Paul Theroux - O-Zone

In those seconds she had let go of her breasts and begun to scream. There was no sound of her voice above the racket of the rotor, but he was frightened by her convulsive movement, her open mouth, her teeth, the whites of her rolled-up eyes. A split second afterward the echo of her scream rang on the walls of his chamber, and he heard the distant growl of the jet-rotor.

It broke the spell — shattered the magic with noise. Valda stood up awkwardly. She seemed embarrassed. She buttoned her shirt and knotted it and without looking at him — she had already begun to leave — she said, "You look so funny in that suit."

"Aw, jings," Fisher said, and felt flustered, as if he had stumbled reaching for something he badly wanted — not only had he fallen but he had ended up with nothing. And now he could not remember what he had wanted; and Valda was gone.

"They're searching for him," Mr. Blue said later that day. They were eating again, but the old stuff — pole greens and stringy meat and bean cakes.

Mr. Blue still talked as though Fisher were deaf or stupid, a dim alien who had washed up on the shores of O-Zone,

"They'll kill us if they find him here."

"And how are we going to swap him for Bligh?" Gumbie asked.

"If we find his people before they find us, we might be able to make a deal."

"He's a dip — he isn't worth the trouble," Rooks said. "Sell him to the Diggers. Give him away. Tie him to a tree and just walk off?"

They usually spoke softly, but Fisher heard everything, because even a normal voice made the vault chambers stutter with echoes. These aliens seemed threatened by echoes, but no whisper was too weak not to reach these walls and be flung back. Fisher stayed away from the echoey darkness at the back of the cavern, and he avoided the blinding glare of daylight at the front. He kept to the edge of the shelf, between the darkness and the light, tuning the transmitter in his helmet and playing with his phones, listening for another rotor. He imagined it swooping, and taking him up and away, and blasting them. But more days passed and there was nothing.

A decision came quite suddenly.

Fisher had been staring at Mr. Blue's skinny face. He thought: I don't know this alien at all. He said, "What's your other name?"

"Elroy," the man said softly. "Elroy Blue." And then he responded to the suggestion and said, "What's your other one?"

"Allbright."

It made an echo, three bounces, and someone was listening inside. That person said, "Like the department stores. That rich family from New York."

"That's my family," Fisher said. "But they closed the stores. They've moved into cable sales — it's all mail order. What are you looking at? They're all Herberts. My uncle's a porker. My father's a dong. He's not even my rea! father!"

He was surprised by their interest and wanted to mock it; these aliens were perhaps even dumber than they looked. They were impressed by the Allbrights! Fisher disliked the Allbrights and every aspect of the business. But the aliens were murmuring and seemed to see possibilities in the name. They kept repeating it, as if trying it out and listening to the sound of the echoes. And now they seemed to know what to do.

"Take him back," Echols said.

"New York," someone said. "That's the States."

"We can walk to the States."

It was their third search-and-scan mission — Hooper laughed to think that that was what Fizzy would have called this afternoon flight to and from New York — the picnic in Firehills, the low-altitude photography. Hooper felt he was flying blind, but he knew that Fizzy would easily have been able to locate the aliens. Hopper was lost without the boy: it seemed impossible to find Fizzy without Fizzy's help. Today was typical. Unless something specific showed up on the film — the band of aliens, a settlement, a hot spot, a glimpse of Fizzy, or any sign of life — it would be another failure. But it had been another lovely day with Bligh.

"We used to scream when we saw planes like this," Bligh was saying.

"I don't believe you," Hooper said. "Only wild men would do that. I mean, real burned-out Skells. Anyway, there are no other planes here. Overflying is forbidden."

"This year there were people," Bligh said.

New Year's: Hooper said nothing.

"They came down like thunder and lightning," the girl said. "But it's so quiet inside here!"

He loved her for not being afraid — he loved it that her wonderment and curiosity overcame her apprehension.

"What's this for?"

"It's a program scanner, a sort of analyzer. Fizzy's. I have no idea how to work it."

"And you said he's stupid!"

"Not stupid," Hooper said. "Just foolish."

The land streaking beneath Hooper's jet-rotor was wild and misleadingly green. He imagined that it was all contaminated, and felt like an outlaw and an adventurer. He saw an exciting similarity between Bligh the alien and O-Zone the Prohibited Area. It was a lovely lawless place with a terrible reputation; it was solitary and cut off, an island outside time; and it was her home. She was a child of all these dangers.

He wanted to believe that Bligh belonged to him now. She was everything that he lacked. He had been desperate to find her; he was desperate to keep her. "Love" was the word he gave his desperation.

In spite of his pleasure in her being with him on the flight, he was uneasy and superstitious traveling with her in O-Zone. He was superstitious most of all, because having found her here, he feared that he could also lose her here — something about just being in this place. And O-Zone still seemed very dangerous.

It was the only part of America that was genuinely empty — empty by law, feared by everyone, and heavily guarded. People dreamed about it and used it as a backdrop for their fantasies. Its very name was a word for wilderness and waste, and all its associations made it a complicated and ambiguous metaphor, as if it were not merely a closed-off area in the state of Missouri, but a remote place, with the features of another planet. It was not just a foreign land. It represented misjudgment and disaster — perhaps trickery, perhaps sabotage. Maybe Fizzy was right about the collapse of those caverns causing the radioactive leak. Yet no one had known until after the catastrophe that the Feds had hidden the waste there! Something unspeakable happened and then people said: There was something I meant to tell you. . O-Zone had been like that. One day it was just the Ozarks, and the next day it was an island revolving in outer space. It was lost beauty — spoiled, people said, ruined and poisoned. But now Hooper knew better, and somewhere down there so probably did Fizzy.

Bligh had been with him for over three weeks, and all that time he had methodically and conscientiously been kind to her. It had become almost instinctive to him in a tall fatherly way — his attention, his tenderness. He gathered that she had been unhappy with her people — those aliens. She said they had been driven out of their camp. What camp? He had not seen one, and neither had Fizzy. She said she had wanted to leave at about the time he had abducted her.

"You took me away," she said. "You stole me!"

Then she laughed, and he was so glad she had made it into a joke, because for him it was no joke. And he was still not sure of her. He had not touched her — didn't dare. He was amazed to think that after three weeks Hooper Allbright had still not made love to her. He wanted her to ask why. "Because I'm very serious about you," he wanted to reply. But the girl didn't ask.

Lovers are cannibals, he thought, and in his hungry, despairing way he wanted to devour her and have her at the same time. He wanted to inhabit her; he wanted her to live within him. But he hung back. He didn't want to frighten her; and he was also nervous. While he mocked his desire with the sad self-parody of cannibalism, there was in his mind the actual suspicion that aliens were animals. It was an irrational thought, he insisted, yet he did not want to rid himself of the notion, because he also found it very exciting.