Lost Memory of Skin (38 page)

K:
Are you not really a professor then?

P:
Oh, yes! I am who I say I am! A professor, husband, father, deacon, library trustee, et cetera. All that and more.

K:
But you’re saying besides being a professor and all you’re also like “targeted” by these super-secret agencies.

P:
That’s correct.

K:
So why the fuck would they do that, target you? Why would they set it up so they can like kill you and make it look like you committed suicide because of some sex scandal?

P: (sighs)
It’s a long story, Kid. I was recruited very early. While still in college, in fact. I was recruited because of my intellectual and linguistic gifts, no doubt, but also because my psychological and social profiles fit certain known and tested templates. I arrived early and stayed late, let us say, and consequently over the years I saw and heard and participated in much that if they became publicly known could cause great harm to powerful political and economic interests. Especially now that both political and economic interests are so intricately connected. Simply put, even though I was never anywhere near the top of the pyramid, I saw and heard and participated in too much. Those on top operate strictly on a need-to-know basis. It’s the people nearest the bottom, people like me, who know too much. More than they need to know.

K:
Yeah, but so what? Lots of people know too much. They don’t get killed for it, so long as they don’t talk about it to anyone. Even me, I know shit for instance about the guys who live under the Causeway that I’d never tell about, stuff they told me or I saw them do that could get them sent back to prison, and nobody wants to kill me. They just trust me not to tell anyone what I know. Were you like planning on telling what you know about these secret agencies and so on, going on TV or writing it in a book or something? And somehow these guys found out about it?

P:
No, nothing like that. But it’s assumed among my previous employers that
people who lived as I did for years, for decades, can only be trusted as long as they are not who they say they are. It’s when they become who they say they are that they can no longer be trusted.

K:
I’m confused. Trusted to what?

P:
Not to reveal what they saw and heard and did in the past.

K:
So now that you are what you say you are, a professor and such, married and all, you can’t be trusted anymore to lie about who you were in the past? Like you might start by telling your wife and then a priest or a shrink or the guys in your therapy group if you had one, and pretty soon some newspaper writer would hear about it or a book writer, and then the whole world would end up knowing what you know. And that would fuck up a lot of important people like in politics and so on?

P:
Correct.

K:
So that’s why they want to get rid of you?

P:
Yes.

K:
This sounds like a fucking movie. Are you sure you’re not making this shit up?

P:
I’m not making any of it up. Unfortunately.

K:
Were you like a spy, then?

P:
Informant first. Then mole. Then spy. Counterspy. Double agent. That’s the usual progression for someone with my particular abilities and temperament.

K:
How do you know they want to do you? The suicide thing.

P:
Like I said, I know the script. The Calusa police have started an investigation. Two plainclothes officers came to my home asking to speak with me. They have already gone to the trouble to question my parents, which means the scandal will no doubt be set in my distant past. It will be a crime that I am accused of having committed when I was a young man, when my parents and I were still more or less in touch, before I decided to distance myself from them. It will therefore have to be an act for which there is no statute of limitations.

K:
What’s that mean?

P:
Misdemeanors and most felonies have to be prosecuted within a limited amount of time following the commitment of the crime. Crimes that society regards as particularly repulsive, however, have no statute of limitations. First-degree murder, for instance. Also, in most states, rape, distribution and possession of child pornography, and sexual abuse of children, especially in cases when the victim doesn’t remember the event until years later. My best guess is that someone has recently uncovered long-repressed memories of having been sexually abused by me when she or he was a child and has taken those resurrected memories to the Calusa Police Department.

K:
But you didn’t, right? Abuse anybody. You’re not a fucking chomo, right?

P:
Correct.

K:
Dude, that’s some serious shit! You could end up living under the Causeway yourself!

P:
It’ll never come to that. I’ll never be indicted or even arrested. I’ll never be tried or convicted. I’ll simply disappear. Then my accuser, whoever she or he is, will allow her- or himself to be interviewed by some local investigative journalist, or else one of the police officers will leak the nature of the accusation and investigation to the press. Sometime after that my body will be found, and the official cause of death will be ruled a suicide. Naturally, they can arrange it so my body is never found. But then my disappearance would remain an open case and would invite a long-term ongoing investigation. Who knows what would turn up? No, they want my wife, my children, my colleagues and students, the entire city of Calusa and especially the press and other news media to believe that I killed myself because I was about to be exposed as a child molester or rapist. It’ll make a titillating, convincing story. “So-called genius professor of sociology, an eccentric, bearded, fat man doing research on homeless convicted sex offenders, is a sex offender himself.”

K:
How come you’re telling me all this in front of a camera, instead of telling your wife in person, say? Or the cops. Or why not go on TV and tell Larry King or some news guy? Or here’s an idea, why don’t you put it up on YouTube?

P:
First of all, if I tell Gloria what is about to happen, she will want me to save myself in a way that will basically destroy her and my children’s lives. She’ll want us to flee to some undeveloped country and assume new identities, for instance. Which wouldn’t work anyhow. It would only shatter their lives and postpone the inevitable. All it would do is buy me a little extra time until they found us. Ten or fifteen years ago it might have worked. But the world is digitalized now and interconnected, so it’s impossible for a high-profile American man with a wife and two small children to flee the country and change his and his family’s identity. The first time one of us went online we’d be located. And if I go to the police, as you suggest, they will merely assume I’m lying in order to protect myself against my accuser. That would make my accuser go away, which is good, and the suicide script would be scrapped. Also good. But they’ll know I’ve been alerted to their intentions, so a different way to make me disappear will be contrived. Which is not good. In that script there’s usually an accident or a fire that takes out the whole family or several other people associated with the target, fellow workers or innocent bystanders. If I’m killed alone it will appear that my story is true. An “accident” that takes others with me is messy, perhaps, but not incriminating. The same thing will happen if I go public with it by posting this interview on YouTube, for instance, or tell my story to a journalist.

K:
Okay. So why don’t you just cut out by yourself ? Leave your family here. Go to Jamaica or someplace, change your name. Shave your beard and get a haircut. If you lost a lot of weight nobody’d recognize you, man. Even your wife when she came and visited you there once in a while. If you really are an ex-spy and all, you oughta know how to disappear. Even in the digital world.

P:
If I fled alone, it would put Gloria and the children in great danger, especially if they knew where I was. To get to me these people would go after my family. My parents would be in danger too. It’s the reason I broke off all contact with my parents in the first place. It was to protect them. I suppose it was also to let me more freely become who and what I wanted to be, regardless of who and what I said I was. That was a long time ago. It’s only in recent years that I began to think I could become the same as who and what I said I was.
(long pause)
I forgot that I was still being watched. And that I was expendable. And because of the life I built here in Calusa, I had become a danger to them.

K:
Are you sure you’re not like paranoid or something, Professor?

P: (chuckles)
I wish I were!

K:
Here’s a question. Maybe my last, unless you still have stuff you want to add. Why tell me all this? Why don’t you just talk to the camera by yourself and then download it onto your computer and burn it onto a DVD and drop it into the mail to the wife? If that’s what you’re planning to do anyhow. Besides, if you’re not nutso paranoid and what you’re telling me is true, then I’m in trouble too, just for sitting here listening to this shit. If they’re watching you, they’re watching me now. What’re you thinking, I’m expendable too? Are you sure this place doesn’t have hidden cameras and microphones?

P:
Don’t worry, I do an electronic sweep of the house every few days. As for your last question, why tell you all this? There’s a very simple answer. I trust you, Kid. I do. For decades I’ve trusted no one but myself. But I trust you. After I burn a DVD of this interview and erase the original from my computer, I trust you to keep the DVD in your possession until my body is found. It’ll be in the papers and on TV, so you’ll know about it. I trust you then to deliver the DVD to Gloria and no one else and never to say a word about it to anyone for the rest of your life. I don’t trust anyone other than you to do that. No one. I don’t even trust the postal service. Besides, I can’t mail the DVD myself if I’m dead. It has to be hand delivered. By you. I trust you to do that. I’ve studied your character closely these last few days. Also, you are probably the only human being I know personally who is not being watched.

K:
C’mon, I got a GPS beeper on my ankle. I’m being watched closer than you. I don’t know, man. If you’re telling me the truth about all this and you’re not just fucked-up in the head or playing some kind of weird college professor’s game with me to prove how much smarter than me you are, like with that treasure map game, then I’ll end up with some very dangerous information on my hands that these guys would like to eliminate. Which would make them want to eliminate me. That DVD is like Captain Kydd’s treasure, man. If anybody thought I figured out where
X
marks the spot, they’d torture me for it and then kill me.

P:
Don’t worry, Kid. That map’s a fake.

K:
Yeah, well, I thought it was, anyhow. Why’d you try to make me think it was real? That wasn’t cool, y’ know.

P:
I apologize, Kid. I was testing you. I knew you were honest, but I wasn’t sure if you were imaginative.

K:
So I passed the test?

P:
With flying colors.

K:
First test I ever passed. Is this what happens when you pass a test? Okay, forget it. Here’s something else I just thought of. What if this whole super-secret spy agencies story is just a cover story? What if you’re not an ex-spy, which can’t be proved anyhow one way or the other, so it doesn’t matter, and you’re really just some old ex-chomo, and you’re about to get busted for something you actually did to a kid or maybe several kids way back before you were a professor and married with kids of your own and so forth, and you know it’s gonna hit the papers and TV? What if you’re planning to kill yourself first, so you don’t have to go through all that and do time and end up living under the Causeway with an electronic anklet like the other sex offenders, and you’ve got me making this interview with you so it’ll look like it was really homicide, not suicide, at least to your wife and your kids, and you weren’t really guilty of sexually abusing kids? What about that, Professor? The camera’s still on, isn’t it?

P:
Yes, it’s running. Hm-m-m. Maybe you’re more imaginative than I thought. Well, yes, Kid, you’re right, you may never know for sure if I’m telling you the truth. But will it make any difference to you? Will you refuse to keep the DVD in your possession and deliver it to Gloria when my body is found and my death is declared a suicide?

K:
Depends.

P:
On what?

K:
On what’s in it for me.

P:
Ah! You mean money, I assume. I hope not Captain Kydd’s treasure. I’m not a rich man, you know. And when my death is ruled a suicide, my wife won’t be able to collect on my life insurance policy.

K:
Maybe that’s what you want this interview for! So your wife can use it to show that you didn’t kill yourself, you were knocked off by some super-spies from Russia or someplace. So she can collect on your insurance.

P:
They’d never go for it. She’d have to take the insurance company to court, and if indeed I am telling the truth, that would put her and the children in grave danger. You don’t want that on your hands, do you? Just tell me what you want in payment for delivering the DVD to Gloria after my body is found and for never revealing the DVD or its contents to anyone else.

K:
I don’t wanna talk about it in front of the camera.

P:
Understandable. Pretty much everything I wanted Gloria to hear has been said already. Except that I truly love her and the children. I need to say that. And I am not guilty of the heinous acts that I will soon be accused of.