Paul Theroux: O-Zone

"Oh, shut up, Fizzy," Moura said. "Everyone can hear you."

"If you don't know the risks, you're stupid," the boy yelled into the microphone. It was another squawk, and it made someone in another rotor laugh out loud. Fisher could not modulate his voice, and his mask only distorted it further. He clucked and growled and quacked in his adolescent way, and then there was more heep from the mike. And more people laughed, making him madder.

"The risks are infinitesimal," Hooper said. "This is a very old disaster."

Fisher started to say something, but Hardy signaled for him to be quiet. Hooper was still talking.

"I guess we'll have to move on and find a safe strip. And, Hardy. If there's any way of sedating your youthful passenger, I'd be mighty grateful. He sounds like a Fed."

"What's the point of sightseeing if we're making a video loop?" Fisher said. "It's a waste of time. It's for dimbos."

"Are we holding you up?" Hooper said. "Have you got a speaking engagement out here? You going to lecture the folks locally on the subject of antimatter? Or particles?"

"A lot you know about particles, you herbert."

"Or inert gases?" Hooper said, and shot his rotor up, and laughed, and added, "We're the only folks in O-Zone!"

"I hate words like 'infinitesimal,'" Fisher said. "I think Skells and Roaches probably use those words."

"I'm listening," Hooper said crisply, and he was still laughing.

"Everything can be measured," Fisher said. "Especially particles — particles have an inside and outside. They have interior dimensions, and weight and density. They have sur-faces, they have topography, they have personalities. Don't tell me about particles! And never mind quarks—"

"Doesn't this kid ever stop?" It was one of the Eubanks, back on the air.

"— I've tracked exodes! I described Antigons! I know all the numbers." He gasped and began again. "We've been flying in circles, slowing down, speeding up. If we had flown straight and let the camera move in circles, we could have calculated exact distances and speeds and fuel to a ten-digit milliliter. All this bullshucking is just creating useless variables. 'Infinitesimal' is crap! Everything has a number!"

"What's your number, then, Fizzy?"

Fisher laughed. It came suddenly, with the quack of his usual voice, but there was a choking behind it. His laughter was a horrible snorting noise. He showed his large disapproving teeth. He said, "You know my number, fuck-wit!"

Moura turned toward her son again. Throughout the flight he had seemed to be suspended by his straploops as he nagged and navigated, appearing to gnaw the mike in his mask. He held his face forward, against the curved window of his faceplate.

He was associated in her mind with masks: she saw his face behind most masks. They had been part of that clinic's ritual. She had worn one, the donor had worn one, and the masked face had hung just above her as he entered her. She had not known the donor's name, but she had approved his pedigree, and she had come to enjoy the sessions — one a month, over the period of two years. When they stopped, with her pregnancy, she had felt abandoned.

The donor's mask had been a soft, beaked thing, with live flicking eyes; and hers had been a human face — a lovely actress who had been popular at the time. After one session Moura had stopped wearing the short smock, after two she dispensed with the stirrups; before a year had passed she went to the clinic as if keeping an appointment with her lover.

It had been a medical fad that had passed through New York — contact with the donor, probably a reaction against the injections and the test tubes and the slivers of frozen sperm. In some contact clinics they wore body masks, like breastplates, and in others they were naked in total darkness. She often wondered whether she had done the right thing. She could have received a sliver or an implant. Now she never spoke about it — people would misunderstand. These days, contact clinics were regarded as little better than brothels.

She had not known the man, of course — that was forbidden. But sometimes — and very often these days — looking at Fisher, she felt that stranger become more familiar and saw not Fisher's face but the face of the man behind the mask. She saw him most clearly in her son as a hovering shadow, and shadows — for the features she gave them — were the most powerful presences of all.

Fisher was fifteen-plus, tall for his age, with a pretty face and some gray hairs. Even though he did not get regular exercise he was hard-fleshed and tight-muscled — probably from tension alone, the nervous way he sat at his console. He was angular; his arms were too long, his feet and hands too big. His palms were always damp. He used body powder but never combed his hair. He had Moura's good looks and like her he was tremulous and attractive, always glancing. The difference was he talked. Mother and son had the sort of pale faces that are brightened and made more beautiful by nervousness. They shared another characteristic: they never smiled.

Fisher yawned constantly, and she could not get him to cover his mouth. He had a phenomenal ability to sleep, yet his mind was tireless and his intelligence easily engaged. He fastened on a problem and would not let go until he had shaken a solution from it, and then he was bored and blank for moments — and deaf — until he snatched at something else to solve. Moura had expected most of these traits in him: she had seen his profile before he was born — before he was conceived.

He was an extraordinary boy. His memory was perfect. He could find his way in pitch dark, steering himself with his memory, or the memory of a picture. But it had been years since he had done so. He was now afraid of the dark. He said, "There's stuff in my nose," when it was only snot — and sometimes it dropped out and he shrieked. He howled at insects, sometimes saying loud simple words to them in his squawking voice.

All this, Moura told herself, was predictable. What she had not expected was his rudeness — his snarls, his corrections, his boasts, his bad manners. He had become worse as he had grown older, and he was harder now to control — impossible, really. He had no humor, no grace, only the rattle of incessant information. He did not converse, he argued and made noisy connections. Most of his questions were belittling or hostile: he seldom listened for answers. And now there was a wobbly quality to his fifteen-year-old's voice that was a bleat or a growl interrupted by a high metallic quack, and he lost his temper with a sound like tin trays dropping. At times four or five strange notes were struck in the same sentence, or in a single word — he knew some very long words. He was completely unselfconscious, and could become angry very quickly — new chords were struck and things snapped in his throat. Moura had not wanted perfection, but she did not want this either. He could be infuriating. He had the asceticism and willful self-indulgence of genius. He was a cold creature and when he was being obnoxious his good looks made him seem far crueler than if he had been homely. People called him "wonder boy."

He was still arguing with Hooper over the radio!

"I love these folds," Hooper was saying. "These little ridges and corrugations of the land—"

"Synclines," Fisher said. "Anticlines."

"Lay off," Hardy said.

"Look at that filthy crawling river.". That was another thing: his horror of dirt.

"It's stupid to put down here!"

He had gone rigid again, because Hooper was leading them in a great circle, around a collection of buildings — two sets of buildings in stone and metal, identical in every way, like gigantic furniture, resembling a pair of narrow matching chests, with balconies like pulled-out drawers.

"It's probably contaminated!"