Christopher Hacker - The Morels

“Yet in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry you write about a man who became convinced that Garrison Keillor was bugging his phone. Can you tell us how the man came to this conclusion?”

“He was an avid listener of A Prairie Home Companion and grew suspicious that the skits he heard resembled the contours of events in his own life. Eventually, the man came firmly to believe that the shows were direct transcriptions of conversations that he’d had throughout his day. The only explanation for this, he reasoned, was that Garrison Keillor was somehow recording his life.”

“So in a sense, this man mistook fiction for real life.”

“This man was in a florid state of paranoid schizophrenia.”

“And how did you conclude that?” A few chuckles at this, even from the witness.

“Well—” He composed himself and began down a jargon-studded road.

Benji stopped him. “What I mean is, did you check for bugs? In the patient’s apartment? Did you question Garrison Keillor?” At this point, an eruption of laughter in the gallery of the courtroom.

“No.”

“And why is that?”

“I can only conclude these leading questions are designed to get me to tell you that A Prairie Home Companion is a scripted, fictional radio show.”

“Right. And wouldn’t you say that knowing this helps in your diagnosis of the man as a paranoid schizophrenic?”

“There are other ways to reach that—”

“But in this case, would you say it helped?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“If, for instance, Garrison Keillor were this man’s father, and Mr. Keillor made skits about their life together—”

Objections from the prosecution, sustained by the judge.

The witness said, “William Morel, in my opinion, is not schizophrenic.”

Benji pressed, but the man would not budge. It didn’t matter. He had accomplished what he’d set out to do, planted the seed.

With the exception of rare moments like this, from the standpoint of pure entertainment, the trial was a disappointment. The ADA seemed aware of her counterpart on television and was attempting somehow to play herself in that role or remind us of it. But it came off like the stiff acting in a high school drama production. Benji, too, nervous though he was, tried to play it up in a way that missed the mark and left people groaning in pity. He bugged his eyes or furrowed his brows and scratched his chin. These were his two best moves. It was clear he’d been coached and that he was not a particularly adept student. Presiding over them, the wobbly, bobble-headed judge sustained and overruled objections in equal measure, offering the droll one-liner when the occasion called for it or a sharp rebuke, stopping one or the other of the attorneys in their tracks. Unlike the attorneys, the judge wasn’t playing a role — if he was, it was a role that he had played for so long that he had inhabited it completely. Who was it who said that eventually our face takes on the contours of the mask we wear? Something I read in college, probably. I thought of it while watching these three performances. And wondered again about Arthur, his role in all of this. When the time came for him to mount the stand, what sort of performance would be required?

Mostly, the court proceedings were of exactly the sort you might expect out of a place with laminate faux-wood paneling and no apparent ventilation: interminable, bureaucratic, the narrative thread lost in the picky back-and-forth about wording and what could and couldn’t be said or what this one meant, exactly, when he used that phrase. Two pigeons fighting over a piece of pretzel. I found myself glad to have been banned from filming it, as no doubt the footage, when we came to edit it, would have sat cold and inert, and the three of us would become gridlocked about what to do. It would have been the Winnebago crash all over again — a moment that seemed, when we planned it, a centerpiece, a riveting climax, but instead proved to be embarrassing and unwatchable.

By the closing gavel of day 3, the prosecution had rested its case. Benji argued for a reprieve but was denied one, and so the following morning began the defense’s long parade. We came early to secure a seat up front behind the defense table.

When they brought Arthur in, Cynthia burst into tears. It was the first good look she had gotten since the arraignment. No doubt the new beard and the outsize jumpsuit had something to do with it, not to mention the sallow greenish light of those fluorescents, but there was no denying that he was a man transformed. He looked caged, some aboriginal man abducted and brought back to the civilized world to be marveled at. There were scrapes and bruises on his wrists and ankles, and his body trembled. He turned, and it seemed to take him some time to process us.

Cynthia said, “Oh, what have they done to you?”

Arthur smiled. He mouthed, I’m fine .

Suriyaarachchi nudged me with a folded New Yorker , gesturing for me to take it. He pointed at an article I was meant to read. It was an essay about the tradition of autobiographical fiction. It mentioned Arthur’s book several times, praising it and its author. From the second paragraph: “ The Morels is one of those books that is memorable not for the story it tells or for its characters or for the quality of its prose, but for an episode within it — Don Quixote tilting at windmills, young Proust dunking a madeleine in a cup of tea — we don’t remember who or what or why, but we remember this […] and these actions come to stand for the book itself, synecdochically, becoming a visual thesis upon which all the rest hinges.”

I handed it back to him, and he gave me a look — tugged mouth and wide eyes — that said, Pretty good . Meaning, for the movie. Suriyaarachchi didn’t care much about Arthur’s fate apart from how it might affect the fortunes of the movie. Or, rather, he did care but only in the way an art collector, heavily invested in a certain artist’s work, might care about that artist’s declining health. I hated him for this, in no small part because it highlighted these same feelings in me. I was not immune to the excitement of filmmaking, nor did I fail to see that Arthur’s plight might be seen in a certain light as good entertainment, something ultimately that would sell.

Benji called his first witness, another psychologist. He had spoken with Arthur a few times at the prison. The man had a different opinion of Arthur and his book than the prosecution’s witness, and so, in effect, these experts canceled each other out.

I looked at the roster of names on the witness list, mine among them. It would take days to get through. It seemed Benji was looking to win through attrition, and I wondered if this was what the judge had meant by “antics.” If Benji had gotten the continuance he’d asked for — three months — how long would that list have grown? And the judge, despite Benji’s rantings, was quite fair, to the point of permissiveness. Even I could see that Arthur’s professionalism, his soundness of mind, his kindness and loyalty as a friend, had little bearing on whether or not Will was lying. Amid the unceasing calls to relevance from the prosecution, Benji persisted, and the judge allowed his witnesses to have their say. I suppose Benji had to work overtime to counteract the effect of Arthur’s very presence there before the jury — a wild creature, capable of anything.

The psychologist on the stand had also spoken with Will, but his evaluation revealed nothing that could be used to our advantage, so during questioning, Benji left it alone. The ADA, however, was very curious. She had him read several passages from his report, which revealed Will to be a somewhat distressed but otherwise normative eleven-year-old.