Paul Theroux: O-Zone

"You'll need this," Hooper said, and gave her a printout with the coded information. "Though there's not much here."

As if accounting for the few lines on the strip of paper, she said, "But he's still young,"

"Forty-two!" Hooper said, still so frisky.

Could he be that old? The number startled her. She was on the verge of denying it and then realized that she would sound ridiculous. Yet she couldn't picture him at that age, or any age except twenty-six. Anyway, he was not like other men — not like any other man she had known. Fizzy was the proof of his uniqueness.

She glanced at the paper printout: "WM UNC PAR 2 REF O

CLASS SUBJ B NYC FED REF REAR ED REF PLUS"--inde-

cipherable.

"Standard data code," Hooper said. "You won't have any trouble checking the references for detail, or finding prose equivalents. The important reference is circled."

The circle contained "CA-FO ZONE" and some numbers.

"Forestdale. Last sighting. And those are the coordinates."

Forestdale was one of those California names that described its opposite. There certainly wouldn't be any trees there.

"I appreciate this, Hoop."

He was looking into her face, beneath her expression, beneath skin and bones.

"It's usually a mistake to find what you're looking for," he said. "It's much better to find what you're not looking for."

In his voice was a kind of listening caution, as if he were testing this thought by saying it out loud. And she could tell from his tone that he wanted to get away now. He had delivered his message and lost some of his bounce. He didn't want her frustration to disturb him.

Hooper had become one of those happy people who went around repelling unhappiness like evil — not wanting to be tainted by anyone's bad luck. They frisked along, protecting themselves with self-congratulation, with boasts, with anything to repel low spirits. They could go very quiet and vanish, too, when they saw clouds blimping up — problems, whines, complaints, envious questions, urgencies. Happy people learned how to be great selfish preservers of their happiness, like strangers walking carefully in the dark — they feared holes and gouging corners and sudden shouts. Hooper wanted to be back with his snug leggy fifteen-year-old.

Moura considered what he had just said, and thought: What am I looking for?

Hooper was rising and bristling and beginning to flee.

"I'm glad you're happy," Moura said, putting it as unselfishly as she could and not asking why it was. His happiness was so unpredictable, so hard to comprehend or contain — and so full of secrets and evasions, like a child's hidden life, with its mingled pleasures and fears.

He said, "We're doing all right."

He's alive, she thought, and envied him. Why was she so jealous of this young girl? All their warmth made her feel very cold.

He said, "I was lucky."

He meant it as an attempt at humility, as if he wanted his ghosts to overhear that he was grateful; and yet even that sounded to her like a boast. Because he was so happy, everything he said sounded like a boast.

"I don't have a lot of time. I don't want to waste it."

I do nothing but waste it, Moura thought. She said, "This must seem so strange to her."

"No — this is very easy," he said. "She sits by the pool and paints her toenails and eats chocolates."

"And what do you do?"

"Buy the chocolates," he said. "She likes it here. New York is safe. But out there — that's hard. We're the ones on the fringe. We always thought O-Zone and those places were dead. But that's where most of the life is. It's a struggle!"

"Holly wants to talk to me about another party this year."

Hooper looked doubtful, and determined to go — more than that, looked as though he wanted to burst through the wall. The last party in O-Zone had been the start of everything for him. Trying to repeat it, he might lose his luck; he might lose everything. That fear was on his face.

"We'll see about that," he said, and made it sound like No.

After Hooper had gone, Moura grew excited. She had not wanted him to know how this man mattered to her. But from the moment she had heard the name she had begun to hope. She envisioned him and thought: I exist. And as she revived she realized how discouraged she had felt — how deep she had dropped. In all the losses, all the vanishing confusion in the inexplicable past, she saw a crumbling pattern in which one element was unchanging: this man, and her feeling for him — and it gave her hope for something more.

The alteration in her was sudden because her vision of him was so clear — not just his bold boyish figure as he approached and hovered over her; but the vivid sense — vibrant as a pulse — of his body humming in the darkness. And his special smell — not flowers, not perfume, but a ripe male smell that soaked him and reminded her of blood. And the smoothness of his skin, his feet, his hands — long gentle fingers, and his slender legs. The memory of particular postures, of his movement and his heat, excited her.

I never saw his face, she thought. But she remembered the beaky mask and she had always felt she knew the face behind it. She had decided on specific features — nose, ears, teeth, chin — and had seen her guesses confirmed as Fizzy had filled out and grown; as his face developed. Fizzy was special and terrible in bis way, but he was handsome.

As for Fizzy's father — Boy — she had seen him so many times: glimpsed him in crowds, seen him on the street and in restaurants, and not only in New York but everywhere she went. Now she stopped seeing him; now she knew where he was.

The masks had made it perfect. Their meetings and their lovemaking in the clinic, and his whispers, had always inspired her the more because of their mystery — because of what she had not seen, never known, what she had guessed at and imagined. Over those two years of going to the clinic she had wanted him — woken up and desired him — and immediately afterward wanted him again.

It was so long ago, but the feeling was fresh in her. The loneliness, the longing: they were physical — she felt that longing in her belly, in her legs, on her face, in all her muscles. Desire was not a thought — it was a desperate thirsting of the flesh. It could hurt. She still wanted him, and now realized helplessly but with a surge of pride that she loved him.

And I'm also going simply to verify it — to see him and prove that he exists, and that it was not an illusion, Maura thought. That I lived once.

She was urged by her pride, and made excuses, but she knew that the risk was that if she were wrong she was left with nothing. Yet if she were right she had everything to gain. It was pathetic to say, "Even if I'm finished now, I had that— I had him," because she wasn't finished. But she was powerfully curious, and felt it in every muscle: it made her weak and eager — like the worst hunger.

It was a way of reminiscing, too — going cross-country, getting out of Coldharbor, away from these New York towers.

After — waveringly — the decision was made, she felt courageous.

Until now she had avoided Holly, but with the prospect of finding her old lover she called her friend and they arranged to meet at Holly's new house.

"No one has a house in New York!"

"They're building them again — it's a town house, in Upper West, facing all that junk on the Jersey heights."

Moura kept herself from saying, Near the clinic.

"I've got a car, too — imagine! The permit cost a fortune, but I figured what the hell. Someday they won't even be selling permits for private cars. And it's nice to snuggle up with someone in the back seat,"

Inevitably, Holly's talk turned to sex. But Moura shrugged. She could meet her without feeling like a failure or a sneak. It was not a question of telling Holly, but merely enjoying the thought that she had someone and that she had joined the two loose ends of her life with this one man.