Lost Memory of Skin (50 page)

What do you mean, too much trouble?

If these super-spies and all are so good at killing people who they don’t trust anymore, they oughta be able to fake a suicide without clamping the guy to his car with bike locks and driving it into a canal, right? I mean, he’s such a fat guy they could’ve made him run on a treadmill or up and down a beach dune until he had a heart attack and died and they could just leave him there. They coulda pushed him off a bridge if they wanted to fake his suicide. Drop him off a boat in the Gulf. There’s a hundred different ways to make it look like a suicide without also making it look like a murder. If that’s what you want. The only one who wanted it to look like a murder was the Professor. But he also wanted to make it look like a suicide. He needed it both ways, or nobody’d believe his story. The murdered ex-spy cancels out the child-molester professor. And vice versa. They both disappear. Like that snake slithering into the swamp.

And we end up not knowing which one he really was.

Maybe he was both,
the Kid says.
Maybe neither. He was supposedly a genius, remember. And he liked playing games with people.

What’re you going to do with that DVD?

Take it to the wife. Like I said I would.

Tomorrow?

Yeah, I guess so.

I’ll drive you there. I’ll cancel my flight back and take you to the Professor’s wife.

You’re not gonna write about this, are you?

God, no!

Where you gonna stay the night?

I’ll rent myself a houseboat so I can write about sleeping in a houseboat deep in the Great Panzacola Swamp instead.

Research.

Yep.

CHAPTER SEVEN

W
HEN
THE
P
ROFESSOR
’
S
WIFE
ANSWERS
the Kid’s light knock on the door she opens it only a crack at first, as if expecting someone she doesn’t want to speak to: another reporter or a nosy neighbor faking concern and offering condolences and a casserole; or a police officer with more of her husband’s “effects” as they call his clothing and the contents of his pockets and car. Her skin is chalky white and dry and she has large dark circles under her green eyes. She doesn’t appear to have been crying, but she looks haggard and exhausted as if she hasn’t slept for days. Her shoulders are slumped and her hands, even though both are clamped to the edge of the door, tremble visibly.

She pushes the door open a few more inches and peers out at the Kid and the big bearded white-haired man in the Hawaiian shirt and baggy shorts standing behind him and asks them what they want. Something about the small young man with the military buzz cut is familiar to her. Did he do some yard work for them? He looks like the kind of young unskilled white man who does yard work for people in neighborhoods like this. Or maybe he’s selling magazine subscriptions and the older man behind him is his supervisor who’s training him.

The Kid asks if she’s the wife. He can’t remember her actual name—the only time he saw it was on her typed good-bye note that she taped to the refrigerator and the Professor barely mentioned her by name, just referred to her as
my wife
. To the Kid therefore she’s the Wife so that’s what he calls her.

She says yes and asks them again what they want, a little less confrontational now than the first time. She opens the door farther. She’s starting to remember that she met the young man briefly at the library once, but is unsure of the circumstances or when—recently no doubt. Possibly she interviewed him for an afterschool job but did not hire him. But if she met him at the library and it was about a job she never gave him, why would he seek her out at home?

Oddly—at least it strikes her as odd—she likes his looks, especially compared to the looks of everyone else she’s had to talk to lately: she likes the angle of his cocked head and the way he stands at an opposing angle with all his weight on one foot like a watchful bird. He seems slightly bored and a little annoyed with having to stand here at the door. He doesn’t appear to want anything from her. She likes that too. Everyone else has wanted something from her—information about her husband mainly, his disappearance and death—and has tried to conceal that fact with false expressions of sympathy and insincere offers of comfort and help: neighbors, friends and colleagues from the library and from her husband’s university, the several reporters who called on her, the police. Even her mother.
If there’s anything I can do . . . , Don’t be afraid to call on us . . . , I know how hard this must be for you, ma’am, but. . . .

She knows what people thought of her husband when he was alive—he was not a popular or particularly admired man to anyone except his wife and his children—and she knows what they think of him now that he’s committed suicide and abandoned that loving wife and those well-behaved pretty children, the only people who knew him and did not think he was odd and ugly and arrogant. But he is or rather
was
a very intelligent man, people always note that. A genius.

But nobody likes a genius. Especially one who is obese and eccentric. And she knows—because of the way he killed himself and because he was a fat weird opinionated genius—that everyone thinks the Professor had secrets, dark secrets, probably secrets of a sexual nature. People who are neither fat nor geniuses always think fat people who are geniuses have strange secret sex lives. And because she was married to him and bore him two children, people probably believe that she too has, or rather had, a strange secret sex life. She senses the presence of that belief especially now in friends and colleagues as much as in strangers. Even in her mother. It’s one of the reasons she was hesitant about leaving the children with her mother while she dealt with the aftermath of her husband’s disappearance and death. But her mother had said,
Please
,
dear, please let me help by taking care of the children for a few days. You have enough to handle, Lord knows, and with me they’ll be more protected from the . . . from the facts of the situation.

As if the facts were somehow sexual. And peculiar. But they weren’t. Were they?

The Wife’s mind is primed by her darting dark thoughts, so when the Kid says,
I have something your husband wanted me to give you,
and holds out a clear plastic case with what looks like a CD inside she remembers suddenly and clearly her one and only meeting with the Kid. He’s the same skinny young man who walked stiff with anxiety into the library on Regis Road one afternoon and asked her to help him look up his neighborhood, his own house in fact, on the National Sex Offender Registry. His is the face that came up on the computer screen, the convicted sex offender who said he was sorry and she told him not to be sorry. Although she had no idea what she meant by that. Ever since, she’s wondered what she was thinking then and has wished he had not fled and instead had stayed and told her what he was sorry for. Whatever it was, she was sure, from the horrified expression on his real face when he saw its digitalized version on the computer screen and from the rigid quick-stepping way he steered his body from the library like a mortified comedian in an early silent movie, that he could not have done something that he should be sorry for. She has believed ever since that she was not wrong to tell him that.

At the same instant the Kid recognizes her too. She’s the fizzy red-haired research lady at the library he was dumb enough to ask for help the afternoon he wanted to see for himself what anybody in the world with a computer and an Internet connection could see. He remembers the afternoon with embarrassment and shame. It’s how he remembers most of his life up till then only sharper because that was the afternoon before the night the cops tore up what passed for his home and killed Iggy. It was the afternoon before the next morning when he was humiliated by the bikini babes on Rollerblades and then got fired from his job at the Mirador on account of his joke about the guy at O. J. Simpson’s table who wanted half a pear. His first and only visit to the library was when everything started going from bad to worse, from simple to complicated, obvious to confusing. It was the day before the night the Professor first came knocking at the door of his tent. And now it’s suddenly all come full circle and feels almost like he’s back at the library again looking at his mug shot on the computer screen with the nice research lady except that it’s much worse this time because not only does she know some of his secrets he knows some of hers.

The Wife’s tired eyes get very large and her mouth opens to speak but nothing gets said. She nods and takes the plastic case from the Kid’s extended hand in silence. For a moment the Wife and the Kid stare at each other as if waiting for an answer to a question that neither of them wishes to ask.

Finally it’s the Writer who speaks.
The young man knew your late husband, ma’am. We’re very sorry to intrude at such a time, but your husband instructed my friend here to deliver the DVD to you personally. They filmed an interview together. Your husband, in the event of his untimely death, wanted you to have it. We thought it was important enough to risk intruding on you like this. I hope you don’t mind.

Without answering him, the Wife as if brushing away cobwebs passes one hand over her face and gestures with the other for them to come inside.

She asks the Kid if she should watch the DVD now since he knows what’s on it.
Can it wait until I’m a little over the . . . the shock of it all? I don’t need any more bad news.

The three of them stand awkwardly together in the middle of the living room. The blinds and curtains are drawn, filling the room with thickened shadow and gloom, as if no one has ventured into it in months. The Kid says,
I dunno, I think maybe you oughta check it out now. Before you
do
get any more bad news.

She says,
Oh!
He’s told her more than she wanted to hear.

I mean, I think the Professor wanted you to look at it right away. Like, as soon as they found his body and said it was a suicide.

Well, it was suicide!

The Writer clears his throat and asks,
Was there a note or a letter to that effect, ma’am?

No. But he was despondent. There were things you couldn’t know. He and I . . . we were recently estranged. I’m afraid to watch it, the DVD. He may say things about me or the children that I don’t want to hear.

The Kid says,
No way. He only says nice stuff about you and the kids.

The Wife looks pleadingly into the Kid’s eyes:
Will you watch it with me? I’m scared to watch it alone. I don’t know who else to ask. You were there, weren’t you?

Yeah. I was sort of like the cameraman.

She asks the Writer if he knows what’s on the DVD, and he says yes, although he hasn’t watched it himself. The Kid summarized it for him.

She says,
All right, then if you don’t mind, we’ll watch it together. Come with me, there’s a computer in my husband’s office,
she says and leads the Kid and the Writer down the hallway to the Professor’s office.

The Wife sits down at the desk and opens the computer and turns it on. As the Kid and the Writer take positions behind her, the Kid glances over at the big black safe and feels a twinge of guilt. He wonders if he should have told the Wife about the money and decides no, it would only complicate things even further. Maybe someday.

When the computer screen has opened and the screen has filled with icons, the Wife slips the DVD into the slot. A few seconds later the Professor’s bearded plate-shaped face appears on the screen.

You sit there, Kid, off camera. I’ll sit here on the sofa in front of it.

Whaddaya want me to ask? I mean, I never done this before, interviewed somebody.

The Kid interrupts his digital self:
I guess I was more than a cameraman. Sorry.

The Professor continues:
No, but you’ve been interviewed. You start by asking a question that you want answered, and then I decide if and how I’m willing to answer it. Then you ask a follow-up question that’s generated by my previous answer. Simple. Especially for the one asking the questions.

Okay. How about what’s the fucking reason for making this interview in the first place?

Excellent first question! The simple answer is that in the coming weeks or possibly months my body will be found, and it will look like a suicide. This interview will provide evidence that it was not a suicide. . . .

For nearly twenty minutes the Kid, the Writer, and the Wife watch the DVD on the Professor’s desktop computer. Finally the interview comes to an end:

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

Are you ashamed, though? Like you asked me when you were interviewing me about brandi18.

Ashamed? Of what?

You know, of spying and shit. Being an informant and a mole and a double agent. All that.

No, I’m not ashamed. And I don’t feel guilty for all those years of deceit and betrayal, secrecy and lies. That was the nature of the world then and now, and those are the rules of the game that runs the world. And once you know that, you either play the game or it plays you. I only regret that I stopped playing the game. Now it’s playing me. Except for this one last move. . . .

Maybe we should shut off the camera and discuss my fee.

Fair enough.

The screen blanks out. The Kid backs away from the Wife, who sits stunned in front of the computer. The Writer hunches over beside her, still staring at the screen as if wanting more. The Kid moves slowly toward the door thinking: I never should’ve said that shit about my fee because now they’re going to ask me how much he paid me and the Wife’s going to ask for the money back and I’ll have to give her what’s left of it if she does on account of she’ll need it for her kids and it isn’t like I actually earned the money by working for it but then I’ll be broke again and homeless with no job and I won’t be able to feed Annie and Einstein or even myself except by Dumpster diving so now I’m totally fucked again!