Paul Theroux: O-Zone

"You put the camera on the wrong setting," Fisher said.

Fisher — Hardy's boy — did not look like either of them. But this boy was never judged, never measured, never assessed, and if he was compared it was with himself at an earlier age.

"I'm the human being in the decision-loop," he said.

Today he was navigator, and he knew he was blazing a trail. But programming the new flight path was not a privilege for him, it was a necessity, he said. "Who else has the math or the memory?"

Hardy put Fisher's fussing down to nervousness, but it was not the responsibility for all the navigation — that was a problem with an exact solution, and exactitude made him arrogant, not nervous. No, the reason for the boy's odd squawking was that he was fifteen years old, and this was the first time he had been outside New York City. He seldom left the Coldharbor Tower, and never alone.

He had come today because, Hardy had said — truthfully, as far as he knew — that Fisher was the only person who could get them to O-Zone.

"We're in your hands, Fizzy. We'll be lost without you."

And so the boy had agreed.

"It's a landmark trip," Hardy said. He was speaking to Moura, his wife, who shared the controls. "This isn't just a New Year's party. This is exploration and discovery. This is a new land. We're the first people here."

Fisher said, "How is that different from any other longitudinal field study?"

"There's a lot of romance associated with this place," Hardy said. "The wilderness, the secret transferral of the nuclear waste, the fact that it was all in caves — big strange toothy limestone caves, boy. And then the leaks and the contamination, and half the state evacuated and closed off. Amazing! And it was kept closed, like a secret garden, and given a perimeter and a new name. So the most dangerous, empty, and primitive part of the world was right here in the United States. It was unknown — that's where the romance came from."

"Know what I think about that?" Fisher said.

Hardy wondered whether he had gone too far — the boy hated listening to him.

"That you're a tool," Fisher said.

"I was talking about the past."

"A complete tool."

"Stop quacking, Fizzy," Moura said, because the boy had begun to laugh. He laughed without smiling.

"What a dimbo," Fisher said. "Didn't you believe your satellite imaging?"

"Watch the video readout," Hardy said. "I want good pictures!"

The boy ignored this. He could be relentlessly rude, and one aspect of his rudeness was that he was deaf to friendly cautions. He hung on his safety harness just behind Hardy and Moura — navigating, squawking the coordinates, reading the video. He dangled, like a bundle of badly fitted software, setting them straight. Some of his rudeness Moura found almost charming, because he was innocent throughout and still so young, even if he was not small anymore. But he could be strange. He often said something or did something and then it was clear you did not know him at all.

"Romance! Adventure!" he said. His eyes became wicked with mockery. He was a good-looking boy but too fidgety and nervous to be called handsome. He was never still, and his questions were incessant.

"When I was your age I couldn't just key into my own satellite like that, and even if I had, it would have given me a big monochrome aerial shot, like a cheap road map."

"Why didn't you enhance it on your computer?"

"My computer was so old it had moving parts," Hardy said.

But Fisher hadn't heard. He was looking at the ground-screen. "'Like a secret garden'! You dong!"

"I used to think it was a kind of wasteland," Moura said. "I never imagined this."

Fisher had opened his mouth to mock; but she spoke first and silenced him.

"Something that's been lost — that you can't see or touch or ever have again — can grow in your mind and acquire wonderful associations. It can become almost magical."

But this, the Outer Zone — O-Zone — was an emptiness. They had left the Red Zone Perimeter and identified themselves with their Access Pass and had been allowed to proceed. For over fifteen years it had been forbidden for anyone to enter O-Zone or even to overfly it. It had been a deadly place. The earth, the air, the water — everything here had been dangerous with radiation. The nuclear waste that had been stored in the caves had got loose, the cylinders had cracked and hemorrhaged — perhaps an accident, perhaps sabotage; everyone had a theory — and this great tract on the Ozark Plateau had been soaked in contamination. But that danger and the rumors of devastation had been its protection. Its peril had kept it lovely. Its name was a fright. O-Zone became a new word for a special wilderness — a place that had once been wooded and parklike and settled, and was now a prohibited area, dangerous and empty, with burst-open roads and fallen bridges and a reputation for poison.

"The average radiation level here has been measured at two-twenty rems," Fisher said. "In New York the daily dose is point one! If we didn't have survival suits we'd die here!"

"It's O-Zone National Park, Fizzy," Hooper said over the radio.

All the lines were open. The conversation carried from rotor to rotor.

One of the Eubanks said, "It looks all right to us!"

"This place was so radioactive it used to be luminous," Fisher said. "It gave off a greenish glow!"

"— before you were born," Willis Murdick was saying.

It was an immense and overgrown ruin, without people. And now that it was bright on their ground-screens they began talking of how the irradiated plants and flowers had had a freakish beauty, and one of the other women — either Rinka or Holly — was describing what it had done to the columbines and bloodroot and wild asters, the walnut trees and the dogwoods.

Fisher said, "I won't believe that until I get some specimens."

"Those trees scare me," Moura said. "I never see a tree without thinking there's someone behind it."

"The trouble with you," Fizzy said, "is you only get one idea at a time." And then he put his glove on the screen and said, "What's that scab down there on the ground?"

Hooper's voice rang in their earphones. "It's a city-stain. They're brighter out here, because they've been left for so long."

"Someday New York might look like this."

"Never!" Fisher shrieked. "Who said that!"

What had been a city was now a low wrinkled wheel of luminous dust, softened and tumbled apart and lying in the sea of green treetops. It was in places struck with color, the footprints of collapsed houses; and some spikes and stools of buildings — and a few half-towers — were visible at its center. Throughout the stain was the faint tracing of the geometry of parks and squares and roads. The river still ran and had an innocent tinfoil gleam, but Hooper said that the river had carried tons of irradiated slush out of the caves and floated it forth.

"I'm reducing speed and going in to shoot," Hooper said.

"You porker," Fisher said. "You're freaking up my program."

The others hovered just behind Hooper's rotor. They approached the city-stain, going slower and hanging together in the same companionable flight pattern — the Eubanks in their Hornet, the Murdicks in their Wellington, Hardy and his wife and boy in their Thruster Three, and Hooper in his two-seater Flea.

The city-stain revolved under them as they crossed four clicks of ruined houses which had lost their paint, and many of them their roofs. Most had been engulfed by their gardens and looked like old tombs or burial mounds. The roads had been narrowed into tracks by overgrown bushes, and many low buildings had been engorged by thickets of trees, giving the impression of hillocks and humps. The taller buildings were staring things with gaping doors and empty window holes; and yet they seemed to have an elderly dignity and a stillness that amounted almost to loveliness. They were stark and grave in the emptiness and clear air, and among the finely printed shadows they were neither dead nor alive, but appeared monumental. It was a stricken city that had been abandoned, but it had not yet fallen into total ruin. Its abandonment — it was clear from the images on their ground-screens — its desertion, had been a form of preservation. It was at last people that brought cities down.