Christopher Hacker - The Morels

“A what? No! How about someone who can prove that Will can’t possibly remember something that didn’t happen!”

“Oh.” Benji thought about this. “There’s that lady in England. She’s kind of a crusader. She’s helped overturn a number of these cases where twenty-five years after the fact the victim will suddenly remember an abuse from childhood? She gets all kinds of death threats and hate mail. But her thing is mostly about debunking hypnosis, that the way the therapists ask questions ends up suggesting false memories in these quote ‘victims.’ It’s worth a phone call, but I’m not sure it can really help us here.”

Doc had put together a pot of frankfurter stew so that we could get him on tape making it. Benji accepted a teacup of the stuff and slurped and chewed it while he talked to Arthur. Doc said, “Packet of franks, can of sauerkraut, can of tomato paste, potatoes, and water. That’s it. A couple of bucks and you’ve got dinner for eight.”

“It’s very good actually,” Benji said, “thanks.”

Benji’s connection with the city administration (“law school buddy”) told him that Arthur’s case would be prioritized on the docket. Giuliani had taken a special interest in it, rumor went. That fall there had been a group show at the Brooklyn Museum with controversial pieces apparently funded by the NEA, photographs of a crucifix in a glass of urine, a collage of the Madonna constructed with bits of dried elephant dung. The mayor was further galled to learn that these reprehensible nobodies’ new notoriety, thanks to him, had caused their artwork to skyrocket in value. He was in no mood to hand out any other such gifts during his tenure. He was looking to take care of this quickly and quietly, before the city tabloids got wind of it.

“If this is true, you’re actually in a good position to plead,” Benji said. “But you don’t want to do that. Right.”

They parted ways at the open arch, agreeing to meet at the arraignment in two days. In the meantime, Benji would figure out what was involved in filing pretrial motions and file everything he could get away with.

They hugged.

For the rest of the afternoon I went around with Benji’s brusque admonishment in my head. I thought you were on my brother’s side! While Suriyaarachchi and Dave were helping Cynthia prepare dinner, I tiptoed down to the basement with the camera. Rewinding to the spot from last night, I watched myself sneer, Well, at least he thinks he’s innocent— playing the moment over several times. What did I believe? Arthur had never struck me as a particularly sexual person — what mystified me as much as anything else was that he would be moved to any procreative urges at all. The idea he had gotten a woman pregnant took me by surprise at first, and some time to wrap my head around. Penelope’s talk of their young lives together — the abandon with which they would give themselves over in the bedroom — was like being told of a grandparent’s youthful exploits. Something that existed in an altogether different plane of reality — the distant past, another age. I had no trouble believing that passage was fiction. But then, I was just as mystified by why he would write it. There seemed no good explanation — the death of literature, The Satanic Verses , the French book on catharsis — all the intellectualizing in the world couldn’t get at the specificity of that hallucinatory scene. There were any number of taboo topics equally as shocking. So why this? Because, Will claimed, it was true. It seemed to offer the missing piece that made everything fit. But fit in this case meant child molester . And to see Arthur talk was to know he believed firmly in his innocence. Well, at least he thinks he’s innocent . I didn’t know what to believe. I let my finger linger for a while over the RECORD button before finally erasing all outward evidence of my doubts.

After Doc and Cynthia had gone to bed, we spent some time with Arthur’s old things. He knelt on the floor, sorting through a large cardboard box, arm in up to his elbow. “Something must have spilled on these,” he said, pulling out a stack of old photos. “They’re stuck together.” He gingerly peeled the top one off and set it on the ground in front of him. He did this with the next one, and the next, as though he were dealing out a game of solitaire. “It’s hard to know where to begin. They make this place sound like some kinky commune paradise out of a John Irving novel. But it wasn’t, certainly not for me, and I wish I could somehow dispel that myth. Okay, now here’s one.” He held it out to me. It was a photograph of a young Cynthia passed out in a chair, the whites of her eyes showing, skirt hiked up to her lap to expose a thatch of pubic hair. It was forensic, the image of a cadaver. “My mother, ladies and gentlemen. Or here.” He handed me a blurry snapshot of a younger Doc holding a boy of about seven. Doc is laughing; the boy is wailing. “There was a thug that lived with us who for some reason disliked me tremendously. He would mete out all sorts of unkindnesses. He would claim the others in the house were jealous of my talent or would whisper in the ear of someone he was talking to and stare at me while he did it. He would tell me of something wonderful I just had to see; excited, I peered into the corner to discover a rat, disemboweled in the teeth of a trap, its body still moving. I suppose he wasn’t that different than a mean older brother. But one who had just returned from Vietnam, a little unstable, whose parents were never around to keep him in check. My father, if you want to call him that, tried to get me to laugh off his pranks, thought they would toughen me up. Here, I believe — you can just make it out in the background, that footlocker? I have just emerged from it after nine hours locked inside.”

“This guy stuffed you inside?”

“Oh, no. He told me something about the cops being after me and that I should hide. And then he clicked the padlock on the lid and walked away.”

“And your mother?”

“I believe she’d been trying to get in his pants at the time. Her words. And the threat of cops was not far-fetched. There was some tension there.” He handed over a series of lurid close-ups of busted lips and ugly inflamed bruises. “A raid like that. The bellowing, my mother screaming, the sounds of splintering furniture, shattering glass. Truly frightening. There’d be outraged talk afterward about police brutality, and someone would take pictures — evidence — and threaten to sue, but it would quickly peter out.”

“What were they after?”

“The cops? Who knows. Money? Some other thing? I tried to shut it out. Here.” A photograph of a mutt. “That was Handsome. I loved Handsome. One day he trotted out through the front gate into the street and was hit by a car.”

“You were there?”

“I held his limp body in my arms. And this was Candy.” Another photo, a cat. “I was less partial to her than I was to the dog, but not so much that I’d have wished on Candy the horror that befell her: found in the back of a closet on the second floor, dead of starvation. Her and her litter of nine newborn kittens. But hold on, you say. How could this happen in a house overrun with people ? Wouldn’t somebody have heard the cries? Heard the scratching at the door? Smelled the accumulation of urine and feces — or at the very least the ten rotting corpses? These are good questions, ones you ought to keep in mind as you consider the paradise those two describe.”

As he sat there picking through his things, silhouetted against the lamplight that pooled around the strewn contents of several boxes, the image of the teenage Arthur reemerged before me — the gangly kid, unwieldy with his limbs, Adam’s apple bobbling as he searched for a word or phrase. Lost, tormented, in his own home. He went on to describe other everyday horrors at the carriage house, the homeless junkies wandering in off the street, the state of perpetual, almost violent neglect — the kitchen counters crawling with mold and maggots, the bathrooms in a continual state of overflow, swarming with blowflies, the stench of rot and raw sewage in every corner of the house, inescapable — aware of it but unable to control it. The stark difference between his life and the lives of others became especially clear once he began his Saturday visits to the conservatory.