The Morels

by Christopher Hacker

  The problem was Arthur didn’t seem to know how to play along. Will, kneeling, picked up a handful of gravel wet with an iridescent sheen—I think it was hand soap—then let the gravel slip through his fingers, back onto the ground. He rubbed his index finger and thumb together, brought them up to his nose. He squinted up at Arthur and said, “This substance has no basis in the natural world. Let’s bag it, have our labs check it out.” And instead of telling his son that the technicians at the labs couldn’t be trusted or that he had no idea what he was getting himself into, that this conspiracy went all the way to the top, Arthur instead began a lecture about how even artificial products were technically part of the natural world because man himself was part of the natural world. And when Will countered that this particular stuff looked like it was of alien origin, Arthur tried arguing that aliens, though they might be from Mars, were themselves still “naturally” occurring, if one included the universe as part of nature.

  As the last of the daylight faded, the votive bags shone more brightly. The gathering around the semicircle took on a campfire glow, which is to say it felt intimate—faces flickering in and out of view, everyone drawn into the radius of light—and yet at the same time it felt vast: the dark dancing shadows beyond each light’s small cone a suggestion of the great void above. I found myself standing with Penelope, both of us slurry with beer. Sri Lanka had described her as a MILF, and I guess she was, though she was our own age. She was curvy, and her playful green eyes complimented a high, singsongy voice. The arm-length tattoo was sexy, I had to admit; after she caught me staring, she held it out for inspection. “It’s a snake,” she said. The beast’s mouth was open around her wrist, its scales like chain mail. The illustration was made to look as though her limb was being devoured. “I got it so this would be less noticeable.” She touched three raised patches on the snake’s body each the size of an infant’s palm print and made of what looked like the pebbly skin of a nipple. I hazarded a feel. “The guy who did it is an artist. His ink work costs triple what anyone else on the East Coast charges. The dishwasher where I was working at the time had his back done to look like one of those old anatomy drawings, skin peeled to show the veins and muscle and all that?”

  She spoke of Arthur’s mother and father, whom she described as “totally batshit.” She said that Arthur wisely steered clear of them. “They’re Manhattan fixtures. They live downtown in a loft and keep their front door open for anybody to walk in off the street. In fact they encourage it; they welcome everybody in. That place was a madhouse back in the day. Arthur tells me stories. Once, when he was maybe thirteen he was taken by a couple—they came in right off the street and Arthur wandered back to their Lower East Side apartment with them. And here’s the kicker: his parents? Didn’t even realize that he was gone—and he was gone for two days. Two days! Arthur laughs when he tells that particular one, so I don’t think anything too bad happened to him while he was away, but there are other stories he doesn’t laugh about. And a few he refuses to even talk about. I’ve dropped by their loft a few times but didn’t mention who I was. Kind of fun being undercover!”

  “They’ve never met you?”

  “They’ve never met me, never met Will. They don’t know he’s published a book—even though the bookstore around the corner has it in the window!”

  “I’ve been meaning to read it.”

  “Oh, you should. He’s brilliant. You read the crap from those people he teaches with, and it’s so clever you want to vomit. Art’s the only serious one of the bunch, definitely the only one those students should be taking advice from.”

  “Said the wife about her husband.”

  “It’s true, though! Those others?” She cocked a thumb at a clutch murmuring behind us. “They’re just trying to keep up with their careers. They spend as much time sleeping with each other at MacDowell and schmoozing with known members of grant committees as they do thinking about what they write. Art’s different. He could care less about career, about tenure—if he continues to teach, he’ll be an adjunct for the rest of his life, and I say fine. What, you’re surprised hear me say that?”

  “You’re living in the city and raising a child. Health insurance and a steady paycheck? That doesn’t interest you?”

  “You’re thinking about some other man, some other marriage. I knew what I was getting into when I picked Art. He’s barely employable. He thinks too much, takes too much to heart. But it’s also what I love about him. I figured out long ago that if we were going to be together, I would have to do the breadwinning, so to speak—” She told me earlier that she was the head baker at Balthazar. “It’s okay, though. I’d rather him be brilliant and happy than a miserable so-and-so. Better for me and better for Will.”

  I didn’t have a bedside lamp—reading in bed was not a habit—and so I took the gooseneck from its perch on the piano’s music stand and clipped it onto the radiator’s knob by my bed. Pointing it at the wall gave me plenty of light to read by. I slid Arthur’s book from the bookcase and sat back against the pillow.

  It had been ages since I last enjoyed a book. As a child I read voraciously, above my grade level, to my mother’s great pride. She was fond of repeating an anecdote my kindergarten teacher once told her, that on my first day when asked to choose a book from the bookcase—arranged in ascending difficulty from lowest shelf on up—I grabbed a chair and nearly split my lip climbing for a selection at the very top. I suppose the bookworm is a common only-child type. But in college I learned the vocabulary of arm’s length. The book was a text. To like or dislike something was to say that it worked or didn’t work, as though we were a classroom of repairmen. The profusion of pages and deadlines made enjoying any of it as likely as savoring a hot dog at a hot-dog-eating contest. And so I lost the habit.

  Arthur’s book is about an intense high school guidance counselor, divorced, living alone, who takes an unhealthy interest in a troubled boy he’s convinced is being physically and sexually abused. He calls the boy to his small cubicle daily, trying to get him to talk, but the boy does not want to talk. The counselor tells the boy that abuse has to be dealt with, that unchecked it will eventually eat the boy alive. The boy denies that anything has happened, but only vaguely, in a way that encourages the counselor. His interest in the boy takes on the quality of an obsession. We sense a train wreck on the horizon as the counselor goes through with the purchase of a gun and begins trailing the boy to his home and lurking behind dumpsters. There will be a confrontation between the counselor and the boy’s mean drunk of a father; we see it coming from a mile off and read on to witness the collision. But the head-on never happens. What we don’t see coming is the moment the boy—having been convinced by the counselor over the course of weeks that it was imperative for abuse to be dealt with—arrives at school with his father’s shotgun and blasts a hole in his coach, who, as it turns out, has been the one molesting him, and makes a getaway with the counselor. It ends with the two on a motel room bed, kissing, boy and man, the counselor unbuttoning the boy’s pants and pulling them off.

  What’s so shocking about this ending is that although we are unsettled, we find ourselves somehow rooting for it. Arthur has achieved that sleight of hand the best authors make us fall for: we want things to work out for the narrator, whatever kind of person he turns out to be. It’s jujitsu, using the natural momentum of a reader’s desire to see his protagonist’s desires fulfilled to launch us over the line into this transgression, to want this transgression, in a sense. What’s troubling is where it departs from the stories of other reprehensible literary characters. Raskolnikov is crushed by his own guilt in spite of himself; Humbert, though unrepentant, tells his story from a prison cell. But in Arthur’s we have no such assurances of the moral balance of the universe.

  I wondered what would have motivated Arthur to invent these characters, to take them—and us—on this journey. That Arthur had written it, not only written it but also essentially performed the role of this character h
imself—the counselor is the “I” of the book—seemed bold and dangerous. Penelope was right. He was a terrific writer. I disappeared down the hole on page one and emerged 196 pages later, wide awake, disturbed by his vision.

  4

  VIKTORIA

  AT THE THEATER, DOOR WAS a special pleasure. You were given a microphone and a copy of the schedule. Before you, a zigzag of velvet ropes like at a bank—and the moment you flipped the switch to make your announcement, all the people chatting cross-legged in the massive carpeted window casements, leaning with a smoothie at the café’s marble bar, would suddenly jump to attention and jostle their way between those ropes. It was amazing, the power you wielded with that microphone and that schedule. Now seating, the six forty-five showing of Buena Vista Social Club, please have your tickets ready. Standing at the far back corner of the lobby, you observed the effects of your booming call from a puppet master’s distance. For these few hours you were the man behind the curtain, giddily yanking each hipster yuppie to attention by his string. The microphone transformed you. Through it, you became an auctioneer, an anchorman, a cabaret act bantering with his audience between sets. You began embellishing, adjusting your timing, discovering funny accents. You could be afraid of public speaking or open spaces or crowds; it didn’t matter. Hearing your own voice over a loudspeaker and seeing its effects were enough to make the shrinkingest violet pick up that mic and be transformed. It was a sound that was related to you and that you were responsible for, but it was not you. It was like a rumor, or a child. You enjoyed seeing the way it could charm people or make them laugh. I made the most of my time at the door.

  After I sent through the nine-fifteen showing of The Minus Man, pondering whether to risk stealing a ham-and-cheese wrap from the café or gorge myself on the unlimited popcorn I was allowed to have, someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was a girl, my own height, with long platinum hair and alien amber eyes. I had encountered her earlier that evening, during my stint in the ticket booth. She had ordered a ticket but was short a few dollars. As she was rummaging through her purse, embarrassed, I slid the ticket out to her. I said she could pay me later, not really thinking she would, yet here she was. She had a folded bill that she now pressed into my hand. When I unfolded it, there was a slip of paper with her name and number tucked inside—Call me, it read. I looked up just as she was disappearing into the crowd. She glanced back and gave me a little toodle-oo with her fingers. I was too stunned to respond.

  No girl, unbidden, had ever given me her number before. A complete stranger!

  Looking more closely on the bill itself, I could see she had written the same thing in the margin—Call me, with her number—but then crossed it out, presumably thinking better of it. I pictured her reasoning through this hasty gesture: What if I didn’t notice and just put the bill back in the register with the rest of the fives? That endeared her to me even more. As if her shocking beauty weren’t enough.

  Our first date was at her apartment. She had a golden retriever puppy that she kept gated in her kitchen who barked incessantly and gave the place a peculiar smell. I brought flowers and the makings of pasta and tomato sauce. She said she didn’t usually eat, that she was a picky eater, but was “superimpressed” by my cooking. It was basic stuff, but it seemed to baffle her, the food, cooking in general. She watched me sauté onions as if I were demonstrating some rare skill. It seemed I was the first person to use her new pots. The dog scrabbled at the gate and yelped the whole time, and she would periodically scream at it. It was a disconcerting scream, a note of unrestrained hysteria in it. She was a recent high school graduate—she had gone to UNIS. Absentee parents. They had paid for the place, obviously.

  She explained that she didn’t drink or do drugs. She was a member of NA. She had to spell it out for me: Narcotics Anonymous. That’s how much I knew of the world, for all my “experience” as a born-and-bred New Yorker. She wasn’t yet eighteen, I don’t think. She had been institutionalized, she explained—not without a certain amount of pride—after attempting suicide. BPD. Again, she spelled it out: borderline personality disorder. I got the impression she was telling me things about herself she’d only learned weeks before from the people in the institution.

  She told me she needed to take things slowly, that she was starting over, from scratch. She described herself as a “reformed party girl.” She liked going to clubs and doing coke and drinking and staying out until dawn. She told me all of this on our first date, sitting in her new chairs at her new table, eating spaghetti off of her new plates, the puppy barking the entire time. There were awkward lapses in conversation. We had nothing in common. I was more than a decade older than her. Her only CDs were dance-club compilations. But she was by far the prettiest girl I had ever dated. Her teeth were crooked in a way that made her seem especially beautiful. I got the impression that she thought her diagnosis was glamorous, or maybe she was clinging to it because it was all she had. Her parents were in Germany. She was on her own. She was due to enroll at NYU in the fall, but she talked about it tentatively, and I got the impression she wouldn’t go through with it or that she would drop out midsemester.

  Talk of firing our editor ended. I was still working at the theater, still living with my mother, and spent most of my awake time daydreaming on the plush leather couch. Sri Lanka was still strapped for cash; it had been weeks since I’d been paid. Our editor was having trouble financially, too. Something to do with the indie market drying up, stiffer competition. It had been almost three months since he’d worked a paying freelance gig. His reserves were depleted. But in spite of this, and in spite of Sri Lanka’s inability to afford to pay him any longer, the editor continued working on our film. He’d grown attached to it, he said, to us. When I talked to my mother about my day, I found myself calling each of them by name: Suriyaarachchi and Dave. We went to Dave’s daily and stayed all day. Suriyaarachchi had his film-related correspondence forwarded to Dave’s address. I was given a copy of the mailbox key; it was my job to get the stuffed wad from the box in the morning, along with crullers and coffee from the diner.

  I don’t want to give the impression that the two of them had stopped fighting; they hadn’t. In fact, these fights became a defining characteristic of their friendship. But now they were like an old Hollywood pair, filling the air with their lively, sharp-witted banter. Occasionally, it would get heated, but just when I thought I needed to step in to break it up, one of them would say something that would cause them both to burst out laughing—and that would be that. I loved it. As an only child, I wanted a brother, someone to show me the ropes or someone to whom I might show the ropes. I yearned after the fraternal pack; and sometimes, after a meal, sitting in silence and listening to the two of them squabble, I felt like I finally got my wish.

  I came to admire them. Suriyaarachchi’s determination was infectious. Like Arthur’s son and his imaginary dog, Suriyaarachchi was willing this movie into existence by the sheer force of his determination. It made me ashamed of my own doubts about the project. His confidence made him seem much taller than the five seven he was, and the rough cut, when we’d watch it together, seem better. Each sentence he uttered was filled with optimism. Here’s an idea. Or: You know what would be cool? In Dave, too, I saw traits I wanted and was ashamed I lacked. Dave was a consummate craftsman—always turning the cut over in the back of his head. We would be at his PlayStation, deep in the bowels of a dungeon, slashing our way through a thicket of skeletal ghouls, the movie right then the furthest thing from my mind—and out of the blue Dave would say, You know what might work? Then go on to describe some technical issue about pacing or continuity. Whereas Suriyaarachchi and I were always striving for something more than what we had, our daily grind a means to some grander, more glamorous end, Dave was different. He was content. He wanted to continue doing exactly what he was doing right now, what he had been doing for the past ten years—his only goal in life to make enough money to keep doing it until the day he died. He had foun
d his true calling.

  And Arthur? What kept me returning to his end of the hall?

  Years later, long after it was all over, people—those who remembered Arthur’s brief moment of fame—would ask me that same question, how it was I could stand to be around that guy. What did I see in a man who could do what he did? In my defense, his second book had not yet come out, so all I knew of the depths of Arthur’s—let’s call it creative stuntsmanship—was still the comparatively minor stuff of that cadenza. Still, it’s true I remained friends with him even after the second book and kept steadfast through it all, following him down into the abyss—so I suppose this deserves a preemptory explanation.