Game Control (26 page)

  Calvin didn't answer at first, and seemed to entertain the notion of one name, but then to think better of it. 'No.'

  Eleanor slumped against the car door.

She couldn't sleep.

  'Calvin,' said Eleanor at last, for he was wide awake—Opah Sanders must have mewled for more orange juice in his head. 'If Panga were still alive, would you expose her to Pachyderm, too? Just to get population down to size?'

  'It is only her absence that makes Pachyderm possible. With Panga, I'd plant forsythia.'

  Injured silence. He seemed mystified.

  'What is the problem?'

  'Well…' She didn't want to cry. 'What about me?'

  'What about you?'

  'Am I included, too?'

  'Of course. We both are.'

Her chest shuddered. 'I'm not enough for you to plant forsythia.'

  'Eleanor.' He was trying to be patient. 'I am not the same man. I couldn't garden for the Queen of Sheba. Please stop taking everything so personally. Try to get some sleep.' He put his hand on hers, with effort.

  'I simply don't understand—how you feel about me.'

  'I'm quite fond of you.'

  'It's just—' Even in that nasal, quivering voice she herself despised, she had to get this out. 'If you believe all human beings are slimy crawly things, well, it's your privilege to regard yourself that way, but don't expect me to see you as a worm, and sometimes I wonder if you say you're a swine or a slug for someone to complain it's not true, you're lovely…I object as often as I'm allowed, which isn't often. If I say I love you, I'm undermining you somehow, because you don't, or no longer, believe in it, and I join the enemy, the soppy, sappy enemy, and you'll push me to the other side of your bed. You seemed positively crushed when I didn't call you a reprobate last night…I mean, if we're maggots, Calvin, am I one? To you?'

  He squeezed her hand. 'We're both maggots.'

  It was his idea of romance. 'No,' she insisted. 'The way you claim to feel about the human race, you can include yourself and you enjoy that. But you have to include me, too. That makes me sad.'

  'I cannot—' His voice was hesitant, and Calvin was rarely inarticulate. 'I cannot feel beyond a certain point for you or I betray something.'

  'Panga?'

  'At one time, but no longer. Myself, I suppose.'

  'You claim to have a distaste for yourself.'

  'I have no love for myself. But something lasts beyond self-love. A feeling of obligation. Of having started something and having to finish. Thoroughness.'

  'Is thoroughness an emotion?'

  'It can be. In my case it is overriding.'

  '
Your work
,' she said mournfully, for to get on the other side of Calvin's work was to join the fifth column for good. He could say his persistence had nothing to do with love, but it

was love; QUIETUS was all he loved, and in this way his plan to wipe two billion people off the face of the earth was the healthiest thing in his life.

  'If I fall head over heels for you, my darling, I cannot finish what I started.'

  Eleanor was startled to find herself thinking, for once, in bed, about population—she felt like Calvin. There was a cold, hard logic to his proposal that we throw our excess over the keel to save the boat. It struck her, however, that the forces of hardness and coldness already had the upper hand; that the very arrangement whereby species success could about-face to species failure was heartless and unfair; that Nature herself was sufficiently abusive to speak for heedlessness, disdain, the impassive. Misanthropy was programmed into the character of the universe, and what was there left in a place which they did not control and which would ultimately defeat them but to hold one another on a cool Nairobi night? She tried to say what she was thinking, but it came out small and trite.

  'But I, too,' said Calvin, 'am a force of Nature.'

'That was a good point you made at Threadgill's. About inequity, that it's a given.' Solastina poured Calvin's coffee and rushed off for toast.

  Eleanor was uncomfortable with servants. Pathfinder had hired a housegirl for the laminate palace, from whom Eleanor hid her laundry in order to wash it herself. She rinsed her own glasses and swept up her own crumbs until there was patently nothing for Beatrice to do. Eleanor knew the old argument that they needed the work; you did no one any favours here scrubbing your own tub. Very well, but she couldn't stand it. And now on rare visits home she found Beatrice smoking and laughing with friends, and crept about the bedroom trying not to interrupt, stuffing some extra underwear in her bag, to skulk out again, leaving Beatrice with her overly generous salary and cash to take care of 'expenses' (more cigarettes). She had allowed what most white Kenyans abhorred: the staff had become uppity and taken over, and those were the ones you sacked. Eleanor was grateful, however, to pay those stray shillings every week to escape the role of foreign master in a country where she was only a guest. She was aware that Beatrice did not consider Eleanor a noble, fair-minded benefactor of the Third World, but a fool. Go ahead, take advantage of me, the American thought. I have taken advantage of more than you will ever. Eleanor was stuck with a crude good fortune she couldn't shed—luck can be a curse, for it prevented her from feeling sorry for herself much as she would sometimes appreciate the pity.

  'Solastina, this butter is hard, and the toast is cold,' Calvin carped. 'Bring fresh toast,
upesi
.' Calvin felt natural in the role of master. 'I thought we made a good team back there. I was wondering if you'd consider working with me.'

  'You mean for you.'

  'Mmm.'

  'That would be strategic, of course. If I'm involved, I'm less likely to be a problem.'

  'That's right.'

  'And the complicity. If I refuse to play my part, indignation. Complicity's the next best thing.'

  'Quite.'

  'You tend to forget I have a job.'

  'What I have in mind sorts right into your job. Though why you insist on keeping that position with Pathfinder when it's obvious it has no impact on population is beyond me.'

  '
Your
work is more important.'

  'It will make more difference.'

  'That's what I'm afraid of.'

  'Have you decided what you think of it yet?'

  'No. It's not real to me.'

  'It's real to Threadgill.'

  'He's as looped as you are.'

  'More. But would you? Work for me?'

  Though the fresh toast had now arrived, Eleanor took a piece of the old, cold batch (not wanting to waste it) and balanced squares of icy butter on top, trailing blackcurrant jam in little streets between the butter houses with childlike concentration. The jam was from one of the tiny airline jars Eleanor compulsively saved. Calvin scowled, took the hot toast and disdained her silly salvage for the bit pot of marmalade.

  'What have you in mind?' asked Eleanor. 'I'm no
fundi
of fatality, you know. I wouldn't have a clue how to go about giving the overpopulated a bad case of psoriasis.'

  'I could use some help fund-raising, for one. QUIETUS is expensive.'

  'Would it involve much of my time?'

  'Weekends. We've targeted some wealthy right-wing Brits right here in Kenya as likely donors. Flights to the highlands? Drinks on verandas? As long as you could tolerate the

company, you might enjoy it. Since I'll warn you, the marks I've identified you won't like.'

  'What does that say about us? About QUIETUS?'

  'Nothing.'

  Eleanor stared into the garden with a crooked smile. 'All this talk of death. And it's so beautiful here.'

  They were breakfasting out at the back, and it was one more of those flawless Equatorial mornings that became a plague, one after the other, pretty and sunny, until you prayed it would rain. For the purpose of this discussion, Eleanor could use a downpour, since the shining pinks and peaches of this garden made QUIETUS the more surreal. After so much talk of having
exceeded the carrying capacity of
the land
, the foliage was thriving, and she wondered if both she and Calvin were deranged, fund-raising for viruses while wrapped in papery bougainvillaea, its leaves the translucent pastels of Monet's, while jasmine laughed down trellises behind their backs. Ten-foot trees of poinsettia spangled the walkway and mocked the failing potted blooms Jane nursed for the centrepiece at Christmas. Elephantine mother-in-law's tongue lashed on either side, sturdy and intimidating. Amid these, birds flickered everywhere, bright, quick and clever. The only mournful note in the whole yard was struck by the weeping gums, whose leafy tears dripped from the upper branches, crying for the
wazungu
who, nested in the blowsy, blushing flora of East Africa, could only contemplate holocaust.
What are we doing?
she wanted to ask.
What are you talking about?

  'It won't stay beautiful,' Calvin was opining. 'Even this property will be bought up and tik-tak-toed.'

  'Maybe it should be.'

  'Some day I would like you to admit, for once, that social justice is one value of several. Not that it has no value. Just that it doesn't supersede every other. And you can't have an infinite number of people with their fair ration of space and food and
motokaris
and still have flowers. Africans, you know, don't give a frig for callililies; you can't eat them.'

  'All right. I like flowers.'

  'Thank you.'

  'Doesn't it bother you, a colleague who can't take QUIETUS seriously?'

  'As our chances of designing Pachyderm to the proper specifications are slim, a measure of scepticism will serve us both better than an extra dose of angst.'

  'But why is your work in my interests?'

  'Because—' He leaned and kissed her. 'It would be a riot.'

  She laughed, an unfamiliar laugh, loose and full like her hair today, washed and unbound. 'All right,' she said. 'You're on.'

They drove to town together, Calvin as ever grumbling about the incessant rumple of speed bumps; weren't there enough sleeping policemen in this country?

  'There's some research we need done,' he suggested, 'preferably by someone who might have reason to do the work anyway and wouldn't attract attention as being about anything odd. You'd be perfect.'

  'For?'

  'This AIDS business. We need to know what the demographic impact looks like. Not only to build AIDS mortality into the parameters, but to table Pachyderm entirely if this pre-existent virus looks capable of doing the job for us.'

  'AIDS isn't really my area.'

  'I don't expect you to do sero-positivity studies, computer modelling; umpteen well-funded epidemiologists are already doing the work for you. We've gotten a file together, but the results are conflicting and incomplete. There are several computer models that we haven't gotten our hands on. Solicit them. Compile and compare. How much will that disease cut into population growth? We don't think much, but we need to be sure. Just in case we're superfluous. Maybe Nature's ahead of us. You might find the research intriguing in its own right.'

  'I'll consider it.'

  'Do. And you are free this afternoon?'

  'Could be.'

  'There's a meeting of the Peace Corpse at three.'

  'Sorry?'

  'A little nickname of mine they don't much like. QUIETUS rents an office suite at Nyayo House.'

  'That's ironic.' Nyayo House, home of the Kenyan government, was rumoured to keep detainees naked up to their waists in cold water; they would often plunge inexplicably to the car-park from the fourteenth floor.

  'I'd like to introduce you as a new member. Though they won't be keen at first. Ordinarily application is quite a process. We do a lot of checking background, references, interviews, and it has to be a unanimous decision. You're coming in through the back door. My back door. They won't like it.'

  'This all sounds so juvenile. Masonic.'

  'Our caution is not clubhouse blood-brothering. If Moi ever got wind of us, we'd be on the next plane, if not out the window. We hear a lot of screams coming up through the carpet; they keep us on our toes. And if QUIETUS gets any publicity at all, its ambitions are thwarted. That's why this business with Threadgill is no joke. But as for you and the Corpse, consensus is a formality. QUIETUS is my baby. They do what I say.'

  They met outside Nyayo House, a sulphur-coloured skyscraper with the rounded contours preferred by architects in the mid-sixties with a penchant for designing office buildings to resemble giant toiletries. This one looked like a twenty-storey tampon holder, the plastic kind that holds two. It was the suspicious ochre of a yolk you have too sniff to check if it's gone off.

  She didn't recognize him at first as Calvin strode up the steps. His languour was arrogant—the others could wait. In his bearing, newly smooth and self-possessed, she discerned an earlier incarnation: Calvin Piper, who had all of Congress quaking at massive migrant families as near by as Mexico; who commanded his own jet and the best hotel suites; who could stroll into any US government office without an appointment. The Director was back.

  Though the colour of poisonous puffball spoor, Nyayo House was a persuasive Western skyscraper from the outside, yet its lobby was Kenyan: directions to offices were handwritten, the floor gritted, two of the elevators didn't work. In every hallway identical glassed photographs of President Moi glowered down at
wananchi
, giving the intended impression they were being watched.

  The QUIETUS office was on an upper floor, and the door, unmarked, resembled Calvin's office with its several locks. She wondered if the cards and codes were necessary, or 007 self-importance.