Half World: A Novel

by O'Connor, Scott

  “I’m sorry, Ginnie.”

  “Yes.” She turned on the hot water, let it lift the ring of coffee grounds up and over the rim, down across her fingers to the drain. “You’ve said that.”

  * * *

  Where was he? She woke every morning with this question on her lips. Years of mornings, middle-of-the-night awakenings, abrupt resurfacings after dozing naps. Opening her eyes some days and needing time, an eternal-seeming moment to remember who he was. The loneliness divorced from any specific missed presence. No one could understand this. Widows she knew at church, at the community center, who spoke as if she was one of them. She wasn’t one of them. She was something else.

  Where was he? Someone used to share this space, this house, this bed. Someone used to recite verse to her while she closed her eyes. His face beside hers on the pillow, his breath in her ear. The last thing she heard, floating toward sleep.

  * * *

  She was in the kitchen making lunch when she felt something grab in her chest, some phantom hand. She made a noise, then swallowed it, not wanting to scare Thomas. She could hear the TV in the living room, joking celebrity banter on The Hollywood Squares. The kitchen started to spin, slowly, like a carousel starting up. She held the edge of the sink. She knew what was happening and she did not want to fall and scare Thomas, so she sank to her knees, still clutching the countertop. She pressed her forehead against the cabinet door. She could smell the jugs of ammonia and bleach she kept under the sink. She was having trouble breathing. She had lost all strength in her left arm, all feeling. Her hand slipped from the edge of the sink, dropped to the floor. The pain acute now, sharp and frightening. She held on with her other hand, kept her head pressed to the cabinet.

  One more day. If she could just have one more day, she could find a place for Thomas, make sure he was safe. But it was too late, there was only this moment kneeling at the sink, the TV sound from the other room, the pain filling her body and her refusal to make a noise, her determination to allow him at least another few minutes without fear, without knowing. Let him watch his show. The rest would come soon enough.

  If she had one more day, she could call Hannah. Take your brother. Hold him close. He is yours now.

  Goddamn you, Henry. The curse slipped in. She had been holding it back for years. An ugly, dark thing, living within her. How dare you leave me here, leave us here. Waiting for nothing.

  She felt her hand slip from the counter, her body spreading across the floor. The pain was so great. She forced her eyes open. This would not be what she saw, at the end. The lime-green linoleum. The fear and bitterness and disappointment. This would not be what she saw. She would see that morning in the park, the sun shining, the green grass, Thomas at a picnic table with his newspaper, the light in his hair. Ginnie humming and then Thomas finishing the verse of the hymn she’d started. No matter what else was taken from her, there were years of mornings like this. This was what she would see. The last moment would be beautiful.

  Sunlight and her precious boy.

  17

  Summer 1972

  His story checked out. Dale’s name was the puzzle piece the cops were missing. Looks like we set the pigs on the right trail, Walter said, leading Dickie out of his room, what Dickie had come to think of as his room. The large cement box. Dale’s name was in the newspaper, and now the feds were tracing things back to the explosion in Portland.

  Congratulations, Walter said. You got your bust after all.

  They had him now. They could drug him, dump him, make a phone call, and Dickie would be nabbed for the Portland bombing. Where would Father Bill be then? On the golf course, out on his back patio with a drink. In his office, burning paperwork.

  They had him now.

  He is given new clothes, which look a lot like his old clothes. A western shirt and faded jeans, a beat-up pair of boots. He is led through the warren of rooms where they live. An abandoned bomb shelter, big enough for a large family to weather a nuclear storm for some time. Concrete walls. No windows, of course. One stairway up, kept behind a locked door at the end of a short hall.

  He is shown into the skinny kid’s room, which he will share. The kid’s name is Julian. That is his real name, his only name. There is a cot against the wall where Julian sleeps. Julian brings in a sleeping bag for Dickie, which he sets on the floor. They eat in a small storeroom which has a card table, folding metal chairs. Another inverted flag hangs on the wall, covering shelves lined with canned goods, tinned meats, dried fruit, a full complement of Zelinsky’s novels.

  Walter has a room, Sarah has a room. There is a small bathroom. Every few days Walter or Sarah or Julian exits through the locked door, climbs the staircase to the outside. They return a few hours later with more canned food, plastic jugs of drinking water, newspapers from the past week.

  He doesn’t see any weapons. He doesn’t see any money. Newspaper clippings from the robberies are taped to a wall in the storeroom. No one mentions the clippings. There is no radio or television; probably no reception this far down. Julian reads Spider-Man comics, the same issues over and over from a small pile he keeps in their bedroom. Sarah strums a third-hand guitar, hums tunelessly. She has an undernourished, xylophone-ribbed cat, another escapee, a test subject sprung by an animal liberation group. The cat, he is told, was part of an experiment in the mind control of domestic animals, brainwashing household pets to spy on their owners. Some even had transmitter chips implanted into their brains so they could record what they saw and heard.

  Not this one, Julian says, stroking the cat’s back. This one’s clean. We checked.

  Walter is often behind closed doors, in his room, in the storeroom. Sometimes Sarah joins him, sometimes Julian. Dickie is not privy to these conversations, whatever plans are being made. Sarah and Julian share nothing, but their moments alone with Walter rekindle their fervor, the larger ideology, what seems to be a revenge fantasy writ large, holding to account those responsible for what was done to them.

  Julian tells Dickie his story at night, when they are lying in their room in the dark. His previous, false life, and then his true life. A teenage runaway, sent to juvenile hall, where he was tortured, mind-wiped. Dickie knows the story from one of Zelinsky’s books.

  Everyone calls him Hinkle. He tells them that this is not his name, but eventually he stops protesting, accepts it, answers to it.

  The room where Dickie was questioned is the largest in the shelter. Its door is kept locked. He passes by frequently because he has found the holes in the walls where he can see inside, into the dark empty space where he was kept.

  One night, sitting at the table in the storeroom, he tells Sarah and Julian his story. The history he had rehearsed as Dick Hinkle, that had come back to him in dreams, the story about the mental hospital, the shadow wing, the drugs, the experiments. He tells them that he can’t remember if he was in the hospital before or after the war, if there was an earlier stay, when he was a teenager, maybe, sent there by his father. He was a troubled kid. He’d started drinking early, taking pills. There was a lot of fighting in his house, his father shouting, his mother shouting, his father raising a hand. Dickie was no angel. Maybe he’d been sent away for a while, shipped somewhere to straighten out.

  He doesn’t know when it happened, he tells them. When he was infected with this false life. He just knows that this isn’t right, this isn’t who he is. He just knows that there’s something else.

  Every time his story runs off the rails he worries that they’ll see through it, pick up on the missed connections, the dangling threads, but whenever he looks up from the table, lost and frustrated, Julian is looking back at him, nodding, holding his hands out, letting them rise and drop, telling Dickie, gently, to slow down.

  They are always clean. Sarah’s hair smells of coconut shampoo; Julian’s face is freshly shaved. Dickie doesn’t know where the showering and grooming take place. Somew
here up above. Every couple of days Julian lets Dickie back into the room with the drain, and Dickie washes himself with the hose and a bar of soap. The two folding chairs are gone, but the chair Dickie had been bound to remains. It sits in the middle of the room over the drain, straps hanging slack at its sides, waiting.

  They all have a tattoo of the word Sons written in script across the inside of their right wrists, taken, Dickie guesses, from the Sons of Liberty, the secret resistance group in Johnny Tremain. Not a great idea, distinguishing-feature-wise, but it doesn’t seem, from the way any of them talk, that they plan to be taken alive.

  Sarah and Julian sometimes mention an action in vague, excited terms. Marching out to do battle, setting this whole place to burn behind them. When Dickie asks what this action is, when it will occur, they only smile, shake their heads. Patience, they say. Patience.

  He tells his story many times. They want to hear it repeated. He is shocked by the level of detail he has conjured, frightened by this thing he’s made. Sitting at the table in the storeroom, trying to get his hands and legs to stop trembling. Ashamed, embarrassed of what happened to him, what he says happened to him. Unable to speak further, to get enough air. He can feel the earth pressing into the walls, down onto the ceiling. His fingers up, trying to cover his face.

  He can’t breathe. Sarah leans forward, holds a couple of pills to his lips, places a hand on his back. Julian puts a hand on his arm. For a second Dickie is afraid that they have seen through his story, that they are going to take him back to that room. But they don’t move, and he doesn’t move. He simply sits shaking with their hands on him, with the earth pressing down, no story left to tell.

  * * *

  He wakes to find the shelter empty. There is no sign of Sarah or Julian. Walter’s door is locked, the room with the drain is locked. The door at the end of the hall is open, though. He can see the stairway leading up. He sits at the table in the storeroom for much of the morning, drinking coffee, smoking, waiting. Listening for Walter to return, impressed that Dickie didn’t take advantage of the open door. Some kind of test passed.

  It’s the sunlight that finally draws him from the room. A thin slice of white light, resting on the bottom step beyond the open door. Dickie leans into the stairwell, looks up. A pair of closed blast doors at the top, a slender gap between them, letting in the light. He climbs, places his hands against one of the doors, pushes. The stairwell floods with sun. He stands on the top step, the light and heat on his face, the air in his mouth, a drowning man breaking the surface, gasping.

  He is on a hillside covered with long, dry grass. Acres of open land, nothing but a few eucalyptus trees on the horizon. A sharp taste in the air. Salt. The ocean is not far.

  He turns to see a large house at the top of the slope. A facsimile of a Spanish villa, stucco walls and an orange tile roof. Wooden shutters on the windows, some open. Flower boxes beneath the sills, either empty or full of vegetative corpses.

  The hill is not steep but the ground is rutted and uneven and he has not walked very far in a while. By the time he reaches the back patio he has to lean against a low wall to catch his breath. He can hear birds chirping in the distance. A faraway engine; a plane, maybe.

  The patio doors are open, so he steps inside.

  The room is cool and dark, and Dickie waits again for his eyes to adjust. A living room, with leather couches and armchairs, a glass coffee table, a large television. Art on the walls, landscapes, seascapes. Framed photographs on the top of the TV, faces coated with a film of dust. A man and a woman and two adolescent boys, a young, blond family, at a birthday party, at the beach, posed for a professional portrait, the husband and wife side by side, smiling, their hands on the shoulders of the children standing in front. One of the photos taken on the patio Dickie just came through, their backs to the doors of this room.

  He walks up a few steps to the kitchen. There is a large dining room, a small bathroom. Everything is in its place but everything is untouched. The water in the toilet has been undisturbed for so long that it has made a thin green ring around the top of the bowl.

  There is a driveway out the front window, empty, though a dark oil spot stains the cement, still wet, glistening in the sun. There’s a gate at the end of the driveway, and a high wall that surrounds the property, blocking any view of the outside, any view in.

  Dickie climbs the stairs to a long hallway. The first door is open to a master bedroom, dresser drawers hanging, bed unmade. Ransacked, looks like, in contrast to the stillness of the rest of the house. A struggle, maybe. A hurried departure. The master bathroom has been used. It is humid in the room, the mirror is partially fogged, the sink and vanity top wet. There’s water on the floor of the walk-in shower. There are toothbrushes by the sink, bristles damp. Back out in the bedroom, there’s a television on top of one of the jumbled dressers. Dickie sets his palm against the side of the set, feels the warmth of recent use.

  He follows the hallway toward what he can sense is life in the house, movement in the dead space. Past a couple of guest rooms to an open door at the end of the hall. The boys’ bedroom. Bunk beds against the wall, a pair of small desks, overoccupied bookshelves. Posters on the walls, sports cars and ballplayers. A plastic racetrack on the carpet, half assembled, with a line of waiting toy cars.

  Sarah is sitting on the floor in an orange sundress, cross-legged, barefoot, her back to Dickie, her hair still wet from the shower. She has a book in her lap, a pirate story, and she is reading it aloud, softly, pausing before turning each page to allow time for the brightly painted illustrations to be fully appreciated. Dickie looks farther in to see who Sarah is reading to, but she’s alone in the room.

  She turns a page, stops reading. “You can use the shower if you like,” she says. “In the big bedroom. There are toothbrushes under the sink.”

  “Where’s Walter?”

  She gestures to the window, another view of the driveway, though this time Dickie can see over the wall, an empty stretch of road. “Getting supplies, gas for the generator.”

  “Where are the people who lived in this house?”

  Sarah stands, crosses to the bookshelf, sliding the pirate story back between the other spines.

  “You can come up here whenever you like,” she says. “You have that right, now. We’re not supposed to loiter, but I do, Julian does. I’ve seen him down in the living room, in the dining room. He’s seen me, too, I’m sure. Sitting up here.” She finds a book on the shelf, pulls it free. “Do you have any children, Hinkle?”

  “No.”

  “Did you? In your false life?”

  Dickie shakes his head.

  “I wanted that baby so much,” she says. “It wasn’t real. I know it wasn’t real. But it all seemed so beautiful sometimes.”

  Her dress is loose, low-cut, and there is something on her chest, a small mark revealed when the fabric gaps as she moves. She sees Dickie looking and steps closer, pulls the dress down to reveal the skin over her heart. Backward letters, small and black. A name in reverse. Sarah.

  She turns and looks in the mirror hanging above one of the desks. “Julian did them,” she says. “The tattoos on our wrists, and these. So we’ll never forget. So they can’t be taken from us again.”

  * * *

  Dickie waited at the table in the storeroom, drinking the last of the coffee, working his way through another of the Zelinsky novels, more than a little worried that he was going to come across one about a guy sitting at a table in a bomb shelter storeroom, waiting, drinking coffee.

  “Hinkle.”

  Dickie turned. Walter stood in the doorway, holding a long canvas duffel bag. The fabric strained with the weight of whatever was inside, the contents clanking when the bag shifted.

  Out into the bright noontime to a wood-paneled station wagon parked in the driveway. Walter and Julian lifted a false floor from beneath the middle bench, s
ecured the duffel within.

  They headed east, a quick glimpse of the ocean disappearing behind another rising hill. Their house looked to be the only one in the area. Walter drove with Sarah beside him, Dickie and Julian in the back. They rode for the better part of an hour, through grassy hills, then marshes, flatlands. Finally, the outskirts of a city, Santa Ana, maybe, if Dickie remembered his Orange County maps correctly.

  They stayed on the margins, wide streets and low-slung stucco houses, laundry strung between porch railings, drying in the motionless air. Climbing a ramp to the freeway, gaining speed as they continued east. Dickie watched what he could see of Walter’s eyes from the backseat, Walter checking the rearview mirror, the side mirrors, then back out the windshield, a continuous, unbroken circuit.

  Sarah played with the radio, settling on a station for a few seconds, a couple bars of music or half a commercial before turning the dial again. Julian smoked and read through a small stack of maps, street-level schematics for an urban area with the name of the city cut out, small rectangular holes in the pages. No one spoke. Just the sound of the radio in the car, Sarah singing quietly to the hook of an old song she recognized, an appliance-store jingle.

  They stopped for gas on the edge of the desert. Walter pumped and Sarah went into the station and Dickie got out, stretched his legs. Julian stayed in the car, looking at his maps.

  Walter chewed a toothpick while he gripped the pump handle. “When was the last time you fired a gun?”

  Dickie watched his own reflection, distorted in the lenses of Walter’s sunglasses. “During the war.”

  “At anybody?”

  Dickie shook his head.

  Sarah came out of the station with a brown paper grocery bag. They drove for another hour, past the last signs of civilization save the road itself, and then they were off the road, Walter turning the wheel at some marker Dickie didn’t catch, out into the brown expanse, sand flying from the tires, engulfing them in a miniature dust storm. Walter rolled up his windows, lit a cigarette, hit the gas. The engine noise in the car was terrific. Visibility out the windshield was near zero, as far as Dickie could tell. Walter steered the wagon toward the one thing that could be glimpsed through the dust, the purple silhouettes of mountains in the distance. Sarah turned off the radio, set her head back, closed her eyes. Julian paged through the folded squares of his maps, seemingly oblivious to anything else.