Christopher Hacker - The Morels

“You look like a Jehovah’s Witness.”

“Jehovah? He’s under federal protection because he knows too much.”

“You’re lucky I’m not a truant officer. Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“Half day. I’m looking for Agent Suriyaarachchi and Agent Dave. They around?”

Dave told me that Penelope would occasionally call on him to babysit last-minute, which entailed getting twenty bucks to have Will come over to do what he normally did. Dave used the money for takeout, which the two of them would eat while blasting the limbs off of zombie hordes.

Will took after his mother, slightly plump with thick black hair and the delicate lashes of a pretty girl. He liked to eat and often came prepared with a knapsack of Tupperwared food Penelope had packed for him.

Will said to me one day, quite out of the blue, “Mom and Art are fighting a lot.” I was looking through the sublet listings in the Voice . Dave and Suriyaarachchi had gone out to the post office. Will had come in during their absence and asked if it would be okay if he played a video game. It had been intended as a rhetorical question — he was already kneeling in front of the console — but I said that he would have to ask Dave’s permission when he got back from his errand.

“When will he be back?” Will was used to being adored by adults, but I had made it clear I was immune to his charms. He would often find himself blinking at me, unsure of how to proceed. I had hoped my answer would discourage him from sticking around, but instead he took a seat next to me and picked up the entertainment circular of the paper and held it out in front of him, as if to read. Cute. I resumed my task of starring any long-term sublets within my budget — there weren’t many — when Will said what he said about Penelope and Arthur fighting. I waited for him to go on, bracing myself for a discussion about how he shouldn’t worry, sometimes parents fight but it doesn’t mean that, et cetera.

Will said, “Mostly it’s Mom who does the yelling. Art listens. I think it’s because she loves him more than he loves her.”

“What makes you say that?”

Stray hair floated up off his head from the static of the hat he’d just removed. A crust of mucus ringed his left nostril. He set down the paper and opened his knapsack, removing a round bin that contained apple slices, a little browned. “I’ve always thought that. She does the hugging and the kissing. He accepts it. It’s not like he doesn’t like it. He’s like me that way. And I don’t hear them doing it anymore, which is another thing. Not since we moved here.”

“You know what ‘doing it’ sounds like?”

He rolled his eyes and popped an apple slice into his mouth.

“What kind of son are you, who doesn’t hug his mother?”

“I hug her. Of course I hug her. But sometimes I need to play it cool.”

Suriyaarachchi and Dave returned. “Will, my man,” Dave said. “Let me score some of that apple. I’m surprised to see you just sitting there. Thought for sure I’d find you warming up the PlayStation for me.”

Will looked over at me as if to say, See?

After dropping Will off at school, Penelope stops in at Barnes & Noble to pick up a copy of Arthur’s new book. Crinkly green bag in hand, she heads up and east along Sixty-Sixth Street, into Central Park. She’d planned to find a quiet spot under a tree, but the benches are wet from the overnight rain. Somewhat at a loss, she wanders around and ends up ordering a pretzel from a vendor cart even though it isn’t yet ten in the morning. It’s an autumn smell, it beckons her, but the pretzel leaves a pasty taste in her mouth with overtones of ashtray and makes her instantly sleepy. She finds a line of dry benches under an eve, above and behind the old proscenium band shell around which people Rollerblade to music on their headphones in bright colored spandex. There is the distant treble of a faraway boom box. She sits and shrugs off her coat, humming a tune that takes her a moment to realize is the song on the boom box. She slips the book from its bag and cracks it open, giving it an involuntary sniff before turning to the first page.

She is shocked anew by the power of Arthur’s writing, its ability to take her in. Is this just the power all authors have? The mere mention of a red shawl —like a command you are powerless to resist — and there it is, the chenille soft in your hands. Even though the title prepares her somewhat, it’s also a shock to be taken into the fictionalized realm of her own life — a version of déjà vu, not unlike hearing her own voice on an answering machine. She reads, and winces, reading, and reads on, and then falls asleep.

In her dream, she is twelve and in braces, self-conscious of her breath and of being naked. She is in a stable, shivering. There are horses stamping and farting around her. Something terrible has just happened, or is about to happen, but she can’t figure out what. She wakes herself so that she can remember and finds that her coat is on the ground and her shirt is hiked up and she is freezing.

She finds the book, which has fallen under the bench. She returns to the last page she remembers reading and continues, but she can’t shake the feeling that something is terribly wrong. Her dream has entered the atmosphere of the book, or maybe she is picking up a subtle atmosphere from the book itself? It’s hard to tell now. She puts her coat back on and zips it up and continues reading.

In the manner of other contemporary fiction, there’s little story to speak of — the dilemmas of everyday life — and yet it’s also compelling. It’s the sentences, the train of thought — it’s persuasive. So she turns the pages to see where it all might lead, because it does seem to be leading somewhere, each scene a preparation for some defining moment. How could he call this a novel? She checks the cover again. The Morels: A Novel .

The main character is named Arthur Morel, who is married to a character named Penelope, and their child’s name is Will. The voice is conversational, less formal than the I-voice of his previous book, closer to Arthur’s own. Main-character-Arthur works as an administrative head at a university library, a job real-Arthur had for a short while, before being let go. It had not been a good time for them. Arthur was miserable. This was three years ago, before his first book was published. Will was eight.

We find ourselves at the beginning of The Morels with Arthur struggling to make meaning from what has become a mundane domestic existence — he works; he comes home; he washes dishes and bundles garbage. The burden of fatherhood puts a strain on him, on the marriage. Manhood does not come naturally; he is not a natural father. What to say, how to behave. His father-in-law tells him not to worry, that it’s eighteen years of on-the-job training, to follow his heart and he would be okay.

The only problem for Arthur is that his heart is a mystery to him. Most of the time, Arthur doesn’t know what to feel and suspects that deep down he feels nothing — for anyone. In the meantime, he fakes it. He watches Penelope for clues, imitating her expressions of affection, her declarations of love — and as such, Arthur feels as though he’s making up his feelings, inventing them as he goes along — careful to feel whatever is appropriate for the situation. His job brings him little satisfaction — it requires a kind of leadership he does not possess — he must motivate his staff as well as those he answers to. He dreads work, feels in over his head daily — the suits he’s required to wear have been given to him by Penelope’s father, his father’s suits, as it were. He looks in the mirror to see that he is no longer himself, but with every passing week, living the life he is living, he is no longer sure who that is anymore.