Christopher Hacker - The Morels

Afterward, he is escorted back to his cell. One of the Hispanic men is gone. He nods at the remaining man, but the man does not nod back. More waiting. New people arrive over the course of hours, half a dozen. Arthur finds himself longing for the good old days, when it was just the two silent Hispanics. One of the new arrivals, a bald kid with an angry clotted cut across the bridge of his nose and many earrings up the spine of his left ear, stares nonstop at Arthur, and whenever Arthur looks back, the kid asks Arthur what the fuck he’s looking at.

Some hours later, he is released. No explanation, at least not to him. The uniformed officers say to one another in his presence something that sounds like Aro ard . He learns later this is an acronym. He has been ROR’d: released on his own recognizance.

He is given papers to sign and keep track of, information about his arraignment. He learns later that a technical hitch is preventing the prosecution from moving forward with the case until late the following week and habeas corpus grants him the courtesy of his freedom in the meantime. He is given back his clothes, his backpack, the contents of his pockets, his watch, and his wedding ring in a ziplock bag. He receives these items like the artifacts of a former life — curious, once filled with meaning, now obsolete. His clothes feel heavy on him now, ill fitting.

He walks out into the afternoon half expecting to see Penelope and Will, despite everything, and finds himself devastated that nobody’s there to meet him. He puts the ziplock along with the paperwork he’s accumulated into his briefcase, in with the class handouts and marked-up drafts of student work.

His classes!

What day is it? He hurries against the anonymous Midtown crush until he finds a newspaper stand. Thursday. It’s two in the afternoon, already a half hour into his three-hour workshop!

He fumbles for his cell phone, but the battery is dead. He hails a cab, a mistake on two fronts: with the traffic, it takes nearly an hour to get uptown — and, two, he has no cash. The driver stops in front of a deli on 114 thstreet with a neon-red ATM sign in the window. By the time Arthur walks through the doors of the Writing Division, out of breath, it is nearly three thirty.

Here, too, he is expecting to be met — by students, colleagues — with some sort of fanfare. After all, it isn’t every day a professor gets arrested! But there is no one here to greet him. The work-study receptionist today is a young man he has never seen before, and from the blank look on his face, it seems he doesn’t know Arthur either.

I didn’t bother checking in on my class, Arthur says. I’m an hour and half late and assume it has been dismissed.

You’re a teacher? I’m sorry — I’m usually at the undergrad office.

I’m Arthur Morel.

The young man’s face registers this. Oh, yes. I mean, they’re expecting you. Let me — here he picks up the phone and unsticks several pink sticky notes on the desk to examine them. Here it is — just a minute.

Arthur doesn’t bother waiting.

He walks into the chairman’s office. He is with a student. They both look terrified to see Arthur, on their faces the same confused sick look the young man gave him when he announced himself. The chairman, Richard is his name, dismisses the student, who seems grateful to be released.

Arthur sits in the vacated seat.

What are you doing? Richard says. Don’t sit down. You can’t sit down. Didn’t you get the messages? I left three messages. I’m sorry, it’s been a rough morning — but who am I to talk about rough, huh? Oh, boy. I’m sorry. But it’s been handed down from on high. It kills me, really. I do everything I can for my fellow instructors. I do. This is a rotating chair, and you never know who will be in it next, so. But even before this latest, there’d been rumblings, up there — I’ve done a lot of wrangling behind the scenes for you already — which you would know if you ever came to visit! Impolitic, Arthur. But that’s over with, done. It doesn’t matter. We’re beyond that now.

He stands, and so Arthur stands as well. Richard holds out his hand, and Arthur has little choice but to shake it. Richard seems greatly relieved to be walking Arthur to the door. He pats Arthur on the back. He shakes Arthur’s hand several more times, using both hands to do it.

He says, Think of Ulysses . Woolf called Joyce a teenager, picking at his pimples, for writing it. Edmund Wilson thought it was an incoherent mess, as did most of the reviewers at the time. Banned in the United States for what, ten years? But who’s getting the last laugh now?

The estate lawyers?

Exactly! That’s exactly it. Richard laughs, clapping Arthur on the back. Oh, you crack me up. Why didn’t you visit me more often? Anyway.

He sees Arthur looking at the framed photos on the wall. That’s Little Freddie, he says. All pictures are of a white dog in various frozen states of romp on a field of grass. These last two are of Little Freddie III. Little Freddie Junior died in ’95. The dogs are indistinguishable from one another.

You see? Everybody wants tenure — well, this is tenure. Irate deans and teachers in distress and an unhealthy attachment to your West Highland terrier. Did you know I seriously contemplated having Freddie Senior stuffed? The day I was awarded a full-time job here was the last day I wrote a word. Seriously. It descended like a hex, the same one that cursed Old Man Mitchell, poor bastard. Don’t do it. I’m sure the wife is pushing you to, but you’re better off, believe me.

The word wife hangs in the air.

How is she, by the way? I mean, under the circumstances?

Arthur heads downtown, to the apartment. He enters through the revolving doors. The doorman on duty doesn’t stop him when he goes for the elevator. When he gets off on his floor, there are no police waiting outside his apartment.

He tries the lock, but his key no longer works. He knocks. He rings the bell. Is there really nobody home? He puts his ear to the door. Voices, indistinct, nautical. Unclear whether they are coming from inside the apartment.

Having nowhere else to turn, Arthur turns to us, down the hall.

We let him in. We poured him a drink. Arthur was, surprisingly, a man who could hold his liquor. While Suriyaarachchi’s and Dave’s talk devolved into slurred declarations of love for Kim Basinger — and eventually lurching trips to the bathroom — Arthur seemed generally unaffected.

Arthur related the events of the previous two days. We were sitting on the couch. Suriyaarachchi had returned to a movie we had been watching in the other room while Dave sat in the lounge chair across from us, arms folded, ostensibly listening but really just sleeping.

“What are you going to do,” I said when he had finished.

“What are my options?”

“Do you have a lawyer?”

Arthur took the mouthful of whiskey left in the coffee mug, filling his cheeks and then gulping it down. “They don’t make it easy for you. Which I suppose makes sense. What’s their incentive? They’re trying to put you away. One gentleman handed me ‘literature.’ That was the word he used. I couldn’t make much sense of it, written as it is in bureaucratese. Here—”

He clicked open his briefcase and handed me a stapled packet on official New York State Division of Criminal Justice letterhead — or what had once been, several xeroxed generations prior. The state seal was an indistinct black ring, the type barely legible. It billed itself as a “handbook” of the court system meant to “demystify the due process that is every citizen’s right,” but managed only to, in its own labyrinthine logic, emphasize just what a maze Arthur was about to navigate. It was a kind of terrible thing, that document. It made you aware of a territory of knowledge that, unless you were law enforcement or a habitual offender, you were gladly ignorant of but that you needed to quickly become accustomed to. If you were lucky, you could forget it all as soon as the ordeal was over. It must be the same for the newly diagnosed cancer patient. I thought of Viktoria, just released from rehab with her brochures on borderline personality disorder.