Lost Memory of Skin (54 page)

Authors: Russell Banks

BOOK: Lost Memory of Skin

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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.

Acknowledgments

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.

About the Author

RUSSELL BANKS
is one of America’s most prestigious fiction writers, a past president of the International Parliament of Writers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. He lives in upstate New York and Miami, Florida.

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Also by Russell Banks

FICTION

The Reserve

The Darling

The Angel on the Roof

Cloudsplitter

Rule of the Bone

The Sweet Hereafter

Affliction

Success Stories

Continental Drift

The Relation of My Imprisonment

Trailerpark

The Book of Jamaica

The New World

Hamilton Stark

Family Life

Searching for Survivors

NONFICTION

Dreaming Up America

The Invisible Stranger
(with Arturo Patten)

Credits

Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover photograph © by Glen Wexler/Gallerystock

LOST MEMORY OF SKIN.
Copyright © 2011 by Russell Banks. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-0-06-185763-8

EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 9780062096739

11 12 13 14 15
OV/RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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