Paul Theroux - O-Zone

The man motioned for her to open her window. She refused and instead set her phones on scan and spoke to him with her helmet on.

When Moura told him who she was looking for, the man offered himself. What was wrong with these men? She had ceased to be angry and insulted by this, but was still frightened, still impelled to keep her hand on the panic button beside her seat.

"He's in his mid-thirties," she said, trying to be businesslike. "I have an urgent message for him."

"Too bad it's urgent, because it's going to take time to find him."

He was smiling, seeing the eagerness she could not conceal; and he was pleased, because his bad news gave him power over her.

"He's gone. He's been picked up. This was a year or so ago."

"Picked up by whom — police? Federals?"

"Could have been any of them. They might have been private. I wouldn't like to say."

She said, "Was he registered when he was picked up?"

Still smiling at her weak questions — an Owner here, asking him these thingsl — the man said, "Only the Feds know that, but they won't tell you."

She saw that he was reaching down to try the door handle.

"Stick around — we can talk about it," he said.

"Keep away from my car or I'll call the police." The car was securely locked, but even so her hand was on the button that would summon a strike-force rotor from New York.

"I'm a policeman!" The man laughed, and threw open his jacket, showing her his badge.

His laughter was still crackling in her headphones as she shot down the street and, two checkpoints later, she was back on the Jamaicaway. She drove on frightened and bewildered, wondering how an intelligent young man, the son of two Owners, with an excellent pedigree, could have been picked up — and what for?

But she thought: Fizzy will know how to find him. He would be able to break into a data bank and find the name, if he were still registered. He would find the right file. And if "picked up" meant arrested, or if he had become an outlaw, or was wanted, or had lost his pass for some reason, Fizzy would still be able to trace him. Fizzy had once said in his humorless and truthful way that he could open any line anywhere and find anyone. No one could keep a secret from him, he said.

Let him find Boy, she thought. She would not tell him that the man was his father, but if he found out, so what?

Moura always felt stronger when she was away from Hardy. Her conception of marriage was that it always weakened one of the partners and strengthened the other. Hardy was secretive and slow, yet he dominated her. She believed he drew his strength from her.

Tonight he said, "You're looking a little better." She had felt fine until he made that undermining remark. But if she protested now, he would say she was being hysterical, and she would probably become hysterical because of his saying that, and he would weaken her in that way.

"I need Fizzy's number," she said, vowing not to be sidetracked. "I've got to talk to him."

That silenced Hardy, for a reason she could not understand. He seemed to be thinking hard. But she trusted him to tell her the truth. He was too literal-minded ever to lie convincingly.

"I don't have his number," Hardy said.

"You told me he was in O-Zone with Hooper."

"Yes, that's what I said — a month ago, when you asked." Hardy, she saw, had been studying a map illuminated on a videoscreen — a very empty map, she thought: perhaps O-Zone.

Turning back to the map, Hardy said, "He's still there, in O-Zone, but he's off the air. However, Hooper's back."

Moura said, "It's Fizzy I need."

"So do I!" Hardy said. "But he'll be in touch."

"He can't be totally unobtainable," Moura said. "You can get him on a satellite relay."

"No, he's using a helmet phone. He's out of range. But if Fizzy wants to be found, he'll be found."

After Hardy said this he realized that it was indisputable: they could not find him; the boy had to find them — and it would be easy for him, when he chose to look.

"Is he all right?"

"Yes," Hardy said, and hearing himself say it convinced him that he believed it. "I know he is."

Moura remained silent. She was trying to imagine Fizzy's face, but the face remained behind one of Fizzy's very complicated masks, one with swollen eyes. In a mask like that he had tramped back and forth in his room saying, "This is Mission Westwind, the commander speaking—"

Hardy said, "Isn't it odd, both of us stuck here, needing Fizzy's help? Fizzy, of all people!"

"Fizzy's my son," Moura said. "I have to talk to him."

"You can't — not just now," Hardy said, and was glad to have a truthful excuse for the delay — time for the boy to show himself. "Have you forgotten? We're going to Africa" — he was gesturing to the map on the screen: so that's what it was. He said, "It was your idea!"

"Fizzy used to call this stretch the most dangerous part of any trip," Hooper said, turning to Bligh.

They were one click out of New York, Hooper driving his own car, and Hardy and Moura in the back seat. They had just left the tunnel checkpoint and were in the brightly lit expressway trough, on the way to the security checkpoint in the barrier that surrounded the airport, forty clicks into Long Island.

But this was more than a rackety speedway — it was like a continuation of the tunnel: high walls along the side, and a canopy of wire mesh overhead. Bligh leaned back to look at it through the sunroof.

"'Enemy territory,' he used to say," Hooper was speeding, not because he thought it was dangerous, but because he hated the look of it — another shabby fortification.

Moura thought: I was here alone, four days ago. But she felt it was no achievement: she had been very frightened, and she hadn't found what she wanted. Fizzy was right!

"Full of aliens," Hardy said. "I don't see the point of going to the airport by car, frankly. If we'd gone with Murdick in his bug we'd be there by now,"

"Bligh's never seen the outskirts," Hooper said, and in his doting, overattentive way he repeated that she was new to New York and was seeing this for the first time. He seemed to be taking pride in offering her this experience.

He was in love — Hardy knew that; and even Moura had said, "I didn't think people like that existed anymore. It's probably her age — she can't be more than sixteen." Yet Bligh was not girlish at all: she was straightforward and strong and very curious about things. For the tenth time, she was saying, "What's that?" And she had an odd effect on Hooper. He seemed different — innocent and kind, unembarrassed and submissive, anxious to please. Hooper Allbright! It was love, certainly — they could see that — but there was more to it: he was that fussing fidgety creature, simpering and stern, the fatherly lover.

A gap in the expressway wall had been mended with a hundred meters of steel mesh. A ruined building flashed past, a black chimney, a stack of flattened cars, and the sight of several orange fires. In the greasy smoke, twenty or more people stood with their arms high and their fingers hooked on the wire and their faces against the mesh. They were motionless, and yet the swirling smoke seemed to give them a sideways movement. Then the expressway wall resumed. It had been like a glimpse through a window to a terrifying interior.

"That was nothing," Hooper said, because it had frightened him and everyone else badly. His smile was not a smile, but rather an expression of the same fear.

At another break in the wall beside the road there was a much larger group, high up on the mesh — hanging and sprawled like smashed insects. Some of them looked both desperate and threatening, as if they were trying to break through, and yet they too were motionless, watching the stream of cars, holding on. Behind them, under a blue and bulky chemical cloud, was a brick township, and it too was smoldering and scribbled on with angry patches of paint. There was writing everywhere, and all of it looked fearsome, all of it like warnings, and fires, and more smoke, and glinting faces in ragged hats and masks, and trash packed against the mesh of the fence.