Half World: A Novel

by O'Connor, Scott

  And, of course, there was an additional perk. It was much harder to get shot or blown up in a bar or a hospital than out in the jungle. He had never been much of a fighter, never had much in the way of physical courage, or so Jack had always told him. He was better at talking and listening, turning guys in. Dickie knew it would be nothing to be proud of. He figured it would make him feel like a fink, like a rat, and he was right. But it had also kept him alive.

  4

  When Hannah first arrived in Los Angeles, she said a prayer every night, asking Thomas’s forgiveness for leaving. She put herself to sleep by imagining that she was talking to him, like she used to talk to him back in Oakland, lying on his bed, whispering in the dark while he fell asleep on the floor beside her. Their long, one-sided conversations. Her plans, dreams, schemes. He was the perfect confidant. He knew everything about her, all her secrets. She could tell him anything and it would fall away into the depths, safe and secure. What he thought of what she told him she would never know, but the answering voice she imagined was forgiving and kind, wise in its way, wryly funny.

  She’d had a final conversation with Thomas the night before she left for Berkeley. Not aware of what she would do a week later, but feeling a gathering sense of change, a momentous break impending. Suspecting, possibly, what she was capable of. Whispering to Thomas and hearing his reluctant approval, his understanding of why she needed to go. A completely imagined conversation, Hannah knew, but one she was able to convince herself was at least possible, was a conversation that she and the Thomas she had constructed over the years could plausibly have. Still, even after she was away she asked for forgiveness every night, unable to sleep until she heard the voice she’d given him in her head, granting it again.

  * * *

  She had a camera of her own, a birthday gift from the high school boyfriend she’d left behind. She took pictures of buildings in Hollywood, their elaborate cornices and fire escapes and rooftop signs silhouetted in the twilight. The city was sliding into something, was past its heyday, crumbling slowly. Cracked buildings and cracked kids, runaways her age or younger asking for money or dope or money for dope. Sometimes she took their pictures, but usually only in service to the buildings behind them, or in concert with them. Not portraits so much as duets. Half a face and an ear and the tall brick shoulder of the Knickerbocker Hotel. The days of those buildings maybe as numbered as the days of the kids smoking in front of them, so they seemed right together, sharing a rapidly disappearing moment in time.

  She got a job taking pictures for real estate firms. All the big property owners in Hollywood were trying to get off the sinking ship, so they needed to sell, preferably to out-of-state investors, foreigners, moneyed men who still envisioned the Hollywood of newsreel movie premieres, red carpets, popping flashbulbs. These were the ideal buyers, but her clients would settle lower on the food chain if need be, locals who planned to open pawnshops and liquor stores and peep-show theaters, bargain-basement entrepreneurs who could see the future and wanted to be there to cash in.

  The pictures she was supposed to take were dead-on frames of the buildings, front, sides, then some of the interior, the common areas, lobbies, and elevator banks. Mug shots. But between these setups she pulled her camera from the tripod and took her own pictures, the corners and fixtures and oblique angles, planes passing rooftop radio antennas in the midafternoon sky.

  This was about the time she met Bert, a film student with a day job at a B-movie factory, directing beach and biker pictures while studying Cocteau and Fellini at night. She moved into his apartment in Echo Park and took still pictures and he took moving pictures. For a while, Ginnie sent envelopes with small amounts of cash. Hannah always intended to leave the money untouched, to send it all back one day, thereby proving her independence, but she needed the funds and usually ended up spending it within days of its arrival, feeling like a failure. Tied, still. Bound.

  Eventually, she returned to Oakland for brief visits, sometimes with Bert, sometimes just with Bert’s car, a day or two, a weekend. Never with much in the way of advance warning. Never on holidays. She wanted to keep the visits free of significance, as if she were any adult child returning home to catch up, visit old friends, old haunts. By then, the heated feelings between her and Ginnie had cooled, and they had relatively civil meals together, somewhat labored conversations about Hannah’s work, her life, Thomas’s progress, what he was learning, whom he had spoken to at the community center.

  Thomas sent her postcards irregularly, a seemingly random mailing schedule that Hannah knew made strict sense in some part of his brain. Images of the bridges and the bay, downtown Oakland. The same card sometimes four or five times over the years. She wasn’t sure if there was any logic to his choices, or if these were simply the options he had, the postcards in the small spinner rack at the drugstore, Thomas turning the display while Ginnie waited for a prescription to be filled.

  The messages on the cards were brief, a line or two about something he’d seen or done that he’d found interesting. His childlike printing. Sometimes just his name, Thomas, sometimes with an exclamation point, Thomas!, as if he was shouting from higher up in the state, reminding her that he was still there.

  * * *

  After she and Bert had gone their separate ways, she found an apartment above a camera shop on Figueroa Avenue. She began frequenting the downtown movie houses, the crumbling vaudeville- and silent-era palaces, watching a bizarre spectrum of films, from the classic to the pornographic. She sat with her feet up on the seat in front of her, her camera resting on her stomach, and when a particularly interesting composition appeared she would take a picture. The on-screen images paired with the physical structure around them. Audrey Hepburn’s jawline and the brocaded edge of the frayed theater curtain. John Wayne’s left eye and the brim of his cowboy hat pushing the outer boundary, the top right corner of the screen.

  Work begat work. She had more real estate jobs than she could handle, and her other photographs began to attract attention, first at some neighborhood coffee shops, then at a few larger spaces in Hollywood, eventually at some higher-end galleries on the west side of town.

  She moved into a new space in a neighborhood a few miles north, a former roller-skating rink with a high domed roof that attracted a daily balcony crowd of cooing pigeons. She made a darkroom, a workshop, cordoned off a place to eat and sleep. It was still more space than she needed, so she turned the rest into a gallery, showing the work of some of the neighborhood artists she admired.

  She left the front door to the roller rink unlocked, which she knew was foolish, but she liked coming out from the darkroom to find someone wandered in off the street looking through the gallery. A surprise in their day. Sometimes it was a runaway or a homeless man and she’d give them a few dollars or make them a sandwich to take. She was held up once by a couple of teenagers with what one of them threatened was a gun in the pocket of his sweatshirt, and they made off with a watch that was an old gift from Bert and the cash she had in her purse, which amounted to about six bucks. Much worse could have happened, she knew, but she still left the door unlocked. She wasn’t willing to give up that moment when she came out into the light to find a stranger standing quietly, hands clasped behind their back, looking at the pictures on the walls.

  She kept all of Thomas’s postcards pinned to a large sheet of corkboard, which she hung in the living space of the studio. When she was a girl she’d had a wall of photos, too, pictures her father brought home from work, images of San Francisco meant to alleviate her fear that the city would be destroyed by a nuclear blast. She’d taken comfort in those images as she took comfort in these. Evidence that Thomas was all right, that her connection with him was still intact. At night she lay in bed and looked at the photos in the glow from one of the small skylights, illumination from the moon or the street.

  Proof of life.

  5

  Dickie had returne
d from Southeast Asia with a name and a phone number, a meeting in an D.C.-area diner with Father Bill. Bill said that Dickie had come highly recommended, that his work in Vietnam had not gone unnoticed. He asked Dickie what he planned to do now that he was back in the States and Dickie told him that he didn’t know. He felt deeply disoriented by his return to the States. His tolerance for everyday life had become just about nonexistent. The pleasantries and rituals of civilization seemed like a shared joke or some kind of sinister game after living in a place where moment-to-moment existence was husked down to the raw basics, to violence and survival. So when Father Bill offered him MAELSTROM, Dickie took it.

  He started in Ann Arbor. At first it was mostly loose groups of hippies who met a few times a week, making signs and planning street-corner rallies, or old socialist ladies in the suburbs collecting money to send to these groups. He got in with a few publishers of leftist newspapers, journals, books, and this was closer to what he was looking for. They talked a good game about overthrow and redistribution of wealth, but it was still nearly impossible to pin them down on anything. Sometimes at the bookstores he’d make the acquaintance of guys too old to be in school, unnervingly quiet men who hung around at the edges of the movement, seemed combustible. One of them led him to the activist group with the most promise, led him to Mary Margaret, who eventually brought Dickie underground. Then to the Pacific Northwest, small actions against recruiting offices, government buildings, and then, finally, to the big action, to Portland.

  The target was a nondescript industrial park, an engineering firm that designed parts of what became napalm canisters. A partially owned subsidiary of a partially owned subsidiary of. The bombing was to take place on a Sunday morning, when no one would be around. The end goal a conflagration of documents and machinery, a big blazing message that would not only make the news but knock weapons development back a few months.

  They had trained and planned, and they executed well. The bomb went off beautifully, creating a fireball that ripped through rooms, feeding on furniture and paperwork, shattering windows, blowing the roof. A perfect action, except for that single, major hitch.

  The office wasn’t empty.

  * * *

  Night in Davenport. Dickie stood in front of the grocery store’s refrigerated case, weighing his options with regard to prepackaged cold cuts, when he heard Father Bill’s voice close behind.

  Dickie assumed they’d find him eventually. Maybe they had Sylvie’s mail tagged. Maybe they’d been following him since Portland. It didn’t matter, really. He figured that one of the world’s two foremost intelligence powers should be able to track down one of its own citizens, no matter how marginal, without too much hassle. They made a date to have lunch, as Dickie had to get back to Jack and also because he liked the idea of making Bill cool his heels for a night after coming all that way.

  The restaurant was empty when Dickie arrived the next day. It was an hour or so after the lunchtime rush, if there had been a lunchtime rush. Humid and buggy outside, blissfully over-air-conditioned within. A teenage waiter was filling vases with plastic flowers. He nodded to Dickie to sit anywhere. Father Bill came in a few minutes later, dressed like he was heading out in the catamaran—polo shirt and khakis and Top-Siders, looking maybe even more conspicuous than mountain-man Dickie with his ripped jeans and flannel shirt. Quite a pair.

  They ordered and Bill drank his seltzer and Dickie drank his beer. Bill regarding him with, what? Concern? Bewilderment? Distrust? All of the above? Looking at Dickie like he was some kind of giant question mark. Finally, Bill asked what had happened in Portland, after the bomb.

  “I lost them.” Dickie saying this like he had any real hope it was enough of an answer, like Father Bill would nod and slap his khaki thighs and stand to pay the check. Bill, though, in reality, looking back at Dickie like this was obviously not a sufficient answer, not with all the money and time this had cost. Not to mention losing an asset like Dickie, who had gotten in so deep. This would blow other operations, wagons would be circled, paranoia would settle in among the movement groups, which in and of itself could be a good thing, could be exploited, but for now Bill’s whole department was in an uproar, they had an uncontrollable thing, a wild variable. A blown operation was shut down and sealed off, cut away like a tumor, but there was always leakage, draining in frighteningly unpredictable ways.

  “How many were in your group?” Bill said.

  “Six.”

  “You lost six people.”

  Dickie nodded.

  Bill sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose. “We were left with a body in Portland, Dickie. What remained of a body. He had a wife, a family.”

  “I saw the news, Bill.”

  “And we have nothing to show for it. Because you lost all of your friends.”

  Bill lifted a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. He shook one out, popped it in his mouth, pushed the pack across the table to Dickie.

  “I’ll need the full story,” Bill said.

  “Fine.”

  “When can you come east?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How’s your father?”

  “Fuck you, Bill.”

  “How can we do this, Dickie? We need to do this.”

  Dickie took a cigarette, turned in his chair, motioned for the waiter, ready to order.

  “I’m free for lunch all week.”

  * * *

  They met in various restaurants around town, Dickie telling the whole story, every detail, like a confession, until the end of their session that Friday where he got to the most important part, the explosion in Portland, what happened after the explosion, what he had done, and this he left out, turning one story into another.

  It was hard to tell if Bill bought it or not. Bill was something of an inscrutable figure to Dickie. That Ivy League polish. Dickie was always disgusted with himself for caring what Bill thought, for wanting Bill’s approval. That week in Davenport, he found himself acting like a petulant kid even more than usual, showing up for a couple of those lunches already half in the bag.

  After their last meeting, they stepped out onto the sidewalk, shook hands awkwardly. Bill left Dickie with a new phone number, an envelope with some cash, what Dickie figured was his severance. He told Dickie to take care of himself, which Dickie answered with a snort, lighting another of Bill’s cigarettes, keeping the pack.

  * * *

  Summer to fall to winter. Dickie bought a shovel and windshield scraper at the hardware store, cleared the walk, tried to get the Fairlane started in the cold. Jack was slipping more each day. The apartment radiators were idiosyncratic at best, so Dickie drove down at the St. Vincent de Paul, bought extra blankets, matching sweaters for Jack and himself. Bought another bunch of coats and parkas, fur-lined boots, which he left down at the riverbank when the men weren’t around.

  It was almost Easter, and Dickie was giving Jack his biweekly bath when the old man started coughing something fierce. Not an unusual occurrence, except this time it refused to dissipate. The coughing grew louder, wetter, Jack’s whole body shaking with it, and then there was blood, suddenly, spiraling in the bath water, and Dickie looked up to Jack’s face and saw a crimson-chinned vampire.

  He got Jack seated on the toilet, ran out to the kitchen, called an ambulance. A dull thudding sound came from the bathroom as he gave the address to the dispatcher. Dickie strained to see around the corner of the doorway, what Jack was doing in there. Off the phone and rushing back into the bathroom to find Jack bashing his head against the edge of the sink, trying to brain himself, the room a bloody mess. Dickie grabbed his father and pulled him out into the living room, tearing off his own shirt to press against Jack’s forehead, trying to stop the bleeding. Jack’s eyes wide, unblinking. Baring his teeth, biting Dickie’s exposed chest. Hell-bent on controlling his own exit, seemingly willing to take Dickie with him. H
is hands at Dickie’s throat, still so goddamn strong when he needed to be. Then the sound of a siren outside, footsteps in the stairwell. A knock at the door, voices. Dickie shouting for them to kick the goddamn thing in.

  The door burst open and a pair of medics rushed into the room, pulled Jack off Dickie or Dickie off Jack, hard to tell, one of the medics holding the old man while the other produced a needle, jabbed Jack in the arm. Dickie sitting on the floor, breathing hard, shirtless, bloody, wanting to beg for a needle of his own, another of those shots, Jesus Christ, please.

  * * *

  The morning of the funeral was bright, unseasonably warm. Sylvie and her family stayed only for the service. She didn’t want to come up to the apartment and Dickie didn’t really want her to see the place. She offered to take Dickie to lunch, but he declined, citing all the things he had to take care of, whatever those were.

  They hugged good-bye, and Sylvie pressed a handful of cash into his hand, which just about broke his heart.

  A week later, Dickie was back in the frozen-food aisle when he heard Father Bill stride up beside him. Bill offered his condolences, looked legitimately alarmed at the shape Dickie was in. The next day they had lunch, and Bill offered Dickie a new job, and a plane ticket to L.A.

  * * *

  Two hours before his flight he sat in the parking lot of the VA hospital, having a hell of a one-man argument. What to ask for, prescription-wise. This being an actual verbalized debate, lots of yelling, pounding the dashboard, the pulling of hair, some tears. Dickie finally feeling shaken by the last few months, few years even. More than shaken, actually, whatever the word for that would be.