Paul Theroux - O-Zone

Someone said, "It must be spring."

"Starkie," was murmured several times.

The alien styles had inspired new schools of fashion, and it was true that this young woman was frankly imitating a Starkie. Other women had smears and stripes on their faces, mock tattoos and markings, and ribbons in their hair. They wore poor-folk styles and outlaw styles, and torn-open metal fiber shirts, and heavy leather belts, and dusty boots. But there was no mistaking these people had lots of money.

Some of the other shoppers and pedestrians in the Greenhouse were more conventionally dressed in one-piece suits, but many girls and young women wore aprons — and nothing else — or skirts that were slit up the back, so that their bare buttocks showed. These were the defiant winter styles this new year.

Hooper followed the naked woman from store to store— she was buying jewelry. There was not much interest in her. Some people muttered, older men stared. She bought another gold chain and fastened it around her waist with the first one. Hooper stayed behind her as far as the main exit. He would have left then, but he wanted to avoid another security check. The woman breezed through, though she too was scanned and sniffed.

A car with black windows was waiting for her at the sidewalk, but before she walked the forty feet from the exit to the car, the woman enlarged her mask, drawing the snout aside and the mouthpiece over the lower part of her face, making it a breathing mask. The city was perfectly represented in the image: the security check, the gold chains, the ornamented mask, the naked woman.

The Greenhouse in the Midtown Mall was pleasantly warm, and fragrant with the odor of its own hot blossoms. It had once been eight blocks of streets and buildings; and then it was sealed and rebuilt, the streets surfaced with tiles and the whole mall roofed over in glass, a crystal cover twelve stories high. Trees and flowers had been planted inside the Greenhouse, and in the rest of the mall there were balconies and walkways erected against the buildings. It was on ten levels, a sealed shopping and business precinct which preserved something of the look of the old city and yet had a perfect climate — no noise, no fumes, no crime. But the rents were high, and although there were enclosed shopping malls in most cities, they were not good places for discount department stores. That was why Hooper had chosen to turn Allbright's into a mail-order business.

Fizzy had once said that someday domes like this on the Midtown Mall would cover the whole city.

Why discourage the boy by telling him that it would never happen? The cities would fail and die long before then. There were too many threats to their security. And look at these fools mimicking aliens — bare-assed, tattooed, wearing ragged ribbons, and some in bare feet. It was because of the protection they felt in the Greenhouse — its warmth, its security guards. But these people had no idea that some aliens were tough and intelligent and very fast; that they wore plain clothes, and had long hair, and dirty knuckles, and were simply out there, waiting. He had seen them! And seeing these parody aliens in their silly costumes made him remember clearly the aliens in O-Zone.

Or had he been wrong? But he had the cartridge of film to verify it all. It was the reason he was here. He did not want to release it until he was certain he could get it developed. Normally he would have sent it with a runner, and the runner would make his way around New York looking for a lab. But Hooper wanted to hang on to the film. And at last he was glad he had come in person on this menial errand. The dreariest jobs were the most revealing: he had forgotten how much he hated New York.

He had already been held up at two security checkpoints because of the film cartridge — its seal, its size, its metal strip.

"I'm sorry, sir, but we've never seen one of those before,"

His Owner's ID made them polite, but still they ran the cartridge through a scanner.

Anything unusual worried the guards. Hooper loathed and pitied their stupidity — they were carrying out orders, they never used their own judgment or took anything for granted. They told him solemnly that they had to be thorough, but Hooper saw them as only very slow, and he growled wordlessly at them in impatience and fury.

The irony was that there had been no security check on their arrival back in New York yesterday. Their rotors had been logged but not searched — they could have imported a blob of radioactive sludge, or a flask of poison dust, or a jar of contaminated water (people said O-Zone was full of such dangerous trash), and no one would have known. Fizzy had a maggot-heaving squirrel in a bag: its brain was bulging out of its skull, probably a mutant. Hooper thought: I could have sneaked in a whole live alien!

No one had seemed to care that they had come from O-Zone. It was off the map. No wonder O-Zone was full of aliens.

"I've read about film like that," the man at the lab told him, and Hooper was almost grateful to the man for treating him like a flunky runner. He hardly looked at Hooper, but he was fascinated by the film. "This is the first time I've seen it." Handing it back, he said, "Sorry. Can't help you."

"It's ordinary film," Hooper said. "What are you telling me?"

"The problem is getting it out of the cartridge. The case is designed to obliterate the film if it's not opened with the right key."

Hooper was examining the seamless case. "What's the point of—?"

"Security. So it won't fall into the wrong hands. You know that, fella."

"It's pictures of my kid's birthday party."

The man pinched the cartridge while it lay in Hooper's hand, and he said in a husky threatening way, "That's no birthday party. Stop wasting my time."

Hooper tried at another lab. Two men puzzled over it, and then one of them said, "I wouldn't want to be responsible for fouling this up."

He kept walking in the Greenhouse. He saw another naked woman. This one wore a mask, and attached somehow to the right place was a rubber penis, which swung as she walked. He saw some naked teenage girls painted with mock tattoos and wearing helmets and face masks. And he saw a naked man wearing what looked like a hangman's hood, leather, with a pointed beak and eye slits — a mask probably. And other people dressed expensively as aliens: men as Trolls, women as Skells. It disgusted Hooper. These people may never have seen an alien in the flesh, and so their mimicry seemed strangely naive and alarming.

The trees planted here in the Greenhouse were taller and greener and far healthier than many he had seen in O-Zone. But there was also something barren and antiseptic about them. They were like overgrown houseplants, with clean leaves, the trunks wrapped in tape, and the limbs neatly pruned. Beneath them were long troughs of flowers, and low fountains; and some streets had been banked into swales, with grass and ferns. It was like a bottle garden or a vast terrarium — greenery under glass — tidy and clean and beautifully lit.

But that orderly place had the effect of making the rest of New York look especially dirty and dangerous, for as soon as Hooper left the Greenhouse — another security check, another argument — he smelled the sour air and was deafened by low-flying one-seaters moving recklessly between the buildings. Cruising above were some booming police gunships. Many people wore mouth-masks and some wore full masks with earphones and receivers: he watched them gabbling as they walked along.

Still looking for someone to deal with the cartridge of film, Hooper headed for a photographic lab where in the past he had sent his own confidential film and tapes for copying. He had never gone to the place in person — had always sent a runner — and it was not until he set off that he realized that the lab was deep down on the west side. He had not expected any problem with the cartridge, so he had not taken his car. Now it was becoming a full day's work on the ground, but it was an instructive day, and moving through the security checks, he was like a man in disguise. There was a humiliation in that scrutiny, but he felt a thrill, too, at the thought that he could be mistaken for an illegal or someone packing a weapon.