The trouble was, she was desperately jealous of a dead person.
Panga was so perfectly designed to make Eleanor feel inadequate that Calvin might have made her up. Worst of all, she was black.
How delicious it must feel to be a victim for once instead of one more unwilling perpetrator.
Eleanor returned after work as she was told, fighting the impulse to apologize. As ever she felt watched; if anything, the sensation was the more violent in Calvin’s absence. She paused before the study, with its gleaming row of brass locks.
‘Panga?’ she asked out loud. ‘Did he ever let you in here?’
Was it whim or did someone over her shoulder suggest she 125
try the knob? To her astonishment, it gave. Perhaps he now trusted her enough to leave it open, so she nervously accepted the compliment.
The room was larger than she had expected, its lighting bright and clinical. Its absence of windows created the atmosphere of an underground bunker. The desk was arrayed with a row of screens, and the computer was a massive highcapacity model that must have cost—she couldn’t say. But that was no home-office laptop.
When she turned to the walls, she felt intensely she shouldn’t be here. On the one side was a montage of photographs—severed heads in Salvador, hacked children in Mozambique, careless rumples of discarded bodies in Chatila, bloated Ugandan torture victims by crocodiles.
The opposite wall was papered with graphs, the lines swooping and peaking and plummeting, their design Miro, Klee, portraiture.
So this is what it looked like inside Calvin Piper’s head. When she inspected more closely, all the high points before the ski slope down were labelled ‘Crop Failure’, ‘Malaria’, ‘Plague’. One aspirant worm wriggled ever upwards: ‘AIDS’. The borders of this composition was framed by all the careening streaks of Third World population Eleanor had grown so tired of.
She scanned the bookshelves behind her: years of Morbidity and Mortality Reports; Plagues and Peoples; Population and Disaster. Along with the usual journals, she found a peculiar preponderance of highly technical epidemiology texts.
She could not put her finger on what was wrong, but her uneasi-ness went beyond having ventured into his study without permission. Germanically organized, this was not the messy crumple of clippings she’d have expected, the notes and motley stacks of a man trying haphazardly to keep up with a field in which he no longer played an active part. The room was concentrated and clean. When she noticed there was text on one computer screen, and print-out on the desk, Eleanor stepped away. She remembered an earlier temptation, and once in a great while you learn from your mistakes.
She had been seriously involved with a man in DC, Edward, and Edward had left a letter out, opened and in its envelope, addressed in a willowy hand. She knew he saw other women, 126
but only as friends. It was easy to rationalize that if Edward left it so carelessly available he subconsciously wanted her to read it, just as Calvin had lured her with an unlocked door. Freud is handy for the prying. Well, in DC she’d burnt her fingers, and her bridges.
When she confronted Edward, he could never forgive her for invad-ing his privacy; she could never forgive him for lying. The point was, having invited them, she could never get those phrases out of her head: the most exotic sex I have ever known…I can’t understand how you put up with that Eleanor doormat. Once you have allowed information into your life, you cannot get it out. She reasoned that innocence, naïvety, even gormlessness were often preferable to feeling completely sick. Why, the affair might have blown over, and she could still have married him, deluded and happier for it. Studying the aqua pulse of text a few feet away, still mercifully undecipher-able, she was reminded of Threadgill’s advice, that there are moves you can make forward that you cannot take back, and Calvin’s computer screen was like that: if she read it, she could never unread it. Eleanor treasured her ignorance so would protect its bliss. She backed all the way out of the study and pulled the door to, clinging to the world in which it is still possible to shut Pandora’s box even if you have peeped inside for an instant.
Eleanor retreated to the living room and stared at the bone. She wouldn’t roam the house, refusing any more discoveries. Lately her posture had improved, but now she slumped like a teenager. She picked up pulp sci-fi for something to hold. Eleanor had always defended herself with books; she wore hardbacks like sun-glasses.
It was the house itself tonight that she held at bay, and she guarded her place like a sulky askari with a rungu in his lap who spoke only Swahili and would do his job, but who had no idea what the mzungu who hired him was up to and didn’t care either and was only waiting for his shift to be over so he could go home.
Calvin returned springy but inattentive. Claiming to have a quick phone call to make, as usual he ignored the phone beside her and strode to his office as Eleanor bulwarked behind trashy fiction. She heard him fit a key, lock, unlock—so he had left the office open by accident. The door slammed. While he was gone, Eleanor created the sound of turning
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pages with fraudulent absorption. Calvin was in his office a long time.
The man who emerged was a man she had never met. His progress down the hall was grave, where Calvin’s common pace was brisk; and his face had lost the asymmetry of sarcasm. Why, she must never have seen Calvin completely serious. His whole body was ominously at rest; the relaxation was somehow frightening. Having arrived in the living room, he did not aim directly for her chair, but stepped sideways towards the front door. Eleanor had the irrational impression he was blocking her exit.
‘Why don’t we start with why you stayed.’ His voice, too, had changed, lower and even softer, and she only now noticed that he would ordinarily talk from the side of his mouth, because he finally talked from its centre. In other circumstances, she might have felt overjoyed: at long last the real Calvin Piper had spoken. Just now, however, she would have gratefully taken the entertainingly em-bittered fake, as she also preferred the contented delusion of his locked office door.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Eleanor peeped from over the book, her own voice gone squeaky. ‘You said wait for you till eight.
So I did.’
‘You’re a terrible liar, Eleanor.’ He sounded tired. ‘I simply don’t understand why you didn’t clear out. I might easily have had you stopped, even at the airport. But I’m surprised you didn’t give it a go.’
Eleanor maintained her stolid incomprehension. Calvin sighed.
‘You put me in an awkward position. Now I don’t know what to do with you.’
‘Dinner would be nice.’ She tried a smile, but her crumpled grin might have just collided with an oncoming matatu.
‘Panga would shoot you. Wouldn’t even say a word, just walk straight in and shoot you, and rout the disks from your dress. But I’m afraid she wasn’t alive here long enough to teach me much.
Dead, she can only make suggestions; otherwise, I’m on my own.
She always found me a little wet. At the moment, I’m inclined to agree. After all, I do have a revolver in the bedroom. I could have fetched it before I came in. I thought about it. But I didn’t. Perhaps I’m not quite up to playing my part. I’m a bit disappointed in myself.’
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‘Calvin, have you lost your mind?’
‘I have kept up appearances. I dab the corners of my mouth after dining. I do not drive my Land Cruiser through the middle of the Karen Provision Store. When you say, “Good morning”, I do not return, “Stink-suck-ga-ga”, but, “Lovely day.” That is all the sanity the world requires. They really don’t care what you’re thinking.’
Again, what he would ordinarily deliver with a smirk hadn’t a trace of humour. Eleanor thought, my God, this man has been pretending to be a nay-saying buffoon, and if that is only a performance, a distraction, who is he really and what has he been distracting me from?
Calvin nodded to the chair opposite. ‘You realize she finds this hilarious. And
me pathetic. Then, it’s all a game to her, everything always was. She never cared who died or who killed her. And she doesn’t care either what happens to my project, whether you spanner it. I care about it, however; it is all I care about. So you see my quandary. If she finds it funny, I don’t.’
‘ Who are you talking about?’
‘Can’t you see her? Panga told me that sometimes you did. She’s given you more credit than I have from the start. She said you would surprise me. I’ve been waiting. Now you have, once: you’re still here. I’m not sure how to interpret it. Were you hoping to confront me? Did you have some sad, woman’s idea of talking me out of it?
Or—’ She saw a flicker of anxiety. ‘Do you have a plan?’ He took a step forward. ‘Did you make any phone calls?’
She flinched. ‘No.’
‘You’re not meant to keep me here? Nattering away as I always do? Don’t you think that was abusive of them? To put you in this position? Don’t you think they knew I was dangerous?’
‘Calvin, I didn’t make any phone calls. I haven’t told anyone anything.’
He grunted, and was moved to sit down. He clasped his hands conversationally. ‘No, I suppose you didn’t. As I said, I can tell when you’re lying; you’re an improbably transparent woman. Besides, Panga says she was watching. You haven’t finked. Yet.’
It was a slow dance, and she had accepted. It’s tricky, as 129
the second in command, to negotiate the floor, to anticipate feints to the left or right, to execute moves the partner determines as if of perfect like minds. It was critical for grace to keep the delay between signal and submission as short as possible.
‘I might lock you in the bedroom,’ he speculated. ‘Feed you along with Malthus. But I would have to keep you for years. You’d get depressed, and I would feel guilty.’
‘Why do you assume,’ stepped Eleanor ( left, right), ‘that I will tell anyone? About—’ She paused. ‘Your project?’ That was it: the move from which there was no retreat. The ledge was waiting.
‘Haven’t you spent your life trying to help people? Aren’t you still a compliant girl trying to impress Stepdaddy with how upstand-ing you are? Aren’t you revolted? I didn’t think we had managed to broaden your horizons as far as all that. You are still, though you dress better, an earnest, liberal Democrat. Why not try to stop me, then? Wouldn’t that make Raymond’s day?’
‘Because,’ she calculated, ‘I love you.’
It was the only answer he could conceivably accept. He might never know if it was true or merely ingenious. Eleanor wasn’t sure herself.
‘That’s just an idea you’ve got,’ Calvin fumbled. ‘You want to love someone. I’m nearby, and a bloody queer choice. But there is nothing to love. You’ll find that out soon enough and become a liability.
Vengeful, if I fail you, which I’m bound to.’
‘Panga’s right,’ countered Eleanor. ‘You underestimate me.’
‘I cannot imagine you think it’s a fabulous idea.’ He seemed offended at the prospect. Much as he might entice her to dinners without doggie bags, she was meant to give him a proper contest. He wanted a fight. That would be hard to organize, since Eleanor hadn’t the foggiest what the argument was over.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t. I think you are afflicted. I think you’ve—dismantled.’ Eleanor said anything that came into her head.
‘This neutrality. Isn’t it merely a haven from agony?’
‘Is it inconceivable to you I should have a conviction, just one, that doesn’t have to do with a frivolous psychological maladjust-ment? Does the rest of the world exist to you at all?
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Does everything you see reduce down to you, your lovers and your friends?’
‘Most of the time,’ she conceded, ‘yes.’
‘So you have to drag me down to your level.’
‘Or up.’
‘But don’t you have anything to say? Don’t you find my intentions frightful?’
‘Quite,’ said Eleanor.
‘So will you not regale me? Where’s the we-shall-overcome rhetoric now that you need it? Aren’t Ray and Jane let down? Did you ever where-have-all-the-flowers-gone with any feeling, or did you just want a bunch of adolescent long-hairs to like you?’
‘What good would consternation do? Have I ever convinced you of anything? And why give you the satisfaction?’
‘The satisfaction would be entirely yours. Boldly defending your values, what sorry tatters are left of them. Most liberals spend their lives at piety, indulging the same selfish, destructive habits as everyone else but decrying them the while and therefore feeling superior. Everyone is bad, but liberals know they’re bad, which, in the convoluted hypocrisy of their creed, somehow makes them good.
They talk a lot. They also drink a lot, understandably. This is your big chance. Grandstand. Please.’
Eleanor reached for one of Calvin’s own phrases, ‘In due course,’
and added, ‘I don’t harangue on command. And I’m willing to hear your side of this. After all, hasn’t this—project—been in the works for a while?’
‘Six years.’
‘So you must have built quite a case by now.’
‘I have. I don’t expect you to be susceptible. You don’t take nearly enough trips to outer space. Intellectually, you’re provincial.’
‘This isn’t the hard sell, Calvin. Now you’re disappointing me.’
Calvin rubbed his chin. ‘I can’t get over it. I expected you’d be hysterical.’
‘I get hysterical when for the third week in a row there is no water and I can’t bathe. I get hysterical over trivia—like most people. On issues of import I am level-headed. I spent
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my childhood in books, my adulthood in offices. I can even sleep placidly by you night after night and be reconciled. I imagine that makes me an abomination of what a real woman was meant to be, but my culture has done its dastardly work and this is the result. So if you were hoping for tearful entreaty, sorry. You’re not the only monster in this house. I’m still waiting for you to defend yourself.
Besides, am I right, that you have yet to do anything dire?’
He grunted. ‘We’re still drafting.’
‘So you’re hot air, too. Like the rest.’
‘I have never at any point in my career been hot air.’
‘Oh, man of action,’ she jeered. ‘Great White Hunter of the population game.’
‘We have to get our parameters straight. They are nearly complete.
If who is not solved before how, the whole scheme could end up a hash.’
‘“Parameters—?”’
‘You didn’t get to read much in there, did you?’
She answered honestly, ‘No.’
‘The issues are stupendously complex,’ he began, no longer able to remain seated and beginning to pace. ‘How much of the reproductive age to target, how much to trim off the bottom and the top so we’re left with a viable society and not just a crop of kids and their grandmothers. That’s one of the problems of AIDS, you see: too centre-cut. Or economics: maintaining enough of an adult labour pool, keeping agricultural and industrial capacities viable. In all these calculations, there has to be a wide acceptable margin of error.
And there will be sacrifices, even cock-ups—we’re resigned to that.
Sectors of some economies, or possibly whole countries, may fall out. Yet they will, based on research of earlier cataclysms—wars, natural plagues and famines—recover with astonishing rapidity.’
Eleanor was beginning to feel physically strange—carbonated and lifted above the sofa. She felt obscenely calm. The room had scooped and upended, as if reflected in a spoon. Calvin, worked up now, wanting to explain the complexities, sounded like a small boy piping about his go-cart. Eleanor was trapped humouring this enfant terrible when she would prefer to slip over and gossip with Panga. She wanted to tittle-132
tattle about boyfriends. Did he tell you about
his work, Panga? Could you make head or tail of it? Eleanor had been a precocious child, an articulate woman, but just now she would like to be a pea-brain. She defended herself with all the feeblemindedness she could marshall, but intelligence, like information, cannot be defeated; it is simply there. So she knew. She had not said it to herself in so many words, but she knew. She wondered when she would have a reaction.
‘The stickiest wicket is politics,’ Calvin was exhorting. ‘It would have been more ideologically convenient to move twenty years ago, when growth rates in the First and Third World weren’t quite so disparate. But now the First World barely has a growth rate. Yet if we strike only in undeveloped countries, we create a politically destabilizing situation of astounding proportions. Therefore, we must take a token shave off the US, Europe, Russia. And more than a shave off China, that goes without saying. They’re already backing us heavily, and they’ve more than a clue what we’re up to.’
‘Calvin,’ she asked nicely, ‘how many?’
‘Good question. Ehrlich thinks a steady-state of three is ideal. But we think that’s a bit low, and besides, probably overly optimistic on the technical side. We could see ending up at five, about where we are now—crowded, but a damned sight preferable to fourteen. We may even be stuck with six, at the end of the day. But to finish up at six, you’ve absolutely got to cut back to four by the turn of the century. So that means taking two, minimum, off the top. We’re setting our sights on 1999. We thought Nostradamus would be pleased.’
‘Have you noticed,’ she inquired, ‘that when you quote these figures you leave off the billion part?’
‘Even great white demographers have their shy side.’
‘There’s another word you’re not using. It’s ordinarily such a favourite.’
‘Which is?’
‘Death. Or,’ she corrected, ‘ mortality. Since death gets on your hands, doesn’t it? Mortality happens only on paper.’
‘What are you getting at?’