Lost Memory of Skin (21 page)

The Kid has cocooned himself in his sleeping bag. The dog, Annie, lies curled at his feet. Neither the Kid nor Annie acknowledges the arrival of the Professor and the Cop. They’re not sleeping; they’re hiding, both of them, the Kid from the children being filmed at Benbow’s, Annie from the people who don’t want her accidental presence to screw up their movie.

The Cop tells the sleeping bag that the Kid inside it will have to pack up his stuff and move from here immediately. He’ll have to be gone by noon. Or the Cop will bust him back to prison. No arguments. No discussion. End of story.

From inside the bag the Kid’s muffled voice asks where should he go?

The Professor asks the same thing,
Yes,
w
here should the lad go?

Gimme a fuckin’ break. The lad’s a felon, a convicted sex offender. You got kids? You want him in your neighborhood?

He’s paid his debt to society.

It’s not about paying your debt to society. It’s not about punishment. These fuckin’ guys are incurable.

I’m not so sure. It depends on the nature and the cause of the offense. On what he did and why he did it. That’s why I’m interviewing him.

You think he’s innocent?

Legally innocent? No, of course not.

You think he’s cured?

I don’t know yet what he did and why.

The Kid has sat up and is gently scratching the forehead of the dog, who appears now to be deeply asleep. Without looking at the Cop or the Professor, the Kid says:
Why are you talking about me like I’m not even here?

They look at him, the Cop with impatience, the Professor with compassion, in both cases mixed with mild curiosity. The Cop wonders if the Kid will decide to cut through his anklet and leave Calusa, go off surveillance and disappear into some other state far from here like an illegal immigrant, a Mexican or Haitian without a green card working in a motel somewhere out west. The Professor wonders what exactly the Kid did that made him a convicted sex offender. Whom he touched, if indeed he touched anyone, and exactly where.

You got till noon to get yourself and your shit off this island.

Can I take Annie with me? The dog?

Am I in charge of your pets now? Jesus!

The Professor says to the Kid:
I’ll help you move.

To where?

I don’t know. We’ll think of something.

Can I bring the parrot? These guys are really cruel to animals, y’know. Benbow and them. I’ll have to steal it. They use the parrot for like a kind of prop.

Yes, bring the parrot.

What about the map? Did you bring the map?

If you’re thinking of going off the reservation, Kid, fuggetabout it.

It’s a treasure map,
the Kid explains.

The Cop looks at the Professor, and he nods slightly, leave it alone, please, and she returns his nod, all right, just get him the hell outa here.

I brought the map. It’s in the van. I’ll show it to you later.

Cool. Very cool.

The Kid crawls over the sleeping dog and out of the tent. He stands in the sun and stretches.

The fog machine is silent now, the mist has dispersed, and the children and the people filming them appear to have left Benbow’s, perhaps for another location—a suburban split-level home with a pool or a dingy motel room in the far North End or a white-walled downtown studio loft with large pillows on the floor, or maybe they’ve got enough footage now to head straight to the editing room.

CHAPTER TEN

E
VERYTHING
THE
K
ID
OWNS
,
INCLUDING
his bicycle, the dog Annie, and Einstein, the gray parrot, has been stashed in the Professor’s van. The Cop watched as they loaded the vehicle, though she took a little walk when the Kid stole the parrot and its cage from the bar and afterward said,
I didn’t see that.
The Professor distracted Benbow in his trailer by explaining why the Kid had to leave the island. Trinidad Bob for reasons unknown had gone off with the film crew. The Professor paid Benbow the Kid’s rent for a week and half a week’s salary, and Benbow said fine, the Kid was a lousy worker anyway, and he attracted cops like the dog attracted fleas, so he was glad to be rid of both of them. Not that there was anything illegal going on here. He just doesn’t like cops. Or fleas.

When the Professor returned from Benbow’s trailer to his van the parrot cage and parrot were in the rear on the floor covered by the Kid’s sleeping bag. He explained to the Professor that when you cover them like that, parrots think it’s night and go to sleep.
They’re real smart except for that. As smart as iguanas. And they talk. I’m gonna teach him to have like real conversations. When can I see the map?

The Professor says later, when he gets the Kid settled. The Kid wants to know if he really thinks that the spot marked
X
is on Anaconda Island. He hopes not, now that he’s been kicked off it. There are hundreds of these little offshore islands scattered around the Bay and up and down the coast close enough to Calusa for pirates to hide out while they bury their treasure. He brags that he’s lived in Calusa all his life and knows these islands like the palm of his hand.

The Professor doubts that. But says nothing to discourage the Kid.

The Professor is now in charge of the Kid. It’s unofficial and the Kid is free to walk away if he wants, but with the addition of the dog and the parrot to his household, the Kid needs the Professor now more than he did yesterday, and the Professor will do what he can to make certain the Kid needs him even more tomorrow. He has a plan for the Kid, still vaguely formed, but a plan nonetheless. Unlike the Kid, the Professor makes a sharp distinction between plans and fantasies. And when he makes a plan he almost always implements it. The Kid doesn’t make plans. He never has.

The Professor intends to cure the Kid of his pedophilia. Not with psychotherapy or drugs or more radical means like feeding him female hormones or chemical castration. He intends to cure the Kid by changing his social circumstances. By giving him power in the world. Autonomy. Putting his fate and thus his character in his own hands. He believes that one’s sexual identity is shaped by one’s self-perceived social identity, that pedophilia, rightly understood, is about not sex, but power. More precisely, it’s about one’s personal perception of one’s power.

Where are we going?

They’ve crossed the bridge off Anaconda Island and have passed through downtown Calusa heading north along the Bay. Across the Bay the long line of beach hotels faces the open sea like lookouts.

Back to the Causeway.

Definitely not cool. Lemme out right here. Me and Annie and Einstein. And my stuff.

Don’t worry. I have a plan.

Yeah, right. I think you’re just another fuckin’ weirdo perv, you wanna know the truth. All you guys got “plans.”

This has got nothing to do with that. This has to do with getting you a home. And a job. Giving you control over your shelter and your economy.

Make fuckin’ sense, Haystack.

The Professor explains to his young charge that he has spoken with a friend who is a county commissioner and another friend who is an advocate for the homeless in Calusa and a third friend who is a state legislator. All have agreed that if the settlement of convicted sex offenders beneath the Causeway can be organized in such a way as to meet Calusa city and county health and safety ordinances and no criminal activities are taking place there, then convicted sex offenders up to a number yet to be determined will be allowed to reside there without interference or harassment by city, county, or state officials. Except for the international airport and the eastern edge of the Great Panzacola Swamp, the Causeway that crosses the Bay between the mainland and the man-made offshore string of barrier islands is the only place in Calusa County that is not also within twenty-five hundred feet of a school or playground or park where children gather and where illegal activities like those taking place on other islands, such as Benbow’s on Anaconda Island, do not occur. Or rather, need not occur. The pretext for the recent police raid at the Causeway, which was indeed driven by local politics and the upcoming municipal elections, was that health and safety ordinances were being violated there and criminal activities like drug use and prostitution were rampant.

If one eliminates the pretext, the Professor explains, there will be no more raids by the police, regardless of the politics. In fact, the problem, basically a housing problem, will have been solved by the residents themselves, and the politicians will be scrambling to take credit for it.

“Eliminate the pretext,”
the Kid says.
How the fuck do you do that? It’s a fuckin’ open sewer down there. Half those guys who end up there are junkies, the other half are total losers, drunks and nutcases or just fucked-up in the head like. . . .

Like who?

Well, like me, I guess.

I don’t believe you’re fucked-up in the head, Kid.

You don’t, eh? What do you know about me? Other than what you got off the Internet. And what I told you yesterday. None of that might be true, y’know. Except what’s on the Internet about me being a convicted sex offender. That’s true. As far as it goes. But it don’t go very far, does it? Believe me, I’m fucked-up in the head. Just like the rest of those guys down there.

The Professor pulls over and parks the van on the shoulder at the farther end of the Causeway. He gets out and follows the Kid, who’s carrying the parrot in its cage, and Annie down the steep, zigzagging pathway to the concrete island below.

Be careful, Haystack. One slip and you’re in the Bay, and I don’t think anybody here can get you out.

The Professor chuckles. “Haystack.” He likes the Kid’s sense of humor. He thinks it’s the key to his personality structure, the way in. It’s the only apparent opening the Kid has kept to the outside world, evidence that he still has an opening to the outside world. With enough support and encouragement, the Kid will be able eventually to widen that opening on his own and gain sufficient control of the world so that, for the first time in his life, he’ll feel powerful. Powerful enough not to need to demonstrate to himself that he has control of children. And animals. Iguanas, dogs, and parrots.

The Professor sits down on a tractor tire next to the parrot cage and, as instructed by the Kid, holds on to Annie’s collar while the Kid returns to the van for the rest of his belongings. The Professor’s theories about pedophilia are rapidly evolving. When a society commodifies its children by making them into a consumer group, dehumanizing them by converting them into a crucial, locked-in segment of the economy, and then proceeds to eroticize its products in order to sell them, the children gradually come to be perceived by the rest of the community and by the children themselves as sexual objects. And on the ladder of power, where power is construed sexually instead of economically, the children end up at the bottom rung.

The Kid may indeed be fucked-up in the head, but it’s because he’s a weak, relatively powerless member of a society that is fucked-up in the head. It’s led the Kid to believe that, except for him, there’s no one in the community who has less control over his or her fate than a child. A female child, the Professor surmises. He’s confident that the Kid is not sexually attracted to males. Although it wouldn’t alter his theory or change his equations a jot if the Kid had a predilection for male children. Because it’s not about sex, and it’s not about gender; they carry no weight in the equation. It’s about power. Control. Dominion. Dominance? Well, yes. When you feel you have nothing and no one you can dominate, you turn to children. And when children have been transformed into sexual objects and you have no other way of controlling them, you dominate them sexually. Thus the obsessive interest in pornography, the literal addiction to it: for the pornographic narrative is always a tale of dominance. Of men over women; of adults over children. If the Professor has lost himself in theory, a thing inconceivable to him, the Kid is lost in fantasy, a thing the Professor is now quite sure of.

When the Kid has lugged all his worldly possessions back down under the Causeway to his old campsite and has dutifully repitched his tent where it was before, he looks around him at the sad wreckage and desolation of the place and sighs and sits heavily down on the cast-off tractor tire next to the Professor. Most of the shacks and tents and polyethylene tarps have been restored to their earlier disheveled state. A few cook fires are burning in the distance. The place smells badly of human urine and feces. A scrawny gray cat spots Annie and changes its path to avoid her, but Annie seems not to notice. The parrot Einstein squawks twice and fluffs his feathers to get rid of some of the dampness of the place. It’s early afternoon but has already grown dark down here. A tinny radio speaker in the distance plays a country tune. Someone has a portable TV going and is watching Martha Stewart’s show, an irony not lost on the Professor, but not noticed by the Kid. To him it’s just part of the background noise, mixed with the quiet rhythmic slap of waves against the concrete pilings that hold up the Causeway, the rumble of vehicles passing overhead, the screeches of scavenging gulls, and the occasional dull honk of a boat horn from the Bay. There are a dozen or more gray figures moving about in the gloom, but they keep to themselves and are silent—the Kid recognizes several of the men out there by shape and posture and walk, but none of them comes to greet him. It’s as if he and the Professor and Annie and Einstein are invisible.

The Professor asks the Kid if he can make the parrot talk. He’s not heard the bird speak—not at Benbow’s and not in the van or here, either.