Lost Memory of Skin (30 page)

In the past it never occurred to the Kid to ask questions of the people he associated with. When they volunteered information—bits and pieces of their past and their longings, their dreads and anxieties, opinions and beliefs—he listened more or less politely but did not invite them to continue, to tell more, to clarify and amplify those bits and pieces and he mostly forgot what they told him soon after the telling. Now he finds himself wondering how the Greek got stuck down here under the Causeway, a mechanically clever and entrepreneurial guy who probably ran a successful machine shop or auto garage before he became a convicted sex offender. And P.C.—what’s his story? And how come a smart guy like the Shyster with a law degree and married with a big-time successful political career gets obsessed with having sex with little girls without knowing how weird and harmful it is? What’s up with that? What crossed his wires and when so that he couldn’t recognize evil when he saw it in himself ? What’s going on inside the Shyster? the Kid wonders for the first time. And Rabbit, an old black dude busted up by the cops for probably the tenth time in his life hobbling around down here in the gloom and the damp surrounded by filth and rats and a colony of outcasts—what did he do to deserve this?

And then there’s the Professor. The Kid wonders especially about the Professor. What’s his story? They are in his van headed to the gigantic Paws ’n’ Claws store for supplies and medicine for Einstein and Annie and the Kid asks him to tell how he came to be a professor. He’s never known a real professor before and has no idea how you become one.

Indirection and serendipity. Belatedly. Not by the usual route. For years after I got my Ph.D. I was a paid consultant. For governments, our own and others. And for private interests. Here and abroad. Then I opted for a more settled life, so to speak. Academia.

Cool. What did you like consult about?

Various things. Cultural anthropology, let’s call it. Local customs and politics in far-flung places.

The Kid would like to interview the Professor. He’d like to ask him what
serendipity
means. And
cultural anthropology,
what’s that? There’s a lot the Professor could teach him. And now that he’s starting to have a story of his own he’d like to know the Professor’s story even though very little of it would be of any use to him. He has no desire to ever become a professor himself and never intends to use the word
serendipity
in a sentence no matter what it means and the only reason he wants to know the meaning of
cultural anthropology
is so that he can better understand the Professor’s story.

But the Professor’s a hard guy to interview. You ask him a simple direct question and he goes all complicated and indirect on you. The Kid tries asking him his age and the Professor answers with a question and chuckles as if he’s amused,
Why do you ask?

The Kid explains that it’s hard to tell how old he is because of the beard and his size—he chooses not to say
fat
.

How old do you think I am?
Another question.

The Kid guesses fifty and the Professor says,
Close enough
. Not really an answer.

He tries another tack:
So where are you from? Originally. You got sort of a southern accent, you know.

Do I?

Yeah. What’s up with that? I didn’t know professors could have southern accents.

It’s sort of a disguise. Most of my students have southern accents. It puts them at ease if I have one too. It’s become a habit.

The Kid decides to come from another angle:
What about a wife? You married?

The Professor just nods. Again, not really an answer but it’ll have to do. The Kid pictures the hugest woman he’s ever seen, a woman the size of a small car. It’s hard to imagine a man this fat being married to a woman not equally fat. But the Kid doesn’t know how to ask if his wife is as fat as he is. It’s what he wants to know though. Interviewing this guy is like trying to pry open a giant clam with only your fingers.

Kids?
And here the Kid is obliged to picture the Professor having sex with his enormous wife, both of them naked and pink and hairy, their arms and bellies and thighs flopping and smacking against one another like slabs of beef and the Kid is sorry he asked—it’s the worst porn film he’s ever called to mind—and hopes the Professor says No. No kids.

But instead he says,
Your curiosity piques my curiosity. Why the sudden interest in my private life?

I dunno. I guess on account of you being so interested in my private life. Interviewing me and all.

My interest in your private life, my friend, is strictly professional. I’m a social scientist and right now you are my object of study.

Like I’m a lab rat, you mean? In some kinda experiment?

In a manner of speaking, yes. But you needn’t worry. In the social sciences we take excellent care of our lab rats. Their life expectancy is nearly twice as long as in the wild.

The Kid says,
Thanks a lot,
and the Professor chuckles again and pulls the van into the parking lot of the Paws ’n’ Claws box store and parks.

CHAPTER NINE

THE PROFESSOR’S STORY ACCORDING TO THE PROFESSOR:

Since childhood, though the Professor has been celebrated for his remarkable memory, he’s a man whose life and mind are carefully compartmentalized, methodically divided into boxes that rarely share a single side, and when he’s living in one box or remembers having lived there and can therefore recount it to himself or to someone else, his wife, for instance, or colleagues or students or strangers or even the Kid, he has no memory of ever having lived anywhere else. It’s one of the reasons, when asked a direct question about his past or present life, he answers vaguely, indirectly, ambiguously, or changes the subject altogether. His life has no single unifying narrative. It has many distinct narratives, each of them internally consistent, with a beginning, middle, and end, but none of them is connected to the other, and for the most part none of them is even aware of the other’s existence.

He’s not a person with multiple personalities, however. In all his memories and accounts of his memories, no matter how they differ from one another in cast of characters, locale, and resolution and no matter the variety of roles he plays, he always presents the same personality to the world, just as he always presents the same physical body. All his adult life he has looked more or less the same as he looks now. As a child his body was merely a child’s version of the body he came to inhabit later. And all his life, man and boy, he has had the same affect, the same manner of speaking, the same set of facial expressions and physical gestures, the same bemused, slightly condescending chuckle. It’s why when he was a child he seemed so oddly and captivatingly adultlike.

Nor is he a pathological liar or even in the strict sense a liar at all. Because he’s able and is actually compelled when living in one box to forget the existence of the others, his descriptions of his life are truthful. He could have been a great actor. Perhaps great actors possess his same ability to play many different roles, from Caliban to Othello to Lady Macbeth, from Uncle Vanya to Blanche Dubois to Mother Courage, all the while never changing their essential personality, and in the Professor’s case never changing his costume either.

It would be easy to credit this unnatural mix of variety, inconsistency, and relentless constancy to his early childhood obesity and his amazing intelligence, to note how at the start of his life they situated him at the extreme outside edge of human interaction, imposing early on in an unusually sensitive and emotionally responsive child a sense of himself as both different from other children, almost freakishly so, and as special. His parents reinforced his sense of specialness, his exceptionalism. Everyone else helped him to feel at the same time strange and ill-formed, both more and less than human.

The Professor knows this much about his formative years. He wouldn’t argue that his oversize body and wildly praised and publicized precocity simultaneously alienated him from everyone and at the same time made him feel superior to everyone, even to his parents. Though his parents doted on him and they genuinely loved him, they also exhibited him to the world and basked in his reflected light, as if his unusual intelligence and intellectual and academic achievements embellished their own. They saw themselves as having been inexplicably exiled to a small mining town in Alabama where their natural aristocracy and refined educations were insufficiently honored, where no one, except each other, properly appreciated them, where the Professor’s mother was merely the town librarian, a position formerly held by unmarried older ladies not quite qualified to teach school, and where his father was merely the manager of the local absentee-owned coal mines, a kind of plantation foreman whose authority was derived from a higher authority located elsewhere, in a mansion on a hill in Pittsburgh.

Their son, therefore, was their homegrown exotic orchid, and they nurtured and nourished the innate qualities that distinguished him from the garden-variety flowers their neighbors grew. He was a large baby at birth, over eleven pounds, which amazed and delighted the doctor and nurses who helped deliver him, and led his parents to overfeed him from the day they brought him home. His appetite and expectations regarding food soon turned into need, as if he would shrivel and die if he were not overfed, and they now had no choice but to continue providing him with great heaping quantities of food at every meal and before and after meals until by the time he was three years old he spent more of his waking hours eating than doing anything else. By the time he was four, when not asleep he was reading and thus was able to take nourishment full-time. His mind and his body grew apace, and the world, at least the world of Clinton, Alabama, took notice of both and marveled. This pleased the Professor’s parents. The child saw this, and though it made him wish to please them still more, just as their overfeeding him had only increased his hunger, so too he came to feel superior to his parents at the same rate and in the same way that he felt superior to other children and their parents. By the same token, he felt different from everyone, including his parents. Alienated, isolated, alone. Utterly alone.

Perhaps that’s the one constant that is shared by all those separate compartments he lives in—a profound sense of isolation, of difference and a solitude that is so pervasive and deep that he has never felt lonely. It’s the solitude of a narcissist who fills the universe entirely, until there is no room left in it for anyone else. In every life he has led, every identity he has claimed for himself and revealed to others, his profound sense of isolation was then and is now his core.

While the Professor knows most of the facts of the various lives he has led and the public and private, often secret, identities he has held, he has no conscious memory of being inside them. No memory of living those lives from one day to the next, from month to month, in some cases for years, or of being that person in a continuing way. For the Professor it’s as if all the separate lives he has led belong to other people. And the life he leads now, it too belongs to someone else. He’s privy to the facts of each, but little more. For him, that’s enough. The facts. There is no use or point for him to remember what he actually experienced when he was perceived many years ago by his college and graduate school classmates and professors as a radical activist in the civil rights and antiwar movements, a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Students for a Democratic Society and for a few harrowing months a member of Weatherman. There is for him no reason to try to remember what he felt back then or believed when he first agreed to work for the government agency that wanted to protect the American people from the unintended consequences of the civil rights and antiwar movements. As far as he remembers, he felt nothing. He believed nothing. It was a game, a puzzle, a test of wits and intelligence, and the higher the stakes the more interesting the game, the more challenging the puzzle, and thus the greater proof of his superior wit and intelligence.

He believed he was smarter than the government agents he reported to and smarter than the people he reported on and needed to prove it, to himself if to no one else. For him it was merely a contest between patriotic careerists and dope-smoking ideologues, both equally deluded, equally utopian, equally clannish. And though both believed that he was one of them, he belonged to neither clan. He stood out too much, could never disappear in a crowd, was odd-looking and grossly overweight, spoke in a peculiar manner, was regarded by both groups as asexual, and was not known to drink alcohol or take drugs and seemed not to be interested in money. He remembers only that he loved the game, the secrecy, and took pleasure from knowing twice as much as either of the groups to which he was thought by the other to belong, even though within each group he was a minor figure. To the political activists in college and later in New Haven, the peculiar fat man was a carrier of signs in demonstrations, a late-night manager of the mimeo machine, a foot soldier in their small army of revolutionaries. To the several government agencies that over time employed him to report on the activities of that army, he was merely one of thousands of informants on college campuses and in ghetto flats and basements, garages, meeting halls, and safe houses all across the country. And later, as he traveled to Asia and Central and South America, ostensibly to extend his knowledge of languages and further his education, he was designated an asset, a reliable asset, but not an essential one, because for the most part the information he provided the agencies was of the type that merely corroborated what they already knew or confirmed what they believed. He was aware of that, of course, and didn’t mind at all. His relatively low status in both groups—or was it three or four organizations or five, and was it one government he worked for or two or three?—suited him perfectly.