The Morels

by Christopher Hacker

  “So in a sense, this man mistook fiction for real life.”

  “This man was in a florid state of paranoid schizophrenia.”

  “And how did you conclude that?” A few chuckles at this, even from the witness.

  “Well—” He composed himself and began down a jargon-studded road.

  Benji stopped him. “What I mean is, did you check for bugs? In the patient’s apartment? Did you question Garrison Keillor?” At this point, an eruption of laughter in the gallery of the courtroom.

  “No.”

  “And why is that?”

  “I can only conclude these leading questions are designed to get me to tell you that A Prairie Home Companion is a scripted, fictional radio show.”

  “Right. And wouldn’t you say that knowing this helps in your diagnosis of the man as a paranoid schizophrenic?”

  “There are other ways to reach that—”

  “But in this case, would you say it helped?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “If, for instance, Garrison Keillor were this man’s father, and Mr. Keillor made skits about their life together—”

  Objections from the prosecution, sustained by the judge.

  The witness said, “William Morel, in my opinion, is not schizophrenic.”

  Benji pressed, but the man would not budge. It didn’t matter. He had accomplished what he’d set out to do, planted the seed.

  With the exception of rare moments like this, from the standpoint of pure entertainment, the trial was a disappointment. The ADA seemed aware of her counterpart on television and was attempting somehow to play herself in that role or remind us of it. But it came off like the stiff acting in a high school drama production. Benji, too, nervous though he was, tried to play it up in a way that missed the mark and left people groaning in pity. He bugged his eyes or furrowed his brows and scratched his chin. These were his two best moves. It was clear he’d been coached and that he was not a particularly adept student. Presiding over them, the wobbly, bobble-headed judge sustained and overruled objections in equal measure, offering the droll one-liner when the occasion called for it or a sharp rebuke, stopping one or the other of the attorneys in their tracks. Unlike the attorneys, the judge wasn’t playing a role—if he was, it was a role that he had played for so long that he had inhabited it completely. Who was it who said that eventually our face takes on the contours of the mask we wear? Something I read in college, probably. I thought of it while watching these three performances. And wondered again about Arthur, his role in all of this. When the time came for him to mount the stand, what sort of performance would be required?

  Mostly, the court proceedings were of exactly the sort you might expect out of a place with laminate faux-wood paneling and no apparent ventilation: interminable, bureaucratic, the narrative thread lost in the picky back-and-forth about wording and what could and couldn’t be said or what this one meant, exactly, when he used that phrase. Two pigeons fighting over a piece of pretzel. I found myself glad to have been banned from filming it, as no doubt the footage, when we came to edit it, would have sat cold and inert, and the three of us would become gridlocked about what to do. It would have been the Winnebago crash all over again—a moment that seemed, when we planned it, a centerpiece, a riveting climax, but instead proved to be embarrassing and unwatchable.

  By the closing gavel of day 3, the prosecution had rested its case. Benji argued for a reprieve but was denied one, and so the following morning began the defense’s long parade. We came early to secure a seat up front behind the defense table.

  When they brought Arthur in, Cynthia burst into tears. It was the first good look she had gotten since the arraignment. No doubt the new beard and the outsize jumpsuit had something to do with it, not to mention the sallow greenish light of those fluorescents, but there was no denying that he was a man transformed. He looked caged, some aboriginal man abducted and brought back to the civilized world to be marveled at. There were scrapes and bruises on his wrists and ankles, and his body trembled. He turned, and it seemed to take him some time to process us.

  Cynthia said, “Oh, what have they done to you?”

  Arthur smiled. He mouthed, I’m fine.

  Suriyaarachchi nudged me with a folded New Yorker, gesturing for me to take it. He pointed at an article I was meant to read. It was an essay about the tradition of autobiographical fiction. It mentioned Arthur’s book several times, praising it and its author. From the second paragraph: “The Morels is one of those books that is memorable not for the story it tells or for its characters or for the quality of its prose, but for an episode within it—Don Quixote tilting at windmills, young Proust dunking a madeleine in a cup of tea—we don’t remember who or what or why, but we remember this […] and these actions come to stand for the book itself, synecdochically, becoming a visual thesis upon which all the rest hinges.”

  I handed it back to him, and he gave me a look—tugged mouth and wide eyes—that said, Pretty good. Meaning, for the movie. Suriyaarachchi didn’t care much about Arthur’s fate apart from how it might affect the fortunes of the movie. Or, rather, he did care but only in the way an art collector, heavily invested in a certain artist’s work, might care about that artist’s declining health. I hated him for this, in no small part because it highlighted these same feelings in me. I was not immune to the excitement of filmmaking, nor did I fail to see that Arthur’s plight might be seen in a certain light as good entertainment, something ultimately that would sell.

  Benji called his first witness, another psychologist. He had spoken with Arthur a few times at the prison. The man had a different opinion of Arthur and his book than the prosecution’s witness, and so, in effect, these experts canceled each other out.

  I looked at the roster of names on the witness list, mine among them. It would take days to get through. It seemed Benji was looking to win through attrition, and I wondered if this was what the judge had meant by “antics.” If Benji had gotten the continuance he’d asked for—three months—how long would that list have grown? And the judge, despite Benji’s rantings, was quite fair, to the point of permissiveness. Even I could see that Arthur’s professionalism, his soundness of mind, his kindness and loyalty as a friend, had little bearing on whether or not Will was lying. Amid the unceasing calls to relevance from the prosecution, Benji persisted, and the judge allowed his witnesses to have their say. I suppose Benji had to work overtime to counteract the effect of Arthur’s very presence there before the jury—a wild creature, capable of anything.

  The psychologist on the stand had also spoken with Will, but his evaluation revealed nothing that could be used to our advantage, so during questioning, Benji left it alone. The ADA, however, was very curious. She had him read several passages from his report, which revealed Will to be a somewhat distressed but otherwise normative eleven-year-old.

  “What observations led you to conclude that William Morel was stressed?”

  “His body language, mostly.”

  “What can you tell us about his body language?”

  “Deep breaths, fidgeting. And he spent much of our session rubbing his genitals.”

  “Rubbing, how?”

  “He was sitting in a large upholstered chair opposite me and held his hands clasped together, fingers threaded like this—down at his crotch. He would press them up and down against his groin when he talked. Quite unconsciously, I thought. In this context it appeared to be a response from stress. This is not unusual. He seemed reluctant to be there, speaking with me. I got the feeling that it made him nervous. He spoke of not wanting to get his father in trouble. The rubbing seemed to be a strategy for comforting himself, calming himself down.”

  “Did William Morel ever exhibit symptoms of a dissociative nature?”

  “What sort of symptoms do you mean?”

  “Trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality?”

  “Not in our time together, no.”

  On redirect, Benji managed to bring things
back in balance by getting the psychologist to admit the possibility that the diagnosis of a dissociative disorder involved more than a single one-hour consultation, that were Will to have one, he could present quite normally for days—even weeks—at a time.

  It was five days of this, at the end of which came me. And Arthur.

  If the courtroom was a bore, the same could not be said of the goings-on outside. The first day I had seen a few people with small flip pads taking notes and wondered if they might be reporters. That evening, eating dinner at the carriage house, Doc pointed at the television with a speared floret of curried broccoli. It was the final segment of the local news, usually reserved for items that would be introduced with a phrase like Now here’s an interesting one. It showed a small insert of Arthur’s dust-jacket photo. Doc stumbled to his feet to turn the volume dial on the small portable television just in time to catch the anchor say, “… but the author claims he made the whole thing up. Wonder what the next book will be about!” The following day, a CBS-affiliate anchor and her cameraman approached Benji and his assistants on their way up the courthouse steps, and that night we all waited impatiently through the day’s leading stories for the footage, which appeared along with a court sketch of grizzle-bearded Arthur. We cheered, and Cynthia declared, “Our fifteen minutes have begun!” The day after that, it was all three of the major networks following Benji up the stairs, along with half-a-dozen photographers clicking and flashing in their faces. It became the evening’s top story. The day after that it was the front page of the Post and the Daily News.

  Benji had been right. In the vacuum of the millennium story, this one entered to fill the void. There were other “bigger” stories going on inside the halls of 100 Center Street that week—a grisly murder, a mafioso on trial—but this was the one that caught the public eye. The Brooklyn Museum exhibit was still fresh in people’s minds. It was also a time of brazen sexual transgressions, from our president’s to nannies caught on video to the several high-profile cases of teachers tried for statutory rape—both male and female—and the trial of Arthur Morel found itself as somehow the quintessence of all this, the last straw perhaps. So in spite of what the judge had said about what this trial was and wasn’t, to those following its progress outside the walls of the courtroom, it became a referendum on the limits of artistic freedom. The papers took pleasure in the possibilities of his name, which—if you substituted e with a—seemed designed to comment ironically on his situation.

  The announcement, in the middle of all this, that The Morels had been nominated for the Faulkner Award was rocket fuel that set the debate aroar and helped launch it past the local news and into the seven o’clock national slot. Two New York Times op-ed columnists took up the debate over several days, one arguing for literature’s return to its historical imperative of extolling our better angels and the other arguing for the prerogative of literature to be whatever it needed to be.

  And as unreal as this short account of Arthur’s ascent may seem to read, this was exactly how it felt to live through: unreal. Dreamlike. It happened so quickly. We sat watching the news at the carriage house, the five of us, the day’s papers scattered around us, scarcely believing what we were reading, what we were seeing.

  Suriyaarachchi clapped Doc on the back. “What did I tell you? Okay? This movie is going to be enormous. Your two sons will see this thing through, and Arthur will come home safe—and be able to share in all of this. Just trust, just trust. And I know the phone is tempting you right now”—ringing off the hook with offers, Hard Copy, Jerry Springer, Larry King—“but your silence is worth more down the line. How does it feel to be the father of a rock star?”

  But I think Suriyaarachchi misinterpreted Doc and Cynthia’s disbelief at all of this. Because what Arthur had achieved here wasn’t fame; it was infamy. He was tarred by the tabloids, already tried and found guilty by New Yorkers at large. And who could blame them? His own book seemed to convict him of this crime, and even assuming his innocence, the act of publishing it alone was thought by most who were talking about it to be a kind of abuse. It was, at best, a perverse and downright mean thing to do.

  But Doc and Cynthia didn’t understand the hostility. “Even if he did do it,” Cynthia said. “Is it really something to get this worked up over?” They had thought themselves one with the city. Their open door to the sidewalk had been a thirty-year testament to this. Neither of them had ever considered there were people who thought differently than they. To find out, finally, that most of the city thought they—and their son—were repulsive freaks must have been a crushing blow.

  From a moving car raw eggs were pelted at the carriage house, whipping through the open doorway. One connected with Doc’s shoulder. He lifted his shirt to reveal a palm-sized welt. After this the doors remained permanently closed. All through the night intermittent hollering from outside reached us down in the basement, a ghostly noise, the pounding of fists on the metal garage door echoing somberly, an uneven drumbeat. In the morning, we found scrawled on it MONSTERS in dripping purple spray-paint.

  On the morning I was to testify, we pressed through a throng of jeering pedestrians before making our way up the courthouse steps. Suriyaarachchi following with the camera merged with a dozen others taping our ascent.

  We were made to wait. Benji and the ADA were conferring with the judge in the emptied courtroom. A guard stood at the doors, which barred any substantive eavesdropping, but I could see the jury was in attendance as well.

  I took a seat on a bench, across the narrow hallway from Mrs. Wright and Will. They were sorting foil-wrapped items out of a plastic bag. While Mrs. Wright kept a wary eye on me, Will was pretending not to notice. It was the first time since the trial began I’d gotten more than a passing glimpse. He kept a blinkered focus on his sandwich, which sat on its foil wrapper in his lap. He carefully removed the top and peeled off two soggy lettuce leaves. In his hunkered-down posture—his twitchy fingers, the dark hollows under his eyes—I saw someone utterly besieged. As though he were ducking not only me but everyone else in the world. I detected something else as well. Guilt. Not the guilt of a betrayer. The guilt of a liar.

  Will and I needed to talk.

  The opportunity presented itself a few moments later when, speaking to Mrs. Wright, his lips formed the word bathroom. Penelope and Frank were not far off, standing against a wall. Frank had been keeping his eye on me. I got up, casually, ahead of Will, and rounded the corner, making my way to the water fountain just outside the men’s room door. I leaned in for a warm coppery draft, lingering until I saw Will’s sneakers pass my line of sight.

  I rose, wiped my mouth, and ducked in after him.

  A line of enormous urinals like marble bathtubs. Will was at the one in the far corner; I took the one next to his. “You’re lying,” I hissed into his ear. “Aren’t you?”

  Will blanched, stepped back a few paces, fumbling with his zipper.

  A tall gentleman emerged from a stall and walked over to the line of sinks. Will and I watched as he rolled up his sleeves, pumped out some soap from the dispenser, and washed his hands. The man became aware of us watching. He stared back through the mirror.

  After he left, I crossed over to the door and kicked the rubber doorjamb into place.

  Will ducked into a stall and latched it shut.

  I stood for a while staring at the stall door, long enough to consider the implications of being caught in here, intimidating the lead witness.

  Then, very softly, came Will’s voice. “I don’t care what happens to him. I hate him.” His voice sounded different in here—thin, crystalline—cupped by the dozen marble basins, as though it were being transmitted from somewhere else.

  “How can you say that? If you knew what you were saying, how jail would be for a man like your father—you wouldn’t say such a thing.”

  “I wish he were dead. We’d all be better off. Mom’s so sad, and it’s because of his lies. Why shouldn’t I lie, too? Then he’ll be pu
t away, and it’ll be over, and we’ll all be happy. It’s what he deserves for writing what he wrote about me. Grandma says it. Grandpa says it. Joanna Brady says it. Even Mom says it.”

  “Will,” I said. “I’m not defending what your father wrote. It’s a terrible thing. But what you are doing here is wrong. Evil, in fact. You know that, don’t you? Are you evil? Do you want people to think of you this way?”

  “I’m not evil,” he said. The stall door rattled. “I’m not evil!”

  “Then you’ve got to make this right, Will. You’ve got to tell people the truth.”

  Someone was knocking outside. Voices.

  “I’ve tried,” Will said.

  “What have you told them?”

  He opened the stall door, peered up at me. “I said I was confused. That I’m not remembering right.”

  “That’s not the same as telling them you lied.”

  “But I can’t! I’ll get into trouble. Serious trouble—you don’t understand. Please.” Tears wobbled in his eyes. “Please don’t tell Mom.”

  “Will, this is bigger than you getting into trouble. I have to tell her—don’t you see, I have no choice.”

  “Please don’t. I’m begging you. Listen, okay? I’ll tell her myself. Let me do it. Please.”

  More banging. Frank’s voice: My grandson, that’s who!

  “Okay,” I said. “Fine. Now switch places.” I pushed past him into the stall and hopped up onto the toilet, pulling the door shut. “I’m not here,” I whispered, crouching.

  Benji was able to get me five minutes alone with Arthur. I waited for him in a closet-sized space down from the courtroom. A glass door looked out onto the busy corridor.

  Arthur was led in by a guard. The guard removed the shackles, then let himself out; he stood watch on the other side of the door. Arthur sat. He really was unrecognizable in his orange jumpsuit, with his hair so shaggy, his beard so thick.