Christopher Hacker - The Morels

“What observations led you to conclude that William Morel was stressed?”

“His body language, mostly.”

“What can you tell us about his body language?”

“Deep breaths, fidgeting. And he spent much of our session rubbing his genitals.”

“Rubbing, how?”

“He was sitting in a large upholstered chair opposite me and held his hands clasped together, fingers threaded like this — down at his crotch. He would press them up and down against his groin when he talked. Quite unconsciously, I thought. In this context it appeared to be a response from stress. This is not unusual. He seemed reluctant to be there, speaking with me. I got the feeling that it made him nervous. He spoke of not wanting to get his father in trouble. The rubbing seemed to be a strategy for comforting himself, calming himself down.”

“Did William Morel ever exhibit symptoms of a dissociative nature?”

“What sort of symptoms do you mean?”

“Trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality?”

“Not in our time together, no.”

On redirect, Benji managed to bring things back in balance by getting the psychologist to admit the possibility that the diagnosis of a dissociative disorder involved more than a single one-hour consultation, that were Will to have one, he could present quite normally for days — even weeks — at a time.

It was five days of this, at the end of which came me. And Arthur.

If the courtroom was a bore, the same could not be said of the goings-on outside. The first day I had seen a few people with small flip pads taking notes and wondered if they might be reporters. That evening, eating dinner at the carriage house, Doc pointed at the television with a speared floret of curried broccoli. It was the final segment of the local news, usually reserved for items that would be introduced with a phrase like Now here’s an interesting one . It showed a small insert of Arthur’s dust-jacket photo. Doc stumbled to his feet to turn the volume dial on the small portable television just in time to catch the anchor say, “… but the author claims he made the whole thing up. Wonder what the next book will be about!” The following day, a CBS-affiliate anchor and her cameraman approached Benji and his assistants on their way up the courthouse steps, and that night we all waited impatiently through the day’s leading stories for the footage, which appeared along with a court sketch of grizzle-bearded Arthur. We cheered, and Cynthia declared, “Our fifteen minutes have begun!” The day after that, it was all three of the major networks following Benji up the stairs, along with half-a-dozen photographers clicking and flashing in their faces. It became the evening’s top story. The day after that it was the front page of the Post and the Daily News .

Benji had been right. In the vacuum of the millennium story, this one entered to fill the void. There were other “bigger” stories going on inside the halls of 10 °Center Street that week — a grisly murder, a mafioso on trial — but this was the one that caught the public eye. The Brooklyn Museum exhibit was still fresh in people’s minds. It was also a time of brazen sexual transgressions, from our president’s to nannies caught on video to the several high-profile cases of teachers tried for statutory rape — both male and female — and the trial of Arthur Morel found itself as somehow the quintessence of all this, the last straw perhaps. So in spite of what the judge had said about what this trial was and wasn’t, to those following its progress outside the walls of the courtroom, it became a referendum on the limits of artistic freedom. The papers took pleasure in the possibilities of his name, which — if you substituted e with a —seemed designed to comment ironically on his situation.

The announcement, in the middle of all this, that The Morels had been nominated for the Faulkner Award was rocket fuel that set the debate aroar and helped launch it past the local news and into the seven o’clock national slot. Two New York Times op-ed columnists took up the debate over several days, one arguing for literature’s return to its historical imperative of extolling our better angels and the other arguing for the prerogative of literature to be whatever it needed to be.

And as unreal as this short account of Arthur’s ascent may seem to read, this was exactly how it felt to live through: unreal. Dreamlike. It happened so quickly. We sat watching the news at the carriage house, the five of us, the day’s papers scattered around us, scarcely believing what we were reading, what we were seeing.

Suriyaarachchi clapped Doc on the back. “What did I tell you? Okay? This movie is going to be enormous. Your two sons will see this thing through, and Arthur will come home safe — and be able to share in all of this. Just trust, just trust. And I know the phone is tempting you right now”—ringing off the hook with offers, Hard Copy, Jerry Springer, Larry King —“but your silence is worth more down the line. How does it feel to be the father of a rock star?”

But I think Suriyaarachchi misinterpreted Doc and Cynthia’s disbelief at all of this. Because what Arthur had achieved here wasn’t fame; it was infamy. He was tarred by the tabloids, already tried and found guilty by New Yorkers at large. And who could blame them? His own book seemed to convict him of this crime, and even assuming his innocence, the act of publishing it alone was thought by most who were talking about it to be a kind of abuse. It was, at best, a perverse and downright mean thing to do.

But Doc and Cynthia didn’t understand the hostility. “Even if he did do it,” Cynthia said. “Is it really something to get this worked up over?” They had thought themselves one with the city. Their open door to the sidewalk had been a thirty-year testament to this. Neither of them had ever considered there were people who thought differently than they. To find out, finally, that most of the city thought they — and their son — were repulsive freaks must have been a crushing blow.

From a moving car raw eggs were pelted at the carriage house, whipping through the open doorway. One connected with Doc’s shoulder. He lifted his shirt to reveal a palm-sized welt. After this the doors remained permanently closed. All through the night intermittent hollering from outside reached us down in the basement, a ghostly noise, the pounding of fists on the metal garage door echoing somberly, an uneven drumbeat. In the morning, we found scrawled on it MONSTERS in dripping purple spray-paint.

On the morning I was to testify, we pressed through a throng of jeering pedestrians before making our way up the courthouse steps. Suriyaarachchi following with the camera merged with a dozen others taping our ascent.

We were made to wait. Benji and the ADA were conferring with the judge in the emptied courtroom. A guard stood at the doors, which barred any substantive eavesdropping, but I could see the jury was in attendance as well.

I took a seat on a bench, across the narrow hallway from Mrs. Wright and Will. They were sorting foil-wrapped items out of a plastic bag. While Mrs. Wright kept a wary eye on me, Will was pretending not to notice. It was the first time since the trial began I’d gotten more than a passing glimpse. He kept a blinkered focus on his sandwich, which sat on its foil wrapper in his lap. He carefully removed the top and peeled off two soggy lettuce leaves. In his hunkered-down posture — his twitchy fingers, the dark hollows under his eyes — I saw someone utterly besieged. As though he were ducking not only me but everyone else in the world. I detected something else as well. Guilt. Not the guilt of a betrayer. The guilt of a liar.