Paul Theroux - O-Zone

He was smiling. He had not been rescued. He had made his own way back to New York. He had saved those aliens. He had saved himself. He could do it again.

Beyond the black scab of this place, and the twittering rotor, the city mounted higher. The air was still gray here, but over there the sky had cleared. Rocket-shaped towers, and some like swords, struck through the parted clouds. Was that Coldharbor — was that the room where he had been a child?

He thought: What a world — and corrected himself. There were a million worlds; they contained all the past and all the future. Time was a matter of choice, if you were free. Every age was simultaneous upon the earth.

He wanted to choose. Mr. B had once said beautifully, "Shall we go?" The man had not needed to ask — that was why it mattered what he said. And Fisher, who had never believed in permission, and had seldom uttered a question, now had to ask one.

"Can I come with you?"

Their consent gave him power.

The uncertain weather and the way he stood in the rotor had masked Hardy by giving him a yellow mottled face, and he went very still and stupid, as if emptied of hope.

Hooper had never expected Fizzy to turn aside. He had agreed to all the terms, and had just begun to say, "You don't have to go all the way back."

But before he had got five words out — and as he was speaking, which made it the worst interruption — the people shimmered into the drizzly heat. It made him feel temporary and unsteady, and he held on to Bligh, as the sun pierced the mist on this perimeter and broke through to reveal the people gone. They were all aliens again in the transfiguring light.

The year of events was not over. Fizzy was gone and Moura noticed that everyone had returned to live quietly, at half-speed, renewing themselves on a routine. It was like load-shedding, a pause from the strain of having lived so fiercely for so long. But Moura was still alert — dissatisfied.

Then one day at the end of that same year Hooper called her to say that he had not forgotten the agreement he had made months before, and she had wondered What agreement? The earlier part of the year had been like another age, and most of it was buried and forgotten until certain words were mentioned, always the ambiguous ones that stirred her, like alien or Owner or perimeter or clinic or O-Zone. They had all acquired different meanings this year.

She was alone. Hardy was on an Asfalt project somewhere in Africa, but when had he ever mattered to her?

"We're back in business," Hooper said, explaining that he had just returned from California. He was flying everywhere these days, and not only to the south and west, where he had warehouses, but to Europe, and his factories in Mexico and India. He was energetic but still narrow and secretive — still in love, very frisky.

He had said to Moura, "Once you get used to having showers with someone else, it isn't the same when you've got to take one alone. It's like sleeping alone. It doesn't work."

It astonished Moura that he could say such a thing to her, but she knew that it was love that had made him insensitive. You could not be offended by his mushy logic.

He traveled for Bligh's sake, and they were always together. He was crowing Look! See! He took her by the hand and showed her the extent of what he owned — See how big! See how lovely! See how valuable! He showed her the world; and he had never been happier, for Hooper, who had never had a child because he had never had a wife he had trusted, now had both — and more. Bligh was a wife, a daughter, a companion, a friend.

Hooper had the boring habit of telling you how old she was — to Moura's annoyance there was never a polite reply to this old news. You just had to pretend that it was somehow a tremendous virtue to be fifteen years old; and really you wanted to laugh at the buffoon showing the space between his teeth and telling you how healthy this child was. Bligh, to her credit, found those moments awkward; and then Hooper seemed like the child, and she the adult. And Moura thought that in all such relationships that must be the case.

In other respects, Bligh must have satisfied a craving in Hooper for a child he could fondle and fuss over and blame— and rely on, too. "I've got to get back and give her a bath," he told Moura one evening, and she didn't know whether to regard that as very sweet or very perverted — but in any case she had always found Hooper both. And often it seemed that it was not even that one was an adult and the other a child, but rather that one was a child and the other a doll.

Yet it touched Moura to see this billionaire trying to impress the alien. It had a grotesque poignancy, like poor confused Fizzy long ago quacking, "Bremstrahlung!" to a room full of party guests. Hooper's love affair would work as long as he supervised everything and kept his own secrets. He was in charge, and so far Bligh was still a comparative stranger. While she remained a stranger she was dependent on him, and he was happy. Hooper's power lay in dazzling her.

Moura saw them fairly often, though she could never effectively separate them. It was always "we" now, and Moura was never able to have a private talk with the girl. It was as though Hooper wanted to prevent Moura from knowing too much, or saying too much — as if Hooper did not want Moura to influence her. But it was so silly of him. Moura knew nearly everything; and Bligh must have been very shrewd and hungry or else she would not have lasted this long with Hooper.

Everyone now knew that Bligh was an alien on a false ID.

Moura felt that it was what most men wanted: a simple soul to manipulate — a doll to play with. Owners captured them and screwed them and killed them. There was a story going around that Bligh was diseased. Moura knew it was not so. It was said because she was an alien. It wasn't true anymore to say that all aliens had diseases. Everyone had diseases. The difference was that Owners had doctors. As lovers and workers, aliens were in demand. Moura sometimes had the heretical thought that it was perhaps the aliens and not the Owners who would determine the fate of the world; but though the heresy gave her life — nothing lifted her spirits like the thought of rebellion these days — she also wondered: Am I thinking that because Fizzy is among them?

Some of them weren't so simple! And Hooper was also grateful to Bligh. She was his project — even he used that patronizing word — but she was also sensible and she was clearly able to make him happy. Moura guessed that underlying everything was a powerful sexual connection, as mysterious and unknowable as in any pair of people. It was a hot animating secret, and it energized them. In the sloppy and lavish ways that couples made themselves happy they were triumphant, and Moura admitted to herself that she envied them that happiness.

Hooper had such a large capacity for it. He was lordly with the girl, but he was also a boy, a husband, a father: Bligh brought out all these sides of him, and for whatever reason— her ingenuity, her peculiar beauty, her youth, the fact that she was illegal — there was no room, no time, for anyone else in Hooper's life. So they lived exclusively in each other's company. It might have destroyed another relationship. It strengthened theirs. Hooper was busy and interested, and who knew what this concentrated intimacy did for their sex life? Moura knew Hooper to be an avid photographer. His wife and girlfriends had always called him "the cameraman." You saw the gap between his front teeth and somehow you knew he was taking your picture. Moura did not want to know more than that. She had seen the strobe lights flashing at his windows in Coldharbor, and heard Hardy: "He's at it again."