Half World: A Novel

by O'Connor, Scott

  She put a hand under his arm and helped him stand. He looked at the opposite wall as he unbuckled his belt. Hannah slid his jeans past his undershorts, to his ankles, gently, helping him step out and then sit again. His hands shaking as he brought the cigarette back to his lips.

  * * *

  He stood at the open medicine cabinet, overwhelmed.

  “People come to parties and leave things,” she said. “I keep the more interesting-looking ones around, thinking there might be something to shoot. To photograph.”

  He studied the faded labels, removed a bottle, replaced it. Finally selected a tall, thin plastic tube, shook a small constellation of pills into the palm of his hand.

  “What are those?” she said.

  “Painkillers.”

  “What hurts?”

  “Everything.”

  She poured him a glass of water at the sink, watched him toss the pills back, the water. He closed his eyes, swallowed.

  * * *

  They sat talking at the worktable. The pills had calmed him. She told him her name again, reintroduced herself. She’d told him when he’d first woken, out on the bench, but she wasn’t sure he’d heard, or processed, his eyes moving quickly out there, passing over her face and then over her shoulder, looking for something, hunted. He looked at the new beer can she’d set in front of him and said, I don’t know why you’d do this, and she said, I don’t know either, and then she’d smiled and he’d smiled, still looking down at his hands.

  * * *

  He wasn’t from anywhere. He had grown up on air bases, the longest stretch in Oklahoma, but he wasn’t really from anywhere. He’d been drafted but had suffered an injury during basic training and spent the rest of his time in Army hospitals. He’d bummed around after that, he’d said. Ended up in Davenport, Iowa, caring for his ailing father. His father was dead. His mother was dead. He had a sister on the East Coast he had lost touch with. He’d come to Los Angeles to find an old friend but had run out of leads and money and then he’d been hit by a car crossing the boulevard.

  Should I call anyone? she asked. Should anyone know you’re here?

  He thought about this for a moment, and then said no, that there wasn’t anyone to call.

  * * *

  He lay on the old sofa in her work space. The sofa was large, but he was larger. His hands dragged on the floor, his feet crested the top of the far arm. He took another couple of pills and closed his eyes and she turned out the light.

  She couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t due to fear. She did not feel threatened by him. She didn’t know if she should, but she didn’t. She felt something else. It was the strangeness of the situation keeping her awake, prickling her skin. Standing out in the gallery, in her bedroom, feeling him on the other side of the thin walls. This strange man in her private space.

  Leadbelly, Son House, Blind Willie Johnson. He coughed once and she went to the doorway and asked if the music was keeping him awake. Speaking into the dark room. There was no answer, just the sound of his breathing.

  He’d tried to sound detached when he’d spoken about his family, reciting his biography for her as a series of facts, names, dates, but the emotion was there, in his voice, his eyes. It had made her want to tell him about Ginnie, about Thomas, her nightmarish trip through the house in Oakland. She’d had to fight the urge to unburden herself to this stranger. She didn’t think she could talk about it the way he had told her about Oklahoma, about Iowa. He was someone who had learned to live with regret. This seemed like an acquired skill, and she wanted to know what he knew, how he did it.

  * * *

  She works at her table and he looks through her photographs, newer prints, the files of older photos she keeps. He swallows her pills, holding the bottles close to his face, squinting at the labels. He combs through her shelf of records, browses her books. He sleeps on the sofa and she turns down the music to listen to him breathe while she works.

  She has known addicts, has lived with a few. Not Bert—Bert never used, never drank much. Bert was addicted to work, and her, for a while, but movies were his real obsession, and when she figured that out she knew it was time to go. But she recognizes the behavior, the compulsion that draws this man to the medicine cabinet at regular intervals, pulls him to the refrigerator for a new beer before the old one is finished.

  She should call the rehab house at the end of the boulevard. She should call a hospital. He pulls a book from the shelf and says something and has to repeat himself before she notices that he has spoken, turning from her work to look across the room. Not used to another voice in this space in the middle of the day. She is used to being alone.

  Dickie. A child’s name. Something someone his size should have outgrown long ago. It fits him, though, perfectly, somehow.

  He finds a passage from a book he likes and reads it aloud for her. He looks at her runaway photos, studying them like he’s searching for a specific face. He tells her stories about growing up, about his mother, a forgotten singer. They order food, Chinese, Thai, Indian. When the delivery boy arrives Dickie always finds his way to a distant spot, standing behind something, sitting, hidden from whoever is waiting at the front door.

  He sleeps on the old couch and after a few days she is able to sleep soundly, too, waking in the morning to the sound of a cough or the toilet flushing and remembering then that this is not a strange dream, that he is out there, on the other side of the wall, his bare feet on the cement floor.

  * * *

  She changed his bandages in the morning, at night. He had a long cut under his shoulder blades, and at night he took off his shirt and sat on the toilet or the edge of the bathtub and she pressed rubbing alcohol into the torn skin.

  He wrapped his wrist with a bandage, covering the tattoo. She wasn’t sure there was an injury there. He hadn’t said anything about pain in his wrist.

  Everything was strange but nothing felt strange. He took a bath every night, after they ate their delivered dinner. The bathroom was just a corner of the living space that she’d had run with plumbing and cordoned off with a few large white sheets hung with twine from the high ceiling. Diaphanous walls, semi-opaque. She wasn’t used to seeing anyone on the other side of the sheets and she couldn’t stop staring. His shadow undressing gingerly, stepping into the big metal tub she’d filled with hot water. Sucking air through his teeth at the heat on his skin, the hurt places. The sheets billowing, slightly, as he moved. Lowering himself until all she could see was the shape of his head and his arms and shoulders along the sides of the tub.

  Everything was strange but nothing felt strange. She thought back to the days before she’d driven to Oakland, before she’d found this man on the bus-stop bench, and that was what felt strange, that other life.

  She heard him exhale deeply from the bathtub, heard the water moving, watched the dark shape on the other side of the sheets.

  Nothing felt strange.

  * * *

  She needed to get some groceries and he said that he’d be fine, so she walked to the market and then to the department store by the freeway and picked up some clothes that seemed his size, jeans and checkered western shirts, a package of socks, undershorts, a sweater she thought he might need. She didn’t even consider how reckless this was until she was on her way back, evening falling. How irresponsible, leaving him alone in her home. What he could steal, what he could deface. She didn’t consider it and then felt guilty when she did, first for the thought and then for its lateness in coming. What she would find when she opened the door.

  The gallery was dark when she entered. She moved through the rooms, turning on lights. Everything was as she’d left it. She stood in the middle of the workroom and set down her bags and finally said his name.

  There was a noise from the gallery and she stepped back through the doorway, her concern growing to fear, hands balled into fists. He was there, stan
ding in a far corner, watching the front door. She’d walked right past him in the dark. He had a broken wine bottle in one hand, was brandishing it, that was the word, and watching the door, looking wild, stripped of whatever defenses he had left.

  She talked him out of the corner, got him to set the bottle on the floor. His boots crunching on the broken glass as he stepped into the center of the room. Keeping her voice low, like calming a feral animal. She got him to the couch and went into the bathroom and shook a few pills into her hand.

  She sat with him until she could feel that the drugs were working, his body untangling, growing heavy beside her, and then she stood and swept the glass from the gallery floor, mopped up the wine. He sat on the couch, watching her, breathing slowly again, his hands on his knees.

  He said moments still came back to him from the war, some of the things he’d seen and done. She said that she’d thought he’d spent most of his war time in the hospital and he said yes, like that fact wasn’t a contradiction. She was not sure he was telling the truth and not sure that it mattered. Standing in a corner with a fistful of jagged glass. She wasn’t sure that level of fear required a verifiable explanation.

  She put on some records and he took some more pills and lay back on the couch. She switched off the light and turned from the room and he asked her to stay. His voice in the dark. She walked back into the room and found the stool at her worktable by memory and touch, sat listening to the music from the other room. Sometime later she got up to leave, sure he was asleep. She crossed out of the room, turned on the bulb in the hallway, and then she heard his voice again, awake and clear but calm, settled.

  Thank you, he said, and she nodded in the light.

  * * *

  The phone rang and it was Bert. It had been a few weeks since she’d brought back the car and he wanted to make sure everything was all right up in Oakland. She said that it was, not believing she was capable of such a lie even as she said the words. You’re okay? he asked, and she said, Yes. Everything is fine.

  * * *

  There was a patio up on the flat part of the roof where she’d arranged a ring of plastic lawn chairs beneath a web work of white Christmas lights. In and around the ring were some potted cacti, a few marigolds and day lilies she always forgot to water. Openings ended up here some nights, the quiet comedown after a show, a small group, Hannah and the artists and significant others, friends, gallerists, looking at the lights in the hills to the south, streetlights and house lights and porch lights in the distant trees.

  A ladder at the back of the work space led up to the roof hatch, and she insisted that he climb first, though she had no idea how brave this demand was, what she could really do if his knee balked and he fell back onto her. Up on the roof, they sat and smoked and drank a bottle of wine, lit by the Christmas lights and the streetlight on the corner. Looking at the skeletal shapes on the neighboring rooftops, silhouettes of TV antennas, telephone wires, the latticed metal bone work at the back of a billboard. He told her more about his mother. It seemed like he was hoping, due to Hannah’s musical taste, that she’d heard some of his mother’s records, but she didn’t believe she had, didn’t think she should lie about it. After a while he talked more about his father, that last year in Davenport. The anointing of the sick parent, a filial sacrament she hadn’t realized was a responsibility until it was too late.

  She climbed back down into the studio to get more wine. On her way back up she became worried suddenly that she’d come upon him with half a bottle in his hand again, or standing out at the edge of the roof, removing his back foot, stepping out into space. The level of relief surprised her, seeing him still there, in his chair, quiet, looking out into the trees. She had to stand at the top of the ladder and breathe for a moment, compose herself. She told him about her mother, her father, her brother. Before she knew what she was saying she was saying it. Moving slowly, back and forth in time, recounting as memories came to her, fragments, imaginings. And then, finally, about the house in Oakland, what she’d found, what the police had said. How she was waiting for her brother. How she hadn’t told anyone. How there wasn’t anyone to tell.

  He didn’t say a word, but it still seemed like a conversation. The relief hit her again. He didn’t have any judgment or platitudes, he just listened, and she felt lighter, slightly, like she had given some of this to him, and maybe that was a fair trade, maybe that was how he saw it, sitting there, listening, that this was something he could take for her in return.

  * * *

  They watched the chess games together at night, in folding chairs in front of the TV. The match had stretched to the end of the month, then over into the beginning of the next. Hannah kept the sound off and played records instead. Dickie was talking more, commenting on the chess or the music. He was starting to sound normal again, what she assumed was normal, what maybe he’d sounded like before she’d found him.

  She had her camera in her lap, was lifting it occasionally, taking pictures of the TV, the edges of the screen and the cinderblock wall behind it, knowing she’d be unhappy with the results, the jittery cathode glow, and then she turned and looked at Dickie and asked if she could take a picture of him.

  “Doing what?”

  “Sitting there,” she said.

  “Watching TV?”

  “Sure.”

  “Not the most interesting subject.”

  “We won’t know until we see the picture.”

  He stood and he was smiling but she could tell this had made him uncomfortable.

  “Never mind,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it. It’s not a big deal.”

  He walked over to the bathroom. She heard the toilet, the pop of a pill-bottle cap, water in the sink. She felt like she should put the camera away before he came back, like she was holding a weapon of some sort.

  “I know that seemed strange,” he said.

  “Plenty of people don’t want their picture taken.”

  “Right.”

  “Happens all the time.”

  “Afraid you’ll steal my soul.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  He smiled awkwardly, standing by his chair.

  “You don’t have to explain,” she said.

  “I feel like I do.”

  “You don’t.”

  She left the camera in her lap. After a while he sat again. She said good night when the broadcast was over, went back to her room, leaving him there with the late news, not entirely sure why she felt so banged up, so wounded by this.

  * * *

  “This is the picture.”

  She turned from the worktable. Dickie was sitting on the sofa with a box of prints. She knew what he was looking at before he turned it for her to confirm. Her father outside the Merchants Exchange in San Francisco.

  “I feel strange having told you about that,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Like it has some meaning.”

  “Of course it does.”

  “Apart from the memory. I think its only meaning is in the memory.”

  “That’s not what you said the other night.”

  “It’s what I’m saying now.”

  She leaned over on the stool and extended a finger to hook the handle of her coffee mug. She always left her coffee on the floor when she was working, to keep the liquid away from the photos on her table. She hooked the handle and straightened herself and took a sip, lowered the mug back to the floor. She could see that he was still looking at the photo.

  “A guy came into the gallery a while back,” she said. “I had that hanging with another exhibition. Just sitting on its own wall. He said he knew the man in the photograph. That the man worked for his father. Recently.”

  “A guy from where?”

  “Mexico. San Vicente, he said, I think.”

 
“You think.”

  “San Vicente.”

  “This was before you went up to Oakland?”

  “Yes.”

  “Worked for his father doing what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Hannah bent again, reaching for the coffee mug, her index finger hooked, feeling in the air for the handle.

  Dickie was still looking at the photograph. “What else did he say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What else did you ask?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You think it’s a coincidence.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Or a mistake.”

  “I don’t know what I think. Yes. I think it’s nothing. I think it’s a mistake.”

  Hannah gave up on the coffee, straightened, arching her lower back, popping something into place that shifted when she was on her stool too long.

  “San Vicente isn’t that far,” he said.

  She let this sit. Not pretending she hadn’t heard, but letting the sentence fall, gravity’s pull, hoping the words would do something, combust, disappear when they hit the floor.

  “What does that mean?” she said.

  “You’re thinking that if you go, you change everything.”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s nothing there, it was a mistake, but now everything has changed.”

  “I’m waiting for my brother.”

  Dickie’s eyes lifted from the photo to Thomas’s postcards on the wall.

  “How far?” she said. “San Vicente.”

  “Half a day, maybe,” Dickie said. “Maybe a day.”

  “That close.”

  Dickie nodded. His eyes moved from the postcards to Hannah.

  “I don’t want to spend my life,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “This is something that would never end.”

  She leaned from the stool again, bending deep, searching with her hooked finger. Came away with nothing. She straightened, put her hands on her worktable. Let that thing in her back sit out of place, a dull throb, a disk shifted a fraction of an inch.