Bunny chimed in, ‘Why, Anderson himself asserts, “There is no a priori reason to assume that extrapolation is valid beyond a short time span”.’
‘It seems ludicrous to me,’ Grant objected, ‘to project the progress of an epidemic about which we know so little and which has already defeated, fantastically, the alarmist predictions of AIDS ghoulies for the developing world made only three or four years ago.’
‘It seems no more ludicrous,’ Eleanor snapped, ‘than planning mass murder on the basis of equally conjectural demographic projections. Just twenty years ago, Ehrlich was
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predicting 33 billion people in 2100, and now we’re down to 14.’
‘So we’re supposed to throw up our hands because we can’t trust anyone’s projections of anything?’
‘Maybe,’ she said hotly.
‘What distresses me,’ Louis raised, ‘is the expectation in your models that sexual behaviour remains constant. Do you believe Africans are so foolish? Hasn’t the gay community successfully disciplined its behaviour in the US? Why assume Africans can’t get the message?’
‘In fact, you omitted,’ Bunny accused, ‘the bulk of this report.’ She waved the orange folder in Eleanor’s face. ‘Intervention strategies.
Even with no cure or vaccine, should a mere 10 per cent of this continent begin using condoms, you bring down sero-prevalence in 2015 by over a third. With 25 per cent condom use, sero-prevalence declines to less than 2 per cent. With a 25 per cent reduction in casual sex—for the average African man, one less encounter per month—sero-prevalence declines in twenty-five years to nearly zero.’
‘To presuppose Africans cannot change their habits as Americans have seems a highly racist assumption,’ Louis charged. ‘Are Africans not rational? Can they not learn?’
Grant added, ‘HIV is an inadequate pathogen precisely for that reason. Even without medical breakthroughs, its spread can be controlled with a little common sense. We need an agent that hits a third of the world up side of the head. It may be taking a long time for people to wise up, but they can, and they will, and then we’re up to our eyeballs in as many starving children as before.’
The meeting degenerated into pandemonium, everyone bellowing at once. Calvin allowed them to caterwaul, Bunny jabbing at graphs, members tearing the Bongaarts or the Anderson out of each other’s hands, while three-colour graphs glowed munificently over their heads. As his comrades clamoured across the table, Calvin stretched.
Eleanor toyed with the computer, playing intervention strategies, age structures, dependency ratios whimsically above their gyrations like videos in a disco. She looked up to find Calvin watching her with that bemused smile, which was, if she wasn’t mistaken, unusually warm. After five minutes of Babel, Calvin reached 232
for a pencil, its end sharpened to a pinprick, and bounced it on teak, t-t-t-t. They shut up.
‘My dear Corpse,’ he intoned. ‘Eleanor was just doing her job. She warned you her results were speculative.’
‘I would like to pursue this research further,’ said Eleanor. ‘The Sixth Annual AIDS Conference meets next month in San Francisco.
I would request funds to make the trip.’
There was no complaint; at least California would get her out of their hair.
The rest of QUIETUS cleared out, irate, arguing, demanding photocopies of the reports. Eleanor and Calvin remained seated until they were gone. He kept looking at her with that appreciative smirk until, flustered, she asked, ‘ What?’
He stood up, put on his coat, came round to pull out her chair.
‘Nice try.’
‘At what?’
He put an arm around her as they walked out of the door. ‘You don’t really believe AIDS will lead to negative population growth, do you?’
She sighed. ‘No.’
He kissed her forehead. ‘You’re brilliant.’
‘I thought you’d be angry.’
‘I am,’ he corrected, ‘entirely charmed.’
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17
Back in the Behavioural Sink
There was no need for Calvin to accompany Eleanor and Basengi to the San Francisco AIDS conference, but he had no desire to be left behind, his house bereft of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘You’re So Vain’—her musical tastes were lamentable. So he would fly to California because the alternative was to admit he missed her, and how could he possibly miss those drippy pieties thrown in the face of the stark, immutable horrors of the hard-hearted real world? What was it about those insipid miniature jam jars she saved from airlines that could make him ache when she was gone?
So he cleared away the detritus of Threadgill’s daily death threats to route out a hefty stack of eco-doom for the trip— The Sea and Summer, The Last Gasp—and arranged to meet a range of demography denizens in the States just to have his own appointments. He reminded himself that Eleanor was working for him, so he wasn’t really tagging along, even if her research was intended to undermine the most important project of his life.
In her own preparations Eleanor fussed over dresses, bought new shoes. ‘We’re not going on honeymoon,’ he quipped as she folded low-cut silk with tissue paper. ‘We’re going to an AIDS conference.’
‘These are highly social events,’ said Eleanor. ‘Lots of chawing after hours.’ She layered linen slacks with micro-cassettes. ‘There’s one issue,’ she raised casually. ‘Are we bringing Panga?’
‘No one brings Panga. Especially dead. I suppose she’ll go if she likes.’
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‘No, Calvin. You bring Panga. You bring her everywhere. I’m suggesting you ask her to stay at home.’
‘In some respects I haven’t any choice. It’s called history.’
‘Panga might be history, but thanks to your regular updates she’s current events.’
‘She’s your best friend.’
‘She’s not my best friend, she’s my predecessor.’
‘You imply she’s been supplanted. She has not.’
Eleanor went stony. ‘Can we at least skip buying her a ticket? She can walk the aisles or sit in the loo, can’t she? It’s 3,000 dollars.’
Calvin smiled. ‘Panga prefers to ride on the wing.’ He watched Eleanor whisk back and forth from the dresser she’d commandeered to her suitcase. She paused with her back turned, not quite concealing a small blue plastic case. With Calvin in the room she couldn’t sneak the thing in gracefully, so she threw the diaphragm on to her peach suit.
‘What’s that for?’ he asked casually.
‘AIDS conferences are big pick-up scenes. I might get lucky.’
He was about to remark that considering the nature of the occasion condoms were de rigueur, but he was suddenly stricken by an unwelcome image: of it getting later and later in a hotel room and still Eleanor has not returned. He reads badly and tries to sleep and cannot and reads again until sunrise, at which time he finds her at breakfast nibbling toast with some pompous CDC poof. Calvin takes a different table and she nods with a little smile and then goes on ogling this oh-so-fascinating glorified hygienist who is maundering about t-cells, but with a sordid glimmer in his eye and a smutty understanding between them…The picture came at him in a rush, in a rage, and this was called: jealousy. Which should not be possible, so he proposed instead, ‘Well, then. Perhaps we should take separate rooms.’
‘Don’t be retarded.’
He was not comforted, for though she would never do such a thing, it didn’t alter this new and offensive information that if she did he would be hurt. You could not injure the predead; that’s what mobile mortality was all about.
On the plane, she had a regressive attack of Eleanoritus, and 235
saved her peanuts; she saved the chocolate, the towlette, she saved the salt and pepper. She tucked the uneaten triangles of Gouda from all three trays into her bag, where they would be found in a week, squished and rancid and leaving a greasy spot on her carry-on. When the stewardess collected their neighbours’ discarded rubbe
r chicken, Eleanor craned her neck with all the morbid fascination of passing a gory road accident. Calvin got the impression that if Eleanor had her way she’d amass the leftovers and shove them out the emergency exit, overseeing the first airlift of pineapple fool to the Ogaden. Most peculiar of all was that Calvin wouldn’t have her any other way; that should she let her jam jar slip nonchalantly into the bin at breakfast he would feel mournful.
While poor services and limited imports might accustom one to the primitive joys of a simple life, instead prolonged spates in the Third World turn the most high-minded Westerners into raving materialists. In the San Francisco airport, Eleanor and Calvin gaped agog at electronics, delicatessens and the mind-boggling proximity of decent ice-cream. Eleanor was beset by longings for pizza and pastrami as if she were pregnant. In the taxi rank, she had to resist the urge to lie with her cheek to the smooth tarmac, and as they drove past pay phones her impulse was to reach for stray receivers through the window, just to hear the dial tone purr.
In their room at the Marriott, Eleanor took off her shoes and danced on the thick carpet, switching across the 120 cable networks, flicking over the tightly packed radio dial and, best of all, phoning Ray and Jane and getting through the first time, and she could hear them and they could hear her as well and the call didn’t cut off in the middle or anything—it was all too wonderful to bear.
Crossing the two blocks to register for the conference, however, was to run a gauntlet of guilt, for panhandlers had flocked from all over the city to line the corridor from the hotel to the Mascone Center, each with his cardboard concession:
COULD YOU HELP A WOMEN WITH A DONATION FOR SOME FOOD.
PLEASE DON’T BE AFRAID—BECAUSE I HAVE AIDS. BUT I AM
‘HOMELESS’ AS WELL.
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Or the more Christian:
GOD GIVES EASE TO THOSE WHO ARE DYING WITH AIDS. YOU
MAY NOT LOVE ME, BUT I LOVE YOU.
When Eleanor started shelling out her quarters, Calvin scowled.
‘What are the chances that a single one of these moochers has anything worse than scabies? Next week stage a conference on malaria and the same crowd will arrive Mercurochromed with tropical mosquito bites.’
Of the file of scientists milling from the Marriott under the stern eyes of both each other and the roving TV cameras, Calvin was the only incorrigible who failed to contribute something, until hats on the walk packed with dollars and overflowed. Even Eleanor stopped groping her pockets by the end of the line, remarking, ‘This is more of a goldmine than the Karen Provision Store.’
Assembling 12,000 delegates and 3,000 journalists was tantamount to founding and breaking down a small town in four days, so the circus had the latest technology at its disposal—vast photocopying resources and computerized message boards, with which Eleanor promptly left callbacks for Roy Anderson, John Bongaarts and Peter Way. The impromptu city may have convened for the discussion of immuno-deficiency, but its atmosphere was celebrative, like an airless, upscale Woodstock in the windowless underground of the massive Mascone Conference Center. At every level were booths for croissants and freshly baked biscuits, sales counters for AIDS T-shirts, with the silk-screened viruses in a selection of colours. Lobbies criss-crossed with physicians nervous about being late to the workshop on ‘Varying Rates of Decline in CD4 Cells in Male and Female PWAs’ the way an earlier generation had feared missing Earth, Wind and Fire. On ground level, rows of leaflets advertised forthcoming AIDS conferences, epidemiological travel brochures: We’ll have you! We’ll have fun!
We’ll have season in the sun!
Come to AIDS Congress India!
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festooned with photos of the Taj Mahal.
Eleanor and Basengi plunged into the event with rolled-up sleeves, huddling over the schedule, debating which sessions to attend like children agonizing over a menu of puddings, and regularly queuing at the message centre to leave more and more urgent appeals to their computer modellers, until they were plotting to waylay their victims as adolescents might plan an ambush of the New Kids on the Block.
‘You’re probably the only woman in America,’ Calvin quipped, ‘who wants Roy Anderson’s autograph.’
Ever the Good Student, Eleanor attended seminars nine to six every day, and Calvin was irascible: ‘Not one of these prolix panels has anything to do with demography. You’re losing your bearings, Merritt. We don’t care about needle exchange programmes, condom distribution in Zaire, or seroconversion among health care professionals— all we’re concerned with is how many scurfy undesirables this disease sweeps from under foot. You’re not an AIDS flunky, you’re a population spy, remember? We’re at cross-purposes. They want to save the varmints and we want to exterminate. This is the camp of the enemy, and you should be keeping your head low.’
‘You’re envious,’ said Eleanor. ‘AIDS is a catastrophe and it’s not yours.’
‘Hardly. I think AIDS is the best thing since sliced bread. It’s inadequate, that’s all. I’ve scanned these papers. The statistics they’re quoting are pitiful. Up to ten million sero-positive worldwide? A drop in the bucket! The race coughs up that many extra babies in six weeks! We do better than this sad little virus with malnutrition and the runs.’
‘ And,’ Eleanor continued, ‘you can’t stand attending any international conference you don’t chair.’
There was some truth to this. Calvin remained aloof, disdaining their hand-wringing about vertical transmission when the real problem was it wasn’t high enough. Once he’d exhausted his appointments with all the reputable demographers in California, he spent the last two afternoons in a Mascone coffee shop reading The Last Gasp, a little put out that no one had recognized him. He was used to being scorned, but never ignored.
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So he wiled away his hours imagining the Sixth Annual Pachyderm Conference—since after 1999, no one would give AIDS the time of day. He hadn’t considered the T-shirt market…or swanky sports-wear, with a little elephant carcass on the breast instead of a croc?
Why, the commercial opportunities would be rife! Pachyderm coffee mugs and lunch boxes; Pachyderm loo roll and undershorts; Pach-man video games! Take your turn for a quarter, eliminate a third of humanity and win an extra game! A Pachyderm Conference, that’s one he’d attend. Too bad he’d be dead.
It was fantasizing at this table that Calvin spotted through the crowd the familiar flap of ratty yellow kikoi: son of a bitch. And still carrying that naff stick, in San Francisco. Of course it made sense he would be here, since the trendy bastard hadn’t been able to resist latching on to the latest in global peril, with all its opportunities for implausible optimism. Despite the predictability of his attendance, however, the presence of Wallace Threadgill at this conference alarmed Calvin in instinctive areas of his head that the ‘perfectly logical’ Dr Piper refused to recognize he possessed.
Through the event, Calvin rarely saw Eleanor, who swished in and out of their hotel room and never seemed to stop talking. She’d managed to get appointments with both Bongaarts and Anderson.
Typically female, she found the Bongaarts model increasingly persuasive because John was nicer to her at lunch. Nights she was out schmoozing with AIDS celebs, overall a slicker collection than the frumpy family planning bunch, whose cause was déclassé. These viral dandies were finger-on-the-pulse types, into fashionable cataclysm, and paraded their material like the latest in viscose.
The last night, however, which was bound to be one big epidemiological booze-up, Eleanor insisted she and Calvin dine alone. She agitated through the meal, unusually inane. Once they arrived back at the Marriott, it was still early. Calvin reached for The Last Gasp, but Eleanor kept him talking. She was working herself up to something—about feelings, no doubt, an issue she had promised herself once and for all she would raise before they left San Francisco, and finally they’d reached now or never. Calvin put his book aside with a groan.
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He determined th
is much: he wasn’t going to help. If she had some kind of problem, she would have to bring it up herself.
When she launched into Pachyderm, pacing the carpet in stockinged feet, it occurred to Calvin they had never once had a knock-down drag-out over his conspiracy. She might be working for him, but she didn’t endorse QUIETUS, not really. She’d dismissed him as a fraud but never argued outright. Tonight, since there was some other subject she wished to avoid even more, she would risk the fight.
‘Isn’t murder,’ she proposed, ‘a slippery slope? Even starting with abortion and euthanasia, don’t you erode the whole foundation of ethical systems? If you don’t respect the sanctity of human life, what’s left? Don’t you arrive in short order at Opah Sanders?’
‘Ethical systems are pious props of social systems,’ droned Calvin, bored. ‘They merely preserve order, and unless someone does something about population growth we are headed for worldwide Lord of the Flies. Moreover, I don’t believe in the sanctity of human life. I’m a great fan of algae. Algae, for example, do not bayonet pregnant women and leave them pinned to a wall.’
‘There, that’s evil. You recognize it when you see it.’
‘I see so much of it that I don’t see the point of a concept that is merely descriptive of what most people do most of the time.’ He lay on the bed, clasping one hand on his chest with the other, in order to keep them from straying to his paperback. He was dying to get back to his book.
‘But isn’t Wallace right—aren’t you yourself on your high horse, trying to save humanity? Isn’t that the most pious conceit imaginable?’
‘On the contrary, I’m a demagogue,’ he said blandly. ‘If I were less well educated, I’d end up on top of a shopping mall with a machine-gun.’
‘You’re being glib.’
‘I’m not.’ He sat up, resigned to a fracas she obviously required.
‘I spent my professional life cocktail-clinking and prawn-peeling, first-classed around the world all under the aegis of aiding the underprivileged. Having lost my cushy job and my sexy housekeeper, I’ve become a bitter middle-aged megalomaniac: raising money from pampered colonials to