Christopher Hacker - The Morels

“It was a gift. I knew they’d prove willing subjects for your movie.”

“I think you were building a bridge you knew you needed to cross. You see, you want to see them again but don’t know how to get over the gap of those fourteen years.”

“Are you sure you visited the right house? Didn’t they tell you about how I was forced to fend for myself while they had orgies in the basement? It can’t be those people you think I’m anxious to reunite with, can it?”

“I’m sorry, Arthur, but you have to. The narrative requires it.”

“The narrative.”

“Things must be seen to have traveled full circle. Your return to where you were born. Reconciliation with your parents. You’d agree that it makes sense.”

“It has a certain Aristotelian logic to it, yes.”

“I don’t know why you’re arguing. It’s an inevitability.”

“Fine.”

“But we have to wait for Suriyaarachchi. He’s got the equipment.”

The footage of the reunion is wonderful. Suriyaarachchi sets up across the street so that the entire archway is visible in the frame, a blue postbox off on the left. Arthur walks into the shot from camera right, crosses the street, and stops dead center, looking around from the edge of the doorway. It’s Cynthia who sees him first. She bounds out from inside and embraces him. Then Doc emerges, tentatively, smiling a kind of nervous smile, leans in — Cynthia still embracing her son, rubbing his back — and shakes Arthur’s hand. Dave is out of frame with a directional mic pointed at them and catches Doc saying, “The prodigy returns, the prodigy returns!” Arthur towers over them. They welcome him in with all the ordinary, unmitigated gratitude of a pair of suburban parents. The light is diffuse, the last light in an overcast day, and covers everything in rich blues and violets. The light falloff from the open threshold is steep, so when they usher Arthur inside, the effect is stark — the three of them disappearing into the gloom. We linger here for a while. A woman enters from camera right with a stack of letters in her hand. She slows at the carriage house’s threshold to see what’s inside, then crosses past it to the postbox to drop off her letters. She double-checks to see that the letters haven’t gotten stuck, and it’s a kind of echo of her gaze into the carriage house’s darkness, which itself echoes Arthur’s peering moments earlier, and suddenly this gesture, flowering into a symbol, reveals itself to us: peering into the darkness.

Unforeseen cost, for which Dave must sell both his high-end Beta decks: settling the carriage house’s Con Ed bill. In order to shoot, one needed light, and not just household light, but industrial-grade light. We replaced all the bulbs in the apartment with high-lumen daylight-balanced compact fluorescents, the highest wattage we dared, filling in the shadows by affixing several fluorescent strips on the ceilings. It took some getting used to. Much of the initial interior footage shows Arthur and his parents blinking glassy eyed at the glare.

Suriyaarachchi was smart. He sat the three of them down and talked frankly about what it meant to be in a documentary, that the camera would always be on, that there would be no privacy. This wasn’t for Doc and Cynthia so much. Total exposure had been their ethos for the past thirty years. This was for Arthur. Suriyaarachchi waited until he had seen some footage before sitting down like this, so that Arthur could get a sense of the project’s worth, aesthetically. For all of his failings, Suriyaarachchi had a great eye. The little footage we’d collected was beautiful. His was an instinctive feel for the limits of the digital medium, its tendency to blow highlights, its need for a narrower spectrum of lights to darks; he insisted on spending extra for a video camera that could shoot cinema-standard twenty-four frames a second and a zoom that allowed a wider aperture so he could get that filmlike look of sharp foreground against a lush background blur. Even on the camcorder’s tiny screen, the playback was gorgeous. With this seed planted, Suriyaarachchi offered the ultimatum: all or nothing, in or out. He would have enough on his plate without having to worry about Arthur’s hand going up whenever he was feeling shy or annoyed. This was the buy-in. Total access. Savvy, having Doc and Cynthia there, too. They acted like plants in a grift, leading the momentum of assent. “Absolutely,” they said. “Understood. Total access.” And so, Arthur agreed. Suriyaarachchi then had them sign exclusivity agreements. At the time, I thought this part was overkill, but a month from now at the height of it, I would look back at this moment and think he had been prophetic. They were not to talk to any other media outlets. This required a sales pitch. Here he talked numbers: dollars and points and box-office profits. “This film will be huge,” he said. “People will be lining up to hear what you three have to say. Guaranteed. But only if they haven’t already heard you say it. You start taking interviews with morning talk shows, syndicated media, you will be depleting the demand for this movie and hence any profits you might see from it. It’s in your hands. You can do what you want, play your chips however you like. You won’t be surprised to hear that I think you should let me hold on to them, that I will play them wisely. But it’s up to you. Just remember, your silence is a very valuable thing. Don’t give it up too easily.”

I was sold. We all signed the papers and shook hands, and then Doc passed around the pipe, and we got high. Even Arthur. We sank into our seats and listened to Doc go on about how great Arthur’s book was.

“You sound like the dust jacket,” Arthur said. “I hate those raves they put all over it, like subliminal messaging. This book is fantastic. You will love this book. The writer is a genius. You know? It’s like they don’t trust readers to come to their own conclusions or the book’s ability to sell you on its own merits.” But Arthur seemed pleased. We ordered takeout from the Indian place up the street, and Cynthia brought us down to the basement to drum up bedding and a spare mattress or two.

It’s interesting to watch Arthur and Cynthia interact in this footage. She’s watching him almost continuously, touching him, caressing his face, even as she is directing us in the search. Arthur stands somewhat stiffly, not rejecting the affection, weathering it, accepting perhaps that this is how it must be, eyes down, gauging for a moment when she is not watching and only then a quick glance up, eyes bleary with pot and exhaustion, and then back to his shoes.

With the lights on, the basement seemed less like a serial killer’s lair and more like a basement. Cynthia looked through the junk. “This mattress”—she patted it, leaning against the wall, went in for a sniff—“with clean sheets shouldn’t be too bad. Artie, look.” She tapped three large boxes, stacked precariously. “Your old stuff. We had to put it down here when we let go of the upper floor.” Looking for bedding, which she swore was down here, we negotiated past percussion instruments of all types, stacked paintings, half-finished sculptures, office chairs, printing supplies, and dusty darkroom equipment, eventually locating some blue sheets inside a large Styrofoam cooler.

Although we hadn’t planned or discussed the matter, the Morels assumed we would all be staying with them. We took a wordless poll, a shrug and an eyebrow wag, and agreed. The best place to make our beds, we decided, was down here, out of the way. We would keep our equipment boxes here as well, neatening and personalizing a strip of wall directly under two dim basement windows.

After the others headed back upstairs, Arthur said, “I’m glad you came. I wouldn’t want to be here alone.”