The Morels Read online

  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 kne
w 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.”

  One of the men Arthur was with, upon closer inspection, was a woman. She had on the same outfit as her colleague—plaid short-sleeved shirt with jeans and Day-Glo sneakers. They both wore crew cuts and horn-rimmed glasses. Penelope introduced us and, having just met them herself, messed up their names.

  “I’m Leslie,” the man said, “and she’s Lucien.” It was unclear if they were related in any way other than their place of employment. Leslie toyed with the strap of his canvas tote like he was adjusting a seat belt.

  Lucien said, “You can call me Lucy.”

  I was looking to chat some more with Arthur, but he was already being pulled away by Will (“You’ve got to come look at this, trust me, it’s really cool”), leaving me alone with his work colleagues and his wife. I excused myself to find Sri Lanka and the editor, who were sitting in a folding-chair semicircle with a half-dozen others.

  “Geography,” the editor said, “Entertainment, Literature, Science, or Sports and Leisure.” He was holding a deck of Trivial Pursuit cards.

  “Entertainment,” someone across from him said.

  “Make sure you’re rotating them.”

  Sri Lanka, when I sat down, said, “So I’ve been on this website lately? And it’s given me some really good ideas for our next project. Why-Frame-the-Juice-Dot-Org.”

  The editor read from the card in his hand. “Here’s your question. What actor played immigrant Latka Gravas on the television series Taxi?”

  “There’s a theory circulating that the murders of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman were masterminded by Andy Kaufman to help O.J.’s flagging career.”

  “Andy Kaufman!” someone said. “That’s his name.”

  “That’s a wild coincidence,” I said.

  Sri Lanka, deadpan, “There are no coincidences.”

  “Anyway, isn’t he dead?”

  “He faked his death, dude. Everybody knows that.” Then hushed, “Listen. Are you ready to head out?”

  “We’re just settling in.”

  “But these are adults. If you want to have fun, I know a couple of places we can go.” He took a pull on his beer and belched. “Plus I’m kind of hungry.”

  “Why don’t you go ahead then,” I said. “I’m going to stay here awhile.”

  Leslie and Lucy joined the circle.

  “Okay, this one’s up for grabs,” the editor called. “Entertainment, of course: How many Rocky movies were made by 1990?”

  “Who on earth would admit to knowing that,” said Lucy.

  “Oh, here we go,” Leslie said. “Let’s hear it.”

  “What,” Lucy said.

  “It’s such familiar ground you’re covering. Generations of old people have been there before you, kvetching about what heathens we’ve all become.”

  Sri Lanka said, “Five! That’s easy.”

  I watched Penelope some yards away cuff a small brown paper bag and set it down on the ground. Will was helping. He held the bag steady while she filled it with dried beans from a large bin and set a small candle inside. Will lit it for her and then handed her another bag from the stack he was holding. By the time they were done, the place looked like a proper roof garden.

  “I’m not going to apologize for having a problem with this, Leslie. I mean, am I really wrong?”

  “Yes, you’re really wrong. Besides, aren’t poets of your generation supposed to have embraced pop culture?”

  “Is there even such a thing anymore? Everything is pop. Fucking semiotics.”

  Leslie turned to me and said, “Departmental politics. Not all that different from seventh grade, actually.”

  “It’s the very thing that bothers me. Trivia. It’s what the age has reduced us to. World knowledge as nothing more than a set of browsable, meaningless facts.”

  “Wine,” said the woman next to me, handing a bottle to Lucy. Lucy thanked her and took a Dixie cup from the stack on the ground. The woman, who had introduced herself as Marsha a few moments ago, said, “It’s a good point you make. Didn’t it used to be that only the people in power had knowledge? Keepers of special knowledge?”

  “The Church,” Leslie said. “Who had it on good authority that there was a big hole in the South Pole where a race of giants lived.”

  Arthur had come over and was standing just outside our semicircle. He said, “You’re thinking of Poe’s novel.”

  “Based on a going theory of the time.”

  “It used to be that knowledge was power,” Marsha said. “But now knowledge isn’t powerful. It’s—”

  “Trivial,” Arthur said.

  “Fine,” the editor said, “but can you answer me this: Do porcupines masturbate?”

  “That’s not a question!”

  “No?” I offered.

  “Wrong. Guess again.”

  “What’s the question?” This was the man next to Marsha.

  “I’m Marsha,” she said to Sri Lanka. “And this is my husband, Greg.”

  “Greg and Marsha?” Sri Lanka said. “Are you serious?”

  “Except we’re not brother and sister.”

  “Neither were your TV counterparts—they totally could have fucked.”

  Arthur stood there for a while—large hands shifting from under his armpits to his pockets to his elbows—as he looked around for a way in. After some time, he took a cross-legged seat on the gravel. I became engaged in some lighthearted repartee with Greg and Marsha, then looked over again to see Arthur staring out blankly, the way one does when caught in an awkward social situation. The people on either side of him were involved in other conversations, leaving him alone in this now-boisterous group. Eventually, he got up, brushed at the bottoms of his chinos, and wandered off. I excused myself.

  I caught up with him at the base of the immense water tower. We talked for some time there, wandering the labyrinth of an idea I kept losing the thread of. In my tipsiness, I didn’t really care, content enough to drink my beer and nod away as he pursued a train of thought. Then he said, “I’m not good at this.”

  “At—”

  “Being with other people. I don’t know how to relax. To chat casually about the world. I do this, what I’ve been doing with you, which seems to alienate most people.”

  “We can talk about the weather if you want.”

  “Penelope is different. She thrives in these situations.” We regarded her as she stood by the grill some yards off with two others, gesturing wildly with a pair of barbecue tongs. The couple she was with held paper plates, onto which Penelope delivered two blackened pieces of chicken off the grill. She caught us looking and waved with the tongs.

  “How did you two meet?”

  “On a bus. If I think about that day, I can still smell it, the air inside that bus. That’s memory! The humid earth, the coffee, t
he cologne. It had been raining. Sometimes I wake up next to her, amazed. A wonderful thing, marriage is—no longer having to navigate the baffling bureaucracy of life alone. To have a partner. Someone who believes in you. Her belief is so strong. Sometimes I wonder if, without her, I’d exist at all.”

  “How’d you manage it—if you’re so bad at small talk? She turned on by long tracts about the reader-driven model of literature?”

  “I got her pregnant.”

  “I like your technique. Effective. I’ll have to remember that. And being a father? As wonderful as marriage?”

  “The boy’s a born artist—all children are, I suppose. But you get to see just how natural the impulse is to invent things out of thin air. His most recent project has been Tug, imaginary Rottweiler. Sublimating his desire for a dog through endless drawings of one. We are in the Tug period of Will’s artistic career. Pencil sketches, clay models, glazed tile. Opening a book I’d been reading the other day, I discovered a Tug on the bottom corner of every page: a flip book of Tug running through a meadow. Tug, because Rottweilers are ugly yet powerful—like tugboats. You’ll look through any of the sketch pads in Will’s room to find page upon page of family portraits, featuring Tug front and center. Tug is being willed into this family through sheer force of imagination. Isn’t that right, O Son of Mine?”

  Will had been beam-balancing the waist-high railing around the water tower as we talked, giving us each a duck-duck-goose on the head every time he passed. He jumped down between us and said, “I’m over the whole dog thing. What I want now is a poltergeist forensic kit. It’s for discovering unexplained phenomena.”

  Will brought us over to see some “suspicious evidence” he and some of the other tenants had found. As we walked off together, I thought of myself at Will’s age, ten or eleven, with my own father. I have vivid memories of our time together—the day we toured the island of Manhattan on the Circle Line, just the two of us, and the hours spent constructing an elaborate scale-model space station I’d gotten for Christmas, heads bowed together at the dining room table, passing a small tube of glue back and forth. Strangely, I don’t much recall playing with friends, although I must have; I spent most of my time at the local playground and at school with those my own age, but I have only the most generalized memories of these as places—sandbox, sprinklers, courtyard—not what I did there. Maybe it’s for their rarity that I remember those moments with my father. He was generous with the time he had for me—but there wasn’t much for him to be generous with. His professional life took so much of him—pedaling twice as hard against the lack of even a high school diploma—that I often found myself on the sidelines having just missed my chance to hold out that cup of water as he passed. At Will’s age, I yearned toward my father, found myself interested in whatever interested him—his favorite television show (Star Trek) became my favorite television show; his favorite author (Isaac Asimov) became my favorite author. This didn’t seem to be the case with Will, I noticed. He was his own man. In this rooftop investigation, Will was the lead detective—Arthur the staid partner with only two weeks left to retirement.