Lost Memory of Skin (33 page)

He knows where and how his parents live now, just as they know where and how he lives and that he is married to a woman and that there are two seven-year-old grandchildren his mother and father have never met and have not seen even in photographs. He knows they have tracked him on the Internet in recent years, ever since he ended up in Calusa. His father even managed to uncover his university e-mail address and for a few years every six months or so has sent him a brief report on their lives and politely asked for a return e-mail, photographs, confirmation of receipt—anything. No explanations for his long silence necessary. No apology requested. Just write back, please. All the old man—for he is old now, in his late eighties—and his wife want is their son’s acknowledgment of their existence.
We’re happy here at Dove Run, as happy as can be expected,
the old man types into his computer.
Except that we do not hear from you, son. Your mother and I do not understand what we have done to deserve this. Please tell us so that we can say we are sorry and can again be your parents as we once were. Love, Dad.

The Professor knows from his father’s e-mails that his mother is ill, suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, and that his father has become her caretaker. The two of them have sold their house in Clinton and moved into an assisted-living compound outside Tuscaloosa. They have a small apartment and there is an attached full-time nursing unit where the Professor’s mother can live when his father can no longer care for her by himself. The Professor, when he read that bit of news six months ago, felt a small ripple of relief wash over him. Soon she will forget she has a son, if she hasn’t forgotten already. As her past gets erased so in a sense does his. That’s the Professor’s ideal lived life—one with no witnesses, or as few as possible.

From the evidence, his father’s memory of the Professor’s childhood and youth, up to the point when he left Kenyon College and went off to graduate school at Yale, is intact. And the old man knows as much of his son’s life since then as he can learn from the Internet: his publications, articles about him in the Calusa newspaper, mentions of his name in certain sociology blogs, his e-mail address, and his home telephone number; he knows his son’s academic rank and place of employment; he knows that he is married to the former Gloria Bennett, who is employed as a librarian, and that there are two children by that marriage, fraternal twins, a boy and a girl.

Of the years between his son’s departure for Yale and his arrival thirty years later in Calusa the old man knows nothing. His letters went unanswered and then after a year were returned stamped
ADDRESSEE
UNKNOWN
. Phone numbers in his son’s name were not listed anywhere in America. Eventually the Professor’s father gave up trying to contact his son, and gradually the Professor’s mother began to forget that she had a son and needed to be reminded of his name, and she would brighten then and ask where was he. When will he be here? Then, early in the century, along came the Internet, and the Professor’s father was able to renew his search with a more thorough and efficient tool at his disposal than he’d had in the early years. He finally located his son and learned about his present life. Not all of it, of course, but enough to excite his desire to know more and a powerful fantasy of presenting his son and his wife Gloria and their two children to his son’s mother before she forgot altogether that he had ever existed.

But now it looks to the old man as if it’s too late. In his most recent, unanswered e-mail to his son he wrote:
Your mother’s memory of all but her own childhood is pretty nearly gone. She recognizes me, but she confuses me with her father. It’s very sad,
he added, hoping to make his son sad enough to want to see his mother again. But he has never seen his son sad, even as a child, so it was probably useless to try arousing in him an emotion that he appeared incapable of feeling. Still, he had to try. But when the Professor read his father’s e-mail he felt relieved, not sad. Then he hit
delete
.

He clears his throat.
So now, after all these years, now you decide you need to know my past. We agreed, didn’t we, from the beginning that there was much about my life before we met that I could not reveal. Not to you, not to anyone. There were oaths I had taken and pledges I had signed. And you understood and accepted that. It was to protect you. You and the children.

Yes, I understood. I did. I knew enough about you and your past, the public part anyhow, to accept not knowing more. But your parents? Why would you say your parents were dead, when they weren’t? Why would you lie about a thing like that?

That, dear Glory, is one of those things I cannot reveal to you. So that when the police or anyone else comes ’round asking questions of you or of my parents, none of you has to lie in order to protect me. You’re free to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you Jesus. You don’t know enough about me to feel obliged to lie. I withhold information so that you don’t have to, m’dear.

He has slipped into his genteel southern accent, and she knows what that means: he’s told her all of the truth that he’s going to. She reminds him that she promised the police detective that she would deliver his message to her husband.
Will you be speaking with the police tomorrow?

Tomorrow is Sunday. The Sabbath. The Lord’s Day. I’ll call him early Monday.

All right. Good night, then.

Gloria, I won’t be going to church with you and the twins tomorrow.

You won’t?

No.

Why not?

I b’lieve I should have me a little private discussion with my daddy.

Your “daddy”? That’s a word I never thought I’d hear from you.

Yes. Now that he exists, I can use it.

Can’t you speak to him by telephone? It’s a day’s drive, practically.

I said “private discussion.” I suspect his telephone ain’t private.

She nods, turns away, disappears into the darkness. The Professor returns to his meal. For the first time he hears the heavy drumming of rain on the roof and the slosh of gutters overflowing. It has been raining steadily, he realizes, for at least the last half hour. If it’s more than a late-summer shower, it’ll slow his drive north to Alabama. He gobbles the last of the meat loaf and macaroni and cheese and empties his glass of iced tea and places the dishes into the dishwasher. The rain, he notices from the sound, is wind driven. He decides he’d better leave now.

CHAPTER TWELVE

T
HREE
TIMES
THE
P
ROFESSOR
STOPS
ON
his journey west and north to Alabama, twice for gas but otherwise for food, truck-stop food—stew and biscuits and pie and ice cream—and fast food—Big Macs and fries and more pies. He does this without deciding to do it, as if his hunger is a constant ongoing need that can never be satisfied. He has no reason to check in on it and ask whether he is actually hungry again. It’s always there, like his breath. It is who he is and has been for as long as he can remember, a never-ending appetite.

The only thing that obliges him to push his plate away and pay the cashier and leave is the pressure of time: he’s obliged to keep driving. After all these years he has to speak with his father. Before he faces the Calusa police detective, or the man claiming to be a Calusa police detective, he has to learn what the man asked his father and what the old man answered. He has to know if the walls that separate the compartments that contain his past have started to erode and collapse. He cannot allow that to happen, not now, after so many years of constructing and reinforcing those walls, making the chambers they contain impenetrable even to the Professor himself. He’s not just trying to preserve and maintain the life he’s built for himself in the last decade here in Calusa; he’s also trying to hold on to the inner integrity and coherence of each box in the set of boxes that precedes his life in Calusa. The story of his life from Kenyon College on is like a long row of rented storage compartments in a warehouse outside a city that he never wants to visit again. As soon as he’s swung shut the door and snapped the lock, he deliberately misplaces the key. A year or two passes, and he departs from Kathmandu or Lima or one of a half-dozen other cities, even a few American cities, small towns, rural communes, and as if renting a new storage unit in the warehouse, he packs up all the details of the year or two of his life just ended and deposits them in the new compartment, clicks the lock shut and moves on, not forgetting to lose the key—tossing it from the window of the taxi on the drive to the airport, dropping it through a sewer grate on his way to catch the train, flipping it into a Dumpster as he approaches the security check at the shipyard.

North of Calusa traffic on the Interstate is light. Rain beats against the flat front of the van. By the time he veers west and passes above the vast Panzacola Swamp on the old Panzacola Highway connecting the Atlantic to the Gulf, the night has worn on, and the only vehicles now are trucks with deliveries crossing from the cities on one coast to the cities on the other and the occasional beat-up pickup driven by a member of one of the remnant Indian tribes still making a life for themselves in the roadside camps and small ramshackle settlements along the northern edge of the swamp.

The lights of Calusa and its suburbs have long since faded and gone dark behind him. Soon out ahead the lights of the cities along the Gulf Coast will begin to tint the western sky. There are no stars. No moon. It’s raining hard, slanted against the van by the wind out of the west. But the Professor barely notices. Since leaving the house, he’s not once thought of the Kid or of his wife and children, not even of his father or the reason for this sudden journey. He’s not thinking of anything or anyone in a focused way. For perhaps the first time in his life the Professor is experiencing panic. The Professor never panics. He admires that fact. But he’s panicking now, and knowing it frightens him and makes it worse. He’s sweating slick sheets and loosens his necktie and collar and turns on the air conditioner.

At the Gulf Coast where the Panzacola Swamp merges with the sea, the old Panzacola Highway connects to the north-running Gulf Turnpike. The wind-blown rain slaps the van on its flat left side now, and he has to wrestle with the wheel to keep the vehicle in its lane. There are suburbs and cities clustered alongside the turnpike here, cloverleaves, overpasses, and exits to attend to and an enormous plaza where he refills with gas and eats another meal, pushes his way through the rain back to the parked van and resumes his drive on up the coast of the peninsula.

Windshield wipers flop rapidly back and forth, but the rain is too heavy for them to wipe away, and his view ahead is blurred. Twice he narrowly misses vehicles moving slowly in front of of him, and several times like a drunk man he loses sight of the white line that divides the lanes and has to slow down almost to a stop before he finds it again. His pulse is racing, and it occurs to him to play some music. Yes, for God’s sake, play some music. Music will calm him, he thinks, and let him focus and organize his mind, his most powerful tool, his weapon against the world.

For the last few hours, since Gloria revealed that she had spoken with his father and that the police had visited the old man at the home in Alabama and had come to his own door in Calusa asking to speak with him, since that moment the Professor has not been himself. He’s been out of his mind, and his mind, he believes, is his true self. He needs to get back inside it, and music will help.

He punches up one of the hundreds of compilations of jazz standards he’s burned onto CDs and keeps in a black plastic CD file box inside the armrest next to the driver’s seat, and soon his mind comes back to him: Tommy Flanagan’s “I Fall in Love Too Easily” and Art Farmer and Bill Evans on “The Touch of Your Lips” and Roy Hargrove’s “The Nearness of You.” By the time he hears the opening chords of Bud Powell’s “My Heart Stood Still” he’s found his true self again and is located there: calm, logical, detached. In control. And his body is where he wants it—on its own again.

His panic has passed. The music, as it has always done, helps to separate his mind from his body. For most people it’s the reverse. Especially for people who, like the Professor, listen to classic American jazz. Jazz is one of the few subjects he never explains to other people. He’s perfectly willing to hold forth on the subject of European classical music from the Baroque to Post-Modern serialism or disco or funk or raga or reggae. But jazz is like a secret drug to him. It alone has the power to alter his brain waves and neurotransmitters such that he feels autonomous, immunized against the contamination of his body, which otherwise is nearly impossible to make go away.

The wind is shifting gradually around to the north and the rain has intensified. It’s nearly dawn when he crosses the state line into Alabama, and finally it enters his mind that a hurricane has come in off the Gulf and he has been driving straight through it for the last several hours. He remembers a buzz off the CNN news loop on the TV monitors at the turnpike plaza earlier and glimpsing a headline in the morning paper that he neglected to pick up when he left home yesterday to meet the Kid at the Causeway. Hurricane George they’re calling it. A medium-size hurricane, it’s expected to pass over the northern half of the state and the southern half of Alabama and Georgia and spin out to the Atlantic where it will weaken and break up. No big deal. But a hurricane nonetheless, high winds and torrential, swirling rain, dangerous to drive through in a slab-sided van or any vehicle lighter than a sixteen-wheeler, especially up the Gulf Coast and into Alabama like this.

Palm trees sway like plumes and palmettos thrash the ground. Now and then his headlights or the lights of oncoming vehicles illuminate overflowing ditches and canals alongside the highway. Thick skeins of water erupt in fantails as the van plows through them.