Paul Theroux - O-Zone

There was a noise. Had Fizzy dropped something? He was probably trying to unwrap the weapon, or whatever it was. He could be very clumsy, dangerously so, as his slow hands sought to keep pace with his racing mind.

"Don't be a nit," she said. "I'll be right in."

But the next moment he was at the door, breathless, swallowing with apprehension, his eyes wide. He had rushed out and confronted Moura, to protect his room. How could you be angry with someone who looked like a penguin?

His panting was like a demand that she leave. His breath was humid. He was trying to speak.

That was another thing — she could never tell these days when he was afraid. His fear seemed like just another kind of rudeness. And hunger always gave him bad breath.

"I thought you might want some food," she said.

"Too busy!"

"And I wanted to talk to you about going away. The Murdicks are getting up a party to go to Africa in March."

Holly had said, I'm going to be a naked savage for a month.

"I hate those places," Fisher said.

"It's completely zoned and secure. The beaches are beautiful, all of them are fortified. I haven't been there for years. When I was your age I went with my parents. I met a boy and had a really good time."

She wanted to say more. He looked so bored she wanted to shock him.

He said, "Those places look safe because of all the soldiers and police. But really they're full of diseases. The food's buggy, the water's contaminated. All those jigs, all those monkey-men."

"It's a lot safer than O-Zone."

"Wrong!" Fisher said, and his repeating the word turned it into a honk. He was protesting with his hands — batting the air. Upset at that little thing!

"What is it, Fizz?"

He fussed, started to speak, then gagged and gave up. Later she heard him banging in his room; and talking. But he often talked to himself. In a sense he talked only to himself.

But tonight she heard him shouting in a ducklike way.

"Negative," he said. "Negative." And more: words so unfamiliar to her they might have been another language. And then a familiar cry of his, "Nuke it!"

I don't know him, she thought, and it frightened her more to think that she once did.

He was more and more a mystery, but she pitied him. That was the first week of this new seclusion. Then crates began arriving for him. He had always been interested in new equipment, yet this interest had apparently developed into an obsession. She could see him trying the stuff out — she had a glimpse into the skylight of his room from a corner window upstairs. She saw him in a bewildering variety of masks, staring out. He had weapons. He pointed these ugly objects at the tall, safe city and its emptiness. He was living out some bizarre fantasy of siege, she supposed.

That was when she bugged the room and listened.

"Mission Westwind Command speaking."

He was full of code names. She had always found men's code names madder than their masks, and insane, as well as simply childish. Women never went in for this ridiculous naming and playing. Hardy was a tremendous user of codes. Perhaps Fizzy was imitating this secretive man, who refused to be a father.

Fizzy was still quacking: "When a risk arises and is canceled out by a solution, there is no risk. I have run a computer check of every possible downside event, from suspected cannibals and a verified biting-death, to foot-rot from boot condensation. 1 have a matching tally of remedies. I will not consider any move until the mission has been declared risk-free. I have drawn my list from all the recorded and projected incidents in all other missions by self-contained vehicles in comparable zones, and nothing will be taken for granted in the decision-loop, not even any loss of—"

Who was he talking to in this severe voice?

Moura went on monitoring the bug: he was not talking to anyone. He was recording this on his memory machine and storing it in what he called "Mission Westwind's Archives." Was he sick?

"Mission Westwind Command, speaking from Headquarters — location confidential. This is the Commander with an update of the details of risk-elimination intelligence—"

Sometimes, clinic kids went hoopy. They blazed with insights until they were in their mid-teens and then burned out and spent the rest of their lives watching cartoons on television, doing jigsaw puzzles, and working on coloring books. They became very pliant and told you what they wanted for Christmas. So she had been warned.

Poor kid, she thought.

Books arrived. He snatched them from her. She heard him stumbling with them in his room. When he was done with them he fed them into the trash extractor, grinding his teeth as he worked the switches.

"What are you doing, Fizzy?"

"Shredding these classified documents."

She pondered whether he was wacko by trying to remember a time when she had believed him to be normal. She was left, still wondering, as video cartridges arrived. He watched them in his helmet and then wiped them.

A two-day silence — and nothing from the bug — impelled Moura to try his door. She knocked.

"Fizzy, can I come in?"

"Negative!"

But his voice sounded so strange and choked she got her own key and unlocked the door.

Fisher was hanging upside-down, his legs crooked over a chair back, his head in a helmet.

"Classified!" he howled, and in his fury he fogged his whole mask.

He was growing odder. Any day she expected to see him grinning from above a jigsaw puzzle and quacking in joy as he pounded a whittled piece into place.

Physically he had changed a great deal. Not long ago he had her lovely solemn face — Moura thought of it as her mother's face — but this past year, the onset of his late adolescence, had coarsened it. He was taller and skinnier, and his face was paler and blotched and bony; his neck was thin; his feet were very large. Those feet! Expedition boots arrived. He limped in them and made snorting noises and ordered more, not bothering to send back the rejected ones. Moura could see some of the equipment from her upper window. She imagined Fizzy's room to be piled high with it.

One day a warning light flashed on the unit's signal board, indicating a fault in Fizzy's room. At first he denied there had been anything wrong, and then he admitted — because Moura threatened to call Jennix — that Pap had overheated.

"Commander," she heard from his dead-ended messages. "Mission Westwind."

It was not that he was mad, but that he was growing madder.

Hardy was no help at all. He was seldom at home these days, and when he was at home and Moura told him of her bafflement, of Fizzy's strangeness, he agreed. But his agreement was useless, and his sympathy was as bad as ridicule. She wanted Hardy to shake the boy, or else plug him in until he lit up.

But all Hardy said was, "He's a fruit all right. No question about it."

Hardy had never taken any responsibility for the boy, and after the novelty of Fizzy's intelligence had worn off he had taken no interest. He's not mine! he seemed to say. It was true, but so what? And it made Moura wonder further: Yes, whose is he?

Hardy's ambition and singlemindedness were no bad thing, but the trouble with ambitious people was that they were invariably secretive and even sneaky, and that made their ambition intolerable.

"I think we should send him for observation," she said. There were whole hospitals filled with kids his age — all problem kids who had become cartoon freaks and jigsaw addicts, who did other odd things like pulling down their pants in public; kids who had been reared as remote students, doing theoretical physics. Though personally Moura did not think it was such a long way from discussing Black Holes to coloring in Donald Duck. Yet she was sure now that Fizzy had to be plugged in or else fed through a wringer. He needed a year of it — a real pasting.