The Morels (44 page)

I told them about the lying game Will learned at school and had us play around the table during our Thanksgiving meal. I told them about the pranks Will boasted of once we’d gotten to know each other. The bumper prank, wherein while crouching he would slap the rear bumper of a car trying to parallel park and when the car stopped would lie prone in the street; the driver, horrified, would emerge from the car, and Will would jump up and run away. Or the overcoat prank, wherein Will would stand just beyond the edge of a restaurant’s street-facing window with an old overcoat, each sleeve stuffed with a heavy sweater, and toss the coat in a high steep arc so that it would plummet right down in front of horrified diners, looking for all the world like a falling body. I told them about our marathon session of prank calls, and the prank calls I heard later on the Morels’ own answering machine.

Benji wondered aloud why Will might prank call his own house but had to withdraw the question, as the prosecution objected on grounds the judged sustained. Benji asked, “Have you known Will to deceive on any other occasion?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Would you mind describing that occasion for the jury now?”

I looked down at Arthur, who looked steadily back, betraying nothing. I looked up to see Penelope watching me, too. Was
she trying to communicate something to me with her eyes? If so, I couldn’t tell. Then I looked over at the jury box and told them what Will had confessed to me. As I was telling it, however, I sensed several members recoil. They did not want to believe me. They wanted to believe Will. They wanted to believe that Arthur was guilty. And who could blame them? If what I was saying were true, then this whole trial was, as Benji had put it, a farce. A morbid farce.

The prosecutor, when she rose to question me, helped the jurors out. She gave them every reason to suspect my testimony. I was a bully, intimidating an eleven-year-old boy. Further, I was making a documentary about the accused, which spoke of my financial interest in securing his freedom. I was currently living with the accused in his parents’ house. I was a longtime friend, had known the accused for fourteen years, which spoke of my emotional interest in securing his freedom. When she was done with me, the judge thanked me, and I stepped down on rubbery legs. On my way back to the witness room, I passed Doc, who gave me a wink.

When I returned, taking my seat next to Suriyaarachchi, Benji was at the defense table, scribbling on a yellow pad and whispering in Arthur’s ear. The judge called the court back to order, and the jury returned. The bailiff escorted Arthur to the witness box and closed him in. The clerk asked Arthur to raise his right hand and swear that the testimony he was about to give would be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and Arthur did. Benji asked the court’s indulgence to allow him to establish in unequivocal terms his feelings about his son. The judge allowed it, and so Benji asked him if he loved his son. Yes, Arthur said. Benji asked if he harbored any sexual feelings for the boy, if he’d ever sexually molested him, or if the book was a confession—and Arthur answered firmly no to these questions.

“Why then,” Benji asked, “would you write such a thing?”

Arthur seemed annoyed to have been asked the question. And, as he started answering, it became clear why—why Benji’s legal
team didn’t want me explaining it and why I’d been puzzling over it this past month and a half: the answers just didn’t make any sense. If Arthur was able in his living room to conjure the rhetorical flair necessary to convince me, that advantage wasn’t available to him under the cold glare of the overhead fluorescents and the dozen perplexed-looking jurors in this room. Here, it sounded like the rantings of a crazy person.

When Arthur was done, Benji took a seat at the defense table and murmured that he had no further questions.

“Mr. Morel,” the prosecutor began, rising, “have you yourself ever been sexually molested?”

“Yes,” Arthur said. “Of course.”

The words hung in the air a moment like an epiphany.
Yes, of course
. I might be projecting a little when I report this, but there seemed to follow a kind of shocked silence in the courtroom. Even the prosecutor, who’d asked the question, seemed caught off guard by the answer. How was it that I never thought to ask? In Penelope’s hours of relentless interrogation, that I bore witness to, how was it that she not once had thought to ask? At Thanksgiving, why hadn’t the Wrights thought to ask? Had nobody asked? How could this be? The obviousness of his answer made it seem inconceivable. I craned to see Penelope’s face but couldn’t from where I was sitting.

Arthur went on. “In that place, it was inevitable. Except those I lived with wouldn’t have thought of it in such moralistic terms.
Early sexual experience
. What could be more natural? Man is a sexual being, after all. Children are sexual beings. Read Freud, he’ll tell you all about it.”

“By whom?” The prosecutor was suddenly motioning to an assistant, scrawling notes. “Who molested you?”

Arthur offered a dismissive wave. “Oh, I can’t remember. I’ve long ago stopped trying to figure it out. That mystery is locked away inside me somewhere, inaccessible. There were any number of candidates.”

“Your father?”

“No, not him. It wasn’t his—thing.”

“Your mother?”

“No. I told you I don’t remember.”

“Then who?”

Something registered in his face. He said again that he didn’t remember, but this time it was less convincing.

“Have you ever performed an act of child sexual abuse?”

“Yes,” Arthur said. Now it was Benji’s turn to begin scribbling furious notes, motioning to his assistant.

“Would you please describe the circumstances of this incident for the court?”

“Incidents,” Arthur said. “Plural.” He took a deep breath. And then another. “Okay,” he said. “At school. The only formal school I’d known thus far in my life. A music school, on Saturdays. In practice rooms, this was where. Sometimes bathrooms. Okay. My first was a boy my own age. Eight, maybe nine. More than touching. The use of mouths and hands and I—enjoyed—the acts, the acts I performed, we performed together. I wanted more, more touching with mouths and hands. I didn’t know him, he didn’t know me. This place was different from a weekday school. One didn’t know one’s cohort. I didn’t know his name. Where to look for him again. But I wanted—more.” He took another deep breath. Another. “Okay. I found another boy, same age. My same age. Another practice room. This boy, too, was—willing, a willing participant.” Deep breath. “Okay. I found many willing participants. It wasn’t difficult.” The prosecutor pressed Arthur to clarify, and he was forced to utter the words
penis
and
anus
, the words
stimulation
and
penetration
. “It was a virus, okay? I was spreading a virus throughout school. The virus of sexual knowledge. Learned at too young an age. I was set loose on the young boys at that school. It’s such a—such a shameful business. Oh, God! Eight, nine, ten. Okay? I was there eight years. Eight years, dozens and dozens of children. Boys, I should say. Only boys. Girls were not the same. It wasn’t that I didn’t desire them. They were just—so much more complicated. They required talking to.
A code I didn’t understand. Boys were always at the ready. Curious. Willing to perform.”

“When did you stop,” the prosecutor asked, “molesting other children?”

“Once I began to learn the language of girls. Sixteen. High school. Once I moved in with my brother.”

“In fact, you’ve never stopped, have you? You have been compelled to, despite your best efforts, continue this practice into adulthood—with your own son. Isn’t that true?”

“No, absolutely not. You haven’t been listening.” But the prosecutor was done.

On redirect, Benji said gently, “Who was it, Arthur? It wasn’t Dad. It wasn’t Cyn.”

“I don’t remember.”

“You remember, Arthur. I know you do. Just say it. This is your moment.”

“No.”

“A teacher. You played violin. Was it your violin teacher?”

His violin teacher. I remembered suddenly. His book. His
first
book. A boy molested by his coach, who comes to school one day with a shotgun and—I almost stood up and shouted.

Arthur’s shotgun. Arthur’s cadenza was his shotgun.

I looked at Arthur as if for the first time. Timid, afraid. Of himself. Of his urges. The advice of the school counselor in his book came back to me now, a character of Arthur’s own imagination, dredged up to give its author the advice:
Abuse has to be dealt with, or it will eat you alive
. Was this what Arthur was doing with his sea of words? Wanting to explain it all away? Hoping a manifesto about art might unravel this troubling knot inside him?

Arthur’s eyes were leaking. His nose was running, and his tongue touched nervously at the glistening tip of his wet mustache. He shook his head. He shook and shook and shook his head.

“You did this for Will,” Benji said, “didn’t you? You worried about your own history. You wanted inoculation from this virus, as you put it. You felt your hands were unclean. You felt the need
to purify them. That’s what this book is about, isn’t it? Purification. A purification ritual.”

“I deserve to go to jail,” Arthur said finally. Then would say no more.

What had Arthur planned to do up on that stand? Was this it? The final stage in his catharsis? Or had the prosecutor thwarted, by her line of questions, some other thing he’d been planning? I’ll never know.

T
HE JURY, AFTER CLOSING ARGUMENTS
and the judge’s instructions about the task before them, took less than an hour with their deliberations. They asked to review a single piece of evidence—Will’s statement—and none of the court transcripts. Amid the hasty reassembly of order in the court—many had assumed it would take days and were on their way downstairs when they were called back—the foreman handed the slip of paper to the judge who, after taking a moment with it, handed it to the clerk to read the verdict:

Guilty on all charges
.

It came out later, once jury members began speaking to the press, that most thought Will’s account was thoroughly credible and had been looking for some testimony to change that opinion but found most irrelevant, mine unconvincing, and Arthur’s, ultimately, damning.

At sentencing, Arthur was given three years in prison. There was a public outcry over this, but the prosecution didn’t press for more, and the judge thought it fair in the scheme of similar cases. Not long after the trial was over, ADA Joanna Brady resigned. In an interview she revealed her misgivings about the case. As Benji’s law school volunteers had surmised, there had been conflicts. But not with Penelope—with Brady’s superior. Will’s story had
become, with time, inconsistent. She had wanted to drop the case but had been pressured to see it through. She had been shaken by Arthur’s testimony and seemed to understand what he was trying to do—atone for past transgressions by calling down on his head his own conviction—and grieved at the verdict condemning an innocent man.

Penelope convinced her father to drop the civil suit, and Arthur convinced Benji to withdraw the appeal and let him serve out his time. He turned down an offer to return home to put his affairs in order. “Everything is settled,” he said. On January 16, 2000, he was transferred to Groveland Correctional Facility in Livingston County, New York.

In prison, Arthur learns fear—the battery-acid tingle in the gums, the muscles’ blind surrender. He pisses himself twice that first day, enduring hours of chafing cold between his legs. He has never known fear like this. Animal, aboriginal fear. The emotion he thought he knew wasn’t fear at all, it turns out—it was a neurotic tic, borne out of unlikely worst-case scenarios: a drowning, a plane crash, a nuclear holocaust. This new, raw emotion is borne out of the very real threats of the present moment. Violence, palpable and everywhere, coming for him.

He does not sleep. In the evening, after lights-out, there are moments of unconsciousness. Mostly it’s a vigilant awareness of his roommate, who won’t talk to him, won’t even look at him, as though he does not exist—or rather no longer existed. This, he supposes, is the look one gives a man marked for death. Merely one in a string of doomed roommates. Why bother learning names? Or so go Arthur’s thoughts in the night.

A blaring loudspeaker beep begins the day.

He’d read somewhere that he’d have a choice of work assignments and imagined choosing the prison library, where he’d find solace among books, the quietude, the soothing orderly stacks, inmates coming in to seek help he’d gladly offer, and in exchange the inmates would offer Arthur protection from harm.

Wishful thinking. He is escorted with several others to the cavernous kitchen, where they are given hairnets and aprons. The clanging of pans, the hissing of meat on the griddle, are especially jarring. He is entrusted with a dull paring knife, but the knife does not make him feel any less vulnerable; in fact, he feels more so with it in his hand among these beasts—inadvertently pointed in the wrong direction it might be misconstrued as a threat. Like he could threaten anyone! The number 5 is branded onto the small knife’s hilt. A guard notes the number on a clipboard. Arthur watches an inmate, behind the guard’s back, snap the tip off a food processor blade, then slip the broken-off piece into his mouth. Eyes on Arthur the whole time.
Shhhh
, finger to lips. Unlike his roommate, these other inmates never take their eyes off him. They track him in the manner of predators, grinning as though they, too, knew his fate.

It comes as he’s toweling off after a shower. Sharp crack against the side of his head, zoomtilt of bathroom tile coming at him. The second crack against his cheek, someone’s bare heel. Chips like eggshells on his tongue. He cries,
Help! Help!
There is a guard outside; he can see him watching through the small square window on the other side of the door. His mouth fills with salty warmth. The third crack he feels against his side, but this one isn’t as bad as the other cracks. It’s softer. Two men grinning above him. No: there’s a third. They say nothing, save the grunts of their exertions and the sharp exhales as they kick and kick, each softer than the last, gentle taps through a thick protective blanket.