Paul Theroux - O-Zone

"They're still licensed. They're very strictly controlled. They're supposed to be clean."

Moura could not help smiling at Holly, who looked so eager and happy now, nervously smoothing her hair — so bright-eyed. "You actually want to go to one."

"Yes." It was another half-formed word, another gasp of pleasure.

Moura said, "I wouldn't dream of going through that again."

"You don't have to do anything — just prop me up a little. It'll be fun, like the party in O-Zone. We'll get Rinka." She was chattering eagerly. "Do you think they still wear masks?"

Before Moura could answer, the door alarm sounded— Captain Jennix from Coldharbor Security, announcing Hooper Allbright. Moura was glad for an interruption to deflect all this talk of clinics. Hooper was just the person to change any subject.

And yet this evening he seemed unusually reserved, almost suspicious. The women were at once too quiet and too interested in his arrival. He detected something conspiratorial in their politeness. What had they been talking about?

He saw Holly as fickle and out of touch, but he liked Moura, and he always thought it a deficiency in himself, not her, that she was the sort of woman he would never be able to make happy. His studious and rather chilly brother had not succeeded with her, he knew, but they were still together. Happy marriages were inexplicable to him, and probably meaningless anyway; but long marriages were another matter — they had a mystery ingredient, something subtler than love, like sympathy or patience or even comedy. However, it was not comedy in Hardy and Moura's case, and he knew they regarded his humor as aggressive and his instincts as impulsive and unpredictable. This knowledge made him self-conscious and more impulsive, and because he hated being watched, made him wilder, too.

He smiled at the women, not knowing what to say. He had become weakened by the apparent futility of his other purpose — the cartridge of film that no one but Godseye could crack open.

Holly said, "It's all right, Moura. Hooper's here to see me. He's been following me around all day."

"Where's Fizzy?" Hooper said suddenly. "I couldn't get him on the radio."

"Hooper's pretending he doesn't see me. Men always do that," Holly said. "He's just waiting for me to make the first move. Woof-woof. Like I'm some animal."

Hooper turned to her and said, "I don't mind your saying that, because you're not really talking to me. You don't know me. So what you say doesn't matter."

He felt that she usually seemed to be talking to herself, and something in him was always on the point of signaling to her: Yoo-hoo!I'm over here!

"You girls look as if you're planning something," he said. It was a kind of nervous smugness with an air of concealment: their exaggerated interest in him was an awkward lack of interest.

"I'd love to hear your plans," Holly said.

"Fizzy's out," Moura said. "Sit down, Hoop. Talk to us."

"I can't sit down. I've been trying all day to get one chore done."

Holly said, "Don't you wish you were back in O-Zone, where there are no chores to do? Just the wilderness and abandoned buildings. Those towers looked so exposed — so naked — with no one in them, and there's something sexual in all that solitude. I mean, being alone in a place like that gives me ideas! I thought: One other person and this would be perfect!"

Hooper objected to the woman saying this, because the sentiments were his but her way of putting them sounded crude and stupid. There were better ways of expressing the simple wish that had woken in him in O-Zone.

"That's very silly," he said, angry that she was making him deny it.

Then he sat down. They had noticed that he was irritable, and so they were trying to please him by being playful and giving him information.

Moura said, "We were all wearing masks in O-Zone. We come back to New York and suddenly everyone is wearing masks."

"It's like we started a fashion," Holly said. "I like that. I love masks. You can get away with anything in a mask."

This made Hooper even more uncomfortable. He had detected something sexual rising in the room. He saw it was Holly, a sort of glow on her: she seemed to shimmer from where she lay on the sofa, propped on one elbow, with her hand cupping her striped face.

She was saying: Look at me.

Hooper was not attracted to women who bore the marks of other men on them. Holly was like that, like those women whose manhandled bodies had slight discolorations, bruises like thumbprints, little reddened patches of pressure. Old lovers and brutes and strangers, and most husbands — they all left their damage on them. The most desirable women looked to him as though they had never been touched — not virginal or innocent, just unscathed and solitary.

Moura and Holly he saw as bright New Yorkers. They had all the money and all the savvy and they had always lived among powerful men. Holly was reckless, and Moura practically unknowable, which puzzled him, because she was almost his own age, and very attractive — those long legs, that smooth serious face — yet there was no evidence that she had ever been manhandled.

He said, "Someday New York could look like O-Zone. It wouldn't take much nuclear trash to take the stuffings out of this city."

"I can't imagine New York without people — like O-Zone."

Hooper almost replied, Don't be silly! but he remembered how they had sworn to the others that O-Zone was empty, that all the aliens had been burned. It was probably full of aliens!

Holly said, "Don't be depressed. This is a great place."

The glow was on her, and there was something else in her expression that seemed brainless and sexy — perhaps the way she worked her mouth and kept it open?

"It could happen. New York could turn into a city-stain," Hooper said. "It might be a good thing. The trouble is that it wouldn't end up as pretty as O-Zone."

"You've been saying that a lot lately," Holly said. "Catastrophes," she said. "Burnouts." She spoke each word with a dreamy smile. "The future."

"Sometimes I think your wishing for a sorry future is your way of taking revenge," Moura said. "It's a kind of threat, because you've had a bad day. But really it's just cursing."

Where am I? Hooper thought, and surfaced again from another conversation. There were so many playing in his head.

He said, "What do you mean Fizzy's out? He never goes out!"

Normally, Fisher would have had a long study session at the mainframe in his room today. He had never gone to school; he had always had high-level classification — Remote Student, Type A, the category that had given him the nickname "wonder boy." He was not alone in the category, but the mention of anyone else made him overprecise and competitive. He had all the strengths of his classification, and the weaknesses, too — hypertension, impatience, humor-lessness. He disliked human company. His pleasures were the symmetry of math and the solitude of his room, and a session like today's, where he was rapping back to a study team and propounding his own new description of particle behavior, Fisher's Theory of Subsequence. He went through his proofs and thought: You porkers.

But he canceled the session, and after that muttering to Moura, he headed over to Hooper's unit, which was in an adjoining tower in Coldharbor. He needed to see his uncle. Much more than verification, he wanted reassurance. He could not be calm about the squirrel autopsy — it had not been a mutant, it had not been contaminated, it had not even been alive! But who had thrown it? It shocked him to think that aliens had crept so close to Firehills. And he had been shocked by the mission — the rapidity of the deaths — the burning of those two trotting men in O-Zone. He had thought that the difference between particle theory and particle practice was a pool of blood. But there had been nothing left of those men. He was a supremely confident boy, and had a flexible if narrow imagination, but he was shaken when challenged with the idea of nothing.