Half World: A Novel by Scott O'Connor Read Free Book Online

been enough time since Weir’s betrayal and what happened after.
    During the interrogation he was so unsettled that he couldn’t remember everything. What he could remember, he didn’t want to give to them until he’d had time to go through it himself. If it were anyone else involved, he would have been the one asking questions, and he saw no reason why things should be different in this case. During the weeks of questioning he came home every night and spent hours writing, making sense of the memories their questions had triggered. Then there was the thing that happened, the indiscretion at the Christmas party, and after the indiscretion he went back to those notes and realized that they made no sense. Some of the memories were obviously false; some were confused amalgamations of unrelated events and discussions. It wasn’t until he was away from Washington that he was able to try again.
    There were nearly ten years to recount—the years during the war and then the years in Washington, with Chicago in between. He started to tell the story in chronological order, but found himself remembering things in no particular sequence. He wrote on loose paper so that he could physically move memories around, changing the shape of thewhole. He asked himself questions, letting the answers lead to other recollections. Hours spent this way at the desk in the basement. The small window high on the cement wall, ground level outside, moonlight on the grass. The quiet house a soft weight above.
    They had discussed everything. Weir was a voracious consumer of gossip, eager to hear what was said at the rare cocktail party he missed, what was whispered out in the secretarial pool. His favorite spectator sport. Henry learned early on that there was more than a prurient interest, that even the most mundane-seeming quarrel or liaison was information to be filed away, whether true or not. Rumor carried its own currency, had its own uses.
    Weir had given him many books over the years, poetry and poetry journals, most with Weir’s comments and opinions scrawled along the perimeters of the pages. Henry read through the books again at the desk in the basement. Auden, Pound, Cummings. Lesser-known poets in hand-sewn chapbooks. Student work from university journals that Weir found promising or laughably pretentious. Clippings from poems that surfaced in popular magazines. Weir’s notes often longer than the poems themselves. Smudges of cigarette ash on the pages, coffee drips and rings. His own or Weir’s, impossible to tell.
    He’d thought that he had known Weir’s thinking inside and out, but he had been wrong, so he spent hours with the books, reading and rereading poems he had memorized long ago, forcing himself to see them stripped of his long-held interpretations. Reading Weir’s comments as if the man was sitting beside him, as if they had resumed their daily conversations, but this time with Henry aware of the truth, or part of the truth, Weir’s double life, and looking for clues to the deception.
    Weir pored over Eastern Bloc poetry, Soviet poetry. Much of it was by-the-numbers propaganda, but there was almost always something deeper to find. It’s hard to write a poem and not include some truth, Weir would say. Look for what slips through. Weir with his cigarettes and coffee and stack of Russian verse, saying, I’ll take a bad poem over a good newspaper any day.
    First light at the window. A thin, golden glow. Henry reshuffledthe papers. Conversations from six years ago, eight years ago. Weir’s words and then Henry’s words. He heard footsteps from above, the creaking of floorboards. Ginnie waking, the house coming to life. There was no telling how long this would take. Weeks, months. No one back east was waiting for this, no one was expecting it. It was his alone, a project of one.
    He reshuffled the papers. There were ten years to analyze, looking for what he had missed.

12
    There were three or four bars in the neighborhood