Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

From that moment on he no longer felt even the slightest desire to watch pornography or jerk off because now he was a convicted sex offender, which provided him with the same feelings he used to get from sitting in front of his computer screen with his hand wrapped around his cock watching one or two or more naked men with huge erect penises pushing their penises into the orifices of one or two or more naked young women. Three holes and two hands per woman. He no longer had to lie to himself. He no longer had to endure mind-numbing boredom in order to feel partially alive. He had been made human — as wholly human as he could then imagine anyhow. And those women — those three holes and two hands each — for the first time the women on the screen were almost human too and not just two-dimensional pictures. They were as real as he was!

There’s a difference between shame and guilt. And the Kid has begun to realize that he’s not ashamed of having spent most of his life so far watching pornography and using it to give himself orgasms: he’s not a bad person, he knows that much, and being a bad person is what makes you feel shame. No, he’s guilty instead because that’s what you are if you do a bad thing. And if the women being abused on camera by facial cum shots, gangbangs, and double anals and so forth as if they were just images designed to make his dick hard enough to whack off with were in fact as almost-real as he, then paying money to watch them being abused and degraded was a bad thing. It was like paying money to watch someone beat a dog.

Ever since the night he got arrested and then was convicted and sent to jail and the months he’s spent as a convicted sex offender he’s thought and acted like a man who was ashamed, a bad man who deserved to be cast out of the city. For reasons he will never fully understand — although he knows its origins go back to his childhood way before Iggy came into his life — he got sluiced into being a nearly full-time consumer of Internet pornography and because he didn’t realize it was a bad thing that he was doing and should therefore feel guilty for doing it which would have made him stop doing it, he felt ashamed instead: a bad person doing his typically bad things instead of a good person doing one bad thing. Or maybe two.

Remembering the night he was arrested for soliciting sex from a minor via the Internet and how as a result he went from feeling like a dust bunny to a flattened image of a man seen on a computer screen, the Kid wonders for the first time if there is a way for him to give that two-dimensional image on the screen a third dimension and become wholly alive.

Maybe if he just acts like he has a third dimension whether he’s seen by others or not — whether he’s seen by practically everyone in the world on YouTube and is monitored by his parole officer on a computer screen with beeps from the GPS on his ankle or instead is invisible to the world, living underground in darkness beneath the Causeway and well out of sight from passersby on the highway — if he acts like a three-dimensional man then maybe, just maybe he’ll turn into one. Isn’t that how everyone does it? By acting?

But he’s not sure how to behave as if he were already a man with three dimensions. It has to be done mentally from the inside out, he knows that much: it can’t be just an act put on for the cameras and the Internet as if life were a gigantic reality TV show that you can download onto your computer or your phone. That would only make things worse. No, it has to start way inside you down in the black hole of antimatter that sits at the exact center of who you are. Diddle that spot even a little and the rest will follow and out of nothingness will come heat, light, and a strong wind blowing across the universe, and they will combine and bring into existence fire, earth, and water, and out of fire, earth, and water will emerge flesh, bone, and blood wrapped in his skin.

So the Kid decides to believe the Professor’s story. All of it. That’s the first move. The rest will follow.

He decides to invest some of the Professor’s money in a new generator for the Greek and go into the battery-charging business with him. That’s the second move. If he’s stingy with it he can maybe make the Professor’s money last a year or possibly more, at least long enough for him to luck onto a job as a busboy again at one of the hotels out along the Barriers. The way he lives he could get by just on panhandling plus his cut of the Greek’s battery-charging fees but a real job will help establish him as a man in the world beyond the Causeway.

Third: he decides to give back the Shyster’s briefcase and not to judge him or feel superior to him. He may even apologize for woofing him the way he did.

Fourth: unfinished business; miscellaneous loose ends. In a week or two he’ll hitch out to the Panzacola and visit Dolores and Cat and see how Annie and Einstein are holding up at the edge of the jungle. He won’t bring them back to the Causeway with him though. This is no place for a dog on her last legs and a restless talkative parrot. He’ll buy a bicycle. Maybe he’ll start pumping iron with Paco.

He needs to move fast if he wants to stay synchronized and ready because the pace of change is picking up. He can feel it spreading out from inside his body in the general direction of his skin.

He’ll check in on his mother but will only stay long enough to let her know he’s alive in case she’s worried about him. He may visit Gloria and her kids and encourage them to continue believing the Professor’s account of how he died, although he figures the Writer will be taking care of that. By now he’s probably getting ready to move in with them.

The Kid stands and drags his duffel and backpack — all his worldly possessions — outside the teepee. The other men gaze at him in silence from under the Causeway, a Greek chorus standing in the shadows offstage watching their disillusioned hero accept his fate. He’s not as sad and beaten down as he looks however. Heroes never are. Otherwise they’d be victims and the Kid is not a victim. He rips down the plastic sheeting and unties the frame and lets the structure collapse of its own weight. Grabbing his pack and duffel he lugs his possessions toward the damp darkness beneath the Causeway.

He will make his home here among the other men. He is after all like them: a convicted sex offender. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. He has nine years to wait in darkness out of sight deep beneath the city before he is no longer on parole. No longer guilty. Nine years before he can remove the electronic shackle from his ankle and can emerge from under the Causeway and mingle freely again with people he believes to be mostly normal people with mostly normal sex lives; nine years before he can live among others in a building aboveground that’s less than 2,500 feet from a school or playground and circulate inside the city walls without fear of being rearrested, buy a one-way ticket on a bus bound for a distant city and live there if he wants to and not be breaking the law; nine years before he can stroll into a public library and legally use the public computer to go online and check out the job listings and apartments for rent on craigslist.org — a website that may not even exist by then — and while he’s online and nobody’s nearby he’ll be tempted to linger over a little free Internet porn as long as he keeps his fly zipped and no one reports him to the librarian. He decides to stop quitting cigarettes. He wonders what pornography will look like nine years from now. He wonders if it will get him hard again. He’ll be thirty-one years old by then.

Special thanks to my assistant, Nancy Wilson, and to Liz Moore for their help with research. Thanks also, as always, to my agent, Ellen Levine, for her ongoing support, and to my irreplaceable friend and editor, Dan Halpern.