Half World: A Novel (24 page)

“You thought you were crazy.”

“Yes.”

“What hospital?”

“I need you take take off the hood.”

“We don’t have to do anything.”

“I know. I’m asking you.”

The voice sucks, blows smoke. “We’ll see.”

“Please.”

“We’ll see.” Chair legs scraping. The man stands, his voice rising in height. “Were you working alone?”

“Yes,” Dickie says.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Footsteps, more than one pair, coming toward him. More movement, grabbing Dickie’s arm.

“What are you giving me?”

“Sleep,” the voice says.

“What are you giving me?”

“Sleep, sleep.”

*   *   *

It seems like one of the restaurants back in Davenport, an Italian place where he and Father Bill had lunch a couple of times, but it can’t be, it has to be a dream or something, the weather out the front window is all fucked, even for Iowa, rain, then bright sun, then rain. Dickie is ravenous, attacking a bowl of tortellini, half a loaf of bread. Father Bill sits
on the other side of the table, sipping his seltzer, watching Dickie eat. A waiter stands back by the door to the kitchen. When Dickie looks he sees that the waiter is holding one of Javier Buñuel’s signs, the long list of the damned.

“You gave them your name,” Father Bill says. “Your real name.”

“Yes.”

“That’s what I like to see. That level of commitment.”

“I know.”

“All in.”

Dickie takes another mouthful of pasta. “They’re not just a bank crew, are they?”

“We have our suspicions.”

“Meaning what?”

“If I knew that,” Father Bill says, “you wouldn’t be here.”

“Here?” Dickie lifts his face from his bowl, looks around the restaurant.

“What was that you said about a hospital?” Father Bill asks. “You mentioned a hospital and they bit. If they were just a bank crew that line would have landed with a thud.”

Dickie sets down his fork, wipes his mouth with a napkin. He pulls
The Night Visitor
out of his back pocket, sets it on the table. “Do you know these books?”

Father Bill looks at the cover.

Dickie says, “The author said he heard Buñuel’s story, other victims’ stories, and incorporated them into the books.”

Father Bill picks up the book, flips pages.

“It’s about a guy named Mr. _____,” Dickie says, “and his band of Merry—”

“Schizophrenics?”

“You know the books.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Maybe he heard their stories,” Dickie says. “This group. Put them into the books.”

“This man in the room with you,” Father Bill says. “You think he’s Mr. _____?”

“Is that how you pronounce it?”

Bill studies the cover, looks pensive. “What are their stories?” Bill says “stories” with an additional affect. Stories meaning fiction. Stories meaning delusions.

“I don’t know,” Dickie says.

“Well.” Bill sets down the book, looks past Dickie, out the restaurant windows. “Then that’s why you’re here.”

*   *   *

He opens his eyes into brightness. He has to squint. His pupils are sensitive from the time under the hood, but he tries to force them wide, absorb the light. He is hungry for it.

He breathes deeply. The hood is gone. The room comes slowly into focus. A large cement box, walls chipped, flaking skins of old paint. A damp space, humid, lit with two rows of fluorescents in protective cages, fastened to the low ceiling.

He is alone in the center of the room. There are two empty chairs a few feet in front of him. There is something on the wall behind the empty chairs. Something large, a rectangle with long alternating bars of black and white, a gray square in the bottom corner, rows of small white stars.

His eyes focusing, slowly. It is a flag hanging in front of him, an inverted American flag, black and white and gray, a reversed image, a colorless twin.

He cannot see behind him. He suddenly needs to make sure there is no one else in the room, no one watching, but he can’t turn his head that far. His hands and ankles are tied. A leather belt encircles his stomach and the back of the chair. He is wearing the same clothes they caught him in, jeans and a western shirt. He has soiled himself, he can tell by the feel and the smell. He has no idea how many times it has happened, how long he has been sitting in it. His feet are bare and cold.

A door opens from somewhere behind him and he tries to turn his neck but he can’t swivel far enough. Someone enters the room. Footsteps on the cement floor. He notices a drain in the floor for the first
time, directly under his chair. The footsteps get closer, and then a man is there, passing Dickie, sitting in one of the chairs opposite. The man is Dickie’s age, short and slight, with a full brown mustache but a hairline that starts up at the top of his head. He is wearing a checkered shirt tucked tightly into stiff-looking jeans. Everything about him seems small and hard, precise. Hands like paws. Front teeth protruding slightly from his closed lips.

A girl passes by. Dickie hadn’t heard her enter, and then he sees why: bare feet stick out of the bottoms of her jeans. She sits next to the ratlike man. She is probably six inches taller than he is. Blond, fresh-faced, with that serene, half-glazed look common to cult members, religious casualties. Like the light in her eyes has, maybe, a dimmer switch.

He has seen their faces now, so he knows a decision has been made. He’s either leaving the room with them, eventually, or he’s not leaving the room.

The man lights a cigarette, passes his pack and matches to the girl. She sets them in her lap. They both watch Dickie.

“My name is Walter,” the man says. “That is my real name, my only name.” The familiar, reedy voice. “You are Richard Benjamin Hinkle of San Francisco, California.”

“That’s not my name.” Dickie’s voice is little more than a dry whisper.

“It is for now.” Walter glances at the girl and she stands and walks past Dickie, reappears a moment later with a paper cup. She holds it to Dickie’s scabbed lips. Cool water. He almost chokes, coughing and sputtering but refusing to stop until he has drained the cup.

The girl sits again, places the cup in her lap beside the cigarettes and matches.

“We’ve never caught a ghost before,” Walter says. He tilts his head to the side as he smokes, studying Dickie. “Tell us your story, Richard Hinkle. Tell us your ghost story.”

“Can I have more water?”

Walter nods and the girl stands again, filling the cup from somewhere on the other side of the room, returning to hold it to Dickie’s mouth. She lights a cigarette and takes a drag and then holds it for Dickie. He inhales
deeply. He looks up at the girl, nods, grateful, embarrassed, suddenly, of his smell and mess.

She leaves him the cigarette to hold in his lips while he speaks. He tells them of his time in Vietnam, in the underground. The same establishing of credibility that worked with the student groups. Except this time he tells them everything, about Father Bill, about the explosion in Portland, about Jack in his Davenport apartment. The truth is all he has. No one is looking for him here, no one is going to rescue him. He can see that these two will only believe him if he gives them everything, if he holds nothing back. All in.

When he is finished, Walter and the girl stand, and the girl brings Dickie another cup of water, a few pills that she places on his outstretched tongue. And then they are gone, the door closing behind them, and Dickie is alone in the room again, with the lights and the drain and the colorless flag.

*   *   *

A tall black kid was untying him when he woke, pulling the last of the straps from Dickie’s wrists. Dickie’s arms hung heavily at his sides. Everything logy, slow to respond. Whatever they’d given him made him feel like a big, dumb animal.

The kid was a few years younger than Walter, in his early twenties, so thin as to seem almost emaciated. He looked like one of the runaways Dickie had seen on Hollywood Boulevard, crossing below the stairs of Javier Buñuel’s perch carrying bedrolls and ratty backpacks. Everything skinny except for the full Afro sitting on top of his head like a space helmet. He was surprisingly strong, though. He got Dickie up and over to a corner of the room. There was a hole in the floor where Dickie could relieve himself.

Nothing much else on this side of the room. Just the hole, a water spigot set into the wall, a big iron door, now closed. The kid helped Dickie out of his soiled clothes, left the room, came back in with a hose, which he attached to the water spigot. Dickie washed himself. The kid stood at the door, looking down at his tennis shoes, chewing a fingernail. When Dickie
was finished, the kid left the room again, returned with an outfit of green hospital scrubs for Dickie to put on. Nothing for his feet. While Dickie was getting dressed, the kid left again, came back with a plate of black beans and rice, a lump of boiled carrots. Dickie sat against the wall and devoured the food, grabbing clumsily with his fingers, choking, too much too soon. He asked for some water and the kid nodded to the spigot.

He splashed water on his face, drank from his cupped hands. Looked around the room, studying the walls, searching for a hole, a deep crack, something they could be watching him through. Not sure why it mattered, but he wanted to know where they were, where their eyes were hiding.

The kid was gone. Dickie’s plate was gone, the iron door was closed. The lights buzzed overhead. He crawled to a corner, as far as he could from the chair where he’d been bound. He lay down, closed his eyes, slept.

*   *   *

“My name is Sarah. That is my real name, my only name.”

Dickie opened his eyes. The blond girl was there, Walter’s sidekick. Dickie was lying on the floor, cheek pressed to the damp cement, so everything appeared sideways. He felt slightly more alert, was able to get to his knees, turn the room back to its upright state. He was still untied, and alone in the room with her, so he figured there was some mechanism in place if he were to make a move, someone watching, aiming something at him. Or maybe she was tougher than she looked, maybe she’d have him back on the floor in no time flat if he tried anything. Either way, he accepted the food she’d brought, the water, the pills, the cigarette.

She was wearing a loose summer dress, its straps hugging her pale shoulders. Her feet were still bare.

The chair with the straps had been removed from the room. They sat in the remaining two chairs, and she talked while he ate, telling him her story, starting with her childhood, her abusive parents, working up through her teenage years, the boy-and-drug experiments, through to a year of junior college, a suicide attempt, hospitalization. She presented
it all without shame or guilt or remorse. It had the dry, confessional ring of a rehab monologue, the rap Dickie’d heard from many of the kids in the army hospitals in Vietnam. Dickie smoked, watched the gnawed cuticles of her fingernails as she gestured and spoke. He had heard this story before. It was recounted, almost verbatim, by a character in one of Zelinsky’s books.

She left him, and while he was alone he slept, or walked the room, looking for holes in the walls. Wondering who was watching, Sarah or Walter or the other kid. The overhead lights burned all the time.

When she returned they sat in the chairs and Dickie ate and listened to more of her story, the experiments in the hospital, the torture, the sensory deprivation, the drugs. He remembered it all from Zelinsky’s book. They had sucked out her identity, her name and personality, leaving a clean white space. Then she was given a new name, with new memories, a loving childhood, a spotless adolescence, this new person squeezed into her brain, one drop at a time, until she was full with it, and then she went out into the world and lived that life.

She came and went. Each time, she picked her story up exactly where she’d left off. Dickie wasn’t sure how long she’d been talking, over how many hours or days. He tried to get his head out of the room, think past the walls, the current moment. Didn’t have much success. He was here, that was all. Whatever they were giving him now was not as powerful a sedative as before, but it still kept him cloudy and slow. He considered not taking what was offered, but figured that they’d find out soon enough, simply inject him with what they wanted him to have. That and the memory of withdrawal kept him swallowing the pills Sarah held out for him.

She came and went. She gave him back the copy of
Johnny Tremain
that Zelinsky had given him. She told him about the new, false life she’d lived. Her job, her fiancé, a failed pregnancy. The moment, on the drive home from her gynecologist, when she realized what had been done to her and began to piece together her old, true life.

When she was finished telling her story, she stopped coming. Dickie waited, read his copy of
Johnny Tremain.
Alone for hours, maybe another day.

When she returned, it was with Walter.

“Your story panned out,” Walter said. “The explosion in Portland, the dead man.” He lit a cigarette. “But what does this give me, really? You didn’t tell me anything I couldn’t have read in a newspaper.”

“So you read the newspaper.”

“Don’t fuck with me.”

Dickie motioned for a cigarette. Sarah looked to Walter and when he nodded she lit one, handed it to Dickie.

“There was a police shooting,” Dickie said. “Somewhere in the plains, I think. It was on the news when you found me.”

Walter worked his lower lip against the bristles of his mustache, nodded.

“A young woman and a young man were killed,” Dickie said. “Radicals from the Portland explosion.”

“Yes.”

“How long has it been?”

“Nice try.”

“Not long?”

“No.”

“I knew them,” Dickie said.

“They don’t have the boy’s name.”

“They don’t, yet?”

“No.”

“I do.” Dickie sat, an attempt to give Walter a slight height advantage. “I’ll give you the name and you have someone make a call. Let the cops check it out.”

Walter worked his mustache, finally reached into the front pocket of his jeans, came away with a handful of pills, shook out a few he was looking for.