Paul Theroux - O-Zone

He mindlessly, uselessly signaled Hooper with his phones, and when there was no reply from Hooper's unit, he set off to look for his uncle outside Coldharbor. He had never been alone in the city — there was always Moura, or Hardy, or a driver, or a pilot. He was walking, and he knew there was something momentous in this move, as there had been in their trip to O-Zone, and the mission. He had never thought of himself as living in New York. He was a resident of Coldharbor. So this was no stroll — this was like flinging himself off the roof.

He had no real hope of finding his uncle in this huge city, and what good was his tracer signal among all the radio waves here? Hooper might be anywhere! But Fisher knew that he was only half-looking. The important thing was that he was outside, skimming — he had liberated himself. It was the effect of O-Zone. He felt braver now. He had seen aliens face to face — and not simple trampy Skells, grubbing in garbage cans, but wild people, net-men, living like settled beasts in a prohibited area.

And the extraordinary revelation was that he had seen that these aliens were not very strange at all. He despised himself for the intrusive superstitions that had made him imagine them as snarling doglike creatures with broken fingernails and dirty feet. The truth was so different from this irrational goblin species. They were clean and fast, they had beards and bright teeth, they seemed self-sufficient. He was overwhelmed by the obvious: they were not beasts. He was surprised and ashamed to discover what logic had told him all along, that they were fully human. They were not like him, but they were very similar to everyone else he knew.

All his terror had come later, on the trip home, when he was safe. Then he went rigid, considering how he might have died. The memory of Murdick had made it worse, because he easily imagined himself being just as defenseless and clumsy, with a pinched wire or a blocked air supply, shuffling in front of the aliens in mute terror, maybe gabbling and pleading just before he was netted and his head twisted off or his bones broken. The forest aliens killed their victims by hand, to save bullets — that was what everyone said about forest aliens. Two of them had been killed—"beasts," he would have called them, yet no one could have looked more human than they had at the moment of impact, when the particle hit, just before they were turned into smoke.

But Fisher had survived. He had steered them out of that place. After that, what terrors could this walled-in city hold for him?

He walked from Coldharbor to the Midtown Mall, but did not enter. He told himself that he was looking for Hooper. He still felt safe, in his mask and headphones, his suit, his big boots. He paused at Madison, somewhere in the East Forties, and clicked his mask out of position and switched off his headset. He was holding his breath, but not voluntarily: there was a catch in his throat, he could not speak or cry out, he was being slowly throttled by a paralyzing yawn. All contact was broken; he felt very weak.

A tear gathered at the corner of one eye, then spilled and ran quickly to the tip of his nose. Air hummed in his head, and his breath and strength returned. He became buoyant— first his face and head, and finally his whole body. He was momentarily weightless — outside, still alive!

The city stank, it screeched, its rough stone was cold. He noticed, as Hooper had, the large numbers of policemen and guards, city cops, private security men, and even some gray-suited Federals. Above him were cruising gunships that did nothing but buck and slide low in the sky. It was a towering city of soldiers and policemen.

He heard the donkey-bray of an alarm and saw nearby lights raking the street and mounted cameras swiveling. He was on the point of running away when he saw that no one near the alarm seemed to notice the pounding noise or the flashing light. Often in the past, when the sound of alarms carried to his tower room in Coldharbor, and he saw confusion on his external screen (he had no outside windows), he put on his headphones and turned up the volume — music or the voice of a teaching panel — merely to calm himself. As an indoor creature, he had always been made anxious by the racket of distant alarm bells or sirens. Now he was outside, up close, and he saw that it was nothing but noise — a false alarm.

"They're too sensitive," a watching man said. "They can be triggered by vibrations — by dust particles,"

"That means they're not sensitive enough," Fisher said. "They're calibrated wrong."

He wanted to explain what he meant, when the man frowned and said "Bullshit" and walked away. The abruptness of it scared him a little.

The other streets were full of people, and the air pulsated with the regular beat of rotor noise and rising choppers. Like Hooper, Fisher was reminded of the emptiness of O-Zone, the great spidery wilderness of hickories and oaks, the sinkholes and swellings of the plateau, and the distant glimpse of prairie. Empty buildings, standing like tombs, with the peculiar nakedness of abandonment. The whine of insects, and birds fluttering like blown paper. The reassurance of wilderness; and then the sudden violence of that shoot.

The O-Zone trip had given him a taste for flying, for navigation. He was restless here in New York, and he was proud of his boldness in wandering the streets. But the wandering also proved that there was nothing to be afraid of here: It seemed to him a somewhat ordinary city, and certainly on the ground it was a great deal less special than it looked from fifty floors up. New Yorkers talked about dangers, but where were these dangers?

"You'll have to pass through this checkpoint, sir."

Sir, because the guard could see from the expensive mask and headset that he might be wealthy. He had slipped his mask on again. The fumes and the noise in this part of New York— surely this was one of the dingier parts? — were too much for him. Another alarm had started, and just the sound of it had shaken him. It might not be dangerous, but it was bad-looking. You needed nerves, not brains, here. The tramping crowds and the traffic had driven him east, where he had hoped to get a look at a sealed bridge. He had not expected a checkpoint.

"Your ID, sir."

He handed over his plate and watched the guard push it tape-side-down into the machine. It was returned to him with a salute by the armed guard on the other side of the metal detector.

"What do I do now?"

"You may proceed, sir."

When had he ever been called sir? Afterward he relished the idea that he had been under suspicion. He might have been armed; he might have been illegal. He might have been dangerous!

Feeling powerful, he stared at his reflection in a store window. The mask and headset gave him an insectile head and beetle jaws, his pimples made his nose look lopsided, the corner of one ear was folded forward under an earpiece. He saw that he was skinny, and he suspected that one arm was slightly longer than the other. He was overdressed in his padded jacket and boots. He was wired. He peered into the reflection of his faceplate and thought: Goofball. He felt ridiculous, and so he squinted until he went out of focus and his image was bearable.

At times like this he remembered that he was fifteen years old. In his defense, he wanted to tell people that he had traveled to O-Zone. I've seen it, he wanted to say. I've seen aliens in the wild — we killed a couple of dangerous ones. I navigated a Welly and hid it in a sinkhole. I collected a specimen — not a mutant, but it was dead before it hit the beam!

Who was there to tell who would understand him?

He found a weapons dealer on East Thirty-fifth. It was six flights up in a rattly elevator, and then through a security check and a very thorough frisking by an armed woman guard smelling sweetly of flowers — a gimmick, Fisher thought, this pretty woman carrying out body searches on potential customers. From the side window he could see the East River — the drive, the wall, the cones of skylights.