Paul Theroux - O-Zone

She was happy now; she never listened anymore. She said she felt braver and bolder; and she made Moura promise to go to Africa with her.

Moura said yes, because Moura was her only friend; and Holly was the best reminder possible of what Moura had been. Once, sixteen years ago, Moura had gone to the clinic with that same ardor.

Dr. Sanford had demanded a high price for the information about the donor, and he had insisted on a number of conditions. The most severe condition was that Moura could do no more than establish the man's whereabouts — what he had become, his position and designation. She was not allowed to tell him who she was, nor even speak to him; and resuming contact was out of the question.

She promised, because she would have promised anything; and she paid, because she would have paid any price.

"You keep in touch with these men," she said.

"Donors," Sanford said. "They're not all men. We update their files regularly for ten years."

Moura hated the way doctors combined coyness and pedantry: the doctor always taking charge, either saying nothing or putting you down. And this doctor was also a pimp.

He said, "There is a one-in-a-million chance that the donor will die of an undetected disease that had been incubating for many years — hiding in the central nervous system, let's say. Or the donor might go mad. In such cases we would warn the recipient."

Moura was not thinking of Sanford's warning about disease or madness. She was pondering the word "recipient."

"After ten years we put the file in limbo," Sanford said, and it was then that he had torn the printout on its perforations and given her the strip showing the name and number.

Again she said, "Don't worry. I promise to follow the rules."

"It is not necessary for you to promise," he said.

But he was not being kind. He reminded Moura of what she had seen in his monitoring room, and that he had in his archives over forty hours of raw tape in which she was shown — as he put it — trying to conceive. He spoke of the excellent quality of the tape, the detailed close-ups, the color and sound quality. She realized that in this boasting way he was threatening blackmail.

He said, "I am very sure you'll do the right thing. You won't misuse this information."

"Boyd," she said, reading the name from the printed strip.

"We always called him 'Boy,'" Sanford said.

Moura had never seen his face, but "Boy" was a name she could easily connect to his slim body. Sanford dismissed her, saying that names were notoriously unreliable but that numbers never changed. She had Boy's fourteen-digit number, and although he was not in the phone book or any of the current reference guides, she found him in an out-of-date ID directory, listed with his parents, who were Owners. Their address was a tower in Upper East, twenty-eight blocks north of Coldharbor.

That was the first day it struck her that Fizzy was perfect for this world. With that ID number and the various scraps of information he would have sat in his room scanning lists for more details of this man. He would have hacked into the data banks and compiled a complete dossier; he would have found what he wanted.

But that was the last resort — sending Fizzy to find his father. Yet, when all she could do was pick up the telephone and try to call the place, she resented Fizzy's skill. She was glad he was not around: just the sight of him would have aggravated her resentment.

There was no answer. She took a taxi to the address — a granite apartment house called Cliffden, one of the older buildings still standing in an area that had been recently redeveloped. The tower was on its own, not in a garrison. The windows on the lower floors were barred and the front door was caged — but beautifully, in silvered steel. It was not heavily guarded — nothing around here was — but Moura was aware of police patrols as soon as the taxi drove off: a checkpoint, a barrier, a roadblock-her ID was examined three times before she found the building, and one of the security men had asked her, "Purpose of journey?"

"I'm seeing an old friend."

She was always startled by her truthful replies to other people's questions.

The doorman at Cliffden was middle-aged and had the torpid and humorless smite of a Pilgrim — so many guards were Rocketmen: you couldn't rattle them. Moura tried to hide her nervousness. Each stage of her search made her think that she had gone too far, that she was pressing her luck.

In a pressuring way, the doorman said, "Maybe there's something I can do for you," and let his sentence hang. He saw her as any woman looking for any man.

He smiled at her shyness; her timidity made him friendly. Yes, he remembered the family, the Boyds. Yup, and the son — big strapping fellow. Nice people, but they'd had setbacks. Moved out of the city. They were in Long Island— Jamaica. He had the forwarding address.

"Must be the Estate," he said. "The rest of it is real jungle."

Moura set out the following day in a taxi. At first the driver had refused to take her, and then he began asking insinuating questions—"for the checkpoints," he said, "for the bridge" — but before they reached the bridge Moura lost her nerve and demanded to be taken home.

"Why won't men ever help you look for another man?" she asked Holly that night.

But Holly liked men these days — the clinic, she said, had made her rational. She only wanted to talk about the trip to Africa, and she reminded Moura that she had agreed to go.

At last she said, "Fizzy would help you."

"But he's not a man," Moura said. "He's nothing, really. And anyway he's not here."

Hardy had kept asking her what was wrong.

She cried because she could not tell him. He might have thought she had a lover who was making her miserable. If so, he would have been right, in a way. A sense of defeat intensified her feelings of loss, and she could not distinguish between despair and passion.

She tried again, driving toward the Jamaica Estate in her own car. It was a mistake, a terrible trip, she was frightened the whole time. She kept thinking: I should have flown, I should have taken Holly, I should never have risked this. The delays at the checkpoints were bad, but then she'd had to leave the sealed boulevard, Jamaicaway, and was subjected to a recorded warning at the barrier. It was not the Estate after all, and not even a garrison. Was it possible he lived in a house? It was still patchy all over Queens — garrisons surrounded by isolated ghettos — Asiatic, Spanish, and black, legals and aliens mingled. The high walls of Jamaicaway hid this dangerous mess, and the bridges protected New York itself — only legal and registered workers in these outlying places had entry passes to the city.

Her fear of the neighborhood was increased when a group of leather-clad boys thumped the doors and kissed the windows of her car as she slowed down. The smears of their lips stayed on the glass. Then she saw someone being screamed at — another gang of leather boys howling at a cornered Asian, probably Korean. Screaming had become a popular method of assault out here; she had never seen it in New York. Some of the gangs claimed they could paralyze their victims with screams — so she had heard.

She found the address, but though it was a listed building and had a number in the directory, Moura was too frightened to get out of her car. Owners' license plates meant very little out here, it seemed. The building was squat and gaunt and gray. She remained parked in front, and waited, trying to call the building on her car phone. Then a man emerged from the front door. He was armed and wore a mask and phones, but whether he was a criminal or a security guard she could not tell. She was glad the car was reinforced — Fizzy had designed it, though he had seldom ridden in it. He had always said: What if we're hijacked?