Paul Theroux: O-Zone

The flood that had caused these recent mudslides had come and gone very quickly. There was no water gleaming anywhere, and instead of the familiar silver-blue peels were rough-textured scoops and snakes, which had once been lakes or watercourses. Great cataracts of dried mud had been left — and sliced-off hills, and screws and casts of bright dirt and sand.

The quake had brought the buildings down, and the floods had washed them away. But it was so dry here now! The broken bungalows had withered without decaying, simply become papery husks or splintered sections of prefab plastic. There was no smog — a few ringlets of smoke, no more; and a film of dust over everything, every roof, every road, even the leaves were coated gray. There were few clusters of green, almost nothing; but in that respect Landslip was like Los Angeles itself, famous for its water shortage.

Moura flew on, between more hills, into dry desert brightness. There were cars on some roads, but here it did not mean traffic: nothing moved, the cars had no wheels — she guessed they were probably lived in by aliens. In another area she first took to be a vast parking lot, she saw that all the cars were definitely inhabited. Among the cars were cooking fires, and clotheslines, and canvas flaps outstretched for shade. The village of junked cars was especially odd, because farther on was a hillside of uninhabited houses — probably a quarantine order, or a subzone in the making. She flew over a wrecked trailer park, a small city-stain, and an elongated fire zone — a whole district burning and smoking, with a few fire trucks on the fringes spraying chemicals along a perimeter road to keep it open and to prevent the fire from leaving the zone.

That fire was just inside Landslip. Moura had been traveling parallel to the fault line, southeast. La Plata Valley led her deeper into Landslip and to La Plata itself.

She had remembered it as a resort town — Hardy had taken her, they had spent a week here, traveling in a ground vehicle in the shady valley between the high white hills. It had seemed to her a lovely place, small and sunny, with good water and secure hotels — green lawns, and tennis courts, and pools filled by waterfalls and elaborate fountains. The valley had been full of birds and wildflowers. Some people had complained: it seemed artificial, they said — the grass so green, the roses so red, the roads so tidy, and not a blemish anywhere. Something unreal about that, they said.

No more: now it had the same gray decomposing look of the dead half of Los Angeles, and it was not old enough or big enough to have become an interesting ruin. In any case, out here the ruins didn't last long. La Plata lay at the foot of a bright blistered hill forty clicks inside Landslip, and it seemed to Moura typical of what she had seen of that zone — rather tumbledown and unprotected, and close-up deranged. Probably it had lost most of its water — Moura was flying low now and looking for green lawns and swimming pools and trees. She saw a golf course gone to seed — but its sand traps were vivid scars; and broken roads, and abandoned houses, and people walking.

That seemed the chief characteristic of these ruined places — the people were more obvious; fewer vehicles. There were people on the streets, foraging, scavenging, peering up at her Hornet. People were always more visible in these dangerous outer districts. Trolls, Hooper called them, Roaches, Diggers; and remembering this, Moura wondered what Bligh had been — what sort of alien.

After the mission to find Fizzy, Hardy had said, "Ohio, Illinois, Indiana — even Pennsylvania. There are towns in those states that haven't changed a bit."

He had described a wedding reception and a baseball game and the way they washed their cars and cut the grass. He was surprised and relieved — he urged her to believe him. He was round-eyed and pious, like a simple-lifer.

She said it didn't matter whether she believed it, but she had not known why until now.

This was where she wanted to be, and this had changed: time and shortages and a drought.and an earthquake and aliens had altered it. Sixty clicks to the northwest people in Los Angeles hardly cared that this zone existed. They had received the same tremor but they had rebuilt and crept back from the brink. Here it had been almost a death blow. Like O-Zone it was an island; it had become like a foreign country, where aliens were the only real natives.

With her New Yorker's eyes, she had seen Los Angeles as a city of folly and free-for-all. It was another city on its back. It had seemed terrifying-looking but in some of its towns what Moura had taken to be rubble were houses, and within the county there were sealed settlements and secure zones that were elegant and had water somehow, maybe their own policed pipes and reservoirs. But of course they were surrounded by the scattered districts of handmade houses, where people lived in cars and under the freeways like wolves. It was not the nightmare that easterners claimed, but it was interminable, and that was nearly as bad: it was endless, and all of it lay on the ground, and it was impossible for anyone to leave, except by air; and only Owners had rotors.

The valley of La Plata had that same look: it had risen and fallen, and now it belonged to anyone who dared live there.

It was the look of O-Zone — bright and apparently abandoned, some of it fallen flat and other parts still standing and perhaps inhabited. That look provoked the suspicion that there were more people hiding there. The O-Zone look was the look of some of Los Angeles, and the whole of Landslip. To Moura it was the look of everything outside New York— the look of New Jersey and Florida, Mexico and Africa and poor overrun Europe. It was familiar.

The strangest thing about O-Zone was that it had not seemed very strange. Moura had been fearful, but she had gotten over that. Her greater surprise was that it was not worse. Fifteen years ago the news had broken: "STORM SWEEPS THE MIDWEST-and then "storm" was changed to "accident," and "accident" to "incident"; and finally it was impossible to know, except that the population of half a state was either dead or resettled. And that was where Moura and the others had spent New Year's this year. But where were the poisoned rivers and the fires? Where were the craters and the demons? Where were the monkeymen and the Shitters? It seemed much stranger to her that Hardy should return from his search mission and say, "They play baseball," "They have weddings," "They sell feed." That seemed much weirder and more exotic. They grew corn, they made quilts, some rode horses, and others drove nice old cars that they had learned to fix. That was very strange indeed and yet somehow very familiar.

Now here was La Plata. What was the difference? No water was an old complaint, and it was not odd to see houses down. It too resembled O-Zone. O-Zone was the look— more than a look, it was a certain sound, a kind of low wind-song, a high temperature, a smell of failure; but it was all too turbulent to be a bitter end.

She thought of Holly, planning another party, sitting with her googly tits pressed against the gaping windows of her dress, and saying confidently O-Zone is nowhere. Moura smiled: No. O-Zone was not a wilderness or a riddle — it was a condition and it was probably eternal, and it was everywhere. O-Zone was the world.

So when she received a stern set of warnings on asking for instructions to land, Moura did not hesitate and consider fleeing and spinning back to Los Angeles for a flight home; she maintained her descent and radioed back that she had noted and stored the warnings.

She liked the feeling that she had been here before, not only in the way that the New Year's party had prepared her for everything, but also in the sense that New York, too, was another part of O-Zone. But you had to have seen O-Zone to know that.