The Morels (45 page)

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.

Here, he says. The first words to come out of his mouth.

Arthur accepted visits from Doc and Cynthia who received—those first weeks of his incarceration—the brunt of Arthur’s abject terror. We sat with them at the carriage house while Cynthia cried and Doc talked about their most recent visit.

Doc said, “He’s harassed, they threaten his life, every day they threaten his life. He’s in danger being in there. They’ve beaten him. I see the bruises.”

“He doesn’t understand the rules,” Cynthia said. “There are so many rules. The official rules. The gang rules. The unspoken rules. And they contradict one another. How is he supposed to survive? And all that fencing, even in the open yard, fencing inside of fencing. I nearly fainted from the claustrophobia of it. After that first time up, I said never again. Doc, I said. Never again.”

Doc said, “And then what happened?”

“I got his letter.”

“Artie’s never written to us before,” Doc said. But he couldn’t go on. He held out the letter, his eyes wide with trying not to cry, and I took the envelope addressed to
Mother and Father Morel
with the address of the carriage house. It bulged with several sheets, and when I went to remove them, Cynthia took it back.

“No, this one’s for us. Just us.” She smoothed the envelope down on her leg and said, “So now we visit every weekend. Every weekend until he’s released.”

“It’s a promise,” Doc said, finding his voice again.

The trial has done something to them. They seem more cautious, less brash with their opinions. She is sweet to him; he is gentle with her. They’ve taken to keeping the rolling front entrance closed at all times, entering and exiting out the back, and have left
the vandalized door the way it is. Out of defiance? Or maybe as a reminder.

Our visit came later. The final leg of the bus ride up had us on a long lonely stretch of road, where the only other travelers appeared to be deliveries to and from the prison. The place, upon first approach, seemed to go on for miles. The tops of the high walls glittered magically with what turned out to be, upon closer inspection, razor wire. Guards with rifles in high towers. In the prison yard, heads turned to follow our passage. The bus deposited us at a massive steel door, itself dwarfed by a pair of fortress-sized doors next to it.

We were buzzed in, treated to impersonal courtesy by the guards as we signed forms, answered questions, stepped through metal detectors, and were wanded on our way to the visitation room, a large cafeteria without salad bars or steam counters, only long plastic tables with built in benches and prisoners waiting for company.

Arthur saw us first and waved us over. He offered a strong hug, the duration of a full breath. We sat. His head was shaved, along with his face. He wore a white T-shirt and green pants like hospital scrubs. His left eye was cupped with a bandage and, trailing from it, across the eyebrow, were parallel scratches that made me think
fork
.

“You’re supposed to knock,” he said. “When you get up from your meal, you knock. Not to do so is considered a disrespect to the other gentlemen at the table. I’m still getting the hang of it, as you can see.” In this light self-deprecating manner, he revealed other areas of his body that bore the marks of lessons learned the hard way: a chipped incisor from using a “reserved” shower stall, an angry zipper of stitches at the back of his head from speaking directly to a man who turned out to be a high-ranking member of the Bloods, a hideous mottled green-and-blue mark on his abdomen from cutting in front of someone in line on Chicken Day. “That was a misunderstanding. I hadn’t actually cut the line. But trying to explain that was the real mistake.”

He said that in spite of all this, he felt fine—wonderful, in fact. “Not all the time, of course. But right now, sitting here with you?” He breathed deeply. “It feels nice to be able to breathe again.” He had taken up meditating. He had started at the detention center during the trial and was making a daily practice of it in here. He was not alone. Many of his fellow prisoners meditated as well. The library was full of books on the subject. “I use the chapel. People think I’m atoning for my sins. I’m just trying to stay out of the way, watching my breath, listening to the song of the barbed wire when the wind blows through.”

Arthur had changed since the trial, too, come out of himself—or maybe back into himself. Gone was the intellectualizing, the analyzing; he no longer seemed to be in need of figuring things out. It would be too glib to say he was content in such an environment, but he did seem that way. Relieved. Purged, perhaps, of those things that made him chase himself so relentlessly.

We talked about the documentary, our progress and plans for it, small talk mostly; he already knew these things from our regular phone conversations. Weeks ago we put in a request to shoot some footage in here, conduct an interview or two, but so far the request had gone ignored. Arthur gave us a name, someone who he thought might be able to help us—and then it was time to go.

Another hug, two breaths this time, stubbled chin pressed tight against my ear.

A last look through the small square window of the closed door frames Arthur alone at the table, smiling and waving.

Six months later and he was dead, having served out less than a third of his time. So it turned out that three years—outrageously lenient by the standards of some—was really a death sentence for Arthur. He was found by his cell mate sitting with the drawstring of his pants around his neck, tied to the top frame of their bunk, hand in pants. A murder made to look like autoerotic asphyxiation, as though he’d been done in by his own dangerous masturbatory urges. Indeed the report from the investigation lists his death as
accidental
.

Among his effects is a letter to me. It’s a long letter. In it, he talks excitedly of a new book idea. It’s not quite coherent, but it’s clear he’s inspired. An inmate, planning a prison break, ends up finding enlightenment from his cell mate, the Buddha—who convinces the man to abandon his escape and serve out his time. Arthur seems swept up in the spiritual texts he’s been reading. There’s a passage from the letter that I find particularly moving in light of the struggles in his life to find peace with himself—and the urgency with which he wants to impart this newfound wisdom to me:

We get it in our heads
, he writes,
that the past is a real place. Which is supported of course by this culture of facsimile we’re steeped in. Right now I’m looking at the postcard you sent me—I have it taped up in my cell—the forest landscape in winter, the tree boughs heavy with snow, the lake frozen over, the sun tiny and hard in the sky. Looking at it, I was struck. I thought: thousands of people look at this image every day. It’s an Ansel Adams photograph. I looked it up—it belongs in more than two dozen public collections and appears, I am sure, in many books of Adams’s work as well as any number of anthologies. On calendars and mugs and T-shirts. Thousands—millions—of copies out there. It’s iconic. We look at that picture and think of the place as real. We’ve seen it so many times we feel we know it. And in a way, with the proliferation of copies, and each successive viewing, it becomes real—more than real, if such a thing were possible—burned into some cortex of the brain. It accumulates a kind of rhetorical power, convincing us of its truth, of its reality. But it’s not real. It was a moment in time back in 1922. After Adams set up his camera and snapped the shutter, after he picked up his equipment and walked away, the landscape changed. The snow melted off the branches; the lake thawed. A brushfire came and leveled that entire stand of trees. A period of drought dried the lake. Where once there was a forest, there is now an open meadow that blooms with purple wildflowers in spring. Everything in life is like that. Constant change. Yet we walk around with a million images in our heads, like this Adams picture, stories of our past—remembered experience, anecdotes told to us about others, or about ourselves—the museum of our own lives. This is memory. And it’s—all of it—false. Time has razed it. The first step in saving your
life starts with accepting this, that all you can do is what you are doing right now, the only thing in your dominion. The past has already passed, and the future is fiction. Wake up! Look around you! The only honest thing in the universe is what is unfolding right now. Just this. Breathe in, breathe out. Can you see it? Hear it? Just what you can smell, what you can taste, what you can feel with the tips of your fingers. Right here. And then it’s gone
.

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.