Half World: A Novel

by O'Connor, Scott

  Henry is unwell, Marist said. He’ll be coming home soon.

  A half hour later she heard a car door closing, the sharp bark of metal in the cold. She looked out the kitchen window to see Roy Pritchard’s beetle-black Ford idling at the curb, exhaust billowing in the December air. Linebacker Roy, seemingly Henry’s only friend left in Washington. Roy came around to the passenger side and opened the door, hunched by the raw wind, holding his gloved hands at the buttons of his coat. Henry stepped out onto the sidewalk, head down, coat open, his face obscured by the brim of his hat. Ginnie stood in the doorway, trying to see Henry’s face as he made his way up the walk. She was one of the only people who could read his expressions. If she could see his face, then she could gauge the seriousness of the situation.

  They reached the door. Roy took off his hat. It looked like he was about to say something, but then he set his hat back on his head and turned and walked to the car.

  Henry didn’t lift his head. Ginnie was afraid to touch him. She had never seen him like this, unsteady, uncertain. She asked if he would like to lie down. He nodded and she stepped aside to let him pass. She didn’t lay a hand on him until he was in bed, still fully dressed, the sheets pulled up to his neck. Sent home like a sick child. She tried to undress him, but he wouldn’t let her take his clothes off. He gripped the front of his shirt like he was afraid it would be ripped from his body.

  She set her hand on his forehead. His skin was cool. His eyes were squeezed shut as if he was trying to force something away.

  Later, he would tell her that he had become ill at work, that something he had eaten at the Christmas party hadn’t agreed with him. This was not the truth. If she couldn’t get the whole story from him, then she could still tell when she wasn’t getting the truth. The man she had opened the front door to was not a man who had simply become sick at the office. Something deeper had happened.

  Who he had looked like was Thomas. She tried to banish the thought, but it stayed with her, the rightness of the comparison making it impossible to send away. In that moment on the bed he had looked like Thomas after coming through a tantrum. Thomas reborn, bewildered. A new boy emerging into a frightening world.

  18

  Oakland, Spring 1956

  They stood on the Sullivans’ front step, waiting for the door to open. Ginnie made one last attempt to smooth Hannah’s hair, but Hannah pulled away, took Thomas’s hand. Thomas stared straight ahead at the door, adjusted his earmuffs.

  The sound of footsteps from inside. Ginnie leaned into Henry. “Doris and Dick,” she whispered. “He’s a lawyer for a firm downtown. She was a beauty queen years ago. Miss Golden Gate Bridge or something.”

  Doris Sullivan welcomed them effusively, the guests of honor, then led them through the house to the back patio doors. She weaved a little as she walked, her hands out to her sides in a half dance step, seemingly more than a little drunk.

  It was a larger party than Henry had expected. The yard was full of neighborhood families. There was a line at the barbecue, another at a bar in a corner by the fence. The noise was considerable, but Thomas seemed all right as long as his earmuffs were on and Hannah was by his side. She was happier than Henry had seen her since the move, the protective big sister, guiding Thomas along the hors d’oeuvre table, over to the sidelines to watch a badminton match between some of the other children.

  Ginnie was at ease here. She had a poise and confidence in social situations that had always seemed effortless to Henry. She moved across the lawn, touching elbows, throwing her head back to laugh at one of Dick Sullivan’s jokes. Henry followed a step behind, smiling mildly, concentrating on his drink.

  “And what do you do, Mr. March?”

  Doris Sullivan had cornered him by the edge of the patio. He’d become separated from Ginnie, somehow. It shouldn’t have been so hard to give his standard answer, that he was an accountant, but he found himself tripped up here, still off balance from the unexpected crowd, stuck in Doris’s close, unblinking gaze. He forced a smile, cleared his throat.

  “Henry is a photographer.”

  Ginnie was there, suddenly, sweeping in beside him, a hand on his arm.

  “How fascinating,” Doris said. “Portraits or landscapes?”

  “Portraits, mostly,” Henry said.

  “You’ll have to show us your work,” Doris said. “Dick is a shutterbug himself. Nothing at your level, I’m sure, but he loves talking about cameras. Would you do that sometime? Show us your work?”

  “Of course,” Ginnie said. “That sounds wonderful. Doesn’t it, Henry?”

  “Wonderful,” Henry said. “Yes, it does.”

  Doris beamed.

  19

  The girls went out with their lists of names and came back with johns that Dorn wanted questioned, open cases in his department that had grown cold utilizing standard methods.

  Dorn procured the drugs. Cannabis, mescaline, morphine, scopolamine. They tested the efficiency of various delivery systems. Whether a drug was smoked in a tainted cigarette or consumed in a spiked drink. They measured onset times, the degree to which the drug softened resistance, loosened tongues.

  The results were different with every john. The men talked, or slept, or wanted nothing but sex for hours. They found that it was better for the girls to ask questions after sex, lying in bed with johns who expected them to dress and take their money and leave. The flattery of the extra attention, the unexpected intimacy. This was far more effective than asking questions earlier in the encounter, while teasing or withholding, which tended only to make the johns angry.

  They watched things Henry would have preferred not to. His eyes on the window and then down to the ledger, reading what he’d written in the spilled-over light from the other room. Taking his attention off the scene when he could. Trying not to think about the fact that these girls were daughters, that they might have brothers and sisters, may have once been part of a family. The girls slapped or pushed or held down. The first few times this happened, Henry rose from his chair but Dorn told him to stay put, that one of them running in would do nothing but blow the project and put the girls in further danger down the road. So Henry sat and looked at the ledger when he could no longer watch the window.

  He checked the post office boxes, sent paperwork back east. He typed up brief memos, the barest outlines of the operation, dates and times, the relative success or failure of a particular night. Funds arrived in the bank account and Henry withdrew enough for the rent and the liquor cabinet, the film and reels of audiotape.

  They used the apartment three or four nights a week. Henry was home during the mornings, working on the biography of his time with Weir, or sleeping when he could, the sounds of Ginnie and Thomas reading or playing in the living room weaving in and out of his dreams. Hannah would already be at school. He seldom saw her during the week. After lunch and maybe a trip to the park with Thomas, he was back in the city, getting to the apartments no later than sundown. The end of the workday on the streets around him, men walking to the train, loosening their ties, heading home. Henry walking against the flow, crossing from one place to another.

  He had told Ginnie that he would be working nights now, mostly. He didn’t give her any more information and she didn’t ask, though he could tell she wanted to. It wouldn’t be for long, he said. Things would be back to normal soon.

  Dorn arrived after his detective’s shift, and they ate the sandwiches Henry had picked up from the deli on Powell. Sometimes Dorn insisted that they go out for a real meal, and then they took the Lincoln to one of Dorn’s favorite spots, a restaurant in Chinatown or North Beach where the maître d’s had booths waiting and the bartenders kept Dorn’s martini glass full.

  My name is Clarence. My name is Heath. My name is Stan. I’m a longshoreman, a truck driver, a shoe salesman in town on business. They all had different wants and needs, different things they told the girl
s to do. Some of the white men wanted to be rough with Emma; some wanted her to be rough with them. Some wanted to be tied to the bedposts with their belts, burned with cigarettes. Some wanted to be coddled, caressed, held.

  The range and depth of need didn’t surprise him. He had been trained to seek out the weaknesses in others. He’d seen photos, read private letters, heard recorded conversations. What surprised him was watching it play out just a few feet away. Human bodies in motion. There was nothing more intimate or frightening than two people alone in a room. It was difficult not to consider what his own need would be, what could be drawn out of him if he were on the other side of the window. What he would be willing to risk everything for.

  He listened in the headphones, snapped pictures. He leaned forward at his desk, peering into the glass before the drugs knocked the johns completely out, straining to hear if their answers to the girls’ questions were any more revealing in that brief moment before the men lost control. Dorn sitting beside him with a cigarette and a drink, chuckling or clucking his tongue or whistling low, whispering to Henry that this was the best goddamn television show he had ever seen.

  20

  Washington, D.C., Winter 1955

  They had him visit an agency-approved physician in Washington. The doctor asked questions, ran tests, told Henry that he was suffering from nervous exhaustion, that his senses had been overrun by the stress of the last few months. Henry left the office with a small bottle of sedatives, a smaller bottle of sleeping pills.

  When he returned to work there were days of nothing, anesthetized days. Henry sitting in his office, moving paper. Roy Pritchard came to visit. Henry’s secretary brought him coffee, avoided eye contact. Everyone avoided eye contact. Doors closed when he approached, conversations ceased in midsentence when he entered the room. Henry taking his pills, moving through the hallways, immaterial, an invisible man.

  One morning he was summoned to a conference room by a couple of Marist’s men. There was no explanation for the call. When he was seated, they pulled down a projection screen and turned off the lights. A film came to life in front of him. Faces of American soldiers, one after another, skinny teenagers, sunken-eyed and gaunt. Unshaven, if they were old enough to grow beards. POWs in a cement room. They stared blankly at the camera. They recited long, rambling lists of grievances against the United States, denigrating their homes and families, telling their fellow soldiers to turn their arms against their commanders. Each of them speaking in the same emotionless monotone, with the same lusterless look in their eyes.

  The North Koreans were using brainwashing techniques they’d learned from the Chinese, maybe the Soviets. The voice came from the back of the conference room. Henry turned but the man who had spoken was standing in shadow. He introduced himself as a staff psychiatrist. Henry turned back to the screen. Sleep deprivation, torture, possibly drugs, the psychiatrist said. Drugs that create an overwhelming sense of paranoia, that sow doubt. Drugs that empty a man’s mind so it can be filled with something new.

  I would like to say that the United States is an imperial, racist nation, bent on domination of the Asiatic countries and their benevolent people. Words the boy on-screen would never have found in his own head. I would like to say to my fellow soldiers that the enemy is behind you, the enemy is beside you.

  Marist’s voice came from the back of the room. He said the boy’s name and rank, his hometown. He said that these soldiers were part of a mission that now appeared to have been compromised by Weir. Information passed to the Soviets and then on to the North Koreans.

  The boy extended a shaking hand out of the frame and brought it back with a lit cigarette. His stare into the camera was direct, as if he was speaking to Henry, to the other men in the conference room.

  Henry sat forward in his seat. He could feel his own mind working again, despite the sedatives. He could feel himself coming back, drawn through the fog toward the boys on-screen.

  He asked how much film they had like this, how many POWs, and Marist asked how much Henry wanted to see.

  * * *

  He began watching every day, sitting alone in the conference room, looking at the films and the list of names and hometowns in the file folder. Private Milt Whitman, Private John Stone. Somebody’s fiancé, somebody’s son. He needed to watch these boys, to listen to them. He felt that he owed them this. They had been captured because of him, because of Weir. There was no information on their current status but he felt in some irrational way he was keeping them alive by replaying their films. That if he stopped watching, if he took his eyes off the screen, then they would truly be lost.

  * * *

  One evening he entered the conference room to find a film already playing. Private Jacob Weiner projected against the far wall, the only soundless clip of the batch, the boy’s mouth moving mechanically, looking in his silence like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  Marist sat in a chair at the front of the conference table, the back of his head silhouetted against the screen. It was the moment in the film where Private Weiner cups his hands over his mouth and coughs. A lost boy from Camden, New Jersey, whom someone had brought up well, his politeness reflexive, his manners persevering despite war and captivity and torture. Somebody’s fiancé, somebody’s son.

  “We need to find out how they did this,” Marist said. He did not turn from the screen. “Most officers would shrink from what we’ll need to do, what I’m asking you to do, but they haven’t seen this, they haven’t sat in this room. You understand the severity of what we’re dealing with better than anyone. What’s at stake. He taught you that. Weir.”

  Marist lit a cigarette, still watching the screen. A close-up on Jacob Weiner’s face, the boy’s features four feet high, dominating the room.

  “I listen to politicians tell me that the enemy is not real or that the threat is not as dire as we think and then I come back here and watch this to remind myself that they are fools. Or that they are the enemy themselves, possibly. How can we be sure? We know how patient they are, how deeply they have penetrated.”

  Marist smoked, watching the next soldier, the next.

  “I have nightmares of my wife and daughters speaking this way,” he said. “I have nightmares where they are on film, in a room like that, staring at a camera. Do you have those nightmares, Henry? After watching these boys? I’d imagine you do.”

  Henry could imagine Ginnie on that screen, in that room. He could imagine Hannah. He watched Private Milt Whitman, Private John Stone. The boys’ eyes in the conference room, lightless, emptied. Their minds broken like plates.

  “You are alone here, Henry,” Marist said. “They all wanted to cut you off, cast you out. But I told them that I needed you. And that is the truth. I need someone who knows what is at stake.”

  Private Weiner was back on the screen. Henry watched the boy cup his hands over his mouth again, cough.

  Marist said, “We need to know how this is done.”

  21

  Oakland, Spring 1956

  Ginnie sat on the floor beside Thomas’s bed and read to him from a children’s book about San Francisco. The pages were full of local landmarks, the wharf and the hills and the streetcars imagined as playfully askew renderings in charcoal and watercolor.

  She could hear the sound of audience laughter from the living room, where Hannah was watching You Bet Your Life. Ginnie pointed to the characters in the book. She asked Thomas to identify them, but he sat passively, staring at the pages as he so often stared at her, at anyone, looking through rather than engaging in any way. She found the page with the streetcars, and he sat up, leaned forward, focusing on the drawings, and she asked him questions about the lines and types of cars, the B Geary and J Church, the Baby Tens and Iron Monsters. He was with her now, answering each inquiry in his metallic monotone, then standing to retrieve his timetables from the desk on the other side of his room.

  Another nig
ht without Henry. He was working late now, sometimes very late, even spending the night in the city. She hadn’t asked for an explanation. They didn’t talk about his work. She knew that it made him uncomfortable to lie.

  There had been plenty of talk at some of the parties in Washington, what the Russians were up to, the Chinese, headlines and generalities, but as the nights grew later and drinks were refilled, the men retired to the living rooms and the women moved into the kitchens and voices lowered, talk loosened. What their husbands were really up to. Dropping leaflets over the Ukraine, dropping paratroopers into Albania, toppling Mosaddegh in Iran. The women intoxicated by their husbands’ roles in shaping history and by their own proximity to those roles, what they felt they contributed in the way of advice, a female perspective, whispers across pillows in the dark.

  Ginnie had little to add to these conversations. It seemed reckless to her, as she knew it did to Henry, discussing these things openly after too many cocktails at someone’s country home. To add a layer of inebriated innuendo and speculation onto an already opaque subject. Even when they were alone, she and Henry didn’t discuss his work. They talked about the parties instead, marveling at the money and servants and silverware, leaving the more sensitive subjects where they belonged, in Henry’s office, in Henry’s head.

  This was the third night in a row he’d been away. She’d told herself that she wasn’t going to keep track, but she was. Three nights this week, three nights the week before. She slept fitfully when he was away, waiting for him to return safe from what still seemed like a foreign city.

  They all slept fitfully. Hannah still woke in the night from dreams of the bomb. Ginnie tried to comfort her, but there was nothing she could say. Hannah only wanted Henry. Only Henry could reassure her.

  More TV laughter from the living room. Ginnie stood and replaced the book on Thomas’s shelf. Thomas plugged himself into the wall, lay back on the floor beside his bed. She turned out the light, covered him with a sheet and a blanket.