Christopher Hacker - The Morels

Doc and Cynthia like the compromise, and so the Permission Room is born.

One day — or evening, it becomes hard to tell after a while — Doc comes up from the basement to discover the bleachers gone.

Cynthia says, It’s time for some real change around here. Out with the old-fashioned, in with the fun! She is naked, the main door wide open.

What combination is she on, Doc wonders, and would she give him the recipe?

If those first years at the house were a celebration directed outward, out into the street, a giving away, now is a time to turn inward again, for each to seek out his or her own pleasure — the time has come to take back. And whereas the ethos of life had been toward excellence and beauty, now it’s the opposite. It’s all revel, without the art, without the life. The drugs do away with any inhibitions, as well as the notion of coupling. It is every man for himself now. There are no more experts. It’s an unwinding of sorts. The only thing to do is fuck.

“That was a crazy time,” Cynthia said wistfully. “Crazy.”

I asked, “What about Arthur?”

Doc said, “What about him? He was a big boy by then. If he lived in India, he would have been married off. If he were a Jew, he would have already been a man. Thirteen, fourteen. Almost the same age as Cyn when I first banged her.”

Cynthia said, “Anyway, he kept to himself mostly. He was in his room practicing or out at the library or at a lesson or up at that music school.”

I tried pressing here; what activities had Arthur seen, exactly? What might he have participated in, in the Permission Room, and with whom? At what age? But their answers were elusive. Later, I could see that this was a mistake, pressing the issue. It pretty much put an end to the interview. Cynthia excused herself to “piddle,” and Doc, taking out the flat marble pipe from his pants pocket along with a Bic lighter, sparked up a waft of pot smoke that he kept in his chest along with anything else he might have been willing to say that day.

The Morels talked for six straight hours. Dave had to make a run up to Tower Records to pick up more DV cassettes after a frantic bit of whispering with Suriyaarachchi; we hadn’t planned for this kind of outpouring. And, despite my failure at the end, Cynthia had come back into the main room as we were packing up and invited us to stay and continue filming — she was planning to design some more jewelry and thought we might be interested in filming her make it. Maybe stay for dinner.

We departed the carriage house after promising to return on Sunday, and, when safely around the corner, we were free to hug one another, to giggle at our good fortune. The Morels had proved to be a gold mine. Suriyaarachchi carried the cassettes in a special bag that he clutched now with both hands to his chest.

“So they’re not married,” Suriyaarachchi said.

“They don’t sleep together. Did you see the other bed?”

“I thought that was for guests.”

“It’s where he sleeps. She’s up in the bunk.”

“Your man Arthur,” Dave said, “had one strange kind of childhood.”

We passed an Indian restaurant on Broome Street that met the description of the one that Doc had recommended earlier. The place was empty. Several waiters were gathered around a table in the back, wiping down menus. We sat down by the window and ordered samosas and three servings of palak paneer .

After hearing about the last days of the carriage house, I had to wonder at Arthur’s sexual inexperience. From what he’d shared with me, and what I gleaned from his book, there had only been that one early encounter with another boy his own age. How was that possible? From the way Cynthia told it, he would have been tripping over writhing orgies on his way to the bathroom every morning. I pictured myself at the age of fifteen, with a perpetual erection, living in that household, with my pick of willing participants and no prohibition whatsoever from my parents. It would have been nonstop fucking, I would have gone insane from fucking. And, I would have thought, growing up in a household like that, Arthur would have been less shy, more at ease with himself in social settings. Another thing that didn’t add up.

“Sunday will be about pickup shots,” Suriyaarachchi said. “And cutaways. We need lots of cutaways. See if we can’t get our hands on old photos or artwork. Signs, anything we can do that Ken Burns slow pan-zoom with. And we’ll need all sorts of footage of that basement.”

“We’re going to need light. The gain in the shadows will be bad.”

“If you bring light down there, it’s not going to look like a creepy basement anymore.”

“As long as we get the ratio right, we can do what we want.”

The two of them argued for a while about this until our food came, and then we lost ourselves to our appetites, piling our plates high with pea-studded steaming rice and torn flaps of naan, ladling the stew from the round copper bowls. There was plenty to go around, and by the end I felt stuffed and a little guilty at my indulgence.

EVENTS DEVELOPED FAIRLY QUICKLY AFTERthis. I was present for very little of it and only put the pieces together through interviews, generously granted to us by Penelope, the Wrights, and law enforcement many months later, after it was all over.

Two officers from Fairfax County responded to the call from the Wrights’ residence in Annandale. Report of an unauthorized person trying to gain entry. The unauthorized person was the Wrights’ son-in-law. Officer Colonna waited outside with the suspect while Officer Fields spoke with the owners of the house.

There had been a domestic dispute between their daughter and her husband, the suspect. All parties were vague as to what had transpired.

Violence? No.

The father and property’s deed holder, Frank Wright, had a pending civil suit against his son-in-law. Defamation. That man out there is a monster. He molested my grandson and wrote about it, just to smear our noses in his awful deed. He’s lucky I’m a Christian and obey my Commandments or I would have blown his head off! Mrs. Wright sat by her husband’s side and stroked his hand.

The officer asked to see the permit for the weapon and the weapon itself — he did this less out of protocol and more as a way of keeping them focused, of calming them all down. Officer Fields asked to speak with their daughter and her boy, who seemed to corroborate Mr. Wright’s claim. The events that the boy described had taken place when the boy was eight, in their place of residence at the time, in Queens, New York. The boy was now eleven.

Officer Fields finished taking statements, checked the permit against the serial number on the firearm. Mr. Wright wanted to file a restraining order against his son-in-law. He has no right to be on our property!

There was a hush in the house. A television in the living room played out an episode of Law & Order quietly. Mr. Wright’s statements sounded like outbursts in the relative calm. Everyone else spoke quietly, mirroring Officer Fields, who recently attended a seminar in which he learned to project the emotional calm he was looking to instill in the people he was sworn to serve and protect, something he revealed to Mrs. Wright when she noted his calm demeanor.

Officer Fields told Mr. Wright how to go about filing for a restraining order. Mr. Wright looked for a pen and paper frantically, which Mrs. Wright calmly found and set before Mr. Wright. He began dutifully copying out Officer Fields’s instructions but stopped after a while. It was too complicated. Obtaining documents from this office, filing it with that office, going to court. The shotgun would do for the purposes of restraint.