Lost Memory of Skin

CHAPTER ONE

THE PROFESSOR DIGS CLASSICAL JAZZ AND swing, music made in the 1930s, the decade before he was born in Clinton, Alabama, and in the 1940s, the decade of his early childhood. He was an only child, his mother the town librarian and his father an accountant for U. S. Steel. They were northerners, originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Both his parents were college educated, Episcopalians, suspected locally of being supporters of Franklin Roosevelt, and despite his father’s white-collar job at U. S. Steel, pro-union.

The Professor’s father’s name was Jason. He kept the books that monitored the costs of inmates hired and often purchased outright from the state and county prisons and local jails. They were, with few exceptions, black men, de facto slaves housed in the company labor camps, serving out their sentences in the dark airless mine shafts deep beneath the red hills. His mother, a high-spirited, easily bored post-debutante from an old Pittsburgh banking family, was named Cynthia.

Classical jazz and swing was music made mostly by black people — Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Benny Carter, and Lester Young — and raffish whites like Jack Teagarden and Benny Goodman. It was the dance music of the Professor’s parents’ northern youth. When he was a child, he watched them after supper spike a stack of records on the old Victrola, set the needle, and as the music began, they would stroll hand in hand from the living room to the wide screened porch that faced the tree-lined street. Invariably the boy put down his book and followed his parents and climbed onto the porch glider. With the soles of his sneakers barely touching the floor, the boy got the glider swinging back and forth in time to the music. His mother and father were already dancing. It was as if they were putting their northern sophistication on defiant display. He watched his handsome young parents happily dance on the open porch where their disapproving white Southern Baptist neighbors could see them, and he fell in love as much with their public defiance as with their private music.

But it’s music he himself never danced to, except when he was alone and no one, especially the neighbors, could see. Even after he went north at the age of fifteen to attend Kenyon College in Ohio and later in graduate school at Yale, he refused to be seen dancing to the music that he and his parents loved. He tapped his hands and feet to it and bobbed his head, keeping time. But he would not put himself on the dance floor for the simple reason that when he was a youngster he was both morbidly obese and taller by a head than any of his contemporaries. He was a child imprisoned in the body of a very fat adult, a boy who was strong and otherwise healthy but believed that when it came to taking part in physical activities of any kind — sports and outdoor games, hunting and fishing, even physical labor around the house, like mowing the lawn or planting flowers with his mother, but especially when it came to dancing — if he did not keep entirely to himself and out of public sight, he would look ridiculous.

Despite being in most ways a sociable boy who appeared actually to seek out and enjoy the company of other children, he could not be said to play well with others, especially with children his own age or near it. Early on this conflict became problematic for him. Year after year he skipped grades, making him to an increasing degree the youngest in his class, although perennially the largest. He had a gift for languages and a near photographic memory and retained vast stores of data. Precociously intelligent and verbally gifted, he developed a compulsion to explain everything, at first just to other children, but then to adults as well. He explained geography, local, regional, national, and international history, politics, statistics and mathematics, physics and chemistry, sociology, anthropology, and, before it became a subject, game theory. Whether they wanted him to or not he explained things. He did it in a friendly way that was neither condescending nor showing off, and children and adults alike, all of whom were astounded by his mental acuity and linguistic clarity, were for the most part grateful for and sometimes amused by his eagerness to reveal the world to them. From kindergarten on, adults and children called him Professor, and mostly they meant it as a compliment.

He had a mass of curly dark brown hair, smooth pale skin, rosebud lips, and round brown eyes with long lashes, and although his face, due to his obesity, was flattened somewhat, he was nonetheless a conventionally pretty child. But he was not like other children, and he knew it. From the time he learned to walk (delayed because of his weight until he was nearly two and a half years old), he positioned himself on the sideline of every group activity with arms crossed over his bulging chest and assumed the facial expression of a cool, skeptical observer: bemused smile, cold eyes, head tilted back slightly, not in disdain so much as ironic detachment.

It was a self-protective disguise, an affect and posture designed to make his outsized body as irrelevant and close to invisible as possible. But it didn’t work. Adults couldn’t help noting and commenting on his body, and their comments, even when they took the approximate outer form of praise (That’s a real big steamroller of a boy, ain’t he? and, Bet you gonna be half the Tide’s offensive line all by yourself when you get down to Tuscaloosa! and, That boy sure mus’ like his biscuits an’ gravy! ), ridiculed him. Consequently, he knew all too well what he would look like to parents, teachers, coaches, and especially to the other children if he waddled over to join them on the playground in their games of kickball, Red Rover, and capture the flag; or if in middle school he lumbered onto the sports field prepared to play baseball or football; or when finally in high school, if he shuffled shyly up to the pretty blond girl named Ashley Tarbox at the school dance and asked her to come onto the dance floor with him and jitterbug to Artie Shaw’s “I Get a Kick Out of You.” He knew that he would look ridiculous. So he never did any of those things.

CHAPTER TWO

IT’S THE SONG THAT’S PLAYING NOW ON THE CD player of his van as he crosses the narrow bridge from Calusa onto Anaconda Key — Artie Shaw’s version of “I Get a Kick Out of You.” His fingertips tap in time against the steering wheel. I get no kick from champagne. Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all. He passes the sewage treatment plant on his left and inside the air-conditioned van, even with the windows closed, catches a whiff of the wind-blown vegetal stink. On his right through a snaggy wall of mangroves he glimpses a narrow channel and the peeling hull of an abandoned, half-sunk shrimp boat. At a fork in the road he spots a tilted, hand-painted sign: BENBOW’S. He turns right and follows the winding, crushed-shell and coral lane into the low live oak and palmetto woods. He shuts down the CD player so he can better concentrate his attention, and as he bumps along the lane he searches in among the trees for the Kid’s tent.

He’s excited about this meeting. Two nights ago when he made his way down to the encampment beneath the Claybourne Causeway he had not expected to find any of the homeless sex offenders who’d been living in abject squalor there. For months he had intended to visit the camp and regretted having postponed it so long, and after hearing on the car radio that the camp had been raided by the police, he expected all the residents, twenty-four hours later, to have been scattered by now or carted back to jail. Although most of his colleagues at the university — indeed, most of the good citizens of Calusa — denied knowing of the camp, there had been numerous newspaper stories and online commentaries and Internet blogs decrying its existence and urging its dissolution and the removal of the colony. There was no agreement, of course, on where the sex offenders should be removed to. They were pariahs of the most extreme sort, American untouchables, a caste of men ranked far below the merely alcoholic, addicted, or deranged homeless. They were men beyond redemption, care, or cure, both despicable and impossible to remove and thus by most people simply wished out of existence.

The Professor was not one of these people. Homelessness, its causes and possible solutions, interested him professionally. The legal apparatus designed to deal with sexual offenses also interested him. And so did the psychology of denial, although that was more a personal interest than professional. He’d leave any professional examination of collective and individual denial to the psychology department. When he stopped on his way home from the university and parked his van at the side of the road and made his way in the dark down under the Causeway, he expected only to see the place where these men had been living, not the men themselves. He wanted to observe what sort of habitation they had made for themselves before the city sanitation workers had a chance to come in and clean it up.

Thus he was elated to discover the Kid asleep inside his tent. The fellow wasn’t much more than a boy. The Professor guessed him to be twenty or twenty-one at most. He acted suspicious and was a little hostile, perhaps. Testy. But why not, after what he’d been through, especially after the raid?

Soon, with no sight of the Kid’s tent—Of course he’d want to hide himself, the poor kid must be terrified—the lane ends at what the Professor assumes is Benbow’s. He parks the van in a clearing where there are several other vehicles: a rusting Toyota pickup, a yellow Calusa city cab, and a gleaming, meticulously restored 1965 Harley-Davidson chromed front to back and top to bottom with an American flag drooping from a rod attached to the rear fender. Last of the FLH panheads, the Professor notes. First of the electric starters.

Beyond the clearing, scattered in the shade of live oaks and palm trees, in no evident pattern and to no recognizable purpose, are a half-dozen unpainted shanties and low, shedlike buildings with corrugated iron roofs. It’s a random-seeming collection of old handmade buildings, most of them windowless and half-open to the elements. Beyond the buildings a rusted, dented, twenty-foot Airstream house-trailer with flattened tires has been set on cinder blocks. A hand-painted wooden plaque with the name BENBOW is bolted to the aluminum outer wall above the entrance.

From his van the Professor can see on the far side of the trailer the dark green waters of the Bay fading to azure in the distance and in flashes through the tangled mangroves the wide channel that surrounds the small key where four or five partially sunk hulks, fishing boats and shrimpers, have been left by the shore to rot, too far gone to claim or repair. Looking north across the Bay he can see the Calusa skyline and the arch of the Claybourne Causeway. The purpose of Benbow’s is unclear to him, but the place looks like a staging area for refugees waiting for the arrival of the man with the boat who will smuggle them from their native land across the sea to America.

Phrases and names have been scrawled and spray painted here and there on the faded plywood and warped board walls of the nearby buildings, more like messages left for a search party than graffiti: BOOM-BOOM BENBOW RULES! and TRINIDAD BOB WAS HERE! THIS IS THE PLACE! EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED! One of the sheds is set up like an open-air bar with a plank counter, an old-fashioned zinc-lined cooler visible behind the counter, and a fourteen-inch TV set with a rabbit ears antenna and VCR perched on a shelf above it. A small wire cage with a large gray parrot snoozing inside hangs next to the TV. Nearby an oil drum overflows with empty beer cans and bottles spilling onto the bare ground.

Keeping their backs to him, as if they haven’t heard his van ease over the crushed coral to a stop barely twenty feet away, two men, one with a shaved head, the other with long, lank, silver-gray hair, lean against the plank, drinking beer from cans. They are scrawny men the same approximate age as the Professor with arms, shoulders, and necks smattered with ancient tattoos too faded and wrinkled to decipher. They are both shirtless, wearing cutoffs, and barefoot, their slack-skinned bodies tanned the color of old bricks. The bald man has bright blue eyes and smokes a large, yellowed meerschaum pipe; the other wears a stringy billy-goat beard and a large gold hoop in his left ear and jangled sets of gold bracelets on his wrists. The TV screen is blank, but both men watch it intently as if it’s the seventh game of the World Series. The Professor decides that the man with the pipe is Boom-Boom Benbow; the one with the gold is Trinidad Bob. A pair of permanently stalled Vietnam vets.

A yellow mixed-breed dog skulks toward the Professor’s van, too sick and undernourished to bark or even growl or glare, but unlike the pair at the bar is unable to resist the instinct to challenge an intruder. She’s an old bitch with sagging teats who’s been allowed to breed too many times. The Professor eases himself from his van to the ground, and a wave of sweat instantly sweeps down his broad face into his beard. The sweet smell of woodsmoke and the damp salt smell off the briny Bay and open sea beyond mingle in the sulfurous breeze that wafts across the Key from the sewage treatment plant. The mix of smells is almost pleasant to him. He’s wearing faded blue farmer’s overalls, fisherman’s sandals, and a yellow seersucker short-sleeved shirt — clothing that makes him look even larger than he is. Sweat circles spread from his armpits across his upper chest where tufts of white hair peek out from the open collar of his shirt. He has a pale blue baseball cap on his head, and his abundant long hair pokes through the plastic, unhooked hatband at the back.

He stares down the yellow dog and dismisses it with a flip of his hand, and the dog, glad for the dominance, flops in the shade of the van and closes her eyes. Slowly the Professor approaches the men at the bar and takes a position next to the one with the shaved head, the man he believes is Benbow, and watches the blank TV screen with them. Neither man acknowledges his presence. The other, Trinidad Bob, finishes his beer and tosses the can in the general direction of the barrel of empties. He reaches over the bar and fishes a fresh can from the cooler and cracks it open.

Got one of those for sale?

Trinidad Bob answers by hauling another can of beer, Miller, from the cooler and slides it down the plank to the Professor.

How much?

Two bucks.

The Professor lays three singles onto the plank in front of him and waits. After thirty seconds Benbow grabs the bills and stuffs them into his pocket. He relights his meerschaum pipe.

Tobacco smells good. Not many people smoke a pipe anymore.

Trinidad Bob laughs, halfway between a chortle and a giggle. Not many people smoke anything anymore! ’Cept mary-juana! He knocks a cigarette from a pack of Parliaments and lights it. Mary-wanna. Mary Jane. Merry Christmas. You here for fish? Got some fresh smoked marlin today. He points to a large rusty oil barrel that’s been converted into a primitive smoker with a low-burning fire beneath it, the source of the sweet-smelling woodsmoke the Professor noticed earlier. Been makin’ it since mornin’. Came in yesterday afternoon. Seven bucks a pound.

Actually, I’m looking for someone. A friend of mine.

Benbow turns and looks the Professor over once, top to bottom, then goes back to the blank TV screen. What’s his name?

Kid. Just Kid. Young fellow, said he’d meet me here around now.

Never heard of him. You ever heard of him, Bob?

Trinidad Bob hesitates a few seconds, then says, Nope. Never heard of him. ’Course, we had a crowd here last night, mostly youngsters over from Calusa an’ the Barriers. He might’ve been one of them people. Lots of pretty girls in bikinis an’ mini skirts dancin’ an’ drinkin’ and partying like crazy! I was sort of distracted by all that so could’ve missed your friend named Kid. They all wanted to talk to Trinidad Bob. That’s me. Them little chickies like talkin’ to Trinidad Bob.

Because you’re so fuckin’ handsome. Without looking at him, Benbow says to the Professor: I take you for a cop.

I’m a teacher. A professor at Calusa State.

I still take you for a cop.

I take you for a vet. ’Nam. Noncommissioned officer, E-5, Air cav, probably. Or else BRO. Two tours, early 1970s. Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. I take Trinidad Bob there as a vet too. A blueleg E-2 who never got to E-3. One tour, late 1960s, maybe early 1970s like you. BRO, but not in your outfit. Took some shrapnel in the head. Like they say, FUBAR. Fucked up in the head.

Trinidad Bob says, Hey, that’s pretty good, Professor! How’d you know all that?

’Cause he’s some kinda fuckin’ cop is how. Turn on the TV, Bob. The news is over. It’s time for Jeopardy!

Bob says, Me, I always wanna watch Wheel of Fortune, but Boom, he prefers Jeopardy! So he says, anyhow. He likes questioning answers, he says. But Wheel of Fortune has Vanna White, man. Fuckin’ Vanna White! You ever check her out? Can’t get enough of that bitch, man! Bob quick-steps around the plank bar and switches on the TV, fiddles with the controls until the picture comes up on Jeopardy!

Don’t think I’ve ever seen the show, the Professor says.

You’d know if you did. They was gonna shoot an episode of that show here at Benbow’s one time, on account of so many TV shows an’ modelin’ shit and movies that gets shot here. Only at the last minute they decide to do it over on the Barriers at a fancy fuckin’ hotel instead. Too bad. I really was hopin’ to meet Vanna White in person an’ maybe get me a lick of that, y’ know what I’m sayin’? Chicks dig me, man.

The Professor glances left at the sound of a door opening and sees a thin woman in her late forties or early fifties step from the Airstream trailer, followed by a slightly older man in jeans and motorcycle boots and a muscle shirt. He has short, stiff, shoe-polish-black hair and a pure white handlebar mustache. He’s a man who lifts weights regularly — broad meaty shoulders, thick neck muscles, and slabbed biceps decorated with tattoos of overlapping dragons and unicorns. He falls into a bow-legged swagger as he nears the men. A competitive power-lifter who just got laid or a blow job, the Professor decides. Senior heavyweight division. Not a bodybuilder. Bodybuilders favor the deliberately cut look over bulk and brute strength and avoid tattoos. She must be the smoked marlin.

The man takes a position at the bar beside Trinidad Bob. The woman walks behind the bar, pulls two beers from the cooler and passes one to her companion. Her face is freckled and blotched from too much sun. She has a web of fine lines around her green eyes and a vertical cluster of smoker’s lines above her upper lip. Her thick coppery hair is cropped short, chopped rather than layered, and streaked with gray, as if the copper-red dye needs to be replenished. She’s her own hairdresser, the Professor observes. She’s full-breasted for such a thin woman and wears a loose, black chenille skirt with a dangling, ripped hem and a faded red T-shirt with I GOT CRABS AT HALEY’S CRAB SHACK printed across the front.

She smiles and says to the Professor, How’re you doin’ today, big man?

Trinidad Bob says, Boom-Boom thinks he’s a cop!

That’s interestin’. Are you?

I’m a professor at CSU. Calusa State. I’m looking for a young friend who was supposed to meet me here.

One of your students?

Sort of. A small young man in his early twenties with a buzz cut and big ears. I think he hoped to camp out here on the Key for a few days.

Sure, the Kid. He’s here. He’s still here, ain’t he, Boom?

Shut the fuck up, Yvonne.

You don’t look like a cop. Or a professor, either. I mean the way you’re dressed an’ all. What’s with the overalls?

I said shut the fuck up, Yvonne.

The weight lifter takes a final gulp from his beer and cleans his mustache with his paw like a schnauzer. I’m outa here. Check you later, Boom. He steps away from the bar, drops the can into the barrel, and walks quickly to his motorcycle. In seconds he is gone.

Yvonne smirks after him. No good-bye even? Jeez.

Cops make Paco antsy.

He said his name was Tom.

Yeah. Whatever.

Trinidad Bob looks over at the Professor. If you ain’t a cop how’d you know so much about me an’ Boom-Boom so fast? You a vet? You in ’Nam?

Would it make a difference if I were?

Without looking away from Jeopardy! Benbow says, What branch?

101st Airborne.

Yeah, you an’ everybody else. The 101st’s like Woodstock. Everybody and his brother over fifty got high and got laid at Woodstock. What year were you in ’Nam?

In-country from December fourth, 1968, to September twentieth, 1969.

Based where?

Long Binh. And mostly up in the A Shau Valley. What is this, a quiz show? Benbow’s version of Jeopardy!?

Yeah. Except in Jeopardy! you get told the answer first and the contestant has to come up with the right question.

Fair enough. Here’s an answer. “Pup tent.”

Trinidad Bob slaps his hand on the plank to ring the buzzer. I got it! “Where’s the Kid?”

Right. Next answer, “On the beach on the far side of the trailer.”

“Where’d the Kid pitch his pup tent?” Man, this is too fucking easy!

Shut the fuck up, Bob.

Here’s the final answer. Get it right, I buy a round of beers. “Yes.”

“Yes”? What the fuck kind of answer is that?

Think of a question that’s answered with “yes.”

Trinidad Bob scratches his head in puzzlement. Yvonne peers around Bob and Benbow at the Professor and says, Ah, how about, “Okay if I visit the Kid in his pup tent on the beach on the far side of the trailer?”

The Professor smiles and pulls a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and lays it on the counter. Correct. She beat you, Bob. But here’s a couple of rounds’ worth. A bonus prize.

Yvonne reaches into the cooler and pulls out two cans of Miller and sets them on the counter in front of her. Trinidad Bob does the same. Benbow pockets the twenty. He says, You may not be a cop. But you ain’t no Vietnam vet.

The Professor moves away from the bar and starts walking toward the Airstream. Well, I sure wasn’t getting I-and-I at Woodstock the third week in August of 1969. So I must’ve been getting stoned and laid in Vietnam.

Benbow calls after him, Here’s an answer, fat man! “BOHICA”!

The Professor stops, turns, looks over at the quiz master, and coolly smiles. He tilts his head back a notch and crosses his arms over the bib of his overalls: What’s “Bend over, here it comes again”? Don’t worry, Benbow, nobody’s gonna get fucked this time. He turns and shambles on.

Trinidad Bob says, Did he get it right, Boom?

Shut the fuck up an’ drink your beer.

Yvonne says, He ain’t no cop. But he ain’t no Vietnam vet, neither.

How do you know that?

He’s too fuckin’ fat.

What is he then?

I dunno. A fuckin’ professor. Like he said.

Yeah, like you’re a cabdriver, Yvonne.

Trinidad Bob laughs and slaps his palm on an imaginary buzzer. I got it! “How does Yvonne make a living?”

Benbow says to Yvonne, Gimme, and extends his hand palm up.

Yvonne pulls two twenties from her pocket and passes them over to him.

Trinidad Bob laughs. How does Benbow make a living?

Just shut the fuck up, Bob.

The big gray parrot in the cage squawks and says, Shut the fuck up, Bob!

CHAPTER THREE

A PAIR OF WHITE-BREASTED TERNS DANCES along the shoreline. Farther out a cackling gang of gulls spots a cruise ship passing slowly from the Bay through Kydd’s Cut into the Atlantic, wheels, and speeds off to hunt and gather in the ship’s garbage-strewn wake. The Kid has pitched his tent and dropped his duffel and cooler beside the crumbling concrete breakwater where Benbow’s property meets the sea, a spot of bare ground with a clear view of the city and the Bay and in the distance the Causeway and the Barriers. The Kid’s bicycle leans against the spindly crutchlike limbs of a nearby screw pine that’s large enough to cast a platter of all-day shade over the nylon tent. It’s an intelligent almost picturesque campsite.

A little exposed to the wind however. The Kid squats in front of his butane stove and with one hand cups his lighter flame against the blustery offshore breeze and struggles to get the stove lit. The wind keeps blowing his flame out, forcing him to start over: turn off the gas, pump up the pressure again, turn on the gas, shield the Bic, and flick it. The Kid curses—Shit, shit, shit! — and lets himself fall backward into a sitting position on the ground and stares angrily at the cold windblown stove.

He ate half a watermelon for breakfast and a chunk of raclette cheese and most of a box of Kashi seven-grain stone-ground crackers for lunch but he specifically wants hard-boiled extra-large organic eggs for supper, at least two from the box of eleven perfect brown eggs plus one slightly cracked egg that he grabbed last night along with the watermelon, cheese, and crackers out behind Bingo’s Wholesome Foods. He’s got a craving for healthy food and knew he needed a nutritional break from his usual diet of Cheetos and canned stew. He rode his bike over to the mainland after dark arriving early at the Dumpster an hour before the store closed catching a primo spot where the hungry and the homeless Dumpster-divers line up by the chain-link fence behind the store all waiting as patiently and politely as the paying customers inside with their overflowing carts at the cash register. When the store closes and the workers shut off the lights and go home the scavengers one by one scale the fence each in his turn.

With rare exceptions they honor the three rules of Dumpster diving: first-come first-dibs; never take more than you need; leave it cleaner than when you arrived. Since you can only take what the Dumpster gives, you can’t control your menu much. But everyone on the streets knows that upscale shoppers and the people who prepare their food are fussy about their diet and in a nice convergence of economics and marketing the high-end organic and natural foods stores like Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and Bingo’s throw out more and better food — especially fresh produce, meats, fish, bread, and dairy products — than the big chain supermarkets like Publix and Price Chopper. If there’s a single cracked egg in a dozen the entire box goes into the Dumpster. If one avocado is bad the entire bag gets tossed. A spot of mold on a cheese wheel disqualifies the wheel, one head of lettuce with rusted tips ruins the crate, and a few bruised apples in a basket spoil the basket. The day before their sell-by date whole boxes and trays of baked goods, milk, hamburger, chickens, even steaks and chops get thrown out. It’s a feast of imperfect but perfectly edible organic and all-natural pesticide- and preservative-free groceries.

Back when the Kid was gainfully employed he had enough cash in hand to pay for his food and though no one ever told him he knew there was a fourth rule in the Dumpster-divers’ code: If you can afford to pay at the register inside, do it. Leave the castoffs for those who have no choice but to forage for food or starve. Now that he’s been fired and has no prospects for future employment he’s decided that even though he’s still got a few bucks left in his pocket it’s okay to hit the high-end Dumpsters and fill his pantry. With no more than what he can carry back in his bicycle basket however — the watermelon, cheese, crackers, and eggs. Enough for two days, possibly three. If he can get his fucking stove lit so he can cook some of these eggs.

The Professor approaches the Kid slowly from behind, unseen. He’s wary and anxious and not sure why. He has no reason to be afraid of the Kid and is confident that the fellow will eventually consent to be interviewed on the subject of his present circumstance. How a citizen of Calusa becomes homeless is common knowledge. At least among Calusans who, like the Professor, view homelessness as a social blight, who regard it sociologically as a community’s debilitating, possibly fatal disease and who, when naming its causes, point to alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness. Commonplace observations. It’s not as easy, however, to identify how a citizen of Calusa becomes a convicted sex offender. It’s the combination of the two that intrigues the Professor — men who are both homeless and convicted sex offenders — and their growing numbers here in Calusa and across the country. It shouldn’t be hard to get the Kid talking about his homelessness. But it may be difficult to get him to tell the truth about what he did to end up a convicted sex offender. He’s bound to be evasive about that. They all are.

Once again the Professor feels like an anthropologist who has ventured deep into the jungle and has stumbled upon a survivor of a tribe long thought to be lost or exterminated. He mustn’t frighten or anger the lad. He needs to be sensitive to the Kid’s cultural norms, even though he’s mostly ignorant of them. He can’t project onto the young man his own middle-class, academic cultural norms and assumptions. His first task will be to obtain the fellow’s trust, to overcome his understandable suspicion that he’s being objectified in the Professor’s eyes, that he’s viewed as a curiosity or as part of a social science research project, rather than as a human being.

Once he’s obtained the Kid’s trust, he’ll try for friendship. He can’t pay him for his trust and friendship, of course; that would corrupt the truthfulness of the subject’s narrative. But when the Professor learns what the fellow needs — other than a safe, more or less permanent home and social respectability, both of which the Kid will probably never be allowed to possess again, if he even had them in the first place — he can offer him certain types of small help. Occasional transportation, the odd household item that the Professor and his wife would otherwise put into a yard sale, and possibly, if he needs a job, help finding one.

This could turn into a long-term project and could eventually produce important data and proposals for dealing with both sexual offenders and the problem of homelessness here and elsewhere. For the Professor, the stakes, like the opportunities, are high. He has tenure but wouldn’t mind acquiring a Distinguished University Professorship. Or an offer from a Washington think tank.

Can I give you a hand with that?

The Kid turns and peers up at the huge man blocking the late- afternoon sun. Yeah. Stop the fucking wind. You’re big enough.

The Professor chuckles. He’s used to chuckling; it’s his default form of laughter. He believes that overt, open-mouthed laughter makes him look too much like a jolly fat man; thus he tends not to laugh at all and rarely even smiles. If he must show pleasure or amusement or delight, he’d rather be seen as a chuckler, another stereotype, perhaps, but a slightly more serious one than that of the jolly fat man. He eases himself down to the ground and takes a position next to the Kid that effectively blocks the wind. The Kid tries again to light his stove and this time succeeds. The two sit there and watch the flame flare yellow and settle quickly back into a steadily purring blue blur.

Thanks.

You’re welcome.

For several minutes they are silent until the Kid stands and visits his tent and returns with the carton of eggs, a gallon jug of water, and a blackened saucepan. He pours three inches of water into the pan and sets it on the stove and sits back down on the ground beside the Professor.

Fresh eggs, man. Organic.

Pretty thin pickings, I’d say. For a growing boy.

Yeah? You into hitting on me or something? You some kinda faggot?

The Professor chuckles. Not in a million years, Kid.

What’s with them old-timey overalls, then? They look pretty faggoty to me, if you wanna know the truth. Especially on a guy built like you.

I just spent the day pretending I’m a carpenter building a house. It’s a volunteer project, Habitat for Humanity.

What’s that?

We build houses for poor people. Remember Jimmy Carter?

Yeah. Sort of. He was like the president way back.

Correct. The thirty-ninth president of the United States, and afterward he did volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity. Among other good things.

I s’pose he wore old-timey overalls too? And hippie sandals.

Not while he was president.

That’s good.

So how do you like it here at Benbow’s? Better than under the Causeway?

The water in the saucepan has come to a boil. With a spoon the Kid carefully places two eggs into the pan. He seems to consider the Professor’s question for a moment. Finally he points to his electronic ankle bracelet and says, I can’t stay here, except for a coupla days at most.

You can’t? Why not? Benbow’s is surely more than twenty-five hundred feet from a school or playground.

Yeah. But I don’t think Benbow’s is what it seems.

What is it, then? If it’s not what it seems.

I dunno. It’s sort of like a movie set maybe. That dude Trinidad Bob says among other things they shoot lots of commercials here but my parole officer says they’re only pretending like it’s some kind of funky island beach club with old guys hanging out making like they’re fucked-up Vietnam vets or something. They’re like wearing Vietnam vet costumes, she says. For TV and fashion magazines an’ shit. Mostly models in bathing suits and underwear and other filmy items. A lot of the models are under eighteen. At least that’s what my parole officer told me. I hadda let her know where I was living after I left the Causeway, and she checked in with Benbow, who ended up telling her they had a shoot scheduled this week for Gap Kids or something and there’s gonna be lots of little kids running around posing for the cameras in bathing suits and underwear. Besides, Benbow’s sort of paranoid about having me camped out here in the first place. Me and people like Paco, we attract attention from cops an’ shit. There’s probably a certain amount of illicit substances being circulated, if you know what I mean. Due to the fashion industry being here so much. And who knows what the fuck they really photograph and film out here? Other than Gap and magazine fashion ads.

Who’s Paco?

A biker dude from under the Causeway. Friend of mine. He came out here when I did.

We just met. I think he suspects I’m an undercover cop.

Paco’s like a part-time mechanic at a biker garage up in North Calusa. He’s got a job at least. Unlike me. But Benbow’s not cool with him being a permanent resident. He told me he’s gonna move back under the Causeway tomorrow. I guess I will too.

But why?

No place else to go, man. Same as with Paco. Same as with everybody who was living there. They’re all gonna come drifting back to the Causeway eventually. Too bad. I kinda like the view here. The sewer factory stinks when the wind’s offshore, but that’s only about half the time. Plus I was hoping maybe I could get Benbow to hire me to help smoke the fish when it comes in and sell it to people or tend bar or something. Or just keep the place cleaned or painting it. I’m good at that. But he doesn’t want it cleaned or painted. They need it looking fucked-up and funky. For the cameras. I guess it turns people on. The desert island fantasy.

I rather doubt he’d hire you to help sell the smoked fish. But maybe he could use you to tend bar.

All he needs for that is the other dude, Trinidad Bob. Trinidad Bob’s part of the act. Like he’s a prop. Even the old dog out there is a prop. And the parrot. You see the parrot in the cage by the bar?

I did.

The whole fucking island’s like a movie set. Probably the whole city of Calusa is. Maybe we’re all only props, like Trinidad Bob and that old broken-down dog and the parrot. You kinda look like a prop, y’ know. Like one of those TV wrestlers from WWF. You could be Professor Humungous Haystack.

Very funny. But won’t the police just come back to the Causeway and throw you out again?

Yeah. Prob’ly.

Where will you go then?

I’m starting to think three hots and a cot.

What do you mean?

Jail, man. Get myself busted for shoplifting a six-pack from a 7-Eleven.

You can’t mean that!

No money, no job, no legal squat. You got any better ideas, Humungous?

The Kid reminds the Professor of Huckleberry Finn somehow. Here he is now, long after he lit out for the Territory, grown older and as deep into the Territory as you can go, camped out alone where the continent and all the rivers meet the sea and there’s no farther place he can run to. The Professor wants to know what happened to that ignorant, abused, honest American boy between the end of the book and now. After he ran from Aunt Sally and her “sivilizin’,” how did he come years later to having “no money, no job, no legal squat”? In twenty-first-century America.

How old are you, Kid?

Twenty-two. Why?

Just wondering. How long have you been living like this?

Like what?

Well, under the Causeway. And now here. Homeless. And on permanent parole, so to speak.

Little over a year. Since I did my time. And I’m not on permanent parole. Just ten years. Nine to go.

How much actual time did you do?

Three months up in Hastings. Minimum security. I got three months off for good behavior, though. Or it would’ve been six months.

You want to tell me what you were convicted of?

No, not especially. Anyhow, you can look it up.

Not if I don’t know your real name.

No shit.

So do you want to tell me your real name?

What is this, a fucking quiz show?

The Professor chuckles. Quiz shows seem to be on everyone’s mind today. The coincidence amuses him and the irony comforts him: quizzes, tests, exams of all kinds are his specialty and have been since he was a schoolboy answering every question correctly on every test from kindergarten through graduate school; going off the charts on IQ tests, pulling perfect scores on his SATs and GREs; and even after graduate school rising through the ranks and becoming the highest nationally rated Mensa member before he was thirty years old. More recently he has moved beyond Mensa to the even more exclusive Prometheus Society, which requires applicants to take the Langdon Adult Intelligence Test, a test specifically designed to winnow qualified membership down to the one-per-million level, compared to Mensa’s paltry one-per-thirty-thousand. The Professor likes tests. It would be more accurate to say that he likes questions, questions with answers that nearly no one other than the Professor can answer. One person in a million.

It shouldn’t be difficult to answer the question of the Kid’s real name. No need to sit around waiting for the Kid to volunteer it. All he has to do is Google his way onto the National Sex Offender Registry, click find offenders, then search by location, and type in Calusa. A map will pop up pocked with little colored boxes, each box representing the location of a convicted sex offender, color-coded red, yellow, blue, and green to indicate the nature of the offense. Red is for offenses against children; yellow is for rape; blue is for sexual battery; and green is for “other offenses,” which is everything from “second-degree sodomy” and “second-degree sexual abuse” to “lewd and lascivious behavior.” That’s probably the Kid’s color, given the relatively short length of his sentence.

Blank boxes indicate the location of a school or playground. For a city the size of Calusa there would be thousands of blank squares and hundreds of green squares on the map, and it would take a while, unless he were lucky, for the Professor to click randomly onto the Kid’s box, and suddenly there on the screen he’d see a mug shot of the Kid, with his real name beneath it, a descriptive history of his convictions, his age at the time of the offense and the age of his victim, last known address, employer’s address, his race, height, weight, eye color, date of birth, and markings. Everything the Professor needs to know in order to start finding out what he wants to know.

It would be more pleasing to him, however, if he could pop the Kid’s real name into the conversation unaided. Relying on the National Sex Offender Registry feels a little like cheating, not that different from his students’ reliance on Wikipedia and other search engines to research their papers. It’s not exactly plagiarism, especially if they acknowledge the source, which they seldom do, but it is lazy and topic specific, so the students rarely learn anything beyond the narrow subject they’ve typed into the subject line. And what they do learn about the subject is no more reliable or authoritative or detailed than what the little colored squares reveal about the Kid’s offense. Yes, his mug shot may come up from under a green box, and maybe he will turn out to have been convicted on a certain date of “second-degree sexual abuse” against an unnamed victim who was eleven years old at the time, let’s say. But was the victim a girl or a boy? Was he or she a family member, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger? What exactly did he do to that little girl or boy? Was it a first offense? Was he alone? And why did he do it?

From his past study of the sexual offender laws of his home state of Alabama, he remembers that a person commits “sexual abuse in the second degree” (1) if he subjects another person to sexual contact who is incapable of consent by reason of some factor other than being less than sixteen years old; or (2) if he, being nineteen years old or older, subjects another person to sexual contact who is less than sixteen years old, but more than twelve years old. The Professor also remembers that in Alabama sexual abuse in the second degree is a Class A misdemeanor, unless that person commits a second or subsequent offense of sexual abuse in the second degree within one year of another sexual offense, in which case the offense is a Class C felony. Calusa’s not in the state of Alabama, but the Professor believes the definition is boilerplate for most southern states. He can check it easily enough. The Professor calls to mind the Internet address of the statute: Code of Alabama/1975/13A-6-67. Acts 1977, No. 607, p. 812, § 2321; Act 2000-728, p. 1566, § 1.

“Kid” is an alias, I take it.

You could say that.

Is it a first name or a last?

Both.

Sort of like Kydd’s Cut, then.

What d’ you mean?

The deep-water channel out there running between the Barriers and Anaconda Key. Kydd’s Cut. It leads from the Bay out to the ocean.

News to me.

Supposedly, the famous pirate Captain Kydd used it when he was prowling the Spanish Main and Calusa was his base of operations. All the other channels between the ocean and the low mangrove islands that were filled in and are now called the Barriers were too shallow for a ship to enter. The only way in or out of the Bay was through that one channel, which Kydd could easily defend with the cannon emplacements that he located here on Anaconda Key and over there by the high-rises on what’s now called Bougainvillea Shores.

No shit. The Kid has finished his eggs. He lights a cigarette and extends the pack to the Professor. Smoke?

No, thanks.

Quit?

Never smoked cigarettes.

Yeah, well, I’m in the process of quitting myself. Tell me more about this Captain Kydd dude, the pirate. How’d he spell it? Like, was it K-I-D, or what?

Variously, as K-Y-D-D and K-I-D-D. A few documents have it as K-I-D-D-E. He was Scottish, born around 1645, a commoner who ran away to sea at a young age. He was executed in London by the British crown in 1701. Actually, he was executed twice. The rope broke the first time, and they had to do it over. Then, as a warning to would-be pirates, they locked his body in an iron cage and hung it from a pole over the Thames River to rot. It hung there for twenty years until it finally disintegrated and the remaining parts fell into the river.

That’s hard, man. The fucking Brits. They’re fucking hard.

He left among his papers a piece of a coded map of the island where he buried his treasure, but no one’s been able to figure out where the island is located. Some think it was off Long Island, others say it’s Oak Island in Nova Scotia. There’s even a possibility he buried his loot on an island off the coast of Vietnam, where he sailed late in his career. On his map the body of water that surrounds the island is called the China Sea, which most people take to be code for Long Island Sound or the Bay of Fundy. But some of us believe it may refer to the actual China Sea, Nan Hai. Which would suggest the island of Cu Loo Hon or possibly Hon Tre, off the coast of Vietnam. I got a little bit involved with that myself back in the early 1980s.

No shit? Have you seen the actual map? Does it have like, “ X marks the spot”?

I’ve seen the map. There is indeed an X. But no scale, so you can’t tell if it’s a big island or a small one. The truth is, Captain Kydd’s treasure could be buried in any one of hundreds of islands from the Bay of Fundy to the waters west of Madagascar. It could even be buried right here on Anaconda Key.

Now you’re shitting me, Professor.

No, I’m not. Kydd’s map fits nicely over the topography of Calusa Bay and Anaconda Key as they existed in the middle of the seventeenth century, when no one was living here, other than the Calusa Indians and the last of the Panzacolas. From time to time Captain Kydd and his men came ashore for fresh water and to trade for food with the Indians, heal their battle wounds, and repair their ship. Every now and then an old coin or shoe buckle or bullet shows up at a construction site, confirming the presence of Europeans here long before there was anything like a permanent settlement in this part of the state, which didn’t happen till the mid-nineteenth century, as you know.

I didn’t know. I thought Calusa was always American. I mean, except for when the Indians were here. Before Columbus an’ shit. I thought the Europeans only started coming here recently. You know, like tourists and models and movie stars and wannabes. For drugs and sex an’ shit and to make commercials and movies and TV shows. Those are the only Europeans I know about. Except for us Americans and black people, the ones who are also Americans, I mean, I thought everyone else in Calusa was from places like Cuba and Nicaragua and the Caribbean islands like Haiti and Jamaica.

No, before the Americans there were Europeans here. And Captain Kydd, who was from Scotland, was one of them.

Cool. So what was Captain Kydd’s first name?

William. They called him Billy.

Billy? No shit? Billy Kydd? The original? Like Billy the Kid?

Well, no. He came later.

Oh. Yeah, sure. I knew that. The Kid looks out to sea with a dreamy, fearful half-smile on his face, like an adopted boy who’s just been handed the name and address of his birth father. After a long silence in a voice barely above a whisper he says: I hate the idea of going back to living under the Causeway, y’know. I like it here. It really is almost like a deserted island. Except for Benbow and them.

You want me to speak to Benbow on your behalf?

There’s still my parole officer. She calls herself my caseworker, but she’s really just a glorified cop.

Maybe since you’re so out of the way here, so far from schools and playgrounds and so on, she’ll cut you a little slack.

I guess it can’t hurt. Sure, go ahead and talk to Benbow. If I could stay out here on the Key, maybe I could sniff out ol’ Captain Kydd’s buried treasure. What d’ you think?

The Professor rolls onto his side and placing both hands against the ground, shoves his huge body into a standing position. I have a copy of Captain Kydd’s map somewhere in my files. I’ll get it to you. But first I’ll have a chat with Mr. Benbow.

That would be awesome, Haystack. You want a boiled egg? I got like nine more.

No, thanks. Not while I’m working. I’ll eat at home. Very generous of you, though.

CHAPTER FOUR

IT’S DUSK, AND A HALF-MOON HAS RISEN IN the southwest and hangs like a silver locket over the Bay. An offshore wind riffles the palms and palmettos, flips the leaves of the live oaks onto their gray backsides, and blows the stink of the sewage treatment plant away from Anaconda Key, across the Bay in the direction of downtown Calusa. Shambling across the compound toward the bar, now lit with strings of blinking red and green Christmas tree lights, comes the Professor. At the bar the television has been turned off, and speakers hanging in the nearby trees and under the eaves of the half-dozen ramshackle buildings broadcast a skein of Jimmy Buffett tunes about getting high in Key West.

The unblinking gray parrot, a key part of the scene, studies the set from its cage. The poor old yellow dog lies in the sand by the bar, licking water from a bowl, completing the scene. Trinidad Bob is mixing a blender of margaritas for a man and two slender young women in miniskirts and silk T-shirts. The man is in his middle fifties and looks like Jimmy Buffett himself — shoulder-length curling white hair, evenly distributed tan, Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts, flip-flops. One of the women jiggles her gold bracelets in time to the music; the other examines her purple fingernails. The man talks to them, but the music muffles his words. The Professor makes out busted condom and equity. Both women laugh. Trinidad Bob fills three glasses from the blender and serves the man and his companions.

Out of long habit the Professor avoids taking a barstool and instead stands at the far end of the counter. He nods at Trinidad Bob and zips a thin smile at the others, which they return in kind. The lights of an arriving BMW flash over the bar, and from the car come two more men, younger than the Jimmy Buffett look-alike, more athletic and predatory, casting their gaze around the compound as if in search of potential prey. There are four or five cars in the parking area now, in addition to the Professor’s van, the pickup truck, which probably belongs to Trinidad Bob, and the taxi, where Yvonne sits smoking in the passenger seat. She has the door wide open, a newspaper in her lap, her dress pulled up to advertise her long legs to anyone who happens to pass by. The two newcomers check her out, shrug, make a slow circle of the compound, and eventually approach the bar.

The Professor tells Trinidad Bob he’d like a beer, a Corona.

Bob places a frosted bottle in front of him and asks, What can I get ya?

The Professor says, I see we’re drinking from bottles now, instead of cans.

What changes at Benbow’s when it gets dark?

The Professor says, The prices, too, I suppose.

What else changes at Benbow’s when it gets dark?

The Professor looks over the four men and two women at the bar and says, Auditions.

What’s happenin’?

The Professor pulls a five-dollar bill from his wallet and pushes it across the counter. He asks Bob if Benbow’s around. He’d like to have a private chat with him.

Trinidad Bob grabs the five and stuffs it into the cash register drawer. No, you hafta give me an answer first, then I’m s’posed to come up with the right question.

Oh, right. Try this one. “In the trailer.”

Where’s Boom-Boom Benbow?

You’re tonight’s winner. Congratulations. The Professor slides him another five and carries his beer across the sand to the trailer and knocks at the shut door. A few seconds later, the door opens to Boom-Boom Benbow, holding a long-stemmed balloon wineglass half-filled with red wine. He’s heavily cologned, head freshly shaved, and wearing a crisp white guayabera shirt and tan slacks, tasseled black loafers. He looks like a small-time film producer with plans for a dinner meeting with potential financiers at a Dominican restaurant on the mainland. Or a man who runs a midlevel escort service. He takes a sip of wine and waits for the Professor to speak.

I’m interested in having the Kid stay out here in his tent for a while.

How interested?

Enough to pay his rent for him.

I expect you plan on coming out to visit him every now and then.

Correct.

This ain’t exactly a whorehouse, you know. You can’t keep your boy here.

I know. How much a week?

This is a place of business. The kid’s a convicted sex offender. I don’t want cops and social workers crawling all over the place. I already hadda talk to his caseworker or whatever the fuck she is.

I’ll take care of the caseworker. The Kid will only be here for a while anyhow, until I find him proper housing and a job. Maybe you could put him to work a few hours a day a few days a week.

I don’t need helpers. Unless you feel like paying his fucking salary too.

Depends. How much will you charge for his rent?

Let’s say two hundred a week. Up front.

And his salary?

Ten bucks an hour for cannin’ the empties and raking the place and whatever other janitorial duties I think up. Let’s say two hours a day times six days a week. That’s a hundred and twenty bucks a week. Three-twenty a week for the package.

Make it an even three hundred.

I still think you’re a cop. Except it’s usually me paying the cops, not vice versa.

I’ll be back in the morning with the first three hundred. You needn’t mention my involvement to the Kid. Let him think you’re merely a warm-hearted benefactor taking pity on him.

Your call.

Thanks.

Stick around and party awhile, Professor. The night’s young.

Can’t. Got to get home to the wife and kids.

Yeah. Sure.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE PROFESSOR’S SEVEN-YEAR-OLD FRATERNAL twins are named Rani and Biswas. His wife is named Gloria, but from the day they met he has called her Glory. She’s his pride and glory, he tells her. She’s small and conventionally pretty and knows it’s an indirect, self-deprecating reference, tinged with irony, to his obesity, though she would never say it to him or even to herself. She takes it as a compliment. When he is exasperated by something she has done or said, attempting to soften irony with affection, he lapses into his marshmallowy Alabama accent and calls her Glory-Glory-Hallelujah. As in: Glory-Glory-Hallelujah! Please stop asking me so many questions about the distant past. Damn! Why do y’all insist on hearing from me a narrative y’all can never personally evaluate or corroborate?

I’m not insisting. I’m just—

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. What folks cain’t observe, folks cain’t measure at all. And what we observe, we disturb by observing and thus cain’t measure accurately. The only reliable information about our lives that’s available to us comes to us indirectly via algorithms based upon data generated by our bodies’ auto-response systems. The rest, Glory-Glory-Hallelujah, the rest ain’t nothin’ but fantasy and fear, darlin’, nothin’ but self-serving delusion and illusion.

Oh, please!

Life is a dream, m’dear. It ain’t that y’all don’t need to know my distant past. It’s that y’all cain’t know it. No one can. Not even me. It’s why they call it the past, m’dear. It’s more like the future than it is the present. And y’all never think to ask me about the future, do you now?

It’s not your “distant past” I’m asking about, for God’s sake. And I don’t need another lecture about your philosophy of life. All I want to know is where you’ve been so late.

She expected him home in time to drive the twins to their flute lesson at 5 P.M., so she could prepare dinner for them and they could eat together as a family, and here it is nearly eight and he has missed dinner altogether, and the kids and she once again have found themselves eating alone in front of the TV.

Gloria is a librarian employed at a branch of the Calusa County library system out on the Barriers and is the reason why the Professor has ended up serving on the library board of directors: her descriptions at home of her working conditions and the overall incompetence of her colleagues and superiors convinced him that the entire library system was woefully mismanaged by the cadre of elderly civic do-gooders who sat on the board. There’s not a professional book person, educator, or scientist among them, he noted. The Professor, although a social scientist, rather than a so-called natural or theoretical scientist, was all three. He put his name on the ballot, sent out e-mails to the membership listing his qualifications, and was promptly elected by an overwhelming majority.

Of the four candidates running for the position, one of whom was the eighty-seven-year-old incumbent, the Professor’s résumé was easily the most impressive. Included among his many qualifications were his summa cum laude (Phi Beta Kappa) bachelor’s degree from Kenyon College and his master’s degree in American studies and doctorate in sociology from Yale, his membership in Mensa and the Prometheus Society, his many professional publications and the several anthologies of monographic studies of homelessness that he has edited, his rank of senior tenured professor at Calusa State University, his position as deacon for the First Congregational Church of Calusa, and his volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity.

Which is pretty much everything his wife Gloria knows about him too — at least all she knows about his near and distant past. That plus the few additional bits and pieces of what he calls data that he’s conveyed to her in a seemingly casual way during their courtship and the nearly nine years they’ve been married: that he is an only child, and his father worked as an accountant for U. S. Steel in Alabama; that both parents were killed in an automobile crash when he was in his early twenties off doing fieldwork in Lima, Peru, and he has no other living family members that he’s close to; that he traveled widely for many years doing independent research for private foundations in Asia, Central and South America, and the Caribbean, before settling down to academic life in his middle forties here in Calusa; that he was never previously married nor, as far as he knew, has he fathered any children other than Rani and Biswas (a datum offered in a jocular fashion that implies a possibly hedonistic period in his youth).

The reason I’m late, then. The usual reason. Research. I’ve befriended a young homeless man who’s one of those sex offenders I told you about who are living under the Claybourne Causeway. I was arranging to interview the fellow. He’s naturally suspicious and needs to be courted a little first. He’s camped out on Anaconda Key for now. I went there after finishing my Saturday stint for Habitat.

You might have called me.

Would you have done anything differently if I had?

No. But I wouldn’t have worried.

Did you worry?

No.

Well, there you are, then.

He heads for the restaurant-size refrigerator that they purchased the first week of their marriage, when they realized they’d be sharing food storage, pulls open the door and scans the gleaming contents. Dozens of topped-off plastic, paper, and cardboard containers of ready-to-eat food — potato salad, macaroni and cheese, beef stew, lamb stew, curried chicken, fried chicken, pork dumplings, chicken pot pies, half a ham, chunks of cheese, egg salad, tuna salad, sliced meats, marinated tuna steaks, mashed squash, creamed spinach, meat loaf, Cuban, Chinese, and Indian takeout, Dominican meat patties and Mexican fajitas, and much, much more — all prepared over the last few days by Gloria or, as instructed and listed by the Professor, purchased at the Watson New York Deli or delivered to the house by the nearby ethnic restaurants, everything ready to be eaten cold or else easily heated in the microwave. In addition, stored for his eventual delectation, there’s plenty of backup in the freezer — loaves of bread, cakes, ice cream, custard pies, pizzas and chicken fingers, french fries, onion rings, waffles, and more. He also has a standing order with his wife to keep at the ready a gallon jug of sweetened iced tea and two unopened liters of Diet Coke and a gallon of milk.

The Professor likes to eat standing up at the kitchen counter, alone, unseen, without his intake being observed, quantified, and judged, and he arranges to do so at least four times a week and would do it every night, if Gloria did not complain that he should spend more time with his children, since the kids’ bedtime is eight-thirty and they can only be together as a family when they all sit down to dinner. So three and sometimes four times a week, he manages to arrive home from the university by 6 P.M. where he presides over the evening meal — eating restaurant-size portions only, nothing excessive — and afterward conducts a brief interrogation of his children as to the particulars of their schoolwork and extracurricular activities and a television program or two that he personally selects and oversees.

Later, long after the twins have been sent to bed and Gloria, a fan of crime and forensic dramas, has retired to their bedroom to watch television alone, he slips into the kitchen again and again, long into the night, and frequently even after he has gone to bed himself the Professor rises, wraps his body in his bathrobe and strolls through the darkened house, as if he is merely restless, unable to sleep, ending his walk at the kitchen, there to swing open the wide refrigerator door and in the cold light spread onto a platter slabs of meat loaf, piles of potato salad and various vegetables, meat patties, ice cream bars, and so on, an entire multicourse meal, which he proceeds for the next half hour or more to serve himself, chewing and swallowing and cutting off another slice and chewing and swallowing that and spooning another clump and chewing and swallowing that, until the ache in his cells has faded, and he can wash his plate and utensils and pack up the tubs, boxes, and plastic containers, switch off the kitchen light, and return to his study and resume reading or, as dawn approaches, slip back under the covers of his queen-size bed that stands next to his wife’s narrow twin bed and for another hour or two, while his stomach and intestines, injecting the undigested food with enzymes and chemicals, contract and expand and extrude, and his involuntary organs, his kidneys, liver, pancreas, and colon, like miners deep in the dark of the earth, do their mindless slow work, and he falls back to sleep. He sleeps soundly until the work in the dark recesses of his bowels is complete, and then the ache in his cells gradually returns and wakes him again, and it’s time to return to the kitchen again, before Gloria and the kids wake.

His outer body, its enormous size and shape and its social and physical liabilities, is a significant, unavoidable part of the Professor’s public life, seen and in his absence commented on by all. For this reason, he avoids mirrors and cameras and reflecting glass windows and doors. His inner body and its needs, however, are his secret life, which by and large he keeps locked away, even from himself. No one comments on his inner life; no one even observes it: not his colleagues nor students nor any of his friends and acquaintances; not his wife anymore nor his children, for whom their papa’s inner life is a threatening, demanding, impossible-to-please-or-penetrate mystery. No one. Since childhood, the only treatment for the Professor’s sickness that he has been able to imagine is more of the sickness itself. Like a drug addict, he has compartmentalized his life, not simply in order to remain an addict, but so that he can continue to treat his addiction with more of what he’s addicted to without contaminating any other part of his life, public or private, outer or inner.

He has not proven to be a particularly adept participant in any of the forms of therapy or the various self-help and twelve-step programs designed to treat his addiction. All his life he has believed that he is the most intelligent person in the room, and — if you measure intelligence by IQ and memory — he has been for the most part correct. He talks, but rarely listens. And then he leaves the room. At the urging of Gloria, he agreed after the second year of their marriage to attend weekly group sessions with a psychotherapist who specialized in treating eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia and on occasion simple overeating. Judgmental terms like glutton, self-indulgent, and vain were forbidden. Everyone in the group pointed accusing fingers at parents, especially mothers. Even so, it went nowhere. At least for him. After a half-dozen meetings with the group, which was made up of four adolescent girls, who, he believed, were obsessed with media celebrity, like most American adolescents, and two perpetually dieting, slightly overweight middle-aged women, women who he felt were indeed gluttonous, self-indulgent, and vain, he announced to the group and the therapist, There is no apparent conflict between my “body image” and my perfectionism. And my parents had nothing to do with shaping either. In fact, I find the former, “body image,” an essentially meaningless construct, and the latter, “perfectionism,” a virtue worthy of cultivation, an aspect of my character and personality that I actually admire and take credit for having instilled in myself and for which I therefore blame no one. But there’s no polarity between the two, my “body image” and my perfectionism. Only a distinction without a difference. I therefore bid you a fond and respectful good-bye.

After that — again to satisfy Gloria, who was still trying to ignore the dietary needs of her husband’s inner body, his appetite, the way early in their courtship she had learned to ignore the visible size and shape of his outer body — the Professor agreed to attend meetings of Overeaters Anonymous, a twelve-step program based on Alcoholics Anonymous. But he never got to the first step. He didn’t even get beyond the threshold. Meetings were held in a basement room at the Watson Unitarian Church, and the room turned out to be filled with fat people. He left immediately after the group recited the pledge to change what they could change and accept and give over to a higher power what they could not change. Those people offend my eye and dull my mind, especially in such numbers, he explained to Gloria. It’s like being in a room full of remorseful self-mutilating amputees. I am not an aesthete, but there is an aesthetic aspect of the human body which, seen whole, pleases my eye and relaxes, even as it sharpens, my mind.

You can get over that. Can’t you get over that?

Why should I?

Dear, it’s a prejudice. A prejudice against fat people.

Au contraire. It’s a delight in the observable beauty of the human body. How can I be prejudiced against fat people when I am one myself? No, it’s about my aesthetic life, my appreciation of the visible beauty of the human body and the sensual pleasure I take from it. Male or female, it doesn’t matter. Y’all wouldn’t have me give that up, now, would y’all? Just watching y’all undress, for instance, thrills me more and with greater complexity today than it ever did in the past.

No, dear, I wouldn’t want you to give that up. As long as it’s me you’re looking at, and not some other woman taking off her clothes.

Glory-Glory-Hallelujah. There ain’t no other woman I’d rather see naked than y’all.

You smooth talker, you.

The Professor is not merely flattering her. He does indeed like looking at her when she is naked. Several times a month, wearing only his size XXXL terry cloth bathrobe, he sits across from her in their bedroom in his forest green leather Barcalounger, and she takes off her clothes, slowly, article by article, and then poses on her narrow bed, as if modeling for an artist, while he masturbates. That’s the nature and extent of their sexual activities. They did not have sex as such — normal intercourse — more than a few times before the twins were born and have attempted it only once since then. A failed attempt. But they did not marry for sex in the first place, nor was it ever an essential part of their relationship. Sexual intercourse, at least in the beginning, was merely a requirement, an obligation on both their parts determined mostly by convention and proximity and her wish to have a child, rather than by attraction or desire.

Gloria is shy, withdrawn, sexually naive and, because of it, insecure. She is the sort of conventionally pretty woman who disappears into the background of group photographs or fails to be properly introduced at social gatherings or office parties. She is a quietly competent person whose calm self-containment masks a resentful feeling of superiority, contradictory characteristics that make other women feel judged by her. Men detect that contradiction from halfway across the room, and alarmed by it back off to an even greater distance. All her adult life, therefore, until the Professor came along, Gloria was a very lonely woman.

The Professor was the first man who treated her as if he were sexually attracted to her. He was not. He was merely looking for a particular kind of wife. She was thirty-one years old at the time, and he had recently purchased a home in the suburb of Watson. He strolled into the branch of the Calusa library closest to his university office one morning before class ostensibly to examine its public programs and holdings, especially the reference section and Internet access and number of computer terminals, as a way of evaluating the educational level and interests of the community. Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America, he explained to her. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture.

Gloria was attracted to the way the man spoke: complete sentences and organized, coherent paragraphs that were essentially pronouncements, beyond opinions or observations. The clarity and authority of his words and grammar made her stomach tighten and loosened the muscles in her legs. But not only his words and grammar drew her to him: it was also the way he spoke, his crisply articulated pronunciation smoothed and diluted by the remnants of a rural Alabama accent that every now and then in a slightly self-mocking way he brought into full use. She also liked the authority of his enormous body, the way it took up so much space in a room, her office, when he first presented himself. When the Professor stands in front of you, no one else in the room is visible: either your eye is drawn to his unusual girth and height, which he does little to disguise, or else he literally blocks everyone else out — even in a very large room, as Gloria discovered when she led him from her office to the reference section of the main hall. The scattered patrons and other library staff members turned toward them and stared at the bearded man walking beside her and saw no one else, especially not Gloria, the short, slender, bespectacled librarian. It was almost as if she had been absorbed by him, as if she had become huge too, four times her usual size, with all the authority and high visibility of a lone adult in a schoolyard surrounded by children.

Until this moment, she had not realized that all her life she had been waiting to feel exactly this. Large and central. As if spotlighted on a stage. It was an emotion without a name, not exactly orgasmic — as she showed the Professor their encyclopedias and dictionaries, English, Spanish, French, Haitian Creole, Mandarin, Russian, German, Italian, and Swahili, and their extensive collection of supplementary reference materials, technical and scientific dictionaries, atlases, medical dictionaries, thesauruses, dictionaries of slang, biography, history, and myth — but close.

You should be careful, hanging out with sex offenders. Especially homeless sex offenders. Don’t you find them… creepy? Scary? Some of them are rapists, I heard. Child molesters.

Nothing they have done or will do offends or frightens me. I view them scientifically. Like lab specimens. They’re less violent, at least toward other men, than the general population. Quite often they themselves have been the victims of violence, and almost all of them have been sexually abused as children. This young man I mentioned particularly interests me. He calls himself the Kid. He wouldn’t tell me his real name, but I’m sure it’s William Kid, spelled either K-Y-D-D-E or K-I-D-D-E. He’s fairly bright and articulate, and he’s nicely, realistically defiant, unlike most sex offenders, who are usually unintelligent and secretive, either from shame, which is understandable, or because they’re hoping for an opportunity to commit their crime again in the future. They’re unforthcoming, to say the least. And if they do speak of their offenses at all, they justify and rationalize them. They attack the interrogator and blame the victim. This fellow seems unusually honest. I think from him I’ll get the straight story, the truth.

The truth? The truth about what? His crime?

No. The reasons for his crime.

There have to be all kinds of reasons why a person does… what they do. What they’ve done.

I don’t think so, Glory-Glory-Hallelujah. It’s why they often go back and recommit the crime again and again. It’s why sex offenders are viewed as incurable.

Maybe they’re just programmed to do what they do. You know, hardwired.

These men are human beings, not chimpanzees or gorillas. They belong to the same species as we do. And we’re not hardwired to commit these acts. If, as it appears, the proportion of the male population who commit these acts has increased exponentially in recent years, and it’s not simply because of the criminalization of the behavior and a consequent increase in the reportage of these crimes, then there’s something in the wider culture itself that has changed in recent years, and these men are like the canary in the mine shaft, the first among us to respond to that change, as if their social and ethical immune systems, the controls over their behavior, have been somehow damaged or compromised. And if we don’t identify the specific changes in our culture that are attacking our social and ethical immune systems, which we usually refer to as taboos, then before long we’ll all succumb. We’ll all become sex offenders, Gloria. Perhaps in a sense we already are.

Oh, please.

We cast them out, we treat them like pariahs, when in fact we should be studying them up close, sheltering them and protecting them from harm, as if indeed they were fellow human beings who have inexplicably reverted to being chimpanzees or gorillas, and whose genetic identity with us and their shared ancestry with us can teach us what we ourselves are capable of becoming if we don’t reverse or alter the social elements that caused them to abandon a particularly useful set of sexual taboos in the first place.

This is a little boring, you know. And far-fetched. These people are sick. That’s all. Sick. Are you coming to bed soon?

First I have to check the sex offender registry for Calusa and find out how to spell the Kid’s real name.

You like him, don’t you?

Personally? I don’t really feel anything personal for him one way or the other. I suppose I admire him somewhat.

Admire him? He’s a convicted sex offender!

He’s plucky. And his defiance doesn’t take the form of denial, like most of them.

“Plucky.”

Go to bed, Gloria. Please.

CHAPTER SIX

THE PROFESSOR STANDS BESIDE HIS VAN IN the parking area at the edge of Benbow’s and watches the Kid drag a large plastic bag across the sand between the buildings and in among the low bushes and trees and mangroves, stopping here and there to collect dropped and discarded empty beer cans and bottles. There’s no one else in sight. The Kid stops for a moment by the bar and appears to be talking with the caged parrot — a short two-way conversation. He listens and talks. The parrot listens and talks. The Kid laughs, as if the parrot’s told a parrot joke, waves good-bye to the bird, and moves on.

When the bag is filled to bulging, the Kid drags it to the tailgate of the red, rusted-out pickup truck parked next to the Professor’s van, where he separates bottles from cans and tosses them into a pair of metal barrels placed in the bed of the truck. Though it’s still early in the day, the sun is already pounding down and the air is thick as syrup. The Kid moves slowly. He knows how to work in the heat. He’s wearing a T-shirt and cutoffs and sockless sneakers and a baseball cap. The Professor wears his usual dark three-piece vested suit, and though he stands in the shade of his van, sheets of sweat run down his entire body, soaking his underwear and socks. He wipes his face and neck with his handkerchief and folds and tucks it neatly back into the breast pocket of his suit coat.

The Kid, who until now has not acknowledged the Professor’s presence, tosses a glance in his direction and looks away.

I see that you are now gainfully employed. Good.

Benbow told me the deal. Not clear who I’m working for, though. Him or you.

You’re employed by Benbow. You answer to him. I’m merely the guarantor of your salary. He’s your boss.

Whatever.

I brought you a few items.

Yeah? What?

Household items. For your campsite.

The Professor slides back the side door of his van and pulls out a cardboard box and sets it on the ground. The Kid walks up to the box. He purses his lips, crinkles his brow, and peers skeptically into it, as if wondering what this weird fat dude wants in return. It’s got to be some kind of trick. What’s the exchange rate here?

Early this morning before leaving for his office, the Professor raked through the kitchen cupboards, linen and cleaning closets, filling the box. Gloria asked him what he was doing, and he told her he was bringing a few things to the Kid. Necessaries, he called them. She said nothing in response, just stood with her back to the stove and watched in silence, wondering: What’s the exchange rate here? What does her husband really want from this person?

The Kid reaches down and pokes through the contents: a cast iron skillet, a large pot, a spatula, a small wooden salad bowl and serving spoons, a set of old mismatched bath towels, laundry detergent, several bars of hand soap, a gallon-size thermos jug.

The Kid grunts. I can’t use this shit. I can’t use any of this shit, man. I travel light.

What could you use, then?

A Mercedes S-Class coupe. A condo twenty-five hundred feet in the air in a building where no children are allowed. That’d be enough, I guess. For a start.

No, seriously, Kid. You might be settled here for a while now.

I don’t think so, man. Benbow didn’t give me no guaranteed lease or anything. He could boot my ass outa here anytime he wants.

No, he can’t. I arranged for you to stay.

There’s still the problem with my parole officer, man. My caseworker, she calls herself. But she’s a parole officer and she can pretty much ruin my life if she wants to. The part that isn’t already ruined. Anyhow, she don’t want me settling here. She didn’t say it, but she wants me to go back to the Causeway. Did you bring the map? The treasure map?

It’s in a file in my office at the university. I’ll bring it next time. I’ll speak with her. Your parole officer.

The Professor pulls out his cell phone and hands it to the Kid. He instructs the Kid to call the woman and tell her that someone wants to discuss the Kid’s housing situation with her. I’ll take it from there.

The Kid shrugs and punches in the caseworker’s direct number, which after these many months of reporting in to her every week he has memorized. Her name, he tells the Professor, is Dahlia Freed. She’s a black lady, he adds. Cold. And hard. Goes by the friggin’ manual.

When Dahlia Freed picks up, the Kid in a flat, uninflected voice tells her that he has someone here who wants to speak with her about his housing situation. The guy’s some kind of professor. He’ll explain, he says and passes the phone to the Professor.

Benbow has stepped from his trailer and stands on the steps watching the Kid. Benbow pointedly looks at his watch, and the Kid immediately goes back to work picking up bottles and cans, leaving the Professor alone by his van to speak with Dahlia Freed.

He introduces himself to the woman and informs her that he is a professor of sociology at Calusa State University.

She is not impressed. She sounds bored and skeptical. Okay, so what’s the purpose of your call? She has a Brooklyn or Queens accent. Queens, he decides. She was probably a New York City cop before coming to Calusa. Half the Calusa police force are ex-cops from northern cities. Snowbirds with badges and guns.

The Professor explains that he’s doing field research for a paper on convicted sex offenders and the causes of their high rate of homelessness and low rate of recidivism. He wants to interview young Mr. Kydd, who has agreed to talk with him about his present situation and his personal history. He invites Ms. Freed to verify his academic credentials and the seriousness of his project by checking the faculty listings on the university’s website or by looking him up on google.com, where he has many listings. She can visit his personal website as well. You will find that I am a legitimate researcher and social scientist and have published numerous monographs and studies on the subject of homelessness. I’m now trying to expand my research into the lives of convicted sex offenders who happen also to be homeless. A subject I’m sure you’re more than familiar with.

So why call me? You want to interview him, go ahead and do it. You don’t need my permission.

He explains that it would be helpful to him if Mr. Kydd could remain in residence here at Benbow’s while he’s being interviewed, since he’s already encamped here and has even arranged to be employed by Mr. Benbow. Otherwise it may be very difficult for me to track him down again and interview him in an ongoing way for the length of time required by my project. I need to meet with him many times over several months in order to test the veracity of what he tells me.

Yeah, yeah.

This is very important work I’m doing, Ms. Freed. Someday it may turn out to be helpful to you in your line of work as well. In fact, I might want to interview you yourself. I’m sure your perspective would be helpful. I would give you proper credit in print, of course. Which might be useful to you down the line. With your department head, when you seek promotion.

She barks a laugh. Maybe. Maybe not. But I don’t like him living at that place. Benbow’s. It’s got a reputation. Supposedly they do all kinds of fashion shoots there. Fashionistas. It’s like a whaddaya call it, a location. But even if that’s all they do there, it’s still clothes coming off and on, cameras rolling, lights, et cetera. It’s only a step or two removed from the porn industry. Which is something I heard they’ve done over there in the past anyhow, make porn films, and are probably doing it still. So-called adult films. It’s not illegal, although you ask me it oughta be illegal. Besides, Benbow’s is a known hangout for upscale junkies. Which means there’s dealers present — we’re talking coke mainly and smack. Lots of soft money moving around. And where there’s upscale drugs being bought and sold, Professor, there’s pretty little sex workers standing on the sidelines looking for work, male and female. And some of them are underage. He’s gonna get caught up in that, one way or the other. At one end of the trade or the other.

The Professor decides to deal with her as if she were the worried parent of a teenage son, not a parole officer. He tells her that he understands her concerns, and he sympathizes. He’s willing to help her by checking in on the Kid daily and reporting to her afterward, either directly by phone or, if she prefers to have a written record of his visits, by e-mail. The Kid, of course, would continue to check in with her on his own once a week as required. His camp is not really at Benbow’s anyhow, he points out. He’s pitched his tent in an isolated spot outside the area where people gather, on a piece of property owned by Benbow, close to the Bay. His job is as a maintenance man, a part-time day job, so he’s not around the place at night. And as for the filming, there seems to be no evidence of it at present, and he, the Professor, would be sure to keep the Kid away from the scene if a crew and actors showed up and started to make an adult film. He certainly wouldn’t want the Kid mixed up in any of that!

He’s thinking, however, that maybe it would be interesting to interview some of the actors — a separate research project — and find out how they came to this line of work, how the males manage to keep their erections for so long, and do the females have actual orgasms or do they fake it? Do the actors take sexual pleasure from their work? Do the directors and the crew get turned on while filming? Or is it all, for everyone concerned, purely and simply work? Skilled labor. The manufacture of a product. Do they take pride in their product? Do they in a Marxist sense identify with it?

He’s in no sense an expert, but he’s seen plenty of porn films in his time — who hasn’t? Anyone who’s spent a night in a hotel or motel room has seen a porn film. Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection has watched clips from porn films. He’s seen enough of them both ways, films and Internet clips, to find pornography too boring to watch anymore, even when he has an itch to masturbate and is alone. But he’s never seen one being made, has never seen a porn film live, as it were. Never been in the audience for a live sex show. At least not in America, and suddenly for the first time in years the Professor is remembering live sex shows in Thailand and Malaysia. He recalls being a member of an audience, being pressured by the audience, all men, mostly Europeans and Americans, to become aroused by the coupling taking place on the stage. The members of the audience nudged one another with their elbows, laughed and cheered, whistled and stomped, then settled into rapt silence, their hands buried in their trousers. No matter how odd or bizarre — male performers with grotesquely large penises, racial mixes, dwarves, huge multicolored dildos, chains, whips and rubber suits, twins, once even a set of triplets — it didn’t work for him. His fly stayed zipped, his cock remained stubbornly flaccid, buried beneath rolls of belly fat. Somehow the pressure he felt from the other men in the audience interfered with his ability to respond sexually to the show. He grew quickly bored, then detached, and finally analytical. He ended up considering the cruelly exploitive politics of the event. Another instance of late capitalist imperialism.

It would be a lot more interesting, possibly a lot more arousing, he thinks, to watch a porn film being made, to be on the actual set, close enough to the actors to see their sweating faces and the women’s breasts and nipples and their vaginas and anuses and the men’s huge thrusting penises, and to know that everything, the sucking, licking, squirming, jamming, and ramming, is being done, not for the sexual stimulation of the director and crew or for the other performers, but for the camera. For an audience that’s not present and is not situated in the present, either, but is instead located somewhere out there in the future, unknown and alone in a darkened motel room or at home in front of a computer screen, invisible to the performers and to the people observing and filming them live in real time. For pay. For money fed to the computer or the TV pay-per-view cable company by credit card number.

The parole officer, Dahlia Freed, says, Okay, I’ll give it a shot. Only temporary, though. I gotta check out the situation in person first.

When? I’d like to be here and introduce myself.

I don’t give advance notice when I make my visits. And you’ve already introduced yourself, thanks.

Well, perhaps I’ll come by your office.

Call ahead.

I will.

CHAPTER SEVEN

K: So you’re back. And lugging another gift box, I see. Whaddaya got for me this time, Haystack? No more household goods, I hope.

P: I think you’ll find these items somewhat more useful. Sorry I misread your needs this morning. Here we have a Swiss Army knife. Many blades, nine by my count. Very handy, given your circumstances. And this terrific little radio. Doesn’t need batteries. You just crank the handle and it charges the radio for eight hours’ playing time.

K: Cool.

P: And a portable telescope. To help while away the time while you’re sitting here by your tent.

K: I ain’t a peeper, y’ know.

P: Yes, I know. But you could watch the cruise ships come and go and the birds and keep track of cars and check out the visitors arriving at Benbow’s from right here by your tent. You could watch the stars at night.

K: What’re you, like the white explorer bringing high-tech presents to the low-tech Indians?

P: (laughs) Something like that.

K: What’s the Indian supposed to do in return? Carry all your shit on his back into the jungle?

P: Just talk into the little black box for an hour or so every few days.

K: It don’t look like no recorder. Is it running? I thought you was just gonna use a tape recorder.

P: It’s a digital camera. A minicamera. Very useful for making both a visual and aural record of interviews. In my field visual cues are as telling as linguistic cues. I’ll just set it on its little tripod here in the sand… and we can forget about it. It’s miked, of course. It has a very good microphone. We can speak normally and just forget it’s there.

K: You can forget about it maybe. Not me though. It’s a fucking camera. I don’t mind recorders but cameras make me nervous, man. Surveillance cameras, hidden cameras, cameras you don’t know are watching. And cameras you forget are there. Especially them. Is it running?

P: It’s running. Okay, where do you want to start?

K: No, where do you want to start? You ask the first question. Then I’ll like decide if I want to answer it. I’m only doing this because I guess I owe you. Like for talking with Dahlia this morning and cutting the deal with Benbow and all. And bringing me the knife and radio and shit. But that don’t mean I hafta tell you shit I don’t feel like telling you. Right? You’re not interrogating me, you’re interviewing me. There’s a difference, man. You’re not a cop, you’re a professor. Correct?

P: Correct. This is an interview, not an interrogation. So let’s begin by talking about your family. Everything starts there, doesn’t it? Tell me about them. Your mother, your father, and so on. Your siblings.

K: My family. That’s a joke. Siblings, that’s like brothers and sisters, correct?

P: Correct.

K: Okay. No siblings.

P: An only child then. Everyone has a mother and a father, however. At least in the beginning they do. Tell me about your parents.

K: Sure. I have a mother. No father though. I mean my mother raised me, not my father. Like there was someone who “fathered” me, but nobody who was my father. My moms, she’s the one who gave birth to me and you could say she took care of me, at least till I was a teenager and was more or less on my own. She’s alive and I guess well and lives right here in Calusa. She’s out in the north end in a house she owns where I used to live and where she has a job as a beautician that she’s had since Day One. My moms is okay. At least I assume she’s okay. I haven’t seen her in a while.

P: How long is that?

K: Not since I got convicted and sent up. About two years now, I guess.

P: Does she know you were living under the Causeway?

K: No. Unless she figured it out on her own when it got into the newspapers and such. Though the papers never used my name or singled me out. She’s not much for newspapers anyhow. I know she didn’t learn it from me. Not that she’d give a shit. Which I can understand.

P: I’ll come back to that. What about your father?

K: Yeah, right, what about him? My so-called father took off as soon as he knocked up my mother. They should have a different word than “father” for someone who just happened to fuck your mother and she got pregnant from it. To me he’s not even got a name. They were never married or anything. That’s why my last name’s the same as my mother’s. He was from up north and went back there supposedly where he probably already had a wife and kids. He was like a roofer or something. Even my mother doesn’t know much about him. One of those northern guys with a pickup and a set of tools who shows up for work after the hurricanes. They fuck all the women and girls for a few months, spend a lot of government and insurance money on booze and drugs and then disappear back north till the next hurricane. My mother’s a sucker for those guys. Especially the black dudes. She likes only black dudes with northern accents though. The same with Latinos. Like Puerto Ricans from New York. That’s what she says anyhow. Maybe she thinks inside they’re really northern white guys, only outside they’re these sexy dark types, if you know what I mean. It’s sort of racist but she doesn’t have a clue. She thinks it’s liberal and all. My mother’s okay but kind of a dim bulb.

P: Was your father black?

K: You shittin’ me?

P: Latino?

K: Look at me, for chrissake.

P: How old is she? Your mother.

K: I dunno. Maybe in her late forties.

P: How old are you? The registry says you’re twenty-two.

K: Registry?

P: The National Sex Offender Registry. I looked you up online this morning.

K: Oh yeah. So you know everything worth knowing about me already. Why bother interviewing me then?

P: To learn what the registry leaves out. And to let you tell your story yourself. Like about your mother. Tell me more about her. And about your childhood. Would you say you had a happy childhood?

K: C’mon, man, what’s a happy childhood? Anybody says he had a happy childhood is bullshitting. But mine was okay I guess. At least nobody beat on me and I didn’t starve and I always had a roof over my head, thanks to my mother, which are things she always likes to remind me of. Until I enlisted in the army anyhow. Although afterward when I got out she let me have my old room back. So I can’t complain about my childhood. Or my mother. Not really.

P: You were in the army?

K: Yeah. For a while. I signed up when I was twenty right after I lost my job at this light store which closed on account of the guy that owned it got killed in a robbery. It happened on my day off, so for a while there the cops thought I was involved and almost busted me for it, but I had an alibi. My mother. Another thing she did for me and won’t let me forget. She said I was home with her all day. Which was basically true, since I really was home all day, only not with her, because she was at the beach working on her tan with her boyfriend of the moment. That’s okay. I was home alone with my friend Iggy but he’s an iguana and couldn’t testify. Or he was an iguana. He’s dead now.

P: I’m sorry. You were in the army? For how long? Did you get sent to Iraq or Afghanistan?

K: I really wanted to. Yeah, Afghanistan, man. I was jonesing for Afghanistan. But no. I only got as far as basic training at Fort Drum in New York State which is way the fuck up by the Canadian border in the middle of winter, man. Freeze your ass off up there. Not exactly good preparation for desert warfare. Except you get really buff in basic, plus you learn how to use your weapon and shit.

P: You didn’t complete basic training?

K: You could say I got discharged early. Not a dishonorable though. I got what they call a general discharge. So I never made it to Afghanistan. Pissed me off. I think I would’ve done good there, kicked some serious Arab ass. I could like kill people with my bare hands, man. They teach you that in basic.

P: Why were you discharged early?

K: (long pause) Porn. Distributing pornography, they said.

P: Pornography! What type of pornography? You mean children?

K: No, no! Just the usual kind. Videos. Triple and quadruple X. Your basic hard-core. I wasn’t really distributing them anyhow. I was only giving them away free to my buddies. Some DVDs I bought and paid for myself. It’s a long stupid story. You don’t wanna hear it.

P: I do want to hear it. Tell me.

K: Well, like I said, I was stationed up at Fort Drum which is only about an hour’s drive from the Canadian border, and over there in Ottawa on the French side of the river there’s a lot of strip clubs and such, and I overheard some of the guys in my outfit saying that this actress who’s my favorite porn star was appearing in a place called Lucky Pierre’s. Her name’s Willow. Just Willow. Which is cool. No last name. I mean she has a last name but she doesn’t use it in her profession. And she’s really special. At least to me. Not like your regular suck-’n’-fuck porn actresses with tats on their butts and clit rings and nipple rings and shaved pussies and who all they do is moan and groan and squeal and can’t act for shit. Willow’s different.

P: How do you mean, “different”?

K: I dunno. Most guys don’t really get off on her. Her Internet videos only get one or two, sometimes two and a half stars instead of five and not many hits compared to Cassidey Rae say or Brianna Banks or Hannah Hilton who look like they’ve had these huge breast implants installed and get thousands of hits. Maybe not Cassidey Rae. Her tits are pretty normal-looking. But Willow’s tits are kind of small. Like plums. With these dark almost purple nipples. Willow’s more natural, if you know what I mean. Also her teeth aren’t perfect white, and she has curly brown hair instead of straight blond like she’s maybe Italian or Jewish. She’s got this fantastic warm smile. Actually, I bet she’s French Canadian, which is why she was performing at Lucky Pierre’s. It’s on the French side of the river in Ottawa where they’ve put all the strip clubs and hookers for the Canadian politicians that keep their offices and homes over on the English side. She was probably in town visiting her family and took the gig to pay off some of their overdue bills. She looks like she comes from a poor family. Her website says she was born in Colorado and went to college in Southern California and studied architecture, but they always lie on those websites. They’d never say things like she’s French Canadian from Ottawa, Canada, and dropped out of high school and got into stripping and porn to help support her family. But that’s what she looks like, and that’s one reason why she’s my favorite porn star. Or was. I don’t have any favorites anymore.

P: Why not?

K: Dude, get a clue! On account of I can’t watch porn anymore! I’d get busted. Back then though, like all the guys in my outfit, I watched porn all the time on my computer, and I really wanted to meet Willow, so I hitched up to Ottawa on a two-day pass. I had to hitch because none of the guys who had cars wanted to take me where they went on passes and hung out, and none of them gave a shit about Willow, and to tell the truth I wasn’t tight enough with anyone to ask any favors, let alone borrow their car. Besides, I didn’t have a driver’s license. I pretty much kept to myself most of the time because from the first day of basic guys gave me a lot of shit. Not just the sergeants and officers. Every outfit has somebody who gets shit on by everyone else, and I guess I ended up being that somebody. You know what I’m saying?

P: Why, do you think?

K: I dunno. It’s my personality maybe. Most people’s personalities have like a specialty. They tell jokes good or they know a lot about cars or computers and video games or heavy metal music or they excel at some sport or at least if they don’t play sports they know everything about the NFL say or the NBA. Or they’re religious and can talk about Jesus and the Bible and shit. There were some guys like that in my outfit. Jesus freaks. Or they can talk about all the women they fucked. My personality just doesn’t have any specialty. All I know about is iguanas, and who gives a shit about iguanas? Plus I’m shorter than most guys and kind of skinny for my age, so I look younger than I’m supposed to be, which means that guys my age and even younger tend to treat me like their stupid little brother. Or they just ignore me. It was like that in school. It’s always been like that for me. You get used to it, and I didn’t mind it after a few years. It was weirder in the army, though, because it was the first time I had to shower naked with other people, and I had the biggest dick in the outfit, and you’d think that would have got me some props—

P: Wait a minute! You had the biggest penis in your outfit?

K: Yeah. Not the thickest. A guy from Akron had the thickest. I had the longest. But they just treated it like it was a joke. Like it was wasted on me, which was sort of right. I think it’s because I didn’t know how to brag about it. You know. And show it off. That sort of thing. I mean, I didn’t have a lot of sexual experience, to say the least, and was kind of shy about my dick and actually didn’t realize it was unusually long until I was in the army, because I didn’t play sports in school and the only other dicks I had seen up to then belonged to male porn stars, and their dicks, except for the really freaky gonzo-size ones, were the same size as mine more or less. Or when I was a kid and sometimes accidentally saw the dicks of the guys who stayed at our house with my mom, which from a little kid’s perspective seemed really huge, even though they didn’t even have a hard-on at the time and were just walking naked from her bedroom to the bathroom or the kitchen or sitting on the couch in their skivvies watching TV and their cock and balls would fall out.

P: So what happened with Willow up in Ottawa?

K: Oh, man, it was awesome! It was a pretty cool club, better than anything I’d seen in Calusa. And for sure not what you’d expect to see in Canada. They had a couple of small stages for the pole dancers and a Plexiglas booth where they put on shower shows—

P: Shower shows?

K: Yeah, like a naked woman takes a shower in this see-through shower stall, and you get to watch. It’s kind of cool if you’ve never seen it before, but once you have it gets sort of boring, unless she flips her button and jerks herself off or has a dildo to play with. That can be interesting. Anyhow after a couple of numbers by the local talent, which wasn’t much, Willow comes on. She’s dressed in a tight nurse’s outfit with furry white boots and pretty soon she’s down to a thong and the boots and then just the boots. It’s supposed to be a little story about a doctor’s office visit and she’s the nurse and she’s wearing a stethoscope that she puts the head of it into her pussy and then sucks it and so on. But mostly she pole dances. The DJ’s playing these old Bee Gees songs, but Willow’s a real good dancer so the audience is into it, especially me, because her and me are having serious eye contact, like she knows I know she’s special and probably because I’m not like the rest of the guys in the audience, who are all these red-faced Canadians, most of them drunk and older than me and yelling and grabbing their junk and so on, while I’m just sitting there quiet all by myself watching her pole dance like she’s dancing for me and nobody else. Like we’re alone together. Y’ know?

P: Yes. I know the feeling. It’s a good feeling.

K: Yeah. Anyhow, at the end she does a split and a couple of final butt flashes from the pole and starts scooping up all the cash the guys in the audience have been tossing up there. I snake my way up to the stage and hand her an American twenty, which stands out because the rest of the money is mostly Canadian twos and fives, and she takes the bill, looks at it a second, then looks at me and purses her lips in a pretend kiss. “American?” she asks and I say, “Yeah, U.S. Army,” and she says, “Awesome.” Then she prances off-stage. But a minute later she’s back, wearing just the thong and the furry booties and sitting at a table at the end of the stage with this huge stack of DVDs of her newest movie, Willow’s Day Off, that she’s selling and autographing. There’s only a couple of wrinkled, red-faced, old guys who’re buying the DVD, and I feel kind of sorry for her and pissed off at these Canadian guys, who don’t know what they’ve got. They don’t know how lucky they are. So when there’s nobody else in line I go up to the table and tell her I want to buy twenty copies of Willow’s Day Off. She goes, “Wow, dude! What do you want with twenty of them?” And I go, “They’re for the guys in my outfit back at Fort Drum. You’re our favorite porn star. They sent me up here to buy them each a copy of the DVD,” I tell her. Which isn’t exactly true, but it makes her feel real good, I can tell. She asks if I’m going to Afghanistan, and I say, “Yeah we’ll be shipping out in a few weeks.” Which was true. I promise her we’ll take her DVDs with us and share them with the other guys over there, which practically gets her crying. No shit, real tears in her eyes. You never see porn stars cry, man. Never. They’re like trained not to cry. “You’re real sweet,” she tells me. And she goes, “You guys’re risking your lives over there to protect our freedoms from the terrorists. I’m gonna give you a free lap dance,” she says, and when the music comes back on, that’s what she does. Gives me a free lap dance. Right there in front of everybody. I could smell her perfume, man.

P: That’s incredible.

K: That’s what I thought. It was like the best night of my whole life. But then after that everything went downhill.

P: How do you mean? (to the dog) G’wan, scat! Go home!

K: No, she’s okay. Let her hang out with us awhile. Those guys, Benbow and whatzisname, Trinidad Bill, they treat her like shit over there. They treat the parrot like shit too. Both those guys are a buncha turds, if you ask me. They like to throw pennies at the parrot and make him yell swears at them so people’ll laugh. (to the dog) C’mere, girl. Wanna treat, Annie? Want a Cheez-It? (to the Professor) She likes Cheez-Its, which is good because I like them too,and it’s the only treat I got for her. Her name’s Annie they told me. For Raggedy Ann and because she’s got red hair. Reddish yellow hair. Only I like thinking it’s for Little Orphan Annie instead, on account of there was this porn movie named Raggedy Ann and Andy that I never liked. It was all about sex dolls that suck and fuck. There’s probably a porn movie named Little Orphan Annie too, but if so, I’ve never seen it. Iggy used to like Cheez-Its.

P: Iggy?

K: My iguana. The cops blew him away the other night when they raided the camp at the Causeway. I hadda bury him at sea. But don’t get me started on Iggy. Jesus!

P: Okay. Tell me how everything went downhill after that night in Ottawa with Willow.

K: You know what a GO-1A is?

P: Hmm-m. General Order Number 1A?

K: Right. You must’ve been in the service, Professor. They passed it in the first Iraq War and updated it after 9/11. It bans you from drinking alcohol in Muslim countries plus doing other shit the Arabs dislike that Americans sort of take for granted, like gambling and drugs and borrowing money with interest, which means no credit cards except on the base. And no promoting Christianity. And no pornography. No porn at all. Nada. Not even skin magazines. Not when you’re stationed in an Arab country. The rest of the time the army don’t bother you about porn, so everyone is into it. I mean, what else are you gonna do with your free time? Everybody’s into porn, even the officers. Especially over there in Iraq and Afghanistan I heard. In spite of the rules. It’s practically un-American not to be into porn. Especially if you’re a guy although I heard the female soldiers are into porn pretty heavy too. Downloading from the Internet onto your computers and iPhones and swapping with your friends and family members and sending out pictures of your dick and your wife’s or girlfriend’s tits and bush to your friends and exchanging sex organ pictures with your wife or girlfriend back home to let her know you’re thinking of her and of course triple and quadruple X hard-core DVDs and jack-off magazines and other shit like that. Except for distribution. That’s out. You can collect and swap skin magazines with your buddies. You can watch porn videos and share them with your homies and exchange sex-oriented family photos with your wife or girlfriend or if you’re a female soldier with your boyfriend or husband. But if you’re U.S. military personnel you can’t like distribute porn, even here in the free world. Which is a pretty fine distinction, if you ask me. Between consuming and distributing. You can be one but not the other. Anyhow, I get back to the base from Ottawa with my stash of twenty copies of Willow’s Day Off, and before I have a chance to give them away to the guys, they do a surprise search of the barracks, and they find the DVDs. It’s called a “Health and Welfare Inspection,” but all it is is a drugs and non — U.S. Army issue weapons search. So they grab all my DVDs, even the ones in my personal collection, and impound my computer and toss me in the brig until a week later, when they haul me before the base commander where they had this hearing, and they shit-can me. They gave me a general discharge and my pay and returned my computer, but they kept all the DVDs and my signing bonus money and handed me a one-way bus ticket to Calusa. None of which made my mother happy, except that she was sick of taking care of Iggy by then and could turn his care and feeding back over to me. A good thing for Iggy as it turned out, because in another week or two my mother would’ve probably given him away or dropped him off at a golf course. He was practically dead of starvation anyhow when I got home.

P: Iggy. The iguana.

K: Yeah.

P: So there you are, back in Calusa, living in your mother’s house, without a job, no friends except Iggy. No girlfriend, I assume.

K: Yeah. I never had an actual girlfriend anyhow.

P: So what’d you do?

K: Pretty much stayed in my old bedroom. Watched television. Watched a lot of porn on my computer. I tried to get a job, but when they found out I was discharged from the army before completing basic, they said forget it. Plus my only work experience was in shipping for a light store, and the guy who owned it was murdered and the new guy still thought I was involved, but I wasn’t. I had a little money left over from my army pay and a debit card. So I started making friends and talking with people on the Internet. Not real people, just people I met in chat rooms and such. I mean, they were real enough. They were real girls who liked to talk about stuff. Some of it sex stuff, but mostly just passing the time. Only not people I knew like in person.

P: We’ve talked for an hour already. That went fast, didn’t it? Let’s quit for now and come back to this in a day or so. I still have a lot of questions. Incidentally, Kid, I really appreciate your doing this.

K: No problem. What about the treasure map? Did you bring it?

P: Oh, I’m sorry! I forgot it again! I’ll bring it next time, I promise.

K: Yeah. Try and remember, okay? It’s sort of our deal is how I understand it. Maybe you can bring a compass and one of those GPS things that can locate coordinates like latitude and longitude. You probably know how to use that kind of gear, being a professor and all. Were you in the military? They teach you how to use those things in the military, but I never got to that particular lesson, so I don’t know how to use a map to find a spot that’s marked with an X.

P: Was I in the military? No. When I was your age it was the 1960s, and I was deeply involved with the movement to oppose the war in Vietnam. The only honorable path for me when I was drafted into the army was to refuse to serve, which I did. I spent a little time in the brig myself. I was in effect a draft dodger. And I’ve never regretted it.

K: No shit. How’d you dodge the draft? I heard that was hard unless you said you were a fag. Was it by being so fat?

P: Neither. It’s a long story, Kid. I’ll tell it to you sometime.

K: Yeah, I’d like to hear it sometime. That and the treasure map. I’d like to see that map sometime.

P: You will. I’ll bring it tomorrow. I promise.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A THICK MIST HAS SPREAD ACROSS BENBOW’S settlement. It hovers low over the sandy grounds between the shacks and the bar and trailers, spreading into the mangroves toward the narrow inlet on one side and over the berm out to the point, where the Kid has pitched his tent, and on to the back side of the settlement, where the pickup truck and several vans, SUVs, and panel trucks are parked. As it grows in density and height it blocks the morning sun and blue sky above. The vehicles slowly disappear from view. The half-dozen men and women standing near them fade and are gone. The buildings and trailers and barrels filled with trash and empty bottles and beer cans are embraced and then swallowed by the silver-gray mist.

It’s hard to tell where the mist is coming from or if the entire island has been devoured by it or possibly the whole city of Calusa and its suburbs all the way west to the Great Panzacola Swamp and beyond to the Gulf of Mexico. Or if it originates out there in the Gulf and has been blown east across the vast swamp to the city and the Bay and Anaconda Island, driven by the morning breeze off the Gulf, the breeze stirred to life by the colossal swirl of a tropical storm named George three hundred miles at sea.

The mist here at Benbow’s is now so thick the Kid can’t see a person, building, or vehicle farther than ten feet away from where he stands. It muffles sounds — the lap of low waves off the Bay, the seagulls and waterbirds, the softly rocking, derelict shrimp boats tied to the posts of the crumbling, half-rotted dock by the inlet.

He knows he is not alone here; there must be dozens of other people close by. He heard their cars and trucks crackle across the crushed coral earlier, heard the doors of their vehicles open and slam shut. He heard them talking to one another, giving orders, arguing and discussing work of some kind. But he can’t hear them anymore, as if, when the mist swept in and settled and thickened, one by one everyone left Benbow’s settlement and the island. He can’t see or hear the parrot, because he can’t see the bar where its cage is kept; he doesn’t know north, south, east, or west, for the sun has long since disappeared; he can barely tell right from left.

It’s been a long time since the Kid has seen the dog, Annie. Or has it been a long time? When he wandered from his camp into the settlement the mist had already gathered at his feet and was starting to grow thicker and to rise from the ground and spread across the place, but now he can’t tell if that was moments ago or half a day earlier. He’s sure there are people nearby; there must be. He can’t be the only person left on the island. He can sense their ghostlike presence close by and standing farther off in twos and threes, but he can neither see nor hear them, except for an occasional shadowy shift in the gray mist, as if a low wind has blown across a wide curtain. He hears a murmur of human voices, as if someone were speaking quietly into a phone behind a closed door in a language he can’t identify.

He’s almost forgotten why he came out here in the first place. Then he remembers that he left his tent to find Benbow so he could learn what his job will be today. But it’s not a memory; it’s a glimpse of one, and it’s gone. He remembers for a second that the Professor is coming to bring the copy of the map today and make a second interview with him. But then he forgets.

For anyone other than the Professor and the Kid there are a hundred different reasons to drive out from Calusa, cross the narrow bridge onto Anaconda Island, and find oneself standing at the center of a cloud that has erased all sights and sounds of the known world and its inhabitants. You might have come in a delivery truck to restock the bar with beer and beverages or a panel truck loaded with ten cases of liquor. Maybe you came with drugs to sell, pot or Ecstasy or meth or coke; maybe you came to buy. You might have come out here to sample and purchase a half pound of Benbow’s famous smoked marlin. Maybe you’re a cop or an inspector from a government agency come to investigate a crime committed elsewhere in the city but with a possible connection to activities at Benbow’s; or you’re here to investigate a violation of county health board regulations. You may have left the city and come to the island for a fashion shoot or to make a pornographic film or act in one. Whatever brought you here this morning, you’ve lost touch with your intentions and desires for being here, as if you’ve taken a drug and can no longer remember the need or desire that induced you to swallow, smoke, or inject it in the first place. For there is something soothing about the enveloping mist: it’s placed you halfway between sleep and wakefulness, halfway into a dream and halfway out. The line of demarcation between inside and outside, between subject and object, has been erased, and a zone that is neither and both has replaced it. You feel like you’re watching a movie or making a movie or acting in one. Or all three at once.

And then, stepping free of the mist on your right not far away, a child. Or is it a child? A very small person, female, white, and wearing a gauzy white scrap of cloth draped across one shoulder and over her belly and wrapped once around her pelvis. Bare shoulders, legs, arms, wearing sandals with thin golden straps. Her hair is long, blond, combed forward and covering her face. She drifts a few slow steps toward you, her arms floating at her sides, then rising to above her head, as if she is plucking a forbidden fruit from a tree. She turns and returns to the mist and disappears inside it.

Another child floats toward you, this one a boy, also white and blond, also looped in a piece of gauzy white cloth, like a dancer in the role of an angel in a silent ballet. But a child; clearly a human child. A beautiful little boy. His eyes, like the eyes of the girl who preceded him, are expressionless, and his face is as still and unsmiling as a mannikin’s. A third beautiful angelic child, a boy with light brown skin and black locks covering his face, parts the mist. The piece of cloth that half covers, half reveals, his body is thin and loose like the others’, but is black, and the boy slowly approaches the first boy, touches his fingertips on both hands with his own, as if passing an electric current through them from one boy to the other, and the two boys turn on an axis, as if welded together at the tips of their fingers, a slow, erotic dance around an invisible Maypole, a dance that, despite its eroticism, is strangely chaste, impersonal, without desire or even shared awareness of the other. The blond girl now joins them, and a fourth child comes into view, a dark-haired white girl, and the four children hold hands in a circle, raise their hands over their heads and come close, face-to-face, expressionless, somber, cold, dead-eyed, turning clockwise.

Behind them, nearly invisible but clearly there, are the dark shapes of four or five adults watching the dance of the children, the nearly naked, dancing children. The beautiful children. One can make out the boxy, black silhouettes of machinery back there, and scaffolding with bright squares of phosphorous light attached. Adult male voices now and then break through the silence, men giving quiet directions to other men and to women, who answer with insecure interrogatories, Here? Okay now? Slightly to my right or yours? They all speak English, both those giving orders and those following them, but without any knowledge of the subject, they might be speaking in a foreign language. The adults are either standing in the middle of the heavy mist or on the other side of it, for perhaps the mist is not as widespread as the Kid thought, perhaps it originates and has settled only here on the island, only here at Benbow’s. Perhaps it’s not natural, is made by one of the machines back there beyond the enchanted children.

Their dance spirals forward out of the cloud and recedes into it, comes forward again, then halfway back. Are they enchanted, though? Entranced is more like it. Lost in a trance, mildly hypnotized or sedated. Their movements are choreographed and directed by someone you can’t see but can hear now in a voice amplified electronically, a man telling the children to turn and face him and come slowly toward the camera holding hands, that’s good, that’s very pretty, keep coming, don’t stop, come right to the camera, you two part to the right of the camera, you two to the left.

And cut!

CHAPTER NINE

FOR CLOSE TO AN HOUR THE PROFESSOR HAS sat in his van, watching the shoot. He thought at first that the cameras and crew and the scantily clad children and their handlers were filming a commercial for television and tried to figure out what product the commercial was designed to promote. Not clothing, surely. Except for the pieces of cloth draped across them, the children were naked, or appeared to be naked. No electronic toys or games or sports equipment or team paraphernalia were visible, no bicycles, boogie boards, or plastic aboveground swimming pools, no sneakers or shoes, except for the gold-strapped sandals, no shampoos or soaps or toothpaste evident. No musical instruments, Frisbees, Hula Hoops, trampolines, or jungle gyms; nothing for children to play with or on or in, nothing to eat or drink or wear.

There would be music added later, of course, and a voice-over to make the images cohere around the pitch, the sales pitch. But what are they selling? the Professor wonders. What product, what manufactured item, made probably in Mexico or China or Indonesia or Ecuador, could possibly be advertised using images of nearly naked children doing a faintly erotic slow-motion dance in a mist generated by a machine with shacks and shanties and rusting house trailers in the background, palms and mangroves and what appears to be the open ocean beyond, glimpsed for a second whenever the mist shifts and parts and then closes over the children again? It’s an island, yes, but not a deserted island. They must be filming a story about children for children. It’s an abandoned island, he decides, abandoned by castaway adults who have been rescued or have built themselves a raft of flotsam and moved on to another island, leaving behind these ghosts of their lost children, lost memories of childhood.

The Professor suddenly realizes his mistake. He thought the images of children were being directed at children. No, the viewers are meant to be adults. Adult men, not women. Men with money. Young men too, and even adolescent boys. The dance would be meaningless to children and women, even as a mood or atmosphere. The figures of two boys and two girls caught between movement and stillness like figures on a Grecian urn would have no sexual charge and no ability to arouse in anyone a possessive desire of even a material nature — except in an adolescent or adult American male. Maybe not just strictly American males. Maybe all males above the age of puberty would feel erotic heat from the sight, once the digital work was done and some thumping music added. You wouldn’t even need a narrative voice-over to get the job of selling done. The images of nearly naked children floating through clouds in an abandoned shantytown on an island thousands of miles from civilization — that could be enough to sell the targeted male viewer anything. A luxury automobile, cologne, a ticket on an airplane, a bottle of vodka, a hip hotel room with an oversize flat-screen plasma TV at the foot of the king-size bed and a full-length mirror on the opposite wall.

The Professor eases himself from the van and peers into the fog, looking for the Kid. It’s like a London fog, only without cold, damp, uptight London. It’s a semitropical island set instead, it’s the end-of-the-road, beyond, before or after the rise and fall of civilization, where nothing matters and everything is permitted.

They are selling an atmosphere, a mood, a feeling of low-key, nonthreatening sexual arousal that can be associated with a product, any product. The advertisers will add the product later digitally. Its mere name will be enough, or a flash of the thing itself, if the product is indeed a thing and not a singer or a song laid in behind the imagery. But can’t a singer or a song be construed as a thing? A product. It’s the imagery that does the selling, the Professor reasons, and the imagery is sexual, an old story, except that in this case, it’s sex of a particular kind: barely conscious fantasies of pedophilia.

He wonders if it was always so, if it’s characteristic of the species for adult males to lust after the very young of the species. No other mammal shares this trait, if indeed it is a trait and is not, as he suspects, socially determined. He is a sociologist, after all, not an anthropologist or biologist. For him, social forces are the primary determinants of human behavior.

Even among the other higher primates, our cousins the chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and bonobos, the adult males show no sexual interest in young females until after they pass menarche and are capable of breeding. But for the higher primate that we call Homo sapiens, the most socially determined creature of all, was it always so? Have Catholic priests always preyed on their young charges to such a scandalous degree that no parish in the world seems to be without a priest mutually masturbating his pretty young altar boys? Have cities in the past ever found themselves struggling to monitor and house whole colonies of pedophiles, creating an entire body of law and a nationwide tracking system designed to protect the young from sexual predators? The Professor doesn’t think so.

To learn which crimes flourished in a specific period social scientists look to the period’s legal code. For the Professor, the need to reason backward from prohibition to behavior is a fundamental principle. He teaches it early and often. Specific laws against piracy, slavery, infanticide, sedition, and ground and air pollution and smoking reveal the antisocial activities likely to attract a reckless, greedy, frightened, mentally disturbed, or merely weak man or woman of a specific era. Until the modern, postindustrial era there have been very few laws against pedophilia, the Professor reasons, because there was not thought to be a need for one. Adult males of the species were not thought to be sexually attracted to premenarche children. If on occasion they were, it was sufficiently regulated by the family’s interests in protecting their young from predation. It generally only happened within the family anyhow — the weird uncle or cousin was not allowed to babysit the kids. Thus, until recent years, very few laws were passed against it. It was not thought necessary. The family, or at most the tribal elders, can handle it. Keep it in the village.

What the hell is this?

Startled, the Professor turns to face a short, round, black woman, her shining face fisted with angry disgust. Her thick arms are crossed over her pillowy chest. She is wearing tight jeans, running shoes, and a black T-shirt. No jewelry. No earrings. Close-cut hair. The Kid’s caseworker, the Professor assumes. A tough, uncompromising, lesbian cop with a Queens accent.

I take it they’re shooting a commercial of some sort, he says. The Professor blankets the woman with his large shadow.

You the guy I spoke to yesterday? The professor?

Yes.

You parta this?

No.

So where’s the Kid?

I haven’t seen him today yet. His camp is over by the Bay. I’ll show it to you if you like.

He parta this too?

No. Neither of us has a thing to do with it.

You got ID?

The Professor hands her his card and his university ID, and with her lips pursed, as if memorizing the information, she studies them both carefully for a full minute: name, title, office address, home address, e-mail, telephone. She keeps the card and passes back his ID and tells him to take her to the Kid’s camp.

This shit gives me the creeps, she mutters. I don’t know how these people find each other.

What people?

The parents of those half-naked kids over there. They gotta have parents. And the creeps making their fucking kiddie porn.

It’s probably just a commercial. An ad for TV.

Yeah, right. And I’m Jack Sprat.

WITH THE COP AT HIS SHOULDER, THE PROFESSOR unzips and folds back the Kid’s tent flap and peers in. The Cop has a name, and the Professor knows it, but to him she’s the Cop — not the Caseworker or the Kid’s Parole Officer. The Cop. She has a steel grid in front of her mind, and for anything in the outer world to reach her it first has to squeeze through the bars of that grid. Information has to be broken into small cubes; information and data packaged in two-dimensional squares are preferable to three-dimensional cubes however: they pass through the grid more quickly and once they reach the Cop’s mind take up less space there.

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, where 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

EVERYTHING THE KID 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.

Not much. I think he only talks with that guy, Trinidad Bob. Actually, I never heard him talk with Trinidad Bob, either. He’s a loser parrot, I guess. A loser dog and a loser parrot. I don’t know why I took them with me. I guess I was just missing Iggy so much, y’know?

The Professor points out that Annie seems to be genuinely attached to him, and if he feeds and shelters her, she’ll prove to be a useful watchdog who will protect him and guard his campsite when he’s away from it.

The Kid says, No, man, she’s too fuckin’ old and feeble.

The Professor doubts she’s as old as she looks. She’s just malnourished and sick with mange and suffering from having been physically abused. She needs to be examined and treated by a veterinarian. Both these creatures need to be seen by a veterinarian, and once restored to health, they’ll make fine and faithful companions.

The Professor makes his first offer. He’ll carry both the dog and the parrot to a veterinarian in his van and pay for their treatment, even including having poor old Annie, who’s probably not that old, spayed and de-fleaed and X-rayed, if necessary. She may have broken bones or damaged internal organs. Einstein too needs to be properly fed and kindly treated. In short order they will be like family to him. He will be like the head of the family.

The Kid likes that idea. He smiles. Hey, what about the map? The treasure map!

Ah, yes. The map. It’s in my briefcase in the van.

The Kid says not to worry, he’ll get it. He jumps to his feet and scrambles up to the Causeway. A few moments later he’s back, looking puzzled and downcast, with no briefcase.

It’s gone. The fuckin’ briefcase. Where was it?

On the backseat.

Well, it ain’t there now, man. Some asshole stole it. We shoulda locked the van, Professor. The Kid is close to tears. It’s my fault. I shoulda locked it.

The Professor stands and places a hand on the Kid’s bony shoulder. No, it’s my fault. I wasn’t thinking. But don’t fret, son. There was nothing irreplaceable in it. Everything’s backed up on my computer.

Nothing irreplaceable? The map, Professor! What about the map? Was it the original? You don’t have that backed up on your computer, do you?

The Professor says no, it was a copy he drew of the original map ten years ago in Washington, D.C., at the Library of Congress. But the Kid can relax, the Professor says he has a photographic memory and can redraw the map exactly, even though he hasn’t examined it closely in a decade.

The Kid doesn’t believe him. But the Professor is telling the truth. At least the part about his photographic memory and his ability to redraw a map he copied by hand years ago. The map, however, the original, as it were, was not in a dusty archive of eighteenth-century documents and charts at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. And it was not ten years ago that he copied it onto a sheet of notepaper for a report he was writing. The map he copied was the frontispiece in a 1911 edition of the novel Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. The Professor was twelve years old at the time, already a sophomore in high school, writing a book report that attempted to prove that the novel, far from being merely a children’s adventure story, was in fact an encoded philosophical treatise on the ethical and religious implications of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

The Professor tells the Kid none of this, of course. He wants the Kid to believe in the map’s authenticity. It’s the means by which he has ingratiated himself with the Kid, and he needs it, now that the Kid’s imagination has seized on it, to buy him cover and time enough to earn the Kid’s complete trust. Without that trust, he’ll not learn from the Kid what he needs to know in order to cure him of his pedophilia. And he needs to cure the Kid in order to prove his theory that pedophilia is the result of social forces, a sexual malfunction shaped by a malfunctioning society. It’s not a mystery; it’s not even a psychological disorder. Because if it is a mental illness, then the entire society is to one degree or another sick with it. Which makes it normal.

I’ll redraw the map tonight and bring it to you tomorrow. But first we have work to do here on this island.

Whaddaya mean?

Eliminating the pretexts. Remember? You’ve got to get this place cleaned up and made safe.

Who, me? No fucking way.

The Professor proposes to pay the Kid a small salary for organizing the residents into clean-up crews and establishing a public safety force. They will begin, he explains, by calling a meeting of all the men currently residing under the Causeway. The Professor will address the group and will inform them that he has hired the Kid to be the official director of the community until such time that the members of the community decide by secret ballot to replace him. A set of rules and regulations for all residents will be drawn up by a special committee appointed and chaired by the Kid. Anyone who violates those rules or refuses to abide by them will not be permitted to reside under the Causeway.

The Kid thinks this is the stupidest idea he’s ever heard and says so.

The Professor explains that all human beings need and want to be organized into social units that guarantee their comfort and safety. You start with what they have in common and build upon it. The men down here share a great deal: geography; gender; forced alienation from the larger community that they came from. And their basic needs are pretty much the same: shelter; sanitation; protection of property and self; freedom from harassment and persecution by outsiders. With a little organization and enlightened leadership, all these needs can be met. A problem can be turned into a solution. A negative can be made a positive. The citizens of Calusa will thank them — the Kid and his men who have been forced to live beneath the Claybourne Causeway. And if they are successful, if they are able to construct a coherent, efficiently functioning society of convicted sex offenders down here, then it may become a model for cities all across America to emulate. Communities of convicted sex offenders able to provide themselves with basic services while residing more than 2,500 feet from anyplace where children gather will start appearing beneath overpasses, causeways, bridges, and in abandoned buildings in hundreds of cities large and small. They could become linked into a nationwide network. As the number of convicted sex offenders grows — and the Professor knows that it will increase exponentially, keeping pace with the increase in law enforcement and fear of pedophilia among the general population — the political and economic power of convicted sex offenders will grow.

Sounds good to me, Professor. But what about the map? The pirate’s treasure map.

I’ll bring it tomorrow. First, let’s call a meeting of the current residents.

And don’t forget the veterinarian. I gotta take care of Little Orphan Annie here and Einstein.

Tomorrow, Kid. Tomorrow. After you’ve formed your safety committee and can leave the island for a few hours and know that your property is protected.

Yeah. Sure. Tomorrow.