‘Population research, I assume.’
‘No, no. This grant is from the AIDS programme.’
She faltered. ‘That’s odd.’
‘I thought so as well. Isn’t Piper the mad magus of mortality? So why would he do AIDS research?’
‘He did say,’ she remembered, ‘it wasn’t the right disease.’
‘The right disease?’
‘But he was joking.’
‘Or so you assumed.’
‘Then he is a philanthropist.’ She recovered. ‘You just don’t like the idea of his working on AIDS. It doesn’t fit your portrait. And it’s your adoptive hobby, isn’t it? He’s butting in.’
‘I hope the explanation is benign as that.’
‘You are one melodramatic mawk, Wallace.’
‘I have come to believe that in the twentieth century it is now impossible to be melodramatic.’
‘That’s Calvin’s line: no one can write science fiction any more. It gets surpassed by history.’
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‘Maybe because Piper has taken up writing it himself.’
‘Science fiction?’
‘History.’
He saw her to her car. ‘You will try to find out about that grant?’
he reminded her. ‘Though asking directly will probably get you nowhere. He’ll lie. But a little nosing about might turn up some surprises.’
‘I can’t see why Calvin would have anything to hide.’
‘On a personal note…’ He paused decorously. ‘I could suggest that semen is a powerful fluid and can accomplish the most insidious septicaemia, and you would dismiss me as mystical. In our current medical climate, however, the concept is no longer absurd. I don’t know what habits he keeps lately, but there was a time Piper was quite a lady’s man. These are hazardous times.’
‘I believe his habits are quite conservative,’ she said icily. ‘Thank you for your concern.’
‘All the same, we don’t know what work he’s about, do we? I guarantee you that man is toying with viruses. You’re aware he keeps a lab?’
‘I know nothing about it.’
‘For such a close friend, we’re not too clued in, are we? But no one knows where it is, you see. That would be interesting to discover as well. Find the lab.’
‘Why do you keep thinking I’m working for you?’
‘In your heart, you are still on my side.’
‘There are no sides that I’m aware of.’
‘That you’re aware of.’ He placed two fingers on her arm. ‘It may be hindsight advice, but I would ask Piper to get tested.’
‘Thanks.’ She didn’t sound very grateful.
‘I would like to say you are always welcome. But there may come a point where I cannot retrieve you to the light. Then, while I find you an ingenuous, provocative guest, I will have no choice but to smite you with the worst of them.’
Eleanor looked at him dully. She couldn’t engage on this level, of course. He was soothing his own conscience; in future he could tell himself he tried.
‘As for Piper’s deep affection for humanity,’ Wallace added as an afterthought, ‘why don’t you ask him what happened 107
to his African girlfriend. It was his fault. You ask him what happened to Panga.’
In the dust of her accelerating anger, he coughed and considered the truth of the matter: she wasn’t as nice.
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8
Bitter Pills in the Love-Stone Inn
‘That man is certifiable,’ Eleanor railed, once more in Calvin’s clipping den. While she spent single nights in her cubicle of wall-to-wall Formica to prove her independence, most of the week she slept at Calvin’s. The evenings she endured New Jersey proved nothing to Calvin, who didn’t seem to notice, and to Eleanor those long neon vigils proved only that she couldn’t live without him. ‘Why is Wallace so obsessed with you?’
‘Maybe he’s homosexual, though that’s a bit of a bore. He used to doggie after me in the sixties. Plagued my regular Nairobi bars.
Where do you think he got the idea to go into demography in the first place?’
‘Is that why he’s so consumed by your minions? That he used to be one?’
‘Minions, is it?’ Calvin laughed. ‘Maybe. But there are two sorts of minions, aren’t there? The kind that truly want to trot after you and wish only to be tolerated; and the other kind that really wish to be you and haven’t the flair. If Wallace was a minion he was the latter variety, and they always turn on you in time. In Washington, he was competent, but undistinguished. Meanwhile, to his consternation, I got the USAID post. Then he hit on this inspired gambit of rampant cheerfulness. For all his whinging about having his grants withdrawn, Threadgill made quite a splash—guest appearance on Firing Line. These days you can’t achieve any notoriety at all by pointing out the world is in the toilet. Everyone knows we’re in the toilet. It’s optimism that’s become outrageous. Addled rays of sunshine have co-opted the avant-garde.’
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‘He unnerves me. There’s something ghoulish about the man.
Those cadaverous bags under his eyes.’
Calvin eyed her as she kept rearranging the new clothes she was still not used to. ‘What did he say that’s got you so rattled?’
‘I dislike hearing anyone tear into you like that.’
‘You have got to stop leaping to other people’s defence. Leap to your own.
‘All right. He wasn’t very sweet to me either.’
‘Into which soft spot has he sunk his shaft?’
‘He’s got this weird—he thinks you’re programming me or something.’
‘That would only upset you if you thought it was true. You have changed, haven’t you?’
‘I suppose,’ she said glumly.
‘Do you want me to fetch your plaid dresses that button to the chin? Return to regaling me about the CIA in Nicaragua?’
‘Just—that’s not what you think of me, is it?’ she burst out. ‘That I “trot along after you” and “only want to be tolerated”?’ She all but asked, you don’t think I’m growing shorter?
‘Don’t be touchy. It’s unbecoming.’
‘Calvin—’ She stopped.
‘Mm?’
‘Could I have a whisky, please?’
Eleanor got up and fidgeted, and while she scanned the titles of his pulp sci-fi, her attention was more on the adjacent armchair.
Panga was watching. She smirked at this smart, sleek dress, at the increasingly abrupt and impatient way the new girlfriend moved, and seemed satisfied by the peculiarly callous remarks that were beginning to lash from the mouse’s throat. Eleanor herself had noticed a growing capacity to demand, where not a few months before she would have sat in a man’s living room all evening and never asked for a drink if it wasn’t on offer. The sing-swish, sing-swish edged the air again.
Calvin was bringing her a drink, and she’d have to ask him. It explained too much—the absorption with mortality. But one thing most of all.
‘Calvin—’ She took a swig. ‘The reason we don’t make love. You’re not—trying to protect me, are you?’
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‘Certainly not. I’m protecting myself.’
‘From what?’
‘I thought we’d discussed this,’ he said irritably. ‘If you’re not prepared—’
‘Calvin, you don’t have something, do you?’
‘Have what?’
‘You’re not—infected with anything, are you?’
‘Anything like what?’
‘Anything—sexual, anything—contagious.’
Finally Calvin raised his head, light-bulb. ‘Threadgill!’
‘This has nothing to do with Wallace.’
‘It has everything to do with Wallace! First I invented it and now I carry it! Obsessed? There’s only one thing he’s more obsessed with than me and that’s his pet virus! And now he’s convinced you I’m sero-positive!’
‘You mean,’ she pressed shyly, ‘you’re
not?’
Calvin picked her up by the waist and swirled her a full turn. With those strong slim hands on her rib-cage Eleanor experienced a surge of desire like nausea. ‘My darling,’ he confessed gleefully, ‘I am infected with death itself. I do not have disease. I am disease.’
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
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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 horn-rims 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 112
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 soft-focus 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
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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
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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 d
escend, 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-115
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.