Game Control (17 page)

  She kissed him. 'Tell me no, though. Say no.'

  'No, what?'

  'Say, no I do not have—I am not positive.'

  'I'm a nihilist. I've never been positive in my life.'

  'No! Say it and I'll believe you. Say,
No, I am not HIV positive
.'

  He hesitated a moment that gave her a stab, but Calvin Piper rarely did anything he was told. 'No-I-am-not-HIV-positive,' he recited, and kissed her forehead. 'Regrettably for my contemporaries, I am not about to die. Tell Wallace I'm sorry not to be more obliging. And some day, far, far away, this mangy species will be grateful.'

  
Normal
couples, at this carthartic juncture, would have gone to bed.
Calvin
suggested they read population journals. She couldn't concentrate. Malthus, who had recently deigned to share the same couch with her, groomed himself blithely on the opposite end as if Eleanor weren't there—the monkey's idea of a compliment. Panga, in the simian's view, was there; he threw a stray corn kernel at the elbow-dented chair in that

blend of hostility and affection which suggested that in their most extreme one was always a version of the other.

  Calvin's ostensible good health both relieved and deflated her, for now she was stuck back with the old explanation that she simply left him physically nonplussed. Moreover, Wallace had planted three further questions, and they plagued her like unattended homework assignments as the evening dragged on. Several times she looked up from her book, and Calvin would glance from his fray of torn and paper-clipped articles inquiringly through his glasses. The hornrims gave him a husbandly air, as if their ascetic arrangements were waxed passion. She would shoot him a timid smile and bury herself in her novel again. She tried to form the questions beginning with a casual, 'By the way', or 'I meant to mention, you wouldn't
believe
what Threadgill claims', but then she could hear his, 'Yes?' just waiting to get back to his beloved
Population Bulletins.

  No, it was impossible. She
could not
ask him why he had a grant from the WHO. Most impossibly of all, she couldn't form the question about—Why not? Why was this the one inquiry that was not on? Fine, she was a coward. But what was so intrusive about asking if he ran a lab?

  At last she couldn't pretend to read and set the book down. Just now she was no longer pestered by the accumulation of mismatched details that surrounded Calvin Piper—the appointments, the meetings that queered as soon as she walked in, the office door down the hall, the obscure infusion of inexhaustible cash, the envelopes of AIDS horror stories that continued to arrive in the mail with no return address, even the grant, this crazy business about a hidden laboratory: all stray parts that would never fit together if she hadn't a clue beforehand whether she was assembling a printing press or a toaster.
What was wrong with Calvin Piper
? This was, so late in the evening, the only thing she wished to know.

  'I believe you,' she bravely interrupted his scissoring of cataclysm, 'that you're not sero-positive. And I'm willing to allow that, though the nature of your work right now doesn't make a lot of sense to me, it's none of my business. But I think it's time you told me what happened to that girl.'

  Calvin took off his glasses and looked at his watch and then admitted it wasn't a very long story, and did not, on the face of it, have anything to do with population, since single disappearances from the planet did not show up as dips on a graph.

Calvin failed to notice, when he first proposed teaching Panga to scuba-dive, the mist of presentiment that clouded those clear-skied eyes, for he considered Panga fearless. Eleanor could have told him there was no such quality. Everyone was afraid of something: blame, thirteen, intimacy;
water.

  To Calvin, Panga belonged undersea. He evaded unseemly details, but when Eleanor pictured them making love, in the watery softfocus that characterizes visions of parents coupling or lovers with someone else, the mattress spread into an ocean bed, branches listing out of the window like kelp. For her own sake, Eleanor did want him to remember his original surprise: that just like diving, below his life the wide, sumptuous quiet of a deeper world thrived. He skimmed the top of what could be penetrated to its floor, wasting years splashing the surface and learning to swim when he should be learning to sink instead. When pressed, he confessed that all the other women Panga had poisoned had been clumsy drill, like the first few dives in a swimming pool, and all there is to explore is the drain.

  He resisted describing himself as happy, a word used too often by drabs who meant their bills were paid. Even at the time, he had never spoken of Panga to his colleagues, not wishing to expose his secret, boundless suspension to their bobbling inflatable prattle about
relationships
. No one around him noticed he had become a completely different person. Most people lived, he claimed, in a dinghy. His office mates crowded into their little rubber boats cracking beers, and if Calvin went diving they were privy only to the surfacing of bubbles; otherwise he disappeared.

  Even when Panga was out with uprisings, slashing her
kukri
through bamboo, she left him in a buoyant emersion, and should he drift to a party in her absence he did not so much tread the rooms as fin. He had never been so graceful, physically or socially, and it was those two years, when every look in his eyes was a documentary by Jacques Cousteau, that must

have turned his tide in USAID, churned the currents that would eddy him shortly to the top of his field. It was a time when no statistic was insignificant, no country irrelevant, no official too lowly to be won. He retained his rancid humour, for in becoming 'a completely different person' he had not turned into a stranger, but into himself. He impressed everyone with his commitment, and while they imagined this was purely to population control, he might have effused just as eagerly over orchid raising or polo.

  Panga did well enough in their exercises in the Banda swimming pool, but he had plenty of confirmation that diving was not her sport, though could dangerously be her destiny, the very first time he took her to the Malindi Marine Park. Calvin had always been at home with scuba, released from the dry drone of demography into the quiet under-populated deeps of the earth's amniotic fluid, so he could not conceive that the woman he loved might feel otherwise. Yet most Kenyans weren't much for water, as Eleanor could have told him, and this one didn't even like the bath. He had forgotten, too, that the sea and a blue square of cement had about as much in common as a wounded buffalo and a pet cat.

  As he revved from shore in the inflatable, Panga went quiet; he assumed she had nothing to say. When he dropped anchor, the weather was iffy, reason to be quick about kitting up. Instead Panga took longer than usual, mis-snapping her stab, fumbling her fins, and for God's sake she forgot to turn on her air. By the time she was ready, the waves were high and the horizon dark, and Panga kept testing her regulator until he had to shout at her not to empty her bottle while still in the boat. Eleanor had faced that same barking irritation when they were on their way out and she stopped to comb her hair, or when she interrupted a soliloquy with questions he thought niggling or irrelevant. Calvin may have been in love, but so newly 'himself', that didn't mean he was patient.

  He instructed the Kamba to meet him at the anchor line, but after they flipped off opposite sides he had surfaced to a manic churn. Working round on the ropes, he found Panga writhing and pawing at the boat, letting the swell surge over her snorkel, which was not even in her mouth. He found the demand valve and shoved it in her face, but it was difficult

to get near her, with those limbs thrashing like a ceiling fan. He ferried her towards the anchor line and gave her the signal to descend, but Panga was less trying to submerge than to fly. Meanwhile her voice was of a ten-year-old child. '
Hapana
!' she said, high and breathless, the water frothing around her, outboard. 'Calvin!'

  After five minutes this cut-throat mercenary, who could hike with seventy pounds of military hardware all night in thick bush, was utterly exhausted. Her breathing shrieked over the smack of the waves, and in those rare moments she had remembered to keep the reg in her mouth she had killed a quarter of the tank. He slew himself back into the boat and dragged her over the side with him. 'Forget it!'

  Panga immediately went limp. As he pulled up anchor, she collapsed into the bottom, making no effort to pull off her gear. Calvin ripped the starter and admitted he'd not been very delicate about banging the inflatable against the swells. Usually so angular, Panga drooped boneless and rubbery, and bounced with every wave. Calvin didn't like, or, Eleanor sometimes thought, even comprehend weakness; it had taken him a little too long to feel sorry for the girl.

  When they docked Panga wouldn't talk, but neither would she leave the boat. As it began to pelt, Calvin waited out the downpour in the car. Eleanor framed her through his drizzling window, her head draped between her knees with the snorkel poking out.

  The squall passed. Calvin got out of the car. Panga raised her head.

  'Shall we go?' he proposed.

  'Down,' she growled.

  'You want to try again?'

  She had nodded resolutely. Eleanor posited that perhaps there was only one thing which mortified Panga more than this contrary white man's fondness for breathing under the sea, and that was disgrace. Bravery, Eleanor was sure, is not lack of fear but one more—the horrors of humiliation loom consumingly above the rest. 'No doubt,' Calvin concurred. 'And a little reputable cowardice at the outset would have saved her life.'

  So he took her out once more. She was docile and mechan ical and did everything he told her and went down just as in the swimming pool, though Eleanor suspected that if he could have seen those eyes behind the mask they would have been wide and blank. On the bottom, he held Panga's hand. It was flaccid. She had absented herself. Calvin might have reasoned that if she was not really there they were going to an awful lot of bother for nothing.

  He had dived with Panga several more weekends. The panic never recurred. If Eleanor didn't miss her guess, Panga never suggested a trip to the coast, but she never rejected a proposal either, and doggedly hauled bottles and wet suits to the car. She never once would have intimated that she didn't enjoy it. Then, Eleanor noted, the woman had something to prove, and when you are trying to prove a lie you can never set about your demonstrations enough times.

  There was a Second World War wreck near Diani, so he hired a boatman who knew the site. The weather was splendid. At the time, Calvin had been in that fulgent humour that he could now only recount like a statistic: I-was-exuberant—it was technical information about the past, the number on a cheque-stub, an old address.

  For the second dive of the day, Calvin estimated they'd enough air left for a quick twenty-five-minute foray, though Panga's bottle, since she still breathed too fast, was lower than his own. He wanted Panga to get used to carrying the surface marker buoy, a balloon attached to a reel of line that kept the boatman apprised of their location. The quick-release clip with which the reel fastened to her stab jacket jammed, however, and, not thinking, he knotted it to a loop as a substitute. ('Stupid.') And he could swear he told her to tie off to the wreck once they found it, but maybe he hadn't. Probably the knot on the jacket was too tight. ('Easy to say now.')

  All went according to plan until they found the hulk, and it a wink the current washed Panga from view. Calvin toured around the silenced rotors, blades poking from the heap like the ribs of rotting elephants. In death, he remarked, machines achieve an increasingly animate aspect, just as animals become objects; they meet in the middle. He had bonged the sides of the carcass, trying to attract Panga's attention, casting about overhead, unable to find the yellow line of the buoy. Calvin

sighed into his regulator, the bubbles disgruntling overhead. He'd looked forward to this dive, all month inundated by the smelly crawl of unwanted babies across his desk, stuck in the traffic jams of spewing lorries full of rocks for more dumpy houses in this low-rent Eden, bustled by the
siafu
of pedestrians in town, hustled by legless beggars and shrill homeless scruff—he didn't want his brief respite from the multitudes cut short. Panga had been drilled, however, that if they ever got separated she should surface. Reluctantly he drifted back to the loud, jabbering, overrun world up top.

When he emerged, however, several hundred feet away there was the buoy, diddling in the poppled calm, and opposite the boat and its lone attendant: no Panga. Calvin checked his own air, and he hadn't more than ten minutes left himself. For the first time in water Calvin discovered what panic felt like. He lashed on to self-possession like tying his body to a post, and finned like the blazes on snorkel to the buoy. Calvin descended the line more quickly than was advisable, neglecting to clear his ears because he could not distinguish the pressure of the water from the pressure of imminent disaster.

  The line led to the wreck itself; she had not tied off. He followed the nylon hand over hand and switched on his torch, remembering that Panga didn't have one and the dark of the corrupted corridors must have crowded her; he explained that it is almost as frightening underwater to run out of light as to run out of air. Still the cord proceeded in and out of portholes and through doorways. Air supply
very
low, but finally the rope led outside the wreck. At that moment the sun broke from behind a cloud, filtering through the sea and cruelly improving visibility.

  For overhead, dangling at the end of the line like a hooked fish, was Panga. She listed to and fro in the current, relaxed underwater at last. As he rose, the bright yellow strap that bound her diving knife to her thigh caught the sun. The story was laid out for him: in trailing the rope through the wreck and out the other side, she had exhausted the reel and run out of line. It was knotted, he remembered, to her jacket. She had struggled towards the surface and been tied down. But he wanted Eleanor to taste the irony: here was a woman so