Half World: A Novel

by O'Connor, Scott

  “Any further objections?” Clarke said.

  Henry finally lit his cigarette, shook out the match.

  “Good.” Clarke stood from the couch, stretched. “Then meeting adjourned.”

  29

  He began complicating his route home in the early morning, often driving a half hour around the city before crossing into Oakland. Watching his mirrors, the cars in front and behind, men passing in train windows. Looking for a face he recognized. Lonnie, Clarence, Clyde from Buffalo. A john waiting somewhere outside the apartment and following Henry to the station wagon and then following him home. A man on the street, on the sidewalk. Henry sitting in the car, the ledger on the seat beside him. Ginnie and the children sleeping and a man standing in their driveway, staring at the dark windows of the house.

  * * *

  The museum was housed in a boat shed on one of the wharf’s piers, a long, high-ceilinged space filled with old mechanical carnival games, telegraphs and early telephones, antique cars with exposed engines. There was a decommissioned railway passenger car at the back of the museum and Thomas headed for it immediately, unlatching his hand from Henry’s, ignoring the machines and display cases he passed along the way.

  The museum was nearly empty, just a few mothers with young children, boys, mostly, working the levers of boxing and baseball games. Henry took a seat in the passenger car and watched Thomas move down the aisle, taking tickets from invisible passengers and depositing them into an imagined slot in his own chest.

  Beyond Thomas, Henry could see some movement in the windows. He lit a cigarette, tried to ignore it, but there was nowhere else to look. They weren’t the usual violent scenes of the girls and johns. Instead, there were men in suits, smoking, listening through headphones, photographing through the windows, taking notes. Henry tried to ignore them, but their movement kept drawing his attention. Their faces, their camera lenses. Finally, he looked straight at the glass, intending to meet their eyes, hoping to dispel the visions with direct confrontation. But he could see now that they weren’t watching him. They were watching Thomas, listening, observing, photographing.

  Henry couldn’t catch his breath. There were more figures in the windows now, so he took his glasses off, blurring his vision. His hands were shaking. The passenger car floating, it felt like, loosed from the pull of the earth, up through the top of the shed, spinning into the open sky.

  He could hear the sound of Thomas’s engine hum. Henry looked away, afraid of what he was showing, what Thomas could see. Thomas stood before him, made another sound, a high teakettle whistle, two long blasts. Henry kept his head down, the muscles in his hands and face jerking. Silence then, except for the sound of the cameras clicking, the men in the windows murmuring. Henry wanting to scream them away, wanting to stand and put his hands through the glass until he felt Thomas on the bench beside him, his son’s weight at his side, Thomas’s hand around his own, squeezing with a coupling click.

  30

  Alone in the office, he listens to the recording, a tape made after Elizabeth had been attacked. Dorn and Clarke talking in the Dictaphone room, thinking they were alone, unheard.

  So I come to you with these types of concerns? Dorn’s voice is low. Both men are smoking, their inhalations audible on the tape.

  That’s correct, Clarke says.

  Because I’m thinking of a catastrophe. The potential for catastrophe. Something going wrong to that degree.

  It’s unlikely.

  But not impossible, Dorn says.

  No.

  And then what? Dorn sucking on his cigarette, holding the smoke in his lungs, exhaling.

  You’re a police officer, Clarke says. You start making arrests.

  Dorn coughs, swears, pounds his chest.

  March is eminently deniable, Clarke says. He’s an unstable personality. What he’s doing out here will come as a complete surprise, officially.

  What about his stuff?

  Those things disappear. Paper is easy.

  His book.

  Easy.

  Not that I’m thinking this is going to happen.

  No.

  But in the event.

  In the event. Yes.

  A scream of hinges on the recording as Clarke opens the door. His voice fading as he exits the room.

  It’s always better to be prepared, he says.

  31

  They sat in the living room, Dorn on one end of the of the sofa, Henry on the other, listening as Clarke told them that he had received orders from back east. It was time to move into a new phase of the operation. It was time for the project to evolve. A few hours, a single night with the subjects wasn’t enough. He needed to observe them over a longer duration.

  Clarke told them that they’d have the building to themselves in a matter of days. Mrs. Barberis and the mechanics would be taken care of. Henry was to call the Perelmans to reinforce the bedroom’s windows and doors, to soundproof the walls.

  Henry asked where, specifically, these orders had originated, and Clarke declined to answer.

  Marist?

  Clarke declined to answer.

  Dorn told them that it would be difficult to keep junkies for that long a span, that they’d be dealing with medical issues, withdrawal. Clarke said that they were moving on from junkies, from drunks, lunatics. They needed to observe someone from straight society, an upstanding citizen, a man like any of them. A traveling businessman, maybe, someone whose wife wouldn’t get too nervous if he didn’t call for a few days.

  A few days, Henry said. And then what?

  Clarke declined to answer.

  * * *

  He develops the pictures that he takes for Hannah. The line at a bus stop, a cook filling the wall of slots at an automat. He uses only black-and-white film for these photographs. A woman walking her dog across Union Square Park. A boy climbing onto a streetcar. Henry stands in the darkroom and waits for the images to materialize.

  He listens often to the recording of Dorn and Clarke. He knows every moment, but he still listens. He is like Hannah in this way. He can’t trust the voices he remembers. He needs to hear the documentary evidence, the sounds on tape, the inhalation of cigarette smoke, the pauses between words.

  March is an unstable personality, Clarke says. What he’s doing out here will come as a complete surprise.

  More images. The steeple of a church in North Beach. An old salesman cleaning the windows of the photographic supply shop. A young woman sitting at a table outside a café sipping espresso.

  The idea of Hannah without him, of Ginnie and Thomas alone. Henry lifts a print from the liquid, hangs it on the line above.

  Something going wrong to that degree. Dorn’s voice on the tape.

  It’s unlikely, Clarke says, and Dorn says, But not impossible.

  32

  They stood at the bottom of the hill, watching the water, the setting sun turning the bay gold and black. They were waiting for the train. When it finally came, Thomas let go of Henry’s hand and covered his ears, opened his mouth. Like the sound of the freight cars was coming from inside him. The wind blowing their coats and hair.

  As they returned home, Henry noticed a car parked at the top of the hill, half a dozen houses past their own. A small sedan, an older model. A man in the driver’s seat, the figure indeterminate in the last of the day’s light. They continued up, the car blocked by trees at certain steps, disappearing behind branches, and when it appeared again Henry could see the bulk of the man in the front seat, his bald head.

  He told Thomas to stay where he was, then continued up the hill alone. The man in the car didn’t move. Henry heard something behind him, Thomas’s engine, and he turned to find Thomas following, chugging up the hill. He shouted for Thomas to stay put. The sedan’s engine started, so Henry continued back up, faster now. The car appearing and then disappearing behind
branches. He heard Thomas again and turned and yelled for Thomas to stay where he was. The noise of the engine and the noise of his voice on the street. Thomas started to yell, a confused and frustrated howl, and Henry called out, telling him to go back to the house. Thomas still approaching and Henry walking backward, turning, almost to the top, where the sedan was nowhere to be found.

  He walked out into the street, looked one way, another. Thomas still howling from below. Henry turned and Ginnie was there, Hannah was there, they were standing with Thomas, trying to calm him. The sun sinking into the water. Ginnie was looking up the hill at Henry, and Henry called out, Get back in the house. Shouting in the street. Neighbors’ faces in windows, in doorways.

  Henry shouting, Get the children back in the house.

  33

  She folded the laundry, Thomas’s shirts and pants laid out across the sofa, Hannah’s dresses over the armchair. She had just put a record on the player, something to break the silence in the house, a Bach recording by a young Canadian pianist she’d purchased earlier in the week. The music sounded clean to her, cleansing, the clear run of notes, the telephonic trill.

  They’d come in from the scene on the street and she’d calmed the children down and put them to bed while Henry descended into the basement, to his desk and papers. She’d just started with the laundry when he reemerged and told her that he would be gone for a few days, maybe longer. Standing drained and hollow-cheeked in the entrance to the living room. She kept wondering why she didn’t say something, why she didn’t act, and then she took a breath and heard her own voice in the room.

  “No, Henry. You are not well.”

  She saw his eyes move up to the mirror on the fireplace mantel, then shift quickly to the wall, negative space.

  “I didn’t do anything before,” she said. “I kept quiet and let it happen. I won’t do that again.”

  “Ginnie, please.”

  “I never ask, Henry. I never ask you about any of it.”

  “We can’t talk about this.”

  “We have to talk about this.”

  He shook his head, his mouth flattening to a tight line. He looked so hurt, so angry, as if she had broken faith with him, crossing the last boundary they had agreed on long ago.

  “You need to come home, Henry.”

  “I am home.”

  “No, you’re not,” she said. “I don’t know who this is.”

  He looked like he was fighting against something, the muscles in his face straining, his hands stiff and open. Then he’d taken his coat and walked out the door.

  In all their years together, he had never removed himself from her in that way. Fleeing the scene. Ginnie felt sick from the feeling that remained. Fear of Henry in that moment and then relief that he was gone. Feeling safer, somehow, alone.

  She checked on the children, listening in their doorways, the sounds of their breathing, the sound of the piano, the record in the living room. She finished the laundry, standing by the front window, watching the street for headlights, not sure if she was waiting for their arrival or hoping that they wouldn’t appear.

  34

  By the end of the week the mechanics’ garage was empty, the doors locked, the windows covered from inside with brown butcher’s paper.

  The Perelmans returned and began work on the north bedroom, soundproofing the walls, the floor, sealing the window, the transom above the door. They installed an electric bell in the wall with a wire that ran to a switch in the office. Salo Perelman showed Henry a schematic of a bedroom door he would construct, a great metal box congested with tumblers and gears. The interior side of the door was flat, without a handle or knob, without purchase of any kind. The exterior side had a long lever that was pushed down to lock the door, pulled up again to open it.

  Clarke said that they would need to increase the amounts Elizabeth and Emma were paid. Dorn had bumped the rate up after Elizabeth was attacked, but they’d need even more. The new room would spook the girls, Clarke said, and he couldn’t afford to lose them now.

  Henry stood at the kitchen window and watched the boy, Isaac, in the alley below, smoking his father’s cigarettes. Two a day: the first after lunch and the second in the late afternoon before they packed up for the night. The low autumn sun slanting into the alleyway, the boy walking in slow curves with his hands clasped behind his back, kicking stones and bottle caps and chunks of plaster with an easy agility that evinced long hours of practice. He played only as long as the cigarette lasted, and then he was back into the apartment with his father, assembling the door from parts they brought from their shop every morning.

  When they were gone, Dorn tested their work, standing in the bedroom and yelling at the top of his lungs while Henry listened from the stairs, out in the alley. He could hear nothing. There was nothing to hear. He watched through the office window while Dorn shouted, pounding the smooth face of the new door. Then Dorn standing silent, waiting, the first red flashes of fear on his face and neck. Staring into the mirror, breathing hard. Dorn’s eyes searching the room, looking for an exit he knew no longer existed, sweat beading in the accordion-fold wrinkles of his forehead, sliding down his temples to his cheeks. Henry watching until Dorn started to shout again, the tendons in his neck straining, his veins purpling in animal terror. Only then did Henry leave the office, crossing back into the north apartment to unlock the door.

  * * *

  Clarke spent a couple of nights in the hotel bars down in the financial district until he found their man.

  A real loudmouth, Clarke said. Some kind of frustrated writer. Sells phones for a living, here for a week for the Western States Telephony Convention. He’d introduced himself as “Denver Dan, the Telephone Man.” Wife and kids back home in Colorado. Very interested in finding a date, some female company after a long day on the convention floor.

  He seems, Clarke said, like the kind of guy everybody knows, but nobody will miss.

  35

  Denver Dan sitting on the edge of the bed in the bright room. His prodigious stomach hangs over the waistband of his undershorts. Long red stretch marks radiate out from his navel, wheel spokes reaching into the dark hair on his breasts. Garters still hold his socks halfway up his calves. He’d broken his glasses hours before, but at some point since had stopped squinting, ceased trying to discern details in the exterior world.

  First dose at 11 P.M. Second dose at 3:30 A.M. A few hours of galloping around the room, singing loudly, pounding on the walls and door. His hair soaked with sweat, dripping from his nose, his mustache. Henry sending Dorn in to hold him down while Clarke checked his pulse, made sure he wasn’t on the verge of a heart attack.

  Finally, the calm, the slow crash. Denver Dan sitting on the edge of the bed. Henry watched him from the office, the other side of the glass. Dan nearly motionless, just the rise and fall of his chest, an idle scratch of one calf with the other stockinged foot. Every few minutes, his tongue slid out from between his lips, lizardlike, finding the underside of his mustache before retreating back into its hole.

  Henry sat with the contents of the man’s wallet spread across his desk. Business cards, driver’s license, membership badges for the Rotarians and Loyal Order of Moose. Daniel Davis. Height, weight, date of birth. There was a laminated card with a color painting of an American flag on one side and the Pledge of Allegiance printed on the other. Folded behind the card was a handwritten note with the times of his flights to and from San Francisco, a phone number for a taxicab service, the address of his hotel. The handwriting was a woman’s, neat and round. Dan’s wife, most likely, the woman in one of the photos from the wallet. The other two photos were of his children, two young girls, twins, smiling in school pictures.

  Henry checked his watch, marked the time in the ledger. He stood, nudged Dorn from his snoring heap on the couch, nudged Clarke from his dozing nod at the other desk, sending them into the room.


  * * *

  One day into the next. No light in the office, only Henry’s watch for news of the hour, occasional confirmation from Clarke or Dorn stepping outside to buy food or cigarettes. It’s day, it’s night. Time is nonexistent in the rooms. They strap Denver Dan to a chair, dose him, question him relentlessly, trying to empty him of all memory and experience. Once he answers a question it is as if that fact disappears from his body, as if the answer leaves his mouth and drifts up to disappear in the gray cirrus of cigarette smoke clinging to the ceiling.

  What is your name?

  Where are you from?

  Are you married?

  Do you have any children?

  Why are you here?

  * * *

  Henry says, “He has a wife.”

  “He’s told us,” Clarke says. “Wife, two kids.”

  “He hasn’t called her in days.”

  “What’s today? Wednesday?”

  “Thursday.”

  “Thursday. Jesus.”

  “Three days,” Henry says. “She’s worried. He missed his flight home. She’s making calls.”

  “Let her worry.”

  “Hospitals. The police. Who saw him last. His colleagues asking around.”

  “Let them ask,” Clarke says. “There’s nowhere to look. He’s disappeared.”

  * * *

  What is your name?

  Where are you from?

  Are you married?

  Do you have any children?

  Why are you here?

  What is your purpose here?

  * * *

  Henry watches from the office. At some point he stops taking pictures. There is no longer any need. They do not capture what is happening. Denver Dan getting lighter, smaller, leaner. His cheeks growing sallow; his eyes sinking, darkening. The man hasn’t eaten in what must be a few days, but it is more than that. He is being reduced. Each fact, each memory that they take from him shaves more flesh from the bone. Transforming him, one man into another.