Paul Theroux - O-Zone

But at Firehills it was Murdick who was first out of the rotor — Murdick, because Hooper was at the controls and Fisher was navigating: Murdick had had nothing to do.

His cry was triumphant but he wore a mad grin of humiliation. "We burned them all down!"

It had been like a voyage to a distant land. O-Zone was an island. And he was now safely back in the world; but shaken.

After all that — two surprising days that had exhausted him by soaking him in fear and excitement — the world looked different to Hooper Allbright. Had the world changed, or had he? The O-Zone trip gave him a way of dating his life. He now had a sense of time, a feeling of before and after. It was scratched on his memory in a long raw stroke that would heal but always remain as a narrow scar. In that sealed wound were the discoveries he had made — the forbidden place, the friends he had seen in a new way, the shock of having seen those aliens in an area believed to be empty. And he had to accept the strange simplicity that O-Zone was America, and aliens were human.

The worst of it was that he had killed two men and nothing at all had happened. Because there was no justice, he had to carry all of the guilt alone. Far away from the shouting lights of New York, among cluttering birds, he had become a man and a murderer. I'd like to take something of this away with me, he had said. Now he realized that he had left something of himself behind. It gave him a lasting desire for solitude, but an aching sense of loneliness — he who had never been lonely. He wondered who was missing in his life, for surely it is only other people who make us lonely?

He stopped thinking of Fizzy as a supermoron. He felt instead a little insecure — dependent on the boy, because they now shared a secret. He needed him in other ways, too: he saw Fizzy's strength, and he suspected that all this time people had mocked the boy — even Moura and Hardy had mocked — in order to give themselves the courage to face him. It was not that the boy had the answers to hard questions, but rather that his navigation had been crucial to their O-Zone trip. The boy had made maps of this unmapped region. They had all found it awkward to admit how much they owed to Fizzy, which was another reason they jeered. And the boy didn't make things easier. He seemed to have the power of a wizard, but he also had all of the wizard's eccentricity. And his life indoors had made him cranky and demanding. Yet I need him, Hooper thought. Something had happened.

As for Murdick — his fears and obsessions had never seemed worse. The man was stupid and mean, and his stupidity Hooper regarded as very dangerous. He was a member of Godseye!

Yet the memory of the weapon, the double-barreled particle beam, which took pictures, continued to fascinate Hooper. Murdick had called it a burp gun. "I'm going to put it into my catalog," Hooper had said when he'd first seen it. It still seemed a profitable idea. Sell it by mail order; there was a fortune in something as simple and deadly as that, especially as the camera apparatus was said to be as efficient as the firearm. You pointed it in the general direction of the target, and the heat-seeking particle beam found its mark and destroyed it. Hooper was eager to develop the film. He was very surprised it wasn't instant self-developing film, like the stuff they had used to tape the trip out.

It had all been discovery! O-Zone was beautiful, the Eubanks were cowards, Hardy was mysterious (but tactfully didn't ask questions), the Murdicks were frantic, and Moura watchful. Fizzy had put himself in charge and then said, "I like math because there's no people in it!" They had streaked back to New York — and Hooper saw it afresh: another discovery. The city seemed silly and tame after those days in O-Zone.

From his tower in the garrison block of Coldharbor on the upper east side, he looked out at the glittering city and saw a long narrow island of more towers in garrisons, arranged like upright tombstone slabs. Some were glass, some granite or coated steel, others scalloped and black-gray like chipped flint. A knot of small choppers whistled past. Flights of rotors sharked through the sky, and circled, and sank, as they dropped onto the flat tops of the towers or on the barge pads moored on the river.

The choppers' monotonous chugging was in odd contrast to the shriek of jet-rotors, and all of it echoed in the deep canyons between the garrisons, a whole sky of aircraft noise, rising and falling. It went on ringing; it was the loudest city in the world. Hooper was sure that there were more than the permitted number of aircraft at this time of day. But the gunships of the police patrols did nothing but make their incessant figure eights over the city. The aircraft — choppers and rotors especially — had multiplied a thousandfold since the bridges had been secured against unlicensed ground vehicles. Sealing the city had meant a longer trip in and out— more security checks, more barriers, more bottlenecks. It had made the city safer but a great deal slower.

Until that trip to O-Zone Hooper had believed — with most of his friends — that aliens did not have aircraft. Now he was not so sure. The aliens he had seen were not freaks; they looked alert and human. He would have been happier with freaks or subhuman creatures — it was the popular view, anyway. It shook him to be reminded that they were human, and that it was not they but the language that had changed. Similarly, his view of O-Zone had altered his view of New York.

The skylights could not mask the gritty January color of the clouds, or the rolling smoke-laden air from New Jersey, or the purple rotor fumes. The only trees he could see were inside, at the high windows of nearby towers. At ground level he saw great empty spaces — the stone plazas, the wide streets, the fenced-in parks. And everywhere — even on this Tuesday morning — the security lights, so powerful, and shining from so many angles, that New York had a superficial magic, an illusion of castle towers suspended on a watery cloud. The profusion of lights made it a city without shadows.

He had not noticed that New York was bad, because it had become bad so slowly. It was a terrible place. All you could say was that it was safe. But the water was foul and the air was woolly and dusty from factory acid that made the light sulfurous. And all the buglike aircraft with their noisy wup-wup-wup. Fizzy was right again! The only solution to living in New York was to stay indoors, in a tower complex like Coldharbor, because indoors there were trees and flowers, there was fresh-cut grass; you could swim, it was warm. And outdoors, however safe, it was a full-time hell. You might be bored in here, but out there you would be suffocated or deafened or blinded by the light; and out of the city — in any direction — eaten alive.

One of Hooper's pleasures was standing on the balcony of his unit and looking through his own windows at his rooms, liking the play of light on his pictures and the arrangement of his furniture and the look of all that warmth and solitude. He became a spectator to his own achievement, and as his scrutiny increased and his interest widened, he became almost disembodied and indulged in the intense vanity of envying himself. It was a kind of pride that he could not suppress, because looking through the windows of his unit he saw that everything was in place: I have what I want. He had only to reenter the unit for the vision to be complete.

But now he knew, without looking in, that something was missing. Over his breakfast of green tea, tangerine juice, and fresh bread, he glanced at the smudged horizon and remembered the two men he had murdered. Not even shreds were left of them. They had been atomized into a fine mist of blood and sprayed apart, and at last blown gently away on the breeze.