Lost Memory of Skin

CHAPTER ONE

THE PROFESSOR WANTS TO CALL A MEETING of the residents which the Kid thinks is a useless idea. Useless and therefore dumb. Despite being a fantasist or perhaps because of it the Kid is a pragmatist. The eight or ten guys he can make out in the gloom under the Causeway are all loners pretty much. Like him. Not the meeting types. They’re not exactly his friends or friends of each other and not colleagues for sure and this isn’t a condo or a fraternal order and if any of them has anything that resembles a social life it’s only with people who live elsewhere — what the residents call “off-island”: family members left behind when they became convicted sex offenders and wives and girlfriends for those that have them, friends from before their arrest and conviction all of whom have enough problems of their own, legal, sexual, and otherwise, not to give a damn about other people’s problems, legal, sexual, and otherwise. Yes, there are people whom the residents work with and for when they have jobs like the Kid had at the Mirador before Dario fired him for being a wiseass punk and of course the social workers and psychologists and counselors and even in some cases the parole officers when those relationships evolve as they sometimes do into something more personal than merely professional and obligatory.

Otherwise the men who live beneath the Causeway mostly keep to themselves. They give themselves or each other names that are not the names they’re known by on the National Sex Offender Registry. There’s the Rabbit and Plato the Greek and Paco the biker-bodybuilder and P.C. the coach and Ginger and Froot Loop and probably by now Lawrence Somerset is no longer Lawrence Somerset, the Kid thinks and wonders what the creep is calling himself now that he’s had a few days to ditch his old name. Those old names are like what black people call their slave names, the names by which they’re known to the cops and caseworkers and on the registry, the names they’re called by the people who knew them when they weren’t convicted sex offenders and by the people they work with and for, those that have jobs. There’s something tainted about their old names, their real names, something shameful about them or at best embarrassing and controlling so that a new name like Kid or Paco or Ginger or even a weird name like Froot Loop can be liberating in a small way. For a minute or at least for as long as you’re under the Causeway you’re almost off the registry of sex offenders. You’re almost somebody else and not anonymous either but a real person. Or almost real. As real as a character in a book anyhow.

The Kid tries convincing the Professor that it’s a dumb idea to try to get his neighbors to meet together but the Professor doesn’t listen which the Kid has decided is typical of him and maybe typical of all professors although this is the only real professor he’s ever actually met in person. Assuming he is a real professor because you can’t be sure that anybody is what he says he is. Or she. He’s remembering the night he got busted and the watery feeling he got all over his body when he realized that nothing was what he thought it was and no one was who he and she claimed to be. He wonders if the guy that day at the Mirador he thought was O. J. Simpson really was the famous ex — football player and movie star who supposedly sliced up his wife and the guy she was with who the Kid heard was gay anyhow. If O. J. had known that, he probably wouldn’t have thought the guy was fucking his wife and he wouldn’t have killed them and he’d still be a rich and famous and beloved ex — football player and movie star instead of a guy playing golf in Calusa with an out-of-work small-time Central American diplomat. He’d be hanging in L.A. with Arnold and Sly. Maybe he wasn’t O. J. Maybe he was just a big black dude who happens to look enough like O. J. that he can fool these star-fuckers into buying him a fancy lunch at the Mirador and get Dario to comp him the best Rhône wine in his cellar. The world is full of people who aren’t who or what they say they are. The people who believe them aren’t who or what they say they are either. That’s the main thing the Kid has learned since the night he got busted and became a sex offender. Nobody’s who he says he is.

One by one the returnees to the Causeway are introduced to the Professor by the Kid. The first is the Rabbit because the Kid can actually call him a friend unlike the others whom he thinks of as neighbors is all. Acquaintances. People who if he saw them off-island he’d only acknowledge with a nod and otherwise avoid. Also he’s worried about the Rabbit because he’s old and the last he saw of him a cop was whaling on one of his legs with a club the size of a baseball bat.

The Rabbit is wearing a thick blue cast and boot on his right leg, the leg without the anklet the Kid notices, which is lucky. He hobbles along with a metal crutch toward the water with a bamboo fishing pole in his free hand.

Yo, Rabbit, wassup?

The old man turns and checks out the Kid and his huge companion in a three-piece suit and tie and he frowns with puzzlement and slight irritation. Who the fuck’s this? he says meaning the Professor who smiles through his beard at the Rabbit and extends his right hand and introduces himself by name and title.

The Kid says, The Professor’s okay, he’s doing some kinda research for the university. Go ahead, Professor, you do the talking.

The Professor more or less repeats what he told the Kid earlier about eliminating the pretexts for the police raids political and otherwise by organizing the residents beneath the Causeway into a law-abiding community that meets the Calusa city and county sanitary and safety regulations. He explains the need for a meeting of the current residents and the composition of a binding charter that will include a set of rules that all who choose to reside here must sign and obey. Also the formation of at least two committees, one to provide physical safety and protection of property and the other to be responsible for sanitation. They will need an executive committee of at least three persons that will make and administer policy with an executive director or chair of the executive committee who will act as spokesperson for the residents.

The Rabbit stares at the Professor for a long moment. Finally he says, I gotta catch a fuckin’ fish for my supper. And starts to hobble away.

I told you it was a dumb idea.

The Professor calls after the Rabbit that everyone will meet in one hour at the Kid’s tent but the Rabbit ignores him and makes his slow limping way down to the edge of the Bay where he takes over a folding metal lawn chair abandoned there and tosses a few bread crumbs into the water to attract his supper and baits his line with a balled chunk of white bread.

The Professor asks the Kid if he thinks the Rabbit will show up for the meeting. The Kid thinks so but only if he manages to catch a fish by then. He’ll probably come out of curiosity if nothing else. He points out that the Rabbit has a good sense of humor and will come for a laugh. The others — forget it.

Undeterred the Professor heads for the next closest person who turns out to be Paco, and the Kid reluctantly follows. The Professor tells the Kid that he recognizes the man from Benbow’s and the Kid shrugs whatever. Paco’s pumping iron. He’s always pumping iron when he’s not riding his motorcycle or getting laid although the Kid’s not sure he gets laid as much as he claims or if he’s just making it up so you won’t think he’s one of those buff beach-buddy types with a tiny dick in a G-string who only wants to be looked at and not touched. He’s lying on his back on his weight bench which is a board held up by two cinder blocks doing presses with his homemade weights that he built from a boxcar axle and steel wheels he stole from the rail yard. His tattoo’d arm and shoulder muscles are like illustrated drawstring bags of coconuts. His abs are like writhing pythons. To the Kid he’s a cartoon character. Harmless and not very bright. The only complicated thing about him is the fact that he’s a sex offender. The Kid isn’t sure of the nature of his offense — the Rabbit figures he’s into giving blow jobs to teenage boys. That’s complicated, the Kid thinks: a guy built like a superhero from a video game likes hookers but still wants to suck teenage dick so he uses his huge muscles to attract the only kind of people who think a body like his is cool and sexy. With his ankle bracelet exposed as if he thinks it’s a come-on to teenage boys. Maybe it is. Maybe in combination with the muscles it turns them on. The Kid can hardly bear to look at Paco’s body. And it’s always out there to look at, shirtless and wearing cutoffs. When he introduces the Professor to him the Kid looks off at the Bay.

Paco clanks his barbell to the ground and sits up, checks out the Professor and when the Professor extends his paw to shake Paco takes it in his and gives it a crunch. The Professor crunches back and Paco winces in pain.

You don’t want to hurt my hand, bro! Paco speaks with a slightly tinted Spanish accent and though he looks like a café-au-lait Cuban or maybe Dominican the Kid suspects the accent is faked and Paco is really an all-American white guy with a tan. The chalk white brush of a mustache looks dyed and the Kid for the first time notices that he’s wearing eyeliner. Also his hair, glistening black, long and tied back with a rubber band, is way too black. Definitely a bad dye job. Maybe the only person he’s interested in turning on is himself, like his own looks instead of other people’s are what give him a hard-on and that’s why he looks the way he does.

Paco says to the Kid, What you doing down here, man? I thought you was squattin’ over at Benbow’s.

My parole officer made me split from there.

I can dig it, man. Them guys is too wiggy when you get down to it, y’know? But here, man, is living like animals, no?

Yeah, like animals.

So, who’s this dude, amigo? What’s up with him? I seen him at Benbow’s. Them guys thought he was a cop. He a cop?

He’s some kinda professor or something. The Kid doesn’t want to talk about the Professor. He’s the only civilian the Kid knows right now but he’s getting a little sick of the man. He takes up too much space, uses too many words, has too many theories and ideas. The Kid doesn’t want the Professor’s ideas and plans and words and his size to become his, the Kid’s. He likes living without any plans, not talking much, keeping to himself and making his life as small as possible.

The Kid tells the Professor he should explain what he has in mind for the men who live under the Causeway and he steps back a ways and looks off in the distance again: the Bay, seagulls, boats, the skyline, cruise ships, stacks of gray clouds coming in from the east promising rain.

Paco says sure he’ll come to a meeting if it helps get this place cleaned up and keeps the cops off their backs and the Kid and the Professor move on to the others. The Kid is surprised that Paco didn’t blow off the Professor’s plan and is even more surprised when Plato and P.C. and the others agree to meet together. Even Froot Loop who claims to be a surrealist whatever that is and Ginger, a redheaded black guy in his thirties whose main activity is pushing a pick through his Afro and checking out his freckles in a handheld mirror in search of skin cancer he says because his Irish father and his brother died of melanoma.

And then there’s Lawrence Somerset who the Kid thought would not have to come back to the Causeway because of his political connections. But once you’re a convicted sex offender all your connections to society are broken no matter how much money you’ve got in the bank or how many houses you own or how big your boat is or how much power political or otherwise you used to have back when you were committing sex offenses in his case on little girls and buying kiddie porn and probably distributing it to other villains. That’s the word the Kid uses when he thinks of Lawrence Somerset — villain. It has the right old-fashioned association with a black top hat and a black suit and a long tweaked mustache and big white teeth with fangs that appear when he smiles like a vampire.

He is a vampire, the Kid thinks. That’s what he’d name him if it was up to him — Vampire. Or Dracula. A guy who sucks the blood out of little girls, turning them into vampires too who can’t stand the light of day and have to live forever prowling the streets of Calusa at night and sneaking into the beds of other little girls and boys and sucking their blood while they sleep making more vampires forever and ever while the parents sit downstairs in the living room watching ha-ha TV shows.

The Professor introduces himself to Lawrence Somerset. The Kid won’t do it even though at one time barely forty-eight hours ago he was willing to share his tent with him. Something happened at Benbow’s that darkened his view of Lawrence Somerset. He’s not sure what but it wasn’t the weird film those guys were shooting of the kids dancing half-naked in the mist which was probably only for a TV ad or a music video even though it looked like a trailer for a kiddie porn film. Actually the Kid thought the filming was interesting to watch because from the start he’d been behind the scenes and saw the crew set up the fog machine and lights and cameras and knew all along that it was real so he never saw it transformed into fantasy on a screen. He never saw the illusion they were creating. Just the tools they were using. Even the kids were tools. They were actors, not half-naked children. They had mothers or people who acted like mothers and agents who brought them to Benbow’s in the family van and probably dropped them off at school after the shoot.

Maybe it was the story about the pirate and the treasure map and X marking the spot that the Professor told him about. When he first heard it the Kid felt his chest expand as if with helium and it made him feel lifted up. Literally uplifted as if he might float up and off the island and drift over the Bay high enough to see all the way west to the Great Panzacola Swamp. The Panzacola Swamp with its thousands of mangrove islands and mazelike waterways would have been a smart place to bury treasure. Maybe, the Kid thinks, the island on the Professor’s map is way inland someplace in the middle of the swamp. Maybe Captain Kydd and his men anchored their ship here in the Bay and rowed one of their lifeboats up the Calusa River for miles to where it originates in the endless shallow waters of the swamp where there are thousands of low hummocks and mangrove-covered islands and buried their treasure on one of the larger islands and using their compass and measuring rods drew a map of the island and wrote the exact longitude and latitude in code on it right where X marks the spot. A code the Kid with the Professor’s help could break.

Call me Shyster, Larry Somerset says to the Professor.

Really? Shyster. How’d you come by a name like that?

The fellow over there fishing, Rabbit, he started it. I didn’t care for it at first, but now I rather like it. The irony of it.

I take it you’re a practicing attorney.

In a past life. An earlier incarnation, let us say.

What was your name then?

It doesn’t matter. Shyster will do well enough, thank you.

Shyster looks a little beat up and bedraggled. He’s still wearing his suit coat and dirty white shirt but one sleeve of the jacket is half torn off at the shoulder and he has a raw contusion on his right temple the size of a poppy blossom. His narrow flat cheeks are covered with black and white stubble. He looks like he spent the last few nights sleeping in a Dumpster.

Kid, you abandoned me! I don’t mean to whine, but we were tent-mates.

Everyone for himself, Shyster.

The Professor interrupts to say that’s just the sort of mentality he’s trying to eliminate here and proceeds to unfold his plan to Shyster. The ex-legislator quickly agrees. He’ll gladly cooperate and will volunteer his expertise as sergeant at arms for the meeting and will provide pro bono legal advice for such matters as the composition of the charter and other questions regarding the law should any happen to arise.

I assume you’ve been disbarred, Shyster.

True. But I haven’t been subjected to brain surgery. I still know what I knew and am willing to share it with my cohabitors here. In our common interests, of course.

Thank you very much. Shyster, yours is precisely the attitude I’m hoping to foster here. We’ll see you at the meeting. We’ll be following Robert’s Rules of Order.

The Kid can tell the Professor likes Shyster which disappoints him in the Professor and when they part from Shyster and make their way back to the Kid’s tent he reveals the lawyer’s real name to the Professor who immediately recognizes it. He remembers the case. Three years ago it made big news all across the state. The Honorable Senator Lawrence Somerset arranged on the Internet to meet at a hotel close by the airport with a woman who claimed to be the mother of two little girls, nine and seven years old. She was to bring her daughters to his room and in exchange for five thousand dollars in cash leave them with him for the night. They were to be freshly bathed and wearing party dresses. When the senator at the prearranged time answered the knock on his hotel room door he was wearing only his underpants. There were some reports that he was stark naked. But there were no little girls awaiting him. The woman claiming to be their mother was a police officer and with her was a pair of state troopers. They arrested and handcuffed the senator, threw a blanket over his paunchy body, and marched him off to jail. They held a press conference the following day at the Calusa County Courthouse where it was revealed that the near-naked state legislator, who had sat on the state parole board, had brought to the hotel room his laptop computer on which were found dozens of downloaded child pornography films. He also had in his possession what were described as “miscellaneous sex toys” and a jar of Vaseline and “a tube of lubricant commonly used by male homosexuals to facilitate anal sex.” Although the senator’s wife in a written statement declared her ongoing support for him and after describing his long struggle with alcoholism her belief in his essential innocence, his two grown sons shut down their real estate business, moved out of state, and changed their names. The senator was sentenced to ten years in prison but after serving two was released because of good behavior which had included weekly attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and group therapy for sex offenders.

The Professor knew his story up to the time of his release from prison from the newspapers. Now he knows the rest of it.

The guy’s wife brought him here, the Kid adds. Dropped him off after he got out of jail and split. That’s what everybody does. Wives, mothers, girlfriends, it don’t matter, he explains. They fuckin’ stand by their man so long as he’s in jail but when he gets out they drop him off someplace where the sun never shines and don’t return his phone calls or answer his letters anymore. You can’t blame ’em though.

Why not?

People in prison. They’re not quite real people. Except to each other. It’s only when you get out that you’re real again. Only now you’re a registered sex offender. It’s like you’re a leper and they let you out of the leper colony.

Is that what happened to you? Your mother dropped you off here and now ignores your letters and phone calls?

I don’t give her the chance. Look, it’s complicated, okay? Forget about it. The Kid doesn’t want to think about his mother; it gives him a headache. It makes him start missing Iggy again.

I gotta feed my dog and my bird. He ducks into his tent and grabs a can of Spam for Annie and two plain doughnuts for Einstein. Tomorrow he’ll go to Paws ’n’ Claws and buy them proper dog and parrot food. He’s got to learn about parrot care. He’s never had to feed a bird before. He figures he’s got enough cash in his pocket and in his ATM account left from the money the Shyster laid on him his first night under the Causeway to last the three of them a week or possibly ten days although he thinks he’s soon going to be able to touch the Professor for what he’ll call a loan but it’ll actually be payment for these interviews he wants.

The Kid has decided to embellish his story a little here and there, make it more interesting to the Professor so he’ll think he’s converting the Kid from being a sex offender into a regular law-abiding citizen with a normal sex life. Whatever that is. The Kid believes that in some sense he already has a normal sex life, as normal as anyone he’s ever known well enough to get a good idea of what they do. Except of course that he’s never done anything with or to anyone himself and is still technically a virgin. That’s not normal. He also admits that it probably was not normal to watch as much pornography as he did from the age of almost eleven until he was busted. Seven to eight hours a day and sometimes more from the time he got home from his afterschool job at the light store well into the night until he finally fell asleep in the gray dawn light. When his mother came in to wake him for school his computer screen would be showing three naked guys fucking a Chinese girl. His mother takes the mouse in her hand and says, You’re too young for this. You better be paying for it yourself this time, buster. Then she sits down at the computer and with her eyes dimming watches the gangbang drag out in front of her as if it was a Ninja video game. Hurry up and get dressed, you’re gonna be late for school.

Plus he knows — or rather he believes as he has no evidence to the contrary — that it was not normal for him to be jerking off five to ten times a day especially as he grew into his late teens and should have been getting blow jobs from girls like the other guys at school. But masturbating had become as automatic and normal a bodily function as swallowing or clearing his throat of phlegm.

On the other hand it’s not normal that he hasn’t masturbated once since the night he was arrested. He tried a couple of times to jerk off but he couldn’t make his dick get hard no matter what porn video he played in his mind, even the kinky scenes that used to make him come without his even having to touch himself. Nothing worked. So he gave up trying. He was only doing it because he thought he should be jerking off once a day given his youth or at least a couple times a week. Once he gave up trying to get hard, once he accepted that he really wasn’t sexually normal, he felt better. Calmer. As if by giving up trying to scratch an itch that he couldn’t reach the itch went away.

As the seven other current residents of the camp beneath the Causeway one by one approach the Kid’s tent more or less at the appointed time to be greeted by the Professor in a to-the-Kid strangely hearty way, the Kid squats next to his dog and his parrot and feeds them. He cuts the cube of Spam into small chunks for Annie and breaks the doughnuts into walnut-size pieces that he hands piece by piece to Einstein. The parrot takes each piece of doughnut gently from the Kid’s fingers with one clawed foot like a prehistoric hand and studies it for a second as if examining it for dirt or contamination and passes it onto his beak and swallows and blinks. He opens his mouth and shows his yellow tongue and seems about to speak. The Kid opens his mouth too. Silence. The Kid hands the parrot another piece of doughnut. The parrot takes it in his claws and stares at the Kid. The Kid hears Einstein say in a creaky but clear voice: Thank you. I like you. You’re a good kid. You may be fucked-up sexually, but you’re normal.

The Kid looks over at Annie who has finished off the Spam and is now smiling gratefully at the Kid. He says to the dog, Did you hear that, Annie?

Annie nods and wags her tail slowly.

The Professor turns and says, Hear what?

The Parrot. Einstein.

I’m afraid I missed it. Sounded like a squawk to me.

Yeah. I guess that’s all it was. A squawk.

CHAPTER TWO

IT’S A MOTLEY BAND OF BROTHERS THAT HAS gathered around the Professor. The Kid is surprised that they answered his call except maybe for the Rabbit who has a mocking way of looking at life and enjoys finding ways to express it. It’s something he shares with the Kid. Or rather it’s something the Kid learned from the Rabbit and now applies to almost everything and everyone that comes to him. When he first arrived at the Causeway settlement — after living for a month on the streets of Calusa and in the public parks and the occasional abandoned building and being hassled and chased off by cops and private security guards and maintenance people — the Kid didn’t have an attitude other than the one that had got him safely through three months in the minimum security prison in Hastings.

A “correctional facility” it was called — he was being corrected, he believed, and made every effort to help them succeed. He was passive and obedient and cooperative. Everyone including the guards liked him and thought he was a little simple. Maybe borderline retarded. It was how he had behaved all his life in school and at his job at the light store and in the army. Until the night he took the initiative to hitchhike up to Ottawa to see Willow his favorite porn star and brought back all those DVDs to give to his buddies at Fort Drum. Big mistake. After that one initiative, that one departure from his usual compliant docility, he’d gone quickly back to his old tried-and-true personality like a turtle into its shell. For him for years his computer and its access to the Internet and pornography and sex-talk chat rooms had provided the shell and kept him from loneliness and dismay and the explosive desperation that often follows hard upon. His computer kept him from turning violent and he was self-medicating with an addiction to pornography to the point where he was no longer using it to get high or hard but merely not to be bored or harmful to others.

Maddie who ran the weekly group therapy sessions at Hastings explained all this to him. She told him that it was as if he had been addicted to heroin during those years and the only real cure was for him to look inside himself and learn what or who was the true cause of his rage. She was a small thin brittle-looking woman in her early thirties with a cloud of curly green-tinted hair. She painted her fingernails black like a 1990s punk queen and said she had a pierced nose and tongue and other piercings on her body that she had to take off and check in a locker every time she came to the prison which she probably thought impressed the inmates in group. But the men serving time at Hastings were mostly upscale white guys convicted of fraud and embezzlement and Type 2 and 3 sex offenders like the Kid none of whom was particularly impressed. Especially not the Kid who saw her as just one more of the kind of girls and women who thought he was weird and pathetic and treated him accordingly.

They got no argument from the Kid. He was weird and pathetic. Had always been that way. Even his mother thought he was weird and pathetic. Many times when she didn’t think the Kid was listening he heard her say it to her women friends or to the guy she happened to be sleeping with and sometimes she even said it to the Kid himself right to his face. Although she always said it with a warm affectionate smile as if she actually preferred weird and pathetic to normal and praiseworthy. So that on one level it made the Kid feel good when she said it: You’re such a loner, such a loser, your only friend is that goddam iguana you’re obsessed with, you’re scared of girls, you don’t play sports like the other boys but at least I don’t have to worry about you getting into a gang or doing drugs, you never seem to have any friends at all, you’re not interested in cars like other boys your age, you’re not turned on by video games, your clothes are like an old retired janitor’s clothes, you spend all your hard-earned money maxing out first my credit card and now your own debit card on Internet porn sites that you have to be eighteen or older to watch anyhow, mister. Don’t forget that. She tousles his hair and smiles and her eyes fill. You’re so short for your age and so skinny. It’s my fault you’re the way you are, honey. I tried. Lord knows, I tried, and I might have found a father for you if I believed that any father is better than no father at all. But I didn’t believe that when you were little, and I sure as hell don’t believe it now.

The Kid would like to take a hard-ass attitude toward the Professor and his plan to organize the men living under the Causeway into some kind of gated community for homeless sex offenders. But he’s having trouble generating the necessary cynicism. He’s starting to trust the man’s intentions — a little, only a little so far. There doesn’t seem to be anything in it for the Professor except maybe bragging rights if it actually works out and nothing lost if it doesn’t except some wasted time spent down here with people who to a guy like the Professor must seem like aliens from another planet. People who to a professor of sociology (or at least that’s what he claims) ought to be worth studying and writing up in a book: a small tribe of men forced to live together in a cave in the middle of the city.

He runs a good tight meeting, the Professor. The Kid admires the ease with which the big man masters the names of the residents — Rabbit, Shyster, Paco, Plato the Greek, Ginger, Froot Loop, and P.C. — and applies them liberally so they feel special and singled out whenever he asks for their opinions which he does often: their opinions on how a security committee should operate, its rules and responsibilities and who should serve on it; their thoughts on the proper number of members of an executive committee (three) and its powers and restraints; the length of term of membership for the three-man sanitation committee (three months — no one is willing to serve longer than that). They agree that the security committee only needs two members. Paco is an obvious choice and is eager to serve but no one else wants the job so it’s left to the executive committee to appoint the second member as soon as they have agreed on the three for that committee and the three on the sanitation committee.

The Kid notices that the Professor is smoothly maneuvering the group into doing exactly what he wants without their realizing it. He defines and narrows their choices his way because they don’t really have any alternatives in mind. Having never imagined taking control of their environment down here under the Causeway, the residents regard the Professor’s options as the only available options. He proposes and they dispose. Or so they think.

How many members of the Executive Committee, Paco? Two or three? Of course we ought to have an odd number, in case of a tie, right, Shyster? And do we want the three to be equal or should we have a rotating chairman so we can have a single spokesman to represent all of us to the police and other authorities? Shall we nominate candidates for the Executive Committee then? One by one, please state your nominees, starting with you, Rabbit, going in reverse alphabetical order.

Predictably Rabbit shrugs and nominates the Kid, and Shyster interrupts the process to note that he should have made the first nomination because in reverse alphabetical order Shyster comes before Rabbit.

The Professor acknowledges his mistake and invites Shyster to nominate a candidate and Shyster adds the Greek to the list. Rabbit sticks with his candidate the Kid. Plato and Paco argue over who goes next and the Professor refers the question to Shyster who invokes reverse alphabetical order again and finds for Paco as they’re more inclined to call Plato “the Greek” instead of just Plato except when addressing him face-to-face. Paco declines to serve, says he’s happy taking care of security and doesn’t need or want no more responsibilities in life. He smiles and nominates the Shyster for membership in the Executive Committee. No sense giving the Greek more power and authority than he already possesses as the owner-operator of their power source, the diesel-fueled generator that the Greek has managed to drag out of the Bay and after a day of drying once again has it charging their cell phones and anklets. Then it’s the Greek’s turn to nominate a candidate and he says, The Rabbit would be good, since he’s been living down here longer than anyone else, and all seven men nod approvingly. The Professor calls for additional candidates but no one volunteers which makes it unanimous that the Executive Committee will be made up of the Kid, Shyster, and Rabbit. The Committee for Safety and Security is made up of Paco and Ginger with Paco officiating as chief of Safety and Security. Ginger is his deputy. They will each be issued a baseball bat to be purchased by the Professor at Rick’s Sporting Goods. The Sanitation Committee is Froot Loop and the Greek and P.C., which displeases Froot Loop and the Greek who take small comfort in the brevity of their term of office but pleases P.C. who had previously and unofficially functioned as a one-man sanitation committee taking it upon himself to provide trash barrels stolen from the park at Twenty-third and Herrington at the western end of the Causeway and regularly emptying the latrine bucket into the Bay, a practice the Professor says will no longer be tolerated.

So what’re we supposed to do with our shit? P.C. wants to know. Yeah, the Kid thinks. Answer that one, Haystack.

The Professor explains that he will arrange for a private contractor to install a portable toilet for their use and until he locates a private donor to pay for the regular removal of their wastes he himself will pay for the service. We have to show the public and their elected officials that we’re at least as capable of meeting local sanitation ordinances on our site as a construction company. The Kid notices his use of we and our and wonders where this is all leading. Or is it just another way for the Professor to get them to do what he wants them to do? For his own mysterious purposes.

The Kid is starting to feel vaguely like a laboratory rat.

CHAPTER THREE

AS CHAIRMAN OF THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE the Kid is essentially in charge of the settlement and that first night back his first executive action is to allow five sex offenders to return to the Causeway and reestablish their homes there. The next morning three more returnees arrive and are told by Paco, who is taking his policing responsibilities seriously, that they must petition the Kid for the right to settle under the Causeway. It’s become routine now. The homeless sex offender either gets the word on the street or simply drifts back to the Causeway because he’s got no other place in Calusa to sleep and is told by Paco on arrival that there is a whole new set of rules of governance operating now, a whole new structure. The applicant is quickly interviewed by the Kid whose main interest is to verify that the man is a genuine convicted sex offender whereupon he is assigned a spot under the Causeway where he is allowed to set up a tent or lean-to or stretch a tarp over a frame. He is instructed on the new sanitation and security rules — all trash and garbage that’s not recyclable has to be carried out by the individual resident and daily deposited off-island in a Dumpster; no urinating or defecating except in the rented Porta Potti that the Professor has arranged to be placed up alongside the Causeway on the shoulder of the highway several hundred feet beyond the bridge; no drugs bought, sold, or consumed anyplace within a thousand feet of the settlement; no drug paraphernalia or needles; no possession of stolen goods allowed; no acts of violence or pilferage permitted. Pets are allowed as long as the resident leashes or otherwise restrains them and cleans up after them. But no aggressive dogs. No cockfighting. No keeping live animals for food or religious sacrifices, not even chickens.

As long as we obey Calusa city and county rules and regulations and don’t commit no crimes down here the cops’ll leave us alone. The Kid has bought the Professor’s party line. To which in his wisdom he adds one further prohibition: No sex offending down here. No weenie-wagging. No knob-jobbing. He makes it clear in a way the Professor never could or would that in spite of the presence among them of predatory wolves and ex-prison punks, come-freaks and chubby-chasers, Charlies and chomos — all kind of sexual weirdos who’ve been arrested, tried, and convicted for their acts — none of them, no matter how much or what kind of therapy and rehab they’ve done, none of them is not a sexual weirdo. They are all sexually offensive. Some in fact may have been made even more obsessed with committing illegal and strange sexual acts by their conviction and time in prison than they were before being arrested. But not here beneath the Causeway. What they do with their dicks and hands and mouths and assholes anywhere else is their business. What they do here is his business, the Kid’s.

The Kid likes his new authority. He might in some oddly undefined way be working for the Professor but he’s never before held any power over anyone else. Except for Iggy. And now Einstein and Annie. A parrot who won’t talk and a watchdog too sick to bark. Now however he has the power to admit or exclude at his discretion any of the growing number of applicants for a spot under the Causeway.

By midafternoon of the second day of his return from Anaconda Key there is a total of nineteen residents, twelve more than the seven who are now running the place. And more will come. The word is spreading that it’s safe beneath the Causeway now and relatively clean. Police cruisers pass overhead without even slowing so word must have reached them too. Just as the Professor predicted the cops are practically relieved to know where all the convicted sex offenders are located at least at night and except for those who have jobs to go to most days as well. They’re fishing in the Bay, scavenging food from the Dumpsters and trash bins behind restaurants and supermarkets, repairing and cleaning their tents and huts, and have even started picking up the trash tossed from cars passing over the Causeway between the mainland and the Great Barrier Isles, bagging beer cans, food wrappers, plastic bottles, as if they’ve adopted that section of the highway like any other civic organization. This place is theirs.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE MORNING OF THE THIRD DAY OF THE Kid’s return to the Causeway the Professor shows up early and checks the place out and is pleased by what he sees. He’s red-faced and sweating from the effort of descending from his van on the roadway above. The Kid remembers reading in Shyster’s Bible the story of Genesis. The Professor is like God stopping by to visit the Garden of Eden and approving the way his human beings are running the place.

Nice work, Kid. The number of residents is multiplying. But that means it’s going to be harder to keep order, the Professor notes and suggests adding two or more members to the security committee.

The Kid says he’ll take that under consideration. He doesn’t want the Professor to think he’s God and in charge down here even though in a sense he is. I’ll talk it over with Paco. He informs the Professor that he’s thinking of forming a construction and maintenance committee. They need to build a shower stall and some of the shanties have to be rebuilt. Most of these guys can’t buckle their belts or tie their fuckin’ shoes right let alone pitch a tent or build a hut outa old boards and plastic.

The Professor nods as if approving and tells the Kid to follow him and leads the Kid away from the others out of earshot. He sits his enormous body down on a grassy slope near the path down from the roadway and pats the ground next to him. Take a seat. I have something to show you.

The Kid doesn’t quite sit where he’s told; he squats three feet away ready to stand up in case the Professor reaches out and lays one of his meaty paws on his thigh. He still doesn’t quite get the Professor’s interest and deepening involvement with the men living under the Causeway. Unless he’s a sex offender himself only not convicted. Although for the Kid it’s very hard to imagine a guy that fat having any kind of sex life at all, even in his head. He knows about chubby-chasers, guys who are into sex with fatties, but they usually aren’t fatties themselves. And the Professor’s not just fat, he’s two or three times fat. He’s enormous all over and wears clothes that make him look even fatter than he is as if he’s trying to warn people off his mountain of flesh. His three-piece suit and buttoned-up shirt and wide necktie strangling his neck with a Windsor knot the size of a fist and his hard leather brogans are like body armor. Plus his beard and long hair enlarge his head and make him look like he’s wearing a hair helmet.

Whaddaya got?

What you’ve been waiting for, my friend.

The Professor pulls a folded sheet of paper from his inside jacket pocket, carefully unfolds it and passes it to the Kid.

The map! Very cool. Very very cool.

It’s only a copy of the original. A copy of a copy, actually. The original is in Washington, D.C., at the Library of Congress, where I expect no one except for me has seen it in two hundred years.

The Kid gives it a once-over, then a closer look, then gazes a little wistfully out across the Bay to the Calusa skyline and beyond to Anaconda Key and west to the Barriers and the stacked hotels facing the ocean there. He’s trying to place the map of the island onto the world that surrounds him. The map is hand drawn and to the Kid looks old-fashioned enough to have been made by Captain Kydd himself even though it’s on a standard sheet of typing paper but like the Professor said it’s a copy of a copy. The original is probably an old sheet of parchment and much larger and faded by time.

The island is shaped sort of like a diving whale with its mouth wide open as if about to swallow a much smaller island. The smaller island has the words SKELETON ISLAND written next to it. The mouth of the whale looks like a bay, unnamed like the whale-shaped island which has a second segment attached to its backside as if a shark were riding piggyback on the whale or maybe it’s the whale’s baby and the mother whale is diving for a chunk of food for her baby. There are other words written on the map: CAPE OF YE WOODS, SPYEGLASS HILL, NORTH INLET, SWAMP, WHITE ROCK, and so on, and in the water surrounding the island are numbers indicating the depths, the Kid figures, none of them over 14 and most of them low numbers, 3, 4, and 5 and so on.

Pretty shallow waters, the Kid observes to himself. Maybe Calusa Bay didn’t used to be as deep as it is now since they dredged it out to make the Barrier Isles and the Cut between the Barriers and Anaconda Key for deep-water freighters and cruise ships to come and go. Maybe back then two hundred or more years ago this place didn’t look like it does now. He’s sure the sky was the same huge blue dome spreading from horizon to horizon from the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean in the east and south and in a vast sweep overhead to the endless Great Panzacola Swamp on to the far side of the swamp to the Thousand Islands and west of the islands the Gulf of Mexico. The sky never changes. He knows that the land between the horizons was flat as a table from shore to shore barely two or three feet above sea level with low sandy ridges and mounds heaped up in places here and there by the hurricanes that for centuries roared out of the Gulf and the Caribbean every summer and fall just as they do today. There were no buildings anywhere then — no skyscrapers, no hotels, no miles and miles of condo developments, gated communities, suburban ranches, and bungalows. No geometrically laid-out fields of sugarcane, vegetables, strawberries, citrus orchards. No mile after mile of drainage and irrigation dikes and canals carrying off the waters of the Great Panzacola Swamp and the overflow from the huge lakes in the central portion of the state. No highways, cloverleafs, bridges, overpasses and underpasses, no causeways. No Claybourne Causeway for sure. No Great Barrier Isles. No Mirador Hotel & Restaurant, Rampart Road with its boutiques, cafés, restaurants, tourists, and hustlers. No airport or Boeing 747s cutting across the sky. No cars, trucks, buses rumbling back and forth day and night between the mainland and the Barriers. No Barriers even, because they’re man-made. No people! Mainly that. No people and everything they’ve done to the land and the water and all the animals that live on the land and the creatures that swim in the waters and the birds that fly above.

The Kid is imagining his city the way the pirates under Captain Kydd saw it when they first sailed into what’s now called Calusa Bay. He doesn’t know their story or the history of this place but with the map in his hand he can imagine it. They’d approach the mainland from the east-southeast sailing up from the Caribbean atop that deep green current called the Gulf Stream. They’d be on the run after pulling off a set of daring raids in the waters off the coast of Hispaniola, their ship loaded down with bars and coins of stolen gold. The Kid would’ve climbed to the crow’s nest atop the mainmast, sent up by the Captain to keep a sharp lookout: Keep your starboard eyeball on the glass for ships sailing north behind us, lad. And use your portside eye for the dear old harbor on the east coast of the mainland. That dear old harbor would be Calusa Bay though it’s not yet named and isn’t on any maps yet, not even the Captain’s.

Between the string of low-lying coastal islands and the mainland a meandering river that drains the mainland dissolves in a marshy delta and empties into a broad bay so that when you enter the bay your first sight of the mainland is of a long green line dividing the sea from the cloudless sky. It’s midday with a light breeze out of the east and where the bow slides through the low waves the water glitters like silver coins. After decades of pillage and flight Captain Kydd knows these waters better than any other man. He takes the wheel himself, orders the mainsails down, and brings his ship straight in toward shore as if he plans to run it aground on the offshore mangrove islets. It’s high tide and from above in the crow’s nest you can see the narrow cut between two of the islets, a channel deep enough at high tide and just wide enough to let the ship slip past the islets into the broad blue-green bay.

The waters on the seaward side of the mangrove isles are thick with schools of silver fish surging and turning in huge sweeping motions, wide rivers of fish just beneath the surface so closely crowded that you can drop a bucket into the sea and bring it back filled with flopping gasping fish. You can drag a weighted basket across the sandy bottom and a minute later pull it back to the ship and dump dozens of large spiny lobsters onto the deck. As the ship approaches, flocks of birds — anhingas, pelicans, cormorants, egrets, and herons — rise from the mangroves into the sky where they thicken into layers of birds and spread out until they block the sun and cover the sea and ship below in darkness as if evening has come on. Herds of sea cows, enormous lumbering manatees, part for the ship, making room for it to pass from the sea into the bay, then gather behind it into a massed crowd of animals, hundreds of them, gently watchful, trusting, and almost politely deferring to the ship.

All sails are furled now and the crew has been sent to man the lifeboats and tow the ship slowly across the bay toward the mainland. As the Kid rows, he looks back over his shoulder at the lush flowering trees, the jacaranda and lignum vitae and the flame-colored poincianas and the forests of thatch palms and palmettos and groves of slash pine spreading inland from the sandy shore. There are sea grapes and along the islets where the streams empty into the bay white, red, and black mangroves float on their stilts.

Captain Kydd stands in the bow of the lead lifeboat. The first mate sits in the stern manning the rudder while the Captain indicates with his one good arm where to aim the boat. There are eight men rowing, their backs bent to their destination, and though the Kid doesn’t want to be seen slacking off every now and then he turns in his seat and steals a look at where he’s headed. They’re moving north in the bay a few hundred yards off the mainland, slowly towing the ship toward what appears to be a large low-lying island at the far end of the bay. He spots a protective shelf of land with hills high enough to look out over the tops of the mangrove islets one way to see if danger is approaching by sea and over the tops of the pines and palms and lush flowering trees the other way to see if danger is approaching by land.

From the top of the highest hill which the Captain has named Spyeglass Hill you can survey the entire island. It’s shaped like a whale with a shark riding its back. The mouth of the whale is wide open and about to swallow the smaller island. The ship has been anchored in the shallow waters on the leeward side of the smaller island. When the tide turns and the waters empty from the cove turning it into a mudflat the ship’s hull will be exposed to the sun and air. One crew will go to work scraping it free of barnacles and sea worms. A second crew will cut trees and construct a small fort atop Spyeglass Hill and a palisade in case they are attacked either by the murderous Indians or by a contingent of European or American sailors. A third crew carefully selected by the Captain for their loyalty to him will carry from the ship his treasure — trunks and wooden cases filled with gold bars and coins, jewels and precious stones, a ton or more in all — sweating in the afternoon sun, lugging the booty from the ship across the mudflat into the jungle to a spot near the center of the island that only the Captain knows how to find, where there is a cave that he has used for years as a hiding place for his stolen cargo. The cave is like an enormous vault known only to a handful of men who have been sworn to secrecy in exchange for a promise to share out the treasure when the time comes for the Captain to give up piracy on the high seas and return to land and a life of respectable law-abiding luxury. The Captain holds five shares of the treasure and the five men he’s chosen to divide it with hold one share each.

Who are the five? The Kid believes he is one. X marks the spot and the Kid puts his finger on it and says to the Professor, Here’s where they buried their treasure.

Correct. But where is the island?

Right here, man. Right where we’re standing.

The Professor chuckles. He’s amused that the Kid seems to have taken seriously the map that the Professor drew from his memory of the map drawn by Robert Louis Stevenson to illustrate his novel Treasure Island. Amused and a little disappointed. He meant it as a joke and a tease. But is it funny if the Kid doesn’t get the joke and doesn’t realize he’s being teased?

No, seriously, dude. I bet we’re standing on Captain Kydd’s original island. What’s left of it.

How do you know?

I just know.

You could be right. But from the map it could be anywhere. I’ve seen a dozen islands that correspond to its approximate shape and contours. From Nova Scotia to the Caribbean to the South Seas. Captain Kydd anchored at hundreds of islands and harbors like this. The Professor squints and studies the map as if searching for something he may have missed in all the times he’s studied it. He says to the Kid, Of course, he probably passed by this bay, Calusa Bay or whatever it was called then, more often than any other. And no doubt there was an island already here when they dredged the Bay for the soil to build the Great Barriers and put up the Causeway to connect the Barriers to the mainland. So it’s certainly possible, my friend. Yes, Captain Kydd’s treasure may well lie beneath us.

More than possible, man. It’s fucking here. I can feel it.

How do you plan to locate it?

I don’t know. Maybe I could use one of those forked sticks people find underground water with. I have the vibe on this, Professor.

Dowse for it? Why not? But assuming you locate the spot where it’s buried, how do you propose getting it out from under this concrete island and the Causeway overhead? Dynamite?

I dunno. Maybe something a little less explosive. I gotta focus on it awhile first. Once I nail down the exact spot where it’s buried I’ll concentrate on how to get it out. One step at a time, Professor.

Have you considered the possibility that the map is a fake?

You mean the one you copied the copy from? The original?

Yes. The original.

That’s like asking have I considered the possibility that you were lying to me.

Exactly.

Why would you lie to me about something like that?

Why, indeed?

I mean, I can see it if you were trying to keep the treasure all for yourself so you drew me a phony map that sent me to the wrong place to dig for it. But if you wanted the treasure all to yourself, why tell me about it in the first place?

Exactly.

Unless there wasn’t any treasure in the first place or even an original map to copy from. And you only wanted to make fun of me. And make yourself feel superior.

The Professor says, I wouldn’t do that to you, Kid. But his smile tells the Kid that’s what he’s done. The Kid stands and turns and walks back to his camp and his dog and parrot.

CHAPTER FIVE

PROBABLY THE KID SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED to own a dog or a parrot. They are helpless dependent creatures, neither of them very healthy, and both unable to function normally especially Einstein whose wings were broken at Benbow’s and tied back so that when they healed and the strings were cut he’d be unable to fly more than a few feet at a time. He’d never be able to escape to the trees above Rampart and breed with the parrots there and spend his days cadging dropped bread and leftovers at the sidewalk cafés, squawking with the flocks of other escapees and their offspring and gawking at the humans down below. And Annie’s like an old lady on a walker, frail and slow and cross. They are rescues is how the Kid sees them but in spite of his limited abilities to take proper care of them he still believes they’re better off under the Causeway with him than they were at Benbow’s.

He wonders if the Professor can give him a lift over to the Barriers to Paws ’n’ Claws the pet food store on Rampart or maybe he’ll hold on to his dwindling cash reserves and hit Bingo’s Wholesome on the mainland for a Dumpster dive. There’ll be three-day-old organic chickens and marrow bones for Annie and plenty of nuts, crackers, and berries a day too stale for the yuppy vegetarians but perfect for Einstein. The Kid used to dive at Bingo’s twice a week at least because of the abundance of the leafy greens that Iggy so loved. But since Iggy went down the Kid’s only been diving at Bingo’s once.

He figures if he can restore Annie’s health she’ll be a serviceable watchdog who can at least stay awake while he sleeps and bark if someone tries to sneak into his tent or cut his bike chain. A little food, kindness, and respect can do wonders for an animal of any kind. It worked with Iggy. It kept him close by and attentive and loyal and fiercely protective which was what got him killed of course but will keep him always in the Kid’s only memory of being loved. In a sense Iggy is responsible for what little capacity the Kid possesses for loving others.

You might think the Kid’s mother loved him — she certainly thinks so — because she bore him after all and had no help from anyone else in raising him. She wasn’t cruel to him or violent and for many years she provided him with food, shelter, and clothing and she offered him companionship from time to time when there was no one else around, no boyfriend or some guy about to become her boyfriend or another guy on the way out. She wasn’t on meth or crack, just weed and the occasional blow. Mostly he remembers her going out the door in the mornings for work at the salon, his box of Coco Pops on the kitchen table, slightly sour milk in the fridge, school lunch money next to his plate. Then he remembers her coming home after afterwork drinks at the Bide-a-Wile with her girlfriends from the salon, putting a microwaved box meal in front of him while they both watch music videos on MTV, and then she puts on her makeup and tight jeans and sleeveless tee with the good cleavage and heads back to the Bide-a-Wile or someplace else where she’s agreed to meet up with her girlfriends to begin the night’s prowl.

That was when she had no boyfriend or as she put it, No beau. Once she found herself a beau he usually moved in with her or at least moved into her bedroom and kitchen and took half the couch in front of the TV. The Kid would hole up in his bedroom with Iggy and his computer so he wasn’t seeing her any more when the beau was around than when she was out looking for one. It was a pretty boring lonely life for the Kid whether his mom was with a beau or without, whether she was at home nights and Sundays or on the prowl. Until he was almost eleven, that is, and clicked his way for the first time onto porn sites. After that if he got bored and lonely it was only the porn that was boring and making him lonely but by then it was working on him like a drug that created a need that only it could satisfy and brought with it a need for more of the same.

Officially then until he was eleven or twelve and could take care of himself more or less the Kid’s mother was neglectful because she left him home alone unattended so much of the time. Unofficially she might still have loved him. People do that sometimes — love somebody they appear not to notice is alive. But she was the kind of person for whom love was only a word and a tone of voice and a ready-made set of facial expressions and body movements. As long as she employed the word and made the right faces and provided the appropriate hugs, kisses, and whatever else was required of her body to support her use of the word she believed that she loved her son just as she believed she was in love with many of the men she brought home and had sex with. They believed it too, her son and some of the men who shared her bed. For a while anyhow. The men that is. For a day or two. Sometimes weeks. Her son however believed for years and years that his mother loved him. Even now he believes that she loved him all his life right up till he became a convicted sex offender and then she stopped. Which the Kid thinks was understandable.

The night he was busted in West Calusa Gardens after they finished interrogating and booking him he called her from the police station to explain why he wouldn’t be coming home unless she could put up a twenty-thousand-dollar bail bond. She demanded to know what he did. She didn’t ask him what he was charged with.

Nothing, really.

If you didn’t do anything, why did they arrest you, then?

On account of the way it looked. I did something really stupid.

Then you did something. And they arrested you for it, and now you want me to bail you out with money I don’t have.

Well, they said you could put your house up if you own it.

Who’s “they”?

The guy who set bail. The judge, I guess he is.

You’re not innocent. You’re guilty of a crime, and you want me to risk my house just to get you out of jail. What kind of crime did you commit? Was it drugs? It better not be drugs, mister. ’Cause if it is, you can forget about me bailing you out. You can forget about me bailing you out anyhow, since you’re not innocent. Was it drugs? Did you rob somebody?

No, it was a sex crime.

Oh, Jesus!

That’s when she hung up. It was the last time he spoke with his mother. At his trial he looked for her in the audience which was made up mostly of the families and friends of other people being tried that day and their lawyers but she wasn’t there which he understood because by then there had been at least two lengthy articles in the Times-Union about child pornography and a five-part series on the nightly TV news about protecting children from sexual predators prowling the Internet. He didn’t blame her for staying home.

At first once he was convicted, sentenced, and in jail, he didn’t miss her very much. But then after he got out of jail and started living under the Causeway and knew that she was living and working only a short bus ride away he began to miss her. Before he left home for the army and everything went bad for him there and when he came back to Calusa and resumed living in his old bedroom again she cracked jokes like she used to and teased him sometimes as if he were still a little boy and asked him what he thought about her clothes and makeup and hair when she was about to go out. She wasn’t mad at him for getting kicked out of the army — not after he explained the circumstances. She actually thought it was kind of funny and the army was being stupid for making it illegal for our young men and women in uniform to buy and sell and watch pornography when we were engaged in a worldwide war against Islamic terrorists.

Plus she was somebody to report to. Everybody needs somebody to report to at the end of the day or in the morning when you wake. But here under the Causeway the Kid has no one to report to. Not even the Rabbit who never asks what the Kid did today or last night. No one down here asks questions except on the first day or two like the Shyster did when he first arrived. It was like a code: Don’t ask and don’t tell. So with no one to report to after a while the Kid missed his mother.

Now however the Professor has come into his life and because he doesn’t live under the Causeway he feels free to ignore the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell code and the Professor asks all kinds of questions of the Kid. In spite of the games he sometimes plays the Professor has gradually gained the Kid’s trust — the bit about the map actually helped because it provoked a temporary feeling of intimacy. At least on the Kid’s part. Plus the stuff he brought the Kid and carrying him and Einstein and Annie and all his worldly possessions in his van from Benbow’s back here to the Causeway. And now he’s helping the Kid organize the settlement and make it clean and safe — or at least cleaner and safer than it was — and has eased the Kid into a position of authority and responsibility down here which the Kid to his surprise enjoys. The fat man’s even willing to help the Kid get food and medicine for Annie and Einstein.

But payback time is on the horizon, the Kid knows. On the drive over to the pet shop on Rampart he asks the Professor what’s all this going to cost him?

You mean for dog food and birdseed and maybe a salve for Annie’s sores? Probably not much. Under twenty dollars for the next four weeks. Do you need money?

Not for that. Not now. I can cover expenses for the next few weeks. Till I find another job busing tables or whatever. No, I mean, what’s it gonna cost me for this, the rides, setting things up back there under the Causeway and shit like that? And the stuff you gave me? What’s in it for you? From me?

The Professor smiles and drives on.

CHAPTER SIX

K: I get to see all this footage and shit and listen to it and give my permission or maybe not give it depending on how I feel about it, right? I ain’t signed any kind of permission slip or anything yet, y’know.

P: Don’t worry, I’ll make you a copy and you can review it before signing a release. It’s not for public distribution anyhow.

K: What’s it for then?

P: Research.

K: Whose?

P: Mine.

K: What’re you researching? Convicted sex offenders? Homeless people?

P: Both. When they’re the same.

K: Yeah, well, usually they are the same. Is that thing running?

P: It’s running.

K: You planning on interviewing the other guys living down here after you finish with me? ’Cause most of them won’t do it, you know.

P: They’re… what? Shy?

K: Fuck no. Ashamed. Scared maybe. Mostly ashamed though. Even though most of ’em don’t think they did anything wrong.

P: What about you? Do you think you did anything wrong?

K: (long pause) Illegal for sure. And stupid. Really stupid. I hadda do group therapy in prison, y’know. We hadda talk about all this right-versus-wrong shit. It never did get cleared up except when guys were lying about it and saying oh yeah it was really wrong what I did and I’ll never do it again for sure, I’m not a come-freak anymore, no more kid fruit for me, no more peeping, no more quail hunting for me, nossir, I’ve learned my lesson, no more weenie-wagging for this old guy. But it was all bullshit. Especially for the chomos.

P: Chomos?

K: You know, child molesters. Guys who’re into little kids.

P: I take it you’re not a chomo.

K: I’m not “into” anything, man. Okay, maybe I used to be like into porn and banging the bishop a little too hard for what’s considered normal, but it was always your normal porn showing the usual run of normal sexual activities between two and sometimes three or more consenting adults. The kind of stuff you can see on pay-per-view TV or your computer screen any night anywhere in America even where Jesus rules. As for banging the bishop all the time, I pretty much had a woodie every minute of the day due to my youth so what else was I gonna do except stroke it? Like I said, I never had a regular girlfriend I could fuck or who would blow me. Listen, is this all being recorded and like on film? ’Cause you’re gonna hafta edit a lot of this shit out on account of the language.

P: Don’t worry, no one but me will ever see or listen to it. Just use the occasion to tell your side of the story. That’s all I’m looking for, your side of the story.

K: That’s not so easy to do, tell my side of the story.

P: Why not?

K: It’s hard to know where it begins and where it ends. Or if it ends. With other people’s versions of your story it’s easy. The cops’ version, the lawyers’, the judges’, even your mother’s version. They can pick and choose where your story begins and what it leads to because they weren’t really there when it began. They weren’t inside you when you were eleven or twelve and started whacking off under the blanket with a flashlight and a beat sheet. You ever wonder why they call them skin mags and skin flicks, by the way?

P: Can’t say I—

K: (interrupts) Me neither. I mean they’re not really skin, they’re just pictures of skin. The only skin they get you touching is your own.

P: I don’t understand.

K: Never mind.

P: So where do you think your story, your side of the story, begins?

K: Good question. I kinda think my story’s pretty much the same as most guys my age up to when I got shit-canned outa the army. Most guys means guys like me who’re pretty much normal sexually speaking but don’t have a regular sex life with another person. No girlfriend and no wife and no prospects on the horizon, so to speak. And no money for ho’s. I never went to a ho. Lap dances. I had a lap dance once. I tell you about that? Yeah, I did. All most guys like me got for sex is their computer and their chubby. Most guys are like that, and face it, most guys my age could end up doing what I did easy.

P: Most guys your age aren’t convicted sex offenders.

K: Don’t remind me.

P: Were you guilty as charged?

K: I pleaded guilty. My lawyer said it would go easier on me if I did. He was only a public defender, but I guess he was right. Six months is a long time for what I did, though. Six months and ten years’ parole and the rest of my life. ’Course I only got to wear this electronic foot collar for ten. But even when I get to take it off I’ll still be on the fucking registry for the rest of my life. I’ll still be homeless and living under the Causeway or someplace like it that’s more than twenty-five hundred feet from wherever there are kids gathered or else I’ll be living in some wilderness where there’s only animals for neighbors, like I’m an animal myself, one of those pet store pythons that people get tired of feeding mice to so they drive out to the Panzacola Swamp and leave them by the side of the road and drive off while the python slithers down from the road into a culvert or under a causeway or an overpass and makes his home there for a while. Until the park rangers decide they can’t have giant pythons from like Asia and South America living in the Great Panzacola Swamp so they raid the place with dogs and baseball bats and guns and bust the pythons and shoot them. For the public’s safety. That’s my fate, I’m pretty sure.

P: Don’t be so sure.

K: I said “pretty” sure.

P: What did you end up pleading guilty to? All it says on the registry is you were convicted of a Class Two felony.

K: I don’t feel like going there. I gotta spend some time with my animals. I gotta get Einstein talking. I gotta encourage Annie here to act like a regular fucking watchdog. All she wants to do is sleep. Maybe I’ll get Rabbit or somebody to try and sneak up on me while I’m pretending to sleep in my tent, and if she barks give her a treat to reward her. Sort of get her started.

P: Why don’t you feel like going there?

K: Where?

P: Telling me what you pleaded to.

K: I’m not telling you, I’m telling that fucking little black box. I don’t like little black boxes. Besides, it sounds worse than what I actually did. What I’m actually guilty of.

P: Are you ashamed of what you did? What you’re actually guilty of?

K: No. Not really. Except it was stupid, like I said. But I’m not ashamed. Actually, yeah, maybe I am.

P: If you’re unsure, maybe you should tell me what you did. It may help you make up your mind about how to feel.

K: You can’t make up your mind about how you’ll feel, man. How you feel is how you feel. Besides, you’ll just think I’m like the rest of these guys down here, making up excuses and shit. Lying and blaming the victim, like they say, or I’m like the Shyster and some of the other weirdos who don’t have a moral compass, like they say, and think there’s nothing twisted about wanting to bonk little kids or wag their weenies in front of old ladies in wheelchairs. I know the difference between what’s normal and what’s weird. And I’m not making up excuses for myself when I admit that what I did was stupid, because it was illegal and I sort of knew it, but I did it anyhow. That’s not an excuse and it’s not blaming anyone else. It’s just a fact. Everybody does shit that they sort of know is illegal. Even you, Professor. Right?

P: Yes. Right.

K: So what do you do that’s illegal? Smoke weed? You don’t look like you’re into blow.

P: To tell you the truth, nowadays I don’t do anything that’s illegal. Nothing that I’m aware of anyhow.

K: “Nowadays.” So you have a shady past, Professor.

P: (chuckles) You could say that.

K: Big-time? I mean shadier than smoking weed or cheating on your taxes.

P: Big-time.

K: Cool. Can you tell me about it?

P: No.

K: You ever do time?

P: No.

K: That’s why you can’t tell me about it. Your side of the story. You can only tell your side of the story if you got caught. If the story has an ending. Right?

P: Right.

K: And your story’s still running.

P: In a sense. But yours isn’t. You got caught. So tell me your story. If I ever get caught I’ll tell you mine.

K: I hope you get caught, Professor. I’d like to hear what a guy like you did that was big-time illegal and shady, a famous professor and all, respected pillar of the community, guy in a three-piece suit and necktie doing valuable research on down-and-out homeless convicted sex offenders like me living like rats under the Causeway. I’d like to hear that story.

P: Let’s hear your story for now. Maybe someday you’ll hear mine.

K: When you get caught for what you did.

P: It won’t happen.

K: That’s what you think.

P: Tell me about it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE KID’S STORY ACCORDING TO THE KID:

He rode the bus south from Fort Drum all the way to Calusa without getting out except for coffee and a take-out sandwich at the bus stops and he sat alone the whole way — fifteen hundred miles and four days and three nights — depressed and angry at himself and the U.S. Army regulations against distributing pornography that couldn’t make a distinction between distribution for a profit and giving away DVDs to guys in your outfit who you wanted to respect you and be your buddies so that when you got to Iraq or Afghanistan they’d watch your back. Now he has no place to go except to his mother’s house, his old bedroom and his tent in the backyard next to Iggy’s cage. He has no job to go back to — the new guy who took over the light store after Tony Perez got killed in the robbery acted like he still believed the Kid was somehow involved even though thanks to his mother’s lie he had an ironclad alibi. No friends either, male or female, except for Iggy of course, Iggy being one of the reasons — a minor reason — for no friends since most people especially people his age thought it was weird to have a full-grown thirty-pound iguana for a pet or else they were scared of it or disgusted. So no posse just like when he was in high school and the other kids and even the teachers thought he was boring and not very bright and short and skinny with a personality that had no specialty. They never even bothered to bully him in school. He might actually have liked it for the attention if once in a while his fellow students had slammed him against a wall or a bank of lockers or stuck his head in a urinal and flushed or yanked off his backpack and tossed his books and notebooks into a toilet. A loser. That’s what he was before he joined the army and that’s what he was while he was in the army and now that he had been kicked out of the army he was even more of a loser than before.

His mother seemed to think so too. The only reason she was glad to see him when he arrived back at her door was because she was sick of taking care of Iggy. Within days of his departure for Fort Drum she had given up following his careful instructions for feeding and watering the iguana and cleaning its cage but couldn’t quite bring herself to ignore the creature altogether and had started tossing unopened loaves of white bread into the cage and the occasional leftover pizza crust and had started hoping for Iggy’s death or escape and disappearance. Several times a week she forgot to close and latch the door of his cage and managed to be both surprised and disappointed when she returned in the evening from work and saw that the cage was open and Iggy was still inside it. It was more or less how she had treated the Kid himself in recent years. Most of his life actually, even when he was a baby. She believed that she was not cut out to be a mother, that’s how she put it to her friends and lovers. Which allowed her to give herself extra credit for keeping her son fed and clothed and housed, however inadequately it may have appeared to a social worker, for example, or to someone who in fact was cut out to be a mother.

So the Kid moved back in with her. Temporarily, he figured, until he got a job and could afford a place of his own preferably over on the Barriers where you could walk along the beach or sit at one of the outdoor cafés on Rampart and let your eyes caress the shoulders and thighs of girls and young women in their bikinis and wonder about their hidden body piercings — nipple- and clit-rings and so on. But he hadn’t been honorably discharged from the army and when he applied for jobs at McDonald’s and Starbucks and the other fast-food chains and even the supermarkets and especially Walmart they ran him through the usual databases and came up with a reason not to hire him. It’s what they wanted, a reason not to hire him. He was a lousy interviewee and got worse as he went along — sullen, inarticulate, evasive — and with each interview grew more pessimistic and discouraged until he came to believe that he was worse than unemployed, he was unemployable and ought not to be hired. His message to the person sitting across from him was Don’t hire me, I’m unemployable.

Soon he gave up reading the want ads altogether or visiting once a week the state unemployment office to check the listings there. When they saw the Kid walk through the door the clerks rolled their eyes and sighed audibly and he noticed and slumped down in the chair and waited until finally one of the clerks called him over and gave him a shorter and shorter list of potential employers and sent him out to be interviewed and not hired again. He made them feel like failures and they in turn passed it back until to break the downward spiral he stayed home at his mother’s and let night turn into day and day into night and talked to Iggy and watched porn on his computer until he ran out of money and maxed out his debit card.

That’s when he started clicking his way onto the sex-talk chat room that he didn’t know at first was a sex-talk chat room. He thought it was a regular discussion forum open to all subjects. It’s how he met brandi18. He followed his mouse from craigslist.org to Calusa to jobs to food/hospitality as if he were looking for a job on the Internet. In minutes he was depressed and discouraged by the curt clean language of the job requirements and knew he was defeated before he even started, so he followed his mouse back out to Calusa again and clicked on services and from there to adults where he declared he was over eighteen years of age and watched a little free porn for a while and when he had jerked off into a tissue he zipped up his fly and clicked out to Calusa again and tried checking out discussion forums thinking maybe somebody out there with a female iguana was looking for a stud like Iggy and he could raise a little cash on stud fees.

He knew people did that with dogs and horses, so why not iguanas? Iggy was ready. Once a year since Iggy was three years old and sexually mature as summer came on and there was a slight increase in the length of the day and a rise in humidity and temperature, starting at his head and dewlap and ending at his tail Iggy turned orange. Male iguanas have two penises hidden in a pouch between their hind legs and in breeding season the pouch swells and the iguana grows restless and lustful and will try to mate with anything animate or inanimate shaped even vaguely like a female iguana, biting down where it thinks the neck is supposed to be located and humping its backside with one of its penises until it splats a dollop of semen and relaxes its grip and sleeps for a short while, when it starts all over again with the second penis. Then a short rest period and it’s back to the first. And on and on.

Usually the Kid filled an athletic sock with wood chips and tied off the open end and tossed it on the floor of Iggy’s cage for him to mate with and a week or ten days later Iggy’s color would slowly turn back to its normal green and he’d calm down and resume his old habits and quiet routines, finished for the year with sex. This time the Kid thought he’d try to put the iguana’s annual sexual crescendo to some money-making use and save himself a sock in the process.

He typed: healthy full-grown m iguana available 2 mate w healthy f. And waited for a response. His handle was iggyzbro.

Almost immediately he received a reply.

brandi18: Huh?

He wasn’t going to dignify the question with an answer — obviously brandi18 knew nothing about iguanas — but when no one else after a day and a night responded to his text, iggyzbro wrote: my iguana rdy 2 breed. do u have a f and want babies? stud fee neg. He would have written negotiable but wasn’t sure how to spell it.

brandi18: stud fees r for losers. r u a ho?

iggyzbro: no way.

brandi18: way. illegal 2 sell sex on craigslist u no.

iggyzbro: im selling iguana sex.

brandi18: gross!!! u serious???

iggyzbro: do u have a f iguana?

brandi18: that’s not what i call it.

iggyzbro: what do u call it?

brandi18: pends on my mood.

iggyzbro: mine’s called iggy.

brandi18: cool. how big is iggy?

iggyzbro: huge. what’s yrs called?

brandi18: like i said, pends on my mood.

iggyzbro: what mood u in today?

brandi18: kinda curious abt u. lol.

iggyzbro: k. what’s yours called when yr curious abt me?

brandi18: kittycat. get it?

iggyzbro: no.

brandi18: gotta go. my mom’s calling me. how old r u?

iggyzbro: 21

brandi18: yeah, sure.

iggyzbro: how old r u?

brandi18: 2 young 4 u and iggy 4 sure.

iggyzbro: pends. iggy likes iguanas younger than him if theyre sexually mature. is yrs sexually mature?

brandi18: what do u mean?

iggyzbro: how old r u?

By this time the Kid knew they were no longer talking about iguanas and was scrambling to keep up with brandi18. At first she said she was eighteen and when he asked if she was on Facebook and had any pictures of herself posted there and said maybe he’d check her out and be her friend she admitted that she was only kidding, she was really fourteen. But she looked older, she wrote.

The Kid pulled up Facebook and signed on and peeped her, then came back and told her she did look seventeen or even eighteen but was real cute. yr a hottie, he added after a pause. He decided not to ask her to friend him and instead continued their conversation on the craigslist forum. It was their own more or less private thread and felt safer to him than Facebook if she really was only fourteen — although he couldn’t imagine why a girl would lie about that, say she was younger than she really was. Until they’re eighteen or so underage girls usually say they’re older than they really are to keep the guy from logging off and deleting the evidence.

No harm just chatting with her, he decided. If he ran into her at a bus stop or sat next to her in a café he’d feel safe asking her about herself like this and telling her a few things about himself. Especially someone as pretty as brandi18, cute and a hottie: in the picture on Facebook she had long brown hair with blond streaks tied back in a ponytail and cream-colored skin and didn’t seem to be wearing any makeup or jewelry except for pearl studs in her ears. Her eyes were large and round and either blue or hazel, he couldn’t quite tell from the photograph, and she appeared to be looking slightly up at the camera as if she had taken it herself with her cell phone with her arm extended and the camera held above her head a ways. It gave her a flirty look that he liked — warm and reassuring but also inviting. Promising. Tempting. She was wearing a Disney World T-shirt, he noticed.

She told him her real name was Brandi and she used brandi18 online because there were seventeen other Brandis in front of her subscribing to the same Internet provider. She said her mom and dad were divorced and she lived with her mom alone in West Calusa Gardens, a suburb that she said was boring and she hated. sux, she wrote. Especially because she could only get to the mall by bus except when her mom drove her and that she said sux 2.

He agreed. He told her he had a car, a two-year-old Beemer that he’d almost totaled a few weeks ago so it was in the body shop forcing him to take the bus too. which sux, he wrote. so i no how u feel. He wished his Beemer was fixed so he could drive her around in it and she wouldn’t have to rely on her mom.

that wld b cool, she wrote.

He said he was living with his mom too but only temporarily because he’d just gotten out of the army and was still getting adjusted to civilian life and planned to take night courses at Calusa Community College in the fall in computer programming.

She asked him if he’d been in Afghanistan in the army and he wrote: ya.

She thought that was really cool and did he see anybody get killed or anything?

He wrote: don’t want 2 talk abt that.

She understood. She hoped he hadn’t been wounded or anything over there and he said he was lucky because he came home in one piece and some of his buddies didn’t.

He asked brandi18 if she had a bf and she said she just broke up with him after three months of going steady. But she was over him now. He was a real loser even though he was older and a senior with his own car.

He asked her why she broke up with him and she said he cheated on her with her best friend and now she hated them both.

plenty of fish in the sea, he typed.

what abt u? she asked.

no gf, he answered. Before he went to Afghanistan there was someone but it wasn’t all that serious. mostly just sexual, he told her, ready to back off and get light again if she took it the wrong way.

She wrote: same with my ex-bf and my ex-bgf.

He told her that it probably wouldn’t last then and the bf would soon come back to her on his knees and ask to be her bf again.

She didn’t think so. Not unless she agreed to have sex with him.

iggyzbro: u dont want that?

brandi18: am scared 2 do it.

iggyzbro: y?

brandi18: dont want 2 get preg.

iggyzbro: what abt protection? u no. condoms.

brandi18: he says only gays use condoms. true?

iggyzbro: no!!! r u a virgin?

brandi18: my moms coming. got 2 go.

He asked for her e-mail address and gave her his so they could talk later, he said. In privacy instead of on the craigslist forum.

Then brandi18 logged out and left the Kid staring at the screen reading and rereading the thread from start to finish, trying to determine if he had written anything to her that he couldn’t have said to her in person in public and finally deciding that even though he had been more intimate with her than he had ever been with a girl before he had been respectful of her youth and the difference in their ages. He was surprised that he had dared to ask her if she was a virgin though. He’d never asked that of anyone before, male or female, and wondered what he would have said if she had answered yes. What if she’d said no? Where in the conversation would they have gone next? Would she have asked him if he was a virgin? Probably not. He was twenty-one, after all. No one his age was a virgin except maybe a few Jesus freaks and you couldn’t be sure about them.

He was sorry he had lied to her about the Beemer and Afghanistan and the rest — although maybe it really was a good idea to take a course in computer programming at the community college in the fall. Maybe it was more than an idea grown from a lie to impress a girl online. Maybe it was a plan. It was the first plan he’d come up with since arriving back at his mother’s house from Fort Drum. Talking to brandi18 was good for him and he felt better about himself than he had in a very long time.

The next night shortly after ten the Kid checked his e-mails and there she was again. It was a different format than the craigslist forum — no ads, no columns of subjects and lists of offerings to click onto, just the simple in-box and subject line. It was like she had showered and changed clothes and her hair was still a little wet from the shower. He could almost smell her soap and a touch of cologne when he saw her name brandi18 under sender and read hi again on the subject line.

He was in his bedroom in front of his old Dell laptop, his mother was out with her girlfriends from the shop making the rounds of the bars — younger women than she, in their late twenties, heavy drinkers and dopers who like to do shots of tequila and get high on weed in guys’ cars in the parking lots outside. Iggy lay on his back sleeping in his cage under the heat lamp, his belly full and rounded from his supper of a pound of spinach leaves, his twin penises engorged in their pouch, ready for action as soon as he converted the spinach into pellets. The Kid opened brandi18’s e-mail and she said wassup? been thinking abt u since last nite.

He answered nuttin up and hoped he hit the correct jocular tone. Harder to do with e-mail than in a chat room. E-mail was a step or two closer to actual conversation, almost like writing a letter which made it harder to control his tone of voice especially with a girl at the other end, a fourteen-year-old girl he was trying to impress. He wanted her to think he was intelligent and worldly and handsome and knew he was none of those things.

She answered right away: u mad @ me?

Okay, wrong tone. Better try sincere and confidential, even though that won’t help make him sound worldly. His idea of worldly was sarcasm. He told her he’d had a hard day. Flashbacks to Afghanistan. Beemer’s still in the shop. Can’t get a decent job because his computer skills aren’t up to speed which is why he needs to enroll at Calusa Community College. Money problems. His mother was nagging him to pay rent for his room (that part was true) and the insurance company wouldn’t pay for the repairs to his Beemer (not true since the Beemer was a total lie) because his driver’s license had expired while he was in Afghanistan. (Only partially true as he never had a driver’s license in the first place. All he had for an ID was his old high school photo identification card that he was still using as a bus pass. He looked younger than twenty-one and the bus drivers never checked the birth date on the card when he flashed it getting on. He didn’t tell her any of that.)

Sincere and confidential worked despite the falsity of almost everything he told her. She said she was really sad for him. that sux. She had problems too, she said. But nothing as bad as his because she was only a kid still and her mom was too cheap to let her have a cell phone of her own and too strict to let her go out alone with guys who had cars even though her mom was almost never home because she traveled a lot for her job and couldn’t know what Brandi was doing when she was away anyhow. And her dad only checked in on her when he wanted to fight with her mom about his alimony and support payments. He was a total asshole, she wrote.

so do u like have guys over when your mom’s away? he asked. do u party when she’s gone?

She said not big parties that the nosy neighbors would notice but sometimes friends came over with beer and weed. She asked him if he smoked weed.

ya, when it comes my way, he typed. That sounds worldly, he thought. btw, u never answered my q yesterday.

what q?

r u a virgin?

lol, she wrote back.

He asked her why it was funny — funny to ask or funny to answer? just curious, he said, so I can no how 2 talk 2 u better.

She said he could say anything he wanted. She knew all about sex, she said, even though she’d never really done it with a guy.

what about w a girl?

ew!! no way!!

what about bjs?

not saying.

He said he’d take that as a yes to blow jobs and suddenly had an erection: gets me excited, he typed.

She changed the subject then, asking him if he had a cam on his computer or cell phone so she could see what he looked like.

No cam, he told her, and no cable to download pictures from his cell phone to send as a PDF from his computer.

She asked him if he looked like anybody she’d know from TV and how tall he was. She said he must be muscular from being in the army like all those guys in the TV ads that try to get guys to enlist.

He admitted he was short, five eight, he said, adding three inches. But yeah, pretty muscular though not bulging like a bodybuilder. He wasn’t sure if he looked like anybody she knew from TV but people sometimes told him he reminded them of Michael J. Fox who had some kind of disease he was always going on about, Parkinson’s or epilepsy or something, although he looked pretty normal to the Kid. It was his mother who had pointed out his resemblance to Michael J. Fox which at the time he had not taken as a compliment except for the fact that the actor was famous and presumably rich. i don’t have any diseases, he reassured Brandi. i’m clean and healthy as a teenager.

lol, she wrote back. u don’t know teenagers.

used 2 be 1 myself a few years ago.

She asked him his real name and he told her. Why did he use iggyzbro for his online name? she wondered and he told her his pet iguana was named Iggy.

She was surprised to learn that there really was an iguana after all and wanted the Kid to describe Iggy in detail because she had never seen one before and wondered why anyone would want an iguana for a pet.

So he described Iggy in affectionate detail and when he got to the part about the two penises and that Iggy was going through his brief sexually active cycle and was turning from green to orange he realized he was starting to flirt about sex with brandi18 again as if he himself were turning from green to orange and had two erect penises. He didn’t mean to go there. He didn’t need reminding that she was only fourteen and he was twenty-one but somehow her questions and comments kept drawing him back to sexual innuendo and inquiry until they both, the Kid and brandi18 too, were getting dangerously explicit — dangerous at least for the Kid. When he read back over their string of e-mails it seemed she was only being playful yet her play kept drawing him forward until finally he typed id rly like 2 hang with u some nite when your mom’s away.

what wld we do?

whatever we want 2 do. just c what happens. i could bring beer and a movie.

what kinda movie?

a sexy 1. u ever watch p?

whats p?

u no. porn.

o ya, i watched a couple on pay-per-view when my mom was away. she found out frm the bill and was pissed.

turn u on?

ya!

were u alone? or w yr bf?

no!! only alone.

wld be fun 2 watch p 2gether.

maybe.

The Kid asked her for her street address and she gave it to him which he took as a clear invitation to visit her. He asked when her mom would be away next and she said this coming weekend she was going on a gambling cruise on a ship out of Calusa with the people who worked at her office.

all weekend? he wondered.

ya!

He said he’d come over.

She reminded him that his car was still in the shop. He’d not be able to drive out to West Calusa Gardens unless he could borrow a car. Better wait till his Beemer was fixed.

He said no, he could take a bus. He’d do a search on MapQuest and find the closest bus stop and walk from there. He lived in the north end of the city and there were buses running west to the suburbs and back every half hour till midnight and every hour after that. Even if they hung out till late he could still get home, he said and waited for her answer to come up on his screen.

After a long five minutes he finally heard the ping signaling the arrival of a new e-mail and the announcement from the AOL woman, you’ve got mail. It was brandi18. Who else? He never got e-mail, never heard that announcement except for spam. He clicked it open.

sorry. had a phone call from my mom checking up on me. i’m sorta grounded.

what 4?

grades. so r u coming fri or sat?

i’ll come fri. c what happens and maybe sat. 2 if u like. u might invite me 2 stay over.

yr 2 old. and a guy. my moms’ll kill me if she finds out.

she wont.

bring the beer. my moms counts her stash when she gets home.

k. i’ll bring some surprises 2.

like what?

u’ll see. Around 10 ok?

k. bye. gotta log out and delete. my moms is home. sometimes she reads my e-mails when she gets home. she’s a bitch. c u fri around 10.

He pushed back from the computer and lighted a cigarette. He was sweating and noticed that his hands were trembling. He was frightened of what he was doing, had done, would do if given the opportunity. But it was too late to back off now. What had begun as an itch had turned into a barely conscious fantasy that had become a plan and now a promise. He wasn’t frightened because she was only fourteen — he had almost blocked that out and besides she looked and sounded older on Facebook and in her e-mails. He was scared and nervous because he had never invited himself to visit a girl at her house alone, had never dared to — no girl had let him believe that he wouldn’t be laughed at for even asking her for more than the time of day. And here this pretty girl was asking him to bring beer and a skin flick and see what happens.

Okay, he’ll see what happens. He’ll have to buy some condoms. How many or what kind or size he wasn’t sure. He’d never bought condoms before, had never even checked the rack to see if they came in different sizes. He figured he’d need extra-large probably unless they only came in one size and were really flexible.

And he’d have to rent a movie from the adult section of Moviemasters, nothing too hard-core, no gangbang or cum-shots although maybe cum-shots are sexy to girls and not just guys. He wasn’t sure what was sexy to girls. Except for vibrating dildo films and the occasional chick-on-chick lesbian films which didn’t really get him excited anymore porn seemed pretty much designed for guys. She was white so she’d probably only want to see white people fucking at least this first time. Maybe down the road she’d be interested in watching a black dude with a donkey-dong getting blown by a white girl.

She’d probably want to see something with a story attached at least at the beginning — one of those movies that start out with the husband going off on a business trip leaving his beautiful wife home alone and horny and this young stud comes over in his tight cutoff shorts and no shirt to clean the pool while she’s watching from the window upstairs and getting all wet so she puts on her bikini and goes down to the pool and lies on a chaise to sunbathe. The pool guy checks her out and asks for a glass of water and she brings it to him from the kitchen and when he finishes and sets the glass down she runs her finger down his bare chest to his crotch. And then the action starts and you don’t need the story anymore till the end where the husband comes home and suggests jazzing up their tired sex life by inviting someone to join them and they look out the window at the pool guy and the next scene has both guys fucking the wife one from behind and her blowing the other and the two guys come at the same time: The End.

He’d look for one of those at Moviemasters tomorrow which was Thursday and watch it alone first to make sure it had enough of a story to interest a fourteen-year-old girl. It wouldn’t matter if it didn’t interest him because he’d already seen it and hundreds of others just like it. He’d be dealing with reality this time. Not illusion. He’d be watching and actually touching a real female human being’s body, skin, breasts, legs, ass, vagina, instead of just pictures made from electronic pixels whose colors and movement and arrangement on a screen were predetermined and controlled by a script and director and a half-dozen camera angles. That’s what frightened him. That’s why his hands were trembling as he lighted another cigarette. He was about to bump up against and break through an invisible membrane between the perfectly controlled world locked inside his head and the endlessly overflowing unpredictable, dangerous world outside.

CHAPTER EIGHT

EVEN THOUGH HE’S STILL NOT SURE WHAT exactly the Professor is after especially with the treasure map bit the Kid mostly trusts him now. Since the night he took the bus out to West Calusa Gardens to visit brandi18 he hasn’t trusted anybody. Period. No one is who he or she seems to be. Not even the other men living under the Causeway. Including the Rabbit who probably made up all those stories about teaching Kid Gavilan how to throw the bolo punch.

That’s okay, the Kid’s not complaining, it’s just the way things are. Everybody has a secret agenda and a secret life. Starting with his mother and moving out from there. Tony Perez had a secret agenda at the light store. Benbow and his goofy sidekick Trinidad Bob. The U.S. Army. It didn’t matter who, people near or close to him, individually and in groups were all using him to advance their own hidden interests. Even brandi18. The Kid was nothing to her except an entertaining fool for her to laugh at and feel superior to. She was maybe the worst. The real problem is that the Kid doesn’t know what his secret agenda is or if he has one.

But something about the Professor has gradually made him seem trustworthy to the Kid. It begins with his size, his enormous body and the way he dresses it. What you see when you first see him is what you get for the duration, a man so fat and tall and wide that you never get used to it — no matter how many times you see him he never looks normal. The bushy beard and long hair and the three-piece suit only add to his size and make no attempt to hide or disguise it. Most fat guys wear loose Hawaiian-style shirts or guayaberas and floppy trousers and try to make their beach-ball faces look smaller with short hair slicked back and going beardless or maybe keeping a trim little Vandyke beard so when you look at them you focus on their eyes and nose and lips and ignore the wide expanse of skin surrounding them. Nothing about the Professor’s appearance is part of a disguise. He doesn’t even wear sunglasses. Just squints in the glare looking like one of those Japanese sumo wrestlers.

The way he talks is trustworthy too. At least to the Kid it is. He talks like a professor, using long clearly pronounced words carefully in complete sentences but slowly said with a noticeable southern accent that the Kid guessed right away was from Alabama or Mississippi where the Kid has never heard of there being any professors so maybe he’s actually more of a regular person than a professor. He’s smart and educated, that’s obvious, but he doesn’t talk like he feels superior to people who aren’t as smart and educated as he is. Most of the people the Kid has met in his life who are smarter and better educated than the Kid either talk down to him from a great height or else try to sound like they aren’t really very intelligent and haven’t even graduated from high school which only makes the Kid suspicious of their attitude. He’s thinking of the social workers and psychologists he met in prison and a couple of teachers he had in high school who tried to get him to join in classroom discussions of current events or the books that were assigned even though the Kid never read newspapers except the headlines or watched the TV news or listened to radio newscasts and had not once read more than the first few pages of any of the books that had been assigned over his entire four years of high school. Most of what he knows about the history of the world and human life he’s picked up from scraps of overheard conversation on the street and at the light store where he worked after school and weekends and from remarks exchanged by his fellow students and later the guys in his outfit at Fort Drum and now the men living with him under the Causeway. The Kid is one of those people who have made up the mass of mankind since the species first appeared on the plains of East Africa two or three million years ago. Most of his troubles arise because he’s a twenty-first-century American and not some ancient East African or an early Cro-Magnon living with his extended family of hunter-gatherers in a cave in prehistoric Spain or a turnip-planting serf in medieval Russia or one of the early Calusa Indians harvesting oysters in the bay as the first ships from Europe hove into view.

He doesn’t think of himself this way, of course — he never heard of Cro-Magnons or Russian serfs and can’t tell East Africa from West — or he didn’t until the Professor came into his life and started interviewing him, just getting him to tell his story and then showing him ways to improve his life by being better organized and more cooperative with the men living under the Causeway with him.

Now slowly he’s starting to realize that he might be not exceptional but at least he’s important simply for being who he is, that he’s not really like the mass of mankind from the beginning of time whose entire lives and everything they chose to do or not to do is determined by their givens, the conditions and circumstances they were born into and the people they found there to accompany them in life. Until now the only living creatures who seemed to care what he did or thought and were therefore affected by his actions and thoughts were Iggy and Einstein the parrot and Annie the dog as if the Kid were closer to being reptile, bird, or four-legged animal than a human being alive and conscious in time with a beginning, middle, and end to his life, all three parts existing simultaneously in each separate part. His subjective life — his accumulated memories, wishes, fears, and reflections in the last few days — has started to take on an importance to him that it never held before. And consequently he’s begun to have a new interest in the subjective lives of the people who are connected to him starting with the Professor but including the men who live alongside him under the Causeway. Even the Shyster whose story up to now he has had no desire to know since he had no story of his own to compare it to.

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

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

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

Cool. What did you like consult about?

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

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

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

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

How old do you think I am? Another question.

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

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

Do I?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER NINE

THE PROFESSOR’S STORY ACCORDING TO THE PROFESSOR:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was as easily replaceable an asset in their ranks as among the activists and revolutionaries. If he didn’t volunteer to print and deliver to every dormitory room at Kenyon a copy of The Port Huron Statement, someone else would. If he weren’t available to be a link in the human chain blocking access to the administration building, there were hundreds ready to take his place. If, after he left Yale and on instructions from the FBI, went to San Francisco, he backed out of selling methamphetamine to the biker gangs of Oakland, there were dozens of entry-level undercover agents eager to step forward and do the deed. Those were the years when the government feared a possible coalition of biker gangs, Black Panthers, Weatherman, famous Beat poets, rock musicians, movie actors, and heiresses, so it was glamorous to be selling and delivering drugs to Hells Angels. You might run into Peter Fonda or Allen Ginsberg or Huey Newton. And when he hit the hippie trail to Kathmandu to learn Urdu and reported back to his handlers from there and ducked down into the Andes to learn Quechua and then off to research the descendants of escaped slaves on the Mosquito Coast until he finally came ashore in Calusa and found employment as a writer of policy papers on the Caribbean for a think tank called the Caribbean Basin Institute and had his papers vetted by the CIA — he was always just another easily replaced asset who appeared to be doing one thing while he was in fact doing another. He was a small enough cog in such a huge machine that he could well have been employed at the same time by the KGB while maintaining a safe house for the last of the Weather Underground to come in out of the cold.

He too came in out of the cold, inasmuch as when he quit working at the Caribbean Basin Institute and accepted a position in the sociology department at Calusa University, he created for himself a life that no longer had one, two, or three false identities. Merely a series of false pasts. For the first time since college he was more or less who he seemed to be, even if there was a disconnect between who he seemed to be and who he once had been. Though he had been many things — political radical, civil rights activist, antiwar warrior, drug dealer, independent scholar and student of exotic languages and cultures, hippie seeker of Eastern enlightenment, FBI and CIA informant simultaneously reporting to at least two other independent intelligence-gathering agencies and one or possibly two foreign government agencies as well — all these identities could conceivably have led separately to his becoming the man he now appeared to be, a happily married father of two children living in suburban Calusa, a somewhat eccentric, tenured professor of sociology at the local university, a member of the library board, a deacon in the Congregational Church, a man once portrayed in the newspaper as the smartest man in town, possibly the state.

But only if none of the men he had been once upon a time was aware of the felt, subjective existence of any of the others. They remained separate and distinct identities that knew of the factual existence of the others but did not identify with the others. They could not remember what it was like to actually be the others. And he, the Professor, can only remember what it was like to be himself in the years since he came in from the cold and ceased being an informant and gradually came to be solely who he seemed to be.

He is a man, therefore, without a past. A man with many pasts, who can, if forced, make a report on his life, but cannot tell his life’s story. Each of his pasts was designed at the time strictly to deny the existence of the others, just as his present life denies the existence of all his previous lives, giving him the freedom to make them up at will. He can claim to one man that he fought in Vietnam and tell the Kid that he was a draft-dodging opponent of the war and not in either case be lying. If everything is a lie, nothing is. Just as, if everything is true, nothing is.

That’s the story the Professor tells himself.

CHAPTER TEN

K: Yeah, sure I was scared. I thought about not going out there at all, just fuck it, stay home again and bash the bishop in front of my computer pretending I was getting a BJ from brandi18, who was a real person with probably bee stings for tits and scared of me, instead of an actress with inflatable boobs and a cooch-light shining on her bush moaning Fuck me harder fuck my ass et cetera. It wasn’t on account of brandi18 said she was only fourteen and a virgin, which I didn’t believe anyhow, the virgin part at least, because of her Facebook pictures which she must’ve snapped with her cell phone in her bedroom wearing what looked like pj’s with valentines all over and the top half unbuttoned and the other picture with really short cutoffs and a too-tight Disney World T-shirt.

P: The fact that she was fourteen and you were twenty-one wasn’t why you were scared?

K: Well, she only said she was fourteen. You can be a talking dog online. She could’ve been a fifty-year-old guy for all I knew. Although I did believe her. I thought she was fourteen, only not as innocent as she was saying. I was thinking I’m the innocent one, I’m the real virgin, all I’ve ever done is beat my banana and watch porn and tell lies to guys that nobody believes. I never even kissed a girl before. Still haven’t.

P: Why are you telling me this? It’s the truth, isn’t it?

K: You’re the only one who’s interested in the truth. Not the cops. Not the judge. Not even the shrink in prison or my parole officer. Whenever I told them the truth, even the guys in my therapy group in prison, they thought I was lying, so I stopped telling the truth. I dunno, maybe you think I’m lying too.

P: That you’ve never kissed a girl and yet you’re a convicted sex offender? No, Kid, I believe you. Not that I don’t think you broke the law. Obviously you broke the law. There you were, arranging to meet a fourteen-year-old girl at her mother’s home, all alone, bringing her beer, a pornographic movie, condoms. Anything else?

K: Well, when I bought condoms I saw this tube of stuff, K-Y jelly, which I bought, I figured on account of my dick being pretty big and in case she really was a virgin it might come in handy. I mean, even though I was totally inexperienced at sex I actually know a lot about it from watching so much porn and listening to other guys. You can learn a lot about sex from porn, y’know. And from just listening.

P: Really? Like what?

K: You learn what gets you off, for instance. And what doesn’t get you off. Like I’m not all that into bondage. Or chubbies. No offense. And guys on guys kinda leaves me limp. And you learn what girls like or at least what they say they like. And from listening to what guys talk about when they talk about sex you learn how to talk about sex. With other guys, that is. I’m not sure how to talk about sex with girls. Not in real life anyhow. I can do it online, okay? Or I could. Like with brandi18.

P: So you went out there to her mother’s house in West Calusa Gardens?

K: Yeah. I took the bus and it let me off a couple blocks from the address, so I walked the rest of the way. It was dark but she had the porch light on and I could see the number. Nice neighborhood and all. Two-car attached garages, mowed lawns, pools in back. I had the beer and other stuff in my backpack and was wearing shorts and sneakers and a Bob Marley tee on account of it was pretty hot that night. I stood there awhile on the sidewalk and checked out the house, which looked normal with lights on in the kitchen I could see and most of the rest dark except for a room upstairs that I figure is brandi18’s room, and thinking about that got me sort of hot and made me forget that I was doing something that could get me in a lot of trouble. Then I see brandi18 walk past the kitchen window. She has a little ponytail and is wearing a pink tank top, has little tits which turn me on more than jugs do, and is sort of short so the rest of her is below the windowsill and I couldn’t see but figured she had on cutoffs, and I’m already getting a woodie just from that glimpse of her in the kitchen. She stops and looks out and sees me standing on the sidewalk out front in the streetlight and kind of waves like she isn’t sure it’s me, so I wave back and she gestures like come on in. So I go up the front walk to the door which is open except for a screened door and she hollers from the kitchen in this teenage girl’s kind of voice, I gotta switch the laundry to the dryer! I’ll be right there! There’s some cookies and lemonade on the counter so help yourself, she says from someplace beyond the kitchen, a laundry room, I figure.

P: So you walk through the door. You cross the line, so to speak. A line once you’re over you can never cross the other way.

K: You got that right, Professor. I walk through the living room and dining room which are pretty fancy with wall-to-wall rugs and designer-type furniture, I notice, even though the only lights on are in the kitchen which is where I settle on a stool beside the counter where there’s a plate with Oreo cookies and a glass of lemonade with ice cubes, like she just poured it when she saw me standing outside. I’m thinking this is cool. I feel like frigging Santa Claus. I put my backpack on the floor and eat an Oreo and take a sip from the lemonade when the door to what I figure is the laundry room swings open and this dude in a suit and tie walks into the kitchen, a guy like in his forties with blow-dry hair who looks like a TV Christian telethoner.

P: Uh-oh.

K: Duh. I stand up and he says sit down. So I sit down and try to swallow the Oreo, but it’s crumbly and dry so I gulp some lemonade and try to look natural. The guy has a wide face like a frog and this orange dyed hair. He asks my name and I tell him my first name only and say what’s his name. Dave, he says. Dave Dillinger. I say are you her father? He says who? Brandi, I say. The girl who lives here. I’m hoping maybe it’s Brandi’s mother’s boyfriend or a preacher for real that Brandi’s mother asked to check on Brandi while she was away. But he doesn’t say. Instead he asks me what I’m doing here and I say I came to see a friend. Brandi’s your friend? he says. Yeah, sort of. We like met online. He goes, What were you planning on doing with Brandi tonight? I dunno. Watch TV. Hang out. Whatever. Now I’m thinking maybe this guy Dave Dillinger is Brandi’s real boyfriend even though he’s in his forties and he thinks she’s fucking me on the side because he’s an old guy and I’m closer to her age group. I don’t want to have to fight the guy even though I’m still in good shape and know a few moves from the army, as he’s quite a bit bigger than me and looks in good shape too. It’s okay, I say. I’ll leave. I was just stopping by. He goes, No, sit down. He has a few questions. For the first time I wonder if he’s a cop so I ask him. No, he’s not a cop, he says. He asks me what I’ve got in my backpack. I tell him beer. A six-pack of Bud Light. Do you know how old Brandi is? he wants to know. I say I dunno, maybe eighteen or nineteen. I was gonna drink it myself, I add. Eighteen or nineteen? he says. Then I notice he’s carrying a file folder and he takes out a bunch of papers and he reads down a couple of sheets. iggyzbro. Is that you? he asks. I say yeah, I guess so. He reads from the papers. iggyzbro: how old r u? brandi18: 18. iggyzbro: r u on facebook? mayb I’ll check u out 4 real. brandi18: u can friend me if u want. iggyzbro: K. brandi18: I’m really 14 like it sez on facebook. Sorry.

P: So he has a transcript of your e-mails? Which he no doubt got from Brandi. Assuming there is a Brandi.

K: Yeah. Anyhow, he reads some more. Like where I ask her if she’s a virgin and everything. And where I suggest watching porn and tell her I’ll bring condoms.

P: You wrote that down? And now this man has the printed transcript?

K: I didn’t know brandi18 was like a real person. I mean, we were just e-mailing. Of course it turns out she wasn’t a real person anyhow.

P: What do you mean?

K: I mean she was like one person online and another person that night in her mother’s house when I went out there thinking we were gonna hook up. It’s complicated. Anyhow, I ask the guy if he’s her father or is he like her boyfriend, since I’m remembering that brandi18 told me her ex-boyfriend was older but I didn’t think this much older. The guy reminds me of the dude on a TV show called To Catch a Predator on MSNBC that I sort of watched a couple of times, and I suddenly think maybe I’m on the show and I’m like this week’s contestant. I always thought they had like a script and the sleazoids they trick online into trying to have sex with underage girls were all actors ’cause some of them were really old, and this one guy was even a rabbi and another was an ex-cop and a couple of them had teenage daughters of their own. I thought it was like a situation comedy reality TV series only not funny. I never knew it was reality. So I’m getting ready for a TV cameraman and another guy with a mike on a boom to come out of the laundry room like they do on the show, when the old dude says he’s Brandi’s father. I go, Whoa! I thought this was Brandi’s mother’s house and shit, and he says it is and he thanks God that Brandi called him to come over when she learned I was coming here to the house tonight.

P: Wait a minute. Brandi called him? And gave him the printout of your chats and e-mails?

K: Yeah. Which is pretty fucked up, if you ask me. Totally fucked up. Anyhow, the guy asks me, How old are you? I tell him twenty-one, and he asks was I in the army like I said to his daughter Brandi, which is how I’m thinking of her now instead of brandi18, and I go, Yeah but I’m not now. And you were in Afghanistan? he says. And I go, No. I was only like talking that way, the way you do when you’re online. He looks really happy to be disgusted. He wants to know what else I’ve got in my backpack besides the Bud Light and can he have a look? I just shrug why not. Whatever happens happens, I’m thinking. So he goes into my pack and pulls out the condoms and holds the package up. Condoms? he asks. Yeah. Were you planning to use these with a fourteen-year-old girl? he wants to know. Actually, he already knows. He just wants me to confess it. Not really, I say. I wasn’t planning on anything. This is true, because I was mostly hoping, not planning. He goes back into my pack and pulls out the DVD and reads the title out loud, Willow’s Day Off, and notes that it’s quadruple-x-rated. Not exactly appropriate for a fourteen-year-old girl to be watching with a twenty-one-year-old man, is it? he says. I shrug again and say it was all I had, which is pretty lame, I know, but also happens to be true. He pulls out the tube of K-Y jelly and says what’s this? I tell him it’s a lubricant. That really gets him off into happy deep disgust. A loo-bricant! he says. He repeats it a couple more times with his voice going lower each time like any minute he’s going to come just from saying loo-bricant! Finally his eyes clear again and he asks if I’m married, and I say no, and he wants to know where I live, and I tell him North Calusa. Long ways out here, he says. Did I drive? No, I took the bus. So it took some effort and planning to get out here to meet up with a fourteen-year-old girl, he says. Yeah, it did. Pretty late to come calling on a fourteen-year-old girl, wouldn’t you say? It’s not a school night, I point out, meaning to joke but he doesn’t get it. It’s like he’s not just her father, he’s also a cop or he thinks he’s a cop because that’s how he’s treating me. It’s like all of America has turned into a cop whose main job is to protect their fourteen-year-old virgins from creeps like me. He asks me who I live with, and I had to say I live with my mother, which let him ask me what would my mother think if she knew I was arranging to meet a fourteen-year-old girl alone late at night apparently for sex and brought beer and pornography and condoms and a loo-bricant with me.

P: How’d you answer that one?

K: I told the truth. I said my mother’d probably think it was kind of weird. But not weird the way he thought I meant. Weird because my mother hasn’t a clue about who I really am, especially when it comes to my sex life, which wasn’t really a sex life anyhow until that night. And even that was only happening in my head so I might as well have been online the whole time or watching porn and jacking off, except that now my sex life such as it was had turned out to be illegal. I asked Brandi’s father if he was going to arrest me. He said no, he had no power to arrest me. I was free to leave, he said. I stood up and put Willow’s Day Off and the condoms and lubricant back in my pack with the beer. Then I looked at Brandi’s father and said, Listen, Mr. Dillinger, this was a big mistake, coming out here tonight. I’m really sorry. It was stupid, and I promise I’ll never do it again. I’m really glad that you were here to catch me and nothing happened. Then I picked up my backpack and headed for the door.

P: And that was it?

K: No. I get outside and I’m really feeling like cheese but also relieved to be away from Brandi and her father. Only I’m not, okay? Because suddenly there’s lights all over the yard, and five Calusa cops rush me from both sides and do like a SWAT team takedown and shove my face into the pavement front walk and yank my hands behind my back and throw cuffs on me, all the time screaming, Get down get down get down! Like I had any choice. This one cop takes out a little book then and reads me my rights and says I’m under arrest for soliciting sex with a minor. I go, Yeah yeah yeah, whatever, and they toss me into the back of a cruiser and take me to the West Calusa Gardens cop station where they interrogate me and book me and lock me in jail. And that’s the end of my big night with brandi18. I never saw her again. Not even at my trial where her father testified about everything I told him and the DA read the whole transcript of my chats and e-mails with brandi18 out loud, leaving out of course the parts she wrote that got me to write the other parts. Actually I never saw her at all. Unless you count through the kitchen window when she was putting out the Oreos and pouring lemonade. But that wasn’t really brandi18 anyhow. Was it? That was Brandi, Mr. Dillinger’s daughter.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE TEENAGE CLERK AT PAWS ’N’ CLAWS refuses to sell the Kid and the Professor a tube of selamectin for Annie’s scabies infestation. Tall and boney, wearing heavy-rimmed eyeglasses, mud-colored hair in a Prince Valiant cut, he’s got skin problems of his own. You’re gonna need a vet’s prescription for that,the clerk declares.

They’re standing in front of a wall of medications for dogs and cats. Pet owners stroll up and down the aisles of the huge warehouse outlet with their dogs in tow, cats in cushy carriers, birds, turtles, miscellaneous reptiles, and small ratlike mammals in cages, brought by their owners to the box store like children by their parents to a candy store. The Kid and the Professor have Annie and Einstein beside them, Annie at the end of a piece of clothesline rope, Einstein in his cage. Outside in the parking lot when he saw everyone else doing it, the Kid insisted on bringing them into the store. It’s like they just got outa the can, man. Let them enjoy their newfound freedom. You don’t know how they feel, maybe, but I can relate, man.

Einstein’s gone mute and has a nasty habit of plucking out his own breast feathers. The Professor claims that all the parrot needs is a larger cage and regular interaction with humans. He’ll soon open up. African grays are like chimpanzees, highly social creatures that become depressed and self-mutilating when not sufficiently stimulated, the Professor explains as they return to the van lugging Einstein’s new cage, which is nearly as large as the Kid’s tent, and bags of dog food and parrot food. The Kid didn’t have a clue as to the cause of Annie’s crusted sores and bald patches, but back at the Causeway the Professor had diagnosed it immediately by stroking the poor animal behind one ear, invoking an involuntary scratching motion of the hind leg on that side. Then the other ear, and her other hind leg automatically tried to scratch her loose belly.

The Pedal-Pinna reflex, he pronounced.

How’d you know that?

It’s the most common disease afflicting dogs in the Third World. For all practical purposes, Annie is a Third World dog.

Still, the Kid is having second thoughts about Einstein and Annie. He’s wondering if he should have liberated them from Benbow’s in the first place. He says, I got a dog with skin cancer and a parrot who needs to fucking party. How’m I gonna take care of them when I can’t even barely take care of myself?

The Professor flips open the rear door of the van, and together they lift the cage, the bags of food, the dog, and the parrot in his new cage and place them carefully inside the vehicle. The Professor wipes his brow with a handkerchief and says, Believe me, you’ll take better care of yourself if you have to take care of Annie and Einstein. I’ve studied the relationship between homeless people and their companion animals. Trust me.

I can’t afford shit like cages and humungous bags of food. And vets and medicine for scabies. It’s only ’cause you’re shelling out for it that we got it now. But what about two or three weeks from now? You still gonna be covering costs? I don’t think so, man.

Two or three weeks from now you’ll be able to pay for it yourself. You’re not going to let them starve or die for lack of medicine or attention.

So your theory says.

Right. Now get in. We’re going to visit the veterinarian.

ALL’S WELL UNDER THE CAUSEWAY. NIGHT IS coming on. Cook fires are burning, tents pitched, shanties up and tightened against the damp breeze off the Bay. A pair of men fish for their supper with bamboo poles; another pair puts the finishing touches on the latrine. Rabbit hobbles over to the Kid’s tent and holds on to Annie’s rope while the Kid applies salve to the dog’s scabs and raw running sores. The two men talk in low voices to the dog, comforting her. Inside his cage on the ground nearby, Einstein watches and listens. The Professor silently stands over the Kid and Rabbit. Suddenly Einstein speaks. The words are the Kid’s, but the voice is Trinidad Bob’s: Good dog. Good dog. Good dog. This’ll hurt but it’ll make you feel better soon. Good dog. Good dog.

The Kid smiles and looks up at the Professor who smiles back, all teeth and red lips and facial hair. He tells the Kid he’ll check in on him tomorrow and turns and leaves. The Kid and Rabbit go back to applying salve to Annie’s sores. Good dog. Good dog. Good dog.

THE PROFESSOR STANDS BEFORE THE OPEN refrigerator like a conductor at the podium in front of his orchestra ready to begin the evening’s opening performance. Gloria enters the kitchen behind him and leans against the door jamb with her arms folded across her chest. Except for the refrigerator light, the room is dark. The Professor likes eating in the near dark. The pale glow from the refrigerator reflects off Gloria’s spectacles, a pair of orange disks.

She says in a low, flattened voice that she received two disturbing pieces of information today.

The Professor seems not to have heard her. He reaches with one hand for a jug of sweetened iced tea and with the other for a plastic container of macaroni and cheese and carries them to the table. He returns to the refrigerator for a meat loaf wrapped in aluminum foil and places it on the table. Methodically he carves off half the meat loaf and slides it onto a dinner plate and ladles the macaroni and cheese onto the plate, covers both with plastic wrap and puts the plate into the microwave and sets it for seven minutes’ cooking time. Gloria remains silent throughout. The Professor fills a tall glass with iced tea, takes a sip, turns to his wife and says, Really? “Two disturbing pieces of information”?

Yes. From a phone call this morning. And from a visitor this afternoon.

The Professor’s alarm system has been triggered: his wife sounds not angry or hurt, as usual, but confused. Really? A phone call and a visitor?

A phone call from a man claiming to be your father. And a visitor claiming to be a detective in the Calusa police department.

Really?

Yes. He showed me his badge and ID.

And what did you tell the man claiming to be my father?

At first I thought he was some kind of con artist. I told him what you have always told me. That your father and mother were killed years ago in a car crash in Alabama.

But he convinced you otherwise. Thus your disturbance.

Yes.

May I ask you how he convinced you that he was my father?

He didn’t want anything from me or you. Money or credit card numbers. And he knew things.

Such as?

About us. Me. And the twins. Their names. And your childhood and college years. Things he didn’t need to lie about.

And I do?

I didn’t think so. Until the detective came to say that he wanted to speak with you. There were two of them. Your father, the man who said he was your father, he said the same thing on the phone. About the detectives. They asked him questions about you.

Did the men claiming to be detectives say what it was they wished to discuss with me?

No. They wouldn’t tell me anything.

What sort of questions did they ask the man claiming to be my father?

He didn’t say.

They are both silent for a moment. The microwave timer dings, and the Professor removes the plate of food and carries it to the table and sits down before it. He removes the plastic wrap carefully and picks up a fork and begins to eat rapidly, voluminously, one heaping forkful after another, washed down with great gulps of iced tea, as if he is alone in the room eating in the near dark.

Who are you? She has a stricken look on her face and stands stock-still, as if she dare not move or the room and all it contains will fly apart and suddenly reveal itself to have been only a stage set, replaced by another stage set that is about to be replaced by a third and a fourth and so on. Really, who are you? Who am I married to? Who is the father of my children?

I am entirely whom I appear to be. Glory-Glory-Hallelujah.

But your father, your parents…

Yes, I said they were dead. And it’s as if they are dead. As if they were killed in a car accident years ago. As if I were a Jew and cut off my hair and sat shiva seven days for them. The Professor lowers his head and resumes eating.

I don’t understand. He said, your father said, the police were asking him questions about you. And then they were here, a pair of them. Detectives. She lays a business card next to his plate and returns to the doorway. They left that card and said for you to call them or come to police headquarters downtown.

Did they say what it was about?

She shakes her head no.

It’s probably nothing. One of my students in a spot of trouble. He gets up from the table and refills his plate and pops it into the microwave and waits, watching the timer count down to zero.

But your parents, that’s not nothing. They’re alive?

No, it’s not nothing. And yes, they are alive. I have been profoundly, painfully alienated from them for many years. Painful for them, perhaps. Not so painful for me. Since long before we met, Gloria. Glory. Hallaloo…

But why would the police be questioning them about you, if it were only a student in a spot of trouble? Like you said.

I have no idea. The timer rings, and he carries his overloaded plate back to the table and sits down. With his yard-wide back to his wife, the Professor resumes eating.

I have never asked you about your past. Even when you made me tell you everything about mine, all the way back to childhood. Even when you made me tell you about my sexual experiences.

Thank you, Gloria. It’s one of the reasons we are still married.

Yes, I know. But now it’s different. Because of the children, the twins. I need to know about your past, so that I can protect our children if necessary.

From me?

From your past. If necessary.

Well, it’s not necessary.

Are you going to tell me about your mother and father? And why you lied to me about them? My God, if you’d lie about that, what wouldn’t you lie about? And if you’d lie to me, who wouldn’t you lie to?

He turns in his seat and looks at her in the gloom, still leaning against the doorframe, in her pink cotton bathrobe and pale gray nightgown, her arms crossed over her breasts. He imagines what he is to her at this moment: a big fat liar. How ridiculous he must look. How pathetic. The smartest man in Calusa, eh? A genius. One in a million when it comes to IQ, the puzzle-meister, the professor with the photographic memory who seems to have read and remembered everything ever printed in a half-dozen different languages. But here, now, at table in his kitchen seated in the dark before his second heap of food, he is just a big fat liar. A liar caught out somehow by his own parents, whom he long ago disowned, prompted by some local police detective’s curious visit to his parents in another state two hundred miles north of here. A visit occasioned by what? Gloria is right, it can’t be merely because some student got into a spot of trouble and invoked his professor’s name as guarantor or alibi or character reference. And it can’t be because he himself has broken the law. He’s been a model citizen for years.

He knows where and how his parents live now, just as they know where and how he lives and that he is married to a woman and that there are two seven-year-old grandchildren his mother and father have never met and have not seen even in photographs. He knows they have tracked him on the Internet in recent years, ever since he ended up in Calusa. His father even managed to uncover his university e-mail address and for a few years every six months or so has sent him a brief report on their lives and politely asked for a return e-mail, photographs, confirmation of receipt — anything. No explanations for his long silence necessary. No apology requested. Just write back, please. All the old man — for he is old now, in his late eighties — and his wife want is their son’s acknowledgment of their existence. We’re happy here at Dove Run, as happy as can be expected, the old man types into his computer. Except that we do not hear from you, son. Your mother and I do not understand what we have done to deserve this. Please tell us so that we can say we are sorry and can again be your parents as we once were. Love, Dad.

The Professor knows from his father’s e-mails that his mother is ill, suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, and that his father has become her caretaker. The two of them have sold their house in Clinton and moved into an assisted-living compound outside Tuscaloosa. They have a small apartment and there is an attached full-time nursing unit where the Professor’s mother can live when his father can no longer care for her by himself. The Professor, when he read that bit of news six months ago, felt a small ripple of relief wash over him. Soon she will forget she has a son, if she hasn’t forgotten already. As her past gets erased so in a sense does his. That’s the Professor’s ideal lived life — one with no witnesses, or as few as possible.

From the evidence, his father’s memory of the Professor’s childhood and youth, up to the point when he left Kenyon College and went off to graduate school at Yale, is intact. And the old man knows as much of his son’s life since then as he can learn from the Internet: his publications, articles about him in the Calusa newspaper, mentions of his name in certain sociology blogs, his e-mail address, and his home telephone number; he knows his son’s academic rank and place of employment; he knows that he is married to the former Gloria Bennett, who is employed as a librarian, and that there are two children by that marriage, fraternal twins, a boy and a girl.

Of the years between his son’s departure for Yale and his arrival thirty years later in Calusa the old man knows nothing. His letters went unanswered and then after a year were returned stamped ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN. Phone numbers in his son’s name were not listed anywhere in America. Eventually the Professor’s father gave up trying to contact his son, and gradually the Professor’s mother began to forget that she had a son and needed to be reminded of his name, and she would brighten then and ask where was he. When will he be here? Then, early in the century, along came the Internet, and the Professor’s father was able to renew his search with a more thorough and efficient tool at his disposal than he’d had in the early years. He finally located his son and learned about his present life. Not all of it, of course, but enough to excite his desire to know more and a powerful fantasy of presenting his son and his wife Gloria and their two children to his son’s mother before she forgot altogether that he had ever existed.

But now it looks to the old man as if it’s too late. In his most recent, unanswered e-mail to his son he wrote: Your mother’s memory of all but her own childhood is pretty nearly gone. She recognizes me, but she confuses me with her father. It’s very sad, he added, hoping to make his son sad enough to want to see his mother again. But he has never seen his son sad, even as a child, so it was probably useless to try arousing in him an emotion that he appeared incapable of feeling. Still, he had to try. But when the Professor read his father’s e-mail he felt relieved, not sad. Then he hit delete.

He clears his throat. So now, after all these years, now you decide you need to know my past. We agreed, didn’t we, from the beginning that there was much about my life before we met that I could not reveal. Not to you, not to anyone. There were oaths I had taken and pledges I had signed. And you understood and accepted that. It was to protect you. You and the children.

Yes, I understood. I did. I knew enough about you and your past, the public part anyhow, to accept not knowing more. But your parents? Why would you say your parents were dead, when they weren’t? Why would you lie about a thing like that?

That, dear Glory, is one of those things I cannot reveal to you. So that when the police or anyone else comes ’round asking questions of you or of my parents, none of you has to lie in order to protect me. You’re free to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you Jesus. You don’t know enough about me to feel obliged to lie. I withhold information so that you don’t have to, m’dear.

He has slipped into his genteel southern accent, and she knows what that means: he’s told her all of the truth that he’s going to. She reminds him that she promised the police detective that she would deliver his message to her husband. Will you be speaking with the police tomorrow?

Tomorrow is Sunday. The Sabbath. The Lord’s Day. I’ll call him early Monday.

All right. Good night, then.

Gloria, I won’t be going to church with you and the twins tomorrow.

You won’t?

No.

Why not?

I b’lieve I should have me a little private discussion with my daddy.

Your “daddy”? That’s a word I never thought I’d hear from you.

Yes. Now that he exists, I can use it.

Can’t you speak to him by telephone? It’s a day’s drive, practically.

I said “private discussion.” I suspect his telephone ain’t private.

She nods, turns away, disappears into the darkness. The Professor returns to his meal. For the first time he hears the heavy drumming of rain on the roof and the slosh of gutters overflowing. It has been raining steadily, he realizes, for at least the last half hour. If it’s more than a late-summer shower, it’ll slow his drive north to Alabama. He gobbles the last of the meat loaf and macaroni and cheese and empties his glass of iced tea and places the dishes into the dishwasher. The rain, he notices from the sound, is wind driven. He decides he’d better leave now.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THREE TIMES THE PROFESSOR STOPS ON his journey west and north to Alabama, twice for gas but otherwise for food, truck-stop food — stew and biscuits and pie and ice cream — and fast food — Big Macs and fries and more pies. He does this without deciding to do it, as if his hunger is a constant ongoing need that can never be satisfied. He has no reason to check in on it and ask whether he is actually hungry again. It’s always there, like his breath. It is who he is and has been for as long as he can remember, a never-ending appetite.

The only thing that obliges him to push his plate away and pay the cashier and leave is the pressure of time: he’s obliged to keep driving. After all these years he has to speak with his father. Before he faces the Calusa police detective, or the man claiming to be a Calusa police detective, he has to learn what the man asked his father and what the old man answered. He has to know if the walls that separate the compartments that contain his past have started to erode and collapse. He cannot allow that to happen, not now, after so many years of constructing and reinforcing those walls, making the chambers they contain impenetrable even to the Professor himself. He’s not just trying to preserve and maintain the life he’s built for himself in the last decade here in Calusa; he’s also trying to hold on to the inner integrity and coherence of each box in the set of boxes that precedes his life in Calusa. The story of his life from Kenyon College on is like a long row of rented storage compartments in a warehouse outside a city that he never wants to visit again. As soon as he’s swung shut the door and snapped the lock, he deliberately misplaces the key. A year or two passes, and he departs from Kathmandu or Lima or one of a half-dozen other cities, even a few American cities, small towns, rural communes, and as if renting a new storage unit in the warehouse, he packs up all the details of the year or two of his life just ended and deposits them in the new compartment, clicks the lock shut and moves on, not forgetting to lose the key — tossing it from the window of the taxi on the drive to the airport, dropping it through a sewer grate on his way to catch the train, flipping it into a Dumpster as he approaches the security check at the shipyard.

North of Calusa traffic on the Interstate is light. Rain beats against the flat front of the van. By the time he veers west and passes above the vast Panzacola Swamp on the old Panzacola Highway connecting the Atlantic to the Gulf, the night has worn on, and the only vehicles now are trucks with deliveries crossing from the cities on one coast to the cities on the other and the occasional beat-up pickup driven by a member of one of the remnant Indian tribes still making a life for themselves in the roadside camps and small ramshackle settlements along the northern edge of the swamp.

The lights of Calusa and its suburbs have long since faded and gone dark behind him. Soon out ahead the lights of the cities along the Gulf Coast will begin to tint the western sky. There are no stars. No moon. It’s raining hard, slanted against the van by the wind out of the west. But the Professor barely notices. Since leaving the house, he’s not once thought of the Kid or of his wife and children, not even of his father or the reason for this sudden journey. He’s not thinking of anything or anyone in a focused way. For perhaps the first time in his life the Professor is experiencing panic. The Professor never panics. He admires that fact. But he’s panicking now, and knowing it frightens him and makes it worse. He’s sweating slick sheets and loosens his necktie and collar and turns on the air conditioner.

At the Gulf Coast where the Panzacola Swamp merges with the sea, the old Panzacola Highway connects to the north-running Gulf Turnpike. The wind-blown rain slaps the van on its flat left side now, and he has to wrestle with the wheel to keep the vehicle in its lane. There are suburbs and cities clustered alongside the turnpike here, cloverleaves, overpasses, and exits to attend to and an enormous plaza where he refills with gas and eats another meal, pushes his way through the rain back to the parked van and resumes his drive on up the coast of the peninsula.

Windshield wipers flop rapidly back and forth, but the rain is too heavy for them to wipe away, and his view ahead is blurred. Twice he narrowly misses vehicles moving slowly in front of of him, and several times like a drunk man he loses sight of the white line that divides the lanes and has to slow down almost to a stop before he finds it again. His pulse is racing, and it occurs to him to play some music. Yes, for God’s sake, play some music. Music will calm him, he thinks, and let him focus and organize his mind, his most powerful tool, his weapon against the world.

For the last few hours, since Gloria revealed that she had spoken with his father and that the police had visited the old man at the home in Alabama and had come to his own door in Calusa asking to speak with him, since that moment the Professor has not been himself. He’s been out of his mind, and his mind, he believes, is his true self. He needs to get back inside it, and music will help.

He punches up one of the hundreds of compilations of jazz standards he’s burned onto CDs and keeps in a black plastic CD file box inside the armrest next to the driver’s seat, and soon his mind comes back to him: Tommy Flanagan’s “I Fall in Love Too Easily” and Art Farmer and Bill Evans on “The Touch of Your Lips” and Roy Hargrove’s “The Nearness of You.” By the time he hears the opening chords of Bud Powell’s “My Heart Stood Still” he’s found his true self again and is located there: calm, logical, detached. In control. And his body is where he wants it — on its own again.

His panic has passed. The music, as it has always done, helps to separate his mind from his body. For most people it’s the reverse. Especially for people who, like the Professor, listen to classic American jazz. Jazz is one of the few subjects he never explains to other people. He’s perfectly willing to hold forth on the subject of European classical music from the Baroque to Post-Modern serialism or disco or funk or raga or reggae. But jazz is like a secret drug to him. It alone has the power to alter his brain waves and neurotransmitters such that he feels autonomous, immunized against the contamination of his body, which otherwise is nearly impossible to make go away.

The wind is shifting gradually around to the north and the rain has intensified. It’s nearly dawn when he crosses the state line into Alabama, and finally it enters his mind that a hurricane has come in off the Gulf and he has been driving straight through it for the last several hours. He remembers a buzz off the CNN news loop on the TV monitors at the turnpike plaza earlier and glimpsing a headline in the morning paper that he neglected to pick up when he left home yesterday to meet the Kid at the Causeway. Hurricane George they’re calling it. A medium-size hurricane, it’s expected to pass over the northern half of the state and the southern half of Alabama and Georgia and spin out to the Atlantic where it will weaken and break up. No big deal. But a hurricane nonetheless, high winds and torrential, swirling rain, dangerous to drive through in a slab-sided van or any vehicle lighter than a sixteen-wheeler, especially up the Gulf Coast and into Alabama like this.

Palm trees sway like plumes and palmettos thrash the ground. Now and then his headlights or the lights of oncoming vehicles illuminate overflowing ditches and canals alongside the highway. Thick skeins of water erupt in fantails as the van plows through them.

He’s driving much slower now, losing time. He planned on arriving at the home — Dove Run: An Assisted-Living and Life-Care Facility, it’s called — early in the day, spending an hour or at most two with his parents, and then departing for Calusa well before noon. He planned on getting home by early evening, in time to prepare his class for Monday. He briefly considers turning back now, forgoing an in-person interrogation of his father and risking a call from a pay phone at one of the rest-stop restaurants. It would be foolish to call from his cell phone. But it’s too great a risk even from a pay phone — the old man’s phone is as surely tapped as his own. Besides, the hurricane is on top of him now, and he’ll no more escape it by turning south toward home than by plunging on ahead.

He could, of course, pull off the highway and park at a truck stop and wait for the hurricane to pass to the east. That would be the sensible thing to do. It’s apparently what the all-night truckers, the only other drivers still moving, are doing now, he observes, as a pair of sixteen-wheel behemoths pulls slowly off the highway into a parking lot illuminated by arc lamps atop tall aluminum poles. The rain drifts in shuddering sheets through the cones of pale light. He should have checked the weather report, he thinks. But no, it wouldn’t have made any difference. He’d still have left the house in the night and driven up here for the information he believes he needs in order to protect himself from whomever it was that came calling first on his father and then showed up at his door in Calusa claiming to be a detective in the Calusa Police Department. He knows it’s got nothing to do with his present life, or they wouldn’t have contacted his father. It’s his past that has come calling — but what part of his past? Which chapter? Which episode or linked series of episodes?

Over on his right the dark eastern sky has started bleeding to gray. Near the horizon the boiling clouds are dark green. He can make out flooded citrus groves, crushed gravel side roads, a soaked wind-flattened landscape with wildly scattered palm and palmetto fronds and here and there abandoned cars and pickups, mobile homes with water to their thresholds looking like houseboats set adrift, tricycles and brightly colored plastic yard toys half-drowned. And no people. Everyone is huddled inside waiting for George to pass over and on to wherever hurricanes go when they’re no longer here — onto the TV screen, the radio report, the Internet, someone else’s reality and thus no longer real at all.

The wind has ceased to buffet the sides of the Professor’s van, and he no longer struggles to hold it to the road, and the rain has let up. He’s situated at the eye of the storm, he thinks, the center of a two-hundred-mile atmospheric coil of low pressure twirling its way across the Caribbean and the Gulf like a colossal dervish. Right here at the still center is the place to stay, if only he can manage it — no wind, no rain, no turbulence or uncertainty. The morning sky is a smooth-sided pale green bowl, the pressure so low it feels like a huge vacuum pump has siphoned the air away. The music plays on — Bud Powell’s arpeggios and stomps — and the Professor feels calm and lucid and safe: almost invisible. The eye of the hurricane: it’s a metaphor for the mental and emotional space where he’s lived most of his life. He thinks this and smiles inwardly. Never quite thought of it that way. Nice, the way the world that surrounds one, the very weather of one’s existence, provides a language for addressing the world inside.

Delighted, he notices that the eastward direction of the storm has shifted ten degrees to the north, and soon after, as he drives on, fifteen degrees, so that he’s able to stay inside the eye, its still center, moving northeast with it into Alabama as if personally escorted by Hurricane George straight to Dove Run: An Assisted-Living Facility and for the first time in over forty years the physical presence of his father and mother.

THEIR HOME IS A TWO-STORY REDBRICK COLLECTION of small apartments, administrative offices and meeting rooms, recreation rooms, dining areas, and emergency medical facilities, with a wing that functions as a nursing home for the assisted-living residents who need more care than mere assistance provides. It resembles a large Holiday Inn, temporary quarters for travelers who will never return home, except to a funeral home or, for the believing Christians, the home prepared for them by their Lord and Savior.

The Professor knows what he should be feeling as he enters the building. He knows what a man his age meeting his parents for the first time after nearly a lifetime of silent, willed absence ought to be feeling, regardless of the reasons or excuses for his absence. He should be feeling dread, anxiety, fearful curiosity, shame, all mingled with a thickened low-key joy: a muddle of intense, conflicted emotions. And yet he feels none of it. Only a mild irritation, as if while reading a difficult text he’s been interrupted by a small household mechanical breakdown that must be attended to before he can continue reading where he was obliged to leave off. For most of his life it’s been a strength, to know what other people, normal people, feel in any given situation, without possessing those feelings himself. It began in his childhood as a consciously willed means of protecting himself against ridicule, on the one hand, and on the other as a response to his parents’ utter absorption in each other to the exclusion of everyone else, even their precocious, morbidly obese, increasingly eccentric and alienated son.

As a couple, the Professor’s parents, Jason and Cynthia, loved the couple itself and the idea of the couple as much as they loved themselves. They felt incomplete when apart and pined for the presence of the other, as if mourning the other. And when they were together they each became the happy center of the other’s universe, a solar system with twin suns at the center orbited by a single lonely planet spinning in darkness, except for the light cast by his parents as they danced on the porch to the music of those old 1940s jazz standards, while he sat on the wooden glider and pushed himself back and forth in slow time to the music and watched from an increasingly cold distance.

He knew what they felt for each other, and because it was for them essentially self-love, he could not share in it. Their feelings not only excluded him, they rejected him. He felt attacked by his parents’ strange mutual narcissism, causing him from an early age to cultivate his differences from them. Another child of such a pair might have tried to enter their charmed circle by emulating the qualities they seemed to admire in one another — their physical beauty, for both Jason and Cynthia were unusually handsome and healthy individuals; or their pragmatic, mechanical turns of mind, socially useful kinds of intelligence that are much admired in communities like theirs; or their natural ease, the ease of the oblivious, among people wholly unlike them, their friends and neighbors in Clinton, Alabama, their colleagues at work, U. S. Steel in Jason’s case, the Clinton Public Library in Cynthia’s, and the people they employed, everyone from the housekeeper and yardman to the inmates Jason hired from the state prison system to work for little or no pay digging the coal out of the Alabama hills. Although it was a variant of a folie à deux, his parents’ marriage was the kind that people with little or no knowledge of its implications and true nature envied. A pretty couple, a smart couple, a socially useful and reassuringly gregarious couple; and because they were from distinguished northern families and well educated and were probably left-leaning Democrats who made no attempts to impose their political views on anyone else, they were a slightly exotic couple as well. The Professor had none of this moderately attractive couple’s qualities. None.

Sheets of plywood cover the large windows of the lobby. The glass doors and remaining smaller windows facing the deserted street have been X’d with tape. The Professor parks his van in the lot adjacent to the sprawling compound and walks slowly up the path to the main entrance. He is sweating and breathing with difficulty, as much from the very low atmospheric pressure as from the humidity and heat.

The receptionist, a stout white-haired lady in a bright red nylon tracksuit, makes him sign the visitors’ register. Recognizing his last name, his parents’ last name, she smiles with a fake slick and says, First time you all been here to visit your momma and daddy, am I correct to say?

He nods yes. She tells him the number of their apartment and gives him a floor plan of the building, which is laid out like a medieval monastery. He feels nothing, or no more than if he were making a delivery for the dry cleaner. The receptionist appears to know this and waves him on dismissively in the direction of the carpeted corridor that leads to the independent-living wing. The walls and carpeting are the color of oatmeal. You’ll find ’em waitin’ in unit 119, she says and picks up the house phone to notify his father that he has a visitor, thinking, A very odd visitor, more like a circus freak than the son of those nice-lookin’ folks in 119.

At the door, the Professor raises his open hand, about to make a fist and knock, and he looks at it — it’s the hand he had as a child, the same fingernails, knuckles, thin blue veins, the same small purse of flesh between thumb and forefinger — and when he turns it over he recognizes the palm, the same creases, lines, and whorls. For a moment he studies the hand, then puts it out in front of him and fans out the fingers and waggles the hand slowly back and forth, as if from the window of a departing train.

A sudden wave of fear surges over him, and he wants to turn around and flee from the eye of the hurricane back into the storm’s full fury. He’s panicking again, afraid to go forward, unable to retreat. And no music to calm him, nothing to bleach out his wild emotions and make his mind translucent and hard and rational as a ladder. His eighty-nine-year-old father and his mother with her perforated memory are on the other side of the door waiting for him. They’re waiting to present him with himself, as if to introduce him to his fratricidal twin.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE PROFESSOR DROPS HIS PALE HAND AND turns away from the door of unit 119 and pumping his heavy arms walks rapidly down the long corridor of numbered doors to the lobby. He strides past the surprised receptionist who calls out, Your folks are home! They expectin’ you, mistah! Then shakes her head in disgust as, ignoring her, he hurries past.

Don’t that beat all? she wonders. First he comes finally to check on his poor momma and his daddy to make sure the hurricane ain’t gonna get them, after never once showing his face before this, and then he acts like they ain’t worth the trouble. You got to wonder what they done to deserve that from their own flesh and blood, she thinks. But she’s seen hundreds, maybe thousands, of grown men and women who don’t seem to know they’re somebody’s flesh and blood, sons and daughters who put their mommas and daddies into Dove Run and say good-bye and are never seen walking through that door again. It’s not like it was in the old days when she was a girl and Grandma died in the upstairs back bedroom. Back then parents and grandparents grew old and died before your very eyes, and it was as if a part of you yourself was growing old and dying alongside them. You didn’t have these Dove Runs where you could park and hide old people, and back then, if you wanted to forget that you too would someday grow old and die, which is natural to want, you couldn’t. She thinks about her own grown son and daughter and their children, and she wonders if she’s flesh and blood to them — kin — and decides, sadly, that the answer is no. They’re just like the man who blew past her a moment ago, and when the time comes they’ll make her live in Dove Run or someplace like it, while they go on living in a world in which no one, no one visible, grows old and dies before their very eyes. She sighs. She’s almost sixty years old, and in her lifetime the world has changed, and human beings have changed too.

How can that be? She always believed that human nature was permanent, unchangeable, that human beings were the same always and everywhere, for better or worse, and when conditions changed for the better, as they sometimes did, like for black people and for women, it was because people, including white people and men, were essentially good and their better nature was letting them recognize their kinship with black people and women. Such were the receptionist’s thoughts as the Professor in flight from his intended meeting with his parents bustled past her desk, pushed through the door, and rushed across the parking lot to his van.