The Morels (6 page)

“But what did you do then? After that night you disappeared. What happened to you?”

Arthur tugged at his tie to loosen it and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt. He sat down on a stack of boxes that sagged under his weight. “I lost my scholarship. My violin teacher dropped me from his studio. I wasn’t officially expelled but might
as well have been. There was no way I could have paid the full tuition, and even if I could have, after that who’d have taken me?”

I shook my head. “Why did you do it? Arthur, you lost everything. And for what?”

“I could say I did it because I wanted to do something that would be unforgettable to an audience. But then you would point out that any number of acts perpetrated on a stage might be unforgettable, though they—like the one I did perform—would none of them be music, and we’d have circled back to where we began, lo those many years ago: what is music, what is its purpose.”

A nonanswer. Intellectualizing away an act that was so self-destructive, so against our basic nature as social beings. If my cousin’s kids were any indication, pooping becomes a private activity fairly early on, its smells and noises associated with shame—by five or six the very muscles and nerve impulses required will refuse to cooperate if others are watching. So why could Arthur? Why
did
Arthur? These questions were not answered by his ontological ruminations.

I was going to press further, but Arthur’s attention became diverted—I followed his line of sight back into the apartment. His wife had suddenly appeared and was setting a heavy bag of groceries down on the dining room table as his son, toting a bright orange gun, stalked the room shouting silently. From out here there were only the sounds of air conditioners and traffic. Arthur said, “Shall we continue this inside?”

He opened the sliding door in time for us to hear his son shout, “You’ll be lying in a pool of your own guts!”

“Not if I blow your brains out first,” Arthur’s wife said in a cutesy voice, sorting through the mail. She looked up and smiled at us. “Who’s ready for a drink?”

On my way to the diner the following week, I marshaled an argument against firing our editor, but Sri Lanka wasn’t in the mood. “This shoestring budget needs all the lacing it can get,” he said. “Is it my fault? Hell, yes, it’s my fault! But what am I going to do? I’ll
tell you what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to keep this guy around because you don’t want to hurt his feelings.”

Our eggs arrived, and we ate in silence. When the check came, he told me he’d forgotten his wallet. I paid with a twenty I’d swept up from one of the theater’s dark aisles the night before, which left it up to our editor to pay the delivery guy for the sushi we ordered for lunch.

We elected to shelve the Winnebago stunt in lieu of something simpler. It was a two-shot in a pickup truck between the young reform-school Hamlet and his yokel best friend Horatio, who is telling a story about some roadkill venison his father had once brought home to feed the family, to hilariously disastrous results. Punch line:
Projectile vomiting!
The scene had been done in one long shot with a car mount, the budget only allowing us a few hours with the thing—we had originally conceived and shot it in Horatio’s living room but decided when screening the dailies that it would be more dynamic if it were told while some action was taking place (the speech was long). It was squeezed into the reshoot schedule as an afterthought—a few hours, a predetermined side road, followed by cutaway footage of telephone poles and passing farmhouses. These shots would be used to cobble together the best moments from each of the half-dozen takes.

But even this fairly straightforward cutting-room task became, in the atmosphere of this place, an occasion for conflict. The editor wanted to do away with the cutaway footage, which he said was overexposed and blended poorly with the much-darker footage in the cab of the pickup, and instead intercut the earlier takes as shot in the living room with the later car-mounted stuff, which made for a rather edgy and stylized edit, one that Sri Lanka argued did not fit with the aesthetic.

“I don’t get it,” the editor said. “You keep saying to get creative with this thing, and here I get creative and you object.”

“Explain it to the man,” Sri Lanka said. I echoed back what Sri Lanka had already said, that while it worked on its own, it needed to blend with the other scenes.

Though Sri Lanka hadn’t given me any explicit order to fire our editor today, the subject hung heavy over me—each look he gave I took for a signal. It was clear that I had two choices here: go through with the firing or offer my resignation.

So when Sri Lanka excused himself to go to the deli for a late-afternoon soda, whether he meant it to be or not, I used the moment to do what I had to do. After I was sure we were alone, I said, “He wants me to fire you.”

We were facing each other, but I was looking down, rolling one of the brushed-steel coasters along the glass coffee table like a wheel.

“Fine by me,” he said. “I’ve been figuring on a way out here for a while.”

“For what we’re paying you, I’m sure it can’t be worth your time.”

“It’d be one thing if I really cared about this project—not that I have anything against your guy, but this thing already feels dated, and it’s not even finished!” He laughed. “Besides, he’s impossible to please. You see how he is. He has no idea what he wants. Is this for festivals or late-night cable? He wants the prestige of the one but the instant market of the other. I’ve seen it a dozen times with these first-time directors. They start out intending to make some groundbreaking piece of cinema, but now that the bills have come due, the money gone, they don’t have the courage to follow it through. It’s a shame—the script is good.”

Why did this hurt my feelings? He was just saying what I’d been thinking—plain truths—but it offended me to hear him say it. I let the coaster roll to the edge of the table and drop to the floor. “The script is the script,” I said. “The movie is the movie.”

“You should just start over.”

“That’s a helpful suggestion.” I got up. “I’ll be sure to pass it along.”

“Listen,” he said, but didn’t get to finish the thought because just then the power cut out. The blinking AV rack went dark, along with the three monitors. A new silence replaced the drone and
whir of equipment-cooling fans. Suddenly traffic noise could be heard, the creaking of footsteps above us. The editor left the room and went to the front door.

I followed.

There were already several residents out, feeling their way along the walls, asking one another what was going on. It had been hot for days, unbearably so, with warnings from the city for people to ease up on their AC usage, but if my mother and this editor were any indication, the warnings had gone unheeded. The movie theater kept its cavernous spaces just a little warmer than bone chilling. Two years later, this same situation would have provoked a wild-eyed panic among the residents of this city, an assumption that we were once again under attack—but back then we made no such assumption. A citywide crisis like this was a time of fun, of mischief, and had a way of making that border we must erect for the sake of sanity in a city of nine million seem porous, somehow, allowing for a deep and satisfying sense of connectedness—an occasion to feel grateful for the human beings around you.

So in spite of our conversation just moments earlier, we were suddenly giddy. A crowd gathered by the red emergency light of the open stairwell. A slow line shuffled past, down the steps, clinging tight to the banister. Echoes rang up from below, traveling word-of-mouth reports from street level. In the hallway, the neighborly sharing of a cell phone, good-natured lamenting about melting ice cream and raw meat. “I’m supposed to have people over,” a woman said. “My husband’s on his way right now with people from work.” The rose glint of eye whites and teeth. Voices in the stairwell, the heavy chunk of a door opening and closing and with it the arrival of more residents, Sri Lanka among them. He found us.

“I heard it’s all of the city,” he said.

Another new arrival said, “On the radio they say it’s into Connecticut, New Jersey too, though a guy I just talked to said some blocks in Queens still have power.”

“There’s a grill up on the roof.”

“Why are people so fixated on spoiled food? Just keep your fridge closed, and it’ll be fine for at least forty-eight hours.”

While we were talking, a discussion had taken place between the woman with the imminent cocktail party and those with raw meat. A coalition was formed, a larger shindig. We were invited to join, to empty our freezers and meet up on the roof. I declined.

“Oh, come on,” Sri Lanka said. “Don’t tell me you’re going to the theater today. Projectors and popcorn machines run on electricity.”

“Unless they’re using alien technology.” From out of the darkness, Arthur’s son appeared, orange gun in hand. “Which most people think isn’t real.”

Sri Lanka said, “Most people are idiots and can’t believe the truth that’s right in front of their eyes.”

The boy said, “In a book I’m reading it says that Thomas Edison was an alien, which would mean that everything is alien technology. The lightbulb, the telephone, the compact-disc player. It’s not really a book-book—it’s more like a comic book.”

“What’s your name, little man?”

“I’m Will, even though I shouldn’t be telling you my name.”

“Is it a secret?”

“It isn’t a secret, it’s just you never know. That’s what Tyler’s mom says. You never know. But she needs to worry less about other people’s influence on Tyler and more about her own.”

Adjusting to the dimness, I saw that the hostess of the imminent cocktail party was Arthur’s wife, Penelope—at the moment handing Will several sloshing ziplock bags of marinated meat. She was short, not much taller than her son, with chopped black hair and a small upturned nose, through one nostril a silver loop that glinted orange. She had cherubic cheeks and full red lips. She was wearing jeans and a black tank top that exposed a sleeve of tattoos the length of her arm. “Hold them by the tops,” she said, “like this. Give me the gun, thank you very much. Here’s the flashlight. Go ahead. I’ll meet you up there.”

Sri Lanka and I helped the editor empty his fridge of its beer
and frozen dinners, and we felt our way back down the hall. On our way up to the roof, Sri Lanka riffed on the submarine, red-lit stairwell—its creative possibilities as an opening location for a low-budget short. “That’s what we need to shake things up,” he was saying to us. “Get back to basics. Just the three of us and a camcorder. Forget all that other crap. Cut it in camera.” He was squinting, framing with his fingers as we made our way upstairs.

The editor and I arched eyebrows at each other. A playful eye roll. A grin.

(How can I describe that feeling, jogging up the stairs after this wordless exchange—that welling up inside? It doesn’t come too often as I am a natural wallflower, closing off the petals of myself to people instinctively, a tendency that has become more pronounced the older I get. But as a child the feeling came to me quite often: the simple desire to be someone’s friend—and the simple hope that this someone felt the same way, too.)

A sign on the roof door read
NO PUBLIC ACCESS
!, yet the door was propped wide by a rusty beige folding chair. Gravel crunched underfoot and the tar floor beneath had a springiness that made it feel, with each step, like you were about to break through somebody’s ceiling. Clouds of grill smoke and the smell of charcoal and lighter fluid. The rising swell of horns from down below, a massive island-long traffic jam. There were no railings—it was just roof and thin air. A water tower loomed in the center of the space, an everywhere city thing rarely seen this close up—a giant homage to the water towers of New York. Already plenty of people were up here, looking out over the roof, bodies tense and rooted, marveling at the sight of a city without power, eerie even in the light of day.

I considered calling my ex-girlfriend, who still worried over me. An and I met during freshman orientation and immediately settled into a domestic bliss that lasted until the day we received our diplomas. After the breakup, she insisted on our continued acquaintance, checking in weekly. Our most-sought-after bassoonist at school, An had afterward gone abroad to study Byzantine frescoes; like so many others at conservatory, myself included, she
had shed the habit of music upon graduation. But she had taken the high road, gunning for a master’s at the most prestigious institution that would have her. An was horrified to learn I had taken up the movies and was doing everything in her power to dissuade me. It was, she said, an aesthetic and intellectual ghetto.

“Aren’t you interested in art anymore? That quintet, oh! I could see it entering the repertoire.” She was referring to my senior thesis, and I knew An well enough to know her praise was meant only for rhetorical effect: she wasn’t pointing out how good a student composer I’d been but rather how little potential there was for me in film. I told her that I was having fun, which was more than I could say for the time spent in the practice room, sweating over that quintet.

“Fun,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “Fun.”

Arthur arrived with his work colleagues, two men who looked like they might be twins. His wife greeted them, his son circling as Arthur droned on to his colleagues. I approached but was forced to wait alongside Arthur’s wife as he wrapped up his train of thought.

She gave me a sympathetic look, as did the twins, who seemed to be looking for a way out of this conversation. “It’s the fundamental mistake with the reader-oriented model,” Arthur was saying. “Just because a readership wants a certain kind of literature doesn’t mean it’s a literature that should be written—a literature that
literature
wants, so to speak. The reader model assumes the reader knows what’s best. But this just encourages fad chasing. And it reinforces existing tastes, which in turn ensures the same kinds of stories get written over and over. Readers can’t be trusted with that kind of responsibility.”