The Morels

by Christopher Hacker

He says, Think of Ulysses. Woolf called Joyce a teenager, picking at his pimples, for writing it. Edmund Wilson thought it was an incoherent mess, as did most of the reviewers at the time. Banned in the United States for what, ten years? But who’s getting the last laugh now?

  The estate lawyers?

  Exactly! That’s exactly it. Richard laughs, clapping Arthur on the back. Oh, you crack me up. Why didn’t you visit me more often? Anyway.

  He sees Arthur looking at the framed photos on the wall. That’s Little Freddie, he says. All pictures are of a white dog in various frozen states of romp on a field of grass. These last two are of Little Freddie III. Little Freddie Junior died in ’95. The dogs are indistinguishable from one another.

  You see? Everybody wants tenure—well, this is tenure. Irate deans and teachers in distress and an unhealthy attachment to your West Highland terrier. Did you know I seriously contemplated having Freddie Senior stuffed? The day I was awarded a full-time job here was the last day I wrote a word. Seriously. It descended like a hex, the same one that cursed Old Man Mitchell, poor bastard. Don’t do it. I’m sure the wife is pushing you to, but you’re better off, believe me.

  The word wife hangs in the air.

  How is she, by the way? I mean, under the circumstances?

  Arthur heads downtown, to the apartment. He enters through the revolving doors. The doorman on duty doesn’t stop him when he goes for the elevator. When he gets off on his floor, there are no police waiting outside his apartment.

  He tries the lock, but his key no longer works. He knocks. He rings the bell. Is there really nobody home? He puts his ear to the door. Voices, indistinct, nautical. Unclear whether they are coming from inside the apartment.

  Having nowhere else to turn, Arthur turns to us, down the hall.

  We let him in. We poured him a drink. Arthur was, surprisingly, a man who could hold his liquor. While Suriyaarachchi’s and Dave’s talk devolved into slurred declarations of love for Kim Basinger—and eventually lurching trips to the bathroom—Arthur seemed generally unaffected.

  Arthur related the events of the previous two days. We were sitting on the couch. Suriyaarachchi had returned to a movie we had been watching in the other room while Dave sat in the lounge chair across from us, arms folded, ostensibly listening but really just sleeping.

  “What are you going to do,” I said when he had finished.

  “What are my options?”

  “Do you have a lawyer?”

  Arthur took the mouthful of whiskey left in the coffee mug, filling his cheeks and then gulping it down. “They don’t make it easy for you. Which I suppose makes sense. What’s their incentive? They’re trying to put you away. One gentleman handed me ‘literature.’ That was the word he used. I couldn’t make much sense of it, written as it is in bureaucratese. Here—”

  He clicked open his briefcase and handed me a stapled packet on official New York State Division of Criminal Justice letterhead—or what had once been, several xeroxed generations prior. The state seal was an indistinct black ring, the type barely legible. It billed itself as a “handbook” of the court system meant to “demystify the due process that is every citizen’s right,” but managed only to, in its own labyrinthine logic, emphasize just what a maze Arthur was about to navigate. It was a kind of terrible thing, that document. It made you aware of a territory of knowledge that, unless you were law enforcement or a habitual offender, you were gladly ignorant of but that you needed to quickly become accustomed to. If you were lucky, you could forget it all as soon as the ordeal was over. It must be the same for the newly diagnosed cancer patient. I thought of Viktoria, just released from rehab with her brochures on borderline personality disorder.

  “We’re on your side,” I said, handing the packet back to him. “Whatever happens.” I reassured him that we had no doubts about his innocence and that he could count on our unwavering friendship. It might have been the liquor talking, but I also felt that welling up that I described earlier. It’s gratitude, really, that feeling, a reciprocal sense of connectedness with another human being. Arthur sheepishly watched me say this, swallowing, his large Adam’s apple bobbing wildly. He gripped the arm of the couch with his large hand, knuckles going white.

  Then I said something insensitive, which also may have been the liquor talking. “That stuff you were talking about last week,” I said, “the book doing its work, generating story and all that—isn’t this exactly what you wanted to happen?”

  Arthur looked at me—a long look—then, softly, so that it almost was a sigh, “God, I think so.”

  It was the last word he said that night. After that he just sat, staring into his empty mug. I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I came back, he was asleep.

  Dave was still in the lounge chair, passed out. I checked in on Suriyaarachchi, also passed out, mouth agape, on the leather couch in the editing suite. I sat down on the opposite corner and took off my shoes.

  I woke to the distant sound of knocking on a door. Suriyaarachchi was still out cold. Daylight shone through the sharp lines of the blinds’ slats. I stumbled out of the editing suite, and the faint knocking revealed itself to be loud banging at the front door.

  Arthur was nowhere to be seen, and Dave was racing around gathering empty beer bottles. “Quick, it’s the cops!”

  I stood and watched him, then went over to the front door. Through the peephole, I saw two uniformed officers, a man and a woman, one standing slightly behind the other.

  “Arthur Morel,” the one in front called, setting a hand on his holster.

  I opened the door and told him my name, invited them in. They took off their hats, scraped their feet on the hallway carpeting before stepping over the threshold. Were they trained to do that? Dave, smiling sheepishly with his armload of empties, offered them a beer, which they humorlessly declined. They asked several questions designed to get to the bottom of who we were and what our relationship with Arthur was. Suriyaarachchi emerged from the editing suite, yawning, hand in pants, and froze. The woman officer asked his name and jotted his answer in her notepad.

  “Look,” the male officer said once the preliminaries were out of the way, “Mr. Morel can’t be here. He can’t be within three hundred yards of here. We got a call about a disturbance this morning, a male trying to gain entry to that apartment, banging on the door, carrying on.”

  “But I have a right to enter my own apartment.” Arthur was standing in the corridor that led to the bathroom, sounds of a recently flushed toilet hissing behind him. “My name is on the lease.”

  “I don’t care whose name is on the lease, sir. You settle things in court, once that order of protection is lifted, you can go wherever you want so far as I’m concerned. Until that time, you are not to step foot on these premises.”

  “Where am I supposed to go?”

  “Hotels, shelters if you can’t afford a hotel. What about family?”

  Arthur made a face.

  The officers insisted on escorting Arthur out of the building. The elevators and lobby were mercifully empty. Dave, Suriyaarachchi, and I huddled quickly as the officers were parting ways with Arthur. It was decided that we could no longer afford to be without a camera rolling at all times. Suriyaarachchi would rent one while Dave, out of necessity, would cannibalize his editing suite to pay for it and the media costs long term, at least a month, through a trial if it came down to that, keeping enough of the suite intact to edit what we came up with. It was also decided that we couldn’t afford to lose sight of our subject. Once Arthur disappeared into the crowd there was no telling where he might go. I would stick with him, keeping Suriyaarachchi informed of our whereabouts.

  I went with Arthur to an Internet café, where he checked the prices of the city’s seediest fleatraps. The Elk. The Sunshine. Each seemed reasonable—under twenty dollars—until we discovered that the rates were hourly. “We could lend you enough for a week at one of these places, maybe, but what are you going to do after that?” We had discov
ered that Arthur could no longer access his bank funds. It was a scene that involved our being removed from the premises by bank security. I imagined Suriyaarachchi kicking himself at not being able to get this on tape.

  Arthur was reluctant to call Benji. Arthur had blown off his wedding, for which he had not been forgiven. “We haven’t spoken in almost three years. It was a legitimate excuse!” He received a Christmas card the year before that showed Benji and his wife, her horsey gap-toothed smile reflected in a young child between them. They were living in Hoboken now. The card had been an olive branch that Arthur let slip from his grasp. However, with my encouragement, he made the call. It was the wife who answered. She was cordial with Arthur, just barely. She gave him Benji’s number at work.

  Bastard! came Benji’s voice loud and clear through the earpiece. From the sound of it though, things were okay between them. They talked for nearly thirty minutes. “He liked it,” Arthur said, a little dazed after the call. “He said he didn’t find it repulsive and that in fact he was able to identify with my character. Which is so unlike him. But he said he liked it.” Until now, when I have said that Arthur smiled, I suppose I really mean he smirked. It was a pinched expression, purposeful, meant to highlight an irony or to show that he disagreed with something you had just said. This smile, though, upon reporting Benji’s reaction, was different. It was radiant and pure, an openmouthed, teeth-and-gums smile, an involuntary reflex that forced his eyes closed just to make room for it.

  Arthur had explained his situation to Benji and asked pointblank for help. Benji seemed grateful to have been asked, to have been allowed to be the big brother, the bigger person. He had passed the New York State Bar some years back, though he was not a practicing attorney. He worked as a legal consultant to a computer software start-up that had managed—with Benji’s help, he wasn’t shy in admitting—to stay aloft in the turbulent aftermath of the tech bubble’s explosion. He would meet with Arthur to talk about his legal options, dismayed that he didn’t yet have an attorney, outraged that Penelope—was it Penelope?—had locked him out of his account. The only thing he could not offer was a place to stay. Although Benji was not put off by Arthur’s book, his wife had her concerns, and with their son in the house—

  “What does she think I’m going to do,” he said. “But it’s okay, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.”

  While Arthur had been on the phone, I asked Jeeves at the computer in my cubicle why the carriage house was of any interest to the people of Japan and discovered that in Tokyo there was a rather famous sex club modeled after it. The walls of this club were plastered with snapshots of Japanese faces between Doc and Cynthia.

  “I know where you can stay,” I said.

  Arthur looked at my browser window. “Absolutely not.”

  “Why?”

  “We have nothing to say to one another.”

  “I find that hard to believe. It’s been more than a decade.”

  “You met them. Why would you want to send me back into that?”

  “You brokered the deal. You wouldn’t have introduced us if you didn’t intend on using that introduction later on.”

  “It was a gift. I knew they’d prove willing subjects for your movie.”

  “I think you were building a bridge you knew you needed to cross. You see, you want to see them again but don’t know how to get over the gap of those fourteen years.”

  “Are you sure you visited the right house? Didn’t they tell you about how I was forced to fend for myself while they had orgies in the basement? It can’t be those people you think I’m anxious to reunite with, can it?”

  “I’m sorry, Arthur, but you have to. The narrative requires it.”

  “The narrative.”

  “Things must be seen to have traveled full circle. Your return to where you were born. Reconciliation with your parents. You’d agree that it makes sense.”

  “It has a certain Aristotelian logic to it, yes.”

  “I don’t know why you’re arguing. It’s an inevitability.”

  “Fine.”

  “But we have to wait for Suriyaarachchi. He’s got the equipment.”

  The footage of the reunion is wonderful. Suriyaarachchi sets up across the street so that the entire archway is visible in the frame, a blue postbox off on the left. Arthur walks into the shot from camera right, crosses the street, and stops dead center, looking around from the edge of the doorway. It’s Cynthia who sees him first. She bounds out from inside and embraces him. Then Doc emerges, tentatively, smiling a kind of nervous smile, leans in—Cynthia still embracing her son, rubbing his back—and shakes Arthur’s hand. Dave is out of frame with a directional mic pointed at them and catches Doc saying, “The prodigy returns, the prodigy returns!” Arthur towers over them. They welcome him in with all the ordinary, unmitigated gratitude of a pair of suburban parents. The light is diffuse, the last light in an overcast day, and covers everything in rich blues and violets. The light falloff from the open threshold is steep, so when they usher Arthur inside, the effect is stark—the three of them disappearing into the gloom. We linger here for a while. A woman enters from camera right with a stack of letters in her hand. She slows at the carriage house’s threshold to see what’s inside, then crosses past it to the postbox to drop off her letters. She double-checks to see that the letters haven’t gotten stuck, and it’s a kind of echo of her gaze into the carriage house’s darkness, which itself echoes Arthur’s peering moments earlier, and suddenly this gesture, flowering into a symbol, reveals itself to us: peering into the darkness.

  Unforeseen cost, for which Dave must sell both his high-end Beta decks: settling the carriage house’s Con Ed bill. In order to shoot, one needed light, and not just household light, but industrial-grade light. We replaced all the bulbs in the apartment with high-lumen daylight-balanced compact fluorescents, the highest wattage we dared, filling in the shadows by affixing several fluorescent strips on the ceilings. It took some getting used to. Much of the initial interior footage shows Arthur and his parents blinking glassy eyed at the glare.

  Suriyaarachchi was smart. He sat the three of them down and talked frankly about what it meant to be in a documentary, that the camera would always be on, that there would be no privacy. This wasn’t for Doc and Cynthia so much. Total exposure had been their ethos for the past thirty years. This was for Arthur. Suriyaarachchi waited until he had seen some footage before sitting down like this, so that Arthur could get a sense of the project’s worth, aesthetically. For all of his failings, Suriyaarachchi had a great eye. The little footage we’d collected was beautiful. His was an instinctive feel for the limits of the digital medium, its tendency to blow highlights, its need for a narrower spectrum of lights to darks; he insisted on spending extra for a video camera that could shoot cinema-standard twenty-four frames a second and a zoom that allowed a wider aperture so he could get that filmlike look of sharp foreground against a lush background blur. Even on the camcorder’s tiny screen, the playback was gorgeous. With this seed planted, Suriyaarachchi offered the ultimatum: all or nothing, in or out. He would have enough on his plate without having to worry about Arthur’s hand going up whenever he was feeling shy or annoyed. This was the buy-in. Total access. Savvy, having Doc and Cynthia there, too. They acted like plants in a grift, leading the momentum of assent. “Absolutely,” they said. “Understood. Total access.” And so, Arthur agreed. Suriyaarachchi then had them sign exclusivity agreements. At the time, I thought this part was overkill, but a month from now at the height of it, I would look back at this moment and think he had been prophetic. They were not to talk to any other media outlets. This required a sales pitch. Here he talked numbers: dollars and points and box-office profits. “This film will be huge,” he said. “People will be lining up to hear what you three have to say. Guaranteed. But only if they haven’t already heard you say it. You start taking interviews with morning talk shows, syndicated media, you will be depleting the demand for this movie and hence any pro
fits you might see from it. It’s in your hands. You can do what you want, play your chips however you like. You won’t be surprised to hear that I think you should let me hold on to them, that I will play them wisely. But it’s up to you. Just remember, your silence is a very valuable thing. Don’t give it up too easily.”

  I was sold. We all signed the papers and shook hands, and then Doc passed around the pipe, and we got high. Even Arthur. We sank into our seats and listened to Doc go on about how great Arthur’s book was.

  “You sound like the dust jacket,” Arthur said. “I hate those raves they put all over it, like subliminal messaging. This book is fantastic. You will love this book. The writer is a genius. You know? It’s like they don’t trust readers to come to their own conclusions or the book’s ability to sell you on its own merits.” But Arthur seemed pleased. We ordered takeout from the Indian place up the street, and Cynthia brought us down to the basement to drum up bedding and a spare mattress or two.

  It’s interesting to watch Arthur and Cynthia interact in this footage. She’s watching him almost continuously, touching him, caressing his face, even as she is directing us in the search. Arthur stands somewhat stiffly, not rejecting the affection, weathering it, accepting perhaps that this is how it must be, eyes down, gauging for a moment when she is not watching and only then a quick glance up, eyes bleary with pot and exhaustion, and then back to his shoes.

  With the lights on, the basement seemed less like a serial killer’s lair and more like a basement. Cynthia looked through the junk. “This mattress”—she patted it, leaning against the wall, went in for a sniff—“with clean sheets shouldn’t be too bad. Artie, look.” She tapped three large boxes, stacked precariously. “Your old stuff. We had to put it down here when we let go of the upper floor.” Looking for bedding, which she swore was down here, we negotiated past percussion instruments of all types, stacked paintings, half-finished sculptures, office chairs, printing supplies, and dusty darkroom equipment, eventually locating some blue sheets inside a large Styrofoam cooler.