The Morels

by Christopher Hacker

  So he fought back. He punched and kicked and clawed and bit down hard, putting the full force of his jaw into it, until he heard that sweet cry of agony, until he tasted blood. Crazy fuck! A boy in the stairwell, threatening Will with a stubby screwdriver: Will shoved the boy down the stairs, running after him, fists clenched. A trio outside school, encircling: Will throws himself full tilt at one, wrestles and straddles the surprised boy, and with a fistful of hair drives the boy’s head into the sidewalk. There was no more Fox Mulder, no more Nintendo or Jerky Boys or comic books. Those days—only weeks in the past—were long gone now, the myths of a sweet and simple golden age. Now it was Twisted Metal and Grand Theft Auto. Games wherein he was invited to drag people out of their cars at gunpoint and barrel through crowded intersections. For fun, he lumbered through an open-air café. Patrons leaped out of the way; the vehicle bumped and lurched over the crunch of bodies. Bloody tire tracks ribboned outward in the rearview. At the edge of a park, he got out of the car and walked purposely to the most peopled section he could find and, withdrawing his pistol—its beastly heft a little slippery in his palm—and fulfilling no particular goal, open-fired on as many innocent people as he could before the police surrounded him and shot him blissfully dead.

  His father’s death did nothing to abate the onslaught at school. Yet now Will welcomed the blows, encouraged them even. He had killed his father, and now he was paying the price. And yet he still hated his father. His father was as much to blame for all of this as he. So, as Will was absorbing the blows meant to atone for his father’s death, Will was also striking out with his own fists against his attackers, and it was his father’s nose, his father’s lip, his father’s teeth, Will’s knuckles crunched against—his father’s groin his knee connected with.

  Will’s mother packed them up and moved them down to Virginia, enrolled him at Annandale Middle School, her own alma mater. She told him he wouldn’t have to worry, nobody would know his father’s name—down here, kids didn’t read books. They played soccer and hung out behind strip-mall convenience stores to complain about how bored they were. But within months, they found him out, and Will was forced to endure a similar isolation. Less violent this time around, more insidious. While engaged in a class discussion, the teacher uttered the phrase a father’s love, and from the back of the room someone said, “Willy knows about a father’s love.” Several students laughed. Then someone else, “Tell us what a father’s love feels like, Willy.” The teacher, not in on the joke, stood there perplexed. Or copies of his father’s book would wind up in his backpack, or in his locker. These kids didn’t read. Ha! The enemy here was unseen—nowhere and everywhere—people he thought were friends would turn on a dime in front of others to offer a cutting remark at his expense. They would provoke Will into using his fists (and elbows and teeth) to fight back and then turn things around so that Will was the one in trouble. He was a caged animal at Annandale Middle School, snarling and snapping at cruel, ceaselessly prodding fingers.

  This time, when Will’s mother packed up and moved them yet again, back to New York City, she enrolled him under her maiden name. Will would be Wright now. Will Wright. He liked the ring, its double-barreledness, much better than Morel, an edible mold that flourished in dark places.

  It was at this point, during his first year of high school, that Will learned the art of keeping his mouth shut. He sat at the back of the class and never—not once in four years—raised his hand. No shortage of fellow freshmen those first weeks of school, wanting to strike up friendships with Will Wright, were turned away. When kids asked Will about himself, he answered vaguely or not at all or made stuff up. He was from Virginia and would be heading back there as soon as his father returned from fighting the Taliban. He was an exchange student, originally from northern Quebec; his parents came from a long line of trappers and only spoke French. By the end of the following semester, kids stopped caring who he was or wasn’t. And Will tried to keep it that way, permanent firewall turned on.

  Yet his fists still couldn’t seem to help themselves. They continued fighting a war that was over. An off-the-cuff remark, even in the most innocuous context, uttered sweetly even, were it to contain a certain key word—jerkoff, for instance, or faggot or sometimes the word daddy—and the fists would let fly. He was no longer in control of them. His body would leap out ahead of him to connect with that word, to beat it from existence. No matter the size or gender of the speaker. His fists were especially sensitive to the word morel, on whichever syllable the accent fell. All friendships in high school were tenuous, provisional—and as soon as they got a load of Will’s fists, bonds were severed for good. By junior year he’d been labeled by most as certifiably loco and given a wide berth.

  Teachers, however, adored Will. Whereas other students sleepwalked through assignments—scrawled onto a sheet of loose-leaf paper in the hallway ten minutes before class—and bloated their essays to bursting with filler phrases, letting platitudes and clichés do their thinking for them, a generation of texters uninterested in the distinction between their and they’re, its and it’s, whose and who’s, Will was different. He was an earnest and thoughtful student. He was impressively well read—as a loner and an only child Will was an avid reader of books—and had a knack with words. Will’s homework assignments were little jewels laser printed on high-quality paper stock—focused, packed with vivid examples, little jolts of unusual vocabulary, fresh turns of phrase, language well-mastered. Other students spent their time before and after class begging for extensions on late work or arguing over a grade. Will did neither. Always on the day it was due, never a word of complaint. Other students, after glancing at the circled grade at the top of the page, tossed the returned assignments into the trash bin as they exited class; Will pored over his graded papers at his desk, carefully considering each red mark, frowning and nodding, the last to leave the room.

  Women teachers were especially fond of Will. It was the black hair, the black eyes, and the way those eyes burned when he was called on to speak. The rough hands that turned in and accepted back assignments, the boxer’s broken nose, the broad shoulders hunched at his desk—a man already, at the age of sixteen. They knew who his father was, who he was. In break rooms, over burned coffee, they swooned over his furious soul, but to him they said nothing. They were the keepers of his talent. They shepherded him through the college application process, test preparations, and personal statements and transcripts and interviews. They celebrated those that accepted him and cursed those that didn’t. They hugged him tearfully at graduation and sent him on his way.

  He wasn’t going far; in fact, he wasn’t even leaving the island of Manhattan. Will emerged from the Downtown Lexington Avenue local on Sixty-Eighth Street, passing that hulking black trapezoid, to enter the North Building of Hunter College on August 28, 2008, for his first day of class. That year he lived at home, commuting from their one bedroom in Washington Heights. The bedroom was Will’s; his mother had insisted on it. For the past four years she’d made hers the living room, sleeping on the foldout couch which she meticulously put away every morning before Will awoke, aware of his guilt at these sleeping arrangements. Sure that he’d have vacated to some midwestern state by now, she was thrilled to have him still here, at least for the time being, to have been granted a stay from the empty nest.

  During his commutes, on the occasions when the subway’s gentle rocking set him to thinking back, age eleven, age twelve, he thought of the phrase scorched earth. In high school he had learned the term while studying the Vietnam conflict. The US military deployed a scorched earth policy there, sprayed millions of acres of cropland during Operation Trail Dust, its herbicidal warfare program, a strategy designed to expose enemy hideouts and deny food and shelter to the Vietcong. Which it did, though it also poisoned friendlies on the ground as well as the ones doing the spraying. It was this way with his father, too, with the war he fought within himself and the methods he deployed to fight that war. He might have dest
royed whatever demons he’d been fighting, but he also poisoned those who stood beside him and, in the end, himself. That year, the year of the millennium, had been the year of scorched earth.

  The firewall remained on, into his new adulthood. Back then it had been necessary, but now it served no purpose. He liked people, despite appearances to the contrary, and made friends easily here. He found he could have friends and still give away nothing of himself, as most other kids his age preferred to talk about themselves anyway. In college, he developed the art of listening. His friends talked; he listened. He found it was still possible to develop intimacy this way. He didn’t have to say a word. Girls for some reason enjoyed the way he demurred to their questions. They reveled in the vague answers he gave about his past. They itched to know more, to peel back the layers. But to girls, too, he gave nothing away.

  His fists, for the most part, had given up the fight. He redirected their energy, putting them to work now defending friends at drunken bar brawls or getting himself out of the odd late-night scrape. He’d once even thwarted a rape-in-progress. The old triggers rarely sent them flying anymore. It had been during his senior year of high school when they last came out. For some reason, the turn of phrase sucking daddy’s dick was in fashion that year—as in “I’ve been popping ollies a long time, bro—longer than you been suckin’ on your daddy’s dick.” It was meant to be humorous, a play on mommy’s tit, but Will’s fists hadn’t found it funny. So, three years ago.

  And then again last week.

  Will had declared his major early, end of first year—history, with a minor in education. He spent most of those first two getting the tough pills down—broad surveys and pedagogical theory—but this semester, fall of the third year, he allowed himself an indulgence: Fundamentals of Imaginative Writing I. A clear cool lake of spring water in this desert of academia. They wrote poems and short prose pieces. His teacher was a man who seemed not much older than himself—energetic, filled with hope for all of them as future wordsmiths. He put up on the overhead a line, She wished this day had never come, and told them to take it from there. Or had them pair off on a sonnet, trading couplets. He passed around a photograph of a man looking pensively out a window and then pulled out a large green teddy bear and put it on the desk. “Connect these dots,” he said, and set them to work. He praised Will’s writing, often making an example of it, which delighted Will, but also embarrassed him. He gave Will a list of authors, none of whom had Will ever read: Auster, Banks, Johnson, Stone. Muscular names. He brought in handouts from his graduate seminar for Will and gave him the latest copy of the literary journal he edited, hot off the presses. They talked together long after class was dismissed, his teacher sitting on the corner of the desk, Will cradling his textbooks as he stood, until an evening instructor kicked them both out.

  During one of these after-class sessions, his teacher pulled a book from his laptop bag. Will had done his best these many years to avoid this book, successfully, too, since coming back to New York after his time in Virginia. The hardcover edition of The Morels, because of its notoriety, had received that year several additional printings past its initial run of five thousand; and a major publisher had taken a gamble on its paperback rights. But by the time Will hit high school, The Morels had long since disappeared from the remainder bins. Just to be safe, though, when browsing for something to read, Will avoided the M’s entirely, and steered clear of used bookstores. Brandishing this book now, his teacher said, “You’re Will Morel.”

  “No,” Will said, looking down, avoiding his teacher’s eye, holding his hand up as if to ward off the book, “You’ve got—I’m not him.”

  “It’s okay,” his teacher said, his voice reassuring, not at all picking up on the cues that Will did not want to talk about this or reminisce about his father, not seeing Will’s eyes go black and his hands become fists, pushing on about what a life-changing book this was for him, one of those happy few, like Naked Lunch or Michaels’s Sylvia, despite what some would say, it could almost be argued—and then he was on the floor cupping a blood-gushing nose.

  At the hearing, the dean recommended expulsion, but interestingly his teacher—nostrils plugged with gauze, eye hollows purpled—pleaded for Will’s future at the college. A deal was struck. Will was to be suspended from college for the remainder of the semester, receiving an incomplete in whatever courses he was currently taking. He would lose his scholarship, unfortunately, nothing could be done about that; and when he returned in the fall, he would do so on academic probation. In the meantime, he was to see a college-appointed social worker every week and accept the young writer-professor as his academic adviser.

  Will accepted these terms with thanks.

  Which is how he finds himself moping about in a hand splint on his twenty-first birthday, the day of his encounter with the Netflix exclusive Who Is Arthur Morel?

  Ironically, this punch landed Will the first true friend of his adult life. Henry Owen Lawrence. When Will asked if he could call his teacher by his first name, he said, “I’ve got three. You can take your pick.” Will apologized for breaking Henry’s nose, which was when Henry told Will about the mythos of the pugilist scholar, dating back to Plato. He related the story of Rick Bass, who once politely declined to have his nose broken by George Plimpton, editor of the Paris Review. Plimpton explained his unusual offer. You see, he’d had his nose broken in a boxing ring by a writer who had his nose broken by Ernest Hemingway. “A prestigious line of broken noses,” Will said. “I would have taken him up on it.”

  Henry came by Will’s apartment with coffee most mornings. He lived nearby, and stopped over on his way to work. He was trying to encourage Will to take advantage of the daylight hours. Some theory involving the word biofeedback that Will did not care to understand. Will had always been a night owl and couldn’t see himself changing anytime soon. But he was grateful for the company—and the coffee—so played along.

  “Listen, Achilles,” Henry said one day. “You’ve got to get ahold of that rage of yours. It will destroy you if you don’t.” (The social worker Will had been seeing, a wiry and tenacious older woman, was forcing Will to dredge up all sorts of muck, which darkened his thoughts and made him extremely irritable.) “And you know where that journey begins and ends, don’t you?”

  “Come on,” Will said.

  “I’m serious.”

  “I’ll always hate him—for writing it, for making me the instrument of his death. I’m going to feel this way for the rest of my life.”

  “That’s a choice you’re making.”

  Will took a sip of scalding coffee and winced. “There’s no way out of it.”

  “There is a way.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll tell you but you won’t like it.” Henry pulled a bagel out of the paper bag next him and tore it in half.

  “I can’t forgive him,” Will said.

  “And yourself.”

  “How do I do that? Tell me.”

  “You need to get to know him first.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “So?”

  “So how do I get to know a dead man?”

  Henry, mouth full of bagel, said, “Use your imagination.”

  Had the documentary not been available to stream instantly, Will might never have seen it. In all likelihood, by the time it arrived in the mail Will would have changed his mind, and the disc would have foundered on top of the television until one of his roommates sent it back. But it is available, so with Henry’s words fresh in his ears, Will is emboldened to hit PLAY.

  His reaction is not what he would have expected. For the first half of the movie, the back of his throat constricts as though he needs to retch, and he keeps a bucket nearby just in case. But after the movie is over, he finds himself—what’s the word? Excited? His hands are trembling. He touches his palm to his chest and feels the knocking. Or maybe nervous. His father, just like that, on his laptop, after ten long years: Adam’s apple bobbing under razor-burn
ed skin, enormous hands that he always seems trying to get rid of, that he hides under his armpits or behind his back. So ill at ease with himself. Strange. That’s not how he remembered the man at all. In the documentary, playing over a voiceover interview, still images of his father in the courtroom pan by, with his orange jumpsuit and his full beard. So thin! He recognizes in those eyes a fellow caged animal.

  The collar of Will’s T-shirt is wet. He touches his cheeks, and they, too, are wet. Has he been crying?

  He watches it twice, and a third time, invites Henry over, and they watch it together.

  They IMDB the filmmakers. “I knew these guys,” Will says. “They lived down the hall from us. Those two used to babysit me!”

  Spring semester his first year, Will had taken a class called Research Methods. One of the assignments had been to craft a portrait of someone no longer living, putting to use the techniques they’d learned in the course. Examining relics, interviewing direct and indirect eyewitnesses, synthesizing primary and secondary sources, conducting statistical inference and arguments from analogy. Whatever it took to arrive at an accurate narrative account of some key part of the person’s life and a fuller understanding of his or her daily routines. The best were invited to read theirs to the class. Will found particularly moving a young woman’s account of her great-grandmother of Japanese descent who, under Executive Order 9066 by Franklin Roosevelt, had spent a formative part of her childhood at the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Jerome County, Idaho. The student had crafted the story of her great-grandmother’s life on the compound in the first person, which breathed a kind of magical life into this otherwise dry assignment.