Paul Theroux - O-Zone

She said, "Of course, I'll pay you."

He was attending to the engine. She had seen gynecologists put their fingers inside her like that — just as carefully, feeling and listening in just that way. He tricked a length of fuel line out.

"Don't talk to me," he said. It was not rude. It was Fizzy's voice of concentration.

She went silent and regarded him and saw Fizzy again: wonder boy, the genius in the wilderness, rebuilding civilization from its ruins. First the practical items — transport, the superior dirt bike, and then probably weapons and communications. Or did weapons come first? Anyway, later he would be circumscribed by his own inventions — he would be safe.

She now knew that Fizzy would succeed — in O-Zone or wherever he had led those people. Of course he had led them. Wasn't this man a leader?

He had prodded and unscrewed — palpated an object like a chromium acorn from one end of the fuel line.

"It's a valve," he said. "It's gummed up. But there's a design fault in it, too. Ill give you a better one than that."

"You have spares — out here?" But somehow she suspected he had.

He said, "We have whole rotors. Better than this insect. They fall out of the sky."

"Like me."

"No," he said. "Ever heard of the Black Cars? Hunters. Searchers. Commandos."

Again he was looking at her in that suspicious and contemptuous way. But she stared back. She saw there was something sexual in his look.

She knew when a man desired her; and there was a dreadful element in it, a kind of fascinated loathing, because the man wanted her and didn't know her. Was it only surfaces that men saw? She wanted just once to know what the attraction was, because she often felt barren and featureless— often saw nothing in the mirror. But she knew when a man was looking at her in that way. She was aware of sometimes looking at a man that way, too, and she disliked the feeling in herself.

Now she felt this might be worse — not that he desired her and didn't know her, but that he desired her and did not remember her.

"Would you like a drink of something?" she said. "And I've also got some food."

"You'll have to do better than that," he said. "In terms of payment."

His eyes were still on her. She felt naked, as if he could pierce her.

"Fuel," he said. "I want the whole of your auxiliary tank."

But there was a stammer of interruption in his voice, as though he wanted more than he said.

Or had he remembered?

"Otherwise I won't fix it."

"Take whatever you want."

She wanted to remember, she wanted him to remember. She had gone to the contact clinic because she had needed help, and she felt the same need standing near this elusive man.

Even if it was not this man, I might have married someone like him. She could almost picture it, and she mourned the life that she had missed in her imagination. She had lately come to despise herself for liking Hardy's wealth, the Allbright inheritance, and for not taking advantage of it. Her life was far from over, and yet—

The thing was to know how much time you had and not humiliate yourself by wanting more than you could manage. At thirty-seven she still sometimes saw that she had her looks — she was not always insulted by the mirror. She knew she was smarter than she had ever been. She had lasted better than this man, who was weather-beaten. And she had time, years more. She had stopped measuring her life by meaninglessly thinking: I can still have another child.

She remembered with the piercing clarity of this man's eyes everything that had happened at the clinic — every session, how he had looked, what he had whispered, how he had smelled, every detail of what she had seen, his mask. But if it was this man, time had wrecked him and caused him pain. Yet oddly it had also given him more life. He looked a little dangerous and if it were truly him he looked a lot freer and stronger.

The difficulty lay in being certain. She could not quite fit the lovemaking to this man; and yet she desired him.

You turn your back and you think people stop living and freeze just for you. But no, they go on, they live, they are wounded, they are altered by pain and bad news, and you turn again and it's all changed. Only happy people never change. She knew there was no certainty for her. The crushing thought was that she too might be ignorant of the past: Because I have changed.

He had scrambled inside with his tools and got the engine fluting. She could see he loved this, in spite of the fact that he didn't smile or show pleasure. It was how Fizzy would have behaved, probably what he was doing in O-Zone this minute — machine-mad, she thought, and felt tender toward them.

"I'm going to need this," he said, lowering himself to the ground and swinging a fuel tank out on a pulley. She knew it was full and heavy — and she had another tank. But how would he carry it?

He'll leave it, he'll come back for it, he has nothing else to do here but learn how to survive.

He stalked close to her and studied her with his bright eyes.

"It's a good thing I was here," he said.

She said nothing. She could stare back. What was that in his hand — another of those valves, maybe the old one, rolling in his blackened fingers.

"It looks like you may be able to use the full service."

She suspected that she knew what he meant. She wanted him to remember — anything. Whoever he was.

"I'm running all right," she said.

She desired him then most of all, as he was proposing and teasing her, and she was keeping him away. She searched his poor lined face for a flicker, but there was nothing. He still did not know her. Her desire for him was almost overpowering — she would do something ridiculous in a moment, she knew — snap at him, insult him, spurn him; because she felt on the verge of saying Take me.

Then she might know. That wild impulse might reveal everything, for sex was our deepest secret; the mask was tame and civilized, even the beakiest one, but the animal within it contained our identity. And shame was just another way of keeping the secret hidden. She almost reached out for him then.

His boots slipped and rolled on the stony ground as he stepped nearer to her into the sun, and the glare on him made him seem full of fresh wounds — his creased face, and the scratches on the backs of his hands, and the slashes in his shirt, and his boot heels worn flat.

He said, "Well, you know where to find me."

She hated his saying that. I'm wrong, it's a mistake, he's a stranger, he doesn't recognize me — because he is not who I think he is: her thoughts raced and jeered at her for coming all this way for nothing.

He cranked the ladder down, and helped her onto it, touching her for the first time. When he touched her he questioned her with the pressure of his fingers, and instead of being helped by them, the fingers made her hesitate.

She turned to face him, and he let go — embarrassed, a bit flustered, touched with innocence, as if he had given himself away. Was it to disguise it that he looked aside and opened his mouth and yawned? It was a hissing gasping yawn — he brushed it with the back of his hand, bumping it with the small bones of his knuckles.

His whole personality was in that yawn: it exposed and betrayed him. Was it this most human and unalterable gesture that he had passed on to Fizzy? She felt it.was so, even more clearly than the way he had touched her, though that had said a great deal — the way his hand had lingered and the fingers had spoken, the abrupt and self-conscious way he had released her. His yawn had seemed to say the rest. It was loud and automatic, seeming to dismiss her, and his folded hand neither stifled it nor covered it. He had gargled air and snapped his teeth shut.

She felt strongly that Fizzy was safe.