Half World: A Novel

by O'Connor, Scott

  Her father was a photographer for the government. This was what Ginnie had always told her. Who and what he photographed was never explained. When she was younger, Hannah entertained fantasies of Henry as some kind of spy, sneaking around the corridors of the Kremlin, taking surreptitious photos of plotting Communist leaders. Later, she looked at war photographs in the newspaper and wondered if he had been in those places, a witness to the gunfire, the bombs. But it seemed so incongruous with the memories she had of him, with the photographs her mother kept around the house. The plumb-straight part in his hair, his heavy-rimmed glasses. He looked like an accountant, a bureaucrat. He looked like a man who could live his entire life without coming near an explosion of any kind.

  In all of their arguments, though, Henry was never brought up explicitly until the end, the night before Hannah left for Berkeley. She didn’t know why she chose that moment to bring him back fully into their lives. Maybe she could sense her imminent freedom and it made her feel brave. Maybe she was just feeling reckless and cruel, wanting to wound one last time.

  He’s not coming back, she had shouted, standing in the kitchen doorway, glaring at her mother’s back. He’s dead, Mom. Jesus Christ, after all this time.

  There was no response. No response was possible. Ginnie could not believe Henry was dead. She would wait until the end of the world, holding her daughter and son hostage, hoping for that knock at the door, the long-prayed-for return. But Hannah wouldn’t wait any longer. She had decided this, whether she’d known it then or not.

  Ginnie had stood facing the sink, her back to Hannah. She made no sound. She had simply lifted her hands from the dishpan, slicked to the wrists with soap, and pressed her fingers to the countertop tile, holding on.

  3

  Waking on the daybed. First smoke, first drink. Dickie picking something from his foil ball to get the synapses started. Jack already up and wandering the rooms or nowhere to be seen and Dickie stumbling into the bedroom to make sure he was still breathing, just sleeping it off in the lopsided bed, an empty Wild Turkey bottle on the pillow beside him.

  Making instant coffee on the range in the kitchen. Some breakfast. Jack up now for sure, maybe standing in the corner by the table glowering at Dickie or out in the living room looking through the stacks of newspapers. Both men in their underpants, padding around in bare feet. The radio on, a news and weather station that also played a few swing numbers every hour, Artie Shaw, Lester Brown, even a few of the Benny Goodman small groups. Getting dressed, getting Jack dressed. Maybe a half hour killed right there. Getting some vegetable broth into Jack. Two coffee cups on the card table in the kitchen, one of broth, the other of Wild Turkey. Feeding the cats.

  Late morning, Jack’s first nap of the day. A little housekeeping, maybe, peeling the rugs off the floors and dragging them into the vestibule to beat them into dusty submission. Scrubbing the bathroom. Gathering newspapers and mail and old soup cans, whiskey bottles, tossing it all into the Dumpster behind the building. Salvaging all sorts of forgotten detritus: Jack’s medals and citations from the Air Force, Dickie’s old driver’s license, a business card for a VA hospital with a handwritten appointment that Dickie couldn’t imagine Jack had kept.

  More coffee. Back to the rapidly shrinking foil ball. Sidetracked by old newspapers, basketball scores, TV listings from his time underground, Dickie hunched over the newsprint like an amnesiac excavating lost history. Jack awake and ready for lunch. The twin coffee mugs. A trip to the bathroom and the ensuing cleanup. One of Jack’s outbursts, screaming obscenities at Dickie or whoever else he thought was in the room, jabbing his fists until Dickie finally grabbed him from behind and wrestled him down, holding Jack until he lay spent, limp, wheezing on the daybed.

  Second nap of the day. Dickie down the stairs and out of the apartment, steering the Fairlane down to the supermarket, the liquor store, the bank if the Social Security check had arrived. Still feeling like a tourist in the aboveground world, but starting to get a few nods of acknowledgment from cashiers and clerks, despite the hair and beard. Becoming something of a regular. The time out of the apartment a breath of fresh air, literally, driving back slowly, windows down, taking slight detours to see the bridge from different angles, the river, the men standing in half circles down on the banks.

  Back to the apartment and Jack up and raging or up and weeping. Trying to get a pill down Jack’s throat. Getting a few down his own to calm things a bit. Jack’s eyes lighting up when he sees Dickie’s shopping bags, the new bottles clinking in the brown paper. Here, boy. Sit. Drinks all around. A moment of lucidity where Jack comments on a news story from the radio, something in the paper from 1969. Maybe an actual discussion, just long enough to lull Dickie into letting his guard down until Jack is after his own throat or Dickie’s with a shaving razor. Dickie gathering all the sharp objects from the apartment and stashing them in the janitor’s closet on the other side of the staircase landing.

  Vespers. The sky purple over the river. The radio station going one hundred percent big-band ballads, sending both Jack and Dickie into a teary melancholy. Dinner for himself, a take-out burger or a sandwich with some of the cats’ tuna, a couple of fruit pies. More broth for Jack. Another trip to the bathroom, Jack crying at the mess he’s made, Dickie holding his father’s shoulders while Jack sobs with his pants pooled at his ankles. A few more drinks, another couple of pills. Nightfall. Streetlights below, pinpricks of orange light from the housing project. Dogs barking down by the river. Dickie’s thoughts of the men there, campfires and cigarette cherries in the dark. Dickie’s thoughts of Portland, an explosion in an office, a Sunday morning, the man who shouldn’t have been there. Jack standing in the living room, staring at the TV, a deodorant commercial, sculpting the fingers of his right hand into a mimed pistol, aiming at the screen, pulling the trigger.

  Sleep, yes or no. Jack in the dark bedroom, talking or snoring. Dickie on the daybed, a last smoke, a last drink, the radio very low. Firecrackers from the street below, a chain of tiny detonations. A man at his desk, alone in a Portland office building. Dogs down by the river.

  Time moves both ways.

  * * *

  It didn’t take long for Dickie to deplete his stash, until he was poking around in the folds of the aluminum foil looking in vain for a stray tablet. After a brief, foolhardy flirtation with the idea of going cold turkey, he decided to drive up to the address on the business card he’d found and visit Jack’s doctor.

  The guy looked Dickie over, asked after Jack, took a few notes. Wrote a refill for Jack’s medication. Dickie almost chickened out, almost walked out the door without another word, but desperation trumped shame long enough for him to ask for another prescription, just something to calm his nerves a little, maybe something else to get him up in the morning. The doc looked at Dickie again, then back down at his pad, started writing.

  “When did you get back?” the doc said.

  Dickie, stunned for a second, wondering what this guy knew, if something had slipped through from Portland, and then, getting a grip, realizing that the doctor meant back from Vietnam. Maybe Jack had once said something about his son overseas. Maybe the guy could just tell, looking at Dickie. Maybe it was that obvious.

  “I’m not exactly sure,” Dickie said.

  The doc nodded, still scribbling. He tore off the sheet and handed it to Dickie without further eye contact. Sent his regards to Jack.

  * * *

  He returned to the apartment to find Jack playing Audrey’s old records in the living room, sobbing and yelling, breaking everything within reach that he hadn’t already broken. Dickie managed to get his father onto the daybed, one of the new sedatives down his throat.

  When Jack was finally asleep, Dickie started cleaning. Broken bottles, broken plates, and then the records themselves, some in pieces, some simply flung into the far corners of the room. The cats still cowering behind the bookcases and the big
oak hutch, furniture they probably figured Jack couldn’t overturn. They obviously didn’t know him as well as Dickie did.

  In a corner of the living room was a box Dickie hadn’t seen before. He lifted the flaps and found it full of his mother’s 78s, some still in their original paper wrappers. He couldn’t believe Jack still had these. His father was the least sentimental man he’d ever known. Dickie hadn’t seen all of his mother’s recordings in one place since the first time his father had destroyed her records, when Jack stood in their driveway on the Oklahoma base and smashed them on the street, one at a time, while the neighbors looked on and Audrey stood watching from the living room window.

  His parents had met during the war, the last war, or, well, actually, the one before the one before, the one that still seemed like a real war, with bond drives and homecoming parades and front-porch flags snapping in the breeze. Audrey had already made her most famous recordings in Paris. She had been a darling of the Resistance, her stripped-down renditions of classic torch numbers reinterpreted under the circumstances as songs of longing for many things in addition to love: country, courage, freedom. She made a few more recordings after she came to the States with Jack, but soon they were living on air bases in towns without main streets let alone recording studios, and after Sylvie and Dickie were born she closed the book on her career, reserving her singing for lullabies and impromptu recitals for friends’ birthdays.

  She hadn’t been forgotten, though. Every couple of years, some middle-aged guy with hair a little too long and a few days’ growth of beard showed up at their house, unannounced. A writer, a college professor, a collector. Audrey tried politely to send them away, but they hadn’t tracked her down to take no for an answer, so she’d invite them in, fix coffee, sit and answer questions, turn down offers to go to New York or Chicago and record something new. She always made sure whoever had come was long gone by the time Jack got home, making Dickie and Sylvie promise to keep the visits to themselves, their little secret.

  At the time, Dickie couldn’t understand his mother’s importance to these men, what possessed them to track her down. He had fallen in with a group of air brats whose main interests included jazz and booze and raiding their parents’ medicine cabinets, not necessarily in that order. Their musical tastes were decidedly modern, Ornette and Miles and Coltrane, and Audrey’s records were anything but. To Dickie, they sounded like distant echoes of some lost time that he didn’t particularly understand or care much about.

  He had one of his mother’s records with him when he started on MAELSTROM. A strange, fragile thing to take. He and Audrey weren’t even on speaking terms at the time, so he couldn’t really explain its inclusion in his duffel bag of bare necessities. It got as far as Ann Arbor, his first step into the student movement. He was living with Mary Margaret, a girl he’d met in an antiwar group, and during an argument one night she threw the record across their living room, shattering it against the far wall. Dickie hadn’t played the thing in years, but the loss nearly brought him to his knees. It took Mary Margaret a few minutes to understand the severity of what she had done. She didn’t ask him about the record, why it had stopped their argument cold. How mortal a sin she had committed. She retreated to the bedroom, leaving Dickie standing over his broken pieces of shellac.

  He slid Jack’s discs back into their musty sleeves, slid the sleeves underneath the big oak hutch, fighting the urge to put one on the old Decca player in the corner. He didn’t want to rile Jack again, and to be honest, he wasn’t sure he was ready to hear one himself. It would be a strange sound to him now. It seemed to Dickie that they were broken more often than they were played. The crack of the records fracturing was more familiar to him than the sound of his mother’s voice in the songs.

  * * *

  It didn’t take long to run out of pills again. He had another bout of cold-turkey optimism, but within a day he started to feel the clawing of withdrawal, his sinuses scratched and throbbing, his mouth dry, his body shimmering with a low-grade panic that threatened to bubble over into something more serious with each unmedicated hour.

  He couldn’t bring himself to go back to the hospital and beg again, so he made his way down to the river, to the men in their camp. Four bucks for a little baggie of Seconal and Benzedrine. Same price it was in Vietnam.

  * * *

  Some kind of commotion from the rooms below woke him on the daybed, drool-chinned and discombobulated, more than a little hungover. It sounded like someone moving around down there, and after Dickie swallowed a few uppers and checked to make sure Jack was still breathing, he pulled on some clothes and went down to the street.

  The door of the used bookstore was open, the lights were on. Dickie was so used to seeing the place dark and shut tight that it seemed almost like a dream. The place was crammed floor to ceiling with shelves of hardbacks and paperbacks, old movie magazines, a locked glass display case with what appeared to be leather-bound rare editions. A graybeard crouched in the back of the store, digging through boxes. He lifted his head when Dickie stepped inside, nodded, went back to his archaeology.

  Dickie perused. Something to read wouldn’t be such a bad idea. He’d pretty much exhausted Jack’s cache of old newspapers, felt as if he’d finally caught up on his lost years, or at least those years’ Hi and Lois strips and Ann Landers columns. He wasn’t quite sure that his attention span could currently accommodate one of those copies of Ulysses or Moby-Dick, but there was a wooden crate of comic books on the floor by the old encyclopedias, two for a dime. The price and level of intellectual commitment seemed about right.

  He left with a pair from a few years back, two issues of Detective Comics with a pretty compelling backup feature about J’onn J’onzz, the Manhunter from Mars, a big green alien guy who was brought to earth by a mad scientist and then got stuck here when the mad scientist gave up the ghost from the shock of bringing a big green alien guy to earth.

  Dickie spent the next couple of nights with the comics, reading via flashlight or the streetlights out the living room window after Jack was down for the count. There was a compelling sadness that loomed over the proceedings, J’onn stranded on Earth, trying not to be found out, using his shape-shifting powers to impersonate human beings. J’onn haunted by memories of the planet he’d left behind, shifting back and forth between his human personas and his Martian look, unsure which was the right one even when nobody else was around. Dickie could identify.

  He wanted to see how things turned out for J’onn, but every time he checked, the bookstore was closed again. He had to content himself with the comics he had, rereading until the covers came loose from their staples, until his thumbs were ink black, wearing holes in the colored newsprint.

  * * *

  He was down at the river once a week now, more often if he’d had a particularly tough stretch of days. Sometimes he’d take a hit from a passed bottle or a joint before leaving, but he didn’t say much, just sat and listened to whatever conversation he’d wandered into. Content just to be away from the apartment while Jack slept, out in the late-afternoon light with the vets, watching the water and the railroad bridge, the middle school kids walking the trestles high above on their way home, arms straight out at their sides, waving for balance.

  * * *

  If pressed, Dickie could come up with some pretty good stories about his time in Vietnam. It had come up occasionally with the student groups during MAELSTROM. Someone would ask, and Dickie would make a show of his reluctance to dredge up painful memories. Of course, this only created more interest, so when he knew he had their attention, he’d hold forth at great length—dramatic, detailed accounts of the mud and blood and horror, the living nightmare of war. His stories were the glue that sealed many a deal during those days, both proving these kids’ larger points about the war and giving Dickie a well-earned legitimacy in their eyes. Someone who’d been there, who’d seen it firsthand, and had made the choice to re
sist.

  The truth was, he hadn’t seen an hour of combat. A month into basic training, the MPs busted him for possession. A few days later, a couple of guys from Naval Intelligence came to visit him in his holding cell. They’d had an eye on him, they said, both because he seemed like a fairly bright guy and because he was in with the local dopers. He seemed well liked by his fellow troops. He was a good listener. His contempt for his superiors was obvious and genuine and gave him an authenticity that was hard to fake. He was just what the NIS guys were looking for, and they were willing to make a deal. Based on Dickie’s family pedigree, based on the respect that many in the mid and higher levels of the military had for his father, they offered him a choice: court-martial or playing ball for their team. Dickie chose to play.

  He spent two years in Vietnam checking in to various military hospitals with vague, usually apocryphal injuries and ailments, cozying up to other patients, sussing out the users and dealers, haunting bars in some of the R&R hot spots and looking for information, i.e., who was ready to snap and shoot up his platoon or commanding officer; what the flow of narcotics was and where it was flowing from; and lastly, with this facet of his job providing some early training for his later involvement in MAELSTROM, trying to find out if there was any contact between troops and antiwar groups back home. (The answers turning out to be, in order: too many to name / ditto / a decent amount of heroin and hash, mostly from the Golden Triangle; a lot of pot, mostly homegrown; a lot of uppers and downers, from parts unknown, pills being nearly impossible to track, just materializing, basically, in the palms of Vietnamese children in the villages, pressed into the hands of American soldiers for four bucks, U.S. / and not much, or not enough to be overly concerned with, at least among the white troops, who were the only guys who would really open up to Dickie—just some books and leaflets, hand-copied Phil Ochs lyrics.)

  What he hadn’t considered was that whatever drug problem he had when he entered the military was about to get ten times worse, due to the basic pants-shitting terror he felt every second he was over there, and the fact that his job involved an easy and steady supply of substances that could alleviate segments of that fear and keep him functioning at something like a reasonable level.