Half World: A Novel

by O'Connor, Scott

  Father Bill sighs, maybe a little too dramatically. Dickie can hear another voice in the background. Does Bill share an office? He’d never thought about this before.

  “Who?” Bill asks.

  “A writer named Robert Zelinsky.” Dickie has The Night Visitor with him, the cover with a painting of a panicked government scientist making a late-night call from a phone booth, the shadowy figure of Mr. _____ appearing from out of the background gloom.

  Bill said, “Out there?”

  “That’s my guess. Or at least he was at some point. All his books take place in L.A.”

  Bill sighs again, and this time Dickie’s sure that it’s purely for effect. “Give me a couple of days.”

  “What’s today?” Dickie says. “Friday?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I’ll know by Monday.”

  “In theory, yes.”

  Dickie wedges the receiver into his neck, the book into his armpit to free his hands, light a cigarette. “Got plans for the weekend?”

  “Dick—”

  “I’m thinking golf, right? A foursome?”

  “I’m hanging up now.”

  “Isn’t that what they call it? A foursome?”

  “Good-bye, Dick.”

  “Monday?”

  “Yes,” Bill says.

  “You’ll have the number?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’re wrong,” Dickie says.

  “About what?”

  “This is just like Columbo.”

  * * *

  The sleigh bells above the head-shop door jingle, cueing Pat to look up from the pieces of a water pipe he’s attempting to screw back together.

  “Shit, it’s the cops.”

  Dickie lifts his sunglasses, trying to keep his hair out of his face. “Those comics come in yet?”

  “You’re in luck.” Pat slides off his stool, makes his way back into the store, scanning the labels on a row of boxes.

  Dickie drums his fingertips on the counter, leans in to look at the covers of a few old Playboys standing between a stack of fifties movie-monster magazines and a couple rows of paperback sci-fi novels.

  By the time Pat returns with a box full with comics, Dickie has the Zelinsky book out of his back pocket, up on the counter.

  “You ever heard of this guy?”

  Pat wipes his forehead with the back of his wrist, gives Dickie a more-than-slightly-insulted look, like, Who hasn’t?

  “Does he live in L.A.?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “I’ve been collecting his stuff forever,” Dickie says. “I figured while I was out here busting dope rings, I could make a side trip and get some of my books signed.”

  Pat sits, catches his breath from all the exertion. “Man, I don’t know. I think he’s a pretty private dude.”

  “So he’s here.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I’m not trying to cause any trouble,” Dickie says. “I’m just a fan, you know? If he’s not into people coming around, that’s cool.”

  Pat nods, picks up the book, flips through the pages. “I haven’t heard about him in a while. For all I know, he’s already shed the old mortal coil.”

  “You’ve met him?”

  “Years ago. He used to come in.”

  “What did he buy?”

  Pat shakes Dickie’s box of comics. “Same worthless shit you’re buying, actually.” He sets the book down on the counter, slides it back toward Dickie. “Give me another day. I’ll see what I can do.”

  10

  She had a small black-and-white television in her workshop and she caught part of the chess match on the nightly news. The broadcast was from a concert hall in Reykjavik, two men sitting at a small table, the shot framed to crop out the audience. The camera was back at what Hannah thought an unusually far remove, setting the men a great way off, as if they were playing a game on the edge of something. The quality of the images was poor, weak-signaled and loaded with fuzz. A transmission from the moon.

  The Russian was poised and handsome, with fantastic hair, a great, tall wave. The American, Fischer, seemed unremarkable from a distance, but when the camera pushed in, Hannah couldn’t take her eyes off him. He looked like her father, the few photographs she’d seen of Henry as a young man. Lean and lanky and darkly serious, the same distracted look on his face. A rigorous intellect at work, a mind at a great distance, full of possibilities and doubt. Fischer with his hand to his forehead, staring at the board, agonizing over his next move.

  She had very few concrete images of her father in memory. He’d usually managed to keep himself out of photographs. Hannah could only recall ever seeing a few, which her mother had taken almost surreptitiously. They were all from after the move to Oakland: Henry on a Christmas morning, pulling gifts from under the tree; on a summer afternoon in the driveway washing the car with Thomas. Even in these lighter moments, Henry had appeared vague, unconnected. There, but not really, not quite. This was in contrast to the memories she had of him from Arlington, before the move west. Her father teaching her to ride a bike on the sidewalk under the birch trees, or sitting on her bed, reading to her from Quite Early One Morning. It took more work to fix these unphotographed moments in her mind, but they seemed more real to her than the pictures. He seemed more real. He had never been fully present in Oakland.

  She did still have one photograph of her father. It was the picture he’d left in her room before he’d gone. Henry standing in front of the Merchants Exchange in San Francisco, looking at the lens while foot traffic moved around him in a blur. She had never shown her mother the photograph. All through the rest of her childhood she’d kept it hidden in books in her room, changing volumes every few months to avoid discovery, the image pressed like a butterfly between pages of Laura Ingalls Wilder or Nancy Drew. She had considered it a secret message, something he was trying to tell her.

  Fischer lost the game. He stood unceremoniously from the table and walked from the hall. End of broadcast. Hannah switched off the set. The picture of her father was in a shoe box along with some of her early snapshots, photos she’d taken as a teenager around Oakland, some of her first photos of L.A. She pulled the box down from its shelf and found the picture of Henry, cleared a space for it among the other prints on her worktable. The mystery of that image had become the driving force of her life after he’d gone. The fascination with the process and technique, how he’d done it, calculating the depth of field, setting the timer, striking the print. The mechanics involved in taking and developing a photograph. Magician’s secrets. And then, once she had mastered those things, there were the larger questions about the preservation of moments, the choices of which moments to preserve, what they were being preserved against.

  Parts of the earlier game were replayed on the late news, and she watched again, sitting at her worktable with a cigarette and a beer. The players’ fingers hovering, hesitating over the heads of their pieces, each move a potential catastrophe, or a link in a longer chain that led to catastrophe. She watched the players’ faces as they strained to see the future, the sequence of events each move would set in motion before their fingers made contact.

  She dialed the telephone number up in Oakland, sat watching the screen with the receiver cradled between her ear and shoulder. She listened to the ring, imagined the sound in the house, echoing in her room, Thomas’s, Ginnie’s, the bell struck again and again in the wall phone in the kitchen, loud and insistent and alone.

  11

  “Shit, Pat, a phone number and an address.” Dickie smiled at the paper rectangle Pat handed him, a subscription card from an old TV Guide with the information scribbled into the empty spaces.

  Pat scratched his beard, adjusted his weight on the head of the stool. “You should call before you try the address. Get permission to approach. The guy’
s definitely kind of infamous for not wanting to be bothered.”

  Dickie nodded. “I owe you.”

  “And this isn’t from me,” Pat said. “You know, if anybody asks.”

  Dickie lowered his sunglasses, stepped back toward the door. “We never had this conversation.”

  * * *

  He took the Cutlass west on Sunset Boulevard, heading toward the ocean, catching glimpses of water beyond the low hills, the road switchbacking for the last mile or so in progressively sharper curves, then out, finally, onto the Pacific Coast Highway, roaring north, the sky going pink, the water reflecting the last of the day’s sun in warm yellow streaks.

  The address was on the ocean side of the road, just past Malibu. A weathered beach house on wooden stilts, the tide crashing on the rocks below, soaking the lower slats of salt-licked clapboard. Dickie rolled past, parked a few houses away. He walked back along the access road, finishing his cigarette, watching surfers beyond the shallows climbing onto their boards and paddling out toward the waves.

  He knocked at the front door, waited. Tried the knob. Went around to a narrow wooden walkway that stretched to the back of the house. He stepped out, looking over the shaky railing to the crashing water below. There was another door at the end of the walkway, but he held off on knocking. Maybe this wasn’t the best idea. If Buñuel’s tracts had been found at the robberies, and Zelinsky’s books were the source for the tracts, it stood to reason that Zelinsky might be, what, involved in some capacity? One of the culprits? Or just an unwitting influence? Dickie watched the water, let the concern flow, then ebb like one of those waves out yonder. It was too late to call for backup. Also, there was no backup. He knocked on the door.

  No answer. The sun was dropping fast. He cupped a hand, peered into a salt-coated window. He turned the knob, which gave, the door opening without much resistance.

  The room was still, underlit. The windows that weren’t covered with thick curtains had been fogged by years of weather. Dickie took off his sunglasses, folded them into his shirt pocket. Bookcases of various sizes and styles hugged the walls, filled layers deep with academic texts, novels, note pads. There were more books in teetering piles by the overstuffed couch on the far side of the room. A doorway led into a dark hall, back to the rest of the house.

  He moved in slowly. The coffee table and the windowsill behind the couch were lined with pill bottles, both prescription grade and some bearing labels of a more ambiguous type, vitamins and powders, ointments and balms. Multicolored crystals were interspersed between the bottles, the glass catching what little light made it into the room and refracting it in weak rainbow rays across the ceiling. There was a heavy medicinal smell, sickly-sweet, mixed with cigarette smoke. A couple of overflowing ashtrays sat on the coffee table, ringed with crystals in what seemed to be a deliberate arrangement.

  Dickie noticed a change in the smell, an increase in that medicinal odor. He turned to find a large man in a stained undershirt and pajama pants standing in the hall doorway. The man leaned on a metal crutch with one hand, held a shotgun in the other, its single barrel leveled at Dickie’s forehead.

  Dickie raised his hands. “The door was open.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Well,” Dickie said. “It was unlocked.”

  The man was sweating something fierce, his unshaven jowls shiny. One of his pant legs was cut away, revealing a bloated and bandaged foot, yellow toes looking ready to pop.

  “Are you Robert Zelinsky?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  If the first response wasn’t a denial, Dickie had learned, you usually had your man. That’s why he’d always been so quick to deny. “My name’s Dick Hinkle.”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  Zelinsky breathed through his mouth with some difficulty. He was in his sixties, Dickie guessed, though he could be older, it was hard to tell. Age wasn’t his defining characteristic. Sickness was. He was profoundly unwell.

  “I’m a friend of a man named Javier Buñuel,” Dickie said.

  “A friend?”

  “A caseworker. Javier’s one of my clients.”

  “You’re a shrink?”

  “Catholic Charities.”

  Zelinsky gave Dickie the once-over. “This is what the Pope is sending around now?”

  Dickie looked at Zelinsky’s bad leg. “You want to sit? You can still keep the gun on me.”

  Zelinsky blew sweat from his upper lip, worked his tongue around his mouth, considering. “Give me the first two lines of the Nicene Creed,” he said.

  Dickie stood in the middle of the room, trying not to make any sudden moves, drawing a pretty big blank, not able to remember much from those Sunday school classes a decade and a half back.

  “Then how about some Saint Augustine?” Zelinsky said.

  Dickie shook his head.

  “Catholic Charities, my ass,” Zelinsky said. “Though that’s a good one. One of the better ones I’ve heard.” He finally got into gear, limping across the room, keeping the shotgun trained on Dickie. His move at the couch was less an act of sitting than simply letting gravity win the ongoing fight, a weight drop into the cushions. He used the end of the crutch to lift his bad leg up onto the coffee table.

  Zelinsky widened, then narrowed one eye. Dickie wasn’t sure what he was doing. Realized, finally, that Zelinsky was sighting him through the notch on the end of the shotgun. Comforting.

  “You mind if I sit?” Dickie said. “At least lower my hands?”

  Zelinsky cleared his throat. “You look like a smoker. Save me a trip off the couch, will you?”

  Dickie pulled out his cigarettes, lit two, handed one across the coffee table. Zelinsky nodded at an ottoman. Dickie sat, resting his hands on his thighs. Zelinsky fit the cigarette between his lips, took a short pull, coughed.

  “How do you really know Buñuel?”

  Dickie was picking something up here. Hard to pinpoint exactly—something in Zelinsky’s manner, a discipline and formality beneath the ruined exterior. A military background, possibly. Dickie switched gears, recalibrated to a more deferential tone, the way he’d spoken to neighbors on the air base when he was a kid, the fathers and husbands, Jack’s fellow officers.

  “I’ve listened to him speak,” Dickie said. “I’ve read his work.”

  “You’ve read his work? That couldn’t have taken long.”

  “It led me to your work.”

  “But not to my house.”

  “That was a favor from a friend.”

  “Not a friend of mine, obviously. Though it doesn’t make much difference. You would have found me eventually.” He set the stock of the shotgun into the crotch of his pants, reached for a pill bottle on the coffee table. “I used to be able to spot it earlier. But I’ve been wrong before. The ghosts they send sometimes look like you, like the other kids. Like Buñuel.” He unscrewed the top of the bottle and shook out a couple of tablets. Looked at the label, popped the pills into his mouth and chewed.

  “The ghosts used to be obvious,” Zelisnky said. “Real Brylcreemed Brahmins, Ivy Leaguers. G-Men. Easy to spot. They basically introduced themselves. But then they got smart about it. Started coming dressed as traveling salesmen, Jehovah’s Witnesses, kids like you. I can still tell the difference, though. You’re no ghost.”

  Zelinsky leaned forward again, selected another bottle from his array. He unscrewed the top and shook a few tablets into his palm. Glanced up at Dickie.

  “What do you need?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know my own kind, son.” He nodded to a brown paper bag sitting on a pile of books. “I got a kid who comes by every week. Sells me whatever I want. He’s a walking pharmacy.”

  Dickie reached into the bag, his fingertips brushing pills and tablets, a couple of glass vials. He felt around for a familiar shap
e. Something to bring him down a bit after the whole shotgun thing wouldn’t be completely unappreciated.

  “You thought Buñuel knew something you knew,” Zelinsky said.

  Dickie held a pill between his teeth, swallowed, nodded, more than willing to let Zelinsky lead here.

  “And he does,” Zelinsky said. “You just can’t understand his method of articulation. Not yet.”

  “But then I found that his stories were from you.”

  “Everyone who finds me through Javier thinks that. But the opposite is true. Javier told me his story and I put it in a book.” Zelinsky fixed his cigarette into what appeared to be his preferred position, hanging from his bottom lip while he spoke. “Javier was the first, but then others came. They told me their stories and I put those in the books.”

  The sun was below the waterline now, dimming the room to an auburn murk. Zelinsky leaned to his side, switched on a reading lamp, illuminating little but his leg, the bloated foot at the end.

  “The books are signals,” Zelinsky said. “Coded messages. Those who speak the code find me, eventually, like you have. They tell me their stories and I write another book. Then that signal goes out into the world and someone else knocks at the door.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then you find that you’re not alone. That there are others like you.”

  Zelinsky finished his cigarette, stubbed it out, motioned for another. Dickie lit one, passed it across the coffee table.

  “What was it?” Zelinsky said. “Nightmares or a vision?”

  Most of the characters in Zelinsky’s books had their revelations through horrific recurring dreams, so Dickie decided to go that route. “Nightmares,” he said.

  Zelinsky nodded. “That’s the most common way of discovery. In dreams. Memories that won’t stay suppressed. But every once in a while someone has a rip in their day where they can see everything.”

  He slid the end of the crutch off the coffee table, planted it in the carpet, pushed, rocked, trying to catapult himself off the couch. Dickie wasn’t sure of the protocol, if he should offer a hand or let the man do his thing. He opted for the latter, deferring to the buried military bearing, thinking of Jack’s refusals of assistance.