Christopher Hacker - The Morels

The man had pulled out his wallet, apologizing he didn’t have a more recent picture (“Boxed up,” he explained) and was showing me a snapshot that had obviously been cropped with scissors to fit in the little plastic photo sleeve. It showed a dark-haired green-eyed beauty holding a child — a boy, if the blue overalls were any indication — old enough to be sitting up and young enough to be held neatly in his mother’s lap and for the mother to have her chin on his head. The photo sleeve was worn almost opaque, and pocket debris had been stuck inside long enough to have formed bumps around the larger particles. I ran my thumb across it. Like Braille, or an oyster forming its pearl. I handed the photo back and asked their names. He was older than me, by a couple of years. I couldn’t think of anyone with whom I had been friends back then who hadn’t been my own age. I knew only one married couple, newlyweds — they’d done it on a dare — and was friends with no parents.

What was I up to these days, he wondered, putting away his wallet. I told him about my career in film (here I introduced Sri Lanka and the editor), leaving out mention of my moonlight occupation at the movie theater. I offered an anecdote about production and its misadventures: the night of the Winnebago stunt. The punch line had me picking the short straw and suck-siphoning gasoline from a grip truck because New Jersey gas stations close early on Sundays. Who knew! It was a well-honed bit, one that usually had people in stitches and got that glow of envy going in their eyes. But my friend here was curiously unimpressed. Not that he didn’t listen politely and chuckle on cue, but there was something in the quality of his listening that made my own words sound in my ears like a child trying to impress the family dinner guest. He told me it all seemed very exciting, and although his tone wasn’t exactly condescending, it was clear that he was saying this only because he could sense I wanted to hear it.

I turned the subject back his way, in part as a stall tactic — Sri Lanka and the editor were making noises about the stairs, and I had no desire for the lunchtime conversation these fourteen flights would lead us to — but also because the new mystery of who this man was exactly had taken root. He told me he was teaching, or rather would be teaching as soon as the new semester began, at the university uptown. He went on to explain in an offhand way, almost dismissively, that he’d written a book.

Sri Lanka broke in, looking at our guest for the first time. “So what’s up with the elevators?”

“The right one’s out of order,” he said. As if to corroborate, the alarm began clanging.

The editor walked over to the stairway exit. Sri Lanka followed and on the threshold shot me a look that said, Now .

I apologized and shook the man’s hand again. I wished him luck, a wish he returned with an ironic smile. Was it really so obvious?

On the jog down, Sri Lanka aborted our mission. The timing was all off, he whispered, and so was the power dynamic. We would have to wait until next week to fire the editor. I didn’t get it but whispered back that I agreed wholeheartedly. We called it a day after lunch at a deli with upscale steam tables and plastic-utensil seating, which left me with some time to kill before my shift.

At Tower Records I gave over a solid hour to the various listening stations. Under the greasy clamp of those headphones, eyes closed, I tried to lose myself to the music. Instead, I pictured my long-lost friend’s odd face. It was familiar. But from where? With thirty minutes to spare before my shift, I stopped in at Shakespeare Books.

He’d mentioned the title in the course of our chat, and at lunch I scribbled it down on a napkin. I approached a kid in pajama bottoms, staff tag around his neck, and handed him the napkin. I had been expecting a blank stare, but was led without hesitation to an island display in the middle of the store. Judging by the assured path he traced through the maze of shelves, this was not an uncommon request. He disappeared and left me to sort through the paperbacks on display. The sign overhead designated them as STAFF RECOMMENDED.

I found the book, partially hidden by a new translation of Borges’s Collected Fictions . Literature? I had been expecting something more, I don’t know, academic: philosophy, some proof disproving some other proof. I picked it up. It was a slim volume entitled Goldmine/Landmine . On the cover, in bold, was the name:

Arthur Morel.

My job at the theater wasn’t the worst thing in the world. There was a kind of glee to our aisle frolic around the emptied auditorium, screen blank, lights up. A perverse pleasure taking in our janitorial duty. Impatient for our rightful place on the red carpet, we ushers spent our downtime debating which actors might play parts in our unsold scripts, dateless schoolgirls planning outfits to the junior prom.

I took my fifteen in the cement break pit with a cup of root beer and a bag of popcorn, then made my way to the ticket booth with Arthur’s slim book for the rest of what I hoped would be a slow evening. From behind the bulletproof face of the theater, the booth contained an earplugged rush of silence. The flutter of money being counted, the pebble clatter of change in the pan — these were the only sounds inside. An entire marching band on parade down the street would register as a polite and twinkling spectacle — and, if you were reading a book, not even that. When the shadow of a customer would darken your page, you’d flip on the thin otherworldly chatter of the squawk box. “Two adults,” they’d say, as though they were announcing themselves to you generically, in the third person. The machine would clunk up two tickets that you’d slide through the change pan. It was a welcome isolation from the crowd control the other positions required. You relaxed into a crouch on your stool until your butt got sore, just in time for the manager to come count you out.

To my frustration, however, it was not a slow night. Everyone was here to see the new Almodóvar, which had probably just been nominated for something because until now the screen it flickered on played to a virtually empty theater. I read the dedication page four times before giving in to the demands of the throng. It would just have to wait. The late show got out at 11:17. After closing, and if I walked briskly enough, I could make it through the front door by midnight.

Home, I stripped off my tie and had a seat at the upright piano parked under my bedroom window, a mid-century Baldwin that hadn’t been tuned since before I left for college. It was a sad old horse. Its uneven keys had the look of nicotine-stained fingernails. The mahogany veneer was splintering off in places; along the side that faced the bare radiator pipe, its finish was blistering like a ripe sunburn. I switched on the small gooseneck lamp on the stand and got out Arthur’s book. According to the preliminary pages, it had appeared in hardcover a year prior. There was no author photo, and the About-the-Author, which I was hoping might offer a clue, was not helpful. “Arthur Morel lives in New York City with his wife and son.” On the back were several blurbs. Russell Banks and Martin Amis both effused about this debut talent. The New Yorker : “… an astonishing feat of language.” The New York Times Book Review : “… unflinching eye for difficult truths; one trembles to think where that eye will turn next.”

Astonishing. Unflinching . I formed a silent chord with my right hand, bringing each key down slowly, to the bump of the key bed.

It seemed that Arthur hadn’t changed a bit.

I AM FIFTEEN — FOR A CHILD PRODIGY, something of a late bloomer. It’s Saturday. I am standing on the platform at Christopher Street Station waiting for the Uptown local. This is the age of the brass token, before the hipster renaissance in Brooklyn and Queens, before If You See Something Say Something. You might encounter any number of things on the platform in those days. This morning: a blood-soaked sock and a paper cup filled with quarters, on the cup’s side scrawled TAKE ONE I DAIR YOU. As I wait for the train, I try to imagine the scenario in which these two props intersected. The head and rear cars are usually empty at this hour, and I have been warned against boarding either. Safety in numbers, which will be made pointedly clear later that same year when a kid not that much older than myself will enter and sit down beside me in a cleared-out car. He will put a knife to my groin and demand twenty dollars, and after I hand him a wallet with only a few singles in it, he will punch me in the face and take off at the next stop through the ding-dong closing doors.