Half World: A Novel

by O'Connor, Scott

  Still debating during the wait in the reception area, staring at a year-old copy of Reader’s Digest. Hard to focus, even enough to look at the cartoons. He’d finished most of his stash before leaving the apartment, having first emptied it of everything, even the cats, setting them loose down by the river, where they just stood and stared at Dickie, like, What the hell are we supposed to do now?

  More than shaken. Past that. Shook.

  The doctor looked at Dickie in much the same way he had the first time, maybe with a little more concern, and then brought out the white prescription pad. So easy just to let him keep writing, to forget about the plane ticket in his pocket, to go back to the apartment and occupy that same space, to let his body give way, let his mind go wherever his father’s had gone.

  He could still feel the bruises on his neck, the bite marks on his chest. Jack’s last gift.

  He told the doc to wait. Asked for something else instead. A medication he’d heard of, a pill that made you sick around alcohol.

  Antabuse, the doctor said, and Dickie said, Yes, that’s what I need.

  I have to stop something, he said. Something has to stop.

  6

  “It’ll be gone soon,” Bert said. He took a drink, rested his forearm on the table. Hannah looked at his watch. She couldn’t help looking at his watch, which was, of course, the point of the thing. It was made to be appreciated, a large, elaborate stainless-steel contraption, its band just loose enough that it slid a quarter turn whenever Bert rotated his wrist, allowing the metal to catch the light.

  “A week, maybe,” he said. “They’re already tearing down the marquee. They’ve got a Dumpster in front, half full of theater seats.”

  The watch got Hannah thinking of the watch he had given her years ago, the one stolen during the holdup at the gallery. But Bert had bought that watch long before he’d made his first studio film, or his second or third, and it had been a department-store layaway, while this thing could make a nice down payment on a Third World country.

  Bert turned his wrist again, tapped a finger along the rim of his whiskey glass. They met a couple times a year now, usually at a bar or restaurant near one of the sound stages where he was filming. After a few of their early meetings, they’d gone back to his place, and one time to hers, for old times’ sake, but eventually they’d both reconciled themselves to the fact that this was a bad idea, or at least not a particularly good one, that it was better to rehash the past in public, fully clothed, without any new worries or regrets to heap onto the old.

  The windows were open to the midday heat. They sat at a small high table, just inside the threshold. Every few minutes, Hannah slid her hand out through the opening, into the sun, pulling it back slowly, into the cool sleepy dusk of the bar.

  “I always wanted to make something that would be shown there,” Bert said. “Whenever I picture a movie I’m making as a finished thing, I imagine it shown in that theater.”

  “Maybe you should work the phones,” Hannah said. “Is that how you say it? Call some big names. Some producing partners who want to dabble in architectural preservation.”

  “It’s too late,” Bert said. “I drive by every morning. You saw me. I’ve got no business on that side of town anymore except to sit in the car and watch these guys pull shit out the front door. A week and it’ll be gone.”

  He turned his wrist again, this time to check the polished face of the watch. They’d planned to have drinks and then dinner, but Bert had greeted Hannah with the news that he could only stay an hour. His apologetic rain checks had become more frequent over the last couple of years, maybe since they’d stopped sleeping together, if Hannah wanted to be cynical. Or maybe it was simply because what they’d had was withdrawing that much further into the past.

  “Did you ever take any pictures in there?” he said. “That theater? I mean any pictures that didn’t have a movie playing in the middle of them?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I feel like I’m going to lose my memory of what the place looked like. That someday I won’t be able to imagine my movies in there.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to imagine them playing somewhere else. In a shopping mall. On a TV in a motel room. I’ll have to picture them smaller, fewer eyes on them. Private things.”

  They paid the bill and stood from their stools. Bert lit a cigarette, pulled on his sport coat.

  “Have you been watching the chess match?” he said. “The American kid and the Russian?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve been following it. Something to watch while I wait for the Olympics. I know you hate sports.”

  “I’m not sure I think of chess as a sport.”

  “You should see these guys play. It’s a sport. You’d hate it.”

  They hugged good-bye, and Hannah stood at the open windows for a moment, watching until Bert turned the corner. She walked outside then, a little disoriented from the early drink, the change from the dark bar to the lighted day. Not unlike leaving a movie theater from an afternoon show, the unsettling realization that the world had continued without her, that something had been lost, possibly, while she sat in the dark, in the strange, false time of the images moving on screen.

  7

  Out of the Vegas airport and into the whitewashed sky. The second takeoff was worse than the first, the plane straining and lurching. Dickie’s seatmate this time around was a blond, long-legged coed wearing a UCLA sweatshirt. He hadn’t seen one of these in he didn’t know how long. A nonradicalized college student. Not a political thought in her head, he guessed.

  The girl closed her eyes, took a deep breath, another, some kind of relaxation exercise, a mini-meditation. Once the plane straightened out, Dickie unfastened his teeth, blinked the dryness from his eyes.

  “Flying makes you nervous?”

  She shrugged.

  “DC-10s have a very good safety record,” Dickie said. “Their accident rate is something like point nine.” He felt fairly gallant sharing this reassuring data. He was thrilled to be able to remember it. One of the kids underground had been studying aerospace engineering before joining the movement, but he’d still picked up trade journals and technical manuals, and Dickie found himself thumbing through them for lack of better reading material on some of those dead-of-night drives.

  The girl opened her eyes, looked at the back of the seat in front of her. “That seems high.”

  “No, no,” Dickie said. “Point nine is like, nothing. It’s the odds of getting struck by lightning, eaten by a shark.”

  “Seems high to me.”

  “No, it’s nothing. It’s less than one.” Dickie started to doubt his own premise, the whole reason he’d brought up the safety record in the first place. Was that number right? Point nine? Or was that another make of aircraft, was he getting the two confused and the DC-10 was more like a one-point-five or even a two, a 580,000-pound flying deathtrap?

  “Is that number right?” the girl said. “Because I don’t like that number at all.”

  “Excuse me for a second.” Dickie shaking again, standing from his seat and maneuvering back to the bathroom. He squeezed inside, locked the door. What else did he have on him, besides the Antabuse? A small baggie of pot, which would do him no good unless he wanted to roll and light a joint right there in the bathroom. More cigarettes, what looked like half a Seconal. Not a great selection. He wondered if the girl was carrying, if they could maybe work out a trade. This seemed like a good idea for half a panicked moment, until Dickie pictured a greeting party of narcotics officers waiting for him at the Los Angeles baggage claim. He went with the Seconal.

  Back in his seat with a glass of orange juice and a cigarette and a slowly enveloping pharmaceutical calm. The girl was asleep with her head pressed to the window. Dickie stared at her legs for a few minutes, the tiny blond hairs that
started halfway up her thighs and disappeared under the ragged cutoffs of her denim shorts.

  He took out the only thing he’d brought to read, the pamphlets Father Bill had given him in Davenport, three slim tracts, the sum total of physical intelligence he had going west. Microscopically printed, poorly proofread litanies of conspiracy theories and apocalyptic predictions written by a man named Javier Buñuel, sometimes spelled Xavier Buñuel, though Dickie couldn’t tell if the authorial discrepancy had some kind of deeper meaning or simply spoke to a basic confusion of identity. Or maybe they were just typos, which, judging from the incoherence of the rest of the material, seemed as plausible an explanation as any other. There was a Hollywood PO box listed for donations, but no further information about the author. It was almost hard to believe the pamphlets were legit. Javier Buñuel sounded like the kind of name Dickie would tell Father Bill he was using as an alias, just to hear the silence on the other end of the phone, the slow crunch of cocktail ice as Bill tried to gauge how much impatience and/or concern to let filter through in his response.

  The gist of Buñuel’s thesis was that the U.S. government, through various intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and even more various front companies and cutouts, was involved in everything from mind control to brainwashing to something called “astral projection,” with these activities including, but not limited to, clandestine-drug and scientific experimentation based on the work of expatriate Nazi and Soviet scientists, illegal imprisonment, torture, and the surgical implantation of surveillance and explosive devices in otherwise innocuous household pets. Somehow, all of this was bringing about the End Times, the revelation of which Javier—or maybe Xavier—had seen in the clouds one afternoon above Dodger Stadium: a nation of burning cities, its people consumed by flames.

  Father Bill had told Dickie that the pamphlets were found at a series of bank robberies in Orange County, shoved into the pockets of customers still lying on the ground with their hands over their heads when the cops arrived. What business this was of Father Bill’s was a bit of a mystery. It seemed like a police issue rather than an intelligence concern, but Dickie realized that making those distinctions wasn’t really in his job description.

  Three pamphlets. It was no surprise that they didn’t trust him with the amount of information they once had—manila folders stuffed with police and bank records, medical histories, glossy photographs, transcripts of recorded telephone conversations—all of which, once Dickie had committed the details to his then-still-reliable memory, he would toss into a wastebasket and set on fire. Those days were gone, though, after the mess of MAELSTROM, and Dickie figured he should consider himself lucky that Father Bill even trusted him with the pamphlets.

  The mountains gave way to the desert, the desert to the city beyond. The ocean stretched to the horizon, glittering in the midafternoon sun. There was a facile, unearned quality to traveling this way. There was something disturbing, he felt, in the fact that someone could move around the country so fast, could be almost anywhere in just a couple of hours, arriving unannounced, with no warning to those on the ground.

  He had never been to Los Angeles. Nearly everyone he had met underground talked about it, almost universally in a desultory way, as a city of sellouts and dimwits, snake-oil salesmen who made movies and TV shows to sedate Middle America. Los Angeles as one of the main reasons the movement wasn’t bigger, why every person under thirty wasn’t actively involved. Too busy watching Batman, standing in line for Love Story.

  Dickie put the pamphlets away. The coed was stirring. She uncrossed her legs, stretched them under the seat in front of her, wiggling her toes around the straps of her discarded sandals. Heading home after a weekend in Vegas, maybe, back to her summer job, her friends, a final year before graduation. People had lives like this. Dickie could have a life like this, couldn’t he? How difficult could it be? Couldn’t he just toss the pamphlets into the trash and ask her name? See if she’d like to grab dinner somewhere, a movie afterward? Was Love Story still playing? They could go on a few dates, fool around, and eventually she’d bring him down to Yorba Linda to meet the folks and he’d propose and a year or so after the beachfront ceremony she’d be heavy with child, adorably round, glowing with good health, and they’d have a son, then a daughter, and a house down by the parents, that same cul-de-sac, and Dickie’d get a job with the father-in-law’s firm, something law-related, or, no, financial, following foreign markets and betting on commodities, corn and oil and pork bellies, calendars filled with backyard barbecues and cocktail parties and season tickets to see the California Angels play in the Anaheim sun.

  The nausea came quickly, a response to the drop in altitude, and Dickie was just able to get the airsick bag to his mouth before disgorging the contents of his stomach into what seemed like an impossibly insufficient space. The blond Bruin was fully awake now, watching him with what could only be described as abject horror, a look that hadn’t factored into his reverie, but one he assumed he could grow to live with, even adore, if its very presence at that moment didn’t pretty much put the kibosh on the whole thing.

  Dickie gripped his armrest with one hand, his airsick bag with the other. He mumbled an apology. The girl closed her eyes again, breathed deeply, desperate to meditate him out of existence.

  The landing gear bumped along the runway. The overhead PA speaker whined to life. A stewardess blew into a microphone.

  “Ladies and gentleman,” she said. “Welcome to Los Angeles.”

  * * *

  The room is on the top floor of a pink stucco building on Selma Avenue, smack in the middle of Hollywood’s dilapidated heart. A transient hotel if you’re feeling generous; a flophouse if you’re not. Only the finest accommodations on Father Bill’s dime.

  It’s the end of the day, the beginning of the long West Coast sunset, two or three hours of fading, feels like. Dickie lies on the too-small bed, limbs hanging off all sides. He smokes a joint and looks out the window at what he can see of the sky, clouds in cornrows of orange and gold.

  The room is small, almost a perfect square, with a dresser, a mirror above the dresser, a small wooden table and two chairs under the window. Two chairs. He wonders if every room has two chairs, what kinds of guests the residents here expect.

  There’s a radio, which he’s set on the windowsill, where it gets the best reception. The radio came with the room, an unexpected amenity, though it’s fastened by a thick nylon cord to an anchor in the wall. He could squeeze out the window and sit on the fire escape but he’s very comfortable on the bed. The radio station is seemingly free-form: a rock song, Bowie, Jefferson Airplane, then a classical piece, maybe, an old jazz record, popped and scratchy. Dickie can tell by the low, airless sound of his voice that the DJ is enjoying a late-afternoon joint as well.

  Apart from the radio, it’s quiet in the hotel, just an occasional cough from a neighbor, the sound of the toilet flush from the bathroom next door, water in the walls.

  He’d rented a car at the airport, a disgruntled Olds Cutlass that seemed like it had been drag-raced down some desert straightaway a few too many times. He’d spent the day driving around town, getting his bearings. West on Sunset, past all the strip clubs and rock clubs, the homeless kids sitting cross-legged on the sidewalks, then out through Beverly Hills and Bel Air, up the Pacific Coast Highway, cutting over the hills into the wide spread of the Valley, capital V, all those stucco boxes, apartment buildings and gas stations, the smog even worse up there, if that was possible. Like driving through an ashtray.

  He could imagine getting lost out here, in a very permanent sense, how easy that would be. It’s a time-stopped place, sun-soaked and lazy. The basin and the canyons and then the flat endless Valley suburbs and the vastness of the desert to the east. A sleepwalking city.

  The DJ is playing Jackson Browne now. This after a minor-key Gershwin piano piece, Prelude No. 2.

  Father Bill had told him to a
pproach Javier Buñuel with caution, figured the guy for someone who spooked easily, might not be completely on board when it came to societal norms of interpersonal violence. But Bill had made clear that this was not an open-ended assignment, there was an accelerated time line here, so Dickie should be deliberate and careful but also get to work ASAP, keep out of the clubs, rock and strip, stay away from the beach, keep his head on straight, or maybe put his head on straight, as it was pretty obvious to both Bill and Dickie in those last meetings that Dickie was far from okay in even the broadest definition of the word.

  Hey, Miles Davis! This actually gets Dickie up off the bed and over to the window, joint in his teeth, head bobbing. Billy Cobham pounding the shit out of those cymbals, Miles and John McLaughlin trading shouts on horn and guitar. The single, overtaxed speaker on the radio adding an extra layer of fuzz to the proceedings, like a captured transmission from some better, funkier planet.

  Dickie walks the room, studying the driver’s license he’s been using since he got to L.A., his photo and the alias he’d been given: Dick Hinkle. Seems like maybe there’s some leg pulling here by Father Bill, or the guys in Bill’s department who forge this stuff. Do they engage in leg pulling? Another mystery. Mr. Hinkle has a realistic-looking press credential from a fringy Bay Area weekly that Bill explained was funded by his department, though whether the editors of said weekly knew this or not was apparently a matter of some debate. Bill figured that this was the best way to approach Buñuel, reasoning that anybody who stands on a street corner and spouts nonsense all day would be something of a publicity hound, probably more than willing to talk to a reporter who could help get his message out. Dickie can’t fault the logic.

  He squeezes himself out onto the windowsill, relights his joint. The day before an approach always put him in a weird frame of mind. About to enter someone else’s world under false pretenses. A feeling that he was stripping away another layer of what was left of himself, fighting off waves of a strange, disassociated panic, like he was threatening to physically leave his body somehow, step off to one side and watch things from there. Having to fight to keep himself in himself, if that made any sense.