The Morels (46 page)

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.

His first assault happened in a toilet stall. Two older boys, impossibly tall.
Take it
, said one, brandishing a ripe banana at crotch level.
Go on, you know you want it
. When Will refused, the boy yanked him by his shirt collar down to his knees while the other one tittered.
Gobble gobble!
He shoved the banana into Will’s face, its slime smearing his cheeks and teeth and plugging up both nostrils. Other assaults followed. After a class that was filing out teacher first, Will brought up the rear to find several boys behind him. The one at Will’s side shoulder-checked him into the open coat closet, where he was smothered with down jackets and piled upon by knees and elbows until he could no longer breathe and passed out. After that, Will kept to the thick of a crowd or near an adult, honing his avoidance instinct, but somehow, no matter how hard he tried, he’d end up cornered in a stairwell or behind a door or in a hallway’s dead end. Not only the older ones but kids his own age, kids who before January he might have named among his friends.

So he fought back. He punched and kicked and clawed and bit down hard, putting the full force of his jaw into it, until he heard that sweet cry of agony, until he tasted blood.
Crazy fuck!
A boy in the stairwell, threatening Will with a stubby screwdriver: Will shoved the boy down the stairs, running after him, fists clenched. A trio outside school, encircling: Will throws himself full tilt at one, wrestles and straddles the surprised boy, and with a fistful of hair drives the boy’s head into the sidewalk. There was no more Fox Mulder, no more Nintendo or Jerky Boys or comic books. Those days—only weeks in the past—were long gone now, the myths of a sweet and simple golden age. Now it was Twisted Metal and Grand Theft Auto. Games wherein he was invited to drag people out of their cars at gunpoint and barrel through crowded intersections. For fun, he lumbered through an open-air café. Patrons leaped out of the way; the vehicle bumped and lurched over the crunch of bodies. Bloody tire tracks ribboned outward in the rearview. At the edge of a park, he got out of the car and walked purposely to the most peopled section he could find and, withdrawing
his pistol—its beastly heft a little slippery in his palm—and fulfilling no particular goal, open-fired on as many innocent people as he could before the police surrounded him and shot him blissfully dead.

His father’s death did nothing to abate the onslaught at school. Yet now Will welcomed the blows, encouraged them even. He had killed his father, and now he was paying the price. And yet he still hated his father. His father was as much to blame for all of this as he. So, as Will was absorbing the blows meant to atone for his father’s death, Will was also striking out with his own fists against his attackers, and it was his father’s nose, his father’s lip, his father’s teeth, Will’s knuckles crunched against—his father’s groin his knee connected with.

Will’s mother packed them up and moved them down to Virginia, enrolled him at Annandale Middle School, her own alma mater. She told him he wouldn’t have to worry, nobody would know his father’s name—down here, kids didn’t read books. They played soccer and hung out behind strip-mall convenience stores to complain about how bored they were. But within months, they found him out, and Will was forced to endure a similar isolation. Less violent this time around, more insidious. While engaged in a class discussion, the teacher uttered the phrase
a father’s love
, and from the back of the room someone said, “Willy knows about a father’s love.” Several students laughed. Then someone else, “Tell us what a father’s love feels like, Willy.” The teacher, not in on the joke, stood there perplexed. Or copies of his father’s book would wind up in his backpack, or in his locker.
These kids didn’t read
. Ha! The enemy here was unseen—nowhere and everywhere—people he thought were friends would turn on a dime in front of others to offer a cutting remark at his expense. They would provoke Will into using his fists (and elbows and teeth) to fight back and then turn things around so that Will was the one in trouble. He was a caged animal at Annandale Middle School, snarling and snapping at cruel, ceaselessly prodding fingers.

This time, when Will’s mother packed up and moved them yet
again, back to New York City, she enrolled him under her maiden name. Will would be Wright now. Will Wright. He liked the ring, its double-barreledness, much better than Morel, an edible mold that flourished in dark places.

It was at this point, during his first year of high school, that Will learned the art of keeping his mouth shut. He sat at the back of the class and never—not once in four years—raised his hand. No shortage of fellow freshmen those first weeks of school, wanting to strike up friendships with Will Wright, were turned away. When kids asked Will about himself, he answered vaguely or not at all or made stuff up. He was from Virginia and would be heading back there as soon as his father returned from fighting the Taliban. He was an exchange student, originally from northern Quebec; his parents came from a long line of trappers and only spoke French. By the end of the following semester, kids stopped caring who he was or wasn’t. And Will tried to keep it that way, permanent firewall turned on.

Yet his fists still couldn’t seem to help themselves. They continued fighting a war that was over. An off-the-cuff remark, even in the most innocuous context, uttered sweetly even, were it to contain a certain key word—
jerkoff
, for instance, or
faggot
or sometimes the word
daddy
—and the fists would let fly. He was no longer in control of them. His body would leap out ahead of him to connect with that word, to beat it from existence. No matter the size or gender of the speaker. His fists were especially sensitive to the word
morel
, on whichever syllable the accent fell. All friendships in high school were tenuous, provisional—and as soon as they got a load of Will’s fists, bonds were severed for good. By junior year he’d been labeled by most as certifiably loco and given a wide berth.

Teachers, however, adored Will. Whereas other students sleepwalked through assignments—scrawled onto a sheet of loose-leaf paper in the hallway ten minutes before class—and bloated their essays to bursting with filler phrases, letting platitudes and clichés
do their thinking for them, a generation of texters uninterested in the distinction between
their
and
they’re, its
and
it’s, whose
and
who’s
, Will was different. He was an earnest and thoughtful student. He was impressively well read—as a loner and an only child Will was an avid reader of books—and had a knack with words. Will’s homework assignments were little jewels laser printed on high-quality paper stock—focused, packed with vivid examples, little jolts of unusual vocabulary, fresh turns of phrase, language well-mastered. Other students spent their time before and after class begging for extensions on late work or arguing over a grade. Will did neither. Always on the day it was due, never a word of complaint. Other students, after glancing at the circled grade at the top of the page, tossed the returned assignments into the trash bin as they exited class; Will pored over his graded papers at his desk, carefully considering each red mark, frowning and nodding, the last to leave the room.

Women teachers were especially fond of Will. It was the black hair, the black eyes, and the way those eyes burned when he was called on to speak. The rough hands that turned in and accepted back assignments, the boxer’s broken nose, the broad shoulders hunched at his desk—a man already, at the age of sixteen. They knew who his father was, who he was. In break rooms, over burned coffee, they swooned over his furious soul, but to him they said nothing. They were the keepers of his talent. They shepherded him through the college application process, test preparations, and personal statements and transcripts and interviews. They celebrated those that accepted him and cursed those that didn’t. They hugged him tearfully at graduation and sent him on his way.

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.