Christopher Hacker - The Morels

“I’m Marsha,” she said to Sri Lanka. “And this is my husband, Greg.”

“Greg and Marsha?” Sri Lanka said. “Are you serious?”

“Except we’re not brother and sister.”

“Neither were your TV counterparts — they totally could have fucked.”

Arthur stood there for a while — large hands shifting from under his armpits to his pockets to his elbows — as he looked around for a way in. After some time, he took a cross-legged seat on the gravel. I became engaged in some lighthearted repartee with Greg and Marsha, then looked over again to see Arthur staring out blankly, the way one does when caught in an awkward social situation. The people on either side of him were involved in other conversations, leaving him alone in this now-boisterous group. Eventually, he got up, brushed at the bottoms of his chinos, and wandered off. I excused myself.

I caught up with him at the base of the immense water tower. We talked for some time there, wandering the labyrinth of an idea I kept losing the thread of. In my tipsiness, I didn’t really care, content enough to drink my beer and nod away as he pursued a train of thought. Then he said, “I’m not good at this.”

“At—”

“Being with other people. I don’t know how to relax. To chat casually about the world. I do this, what I’ve been doing with you, which seems to alienate most people.”

“We can talk about the weather if you want.”

“Penelope is different. She thrives in these situations.” We regarded her as she stood by the grill some yards off with two others, gesturing wildly with a pair of barbecue tongs. The couple she was with held paper plates, onto which Penelope delivered two blackened pieces of chicken off the grill. She caught us looking and waved with the tongs.

“How did you two meet?”

“On a bus. If I think about that day, I can still smell it, the air inside that bus. That’s memory! The humid earth, the coffee, the cologne. It had been raining. Sometimes I wake up next to her, amazed. A wonderful thing, marriage is — no longer having to navigate the baffling bureaucracy of life alone. To have a partner. Someone who believes in you. Her belief is so strong. Sometimes I wonder if, without her, I’d exist at all.”

“How’d you manage it — if you’re so bad at small talk? She turned on by long tracts about the reader-driven model of literature?”

“I got her pregnant.”

“I like your technique. Effective. I’ll have to remember that. And being a father? As wonderful as marriage?”

“The boy’s a born artist — all children are, I suppose. But you get to see just how natural the impulse is to invent things out of thin air. His most recent project has been Tug, imaginary Rottweiler. Sublimating his desire for a dog through endless drawings of one. We are in the Tug period of Will’s artistic career. Pencil sketches, clay models, glazed tile. Opening a book I’d been reading the other day, I discovered a Tug on the bottom corner of every page: a flip book of Tug running through a meadow. Tug , because Rottweilers are ugly yet powerful — like tugboats. You’ll look through any of the sketch pads in Will’s room to find page upon page of family portraits, featuring Tug front and center. Tug is being willed into this family through sheer force of imagination. Isn’t that right, O Son of Mine?”

Will had been beam-balancing the waist-high railing around the water tower as we talked, giving us each a duck-duck-goose on the head every time he passed. He jumped down between us and said, “I’m over the whole dog thing. What I want now is a poltergeist forensic kit. It’s for discovering unexplained phenomena.”

Will brought us over to see some “suspicious evidence” he and some of the other tenants had found. As we walked off together, I thought of myself at Will’s age, ten or eleven, with my own father. I have vivid memories of our time together — the day we toured the island of Manhattan on the Circle Line, just the two of us, and the hours spent constructing an elaborate scale-model space station I’d gotten for Christmas, heads bowed together at the dining room table, passing a small tube of glue back and forth. Strangely, I don’t much recall playing with friends, although I must have; I spent most of my time at the local playground and at school with those my own age, but I have only the most generalized memories of these as places — sandbox, sprinklers, courtyard — not what I did there. Maybe it’s for their rarity that I remember those moments with my father. He was generous with the time he had for me — but there wasn’t much for him to be generous with. His professional life took so much of him — pedaling twice as hard against the lack of even a high school diploma — that I often found myself on the sidelines having just missed my chance to hold out that cup of water as he passed. At Will’s age, I yearned toward my father, found myself interested in whatever interested him — his favorite television show ( Star Trek ) became my favorite television show; his favorite author (Isaac Asimov) became my favorite author. This didn’t seem to be the case with Will, I noticed. He was his own man. In this rooftop investigation, Will was the lead detective — Arthur the staid partner with only two weeks left to retirement.

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!”