Game Control (25 page)

me as vile, Wallace, and we only agree. The trouble with all you Jesus people is you trap yourselves with your own throat-slitting inclusion. If we are all so God-chosen, if humanity is so bunnies and chickies according to you, then you're stuck with
me
, aren't you? I am one of your little lost lambs. I, on the other hand, regard myself as a maggot and reserve the right to act like one. I've given up fighting. I've joined with open arms.'

  'Oh, tripe, Calvin, I'm sorry, but I've listened to this long enough. You don't think you're a maggot, you think you're a hero.' It was Calvin's own fault if, after months of reeducation, Eleanor interrupted from time to time.

  'She's right,' said Threadgill. 'I've read your
parameters
. You think you're a saviour. You believe you'll do your victims a favour.'

  'I will. The dead are a contented lot. They don't complain, they don't suffer, and they don't get up to bad business either.'

  'What if I decided
you
were better off dead, Piper?'

  'I'd take you up on your kind offer, sport, but I've some work to do before I indulge myself a vacation.'

  'I'm warning you,
bwana
—' Threadgill picked up Calvin's White Horse and threw his remaining whisky on the fire. 'Virtue as well as vice can be violent.' The flames shot three feet high.

  'People who think they're virtuous are almost always violent,' Calvin purred. 'How the concept gets turned on its ear.'

  'Listen to you!' Eleanor exploded. 'Talk about turning virtue on its ear!'

  'I have never claimed to be virtuous, my dear.'

  'Nonsense. You're the most self-righteous jingo I've met in my life.'

  'All that matters,' he turned from her coolly, 'is my research is accurate. Humanity is headed for extinction without a little help from its friends.'

  'You're a music lover,' said Wallace. 'Do you ever wonder how many Bachs and Bucherini's you will exterminate? Or Frank Lloyd Wrights, Rembrandts, Einsteins?'

  'How many Mussolinis and Caligulas? How many petty, tinyeyed coke addicts with a knife in your back? How many Hindu mothers who cut off their children's feet to make them

better beggars? How many fat nurses who leave geriatrics dozing in their own faeces and have another cigarette? More, Threadgill. A lot more. Einstein, at his most exacting, regretted himself. For that matter, once Mathare Valley spreads the globe like ringworm, what are the chances that if Mozart were born in a fetid slum with two potatoes a day some aid agency would float down from the sky and give the kid a piano? What would Dickens be worth growing to premature old age with a whore mother, never learning to spell his name? What would Frank Lloyd Wright build with mud and corrugated iron?'

  'Does he build,' Wallace corrected. 'Frank Lloyd Wright knocks up shacks out of cooking-oil tins. Mozart hums kwasa-kwasa in Mathare. Dickens cannot write his name.'

  'Right. And Christ is selling badly carved elephants on Kenyatta Avenue. So what good is he? No one will bother to crucify the bastard.'

  'I'm disconcerted. If we are all "maggots", and you truly believe we are over-populating ourselves into oblivion, high growth rates should drive you to the violin. Why fiddle with viruses? Have dozens of children instead, to hurry us toward the Armageddon that will put us all out of our misery. Why, Dr Piper, try to save a race you hate?'

  Calvin shrugged. 'I'm sentimental.'

  'I hope so.'

  Calvin stood up. It seemed time to go. Collecting to depart, they shuffled. Presenting his case did not seem to have refreshed Calvin as much as he might have hoped.

  Before his guests ducked in the car, Threadgill placed a ministerial hand on Piper's shoulder. 'I don't know why it is,' he began, 'but for some reason everything we have and everything we make is gradually taken away from us. Your life is a leaky vessel; no matter how much you pour, your cup will never overflow, because there is a hole in it. The universe has a hole in it. Your lovers die or betray you; your professional successes are diluted by failure or by simply being past; the summer homes where you spent the idyllic holidays of your childhood are bought by strangers and painted a garish green. So you can never stop making; maybe that's the reason for the hole. I don't know where these things go; I

don't believe they vanish. I wonder if there isn't a magnificent junk heap in the next dimension of favourite train sets before they were broken and golden afternoons before the last terrible thing was said that parted two friends for ever. Whyever, the hole is there. It will suck from you everything you love. You have stopped pouring, Piper, and your cup is bone dry. No wonder you're dying.'

  'I have my work,' said Calvin.

  'You'd have done better to start a pottery.' He turned to Eleanor. 'You can still save him. Though you might do better to save yourself.'

  Eleanor held Calvin's hand defiantly. 'I'm very happy.'

  'That's what I was afraid of. Piper,' he charged, 'it isn't too late. Forswear demography. Study a whole new field. Go back to university and read archaeology. Marry her. Make something.'

  'Not on your life. Population is all I know and all I care about.'

  'Then take the consequences. You think you're so ruthless. You haven't seen ruthless. Now, get off my property.'

'Why didn't you take the disks back?' asked Eleanor in the car.

'He made copies. I have copies. What's the point?'

  Even were they one of a kind, she couldn't imagine Calvin physically retrieving them, having to hit Wallace on the head. She couldn't penetrate this man—so rancorous over newspapers, while with Eleanor he was considerate: he met her for dinner on time, tendered wine or flowers in bursts of uncalculated affection, and always noticed when she was tired or sad. It grieved him to see her cry. She couldn't picture Calvin lifting up one of those logs and clumping Wallace on the temple if the fate of six years' work or, as he saw it, the survival of civilization depended on it.

  'I didn't like that story,' said Eleanor. 'About the retarded people.'

  'Nor did I. That's why I told it.'

  'But you enjoyed telling it.'

  'It illustrates something. After all, we've both seen and read worse.'

'I wonder.'

  'You find a story like that and you think,
it should't be possible.
Why, ask Basengi some day what happened to his parents. So if you think it shouldn't be possible, there is clearly something wrong with the way you think. It's attractive to imagine there's a separate class of human being that's depraved, so we need only identify them and put them away. But that version is too transparently self-serving. So you have to look in the mirror and confess, I, too, could tie up my retarded sister in a closet and suffocate her boyfriend and throw a party until he begins to smell.'

  'You would never do any such thing.'

  'Eleanor. Look at what I am planning to do. Isn't QUIETUS far more nefarious?'

  Eleanor twisted in her seat. 'You sit at your computer and play with numbers. It's not the same. I've never seen you step on a spider.'

  Calvin laughed. 'Women are miraculous. I can't imagine any greater test of devotion than I put you through yesterday. Why, I was dead sure you'd rung the police. And still you can cling to this myth of Calvin the Nice Person. I'm impressed.'

  'To be willing to trade two billion people for one man; it's not very admirable, is it?'

  'It is, in a way. Panga would trade, of course—with pleasure. But Panga is merciless. You're not.'

  Eleanor stared out at the dark game park, oppressed with the helplessness that characterized her life. Now it was just the two of them, the intimacy of a common foe fell way, and she was left with the drone of that fan unsuccessfully wafting the smell of putrefying flesh out the window. She felt soiled. Eleanor searched for redemption. Whom did Calvin care about? One drowned Kamba. What did Calvin love that people made or people did? Music, cheap science fiction and population studies. What a surprisingly narrow man.

  Eleanor combed through her own life for antidotes to the fan. The lamest tale would do so long as it illustrated qualities of bravery, honesty and affection that her race must conceal in at least small quantities. But was it a spell Calvin cast? The harder she tried to remember acts of kindness and sacrifice, the more memories of malice and avarice came back to her,

clippings from her own private B-section: Edward in DC; the lies; the letter:…
that Eleanor doormat
. Andrew, who after living with her for eight months in Addis Ababa, had left her with a hug at the airport, off to the States for a three-week vacation that turned into the rest of his life. He didn't write. Or that whirlwind with Mwema in Arusha, when it transpired she was merely a ticket to America…

  And in the Third World aid biz, you might allow that your motives weren't as sterling as you first pretended; you might project yourself into the victims of your generosity and see through their eyes the resentment of being given some microscopic portion of what you have, or even their casual acceptance of what they never asked for in the first place, none of which prevents you from expecting they'll feel appreciative—which they do not. Didn't Eleanor travel with that single carry-on because anything she owned of value had been stolen? Florence, Peter, her parking boy shuffled her mind, a tatty, dirty deck. Eleanor was not, like Calvin, repelled by other people; yet she had found them thoroughly disappointing.

  What did people do or make that Eleanor loved? She didn't mind music, but she could live without it, whereas Calvin claimed when the stereo was down it was like spending too long in the dark. Literature? It was more for filling time. Should she ever consider suicide, she could not imagine any novel tipping the scales towards staying alive. Art? Museums had never lost the atmosphere of a grade school field trip. She did, she recalled, love light: the hour between six and seven on the Equator when the colours went insane, what those poor painters could never seem to imitate quite. But people didn't make light. And she adored a comfortable chair. It embraced you without expecting anything back; it couldn't make you feel bad. People designed chairs…This was precious little salvation from someone who considered herself a humanist.

  One memory rose, however. She'd been twelve years old. Her mother was in hospital again. Eleanor was staying with Ray and Jane, and they took her for a walk. One held each hand. They stooped towards her in the park. 'Would you like

it very much,' asked Jane, 'if you stayed with us? Not just for a little while, like before, but always?'

  The child had exhaled. 'Yes,' said Eleanor. It was the sweetest moment of her life.

  They needn't have done that, she realized over and over, with an incredulity that almost destroyed the generosity in the end. She was just their loony friend's daughter, a strange child and an added burden to a large family. A maggot wouldn't do such a thing, would it? A maggot didn't adopt lonely little girls.

  Yet the last time she'd seen Ray and Jane they were busy, if kind; they were always so kind she couldn't trust them, and Eleanor had been away too long. All the people she mentioned they'd never heard of. Andrew had left her, and he was just a name. She could only tell floating, disassociated stories that drifted separately off, helium balloons. More, her mother, an outpatient once again, had been a witch the week before, screaming outside their house that Jane had stolen her daughter. Eleanor had kept apologizing, perfectly aware that when she apologized she was at her most irksome.

  Here she was, childless and thirty-eight, on this brutal continent with a job that seemed increasingly futile and nothing much to return to in the States. What did she have left, what or whom did she care for herself?

  Eleanor sighed. The dark car was cosy, their silence comfortable. Admit it: Calvin. Calvin the Psychopath.

  She turned to stare at him as he swerved around an oncoming
matatu
as it swayed over the centre line with one working headlight. His face was arguing: she wondered who was winning. She tried to hold QUIETUS in her mind and could not. The premise was so extreme and abstract that she still could not be taken aback. The project was so like him she was charmed. But what kind of
poor enslaved
dwarf
could find mass murder adorable?

  Then, something did not line up. Tone of voice. When Calvin talked of death, he sounded festive. How he spoke belied what he said, and when you sing, do the words matter? Isn't the spirit of a song almost always in the tune? How then could she interpret the tousled, boyish abandon of his hatred?

  Cynics are spoiled romantics. They are always the ones who had the highest expectations at the start. They were once so naïve themselves that they despise naïvety more than any other quality. Alchemists, they turn grief to gold. They take quinine in their tonic, Campari with their soda—bitterness is an acquired taste. Cynics have learned to drink poison and like it. They are resourceful people, though the sad thing is, they know what's happened to them. They remember what they wanted to be when they grew up, and not a single one of them dreamt of becoming a cynic.

  But studying Calvin's over-active face, recalling the jubilance with which he foretold apocalypse, Eleanor could see his complement, the past. She remembered that look in his eyes in the photograph from Murchison Falls, the cocky hat. For Calvin to be so disgusted with humanity, there had necessarily to have been a time he had the highest hopes for it. Eleanor felt a little less demented. Because that was attractive, old girl. That was attractive as could be.

  Wallace had said she could save the man. Must you persist in being a cynic if your aspirations, however belatedly, come to pass?

  'Isn't there anyone,' she asked when they were almost home, 'whose death you would regret?'