Christopher Hacker - The Morels

He wasn’t going far; in fact, he wasn’t even leaving the island of Manhattan. Will emerged from the Downtown Lexington Avenue local on Sixty-Eighth Street, passing that hulking black trapezoid, to enter the North Building of Hunter College on August 28, 2008, for his first day of class. That year he lived at home, commuting from their one bedroom in Washington Heights. The bedroom was Will’s; his mother had insisted on it. For the past four years she’d made hers the living room, sleeping on the foldout couch which she meticulously put away every morning before Will awoke, aware of his guilt at these sleeping arrangements. Sure that he’d have vacated to some midwestern state by now, she was thrilled to have him still here, at least for the time being, to have been granted a stay from the empty nest.

During his commutes, on the occasions when the subway’s gentle rocking set him to thinking back, age eleven, age twelve, he thought of the phrase scorched earth . In high school he had learned the term while studying the Vietnam conflict. The US military deployed a scorched earth policy there, sprayed millions of acres of cropland during Operation Trail Dust, its herbicidal warfare program, a strategy designed to expose enemy hideouts and deny food and shelter to the Vietcong. Which it did, though it also poisoned friendlies on the ground as well as the ones doing the spraying. It was this way with his father, too, with the war he fought within himself and the methods he deployed to fight that war. He might have destroyed whatever demons he’d been fighting, but he also poisoned those who stood beside him and, in the end, himself. That year, the year of the millennium, had been the year of scorched earth.

The firewall remained on, into his new adulthood. Back then it had been necessary, but now it served no purpose. He liked people, despite appearances to the contrary, and made friends easily here. He found he could have friends and still give away nothing of himself, as most other kids his age preferred to talk about themselves anyway. In college, he developed the art of listening. His friends talked; he listened. He found it was still possible to develop intimacy this way. He didn’t have to say a word. Girls for some reason enjoyed the way he demurred to their questions. They reveled in the vague answers he gave about his past. They itched to know more, to peel back the layers. But to girls, too, he gave nothing away.

His fists, for the most part, had given up the fight. He redirected their energy, putting them to work now defending friends at drunken bar brawls or getting himself out of the odd late-night scrape. He’d once even thwarted a rape-in-progress. The old triggers rarely sent them flying anymore. It had been during his senior year of high school when they last came out. For some reason, the turn of phrase sucking daddy’s dick was in fashion that year — as in “I’ve been popping ollies a long time, bro — longer than you been suckin’ on your daddy’s dick .” It was meant to be humorous, a play on mommy’s tit , but Will’s fists hadn’t found it funny. So, three years ago.

And then again last week.

Will had declared his major early, end of first year — history, with a minor in education. He spent most of those first two getting the tough pills down — broad surveys and pedagogical theory — but this semester, fall of the third year, he allowed himself an indulgence: Fundamentals of Imaginative Writing I. A clear cool lake of spring water in this desert of academia. They wrote poems and short prose pieces. His teacher was a man who seemed not much older than himself — energetic, filled with hope for all of them as future wordsmiths. He put up on the overhead a line, She wished this day had never come , and told them to take it from there. Or had them pair off on a sonnet, trading couplets. He passed around a photograph of a man looking pensively out a window and then pulled out a large green teddy bear and put it on the desk. “Connect these dots,” he said, and set them to work. He praised Will’s writing, often making an example of it, which delighted Will, but also embarrassed him. He gave Will a list of authors, none of whom had Will ever read: Auster, Banks, Johnson, Stone. Muscular names. He brought in handouts from his graduate seminar for Will and gave him the latest copy of the literary journal he edited, hot off the presses. They talked together long after class was dismissed, his teacher sitting on the corner of the desk, Will cradling his textbooks as he stood, until an evening instructor kicked them both out.

During one of these after-class sessions, his teacher pulled a book from his laptop bag. Will had done his best these many years to avoid this book, successfully, too, since coming back to New York after his time in Virginia. The hardcover edition of The Morels , because of its notoriety, had received that year several additional printings past its initial run of five thousand; and a major publisher had taken a gamble on its paperback rights. But by the time Will hit high school, The Morels had long since disappeared from the remainder bins. Just to be safe, though, when browsing for something to read, Will avoided the M ’s entirely, and steered clear of used bookstores. Brandishing this book now, his teacher said, “You’re Will Morel.”

“No,” Will said, looking down, avoiding his teacher’s eye, holding his hand up as if to ward off the book, “You’ve got — I’m not him.”

“It’s okay,” his teacher said, his voice reassuring, not at all picking up on the cues that Will did not want to talk about this or reminisce about his father, not seeing Will’s eyes go black and his hands become fists, pushing on about what a life-changing book this was for him, one of those happy few, like Naked Lunch or Michaels’s Sylvia , despite what some would say, it could almost be argued — and then he was on the floor cupping a blood-gushing nose.

At the hearing, the dean recommended expulsion, but interestingly his teacher — nostrils plugged with gauze, eye hollows purpled — pleaded for Will’s future at the college. A deal was struck. Will was to be suspended from college for the remainder of the semester, receiving an incomplete in whatever courses he was currently taking. He would lose his scholarship, unfortunately, nothing could be done about that; and when he returned in the fall, he would do so on academic probation. In the meantime, he was to see a college-appointed social worker every week and accept the young writer-professor as his academic adviser.

Will accepted these terms with thanks.

Which is how he finds himself moping about in a hand splint on his twenty-first birthday, the day of his encounter with the Netflix exclusive Who Is Arthur Morel?

Ironically, this punch landed Will the first true friend of his adult life. Henry Owen Lawrence. When Will asked if he could call his teacher by his first name, he said, “I’ve got three. You can take your pick.” Will apologized for breaking Henry’s nose, which was when Henry told Will about the mythos of the pugilist scholar, dating back to Plato. He related the story of Rick Bass, who once politely declined to have his nose broken by George Plimpton, editor of the Paris Review . Plimpton explained his unusual offer. You see, he’d had his nose broken in a boxing ring by a writer who had his nose broken by Ernest Hemingway. “A prestigious line of broken noses,” Will said. “I would have taken him up on it.”

Henry came by Will’s apartment with coffee most mornings. He lived nearby, and stopped over on his way to work. He was trying to encourage Will to take advantage of the daylight hours. Some theory involving the word biofeedback that Will did not care to understand. Will had always been a night owl and couldn’t see himself changing anytime soon. But he was grateful for the company — and the coffee — so played along.