Half World: A Novel (38 page)

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.

There was a presence, close, the smell of cold air clinging to the skin of a jacket. There was weight there, someone sitting in the empty seat beside him. Dickie unable to lift his face from his hands, to stop the noise he was making. A shift in the weight. He felt a face move closer, warm breath on his hands, his cheeks. You do not need to open your eyes. You do not need to uncover your face. The voice low and close within the surrounding noise of the train. Let me be with you through this. Let me pray with you. Dickie shaking, making that terrible noise. The man’s body beside his own.

Their legs touching at one place, at two.

CODA

In the gallery a man is touching her arm, complimenting the work. The woman beside the man smiles, nodding in agreement. The space is full, the crowd spilling out the doors and onto the sidewalk. Some sit on the bus stop bench with their drinks. The music comes from the record player in the other room and it is a woman singing in French, torch songs, war songs, and it is a sound she always imagines calling out of the open doors into the night.

Bert is standing by the refreshment table holding the baby and Hannah catches his eye and he smiles.

There was a postcard that morning from her brother in Chicago. A photograph of the river that cuts through the city, train tracks crossing the water. She wants to see him, wants proof that he is healthy and safe, but she does not want to force herself into his life. He has a new life now, one he created on his own. She has the postcard folded in the front pocket of her jeans. She always writes back, invites him to come when he’s ready, to see her city, to meet his niece.

Some laughter from outside, more people squeezing into the gallery. She watches the door. She always watches the door when this record plays.

That morning while sweeping she found a small shard of glass in the corner of the gallery. She couldn’t remember anything breaking in that
room and then she remembered the wine bottle, the jagged glass held like a weapon. How long ago? Her hands on Dickie’s shoulders, moving him back across the room to the couch on the other side.

How many times she has swept this room since that night, and yet today, a single sliver of glass, no longer than her thumbnail.

The song ends and one of Bert’s friends steps to the record player in the work space. She expects to hear a different record, something loud and modern, but when the music returns it is the woman singing in French again, the sound filling the room, just below the laughter and conversation.

A man touches her arm and compliments the work on the walls.

She watches the door. She always watches the door.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

MKULTRA, the CIA’s human experimentation project, was active from the 1950s through at least the late 1960s, and included clandestine safe houses in New York City and San Francisco, as well as tests on unwitting subjects in prisons and mental institutions.

In January 1973, all official project records were destroyed.

This novel, though inspired by fact, is a work of fiction.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to many writers and historians whose work informed and inspired this book:

Philip Agee’s
CIA Diary
;
A Very Private Woman
, Nina Burleigh’s biography of Mary Meyer; Alex Constantine’s
Psychic Dictatorship in the U.S.A.; The Fifties
and
The Coldest Winter
by David Halberstam;
A Look Over My Shoulder
by Richard Helms and William Hood;
James Jesus Angleton,
Michael Holzer’s masterful biography of the Agency’s longtime head of counterintelligence; Ronald Kessler’s
Inside the CIA;
Cold Warrior
by Tom Mangold;
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
by Victor Marchetti and John Marks;
The Search for ‘The Manchurian Candidate’
by John Marks, the seminal work on Project MKULTRA; David C. Martin’s
Wilderness of Mirrors
;
The Man Who Kept the Secrets
, Thomas Powers’s biography of CIA Director Richard Helms;
In the Care of Devils
by Sylvia Press; John Ranelegh’s
The Agency; The Very Best Men
by Evan Thomas; Timothy Weiner’s
Legacy of Ashes; Inside CIA’s Private World,
edited by H. Bradford Westerfield;
and
Molehunt
,
David Wise’s account of James Angleton’s obsession with possible Soviet penetration within the CIA.

There was also much to be found in the files and Congressional Reports of the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission, as well as in the archives at Stanford University.

Simon & Schuster
Reading Group Guide

HALF WORLD

S
COTT
O’C
ONNOR

The year is 1956 and CIA analyst Henry March has uprooted his wife, Ginnie, and his children, sensitive Hannah and autistic Thomas, to bring them to a new home in Oakland, California. Tasked with running clandestine mind control and hallucinogenic drug experiments on unsuspecting men, March sets up shop in a makeshift brothel on San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill with his partners Jimmy Dorn and Dr. Cameron Clarke. March attempts to keep his family life separate from his work across the bay; but when maintaining dual identities proves impossible, he vanishes suddenly, leaving behind his family and the truth about what happened within the brothel walls.

Almost twenty years later, Dickie Ashby is dispatched to investigate a series of bank robberies in Orange County that appear to be somehow connected to the CIA’s mind control experiments. His investigation leads him first to a group of young radicals obsessed with finding March, and eventually to Hannah March, whom he decides to protect no matter what the cost.

Lyrically written and utterly compelling, Scott O’Connor’s
Half World
is a fresh and revealing exploration of a hidden chapter of American history and the individuals impacted by the actions of a government hungry for progress at any cost.

Questions for Discussion

1. How do March, Dorn, and Dr. Clarke justify their actions at the Telegraph Hill apartment? What do they believe they are accomplishing, and why do they feel that their violence, brutality, and manipulation are essential to the job? Is it patriotism that drives them, duty to their superiors, belief in the project, or something else?

2. March’s sudden disappearance leaves a void in the lives of his wife, children, and his partners Dorn and Clarke. Who is most impacted by March’s betrayal and why? How does March’s disappearance impact Hannah and Ginnie’s relationship in particular? How does March’s betrayal compare to that of his CIA mentor and colleague, Arthur Weir?

3. From “the incident” at the CIA Christmas party (“March standing before them, a pale ghost,” there, and then gone) to creating a new identity for himself as Henry Gladwell to constructing a life for himself as “the white ghost” in Mexico, March spends most of the novel trying to disappear. What drives March’s obsession with distancing himself from his life and who he is? Why is becoming a ghost preferable to being a man? By the end of the novel, have March’s efforts to disappear proven successful?

4. Young Hannah is deathly afraid of a nuclear attack on San Francisco, “radiation in the air; desperate criminal activity; still-falling masonry.” She implores her father to photograph the city for her to ensure her that things are normal and she is safe. How does such a fearful child grow into an adult who seems to actively courts danger, from hitchhiking with strangers and leaving her apartment and gallery unlocked to taking in Dickie and venturing to Mexico to seek her father? Why does Hannah remain obsessed with a photo of her father taken outside the Merchants Exchange in San Francisco?

5. When asked by her new neighbors in Oakland what her husband does for a living, Ginnie identifies Henry as a photographer. Years later, we learn that Henry is working as a photographer in Mexico, among the other jobs he takes on there. Hannah also works as a photographer in Los Angeles, capturing images of runaways and architecture in between her corporate gigs. Why is photography the art form that Henry and Hannah choose to capture the world? Why do Henry and Hannah prefer photographing people who are unaware of their cameras and believe that “there was some sacred space that disappeared when they were aware”?

6. Dickie lies to the Sons about his experiences with mind control but feels liberated by telling them the truth about the rest of his life, from Vietnam to Ann Arbor to Portland. How much of Dickie is truly invested in the mission of the Sons, and how much of him is pretending to be one of them? How does Dickie’s life change when he participates in the bank robbery and shoots one of the guards?

7. How does Dickie’s relationship with Mary Margaret and the fallout from the bombing in Portland compare to his loss of his mother and witnessing his father’s descent into dementia? How does the way in which Dickie is impacted by the events in his constructed life differ from the way that he is impacted by events in his “real” life?

8. Years after his experiences at Telegraph Hill, Denver Dan/Lawrence Tarhammer has renamed himself Robert Zelinsky, a science fiction writer whose novels about mind control recount stories similar to his and galvanize young radicals. Why is it important to Zelinksy to document these cases of mind control? How did the mind control experiments and fallout from them shape his own life? Were you surprised to see the extent to which Zelinsky’s life was transformed by what happened that night in Chinatown? How does he become crucial in connecting Dickie’s story to March’s story?

9. Reading Zelinsky’s novels, Dickie observes: “The books have a lot of this kind of doubling back, characters wondering what memories can or can’t be trusted, who and what’s been planted to push them forward on their missions versus what’s real, what’s actually been lived.” How is this statement applicable to Dickie’s assessments and memories of own life? How is it applicable to Hannah’s?

10. Twenty years after the Telegraph Hill experiments, Jimmy Dorn is sick, isolated, and deeply impacted by what he’s done. How has Dorn’s work with March affected his life and relationships? Why doesn’t he seek treatment for the cancer wreaking havoc on his body? What drives Dorn to go after Dickie and March? What would it mean for him to die without confronting March?

11. As an adult, Thomas rides the rails in Chicago, looking for men who have no home, no friends, who are vagrant, alcoholic, and struggling—just the type of men that March and Dorn sought to bring back to the apartment in the early days of their work in San Francisco. How is the work done by Thomas and his father different, and how is the work similar? How do projects with such disparate ends come to rely on the same type of recruits?

12. From Henry March/Henry Gladwell to Richard Ashby/Dick Hinkle and all of the Sons, many characters in the novel have multiple names and dual lives. What does having an alias do for these characters? How does constructing a second identity provide the characters with a refuge in which to hide from themselves, as well as from others? What do these dual identities say about human nature?

13. 
Half World
spans decades and employs multiple narrative voices to tell the story. How did the continual shift in narration impact your reading of the novel? How would the story have been different if the entire novel was told from March’s perspective, or Hannah’s, or Dickie’s?

14. By the end of the novel, which of the characters, if any, have achieved what they set out to accomplish? Which have found redemption?

15. Discuss the book’s title. What is a “half world”? Which of the characters is living in a half world? Is it possible or even desirable to leave a half world for a whole world?

Enhance Your Book Club

1. Watch the film
The Manchurian Candidate
(whichever version you prefer: 1962 or 2004). Discuss the connections you observe between the film and Project MKULTRA as evidenced in
Half World
.

2. Read the documents from the 1977 hearing held by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to look further into Project MKULTRA:
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/13inmate_ProjectMKULTRA.pdf
.

3. Visit Scott O’Connor’s Tumblr,
whoishenrymarch.tumblr.com
, to see photographs of Los Angeles in the 1950s and the 1970s, listen to songs that Scott listened to while writing, and learn about some of the events and ideas that inspired the novel.

4. Read
Johnny Tremain
and discuss the Sons of Liberty, and how this group influenced the Sons in
Half World
.

A Conversation with the Author

How did you first come across Project MK Ultra? Was this the starting point for the novel, or did you begin somewhere else and bring in the idea of mind control experiments later?

I was interested in writing about the origins of the CIA, and came across some throwaway references to failed early projects and Agency embarrassments. One of these had to do with agents opening safe houses and hiring prostitutes to surreptitiously drug johns with LSD, and that’s when the antenna went up.

What kind of research did you do for the novel? Were you able to interview any CIA agents involved in MK Ultra or any individuals claiming to have been subjects of mind control experiments? Is STORMY meant to be LSD, or is it another drug of your own imagination?

I read widely, visited archives and locations, talked a little, listened. Most of the work is imaginative, trying to conjure a time and place and the people who could have been there.

STORMY was, in fact, the Agency’s pet name for LSD.

Did you base the characters of March and Dorn on real individuals?

No. Characters are amalgams of many things. There may be some research into historical figures (often from histories seemingly unrelated to the topic at hand), but there is also personal observation, and memory, and the mining of many of my own traits which all combine to start a character off. As the writing of the book progresses, they take on a life of their own within the world of the novel.

Weir says “I’ll take a bad poem over a good newspaper any day,” and after his disappearance, March “spends hours with [Weir’s] books, reading and rereading poems he had memorized long ago, forcing himself to see them stripped of his early impressions.” It seemed surprising that Weir, and then March, would be interested in poetry. How did you decide to make this a shared passion of the two men?

Many of the CIA’s early officers had Ivy League educations. They were incredibly well read. James Jesus Angleton, who was the Agency’s head of counterintelligence for many years, was a poet and editor in his younger days. Poetry was seen as something to decode, a text with hidden meanings. There was an intellect and sensibility to which both poetry and intelligence work appealed to.

Why did you decide to have Thomas be autistic? Do you think that some part of March recognized that his son could grow up to be the sort of man that he and Dorn sought to bring back to the brothel on Telegraph Hill?

I never really intended for Thomas to be autistic. The definition of that word has changed a lot in fifty years. I try not to diagnose characters. Thomas is Thomas, if that makes any sense. That said, there is an incredible, wrenching documentary by David E. Simpson called
Refrigerator Mothers
that looks at the history of autism diagnosis and treatment that haunted me throughout the writing of the book.

Henry March is well aware that he is preying on men like the man Thomas will become. For Henry, this becomes impossible to reconcile.

Did you find it difficult to write about the type of brutality, violence, and manipulation that March, Dorn, and Clarke impose on their subjects?

There were moments when I wondered what kind of dark line I was following. But all sorts of scenes are difficult. Characters acting charitably to one another is hard to write, too.

What is your take on Project MK Ultra and various CIA mind control conspiracy theories? For example, some claim that Sirhan Sirhan was under mind control when he assassinated RFK, and that Jonestown was a site of MK Ultra experimentation. Do you think there is any truth to these theories?

ULTRA was a deviously perfect design. Every participant at every stage was deniable, making it almost impossible to discern what was real and what was fantasy or madness. It has become the Great American Conspiracy Theory. Everything is possible, but it’s hard to say what’s probable. I have no idea how far it actually extended.

Until Lawrence Tarhammer shoots the convenience store worker in Chinatown on Halloween night, the experiments at Telegraph Hill seem to have little impact on the outside world. How did it feel to cross that line and show the ways in which the experiments could go horribly wrong?

Tarhammer’s action really kicked the book into high gear for me. That scene pulled the story along through to the end.

How did you decide how to end the novel? Did you consider any alternative outcomes for the various characters?

The end came at the end of writing the first draft. The last twenty pages, all in a rush, after years of trying to figure it out. Once it emerged, there was never another possibility.

What writers and novels, if any, influenced this book?

Michael Ondaatje, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Don Delillo, T. S. Eliot, C. P. Cavafy, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Larkin, Philip K. Dick. . . . The list could go on and on. Cormac McCarthy has said that “books are made out of books,” and I think it’s also safe to say that writers are made out of other writers.

What message do you hope readers will take away from book? Do you think Americans need to be more concerned about what the government and the CIA might be doing today without our knowledge?