Lost Memory of Skin (53 page)

Coming forward from the gloom is P.C. wearing a crooked smile of recognition although he’s not exactly welcoming the Kid with open arms and beyond P.C. stands the Greek holding a large adjustable wrench in his hand and behind him are a half-dozen other impassive men—among them red-haired Ginger, the goofball Froot Loop and finally in his navy blue lawyer’s suit and stained white shirt and loosened tie there stands the Shyster. They all regard the Kid with an expression mingling welcome with suspicion that to the Kid signifies a reluctant acceptance of his presence among them. It’s as if thanks to the chaos of the hurricane the men living under the Causeway pulled off a mass jailbreak, but then one by one each man was hunted down in most cases probably by no one other than himself, captured by himself and returned by himself to his cell. They gaze almost mournfully out of the shadows at him, as if his return is the final proof of their collective defeat. As if their last hope after the storm was that he alone of the original settlers, the last of the lost colonists and the first, the youngest and the scrappiest, had somehow permanently escaped. And now by coming back to the Causeway he’s let them down. Of all the settlers the Kid was the one thought most likely to survive above the Causeway among normal people. And if the Kid is back it’s certain that those who haven’t yet returned will soon be caught and brought back too—by the police or their parole officers or caseworkers. Or if not caught and returned by the authorities, they like the Kid will catch and bring themselves back here on their own. There’s no escape from under the Causeway.

No one steps forward to greet him; no one says anything.

Wussup, Paco,
the Kid finally says.

You pitch your tent too far out in the light, man. They can see you from the highway.

P.C. says,
New rules, Kid. We can’t stay here unless no one can see us. So you better take down your tent and move it and your shit all the way inside like the rest of us.

The Kid squints and looks past the group into the jumbled damp darkness that surrounds them.
No way
,
man. You guys’re like fucking bats scared of the light living inside a wall. I ain’t moving in there.

The Shyster says,
We don’t have much of a choice, Kid. And they don’t either.

“They”? Who’re “they”?

The police. The authorities. The upholders of the law. And those who make the law, the frightened citizens of Calusa.

Yeah, well, fuck them. And besides, scumbag, I don’t want you living next to me. I don’t even want you talking to me
,
man.
Suddenly the Kid’s heart is pounding and he’s breathing rapidly and hard. He spits on the ground to calm himself, looks straight at the Shyster, focuses his mind and in a voice barely above a whisper he says,
Big Daddy.

The Shyster raises his eyebrows as if surprised by hurt feelings. Or in mockery of surprise. Or both.
You’re judging me? Really, Kid? You think you’re better than I am? Sorry to break it to you, but no matter what we’re guilty of, we’re all down here for the same reason. That includes you.

The Kid turns away and starts back to his teepee. At the entrance flap he stops, spins on his heels and calls back to the Shyster,
I seen your e-mails, man! I know what you did! You and Doctor Hoo!

Ah! So you have my briefcase. I wondered where it ended up. Better you, I suppose, than the police.

You want it back? You can have it. The e-mails make me want to puke, man. They’re so dirty they make everything they touch dirty. I thought I’d seen dirt before but nothing comes close to the e-mails between you and Doctor Hoo. Nothing. Too bad you didn’t fucking drown yourself like he did.

Drown?
Again the Shyster raises his eyebrows as if in mock surprise. It’s his default facial expression.
Poor old Doctor Hoo is certainly dead, which turned out to be a problem for me. But he didn’t drown.

Yeah? How’d the fucker die, then?

Oh, he shot himself in the head. Right after I was arrested, unfortunately. Nearly two years ago. Before my trial. You might as well burn those papers, Kid. I don’t know why I kept them. They’re of no use to anyone now, not even to me. They were part of my defense, which obviously didn’t work, and ended up in the trial transcript. I would like the briefcase back, however. And my Bible.

What’re you telling me?
The Kid has made his way back to the Shyster and stands close enough to him now to see the man’s nearly black pupils—they’re opaque. Nothing visible on the other side. Like the eyes of a snake.
What d’you mean, they were part of your defense?

The jury didn’t buy my claim that by posing online as Big Daddy I was merely trying to entrap a child molester who happened to be a well-respected Calusa pediatrician known in certain Internet circles as Doctor Hoo. It’s the old legal strategy of trying to confuse the jury or at least one member of the jury by providing too much information. One holdout and you’ve got a hung jury. Surprised me that the judge admitted the e-mails as evidence, since by then the good doctor was dead and no longer available to testify on his own behalf. Or on mine, as it were. Wasted effort.

Was it true?

Was what true?

That you were trying to entrap this doctor. This fat perv who was all into kiddie porn and sex with little girls. Or was it boys?

In his case, boys. And he was hardly fat. He was one of those Ironmen. A competitive triathlete. Zero body fat. But puh-lease, I was merely trying to avoid going to jail. The same as everyone living down here. It’s the same for everyone everywhere, Kid. It’s what people do. We tell stories that proclaim our innocence. All of us. We tell them to ourselves and to anyone who’ll listen. Even your old friend the late lamented Rabbit with his boxing stories did it. No doubt your professor friend too. Even you. And it’s not just us pervs. Everyone has a story that proclaims his innocence. It’s human nature. I’m a lawyer, Kid. I’ve heard them all.

The Kid lowers his face and looks down at his feet. He turns slowly away from the lawyer and returns slump-shouldered to his teepee. Brushing the plastic door flap aside he steps in and sits down on the cement floor facing out. The view of the Bay and downtown Calusa isn’t as appealing as it was a few minutes ago. Nothing is.

He’s almost back where he started. If the Professor wasn’t Doctor Hoo then the Shyster couldn’t have been the one who told the cops where to look for the Professor’s body. The Kid realizes that he’s disappointed: on some deep level he
wanted
the Professor to have been Doctor Hoo. Even if repellent and disgusting it would have made him finally known to the Kid. There isn’t much about people that he lets disgust him because there’s always a chance people aren’t what they seem to be or say they are. But if he knew the Professor really was a chomo then he would at least be free to be disgusted.

But if it wasn’t the Shyster who phoned in the location of the Professor’s body, it must have been whoever put him there. The Professor’s story proclaiming his innocence, his story about the spies and counterspies, could still be true, right?

Unless it isn’t. Unless the Professor himself was the one who told the cops where they could find his body and then drowned himself in a slightly suspicious way so Gloria and other people like the Writer would believe his story and think he was assassinated because he knew too much. It’s a plausible story after all. Even the Kid believes it happens sometimes, that secret agents murder other secret agents who they think can’t be trusted anymore. Even in America. So it could be true.

He doesn’t know which story to believe—the one in the Professor’s filmed interview or the report from the Calusa County coroner’s office. His mind is bouncing off competing versions of reality as if he’s living inside a video game and it’s making him feel dizzy and nauseated. He wonders if the Writer’s harsh theory about knowledge—that you can’t ever know the truth about anything—is true after all. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. But the Kid can’t even know that: he’s stuck between believing the Writer’s theory and not believing it.

He does know however that if nothing is true then nothing is real. Logic tells him that. And if nothing is real then nothing matters. Which means you’re free to believe whatever you want—unless you’ve got an innocent soul like Iggy had and Annie and Einstein. Unless you’re an animal, that is. Except for the Snake which is neither a human being nor an animal. Because once you’re born a human being and the Snake talks you into doing something that you have to lie about you’re no longer innocent. That’s when you start making up stories that proclaim your innocence like Adam and Eve did after they ate the forbidden fruit and like the Shyster says is what everyone does. It must happen very early in life when you’re still new at being human, the Kid reasons and he wonders when it happened to him, when he got talked into doing something that he had to lie about and as a result no longer had an innocent soul.

Maybe the Internet is the Snake and pornography is the forbidden fruit because watching porn on the Internet is the first thing the Kid remembers lying about. He was only ten years old that summer and he remembers getting his first real hard-ons from listening to his mother screwing her then boyfriend in her bedroom. The Kid can’t remember which of three boyfriends she was making it with that summer, Dougie or Sal or the retired U.S. Airways pilot. They kind of blend together in his memory. The only thing that helped him ignore her orgasmic shouts and the thumping of the headboard against the wall was sitting in his room in front of the computer screen of her old Dell desktop, clicking onto free porn sites. Later he memorized her credit card number and whenever his mother and her boyfriend of the moment were screwing he got into watching pay-per-view hard core and then a year or so later he was watching it when she was out with her women friends cruising the bars or after he got home from school and she was at work and he was alone. It relaxed him. When he sat down and booted up the computer and mouse-clicked his way straight to the porn sites he favored he could feel and almost hear a corresponding series of clicks in his brain. A warm spot would emerge at the back of his skull and spread up over the top of his head until he felt like he was wearing a heated cap.

He didn’t lie about it to his mother—except about using her credit card which she discovered on her own anyhow when he finally maxed it out prompting her to read the whole statement for once instead of just checking the minimum monthly payment due. But she knew he was deep into porn—maybe not how deep—and although she shook her head and clucked her tongue whenever she caught him at it she didn’t seem to care. She treated his growing addiction to pornography like it was little worse than a waste of time better spent doing his homework or helping out with housework. So it wasn’t his mother he lied to or anyone else either since no one else knew or ever asked him about it. He lied to himself.

And it wasn’t watching porn that he lied about or even his constant jerking off. He lied about the way they made him feel, both the porn and jerking off. He told himself it was normal, everyone did it—especially guys. Well, maybe only guys. And it was no big deal anyhow. In fact it was boring, he told himself. Even the quintuple-X hard-core multiple black-on-white fisting double anals. Porn was boring; beating his meat was boring. The same-old same-old. He just did it because it felt better and less boring than not doing it, he told himself, like chewing gum or wearing sneakers instead of shoes. That’s what he told himself.

But he knew better. He did it because he couldn’t stop himself. He couldn’t stop himself because watching pornography and masturbating were the only times he felt real. The rest of the time he felt as if he were his own ghost—not quite dead but not alive either. A dust bunny shaped like a person. So for years whenever he was alone with a computer he watched pornography and masturbated. Until the night he let himself get lured by brandi18 into a house in the suburbs and got busted by her and her father.

He doesn’t know why but everything changed that night. Suddenly for the first time in his life he was visible to himself. The police who took him down in Brandi’s yard when they interrogated him at the station later opened a laptop on the table in front of him and put in a disc and showed him a video of him and Brandi’s father in the kitchen that Brandi’s father had taped with a hidden camera and the second he saw himself on the screen he felt like all his atoms were instantly reconfigured. It was as if he had never seen himself in a mirror before. It was like being touched by an angel. He had an actual body and it was not just his body, something he merely possessed, it was
him
! And who was he? He was the digitalized body of an about-to-be convicted sexual offender, a grown young man with a six-pack of beer, a porn movie, condoms, and a tube of lubricant trying to hook up in the suburbs with a fourteen-year-old Internet girl—and because now it was on a computer screen for everyone in the world to see, it was reality.

From that moment on he no longer felt even the slightest desire to watch pornography or jerk off because now he was a convicted sex offender, which provided him with the same feelings he used to get from sitting in front of his computer screen with his hand wrapped around his cock watching one or two or more naked men with huge erect penises pushing their penises into the orifices of one or two or more naked young women. Three holes and two hands per woman. He no longer had to lie to himself. He no longer had to endure mind-numbing boredom in order to feel partially alive. He had been made human—as wholly human as he could then imagine anyhow. And those women—those three holes and two hands each—for the first time the women on the screen were almost human too and not just two-dimensional pictures. They were as real as he was!

There’s a difference between shame and guilt. And the Kid has begun to realize that he’s not ashamed of having spent most of his life so far watching pornography and using it to give himself orgasms: he’s not a bad person, he knows that much, and being a bad person is what makes you feel shame. No, he’s guilty instead because that’s what you are if you do a bad thing. And if the women being abused on camera by facial cum shots, gangbangs, and double anals and so forth as if they were just images designed to make his dick hard enough to whack off with were in fact as almost-real as he, then paying money to watch them being abused and degraded was a bad thing. It was like paying money to watch someone beat a dog.