Christopher Hacker - The Morels

“We’re on your side,” I said, handing the packet back to him. “Whatever happens.” I reassured him that we had no doubts about his innocence and that he could count on our unwavering friendship. It might have been the liquor talking, but I also felt that welling up that I described earlier. It’s gratitude, really, that feeling, a reciprocal sense of connectedness with another human being. Arthur sheepishly watched me say this, swallowing, his large Adam’s apple bobbing wildly. He gripped the arm of the couch with his large hand, knuckles going white.

Then I said something insensitive, which also may have been the liquor talking. “That stuff you were talking about last week,” I said, “the book doing its work, generating story and all that — isn’t this exactly what you wanted to happen?”

Arthur looked at me — a long look — then, softly, so that it almost was a sigh, “God, I think so.”

It was the last word he said that night. After that he just sat, staring into his empty mug. I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I came back, he was asleep.

Dave was still in the lounge chair, passed out. I checked in on Suriyaarachchi, also passed out, mouth agape, on the leather couch in the editing suite. I sat down on the opposite corner and took off my shoes.

I woke to the distant sound of knocking on a door. Suriyaarachchi was still out cold. Daylight shone through the sharp lines of the blinds’ slats. I stumbled out of the editing suite, and the faint knocking revealed itself to be loud banging at the front door.

Arthur was nowhere to be seen, and Dave was racing around gathering empty beer bottles. “Quick, it’s the cops!”

I stood and watched him, then went over to the front door. Through the peephole, I saw two uniformed officers, a man and a woman, one standing slightly behind the other.

“Arthur Morel,” the one in front called, setting a hand on his holster.

I opened the door and told him my name, invited them in. They took off their hats, scraped their feet on the hallway carpeting before stepping over the threshold. Were they trained to do that? Dave, smiling sheepishly with his armload of empties, offered them a beer, which they humorlessly declined. They asked several questions designed to get to the bottom of who we were and what our relationship with Arthur was. Suriyaarachchi emerged from the editing suite, yawning, hand in pants, and froze. The woman officer asked his name and jotted his answer in her notepad.

“Look,” the male officer said once the preliminaries were out of the way, “Mr. Morel can’t be here. He can’t be within three hundred yards of here. We got a call about a disturbance this morning, a male trying to gain entry to that apartment, banging on the door, carrying on.”

“But I have a right to enter my own apartment.” Arthur was standing in the corridor that led to the bathroom, sounds of a recently flushed toilet hissing behind him. “My name is on the lease.”

“I don’t care whose name is on the lease, sir. You settle things in court, once that order of protection is lifted, you can go wherever you want so far as I’m concerned. Until that time, you are not to step foot on these premises.”

“Where am I supposed to go?”

“Hotels, shelters if you can’t afford a hotel. What about family?”

Arthur made a face.

The officers insisted on escorting Arthur out of the building. The elevators and lobby were mercifully empty. Dave, Suriyaarachchi, and I huddled quickly as the officers were parting ways with Arthur. It was decided that we could no longer afford to be without a camera rolling at all times. Suriyaarachchi would rent one while Dave, out of necessity, would cannibalize his editing suite to pay for it and the media costs long term, at least a month, through a trial if it came down to that, keeping enough of the suite intact to edit what we came up with. It was also decided that we couldn’t afford to lose sight of our subject. Once Arthur disappeared into the crowd there was no telling where he might go. I would stick with him, keeping Suriyaarachchi informed of our whereabouts.

I went with Arthur to an Internet café, where he checked the prices of the city’s seediest fleatraps. The Elk. The Sunshine. Each seemed reasonable — under twenty dollars — until we discovered that the rates were hourly. “We could lend you enough for a week at one of these places, maybe, but what are you going to do after that?” We had discovered that Arthur could no longer access his bank funds. It was a scene that involved our being removed from the premises by bank security. I imagined Suriyaarachchi kicking himself at not being able to get this on tape.

Arthur was reluctant to call Benji. Arthur had blown off his wedding, for which he had not been forgiven. “We haven’t spoken in almost three years. It was a legitimate excuse!” He received a Christmas card the year before that showed Benji and his wife, her horsey gap-toothed smile reflected in a young child between them. They were living in Hoboken now. The card had been an olive branch that Arthur let slip from his grasp. However, with my encouragement, he made the call. It was the wife who answered. She was cordial with Arthur, just barely. She gave him Benji’s number at work.

Bastard! came Benji’s voice loud and clear through the earpiece. From the sound of it though, things were okay between them. They talked for nearly thirty minutes. “He liked it,” Arthur said, a little dazed after the call. “He said he didn’t find it repulsive and that in fact he was able to identify with my character. Which is so unlike him. But he said he liked it.” Until now, when I have said that Arthur smiled, I suppose I really mean he smirked. It was a pinched expression, purposeful, meant to highlight an irony or to show that he disagreed with something you had just said. This smile, though, upon reporting Benji’s reaction, was different. It was radiant and pure, an openmouthed, teeth-and-gums smile, an involuntary reflex that forced his eyes closed just to make room for it.

Arthur had explained his situation to Benji and asked pointblank for help. Benji seemed grateful to have been asked, to have been allowed to be the big brother, the bigger person. He had passed the New York State Bar some years back, though he was not a practicing attorney. He worked as a legal consultant to a computer software start-up that had managed — with Benji’s help, he wasn’t shy in admitting — to stay aloft in the turbulent aftermath of the tech bubble’s explosion. He would meet with Arthur to talk about his legal options, dismayed that he didn’t yet have an attorney, outraged that Penelope — was it Penelope? — had locked him out of his account. The only thing he could not offer was a place to stay. Although Benji was not put off by Arthur’s book, his wife had her concerns, and with their son in the house—

“What does she think I’m going to do,” he said. “But it’s okay, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.”

While Arthur had been on the phone, I asked Jeeves at the computer in my cubicle why the carriage house was of any interest to the people of Japan and discovered that in Tokyo there was a rather famous sex club modeled after it. The walls of this club were plastered with snapshots of Japanese faces between Doc and Cynthia.

“I know where you can stay,” I said.

Arthur looked at my browser window. “Absolutely not.”

“Why?”

“We have nothing to say to one another.”

“I find that hard to believe. It’s been more than a decade.”

“You met them. Why would you want to send me back into that?”

“You brokered the deal. You wouldn’t have introduced us if you didn’t intend on using that introduction later on.”