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.