Christopher Hacker - The Morels

For the past week, since learning of his son’s claim, Arthur has been trying to wrap his head around it. It’s clear the boy is angry, that this “memory” is an attempt to punish Arthur for what he wrote. He knows his son to be spiteful, unafraid of putting himself in harm’s way in order to harm another or gain something for himself.

There was an incident a few years ago. They were still living at the apartment in Queens. Penelope was out; Arthur was watching Will entertain a friend from school. At some point that morning the two approached Arthur — two privates at attention, reporting for duty — to solicit Arthur’s permission to attend the schoolmate’s family camping trip the following weekend. Arthur reminded Will of his obligation to his next-door neighbor’s poodle — left for two weeks in Will’s care. It was an easy refusal for Arthur, himself blameless. Will, he could see, was furious about it. There was no arguing to get his way here. Will was, at the age of nine, a master litigator, adept at winning his way by the sheer relentlessness of his logic. Will wondered if he might hire a friend to take over the responsibility, but Arthur refused. The neighbors had entrusted Will and Will alone with the responsibility. Will and his friend left, but Arthur knew this would not be the end of the issue.

Sure enough, a little while later Arthur entered the living room to see Will and his friend with the neighbor’s dog — it appeared that Will’s friend was trying to goad the dog into biting Will. The dog was growling, snapping at Will’s ankle. Arthur demanded to know what was going on. Will said that if a dog bites a person, it has to go to the pound. It would free him of his obligation and enable him to go on the camping trip. When Arthur told the boy that sending a dog to the pound would be sending it to its death, Will burst into tears. Arthur was both appalled and impressed by the scene. The extreme he was willing to go to get what he wanted, to punish his father for not giving it to him. Was it possible that this “remembering” business was Will’s way of making a point? What other explanation could there be — for it could not simultaneously be true that Arthur had made this all up and that Will actually remembered it.

Unless.

What if Will weren’t lying? What if he believed he was telling the truth? Was it possible that Arthur’s writing was so effective — so authentic, so vivid, so lifelike — it had actually convinced the boy he had lived it? Wasn’t this, after all, the aim of a certain kind of fiction? Realism, the hypnotic spell, the continuous dream. A couple of his colleagues at the college took it for granted that the writer’s work was that of the hypnotist, the spell caster — exhorting their students toward ever-more-vivid words, ever more “authentic” renderings of a place, an object, a person — Geppetto trying to turn a block of wood into a real-live boy. What if Arthur’s spell had worked? His block of sentences had somehow transformed into the memories of a real-live boy?

Or here was a thought: What if what Will said was true? What if it was he, Arthur, who had forgotten? What if this had all happened, but both had repressed the memory because it was too awful? And when Arthur was spinning this fiction out of what he imagined to be thin air, he was merely recalling it? Reading the passage had jogged Will’s memory. And now, the boy’s claim to its veracity was doing the same for Arthur; in a sense, they were reminding each other about something they’d both tried to forget.

But how was Arthur to know? The scene in the bathtub now existed in his mind vividly, for he had dreamed it up. How was he to distinguish this from factual pieces of the past? What were “real” memories but fragments of remembered sense impressions glued together with, made coherent by, imaginative invention. And what was fiction but the inverse of this? Imaginative invention was made plausible by fragments of remembered sense impressions. On one extreme there was fiction, and on the other a memory. And in the middle? For this reason, perhaps, memory was so unreliable. It was suggestible, colored by emotion, infinitely mutable.

One of Arthur’s most vivid childhood recollections was of a summer afternoon in a playground in the city — he first figured the event to be memorable because of its rarity. His parents seldom took him places as a child. For some reason, he placed the playground in Washington Square Park, though it could have been anywhere. He was holding an ice-cream cone his mother had just purchased for him from a truck nearby. It was a hot day, and the ice cream, soft to begin with, had immediately begun to melt. He was perhaps four or five at the time, and in a rage he cried out to his mother, full of blame, Make it stop! The sun is melting my ice cream! His mother laughed and handed him some napkins as it continued to melt down around his hand, and Arthur cried and cried, bitterly, blaming his mother for this misfortune. It was a favorite story of his mother’s. As he got older, whenever he complained about something beyond his or his mother’s control, she would cry out, Oh! The sun is melting my ice cream! Arthur learned much later from Doc that this event had not happened, or at least had not happened to him. This was an anecdote about Doc’s son Benji, years before Arthur was born, in New Jersey. Cynthia had so liked the story, with its neat lesson about surrendering to things beyond one’s control, that she co-opted it. It wasn’t even clear that she had done this on purpose. It could have been that, in the jumble of stories she would tell about herself and those she told about other people, she had simply gotten mixed up about this one. And yet the memory remained — the hot sun, the vanilla ice cream dripping across his dirt-caked little knuckles, the hot honeysuckle air of the playground trees, the despair, the rage and blame — this memory was undiminished by the discovery that it was a fake.

But what were these sense impressions? Were they bits of other childhood occasions brought together by the suggestion of this anecdote? Perhaps. So it would follow that, if Arthur had made up the scene in the bathtub with Will, Will’s “memory” would have to have some basis of truth, wouldn’t it? If Arthur had never in his life visited a playground or eaten an ice-cream cone, would he have been as susceptible to his mother’s suggestion? Which left him with a troubling thought: Where in Will’s young life had he seen what Arthur had described in his book in such vivid detail?

Was it possible that Will had been abused, just not by Arthur? But surely this wouldn’t exist as a detached fragment in Will’s mind. It would be an indivisible part of that singular event. Well, Arthur certainly hadn’t exposed Will to those things he claimed to have seen, on purpose at least, but what if it was something Will had glimpsed on his own, blocked out because it was too disturbing, and then somehow unconsciously paired the image with the one Arthur suggested in his book?

But of course all this speculation about memory is founded on nothing but notions picked up from Hollywood thrillers and television soap operas. And in any case is irrelevant. Arthur can learn nothing without talking to Will, and it seems Penelope is determined not to let that happen.

He can’t blame her, really. What choice has he given her?

He clicks open the pen and writes:

Once upon a time there was a man who sought peace and happiness .

He sat under a banyan tree because this was where wise men told him that they had come to attain the lasting peace and happiness they themselves enjoyed — where, in fact, the original Enlightened One had come many generations ago. So the man sat up against the tree’s base and crossed his legs and placed his hands upon his knees. He closed his eyes and tried to empty his mind of all thought. These were the instructions of the wise men, who had received their wisdom from other, wiser men who had received their wisdom from the original Wise One many generations ago .