Half World: A Novel (37 page)

6

1 bookcase

1 lot of electrical small parts including microphones, etc.

2 cameras, mounted

1 camera, loose

1 tripod

2 buckets paint, black

1 folding card table

2 sealed-beam work lights with clips

2 extension cords

Assorted cans of meat, vegetables, fruit

1 chair

1 electric hot plate

1 ceramic coffeepot

1 lamp

1 cot with sleeping bag

1 cardboard suitcase, with film

1 recorder, with headphones

1 man, standing, listening

The ghost, alone in his room.

*   *   *

There was a name now, in the air around him. He sat on the edge of his cot in the darkness and the name buzzed like a fly, circling. He swatted at it with an open hand but it was insistent, its small noise growing larger, the only sound he could hear.

In the beginning he had come to this country, working his way south, changing towns, rooms within towns every few months. A room in _______ with crying children on the other side of the thin wall. A room in _______ with a sheet in the window to block the sun and keep out the birds. He stayed off the streets as much as possible. When he was on the streets, he watched for Americans, white faces.

He had some money. He learned the language. He paid a woman in _______ to sit with him three times a week and go through books, line by line. He went to the towns’ small, shabby cinemas. He practiced his Spanish in the dark, speaking along with the faces on screen, watching the same films two or three times a week. He grew to know Mexican cinema of all stripes, the actors and actresses, the names of the directors and cinematographers. He found the
novelas
some of the films were based on and picked his way through the grammar, the familiar plots, hoarding words. Alone in his rooms, he read the
novelas
aloud to hear his voice carrying the sound.

He did not read the newspapers. He wanted to know of nothing beyond the spaces he moved within. He kept a small radio and there was a station that arrived when the weather was warm that played film music most of the night. He was constantly wanting for sleep. It took him months to get used to the diet, the oversweet drinks. He took to rolling his own cigarettes because the Mexican cigarettes were unpalatable. The coffee was good, though, dark and rich. The coffee made up for the cigarettes. He grew accustomed to taking it with milk. Moving rooms, moving towns. He finally visited a dentist in _______ about the pain in his teeth and the man pulled the rotten bone from his mouth and set metal in its place. An infection set in and he was delirious for days, his face throbbing like a guitar string. He found himself at the house of the woman who taught him Spanish and she brought him inside and bent him over the sink in her bathroom and placed
towels soaked in tequila in his mouth until his fever had subsided. He was left with the taste of metal in his gums, on his tongue. This faded but never left him entirely. The new teeth buzzed sometimes, in parts of certain towns. Coming into a radio field, perhaps, some kind of invisible current.

There were other Americans in the towns, criminals, artists, alcoholic businessmen fleeing their losses or their wives. In later years, young men began to appear, avoiding war, unkempt, bearded, believing that hair made a disguise, false names made a disguise. Not understanding the difference between hiding and disappearing.

Spiders in his room the size of a child’s fist.

He bought a camera and lenses and a tripod. Films of various quality. He found work as a photographer and then as something else, developing a reputation as a man who could settle delicate matters. He traveled to the ranchos in the north or the villas by the sea and took photographs at lavish first communions or
quinceañeras,
and afterward the father of the girl would take him aside, into an office or bedroom and ask him to deal with something, destroy something, speak with someone discreetly. Criminals and whores, young women with babies. Paying them when possible, bus fare to leave town, sending them somewhere they couldn’t cause trouble for the wealthy father of the child in their arms.

El Güero Fotógrafo
. A name he disliked because he thought it would draw more attention than his skin alone. Or sometimes he was called
La Escoba
, which he was assured was not an insult, just a statement of fact. Or sometimes the ghost, the white ghost, a name given to him by the curious, timorous children of his wealthy patrons.

The fly buzzed in the dark room, growing louder, more insistent.

He traveled on foot or by bus if he was going a great distance. Up to the ranchos for a wedding or an anniversary. Sometimes accepting his patrons’ hospitality and spending the night in a back room while the guests drank and danced in the fields. Laughter and song and fireworks in the night. He would be up with the sun and back down to the towns to deal with an indiscretion or a gambling debt or a bad investment, letting the men in question know that this was the final payment, that any further compensation would not come in pesos.

There were times when men would not accept money or threats. There were other ways of dealing with these situations and this was something he knew how to do, this was a skill he had acquired. Distancing himself from the moment. The action taking place in front of him but seeming very far away. This is who he was. He was a man who could do these things.

He had no history prior to Mexico. Every morning when he woke he cleared his mind of any memory, any name that might be waiting there.

The money was not as important to him as the accumulation of favors, respect, fear. This created something of a protective ring, a thin perimeter of men who were powerful in these small worlds and who needed and feared him and so would alert him to any danger coming his way.

After many years he settled in the string of coastal towns at the end of the peninsula. Dry places, despite the closeness of the sea. Everything was dust. He stood waiting to cross the main town street and the buses and pickup trucks passed by flinging dust. He could taste it on his tongue, feel it in his eyelashes. The furniture in his room sat under a thin film of it. Every night he took apart his camera and lenses and brushed the dust loose. His hand on the windowsill in the evening comes away powder white.

In _______ he came across a pair of storefronts on the south side of the street. The larger of the two had wide plate-glass windows at the front where he could see the entirety of the sun’s daylong arc, the slow progression of light across the town. The smaller storefront had a thick metal door, an old, impenetrable-looking thing, green with calcium, striped with rust. There was a sink and a toilet at the back of the room. There were no windows. The man who sold him the rooms told him that the larger one had been a barbershop at some point in the past and that the other, the room with the door, had once secured something valuable, though he didn’t know what.

So this was where he lived, in the smaller room with the door, without windows. A card table, a lamp, a hot plate, a sleeping bag on a cot. A monk’s cell.

He stood and waited for the bus on the rancho road. Holding his suitcase of camera and lenses, his tripod. The motes of dust in the evening air moving like a flock, rising and falling, turning in unison to disappear, and for seconds
it seems that the air is clear but then they turn again together and catch the last of the sun and it is like a thousand little golden doors closing.

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 and 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.