Lost Memory of Skin

Lost Memory of Skin was a timely read, because right in this morning's headlines is: Florida Man Gets 2.5 Years for Having Sex on the Beach. Despite protesting that there was no actual sex going on beneath their blanket, this man will be going to jail for two and a half years, his girlfriend received time served, and the two of them will be on the National Sex Offender Registry for the rest of their lives. And the thing about being put on the registry – as demonstrated in the book – is that there is no distinction made between violent rapists, high school sweethearts who have one partner over and one under 18, the guy who is caught peeing in the bushes, or those who create and those who collect child pornography: everyone on the registry is equally a sex offender under the law, and society is free to use this information to discriminate against the offenders regarding housing, employment, child custody, etc. Author Russell Banks performs a tidy trick in this book: without expecting the reader to completely empathise with or forgive the sex offenders, he simply wants you to consider what is fair treatment after they've served their time.

The book takes place in the fictional city of Calusa in an unnamed state (recognisably Miami-ish), and in this city (as in many in real life), sex offenders, while on parole, mustn't live within 2500 feet of a school, daycare centre, park, playground – basically anywhere children might be found – and as the overlapping no-go zones cover most of the county, there are only three places where they might legally reside: at the airport; in the swamp; or under a causeway that links the city to some man-made islands. The description of the shanty-town that exists under this bridge sounds even worse than a Mumbai slum, but one just like it is actually found in Miami. 

In this community, we meet the Kid – a twenty-two-year-old sex offender, recently released from prison, who will need to live apart from society (while remaining in the county, confirmed by ankle GPS) for the next ten years. Although his tent home is at risk from police raids, vigilante violence, and the weather – this is Florida – he has nowhere else to go, and in the beginning, is determined to make the best of it. Eventually we learn his backstory, and although it might go some ways towards explaining why he did what he did, it isn't used to excuse his actions.

He was no more or less than what he seemed to be – a fatherless white kid who graduated high school without ever passing a single test or turning in a single paper, a kid who could barely read and write or do math beyond the simplest arithmetic, who was hooked for years and maybe still was hooked on porn and jacking off and never had a girlfriend or a best friend and belonged to no one's posse – but that was okay to the Kid back then.

Soon enough, we meet the Professor – a respected academic who thinks that he might have something to offer the homeless sex offender community – and he's a monster of a different sort:

A huge hairy figure sweating inside the ten yards of brown cloth it takes to cover him with a suit, a man submerged in a body as large as a manatee's, graceless, slow moving, arms and thighs rubbing themselves raw, spine and knee and ankle joints nearly to the breaking point by the weight they must support, enlarged heart thumping rapidly from the effort of shoving blood and oxygen through all that flesh, overheated lungs gasping from the work of getting that enormous bulk up the incline to the parking lot, liver, kidneys, glands, digestive tract, all his organs overworked for half a century to the point of exhaustion and collapse – a man with two bodies, one dancing inside his brain, a hologram made of electrons and neurons going off like a field of fireflies on a midsummer night, the other a moist quarter-ton packet of solid flesh wrapped in pale human skin.

Lost Memory of Skin has plenty of plot (used mainly to illustrate the daily lives of those under the causeway), but most of the book happens inside the heads of the two main characters. While the Professor – as a recognised genius – feels superior to everyone around him, the Kid feels superior to those ranked below him on the sex offender ladder (and especially, superior to the baby rapists). They both lie, struggle with shame over their cravings, hide their pasts, and have suffered from feelings of unreality. In a way, their childhoods were similar, with the Professor feeling isolated because of his extreme intelligence and his parents' focus on only each other, and the Kid being physically isolated by his absent father and his mother's neglect. Although their paths have been very different, it's a fascinating idea that there but for the grace of God, one of these men is respected and the other shunned. While considering how disconnected he feels from his own past, the Professor muses:

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.

And the Kid remembers the first time he felt like a real person (as he was being taken down by the police):

(T)he second he saw himself on the screen he felt like all his atoms were instantly reconfigured. It was as if he had never seen himself in a mirror before. It was like being touched by an angel. He had an actual body and it was not just his body, something he merely possessed, it was him!

The Kid wonders if being a grown up man just means pretending to be a grown up man; if acting like he has three dimensions will give him a third dimension; if he should behave as if life were a giant reality show. The Professor believes that he was safe in the past, when he pretended to be people that he was not, and is now in danger for seeming to be what he actually is. This existential crisis is key to both main characters, and in what I thought to be an odd move, a character named “the Writer” is introduced to settle these questions, advising that people are whoever they say they are, and shouldn't be judged too harshly if they get creative with their biographies as that's something we all do. 

What you believe matters, however. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe anything is true simply because you can’t logically prove what’s true, you won’t do anything. You won’t be anything. You’ll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes. You might as well be dead. It’s an old philosophical problem.

The Writer is a late-appearing travel journalist, and while the Kid thinks he looks like Hemingway, it's obvious that the physical description matches that of Russell Banks as well. So, he inserted himself just to resolve the philosophical questions that he himself asks? Since I was waiting for the Writer to not be who he said he was, this whole aspect of the book was a disappointment to me.

This really is a timely subject: will the Florida man I opened with need to live out years of parole under that Miami bridge after he's released from jail? From the comments on the article, no one agrees that he should be going to jail in the first place, so how can schlepping him off to a modern-day leper colony after he's done “paying his debt” be considered justice? Would we feel differently about him if he was a baby rapist? If he was just a guy caught peeing in the bushes? Are all sex offenders monsters, or are there shades of offense? Do even the worst of the monsters deserve to live under a bridge like an animal or a fairytale troll? I applaud Banks for making me think about all this, and especially, for not forcing me to excuse the Kid – there's plenty of black in the shades of grey which made me feel unmanipulated.

And since I ended on questions, I might as well answer them. Of course no one wants a convicted pedophile living across the street from an elementary school, but with these overlapping no-go zones effectively barring these offenders from living in a permanent structure, society has no idea where they're living. In addition to the danger that presents, aren't we compassionate enough to not expect these recently released prisoners to become homeless? Anyone who has "paid their debt" ought to have a place to live, and if that means a community-provided halfway house, then that's what we should provide.

On the other hand, I don't know if serial rapists or repeat-offense pedophiles should ever be released. I'm disgusted to learn that Paul Bernardo is applying for day parole (and even though I don't believe he'll get it, I don't think he should even have "faint hope"). Some people are monsters.