The promised comix half filled a metal spinner rack in the back corner: black-and-white underground stuff, talking animals smoking joints and taking hits of acid, big-nosed cavemen chasing big-assed cavewomen. Not really Dickie’s cup of tea. But there was a box on the floor filled with issues of Justice League of America and Showcase and The Brave and the Bold and, at the end of the box, a handful of Detective Comics. He opened the Detective issues, flipped to the final pages. More than half of them had Martian Manhunter backups.
Dickie called up to the front of the store. “How much for the comics in the box?”
“Two bucks.”
“Two bucks apiece?”
“Two bucks for the box.”
“You got a lid for it?”
“No lid.”
Dickie carried the box up to the counter. “Are there any more of these?”
The heavy guy coughed, turned his head a second too late. He thumbed through the comics. “A dude comes by every couple of weeks with the Robert Crumb stuff, Zap and whatnot. He’s got a big stash of old DCs he’s itching to get rid of. Come back in a few days.”
“My name’s Dick.”
“Pat.”
“Sell a lot of comics, Pat?”
“The Crumb stuff. Old Marvels if I can get them.”
“Sell anything else?”
“You a cop?”
“Do I look like a cop?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m not a cop.”
“Then what do you care what I sell?”
Dickie put his money on the counter. “I just want to know you’ll still be in business when I come back for those comics.”
* * *
Nice morning for a break-in. Dickie heads down Sunset, passing Buñuel on his steps, continuing farther east, parking the Cutlass a few streets away from the house on the hill. What he might find up there is anybody’s guess. Something to tie Buñuel to the Orange County robberies, maybe. Probably too much to hope for a ski mask, a couple of handwritten notes: Stick ’em up!
Broad daylight, but this seems like the kind of neighborhood where a semi-overt B&E might not be a completely unusual sight. The fence down at street level is a high wrought-iron number, nothing he can cut or squeeze through, and the lock looks ridiculously complex, so it seems Fosburying it is the only real option. He takes a quick look around, jumps, and grabs the top crossbar. Dickie thinking that he hasn’t done a pull-up since basic training, many pounds ago. It isn’t going to happen easily. He finally gets himself up to his elbows, pulls his fat ass over to the other side. Not a pretty sight, he’s sure, or a particularly fleeting one. Taking so much time getting his weight to shift from one direction to the other that it’s a wonder the cops aren’t there already.
There we go, finally. Dickie flopping like a walrus over to the yellow grass on the other side. He gets back to his feet as quickly as possible, brushing off his jeans, nonchalant, everything’s cool, just hanging out here on the other side of the fence, folks, nothing to see.
He climbs the stairs, almost turning his ankle a couple of times on the uneven flagstone. The house is, quite literally, perched at the top of the hill. Dickie isn’t sure if it has moved toward the edge over time, or if it was built in that position for some reason, but either way it appears to be leaning toward street level, or, more precisely, leaning toward the steep drop that will eventually end at street level.
Another look around from the top. Some view from up here. He can see all the way back through the burnt haze over to Hollywood, the tops of the buildings there, billboard backs and radio antenna, the observatory dome and the infamous sign.
It only takes a few minutes to rake the locks on the front door, nothing too complex, just a lot of them. Dickie had learned his lockpicking skills from a kid underground who got the group into recruiting centers and research labs after-hours. Dale was his name, a good kid, and Dickie had turned out to be a good student. Dale giving Dickie his own little snake rake as a sort of graduation present, the rare gift Dickie had actually managed to hold on to, pressed into a credit-card slot in his wallet, which might, now that he thinks about it, account for some of that poor circulation in his right leg.
The last lock turns and he steps inside. No booby traps, no alarm, no dogs. There’s a single large room with boxes everywhere, stacked in some places higher than the windows, none of which have any kind of covering or treatment, no curtains or blinds, so Dickie feels completely exposed, standing there on great display. He’d be visible to anyone watching from the houses in the surrounding hills, certainly anyone coming up the steps. Buñuel home for an unexpected lunch break, say, would see Dickie long before Dickie saw him. Best to look around and get out as quickly as possible.
The boxes are stuffed full with copies of Buñuel’s tracts. Seems like Dickie already has the whole set, but he checks to be sure before moving to the back of the house. There are ants on the kitchenette counter, multiple trails, heading down into the sink, where they’ve found half a cruller, shining with glaze. Nothing but condiments in the fridge, ketchup and mustard and pickle relish. An open can of tomato soup toward the back, age indeterminate, fuzzy-rimmed, covered with a loose square of plastic wrap.
Dickie looks out the windows down the hill every few minutes, sure each time that he’ll see Buñuel ascending the stairs, shaking his fists, his signs, shouting through the microphone.
He parts a beaded curtain and steps into the small bathroom. He flips the light switch, jolting the fluorescent tube over the mirror to life. More ants, marching in a long line from the drain in the sink down and across the floor and then up and over the side of the tub, disappearing behind the drawn shower curtain. There’s a small linen closet with no actual linen, just more piles of tracts. No hidden cash, nothing about banks or getaway routes.
Back out through the tiny dark space between the bathroom and kitchenette, Dickie ramming his knee on a low, flimsy dresser pressed against the wall. He checks the windows again for any sign of approach. Stands in the main room with the towers of boxes, hands on his hips, scanning for something he might have missed the first time through. There’s nothing he hasn’t checked, except, well, the tub back in the bathroom, Dickie having sort of convinced himself that there’s probably nothing to see in there, the curtain drawn for propriety’s sake, knowing full well, though, that he’s really more than a little chickenshit to pull back that covering, find a body, or bodies, or body parts, or whatever dark things a head case like Buñuel collects and stores in his tub behind a floral-print curtain. Those ants are heading in there for a reason.
He forces himself back into the bathroom, turns on the fluorescent again, waits for the room to fill with sickly light. Grabs one end of the curtain, takes a deep breath. Pulls, ready to scream or run or just generally freak out, throwing his arm wide, the curtain rings scraping along the rusty rod, the fabric folding back to reveal, once Dickie has opened his eyes, a bathtub full of paperback books. Hundreds of them, must be. Thin, cheaply printed novels from the looks of the volumes on top, sci-fi stories with Day-Glo covers. A few feature trippy paintings of screaming men and women with radio waves or gamma rays extending from or into their skulls. A number of others have characters cowering from advancing hordes of dark, indeterminate figures, or, on one of the covers, an army of what looks like TV G-Men, clean-cut white guys in suits and sunglasses.
Dickie digs deeper, still half sure he’ll find a body, but except for another ant-mobbed cruller there’s nothing but books, multiple copies of six or seven novels, some with different covers, slightly varying page counts. Twenty or thirty copies of The Night Visitor and Watching, Waiting, Watching, and Good Morning, Dr. Lucifer. All by the same author, someone named Robert Zelinsky, though there are no photos, no author bio on the backs of any of the books.
There’s a loud thump from the other room, so Dickie kills the light and crouches down o
n the floor with the ants, breathing hard, waiting for Buñuel to fling open the front door and howl at the intrusion. Or maybe it’ll be a gang of bank robbers, busting in and kicking through the place, spraying bullets indiscriminately.
After a few minutes of nothing, Dickie crawls out to the doorway, peers around the main room, peeks up over the lowest windowsill. He stands, finally, to see a rubber-banded bundle of mail out on the front step, a postman way down on the sidewalk already half a block away. Some arm on that guy. Dickie pokes through the mail, nothing but utility bills and advertising circulars. Buñuel probably has anything of any importance delivered to his PO box.
Back in the bathroom, Dickie takes a copy of each Zelinsky book, hoping they won’t be noticed missing from the giant heap, though he knows it’s possible that Buñuel counts them every night or something similarly insane. He pulls the curtain closed, double-checks that he hasn’t left anything else disturbed. Takes one last look out the windows to make sure the coast is clear, and then steps out into the heated morning, relocking the front door, heading back down the steps, girding himself for another attempt at getting up and over that fence.
* * *
The afternoon goes soft, rolling over into evening. Dickie sits out on the fire escape of his hotel room with the radio and a stack of Buñuel’s sci-fi books. He takes his Antabuse, wishing he had a beer, or a Jack and Coke, but you can’t have everything, and the books aren’t half bad. This type of stuff is not usually his thing, but Zelinsky writes hard and fast and lurid, has a way with a car chase and a shoot-out.
The novels were all published over the last ten years by various outfits, small firms, seemingly, publishers in the South and Midwest. The six were a series, starting with The Night Visitor, whose nameless main character starts the book as a mild-mannered accountant, a real man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit type with a wife and a couple of kids and a house in the San Fernando Valley. Most of the early part of the book is taken up by an incredibly detailed and fairly tedious meditation on his day-to-day routine, which is then, on about page 100, violently interrupted by a revelation where he recalls, with terrifying clarity, being admitted to a psychiatric hospital some years back for a nervous breakdown, where he’s then secretly imprisoned and tortured at the hands of a shadowy government agency. After his revelation, he starts to suspect that he’s been programmed to forget all of that, as some of the memories that return to him are memories of losing his memories, with that empty space then filled with new, artificial memories, including the relationship with the woman he’s always thought of as his wife, and these two strange children he’s always thought of as his kids, and his bullshit job, and et cetera. It’s a fairly convoluted sequence that Dickie has to read a few times in an attempt to get straight, or at least as straight as possible.
So obviously this guy’s only recourse, once he’s seen the curtain, is to find the man behind it, the head government agent responsible for all of this, so he drops out of the straight life he’s been living, leaves his wife and kids, his house in the suburbs, and becomes the Night Visitor, breaking into top-secret government offices and installations, appearing at the middle-of-the-night bedsides of ex-Nazi scientists and the bureaucrats who helped them secretly repatriate so they could teach the local spooks their infernal methods. These guys then conducted their dirty work in prisons and psych wards or sometimes just grabbed unsuspecting folks off the street for mind-control experiments, trying to create brainwashed assassins for the inevitable Third World War. The Night Visitor, who now calls himself Mr. _____ (Dickie unsure, exactly, of how to pronounce this tenantless underscore, either when he’s reading in his head or aloud, sort of half whispering out on the fire escape . . . Mr. Blank?) slowly working his way up the food chain and shadow-government pay scale, piecing together the story of what had been done to him, torturing or killing those he finds and deems responsible, but always searching for the mastermind, the guy he believes ran the whole ugly plot.
Dickie takes a break every few chapters to stretch his legs, adjust the radio volume. He swallows a couple of pills to keep him up. Mary Margaret loved this kind of stuff. Dickie can’t remember these exact books, but she always had some pulpy sci-fi paperback close by. She was a pragmatist, a realist, at least most of the time, but these kinds of books were her escape, entering a world where a good conspiracy theory could explain war or deprivation or even personal tragedy. She took some comfort in reading about a place where someone was always responsible, could be taken to account.
The margins of Buñuel’s paperbacks are filled with notes, mostly illegible, his penmanship nearly microscopic. What Dickie can read seems to be Buñuel agreeing with passages in the books, corroborating them with personal recollections, while trying to remember, like Mr. _____, who had done this to him. Some chapters have lines or entire paragraphs blacked out, forcing Dickie to hold the pages up to the bulb in his room to try to make out what has been obscured, what was too awful to leave naked on the page.
He realizes, eventually, that the voice in which he hears the books is Buñuel’s, and then he imagines he can hear Buñuel ranting from his corner a few blocks away. A physical impossibility, he’s sure, even on a warm evening like this, where sound would indeed travel. A little later, as night falls, it even seems like he can hear Buñuel’s voice coming from farther east on Sunset, around that last corner before downtown, the crooked little house on the hill, shrieking after counting his books in the bathtub and coming up six short . . .
Okay, so maybe the pills and the books are not the best combination, paranoia on top of paranoia, though Dickie does get the sense that this Zelinsky is a fellow traveler, no stranger to pharmaceuticals, both over- and far-below-the-counter. He takes a quick bathroom break, splashing some cold water onto his face before jumping back into the narrative. By this point in The Night Visitor, Mr. _____ has discovered that he’s not alone, that he isn’t the only experimentation subject to have escaped. So he makes it his mission to find the others, track these sleeper agents down, kidnap them, run a sort of reverse mind-control process, filling them in on what has been done to them, who they used to be. Some decide that this isn’t their fight, and return to their brainwashed lives, but some are too damaged or pissed off to go back to the way things were, so they become the Night Visitor’s agents, helping him find others like themselves, assembling, over the course of the books, an underground army that’ll one day take down the government that created them. The big, sad irony here of course being that despite helping these others rediscover their previous lives, Mr. _____ has no such luck in remembering his own. His life before the check-in at the psych ward remains a blank. No matter what answers or secret files he discovers, he’s unable to remember his old, true life, the man he was before the mind-wipe.
There’s also the big question, which Mr. _____ does a good job of avoiding, of why all these other sleepers were sent off with actual covert government missions, and Mr. _____ was simply sent to a wife and kids and house in the Valley. Like maybe was he a failure of some sort, in his reprogramming? Or was his reprogramming leading to something else, something deeper? Maybe even something like he’s involved in right now . . .
The books have a lot of this kind of doubling back, characters wondering what memories can or can’t be trusted, who and what’s been planted to push them forward on their missions versus what’s real, what’s actually been lived. Some of the agents suspect Mr. _____ of being just another stage of government experimentation, the underground army simply more bullshit to get them further along in their role as superspy or assassin. Good Morning, Dr. Lucifer, the last book in the series, even heads in a larger philosophical direction, like, maybe everything’s planted, ultimately, by some kind of higher power, and then what difference does it make if covert government agencies are just tinkering around the edges?
Daybreak, the sun starting to color the sky behind the hotel. Dickie’s spent the night out on the fire escape, lying
on his bed, pacing his room, but always reading. A real sci-fi bender. Probably should have caught some sleep in there somewhere, but it feels too late now, his mind still racing with the pills and the books. For a second he tries to draw a direct connection, entertaining the idea that Robert Zelinsky could be a pen name for Javier Buñuel. Much of the stuff in Buñuel’s tracts and performed live in his rants comes straight out of the novels. But considering the level of written and spoken English in Buñuel’s work, it seems hard to imagine that they’re the same guy. Dickie can, however, appreciate that this is the kind of stuff a crazy person could find and obsess on, figuring that it’s truth disguised as fiction, an explanation for the voices in his head. Mr. _____’s initial revelation even comes to him at a ballpark, just like Buñuel’s, though in the book it’s Angel Stadium, not Dodger Stadium, which means only, Dickie guesses, that Buñuel’s a National League man.
There is a bank robbery in one of the books, Mr. _____’s agents knocking over a branch to get some funds for weapons and supplies, so Dickie feels some assurance that even though most of this may not make much sense, it hasn’t quite veered into wild-goose-chase territory yet either.
He should get some sleep, he knows he’s little to no good when he’s like this, but before cooler heads prevail he’s out at a pay phone a half mile down La Brea Avenue, pumping coins, dialing the number he has for Father Bill.
“If I give you a name, can you get me a phone number?”
“This isn’t Columbo, Dickie.”
“Can you get me an address?”
“Where are you?”
“You mean, like, physically? On the corner of—”
“Where are you in the process?”
“I’m at the part where I give you a name and you give me an address.”
Half World: A Novel Page 19