Paul Theroux: O-Zone

Moura could not think of a way of telling Holly the truth— that she thought much more about Fizzy's father.

"He's so young to be with those aliens. What is he, fifteen?"

"Just turned sixteen," Moura said.

"You must wonder what he*s doing."

No: her inability to imagine what the strange boy might be doing kept her from worrying. He was like a different species — like an alien himself.

She said, "I just hope he's happy."

"How could he be! Those people are animals! Look what they did to Willis!"

The official story was that the aliens had burned the Godseye gunship and that Hooper had been unable to rescue the crew. But Hooper had told Moura another story; and Hardy confirmed it — how they destroyed the attacking gunship and let the aliens vanish.

"Don't you want to save him?"

"If he wants to be found, he'll be found," Moura said. And she thought: We are the ones who are lost. "I'd only like to know what sort of person he is."

A loud pair of rotors went overhead, chugging and making the windows shake, and Holly's squint of incredulity — what sort of person? — was tightened by the squint the noise gave her.

Moura said, "I never really knew him. He lived his own life."

"But he's in O-Zone!"

"O-Zone might be the perfect place for him."

"O-Zone is nowhere."

"You want to have a party there," Moura said, but it was more a mocking reminder than a statement of defiance.

Holly made a mask of her face — she was thinking hard— and then she said, "Like a lot of really far-out places — like that Earthworks place in Africa, and some deserts and wildernesses and city-stains — the only thing it's good for is a party."

She smiled, thinking of the party in O-Zone.

"Willis would have wanted us to," she said.

She so enjoyed herself now. She had become an extravagant boasting widow. You couldn't dispute or deny anything she said or else she'd turn on you and cry, My husband was killed! And though it made no sense at all to Moura, Holly was happy, because as she said, she had Woody to be unfaithful to.

It seemed strange that this woman had once been her close friend. But now they had their own secrets, and Moura wanted to leave. And she had felt throughout the hopeless conversation that Holly wanted to be elsewhere — her blood was up, she knew she didn't have much time, she was dressed to meet a man. Moura lingered because she knew she would probably never see Holly again — a former friend could be so dangerous: there was no worse enemy. She never wanted to see her again, so she gave her another minute.

Why should I be sorry that Fizzy is gone? she thought. He had seldom been happy in Coldharbor, and never in New York. It was just possible that he was happy now, among aliens. And it was not that the year had taken so much away — those losses and disappearances — but rather that so much had become apparent. She had seen who these people were — who she was.

Holly seemed on the verge of speaking. She was holding her breath, wondering whether she should risk it. Moura stared at her and refused to be undermined by how obvious a sneak Holly was, how her trickery was always apparent on her face, and how her real emotions never were — only the creased surface of that bag in which they were jumbled.

"Say it." And Moura got up to leave this woman for good.

"You should really find someone for yourself," Holly said.

Moura wanted to rent a light plane and fly cross-country on her own, but at the last minute her impatience overtook her, the matter became urgent: she hopped by rotor from Coldharbor to the airport and went on the fastest flight she could find to Los Angeles, arriving at dawn, three hours before the time she had set out.

The speed frightened her, she imagined the crash, and her fear was so acute that she knew she would remember it as though the crash had happened, as though she had died. She had died that vivid death so many times before — suffocated in panic and noise.

In the sealed and windowless plane, flying at an altitude of thirty-two clicks, Moura could not see the country below. Yet strapped in and with her eyes shut, she had the impression that things had changed — the entire country, everything, everyone, all they overflew. But that was absurd: she knew it was her mood. She was ashamed that Holly had seen her loneliness. Sex was always possible, it was a fever that came and went; but how pathetic she felt, flying alone and blaming her odd solitary feeling on a world she had imagined was completely changed. She thought: the world is the same. The misery is mine. I need a friend.

But then on the low daybreak approach to Los Angeles the large ground-screen was switched on in front of her and she saw that the city had changed. It was almost unrecognizable. And it was not just the effect of the yellow smog, though she could see how much dustier it was. The smog lay thicker than any cloud, bulked between the mountains and the sea, and where there were holes in it Moura saw devastation, which was the severest difference.

To the southeast, bordering the area that everyone called Landslip, the fault line was distinct. It was a crack, a wrinkle, a seam — depending on the depth of the rupture. In places it looked as solid and upstanding as a curbstone. It had risen and cast a shadow against the powdery light. It was patchy and blistered, and in some places it was a physical feature, a rounded lump, like a bad vein bulging in an elderly leg; in other places it was a stain — the result of the way people had resettled an area, or stayed away. It gave the city a look of division.

The shadow at the southeast side of the seam was Landslip, distinct and depopulated, with the same kind of city-stains she had seen in O-Zone. There were some live or reactivated settlements here. It was not officially a designated zone of any kind, though everyone regarded it as a zone. The point was — and this was obvious — most people preferred not to live there.

That isolated area had dried out; the streets and freeways were broken, there were many shattered roofs, and everywhere the scars and sluicemarks from flash floods and burst pipes and mudslides. The memory of water was hacked into the land.

And even the rest — the whole of Los Angeles — looked so temporary to her; it was built so close to the ground. It was a large lopsided city, with a crack down one corner. Silvery and spiky with towers on its western side, it was mottled with bungalows and low houses everywhere else. The outer towns had shrunken and, ring within ring, had contracted to the small dark circle that had always been the crossroads or the central mall. But there were stranger settlements, too— Moura saw them in a glimpse as the plane sped by on its approach. They were the ragged huts and camps of desperate people, probably aliens, who had moved out of Landslip after the quake.

Los Angeles had always seemed to Moura a mixture of grandeur and ruin, with a look of seedy magnificence. Now it was divided, the crack of the fault line was like a wall, fifty clicks to the southeast, and on the far side a look that had become familiar to her. It was the look of O-Zone.

As soon as she was on the ground, Moura began looking for Boy, and seeing him — so often that she knew she had to be mistaken. But that illusion strengthened her and gave her hope. Frequently, in New York, she saw someone she thought she knew on the street, then realized she was wrong. But afterward and often on the next street she saw the very person she had imagined the moment before. There was a certain amount of clairvoyance in her imagination — probably in everyone's — and she began to understand what that person had meant a year ago by saying that the future is familiar.

"I want to rent a chopper."