Paul Theroux - O-Zone

"Fizzy's a slug," Hardy said. "I've seen kids like that just collapse and cry when you talk to them, and spend the whole day watching their fingernails grow. They stop taking baths. Liquid diet. They develop this tremendous interest in germs and fecal odors. They start talking about dirt. They receive strange orders over their headsets. They get very unscientific and monotonous."

"Are you talking about your kid?"

Hardy said, "You should hear him describe the right way to open a can. Gloves, tongs, tweezers, hot water, plastic bags—"

But Hooper thought: We are here to talk about O-Zone.

He said, "The mission might do Fizzy some good. But he's not crucial to it. And if you want elevations and temperatures, you could use satellites or send a plane over."

"I want eye-level stuff," Hardy said. "I want to know what it smells like. I want your feet on the ground."

He wants secrecy, Hooper thought, so he wants me. Who else could he trust? His favor to Hardy, and Hardy knew it, was that he did not ask why he wanted eye-level videos, and the smell of it, and his feet on the ground. Secrecy certainly, and he also suspected that Hardy was a bit of a coward — it seemed to go with the limp dick of impotence, and if Hardy wasn't a coward, why was Fizzy so fearful? The boy had never learned courage. Hardy had neglected him that way, and in so doing had made him think that courage was something special and unattainable. The boy was a brain, but not more than that. It was like being a moron.

"I'm pretty busy," Hooper said.

Hardy nodded slightly, to show he had heard.

Hooper was grateful to him for not challenging this. Hardy knew he was lying — that he had been restless but never busy.

Hardy said, "It would mean a lot to me if you took over. I think the kid likes you. You can set him straight."

"What if we find aliens?"

"Probably none there. And didn't Murdick say you'd burned them all down?"

"But what if?"

"You know how to handle yourself," Hardy said. "Anyway, they're all sick. They're cranks and cancer patients. They don't fight back. I can't see them worrying you."

It was the popular view — aliens are sick and diseased— and it was a measure of its pervasiveness that even someone as scientific and well-informed as Hardy appeared to believe it. Maybe he's just trying to urge me to go, Hooper thought.

But Hooper knew that the aliens he had seen in O-Zone and on the Godseye hunt were not sick at all, and what had struck him most was the way they resembled Owners and pass-holders and everyone else.

"They could delay our research," Hooper said. "And we might want to study them."

Hardy smiled and shook his head. "People make a mistake in thinking aliens are interesting. They're not. They're empty. They're diseased. They're very easily intimidated. Very few of them have killer instincts. They don't make anything. See, if you don't bother them they won't bother you."

All this talk had made the meal mechanical, and concentrating on what Hardy was saying;—especially this bullshit about aliens — had made Hooper incapable of tasting his food. It was there one minute; then it was gone. He could not remember having eaten it-it had something to do with pauses in the conversation, with listening. It was a form of punctuation.

But Hooper had his answer — he was still suppressing his urge to blurt it out. He pretended to worry a bit longer. He dropped his eyes, then took a deep breath and expelled it slowly, so that Hardy could see and hear that he was being judicious. It was such a charade! He had never been so eager to do something, and he felt foolishly grateful to his brother, for this favor, and for sparing him other questions.

At last, almost bursting, he said, "I'll go on one condition. That you don't give me instructions — no warnings, no advice. If you want to be in charge you can go yourself. I'll carry out your instructions to the letter-whatever data you want, I'll get. And I'll look after Fizzy. But I'm in charge."

Hardy had already begun to nod in agreement as Hooper was talking. Then he said, "That's fine, as long as you treat it as secret. Not a word to anyone."

Hooper opened his mouth to speak.

"Not even Moura," Hardy said (and his quick interruption made Hooper stammer). "Let her keep her own secrets."

It was perfect for Hardy: nothing official. He had no job, no project, no research, no proposal — nothing existed except the words they had just spoken, which had risen and disappeared like vapor over their food in this anonymous restaurant. It was perfect for Hooper too. No one knew what he planned — he hardly knew himself. So there was no mission, no purpose, no plan. Nothing existed, no routes, no checkpoints, no aliens—

"You're smiling," Hardy said. "That's good." Only the girl existed, waiting to be rescued. The brothers had managed to please each other again. It was not a gift, but an agreement — a mutual favor that went back and forth. Hardy was glad, for whatever reason. And Hooper was delighted. It was all he wanted and yet he had never revealed more than a mild willingness. Give someone something and they go on dogging you, if not traipsing after to thank you, then trying to return the favor, which was worse, like giving the same thing back.

Moura had always stayed clear of her son, as from a biting animal or one of those toothy household trash extractors, the garbage-chewers that ate everything and were so hungry and vicious you needed a license for them. Fizzy hated to be touched. If it happened, he quacked — or worse, he laughed. His laugh was both a bark and a squawk, and always abusive, with the stink of his bad breath in it. He laughed, always without smiling, and it had the rhythm of a rotor blade.

The distance and the hands-off might have helped them succeed as mother and son. Moura had never liked to touch him, or be touched by him either. Once it had been like politeness, but now it was closer to revulsion, and Moura was so amazed by her behavior that she told Holly Murdick.

They were at their exercise class on the roof garden of Coldharbor — Holly had come over from Wedgemere. Each woman was on a muscle machine, looking as though she were being snatched and swallowed. Holly was glowing, damp and pink with exertion, groaning in her body sock. And yet, even twisted in the machine — but perhaps it was the way the machine held her in its grip — she looked fleshy and eager. Lust gave her a silly face and a doggy friendliness — heated eyes and a wide stare and a slow half-smile, all lust.

"It might mean you're repressing your sexual feeling for him," Holly said.

Moura wanted to laugh — and it was not just the idiotic idea that she might have a sexual feeling for the supermoron ("I've got an on-line program waiting for me on Pap, quack quack!"), but the way Holly said it, hanging there with her arms out, like a bondage queen, sweating as her legs were being worked. There was a panting lunacy in Holly's lust that made the woman impossible to take seriously and aroused a protectiveness in Moura, something almost motherly, because in that mood Holly had no defenses. But she was still theorizing about Fizzy!

"— and sort of masking it in self-disgust," she was saying. "It's fairly common among a lot of mothers."

And the other thing about Holly's ignorant defenselessness was that you had to listen to her nonsense or she would be dreadfully hurt.

"I've never been his mother in that way," Moura said, trying to be tactful. She was on the next machine, being stretched. "Holly, I don't even like him very much."

"That's what I mean by disgust," Holly said. "Or maybe he's attracted to you and you somehow understand this." She was full of theories, many of them contradictory, and perhaps it was because she had so many that she was seldom dogmatic. "Maybe it's your way of thwarting him. You're discouraging him. You suspect that he wants to jump you."