Paul Theroux - O-Zone

Bligh said, "What's wrong?"

"I think that distress call could have been the Godseye rotor. I know they're in front of us, and they've got a faster ship."

He could tell that Bligh was worried — she had been frightened at Winslow when Godseye surprised them, and was glad to leave Guthrie before they showed up. She seemed to recognize the troopers as her natural enemy. They represented everything that she feared and hated in New York; and yet the rest of the time she was happy, feeling freer in the jet-rotor than she had in Coldharbor or the city.

Hooper loved her watchfulness, and the fact that she took nothing for granted. At Coldharbor she was able to sleep for long periods, and there was a sensuality in her slumber— sleep heated her skin and made her damp — as if all her dreams were sexual. But here in the jet-rotor, Hooper's Flea, she was wakeful and always alert, and she vitalized Hooper with her energy.

But he was careful with her. He knew he had a rich man's presumption, and that his possessiveness spooked her. Whenever he reached out for her she drew away. She was like a cat: when he ignored her she crept into his lap, as if reassured by his inattention. This search for Fizzy had had the same effect: it was a distraction that brought them closer.

Each night in the parked jet-rotor they made love in a fierce way, losing themselves in it, and simulating rapturous murder — not only his old impaling, but all the interruptions of it, as she rode his face like a saddle and galloped him into ecstasy as he gasped between her thighs; but it was she who was winded and made the sounds of suffocation. And when she took him into her mouth and drank, it was he who howled as if he were dying. They lay head to toe, licking the dew from each other's bodies, and giving themselves life.

"What do you want?"

"You know what I want,"

It was dark magic, and it worked. It confounded them, then helped them understand in a way that words would have failed to do. Sex took away their loneliness, then gave it back; and so desire returned.

Yet Hooper had noticed that at times his passion for her alarmed her. I want to eat you — and for a moment fear flickered on her face, as if he meant just that and would devour her with cannibal teeth. She laughed when he told her that she had the dark fishy taste of smoked salmon. He wanted more.

The sky was blue, but night was falling and the ground had gone gray.

"If that distress call was Godseye," Hooper said, "I don't understand why they went off the air."

Bligh was silent — the name Godseye reminded her of the story Hooper had told her of the hunt in New York. But he had not intended to frighten her. He had been trying to tell her that he loved her: he wasn't like the others, he was saying, and now he had stopped thinking of her as an alien.

"I wish we could see something," he said as the clouds buffeted around them. "I was sure we were following that ship. Now we've lost them. No more landmarks."

"It's getting dark," Bligh said.

He had said: Only Fizzy knows how to fly one of these things in the dark.

"Are we going home tonight?"

Hooper stared at her.

"You said 'home.'"

The pinprick on the ground-screen was at just the point where the other ship had signaled, but now it was too dark to tell what the pinprick was. It seemed hotter than a human being, and not hot enough to be the burning wreck of a crashed gunship.

He flew closer and saw that it was a small fire — the sort of dinner fire that aliens might build to cook an evening meal: roast a dog, or soften potatoes, or stew the vegetables they were so fond of. Yet he could not pick up the heat of any humans. Perhaps they were sitting too close to the fire to be located?

He spun the rotor down with all his lights blazing and saw a figure separate itself from the fire. It was a person in a helmet, but with its arms up — welcoming, surrendering.

"It might be Fizzy," Hooper said, and hoped it was, so that he could bring him back to Coldharbor and vindicate himself for having lost him.

The boy wonder was capable of anything — even this, turning up beside a fire in a rural buffer zone in Pennsylvania.

"People always look so small on the ground," Bligh said. "So helpless and alone. I never knew that."

She's thinking of herself, Hooper thought. Flying with him had shown her the true size of things. She realized how precarious her life had been before they had met. She felt a sort of retrospective fear and was puzzled by the illogicality of her luck.

"And they always look desperate at night."

But even though she was reflecting in this way she still managed to work the spotlight expertly as they descended.

"It's my brother," Hooper said.

It was raining — a soft rat-tat that became a sizzling on the roof of the boxcar, and oddly quickened each time the train slowed down.

Through a crack in the door of the car they saw a spattery blaze of lights flash past. Fisher, speaking from within his helmet, told them about the people out here — commuters, simple-lifers, fanners, Astronauts.

"Some of them work in Philadelphia, Some of them want to go into orbit, though the program only takes one in two hundred thousand," the boy said. "Some of them don't even have telephones."

Explaining to them what they could not see strengthened his influence on them. He conveyed to them the sense of strange lives pulsing in the dark — it was the way he had told them about the stars, giving them names and shapes. He said there were people awake all night under those lights as the train slid past. He told them what he heard on his radio earphones, as he monitored local broadcasts: more mysteries.

"I've got a police patrol — a standoff with some aliens," he said. "I've got a roadblock incident — someone just flunked a security check. Dong! A suspected tax defaulter! And what's this? An unfortunate motorist, as this willy calls himself, is broadcasting from his broken-down car. It's a distress call. He thinks he's being watched by Roaches. What a dick! What if those Roaches have a radio? He thinks they're sort of subnormal peckerheads who've never heard of radios!"

The others listened attentively.

"Good thing we're in here," Fisher said. "There are a lot of patrols in this area. The private ones are the worst. I mean, who are they answerable to?"

Light from the door crack cut across their faces, and the boy saw their eyes flash at him.

"Don't be scared," he said.

"You're the one with gray hairs," Valda said.

The boxcar smelled of dusty vegetables. Foraging in the corners, they found onions, the remainder of a shipment— enough for three apiece. They peeled them, and chewed them, and wept.

"No one's going to want to kiss us," Fisher said.

He was still monitoring the passing transmissions.

"Altoona," he said at one point, and at another, "Harrisburg."

Place names meant nothing to these people, he could tell. They fell asleep, they stayed that way, and finally, banging across the trestles of an iron bridge, they were shaken by the clatter, and woke. The outside lights were dimmed by the oncoming dawn. Soon after, they looked out and saw horses, with smooth gleaming skin drawn tight over their muscles and their heads up at the approach of the train.

"Naked horses," Fisher said, and seeing a man on horseback, went on, "Some of the people here ride them. That's how they go to work." Yet he did not quite believe it, nor did he believe those men in black made a virtue of it.

The lock hasp swung and clanged at the boxcar door as the aliens gaped. Seeing their helpless curiosity, Fisher felt refreshed and strengthened.

"Bet you weren't expecting this, Elroy!"

Mr. Blue smiled.

"What are you thinking?"