cops where they could find his body and then drowned himself in a slightly suspicious way so Gloria and other people like the Writer would believe his story and think he was assassinated because he knew too much. It’s a plausible story after all. Even the Kid believes it happens sometimes, that secret agents murder other secret agents who they think can’t be trusted anymore. Even in America. So it could be true.

He doesn’t know which story to believe — the one in the Professor’s filmed interview or the report from the Calusa County coroner’s office. His mind is bouncing off competing versions of reality as if he’s living inside a video game and it’s making him feel dizzy and nauseated. He wonders if the Writer’s harsh theory about knowledge — that you can’t ever know the truth about anything — is true after all. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. But the Kid can’t even know that: he’s stuck between believing the Writer’s theory and not believing it.

He does know however that if nothing is true then nothing is real. Logic tells him that. And if nothing is real then nothing matters. Which means you’re free to believe whatever you want — unless you’ve got an innocent soul like Iggy had and Annie and Einstein. Unless you’re an animal, that is. Except for the Snake which is neither a human being nor an animal. Because once you’re born a human being and the Snake talks you into doing something that you have to lie about you’re no longer innocent. That’s when you start making up stories that proclaim your innocence like Adam and Eve did after they ate the forbidden fruit and like the Shyster says is what everyone does. It must happen very early in life when you’re still new at being human, the Kid reasons and he wonders when it happened to him, when he got talked into doing something that he had to lie about and as a result no longer had an innocent soul.

Maybe the Internet is the Snake and pornography is the forbidden fruit because watching porn on the Internet is the first thing the Kid remembers lying about. He was only ten years old that summer and he remembers getting his first real hard-ons from listening to his mother screwing her then boyfriend in her bedroom. The Kid can’t remember which of three boyfriends she was making it with that summer, Dougie or Sal or the retired U.S. Airways pilot. They kind of blend together in his memory. The only thing that helped him ignore her orgasmic shouts and the thumping of the headboard against the wall was sitting in his room in front of the computer screen of her old Dell desktop, clicking onto free porn sites. Later he memorized her credit card number and whenever his mother and her boyfriend of the moment were screwing he got into watching pay-per-view hard core and then a year or so later he was watching it when she was out with her women friends cruising the bars or after he got home from school and she was at work and he was alone. It relaxed him. When he sat down and booted up the computer and mouse-clicked his way straight to the porn sites he favored he could feel and almost hear a corresponding series of clicks in his brain. A warm spot would emerge at the back of his skull and spread up over the top of his head until he felt like he was wearing a heated cap.

He didn’t lie about it to his mother — except about using her credit card which she discovered on her own anyhow when he finally maxed it out prompting her to read the whole statement for once instead of just checking the minimum monthly payment due. But she knew he was deep into porn — maybe not how deep — and although she shook her head and clucked her tongue whenever she caught him at it she didn’t seem to care. She treated his growing addiction to pornography like it was little worse than a waste of time better spent doing his homework or helping out with housework. So it wasn’t his mother he lied to or anyone else either since no one else knew or ever asked him about it. He lied to himself.

And it wasn’t watching porn that he lied about or even his constant jerking off. He lied about the way they made him feel, both the porn and jerking off. He told himself it was normal, everyone did it — especially guys. Well, maybe only guys. And it was no big deal anyhow. In fact it was boring, he told himself. Even the quintuple-X hard-core multiple black-on-white fisting double anals. Porn was boring; beating his meat was boring. The same-old same-old. He just did it because it felt better and less boring than not doing it, he told himself, like chewing gum or wearing sneakers instead of shoes. That’s what he told himself.

But he knew better. He did it because he couldn’t stop himself. He couldn’t stop himself because watching pornography and masturbating were the only times he felt real. The rest of the time he felt as if he were his own ghost — not quite dead but not alive either. A dust bunny shaped like a person. So for years whenever he was alone with a computer he watched pornography and masturbated. Until the night he let himself get lured by brandi18 into a house in the suburbs and got busted by her and her father.

He doesn’t know why but everything changed that night. Suddenly for the first time in his life he was visible to himself. The police who took him down in Brandi’s yard when they interrogated him at the station later opened a laptop on the table in front of him and put in a disc and showed him a video of him and Brandi’s father in the kitchen that Brandi’s father had taped with a hidden camera and the second he saw himself on the screen he felt like all his atoms were instantly reconfigured. It was as if he had never seen himself in a mirror before. It was like being touched by an angel. He had an actual body and it was not just his body, something he merely possessed, it was him ! And who was he? He was the digitalized body of an about-to-be convicted sexual offender, a grown young man with a six-pack of beer, a porn movie, condoms, and a tube of lubricant trying to hook up in the suburbs with a fourteen-year-old Internet girl — and because now it was on a computer screen for everyone in the world to see, it was reality.