Half World: A Novel

by O'Connor, Scott

  He went to work in the larger storefront, sweeping out the dirt and trash that had accumulated over the years of its dereliction. He purchased some tools, drilled small holes in the cinder block between the two rooms, just below eye level.

  Every couple of hours he took a break from his work and stood out on the sidewalk and smoked. There was an open lot behind the empty storefronts on the other side of the street, and in between the buildings he could see boys playing fútbol, running and kicking between the short groves of weeds and grass. A moment of banished history returned to him, as those moments sometimes did. Fugitive memories returning because of the bend of sunlight along the edge of a wall, the smell of American cigarettes, a stray line of verse. He watched the boys playing and inhaled his own smoke and thought of a boy kicking a ball in an alleyway long ago.

  He lay on the cot at sundown and waited for sleep. Hours sometimes; sometimes it never came. He watched the last light withdraw from the room, disappearing through the tiny eyelet in the door.

  He purchased other cameras, hung wooden blocks on the wall, mounted the cameras on the blocks, the lenses focused through the pinholes into the other room. There he hung framed pictures near the holes, images of weddings and quinceañeras, family gatherings in late afternoon light, a stretch of ripe cotton field bursting in the blurred distance. He drilled a small hole in the cement floor of the gallery and placed a tiny microphone inside.

  When he was finished, he switched on the work light he’d set in the corner, propped the door open to the street, left the storefront space alone. He sat in his room on the other side of the wall and listened to shuffling steps, muffled voices. Spanish, Portuguese, English. He sat with the cords and buttons for the shutters of the cameras. The cameras clicking against the wall, the sound smothered by the cinder block before it could enter the other space. A voice every few hours, maybe; sometimes nothing for days at a time. Voices at night on occasion, the work light burning continually, drawing visitors, while he sat on the other side with the cords and buttons, shutters clicking in the dark.

  He wasn’t interested in photographing people who knew they were being photographed. There was some sacred space that disappeared when they were aware. A posed picture was a lifeless thing.

  He developed the film in the back of his room. A line of glossy images strung across the ceiling. In the night their wetness gleamed in the light of his cigarette or the flashlight he used when he was reading novelas. When the prints were ready he made simple wooden frames and hung the pictures alongside the earlier photos in the gallery, slowly filling the walls. Occasionally the subjects of the photos returned, stood looking at the earlier photos of their own faces. This was what he waited for on the other side, clicking his shutters blindly. To capture an image of someone capturing an image, and the realization that would come, the play of features on their face, the understanding that something had been taken.

  The fly in the room buzzed. He sat powerless before it. He couldn’t let something like this stay with him, but the buzzing in the room had grown so insistent, the things the young man had said, the name, so he allowed this moment to fill his head, and with it came other moments. He saw himself lying in a motel room, smoking, staring up at the ceiling in the dark. There were others sleeping in the room. Their names flashed before him, their faces, and he tried to swat them away, swinging his hands around his head. Driving on the lower deck of a bridge and the girl on the seat beside him. Hiding behind a curtain in a living room while the boy trudges through the house, laughing, searching for him. The smell of the woman in their bed, the sweat at her neck, his hand finding hers in the dark.

  There was a book. He remembered now. He could see the pages clearly, the handwriting, the ink pressed into the paper. He could see a secret history, dates and times and lists of chemicals. Accountings and reconciliations, as if mathematics could justify what they had done.

  He saw a diagram drawn by his own hand of a door, the metal case filled with gears and tumblers and the long bolts that transfigured it, that made the door into something else.

  He was surrounded now, a host of flies, their drone rising to a single note.

  The things he had loosed into the world and the faces of his wife and son and daughter. He sat on his cot and wept into his hands. Music from films in his head. Names returning to him. El Güero Fotógrafo. La Escoba. El Fantasma. Another name, and then another, deeper name. The name returned to him by the young man. Brought back and held before him, shimmering in the air.

  His face in his hands. Dust in his throat, in his mouth. Dust on his lips as he speaks the name aloud in the room.

  * * *

  He redrew the schematic from memory. There were men in the town that he hired for certain work and he showed them the schematic and they acquired the necessary hardware, the long metal they would cut into tumblers and bolts. He told them that there wasn’t much time and they worked quickly, removing the great green door from its moorings and altering its body in such a way that it became the door from the schematic. Before they set it back into place he told them to reverse it, so that the metal arm which locked it was facing the interior of the room. He showed them one more drawing, a spring mechanism that would dislodge the metal arm once it was pulled. The door would become a wall then, irreversible. When they were finished the men looked at the door and one of them said, Con esto, se puede permanecerse en este salón para siempre. He paid the men and burned the drawings in his room, watching the paper fold and crumble, rise as smoke.

  He didn’t know who was coming, but he could imagine another figure, reemerging, a great beast who would never have forgotten what they had done, who they had once been.

  He said the name again, the name the young man had returned to him, said it aloud to get the feel in his bones, in his hands. He repeated it, alone in his room, chanting until there was no other name, until the ghost became flesh again, and then he was ready to leave the room and walk into the daylight of the town.

  7

  He’d come to after passing out in the street and when he’d opened his eyes the man with the dog was almost upon him. Other neighbors gathering. Jimmy clambered to his feet and held them all off with the gun, limped to the Ford. Found a roach-ridden hostel in the fourth town, what seemed like an endless drive from where he’d been shot. He spent a feverish few days in the shade-drawn room, where he wrapped the leg wound and lay down foolishly, thinking that something would pass and then realizing finally that nothing would ever pass again and standing from the bed and moving slowly across the floor.

  There was an unrecognizable face in the mirror. He’d lost blood and weight. His eyes were recessed and hard. There was no feeling in the leg. He could move it, he could walk, but it was nothing more than a post he dragged behind. He poked at it with a finger and felt nothing. Pressed the tip of his pocketknife into the skin and muscle and felt nothing. One limb gone. He pissed and felt nothing and knew that this was worse than the pain, that there was no stage after this. He cleaned himself up as best he could and left his room and walked into the bright day of the town without a plan, without thought of a plan. He sat on the edge of the small concrete fountain in the plaza with the birds and the other old men and tried to eat once and threw up the handful of sunflower seeds into the dry basin behind him and so only drank, slowly, another bottle of the clear, foul liquid that moved through him and cauterized. His sunburned head itched and peeled. A woman walked by selling straw hats and he bought one, grateful for the shade on his face. An old man came by with a shopping bag and picked through the dry fountain, lifting coins from the cement, avoiding Jimmy’s sickness which baked in the sun. Jimmy took the change he had remaining in his pocket and set it beside him on the edge of the fountain but the old man ignored the coins, twisting his bag closed, walking away across the plaza. A bus came and people got on and later in the day it returned and people got off. It grew dark and Jimmy slept sitting with his hat an
d in the morning when he opened his eyes someone had left additional coins beside him. He saw Jayne and Steven and the grandkids walking though the empty plaza. He saw Elaine and she was a young woman when she first stepped up off the street but she aged and sickened as she passed the fountain and at the other end of the plaza she was bald and burned and fell to the tiles and lay there in the sun and he was unable to stand and carry her away. He saw Denver Dan and Clarke and the whores and then he saw Henry March on the other side of the street and so he got to his feet and followed.

  Away from the center of town to a long street, empty storefronts on one side, an open lot on the other. Henry March walked along the storefronts, his skin pale and his body old and slight as a ghost. He finally stopped at an open door and stepped inside. Jimmy felt like he had been walking forever. There was a rip in the brim of his hat and the sunlight streamed through. He walked with a hand shading his eyes under the hat and came to a storefront with pictures hung on the walls but there was no one inside and he continued on to the next doorway, which led to a dark cinderblock room. Henry March stood at the far end with his back to Jimmy, facing a sink, cupping water in his hands, lowering his face to the water. Jimmy had never coveted something as deeply as he coveted that water, the feel of his face in March’s hands, the coolness on his skin, his eyes. He stepped into the room. He said, Hello, Hank, and March straightened his back and let his hands fall from his face and said, Hello, Jimmy.

  March turned from the wall and looked at Jimmy and Jimmy lifted the gun out of his loose waistband and said, I don’t have much time. I still have other people to see.

  March said, I know.

  Jimmy turned back to the bright rectangle of the open door and squinted into the light and could see kids in the open lot across the street kicking a soccer ball. He said, I’ve had dreams of this for years. This moment. Have you had dreams of this?

  March said, Yes.

  Jimmy watched the kids in the lot. I never pictured it like this, though, he said. A place like this.

  He turned to the door. It looked like something dredged up from the bottom of the sea, claimed from a shipwreck, stern and weathered. He put his free hand on the door and said, Look at this fucking thing, pushing with all his remaining strength to get it closed. The only light in the room a thin white beam coming through the eyelet. March still standing on the other side of the room, facing Jimmy, his hands at his sides, water dripping. Jimmy wanted to get to that sink, wanted to feel Henry March’s wet fingertips on his own burned skin. He looked at the back of the door, the mechanisms and bolts there, and smiled and said, I remember this, and he grasped the lever with his free hand and pushed it down, slamming it into place, pleased with the strength it took, the strength he still had, the door’s tumblers turning and locking and then Jimmy said, Oh, Hank, as the lever came away in his hand.

  8

  Inés had shot the bald man, and Hannah had run from the house to the church in the plaza, waiting inside, frantic, trying not to scream or call out in some way that would give voice to what had happened. Everything in her alive and terrified. When the bus came and Dickie wasn’t there she used the last of the money Bert had given her and paid for rides from one town to another, working her way north. Climbing into each car or pickup and wondering if the driver was someone who had been waiting for her. She thought back to the house and the family there and the bald man moving through their rooms like a bull. She had run without thinking and had left the gun behind in the bedroom and she prayed that one of the women found it before the children.

  Up into Tijuana and across the border and feeling no sense of childlike safety at returning to her home country. Refusing to sleep. Drinking coffee and taking some of the small white pills the truck drivers offered, weighing the risk of the pills against the risk of sleep, making those kinds of calculations now. Up through San Diego and into Los Angeles, finishing her journey on a bus that let her off at the bench in front of her studio.

  No one there, just mail, but nothing from Thomas. She went to the bank and stood in line and waited for the doors to burst open, animal masks waving guns. This was the way she saw the world now. She withdrew all of the money she had left and bought a bus ticket north. She did not contact Bert. She did not want to bring this thing to anyone else. She rode the bus and thought of Dickie riding a bus along the rancho road in Mexico. She wondered if he had come upon the ghost, and who that man had been.

  At the house in Oakland, she dragged rugs out into the thin October light, wringing them dry, hanging them over the lower boughs of the oak tree in the backyard. She knew she could be found here, that whoever was after her would think to look in this place, but she could be found anywhere, they had proven that, and there was still a possibility that Thomas was nearby. In that way it didn’t seem like a risk, coming home. There was no safe place anymore.

  She mopped the kitchen and dining room floors, threw out the trash, swept the bugs into teeming garbage bags. Got on her hands and knees and scrubbed until it was a habitable space again. She lay with a pillow and a blanket on the floor of Thomas’s bedroom. The sounds of traffic and laughter from the street, a radio playing, a blues singer she couldn’t hear clearly enough to identify. Her body stiff and heavy, whispering to her brother in the dark until she slid beyond.

  She took Thomas’s maps and timetables from his room and crossed the bridge and rode the trains. She carried the most recent photograph of him that she could find in the house and asked passengers, conductors taking smoke breaks. At night she continued cleaning the house, eventually making her way to the basement. The leak from the kitchen had found its way down, soaking her father’s empty desk. The smell of rotting wood, mildew. Hannah pulled his chair over to the high window on the cement wall. She climbed on top and banged the latch with the heel of her hand, breathed deeply of the night air. She’d snuck down here as a teenager to smoke. Another place she knew her mother wouldn’t follow. Standing on the chair at the window, her nose pressed to the sill, the ancient smell of her father’s cigarettes, captured history. The scent was still there now, Henry’s smoke deep within the wood.

  At night she lay on the floor of Thomas’s room and read the books of poetry from her father’s shelves. The poems themselves, the narrow islands of black ink on the white page, and then her father’s handwriting surrounding the poems, filling the gutters and margins. Books within books. She read the poems without him and then she read the poems with him, allowing him to lead her around them, through them, within.

  She rode the trains and saw the bald man everywhere. She saw Dickie everywhere, caught herself calling out to him a few times. She didn’t see Thomas, didn’t see anyone who looked like Thomas from any angle. She walked the streets toward the water and then up the steep incline because Dickie had told her that one of the entries in her father’s ledger had read Telegraph Hill.

  At the top she looked out across the Embarcadero to the dead prison and the bay and then turned and looked at the faces of the buildings on the hill. They were mostly new, recently built condominiums, pricey water views. The cement of the sidewalk was new. Someone had scribbled a name and a date into one of the squares with the end of a stick or a finger.

  She waited, trying to feel something, ghosts, standing on the street until the shadows got too long and the light too low. Then she walked back down through the city and rode the train, scanning faces, asking questions, her brother’s picture in her hands.

  9

  Dickie searched the coastal towns, looking for signs, a trail leading to where he would find her safe. He could not afford to sleep and so he bought pills from some of the American kids, and after a few days he couldn’t come down, so he bought other pills, finally sleeping fitfully in the last car he would ever steal.

  He made his way back to Los Angeles, to her studio. Hard to tell if she had been there. He hoped that she had gone to the man they’d borrowed the car from. Bart. Bert. He hoped
that she’d gone to the police. He looked through the newspapers that had been delivered while they were gone and read the story about the mansion in Orange County that had gone up in flames, the bomb shelter in the yard that had been flooded with gas and set alight, that was still burning, sending a continuous plume of gray smoke into the sky over the sea, a long tower of ash ever rising.

  At night he lay on the couch in her dark workroom and listened to her records, waiting for someone to come through the door.

  Mail slid onto the gallery floor in the mornings. Nothing until there was a postcard, the same as many of the postcards fixed to her wall, a black-and-white photograph of an Oakland streetcar. Her brother’s handwriting, which Dickie had grown to recognize. Much the same message as Thomas had written on all the others, but the date and the postmark were different and so Dickie set off north and east, hitchhiking because he needed to save the last of his money for pills. Los Angeles to Reno, Nevada. Reno to Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City to Laramie, Wyoming. Stepping out of an eighteen-wheeler in Chicago on the first day of winter, knowing nothing but the zip code on the postmark and the trains.

  Days of riding. Nights. Changing lines, one end of the city to the other. He was offered money sometimes, from businessmen or housekeepers or high school kids, money which he refused and then began to accept. He needed to eat, to stay awake. He thought of Father Bill, thought of arriving at Bill’s leafy suburban home and killing the man at his dining room table. He thought of Walter and Julian and Sarah and didn’t know what he wished, his fantasies changing by the hour. The three of them knee-deep in the gasoline-filled shelter when they set it alight. The three of them out in the world, in the fresh air, free. He didn’t know what he wished.

  His beard had returned, his hair. He rode the Green Line, the Brown Line, the Red. He rode the Blue. He sat in a seat at the far end of a car and could no longer see, could no longer remember what he was looking for. His hands had been clenched into fists for so long that when he opened them there was a thin line of blood where his nails had bitten the skin. He wiped the blood on his jeans and lifted his hands again and set his face there, unable to catch his breath. Sinking his teeth into the heels of his hands to stop whatever noise was coming from his mouth. Hoping the other passengers couldn’t hear him, see him. Shaking in his seat and making that noise and crying with shame.