Paul Theroux - O-Zone

"Fizzy's the only person who could write that kind of program," Murdick said.

"Sorry, Hoop," Hardy said — and all his bitterness toward his brother was in the word sorry: it could be the cruelest word, for nothing was more insulting than an insincere apology. "You'd need an Access Pass to get back into O-Zone. I won't get one for you. But you'll make out all right" — and he glanced at Bligh—"you've got your young flesh-pup."

Hooper checked himself in his reply. He had been on the point of shouting at Hardy. But there was always a problem in arguing with his brother. Because they were brothers, Hooper knew that at some stage they would have to settle the quarrel and make up. They knew each other too well to use words casually — anything spoken in the heat of argument was likely to be intended. Angry words sounded just as truthful as calm ones, and they cut much deeper. They were never forgotten. The brothers had always talked too much; and thai was always an error, it always made things worse. Still, fleshpup hurt.

"Fizzy doesn't concern you," Hardy said. It was another cut — as if Hardy was provoking Hooper to hit back, in order to justify himself and put Hooper in the wrong. "Forget it."

Hooper hated that from his brother; and it was more than a rebuff and worse than a rejection — it was a deliberate slap. But even Moura had joined him in it — even she wanted Fizzy back. "He's my son!" she said sadly. Even she was sulking.

"All at once the supermoron's very popular," Murdick said — and kept talking, because he did not understand how insulting his words were. "Still, the kid's got to be rescued."

In New York, they did not say good-bye — it wasn't necessary; it was a bit too polite, it was certainly too late. Anyway, the argument over Fizzy had done that. It seemed to Hooper that arguments were always either a hopeless beckoning or else a terrible kind of farewell.

That left Hooper isolated. At any other time he would have clung to Hardy and swallowed his pride and made an effort to repair the friendship. He believed that a break between his brother and himself explained the hatred in the world: it made the world look wasted and desperate. He did not want to be forced to admit the truth of this — but if a family was divided, what hope was there for any people?

Fizzy was the rallying point: they had to love him in order to love each other.

In the past, Hardy's anger or any friction between the brothers caused Hooper to grieve — and he knew that he had caused Hardy to grieve in the past. But tonight in Coldharbor Hooper did nothing. He thought: Find him if you can. Go buzzing and yomping through O-Zone in your humping rotor—

What they would discover was what Hooper had known for much longer: that Fizzy was not the pathetic squawking su-permoron they had always made him out to be — tripping over himself and afraid to leave his room. No, Fizzy had begun to grow, and he might find his manhood in that thorny place. He had all the skills it took to live there. Perhaps that was what really frightened them — the suspicion that Fizzy was strong. They needed him.

They said they were worried; but O-Zone was fenced in. The boy was not on the loose — he was trapped. He would not be found until he wanted to be found. Hooper had convinced himself that the boy had already overcome his sense of strangeness and had probably conquered his irrational fear of aliens. The odd experience was liberating him — releasing him from his lonely terror. Or am I thinking of myself! he thought. Hooper was isolated, but he was not anxious. For once he was not alone.

"Your brother's so angry," Bligh said. "I shouldn't have said anything. You told me never to—"

"I'm glad you spoke up," Hooper said.

He wasn't glad at all, but he was ashamed of having to hide Bligh on a false ID. And because he was hiding her from his brother she was dearer to him. That phrase flesh-pup still rankled: it was another insult he'd have to endure. Now, cut off from his few friends and his family, he needed Bligh more than ever.

This isolation contained a smothering darkness that generated heat and power — the airless-attic intensity that made things explode into flames. It was the first time that Hooper had felt alone with Bligh. The responsibility for Fizzy had been taken away from him. That offered him a greater isolation. This hot solitary feeling, being alone with Bligh, excited him and made him grateful. It also filled him with desire.

He observed her, and his secrecy made him passionate. It was keyhole adoration: he knelt and watched her with one eye.

It was late in the evening of their return from Africa. The last leg had been a rotor flight to Hooper's car, and then the drive through the layers of night smoke in Long Island to Coldharbor in New York. They were exhausted. Bligh had gone to her suite — to wash, she'd said, but she had lain on her bed and had not moved.

Having lived wild — and also, Hooper suspected, because she could not read or write — Bligh had developed the capacity to be very still for long periods. She was a light sleeper she woke at the slightest sound; she heard everything — but she could spend the entire day motionless, only her eyelids flicking, like a bird on a branch, just sniffing and blinking That was her daytime dozing. At night her sleep was a form of sensuality, and she lay and turned slowly, as if falling from a tremendous height and learning to fly.

Hooper watched her until very late, until his eyes burned Then he too went to sleep. But still he saw her, bright naked, making solemn truthful faces at him — her mirror.

The next day at breakfast — real food for Hooper, a meal tray for Bligh — Hooper said, "I'm going to be very busy for the next week or so."

"Tell me when you want me."

He loved hearing her say that, but he took just as much pleasure in spending the rest of the day watching her on his monitor. She undressed, she folded her clothes, she stretched, she scratched herself as she gazed downtown — and he focused on her fingertips relieving the itch. How thoughtful she looked when she scratched herself. She washed, taking more care than before, using more water. She wiggled her toes, she picked her teeth, she took her buttocks in both hands and warmed them. She tried on the clothes that Hooper had put in the room — nothing exotic; in fact, the opposite. They were the sort of clothes worn long ago by his first girlfriend, when they were both fifteen; but "girlfriend' had not meant much then. White silk panties, and tight shorts, and a frilly halter that left her midriff bare. Bunny, she was called. She was bad-tempered and a tease. She had an insolent way of walking that excited him — like that: Bligh was prowling the room. She found a soft spot and folded herself compactly like a cat, and dozed and blinked.

If I were in that room, or beside her, Hooper thought, as if replying to an accusing voice, I wouldn't be able to see her. I would hardly know her.

He needed this distance to see her clearly, and yet it had all started so simply — with his determination to know, when she had left him and gone into her suite weeks ago, whether she had kept her happy expression. He had wanted to know whether she was still smiling, hadn't he? Or had this monitoring grown out of his earlier habit of watching her on the first tape they'd shot in O-Zone, the morning of those murders?

During the days that followed, he went on watching her twitch and glide like a fish in a glass tank. He wished it could have been literally so — her swimming alone in the pool; but she couldn't swim. Yet her sleeping was a form of swimming: she rolled over and came up for air, and surfaced and sipped; and then she seemed to sink slowly and doze on the bottom. Often, when she was at rest, Hooper shot her face, the clasp of her nostrils gripping air when she breathed, the flutter of her eyelids and the hiding eyes beneath, the way she dampened her lips with her tongue, or slept with her fingers against her cheek. He shortened the focus so that he could see the veins in her neck, and the way the sun struck through her ears.