Half World: A Novel

by O'Connor, Scott

  The pills began to kick in. The world sharpened: the building entrances, the cars, pedestrians in the crosswalk. An incredible clarity. Everything had a defined edge, separate and distinct from everything around it. Every sound separate, able to be plucked out, examined. Dickie could zero in, focus on whatever he chose. Details of faces, minutiae, shaving nicks and old acne scars and bubbles of spit on chins. His muscles relaxed, his hands, his knees. He and Walter crossed the street, calm, focused, moving though the slow-motion world.

  They joined Sarah and Julian at the front doors of the bank. Julian in the same black duster Walter wore, his shotgun at his side. No one batted an eyelash at their approach. Walter had been right. If you moved deliberately, with purpose, you could cross a city street carrying just about anything.

  They pulled their masks from their coats and jackets, characters from a long-forgotten TV cartoon that Walter had searched for in junk shops. A panda, a pig, a cat, a dog. A detail Dickie had read first in one of Zelinsky’s novels.

  Walter in his panda mask was the first through the door, shotgun pointed straight ahead. Julian the pig followed. Sarah the cat, Dickie the dog. There were three customers at the counter, three tellers, the two guards, the manager behind a desk by the windows. Dickie could see everything, even in the stuffy confines of the mask. Could hear everything, smell everything. His own smoky breath. He was amazed at how long it took anyone to notice the guns. This is a robbery. No one even had to say the magic words. Julian chained the front doors together. Dickie took aim at the closer of the two guards, a thin, wiry man, Jack’s age. What would have been Jack’s age. A woman at the counter screamed. Walter spoke for the first time, his shotgun leveled at the younger guard’s forehead.

  Everyone on your hands and knees on the ground.

  The assumption was that the alarm would be triggered within seconds of their entrance. There was nothing they could do about the alarm. They’d be in and out before it could be a factor.

  They took the guards’ revolvers from their holsters. Julian jumped over the counter and instructed the tellers to fill his bag. Sarah kept her pistol trained on the kneeling customers. Dickie watched the door, the older guard.

  Walter steered the younger guard and the manager back toward the vault. The manager fumbled with his keys and Walter prodded him in the back with the shotgun. Dickie glanced at the clock on the wall behind the counter. Just minutes, that was all that had gone by. So fast, everything so fast.

  Stay down. Sarah shouting, thrusting her pistol at one of the women on the floor. Her cat mask wide-eyed, wide-grinned.

  Walter was in the vault with the manager and the younger guard. Julian worked his way down the line of tellers, tossed a full bag over the top of the partition. It landed on the floor by Sarah’s shoes. She kicked it back toward Dickie. Dickie crouched to pick it up, keeping his gun on the older guard.

  Something flashed out the front windows. Dickie glanced. Just the sun off the hood of a passing car. More passing cars, people on the street. A woman and a young boy walking by, hand in hand, oblivious to what was transpiring on the other side of the glass. That day out there; this day in here.

  Dickie looked back and the older guard was watching him from the floor. Dickie could see the fear on the man’s face, the revulsion, the indignity. Staring at the smiling dog mask. Dickie fought the urge to shout something, to tell the man to look away.

  Walter was out of the vault, carrying a full duffel. He’d left the manager and younger guard locked inside. Julian came around the counter to take the bag. Sarah moved from customer to customer, shouting at them to turn their heads while she pushed copies of Javier Buñuel’s tracts into their pockets and purses.

  Walter and Julian were at the door, unwinding the chain. Dickie looked at the clock. Another couple of minutes had passed. Nothing. This was like nothing.

  Movement on the floor. The older guard was getting to his feet. He stared into the eyes of Dickie’s mask as he stood. Defiant. Shamed into defiance. The guard turned to Walter and Julian at the door, their backs to him. Dickie pointed his gun at the guard. The guard had a gun, too, somehow, a small pistol in his right hand. They’d pulled the revolver from his holster but he’d had this on him somewhere, hidden. An old pro. Julian was having trouble with the chain at the door. The guard lifted his gun. Dickie shouted, but his voice died in the mask. The guard took aim at Walter’s back. Dickie shouted again, pulled the trigger. The guard’s knee disappeared. He folded, clutched. Everyone turned. The guard rolled on the floor, grasping and moaning, a red explosion on the tile beneath his leg.

  Walter turned, looked at Dickie, looked down at the guard. Walked back into the room and stood over the crippled old man. The dead eyes of the panda mask, looking down, showing nothing, but Dickie could see Walter’s contempt in the cocked slant in his posture. He pointed his shotgun, fired.

  Out on the street, the roomful of screams behind them, into the open air and the noise of the city, distant sirens, Julian and Sarah peeling off to the plumber’s van with the bags, Dickie following Walter, watching the back of his duster as they crossed the streets to the station wagon.

  Walter started the car, pulled the jug of gasoline out of the backseat, doused the interior. He put the car in gear and they pushed it out into the street, got it going as Walter lit a match, tossed it in through the open window. The plumber’s van came around the corner and Dickie and Walter jumped into the back, the van turning, and they watched out the back windows, the flaming wagon like a Viking funeral boat sailing into midday traffic, and everything—the burning car, the onlookers’ faces, their eyeballs and fingers—pointing in one direction as the Sons of Liberty go, are gone, into the other.

  20

  Spring 1971

  They’d driven from the office park, the explosion still ringing in their ears, Mary Margaret and Dickie in a small sedan, Dale and the rest of the crew packed into a VW bus. A serpentine route away from Portland until they reached the woods, the cabin deep within. When they were sure they weren’t being followed, they ditched the cars and ran the rest of the way through the trees, jubilant and adrenalized, trying to contain themselves until they were all inside, the doors and windows closed, and then there was a celebratory release, shouting and cheering, hugging, kissing, beer passed, joints lit. There was nothing like seeing something blown up. They were now at war. They thought this was what war was like.

  One of the kids found a news station on the radio, and they all circled around, waiting for a live bulletin to interrupt the somnolent Sunday-morning broadcast, a “This Just In” that would reshape the public conversation. An engineering facility bombed, records destroyed, secret ties to the military complex exposed.

  Dickie stood in the living room doorway with Mary Margaret. She took his hand, fingers squeezing, pressure and warmth, anticipation.

  The bulletin came, finally. Shushing in the rooms, throughout the small cabin. They all crowded around the speaker, expectant smiles spreading wide.

  Dickie remembers the exact words from the newsman: There is a casualty. The jubilation drained from the room, water let out of a bathtub. An unidentified male, the newsman said. The authorities are waiting to confirm his identity, to notify his family before any other details can be given.

  One of the girls was the first to cry out, No, No, an insistence directed at the radio, and then others followed, yelling, sobbing, or simply standing in shock, their hands on their heads, on their mouths.

  Some of the guys started to yell for Dickie. This had been his idea, and they wanted to know what he had to say for himself. He left Mary Margaret, steered Dale into the bedroom, shut the door behind them. They were both breathing hard. They were holding hands somehow, like little kids in trouble. Dale asked Dickie if he’d known, and Dickie told him the truth: he’d had no idea anyone would be at the office. And then he told Dale that he had to get everyone out, get everyone away. Di
ckie could promise them an hour, at most. Dale asked what Dickie was talking about and Dickie said, I’m not who you think I am.

  He moved through the rooms like a sleepwalker while Dale shouted instructions, everyone packing what they could carry, some of them screaming at Dickie, calling him a fink, a rat, a Judas. Someone took a swing, cuffing Dickie in the ear before Dale pulled the guy away.

  Through all the commotion, he found Mary Margaret by the front door on the other side of the room. Her eyes down, her arms at her sides. She looked like she was going to be sick. Dickie couldn’t think of what to say, any kind of explanation. Out of words for the first time he could remember. He could still feel her hand in his from the moment before, when they’d stood in the doorway listening to the news.

  He was shoved to the side then, by a couple of guys carrying boxes. When he stumbled upright again and looked toward the door she was gone.

  21

  Summer 1972

  “Your name is Richard John Ashby. That is your true name, your only name.”

  Walter stood before the inverted flag in the storeroom. Sarah sat with the cat on her lap, the low light softening her features, the beatific expression.

  “All other names are gone from you,” Walter said. “All other lives. There is only this name, this life.”

  Julian sat with his needle and ink, moving the point along the inside of Dickie’s wrist.

  Dickie didn’t know how long it had been since he’d had a drink. He hadn’t taken the Antabuse since Hollywood and he could feel it gone from his system, the void left behind. He wanted a drink or a pill. The first thing he would do when his hand was free would be to dig into his pockets for a pill.

  “There is only this truth, one truth, absolute,” Walter said. “You no longer have to guess, or wonder, or believe. You no longer have to remember. You only have to know.”

  The guard had looked at Dickie and Dickie had let him stand, let him turn and point his gun. There was the guard on the floor of the bank and the engineer in Portland on the floor of his office. There was Dale in the seat of the crashed car. There was Mary Margaret.

  The cat jumped down from Sarah’s lap, slunk around the corner, out of the room.

  Dickie felt like he could kill someone for a drink, a way to sleep.

  Julian lifted the needle, the last drop of ink clinging to the point, thick as syrup. The hot sting on the reddened skin of Dickie’s wrist.

  “There is only this,” Walter said.

  Sons.

  * * *

  He followed Walter across the dark yard to the house. The night was cool and damp. The tattoo on his wrist still burned, and the change in temperature felt soothing on his skin.

  Walter switched on a lamp in the living room. He had been carrying something covered in brown butcher’s paper, and now he unwrapped what looked like a leather-bound accounting ledger. Dark, soft from age, its covers gouged and stained.

  “This is something you must read alone,” Walter said. “That we have all read alone.” He passed the ledger to Dickie. “This is the Old Testament. You deserve to know where you came from.”

  Dickie’s first instinct, after Walter had gone, was to run, to take this thing or leave this thing and go out the front door, down to the gate, jump the fence, running until he found civilization again, streetlights and stoplights, gas stations, restaurants, people on sidewalks. But that was crazy, that was impossible. There was nowhere to run, unless he continued past the wall and across the highway, down the slope to the sand and water. That was the only place, if he went out far enough, deep enough, his body sinking, his head, his mouth, his nose. Another hood pulled over his face. That was the only place he could go if he didn’t want to run anymore.

  The first few pages of the ledger recounted some kind of road trip in minute detail. Towns, distances driven, amounts paid for food and lodging. Then there were pages of what seemed like photographic instructions, or maybe a log of techniques—apertures, shutter and film speeds.

  Dickie kept turning. He found columns of a man’s name written again and again, first in what seemed like a natural signature, then modified, repeatedly, the height and slant of the letters, signature after signature, working toward the simple, elusive feel of a name resting comfortably on the page.

  Dickie knew what this was. He’d done the same thing himself. Getting a new name on paper, in his fingertips, his hand, his body. Assuming a new identity. In the first few pages of the ledger, this man was becoming someone else.

  Henry Gladwell Henry Gladwell Henry Gladwell Henry Gladwell.

  More pages, bureaucratic bookkeeping: a requisition list, apartment floor plans, neat columns of expenses and reimbursements. But further into the ledger a kind of personal shorthand took over, maybe a code of some sort. The things that Henry Gladwell didn’t understand, or that he was learning, were written out, only to be abbreviated later, once he had internalized them. Chemical names and measurements, milligrams and micrograms, dosages, onset times. Dates and names, or parts of names, fragments, descriptions of men, approximate heights and weights, ethnicity, occupation, demeanor.

  Dickie recognized nearly all the drug names, could picture the doses. This was an area of personal expertise.

  Clyde from Buffalo. Ernest from El Paso. Lonnie from San Francisco. Each man given a page, sometimes more than one. Prosaic details, physical descriptions, scraps of conversation, and then a chemical name and dosage and onset time and then, finally, the shorthand description of nightmare after nightmare.

  15 July 1956. 18 July 1956. Subject Negro male, late thirties. Subject Caucasian male, approx. early fifties. What was done to these men. The things that were done. Dickie read, his hands wet, his heart stuttering an irregular rhythm. It felt like he was choking, the horror of the ledger compounded with the horror of the day, sitting in his stomach, his throat.

  Subject transient. Subject alcoholic. Subject known schizophrenic.

  There were appearances by others. A doctor called C. A monster called D who tortured the men for hours, attempting to gain information that was never recorded, at least not into the ledger. Henry Gladwell had not been interested in that information, only the methods of its extraction.

  Subject has forgotten name. Subject has forgotten biography. Subject given different name and biography. Subject answering to new name consistently. Subject able to answer questions about new biography, elaborate on details.

  D entered the room. D entered the room.

  Dickie was sitting on the sofa with the ledger closed on his lap when he realized Walter had returned, had been back for some time, maybe, standing in the dark doorway.

  Dickie cleared his throat. “Where did you get this?”

  “Robert Zelinsky is one of the men in that book.”

  “Where did he get it?”

  “Does it matter? It exists. It is here. It can be exposed, brought into the light.”

  “It could be fake,” Dickie said. “It could be fiction.”

  “Are you fake, Richard?” Walter looked around the room. “Is this? Are we?”

  “No one would know what to make of this.”

  “Not without proof, no. Not without corroboration.”

  “You have proof?”

  “We have the means of acquiring it.”

  In Walter’s hand was another ledger, newer, but otherwise nearly identical to the first.

  “This is the New Testament,” Walter said. “This is where I record the stories of the children of that first book. My story, Sarah’s, Julian’s, yours. There are others. Some alone, some in groups like ours. Up the coast, inland, out in the mountains. A group right across the Canadian border. We’ve been outfitting these groups, weapons bought with the bank money. A redistribution of wealth.”

  Walter stepped into the room. “There is a hospital up north. Many of our brothers and sisters a
re children of that facility. Some of the doctors are still there. The same rooms, maybe the same machines. We won’t know until we get there.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then we make so much blood and noise that we will be impossible to ignore.”

  Dickie opened the ledger again, turned to the pages covered with Henry Gladwell, the name chanted, repeated in columns.

  Walter said, “The man who wrote that book, who kept those notes, was named Henry March. That was his true name.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you’ve been looking for him.”

  “Since the day I first read the book.”

  “And?”

  “There is a woman living in Los Angeles,” Walter said. “A photographer. Her name is Hannah March.”

  “His wife?”

  “His daughter.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We have eyes. We have as many eyes as they do. Some of us are not in groups. Some of us are out in the world, watching.”

  “You think she knows where her father is.”

  Walter shrugged. “We’ll have to find out.”

  “You want to take her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Just like that. Off the street.”

  “Yes.”

  “A hood and some drugs and that room.”

  “It’s what we know.”

  Dickie stood. He was still holding the ledger, his fingertips pressed into the soft leather. He turned to the window, the blackness at the front of the house. Somewhere out there was the wall and the slope and the water.

  “Let me do it,” Dickie said.

  “What?”

  “If something goes wrong with her, you’ll never get to him.”

  “Nothing will go wrong.”

  “If we get caught dragging her off the street—”

  “We won’t get caught. We haven’t gotten caught.”