Half World: A Novel (7 page)

20

Washington, D.C., Winter 1955

They had him visit an agency-approved physician in Washington. The doctor asked questions, ran tests, told Henry that he was suffering from nervous exhaustion, that his senses had been overrun by the stress of the last few months. Henry left the office with a small bottle of sedatives, a smaller bottle of sleeping pills.

When he returned to work there were days of nothing, anesthetized days. Henry sitting in his office, moving paper. Roy Pritchard came to visit. Henry’s secretary brought him coffee, avoided eye contact. Everyone avoided eye contact. Doors closed when he approached, conversations ceased in midsentence when he entered the room. Henry taking his pills, moving through the hallways, immaterial, an invisible man.

One morning he was summoned to a conference room by a couple of Marist’s men. There was no explanation for the call. When he was seated, they pulled down a projection screen and turned off the lights. A film came to life in front of him. Faces of American soldiers, one after another, skinny teenagers, sunken-eyed and gaunt. Unshaven, if they were old enough to grow beards. POWs in a cement room. They stared blankly at the camera. They recited long, rambling lists of grievances against the United States, denigrating their homes and families, telling their fellow soldiers to turn their arms against their commanders. Each
of them speaking in the same emotionless monotone, with the same lusterless look in their eyes.

The North Koreans were using brainwashing techniques they’d learned from the Chinese, maybe the Soviets. The voice came from the back of the conference room. Henry turned but the man who had spoken was standing in shadow. He introduced himself as a staff psychiatrist. Henry turned back to the screen. Sleep deprivation, torture, possibly drugs, the psychiatrist said. Drugs that create an overwhelming sense of paranoia, that sow doubt. Drugs that empty a man’s mind so it can be filled with something new.

I would like to say that the United States is an imperial, racist nation, bent on domination of the Asiatic countries and their benevolent people
. Words the boy on-screen would never have found in his own head.
I would like to say to my fellow soldiers that the enemy is behind you, the enemy is beside you.

Marist’s voice came from the back of the room. He said the boy’s name and rank, his hometown. He said that these soldiers were part of a mission that now appeared to have been compromised by Weir. Information passed to the Soviets and then on to the North Koreans.

The boy extended a shaking hand out of the frame and brought it back with a lit cigarette. His stare into the camera was direct, as if he was speaking to Henry, to the other men in the conference room.

Henry sat forward in his seat. He could feel his own mind working again, despite the sedatives. He could feel himself coming back, drawn through the fog toward the boys on-screen.

He asked how much film they had like this, how many POWs, and Marist asked how much Henry wanted to see.

*   *   *

He began watching every day, sitting alone in the conference room, looking at the films and the list of names and hometowns in the file folder. Private Milt Whitman, Private John Stone. Somebody’s fiancé, somebody’s son. He needed to watch these boys, to listen to them. He felt that he owed them this. They had been captured because of him, because
of Weir. There was no information on their current status but he felt in some irrational way he was keeping them alive by replaying their films. That if he stopped watching, if he took his eyes off the screen, then they would truly be lost.

*   *   *

One evening he entered the conference room to find a film already playing. Private Jacob Weiner projected against the far wall, the only soundless clip of the batch, the boy’s mouth moving mechanically, looking in his silence like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

Marist sat in a chair at the front of the conference table, the back of his head silhouetted against the screen. It was the moment in the film where Private Weiner cups his hands over his mouth and coughs. A lost boy from Camden, New Jersey, whom someone had brought up well, his politeness reflexive, his manners persevering despite war and captivity and torture. Somebody’s fiancé, somebody’s son.

“We need to find out how they did this,” Marist said. He did not turn from the screen. “Most officers would shrink from what we’ll need to do, what I’m asking you to do, but they haven’t seen this, they haven’t sat in this room. You understand the severity of what we’re dealing with better than anyone. What’s at stake. He taught you that. Weir.”

Marist lit a cigarette, still watching the screen. A close-up on Jacob Weiner’s face, the boy’s features four feet high, dominating the room.

“I listen to politicians tell me that the enemy is not real or that the threat is not as dire as we think and then I come back here and watch this to remind myself that they are fools. Or that they are the enemy themselves, possibly. How can we be sure? We know how patient they are, how deeply they have penetrated.”

Marist smoked, watching the next soldier, the next.

“I have nightmares of my wife and daughters speaking this way,” he said. “I have nightmares where they are on film, in a room like that, staring at a camera. Do you have those nightmares, Henry? After watching these boys? I’d imagine you do.”

Henry could imagine Ginnie on that screen, in that room. He could
imagine Hannah. He watched Private Milt Whitman, Private John Stone. The boys’ eyes in the conference room, lightless, emptied. Their minds broken like plates.

“You are alone here, Henry,” Marist said. “They all wanted to cut you off, cast you out. But I told them that I needed you. And that is the truth. I need someone who knows what is at stake.”

Private Weiner was back on the screen. Henry watched the boy cup his hands over his mouth again, cough.

Marist said, “We need to know how this is done.”

21

Oakland, Spring 1956

Ginnie sat on the floor beside Thomas’s bed and read to him from a children’s book about San Francisco. The pages were full of local landmarks, the wharf and the hills and the streetcars imagined as playfully askew renderings in charcoal and watercolor.

She could hear the sound of audience laughter from the living room, where Hannah was watching
You Bet Your Life.
Ginnie pointed to the characters in the book. She asked Thomas to identify them, but he sat passively, staring at the pages as he so often stared at her, at anyone, looking through rather than engaging in any way. She found the page with the streetcars, and he sat up, leaned forward, focusing on the drawings, and she asked him questions about the lines and types of cars, the B Geary and J Church, the Baby Tens and Iron Monsters. He was with her now, answering each inquiry in his metallic monotone, then standing to retrieve his timetables from the desk on the other side of his room.

Another night without Henry. He was working late now, sometimes very late, even spending the night in the city. She hadn’t asked for an explanation. They didn’t talk about his work. She knew that it made him uncomfortable to lie.

There had been plenty of talk at some of the parties in Washington, what the Russians were up to, the Chinese, headlines and generalities, but as the nights grew later and drinks were refilled, the men retired to
the living rooms and the women moved into the kitchens and voices lowered, talk loosened. What their husbands were really up to. Dropping leaflets over the Ukraine, dropping paratroopers into Albania, toppling Mosaddegh in Iran. The women intoxicated by their husbands’ roles in shaping history and by their own proximity to those roles, what they felt they contributed in the way of advice, a female perspective, whispers across pillows in the dark.

Ginnie had little to add to these conversations. It seemed reckless to her, as she knew it did to Henry, discussing these things openly after too many cocktails at someone’s country home. To add a layer of inebriated innuendo and speculation onto an already opaque subject. Even when they were alone, she and Henry didn’t discuss his work. They talked about the parties instead, marveling at the money and servants and silverware, leaving the more sensitive subjects where they belonged, in Henry’s office, in Henry’s head.

This was the third night in a row he’d been away. She’d told herself that she wasn’t going to keep track, but she was. Three nights this week, three nights the week before. She slept fitfully when he was away, waiting for him to return safe from what still seemed like a foreign city.

They all slept fitfully. Hannah still woke in the night from dreams of the bomb. Ginnie tried to comfort her, but there was nothing she could say. Hannah only wanted Henry. Only Henry could reassure her.

More TV laughter from the living room. Ginnie stood and replaced the book on Thomas’s shelf. Thomas plugged himself into the wall, lay back on the floor beside his bed. She turned out the light, covered him with a sheet and a blanket.

Thomas was shouting, suddenly.
The B Geary line runs continuously from six
A.M.
to eight
P.M.
and on an intermittent overnight schedule. Streetcars running every ten minutes during the workday, every half hour thereafter.

Ginnie knelt beside him, held her finger to her lips.

The Geary Street rail service will close at the end of the year,
he shouted,
with buses replacing the streetcars. Thereafter streetcar service will permanently cease operation.

“Switch,” she whispered. “Switch.” She could see Thomas struggling
for the meaning of the word, his eyes circling the room, then it came to him and he pressed the imagined button on his chest, closed his mouth, his eyes, the power draining from his engine.

Ginnie could hear a big-band theme from the living room, the quiz show signing off. She leaned in and kissed Thomas on the forehead. She stood and watched him flinch, recoiling, as if wishing away the simple feeling of contact.

22

Henry’s visions began not long after they’d started with the johns. Fleeting things, in windows, mirrors. The moments in the north bedroom that Henry turned away from, brought back to him later, as if trapped in the glass. The car windshield, the television in the living room of the house in Oakland, its screen dark in the early morning, Ginnie and the children asleep.

A john with Elizabeth, a john with Emma. A john holding Elizabeth’s wrists and Henry looks away, down from the glowing window to his ledger. A john pulling Emma’s hair, slapping her across the face. A john holding Elizabeth by the neck, shouting into her open mouth.

At a movie theater with Hannah
and the images on-screen twist into a nightmare memory. At the breakfast table, cutting Thomas’s toast and a movement in the window catches Henry’s eye. A john’s arm swinging and a girl falling and the first body climbing onto the second.

He looks at Hannah, at Thomas. He looks at Ginnie in the passenger seat beside him and can see the north bedroom in the car’s window beyond.

That is Henry Gladwell. Henry March would not allow these things. He needs to remind himself of the distinction. This is something Weir taught him. Every operation has casualties. There are always compro
mises made for a larger good. This was why other names were necessary. There were practical reasons and then there were deeper concerns.

A girl in a window with a man who means her harm.

Henry Gladwell, Henry March. He excuses himself from the dinner table and looks in the bathroom mirror, the face reflected there. Repeating the name. You have to go home at night, Weir had said. Don’t forget this. You have to remind yourself of who you really are.

23

The man from Washington arrived on the first afternoon of the summer. He seemed like an extension of the day, bright and blond and blue-eyed, tan from his time on the road in the rented convertible he’d parked halfway down the block.

His sleeves were rolled to his elbows, his shirt open at the collar. He approached Henry with a matinee-idol smile.

“Let me guess. They didn’t tell you I was coming.”

Henry shook his head.

“Dr. Cameron Clarke,” he said, offering his hand. “You can call me Chip. Paul Marist says hello.”

*   *   *

Clarke walked through the north living room, taking in the furnishings, the artwork.

“This is really something.”

Henry poured Clarke a scotch in the kitchen. The man was familiar somehow. Henry tried to place the face. The name didn’t register, but the name could have been invented two weeks ago, could have been created in the convertible on his drive west.

“Where’s the other man?” Clarke said. He sat on the sofa, sipping his scotch.

“Dorn.”

Clarke lifted a packet out of his shirt pocket, set a cigarette on his lower lip. “I’ve been told he’s quite a character.”

“That would be an accurate description.”

“How many”—Clarke lit a match, looking for the word—“
ladies
do you have working?”

“Two.”

That Saturday-afternoon smile again. “Ever thought you’d be doing something like this, Mr. March?”

“Gladwell.”

“Gladwell, right. Mind if I call you Henry?”

“That’s fine.”

Clarke shook his head, delighted by the entire thing.

Henry said, “Did we meet in Washington?”

“I don’t believe so. Do I look familiar?”

“No.”

“Well, there you go.” Clarke sipped his drink. “I have a delivery for you, down in the car. Locked in the glove box, don’t worry. I meant to bring it up, but I was so eager to see the place.” He leaned back on the couch, smiling at the prints on the walls. “This is really something else.”

“We should go down.”

“Of course.” Clarke rose from the sofa, swallowed the last of his scotch, shaking a sliver of ice into his mouth. “You’ll want to meet Stormy.” He looked at Henry. “That’s what we call it. I have no idea who came up with the name, but it fits. Just wait until you see Stormy in action.”

*   *   *

They sat around Henry’s desk in the office. Clarke opened the box and unrolled a sheet of newspaper. He removed a glass vial and held it between his thumb and index finger. The vial was half full with a clear liquid. He turned it to catch the light from the desk lamp.

He talked about dosage. He talked about onset period and duration of effects. He talked about precautionary measures to take when handling, not to let the liquid touch their clothes, their skin.

“What’s a microgram?” Dorn said.

Clarke set the vial on the desk. They all stared, as if waiting for it to do something on its own.

“One millionth of a gram,” Clarke said.

“That means nothing to me.”

“One-tenth the size of a grain of sand.”

“And how much is in there with the water?”

“Five hundred micrograms. One dose.”

“How much is too much?” Henry said.

Clarke shook his head. “You can’t overdose. Not that we’ve seen.”

“Have you tried it?” Dorn said.

“Yes.”

“And?”

Clarke smiled. “And everything changes.”

He said that everyone back east used the pet name for the drug. Small caps when written, whispered when spoken.
STORMY.
They even used the name in official correspondence, though official correspondence on the subject was rare and discouraged.
STORMY
was a more accurate description, Clarke said, more elegant than its full Christian name.

“Which would be what?” Dorn said.

Clarke lit a cigarette, shook his match out into the ashtray on Henry’s desk. “Lysergic acid diethylamide.”

Dorn stared at the vial, tapping his teeth with his fingernail.

“How many doses did you bring?” Henry said.

“Enough.”

“Where are they?”

“They’re secure.”

“They’re not secure unless they’re with me.”

“I’ll hang on to them,” Clarke said.

“That’s not acceptable.”

“I’ve been instructed to hang on to them.” Clarke pulled on his cigarette, set it to rest in the ashtray. He looked across the desk at Henry. “Do you want to try it? You could consider it hands-on research.”

“No.”

Clarke looked at Dorn. “How about you?”

“No.” Henry answered before Dorn could open his mouth.

“Have it your way.” Clarke sat back, lifted his cigarette. “But you have no idea what you’re missing.”