Half World: A Novel

by O'Connor, Scott

  Valerov sat motionless on the edge of the bed, staring at the mirror. It seemed that he was ignoring Dorn, or that he hadn’t registered Dorn in the room, but then he began to shake his head, slowly, once to the left, once to the right.

  You’re here because you’re a liar. You’ve been lying to the people who are trying to help you.

  Henry could only see Dorn’s left arm hanging into the right side of the mirror’s frame. The rest was just a disembodied voice in the headphones.

  No response, again, and then that same torpid head turn, Valerov still looking straight ahead at the mirror.

  Henry had told Dorn about Weir, what Valerov might know. Dorn had already heard it all from Clarke, Henry had listened to their discussions on the tapes, but he wanted Dorn to hear it from him, wanted to be clear so that there would be no mistakes.

  If you admit that you’re lying, Dorn said, this will be a lot easier. We can go from there, no problem. Do you understand what I’m saying? No problem?

  Dorn’s arm disappeared from the frame and he clapped sharply once, twice.

  Do you understand what I’m saying?

  * * *

  After the sedative wore off, they left Valerov alone, let him test the new door, the metal slab over the window. Let him pound on the walls, the ceiling.

  Dorn questioned him for the remainder of the afternoon. Valerov obstinate, defiant, demanding to be released. Threatening Dorn, Dorn’s family. Refusing to speak. Speaking only in obscenities and insults. There were a few brief struggles, but by and large Dorn stood in nearly the same position for hours, arms folded, watching Valerov move around the room, getting close, nose to nose, then receding into the corners, onto the bed. Dorn repeating the questions Henry had given him, the endless repetition, regardless of the answers. The circular interrogation designed to break down even the simplest responses, the bedrock of personality, core facts questioned so many times that the answers became meaningless, became less than words, just knots of sound, animal utterances. It went on, seemingly without structure or goal. Any hesitation, any inconsistency in an answer forcing the questioning to begin again.

  What is your name. What was your father’s name. Your mother’s name, your wife’s name. How many children do you have. What are their ages, their names.

  Each answer from Valerov receiving no response from Dorn. As if the answers were unimportant; as if only the questions mattered. Clarke quickly grew bored watching this, but Henry gained focus as the hours passed, attuned to the smallest details, the unconscious cues from Valerov, the sweat, the slowed speech. The man had been interrogated before, would know the tactics and techniques. He would believe he could outlast them. This would be the professional’s response. Henry let the questioning continue past the point of his own distraction, to where he began to feel the numbness coming from the other room. Hours more, until he saw Dorn’s knees giving a little, his weight pulling down, and then Henry sent the signal, a single ring of the electric bell in the wall, and Clarke went out into the north apartment to unseal the door.

  * * *

  They fastened him to the chair with the leather restraints. When he was secure, Dorn stood back by the door and Clarke sat on the edge of the bed asking the same questions. Valerov irate, straining against the straps, his face red, then purple, veins surfacing on his forehead and neck.

  Kept like an animal, he said, spitting the words in English and Russian. Kept like an animal.

  Clarke asked questions and the polygraph needle jumped at Valerov’s responses, settled into a long, steady line, jumped again.

  They allowed him to use the bathroom every few hours, Dorn standing watch in the doorway. Then they strapped him back into the chair. From time to time Dorn would leave the room, and Clarke would attempt to change the tenor of the questioning, implying that he was the one who could make things easier, could run interference with Dorn. Valerov wasn’t persuaded, insulting Clarke in long streams of guttural Russian, rocking back and forth in the chair with increasing violence until Henry signaled Dorn to reenter the room.

  They told him he had failed the polygraph test. They told him his lies were obvious, that it would be better for him to tell the truth. They would get it from him eventually. They questioned him again and he gave them the same answers and they left him alone for a few hours, still strapped to the chair, and then they returned to the room and told him that he had flunked another test.

  We can do this forever, Clarke said, lighting a cigarette, looking at the jagged marks on the polygraph roll. We have all the time in the world.

  * * *

  Dorn and Valerov alone. No questions. Valerov shielding himself in a corner, hands out, trying to hold Dorn at bay. Promising that he’ll talk. He’ll talk if Dorn stops. Dorn under strict orders not to stop for any response from Valerov, any promise, any softening. Dorn under strict orders not to stop for anything but the sound of the bell.

  * * *

  Clarke found a vein, slipped the needle in, squeezed the plunger. Dorn loosened the restraints and Valerov slumped in the chair. His face mottled, bumped and swollen. Watching Dorn leave the room.

  Clarke lit a cigarette, lit one for Valerov. Poured them each a drink.

  We want to know why you’re still lying, Clarke said. At this point it seems counterproductive.

  Valerov tried to speak, fumbled over his words, stopped, took a drink. Winced when the alcohol touched the hole where a front tooth had been.

  I have been telling you the truth.

  Clarke shook his head. This can be so much easier, he said. You understand why we have to know. We are both professionals. If you were in my position you would need to know the same thing from me.

  If I were in your position you would be dead.

  Clarke stood, refilled Valerov’s glass. Well then, he said. All the more reason to be honest with me.

  * * *

  The needle in the arm. They retightened the restraints. Valerov blinking rapidly, his eyes jumping around the room.

  Stop this. Make this stop.

  Valerov shaking the chair, the chair’s legs banging against the floor.

  Stop this. Please.

  Clarke and Dorn left the bedroom, reappeared a minute later back in the office.

  Dorn lit a cigarette. “He’s not breaking.”

  “Give it time,” Clarke said.

  “It’s been a long fucking time already.”

  They watched Valerov yelling and rocking the chair, writhing under the restraints. Henry and Clarke at the desks, Dorn standing by the window.

  Dorn turned, looked at Clarke, at Henry, back at Valerov.

  “He’s not breaking.”

  * * *

  They began to lose track of the date, asking each other what day it was, what hour of the day. Clarke and Dorn had taken their watches off that first afternoon, so as not to give Valerov any sense of time when they were in the room. Eventually, their watches had gone dead. They’d forgotten to wind them and then when they were dead they had nothing to set them by.

  Henry tried not to close his eyes. He was afraid that he would sleep and not know where he was, who he was when he came to. The horror of Henry March waking in that room.

  Valerov would not answer questions about Monarch. He maintained that he knew nothing more than what he had already disclosed back in Washington. That some of what he had disclosed may have been incorrect. He maintained that he knew nothing about further penetrations.

  It was hot in the bedroom. Beastly, Dorn called it. Henry could see the sweat soaking through Dorn’s shirt and slacks while he questioned Valerov. After a couple of hours Dorn would come into the office and change his clothes and gulp water. Then back into the bedroom, where dark rings appeared immediately under his arms, at the small of his back.

  Clarke gave Dorn amphetamine shots to keep him awake if he was to be
up through the night with Valerov, sedatives if he needed to sleep. After the first few days they ate very little, usually only when they had given Valerov something to eat, and then they sat in the office and ate and watched Valerov eating in the bedroom.

  Sometimes Henry opened his eyes in the middle of the night to see Dorn and Clarke sleeping in their chairs and Valerov in the brightly lit bedroom, raging on amphetamines, pacing, destroying what was left of the furniture. The silence of the scene and the bright square of the window, the lit tableau in the dark office. Valerov had struck the mirror sometime earlier, creating large black cracks across the shatterproof glass. A spiderweb of lines in the frame through which they saw the room.

  * * *

  They sat drinking and smoking, Dorn in the chair with the straps hanging loose at his sides, Valerov unrestrained on the bed. An uneasy peace in the room. The two men were not so far apart in their appetites, their interests. They talked about women, about baseball. Valerov had been following the game for years through Western newspapers and radio broadcasts. The game as an abstraction, as box score and faceless voice. He had hoped to see the Senators play when he’d come to Washington. He wanted to see the actual game, the flesh-and-blood athletes he’d heard described for so long. He knew all the numbers, the statistics. Dorn was impressed by this. He quizzed Valerov on the Giants, on Willie Mays’s batting average. He thought it was a cardinal sin that Valerov knew Mays only by statistics, by secondhand descriptions. That he had never seen the man in motion, the poetry of his movement.

  You will have to take me, Valerov said. We will go and drink beer and sit in the sun.

  Dorn gave a thick belly laugh, lit another cigarette, still laughing but nodding as well, as if in some way something like this was still possible.

  You want to hear that I am still working for my country, Valerov said.

  If that’s the truth.

  It is not the truth. But you want to hear it regardless.

  I want to hear about Monarch.

  I do not know who that is.

  Now you don’t know who that is.

  I believe I may have been wrong, when I spoke of him before. I believe I may have had my facts wrong.

  Your facts.

  Yes.

  Dorn shook his head, blew out a long breath.

  Valerov sat quietly, looked to the mirror, the door. How many of you are here?

  What do you mean?

  How many of you are here?

  Just me, Dorn said.

  You and the doctor.

  Yes.

  Valerov looked up at what was left of the ceiling fan, looked at the mirror.

  I want to talk to the others.

  There aren’t any others, Dorn said.

  Valerov kept his eyes on the mirror, the cracks he had made.

  Who is the liar now? he said.

  41

  Henry stood in front of the open mouth of the empty bus-station locker, the key in his hand. All that was left inside was a small flake of black leather, a last remnant of the ledger’s skin. Anyone could have taken it. Dorn, Clarke, someone sent from back east to follow Henry. It could be anywhere now, the record of what they’d done.

  He had taken the secret tapes from the south office, Clarke and his Dictaphone, Clarke and Dorn, and now he burned them in the bus-station restroom, letting the reels melt in the sink before turning on the faucet.

  He couldn’t find Elizabeth. She wasn’t in her apartment in the Tenderloin, wasn’t in her usual bars. He made his way south through the city to Hunters Point, Emma’s tenement, her room on the top floor. A single mattress, a chair by the window. A small pile of books by the chair. Poetry, some of the names familiar, some unknown to him. Strangers. Laundry on a line, dresses and undergarments he recognized. The radiator banging and then hissing steam.

  The door finally opened and Emma came in, bundled against the cold, seemingly unsurprised to find an uninvited guest in her room.

  She offered him a drink and when he declined she poured herself one, took a long swallow to prove that it was untainted, then poured another and handed him the glass. She was still wearing her coat and scarf. She stood against the wall and they drank and she watched him in silence.

  “Am I in trouble?”

  Her voice broke something in the room. A moment’s peace. Henry opened his eyes. He hadn’t realized he had closed them. He took a bank envelope from his jacket pocket.

  “I’m going to give you some money and you’re going to leave,” he said. “You’re not going to tell me where you’re going. You’re not going to tell anyone.”

  “You look like you’re in trouble,” Emma said.

  Henry held the envelope. Emma set down her glass, reached for it, opened the flap.

  “This is a lot.”

  “You’re going to go,” Henry said, “and not stop for anything, for anyone, until you feel that you’re safe.”

  Emma closed the flap, held the envelope at her side.

  “Until I’m safe?”

  He nodded.

  She took a drink, looked at Henry again.

  “What will that feel like?” she said.

  * * *

  Henry stood on the sidewalk in front of the Merchants Exchange. He set his camera on a postal box and looked through the viewfinder, adjusting the angle so he could see as much of the building as possible: the heavy stone walls, the powerful columns, a structure that had survived the last cataclysm, could survive the next. He used a short lens, which gave a vast field of vision but distorted the view, pushing the center back and bowing the edges of the frame like a fishbowl. Pedestrians passed through the glass, moving across the newly created space. When Henry was satisfied, he set the timer on the camera and stepped back into the frame.

  He returned to the office to develop the film. Dorn was asleep on the sofa. Clarke sat at Henry’s desk, his head tilted listlessly to one side, half awake, watching Valerov through the window.

  Valerov was hunched sick in a corner of the room. He had ripped the room apart, the walls and ceiling gutted, studs and chicken wire exposed, newspaper insulation. Red finger streaks across what was left of the paint. The camera and microphone wires hanging free, fallen in tangles across the floor.

  It was dark when Henry crossed the bridge into Oakland. No lights in the windows of the house. Inside, down the hallway, careful not to make a sound. Thomas was asleep on the floor beside his bed, legs straight, arms at his sides. Henry stood for a long moment, watching his son, and then bent to brush Thomas’s hair from his forehead, kiss the cool skin there.

  He stepped into Hannah’s room. Gray moonlight through the window. One wall was covered with photographs, the entire city in black and white. Henry set the photo he had taken on her desk. No crumbled buildings, no destruction. No panic, no fear. No still-falling masonry. Just people passing on the sidewalk and the Merchants Exchange building and her father, everything secure in that moment, a day like any other.

  * * *

  “You’re not really home.” Ginnie’s voice in the dark bedroom.

  “No.”

  “When do you have to go back?”

  “I should have gone already.”

  “Come closer so I can see you.”

  He took a step toward the bed and Ginnie reached over and switched on her reading lamp. A soft circle of orange light in the room. Ginnie in her blue nightgown, her hair in curlers. She sat up, watched him. He could only imagine what he looked like, the fear this struck in her. Standing folded and disheveled, his hands hanging at his sides.

  “You should take a shower, change your clothes,” she said. “I’ll fix you something to eat.”

  “I have to go back.”

  “You should sleep for a while, Henry.”

  He shook his head.

  “Then lie here beside me,” she
said. “Just for a minute.”

  He lay on top of the covers, still in his shoes, his coat. Ginnie lay back down and closed her eyes, took his hand.

  “I’m not going to let you go,” she said. “I don’t care what you have to do. I’m going to keep you here beside me.”

  He didn’t move. He could feel the black water of the bay, slowly rolling. He could feel himself drifting between names. The man who belonged on that side of the water and the man who belonged on this side.

  Henry said, “You have to trust me.”

  “I’m trying to.”

  “I’m very close.”

  “Close to what?”

  Ginnie’s face was drawn, her eyes wet. He couldn’t look at her eyes. He looked at her neck, her hair.

  “Weir,” Henry said. “I’m almost to Weir.”

  Ginnie took a breath, released it. Pulling from whatever reserves she had left.

  He said, “It will all be over soon.”

  She wiped her cheeks with the back of her wrist, took Henry’s hand again.

  “I want you to promise that you’ll come back to me.”

  Henry nodded.

  “Please,” she said.

  “I will.”

  “You promise.”

  “Yes.”

  Ginnie studied his face, closed her eyes. She squeezed his hand a last time, then let him go.

  42

  Dorn and Clarke reinforced the chair, bolting it to two-by-fours which they then bolted to the floor. They strapped Valerov in and forced the water into his mouth, down his throat, massaging his neck until he swallowed. When he gagged and spat they were careful not to get any of the liquid on their skin. More water, then the blindfold, and then they cut the lights and left him, waited for the drug to take hold.

  The window from the dark room into the dark room. Some of the microphones still worked, though there was nothing but the sound of Valerov’s breathing, the struggle for air. They sat in the office with their headphones and cigarettes, watching the black square of glass. Dorn and Clarke passed a flask. Nothing for half an hour, an hour. Grain swimming before Henry’s eyes in the darkness, tiny gray spots, like imperfections in an emulsion, underexposed film. He was beginning to wonder if they should try again when the sound began: a long, low hum, rising slowly in pitch as if reaching for something. Then Valerov’s voice, just a whisper at first, tentative, a question, what sounded like a woman’s name, a multistepped Russian word, soft then hard then soft.