Christopher Hacker - The Morels

“In fact, you’ve never stopped, have you? You have been compelled to, despite your best efforts, continue this practice into adulthood — with your own son. Isn’t that true?”

“No, absolutely not. You haven’t been listening.” But the prosecutor was done.

On redirect, Benji said gently, “Who was it, Arthur? It wasn’t Dad. It wasn’t Cyn.”

“I don’t remember.”

“You remember, Arthur. I know you do. Just say it. This is your moment.”

“No.”

“A teacher. You played violin. Was it your violin teacher?”

His violin teacher. I remembered suddenly. His book. His first book. A boy molested by his coach, who comes to school one day with a shotgun and — I almost stood up and shouted.

Arthur’s shotgun. Arthur’s cadenza was his shotgun.

I looked at Arthur as if for the first time. Timid, afraid. Of himself. Of his urges. The advice of the school counselor in his book came back to me now, a character of Arthur’s own imagination, dredged up to give its author the advice: Abuse has to be dealt with, or it will eat you alive . Was this what Arthur was doing with his sea of words? Wanting to explain it all away? Hoping a manifesto about art might unravel this troubling knot inside him?

Arthur’s eyes were leaking. His nose was running, and his tongue touched nervously at the glistening tip of his wet mustache. He shook his head. He shook and shook and shook his head.

“You did this for Will,” Benji said, “didn’t you? You worried about your own history. You wanted inoculation from this virus, as you put it. You felt your hands were unclean. You felt the need to purify them. That’s what this book is about, isn’t it? Purification. A purification ritual.”

“I deserve to go to jail,” Arthur said finally. Then would say no more.

What had Arthur planned to do up on that stand? Was this it? The final stage in his catharsis? Or had the prosecutor thwarted, by her line of questions, some other thing he’d been planning? I’ll never know.

THE JURY, AFTER CLOSING ARGUMENTSand the judge’s instructions about the task before them, took less than an hour with their deliberations. They asked to review a single piece of evidence — Will’s statement — and none of the court transcripts. Amid the hasty reassembly of order in the court — many had assumed it would take days and were on their way downstairs when they were called back — the foreman handed the slip of paper to the judge who, after taking a moment with it, handed it to the clerk to read the verdict:

Guilty on all charges .

It came out later, once jury members began speaking to the press, that most thought Will’s account was thoroughly credible and had been looking for some testimony to change that opinion but found most irrelevant, mine unconvincing, and Arthur’s, ultimately, damning.

At sentencing, Arthur was given three years in prison. There was a public outcry over this, but the prosecution didn’t press for more, and the judge thought it fair in the scheme of similar cases. Not long after the trial was over, ADA Joanna Brady resigned. In an interview she revealed her misgivings about the case. As Benji’s law school volunteers had surmised, there had been conflicts. But not with Penelope — with Brady’s superior. Will’s story had become, with time, inconsistent. She had wanted to drop the case but had been pressured to see it through. She had been shaken by Arthur’s testimony and seemed to understand what he was trying to do — atone for past transgressions by calling down on his head his own conviction — and grieved at the verdict condemning an innocent man.

Penelope convinced her father to drop the civil suit, and Arthur convinced Benji to withdraw the appeal and let him serve out his time. He turned down an offer to return home to put his affairs in order. “Everything is settled,” he said. On January 16, 2000, he was transferred to Groveland Correctional Facility in Livingston County, New York.

In prison, Arthur learns fear — the battery-acid tingle in the gums, the muscles’ blind surrender. He pisses himself twice that first day, enduring hours of chafing cold between his legs. He has never known fear like this. Animal, aboriginal fear. The emotion he thought he knew wasn’t fear at all, it turns out — it was a neurotic tic, borne out of unlikely worst-case scenarios: a drowning, a plane crash, a nuclear holocaust. This new, raw emotion is borne out of the very real threats of the present moment. Violence, palpable and everywhere, coming for him.

He does not sleep. In the evening, after lights-out, there are moments of unconsciousness. Mostly it’s a vigilant awareness of his roommate, who won’t talk to him, won’t even look at him, as though he does not exist — or rather no longer existed. This, he supposes, is the look one gives a man marked for death. Merely one in a string of doomed roommates. Why bother learning names? Or so go Arthur’s thoughts in the night.

A blaring loudspeaker beep begins the day.

He’d read somewhere that he’d have a choice of work assignments and imagined choosing the prison library, where he’d find solace among books, the quietude, the soothing orderly stacks, inmates coming in to seek help he’d gladly offer, and in exchange the inmates would offer Arthur protection from harm.

Wishful thinking. He is escorted with several others to the cavernous kitchen, where they are given hairnets and aprons. The clanging of pans, the hissing of meat on the griddle, are especially jarring. He is entrusted with a dull paring knife, but the knife does not make him feel any less vulnerable; in fact, he feels more so with it in his hand among these beasts — inadvertently pointed in the wrong direction it might be misconstrued as a threat. Like he could threaten anyone! The number 5 is branded onto the small knife’s hilt. A guard notes the number on a clipboard. Arthur watches an inmate, behind the guard’s back, snap the tip off a food processor blade, then slip the broken-off piece into his mouth. Eyes on Arthur the whole time. Shhhh , finger to lips. Unlike his roommate, these other inmates never take their eyes off him. They track him in the manner of predators, grinning as though they, too, knew his fate.

It comes as he’s toweling off after a shower. Sharp crack against the side of his head, zoomtilt of bathroom tile coming at him. The second crack against his cheek, someone’s bare heel. Chips like eggshells on his tongue. He cries, Help! Help! There is a guard outside; he can see him watching through the small square window on the other side of the door. His mouth fills with salty warmth. The third crack he feels against his side, but this one isn’t as bad as the other cracks. It’s softer. Two men grinning above him. No: there’s a third. They say nothing, save the grunts of their exertions and the sharp exhales as they kick and kick, each softer than the last, gentle taps through a thick protective blanket.

Numb, he rocks himself to sleep.

Arthur wakes in a sterile room with caged fluorescent lights. Smells of talc and iodine. The male nurse — a fat man with a beard — tends to Arthur angrily. Don’t move, he says. You’ll pop the sutures. In the mirror, the person who stares back at Arthur bears no resemblance to himself. The left half of his face is thick with plum-red welts. Hairy black stitches. Lips sphincter-swollen. Right eye squeezed shut by a heavy blood-sac eyelid.

Pain orbits his awareness like an impatient vulture.

On his way through the corridors, fewer people grin at him. They seem less interested, despite his freakish appearance. Even his roommate — a wiry black man named Kennedy — hazards a look in his direction when Arthur returns after his overnight in the prison hospital; he tosses a protein bar on Arthur’s bunk.