Christopher Hacker - The Morels

“It was a home without walls,” he said. “There was little separation, little privacy. At that age when I began to develop a sense of modesty — seven or eight — I did what I could. I put up a curtain, changed my clothes when I was sure I was alone. I don’t think my mother knew what to make of me. She thought of this bacchanalia of hers as a gift. She wanted to treat me to a childhood of limitless pleasures, but the more I saw of it, the less I liked. The only pleasures I truly enjoyed were those that I had to earn. This is what my own experience taught me. The fruits of a piece well learned, the pleasure in the muscles of each finger, the piece itself and its ability to bring about the stern approval of a jury committee. Even the pleasures of an unrequited crush were sweet. The borders made it pleasurable, what I couldn’t have, so that pining in a sense was an earned pleasure. I wanted to remain a virgin, to remain virginal , and earn the fruition of that pleasure. But how could I, in that place? With those hairy bodies everywhere, the stink of sex in the air along with the rot. For all their talk of pleasure, those people engaged in theirs with the enthusiasm of a nap. The moaning sounded like snoring to me; it was perfunctory, robbed by its daily indulgence of any appeal. The infantile revelry that my mother and my namesake engaged in, this was cheap and ugly, even at the age of twelve I could see it. I wanted out. To purge myself of it.”

He picked up a score from a stack on the floor, a bright yellow Schirmer edition, dog-eared, its cover torn along the spine. Penciled fingerings and one-word invectives, likely scrawled in haste by his teacher: Lightly! Fingerboard! Throat! A foldout sheet of linen paper taped to the last page on which was typed:

CADENZA

Accept all offerings of food [24 hours prior];

Refrain from defecation [24 hours prior];

Ingest one dose laxative [39 minutes prior];

Remove pants and squat;

Think impurest thought imaginable;

Empty bowels completely.

“Lest you think it was merely an improvisatory whim up there on that stage. As you can see, it took planning. I practiced for days, so that I could better know my digestive tract and how those laxatives worked. You see? On that stage, it wasn’t anger. I wasn’t trying to get anybody in trouble. It was transformation I was after. Le Pur . Blood washing blood. And you know what? It worked. Less than a week later, I found myself living with Benji, in a normal, quasi-suburban house, enrolled in a normal, quasi-suburban school, pining after normal quasi-suburban girls. Alchemy, I tell you! Those Greeks were really onto something.”

“But when I hear purge ,” I said, “I think vomit. Wouldn’t it have been easier to just stick your finger down your throat? Wouldn’t vomiting have been more like what you were after?” God help me, I was beginning to think like Arthur!

“Absolutely,” he said. “And yet as much as I would have liked to rid myself completely of that place, I wasn’t so naïve to think that I might purge it as though it were a poison. I knew it was already in me, partially digested, a piece of bad meat lodged in a fold of my intestine. And my only chance would be in showing it the other door, hoping that whatever I had absorbed already wasn’t fatal.”

I spent much of the night tossing and turning, thinking about that casually tossed-off litany of terrors Arthur had endured here and his unique — and uniquely disturbing — trapdoor exit from the place, yearning for what must have been to him a holy grail — a normal life with a wife and child. But by the time he found it, he was just too irrevocably broken to hold on to it.

Despite our talk about the possibility of Arthur not returning after the arraignment, we all assumed that he would not be remanded without bail. Benji suggested to the judge, quite reasonably, that as a respected educator at one of the city’s top schools and born-and-bred New Yorker with parents who owned property in Manhattan, Arthur posed no flight risk. He had every intention of sticking around for the trial; there was no reason to burden taxpayers with his room and board. The ADA presenting the case, Joanna Brady, was as tall as Arthur, with sharp features and eyes whose natural wideness left her looking perpetually surprised. She conceded Arthur’s status as a New Yorker but none of these other things. He had been fired from his position at the university, was estranged from his parents, estranged from his wife and son. He had threatened his in-laws and broken an order of protection. There was no telling what the man was capable of. We had been prepared for a high bail. Doc and Cynthia had calculated using the carriage house as collateral. But the figure uttered by the judge dwarfed this offering, an absurd sum that meant to keep Arthur behind bars for the duration of the trial.

We also assumed that after obtaining a press pass at the Mayor’s Office we would be able to join the section set aside in the courtroom for those with such passes and be allowed to film the trial. Our worst-case scenario had only one official “pool” camera, and we would have to get permission afterward to use the footage. Trials were being videotaped in every courtroom in the country and aired around the clock on cable; it was the age of Court TV. But it was also the age of O.J. Simpson, and in the aftermath of that case judges were becoming shy of cameras, afraid of having to play ringleader in a high-profile circus. And if Benji’s source was to be believed, perhaps the judge was feeling pressure to keep proceedings as low-key as possible. We considered sneaking in a hidden camera, but Benji assured us that we could be in a lot of trouble if the footage was ever made public. So, no cameras.

The last footage we have of Arthur — ever, as it turned out — shows him dressing for court in the bathroom at the carriage house: shaving, washing his face, combing his hair, tying his tie. But it’s clear from the nervousness that leaves several nicks he has to stem with tiny bits of toilet paper, that has his fingers trembling as he struggles with the silk loops around his neck, that there is more to this than appearing clean-cut before a judge. He is dressing for Penelope and Will.

We have a shot of the three Morels as they exit, a kind of reversal of the exterior from a few nights before. We are inside, looking out. We don’t have the whole archway in the frame — the lens doesn’t go wide enough to capture it all — but along the bottom of the frame we have the rugs, a milk crate, the corner of a chair. The Morels are centered, exposed correctly, their backs to the camera, facing the street. Outside is bleached white, a bright glare made brighter by the snow. And as they walk out, the effect is one of disappearing into a brilliant field of white.

At the arraignment, Arthur stood with Benji while the charges were read. They seemed to go on forever. Arthur and Benji said in unison, “Not guilty.” Arthur kept turning back to scan the room, but Penelope and Will were not here. With the exception of his petition for discovery, all other requests that Benji had filed were denied. The judge was a jowly codger who didn’t seem to have full physical control of his head. It would jerk back and forth, side to side, and he would move his body around in an effort to catch up with it. He lectured from his high perch in a nasal sneer.

His lecture that day went, “The case before us has high potential for antics, to become a grad seminar in ethics and the elusive and ultimately unknowable line between truth and fiction.

“Bah! This court will not tolerate irrelevance. The truth is plain, earthbound, knowable. The line is clear. This accused is either innocent of the charges or he is guilty of them. We are talking about a man’s freedom and professional reputation. We are talking about the violation of a young boy’s innocence. The stakes are high, too high for such antics. So to minimize the chance, and out of respect for the stakes involved, this court will proceed carefully but expeditiously. It is Monday, December thirteenth. I will hear opening arguments the twenty-seventh, two weeks from today. Two weeks for voir dire and discovery and all matters of preparation. Happy holidays indeed.”