Paul Theroux - O-Zone

"When they fucked it," Rooks said.

No one commented on that. They picked up the boxes and crates and started downward, skidding on loose stones. The sun was up and they were perspiring, on their last push,

Gumbie dropped behind, where Fisher was stepping carefully down the steep sides of the valley.

"Boy, you're real area-dite," Gumbie said in an admiring voice.

"No — not over there," Mr. Blue was saying. "It's right here."

But even with the man pointing, Fisher could not see a thing, and it was only after they began climbing again that Fisher saw the slash in the hillside, under a great hanging cliff. It was a stone vault in the mouth of the rockface, this cave they called home.

So he had been completely wrong — he understood that when they had assembled at the cave. He had not expected huts — he had not found any on the raw tape. From the way they had been living and camping on this march he had come to believe that they were tramps: huddling under bushes at night, and then in the morning burying their fire and scattering their leaves, and marching on to find a new bush and scavenge for some food. It was a grubby, prowling animal existence, based on hunger and fatigue. But now he saw that that was not it at all: they had a home, they had possessions, they had beds, they had comforts.

But this place also worried Fisher. It was a high limestone cave, very deep and full of chambers, but from the outside it was hardly a shadow. Even when he had stared directly at it he had not seen it. It was invisible to any search plane: Fisher himself had not seen it with any of the scanners or scopes. He had seen — it was pure luck — aliens scurrying on the video. And no wonder they scurried. In that New Year's party were the first aircraft they had seen for fifteen years. And no wonder, afterward, they had started screaming.

Not even satellites had picked up the presence of these aliens. That was how ingenious their living arrangement was. And that was why Fisher became very silent when he was led through it and shown its various entrances and its hidden corners.

We're bluff-dwellers, they said. These castaways had solved their problem of how to survive in O-Zone. But what was a solid and secure home for them was a prison for him. He had not detected it, so how could anyone else — like Hooper or Hardy or a search party or a strike force?

He thought: They'll never find me.

"I know they're looking for me!" he said, quacking in a kind of protest. But it was empty defiance: he had no proof. In fact, the reverse seemed much more likely — that he had no chance at all, for more than a week had passed since his abduction and there was no sign of rescue. But still he quacked at them. "They'll find me!"

"That's not necessarily a good thing," Mr. Blue said.

"Why not?"

"Because they'll have to find us first."

They were standing on the open platform at the cave mouth, Mr. Blue and Fisher, while the others had dispersed into the cool shadows of the interior chambers. Water ran in a continuous blabbing somewhere deep in the cavern, and this platform that gave onto the valley smelled of fire and burned corn. It was like living on a shelf in the wilderness.

"Troglodytes," Fisher said.

And yet, in this setting, these people appeared to be almost human. They were not sleeping under bushes anymore; they had food; they had rugs and chairs and tables and lanterns — most likely stolen from the abandoned houses of a nearby town, where they got their clothes. The whole of their quarter of O-Zone was available to them, every house, every hotel, every condominium. Everyone in America spoke of the ghost towns of O-Zone, and these aliens were its ghosts.

"Put him to work," Mr. Blue said.

Fisher said, "You don't mean me."

But Mr. Blue had spoken to Rooks, and Rooks was smiling.

"Get that helmet off so you can hear me better."

With another quack of protest, Fisher yanked the helmet from his head.

"Now get that suit off."

"No," Fisher said. "I won't."

"Do it now," Rooks said, insisting with the kind of whisper Mr. Blue used.

"I was sealed into this suit!"

Rooks had a knife. "I'll cut you out of that suit and you'll never get back in, because there'll be nothing to get back into."

After he unfastened the clasps and the zips, Fisher peeled the suit down and stepped out of it. Standing in the liner, long Johns, and a T-shirt, but still wearing his boots, Fisher felt more naked than he ever had among these aliens. Once he had felt distinctly like a turtle torn out of its shell — it seemed to sum up his situation. But that had been fanciful then, a random image to describe his sense of nakedness. Now it precisely described him, for he stood wearing only the thin liner, and there was his shell, folded in a pile with his beaky helmet on top.

He felt weak, but he was bigger than Rooks, with a big boy's thick legs and wide shoulders. And he was tall, roughly the height of Mr. Blue, who was the tallest of the aliens. Yet he had never felt that he was at any physical advantage, and out of his suit and helmet he felt terribly reduced. His great fear now was that he might burst into tears if anyone threatened him, and to calm himself he fantasized again about how he planned to destroy these people, first deafening them with howlers, and then blinding them with lightning bolts, and then burning them down, one by one.

Rooks said, "We've got some boxes down there — food boxes mostly. But other boxes, too, because when we left here we left in a hurry — never got time to hoist those boxes."

"What are we going to do with them?"

"When I said 'we' I meant you," Rooks said. "You're hoisting them, Fish. Get them up here. All of them."

"That'll take me a week!" Fisher said, and he feared that he might not be able to do it at all.

"We've got a week," Rooks said. "We've got time. Now go to it."

Fisher was on the point of asking what the others were doing to help, but before he spoke up he saw them. They seemed very busy, and some of them were engaged in harder tasks than his. Gumbie was carrying huge dirty boulders, and Valda was digging, and even Mr. Blue was hacking away at something.

All that day, Fisher labored with the boxes that lay against the hillside. His job was to raise them fifty meters up to the shelf at the entrance to the cave. The first day he fumbled with them — carrying one, dragging another, pushing a third. He bruised his hands and knees, and quietly — in frustration and rage — he wept to himself in the shadow of the hill. He was too tired to eat that night, but he noticed that they had broken open a crate of sealed provisions, and the next morning he found some packets of cookies and some Guppy-Cola.

He felt weaker the second day, but he had devised a system for raising the boxes. Using a long crank from an old meat grinder, and a ratchet from a truck jack, and a sequence of pulleys, Fisher made a hand-operated lifting machine that he predicted would allow the person lifting the weight to rest, as the ratchet prevented the ropes from slipping.

The question was, where to hang it? There was no tripod, no beam heavy enough or long enough to make into a crane, and the only logical alternative was a hook over the cave entrance.

"Don't you think we tried a block and tackle like that before?" Echols said. "You must think we're pretty stupid to have lived here this long without trying a gizmo like yours."

"Where is it, then, shit-wit?"

"Didn't work, and yours won't either."

"Yes, it will. All I have to do is find a place to hang it."

"Find me a point to put my lever, and I will move the world," Echols said. "There is no point. That's why ours didn't work. My advice to you is start heaving them boxes,"