Christopher Hacker - The Morels

Benji gets the call. He is listed as next of kin. He contacts Doc and Cynthia, and arrangements are made. A hearse comes for Arthur’s body, and it is brought back to Fanelli Funeral Home on MacDougal Street, a fifteen-minute walk from the carriage house. Benji suggested having Arthur’s body cremated and his ashes spread ceremonially — on his intake papers at the prison, Arthur had declared himself Buddhist — but Doc, lapsed Catholic, objects. I don’t want him feeling that heat for all eternity. It’s just not right.

Cynthia is impressed. I think that’s the first time in thirty years I’ve seen you put your foot down.

When was the last time?

The time you insisted I go to a doctor when I was pregnant.

Arthur’s body is embalmed, touched up, and set out in a casket, lid up, in a sitting room with green velvet walls. At the wake, a priest is on hand to hold a short mass, after which Doc again puts his foot down, convincing Cynthia — and the priest — to marry them in the eyes of God in the small, cluttered back office of the funeral home. Benji stands to one side, hands clasped in front, chin to chest, shaking his head. I’ll never, as long as I live, understand the two of you.

Each of the four viewings is packed to overflowing with former students. Benji has brought Sarah and Dolores. Dolores tells Cynthia that she is sorry for her loss. They embrace. Cynthia and Sarah marvel at each other.

Look at us, Sarah says. Menopausal.

Old farts, Cynthia says, and they both laugh.

Doc says, Come to the burial tomorrow.

It’s a small service at a cemetery in Scotch Plains, the Morel family plot. It has rained the night before, and this morning the sky is clear and still. The grass is shivering wet, and after a few steps everyone’s shoes are soaked through. Cynthia, Doc, Benji, Dolores, Penelope, and Will. The priest who married them only days before sanctifies the burial, and Arthur’s casket is laid in the ground. October 17, 2000, nearly a year to the day from the publication of The Morels . In the end it was almost like he got what he wanted, Benji says to Sarah as they consider the black-lacquered piano-lid top of the casket, rose strewn, dirt strewn, at the base of the pit. Eaten alive by his own creation.

I thought about Penelope a great deal after Arthur died. At the wake she was warm toward me, and for some months after I might have gotten it into my head to begin courting her. I passed by the bakery and had a cigarette with her on our bench. But I could immediately sense its wrongness, sitting there with her. It would have been unseemly, swooping in after Arthur’s death like that, no matter how much time had passed, and no matter how I justified it. I would have been the tractor salesman Claudius in Dead Hank’s Boy , who usurps the wife and throne of his junkyard-king brother. Which would have made Will Hamlet, I suppose.

Anyway, whatever had passed between us that fall, now, late summer, was gone. I asked after Will, made promises to visit. But never did.

Media coverage made up somewhat for our lack of footage at trial; we were able to splice in news segments and on-air debates, and by festival time that same year, we had a cut submitted that we were all very satisfied with. It made the final round at every one of the places we sent it to, jury selection at four, and first place at two others. A remarkable reversal from Dead Hank’s Boy , which had been unanimously rejected. It made its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival, screened in the very same art house on Houston where I was still employed. Which would have made it a classic success story had it not happened on Friday, September 15, 2001.

A copy of the film, transferred from digital video to thirty-five-millimeter reversal — three hexagonal cans of spooled stock — limped its way around the circuit until a distributor finally took an interest and it was sold.

We waited for news of its release — theatrical or otherwise — placed weekly phone calls to our man at the company, who gave us no definitive answers. “Right now it’s just not a movie anybody wants to see. Give it time, though. Tastes change.”

We gave it time; tastes did change, but not for the flavor we had hoped. Even we had to admit, viewing it more than a year later, in the light of this new postapocalyptic dawn, it seemed morbid and naïve. Who had time to navel gaze anymore? There were more important things to worry about. For Christ’s sake, Dan Rather had wept on David Letterman !

And so the film was swallowed up by that great oily shadow, along with everything else that year.

The Netflix-only release of Who Is Arthur Morel? in the spring of 2009 coincided with Will’s twenty-first birthday, a day spent moping about his apartment in a hand cast. His roommates were out at a bar, no doubt failing miserably at their endeavor to pick up girls. They had better success, they said, on Craigslist, with the girls who actually wanted to have sex. Bars were a lark — picking up girls just an excuse to drown their sorrows at failing to pick up girls. Or something like that. On another day, Will might have joined them, but birthdays were for sitting dejectedly alone in one’s room. His roommates did not know it was his birthday — Will had not told them. Will tells most people very little of himself, a habit that began ten years ago, during the scorched earth period of his life.

After the trial, the situation at school quickly grew untenable. His mother cupped his face with her cool hands as she dropped him off his first day back late January and told him to expect things to be rough for a little while, that he was kind of a celebrity now and that if other kids teased him it only meant that they were jealous — to ignore them, or beat the shit out of them, whatever worked best. But he was unprepared for just how different things would be. He was a celebrity. Every head turned as he walked the halls, trying in his nervousness not to slip and fall on the glassy high-polished linoleum; every head turned as he traveled the stairwells with their too-loud echoes; every head turned as he entered his classroom to take his seat. A celebrity — but not celebrated. It was whispering at first. He would turn to see who was whispering to find two or three or four heads together, eyes fixed on him. Then it was the anonymous shout. Faggot! That was a common one. Cocksucka! That was another. Or Daddy’s Dick!? Shouted in the manner of a furious drill sergeant. Between classes or in the recess yard or at the large exit doors — a clarion call among the anonymous swell of the throng, a call that would focus attention on Will, sending through those crowded around him a shiver of malicious glee.

From anonymous shouting to out-and-out jeering. This took less than a week. Once the thrill of the tease was on, it was a tenacious pack of wild dogs, its sheer relentlessness making it difficult most days to breathe. There wasn’t a moment when he wasn’t being singled out or ridiculed. In the cafeteria, he’d pass row upon row of boys with bananas protruding from open flies. Touch it! They’d gleefully scream. Even girls did this. At recess they made up terrible rhymes to punctuate their jumping and skipping and bouncing of balls. Even in class, pranks were waiting for him — great glistening wads of gum on his seat or some terrible phrase scrawled on his desk or in his textbooks slips of paper that contained terrible pictures just waiting for him to discover. He had to sit up front every day and stare directly at the teacher. Turn his head in any other direction, and there was someone waiting to mouth some terrible, frightening word.

This was the good school, the one his parents brought him to after they moved into the new apartment, the one where the kids were supposed to be kinder, more like himself. There was nobody like him here.